One Step Closer
Title: One Step Closer
Pairings/Characters: Santana/Brittany, Brittany's parents (John and Anna), several original characters, side Rachel/Quinn and their children: Gabriela, Ethaniel, Adrian, Susan, Harmony, and Jonah
Rating: PG-13
Length: ~20,600 words
Summary: Dreams are peculiar things. For Santana, her worst nightmare comes true with the words “there's been an accident”. It takes thousands of steps to rebuild her life and replace the nightmare with her greatest dreams.
Author's Note #1: This has been in my “In Progress” folder for well over a year and was originally a Rachel/Quinn. I honestly thought I would never finish it but about a month or so ago I decided to pick it back up, convert it to Santana/Brittany, rewrite everything I already had written, and then finish it.
Author's Note #2: I am by no means a doctor but I did as much as I could to make it accurate. I know someone who went through very similar things and so a lot of the details were pulled from that. So I guess you could say that this is inspired by true events.
Music: My 'inspirational soundtrack' for this story:
A Thousand Years - Christina Perri (also the inspiration for the title)
1000 Ships - Rachel Platten (I also highly recommend the rest of her music)
-Chapter 1-
Dreams are peculiar things. For Santana Lopez, the one she was having was about to become eerily real. There were flashes of snapped wires and hospitals. Blonde hair and terrified blue eyes. Helplessness and rage. Of course, she had no idea what it all meant. At least not until her dreams were interrupted by the sound of her phone going off (“I'm a Bitch” as her ringtone, naturally). What she did know, as she fought her way back to consciousness, was that something definitely wasn't right. Santana first checked her clock and found that it was well past midnight, before realizing that A) Brittany wasn't in bed with her which was odd since the blonde was almost always home from her show before eleven and B) That her phone had fallen to the floor in her haste to try to answer it. Knowing she only had a few seconds before it would go to voicemail, she didn't bother to look at who might be trying to call.
“Hello?” Santana answered with a yawn, rubbing her eyes and somewhere in a far corner of her brain praying that it was Brittany telling her she'd lost her keys (again) and needed to be let in.
“Santana Lopez?” a female voice (definitely not Brittany) asked on the other line. The first thing Santana noticed was chaotic background noise of voices and beeps. It put a knot in her stomach and a lump in her throat because this wasn't bar noise or backstage noise. It was unfamiliar and a little terrifying. Willing herself to fully wake up and focus on the conversation, Santana shook her head a little and finally responded.
“Speaking.”
“You’re listed as the emergency contact for Brittany S. Pierce?”
“Yeah, did she get lost again?”
To the woman on the other line it may have sounded a little mean but to Santana it was another prayer that Brittany had gotten off at the wrong train station or ended up in the wrong apartment building and some kind person was looking through the blonde's wallet to help her figure out where she belonged... Anything but what her knotted stomach told her it really was.
“There’s been an accident.”
All Santana waited for was the name of the hospital and where to go before she dropped her phone and made a quick dash to her dresser, grabbing whatever sweatpants and sweatshirt she could find. She grabbed her phone from the bed, her keys from the rack by the door, and her purse on the coathanger while she slipped on the nearest pair of shoes (Brittany's running shoes, she later noticed) and was out of the apartment in under two minutes.
Another prayer, this time a thank you for New York City's 24-hour cab service, was sent up when Santana almost immediately got a cab outside of her apartment. She directed the man to New York Presbyterian Hospital, oddly enough right across the street from her office. It was strange, she thought during what she was sure to be the longest cab ride of her life, that she'd seen the hospital nearly every single day for the last few years but had never given a second thought to it. Yet now she had the feeling that the walls were going to become more than familiar.
The cab had just barely slowed down when Santana threw a $50 bill at the man and yelled for him to keep the change as she practically jumped out of the cab and dashed in to the emergency room entrance.
“Brittany Susan Pierce,” she gasped at the window. “Please.”
The look on the face of the woman at the reception desk should've told Santana that whoever she talked to wasn't going to have good news. She felt herself being taken by the arm and tugged gently down a hallway, the nurse with dark skin glancing at her every now and then while her lips moved. Santana didn't hear anything. Only blood rushing in her ears and her heart pounding. She was only focused on getting to Brittany at that moment.
“Ms. Lopez did you hear me?” the nurse said when they stopped outside a room.
Santana shook her head.
“She’s not awake, the doctors have sedated her. She’s in a neck brace to keep her from moving and also on a ventilator to keep her breathing, do you understand?”
Santana's breath caught in her throat. She nodded weakly. “H-how long has she been here?”
“About an hour.”
“Wh-why didn’t I get the call?”
“We had a four-car pile up come in about the same time as she came did,” the nurse said. “I'm sorry you didn't get called right away but there was nothing you could've done if you'd been here, honey.”
“She's okay, right? She'll be fine.”
The nurse only took a deep breath and squeezed Santana's arm a little before pulling her into the room. The monitors were beeping, the sound of the ventilator was rhythmic. And there, in a single bed with blonde hair cascading across the pillow and only a few small bruises on the side of her face, lie Brittany - a tube sticking out of her mouth, wires seemingly coming from everywhere and connected to the monitors and her long neck in a brace, completely immobilized.
“That’s not her,” Santana whispered. “That’s not B. It can’t be.”
But it was. The nurse pushed Santana toward the bed and the brunette stared down at her girlfriend. She looked fine if it weren't for the bruises. As if nothing had even happened except maybe walking into a door.
“From what we were told it was after the show,” the nurse said. “They were doing some setting and her harness malfunctioned. She fell about twenty feet and it was enough... The doctor will explain more when he comes in.”
Flashes of the dream she'd been woken from went through Santana's brain. The feeling of eerie familiarity made her shiver. “Enough? Enough to what?”
“Ms. Lopez?” A tall, pale man with gray hair and small glasses stepped into the room. “Ms. Lopez, I’m Dr. Harris. I'm an orthopedic surgeon.”
Santana nodded and the nurse pulled a chair to the side of the bed for the brunette to sit in. She pulled it even closer and slipped her hand into Brittany’s. There was no response.
“Your partner has sustained a rather dangerous injury, Ms. Lopez,” Dr. Harris said, his voice monotone and serious. “Her x-ray shows she has shattered part of her spine, vertebrae C-seven and T-one.” Santana watched as the man held up a sheet of paper with a drawing of a person's neck, spine included. Dr. Harris pointed to the two vertebrae right where Brittany's neck met her shoulders. “We're fairly certain that, by some miracle, it did not sever her spinal cord which is the best thing that could've happened in this situation. Our best bet to make sure she has as a good recovery as she can get is to do surgery to repair the vertebrae as soon as possible.”
“Wh-what? What kind of surgery?”
“The way the vertebrae broke we would need to remove bone from another part of her body, hip would be the best, and use it to replace what she’s lost. After that it would be a waiting game.”
Santana looked down at her girlfriend and nodded. “Whatever helps,” the brunette whispered. “Just fix her.”
XXXXXXXXXX
An hour later Santana found herself sitting in the waiting room outside of the operating wing. The doctor, a nurse, and some other woman with a stack of paperwork had talked to her for a good half-hour on the risks of the surgery (her spinal cord could be permanently damaged, there could be infection, she could have brain damage ranging from mild to severe, death...) and what to expect for the time after surgery (not too much, was all Santana could gather). Brittany’s parents’ house phone number had been on her phone screen waiting for her to hit “call” for the remainder of that hour. A few deep breaths to compose herself and Santana finally pushed the green button. She shook as she quietly told Brittany's mother where she was and why.
“Stay strong, Santana,” Anna had said. “We'll get the first flight out. Just be there for her alright, sweetie?”
It was only after that Santana realized she had a voicemail, timestamped right around the time she was in the shower. She cursed herself for never checking them before she went to bed. Brittany's messages were almost always texts.
Hey San. It's intermission. I'm gonna be late, they got new harnesses in and I have to stay to get it fitted. I'll see you when I get home. Love you
Not wanting to kill her phone battery, Santana stopped listening to it after the fifth time. Seven hours and three updates that it would be “a little longer” and “we're doing everything we can” later, Santana had begun to yet again fall asleep on the couch. The nurses told her after the first three hours that she might as well try to rest because staying awake was only going to make time go slower. It was the only thing making her sleep, knowing that time would fly by. She watched as her eyelids dropped for the blue shoe covers she'd seen walk to other families.
“Santana?”
The Latina snapped up to a sitting position, Dr. Harris' scrub-clad legs in front of her. As she rubbed the sleep out of her eyes the doctor sat down and, for the umpteenth time that day, Santana prayed. She prayed that what he was about to say was at least a little good.
“She’s stable,” he said. “We did what we could and we consider the surgery a success as far as repairing the vertebrae. She has a titanium plate and screws in as well as a piece of bone we removed from her hip. We’ll have to keep her sedated for a few days at least to give it time to heal a little. After that we’ll let her wake up and see if there’s been damage to the spinal cord. There were no visible tears or leakages but bruising can still do a lot of damage.”
Santana could only nod. She was so numb at this point that she had no questions and didn’t want any answer other than Brittany was going to be okay. Dr. Harris patted her on the shoulder and in a few seconds a nurse was at Santana's side and tugging on her arm as she led the way to recovery. Brittany was in her own, small room at least - as opposed to the rows of beds behind curtains that Santana had passed. They’d taken the blonde off of the ventilator; at least now Santana had one less thing to remind her that her life was probably never going to be the same again. One big reminder, however, was the almost cage-like neck brace encompassing Brittany's upper body along with the surgical brace around her neck.
Brittany was in recovery for two hours before the doctor consented that she was stable enough to be moved up to the ICU. Santana never let go of the bed railing. The team of nurses moved swiftly but carefully in getting Brittany situated in the new room - they put cuffs on Brittany's legs to help keep circulation going since the blonde wasn't going to be moved any more than what was necessary until she was brought out from under the sedation.
None of the other rooms had windows and it was the first time Santana realized there was an outside world since she'd received the phone call. She could see her office building with the Chase Bank logo lit up against the dawn sky. Not really remembering exactly what day it was, she checked her phone to see that it was Saturday. She sent a text to Brittany's mother to let her know exactly where they were and then she waited. For what, she was unsure. But she waited.
Twelve hours after Santana called the Pierce home, John and Anna stepped quietly into the ICU room. Anna's eyes were brimmed with tears and John's face went pale at the sight of his daughter. Knowing that the nurses would be in the room in only a few seconds to remind them of the two-visitor rule, Santana hugged them each quickly and tried to get out the door before being caught by the arm. They tried asking her questions about how long Brittany would be there and what the doctors did but all Santana could do was shake her head and whisper, “I don't know.”
Once out of John's grip, Santana headed out of the ICU wing to the lounge bathroom where she knew no one would hear her. When she was locked safely in the women's restroom she gripped onto the sink with all of her might, almost willing it to crumble in her hands as her life had done in the last fourteen hours. It didn't work. All she could do was sob until she made herself sick and mumble prayers that the nightmare would end.
Pairings/Characters: Santana/Brittany, Brittany's parents (John and Anna), several original characters, side Rachel/Quinn and their children: Gabriela, Ethaniel, Adrian, Susan, Harmony, and Jonah
Rating: PG-13
Length: ~20,600 words
Summary: Dreams are peculiar things. For Santana, her worst nightmare comes true with the words “there's been an accident”. It takes thousands of steps to rebuild her life and replace the nightmare with her greatest dreams.
Author's Note #1: This has been in my “In Progress” folder for well over a year and was originally a Rachel/Quinn. I honestly thought I would never finish it but about a month or so ago I decided to pick it back up, convert it to Santana/Brittany, rewrite everything I already had written, and then finish it.
Author's Note #2: I am by no means a doctor but I did as much as I could to make it accurate. I know someone who went through very similar things and so a lot of the details were pulled from that. So I guess you could say that this is inspired by true events.
Music: My 'inspirational soundtrack' for this story:
A Thousand Years - Christina Perri (also the inspiration for the title)
1000 Ships - Rachel Platten (I also highly recommend the rest of her music)
-Chapter 1-
Dreams are peculiar things. For Santana Lopez, the one she was having was about to become eerily real. There were flashes of snapped wires and hospitals. Blonde hair and terrified blue eyes. Helplessness and rage. Of course, she had no idea what it all meant. At least not until her dreams were interrupted by the sound of her phone going off (“I'm a Bitch” as her ringtone, naturally). What she did know, as she fought her way back to consciousness, was that something definitely wasn't right. Santana first checked her clock and found that it was well past midnight, before realizing that A) Brittany wasn't in bed with her which was odd since the blonde was almost always home from her show before eleven and B) That her phone had fallen to the floor in her haste to try to answer it. Knowing she only had a few seconds before it would go to voicemail, she didn't bother to look at who might be trying to call.
“Hello?” Santana answered with a yawn, rubbing her eyes and somewhere in a far corner of her brain praying that it was Brittany telling her she'd lost her keys (again) and needed to be let in.
“Santana Lopez?” a female voice (definitely not Brittany) asked on the other line. The first thing Santana noticed was chaotic background noise of voices and beeps. It put a knot in her stomach and a lump in her throat because this wasn't bar noise or backstage noise. It was unfamiliar and a little terrifying. Willing herself to fully wake up and focus on the conversation, Santana shook her head a little and finally responded.
“Speaking.”
“You’re listed as the emergency contact for Brittany S. Pierce?”
“Yeah, did she get lost again?”
To the woman on the other line it may have sounded a little mean but to Santana it was another prayer that Brittany had gotten off at the wrong train station or ended up in the wrong apartment building and some kind person was looking through the blonde's wallet to help her figure out where she belonged... Anything but what her knotted stomach told her it really was.
“There’s been an accident.”
All Santana waited for was the name of the hospital and where to go before she dropped her phone and made a quick dash to her dresser, grabbing whatever sweatpants and sweatshirt she could find. She grabbed her phone from the bed, her keys from the rack by the door, and her purse on the coathanger while she slipped on the nearest pair of shoes (Brittany's running shoes, she later noticed) and was out of the apartment in under two minutes.
Another prayer, this time a thank you for New York City's 24-hour cab service, was sent up when Santana almost immediately got a cab outside of her apartment. She directed the man to New York Presbyterian Hospital, oddly enough right across the street from her office. It was strange, she thought during what she was sure to be the longest cab ride of her life, that she'd seen the hospital nearly every single day for the last few years but had never given a second thought to it. Yet now she had the feeling that the walls were going to become more than familiar.
The cab had just barely slowed down when Santana threw a $50 bill at the man and yelled for him to keep the change as she practically jumped out of the cab and dashed in to the emergency room entrance.
“Brittany Susan Pierce,” she gasped at the window. “Please.”
The look on the face of the woman at the reception desk should've told Santana that whoever she talked to wasn't going to have good news. She felt herself being taken by the arm and tugged gently down a hallway, the nurse with dark skin glancing at her every now and then while her lips moved. Santana didn't hear anything. Only blood rushing in her ears and her heart pounding. She was only focused on getting to Brittany at that moment.
“Ms. Lopez did you hear me?” the nurse said when they stopped outside a room.
Santana shook her head.
“She’s not awake, the doctors have sedated her. She’s in a neck brace to keep her from moving and also on a ventilator to keep her breathing, do you understand?”
Santana's breath caught in her throat. She nodded weakly. “H-how long has she been here?”
“About an hour.”
“Wh-why didn’t I get the call?”
“We had a four-car pile up come in about the same time as she came did,” the nurse said. “I'm sorry you didn't get called right away but there was nothing you could've done if you'd been here, honey.”
“She's okay, right? She'll be fine.”
The nurse only took a deep breath and squeezed Santana's arm a little before pulling her into the room. The monitors were beeping, the sound of the ventilator was rhythmic. And there, in a single bed with blonde hair cascading across the pillow and only a few small bruises on the side of her face, lie Brittany - a tube sticking out of her mouth, wires seemingly coming from everywhere and connected to the monitors and her long neck in a brace, completely immobilized.
“That’s not her,” Santana whispered. “That’s not B. It can’t be.”
But it was. The nurse pushed Santana toward the bed and the brunette stared down at her girlfriend. She looked fine if it weren't for the bruises. As if nothing had even happened except maybe walking into a door.
“From what we were told it was after the show,” the nurse said. “They were doing some setting and her harness malfunctioned. She fell about twenty feet and it was enough... The doctor will explain more when he comes in.”
Flashes of the dream she'd been woken from went through Santana's brain. The feeling of eerie familiarity made her shiver. “Enough? Enough to what?”
“Ms. Lopez?” A tall, pale man with gray hair and small glasses stepped into the room. “Ms. Lopez, I’m Dr. Harris. I'm an orthopedic surgeon.”
Santana nodded and the nurse pulled a chair to the side of the bed for the brunette to sit in. She pulled it even closer and slipped her hand into Brittany’s. There was no response.
“Your partner has sustained a rather dangerous injury, Ms. Lopez,” Dr. Harris said, his voice monotone and serious. “Her x-ray shows she has shattered part of her spine, vertebrae C-seven and T-one.” Santana watched as the man held up a sheet of paper with a drawing of a person's neck, spine included. Dr. Harris pointed to the two vertebrae right where Brittany's neck met her shoulders. “We're fairly certain that, by some miracle, it did not sever her spinal cord which is the best thing that could've happened in this situation. Our best bet to make sure she has as a good recovery as she can get is to do surgery to repair the vertebrae as soon as possible.”
“Wh-what? What kind of surgery?”
“The way the vertebrae broke we would need to remove bone from another part of her body, hip would be the best, and use it to replace what she’s lost. After that it would be a waiting game.”
Santana looked down at her girlfriend and nodded. “Whatever helps,” the brunette whispered. “Just fix her.”
XXXXXXXXXX
An hour later Santana found herself sitting in the waiting room outside of the operating wing. The doctor, a nurse, and some other woman with a stack of paperwork had talked to her for a good half-hour on the risks of the surgery (her spinal cord could be permanently damaged, there could be infection, she could have brain damage ranging from mild to severe, death...) and what to expect for the time after surgery (not too much, was all Santana could gather). Brittany’s parents’ house phone number had been on her phone screen waiting for her to hit “call” for the remainder of that hour. A few deep breaths to compose herself and Santana finally pushed the green button. She shook as she quietly told Brittany's mother where she was and why.
“Stay strong, Santana,” Anna had said. “We'll get the first flight out. Just be there for her alright, sweetie?”
It was only after that Santana realized she had a voicemail, timestamped right around the time she was in the shower. She cursed herself for never checking them before she went to bed. Brittany's messages were almost always texts.
Hey San. It's intermission. I'm gonna be late, they got new harnesses in and I have to stay to get it fitted. I'll see you when I get home. Love you
Not wanting to kill her phone battery, Santana stopped listening to it after the fifth time. Seven hours and three updates that it would be “a little longer” and “we're doing everything we can” later, Santana had begun to yet again fall asleep on the couch. The nurses told her after the first three hours that she might as well try to rest because staying awake was only going to make time go slower. It was the only thing making her sleep, knowing that time would fly by. She watched as her eyelids dropped for the blue shoe covers she'd seen walk to other families.
“Santana?”
The Latina snapped up to a sitting position, Dr. Harris' scrub-clad legs in front of her. As she rubbed the sleep out of her eyes the doctor sat down and, for the umpteenth time that day, Santana prayed. She prayed that what he was about to say was at least a little good.
“She’s stable,” he said. “We did what we could and we consider the surgery a success as far as repairing the vertebrae. She has a titanium plate and screws in as well as a piece of bone we removed from her hip. We’ll have to keep her sedated for a few days at least to give it time to heal a little. After that we’ll let her wake up and see if there’s been damage to the spinal cord. There were no visible tears or leakages but bruising can still do a lot of damage.”
Santana could only nod. She was so numb at this point that she had no questions and didn’t want any answer other than Brittany was going to be okay. Dr. Harris patted her on the shoulder and in a few seconds a nurse was at Santana's side and tugging on her arm as she led the way to recovery. Brittany was in her own, small room at least - as opposed to the rows of beds behind curtains that Santana had passed. They’d taken the blonde off of the ventilator; at least now Santana had one less thing to remind her that her life was probably never going to be the same again. One big reminder, however, was the almost cage-like neck brace encompassing Brittany's upper body along with the surgical brace around her neck.
Brittany was in recovery for two hours before the doctor consented that she was stable enough to be moved up to the ICU. Santana never let go of the bed railing. The team of nurses moved swiftly but carefully in getting Brittany situated in the new room - they put cuffs on Brittany's legs to help keep circulation going since the blonde wasn't going to be moved any more than what was necessary until she was brought out from under the sedation.
None of the other rooms had windows and it was the first time Santana realized there was an outside world since she'd received the phone call. She could see her office building with the Chase Bank logo lit up against the dawn sky. Not really remembering exactly what day it was, she checked her phone to see that it was Saturday. She sent a text to Brittany's mother to let her know exactly where they were and then she waited. For what, she was unsure. But she waited.
Twelve hours after Santana called the Pierce home, John and Anna stepped quietly into the ICU room. Anna's eyes were brimmed with tears and John's face went pale at the sight of his daughter. Knowing that the nurses would be in the room in only a few seconds to remind them of the two-visitor rule, Santana hugged them each quickly and tried to get out the door before being caught by the arm. They tried asking her questions about how long Brittany would be there and what the doctors did but all Santana could do was shake her head and whisper, “I don't know.”
Once out of John's grip, Santana headed out of the ICU wing to the lounge bathroom where she knew no one would hear her. When she was locked safely in the women's restroom she gripped onto the sink with all of her might, almost willing it to crumble in her hands as her life had done in the last fourteen hours. It didn't work. All she could do was sob until she made herself sick and mumble prayers that the nightmare would end.