Always Be This Way [1/1]
Title: Always Be This Way
Pairing: Santana/Brittany
Rating: PG
Summary: They decide to take the marital plunge
Spoilers: None, really
Santana always hoped she and Brittany would end up together, but she did not always have faith that they would.
But here they were, at 25, still together since high school. They struck out on their own, but they were together. And while there were a few college and post-college years where they regularly ate cup-of-noodles brand ramen (whoever said ramen was cheap was an idiot, but cup-of-noodles could be bought for 33 cents) and supremely generic peanut butter (Brittany could never be cured of her love of a good pb and j sandwich), they were pretty much okay now.
When Santana was small, her parents encouraged her and her brothers to be peaceful. She was the only girl, but wedged in the middle of the birth order. She was used to being smaller than her older brothers-- that is why they were her big brothers, but when her little brother was taller than her from the time that she was seven and he was five, she knew she had to fight if she was going to have a standing chance.
Her childhood was mostly peaceful. Her mother and father had some fights, but they were rarely bad enough that she was scared of them. Mostly, she spent it with her brothers, beating the crap out of each other.
Everything changed when she met Brittany.
Everything.
Santana loved her family, especially now that she was so far away from them. But Brittany, oh Brittany. Brittany was the most important relationship in her life.
There were a lot of words she could use to describe herself-- some of it demographic (female, Latina, mid-20s, college grad, California resident, gay), some of it characteristic (bitchy, standoffish, calculating, observant), some of it factual (good singer, good posture, bad driver, facile with mathematics, conversationally fluent in Spanish).
But the most important way she described herself, the words that first came to her mind any time some lame ass internet quiz, census taker, job interview, grad school application, job application asked her to describe herself, she thought: Brittany’s girlfriend.
Words mattered. When she was little and she fought with her brothers, her mother would try to tell her not to get so angry with them, to tell them that whole spiel about ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.’ But even then Santana knew it was a lie her mother told her to get her to stop hiding in her brothers’ closet to leap out at them and sucker punch them in the stomach.
For a long time, she tried to tell herself that words didn’t matter, but the truth was, words hurt her just as much as they hurt anyone else.
Brittany was probably the one person on earth who rarely said something that hurt Santana’s feelings. That didn’t mean Brittany never did-- they’d been friends for years and had been dating for close to a decade-- things sometimes get said late at night, leaving otherwise sensible people to stalk out of apartments in the middle of the night only to return a couple hours later.
There were times when Santana was tired of feeling like the asshole in the relationship, tired of feeling like she was too mean to be with Brittany. Not that she ever tried to deliberately be mean to Brittany or anything. Santana wasn’t capable of doing that. But when Santana cackled over dinner about a hated coworker who got in trouble (in that moment, if you’d looked up the word schaudenfreude in the dictionary, it would have simply had a picture of Santana Lopez laughing), Brittany did not laugh. Instead, Brittany looked vaguely disapproving about Santana laughing at someone else’s misfortune and actually looked pretty bewildered about why anyone would laugh at someone else’s misfortune But Santana laughed because Crystal Cohen had been a bitch to her for three years, and Crystal Cohen finally got some kind of comeuppance from the universe.
Whenever Brittany gave people second, third, fourth chances, or looked for the silver-lined parts of people who were otherwise wildly unlikable, Santana felt like the jerk. Even when Santana knew that she wasn’t really being a jerk, just realistic, she felt like a jerk. After all, if Santana didn’t put Brittany’s constant adoration of other people in check, they would be broke from Brittany lending money that was never returned, and their apartment would always be full of people who just dropped by and their refrigerator and liquor cabinets would constantly be empty.
As it was, their apartment was already basically a Halfway House for Wayward Friends.
When Brittany’s dancer friend, Natasha, got evicted for the third time from her apartment, it was their couch that Natasha crashed on for a month until Santana couldn’t take it anymore. When Patrick, the guy that Brittany met during Happy Hour with her coworkers, when he was justso sad about his break-up with his girlfriend, Ilene, broke up with Ilene for the fifth time that year, it was their apartment that he came blubbering to at four am. In his drunken, sloppy, overly affectionate way. When Rachel, supremely mad at Quinn for one thing or another, pulled a hilariously divalicious antic and got on a plane headed for LA rather than staying at their weeklong romantic getaway in Cabo, it was their apartment Rachel showed up at. And of course, Quinn showed up six hours later, so angry that she actually looked more like a cartoon than an actual human, to drag Rachel back-- allegedly kicking and screaming if necessary. And when Quinn and Rachel got into a heated argument about who would be stronger than whom, and who could take the other in a fight, whose couch was it that the two of them made out on? That’s right, Santana and Brittany’s couch.
Santana had put up with a lot in her relationship with Brittany. Not necessarily from Brittany herself, but from all the people who were pulled into Brittany’s orbit.
And of course, that meant that sometimes, Brittany attracted someone bad into their lives, and Santana made no apologies for regulating.
Santana didn’t want to feel like a jerk every time she had to do it, but she did. So there’d been times in their relationship that Santana felt weary from being the jerk and just wanted to end things with Brittany and find someone who was just as much of a jerk. She wouldn’t have loved that person as much-- she probably wouldn’t have even liked that person, but she wouldn’t have felt like a bad person just because the other person was nicer.
But the truth was, she couldn’t fathom being with anyone other than Brittany.
Her parents could tell her that she was adopted and was actually part Irish and part Eskimo. Hell, they could tell her she was part penguin. She could wake up in Egypt, Lima or Timbuktu. She could be a bartender, waitress, astronaut or paratrooper. She could be Polly Pocket, Rainbow Brite, Pollyanna or Rebecca of Sunnybrook farm. She could be anything other than what she already was, but she would still love Brittany. She would still be Brittany’s girl, and Brittany would be hers. They could be going nowhere, and Santana wouldn’t care. At least, they could go nowhere together, right?
When she thought about Brittany, she thought about the girl she met as a kid and grew up with. There were shared Diet sodas, shared bags of chips, lunches, dinners and gossip. They watched movies together, worked out together, practiced together, made out with each other and got manicures and pedicures. And now, as adults, if there were some band that Santana wanted to go see, or movie she wanted to watch or a restaurant she wanted to try, she knew she had a built-in partner.
But there was more important stuff. Like, when she looked at Brittany, she saw the only person she ever wanted to share a life and a bed with. She saw someone she could raise children with (not that she wanted them, at least at the moment, but she knew Brittany would make a good mom. Brittany could be the nice mom and Santana knew she’d be relegated to the role of strict mom). She saw the girl she loved to snuggle under freshly laundered sheets with, because Brittany would giggle, hum in contentment and do this little wiggly thing like Brittany was trying to drill herself even deeper into the bed).
When Brittany touched her, Santana always felt warm, even when Brittany’s hands were cold (even when Santana would squeal and then tell Brittany she needed to get her circulation checked out, Santana still felt warm). Like that one almost-Christmas day when Brittany came home from doing some shopping at Target (to stock up on their laundry detergent and liquid soap and to get a new heater), Brittany also happened to buy a sad ass Charlie Brown tree, complete with the sad solitary red ornament.
“Because the only thing you like about Christmas is the Charlie Brown Christmas special,” Brittany explained. “You love it.” As though Santana needed reminding.
Santana would never admit it to anyone other than Brittany how much she loved that 25 minute decades-old cartoon, but she did.
And it wasn’t like Brittany was giving it to Santana as a present or anything, it was just because it was there and it reminded Brittany of Santana. And there were little things like that all the time. Like when Brittany went to Sephora because she needed to get another compact powder and she got Santana a Rosebud brand lip balm, because Santana liked it.
She wanted to spend the rest of her life with Brittany, and she was pretty sure Brittany felt the same way. Santana was pretty sure of this because Brittany said things like, “Santana, I really hope I don’t still have to tell you to pick up your socks when we’re sixty” and “we’re going to have to have at least one kid, because who will climb up the ladder to put the angel on top of the Christmas tree when we’re both too old to do it?” And when Brittany was feeling particularly playful, she said things like, “I really hope you’re the one who gets too old to drive first. I drive better than you do.”
Words were important, and in Santana’s life, words had uplifted her to the highest highs (a softly-spoken, matter-of-fact concession of mutual love--“I’m in love with you”) but had also broken her spirit (an angry accusation that had been so incredibly wrong “you lied to me when you said you loved me”)
Words mattered to Santana, and so one day, after a conversation with Rachel who was going through a quarter-life crisis, Santana made a decision. (Rachel explained that she’d accomplished what she’d wanted professionally, but still had a long way to go personally, and this was causing her to go through the twenty-five year old woman’s equivalent to getting a toupee and buying a Ferrari)
“Let’s get married,” Santana murmured one night while they were curled up together on the couch watching a rerun of Deadliest Catch. Brittany was oddly enthralled with Deadliest Catch and it was just one of those things that Santana unquestioningly and unprotestingly gave into.
Brittany sort of froze, and then pulled away from Santana to stare at her.
Immediately, Santana missed the weight of Brittany pushed up against her body.
She was never the little girl that imagined herself in a white wedding gown, never pictured herself falling in love with a boy and being the bride to his groom. When she met Brittany, there was some part of her that believed they’d always be together, one way or another. But back in Lima, where Rachel was routinely mocked for having gay dads, a marriage between two girls was out of the question and Santana didn’t even think about it. Other parts of the country had their civil unions and domestic partnerships, but most people in town sort of sniffed at the thought of those things in disdain. And anyway, Santana always thought those words lacked the poetry, was devoid of the love and devotion that she felt for Brittany. It could never convey how much she felt for Brittany. She never put much consideration into marriage, either. Who needed to get married anyway, it usually ended in divorce. Although she had to concede her own parents seemed like they were still pretty in love, and she could now recall (with a deep, abiding shiver) hearing the raucous laughter coming from Brittany’s parents’ bedroom back when they had sleepovers. And Rachel’s dads still had their weekly date night, apparently, even after all these years. (Santana knew this because both Quinn and Rachel had a tendency to overshare when it came to things they argued about)
“Aren’t we already, sort of anyway?” Brittany asked.
“Yeah, but we should make it official.”
Brittany took Santana’s hands, and their fingers threaded together. “Are you sure?”
Santana grinned. “Duh. We’ve only been together since we were kids.” She smiled. “So,” she said, casually, trying to mask her trepidation. “Do you want to?”
Brittany ran her right thumb up the length of Santana’s ring finger on her left hand. She bent her head down and pressed a kiss to Santana’s ring finger. “Yeah,” she said.
Santana smiled broadly and palmed Brittany’s cheek “Yeah?” she asked softly.
“Yeah,” Brittany assured.
Santana loved Brittany when they were children together, and then when they were teenage girls trying to navigate through life in a small town. And she loved the woman that Brittany grew into. Brittany wasn’t trying to deliberately dumb herself down anymore because she was self-conscious about not being smart enough, so she wasn’t pretending like she really thought the square root of 4 was rainbows anymore. But she was still the same sweet, considerate person she’d always been.
“We can always be this way,” Santana murmured softly.
Brittany had already resumed her position of cuddling into Santana by then, the top of her head resting under Santana’s chin. Brittany tilted her head back ever so slightly so that her lips grazed the underside of the curve to Santana’s cheek.
“We’re going to be so good,” Brittany murmured.
“Well,” Santana said. “We’ve almost always have been.”
There’d been rough patches in their time together, and Santana preferred to forget about them or at least pretend like they never happened. But Brittany was someone who demanded precision, at least, when it came to their relationship. Brittany may not be able to balance their checkbook, but that’s why Santana did it. And Brittany may be optimistic and always looked for the silver lining, but she was always truthful, too. And anyway, it couldn’t always be sunshine and rainbows, so if they had to weather through some storms, at least they were doing it together.
Brittany grinned. “Almost always is better than everyone else.”
Santana grinned back. “Yeah.”
“Yeah,” Brittany echoed.
When Santana thought about her future, Brittany was always there. Sometimes, there were kids involved in that picture, and sometimes there weren’t. But Brittany was always there, which, as far as Santana was concerned, basically made them as married as two people could be. They could grow old together (although Santana was not at all inclined to think about being older, wrinklier or saggier) and they could continue on the way they always had. Brittany could be the one everyone came to when they had a problem, and Santana could be the one to chase them away when they finally got on her nerves. Santana had an admittedly short fuse, but it’d grown longer due to all the years she spent with Brittany. Maybe one day, her fuse would be as long as Brittany’s. Santana was looking forward to finding out. They had the rest of their lives together to find out, but first, they had a wedding to plan.
Pairing: Santana/Brittany
Rating: PG
Summary: They decide to take the marital plunge
Spoilers: None, really
Santana always hoped she and Brittany would end up together, but she did not always have faith that they would.
But here they were, at 25, still together since high school. They struck out on their own, but they were together. And while there were a few college and post-college years where they regularly ate cup-of-noodles brand ramen (whoever said ramen was cheap was an idiot, but cup-of-noodles could be bought for 33 cents) and supremely generic peanut butter (Brittany could never be cured of her love of a good pb and j sandwich), they were pretty much okay now.
When Santana was small, her parents encouraged her and her brothers to be peaceful. She was the only girl, but wedged in the middle of the birth order. She was used to being smaller than her older brothers-- that is why they were her big brothers, but when her little brother was taller than her from the time that she was seven and he was five, she knew she had to fight if she was going to have a standing chance.
Her childhood was mostly peaceful. Her mother and father had some fights, but they were rarely bad enough that she was scared of them. Mostly, she spent it with her brothers, beating the crap out of each other.
Everything changed when she met Brittany.
Everything.
Santana loved her family, especially now that she was so far away from them. But Brittany, oh Brittany. Brittany was the most important relationship in her life.
There were a lot of words she could use to describe herself-- some of it demographic (female, Latina, mid-20s, college grad, California resident, gay), some of it characteristic (bitchy, standoffish, calculating, observant), some of it factual (good singer, good posture, bad driver, facile with mathematics, conversationally fluent in Spanish).
But the most important way she described herself, the words that first came to her mind any time some lame ass internet quiz, census taker, job interview, grad school application, job application asked her to describe herself, she thought: Brittany’s girlfriend.
Words mattered. When she was little and she fought with her brothers, her mother would try to tell her not to get so angry with them, to tell them that whole spiel about ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.’ But even then Santana knew it was a lie her mother told her to get her to stop hiding in her brothers’ closet to leap out at them and sucker punch them in the stomach.
For a long time, she tried to tell herself that words didn’t matter, but the truth was, words hurt her just as much as they hurt anyone else.
Brittany was probably the one person on earth who rarely said something that hurt Santana’s feelings. That didn’t mean Brittany never did-- they’d been friends for years and had been dating for close to a decade-- things sometimes get said late at night, leaving otherwise sensible people to stalk out of apartments in the middle of the night only to return a couple hours later.
There were times when Santana was tired of feeling like the asshole in the relationship, tired of feeling like she was too mean to be with Brittany. Not that she ever tried to deliberately be mean to Brittany or anything. Santana wasn’t capable of doing that. But when Santana cackled over dinner about a hated coworker who got in trouble (in that moment, if you’d looked up the word schaudenfreude in the dictionary, it would have simply had a picture of Santana Lopez laughing), Brittany did not laugh. Instead, Brittany looked vaguely disapproving about Santana laughing at someone else’s misfortune and actually looked pretty bewildered about why anyone would laugh at someone else’s misfortune But Santana laughed because Crystal Cohen had been a bitch to her for three years, and Crystal Cohen finally got some kind of comeuppance from the universe.
Whenever Brittany gave people second, third, fourth chances, or looked for the silver-lined parts of people who were otherwise wildly unlikable, Santana felt like the jerk. Even when Santana knew that she wasn’t really being a jerk, just realistic, she felt like a jerk. After all, if Santana didn’t put Brittany’s constant adoration of other people in check, they would be broke from Brittany lending money that was never returned, and their apartment would always be full of people who just dropped by and their refrigerator and liquor cabinets would constantly be empty.
As it was, their apartment was already basically a Halfway House for Wayward Friends.
When Brittany’s dancer friend, Natasha, got evicted for the third time from her apartment, it was their couch that Natasha crashed on for a month until Santana couldn’t take it anymore. When Patrick, the guy that Brittany met during Happy Hour with her coworkers, when he was justso sad about his break-up with his girlfriend, Ilene, broke up with Ilene for the fifth time that year, it was their apartment that he came blubbering to at four am. In his drunken, sloppy, overly affectionate way. When Rachel, supremely mad at Quinn for one thing or another, pulled a hilariously divalicious antic and got on a plane headed for LA rather than staying at their weeklong romantic getaway in Cabo, it was their apartment Rachel showed up at. And of course, Quinn showed up six hours later, so angry that she actually looked more like a cartoon than an actual human, to drag Rachel back-- allegedly kicking and screaming if necessary. And when Quinn and Rachel got into a heated argument about who would be stronger than whom, and who could take the other in a fight, whose couch was it that the two of them made out on? That’s right, Santana and Brittany’s couch.
Santana had put up with a lot in her relationship with Brittany. Not necessarily from Brittany herself, but from all the people who were pulled into Brittany’s orbit.
And of course, that meant that sometimes, Brittany attracted someone bad into their lives, and Santana made no apologies for regulating.
Santana didn’t want to feel like a jerk every time she had to do it, but she did. So there’d been times in their relationship that Santana felt weary from being the jerk and just wanted to end things with Brittany and find someone who was just as much of a jerk. She wouldn’t have loved that person as much-- she probably wouldn’t have even liked that person, but she wouldn’t have felt like a bad person just because the other person was nicer.
But the truth was, she couldn’t fathom being with anyone other than Brittany.
Her parents could tell her that she was adopted and was actually part Irish and part Eskimo. Hell, they could tell her she was part penguin. She could wake up in Egypt, Lima or Timbuktu. She could be a bartender, waitress, astronaut or paratrooper. She could be Polly Pocket, Rainbow Brite, Pollyanna or Rebecca of Sunnybrook farm. She could be anything other than what she already was, but she would still love Brittany. She would still be Brittany’s girl, and Brittany would be hers. They could be going nowhere, and Santana wouldn’t care. At least, they could go nowhere together, right?
When she thought about Brittany, she thought about the girl she met as a kid and grew up with. There were shared Diet sodas, shared bags of chips, lunches, dinners and gossip. They watched movies together, worked out together, practiced together, made out with each other and got manicures and pedicures. And now, as adults, if there were some band that Santana wanted to go see, or movie she wanted to watch or a restaurant she wanted to try, she knew she had a built-in partner.
But there was more important stuff. Like, when she looked at Brittany, she saw the only person she ever wanted to share a life and a bed with. She saw someone she could raise children with (not that she wanted them, at least at the moment, but she knew Brittany would make a good mom. Brittany could be the nice mom and Santana knew she’d be relegated to the role of strict mom). She saw the girl she loved to snuggle under freshly laundered sheets with, because Brittany would giggle, hum in contentment and do this little wiggly thing like Brittany was trying to drill herself even deeper into the bed).
When Brittany touched her, Santana always felt warm, even when Brittany’s hands were cold (even when Santana would squeal and then tell Brittany she needed to get her circulation checked out, Santana still felt warm). Like that one almost-Christmas day when Brittany came home from doing some shopping at Target (to stock up on their laundry detergent and liquid soap and to get a new heater), Brittany also happened to buy a sad ass Charlie Brown tree, complete with the sad solitary red ornament.
“Because the only thing you like about Christmas is the Charlie Brown Christmas special,” Brittany explained. “You love it.” As though Santana needed reminding.
Santana would never admit it to anyone other than Brittany how much she loved that 25 minute decades-old cartoon, but she did.
And it wasn’t like Brittany was giving it to Santana as a present or anything, it was just because it was there and it reminded Brittany of Santana. And there were little things like that all the time. Like when Brittany went to Sephora because she needed to get another compact powder and she got Santana a Rosebud brand lip balm, because Santana liked it.
She wanted to spend the rest of her life with Brittany, and she was pretty sure Brittany felt the same way. Santana was pretty sure of this because Brittany said things like, “Santana, I really hope I don’t still have to tell you to pick up your socks when we’re sixty” and “we’re going to have to have at least one kid, because who will climb up the ladder to put the angel on top of the Christmas tree when we’re both too old to do it?” And when Brittany was feeling particularly playful, she said things like, “I really hope you’re the one who gets too old to drive first. I drive better than you do.”
Words were important, and in Santana’s life, words had uplifted her to the highest highs (a softly-spoken, matter-of-fact concession of mutual love--“I’m in love with you”) but had also broken her spirit (an angry accusation that had been so incredibly wrong “you lied to me when you said you loved me”)
Words mattered to Santana, and so one day, after a conversation with Rachel who was going through a quarter-life crisis, Santana made a decision. (Rachel explained that she’d accomplished what she’d wanted professionally, but still had a long way to go personally, and this was causing her to go through the twenty-five year old woman’s equivalent to getting a toupee and buying a Ferrari)
“Let’s get married,” Santana murmured one night while they were curled up together on the couch watching a rerun of Deadliest Catch. Brittany was oddly enthralled with Deadliest Catch and it was just one of those things that Santana unquestioningly and unprotestingly gave into.
Brittany sort of froze, and then pulled away from Santana to stare at her.
Immediately, Santana missed the weight of Brittany pushed up against her body.
She was never the little girl that imagined herself in a white wedding gown, never pictured herself falling in love with a boy and being the bride to his groom. When she met Brittany, there was some part of her that believed they’d always be together, one way or another. But back in Lima, where Rachel was routinely mocked for having gay dads, a marriage between two girls was out of the question and Santana didn’t even think about it. Other parts of the country had their civil unions and domestic partnerships, but most people in town sort of sniffed at the thought of those things in disdain. And anyway, Santana always thought those words lacked the poetry, was devoid of the love and devotion that she felt for Brittany. It could never convey how much she felt for Brittany. She never put much consideration into marriage, either. Who needed to get married anyway, it usually ended in divorce. Although she had to concede her own parents seemed like they were still pretty in love, and she could now recall (with a deep, abiding shiver) hearing the raucous laughter coming from Brittany’s parents’ bedroom back when they had sleepovers. And Rachel’s dads still had their weekly date night, apparently, even after all these years. (Santana knew this because both Quinn and Rachel had a tendency to overshare when it came to things they argued about)
“Aren’t we already, sort of anyway?” Brittany asked.
“Yeah, but we should make it official.”
Brittany took Santana’s hands, and their fingers threaded together. “Are you sure?”
Santana grinned. “Duh. We’ve only been together since we were kids.” She smiled. “So,” she said, casually, trying to mask her trepidation. “Do you want to?”
Brittany ran her right thumb up the length of Santana’s ring finger on her left hand. She bent her head down and pressed a kiss to Santana’s ring finger. “Yeah,” she said.
Santana smiled broadly and palmed Brittany’s cheek “Yeah?” she asked softly.
“Yeah,” Brittany assured.
Santana loved Brittany when they were children together, and then when they were teenage girls trying to navigate through life in a small town. And she loved the woman that Brittany grew into. Brittany wasn’t trying to deliberately dumb herself down anymore because she was self-conscious about not being smart enough, so she wasn’t pretending like she really thought the square root of 4 was rainbows anymore. But she was still the same sweet, considerate person she’d always been.
“We can always be this way,” Santana murmured softly.
Brittany had already resumed her position of cuddling into Santana by then, the top of her head resting under Santana’s chin. Brittany tilted her head back ever so slightly so that her lips grazed the underside of the curve to Santana’s cheek.
“We’re going to be so good,” Brittany murmured.
“Well,” Santana said. “We’ve almost always have been.”
There’d been rough patches in their time together, and Santana preferred to forget about them or at least pretend like they never happened. But Brittany was someone who demanded precision, at least, when it came to their relationship. Brittany may not be able to balance their checkbook, but that’s why Santana did it. And Brittany may be optimistic and always looked for the silver lining, but she was always truthful, too. And anyway, it couldn’t always be sunshine and rainbows, so if they had to weather through some storms, at least they were doing it together.
Brittany grinned. “Almost always is better than everyone else.”
Santana grinned back. “Yeah.”
“Yeah,” Brittany echoed.
When Santana thought about her future, Brittany was always there. Sometimes, there were kids involved in that picture, and sometimes there weren’t. But Brittany was always there, which, as far as Santana was concerned, basically made them as married as two people could be. They could grow old together (although Santana was not at all inclined to think about being older, wrinklier or saggier) and they could continue on the way they always had. Brittany could be the one everyone came to when they had a problem, and Santana could be the one to chase them away when they finally got on her nerves. Santana had an admittedly short fuse, but it’d grown longer due to all the years she spent with Brittany. Maybe one day, her fuse would be as long as Brittany’s. Santana was looking forward to finding out. They had the rest of their lives together to find out, but first, they had a wedding to plan.