So Destined I Am To Walk Among The Dark (1/2)
Title: So Destined I Am To Walk Among The Dark (1/2)
Pairing: Santana Lopez/Brittany, very minor Quinn Fabray/Rachel Berry
Rating: R: violence, sexuality
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Spoilers: Mild ones for the first season or so of Dexter. Yep. You read that right.
Summary: This is not a TV show. But if it were? Santana would be anything but the hero.
A/N: This might well be the weirdest thing I've ever written. Let’s call this a practice round for all the suspension of disbelief I’ll be asking from my readers in The Beast. Title from Coheed and Cambria's "Blood Red Summer."
She doesn’t know why it keeps happening. She couldn’t explain it if her life depended on it-and truth be told, if she’s ever caught? That is exactly what will happen. Her life-every inch of it-will be on the line. Her career. Her home. Her friends.
Well. Sort of friends, anyway. She doesn’t really do friends, in the particular sense of caring a whole lot about them. More than anything, she keeps them around for…
Cover is such a nasty, clinical term, but she can’t think of anything better.
Anyway, she’s got people who care about her, even if she can’t really return the favor. Not that she couldn’t. It’s not like she’s some fucked up psychological trope, a television archetype like that guy on HBO-Showtime? With the knives and the bleeding and the opening credits with the breakfast foods.
Dexter.
She’s not Dexter.
She never watched her mother get chopped into bitty-bits. She never spent even a second of toddlerhood in an ever-growing puddle of another person’s blood. She doesn’t have voices in her head.
At least, nothing she can’t handle.
Usually.
Still, these things keep happening. And that caring about people thing? It’s just not her vibe. She’s tried it. It’s bullshit. Caring about people only leads to a certain indescribable pain when they vanish down the line.
So she’s got who she’s got: Puck, with his dumbass mohawk, which he is far too old for; Quinn and Rachel, with their sickly-sweet domestic bliss; Mike, with his smirks and penchant for card tricks. People. Just people. Replaceable. She can deal with or without; it’s just that much easier to walk through the world with.
Which is why she has to keep this whole killing people thing clamped tightly under her hat. Because, really, who the hell wants to be friends with a serial killer?
She doesn’t figure those bitches trying to bang Charles Manson or whoever count. She may be a raging psycho, but even Santana Lopez has her limits.
***
The first time it happened, she was ten years old, and it wasn’t a person. Ten-year-olds don’t have that kind of care, that kind of finesse for the job where full-fledged human beings are concerned. At ten, she was beating kids senseless, but that wasn’t considered so weird. With an older brother popping in and out of the system thanks to his sincere disregard for locked doors and a slight arson fetish, Santana was actually thought of as the normal end of her family spectrum.
Her parents were gone, and she would love to take that as The Reason, but the fact of the matter is, Santana doesn’t harbor any ill will towards the pair who passed down their name. They were there, and then they weren’t. Accidents happen. Planes crash. Whatever. Move on.
It was up to her grandparents to do the trick, and they were unpredictably lovely. Santana doesn’t blame them for how she turned out. Santana, in a rare fit of responsibility, doesn’t blame anyone.
Sometimes, people just turn out wrong.
She’s okay with that.
The first time she did damage-real, genuine damage, not just a couple of busted teeth or a broken wrist-it was to a raccoon. She knew when she was done that it wasn’t right, that she shouldn’t have done it. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what had even happened; to this day, she can only describe that moment-and every one since-as a euphoric blackout. One minute, Santana was there, watching this furry creature amble towards her in the semi-darkness. The next…
She buried it. It seemed like the thing to do at the time, not because she felt guilty, but because people tend to notice carved-up animals laying around the suburbs. Digging through mud and rocks left dirt under her nails for days to come, but at least it masked the other things. The darker things. Things no grandparent ever wants to find on their ward.
She went four months before doing it again.
The tools of the trade were small, things she could keep in her pockets without calling attention to herself. A hunting knife, passed down posthumously from her father, was the primary item of choice. She also kept one of Miguel’s old Zippos on her, just in case.
Burning wasn’t as satisfying, but the smell did something for her. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She sort of thinks there’s merit to not thinking too deeply about the whole…situation.
She didn’t actually take a life-well, y’know, one that counted; a human life-until she was fifteen. By that point, she was everything her parents would have dreaded: burn out, washed out, smoked out. All leather jackets and ripped jeans, aviator sunglasses and cheap cigarettes, skipped classes and failing grades. At the time, she thought she was badass.
It was only years later that she realized badass is being able to pull off the things she does and look clean doing it.
Her first was a boy, some dipshit headbanger with a hard-on for violence and cocaine. Nothing impressive, no one to be missed. Santana doubts, looking back, even his mother cared when he never came home.
But then, what would she know about mothers? It’s not like she’s got a lot of experience in that realm.
The knife worked. The knife worked well. By that point, Santana was more comfortable with a blade than a pencil (which, believe it or not, is actually saying something, because if there’s one thing Santana is as good at as killing, it’s-don’t laugh, asshole-art). Taking care of-what was his name? Josh? James? Caleb? Who fuckin’ cares, anyway-took less than she figured. It was the act of getting the knife through that really counted, but the rest of it?
The kid was three times her size, but conveniently jacked up on whatever powder he’d managed to insert into his nose or his veins or whatever the fuck it was that day. It’s part of the gig now, drugs-not taking them, of course, because nicotine is really quite enough for her. But for the targets?
Yeah, they’re easier when they’re high. They don’t squirm so much, they usually don’t scream. Hell, from what she can tell through the haze of semi-consciousness, sometimes they even seem to like it.
She always gets tingly when they like it.
She took him the way she came to take them all: quietly, solitarily, and at night. Lima, Ohio is not the premium location for murder, it’s true; people tend to notice a pile-up of carcasses in Small Town, USA. But even Ohio has its docks, and…
Let’s just say that Dexter show? Gets some things right.
She’s still not sure what triggered it that first time. Josh-James-Caleb was irritating, in his own way, but not an expressly bad guy. He was just…a boy. A boy with some problems. Not a friend, not an enemy, not anything more than a gust of stale, junkie air.
But he was there. He was there, and it was dark. It only happens when it’s dark.
There’s something about the shadows that does it, she thinks. By daylight, she’s Santana Lopez, artist, smart-ass, coffee enthusiast. She doesn’t exactly crave long walks on the beach and Nora Roberts novels, but she likes to think there’s something sane about her. She’s got friends-again, sort of. She’s got a job. She’s got a life.
At night, it all goes to hell.
Not every night. Not all the time. If that were the case, Jesus Christ, she’d have a body count well into the thousands by now. But maybe that’s the worst part: it’s not every night. It’s totally unpredictable. She can’t see it coming, can’t rein it in. It strikes when it wants to, and that’s that. Hold on for the ride, baby girl, or get ready to get thrown loose.
It happened that night. She was sitting around, thumbing through a worn copy of some Steinbeck novel, and her blood…pumped. There was something about it…something unfathomable and strange, something she still can’t define after innumerable occurrences. She felt restless. She felt anxious. She felt lustful.
She wanted something, and she wanted it bad enough to-well, to-
It’s a whole cliché thing, and she doesn’t feel like following it through to the end. Fact of the matter is, she killed for it. End of story. She lost all sense of being awake and killed for it once, and whatever it was eased off. It took the edge away, pulled her teeth back from how they were grinding so relentlessly together.
She killed for it, and it made her happy.
Which, she’s aware, makes her kind of a sick fuck.
After that first time, everything changed. She changed. The clothing, the cutting, all of it had to go. This was the thing she was after, the thing that filled whatever gaping hole happened to be cookie-cuttered into her chest. This was it, not the drugs or the smirks or the distaste for authority.
This mattered more. And it was the sort of thing that had to be protected at all costs.
So she changed. Not overtly, and not all at once. She didn’t exactly go out for the fucking Pom-Pom squad or some shit. It was gradual, it was careful, and it worked.
No one suspected a thing.
***
If a psychologist were to get a hold of her, she can’t imagine the multitude of brands they’d slap on her back in an instant. She can, however, pull to mind the first and foremost label of choice.
Serial killer.
Which, okay, she’s not so sure about that. Serial killers, they’ve got a purpose, right? She’s looked it up online, skimmed through her share of books. The definitive serial killer has always got a thing that keeps him going, some kind of “psychological gratification”, as they call it.
She supposes that much is true.
And then there are the other details to consider-the fact that there’s supposed to be, what, more than three murders? And they’re supposed to have similar factors stringing them together. And there’s supposed to be time in between, something about a cooling off period-
Okay. She supposes she is a serial killer. In her own way.
But she’s not, like, a bad person.
There’s a line there, she thinks, between killing because it’s fun and killing out of necessity.
Just because she happens to have a foot on either side of that line doesn’t mean she’s some ruthless piece-of-shit person. It’s just the way it is.
Santana finds herself coming back to that phrase a lot: just the way it is. She supposes any psychotherapist worth her salt would call that an excuse. Maybe some variation on repression. Something.
Santana calls it reality.
***
She hates to call them trophies. That sounds weird, like that creepy cheerleading coach in high school who was always sitting around her office polishing cups the size of Santana’s whole body. Trophies imply triumph, the reflection of a big win.
Murder isn’t really what Santana would call a winning game. If anything, it’s kind of lose-lose. One party loses their life, while the other loses something bigger.
Santana wonders how much humanity she’s really got left at this point. Six years since her first kill, six years of sharpening blades in preparation for the next blackout, six years of flicking that ancient Zippo as she strolls through shadowed streets, nursing the hunger…
She doesn’t like to call them trophies, but she does take something from each kill. Something small, trinkets, really. Usually a coin, or a scrap of jewelry. Shiny things.
She keeps them in a carved wooden chest slightly larger than your common bargain bin hardcover novel. Her mother’s piece, an old favorite of both Lopez women (as far as she can recall anyway; she’s not exactly up on the warm-n-fuzzy childhood memories). Once upon a time, it played music when its lid was raised-“Hey Jude”, she thinks it was, or maybe “Let It Be.” Something soothing and Beatle-y. Doesn’t matter now; the box has been silent for years. Maybe it’s broken, or maybe there’s a battery somewhere that has long worn down. Santana doesn’t care one way or the other. She’ll never pry it open, or cart it into a shop. It does its job perfectly well the way it is.
They kind of have that in common.
She never takes anything big, or expensive, or readily missed. It’s the same philosophy she applies to the targets themselves: small, lonely, pointless creatures operating on the far reaches of the world. Heads down, eyes tired, dime bags hot in the pockets of threadbare winter coats. The reckless, weary Lima Losers she always feared she would one day become.
Maybe it’s poetic. Maybe it’s just disgusting.
Santana never really has time to ask what they think about it all.
***
Sometimes, she wonders how she has friends-or these weirdos who masquerade as such, anyway. It’s not like she’s an overly amiable person.
Puck came first: an old joke, tired and kicked to death, but they make it consistently all the same. Puck, with his calloused hands and wicked grins, Puck who tried that very first night to get into her pants. Puck, who actually succeeded-although that had much more to do with the fact that she gets really fucking horny after a blackout, rather than anything relating to the size of his dick. Puck who, since then, has become more or less the brother she doesn’t care that she’s got.
She’s got a few of those running around.
Quinn came along a little later, with her perfect blonde hair and silver reading glasses. Quinn, who loves eclectic poetry and stamping the hell out of the competition during Mortal Kombat tournaments, Quinn who absolutely loves playing euchre, Quinn who can’t smell quiche without throwing up. Quinn’s kind of an bitch, and definitely smarter than a person should be, and if Santana had the time or patience for a best friend, she’s pretty sure Quinn would be it.
Rachel, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. Tiny as tiny can be, and ten times louder than that, Rachel’s only around because Quinn can’t live without her. Which doesn’t make any sense to Santana. She has to make a point not to spend too much time around the brunette come nightfall, because if ever the hunger strikes? She just might dart heavily off her usual game in a blind effort to silence the clear-as-day voice that rings out from that little body.
Rachel’s not awful, she supposes grudgingly, so much as overbearing and too genuine for her own good. She falls into the friend category because Santana doesn’t have another choice. End of story.
And then there’s Mike, who is Asian, and quiet, and a hell of a dancer. There isn’t a whole lot else to him, thankfully; he’s a simple man with simple needs. Santana keeps him around precisely because he doesn’t talk much, and because his DVD collection is bangin’.
She may be hard-hearted and murderous, but Santana Lopez loves her a little Focus Feature every now and again.
These people, they’re weird. A strange mix that probably shouldn’t get along even half as well as they do. Santana can’t figure out what they see in her.
But on the nights when the thing inside is silent, nights spent in the Fabray-Berry living room with a few pizzas and a lingering appreciation for Mario Kart, she’s almost grateful for them.
At least they allow her, for a few hours at a time, to pretend she isn’t unutterably insane.
***
The day she meets Brittany is bizarre for a whole host of reasons.
For one, it’s cloudy out. Santana’s got this thing about weather-not a superstition, nothing so clear-cut as that, but close enough-that she just can’t shake. She can’t meet people when it’s cloudy. Raining, sure, Sahara-dry-sunny, why not, but overcast? Fuck overcast. She can’t abide it.
People met on cloudy days are bound to bring with them problems galore.
Santana doesn’t need any more in the way of problems.
Another oddity: the day she meets Brittany is a good day. An easy day. No stress, no frustrations to speak of. She finishes a painting that morning, and already the muses are clamoring for the next to begin. A buyer has patched through for a series long-dry, and all her rent is paid up through the month. Santana is actually happy.
It’s not quite as rare as one might think, but that doesn’t make it a day-that-ends-in-Y occurrence either.
She runs into the girl in her favorite coffee shop-and by ‘runs into’, means it literally. She trips coming through the door, bouncing overzealously off of the St. Nick-sized fellow at the end of the line and stumbling directly into the nearest table.
Santana is by and large the most graceful murderer in Ohio.
The girl whose papers she upends has long blonde hair, crystal blue eyes, and the kind of skin that suggests she wouldn’t recognize a zit if it leapt up and vigorously made out with her on the spot. Instantly, Santana is mortified, which leads to just-as-instant confusion. Because Santana doesn’t get mortified. Or much of anything anymore, really. Emotions come in pretty mild doses when a person’s main focus is ‘who am I going to have to slice open next?’
All the same, looking into those massive eyes, the scent of fresh-spilled coffee clinging to her senses, Santana’s mouth drops open.
“Shit. I am so…I didn’t see…fuck.”
Okay, a touch more verbal than she generally aims for, but it has been such a nice day. And this girl? Not half bad looking.
Especially when she smiles.
“It’s totally fine,” the blonde returns, catching hold of a few flyaway scraps and bringing them back to the table. “Not like they’re the notes for my senior thesis or anything.”
“Oh God, are they?” What is with her today? It’s like she’s completely forgotten she’s single-handedly responsible for the deaths of half the junkie population of Ohio. Maybe some of the paint fumes got lodged in her brain again.
Blue eyes twinkle mischievously. “Are you kidding? I hate school. These are cartoon ideas for the next issue of the paper.”
The way she says it-the paper, like Santana should have the first clue which paper that is and immediately run out to snag a copy-is entirely too charming. This whole girl is entirely too charming. Something inside itches.
She brushes it away.
“Anyway, I’m sorry,” she says at last, reaching for the upturned mug and righting it carefully. “You want me to…?”
Blonde hair shivers like a wayward miracle across the girl’s shoulders. Santana stares.
“Don’t worry about it. Wanna hear a secret?”
Just don’t ask for one in return. “Sure,” she says uncertainly, fingers toying with the mesh back of the chair in front of her. The blonde beams.
“I can’t stand coffee. I only order it so the mean guy behind the counter doesn’t harass me for loitering.”
Loitering? It’s a goddamn coffee shop. They only exist so people like this beautiful woman can loiter. Santana eyes the barista in question darkly, weighing the pros and cons of trying to jump-start a blackout with specific intent. She figures it’s probably a bad idea, if only because emotional entanglements statistically fuck people up, make them sloppy, but seriously-she’ll keep it in mind.
“I’m Brittany, by the way,” the girl goes on as if she couldn’t care less about Santana’s wavering attention. Long fingers stretch across the table and wait there, expectant, until the dark-haired girl shakes her head and clasps them shakily.
Should I even- “Santana.”
“Oh, like the guitar guy!” Brittany’s smile brightens further. Santana shrugs.
More like the knife enthusiast. “Sure.”
“Well, not-guitar Santana,” Brittany goes on, tearing off a corner from her only remaining clean napkin and scribbling something on it, “I like you. You should give me a call sometime, you know? We could get…well, not coffee, since I hate coffee, but like…something. Could be fun.”
I like you. The words rattle inside her hollow chest, seeking out an organ she doesn’t allow free reign anymore. Santana swallows.
“How do you know you like me? It’s been two minutes. And I totally ruined your…cartoons…”
Brittany shrugs. “You stayed to help clean them up. And you looked at the mean guy like you wanted to kill him. Which is pretty funny. You just seem different, and I like that.”
She has no idea, when Santana pockets the phone number with a grunt and a shrug, how correct she is.
***
She never expects to actually do something with that number. It’s not the first she’s picked up from a pretty girl (or boy) at random, after all. They usually wind up shredded in the back of a bus, the victim of sheer boredom. Or, at best, there’s a small drawer in her desk filled with the ones she thought for a half a second might be a good idea.
The last “good idea” she had wound up deader than dead. She’s not big on making the same mistakes twice.
But weirdly, she doesn’t shred it, nor tuck it away in the drawer never to be seen again. Weirdly, she stuffs it into the corner of her mirror, and then she just stares at it. Like a creep.
Santana Lopez is one hell of a killer, but she is not a creep. There’s a line there. She toes it effortlessly.
She ends up calling one night, much later than a normal person would, and she only realizes she’s doing it when the dial tone gives way to a sleep-addled, “Hello?”
She curses herself on the spot, all too aware of her thrumming limbs and the desperate fire in her belly. She’s at the docks. She’s at the docks, knife jammed into the waistband of her jeans, and wonderful, her horny, successful self has just blackout-dialed Brittany.
At…three in the morning.
Terrific.
“Hello?” Brittany says again, sounding more awake and rather suspicious now. “I’m hanging up if-“
“It’s me,” Santana croaks, hating herself for it but too wired to give up the chance. “Um. From the coffee shop? The not-guitarist.”
“Santana?” The edge wavers from Brittany’s tone, replaced with something dangerously like delight. “Hey! You called!”
At a completely unreasonable hour. “Yeah. Listen, I was just thinking-“ How is she supposed to put this? ‘Hey, baby, I just stuck another heroin junkie and dropped his body in the lake. Wanna fuck all night?’
It’s what she wants. It’s what the craving wants. But Brittany is this sweet, blonde, beautiful person who draws cartoons for “the paper”, not one of Santana’s typical half-assed lays. Brittany is-
“You should come over.”
She nearly drops the phone. “Sorry, what?”
“You should come over,” Brittany repeats, and Santana can just about hear her smile. “Right now. You should come to my place. Here, I’ll get you directions…”
There’s a rustling sound, like Brittany’s digging for a map or something in what Santana imagines to be the endless clutter of an artist’s desk. She shakes her head. “Brittany, it’s three in the morning. I have no idea what possessed me to call-“
“Come over,” Brittany says again, determined. “I’m awake now-really awake, like, get up and dance awake-and if you don’t come, I’ll be bored. You don’t want to be responsible for me being bored, do you?”
No, Santana thinks with wary amusement, she does not want that at all.
Brittany’s place is a shabby little apartment not terribly far from where Santana’s already standing. She makes the walk in twenty minutes, rolling the silver ring she pulled off the body between her fingers as she goes.
She taps the buzzer once, feeling a little loopy on protocol, and buries the ring deep in her pocket seconds before a clatter of footsteps precedes the door being flung nearly into her face. Brittany stands, in duck-patterned pajama bottoms and a McKinley High School sweatshirt, hands already reaching to yank Santana indoors.
“We’re going to play Candy Land,” the girl announces as she drags Santana bodily up the stairs. She’s relieved she at least remembered to wash her hands before making this little pit stop, because Brittany’s fingers are wrapped tight around her wrist, molding right to where her heartbeat slams under the skin.
“Candy Land,” she deadpans. The need for sex increases at the sight of Brittany’s lower back dipping in and out of sight under the sweatshirt. A board game is not going to do it. “Brittany, how old are you?”
The blonde glances over her shoulder, skidding to a stop in front of a cream-colored door. “21. What’s your point?”
Her point is, 21-year-olds don’t play three-A.M. games of Candy Land. Her point is, 21-year-olds don’t invite strangers over in the dead of night. Her point is, 21 years old is totally and completely legal, and all she wants right now is to slam this woman against her own door and claim her hard.
But Brittany’s smiling too innocently to deny, and her couch has a giant friggin’ rainbow painted over it, and Jesus, what the fuck has Santana stumbled into?
The craving is none too pleased when she spends the next two hours losing a game centered around gumdrops and colored squares to a girl with a laugh like Christmas.
But Santana doesn’t hate it at all.
***
It starts happening more and more frequently, on both accounts. She only sees Brittany at night, when her fingers desperately punch out the now-memorized number after a kill. It’s the weirdest start to a friendship ever (or, at least, she thinks so; Santana hasn’t had a real friendship in a long damn time, so she’s not positive she’s doing this right in the first place), but Brittany doesn’t comment. In fact, she sounds genuinely happy to hear Santana’s voice each night, like she’s just been sitting and waiting for the call for two weeks.
That idea is one Santana likes altogether too much.
It’s strange-in the past, the space between kills has been reasonable. A few weeks, at least, a few months at most. While it’s not enough to narrow down into a neat time frame she can fit into a daybook, Santana has gotten used to the periods of rest between blackouts. The “cool down” period, as the charming men down at the FBI like to call it.
But now that’s she got Brittany practically on speed-dial, the cool down periods have been decreasing dramatically. She finds herself on those docks twice, three times a week after a while, phone in hand. It’s getting ridiculous.
It’s getting, for the first time since she was fifteen, a little scary.
Because, okay, Santana doesn’t fight what she is, normally. She doesn’t see a point. There was a short span that first year after high school where she tried not to kill, tried to push off the urges and pretend they weren’t there, using…well, using a person she never should have used. And it went badly. It went…
She tries not to think about it. The point is, she tried fighting that battle against herself, and she lost. Big loss. Ugly loss. Lions-at-the-Superbowl kind of loss. It never should have happened to begin with, and there was no way in hell she was coming out on top. She knows that now. She embraces what she’s got, because it may suck-but in the long run, fewer people die.
She’s totally aware of the irony.
She doesn’t fight it, but that doesn’t mean she’s, like, in love with waking up with stained hands and a vague memory of plunging a blade into a man’s chest. It’s like there are two parts to Santana Lopez: the part that relishes each kill, totally gets high off it, rides it home with a whoop and an orgasmic rush; and the part that doesn’t.
It’s as simple as that. There really isn’t any of the boo-hoo, tortured conscience crap anymore. Again, been there, done that. It’s pointless to feel guilty about something you can’t control, she figures. This is who she is, what she needs, and she’s good at it. Good enough not to get caught. Good enough to just…live with it.
But this, suddenly doing it all the time? This is kind of a problem. Because, yeah, there are plenty of junkie loner freaks in Ohio. Plenty of people to slice, dice, and move on from. Plenty of losers ripe for the taking.
But that’s only the case when she leaves them time to breed. If she keeps this up, picking off three a week, word’s going to start getting around. Sooner or later, she’s going to wind up taking the wrong junkie-a dealer, maybe, or someone equally noticeable in that disgusting little sub-community-and then what? Druggies are dumb as shit, but they don’t necessarily lack the basic human preservation instincts. They sense something’s up, maybe they’ll stop shooting as often, snorting as often, and then…
She runs out of this supply, she’s going to have to find something new. And there’s just little enough control to this whole process that Santana really doesn’t love that idea.
Still, she only calls Brittany when she’s out, and each meeting is better than the last. They play games (Santana Lopez, playing games-now there’s something), and watch movies (she’s seen The Last Unicorn six times now, and somehow that doesn’t bother her at all), and they talk. Actually talk, about, like, their lives and shit. About their work. About Santana’s paintings and Brittany’s cartoons-which are actually surprisingly impressive-and about where they’d like to end up someday.
In the span of two months, Santana reveals more about herself to this girl than she’s given Puck or Quinn or Mike in years.
It’s a little sappy, a little gross, but she just can’t stop.
And so the routine carries on. Every few days, she loses control. Every few days, her knife finds use, digging deep into the guts of someone lonely, someone otherwise out of options. Every few days, the lake gets another meal, and Santana gets another dose of Brittany.
It’s stupid. She knows it, somewhere in the not-quite back of her mind. She is playing with something way dangerous, way threatening, a fire that will-not can, not might; will-consume her one of these days.
But it’s Brittany, and for the first time, Santana’s not play-acting. She’s not miming the expressions she’s memorized from other people’s faces, or parroting lines back on unwitting ears. She’s doing this. For real.
Brittany, with all her completely not-Santana personality, with her love of bad hip-hop music and Elvis movies, with her stubborn claims that Batman could beat Spider-Man in a fist-fight-
Brittany is something truly wonderful.
And Santana, serial killer, emotional wastecase, painter extraordinaire-
Kind of loves her.
***
It’s pretty hard to shake Santana’s calm, all things considered. She deals with herself, for one, and with the disgustingly saccharine displays put on by Quinn and Rachel’s domesticity. She likes to think of herself as a relatively centered, Zen serial murderer.
But the day she wakes in the middle of a blackout?
For a second, she thinks she’s woken up in Hell.
She’s leaning over a woman-stringy red hair, stringy pale arms riddled with the tattoos left from a long love affair with a needle-when it happens, knife spinning in her left hand. The woman’s eyes are dim, far-away. Riding the high.
She’s riding, and Santana’s awake, and this is just not the norm.
It feels like she imagines a coma patient might, like she’s been caged in her own body. Or, worse, like jerking out of anesthesia in the middle of surgery. She sees what’s going on, feels it, smells that first copper tang when the knife sinks low into the woman’s belly, but there’s no control. She couldn’t stop it even if she wanted to; she can only draw out and plunge back in, again, again, slitting and slicing, watching the beautiful bend to the woman’s spine, watching her jerk and twitch like a fish on the floor of boat…
She pushes in one last time and jerks up as hard as she can, the blade slashing through all manner of really essential things, and then the woman stops. Stops moving, stops riding, stops being anything more than a body.
There’s blood on her cheek. In her hair. All over her hands, all the way up her arms. Santana turns her head away, but she can smell it. It is her. She is it. There is an unbreakable bond.
Thankfully, they’re in a bathroom, fully equipped with sinks and soap, and Santana’s able to get the worst of it off after a few minutes of rubbed-raw scrubbing. The odor has its talons in her still, locked inside her nostrils like it’s planning on taking up permanent residence, but at least no one will be able to see the damage.
It’s much harder to drag a body through town when she’s conscious, she finds. She imagines she must do just about the same thing when she’s out-lift the body up, position its arm around her shoulder, wrap a jacket around the gaping wound. Prepare the scene. No one would ever think to stop a woman guiding a drunk friend home in this part of town, where asking questions generally leads to trouble. No one likes trouble.
It’s hard, dragging a corpse. She must be stronger when she’s out, sleeker, and it’s not like she’s some weak-ass punk now, but damn. They don’t joke around when they call it dead weight.
She nearly has an anxiety attack when the first car sidles past, headlights blazing. She nearly loses her grip on the body. The body, oh Christ, how on earth did she think she could get away with this? The killing isn’t a Santana thing, it’s a carnal thing. It doesn’t belong to her. How the hell did she think she could pull through?
This-waking up before the job is complete, before she’s supposed to-has only happened once before, and honestly, she was way too freaked that night to have memorized the clean-up details. She mostly just prayed it would never, ever happen again.
So much for that.
This shouldn’t have happened tonight. She should have pushed off of the woman, walked away. Waited for the next blackout. She should have fled. Then this stringy-haired ginger would still be breathing, still be tripping, a target for a new day.
And Santana could have gone home, washed her face, sketched out a few ideas for tomorrow’s work. Slept.
Instead, she’s dragging a goddamn body through what boils down to the red-light district of small-town Ohio. Fabulous.
She’s half-limping under the weight, reminding herself over and over again not to mumble under her breath, and all the while she’s expecting to black out again. That’s the way this is supposed to work. She’s not supposed to be in her head, she’s not supposed to have to deal with the as-it-comes crap.
Making it to the docks unnoticed is just about the most miraculous element of her life. It’s also the part where things get even more stressful because, shit, she can’t remember how this works. What to do, how to drop Raggedy Ann without the threat of having her rise again later down the line.
Obviously, the impulse has it down, because it’s been six years without a single finger pointing her way. But Santana on her own?
Shit.
She settles for a good old-fashioned mafia-style burial: concrete blocks around the ankles, fastened via girl-scout-hardy knots and a desperate prayer. As she watches the body sink, Santana feels her own sanity slipping further below the surface of that black water.
This shit is a goddamn nightmare.
She drops right there on the dock, dizzy as a kid fresh of her first roller coaster. Wrapping her arms around her knees gingerly, she sits for a long set of moments and just stares at the waves lapping lightly over one another.
She should get up.
She should get up, go home, take a shower. Go to bed. Forget this ever happened.
Her legs wobble when she stands; her whole head spins. She takes a step.
She has walked for ten minutes before she realizes she forgot to take a token.
Fifteen before she realizes this isn’t the way home.
Twenty before it occurs to her that this might be a really awful idea.
Her finger is on the buzzer before she can stop it, her body relying heavily upon the doorframe to keep from buckling. Forehead pressing solidly against cool wood, she waits.
Brittany takes a little longer than is typical to appear, probably because it’s the middle of the damn night and she hasn’t gotten her usual warning. Santana can see through the little window that the girl-her girl? She doesn’t know how to put labels on it, feels safer, better just not doing so at all-is still rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. Her pants have tiny sloths on them today, her feet are bare, and she yawns a little as she opens the door.
Santana is inside, propelling them both backwards into the nearest wall, without a single word. She feels Brittany gasp softly, feels the press of her chest against Santana’s own as she buries her face in a long, pale neck and inhales.
“San?” Brittany’s muffled voice comes from just above her head. “Baby?”
She can’t speak, can’t explain, can only flatten her palms between the wall and Brittany’s back, and nuzzle in closer. She can feel Brittany’s hesitation, her concern, even as fingers trail softly up the nape of her neck. This is weird, she knows, coming here without calling first and then getting all grabby-hands on her, but she can’t resist. She’s shaking all over like a little kid in a thunderstorm, and the very idea of letting go and going home now is on par with the most terrifying image she can think of.
For example, a dark-haired Latina with a blood-stained knife tucked safely away in a hidden jacket pocket.
“San, you wanna come up?”
No, she thinks even as her head bobs manically up and down under Brittany’s chin. No, I need to go home, I need to get away from you, leave you alone. You don’t know what I did tonight, you’re too sweet for-
But Brittany’s nimble fingers are tucking her collar down, tugging her back enough to look her in the eye, and Santana can only stare dumbly up at her. Brittany isn’t even looking for an explanation, because that’s not the kind of person Brittany is. Brittany just cares that she’s all right.
It might be the most melodramatic first kiss on record, but Brittany is warm and sleepy, and kissing right back as she presses her face into Santana’s searching hands.
She kisses Brittany softly, gently, trying to make up for every secret, every lie, every felony on her record. She kisses her like doing so will erase every failure to love and decimate all future opportunities to fuck up.
They break for a moment, Brittany breathing heavily against her mouth, and it’s all Santana can do not to shatter then and there and admit everything. Because Brittany smells like sleep and cinnamon toothpaste, and she’s looking at her like Santana’s got all the answers, like that one kiss just changed absolutely everything.
As she moves back in a little more slowly, catching Brittany’s lower lip between her own with a nearly religious reverence, Santana reflects that there’s a whole lot of truth in that idea. More than she’d like. More than she can afford.
A kiss can be the beginning of the end. Fact of life.
Knowing that is not enough to stop her.
[Part 2]
Pairing: Santana Lopez/Brittany, very minor Quinn Fabray/Rachel Berry
Rating: R: violence, sexuality
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Spoilers: Mild ones for the first season or so of Dexter. Yep. You read that right.
Summary: This is not a TV show. But if it were? Santana would be anything but the hero.
A/N: This might well be the weirdest thing I've ever written. Let’s call this a practice round for all the suspension of disbelief I’ll be asking from my readers in The Beast. Title from Coheed and Cambria's "Blood Red Summer."
She doesn’t know why it keeps happening. She couldn’t explain it if her life depended on it-and truth be told, if she’s ever caught? That is exactly what will happen. Her life-every inch of it-will be on the line. Her career. Her home. Her friends.
Well. Sort of friends, anyway. She doesn’t really do friends, in the particular sense of caring a whole lot about them. More than anything, she keeps them around for…
Cover is such a nasty, clinical term, but she can’t think of anything better.
Anyway, she’s got people who care about her, even if she can’t really return the favor. Not that she couldn’t. It’s not like she’s some fucked up psychological trope, a television archetype like that guy on HBO-Showtime? With the knives and the bleeding and the opening credits with the breakfast foods.
Dexter.
She’s not Dexter.
She never watched her mother get chopped into bitty-bits. She never spent even a second of toddlerhood in an ever-growing puddle of another person’s blood. She doesn’t have voices in her head.
At least, nothing she can’t handle.
Usually.
Still, these things keep happening. And that caring about people thing? It’s just not her vibe. She’s tried it. It’s bullshit. Caring about people only leads to a certain indescribable pain when they vanish down the line.
So she’s got who she’s got: Puck, with his dumbass mohawk, which he is far too old for; Quinn and Rachel, with their sickly-sweet domestic bliss; Mike, with his smirks and penchant for card tricks. People. Just people. Replaceable. She can deal with or without; it’s just that much easier to walk through the world with.
Which is why she has to keep this whole killing people thing clamped tightly under her hat. Because, really, who the hell wants to be friends with a serial killer?
She doesn’t figure those bitches trying to bang Charles Manson or whoever count. She may be a raging psycho, but even Santana Lopez has her limits.
***
The first time it happened, she was ten years old, and it wasn’t a person. Ten-year-olds don’t have that kind of care, that kind of finesse for the job where full-fledged human beings are concerned. At ten, she was beating kids senseless, but that wasn’t considered so weird. With an older brother popping in and out of the system thanks to his sincere disregard for locked doors and a slight arson fetish, Santana was actually thought of as the normal end of her family spectrum.
Her parents were gone, and she would love to take that as The Reason, but the fact of the matter is, Santana doesn’t harbor any ill will towards the pair who passed down their name. They were there, and then they weren’t. Accidents happen. Planes crash. Whatever. Move on.
It was up to her grandparents to do the trick, and they were unpredictably lovely. Santana doesn’t blame them for how she turned out. Santana, in a rare fit of responsibility, doesn’t blame anyone.
Sometimes, people just turn out wrong.
She’s okay with that.
The first time she did damage-real, genuine damage, not just a couple of busted teeth or a broken wrist-it was to a raccoon. She knew when she was done that it wasn’t right, that she shouldn’t have done it. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what had even happened; to this day, she can only describe that moment-and every one since-as a euphoric blackout. One minute, Santana was there, watching this furry creature amble towards her in the semi-darkness. The next…
She buried it. It seemed like the thing to do at the time, not because she felt guilty, but because people tend to notice carved-up animals laying around the suburbs. Digging through mud and rocks left dirt under her nails for days to come, but at least it masked the other things. The darker things. Things no grandparent ever wants to find on their ward.
She went four months before doing it again.
The tools of the trade were small, things she could keep in her pockets without calling attention to herself. A hunting knife, passed down posthumously from her father, was the primary item of choice. She also kept one of Miguel’s old Zippos on her, just in case.
Burning wasn’t as satisfying, but the smell did something for her. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She sort of thinks there’s merit to not thinking too deeply about the whole…situation.
She didn’t actually take a life-well, y’know, one that counted; a human life-until she was fifteen. By that point, she was everything her parents would have dreaded: burn out, washed out, smoked out. All leather jackets and ripped jeans, aviator sunglasses and cheap cigarettes, skipped classes and failing grades. At the time, she thought she was badass.
It was only years later that she realized badass is being able to pull off the things she does and look clean doing it.
Her first was a boy, some dipshit headbanger with a hard-on for violence and cocaine. Nothing impressive, no one to be missed. Santana doubts, looking back, even his mother cared when he never came home.
But then, what would she know about mothers? It’s not like she’s got a lot of experience in that realm.
The knife worked. The knife worked well. By that point, Santana was more comfortable with a blade than a pencil (which, believe it or not, is actually saying something, because if there’s one thing Santana is as good at as killing, it’s-don’t laugh, asshole-art). Taking care of-what was his name? Josh? James? Caleb? Who fuckin’ cares, anyway-took less than she figured. It was the act of getting the knife through that really counted, but the rest of it?
The kid was three times her size, but conveniently jacked up on whatever powder he’d managed to insert into his nose or his veins or whatever the fuck it was that day. It’s part of the gig now, drugs-not taking them, of course, because nicotine is really quite enough for her. But for the targets?
Yeah, they’re easier when they’re high. They don’t squirm so much, they usually don’t scream. Hell, from what she can tell through the haze of semi-consciousness, sometimes they even seem to like it.
She always gets tingly when they like it.
She took him the way she came to take them all: quietly, solitarily, and at night. Lima, Ohio is not the premium location for murder, it’s true; people tend to notice a pile-up of carcasses in Small Town, USA. But even Ohio has its docks, and…
Let’s just say that Dexter show? Gets some things right.
She’s still not sure what triggered it that first time. Josh-James-Caleb was irritating, in his own way, but not an expressly bad guy. He was just…a boy. A boy with some problems. Not a friend, not an enemy, not anything more than a gust of stale, junkie air.
But he was there. He was there, and it was dark. It only happens when it’s dark.
There’s something about the shadows that does it, she thinks. By daylight, she’s Santana Lopez, artist, smart-ass, coffee enthusiast. She doesn’t exactly crave long walks on the beach and Nora Roberts novels, but she likes to think there’s something sane about her. She’s got friends-again, sort of. She’s got a job. She’s got a life.
At night, it all goes to hell.
Not every night. Not all the time. If that were the case, Jesus Christ, she’d have a body count well into the thousands by now. But maybe that’s the worst part: it’s not every night. It’s totally unpredictable. She can’t see it coming, can’t rein it in. It strikes when it wants to, and that’s that. Hold on for the ride, baby girl, or get ready to get thrown loose.
It happened that night. She was sitting around, thumbing through a worn copy of some Steinbeck novel, and her blood…pumped. There was something about it…something unfathomable and strange, something she still can’t define after innumerable occurrences. She felt restless. She felt anxious. She felt lustful.
She wanted something, and she wanted it bad enough to-well, to-
It’s a whole cliché thing, and she doesn’t feel like following it through to the end. Fact of the matter is, she killed for it. End of story. She lost all sense of being awake and killed for it once, and whatever it was eased off. It took the edge away, pulled her teeth back from how they were grinding so relentlessly together.
She killed for it, and it made her happy.
Which, she’s aware, makes her kind of a sick fuck.
After that first time, everything changed. She changed. The clothing, the cutting, all of it had to go. This was the thing she was after, the thing that filled whatever gaping hole happened to be cookie-cuttered into her chest. This was it, not the drugs or the smirks or the distaste for authority.
This mattered more. And it was the sort of thing that had to be protected at all costs.
So she changed. Not overtly, and not all at once. She didn’t exactly go out for the fucking Pom-Pom squad or some shit. It was gradual, it was careful, and it worked.
No one suspected a thing.
***
If a psychologist were to get a hold of her, she can’t imagine the multitude of brands they’d slap on her back in an instant. She can, however, pull to mind the first and foremost label of choice.
Serial killer.
Which, okay, she’s not so sure about that. Serial killers, they’ve got a purpose, right? She’s looked it up online, skimmed through her share of books. The definitive serial killer has always got a thing that keeps him going, some kind of “psychological gratification”, as they call it.
She supposes that much is true.
And then there are the other details to consider-the fact that there’s supposed to be, what, more than three murders? And they’re supposed to have similar factors stringing them together. And there’s supposed to be time in between, something about a cooling off period-
Okay. She supposes she is a serial killer. In her own way.
But she’s not, like, a bad person.
There’s a line there, she thinks, between killing because it’s fun and killing out of necessity.
Just because she happens to have a foot on either side of that line doesn’t mean she’s some ruthless piece-of-shit person. It’s just the way it is.
Santana finds herself coming back to that phrase a lot: just the way it is. She supposes any psychotherapist worth her salt would call that an excuse. Maybe some variation on repression. Something.
Santana calls it reality.
***
She hates to call them trophies. That sounds weird, like that creepy cheerleading coach in high school who was always sitting around her office polishing cups the size of Santana’s whole body. Trophies imply triumph, the reflection of a big win.
Murder isn’t really what Santana would call a winning game. If anything, it’s kind of lose-lose. One party loses their life, while the other loses something bigger.
Santana wonders how much humanity she’s really got left at this point. Six years since her first kill, six years of sharpening blades in preparation for the next blackout, six years of flicking that ancient Zippo as she strolls through shadowed streets, nursing the hunger…
She doesn’t like to call them trophies, but she does take something from each kill. Something small, trinkets, really. Usually a coin, or a scrap of jewelry. Shiny things.
She keeps them in a carved wooden chest slightly larger than your common bargain bin hardcover novel. Her mother’s piece, an old favorite of both Lopez women (as far as she can recall anyway; she’s not exactly up on the warm-n-fuzzy childhood memories). Once upon a time, it played music when its lid was raised-“Hey Jude”, she thinks it was, or maybe “Let It Be.” Something soothing and Beatle-y. Doesn’t matter now; the box has been silent for years. Maybe it’s broken, or maybe there’s a battery somewhere that has long worn down. Santana doesn’t care one way or the other. She’ll never pry it open, or cart it into a shop. It does its job perfectly well the way it is.
They kind of have that in common.
She never takes anything big, or expensive, or readily missed. It’s the same philosophy she applies to the targets themselves: small, lonely, pointless creatures operating on the far reaches of the world. Heads down, eyes tired, dime bags hot in the pockets of threadbare winter coats. The reckless, weary Lima Losers she always feared she would one day become.
Maybe it’s poetic. Maybe it’s just disgusting.
Santana never really has time to ask what they think about it all.
***
Sometimes, she wonders how she has friends-or these weirdos who masquerade as such, anyway. It’s not like she’s an overly amiable person.
Puck came first: an old joke, tired and kicked to death, but they make it consistently all the same. Puck, with his calloused hands and wicked grins, Puck who tried that very first night to get into her pants. Puck, who actually succeeded-although that had much more to do with the fact that she gets really fucking horny after a blackout, rather than anything relating to the size of his dick. Puck who, since then, has become more or less the brother she doesn’t care that she’s got.
She’s got a few of those running around.
Quinn came along a little later, with her perfect blonde hair and silver reading glasses. Quinn, who loves eclectic poetry and stamping the hell out of the competition during Mortal Kombat tournaments, Quinn who absolutely loves playing euchre, Quinn who can’t smell quiche without throwing up. Quinn’s kind of an bitch, and definitely smarter than a person should be, and if Santana had the time or patience for a best friend, she’s pretty sure Quinn would be it.
Rachel, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. Tiny as tiny can be, and ten times louder than that, Rachel’s only around because Quinn can’t live without her. Which doesn’t make any sense to Santana. She has to make a point not to spend too much time around the brunette come nightfall, because if ever the hunger strikes? She just might dart heavily off her usual game in a blind effort to silence the clear-as-day voice that rings out from that little body.
Rachel’s not awful, she supposes grudgingly, so much as overbearing and too genuine for her own good. She falls into the friend category because Santana doesn’t have another choice. End of story.
And then there’s Mike, who is Asian, and quiet, and a hell of a dancer. There isn’t a whole lot else to him, thankfully; he’s a simple man with simple needs. Santana keeps him around precisely because he doesn’t talk much, and because his DVD collection is bangin’.
She may be hard-hearted and murderous, but Santana Lopez loves her a little Focus Feature every now and again.
These people, they’re weird. A strange mix that probably shouldn’t get along even half as well as they do. Santana can’t figure out what they see in her.
But on the nights when the thing inside is silent, nights spent in the Fabray-Berry living room with a few pizzas and a lingering appreciation for Mario Kart, she’s almost grateful for them.
At least they allow her, for a few hours at a time, to pretend she isn’t unutterably insane.
***
The day she meets Brittany is bizarre for a whole host of reasons.
For one, it’s cloudy out. Santana’s got this thing about weather-not a superstition, nothing so clear-cut as that, but close enough-that she just can’t shake. She can’t meet people when it’s cloudy. Raining, sure, Sahara-dry-sunny, why not, but overcast? Fuck overcast. She can’t abide it.
People met on cloudy days are bound to bring with them problems galore.
Santana doesn’t need any more in the way of problems.
Another oddity: the day she meets Brittany is a good day. An easy day. No stress, no frustrations to speak of. She finishes a painting that morning, and already the muses are clamoring for the next to begin. A buyer has patched through for a series long-dry, and all her rent is paid up through the month. Santana is actually happy.
It’s not quite as rare as one might think, but that doesn’t make it a day-that-ends-in-Y occurrence either.
She runs into the girl in her favorite coffee shop-and by ‘runs into’, means it literally. She trips coming through the door, bouncing overzealously off of the St. Nick-sized fellow at the end of the line and stumbling directly into the nearest table.
Santana is by and large the most graceful murderer in Ohio.
The girl whose papers she upends has long blonde hair, crystal blue eyes, and the kind of skin that suggests she wouldn’t recognize a zit if it leapt up and vigorously made out with her on the spot. Instantly, Santana is mortified, which leads to just-as-instant confusion. Because Santana doesn’t get mortified. Or much of anything anymore, really. Emotions come in pretty mild doses when a person’s main focus is ‘who am I going to have to slice open next?’
All the same, looking into those massive eyes, the scent of fresh-spilled coffee clinging to her senses, Santana’s mouth drops open.
“Shit. I am so…I didn’t see…fuck.”
Okay, a touch more verbal than she generally aims for, but it has been such a nice day. And this girl? Not half bad looking.
Especially when she smiles.
“It’s totally fine,” the blonde returns, catching hold of a few flyaway scraps and bringing them back to the table. “Not like they’re the notes for my senior thesis or anything.”
“Oh God, are they?” What is with her today? It’s like she’s completely forgotten she’s single-handedly responsible for the deaths of half the junkie population of Ohio. Maybe some of the paint fumes got lodged in her brain again.
Blue eyes twinkle mischievously. “Are you kidding? I hate school. These are cartoon ideas for the next issue of the paper.”
The way she says it-the paper, like Santana should have the first clue which paper that is and immediately run out to snag a copy-is entirely too charming. This whole girl is entirely too charming. Something inside itches.
She brushes it away.
“Anyway, I’m sorry,” she says at last, reaching for the upturned mug and righting it carefully. “You want me to…?”
Blonde hair shivers like a wayward miracle across the girl’s shoulders. Santana stares.
“Don’t worry about it. Wanna hear a secret?”
Just don’t ask for one in return. “Sure,” she says uncertainly, fingers toying with the mesh back of the chair in front of her. The blonde beams.
“I can’t stand coffee. I only order it so the mean guy behind the counter doesn’t harass me for loitering.”
Loitering? It’s a goddamn coffee shop. They only exist so people like this beautiful woman can loiter. Santana eyes the barista in question darkly, weighing the pros and cons of trying to jump-start a blackout with specific intent. She figures it’s probably a bad idea, if only because emotional entanglements statistically fuck people up, make them sloppy, but seriously-she’ll keep it in mind.
“I’m Brittany, by the way,” the girl goes on as if she couldn’t care less about Santana’s wavering attention. Long fingers stretch across the table and wait there, expectant, until the dark-haired girl shakes her head and clasps them shakily.
Should I even- “Santana.”
“Oh, like the guitar guy!” Brittany’s smile brightens further. Santana shrugs.
More like the knife enthusiast. “Sure.”
“Well, not-guitar Santana,” Brittany goes on, tearing off a corner from her only remaining clean napkin and scribbling something on it, “I like you. You should give me a call sometime, you know? We could get…well, not coffee, since I hate coffee, but like…something. Could be fun.”
I like you. The words rattle inside her hollow chest, seeking out an organ she doesn’t allow free reign anymore. Santana swallows.
“How do you know you like me? It’s been two minutes. And I totally ruined your…cartoons…”
Brittany shrugs. “You stayed to help clean them up. And you looked at the mean guy like you wanted to kill him. Which is pretty funny. You just seem different, and I like that.”
She has no idea, when Santana pockets the phone number with a grunt and a shrug, how correct she is.
***
She never expects to actually do something with that number. It’s not the first she’s picked up from a pretty girl (or boy) at random, after all. They usually wind up shredded in the back of a bus, the victim of sheer boredom. Or, at best, there’s a small drawer in her desk filled with the ones she thought for a half a second might be a good idea.
The last “good idea” she had wound up deader than dead. She’s not big on making the same mistakes twice.
But weirdly, she doesn’t shred it, nor tuck it away in the drawer never to be seen again. Weirdly, she stuffs it into the corner of her mirror, and then she just stares at it. Like a creep.
Santana Lopez is one hell of a killer, but she is not a creep. There’s a line there. She toes it effortlessly.
She ends up calling one night, much later than a normal person would, and she only realizes she’s doing it when the dial tone gives way to a sleep-addled, “Hello?”
She curses herself on the spot, all too aware of her thrumming limbs and the desperate fire in her belly. She’s at the docks. She’s at the docks, knife jammed into the waistband of her jeans, and wonderful, her horny, successful self has just blackout-dialed Brittany.
At…three in the morning.
Terrific.
“Hello?” Brittany says again, sounding more awake and rather suspicious now. “I’m hanging up if-“
“It’s me,” Santana croaks, hating herself for it but too wired to give up the chance. “Um. From the coffee shop? The not-guitarist.”
“Santana?” The edge wavers from Brittany’s tone, replaced with something dangerously like delight. “Hey! You called!”
At a completely unreasonable hour. “Yeah. Listen, I was just thinking-“ How is she supposed to put this? ‘Hey, baby, I just stuck another heroin junkie and dropped his body in the lake. Wanna fuck all night?’
It’s what she wants. It’s what the craving wants. But Brittany is this sweet, blonde, beautiful person who draws cartoons for “the paper”, not one of Santana’s typical half-assed lays. Brittany is-
“You should come over.”
She nearly drops the phone. “Sorry, what?”
“You should come over,” Brittany repeats, and Santana can just about hear her smile. “Right now. You should come to my place. Here, I’ll get you directions…”
There’s a rustling sound, like Brittany’s digging for a map or something in what Santana imagines to be the endless clutter of an artist’s desk. She shakes her head. “Brittany, it’s three in the morning. I have no idea what possessed me to call-“
“Come over,” Brittany says again, determined. “I’m awake now-really awake, like, get up and dance awake-and if you don’t come, I’ll be bored. You don’t want to be responsible for me being bored, do you?”
No, Santana thinks with wary amusement, she does not want that at all.
Brittany’s place is a shabby little apartment not terribly far from where Santana’s already standing. She makes the walk in twenty minutes, rolling the silver ring she pulled off the body between her fingers as she goes.
She taps the buzzer once, feeling a little loopy on protocol, and buries the ring deep in her pocket seconds before a clatter of footsteps precedes the door being flung nearly into her face. Brittany stands, in duck-patterned pajama bottoms and a McKinley High School sweatshirt, hands already reaching to yank Santana indoors.
“We’re going to play Candy Land,” the girl announces as she drags Santana bodily up the stairs. She’s relieved she at least remembered to wash her hands before making this little pit stop, because Brittany’s fingers are wrapped tight around her wrist, molding right to where her heartbeat slams under the skin.
“Candy Land,” she deadpans. The need for sex increases at the sight of Brittany’s lower back dipping in and out of sight under the sweatshirt. A board game is not going to do it. “Brittany, how old are you?”
The blonde glances over her shoulder, skidding to a stop in front of a cream-colored door. “21. What’s your point?”
Her point is, 21-year-olds don’t play three-A.M. games of Candy Land. Her point is, 21-year-olds don’t invite strangers over in the dead of night. Her point is, 21 years old is totally and completely legal, and all she wants right now is to slam this woman against her own door and claim her hard.
But Brittany’s smiling too innocently to deny, and her couch has a giant friggin’ rainbow painted over it, and Jesus, what the fuck has Santana stumbled into?
The craving is none too pleased when she spends the next two hours losing a game centered around gumdrops and colored squares to a girl with a laugh like Christmas.
But Santana doesn’t hate it at all.
***
It starts happening more and more frequently, on both accounts. She only sees Brittany at night, when her fingers desperately punch out the now-memorized number after a kill. It’s the weirdest start to a friendship ever (or, at least, she thinks so; Santana hasn’t had a real friendship in a long damn time, so she’s not positive she’s doing this right in the first place), but Brittany doesn’t comment. In fact, she sounds genuinely happy to hear Santana’s voice each night, like she’s just been sitting and waiting for the call for two weeks.
That idea is one Santana likes altogether too much.
It’s strange-in the past, the space between kills has been reasonable. A few weeks, at least, a few months at most. While it’s not enough to narrow down into a neat time frame she can fit into a daybook, Santana has gotten used to the periods of rest between blackouts. The “cool down” period, as the charming men down at the FBI like to call it.
But now that’s she got Brittany practically on speed-dial, the cool down periods have been decreasing dramatically. She finds herself on those docks twice, three times a week after a while, phone in hand. It’s getting ridiculous.
It’s getting, for the first time since she was fifteen, a little scary.
Because, okay, Santana doesn’t fight what she is, normally. She doesn’t see a point. There was a short span that first year after high school where she tried not to kill, tried to push off the urges and pretend they weren’t there, using…well, using a person she never should have used. And it went badly. It went…
She tries not to think about it. The point is, she tried fighting that battle against herself, and she lost. Big loss. Ugly loss. Lions-at-the-Superbowl kind of loss. It never should have happened to begin with, and there was no way in hell she was coming out on top. She knows that now. She embraces what she’s got, because it may suck-but in the long run, fewer people die.
She’s totally aware of the irony.
She doesn’t fight it, but that doesn’t mean she’s, like, in love with waking up with stained hands and a vague memory of plunging a blade into a man’s chest. It’s like there are two parts to Santana Lopez: the part that relishes each kill, totally gets high off it, rides it home with a whoop and an orgasmic rush; and the part that doesn’t.
It’s as simple as that. There really isn’t any of the boo-hoo, tortured conscience crap anymore. Again, been there, done that. It’s pointless to feel guilty about something you can’t control, she figures. This is who she is, what she needs, and she’s good at it. Good enough not to get caught. Good enough to just…live with it.
But this, suddenly doing it all the time? This is kind of a problem. Because, yeah, there are plenty of junkie loner freaks in Ohio. Plenty of people to slice, dice, and move on from. Plenty of losers ripe for the taking.
But that’s only the case when she leaves them time to breed. If she keeps this up, picking off three a week, word’s going to start getting around. Sooner or later, she’s going to wind up taking the wrong junkie-a dealer, maybe, or someone equally noticeable in that disgusting little sub-community-and then what? Druggies are dumb as shit, but they don’t necessarily lack the basic human preservation instincts. They sense something’s up, maybe they’ll stop shooting as often, snorting as often, and then…
She runs out of this supply, she’s going to have to find something new. And there’s just little enough control to this whole process that Santana really doesn’t love that idea.
Still, she only calls Brittany when she’s out, and each meeting is better than the last. They play games (Santana Lopez, playing games-now there’s something), and watch movies (she’s seen The Last Unicorn six times now, and somehow that doesn’t bother her at all), and they talk. Actually talk, about, like, their lives and shit. About their work. About Santana’s paintings and Brittany’s cartoons-which are actually surprisingly impressive-and about where they’d like to end up someday.
In the span of two months, Santana reveals more about herself to this girl than she’s given Puck or Quinn or Mike in years.
It’s a little sappy, a little gross, but she just can’t stop.
And so the routine carries on. Every few days, she loses control. Every few days, her knife finds use, digging deep into the guts of someone lonely, someone otherwise out of options. Every few days, the lake gets another meal, and Santana gets another dose of Brittany.
It’s stupid. She knows it, somewhere in the not-quite back of her mind. She is playing with something way dangerous, way threatening, a fire that will-not can, not might; will-consume her one of these days.
But it’s Brittany, and for the first time, Santana’s not play-acting. She’s not miming the expressions she’s memorized from other people’s faces, or parroting lines back on unwitting ears. She’s doing this. For real.
Brittany, with all her completely not-Santana personality, with her love of bad hip-hop music and Elvis movies, with her stubborn claims that Batman could beat Spider-Man in a fist-fight-
Brittany is something truly wonderful.
And Santana, serial killer, emotional wastecase, painter extraordinaire-
Kind of loves her.
***
It’s pretty hard to shake Santana’s calm, all things considered. She deals with herself, for one, and with the disgustingly saccharine displays put on by Quinn and Rachel’s domesticity. She likes to think of herself as a relatively centered, Zen serial murderer.
But the day she wakes in the middle of a blackout?
For a second, she thinks she’s woken up in Hell.
She’s leaning over a woman-stringy red hair, stringy pale arms riddled with the tattoos left from a long love affair with a needle-when it happens, knife spinning in her left hand. The woman’s eyes are dim, far-away. Riding the high.
She’s riding, and Santana’s awake, and this is just not the norm.
It feels like she imagines a coma patient might, like she’s been caged in her own body. Or, worse, like jerking out of anesthesia in the middle of surgery. She sees what’s going on, feels it, smells that first copper tang when the knife sinks low into the woman’s belly, but there’s no control. She couldn’t stop it even if she wanted to; she can only draw out and plunge back in, again, again, slitting and slicing, watching the beautiful bend to the woman’s spine, watching her jerk and twitch like a fish on the floor of boat…
She pushes in one last time and jerks up as hard as she can, the blade slashing through all manner of really essential things, and then the woman stops. Stops moving, stops riding, stops being anything more than a body.
There’s blood on her cheek. In her hair. All over her hands, all the way up her arms. Santana turns her head away, but she can smell it. It is her. She is it. There is an unbreakable bond.
Thankfully, they’re in a bathroom, fully equipped with sinks and soap, and Santana’s able to get the worst of it off after a few minutes of rubbed-raw scrubbing. The odor has its talons in her still, locked inside her nostrils like it’s planning on taking up permanent residence, but at least no one will be able to see the damage.
It’s much harder to drag a body through town when she’s conscious, she finds. She imagines she must do just about the same thing when she’s out-lift the body up, position its arm around her shoulder, wrap a jacket around the gaping wound. Prepare the scene. No one would ever think to stop a woman guiding a drunk friend home in this part of town, where asking questions generally leads to trouble. No one likes trouble.
It’s hard, dragging a corpse. She must be stronger when she’s out, sleeker, and it’s not like she’s some weak-ass punk now, but damn. They don’t joke around when they call it dead weight.
She nearly has an anxiety attack when the first car sidles past, headlights blazing. She nearly loses her grip on the body. The body, oh Christ, how on earth did she think she could get away with this? The killing isn’t a Santana thing, it’s a carnal thing. It doesn’t belong to her. How the hell did she think she could pull through?
This-waking up before the job is complete, before she’s supposed to-has only happened once before, and honestly, she was way too freaked that night to have memorized the clean-up details. She mostly just prayed it would never, ever happen again.
So much for that.
This shouldn’t have happened tonight. She should have pushed off of the woman, walked away. Waited for the next blackout. She should have fled. Then this stringy-haired ginger would still be breathing, still be tripping, a target for a new day.
And Santana could have gone home, washed her face, sketched out a few ideas for tomorrow’s work. Slept.
Instead, she’s dragging a goddamn body through what boils down to the red-light district of small-town Ohio. Fabulous.
She’s half-limping under the weight, reminding herself over and over again not to mumble under her breath, and all the while she’s expecting to black out again. That’s the way this is supposed to work. She’s not supposed to be in her head, she’s not supposed to have to deal with the as-it-comes crap.
Making it to the docks unnoticed is just about the most miraculous element of her life. It’s also the part where things get even more stressful because, shit, she can’t remember how this works. What to do, how to drop Raggedy Ann without the threat of having her rise again later down the line.
Obviously, the impulse has it down, because it’s been six years without a single finger pointing her way. But Santana on her own?
Shit.
She settles for a good old-fashioned mafia-style burial: concrete blocks around the ankles, fastened via girl-scout-hardy knots and a desperate prayer. As she watches the body sink, Santana feels her own sanity slipping further below the surface of that black water.
This shit is a goddamn nightmare.
She drops right there on the dock, dizzy as a kid fresh of her first roller coaster. Wrapping her arms around her knees gingerly, she sits for a long set of moments and just stares at the waves lapping lightly over one another.
She should get up.
She should get up, go home, take a shower. Go to bed. Forget this ever happened.
Her legs wobble when she stands; her whole head spins. She takes a step.
She has walked for ten minutes before she realizes she forgot to take a token.
Fifteen before she realizes this isn’t the way home.
Twenty before it occurs to her that this might be a really awful idea.
Her finger is on the buzzer before she can stop it, her body relying heavily upon the doorframe to keep from buckling. Forehead pressing solidly against cool wood, she waits.
Brittany takes a little longer than is typical to appear, probably because it’s the middle of the damn night and she hasn’t gotten her usual warning. Santana can see through the little window that the girl-her girl? She doesn’t know how to put labels on it, feels safer, better just not doing so at all-is still rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. Her pants have tiny sloths on them today, her feet are bare, and she yawns a little as she opens the door.
Santana is inside, propelling them both backwards into the nearest wall, without a single word. She feels Brittany gasp softly, feels the press of her chest against Santana’s own as she buries her face in a long, pale neck and inhales.
“San?” Brittany’s muffled voice comes from just above her head. “Baby?”
She can’t speak, can’t explain, can only flatten her palms between the wall and Brittany’s back, and nuzzle in closer. She can feel Brittany’s hesitation, her concern, even as fingers trail softly up the nape of her neck. This is weird, she knows, coming here without calling first and then getting all grabby-hands on her, but she can’t resist. She’s shaking all over like a little kid in a thunderstorm, and the very idea of letting go and going home now is on par with the most terrifying image she can think of.
For example, a dark-haired Latina with a blood-stained knife tucked safely away in a hidden jacket pocket.
“San, you wanna come up?”
No, she thinks even as her head bobs manically up and down under Brittany’s chin. No, I need to go home, I need to get away from you, leave you alone. You don’t know what I did tonight, you’re too sweet for-
But Brittany’s nimble fingers are tucking her collar down, tugging her back enough to look her in the eye, and Santana can only stare dumbly up at her. Brittany isn’t even looking for an explanation, because that’s not the kind of person Brittany is. Brittany just cares that she’s all right.
It might be the most melodramatic first kiss on record, but Brittany is warm and sleepy, and kissing right back as she presses her face into Santana’s searching hands.
She kisses Brittany softly, gently, trying to make up for every secret, every lie, every felony on her record. She kisses her like doing so will erase every failure to love and decimate all future opportunities to fuck up.
They break for a moment, Brittany breathing heavily against her mouth, and it’s all Santana can do not to shatter then and there and admit everything. Because Brittany smells like sleep and cinnamon toothpaste, and she’s looking at her like Santana’s got all the answers, like that one kiss just changed absolutely everything.
As she moves back in a little more slowly, catching Brittany’s lower lip between her own with a nearly religious reverence, Santana reflects that there’s a whole lot of truth in that idea. More than she’d like. More than she can afford.
A kiss can be the beginning of the end. Fact of life.
Knowing that is not enough to stop her.
[Part 2]