scotch tape and paper scraps (quinn/santana, pg-13)
Title: scotch tape and paper scraps
Author: intobrakelights/definexfreedom on tumblr
Pairing: Quinn/Santana
Rating: PG-13
Length: ~4500
Spoilers: Um, there's nothing really explicit - vague references to the power struggles in seasons one and two, I suppose?
Warnings: Some swearing.
Summary: Quinn Fabray never expected to be the one to pick up the pieces of Santana Lopez. A series of scenes exploring a Quinn and Santana relationship after Brittany and Santana fall apart.
Author's Notes: Sorry if some of this seems profoundly unedited - much of the editing took place at five in the morning and I have to get to class now so I apologize if there are any egregious mistakes.
Quinn Fabray never expected to be the one to pick up the pieces of Santana Lopez.
Of course, it isn’t quite as simple as that (they’ve never been simple) because Santana has been known to protect herself with insults when everything feels like too much and Quinn has been known to keep everything as far from herself as possible, so that none of it will matter.
Quinn isn’t sure why Santana and Brittany couldn’t last. Ever since ninth grade, when Brittany told Santana her cats were plotting to steal her diary and Santana rolled her eyes but shot her an adoring smile rather than resorting to cruel mockery, Quinn sort of had a feeling their relationship was…well, special, at the very least. And when she saw them in the gym showers doing anything but getting clean, her suspicions were mostly just confirmed.
She knew then her first reaction ought to have been disgust-there was a cross around her neck that had long since been imbued with the weight of shoulds and shouldn’ts and “yay gay” certainly did not fall into the former category-but instead she felt a little uncertainty and a little admiration and a little vindication. And she felt a lot lonely.
It was sometimes Santana and Quinn and Brittany, but it was always Brittany-and-Santana.
At least until insecurities tore them apart and shattered the always and changed everything.
---
They’re eating lunch together in the choir room. It’s ironic, she supposes, when only a year ago they were sitting at the Cheerios table like they meant something more than the rest of the “infidels” (in the words of Coach Sylvester). Except that even though Santana would take the chair to the right of Quinn’s, it had been a long time since the two were sitting together.
Quinn wants to keep thinking that popularity will protect her. She wants to keep pretending that it will make her worth something.
But she knows Santana’s right to roll her eyes and tell her get over it, Fabray, you’re blind if you can’t see by now that’s all pretend. Glee club is home to the biggest losers at this school, and glee club is where they mean the most.
“You know, we’d never be here now if Finn hadn’t wanted Rachel,” she says, because it’s the their last year of high school and she can’t stop thinking about the past. She isn’t sure if she means it resentfully or gratefully-maybe a little bit of both.
“Well when you put it that way, I guess I should be sending a thank you bouquet to the Cabbage Patch Kid himself for his taste in midgets.” It’s sarcastic, Quinn knows (and she knows Santana doesn’t really mean it, either, because somehow or another New Directions is sometimes the closest thing they have to family), but she thinks maybe it’s a little genuine, too. That maybe if they were given the choice again, they would make the same stupid decision every single time.
“Brittany’s going to school in California next year.”
“Yep, she is,” Santana says, too abruptly and then, moments later. “There a point you wanted to make about that, Q?”
“Don’t play stupid now, it doesn’t suit you.”
“I think that might’ve been a compliment,” Santana says with a smirk and Quinn knows she’s just avoiding the topic at hand but she rolls her eyes anyway, engaging.
“If that’s the only part you caught, you really are a lost cause,” she replies dryly.
“C’mon, don’t sell yourself short. A compliment from Quinn Fabray, that’s legendary shit. Something to go down in history. I’ll be sure to tell all my grandkids about this day.”
Quinn just sighs and carefully arches an eyebrow in her direction without saying a word. It’s several long moments before Santana speaks again. “Yeah, she is. Good for her.”
Quinn covers Santana’s hand carefully with her own.
Moments later, Santana turns her palm face-up and entwines their fingers.
They sit there together, like that, until the bell rings and life starts up all over again.
---
“I just miss her sometimes,” Santana says a week later, entirely without segue. They’re lying on Quinn’s bed like they sometimes used to do in the summer after freshman year, except Brittany was usually there to instigate cuddling and to make them laugh and to make everything easy.
And yet, complicated as they’ve always been, Quinn wouldn’t call this hard, either.
Quinn turns her head to find Santana staring up at the ceiling. “I’ve known her since were both, like, five. How am I s’posed to see her around with him and not want to make him wish his legs were his only handicap?”
It should probably be a pretty offensive remark, but, in the grand scheme of Santana insults, it’s far from the worst thing Quinn’s heard-although the fact that she’s past derogatory nicknames and reduced to pronouns does seem especially dangerous.
“I don’t know,” Quinn says, because she doesn’t. Because she can’t delude herself into somehow imagining she’s ever had someone like that.
“I want her to be happy,” Santana says, long minutes later, and so quietly that Quinn almost isn’t sure she was intended to hear. But then Santana turns to face her and meets her gaze and she feels a little off-kilter, suddenly. “Do you think he makes her happy?”
It’s a huge step up from a month and a half ago, when Santana spent the majority of her time cursing his name and creating a variety of scenarios that inevitably ended in his death.
“Yeah, I guess,” Quinn says, because even though she doesn’t see them the same way she ever saw Santana and Brittany-lasting, inextricably linked-Brittany smiles like she means it when she’s with him and he cares about her more than Quinn would’ve expected. She’s not expecting a forever, but as far as relationships in high school go, she thinks they’re happy, at least.
“Okay,” Santana says, quietly. They are silent for several minutes and then Santana shrugs and adds, with what is quite apparently forced nonchalance, “Well I guess that puts him one step ahead of me.”
“You weren’t ready,” Quinn answers honestly.
“I should’ve been,” Santana replies, after several beats. “I should’ve been for her.”
Quinn doesn’t know if that’s true or not. Maybe it is, she thinks, because ever since she’s known them they’ve been Brittany-and-Santana, and that’s always seemed to transcend the lines of friendship or relationship or sexuality. It’s been just them, always.
But it’s obvious now, from the way that Santana’s looking anywhere but Quinn-she wonders, rather jarringly, if this is maybe what nerves look like on Santana-that it’s mired in all of that, too. That it’s Brittany-and-Santana but it’s also Santana, it’s also Santana and it’s Lima and it was never just.
Quinn finds she can’t blame Santana at all.
---
Three weeks later, Brittany and Santana are linking pinkies in the hallway again.
Quinn wonders if this means everything will return to normal. She wonders if she even knows what normal is anymore.
Mostly, she isn’t sure she wants it back.
(She’s been a bitch for most of high school. She’s done a lot of things she isn’t proud of to maintain her place at the top of high school’s figurative-and literal-pyramid, as much as she would claim otherwise. But the implication that Brittany and Santana should in any universe be separated feels so wrong and vengeful that she actually feels sick to her stomach for a moment.)
Quinn wonders, with a dull thudding in her ears, if she will ever not feel alone.
---
They’ve been spending nearly every afternoon together for the past month, but Quinn is nevertheless caught off-guard to find Santana lounging beside her car, inspecting her nails boredly. Waiting for her. (Except Quinn doesn’t miss the slight curve of her lips, the way the idle drumming of her fingers on Quinn’s window is more excess energy than impatience.)
“What are you doing here?” Quinn asks, unable to keep the surprise from her tone even as she unlocks their doors.
“Same thing I’ve done every day this week, Q,” Santana says, which mostly just reads duh. “Now, why don’t you put in some music-but none of that Broadway shit you pretend not to listen to. I wants to get my jam on to some real music.”
Quinn doesn’t even bother denying it anymore. Her collection may not have anything on Rachel’s or Kurt’s, but it’s certainly sizable enough-and it’s something Santana hasn’t let her forget since she first discovered it two and a half years ago.
It’s Santana smiling and singing along to Heavy Metal Lover under her breath that cements Quinn’s certainty: everything has changed.
---
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on with you and Brittany?” Quinn asks the next day, because Santana may have shoved that kid who ran into her in the hallway and threatened him with her Lima Heights techniques (even though Quinn knows the only bad things that ever happened there involved some kids breaking into their parents’ liquor cabinets), but her smirk was decidedly less biting than it had been recently.
Santana just shrugs. “Not much.”
“I don’t think walking through the hallways together like you used to qualifies as ‘not much,’” Quinn replies, arching an eyebrow at the attempted nonchalance (she does it well, though, it’s just that they’ve been spending too much time together for the past few months for Quinn not to notice her slight change in pitch, the way she just barely shifts her weight).
“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” she says, and it’s sharp enough that Quinn knows it might well mean everything.
“You’re explaining everything tonight,” Quinn demands, and Santana just rolls her eyes and scowls at her. (They both know she’ll be there.)
---
“So you’re friends again,” Quinn says, once Santana explains (after much reluctance) the conversation she and Brittany had about where they stood.
They talked about how much they mattered to one another, from what Quinn can gather-how much they’ve always been in each other’s lives, how they’ve been best friends almost since they can remember. They talked about the things that had happened to them together and what they weren’t willing to give up. That, Quinn assumes, included one another.
Santana looks out Quinn’s window for long moments-long enough that Quinn thinks maybe she’s just purposefully being obnoxious-before turning back and meeting her gaze. “Yeah,” she says, and she’s smiling just a little bit, just enough, “yeah, I guess we are.”
They spend the rest of the day talking mostly about things that don’t matter and sometimes about things that do (about the way Quinn’s mother is drunk more than she is sober, about the way Santana’s father is gone more than he is there) and she’s struck by how unexpected it is. She’d assumed that once things were Brittany-and-Santana, in whatever form, this would stop. This-this just Quinn and just Santana, spending time together like there were things besides power and competition and who came out on top. Like they matter…to each other. She’d never expected it to last.
It never occurred to Quinn how much she felt like a replacement until she begins to wonder if there’s a chance she never was.
But they lay on Quinn’s bed and talk about nothing and everything all at once and she doesn’t realize they’ve fallen asleep until she wakes up to the sun streaming in through the windows they never closed and an arm wrapped securely around her waist and a warm body pressed against her side and-
She twists, sharply, so that she’s suddenly met with Santana’s face a little bit too close and there’s an arm tightening around her again and their legs are tangled together and there’s this frantic feeling thudding inside of her chest and she wants-
Quinn’s scrambling off the bed before she can even consider finishing that thought, nearly falling over in her effort to escape, and it’s stupid because it’s not like they haven’t done this before ever (because even if it was mostly Brittany and Santana or the three of them together there were moments in between, too, of Santana and Quinn) and it’s not like people never cuddle, but her throat is dry and somewhere along the line breathing became a secondary issue and-
Of course, in the process she’s roused Santana, who gives her a decided what the fuck are you doing look. Her hair is messy and she blinks several times in an effort to figure out why the hell Quinn’s suddenly on the opposite side of the bedroom. “What are you-” Her voice is rough with sleep and, God help her, the first word that comes to Quinn’s mind is adorable. There must be something seriously wrong with her. That, she thinks, would explain a lot.
But then Santana’s voice is sharper and she’s scowling at her as she asks, “Are you shitting me? I thought you were okay with this.”
Quinn has no idea what she’s talking about. She’s still trying to steady her own breathing.
“I’m sorry, Q,” she says, in a voice dripping with sarcasm (but if Quinn knows her at all, she thinks it’s barely layered over the hurt underneath), “next time I’ll make sure to sleep on the floor so I can’t get my gay cooties all over your precious bed. Might taint you or something. I mean, I know sometimes you’re into Jesus and all, but after Kurt…I actually thought you’d be okay with everything. You didn’t even seem freaked out when I-you know what, what the fuck ever, I’ll leave the princess to her happy heterosexual life with the perfect parents and her perfect…oh, wait.” She pauses, tilting her head as if in thought, and then offers Quinn a bright smile that she’s never meant less. “Catch you later, Q,” she tells her with a smirk, as if she’s won, and then she’s gone.
It’s not what Quinn meant, at all, but chasing after Santana now would mean swallowing her pride-and the remarks about her family still sting the way she’s sure they were meant to.
Mostly, though, it would mean providing Santana with some kind of alternate reason that Quinn doesn’t have.
(Somehow the explanation that Santana offered her seems a thousand times safer than Quinn’s not-answer.)
---
When she approaches Santana in the hallway the next day, she is immediately met with a glare and a calculated superiority that actually startles her. It shouldn’t, she knows; months ago, it was their everyday approach to one another. And it’s not like Santana doesn’t insult her on a daily basis (even though her words are no longer sharpened to exact a fatal blow; even though sometimes they’re more familiar than threatening) and it’s not like Quinn never retaliates, but this is different.
This is everything back where it started, when there was Cheerios and boys and a desperate grab for the spot at the top of the pyramid.
Maybe everything’s right in the world again.
(But there’s a hollowness that feels like it’s been carved out of her chest at an achingly slow pace and she mostly just feels sick to her stomach.)
---
“I don’t care,” she says two days later, and suddenly it doesn’t matter that they’re in the middle of the hallway and that people are walking by and that Quinn’s voice is cracking because she’s spent the last two nights with the sharp sting of loneliness that’s always been there but that she didn’t realize could ever not be there. “I don’t care that you’re…” Santana gives her a look and she lowers her voice because there are people everywhere and her intention right now is certainly not to out her…best friend? “It doesn’t matter, okay?”
“It doesn’t matter as long as I don’t touch you, you mean,” Santana says, sneering and folding her arms across her chest. “As long as I don’t convert you to my team or anything.”
“No. I mean it doesn’t matter.”
They look at each other for long moments before Santana shrugs and turns back to her locker. “You couldn’t have pulled off a softball jersey, anyway.”
Quinn doesn’t miss the almost-smile she tries to disguise.
Everything hurts a little bit less.
---
It’s the first time Quinn and Santana and Brittany have all hung out together in months. They’re at the park looking at the ducks-what else?-and Brittany’s naming them all and inventing stories about happy duck families and their little duck children and Santana’s watching her with this affectionate half-smile she reserves for Brittany alone. Suddenly Quinn feels like she’s caught them in the showers all over again.
Except this time instead of vindication, she mostly just feels a crushing weight against her chest.
“I missed us,” Brittany says without segue and then she’s pulling them both into a tight hug and Quinn clenches her jaw against the wave of guilt that collapses over her.
“Yeah, B,” Santana says, “so did I.” She pauses for a moment and then glances over at Quinn, expectantly. “Q, too.”
Brittany smiles at her, a little bit questioningly, and she just nods. “Yeah, I did, too.”
As Brittany wraps an arm around her waist and pulls her a little bit closer, she’s surprised to realize exactly how much she means that.
---
It’s Beth’s second birthday and all Quinn wants is not to feel.
Mostly, she doesn’t think they remember. They’re too focused on the approach of Regionals-it’s their last year, so Rachel is taking no chances, which really just means endless commentary on every component of every performance they’ve ever done that no one will listen to anyway. Quinn actually kind of admires her.
Puck tries to catch her eye a few times. His hands are shoved into his pockets and he looks decidedly uncertain and Quinn understands. And it’s the rush of understanding that terrifies her most, that forces her to look away almost immediately-because where he wants some kind of emotional bond (not that he’d ever phrase it quite like that), some kind of resolution, all she wants is to forget.
Santana sits beside her all day. She doesn’t say anything about the date, doesn’t mention anything about Quinn’s distance or the way her smiles seem forced. She doesn’t say anything on the ride home, just nods along to the music on the radio. She grabs food from Quinn’s kitchen, like always, and flops down beside her on the couch and doesn’t say a word for hours.
Finally, when it’s dark outside and inside, too, because neither of them have bothered to turn on the light and her mom’s still not home yet, she says, “Hey, Q?” (Quinn thinks maybe there’s an edge of uncertainty in the question and it startles her even now.)
“Yeah?”
Santana wraps her arms around her waist, tugs her into her lap, and pulls Quinn into a tight embrace. The affection is so stark and unexpected that Quinn feels herself crumbling at the edges. She feels her world-held together so carefully with scraps of paper and scotch tape-ripped straight through the middle.
Quinn trembles in Santana’s arms and cries until she can’t remember how to do anything else, until she falls asleep feeling a profound sense of loss and a boundlessness she cannot understand. She falls asleep curled up against the last person she expected to ever give her this.
It’s the first time anyone has ever held her while she cried.
---
Brittany and Santana have been spending more and more time together.
It’s something that always seemed sort of inevitable to Quinn. Maybe Santana’s finally ready. Maybe she’s realized it’s worth it after all.
She wants to be happy for them. They’re the closest thing to best friends she’s ever had, and what they have has always seemed more real than anything in high school ever deserved. She wants her stomach to stop twisting uncomfortably and she wants to stop the acrid sting of jealousy and she wants to smile at their reunion and mean it.
Quinn’s been pulling back, little by little, trying in vain to tape the pieces of her world back together, as if there was ever any hope for it to begin with. It’s why she’s eating lunch in the auditorium, alone, and it’s why she starts when she hears the doors open suddenly. She expects Rachel, perhaps (sometimes, on the days Quinn comes here by herself-more and more often, lately-she sees Rachel here, too, and it’s becoming more and more okay; sometimes they even talk like two normal people who didn’t spend most of high school at odds because Quinn thought tormenting the girl was a legitimate way of dealing with her problems), but she certainly doesn’t expect Santana.
“Okay, Fabray, what the hell is going on?” she demands. “And don’t tell me you’re here to have a lunch date with the dwarf, either-”
“Actually,” Quinn interrupts, “we have eaten together a few times and it’s kind of nice.”
Santana gives her a look like she doesn’t understanding what planet she’s landed on. “So, what? Berry’s your new BFF then? You guys gonna hit up the mall and do each other’s nails and sing show-stopping Broadway numbers to each other all day or something?”
Quinn just breathes a heavy sigh. “What do you want, Santana?”
“I want to know why the fuck you’re not…” She make this frustrated noise in the back of her throat-and Quinn knows exactly what she means that she can’t put into her words. Quinn has been answering her texts, but her replies have been shorter, more distant; Quinn has been answering her phone, but she’s hidden any real investment in their conversations; they have been spending time together, but Quinn smiles less and doesn’t approach anything that really matters. “I want to know what the fuck is going on with you.”
“You have Brittany,” Quinn answered, as mildly as she can. “Why are you here?”
Quinn gives her a look that goes from absolute confusion to what looks dangerously close to sudden understanding. “Yeah, it’s not like there’s a quota. I mean, not that I’m going to go around linking arms and singing kumbaya with everyone I meet, but-”
“We both know Brittany’s more than just your best friend,” she’s saying suddenly, before she can stop herself, her voice rising violently in pitch, “and we both know you’re going to end up back together with her whenever you’re ready to come out, because you’re in love with her and she’s in love with you and that’s the way it’s always been, hasn’t it? That’s the way it’s always going to be.”
Her tone is much more bitter than she intended, but she’s too overcome by a frustration she can’t-won’t-name to mind much.
“Why does that matter? Even if I wanted to be with Brittany, since when did that stop us from being friends?” Santana asks. She’s standing right in front of Quinn, now, meeting her gaze with a look Quinn can’t name. It might be wonder.
“Oh, please, where would that put me? I’m always going to lose, Santana, and I’m sick of-”
And then Santana leans down, cups her jaw, and quietly presses a kiss to her lips. It lasts for several beats, and it’s more gentle than anything Quinn might have anticipated.
“….oh,” Quinn whispers, staring at her, and all of a sudden it all falls abruptly into place. “Oh.”
Santana smirks a little bit and Quinn rolls her eyes and they meet somewhere in the middle.
(It’s hungrier this time, but everything is still a discovery-like the way Santana licks along Quinn’s lips and the way she backs her against the wall and trails kisses along her jawline and the way Quinn didn’t realize she could make that breathy whimpering sound that she doesn’t even recognize as her own for several long moments.
And every noise Santana makes-like the low one in the back of her throat when Quinn lightly sucks on her bottom lip-sounds a little bit like an epiphany.
It occurs to her that maybe this is what wanting someone feels like.)
---
It’s absolutely terrifying.
There’s not any part of this that’s sane, or rational; even if Santana were a boy, which she’s decidedly not, she certainly wouldn’t be the kind you take home to meet your parents. But she’s a girl, and she’s a girl Quinn likes spending time with (mostly) and kissing and she’s a girl who makes Quinn unexpectedly happy.
They’re probably defying the laws of the universe by being together. They’re certainly defying the laws of Quinn’s family.
Maybe that makes us star-crossed lovers, she thinks wryly, and then she laughs at Santana’s imagined reaction to the two of them as the reincarnation of Romeo and Juliet.
She thinks being Quinn and Santana is probably enough.
(She thinks that maybe, against all odds, it’s more than enough.)
---
“Make sure not to trip or anything,” Santana whispers to her, smirking, because they’ve just called her name and that means collecting her diploma and saying goodbye to this town for the last time. (With the exception of New Directions, she’s surprised to realize she doesn’t think she’s going to miss it at all.)
She shoots Santana a dirty look and successfully claims her official right to freedom-without tripping.
“What do you think, babe?” Santana asks, once the ceremony’s over. “Ready to get the hell out of here?”
They have an apartment waiting for them and a summer together ahead of them.
It’s insane. It’s insane because Quinn was never supposed to get out of Lima and because they were probably never supposed to so much as keep in contact after high school-and because they’re Santana Lopez and Quinn Fabray..
Which is the only reason she’d make the same stupid decision all over again.
“Yeah,” she says, because she’s been ready since the moment she believed she could ever have a destination that wasn’t here. “Let’s go.”
Suddenly Santana’s leaning forward and grabbing her waist and kissing her thoroughly and altogether without warning.
“Okay,” Santana says when she pulls back, as they both draw in slightly ragged breaths, “we can go now.”
Quinn wonders distantly if anyone might have seen their display and finds, to her surprise, she wouldn’t mind at all.
With that, she takes Santana’s hand and pulls her toward a future in which winning prom queen means nothing more than winning a cheap crown someone probably found at the Dollar Tree.
It’s a future she always thought would be someone else’s.
It’s a future in which she’s not ex-Head Cheerio or member of the Celibacy Club or the girl who used to be pregnant. It’s a future in which she’s not even Quinn Fabray.
All she’ll be is Quinn, and that won’t mean a thing to anyone-except maybe it’ll be attached to Santana Lopez, sometimes-and somehow it will be the best thing that’s ever happened to the girl who spent her entire high school career claiming she wanted nothing more than to be on top.
For the first time in her life, Quinn will be allowed to want everything.
Author: intobrakelights/definexfreedom on tumblr
Pairing: Quinn/Santana
Rating: PG-13
Length: ~4500
Spoilers: Um, there's nothing really explicit - vague references to the power struggles in seasons one and two, I suppose?
Warnings: Some swearing.
Summary: Quinn Fabray never expected to be the one to pick up the pieces of Santana Lopez. A series of scenes exploring a Quinn and Santana relationship after Brittany and Santana fall apart.
Author's Notes: Sorry if some of this seems profoundly unedited - much of the editing took place at five in the morning and I have to get to class now so I apologize if there are any egregious mistakes.
Quinn Fabray never expected to be the one to pick up the pieces of Santana Lopez.
Of course, it isn’t quite as simple as that (they’ve never been simple) because Santana has been known to protect herself with insults when everything feels like too much and Quinn has been known to keep everything as far from herself as possible, so that none of it will matter.
Quinn isn’t sure why Santana and Brittany couldn’t last. Ever since ninth grade, when Brittany told Santana her cats were plotting to steal her diary and Santana rolled her eyes but shot her an adoring smile rather than resorting to cruel mockery, Quinn sort of had a feeling their relationship was…well, special, at the very least. And when she saw them in the gym showers doing anything but getting clean, her suspicions were mostly just confirmed.
She knew then her first reaction ought to have been disgust-there was a cross around her neck that had long since been imbued with the weight of shoulds and shouldn’ts and “yay gay” certainly did not fall into the former category-but instead she felt a little uncertainty and a little admiration and a little vindication. And she felt a lot lonely.
It was sometimes Santana and Quinn and Brittany, but it was always Brittany-and-Santana.
At least until insecurities tore them apart and shattered the always and changed everything.
---
They’re eating lunch together in the choir room. It’s ironic, she supposes, when only a year ago they were sitting at the Cheerios table like they meant something more than the rest of the “infidels” (in the words of Coach Sylvester). Except that even though Santana would take the chair to the right of Quinn’s, it had been a long time since the two were sitting together.
Quinn wants to keep thinking that popularity will protect her. She wants to keep pretending that it will make her worth something.
But she knows Santana’s right to roll her eyes and tell her get over it, Fabray, you’re blind if you can’t see by now that’s all pretend. Glee club is home to the biggest losers at this school, and glee club is where they mean the most.
“You know, we’d never be here now if Finn hadn’t wanted Rachel,” she says, because it’s the their last year of high school and she can’t stop thinking about the past. She isn’t sure if she means it resentfully or gratefully-maybe a little bit of both.
“Well when you put it that way, I guess I should be sending a thank you bouquet to the Cabbage Patch Kid himself for his taste in midgets.” It’s sarcastic, Quinn knows (and she knows Santana doesn’t really mean it, either, because somehow or another New Directions is sometimes the closest thing they have to family), but she thinks maybe it’s a little genuine, too. That maybe if they were given the choice again, they would make the same stupid decision every single time.
“Brittany’s going to school in California next year.”
“Yep, she is,” Santana says, too abruptly and then, moments later. “There a point you wanted to make about that, Q?”
“Don’t play stupid now, it doesn’t suit you.”
“I think that might’ve been a compliment,” Santana says with a smirk and Quinn knows she’s just avoiding the topic at hand but she rolls her eyes anyway, engaging.
“If that’s the only part you caught, you really are a lost cause,” she replies dryly.
“C’mon, don’t sell yourself short. A compliment from Quinn Fabray, that’s legendary shit. Something to go down in history. I’ll be sure to tell all my grandkids about this day.”
Quinn just sighs and carefully arches an eyebrow in her direction without saying a word. It’s several long moments before Santana speaks again. “Yeah, she is. Good for her.”
Quinn covers Santana’s hand carefully with her own.
Moments later, Santana turns her palm face-up and entwines their fingers.
They sit there together, like that, until the bell rings and life starts up all over again.
---
“I just miss her sometimes,” Santana says a week later, entirely without segue. They’re lying on Quinn’s bed like they sometimes used to do in the summer after freshman year, except Brittany was usually there to instigate cuddling and to make them laugh and to make everything easy.
And yet, complicated as they’ve always been, Quinn wouldn’t call this hard, either.
Quinn turns her head to find Santana staring up at the ceiling. “I’ve known her since were both, like, five. How am I s’posed to see her around with him and not want to make him wish his legs were his only handicap?”
It should probably be a pretty offensive remark, but, in the grand scheme of Santana insults, it’s far from the worst thing Quinn’s heard-although the fact that she’s past derogatory nicknames and reduced to pronouns does seem especially dangerous.
“I don’t know,” Quinn says, because she doesn’t. Because she can’t delude herself into somehow imagining she’s ever had someone like that.
“I want her to be happy,” Santana says, long minutes later, and so quietly that Quinn almost isn’t sure she was intended to hear. But then Santana turns to face her and meets her gaze and she feels a little off-kilter, suddenly. “Do you think he makes her happy?”
It’s a huge step up from a month and a half ago, when Santana spent the majority of her time cursing his name and creating a variety of scenarios that inevitably ended in his death.
“Yeah, I guess,” Quinn says, because even though she doesn’t see them the same way she ever saw Santana and Brittany-lasting, inextricably linked-Brittany smiles like she means it when she’s with him and he cares about her more than Quinn would’ve expected. She’s not expecting a forever, but as far as relationships in high school go, she thinks they’re happy, at least.
“Okay,” Santana says, quietly. They are silent for several minutes and then Santana shrugs and adds, with what is quite apparently forced nonchalance, “Well I guess that puts him one step ahead of me.”
“You weren’t ready,” Quinn answers honestly.
“I should’ve been,” Santana replies, after several beats. “I should’ve been for her.”
Quinn doesn’t know if that’s true or not. Maybe it is, she thinks, because ever since she’s known them they’ve been Brittany-and-Santana, and that’s always seemed to transcend the lines of friendship or relationship or sexuality. It’s been just them, always.
But it’s obvious now, from the way that Santana’s looking anywhere but Quinn-she wonders, rather jarringly, if this is maybe what nerves look like on Santana-that it’s mired in all of that, too. That it’s Brittany-and-Santana but it’s also Santana, it’s also Santana and it’s Lima and it was never just.
Quinn finds she can’t blame Santana at all.
---
Three weeks later, Brittany and Santana are linking pinkies in the hallway again.
Quinn wonders if this means everything will return to normal. She wonders if she even knows what normal is anymore.
Mostly, she isn’t sure she wants it back.
(She’s been a bitch for most of high school. She’s done a lot of things she isn’t proud of to maintain her place at the top of high school’s figurative-and literal-pyramid, as much as she would claim otherwise. But the implication that Brittany and Santana should in any universe be separated feels so wrong and vengeful that she actually feels sick to her stomach for a moment.)
Quinn wonders, with a dull thudding in her ears, if she will ever not feel alone.
---
They’ve been spending nearly every afternoon together for the past month, but Quinn is nevertheless caught off-guard to find Santana lounging beside her car, inspecting her nails boredly. Waiting for her. (Except Quinn doesn’t miss the slight curve of her lips, the way the idle drumming of her fingers on Quinn’s window is more excess energy than impatience.)
“What are you doing here?” Quinn asks, unable to keep the surprise from her tone even as she unlocks their doors.
“Same thing I’ve done every day this week, Q,” Santana says, which mostly just reads duh. “Now, why don’t you put in some music-but none of that Broadway shit you pretend not to listen to. I wants to get my jam on to some real music.”
Quinn doesn’t even bother denying it anymore. Her collection may not have anything on Rachel’s or Kurt’s, but it’s certainly sizable enough-and it’s something Santana hasn’t let her forget since she first discovered it two and a half years ago.
It’s Santana smiling and singing along to Heavy Metal Lover under her breath that cements Quinn’s certainty: everything has changed.
---
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on with you and Brittany?” Quinn asks the next day, because Santana may have shoved that kid who ran into her in the hallway and threatened him with her Lima Heights techniques (even though Quinn knows the only bad things that ever happened there involved some kids breaking into their parents’ liquor cabinets), but her smirk was decidedly less biting than it had been recently.
Santana just shrugs. “Not much.”
“I don’t think walking through the hallways together like you used to qualifies as ‘not much,’” Quinn replies, arching an eyebrow at the attempted nonchalance (she does it well, though, it’s just that they’ve been spending too much time together for the past few months for Quinn not to notice her slight change in pitch, the way she just barely shifts her weight).
“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” she says, and it’s sharp enough that Quinn knows it might well mean everything.
“You’re explaining everything tonight,” Quinn demands, and Santana just rolls her eyes and scowls at her. (They both know she’ll be there.)
---
“So you’re friends again,” Quinn says, once Santana explains (after much reluctance) the conversation she and Brittany had about where they stood.
They talked about how much they mattered to one another, from what Quinn can gather-how much they’ve always been in each other’s lives, how they’ve been best friends almost since they can remember. They talked about the things that had happened to them together and what they weren’t willing to give up. That, Quinn assumes, included one another.
Santana looks out Quinn’s window for long moments-long enough that Quinn thinks maybe she’s just purposefully being obnoxious-before turning back and meeting her gaze. “Yeah,” she says, and she’s smiling just a little bit, just enough, “yeah, I guess we are.”
They spend the rest of the day talking mostly about things that don’t matter and sometimes about things that do (about the way Quinn’s mother is drunk more than she is sober, about the way Santana’s father is gone more than he is there) and she’s struck by how unexpected it is. She’d assumed that once things were Brittany-and-Santana, in whatever form, this would stop. This-this just Quinn and just Santana, spending time together like there were things besides power and competition and who came out on top. Like they matter…to each other. She’d never expected it to last.
It never occurred to Quinn how much she felt like a replacement until she begins to wonder if there’s a chance she never was.
But they lay on Quinn’s bed and talk about nothing and everything all at once and she doesn’t realize they’ve fallen asleep until she wakes up to the sun streaming in through the windows they never closed and an arm wrapped securely around her waist and a warm body pressed against her side and-
She twists, sharply, so that she’s suddenly met with Santana’s face a little bit too close and there’s an arm tightening around her again and their legs are tangled together and there’s this frantic feeling thudding inside of her chest and she wants-
Quinn’s scrambling off the bed before she can even consider finishing that thought, nearly falling over in her effort to escape, and it’s stupid because it’s not like they haven’t done this before ever (because even if it was mostly Brittany and Santana or the three of them together there were moments in between, too, of Santana and Quinn) and it’s not like people never cuddle, but her throat is dry and somewhere along the line breathing became a secondary issue and-
Of course, in the process she’s roused Santana, who gives her a decided what the fuck are you doing look. Her hair is messy and she blinks several times in an effort to figure out why the hell Quinn’s suddenly on the opposite side of the bedroom. “What are you-” Her voice is rough with sleep and, God help her, the first word that comes to Quinn’s mind is adorable. There must be something seriously wrong with her. That, she thinks, would explain a lot.
But then Santana’s voice is sharper and she’s scowling at her as she asks, “Are you shitting me? I thought you were okay with this.”
Quinn has no idea what she’s talking about. She’s still trying to steady her own breathing.
“I’m sorry, Q,” she says, in a voice dripping with sarcasm (but if Quinn knows her at all, she thinks it’s barely layered over the hurt underneath), “next time I’ll make sure to sleep on the floor so I can’t get my gay cooties all over your precious bed. Might taint you or something. I mean, I know sometimes you’re into Jesus and all, but after Kurt…I actually thought you’d be okay with everything. You didn’t even seem freaked out when I-you know what, what the fuck ever, I’ll leave the princess to her happy heterosexual life with the perfect parents and her perfect…oh, wait.” She pauses, tilting her head as if in thought, and then offers Quinn a bright smile that she’s never meant less. “Catch you later, Q,” she tells her with a smirk, as if she’s won, and then she’s gone.
It’s not what Quinn meant, at all, but chasing after Santana now would mean swallowing her pride-and the remarks about her family still sting the way she’s sure they were meant to.
Mostly, though, it would mean providing Santana with some kind of alternate reason that Quinn doesn’t have.
(Somehow the explanation that Santana offered her seems a thousand times safer than Quinn’s not-answer.)
---
When she approaches Santana in the hallway the next day, she is immediately met with a glare and a calculated superiority that actually startles her. It shouldn’t, she knows; months ago, it was their everyday approach to one another. And it’s not like Santana doesn’t insult her on a daily basis (even though her words are no longer sharpened to exact a fatal blow; even though sometimes they’re more familiar than threatening) and it’s not like Quinn never retaliates, but this is different.
This is everything back where it started, when there was Cheerios and boys and a desperate grab for the spot at the top of the pyramid.
Maybe everything’s right in the world again.
(But there’s a hollowness that feels like it’s been carved out of her chest at an achingly slow pace and she mostly just feels sick to her stomach.)
---
“I don’t care,” she says two days later, and suddenly it doesn’t matter that they’re in the middle of the hallway and that people are walking by and that Quinn’s voice is cracking because she’s spent the last two nights with the sharp sting of loneliness that’s always been there but that she didn’t realize could ever not be there. “I don’t care that you’re…” Santana gives her a look and she lowers her voice because there are people everywhere and her intention right now is certainly not to out her…best friend? “It doesn’t matter, okay?”
“It doesn’t matter as long as I don’t touch you, you mean,” Santana says, sneering and folding her arms across her chest. “As long as I don’t convert you to my team or anything.”
“No. I mean it doesn’t matter.”
They look at each other for long moments before Santana shrugs and turns back to her locker. “You couldn’t have pulled off a softball jersey, anyway.”
Quinn doesn’t miss the almost-smile she tries to disguise.
Everything hurts a little bit less.
---
It’s the first time Quinn and Santana and Brittany have all hung out together in months. They’re at the park looking at the ducks-what else?-and Brittany’s naming them all and inventing stories about happy duck families and their little duck children and Santana’s watching her with this affectionate half-smile she reserves for Brittany alone. Suddenly Quinn feels like she’s caught them in the showers all over again.
Except this time instead of vindication, she mostly just feels a crushing weight against her chest.
“I missed us,” Brittany says without segue and then she’s pulling them both into a tight hug and Quinn clenches her jaw against the wave of guilt that collapses over her.
“Yeah, B,” Santana says, “so did I.” She pauses for a moment and then glances over at Quinn, expectantly. “Q, too.”
Brittany smiles at her, a little bit questioningly, and she just nods. “Yeah, I did, too.”
As Brittany wraps an arm around her waist and pulls her a little bit closer, she’s surprised to realize exactly how much she means that.
---
It’s Beth’s second birthday and all Quinn wants is not to feel.
Mostly, she doesn’t think they remember. They’re too focused on the approach of Regionals-it’s their last year, so Rachel is taking no chances, which really just means endless commentary on every component of every performance they’ve ever done that no one will listen to anyway. Quinn actually kind of admires her.
Puck tries to catch her eye a few times. His hands are shoved into his pockets and he looks decidedly uncertain and Quinn understands. And it’s the rush of understanding that terrifies her most, that forces her to look away almost immediately-because where he wants some kind of emotional bond (not that he’d ever phrase it quite like that), some kind of resolution, all she wants is to forget.
Santana sits beside her all day. She doesn’t say anything about the date, doesn’t mention anything about Quinn’s distance or the way her smiles seem forced. She doesn’t say anything on the ride home, just nods along to the music on the radio. She grabs food from Quinn’s kitchen, like always, and flops down beside her on the couch and doesn’t say a word for hours.
Finally, when it’s dark outside and inside, too, because neither of them have bothered to turn on the light and her mom’s still not home yet, she says, “Hey, Q?” (Quinn thinks maybe there’s an edge of uncertainty in the question and it startles her even now.)
“Yeah?”
Santana wraps her arms around her waist, tugs her into her lap, and pulls Quinn into a tight embrace. The affection is so stark and unexpected that Quinn feels herself crumbling at the edges. She feels her world-held together so carefully with scraps of paper and scotch tape-ripped straight through the middle.
Quinn trembles in Santana’s arms and cries until she can’t remember how to do anything else, until she falls asleep feeling a profound sense of loss and a boundlessness she cannot understand. She falls asleep curled up against the last person she expected to ever give her this.
It’s the first time anyone has ever held her while she cried.
---
Brittany and Santana have been spending more and more time together.
It’s something that always seemed sort of inevitable to Quinn. Maybe Santana’s finally ready. Maybe she’s realized it’s worth it after all.
She wants to be happy for them. They’re the closest thing to best friends she’s ever had, and what they have has always seemed more real than anything in high school ever deserved. She wants her stomach to stop twisting uncomfortably and she wants to stop the acrid sting of jealousy and she wants to smile at their reunion and mean it.
Quinn’s been pulling back, little by little, trying in vain to tape the pieces of her world back together, as if there was ever any hope for it to begin with. It’s why she’s eating lunch in the auditorium, alone, and it’s why she starts when she hears the doors open suddenly. She expects Rachel, perhaps (sometimes, on the days Quinn comes here by herself-more and more often, lately-she sees Rachel here, too, and it’s becoming more and more okay; sometimes they even talk like two normal people who didn’t spend most of high school at odds because Quinn thought tormenting the girl was a legitimate way of dealing with her problems), but she certainly doesn’t expect Santana.
“Okay, Fabray, what the hell is going on?” she demands. “And don’t tell me you’re here to have a lunch date with the dwarf, either-”
“Actually,” Quinn interrupts, “we have eaten together a few times and it’s kind of nice.”
Santana gives her a look like she doesn’t understanding what planet she’s landed on. “So, what? Berry’s your new BFF then? You guys gonna hit up the mall and do each other’s nails and sing show-stopping Broadway numbers to each other all day or something?”
Quinn just breathes a heavy sigh. “What do you want, Santana?”
“I want to know why the fuck you’re not…” She make this frustrated noise in the back of her throat-and Quinn knows exactly what she means that she can’t put into her words. Quinn has been answering her texts, but her replies have been shorter, more distant; Quinn has been answering her phone, but she’s hidden any real investment in their conversations; they have been spending time together, but Quinn smiles less and doesn’t approach anything that really matters. “I want to know what the fuck is going on with you.”
“You have Brittany,” Quinn answered, as mildly as she can. “Why are you here?”
Quinn gives her a look that goes from absolute confusion to what looks dangerously close to sudden understanding. “Yeah, it’s not like there’s a quota. I mean, not that I’m going to go around linking arms and singing kumbaya with everyone I meet, but-”
“We both know Brittany’s more than just your best friend,” she’s saying suddenly, before she can stop herself, her voice rising violently in pitch, “and we both know you’re going to end up back together with her whenever you’re ready to come out, because you’re in love with her and she’s in love with you and that’s the way it’s always been, hasn’t it? That’s the way it’s always going to be.”
Her tone is much more bitter than she intended, but she’s too overcome by a frustration she can’t-won’t-name to mind much.
“Why does that matter? Even if I wanted to be with Brittany, since when did that stop us from being friends?” Santana asks. She’s standing right in front of Quinn, now, meeting her gaze with a look Quinn can’t name. It might be wonder.
“Oh, please, where would that put me? I’m always going to lose, Santana, and I’m sick of-”
And then Santana leans down, cups her jaw, and quietly presses a kiss to her lips. It lasts for several beats, and it’s more gentle than anything Quinn might have anticipated.
“….oh,” Quinn whispers, staring at her, and all of a sudden it all falls abruptly into place. “Oh.”
Santana smirks a little bit and Quinn rolls her eyes and they meet somewhere in the middle.
(It’s hungrier this time, but everything is still a discovery-like the way Santana licks along Quinn’s lips and the way she backs her against the wall and trails kisses along her jawline and the way Quinn didn’t realize she could make that breathy whimpering sound that she doesn’t even recognize as her own for several long moments.
And every noise Santana makes-like the low one in the back of her throat when Quinn lightly sucks on her bottom lip-sounds a little bit like an epiphany.
It occurs to her that maybe this is what wanting someone feels like.)
---
It’s absolutely terrifying.
There’s not any part of this that’s sane, or rational; even if Santana were a boy, which she’s decidedly not, she certainly wouldn’t be the kind you take home to meet your parents. But she’s a girl, and she’s a girl Quinn likes spending time with (mostly) and kissing and she’s a girl who makes Quinn unexpectedly happy.
They’re probably defying the laws of the universe by being together. They’re certainly defying the laws of Quinn’s family.
Maybe that makes us star-crossed lovers, she thinks wryly, and then she laughs at Santana’s imagined reaction to the two of them as the reincarnation of Romeo and Juliet.
She thinks being Quinn and Santana is probably enough.
(She thinks that maybe, against all odds, it’s more than enough.)
---
“Make sure not to trip or anything,” Santana whispers to her, smirking, because they’ve just called her name and that means collecting her diploma and saying goodbye to this town for the last time. (With the exception of New Directions, she’s surprised to realize she doesn’t think she’s going to miss it at all.)
She shoots Santana a dirty look and successfully claims her official right to freedom-without tripping.
“What do you think, babe?” Santana asks, once the ceremony’s over. “Ready to get the hell out of here?”
They have an apartment waiting for them and a summer together ahead of them.
It’s insane. It’s insane because Quinn was never supposed to get out of Lima and because they were probably never supposed to so much as keep in contact after high school-and because they’re Santana Lopez and Quinn Fabray..
Which is the only reason she’d make the same stupid decision all over again.
“Yeah,” she says, because she’s been ready since the moment she believed she could ever have a destination that wasn’t here. “Let’s go.”
Suddenly Santana’s leaning forward and grabbing her waist and kissing her thoroughly and altogether without warning.
“Okay,” Santana says when she pulls back, as they both draw in slightly ragged breaths, “we can go now.”
Quinn wonders distantly if anyone might have seen their display and finds, to her surprise, she wouldn’t mind at all.
With that, she takes Santana’s hand and pulls her toward a future in which winning prom queen means nothing more than winning a cheap crown someone probably found at the Dollar Tree.
It’s a future she always thought would be someone else’s.
It’s a future in which she’s not ex-Head Cheerio or member of the Celibacy Club or the girl who used to be pregnant. It’s a future in which she’s not even Quinn Fabray.
All she’ll be is Quinn, and that won’t mean a thing to anyone-except maybe it’ll be attached to Santana Lopez, sometimes-and somehow it will be the best thing that’s ever happened to the girl who spent her entire high school career claiming she wanted nothing more than to be on top.
For the first time in her life, Quinn will be allowed to want everything.