Work Text:
Title: If You Need Someone At Your Side, I Am Out There
Pairing: Santana Lopez/Quinn Fabray/Brittany
Rating: PG/PG-13 (for character death)
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Spoilers: None.
Summary: There are three women Santana truly needs in this world.
A/N: I was feelin’ angsty. By which I mean, I needed the therapy granted by this kind of story, and it made me feel angsty in the long run. Sorry, y'all. Title, by the way, from Nightmare of You's "The Days Go By Oh So Slow."
If there is one person on this earth who really gets Santana Lopez, it is her grandmother. It seems strange to her sometimes, that this elderly woman could have anything in common with her semi-feral, overly rebellious granddaughter, but that’s family for you. Sometimes, the things that make the least sense are the most wonderful.
Both of her parents work, so Santana spends her childhood running like the hellion she is through an over-warm kitchen, inhaling the constantly wafting scent of home. She usually manages to break something, prompting her grandmother to scold her for “meddling”, but there is always love on the other side of the rebuke. Santana doesn’t mind getting yelled at by Abuela; at least the action is never accompanied by the slap of a wooden spoon across her rear end.
Once she has achieved her daily goal of destruction, Santana is set loose upon the neighborhood, toting the promise that, should she not adhere to her curfew of 4 PM, that spoon might become a reality.
She usually sets up shop with two girls down the street: the so-called saintly Quinn Fabray, with her blonde ponytail and wicked penchant for breaking rules and getting away with it, and the completely sweet Brittany, whose hair and demeanor are both just a little lighter than Quinn’s. They are the best friends a nine-year-old could ask for, because they know the merits of sticking together. Santana would do anything for them, regardless of how many times she gets caught letting Brittany copy her homework, or how many rocks get lobbed at her when Quinn fails to wisely pick her battles.
They understand her almost as well as her grandmother does, and consequently, Abuela loves them dearly. As a peaceful foursome, they indulge in long evenings spent in the living room, with Santana curled on the couch between Quinn and Brittany, listening to Abuela sing Spanish refrains as she prepares dinner a room away. It’s the ultimate comfort, and though Santana is most definitely a jealous child (one who generally prefers to clutch her grandmother close and share her with no one), she has found she does not at all mind when Abuela swirls cheerfully into the room and grasps Brittany by the hand, or ruffles Quinn’s hair. This is her family, and that, more than Santana being the center of attention, is what counts.
As Santana grows up, so does her adoration for her grandmother, as well as the strength of her bond with Quinn and Brittany. They don’t always get along, of course; as teenagers, they are bound to butt heads over boys, and status, and uncontrollable PMS. But through it all, they are still the best of friends, even if Quinn is kind of a bitch most of the time, and Brittany can’t count higher than thirty-two, and Santana is the most pig-headed thirteen-year-old in existence.
Most importantly, despite every inch of teen angst, Abuela remains a steadfast companion. Santana is too old to need a babysitter anymore, but she still spends an inordinate amount of time at her grandmother’s house, keeping the old woman company while she bakes bread and scrubs floors. It feels like Santana’s birthright of sorts, especially since her grandfather is long deceased. This is too vast a house for one woman to handle by herself. Abuela, Santana is proudly convinced, needs her granddaughter as desperately as Santana needs her.
The years creep by, and somehow, they manage to draw closer to one another. The guest room is permanently set up in Santana’s name, with a décor that might actually be more personal than her bedroom at home. Brittany and Quinn leave clothes over in one of the drawers, so accustomed are they all to crashing after Cheerio practice or particularly long school days; their parents have long realized that their children are almost always to be found at old Mrs. Lopez’s house, doing homework or learning to cook. The Fabrays in particular seem pleased to have their daughter out of the house, which irritates Santana on a level completely unrelated to the security of their tight-knit life together.
Abuela, on one such day of extreme Fabray-oriented frustration, pulls Santana aside and looks her in the eye. “Do you believe,” she asks firmly, “that Quinn is happy here?”
Santana’s mouth opens and closes uncertainly. “Yes?”
“And Brittany, she is happy too?”
Santana glances back over her shoulder, to where Brittany and Quinn are engaged in a heated round of Egyptian Ratscrew. “I think so,” she says fondly, as the taller blonde triumphantly smacks her hand down on a large pile of cards. Quinn swears.
“Language, little one,” Abuela reminds her calmly. Quinn flushes.
“Lo siento.”
Santana laughs, because few things are funnier or more pathetic than Quinn Fabray trying to speak Spanish. Abuela, still smiling affectionately, catches her arm.
“They are happy, Santana. As are you. Nothing else ought to matter, si?”
As always, her grandmother’s tendency towards wisdom makes Santana grin. She lopes to the table just in time to witness Quinn’s crushing defeat at the hands of Brittany, who immediately leaps to her feet, grabs Santana around the waist, and twirls her around in a victory dance.
Everything is good. Everything is wonderful. And then Abuela gets sick.
It’s not much at first; just a cough here, a tired expression there. Santana takes to scrubbing the floors for the sake of her grandmother’s knees, leaving Quinn to clean the bathroom and Brittany to dust the high shelves. None of them mind pulling their weight; at William McKinley High, they are the Power Trio, ruling the school with the combined strength of their hotness. But here, under this roof, they will always, always do as asked of them. It’s just common courtesy.
But as the months slip away into nothing, Santana begins to notice the things she is doing for her grandmother go beyond simple courtesy. They are headlining straight into what feels scarily like necessity, and Santana has no idea how to feel about it. On the one hand, it’s comforting to think she can do for her grandmother what the woman has spent sixteen years doing for her—cooking, aiding, protecting. On the other…
This is not the way their relationship goes.
Abuela is a strong woman, raised in an age where independence was hard to tamp down. She has always prided herself upon recovering swiftly from the death of her husband and continuing to serve as matriarch of the Lopez clan, be it through elaborate birthday cakes, back-to-school shopping sprees, or delighted attendance to every child’s play, band concert, and soccer game. She is the very foundation of a family otherwise rooted in all work and no play, and it makes Santana kind of sick to see her floundering at her usual duties.
Something is seriously wrong, Santana knows, but the woman won’t explain. It’s an ego thing, one Santana can relate to all too well, but that doesn’t make her any less angry about it. Their relationship is special; this isn’t like her mom’s shifty eyes, or her father’s stammering inability to talk about his day. This is the woman who walked her through every year of school, who taught her to make cookies and throw a punch, who taught her how to be strong. This is who she has gone to with every fear, every ounce of loneliness, every crush—even when those crushes happened to be on her best friends. This is all she has.
And she has the nasty feeling, deep down, that she is on the verge of losing it forever.
Quinn and Brittany feel it too, she can tell, but for the first time in years, Santana is far too wrapped up in her own head to care. They may be her best friends, and she may love them to potentially inappropriate degrees, but this is her blood. Blood is thicker than all sorts of other shit. If they can’t understand that, she thinks furiously that she might be better without them.
She starts spending every waking moment not already locked into school or Cheerios at Abuela’s house. At first, her mother presses for her to come home, threatening infinite grounding should she fail to comply, but it’s no use. Santana’s resolution is sturdier than the walls holding this familiar building up, and nothing short of a bullet is going to tear her away. As long as her grandmother is confined to her bedroom, coughing and wheezing broken melodies, Santana isn’t going anywhere.
She doesn’t realize how deeply the support of her friends touches her until they come by with fresh clothes and ready-to-go homework (that part obviously being all Quinn, because Brittany can barely even do her own work properly). They look prepared to settle in and do whatever she asks of them, and even though Santana prides herself on being stone-strong, she nearly breaks at the sight of Quinn’s firmly set jaw and Brittany’s soft smile. Part of her wants to lunge into their arms and fall apart, but Abuela chooses that exact moment to let out a low, keening wail of pain from down the hall. Santana snaps out of it and lopes after her, armed with fresh tea and a cold compress.
It isn’t in the contract of teenage girls to abandon frivolous shopping excursions and boy-chasing for the sake of damaged old women, but Santana doesn’t care. She’s a badass; she will be young until she decides otherwise, which means there will be plenty of time to act like a lunatic later. For now, her life is all about doctor’s visits, carefully constructed medication regimens, and comfort. That last part isn’t exactly Santana’s forte, but she’s got enough of Abuela’s favorite songs memorized to at least give that much back. Her voice may not be radio-caliber—at least not in comparison to certain midgets at school who will remain Berry—but it is enough to bring a smile to Abuela’s tired, pale lips.
As long as that is the case, Santana will sing until her lungs explode.
She can see it getting worse—more doctor’s visits, piles of pills, and still Abuela is undoubtedly growing weaker. The woman’s hands shake constantly now, as if her body has completely forgotten what stability means, and a trip to the bathroom takes as much energy as one of Brittany’s hip-hop routines. Dark eyes, the only part of her grandmother Santana recognizes now, reflect the old woman’s agony—not from the pain she’s in, but rather what the illness has stripped from her simply by force of being. Reduced in such a short time to an invalid; it’s so obviously the thing destroying her that Santana has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from crumbling under Abuela’s bleak stare.
She spends her nights tossing restlessly in a bed meant for one, trapped between Quinn and Brittany, who each insist upon taking “Abuela shifts” so Santana can catch a few measly hours of sleep here and there. It’s her first instinct to fight them, but at this point, the combined efforts of lack of food, constant vigilance, and Sue Sylvester’s inexhaustible tirades have her swaying on her feet. If she doesn’t sleep occasionally, she rationalizes mutely, she’ll drop dead in the middle of Algebra, and what good will she be to anyone then? It kills her to allow anyone to take her place at Abuela’s bedside, but she’s got to keep her energy up somehow.
The days bleed together, and almost before she knows it, her rightful place at Abuela’s side is shifted to a hospital bed. The woman lies dormant, breathing shallowly and staring with glassy eyes at a dim television screen. Santana (and Brittany, and Quinn) holds steady in the visitor’s chair, hands folded into neat fists as she forces herself not to think about where she is or why she’s there. Denial is a thing of the past by now—she would have been useless if she’d allowed such dismal feelings to eat her up in the first place—but that doesn’t mean she wants to dwell.
If there’s one thing Santana has learned over these past few months, it is to never, ever dwell.
She’s not allowed to sleep at the hospital, thanks to some seriously bullshit mandate, but it doesn’t stop her from heading there before and after school, sticking around until at least three nurses have given her the evil eye and tried to shoo her out. Once or twice, she debates sleeping in her car until morning breaks, but Brittany in particular is uncomfortable with the idea of Santana freezing to death in the middle of the night. She settles for crashing on her parents’ couch, ignoring their requests for her to retire to her own room, because the couch is the closest thing to the door.
She’s getting to be one hell of a mess, and she knows it. She’s even slipping at school; she has lost track of the number of times she’s fallen asleep in Will Schuester’s class, for example, and her body is less useful than a jello mold during practice. Twice, she has tripped on the stairs and gone sprawling clumsily into various members of the student body. Emma Pillsbury has taken to watching her guardedly in the halls, clearly biding her time for the moment when she calls Santana into her creepily-immaculate office for a heart-to-heart.
Still, through it all, Brittany and Quinn stay close. Each time she nods off in class, she is woken by Brittany’s gentle finger stroking across the bridge of her nose. When she flounders at practice, it is Quinn who sets up station behind her, ready to lend her own strength. Falling down the stairs, she’s found, isn’t so bad when there’s a warm body on either side to catch her, and Ms. Pillsbury won’t be able to withstand the force of the inimitable Fabray Glare much longer without wetting herself.
It should come as no surprise, then, that they are the first people to find her when it finally happens.
It has been a long time coming—months, in fact—and Santana really thought she was prepared. Abuela’s once-spirited conversations have long since petered off into frightened silence, her ever-quaking hands clenched around Santana’s as they sit. She isn’t the woman Santana has grown up with, for certain, and she hasn’t been for longer than Santana is willing to recognize. She is, as much as the girl hates to admit it, more or less a shell waiting for the inevitable.
Santana thinks she’s ready, but when she trudges through the door after practice one Thursday, intending a two-minute shower before making that familiar drive, she finds her parents. Sitting. Holding each other, as they never do, and it takes all of thirteen seconds for the largest, most essential part of Santana to crack.
She’s at Abuela’s house before she realizes it, carried on the blind velocity of heartbreak. Wordless, breathless, she makes her way to her room and sinks down upon the bed.
It’s over.
She has done everything she could possibly think of, has run every errand and triple-checked every chart, and still, here it is. Unceasing, unflinching, merciless. The end.
Santana Lopez has always been as strong as she’s known how to be—stronger than most of the people in her life combined, she likes to believe—but right now? She has nothing left.
The pillow smells like lavender and fresh apples when she nuzzles into it, tears washing down her cheeks, and suddenly, Santana can’t breathe. She can’t move, she can’t think. She has become one massive, pulsing bruise, kicked into the flesh of her life by some malicious, uncaring god.
With Abuela gone, she’s not sure she remembers how to be anything better.
The house having been so empty for so long, it should surprise her—no, scare the shit out of her—when the bed sinks on either side. But, of course, it’s them—the fabulous threesome, forever entwined by way of bitchery and short skirts. How could this ever be surprising?
Brittany’s arms wind around her from the left, Quinn’s from the right, and for long, staggering moments, she lays still. Two steady heartbeats pound against her, throbbing through her shirt and skin and bones. Sniffling, Santana closes her eyes and lets herself fall.
It’s Brittany who kisses her first, a brief brush of lips against her shoulder. Every muscle in Santana’s body tenses involuntarily, then relaxes again as the tall blonde moves against her back, strong-armed and gentle as ever. Kisses sway from one shoulder to the other, slow, unhurried. Santana sighs shakily around a sob, burrowing backwards.
Quinn’s mouth rests against her forehead, her lithe body cradling the darker girl close to her chest, and Santana is surprised to feel her numb mind going blank at the sensation of warm breath ghosting across her skin. It is so easy to get lost here, sandwiched between the two women she’s still got left, Brittany’s lips trailing a secure path up the back of her neck while Quinn presses her mouth into the crest of Santana’s hair. Shaking, miserable, broken, Santana slowly remembers to breathe.
She doesn’t know how long she stays there between them, feeling the tender brush of hands working along her spine, her ribs, her arms. Legs twine with hers from all sides, keeping her grounded. She can taste their tears, feel the weight of their grief soaking into her clothing, her hair, her self, and it kills her to know they are hurting the way she is hurting. But somehow, at the same time, she cherishes that misery like she has cherished nothing else in her life.
They hold her for what could easily be years, and the shattered thing inside Santana’s chest slowly, painfully beats on. They do not speak, because there is nothing to say besides the banal clichés that Abuela would roll her eyes at anyway. They simply stay here, curled protectively into one mass of anguish made flesh.
Santana weeps until there is nothing left in her system, and then she nudges her head under Quinn’s chin, reaching behind herself to tug until Brittany is molded seamlessly with her back. Eyes closed, she sucks in a shuddering breath and waits for the realization to fade away into sorely-needed sleep.
Abuela is gone.
And for every action Santana took against it, for everything she remembered to do, for all her forced maturity there is one detail she forgot.
She needs Abuela.
Laying here, shivering with emotion, she realizes she is barely more than a scared, miserable little girl in need of her grandmother. She is alone, lost, intolerably lonely. Without Abuela, what the hell is there?
A sound breaks the silence, tiny, almost unnoticeable. Santana presses further into her friend-made burrow, listening.
All around her, music. Quinn and Brittany are singing, soft and low and muffled through their tears. They are singing, and it's not the way Abuela did it, not even close, but...the song is the same. The words, the melody, the love behind it.
By the time they finish, she is weeping again, this time with new regret and a strange new sense of connection. Her grandmother is gone, but Brittany and Quinn are here. They are here when no one asked them to be, when she needs them most, and--
Quinn kisses her temple and does not move away.
Brittany mouths cautiously at where her shoulder and neck join.
They are here, and though she is broken and wounded and hopeless, something stirs within her heart. Something like need. Something like home.