The Place We Used To Call Our Home (Can't Be Found When We're Alone)
Title: The Place We Used To Call Our Home (Can't Be Found When We're Alone)
Pairing: Santana Lopez/Brittany Pierce
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Spoilers: Through S2.
Summary: Brittany is scared of everything. Including the new girl in class.
A/N: Title from Joshua Radin's "No Envy, No Fear." Please note how it is yet another long, vaguely obnoxious lyric.
Seven years old, and still afraid of everything. It’s pretty stupid, but Brittany can’t help it. The world is a scary place.
Like clowns. Who made up clowns? Big, and bumbling, and all the Happy Meals in the world couldn’t make it better again. The hair is too big, the noses too bright, and some of them have fangs. (Fangs, for the record, are only okay on big cats.) It probably doesn’t help that she accidentally saw part of It once. It ruined the circus forever.
Which is really sad, because elephants are her favorite. She doesn’t know how she’ll ever get to be one when she grows up if she can’t watch them in their natural habitat.
And then there’s the dark. The sun is just about the greatest thing in the world, so why does it have to go away every night? The second the sun leaves, it’s replaced by shadows (she’s more than a little sure they follow her), and shaking (she wraps herself in all the blankets she has, but it never helps), and sometimes even Chastity hides where she can’t find her. Which is worse than anything, because hiding in the dark gives the shadows a bigger shot at keeping you forever.
So far, Chastity has returned every morning, but she’s pretty sure that luck won’t hold out forever.
She’s afraid of just about everything there is to be scared of, and it feels like everybody knows it. Especially Noah Puckerman, who likes to dance around making ghost noises whenever the classroom lights go off, which is the worst.
Noah Puckerman is a jerkface.
She thinks it’s because he’s angry all the time.
When a tiny girl draped in a too-large hooded sweatshirt and jeans with the cuffs rolled up walks in one day, Brittany kind of expects her to be a jerkface too. She’s wearing the same scowl Noah tends to come to school with, and even though she’s a lot prettier than Noah (who is kind of pretty too sometimes, but the last time she tried to tell him that, he ripped her paper flower all up and kicked her in the shin), Brittany is cautious.
Especially when the teacher asks the girl to introduce herself. A mumbled response and a heavy glower is the best she gets, and then the girl is being maneuvered over to sit in the empty chair next to Brittany.
Nobody likes that chair; it’s the broken one, cracked along its bright blue seat, and one of the back legs wobbles. The second the girl shifts uncomfortably, the whole chair threatens to tip over. Dark eyes widen in surprise, thin limbs windmilling for balance. Noah Puckerman gives a sneering laugh.
Before Brittany can blink or try to help, the tiny girl emits a brazen squawk and leaps over their table, tackling Noah out of his own chair.
The room erupts in shouts and laughter, and Brittany can only stare as the teacher grabs the new girl around the waist and jerks her backwards.
“That’s right, asshole!” the girl shrieks down at Noah. The word makes Brittany’s ears vibrate uncomfortably; it’s a Bad Word, the kind no one is supposed to say ever.
Three minutes in, and this girl has reduced their mild-mannered classroom to Pay-Per-View. It’s stunning.
Brittany is terrified.
It goes on like that for a week. Anybody who messes with the new girl gets a punch in the mouth and a new Bad Word thrown in for good measure. Brittany spends each day with her special green earmuffs firmly clenched over both ears, drawing elephants on the desk. It doesn’t make the teacher very happy, but she never has to look at the scary new girl, and it never gets her punched. It seems safe enough.
The routine holds out exactly six days.
On the seventh, it rains.
“Rain” is actually kind of a gentle term; Brittany is actually fairly sure the sky is falling. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense, because everything was blue and sunny and pretty before recess. She likes blue and sunny and pretty.
Rain, not so much.
And definitely not thunder.
The first blast rocks her hard. Hunching her shoulders, she tries to press her earmuffs harder against her head and forget how to be afraid.
It works for maybe a minute-right up until the lights go out and refuse to come back on again.
Then she kind of loses it.
The good thing about it being dark-the only good thing-is that nobody notices her slipping out of her chair and curling up under the table, her thumb in her mouth. She’s too old to be a thumb-sucker, but if nobody can see, no one can tell on her.
Besides, everyone’s too busy going crazy (Mercedes keeps shouting for Kurt to shut up, which would be great, because his shrieking is making her head hurt almost as much as the thunder) to pay her any attention at all.
“What’re you doing?”
She screams around her thumb, the sound a little bit garbled, and whacks her head promptly on the underside of the table. The new girl crouches beside her, curious and amused.
“You just hit your head,” she points out. Brittany frowns.
“Did not.”
The girl tilts her head, staring. “Are you sucking your thumb?”
“…no.” As discreetly as she knows how, she pulls the offending digit from her mouth and wipes it on her skirt. The girl laughs.
“Whatcha doin’ under the table? Don’t you know all the cool stuff is going on out there? Puckerman just threw Hudson on his ass, and it was really funny.”
Brittany winces. “I don’t-“
“Really. Funny,” the girl repeats with a twinge of menacing humor. Brittany pulls her shoulders in tight and resists the urge to crawl away.
The girl should leave, she thinks uneasily. The girl should get up and leave right now. She should go pick on someone else, because Brittany is getting really tired of being bullied just because she’s a little scared a lot of the time. It’s not like being scared is hurting anybody, so why is it even their business?
The girl should go away, but she doesn’t. Instead, she hikes her knees up to her chest and leans lightly against Brittany’s shoulder, watching legs speed past as kids laugh and shout and generally make their teacher’s life miserable. She’s smiling, but it isn’t a mean smile, exactly. It looks more like the smile Brittany’s sister wears while watching television.
Like she really does think this is all really funny.
Brittany unfolds slightly, watching the girl from the corner of her eye. “What’s your name, anyway?”
“Santana,” the girl replies carelessly, grinning when one kid goes sprawling across the floor, tiny keychain flashlight skidding out from between pudgy fingers. “Ten bucks says Puckerman shoved him.”
“Probably,” Brittany agrees, shuffling an inch closer and looking cautiously at the smaller girl. “Why’d you move here?”
“Old school burned down,” Santana replies with a shrug. “Some girl with a weird name liked matches too much. Aph…something, I dunno, she sounds like a disease from one of my dad’s patients. Anyway, we moved here. Over to Prescott Street.”
“I’m on Maple!” Brittany fires back excitedly, forgetting for a second how this girl scares the pants off her. “That’s…I dunno where it is, actually, I get lost a lot. But I remember seeing the sign for Prescott, so it’s gotta be close.”
Santana grins. “Cool. You got a bike? We could maybe hang sometime.”
She looks so calm, Brittany thinks, and so easy-going. It’s hard to imagine this is the same girl who scares her so fiercely every single-
“Hey! Butthole! Does your mom know raid her sweater collection?” Santana shouts suddenly, laughing hysterically when Artie Abrams takes an immediate header. Brittany bites her lip.
“That wasn’t very nice,” she observes hesitantly, wrapping her arms protectively around her torso in case Santana tries to hit her. One dark eyebrow twitches.
“Nice is for suckers,” Santana says simply. When Brittany looks away without a response, she heaves a sigh. “Fine.” She shifts up on her hands and knees, calling out into the shadows where Artie went down. “Sorry, four-eyes!”
It isn’t a whole lot nicer, but she didn’t get decked; Brittany thinks that’s good enough. Smiling weakly, she rubs two fingers over the fuzzy part of her earmuffs. It always calms her down a little.
“What’re you wearing those for, anyway?” Santana asks, interested. She gives the puff hiding Brittany’s left ear a quick poke. “Aren’t they for winter?”
“I…” Taking a deep breath, she decides to just go for it. It’s not like being made fun of for it would be surprising. “I don’t like loud things. Or…thunder…or the dark.”
Santana stares at her. She bows her chin towards the ground, embarrassed. “I’m kind of afraid of a lot of things.”
“Yeah?” Santana asks curiously. “What else?”
“Um.” Thinking of them on the spot is surprisingly hard, but after a few seconds, she manages to compile a short list. “Alligators, piranhas, wasps, those weird bald rat things, tornadoes, elevators, shrimp, fake eyeballs, peg legs, potatoes with the little things growing on them, and swordfish. Also, Noah Puckerman. But don’t tell him, or he’ll push my head in the sand again.”
Something new glints in Santana’s eyes. “He pushes your head in the sand?”
“Only when I try to give him flowers,” Brittany hurries to explain. “Or that time I told him his hair was soft like my cat. Or the time I caught him kissing Finn in the empty cafeteria and-shoot, I wasn’t supposed to talk about that.”
“He kissed Finn?” Santana repeats, wide-eyed. Brittany shrugs.
“Kurt dared him to. He gave him a nickel. And he punched Finn in the teeth, so it didn’t really count anyway. But I still told him I wouldn’t tell, and now I did, and he’s gonna find out and chase me with a scorpion-“ The faster she talks, the quicker the panic builds. Shivering, Brittany buries her face in her knees and tries not to think about poison-tipped stingers in her bed.
“Brittany,” Santana drawls. “We’re in Ohio. I don’t think there are any scorpions in Ohio.”
“Oh,” Brittany says in a small voice. “Do we have lobsters?”
Dark hair swishes around, smacking her gently across the cheek. “Nope.”
“Oh. …good.”
“Still,” Santana says, surprisingly fierce, “I won’t tell that you told. No stupid boy’s ever gonna put a spider in your lunch if I can help it.”
“Thanks!” Brittany exclaims, brightening just long enough to register the words. An expression of pure horror curls around the edges of her face. “Wait. Spider?”
Santana cocks her head, smiling faintly. “Never mind. Is there anything you do like?”
“Elephants!” Brittany replies instantly. “And kittens, even though mine looks at me funny sometimes. And sunshine, and rainbows, and tennis balls, and picking feathers out of my winter coat.”
Santana shuffles a little closer, grinning. “What about me?”
“What about you?” Brittany asks, fading nervously backwards. Rolling her eyes, Santana reaches up and claps both hands over her earmuffs, holding her in place.
“You like me, right?” she asks. Brittany shivers as a slice of lightning momentarily brightens the room.
“Um.”
“Um?” Santana repeats, indignant. “What do you mean, ‘um’?”
“I just. You’re just. I just.” Her shoulders sag, bringing her unintentionally closer to Santana’s unhappy expression. “I don’t know.”
Santana slumps, hands dropping to her sides. “Oh.”
“It’s not that I don’t like you,” Brittany explains in a rush, heart twisting at being faced with such a hangdog expression. “I just don’t know you. You’re new, right? I totally didn’t even know your name before, like, just now.”
“Oh,” Santana repeats, more happily. “Right. Yeah, totally. But you know me now.”
“Yep.” She’s still not sure how she feels about that, but Santana’s smile is growing at an insane speed. It’s a very nice smile.
“So, it’s settled.” Santana claps her hands together. Brittany frowns.
“Wait, what is?”
“We’re friends,” Santana says slowly, like she’s making absolutely certain Brittany’s following. “You’re scared of, like, everything. I’m totally not. So, since we’re friends, I’m gonna help you out.”
“Help me…not be scared?” It’s a great idea, Brittany thinks, except for the part where she’s kind of afraid of the whole ‘Santana helping her’ thing. Maybe more afraid than she is of spiders in her lunch, even.
But the girl is nodding fast and excited, like she just remembered her favorite movie (Homeward Bound, maybe, like Brittany’s favorite-either that, or The Aristocats., she can never decide) is going to play on TV after school.
“Yeah! All you have to do is follow my lead. Do whatever I do, even if it scares the hell out of you, and pretty soon you’re gonna be just like me.”
That’s a pretty good question, actually, Brittany thinks. Does she even want to be just like Santana? Sure, the new girl seems pretty cool, except for being angry and terrifying. She seems funny, and smart-something Brittany herself sometimes has trouble with-and she’s got such a nice smile. Plus, she’s going to protect Brittany from Noah and his jerkface ways, which would be more than okay. She really doesn’t want to eat sand again; the grains get stuck in her teeth all funny.
“Okay,” she agrees at last, accepting Santana’s hand and giving it a gentle shake.
“Sweet. Now. First things first.” And without another word of warning, Santana lunges at her, knocking her onto her back with a cry of surprise.
In a split second, Brittany is terrified all over again. So much for trusting Santana to be her friend, to help her. Santana is on top of her now, which is something that happens a lot, and usually ends with Brittany running home in tears at lunch. Santana is going to beat her up, and take her lunch money, and-
“There!” Santana says, satisfied. Sitting astride Brittany’s stomach, she holds both hands as far above her head as she can (given the table, which Brittany has sort of forgotten about being under in the first place), clutching the neon-green earmuffs. “Step one is complete.”
“Step…why are you on top of me?” Brittany asks, voice wavering uncertainly. Santana grins, shaking the earmuffs.
“If you’re gonna be brave,” she instructs in her best teacher-voice, “you’re gonna have to stop hiding. Scary stuff isn’t so scary when you face it head-on, right?”
Brittany isn’t sure that makes any sense at all; from what she remembers about sharks, they’re just as scary from the front as from the back. Still, she’s seen Santana angry, and that might be even more horrifying than the sharks. She nods.
Santana must understand the look on her face for what it is, because instead of moving on to dictating step two, she unexpectedly slides off her perch, pulls Brittany back into a sitting position, and drapes an arm around her shoulders.
“Don’t worry,” she says in a softer voice than Brittany expects. “I’ve got your back. You’ll be brave real soon, and until then I promise I’m not gonna let anything get you.”
“Not even tornadoes?” Brittany demands nervously, stooping to nestle her head against Santana’s shoulder. The strange new girl makes an equally strange face.
“Uh. Yeah. Not even that.”
It’s funny how that’s all Brittany needs. Santana is at least as scary as tornadoes and Dustbusters combined. She even took the earmuffs, which were really Brittany’s one defense between herself and the rest of the world. She’s loud and violent and she uses all kinds of words Brittany wouldn’t dream of saying.
But maybe being scary and being brave aren’t so different. Santana is definitely scary. Who’s to say she’s not both?
Huddled under a table in the middle of McKinley Elementary's messiest classroom during a massive thunderstorm, Brittany looks at her new friend and beams.
She has no way of knowing how scared Santana feels every time she walks through her own front door, shoulders steeled against another endless barrage of parental criticism and disinterest.
She has no way of recognizing the horror reflected in dark brown eyes when Santana turns fourteen and realizes her first kiss-the first kiss that really means something-is with her best friend in the world.
She has no way of understanding how, in only a few years’ time, Santana will go from being the bravest person she has ever known to the most terrified, kneeling behind a whole array of bitchy shields that put those bright green earmuffs to shame.
She has no way of suspecting that one day, Santana Lopez will face her in a high school hallway, face open and petrified, and bare her soul-and that it will be Brittany, who has always been so afraid and so carefully protected, who will scare her senseless.
Long before any of that, sitting cross-legged beneath this table in the dark, Brittany stretches up and presses a soft kiss of thanks to a softer cheek and feels, for the first time, perfectly safe.
Santana is totally the bravest person in the world.
Pairing: Santana Lopez/Brittany Pierce
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Spoilers: Through S2.
Summary: Brittany is scared of everything. Including the new girl in class.
A/N: Title from Joshua Radin's "No Envy, No Fear." Please note how it is yet another long, vaguely obnoxious lyric.
Seven years old, and still afraid of everything. It’s pretty stupid, but Brittany can’t help it. The world is a scary place.
Like clowns. Who made up clowns? Big, and bumbling, and all the Happy Meals in the world couldn’t make it better again. The hair is too big, the noses too bright, and some of them have fangs. (Fangs, for the record, are only okay on big cats.) It probably doesn’t help that she accidentally saw part of It once. It ruined the circus forever.
Which is really sad, because elephants are her favorite. She doesn’t know how she’ll ever get to be one when she grows up if she can’t watch them in their natural habitat.
And then there’s the dark. The sun is just about the greatest thing in the world, so why does it have to go away every night? The second the sun leaves, it’s replaced by shadows (she’s more than a little sure they follow her), and shaking (she wraps herself in all the blankets she has, but it never helps), and sometimes even Chastity hides where she can’t find her. Which is worse than anything, because hiding in the dark gives the shadows a bigger shot at keeping you forever.
So far, Chastity has returned every morning, but she’s pretty sure that luck won’t hold out forever.
She’s afraid of just about everything there is to be scared of, and it feels like everybody knows it. Especially Noah Puckerman, who likes to dance around making ghost noises whenever the classroom lights go off, which is the worst.
Noah Puckerman is a jerkface.
She thinks it’s because he’s angry all the time.
When a tiny girl draped in a too-large hooded sweatshirt and jeans with the cuffs rolled up walks in one day, Brittany kind of expects her to be a jerkface too. She’s wearing the same scowl Noah tends to come to school with, and even though she’s a lot prettier than Noah (who is kind of pretty too sometimes, but the last time she tried to tell him that, he ripped her paper flower all up and kicked her in the shin), Brittany is cautious.
Especially when the teacher asks the girl to introduce herself. A mumbled response and a heavy glower is the best she gets, and then the girl is being maneuvered over to sit in the empty chair next to Brittany.
Nobody likes that chair; it’s the broken one, cracked along its bright blue seat, and one of the back legs wobbles. The second the girl shifts uncomfortably, the whole chair threatens to tip over. Dark eyes widen in surprise, thin limbs windmilling for balance. Noah Puckerman gives a sneering laugh.
Before Brittany can blink or try to help, the tiny girl emits a brazen squawk and leaps over their table, tackling Noah out of his own chair.
The room erupts in shouts and laughter, and Brittany can only stare as the teacher grabs the new girl around the waist and jerks her backwards.
“That’s right, asshole!” the girl shrieks down at Noah. The word makes Brittany’s ears vibrate uncomfortably; it’s a Bad Word, the kind no one is supposed to say ever.
Three minutes in, and this girl has reduced their mild-mannered classroom to Pay-Per-View. It’s stunning.
Brittany is terrified.
It goes on like that for a week. Anybody who messes with the new girl gets a punch in the mouth and a new Bad Word thrown in for good measure. Brittany spends each day with her special green earmuffs firmly clenched over both ears, drawing elephants on the desk. It doesn’t make the teacher very happy, but she never has to look at the scary new girl, and it never gets her punched. It seems safe enough.
The routine holds out exactly six days.
On the seventh, it rains.
“Rain” is actually kind of a gentle term; Brittany is actually fairly sure the sky is falling. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense, because everything was blue and sunny and pretty before recess. She likes blue and sunny and pretty.
Rain, not so much.
And definitely not thunder.
The first blast rocks her hard. Hunching her shoulders, she tries to press her earmuffs harder against her head and forget how to be afraid.
It works for maybe a minute-right up until the lights go out and refuse to come back on again.
Then she kind of loses it.
The good thing about it being dark-the only good thing-is that nobody notices her slipping out of her chair and curling up under the table, her thumb in her mouth. She’s too old to be a thumb-sucker, but if nobody can see, no one can tell on her.
Besides, everyone’s too busy going crazy (Mercedes keeps shouting for Kurt to shut up, which would be great, because his shrieking is making her head hurt almost as much as the thunder) to pay her any attention at all.
“What’re you doing?”
She screams around her thumb, the sound a little bit garbled, and whacks her head promptly on the underside of the table. The new girl crouches beside her, curious and amused.
“You just hit your head,” she points out. Brittany frowns.
“Did not.”
The girl tilts her head, staring. “Are you sucking your thumb?”
“…no.” As discreetly as she knows how, she pulls the offending digit from her mouth and wipes it on her skirt. The girl laughs.
“Whatcha doin’ under the table? Don’t you know all the cool stuff is going on out there? Puckerman just threw Hudson on his ass, and it was really funny.”
Brittany winces. “I don’t-“
“Really. Funny,” the girl repeats with a twinge of menacing humor. Brittany pulls her shoulders in tight and resists the urge to crawl away.
The girl should leave, she thinks uneasily. The girl should get up and leave right now. She should go pick on someone else, because Brittany is getting really tired of being bullied just because she’s a little scared a lot of the time. It’s not like being scared is hurting anybody, so why is it even their business?
The girl should go away, but she doesn’t. Instead, she hikes her knees up to her chest and leans lightly against Brittany’s shoulder, watching legs speed past as kids laugh and shout and generally make their teacher’s life miserable. She’s smiling, but it isn’t a mean smile, exactly. It looks more like the smile Brittany’s sister wears while watching television.
Like she really does think this is all really funny.
Brittany unfolds slightly, watching the girl from the corner of her eye. “What’s your name, anyway?”
“Santana,” the girl replies carelessly, grinning when one kid goes sprawling across the floor, tiny keychain flashlight skidding out from between pudgy fingers. “Ten bucks says Puckerman shoved him.”
“Probably,” Brittany agrees, shuffling an inch closer and looking cautiously at the smaller girl. “Why’d you move here?”
“Old school burned down,” Santana replies with a shrug. “Some girl with a weird name liked matches too much. Aph…something, I dunno, she sounds like a disease from one of my dad’s patients. Anyway, we moved here. Over to Prescott Street.”
“I’m on Maple!” Brittany fires back excitedly, forgetting for a second how this girl scares the pants off her. “That’s…I dunno where it is, actually, I get lost a lot. But I remember seeing the sign for Prescott, so it’s gotta be close.”
Santana grins. “Cool. You got a bike? We could maybe hang sometime.”
She looks so calm, Brittany thinks, and so easy-going. It’s hard to imagine this is the same girl who scares her so fiercely every single-
“Hey! Butthole! Does your mom know raid her sweater collection?” Santana shouts suddenly, laughing hysterically when Artie Abrams takes an immediate header. Brittany bites her lip.
“That wasn’t very nice,” she observes hesitantly, wrapping her arms protectively around her torso in case Santana tries to hit her. One dark eyebrow twitches.
“Nice is for suckers,” Santana says simply. When Brittany looks away without a response, she heaves a sigh. “Fine.” She shifts up on her hands and knees, calling out into the shadows where Artie went down. “Sorry, four-eyes!”
It isn’t a whole lot nicer, but she didn’t get decked; Brittany thinks that’s good enough. Smiling weakly, she rubs two fingers over the fuzzy part of her earmuffs. It always calms her down a little.
“What’re you wearing those for, anyway?” Santana asks, interested. She gives the puff hiding Brittany’s left ear a quick poke. “Aren’t they for winter?”
“I…” Taking a deep breath, she decides to just go for it. It’s not like being made fun of for it would be surprising. “I don’t like loud things. Or…thunder…or the dark.”
Santana stares at her. She bows her chin towards the ground, embarrassed. “I’m kind of afraid of a lot of things.”
“Yeah?” Santana asks curiously. “What else?”
“Um.” Thinking of them on the spot is surprisingly hard, but after a few seconds, she manages to compile a short list. “Alligators, piranhas, wasps, those weird bald rat things, tornadoes, elevators, shrimp, fake eyeballs, peg legs, potatoes with the little things growing on them, and swordfish. Also, Noah Puckerman. But don’t tell him, or he’ll push my head in the sand again.”
Something new glints in Santana’s eyes. “He pushes your head in the sand?”
“Only when I try to give him flowers,” Brittany hurries to explain. “Or that time I told him his hair was soft like my cat. Or the time I caught him kissing Finn in the empty cafeteria and-shoot, I wasn’t supposed to talk about that.”
“He kissed Finn?” Santana repeats, wide-eyed. Brittany shrugs.
“Kurt dared him to. He gave him a nickel. And he punched Finn in the teeth, so it didn’t really count anyway. But I still told him I wouldn’t tell, and now I did, and he’s gonna find out and chase me with a scorpion-“ The faster she talks, the quicker the panic builds. Shivering, Brittany buries her face in her knees and tries not to think about poison-tipped stingers in her bed.
“Brittany,” Santana drawls. “We’re in Ohio. I don’t think there are any scorpions in Ohio.”
“Oh,” Brittany says in a small voice. “Do we have lobsters?”
Dark hair swishes around, smacking her gently across the cheek. “Nope.”
“Oh. …good.”
“Still,” Santana says, surprisingly fierce, “I won’t tell that you told. No stupid boy’s ever gonna put a spider in your lunch if I can help it.”
“Thanks!” Brittany exclaims, brightening just long enough to register the words. An expression of pure horror curls around the edges of her face. “Wait. Spider?”
Santana cocks her head, smiling faintly. “Never mind. Is there anything you do like?”
“Elephants!” Brittany replies instantly. “And kittens, even though mine looks at me funny sometimes. And sunshine, and rainbows, and tennis balls, and picking feathers out of my winter coat.”
Santana shuffles a little closer, grinning. “What about me?”
“What about you?” Brittany asks, fading nervously backwards. Rolling her eyes, Santana reaches up and claps both hands over her earmuffs, holding her in place.
“You like me, right?” she asks. Brittany shivers as a slice of lightning momentarily brightens the room.
“Um.”
“Um?” Santana repeats, indignant. “What do you mean, ‘um’?”
“I just. You’re just. I just.” Her shoulders sag, bringing her unintentionally closer to Santana’s unhappy expression. “I don’t know.”
Santana slumps, hands dropping to her sides. “Oh.”
“It’s not that I don’t like you,” Brittany explains in a rush, heart twisting at being faced with such a hangdog expression. “I just don’t know you. You’re new, right? I totally didn’t even know your name before, like, just now.”
“Oh,” Santana repeats, more happily. “Right. Yeah, totally. But you know me now.”
“Yep.” She’s still not sure how she feels about that, but Santana’s smile is growing at an insane speed. It’s a very nice smile.
“So, it’s settled.” Santana claps her hands together. Brittany frowns.
“Wait, what is?”
“We’re friends,” Santana says slowly, like she’s making absolutely certain Brittany’s following. “You’re scared of, like, everything. I’m totally not. So, since we’re friends, I’m gonna help you out.”
“Help me…not be scared?” It’s a great idea, Brittany thinks, except for the part where she’s kind of afraid of the whole ‘Santana helping her’ thing. Maybe more afraid than she is of spiders in her lunch, even.
But the girl is nodding fast and excited, like she just remembered her favorite movie (Homeward Bound, maybe, like Brittany’s favorite-either that, or The Aristocats., she can never decide) is going to play on TV after school.
“Yeah! All you have to do is follow my lead. Do whatever I do, even if it scares the hell out of you, and pretty soon you’re gonna be just like me.”
That’s a pretty good question, actually, Brittany thinks. Does she even want to be just like Santana? Sure, the new girl seems pretty cool, except for being angry and terrifying. She seems funny, and smart-something Brittany herself sometimes has trouble with-and she’s got such a nice smile. Plus, she’s going to protect Brittany from Noah and his jerkface ways, which would be more than okay. She really doesn’t want to eat sand again; the grains get stuck in her teeth all funny.
“Okay,” she agrees at last, accepting Santana’s hand and giving it a gentle shake.
“Sweet. Now. First things first.” And without another word of warning, Santana lunges at her, knocking her onto her back with a cry of surprise.
In a split second, Brittany is terrified all over again. So much for trusting Santana to be her friend, to help her. Santana is on top of her now, which is something that happens a lot, and usually ends with Brittany running home in tears at lunch. Santana is going to beat her up, and take her lunch money, and-
“There!” Santana says, satisfied. Sitting astride Brittany’s stomach, she holds both hands as far above her head as she can (given the table, which Brittany has sort of forgotten about being under in the first place), clutching the neon-green earmuffs. “Step one is complete.”
“Step…why are you on top of me?” Brittany asks, voice wavering uncertainly. Santana grins, shaking the earmuffs.
“If you’re gonna be brave,” she instructs in her best teacher-voice, “you’re gonna have to stop hiding. Scary stuff isn’t so scary when you face it head-on, right?”
Brittany isn’t sure that makes any sense at all; from what she remembers about sharks, they’re just as scary from the front as from the back. Still, she’s seen Santana angry, and that might be even more horrifying than the sharks. She nods.
Santana must understand the look on her face for what it is, because instead of moving on to dictating step two, she unexpectedly slides off her perch, pulls Brittany back into a sitting position, and drapes an arm around her shoulders.
“Don’t worry,” she says in a softer voice than Brittany expects. “I’ve got your back. You’ll be brave real soon, and until then I promise I’m not gonna let anything get you.”
“Not even tornadoes?” Brittany demands nervously, stooping to nestle her head against Santana’s shoulder. The strange new girl makes an equally strange face.
“Uh. Yeah. Not even that.”
It’s funny how that’s all Brittany needs. Santana is at least as scary as tornadoes and Dustbusters combined. She even took the earmuffs, which were really Brittany’s one defense between herself and the rest of the world. She’s loud and violent and she uses all kinds of words Brittany wouldn’t dream of saying.
But maybe being scary and being brave aren’t so different. Santana is definitely scary. Who’s to say she’s not both?
Huddled under a table in the middle of McKinley Elementary's messiest classroom during a massive thunderstorm, Brittany looks at her new friend and beams.
She has no way of knowing how scared Santana feels every time she walks through her own front door, shoulders steeled against another endless barrage of parental criticism and disinterest.
She has no way of recognizing the horror reflected in dark brown eyes when Santana turns fourteen and realizes her first kiss-the first kiss that really means something-is with her best friend in the world.
She has no way of understanding how, in only a few years’ time, Santana will go from being the bravest person she has ever known to the most terrified, kneeling behind a whole array of bitchy shields that put those bright green earmuffs to shame.
She has no way of suspecting that one day, Santana Lopez will face her in a high school hallway, face open and petrified, and bare her soul-and that it will be Brittany, who has always been so afraid and so carefully protected, who will scare her senseless.
Long before any of that, sitting cross-legged beneath this table in the dark, Brittany stretches up and presses a soft kiss of thanks to a softer cheek and feels, for the first time, perfectly safe.
Santana is totally the bravest person in the world.