Chapter One: Everbody's Changing

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So little time
Try to understand that I'm
Trying to make a move just to stay in the game
I try to stay awake and remember my name
But everybody's changing
And I don't feel the same

Everybody's Changing – Keane

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Jesse St. James had never been to a real party before. He had no desire to indulge in any lewd teenage behavior and inject any illegal substances into his body. He'd never gone out with his team mates from Vocal Adrenaline to the after parties, preferring instead to go home and watch recordings of their performances, critiquing where they could have done better. He was generally admired and mutually disliked by all of his team mates for these reasons, but he didn't care. He didn't care that they thought he was boring and too serious; all that mattered to him was winning.

Until he met Rachel Berry.

When he met her that day in the music store it was like a few layers of ice surrounding his heart had thawed out, giving the talented singer a chance to inch her way in and become the most important aspect of his life.

But now she was gone…and he didn't know what to do.

He had gone to her house the day after they got back from Regional's and had been devastated and shocked to hear from her father's that she was going to be spending the summer in New York with her Aunt and Uncle, and that she didn't want him to make any contact with her.

He refused to abide by her wishes and called repeatedly for the first three weeks, until someone else answered her phone. It was a man, a dangerous sounding one, and he told Jesse to leave his girl alone or he'd break his face. Three days later her number was changed, and he had no way to contact her because no one from her old glee club would talk to him long enough to tell him, not even Quinn.

He and Quinn had established a weird sort of friendship since Shelby had adopted Beth, probably because he spent so much time around Shelby. Whenever he was sad, upset, or angry about Rachel or anything like that he would go see Shelby and Beth and try his best to pretend that Rachel was still talking to him.

Shelby let him pretend, because it was easier than dealing with the truth.

*GLEE*GLEE*GLEE*

"Is Jesse coming over again?" Quinn asked Shelby as she helped set out the plates on the table, watching the older woman's interactions with their daughter. Shelby had arranged to have an open adoption and had graciously allowed Quinn to move in with her in order to be around Beth as often as possible. Quinn knew that when Beth got older Shelby would be known as Mom, but it still made her feel good to be around Beth as much as possible. She was living with Shelby for the summer, and she dreaded having to move away from Beth and back in with her mother when school started back up.

"He said he wasn't. I think he's having a rough day, he sounded horrible." Quinn furrowed her brow and thought back to her last conversation with Jesse, and how it had unnerved her.

They had been talking on the phone and when Jesse revealed that he wasn't going to be around as much anymore he told her that he was trying to move on, and then he'd hung up the phone. Quinn wondered what moving on entailed but she hadn't asked, because it wasn't really any of her business.

Except that it was, considering she was giving Rachel weekly updates on Jesse St. James, the man that she still loved. Rachel was living with her relatives in New York and was having an awesome time, except that she missed Jesse more than she wanted to admit. She had broken down to Quinn and told her all of her secrets, and Quinn had been shocked. She understood why Rachel stayed away though; it was a test for Jesse. She wanted to trust Jesse again but her heart had been so played with that she just couldn't be around him until she was sure, so she watched from a distance.

Quinn told Rachel that letting Jesse think she had moved on was a bad idea, but Rachel was just trying to protect herself. When she told Rachel that Jesse was thinking about moving on she knew that the brunette girl was worried, but she told her that she didn't think Jesse would actually be able to move on, he was so enamored.

Rachel decided it was about time for her to come home.

Or in a month.

She was ready, but she was scared.

"I'm going to give him a call. Be right back." Quinn left the room and took the stairs up to her bedroom, grabbing her cell phone off the desk and calling a familiar number. A number she never thought she'd be dialing again after their last conversation.

"Is he there?"

"Quinn. You need to stop calling, Jesse is a big boy. He can handle himself."

"He really can't, Andrea. That's why I keep calling."

Andrea Cohen was the only Vocal Adrenaline member that Quinn knew personally, and it was purely by coincidence that they'd even met. Back when they'd been trying to enlist the VA choreographer to help them with their routines, he had been torturing VA and Andrea to the point of exhaustion. Quinn and Andrea had bonded over a shared problem; Andrea was secretly pregnant. The two of them had established somewhat of a bond until about twelve weeks into her pregnancy, when she fell down during a VA practice and miscarried the baby. They had tried to remain as friendly as they had before then, but their friendship had died when Quinn was just a painful remainder of what Andrea had lost.

They only talked once a week now, when Quinn got her Jesse updates. The ones that she would never ever share with Rachel.

"I'm trying to watch out for him, but I can't go everywhere with him Quinn. Why don't you just ask about it yourself? I don't think he's a very good liar."

"I have asked him about it, and he denied it." Quinn could remember the conversation she'd had with Jesse quite clearly, and it hadn't gone well. He had just accused her of trying to ruin his life and had stormed out without answering any of her questions.

She didn't know what to do anymore.

"I have to go." Andrea said quickly, hanging up the phone before Quinn could say a word. She looked at the call disconnected read out across the phone and set it down gently on the bed before pressing her hands to her face and crying softly.

She had no idea what to do.

*GLEE*GLEE*GLEE*

"!"

Jesse heard the shouts as he walked into the crowded house and he sent all the admirers a suggestive smirk before sauntering into the room, pushing through the crowd of people towards the kitchen. He made his way to the counter and leant up against the counter, counting to ten silently in his head. Without fail, when he hit four a pretty looking blonde girl in a short black skirt and sexy red tube top was standing directly in front of him, two Smirnoff Ice's in her hands. She handed one to him and he took it, downing it in a few gulps before taking the second one and doing the same. She giggled and introduced herself but he ignored her, grabbing another drink from the cooler behind him. He could hear her talking and he pretended to be engaged, nodding and smiling with a few casual laughs thrown in for good measure. By the way she was beaming up at him; he could tell that he was passing the test.

He almost had enough drinks in him to be able to kiss her and not think about Rachel Berry.

Almost.

After a few more drinks and some shots, he was so wasted that he could barely remember his own name, let alone the girls. He pressed her up against the wall and kissed her lips fiercely, coldly, ignoring the sounds that she was making. In his mind she was Rachel Berry, the girl he loved more than life itself, and as long as he kept his eyes closed the illusion wouldn't be shattered. He allowed her to lead him into the bedroom, slamming the door behind them as clothing was shed. Unlike with Rachel, he didn't take things slow. He did what he had to do and then left while the girl was sleeping, unable to pretend that she was Rachel in the light of day. It happened so often that he didn't even get hangovers anymore, he would just go home and sleep until nightfall and proceed to repeat the process all over again.

Until one day, things changed.

He didn't remember inviting anyone over, but when he woke up at 9pm he wasn't surprised to find his house full of people. He staggered out of his bedroom and passed by several faces, no one that he knew by name though. His VA team mates had stopped going out to the parties as National's was in two weeks, and if they could see him now he knew that they would be kicking his ass for even contemplating getting trashed again. If Jesse could be honest with himself, he'd admit that getting drunk and sleeping with random drunk girls wasn't helping him anymore. He couldn't keep lying to himself, closing his eyes and hoping that Rachel would just materialize in front of him.

He needed something else. Something to make the pain go away.

As he wandered through his house he quickly realized that the only person he recognized was Andrea Cohen, and she was quite possibly the last person he wanted to talk to. She had been pregnant with his baby, unfortunately for him, and she had miscarried during one of their VA practices. Well at least he assumed it had been his baby, they had been dating at the time, but with her you never know. It probably wasn't even his. He didn't care enough to ask, he was happier not knowing. She was sitting on the couch talking to a random blonde girl he didn't recognize, and he passed them by without even acknowledging them. He marched past a scared looking kid that was probably a freshman, grabbed his drink and downed it in seconds, throat burning when he realized it was straight liquor. He had never tried drinking really hard liquor straight, preferring to stick to beer and coolers, but the burn of the alcohol in his throat momentarily made him loose his balance, and forget about the one person who was always on his mind.

He grabbed the bottle of Jack Daniel's off the counter and took a drink out of it, wincing as the alcohol ran down his throat.

He would have to get used to it.

*GLEE*GLEE*GLEE*

"Rachel, sweetie, are you sure you don't want to go see Spring Awakening with us tonight?" Her Aunt asked sweetly, noticing that Rachel seemed sadder than usual. Rachel just shook her head, stating that she'd rather stay in and get caught up on the numbers that she'd been practicing for the invitational in October. Her Aunt gave her a pitying look and left with the rest of the family, hoping that whatever was bothering Rachel could be solved, as the sadness in the young girls eyes reminded her of the same look she used to see in her brothers eyes before he met his life partner. She was lonely and missing the boy she loved, it was understandable to be that sad.

When Rachel heard the door slam behind her Aunt she jumped up off of the bed and went over to the computer in the den, which her fathers had explicitly refused to allow her to use. They said that while she was in New York she should stay away from any kind of technology like the computer, as all it would do was make her miss Jesse more. She logged into MySpace and grinned when she saw that she had many notifications and messages. She liked that people from Lima were missing her, and it made her feel better to know that her presence was missed. Many of the messages were from Jesse, dated over a month ago, and she noted that the messages died off after the 12th of July. She wondered what had happened on that day to make him decided to stop sending her messages. It was the 18th of July currently, and over a month since Jesse had sent her any kind of message. She wondered if he really was trying to move on, like Quinn had mentioned in their last phone conversation.

"It's been a long time coming down this road, and now I know what I've been searching for." She sang quietly to herself, looking through the pictures on her MySpace account. She stopped when she came to a picture of her and Jesse, with her arms wrapped around his neck as he pressed a kiss to her lips. They looked so happy and in love, that she couldn't even begin to fathom how those people had become the people they were now. She knew that she was a wreck and as for Jesse, he seemed to have dropped off the radar somewhat. Quinn had said that he was really quiet and his confidence seemed to have disappeared, as well as himself now. Quinn said she hadn't seen him around the house in over two weeks, and that she was starting to get worried about him. Rachel wondered if she had made the right decision in changing her phone number, but at that point in her life she hadn't been ready to let him back in…and if she had talked to him she would have.

And they would have failed, because she wouldn't have trusted him.

After having a lot of time to think about their situation she wondered whether or not she was making the right decision, being so far away from him when only being together could mend their frayed relationship. She knew that the second she got back to town she would throw herself into his arms and pray that he isn't too angry with her for hiding away. She just had more than herself to think about, and she hoped that he would understand that she did what she did for everyone involved.

She didn't know that Jesse was self-destructing without her.

A/N: So this is the first chapter of Brave New World! This chapter is dedicated to everyone that reviewed The Only Exception and Sorry's Not Enough. I also want to mention that if the Andrea/Jesse thing seems sketchy, we don't really know much about her and I want to make her somewhat of a good person. It's easy to group VA into a bunch of evil people, but I'm sure they aren't bad people at their cores. Expect to see some good VA in this story, as well as some evilness.

In the next chapter: Jesse does something bad, Rachel has a revelation, and Quinn reaches out to Finn.