Chapter Text
Santana glares at the newly acquired forward with thinly-veiled animosity. The blonde tilts her chin and meets her glare with a large, loopy smile, which only makes her angrier. For fuck’s sake, the woman could at least be decent enough to give her some cause to lash out. Now she couldn't even go on any of the many bitchy tirades she'd been rehearsing: it would just be bad form. Contrary to popular belief, Santana Lopez could be mean, but she also had standards.
Fuck, she curses again, inwardly, and sends up a desperate prayer for provocation. Someone – anyone – would hopefully do something stupid enough to give her an excuse to vent her mounting frustrations.
Because Brittany had played primarily on the East Coast, this was the first time most of them were meeting her in person - barring the times they'd met on-pitch on opposing sides.
In normal circumstances, a new transfer wouldn’t be in the starting line-up until they’d been eased into the team on the training pitch, but these weren’t normal circumstances. Everyone knew that the club was desperate, for lack of a more accurate description, and the sheer reality of the situation was that after Portland Thorns’s miserable flame-out in the previous season, they really had very little to lose.
Full-color pictures of Brittany had accompanied a two-page spread in the city's main newspaper, reporting on the rising star’s shock transfer to the Portland Thorns for almost no fee at all. The club, once great, had recently been at the center of a series of high-profile scandals. When the fact that the club owner and CEO had embezzled nearly $50 million worth of funds had finally been exposed, the club had imploded, dropping seven positions in the league standings in about two months, to finish in the lowest position since the club's inception in 2012.
What was left of the club’s reserves had been spent taking the CEO to court, only to lose based on some incomprehensible legal technicalities. If Santana had known all this would happen, she probably never would’ve signed on with the club straight out of college. It was like her grandpa’s warning was coming to bite her in the butt: “Girls aren’t supposed to play futbol,” He’d told her, scoffing. “Mark my words. Nothing good will come out of this.”
In any case, most of the players worth their salt had been busying themselves with trying to find an escape clause in their contract that they could exploit. The mass exodus had not registered much media attention apart from the occasional cloying fake-sympathy that Santana usually ignored. Until Brittany's inexplicable transfer deal.
The left winger had just come off the heels of a legendary season for NC Courage, who'd won that season's championship. She’d topped the league in assists and was fourth-highest in goals scored. And yet, over the recent transfer window, she’d signed a contract with a club that had finished second from the bottom, even accepting a 40% pay cut in the process. It was nothing short of incomprehensible. The Portland Thorn’s dire financial circumstances aside, to give up that kind of momentum and start afresh in a new club was akin to career suicide – especially for a young player just beginning to make a name for herself.
There was no shortage of speculations as to the reasons behind the transfer, and Santana couldn’t quite believe any of them. For one, some had suggested that Brittany’s club had wanted to loan her out because she hadn’t been ‘jibing’ well with the rest of the team, and they’d wanted to test out some other players who might be a better fit. Any idiot with half a brain cell would know that was utter hogwash – considering just how well Brittany had been playing.
Santana has watched interview snippets of Brittany explaining why she’d accepted the transfer offer on YouTube more times than she'd care to admit. "I've always dreamed of playing for the Thorns," Brittany had told the reporter. "As a kid, it was my favourite team. My mom's from Portland, and I love their fluid, attacking style of play. I used to have a whole shelf of old Thorns games and I'd rewatch them over and over again, taking notes. Maybe that's why the other kids thought I was weird." She grinned and shrugged. "Anyway. I've also always wanted to play with Santana Lopez. That woman is absolutely incredible." And here, she'd leaned in and blown a kiss to the cameras. And, infuriatingly, that's where most of the video footage of the interview cuts off.
Santana sighs again, wondering if the woman had genuinely been foolish enough to transfer to a club in the hopes of playing alongside someone she would, in actuality, be replacing.
Because it was pretty clear to Santana that Brittany's entry to the club meant that she was being bumped out. They didn't play in the exact same position, since Santana was more of a bona-fide center forward, but Brittany had long demonstrated her mettle as a well-rounded striker. And ever since the Thorns's disastrous season, a new coach and manager had been appointed, and both had made it abundantly clear that there would be radical changes to the club's fundamental DNA.
All throughout the off-season training, they'd extensively practiced a couple of very different formations, as though preparing for some drastic changes, particularly up-front. It didn't really take a genius to see that following from the acquisition of a new winger, it meant one of the club's current forwards would be sold for money that the club so desperately needed.
Finally, seeing as the only other forward on the team also happened to be Quinn Fabray – the current team captain, it was clear to Santana that she would be the one being axed.
Shaking her head, Santana attempts to banish these thoughts to the back of her mind. If there was anything she's good at, besides soccer, it's burying her feelings so deep that she eventually forgets they even exist in the first place. If her 4-year contract with the Thorns was about to be prematurely terminated, Santana was determined to go down in history proving that it was the single worst decision the club would make - well, apart from allowing half its fortunes to be siphoned off to various offshore accounts in the Bahamas.
For the next hour of warm-up, Santana runs herself damn near to the ground. The coach, Sue Sylvester, pulls her off to the side. “ Cool it, Lopéz. Jesus. Are you trying to give me a heart attack? Save it for the match.”
Santana bites down a snide remark about the correlation between age and increased risk of cardiac arrest. Instead, she just stalks back to the locker room in a huff, only to be accosted by Quinn and dragged into an overenthusiastic team huddle. "First game of the season," Quinn announces, rather unnecessarily. "Let's make it count!"
The home game, against a club near the bottom of the league, should by all accounts be an easy warm-up to the season. But with the club's terrible performance last season, pundits had chickened out of giving them clear winning odds. “ The ball is round , and the pitch is square. That is to say, anything could happen," One esteemed pundit had asserted, as though listing blatant facts about the sport would distract his readers from the fact that he wasn't actually giving them any concrete predictions.
The coach comes in to announce the starting line up for the game and, to Santana’s surprise, he’s shying away from the defensive formations they’d practiced all summer, opting instead to reprise the Thorns’s usual 4-3-3: with Quinn on the right, Brittany on the left, and Santana dead center.
Santana bites down the surprise. Quinn, standing next to her, gives Brittany a reassuring smile and a shoulder squeeze, and Santana realizes with a start that in the midst of her own existential crisis, she'd cleanly forgotten that it was, after all, the new winger's first appearance for her new club, and the fact that she'd never even seen - let alone played - with any of them before might a slightly daunting prospect. Feeling slightly guilty, she gives the woman a quick sidelong glance.
The blonde was happily chatting with Kelly and Laurie - the dynamic duo in midfield - and certainly doesn't appear to be suffering from any nerves. Santana's momentary guilt completely evaporates and shifts back to annoyance. That her years of hard work would be so easily eviscerated by this young upstart. "Yo, should I be jealous that you've found someone else to glare at, or can I assume you're thinking about me, while glaring at this newbie?" Tina asks, punching Santana in the arm.
Santana scoffs. "Sorry, glaring eyes reserved for you only. Here, enjoy," She says, glaring at Tina, who only giggles and grabs her hand as they jog out onto the pitch. "Tina, I swear, if you make them think we're dating again, I will killyou. Those three months of fielding questions on whether you were wearing my team hoodie or whether it was, indeed, your own team hoodie, were the worst months of my life."
"But was it the best fake relationship you've ever been in?" Tina asks, taking her place in the defensive line.
"It was the only fake relationship I've ever been in," Santana informs her, rolling her eyes. "Break many legs, champ," She says, patting the spritely defender on the back before realizing that this was a very dangerous thing to sanction. "I was just kidding," She says, slightly horrified at the delighted expression on Tina's face.
Shaking her head, Santana jogs off toward the center. When she passes by Brittany on the way to her starting spot on the pitch, the winger gives her a dazzling, bright-eyed smile. Santana was willing to wager that it had not left her face since the woman had entered the locker room at 8.05am that morning. By contrast, the scowl on her own face had also probably been there since this morning.
"Wipe that grin off your face, newbie," She orders. "The game's about to start and I'm not sure if you can see anything with that smile taking up all that real estate."
"Oh, got it," Brittany says, instantly widening her eyes. "Is this OK? This is as big as they go."
"Okay, now you're scaring me," Santana says. "Just- Ugh, I don't have time for this. I gotta give Quinn some moral support for the toss-up or she'll probably lose. That woman once lost to me thirty times in rock-paper-scissors, consecutively. I mean, how's that even possible? She probably has really shit karma."
"Very possible," agrees Brittany, completely serious. "I'll help you channel good vibes. See? This is my intense win-toss-up gaze." She fixes an intense stare at Santana.
Santana takes her eyes off of Quinn for a second to study Brittany. She sighs. "Brittany, that just looks exactly like your pass-me-the-ball, I-promise-I'm-paying-attention face."
"Exactly! I have a very multi-purpose face." Brittany says, beaming.
"We all do," Santana grumbles, well and truly done with the conversation now.
...
Quinn does, indeed, win the toss-up. After a brief handshake between the captains, referee, and linesmen, Quinn flicks the ball to Santana, who immediately sprints up the pitch. Surveying the pitch to gauge the support she has, Santana dodges an incoming defender, then passes the ball quickly to Kelly. A flurry of one-two passes ensue, transporting the ball further up-field.
When it comes back to Santana, she makes a run up the right flank, noting that Quinn has already positioned herself in the far-right corner of the penalty box.
Skipping easily past a large defender, she lobs the ball high overhead, curling it so it will dip right in front of Quinn. Except - that's not how it goes. Before the ball even reaches Quinn, Brittany leaps, flips backward, and makes solid contact with the ball in a bicycle kick that sends it flying straight into the left corner of the post. The keeper, covering off the side of the goalpost in front of Quinn, scrambles to get a hand on the ball, but it blasts right past her gloves and into the back of the net.
Brittany picks herself up from the ground and Quinn rushes over, pulling her into a tight hug.
The two midfielders – Laurie and Kelly, run over and leap onto Brittany, thumping her on the back. “A bicycle kick in your first three minutes of play?! Way to show off, rookie!” Laurie yells. Santana notices Brittany’s eyes search for hers, but all she offers is a small curt nod before jogging back toward the center of the pitch.
Quinn soon joins her, giving her a big grin and a shoulder bump. “Amazing cross, Lopes.”
“Was meant for you,” Santana grits out. “But whatever.”
Brittany, a few paces next to her, swallows and turns slightly pink, but says nothing.
Quinn gives Santana a stern look and opens her mouth, but before she has time to say anything, the whistle blows and play restarts.
Santana, usually already the grittiest, most passionate player on the team, plays the match like someone possessed. It’s a mixture of having something to prove – how dare they replace her (!) – and the bitter-sweet feeling of knowing that if she is replaced, she might never play with this team again, and it had been damn good while it lasted.
She cuts right into the penalty box time and again with her devastating pace, makes the defenders look like lumbering elephants in comparison, and is an absolute menace in front of goal. By half-time, she has already racked up a hat-trick, and is raring for more. That is, until Coach Sylvester pulls her aside – again – as she’s heading back to the dug-outs with the rest of the team.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” She demands. “First training, now this – are you trying to injure yourself?”
Santana glares back at the coach. A mixture of adrenaline and red-hot anger courses through her veins; She was at the top of her form, goddammit, she didn’t deserve to be axed. And she certainly didn't deserve a talking-to for playing her heart out for this damn team that was probably going to just get rid of her. “There's nothing wrong with me, Coach. It’s called working hard. Maybe you should look it up sometime?” She suggests.
Coach Sylvester has had enough. “Look – I don’t know what the hell has gotten into you, Lopez, but you’ve been surly all day and until you fix that attitude of yours, you can damn well sit on the bench!”
Santana’s throat constricts. She is about to say something else, but thinks better of it at the last moment. Turning on her heel, she storms into the lockers, face stony, heart pounding. She makes a bee-line for the showers, seeing as she won’t be playing the rest of the match, and figures a long, hot bath will fix the throbbing in her head.
She finds her path barred by Brittany, of all people. The woman's gaze is calm and kind like a clear summer’s day. “Santana,” She starts.
“Save it,” Santana says curtly, her tone humming with an undercurrent of warning. “Just get out of my way.” She attempts to push her way past, but Brittany simply side-steps so that Santana ends up colliding right into her.
Santana takes a deep breath. She thinks about the years of collecting enough dimes from mowing lawns so she could go to after-school soccer practice; years of accepting, silently, her abuela’s hard-earned money, slipped furtively into Santana’s lunch bag just so that she would have enough to eat at school; years of struggling to juggle soccer and waitressing and part-time community college so she'd qualify for the scholarship that UPenn had offered. All those years of blood and sweat, all coming to naught.
Reeling from the pain and frustration and fear, Santana blinks the moisture from her lashes and changes her mind - reverts to anger, because that's what she knows, that's what she's good at. Fuck conflict avoidance. Fuck it all. She takes a step forward, so that there’s barely an inch of space between the two of them. The air between them crackles with tension. "Look, You wanna talk? Let's talk, then." Santana starts, voice low, eyes blazing. "You're taking my spot in this club. I can't do anything about it, but don't expect me to pretend like I'm happy that this is happening."
Brittany swallows. "I don't understand why you think-"
"Oh come on!" Santana snaps, impatiently. "Don't act dumb, because I see it in your eyes, in the way you play - you're not." She sighs and looks away quickly, chest heaving. When she speaks again, her voice is calmer. "Look. I get that they'd replace a player like me with a player like you. I mean, people don't wanna watch ugly, scrappy goals. They don't wanna watch you struggle on a pitch, cause life's enough of a struggle already. Soccer's an escape from that. People want effortless beauty, grace, whatever. You give them that. So don't - don't waltz in here and pretend to understand what it feels like to have to have to fight and claw your way to where you want to be," Santana says, hating how her voice cracks just a little at the end.
Brittany's angry now too, and Santana can see it in her eyes, the tight set of her jaw, and in some sick way, she feels good about that - satisfied that she's finally hit a nerve and burrowed deep enough under the woman's skin to elicit some sort of reaction beyond the huge, dopey-eyed grins she'd been getting all day.
“You don’t know anything about me, Santana Lopéz," Brittany grits out. "So don't tell me what I am or what I am not, what I understand and what I don't. It's not easy, what I do. It never is and never will be. And you're so wrong, about-" She breaks off, her voice softening. "Watching you play is mesmerising. Magical. You take all these things that should be impossible - and somehow, you make them possible."
Santana sucks in a breath, a riot of emotions competing for primacy. A beat passes, and another, until she finally says, "Just - stay out of my way, Pierce, and I'll stay out of yours." She turns and walks away, but not quickly enough to miss the hurt in Brittany’s eyes. As she finally reaches the showers and shuts the door behind her, she finally lets out the deep, shuddering breath she's been holding the whole time, and uncurls her balled fists.
...
After a steamy shower, Santana pads out into the empty locker room and pulls her hair up into her towel. It's nice, the peace and quiet of the empty locker room as the rest of the team slogs it out on the field. But it doesn't last very long. The moment she steps into her clean set of clothes - a simple dark shirt and jeans - the rest of the team bursts into the locker room, whooping and chattering loudly, completely oblivious to her stormy mood. They'd all assumed that coach had wanted to rest her for the next game, considering she'd already scored a hat-trick by half-time. "5-0, suckersss," Kelly tells her, "Last goal scored by yours truly," She announces proudly, leaning in for a high-five. Santana rolls her eyes and obliges.
Laurie too skips over and thumps Santana over-enthusiastically on the back. "Fuckin' terrific start to the season, innit?” Laurie bellows, at a volume that really should not be humanely possible, especially not coming from the 5’2 midfielder, who probably weighed no more than a 110 pounds sopping wet.
“God," Santana gripes, pushing the tiny woman away. "Who the hell says 'innit'? Do you always have to be so loud and... British?"
Laurie just grins at her and cackles. “ Always, bitch. Team dinner tonight, by the way, at that taqueria you love.”
“BOTTOMLESS TEQUILLA!” Tina sings, sprinting over to sandwich her in a bruising hug that feels a lot more like a football tackle than an embrace.
Santana sighs. “Get your unwashed body off me, peasant,” She says, peeling herself away from her sweaty teammate. Against her better judgment, she allows herself to be dragged along to dinner.
...
The whole affair starts off innocuously enough, since she’s able to maintain a 7-person-minimum buffer between herself and Brittany at all times. Brittany too, seems to be avoiding her.
Then, six tacos and five shots in, things start to get rowdy. Laurie starts to do body-shots off of Kelly, and everyone starts to chant and bang on tables. Vivian, the goalkeeper, orders them another round of drinks on Coach's tab, and Santana, no stranger to alcohol-induced stupidity, finds herself tipping back another two shots in rapid succession. “TO AN AMAZING NEW SEASON!” Someone yells, and everyone begins to cheer. The taqueria’s other paying customers have long cleared out except for two tables of equally raucous dudes who happen to be fans of the Thorns, or so they claim. “TO THE THORNS!” They yell, tipping their drinks down.
Santana is on her way to the bathroom when a sturdily-built, not exactly bad-looking man from one of the tables approaches her. "Can I buy you a drink?” He asks. Santana doesn’t really want anything to do with the guy. But she does want to forget who she is and was and who she wants to be. Above all, she wants to forget the nagging feeling that she doesn't know why she's working so hard, and the suspicion that no matter how hard she plays, she'll never feel the bottomless black hole in her chest that never seems to go away. And Santana has learnt, over the years, that nothing helps with forgetting as much as alcohol and a stranger who owes you nothing, preferably both together.
And so, she gives him a salacious wink of her own, says “sure,” and really, he stands no chance. She follows him toward the bar and ignores the wolf-whistles from his buddies when she pushes him against the counter and starts kissing him, hard. He kisses her back, and nothing about it is complicated, which is exactly what Santana has come to rely on these days.
He's about to yank her toward the bathrooms when she feels a gentle hand on her shoulder, tugging her around.
It’s Brittany. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Santana snaps, words slurring slightly. “What do you want now?”
Brittany bites her lip. “I just wanted to make sure-” Her eyes flick to the dude’s mussed up hair, then to the already-blooming hickey on his neck, and finally to Santana. “That you’re alright,” She finishes, quietly. The sweetness in her expression is so genuine that Santana is filled with a brief, hazy desire to take back her words and apologise, but she comes from a family of hard men and women with soft hearts that have been broken time and again by hard men. Santana has made up her mind a long time ago about which of the two she'd rather be.
So she blames the brief moment of misplaced, unfamiliar softness on the alcohol and buries it away, deep in the recesses of her hardened heart. “ Jesus," She drawls instead, waving an arm at the dude. “Can you believe it? Nowadays you can’t even have some fun without your grandma breathing down your neck!”
Brittany’s jaw sets at that, and Santana realizes with a plunging heart that she's well and truly hurt the woman now. “You know what – forget it." The woman's eyes are cold and steely. "Forget I even bothered. I am done with you, Lopéz.” She turns on her heel and stalks angrily off.
The guy raises an eyebrow, then grins. “Any chance of a threesome, perhaps? Lesbian hate sex is the absolute bomb.”
“You know what? Just go fuck yourself,” Santana tells him, and stalks off as well. The rest of the team are still in loud and animated conversation at the other end of the restaurant, practically yelling over each other to be heard.
Tina notices her collect her stuff from her seat. “YOU LEAVING ALREADY?” She shouts.
“Yeah,” Santana says. “Say bye to everyone for me. See you tomorrow.”
“WHAT?” Tina lifts a cup to her ear, as though that would help with the transmission of sound waves. “SAY THAT AGAIN!”
Santana gives up and heads toward the door. Brittany catches her gaze briefly, but then she quickly looks away, pointedly returning to her conversation with a group of defenders. Santana pulls the door open and is about to step out into the street when Laurie hops on a chair and starts chanting “SANTANA! THE BEAST! THE BEST! THE BIG BEST BEAST!” And everyone laughs and cheers and starts to repeat it, – well, everyone but Brittany- and Santana just rolls her eyes and shoots them a small smile before letting the door swing shut behind her.
Outside, in the slightly cool summer night-air, she feels some semblance of normalcy return to her. She didn't quite know what to do with the strange, tight, and utterly unfamiliar feeling that nestled into her chest every time the woman so much as looked at her. But what she did know was that it was far, far easier to push down complex thoughts in favour of anger - which was simple, easy, something she knew like the back of her hand. Still, long after she's tried and failed to distract herself with a warm body beneath her, Santana lies awake with the niggling feeling in her mind that somehow, this was something that would take a lot more to forget.