Fic: Quantum Gleep (1/1)
Title: Quantum Gleep
Author: cranberry_pi
Rating: PG
Spoilers: None.
Summary: Glee/Quantum Leap/a whole lot of stupidity in a blender. I can’t even apologise enough for this. It popped into my head, hijacked my muse, and demanded I write it or it would do terrible things to her!
Theorizing that it was possible to time travel within her own lifetime, Doctor Quinn Fabray led an elite group of scientists into the desert to develop a top-secret project known as Quantum Leap. Pressured to prove her theories or lose funding, Doctor Fabray prematurely stepped into the project accelerator, and vanished.
She awoke to find herself in the past, suffering from partial amnesia and facing a mirror image that was not her own. Fortunately, contact with her own time was maintained through brain-wave transmissions with Rachel, the project observer, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Doctor Fabray can see and hear. Trapped in the past, Doctor Fabray finds herself leaping from life to life, putting things right that once went wrong, and hoping each time that her next leap - will be the leap home...
The blue corona faded, just in time for her to take a cold, sticky drink full in the face. She stood there, frozen to the spot as the drink dripped down and soaked into her clothes, listening to the laughter of whoever had thrown it at her. She wiped furiously at her eyes, trying to clear the corn syrup before the burning got any worse, and took a look at her surroundings. Girls in cheerleading uniforms, jocks wearing letter jackets, a hallway full of lockers-
“Oh, no,” she thought to herself. “No, it can’t be. High school? Again? I swear, God is a perv who just enjoys sticking me in the bodies of sixteen year-olds.” She took a second look as one of the cheerleaders walked past, though, and tilted her head appreciatively. “I need to get one of those for Rachel when I get back.”
“Are you just going to stand there and drip, Beckett, or are you going to get cleaned up?” a feminine voice whispered in her ear. Through her blurred vision she could make out the outline of a cheerleader, who took her by the arm and led her to the bathroom. “Here,” the cheerleader handed her a sweater, emblazoned with an obnoxious animal design.
“Who would wear something like this?” she wondered out loud. Then she saw her reflection. - the face she’d be wearing for the rest of this leap. She was a brunette, which didn’t seem to happen often, with a well-proportioned face - and she was dressed in a nearly identical sweater to the one she’d just been handed.
“Great,” she muttered. “I’m a dork.”
“No,” the cheerleader protested. “Well, okay, maybe a little. You’re a cute dork, though,” she gave Quinn a playful shove. “See you in class, okay?” she disappeared out the door, leaving Quinn alone in the bathroom. She stripped off her soaked sweater - which was, of course, the moment she heard the imaging chamber door open.
“Wowza,” Rachel leered. “Looking good.”
“Oh, shut up,” she dried herself off with paper towel and shrugged the new sweater on. “Sometimes I think you’re the one that chooses these leaps, so you can spend more time ogling teenage girls.”
“I’m certainly not complaining about it,” Rachel admitted. She was dressed in her usual white Navy uniform, an unlit cigar clamped between her teeth.
“You guys found me quick this time.”
Rachel’s handlink, a device that looked like a collection of lego blocks with an LCD screen, squealed in her hand. She rolled her eyes and smacked it soundly. “That egotistical pile of circuits you call Emma says she deserves all the credit. Anyway, let’s check the vitals. The year is two thousand nine. Your name is Samantha ‘Sam’ Beckett. You’re sixteen, and attending high school in Lime-“ she smacked the handlink again, ignoring the pained sound it made - “sorry, Lima. Lima, Ohio.”
“What am I here to do?”
“Well, Emma calculates a ninety-six percent probability that you’re supposed to say - no, save,” she slapped the handlink again. “You know, you’re supposed to be a damn genius, you couldn’t have built a screen big enough to show whole sentences?”
“Hey, that wasn’t supposed to be the final version. Why don’t you get Will to upgrade it?”
“He and Emma aren’t on speaking terms this week.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake. What’d he do this time?”
“She caught him working on the project laptop. Screamed that he was a slut, and turned off all of her uplinks.”
Quinn sighed. “Tell her if she doesn’t want to be cooperative with the staff, we’ll use the handlink as a sex toy again.”
“I don’t know how you managed to create a germophobic computer in the first place.”
“Look, I’m going to need to get to class soon, can we speed this up?”
“Fine. Where was I - oh right, ninety-six percent probability you’re supposed to save Sam’s life.”
“When does she die?”
“Twenty-five years from now.”
Quinn glared. “What?”
“She wanted to be a Broadway star. Instead she got a few bit parts in community theatre and committed suicide. She left an eight-page suicide note about how she couldn’t live with her melancholia anymore - god, what a drama queen. Emma hacked the police database to read it, said it nearly overloaded her. She figures that if Sam had been more popular in high school, she might have had more friends and not offed herself.”
“That’s pretty thin. Besides, how long would I have to stay here to make her popular?”
Rachel looked at the reflection in the pitted bathroom mirror. “I’d say about a decade.” Before Quinn could reply, she opened the imaging chamber door with a button press and disappeared through it.
“Bitch,” Quinn muttered.
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It turned out the cheerleader - Alice - was about the only person in the school who would voluntarily exchange words with her, with the exception of a hulking football player named Ziggy who seemed to think she was his girlfriend.
“So, Gooshie flattened me in practice today,” he was droning on as they walked down the hall, “but I totally nailed the pass, and if it was in a game it would totally have been a touchdown. It was totally awesome. Sam, are you listening at all?”
“Huh?” Ziggy reached out and put a hand on her shoulder - and reality warped around her as Ziggy was enveloped in a red corona of light and turned into an attractive Latina.
“Oh, come on,” Quinn complained. About a year after she’d begun leaping, she’d encountered Santana the first time. She was an agent of an unidentified agency that had sent its own leaper through time to put things wrong that once went right. She and Quinn had crossed paths multiple times, and so far Quinn had always emerged the victor. They never had any indication of each others’ presence, though, unless they came into physical contact and cancelled out the effect that made others see them as the people they’d leapt into. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh, you know - just having a little vacation,” Santana rolled her eyes. “You know, this so isn’t fair. You always get to be girls. I end up with a penis more times than not.” She looked to Quinn’s right, where her observer must have been standing - they couldn’t see or hear each other’s observers. “No, Britt, it’s not ‘kinda cool.’ It’s gross, okay? If you want me to have a dick, then just go to the closet and get the-”
Quinn coughed. “So, you’re here to ruin Sam’s life, then?”
“Good call. I was totally going to dump her in front of the whole football team. I figured that’d pretty much put an end to her being popular at all.”
“I don’t know how long you’ve been here, but I don’t think she could be any less popular than she already is.”
Their conversation was interrupted when Alice bounced up to her, looking fetching in her red-and-white uniform, her blonde hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. “We’re going to be late for Glee, Sam, come on!” she ignored Ziggy entirely, taking Quinn by the hand and pulling her down the hall.
“Glee?”
“Glee Club,” she heard Rachel’s voice from behind her. “Kids get together and sing.”
“You’re not even serious,” Quinn muttered, “this is what she does in her spare time? It’s no wonder this girl killed herself.” The lockers blurred together as Sam dragged her down the hallway to the school’s choir room.
“Are you ready for your solo, Sam?” the teacher greeted her. He was tall, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, with an absolutely horrendous hairstyle. She shook her head.
“Definitely not.”
“What?” one of the other kids asked loudly behind her. “After all your complaining that you had to have this solo, you’re not ready?”
“I’m not feeling well, okay?” Quinn snarled. Alice moved down to the chair next to her and gently took her hand.
“Leave her alone! If she’s not ready, then she can sing tomorrow.” Quinn looked sidelong at her, an idea forming in her mind.
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She should have seen it coming, she realised. She stepped into the hallway at the end of the interminably boring Glee Club meeting, and Santana was waiting there with a slushie in hand. She looked for an exit, or someone to hide behind, and found everyone had scattered.
“So,” Santana sauntered toward her. “Sam, you’re just not girlfriend material. The football team’s been on my back about dumping you, and I think they’re right. As long as you’re my girlfriend, I’m never going to be popular.” She threw the slushie, and Quinn didn’t even try to dodge it. The experience of taking a cold drink in the face, she found, didn’t improve the second time around.
“Are you just going to take that?” Rachel asked. “Go over there and kick him in the-“
“That’s Santana,” Quinn hissed.
“Again? We need some kind of restraining order against that girl. She’s like a bad ex or something.”
“Isn’t Emma supposed to be working on figuring out where she comes from?”
“She’s got some dust on one of her CPUs. She’s not working on anything until Will takes the stack apart and uses an air can on her.”
Quinn groaned. “Okay, look - did Sam have any significant others when she died?”
“Uh,” Rachel tapped the handlink. “Divorced from that Ziggy kid, but nothing besides that. Why?”
“I have a theory. Emma’s wrong about why I’m here.”
“Oh, she’s not going to be happy to hear you say that.”
“I really don’t care. Just be ready to run the retrieval program, okay?” Quinn stalked away, then turned back. “Oh - and find yourself a cheerleader outfit. Be wearing it when I get home.” She wandered down the hall to where Alice was standing at her locker - she turned and looked at her with a horrified expression.
“Oh, Sam - do you need some help getting mmph,” Quinn cut off her question with a kiss. She felt the cheerleader struggle for a moment before melting into the kiss. She tasted the girls’ lip gloss, mixed with the sugary liquid still dripping down her face, and her heart raced. Behind her, she could hear the handlink squealing loudly.
“You did it, Quinn! Sam grows up to be a mother of four children and a five-time Tony award winner, married to Alice - all she needed was to come out of the closet! We’re running the retrieval program - now.” The world disappeared in a wash of blue light, and Quinn found herself back in the accelerator. The door opened and Rachel, dressed in an exact replica of Sam’s red-and-white uniform, wandered in. Quinn’s eyes lit up.
“Thank god we got Emma to look over that program after we got it from that other guy.”
“Never mind that,” Quinn beckoned her with a finger. “Get over here. Emma, turn off the cameras.”
“Yes, Doctor Fabray.”
“I’m serious, Emma. I’ll take that handlink, and I’ll stick it right up-“
“Done!” Emma agreed hastily, and the lights on the room’s cameras went dark.
“I’ll say one thing for being a teenager,” Quinn took Rachel in her arms, “the hormone overload is fantastic.”
Author: cranberry_pi
Rating: PG
Spoilers: None.
Summary: Glee/Quantum Leap/a whole lot of stupidity in a blender. I can’t even apologise enough for this. It popped into my head, hijacked my muse, and demanded I write it or it would do terrible things to her!
Theorizing that it was possible to time travel within her own lifetime, Doctor Quinn Fabray led an elite group of scientists into the desert to develop a top-secret project known as Quantum Leap. Pressured to prove her theories or lose funding, Doctor Fabray prematurely stepped into the project accelerator, and vanished.
She awoke to find herself in the past, suffering from partial amnesia and facing a mirror image that was not her own. Fortunately, contact with her own time was maintained through brain-wave transmissions with Rachel, the project observer, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Doctor Fabray can see and hear. Trapped in the past, Doctor Fabray finds herself leaping from life to life, putting things right that once went wrong, and hoping each time that her next leap - will be the leap home...
The blue corona faded, just in time for her to take a cold, sticky drink full in the face. She stood there, frozen to the spot as the drink dripped down and soaked into her clothes, listening to the laughter of whoever had thrown it at her. She wiped furiously at her eyes, trying to clear the corn syrup before the burning got any worse, and took a look at her surroundings. Girls in cheerleading uniforms, jocks wearing letter jackets, a hallway full of lockers-
“Oh, no,” she thought to herself. “No, it can’t be. High school? Again? I swear, God is a perv who just enjoys sticking me in the bodies of sixteen year-olds.” She took a second look as one of the cheerleaders walked past, though, and tilted her head appreciatively. “I need to get one of those for Rachel when I get back.”
“Are you just going to stand there and drip, Beckett, or are you going to get cleaned up?” a feminine voice whispered in her ear. Through her blurred vision she could make out the outline of a cheerleader, who took her by the arm and led her to the bathroom. “Here,” the cheerleader handed her a sweater, emblazoned with an obnoxious animal design.
“Who would wear something like this?” she wondered out loud. Then she saw her reflection. - the face she’d be wearing for the rest of this leap. She was a brunette, which didn’t seem to happen often, with a well-proportioned face - and she was dressed in a nearly identical sweater to the one she’d just been handed.
“Great,” she muttered. “I’m a dork.”
“No,” the cheerleader protested. “Well, okay, maybe a little. You’re a cute dork, though,” she gave Quinn a playful shove. “See you in class, okay?” she disappeared out the door, leaving Quinn alone in the bathroom. She stripped off her soaked sweater - which was, of course, the moment she heard the imaging chamber door open.
“Wowza,” Rachel leered. “Looking good.”
“Oh, shut up,” she dried herself off with paper towel and shrugged the new sweater on. “Sometimes I think you’re the one that chooses these leaps, so you can spend more time ogling teenage girls.”
“I’m certainly not complaining about it,” Rachel admitted. She was dressed in her usual white Navy uniform, an unlit cigar clamped between her teeth.
“You guys found me quick this time.”
Rachel’s handlink, a device that looked like a collection of lego blocks with an LCD screen, squealed in her hand. She rolled her eyes and smacked it soundly. “That egotistical pile of circuits you call Emma says she deserves all the credit. Anyway, let’s check the vitals. The year is two thousand nine. Your name is Samantha ‘Sam’ Beckett. You’re sixteen, and attending high school in Lime-“ she smacked the handlink again, ignoring the pained sound it made - “sorry, Lima. Lima, Ohio.”
“What am I here to do?”
“Well, Emma calculates a ninety-six percent probability that you’re supposed to say - no, save,” she slapped the handlink again. “You know, you’re supposed to be a damn genius, you couldn’t have built a screen big enough to show whole sentences?”
“Hey, that wasn’t supposed to be the final version. Why don’t you get Will to upgrade it?”
“He and Emma aren’t on speaking terms this week.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake. What’d he do this time?”
“She caught him working on the project laptop. Screamed that he was a slut, and turned off all of her uplinks.”
Quinn sighed. “Tell her if she doesn’t want to be cooperative with the staff, we’ll use the handlink as a sex toy again.”
“I don’t know how you managed to create a germophobic computer in the first place.”
“Look, I’m going to need to get to class soon, can we speed this up?”
“Fine. Where was I - oh right, ninety-six percent probability you’re supposed to save Sam’s life.”
“When does she die?”
“Twenty-five years from now.”
Quinn glared. “What?”
“She wanted to be a Broadway star. Instead she got a few bit parts in community theatre and committed suicide. She left an eight-page suicide note about how she couldn’t live with her melancholia anymore - god, what a drama queen. Emma hacked the police database to read it, said it nearly overloaded her. She figures that if Sam had been more popular in high school, she might have had more friends and not offed herself.”
“That’s pretty thin. Besides, how long would I have to stay here to make her popular?”
Rachel looked at the reflection in the pitted bathroom mirror. “I’d say about a decade.” Before Quinn could reply, she opened the imaging chamber door with a button press and disappeared through it.
“Bitch,” Quinn muttered.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It turned out the cheerleader - Alice - was about the only person in the school who would voluntarily exchange words with her, with the exception of a hulking football player named Ziggy who seemed to think she was his girlfriend.
“So, Gooshie flattened me in practice today,” he was droning on as they walked down the hall, “but I totally nailed the pass, and if it was in a game it would totally have been a touchdown. It was totally awesome. Sam, are you listening at all?”
“Huh?” Ziggy reached out and put a hand on her shoulder - and reality warped around her as Ziggy was enveloped in a red corona of light and turned into an attractive Latina.
“Oh, come on,” Quinn complained. About a year after she’d begun leaping, she’d encountered Santana the first time. She was an agent of an unidentified agency that had sent its own leaper through time to put things wrong that once went right. She and Quinn had crossed paths multiple times, and so far Quinn had always emerged the victor. They never had any indication of each others’ presence, though, unless they came into physical contact and cancelled out the effect that made others see them as the people they’d leapt into. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh, you know - just having a little vacation,” Santana rolled her eyes. “You know, this so isn’t fair. You always get to be girls. I end up with a penis more times than not.” She looked to Quinn’s right, where her observer must have been standing - they couldn’t see or hear each other’s observers. “No, Britt, it’s not ‘kinda cool.’ It’s gross, okay? If you want me to have a dick, then just go to the closet and get the-”
Quinn coughed. “So, you’re here to ruin Sam’s life, then?”
“Good call. I was totally going to dump her in front of the whole football team. I figured that’d pretty much put an end to her being popular at all.”
“I don’t know how long you’ve been here, but I don’t think she could be any less popular than she already is.”
Their conversation was interrupted when Alice bounced up to her, looking fetching in her red-and-white uniform, her blonde hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. “We’re going to be late for Glee, Sam, come on!” she ignored Ziggy entirely, taking Quinn by the hand and pulling her down the hall.
“Glee?”
“Glee Club,” she heard Rachel’s voice from behind her. “Kids get together and sing.”
“You’re not even serious,” Quinn muttered, “this is what she does in her spare time? It’s no wonder this girl killed herself.” The lockers blurred together as Sam dragged her down the hallway to the school’s choir room.
“Are you ready for your solo, Sam?” the teacher greeted her. He was tall, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, with an absolutely horrendous hairstyle. She shook her head.
“Definitely not.”
“What?” one of the other kids asked loudly behind her. “After all your complaining that you had to have this solo, you’re not ready?”
“I’m not feeling well, okay?” Quinn snarled. Alice moved down to the chair next to her and gently took her hand.
“Leave her alone! If she’s not ready, then she can sing tomorrow.” Quinn looked sidelong at her, an idea forming in her mind.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
She should have seen it coming, she realised. She stepped into the hallway at the end of the interminably boring Glee Club meeting, and Santana was waiting there with a slushie in hand. She looked for an exit, or someone to hide behind, and found everyone had scattered.
“So,” Santana sauntered toward her. “Sam, you’re just not girlfriend material. The football team’s been on my back about dumping you, and I think they’re right. As long as you’re my girlfriend, I’m never going to be popular.” She threw the slushie, and Quinn didn’t even try to dodge it. The experience of taking a cold drink in the face, she found, didn’t improve the second time around.
“Are you just going to take that?” Rachel asked. “Go over there and kick him in the-“
“That’s Santana,” Quinn hissed.
“Again? We need some kind of restraining order against that girl. She’s like a bad ex or something.”
“Isn’t Emma supposed to be working on figuring out where she comes from?”
“She’s got some dust on one of her CPUs. She’s not working on anything until Will takes the stack apart and uses an air can on her.”
Quinn groaned. “Okay, look - did Sam have any significant others when she died?”
“Uh,” Rachel tapped the handlink. “Divorced from that Ziggy kid, but nothing besides that. Why?”
“I have a theory. Emma’s wrong about why I’m here.”
“Oh, she’s not going to be happy to hear you say that.”
“I really don’t care. Just be ready to run the retrieval program, okay?” Quinn stalked away, then turned back. “Oh - and find yourself a cheerleader outfit. Be wearing it when I get home.” She wandered down the hall to where Alice was standing at her locker - she turned and looked at her with a horrified expression.
“Oh, Sam - do you need some help getting mmph,” Quinn cut off her question with a kiss. She felt the cheerleader struggle for a moment before melting into the kiss. She tasted the girls’ lip gloss, mixed with the sugary liquid still dripping down her face, and her heart raced. Behind her, she could hear the handlink squealing loudly.
“You did it, Quinn! Sam grows up to be a mother of four children and a five-time Tony award winner, married to Alice - all she needed was to come out of the closet! We’re running the retrieval program - now.” The world disappeared in a wash of blue light, and Quinn found herself back in the accelerator. The door opened and Rachel, dressed in an exact replica of Sam’s red-and-white uniform, wandered in. Quinn’s eyes lit up.
“Thank god we got Emma to look over that program after we got it from that other guy.”
“Never mind that,” Quinn beckoned her with a finger. “Get over here. Emma, turn off the cameras.”
“Yes, Doctor Fabray.”
“I’m serious, Emma. I’ll take that handlink, and I’ll stick it right up-“
“Done!” Emma agreed hastily, and the lights on the room’s cameras went dark.
“I’ll say one thing for being a teenager,” Quinn took Rachel in her arms, “the hormone overload is fantastic.”