Breaking The Silence
Title: Breaking The Silence
Pairing: Santana Lopez/Quinn Fabray friendship
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Spoilers: Nothing in particular.
Summary: They don't talk about stuff like this--not ever.
“I can’t get married,” Santana announces around a light slur, her head bumping Quinn’s shoulder. Her fingers clutch the neck of her third wine cooler, practiced carelessness oozing every which way. Quinn tilts her own head uncertainly.
“I’m not allowed to,” Santana goes on in her I’m-drunk-and-sharing-too-much voice. Quinn isn’t overly familiar with this-they’ve only been here twice before, furtively knocking back liquor in Santana’s bedroom while her parents are away-but she knows her best friend well enough to read her uncharacteristically vulnerable tone. Santana is gone, and doing her very sloppy best to take Quinn down with her.
“You’re fifteen,” she points out, sipping her own drink. “What do you want to get married for, anyway?”
“I don’t want to,” Santana shoots back witheringly. “I’m just saying-if I did-I couldn’t. Isn’t that stupid?”
Quinn has no idea what she’s talking about. Her head’s gone sort of fuzzy around the edges, her mind having trouble keeping thoughts distinct from one another. She hates this part of drinking, the sense that the world is spinning on without her, leaving the realm of intelligent consent far behind. It makes her dizzy, but Santana insists on them getting used to it before the year’s parties kick into high gear and they wind up looking like children. Quinn guesses she has a point; where things like this are concerned, Santana usually does.
Santana can be very smart sometimes, when she’s in the mood for it. Which doesn’t make her drunken ramblings any less nonsensical.
“I can’t get married,” she’s saying now, kicking her feet against the side of the mattress, “because a handful of jackasses wouldn’t like who I fell in love with. Which is even stupider. I mean-I hate your boyfriend, and you could still marry his janky over-sized ass, if you felt like it.” She pauses thoughtfully before tacking on, “Moron.”
Quinn’s not sure if that last part is referring to her hypothetical decision to marry Finn Hudson, or Finn himself. Either way, she manages to push aside her buzz long enough to feel properly insulted.
“Finn’s a good-“
“Whatever,” Santana waves her off, shooting back most of what’s left in her bottle and swishing the rest noisily around. “It’s just stupid, that’s all I’m saying.”
Quinn hears her just fine-it’s hard not to hear Santana, even on the soberest of days-but still doesn’t have the first clue what she’s going on about. She could marry anyone she likes, as far as Quinn can tell. Hell, she could even marry Noah Puckerman, if that was her heart’s fondest desire-although, who would want to touch that with a ten-foot pole, Quinn honestly can’t say.
She takes another tentative sip of pretending-to-be-fruity-but-really-just-unpleasant liquid and wonders why Santana Lopez even cares about this topic in the first place.
“Stupid,” Santana repeats, flopping backward on the floor and shuffling her sock-clad feet like she’s creating a carpet angel. “Marriage ain’t nobody’s business but whose business it ‘tis.”
“You sound like a ghetto pirate,” is the best Quinn can think of to say in response. Santana wrinkles her nose.
“Nobody tells pirates who to marry.”
Plainly, she’s obsessed, and it’s sort of beginning to freak Quinn out a little. Not because it’s marriage they’re discussing, but because she’s known Santana since they were eleven, and not once in all those years have they had a conversation even remotely serious-not the way this clearly is, in Santana’s eyes. Yeah, when she gets drunk, Lopez tends to go off on all of these little “you’re so much prettier than me” and “God, I wish Britt would come over” tirades, and sure, sometimes they come complete with waterworks, but whatever. Quinn can deal with all of that.
It’s when Santana gets deep-the kind of deep that’s all politics and human relationships-that her skin starts to do the creepy-crawl under her sweater sleeves.
“Do you care?” Santana demands, sitting up so suddenly, she careens sideways into Quinn’s shoulder. Quinn blinks sleepily.
“About what?”
“About marrying…people.” Santana purses her lips, eyebrows knotted tight above hazy eyes. “Do you care?”
She thinks about it for a second, the way she never really has. When she was little-really little, sandbox-and-crusts-cut-off little-she went through a serious Playing House phase. It was usually Mike Chang she ended up corralling into being her pretend husband, because Mike lived three houses down, and was one of the only boys in the whole school who managed to keep a couple of inches on her. And Mike was sweet enough to indulge her without complaining; not like Puck, who scowled from under his unruly mop of curls and tossed handfuls of dirt down her dress, or even Finn, who wasn’t always the big-hearted galumphing dork he is today. Finn had a thing about frogs back then. Mike never even showed her a caterpillar.
Mike was a great play husband, even if he did insist on his “career” being a firefighting ninja pilot. He never neglected their pretend children, and once, he brought her a fistful of hastily-picked daisies and pecked her cheek. She still remembers how cherry-red his whole face went, and how it stayed Christmas-tree bright for an hour after the fact.
But all of that was just imagination, the meandering whims of a child; she hasn’t thought about it in years. As for getting married-the real deal, with the veil, and the church, and the groom who could wear size-ginormous sneakers and restlessly finger-comb his hair (or not; who knows if Finn is really even Homecoming Court material, much less a promising candidate for husband)-she can’t...really say she’s gone there at all. The only couple she has to reflect on are her own parents, and truth be told, if she ever becomes her mother-
“I don’t know,” she says at last. Santana’s mouth twists, her gaze veering off toward the muted television on the dresser.
“Oh.”
“I just never think about it,” Quinn tells her, with the kind of brazen honesty they both try to steer away from at all costs. Her tongue is feeling all kinds of thick and uneasy, jutting up against her teeth until she has trouble focusing on anything but its heavy weight, and there’s something about the shine of Santana’s hair in the lamplight that seems weirdly distracting. She doesn’t really want to talk about this anymore, but Santana is wearing this fixed expression that looks a little like disappointment and a lot like frustration. They don’t talk like this, not ever, but as long as they are-
“I don’t even know if I want to get married,” she says quietly, picking with her free hand at a loose thread on her sleeve. Santana’s hair gleams prettily, her head cocking off to the left.
“Isn’t that the plan?” she sneers, a shimmering echo of the usual Santana-sober, and angry, and not at all interested in feelings-cutting the edge of her tone. “Grow old with some fancy lawyer type-the kind who keeps all his glossy locks well into middle age-and pop out two-point-five roly-poly baby Fabray-hyphen-whatevers?”
It’s a plan, she has to admit internally, and maybe even a plan that made sense to her once upon a time-when she was still cutting the crusts off her sandwiches, when Mike Chang’s chapped lips skidded across her cheekbone and flitted away again with embarrassed velocity. But now, sitting on Santana’s black carpet, staring up at posters of Jimi Hendrix and The Breakfast Club, turning a lukewarm wine cooler between her palms…
“Maybe,” she says, because Santana is staring at her with hard eyes. “Maybe not.”
“So decisive,” Santana mutters, and fumbles around with her free hand for the phone buried in her pocket. Quinn sucks in an indignant breath.
“Fifteen,” she repeats with as much venom as she can muster with her head buzzing so loudly. “Fifteen is not the age for deciding anything, except what color to repaint my bedroom.”
“Like you’ll ever move away from green,” Santana deadpans. Her thumb is sluggishly tapping keys, her brow creased with concentration. “Dammit. You think Britt is home yet?”
Quinn doesn’t know, and doesn’t particularly care; Brittany’s nice enough, but she’s sort of dim, and goofy in a way Quinn doesn’t know what to do with, and when she’s around, Santana sometimes seems to forget Quinn is even in the room.
Which is kind of weird, she supposes, since Quinn is her best friend and all. Anybody who makes you forget your best friend is pretty-
The thought that jerks into her head has all of the momentum of a speeding car, and none of the practical logic she’d prefer her ideas to possess. All the same, for as clumsy and uncomfortable as it is, she can’t help but wonder…
“Who are you thinking of marrying?” she asks carefully, keeping her back straight and her tone loose. Santana’s eyes flick to her temporarily.
“Doesn’t matter,” she mumbles. Quinn raises an eyebrow.
“You brought it up,” she points out. Santana’s shoulders perform an awkward shimmy that’s probably meant to be a shrug, except she’s half-laying down, and her hands are occupied with trying to do too many things at once, between the drink and the texting.
“So? Doesn’t mean I want to-“ She coughs unconvincingly, and shimmies again. “Whatever.”
No way, Quinn thinks. No way is her best friend-beautiful, confident, irritating Santana Lopez-trying not to say what she thinks she’s trying not to say. No way are they actually having this conversation, when they don’t talk like this at all, when they don’t talk about anything that isn’t boys-boys!-and clothes and what car they’re praying for on their sixteenth birthdays. No way is Santana sitting here in a half-lit room, gazing studiously away from Quinn, and talking about marriages that can’t happen. No way does it mean-
She can’t say it out loud. Her tongue is too fat between her teeth, her vision too blurry to focus. She can’t actually spit out the words, pose the question rotating in her mind, because if she did, it would come out wrong. Too forceful, or too accusatory, and Santana would snap back at her, and this would turn into one of their infamous battle royales, right in the middle of a drunken “study session.”
And, most importantly, she’d never be able to tell if Santana was lying.
She bites her tongue, thunking the base of her bottle against the floor to the time of some old 90s pop song cranking along in her head, and leans over to nudge Santana with her shoulder. Dark eyes flick up, all thick lashes and flashes of discomfort. Drunk Santana, clinging to aggression to keep from crying.
“I don’t care,” she says, throaty with the effort of not asking Santana for the truth. “About the marrying people thing. It is stupid.”
With a little less alcohol in her system, she thinks she wouldn’t even be sure they’re talking about the same thing. She thinks they wouldn’t be talking about this at all, and maybe that would be far better than twitching her way through a conversation she never dreamed she’d be having, but-
Santana sits up a little straighter, cracks her back, and smiles shakily. A half-smile, hesitant and bleary, but honest. “Yeah?”
“So stupid,” Quinn says, even though she’s not sure how much she believes it. Things are hard sometimes, too grayscale to pinpoint for sure, and this is one of those things that she’s never considered in her life-even less than she’s considered her future husband. She knows what her parents think about it, and what her pastor would say, and what her Bible Study group mumbles on the rare occasion the topic comes up. She knows what everybody else thinks-except herself. Except what really counts.
But, then, she thought she knew where Santana stood on this, too. Before this moment of lightning-bright realization, she would have said Santana would be one of those scoffing, rolling her eyes, making snide comments. It’s what Santana does.
But Santana also grins too madly when Brittany skips up to her locker, and laughs too loudly when Brittany whispers a joke against her ear, and goes strangely stiff when Brittany’s arms thread around her middle after practice and lift her carelessly from the ground.
What Santana does is not as simple as Quinn has always believed, and maybe that means what Quinn thinks can’t be so simple, either.
Santana is looking at her-just looking, like she’s weighing the pros and cons of all of this, trying to decide whether to be flustered, or mortified, or giddy-and Quinn finds herself smiling back. Honest, and charming, and easy, like they aren’t the textbook asshole best friends who push each other to the breaking point six times a week. Like they don’t spend their days laying catty remarks and shoving each other in the halls. Like Santana doesn’t consistently cut down everything Quinn does with her life, and like Quinn doesn’t fire her own cannons back on a regular, bitchy basis.
They’ll be back to normal, she’s convinced, in a day or so-when the wine coolers give way to class and cheerleading, when Santana’s once again aware of her motor functions and her dangerous secrets. They’ll go back to being those friends soon enough.
For the moment, she settles against Santana’s side and lays a palm across her knuckles, repeating, “Stupid,” until Santana goes bright like she’s being lit by a thousand candles from the inside.
They don’t talk about stuff like this, not ever-but as long as they are, as long as Santana feels this itch to break the silence, Quinn guesses they can make it work. If that’s what Santana needs, she can twist and bend to fit the mold. After all, no matter how Santana looks at Brittany, or how violently her attention wavers when bright blue eyes and a cheerful wave enter the room, Quinn knows the fact of the matter: she is Santana’s best friend.
Whether she can get married, or not.
Pairing: Santana Lopez/Quinn Fabray friendship
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Spoilers: Nothing in particular.
Summary: They don't talk about stuff like this--not ever.
“I can’t get married,” Santana announces around a light slur, her head bumping Quinn’s shoulder. Her fingers clutch the neck of her third wine cooler, practiced carelessness oozing every which way. Quinn tilts her own head uncertainly.
“I’m not allowed to,” Santana goes on in her I’m-drunk-and-sharing-too-much voice. Quinn isn’t overly familiar with this-they’ve only been here twice before, furtively knocking back liquor in Santana’s bedroom while her parents are away-but she knows her best friend well enough to read her uncharacteristically vulnerable tone. Santana is gone, and doing her very sloppy best to take Quinn down with her.
“You’re fifteen,” she points out, sipping her own drink. “What do you want to get married for, anyway?”
“I don’t want to,” Santana shoots back witheringly. “I’m just saying-if I did-I couldn’t. Isn’t that stupid?”
Quinn has no idea what she’s talking about. Her head’s gone sort of fuzzy around the edges, her mind having trouble keeping thoughts distinct from one another. She hates this part of drinking, the sense that the world is spinning on without her, leaving the realm of intelligent consent far behind. It makes her dizzy, but Santana insists on them getting used to it before the year’s parties kick into high gear and they wind up looking like children. Quinn guesses she has a point; where things like this are concerned, Santana usually does.
Santana can be very smart sometimes, when she’s in the mood for it. Which doesn’t make her drunken ramblings any less nonsensical.
“I can’t get married,” she’s saying now, kicking her feet against the side of the mattress, “because a handful of jackasses wouldn’t like who I fell in love with. Which is even stupider. I mean-I hate your boyfriend, and you could still marry his janky over-sized ass, if you felt like it.” She pauses thoughtfully before tacking on, “Moron.”
Quinn’s not sure if that last part is referring to her hypothetical decision to marry Finn Hudson, or Finn himself. Either way, she manages to push aside her buzz long enough to feel properly insulted.
“Finn’s a good-“
“Whatever,” Santana waves her off, shooting back most of what’s left in her bottle and swishing the rest noisily around. “It’s just stupid, that’s all I’m saying.”
Quinn hears her just fine-it’s hard not to hear Santana, even on the soberest of days-but still doesn’t have the first clue what she’s going on about. She could marry anyone she likes, as far as Quinn can tell. Hell, she could even marry Noah Puckerman, if that was her heart’s fondest desire-although, who would want to touch that with a ten-foot pole, Quinn honestly can’t say.
She takes another tentative sip of pretending-to-be-fruity-but-really-just-unpleasant liquid and wonders why Santana Lopez even cares about this topic in the first place.
“Stupid,” Santana repeats, flopping backward on the floor and shuffling her sock-clad feet like she’s creating a carpet angel. “Marriage ain’t nobody’s business but whose business it ‘tis.”
“You sound like a ghetto pirate,” is the best Quinn can think of to say in response. Santana wrinkles her nose.
“Nobody tells pirates who to marry.”
Plainly, she’s obsessed, and it’s sort of beginning to freak Quinn out a little. Not because it’s marriage they’re discussing, but because she’s known Santana since they were eleven, and not once in all those years have they had a conversation even remotely serious-not the way this clearly is, in Santana’s eyes. Yeah, when she gets drunk, Lopez tends to go off on all of these little “you’re so much prettier than me” and “God, I wish Britt would come over” tirades, and sure, sometimes they come complete with waterworks, but whatever. Quinn can deal with all of that.
It’s when Santana gets deep-the kind of deep that’s all politics and human relationships-that her skin starts to do the creepy-crawl under her sweater sleeves.
“Do you care?” Santana demands, sitting up so suddenly, she careens sideways into Quinn’s shoulder. Quinn blinks sleepily.
“About what?”
“About marrying…people.” Santana purses her lips, eyebrows knotted tight above hazy eyes. “Do you care?”
She thinks about it for a second, the way she never really has. When she was little-really little, sandbox-and-crusts-cut-off little-she went through a serious Playing House phase. It was usually Mike Chang she ended up corralling into being her pretend husband, because Mike lived three houses down, and was one of the only boys in the whole school who managed to keep a couple of inches on her. And Mike was sweet enough to indulge her without complaining; not like Puck, who scowled from under his unruly mop of curls and tossed handfuls of dirt down her dress, or even Finn, who wasn’t always the big-hearted galumphing dork he is today. Finn had a thing about frogs back then. Mike never even showed her a caterpillar.
Mike was a great play husband, even if he did insist on his “career” being a firefighting ninja pilot. He never neglected their pretend children, and once, he brought her a fistful of hastily-picked daisies and pecked her cheek. She still remembers how cherry-red his whole face went, and how it stayed Christmas-tree bright for an hour after the fact.
But all of that was just imagination, the meandering whims of a child; she hasn’t thought about it in years. As for getting married-the real deal, with the veil, and the church, and the groom who could wear size-ginormous sneakers and restlessly finger-comb his hair (or not; who knows if Finn is really even Homecoming Court material, much less a promising candidate for husband)-she can’t...really say she’s gone there at all. The only couple she has to reflect on are her own parents, and truth be told, if she ever becomes her mother-
“I don’t know,” she says at last. Santana’s mouth twists, her gaze veering off toward the muted television on the dresser.
“Oh.”
“I just never think about it,” Quinn tells her, with the kind of brazen honesty they both try to steer away from at all costs. Her tongue is feeling all kinds of thick and uneasy, jutting up against her teeth until she has trouble focusing on anything but its heavy weight, and there’s something about the shine of Santana’s hair in the lamplight that seems weirdly distracting. She doesn’t really want to talk about this anymore, but Santana is wearing this fixed expression that looks a little like disappointment and a lot like frustration. They don’t talk like this, not ever, but as long as they are-
“I don’t even know if I want to get married,” she says quietly, picking with her free hand at a loose thread on her sleeve. Santana’s hair gleams prettily, her head cocking off to the left.
“Isn’t that the plan?” she sneers, a shimmering echo of the usual Santana-sober, and angry, and not at all interested in feelings-cutting the edge of her tone. “Grow old with some fancy lawyer type-the kind who keeps all his glossy locks well into middle age-and pop out two-point-five roly-poly baby Fabray-hyphen-whatevers?”
It’s a plan, she has to admit internally, and maybe even a plan that made sense to her once upon a time-when she was still cutting the crusts off her sandwiches, when Mike Chang’s chapped lips skidded across her cheekbone and flitted away again with embarrassed velocity. But now, sitting on Santana’s black carpet, staring up at posters of Jimi Hendrix and The Breakfast Club, turning a lukewarm wine cooler between her palms…
“Maybe,” she says, because Santana is staring at her with hard eyes. “Maybe not.”
“So decisive,” Santana mutters, and fumbles around with her free hand for the phone buried in her pocket. Quinn sucks in an indignant breath.
“Fifteen,” she repeats with as much venom as she can muster with her head buzzing so loudly. “Fifteen is not the age for deciding anything, except what color to repaint my bedroom.”
“Like you’ll ever move away from green,” Santana deadpans. Her thumb is sluggishly tapping keys, her brow creased with concentration. “Dammit. You think Britt is home yet?”
Quinn doesn’t know, and doesn’t particularly care; Brittany’s nice enough, but she’s sort of dim, and goofy in a way Quinn doesn’t know what to do with, and when she’s around, Santana sometimes seems to forget Quinn is even in the room.
Which is kind of weird, she supposes, since Quinn is her best friend and all. Anybody who makes you forget your best friend is pretty-
The thought that jerks into her head has all of the momentum of a speeding car, and none of the practical logic she’d prefer her ideas to possess. All the same, for as clumsy and uncomfortable as it is, she can’t help but wonder…
“Who are you thinking of marrying?” she asks carefully, keeping her back straight and her tone loose. Santana’s eyes flick to her temporarily.
“Doesn’t matter,” she mumbles. Quinn raises an eyebrow.
“You brought it up,” she points out. Santana’s shoulders perform an awkward shimmy that’s probably meant to be a shrug, except she’s half-laying down, and her hands are occupied with trying to do too many things at once, between the drink and the texting.
“So? Doesn’t mean I want to-“ She coughs unconvincingly, and shimmies again. “Whatever.”
No way, Quinn thinks. No way is her best friend-beautiful, confident, irritating Santana Lopez-trying not to say what she thinks she’s trying not to say. No way are they actually having this conversation, when they don’t talk like this at all, when they don’t talk about anything that isn’t boys-boys!-and clothes and what car they’re praying for on their sixteenth birthdays. No way is Santana sitting here in a half-lit room, gazing studiously away from Quinn, and talking about marriages that can’t happen. No way does it mean-
She can’t say it out loud. Her tongue is too fat between her teeth, her vision too blurry to focus. She can’t actually spit out the words, pose the question rotating in her mind, because if she did, it would come out wrong. Too forceful, or too accusatory, and Santana would snap back at her, and this would turn into one of their infamous battle royales, right in the middle of a drunken “study session.”
And, most importantly, she’d never be able to tell if Santana was lying.
She bites her tongue, thunking the base of her bottle against the floor to the time of some old 90s pop song cranking along in her head, and leans over to nudge Santana with her shoulder. Dark eyes flick up, all thick lashes and flashes of discomfort. Drunk Santana, clinging to aggression to keep from crying.
“I don’t care,” she says, throaty with the effort of not asking Santana for the truth. “About the marrying people thing. It is stupid.”
With a little less alcohol in her system, she thinks she wouldn’t even be sure they’re talking about the same thing. She thinks they wouldn’t be talking about this at all, and maybe that would be far better than twitching her way through a conversation she never dreamed she’d be having, but-
Santana sits up a little straighter, cracks her back, and smiles shakily. A half-smile, hesitant and bleary, but honest. “Yeah?”
“So stupid,” Quinn says, even though she’s not sure how much she believes it. Things are hard sometimes, too grayscale to pinpoint for sure, and this is one of those things that she’s never considered in her life-even less than she’s considered her future husband. She knows what her parents think about it, and what her pastor would say, and what her Bible Study group mumbles on the rare occasion the topic comes up. She knows what everybody else thinks-except herself. Except what really counts.
But, then, she thought she knew where Santana stood on this, too. Before this moment of lightning-bright realization, she would have said Santana would be one of those scoffing, rolling her eyes, making snide comments. It’s what Santana does.
But Santana also grins too madly when Brittany skips up to her locker, and laughs too loudly when Brittany whispers a joke against her ear, and goes strangely stiff when Brittany’s arms thread around her middle after practice and lift her carelessly from the ground.
What Santana does is not as simple as Quinn has always believed, and maybe that means what Quinn thinks can’t be so simple, either.
Santana is looking at her-just looking, like she’s weighing the pros and cons of all of this, trying to decide whether to be flustered, or mortified, or giddy-and Quinn finds herself smiling back. Honest, and charming, and easy, like they aren’t the textbook asshole best friends who push each other to the breaking point six times a week. Like they don’t spend their days laying catty remarks and shoving each other in the halls. Like Santana doesn’t consistently cut down everything Quinn does with her life, and like Quinn doesn’t fire her own cannons back on a regular, bitchy basis.
They’ll be back to normal, she’s convinced, in a day or so-when the wine coolers give way to class and cheerleading, when Santana’s once again aware of her motor functions and her dangerous secrets. They’ll go back to being those friends soon enough.
For the moment, she settles against Santana’s side and lays a palm across her knuckles, repeating, “Stupid,” until Santana goes bright like she’s being lit by a thousand candles from the inside.
They don’t talk about stuff like this, not ever-but as long as they are, as long as Santana feels this itch to break the silence, Quinn guesses they can make it work. If that’s what Santana needs, she can twist and bend to fit the mold. After all, no matter how Santana looks at Brittany, or how violently her attention wavers when bright blue eyes and a cheerful wave enter the room, Quinn knows the fact of the matter: she is Santana’s best friend.
Whether she can get married, or not.