Glee | The Home Wall: 5. Home, Sweet Home | Brittany (5 of 6)
Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th , 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 24th, and 25th, 26th, 27th, and 28th cycle. Now cycle 29!
if you have things you would like to see get written, pleeease drop by the suggestion box. The link is further down!
TOP 16, TAKE 2: Okay so a couple cycles back, I did my second 'top of Glee at the moment' cycle. Now since I was still in university and such at the time, those were planned a while back, before the second half of the season every started. This made it that by the time that cycle rolled around I realized that some things had changed... Things were added, removed, bumped up... Point is it didn't really reflect where I was anymore. So I decided 'what the heck, I'll do another one ASAP!' And so here we are :) This is my revised Top 16 (of course I HAD to plan before the finale, so there are still a couple things missing like Samcedes, Unholy Trinity, etc, but let's assume they're there ;) They'll get some love in coming cycles ;)) So off we go!
Coming in at number one... (last two chapters!)
"THE HOME WALL: 5. HOME, SWEET HOME"
Brittany (& Sue)
Extra to the Sylvesters series
Her mother, surprisingly, had written her most of all, but at the same time she had not written at all. What that meant was, while she had sent the most letters as far as sheer volume, to Brittany they said… nothing. It might have been identified as ‘shop talk.’ Her mother talked about the Cheerios, how they were doing, how they were disappointing her day after day, as they tended to do. She told her about people, most of them for their infractions on her person, but always it was people, other people… She never spoke about herself. So for that, she counted the number of letters from ‘Coach Sylvester’ to many, but the letters from her mother Sue as none. She tried not to rest on that, but from tidbits she’d heard of her through other letters, and from what her grandfather had written, she knew there was much more to it. So she’d tried something… She stopped sending her videos back, refusing her a response until she had something real to respond to. It might have come off as harsh, especially from her, but she knew somehow her mother would appreciate the gesture.
All of a sudden, over this struggle of the last few days, something else had happened… Brittany had actually started bonding with her roommates, finally. She didn’t know what had changed, but Aimee was talking to her now, was trying to include her now, was working her way toward ‘open’ now. It was still awkward, a work in progress, they might say, but it was something to work with, at least. And she got the sense that, of the two of her roommates, while Tessa had gotten it fairly easy in settling in, Aimee had a harder time of it, the way Brittany did. She wanted to ask her how she’d done it, if it had been hard, or… But she didn’t; part of it was just not wanting to intrude, to abuse of a still fragile connection. Really though, if she had to put it into words, it was she was afraid of… that, of Aimee explaining it, and for Brittany to realize that she was just beyond help, that it was just the way she had imagined, that it wouldn’t work out no matter what…
She made it through the week. She was so pleased with herself for that, and on Friday morning she had decided that, with her time off before her first class of the day, she would reorganize some things. One of them was the Home Wall. She stood on her knees on her top bunk of the bed, her head almost touching the ceiling. Aimee and Tessa, sitting side by side on the single bed, watching a movie on Tessa’s laptop, couldn’t help but beg that she be careful, like she would trip and fall any moment, but she didn’t.
She had the items that had been on her wall already on one side, and some new things on the other. She started with letters. They formed a neat border where the ceiling and the wall met. A lot of the paper was plain lined paper, some of it from spiral notebooks, judging by the shredded edges, but in some cases the paper was a different color, or had some border… She tried to alternate those, spread them out. The bunk bed was placed in a bit of a nook, making so that she also had a wall-meets-ceiling section at the head of her bed. So the letters continued there, too.
Once the letters were all up, she just had pictures left. Those from the first side, the ones she had first taken off the wall, she put up first. She tried to keep them as much as possible close to their associated letters. Every time she would pick up another one, it would make her smile, and she would stare at it a moment before sticking it to the wall. This went on until the pile on the left was cleared. This left the one on the right...
On Wednesday morning there had been a box in her mail box. It wasn’t too big, about the size of a DVD case. She’d opened it from on top of her bed and she hadn’t expected the contents to slip out, but they did, they slipped out… Well, they rained down, really. And as she looked down, she saw them hit the carpet… pictures. Maybe it was that she was up above and so they looked smaller, but they reminded her of pictures from a photo booth, in the way that they tended to include one person, sometimes more, up close, mugging for the camera. When she saw this, saw all their faces, smiling faces, squooshed faces, dramatic faces, fish faces… she laughed. She climbed down from her bed, careful not to step on any of them before she started gathering the pictures.
There were so many of them, pictures, of all of them from Glee Club. Every one made her laugh more than the last. They’d all posed a number of faces, from what she saw. She got a fair share from Sam, and Tina, and Quinn, and Artie, and Mike, and Santana, and all of them… There must have been fifty or so of them overall. She would spend the next couple of days flipping through them on and off in her free time. She had no idea who had sent the box, one of them, obviously, but… there was nothing in or outside the box to give her a clue. She kind of liked it that way though; it was a mystery.
It was as she was flipping through the pictures that morning that the idea came to her… there was still the ceiling above her bed… So she started to stick the pictures overhead, so that when she’d be lying in bed, staring up, there they would all be… That was what she did, once she’d put the last pictures; she stared at them… Tina’s fish face, Quinn’s dramatic upturned eyes, Sam’s wide-eyed gasp, Mike’s growl…
“Hey, you got mail,” Tessa showed up on the ladder, handing out the envelopes. There was one letter from her mother, sitting right on top, and she immediately put the rest down so she could open it. She figured it’d be yet another update on how the Cheerios had deceived her this time, but… even as she was reaching in the envelope she knew something was different…
This morning I woke up and your cat was lying on my bed, near my feet, and I let it. And it was after that realization that I felt I had to say the words I hadn’t allowed myself to say until now, about missing you. Because I do, and I know even if I haven’t said it, you know it, but I wanted to say it anyway. And I’m thinking maybe you need to hear it, too, judging from the silent treatment.
I always took pride in my own strength, or at least what I thought was strength. And in the beginning I thought that, no matter what, with you being gone, that would be all I’d need to make the days go by: my strength. It was only as the days stretched, with silence and loneliness, that I understood. What I call strength, what I’ve always seen as that, well… It’s not invincible, and neither am I.
There are probably a lot of people out there who would never in a million years imagine me as a mother, or who would even just recommend against it as a practice. And before you came along, maybe I was one of them, too. I’ve told you this before. I don’t think I ever told you about the day I found out you were on your way though. Your father and I, we’d already split up by then, of course, but I was doing fine, carrying on with life. At least that was what I wanted everyone to know, to believe, myself most of all. But he had been… my whole world, for the time we were together. He took up all this space, and now that he was gone, that space was left empty. It should have felt different, and shocking, and unusual, but what I realized was this was just how I felt before him. My life was empty, just as it had been all along. Sure, I had your aunt, and my work, but it still left so much emptiness that couldn’t be their place even if I tried to put them in it.
But that day, after spending so much time wondering if I was going to spend the rest of my life like this, I had to see the doctor, and he would ask me questions, one after the other, and you know how I feel about endless questions… One of those questions though, the moment he asked it, I knew… Even without a test, I already knew... I’d tell you that I wasn’t terrified at all about it, but that’d be a lie. Like I said, I didn’t see myself as anyone who should ever be handed a child and expected to raise it properly. Add to this that I was on my own, although this would lead me to meeting your grandfather one day…
I said I’d tell you about the day I found out you were coming, but the one I should really tell you about is the one where I stopped being scared. I spent so much time being afraid, and questioning my abilities, and just filling my own head with doubt, and… then I saw you, on the screen, in the doctor’s office. You were too small for anything in the way of limbs, though I’m sure the moment you had them they fell in love with motion the way they are now, but you had a heart that was beating… I heard it, like it was measuring the space of my own heart, to jump in there and take over. That was when I knew, I was going exactly where I was supposed to be. The rest just didn’t matter anymore.
Others will probably have told you I’ve been acting a little crazy recently. And maybe I have. What do they expect? I know they don’t know the real reason, but it’s not their business anyway. I want you to know though that I am alright, and I don’t want you to second guess your decision. You belong there, and you should stay.
I hope to hear from you soon. I miss seeing that face of yours, and I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve seen your smile…. Just promise me at least others are getting to see it, alright?
Take care, and if anyone is giving you trouble, you tell them who your mother is.
Love always, and for you only,
Mom
PS: In your next video, I’d appreciate it if you recorded something to tell the cat to sleep back in your room or else one morning he’ll get my foot on his head by accident
She had to let out a breath, when she finished reading… Like her heart had felt so warm that it was steaming, and it manifested in the form of breath… Her fingers reached to the paper, tracing where she had written the word ‘Mom.’ Even written, by her, it still felt the way it always felt… Forbidden and daring. If she ever got to call her that, then they were on their own, together, so that was what it felt like, holding that letter; she was with her mother.
She stared up at the ceiling now, to the smiles and the fish faces… She had been at her very lowest, wanting to go home, and though she felt warm and loved now, even if she had their faces to glance at, her loneliness would only attack her and remind her nastily that they weren’t actually there, that they were hundreds of miles away, and she couldn’t see them all the time, that she hadn’t seen them in weeks… She felt so close to a decision, and she feared what it would be… Either way, someone would be left disappointed.
She had gone and recorded her message to her mother. She wanted to record it now, while the joy of reading her letter still showed on her face. Her grandfather may have sworn to drive her home, no questions asked, if she ever needed it, but if she showed up on camera with the face she’d been walking around with lately, she could bet her mother would find the fastest way to get from Lima to Boston and she’d come and get her.
Finally she’d climbed back on her bed to pick the best space for her new letter. As she was sticking it though, once again on her knees on the top bunk, her foot knocked off the rest of her mail, which she’d forgotten until then. She’d hopped off to pick it up and, when she did, she felt her heart restart, like a locomotive slowly picking up speed… She had another letter, and this one came from Santana Lopez.
TO BE CONCLUDED (TOMORROW)
* IN CONSTRUCTION! *
PREVIOUS DAYS
[Cycle 01] [Cycle 02] [Cycle 03] [Cycle 04] [Cycle 05]
[Cycle 06] [Cycle 07] [Cycle 08] [Cycle 09] [Cycle 10]
[Cycle 11] [Cycle 12] [Cycle 13] [Cycle 14] [Cycle 15]
[Cycle 16] [Cycle 17] [Cycle 18] [Cycle 19] [Cycle 20]
[Cycle 21] [Cycle 22] [Cycle 23] [Cycle 24] [Cycle 25]
[Cycle 26] [Cycle 27] [Cycle 28]
[Cycle 29]
[589] [590] [591] [592] [593]
[594] [595] [596] [597] [598]
[599] [600] [601] [602] [603]
[604] [605] [606] [607]
Suggestion Drop Off
Title: "The Home Wall: 5. Home, Sweet Home"
Pairing: None; Brittany, Sue
Rating: G
Summary: Now that she's in Boston, she can't wait to get letters from home and reply to them.
Spoilers: None really, AU-ish
if you have things you would like to see get written, pleeease drop by the suggestion box. The link is further down!
TOP 16, TAKE 2: Okay so a couple cycles back, I did my second 'top of Glee at the moment' cycle. Now since I was still in university and such at the time, those were planned a while back, before the second half of the season every started. This made it that by the time that cycle rolled around I realized that some things had changed... Things were added, removed, bumped up... Point is it didn't really reflect where I was anymore. So I decided 'what the heck, I'll do another one ASAP!' And so here we are :) This is my revised Top 16 (of course I HAD to plan before the finale, so there are still a couple things missing like Samcedes, Unholy Trinity, etc, but let's assume they're there ;) They'll get some love in coming cycles ;)) So off we go!
Coming in at number one... (last two chapters!)
"THE HOME WALL: 5. HOME, SWEET HOME"
Brittany (& Sue)
Extra to the Sylvesters series
Her mother, surprisingly, had written her most of all, but at the same time she had not written at all. What that meant was, while she had sent the most letters as far as sheer volume, to Brittany they said… nothing. It might have been identified as ‘shop talk.’ Her mother talked about the Cheerios, how they were doing, how they were disappointing her day after day, as they tended to do. She told her about people, most of them for their infractions on her person, but always it was people, other people… She never spoke about herself. So for that, she counted the number of letters from ‘Coach Sylvester’ to many, but the letters from her mother Sue as none. She tried not to rest on that, but from tidbits she’d heard of her through other letters, and from what her grandfather had written, she knew there was much more to it. So she’d tried something… She stopped sending her videos back, refusing her a response until she had something real to respond to. It might have come off as harsh, especially from her, but she knew somehow her mother would appreciate the gesture.
All of a sudden, over this struggle of the last few days, something else had happened… Brittany had actually started bonding with her roommates, finally. She didn’t know what had changed, but Aimee was talking to her now, was trying to include her now, was working her way toward ‘open’ now. It was still awkward, a work in progress, they might say, but it was something to work with, at least. And she got the sense that, of the two of her roommates, while Tessa had gotten it fairly easy in settling in, Aimee had a harder time of it, the way Brittany did. She wanted to ask her how she’d done it, if it had been hard, or… But she didn’t; part of it was just not wanting to intrude, to abuse of a still fragile connection. Really though, if she had to put it into words, it was she was afraid of… that, of Aimee explaining it, and for Brittany to realize that she was just beyond help, that it was just the way she had imagined, that it wouldn’t work out no matter what…
She made it through the week. She was so pleased with herself for that, and on Friday morning she had decided that, with her time off before her first class of the day, she would reorganize some things. One of them was the Home Wall. She stood on her knees on her top bunk of the bed, her head almost touching the ceiling. Aimee and Tessa, sitting side by side on the single bed, watching a movie on Tessa’s laptop, couldn’t help but beg that she be careful, like she would trip and fall any moment, but she didn’t.
She had the items that had been on her wall already on one side, and some new things on the other. She started with letters. They formed a neat border where the ceiling and the wall met. A lot of the paper was plain lined paper, some of it from spiral notebooks, judging by the shredded edges, but in some cases the paper was a different color, or had some border… She tried to alternate those, spread them out. The bunk bed was placed in a bit of a nook, making so that she also had a wall-meets-ceiling section at the head of her bed. So the letters continued there, too.
Once the letters were all up, she just had pictures left. Those from the first side, the ones she had first taken off the wall, she put up first. She tried to keep them as much as possible close to their associated letters. Every time she would pick up another one, it would make her smile, and she would stare at it a moment before sticking it to the wall. This went on until the pile on the left was cleared. This left the one on the right...
On Wednesday morning there had been a box in her mail box. It wasn’t too big, about the size of a DVD case. She’d opened it from on top of her bed and she hadn’t expected the contents to slip out, but they did, they slipped out… Well, they rained down, really. And as she looked down, she saw them hit the carpet… pictures. Maybe it was that she was up above and so they looked smaller, but they reminded her of pictures from a photo booth, in the way that they tended to include one person, sometimes more, up close, mugging for the camera. When she saw this, saw all their faces, smiling faces, squooshed faces, dramatic faces, fish faces… she laughed. She climbed down from her bed, careful not to step on any of them before she started gathering the pictures.
There were so many of them, pictures, of all of them from Glee Club. Every one made her laugh more than the last. They’d all posed a number of faces, from what she saw. She got a fair share from Sam, and Tina, and Quinn, and Artie, and Mike, and Santana, and all of them… There must have been fifty or so of them overall. She would spend the next couple of days flipping through them on and off in her free time. She had no idea who had sent the box, one of them, obviously, but… there was nothing in or outside the box to give her a clue. She kind of liked it that way though; it was a mystery.
It was as she was flipping through the pictures that morning that the idea came to her… there was still the ceiling above her bed… So she started to stick the pictures overhead, so that when she’d be lying in bed, staring up, there they would all be… That was what she did, once she’d put the last pictures; she stared at them… Tina’s fish face, Quinn’s dramatic upturned eyes, Sam’s wide-eyed gasp, Mike’s growl…
“Hey, you got mail,” Tessa showed up on the ladder, handing out the envelopes. There was one letter from her mother, sitting right on top, and she immediately put the rest down so she could open it. She figured it’d be yet another update on how the Cheerios had deceived her this time, but… even as she was reaching in the envelope she knew something was different…
This morning I woke up and your cat was lying on my bed, near my feet, and I let it. And it was after that realization that I felt I had to say the words I hadn’t allowed myself to say until now, about missing you. Because I do, and I know even if I haven’t said it, you know it, but I wanted to say it anyway. And I’m thinking maybe you need to hear it, too, judging from the silent treatment.
I always took pride in my own strength, or at least what I thought was strength. And in the beginning I thought that, no matter what, with you being gone, that would be all I’d need to make the days go by: my strength. It was only as the days stretched, with silence and loneliness, that I understood. What I call strength, what I’ve always seen as that, well… It’s not invincible, and neither am I.
There are probably a lot of people out there who would never in a million years imagine me as a mother, or who would even just recommend against it as a practice. And before you came along, maybe I was one of them, too. I’ve told you this before. I don’t think I ever told you about the day I found out you were on your way though. Your father and I, we’d already split up by then, of course, but I was doing fine, carrying on with life. At least that was what I wanted everyone to know, to believe, myself most of all. But he had been… my whole world, for the time we were together. He took up all this space, and now that he was gone, that space was left empty. It should have felt different, and shocking, and unusual, but what I realized was this was just how I felt before him. My life was empty, just as it had been all along. Sure, I had your aunt, and my work, but it still left so much emptiness that couldn’t be their place even if I tried to put them in it.
But that day, after spending so much time wondering if I was going to spend the rest of my life like this, I had to see the doctor, and he would ask me questions, one after the other, and you know how I feel about endless questions… One of those questions though, the moment he asked it, I knew… Even without a test, I already knew... I’d tell you that I wasn’t terrified at all about it, but that’d be a lie. Like I said, I didn’t see myself as anyone who should ever be handed a child and expected to raise it properly. Add to this that I was on my own, although this would lead me to meeting your grandfather one day…
I said I’d tell you about the day I found out you were coming, but the one I should really tell you about is the one where I stopped being scared. I spent so much time being afraid, and questioning my abilities, and just filling my own head with doubt, and… then I saw you, on the screen, in the doctor’s office. You were too small for anything in the way of limbs, though I’m sure the moment you had them they fell in love with motion the way they are now, but you had a heart that was beating… I heard it, like it was measuring the space of my own heart, to jump in there and take over. That was when I knew, I was going exactly where I was supposed to be. The rest just didn’t matter anymore.
Others will probably have told you I’ve been acting a little crazy recently. And maybe I have. What do they expect? I know they don’t know the real reason, but it’s not their business anyway. I want you to know though that I am alright, and I don’t want you to second guess your decision. You belong there, and you should stay.
I hope to hear from you soon. I miss seeing that face of yours, and I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve seen your smile…. Just promise me at least others are getting to see it, alright?
Take care, and if anyone is giving you trouble, you tell them who your mother is.
Love always, and for you only,
Mom
PS: In your next video, I’d appreciate it if you recorded something to tell the cat to sleep back in your room or else one morning he’ll get my foot on his head by accident
She had to let out a breath, when she finished reading… Like her heart had felt so warm that it was steaming, and it manifested in the form of breath… Her fingers reached to the paper, tracing where she had written the word ‘Mom.’ Even written, by her, it still felt the way it always felt… Forbidden and daring. If she ever got to call her that, then they were on their own, together, so that was what it felt like, holding that letter; she was with her mother.
She stared up at the ceiling now, to the smiles and the fish faces… She had been at her very lowest, wanting to go home, and though she felt warm and loved now, even if she had their faces to glance at, her loneliness would only attack her and remind her nastily that they weren’t actually there, that they were hundreds of miles away, and she couldn’t see them all the time, that she hadn’t seen them in weeks… She felt so close to a decision, and she feared what it would be… Either way, someone would be left disappointed.
She had gone and recorded her message to her mother. She wanted to record it now, while the joy of reading her letter still showed on her face. Her grandfather may have sworn to drive her home, no questions asked, if she ever needed it, but if she showed up on camera with the face she’d been walking around with lately, she could bet her mother would find the fastest way to get from Lima to Boston and she’d come and get her.
Finally she’d climbed back on her bed to pick the best space for her new letter. As she was sticking it though, once again on her knees on the top bunk, her foot knocked off the rest of her mail, which she’d forgotten until then. She’d hopped off to pick it up and, when she did, she felt her heart restart, like a locomotive slowly picking up speed… She had another letter, and this one came from Santana Lopez.
TO BE CONCLUDED (TOMORROW)
* IN CONSTRUCTION! *
PREVIOUS DAYS
[Cycle 01] [Cycle 02] [Cycle 03] [Cycle 04] [Cycle 05]
[Cycle 06] [Cycle 07] [Cycle 08] [Cycle 09] [Cycle 10]
[Cycle 11] [Cycle 12] [Cycle 13] [Cycle 14] [Cycle 15]
[Cycle 16] [Cycle 17] [Cycle 18] [Cycle 19] [Cycle 20]
[Cycle 21] [Cycle 22] [Cycle 23] [Cycle 24] [Cycle 25]
[Cycle 26] [Cycle 27] [Cycle 28]
[Cycle 29]
[589] [590] [591] [592] [593]
[594] [595] [596] [597] [598]
[599] [600] [601] [602] [603]
[604] [605] [606] [607]
Suggestion Drop Off
Title: "The Home Wall: 5. Home, Sweet Home"
Pairing: None; Brittany, Sue
Rating: G
Summary: Now that she's in Boston, she can't wait to get letters from home and reply to them.
Spoilers: None really, AU-ish