Challenge 10 - Jar of Hearts
Title: There's Nothing You Could Say, Nothing You Could Do
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Quinn/Santana friendship
Word count: 1,156
Prompt: The picture of the girl with the bow in her hair.
Summary: This is just a little look at Santana and Quinn's friendship and the effect that baby gate had on it. Set during season 1.
***
“Almost there,” Quinn encouraged herself as she bent her right knee, pulled her leg close to her stomach and leaned over in an attempt to reach her toes, bottle of hot pink nail polish in hand and a determined look on her face.
Santana sat on the floor next to her bed, watching in mild amusement as Quinn tried (and failed) to brush polish onto her big toe. “Need some help with that, Preggers?”
“No,” Quinn insisted, “I can do it myself.”
Santana sighed, “You’re going to squish that kid.”
“I am not,” Quinn bent even further over her belly to prove her point. “The baby is well protected.”
“You’re eight months pregnant. You might as well give up on the deluded idea that you’re even somewhat capable of painting your own toes until after the baby is born. You can’t even see your own feet anymore.”
“Just because I’m huge and pregnant doesn’t mean I can’t do stuff for myself,” Quinn hissed. She was hormonal and grumpy and clinging desperately to what little bit of control she still had left over her own body.
“Suit yourself,” Santana said, “but if your water breaks and you get baby juice all over my bed because you insisted on folding yourself in half like a damn pretzel, you’re going to have to buy me a new comforter.”
“Fine,” Quinn replied before abandoning her conversation with Santana and returning to the task of painting her toes. “Ouch,” she winced, her hand rubbing at the sharp pain that had suddenly developed in the side of her stomach.
“Quinn Fabray, if you pop out that kid of yours on my bed, I swear to God…”
“Relax, I’m not going to give birth on your bed.”
“You better not,” Santana said, standing up from her spot on the floor and grabbing the bottle of polish from Quinn’s hand. She sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled Quinn’s feet into her lap. “Hold still.”
Quinn watched as Santana quickly and skillfully applied polish to each of her toes. “You’re really good at that.”
Santana shrugged, “I’ve had a lot of practice.”
“Do you give foot massages too?”
“Don’t push your luck, Fabray.”
When she was finished putting on the clear top coat, Santana stood up and grabbed a couple of magazines off her desk, tossing them in Quinn’s direction. “Read those while your toes dry so you don’t smear them.”
“Thanks.”
“Whatever,” Santana said, picking up the bottle of nail polish and walking towards her bathroom, “I have to pee.”
Santana caught a look at herself in the reflection of the mirror while she was washing her hands and groaned. She’d skipped washing her hair the night before and it was a mess (a hot mess, but still) of knots and uncontrollable flyaways. It was like her hair didn’t know what to do with itself when it wasn’t forced into the Cheerios high ponytail and plastered with hairspray. She quickly ran a brush through it and gathered half of it up and away from her face, securing it with the pink bow Brittany had insisted she buy because it was cute. What even?
“So?” Santana asked, coming back into the room and turning the back of her head towards Quinn. “What do you think?”
Quinn glanced up from the issue of Cosmo she was idly flipping through to look at Santana’s hair. “I think that bow makes you look like Rachel Berry.”
Santana groaned and pulled the bow from her hair, tossing it into the wastebasket next to her vanity. “Ugh, gross, Q! That dwarf wishes she were a fraction of as hot as I am.”
Quinn shrugged, “You asked me what I thought.”
Santana narrowed her eyes a little and glared at Quinn. “I still sort of hate you, you know,” she said, flopping down on the bed next to her. “I only invited you over because Brittany was busy with Girl Scouts or some shit and I was bored or whatever.”
Quinn took a deep breath, closed the magazine she was looking at, and set it on Santana’s nightstand. She had been bracing herself for this very moment since she'd walked into the Lopez’s house an hour earlier. “I know.”
“Why did you have sleep with him? He was mine.”
“He wasn’t yours, Santana. Puck doesn’t belong to anyone, he never has and he never will. He has made that perfectly clear.”
Santana picked at the peeling red polish on her thumb. “I would say he’s pretty much anchored to you right now, considering you are living in his house and sleeping in his bed while you grow his demon spawn in your uterus.”
Quinn curled her arm protectively around her bulging belly. “If you’re planning on being an insufferable bitch the entire time I’m here, then I can just leave now.”
She tried to push herself up off the bed, struggling under the additional weight of her eight months pregnant belly. She looked sort of pitiful, like a damn beached whale flopping around, and Santana couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. She reached her hand over and grabbed Quinn’s elbow lightly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Stay.”
Quinn settled back against the pillow and quirked an eyebrow at her. “You, Santana Marie Lopez, are sorry?”
Santana rolled her eyes. “Yeah, don’t make a big deal about it though. I’m only sorry because you’re too pathetic to be mean to right now. I think that massive basketball you’ve got under your shirt is probably punishment enough for sleeping with Puck.”
Quinn nodded slowly, “I certainly would have made a different decision that night had I known that this was going to happen.”
“Do you know what you’re going to do with it yet?” Santana asked, eyeing Quinn’s midsection with a certain level of disgust.
“The baby is not an it, she is a girl. And no, I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with her yet.”
“Quinn,” Santana started, her tone much gentler than before, “You’re going to have to decide something really soon.”
“You think I don’t realize that, that I don’t spend every minute of every day agonizing over what is going to be the best thing for her? It is not an easy decision to make.”
“No one ever said it was going to be easy, Q, but I think it’s only going to get harder to decide what you should do once she’s born.”
“It’s just…”Quinn swallowed hard. “I know that I can’t keep her and give her the life that she deserves, but I also don’t feel like I can give her away to someone-” Her voice started to break and she shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” she said, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand.
Santana let her head drop so that it was resting against Quinn’s shoulder. “Okay.”
***
