Hello Darkness, My Old Friend
Title: Hello Darkness, My Old Friend
Pairing: Santana Lopez/Dave Karofsky friendship, Santana Lopez/Brittany Pierce
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Spoilers: Through S2, though only mildly.
Summary: A version of this prompt, though largely altered: post Brittana (or maybe they never quite happened, your call). Santana and Dave cross paths in a hotel bar whilst on a business trip. They reminisce about their days at McKinley, and they end up having dinner together. They’ve both mellowed and Dave is comfortable with himself now, but Santana’s still doing what she does best, pretending everything is fine …
A/N: Title from Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence.”
She feels sometimes as though she’s been in bed for years. Which is stupid, of course; at twenty-six, she has achieved all sorts of dreams that can’t be made real from under the covers. Graduating university with honors, slipping off to a heady little slice of Boston and immersing herself in fairly gratifying work (which mostly consists of wearing business suits and ordering underlings around; it’s Cheerios without the back-breaking effort)-she’s an adult now. An adult who does adult-type things.
And does not, as she so heartily desires, lay in bed with the sheets pulled up over her head at all hours.
Still, she feels sometimes-on days like this one, with the sky churning out gray cloud after gray cloud, darkening and drifting without purpose-like adulthood is the furthest thing from her grasp. She’s not a grown-up, and maybe she never was. Santana Lopez, for all her bark and bite and threats of razor blades, is still…
But she’s not. She has to remind herself of this entirely too often: she has grown up. She has left behind all of those little niggling worries, the ones that snake in under her skin and wrap talons around her heart and squeeze until the life drips, moment by moment, to the floor. She has left everything behind.
That was the point.
When she spots Dave Karofsky in a Los Angeles bar, it’s the kind of blast from the past that, by all regards, should be unpleasant. It should make her skin quiver on her bones, her scalp prickle with distaste. Had he been anyone else from Lima-Finn, or Puck, or Rachel Berry-this would undoubtedly have been the case.
Especially if he happened to be-
The fact that it’s Dave actually works in her favor, however, twisting her lips into a long-familiar sneer. Dave was a mess in high school, the kind of trainwreck that could only make someone like her feel better about life. Threats and hidden scars made him a sad, easy target, an escape from the struggle of-
She doesn’t think about that.
It’s tempting to snicker at him from afar before slinking away and finding a drink of her own, but Dave has always had a strange sense of observation. She assumes it comes from spending his life in a state of terror, hyper-aware of who might be lurking in the shadows, ready to rip away his mask. It’s sad, really, sad and familiar, and-
“Santana!” He’s waving, one elbow propped on the bar next to his drink, a broad smile distorting typically-angry features. He looks smaller, somehow, than he did in school; his shoulders seem less rigid, his jaw looser. His eyes, she notes as she makes short work of the space between them, are missing that hard, beetle-shell quality they always used to carry.
He looks rather happy.
Her heart sinks.
“Karofsky,” she greets him coolly, seating herself beside him and raising a hand towards the bartender. “You doing the L.A. thing full time?”
He nods and sips his drink. “Got into advertising. A little place, all things considered, but we do all right. It’s kind of great.”
“Just kind of?” she snips, hating herself for it. He’s being perfectly polite, all smiles and open arms, and here she is wielding the same old barbs. God help her if he had been someone else, someone she once cared about, and not just an old beard-
Nope. We still don’t talk about that.
Dave takes it in stride, like it’s all he’s ever expected from her-which, truthfully, sort of pisses her off. He seems so warm and cheerful, and she’s just…Santana.
Always been, always gonna be.
“How about you?” he asks, rapping a finger against her arm lightly. “Doing anything fun with your life?”
“Fun?” She laughs, a cold sound that seems too loud to her own ears. “Beating men’s self-esteem out of them one client at a time, mostly. So, yeah. Tons of fun.”
His eyebrows raise, mouth grinning in a way she’s never seen him do. “That’s very you. I like it.”
Very you. As if he has a singular clue about who she was or who she’s grown into. Dave Karofsky never was very bright.
He’s already off, bouncing to the next topic with a gesture at her drink. “You have anything in you to offset that? We could do dinner. Play catch-up.”
She has no idea why either of them would want something like that; “catch-up” would involve nothing better than fake relationships, lies, bitter struggles to escape who they were meant to be-
But hell, food doesn’t sound bad.
She allows him to lead her across the room to a table; a waiter meets them promptly, all genial smiles and flourished menus. She orders the perch, less because she likes it and more because it seems like a very adult thing to do at a time when she wants nothing more than to slipslide back down the ladder.
She can feel high-school-Santana down there, pacing back and forth, all too willing to claw her way out. It’s an unacceptable desire, the kind that can only be brought on by old acquaintances and long-murdered memories.
“You seem…different,” she lets herself observe cautiously, mostly because she doesn’t want to be sitting here in awkward silence until the food arrives. Dave shrugs modestly, hands folded in front of him.
“Like I said, I’m doing all right for myself. Good job, nice place, enough to pay the rent and catch a game every now and then.” He hesitates for a second, reaching up to rub his jaw, then plunges ahead. “And I’ve got a guy.”
It takes considerable effort to arrange her features into an expression of unaffected calm. Dave Karofsky, the boy who beat up every member of Glee at some point or another, who threatened the life of Kurt Hummel, who went to Prom with her to prevent the truth from coming out-Dave Karofsky is out and proud? And happy?
Why should that even be astonishing? They’re nearly thirty, after all; high school’s wear and tear has long worn off, replaced by the routine and pressure of adulthood. Dave is on the opposite side of the country from everything he ever had back then, living in a world he never knew existed. Why shouldn’t he be out? Free? Happy? He has nothing to hide from anymore.
Great logic. What about-
“And you?” he presses, bringing her back to reality. “Whatever happened with you and the blonde chick? You finally wore her down, right? Got all U-Hauled or whatever?”
U-Hauled. Right.
“No,” she replies shortly, jaw twitching around the next sip of her martini. “So you’re in advertising, huh?”
His eyes skim across her face, reading the tight sadness between the lines. He smiles thinly, and in the expression, she sees a shadow of high school. Of hidden dreams and terrifying desires, things you know you’re never supposed to want, though they prevent you from sleeping night after night. He knows, she realizes, far more than she ever would have given him credit for.
You and that blonde chick? You finally wore her down, right?
“Advertising is great,” he tells her as the food arrives, already sawing into his steak with abandon. “I never thought about that sort of thing before college, but it’s really cool. There’s a whole psychology to it, you know? Getting at what people really want. You have to get what makes them tick to do it well.”
And he does, she observes, judging from the way his eyes flick casually around the room. It’s not the expression of a paranoid man so much as a connoisseur of the human race. Admirably, impossibly, David Karofsky understands people-can read them like the dessert card in front of them. She never would have guessed.
Meanwhile, what does she do? Breaks people’s wills. Cuts them into tiny, bite-sized pieces. All but tricks them into paying more than they would like for services they don’t need. She should have just kicked the dream entirely and gone straight for law school; all the bloodthirsty joy, plus a bigger paycheck. Might as well.
He eats slowly, reverently, brows relaxed over curious eyes. This isn’t the boy she dated in high school. He’s a man she’s never met.
She wishes she had picked any other bar, hotel, conference in the city.
“It never worked out,” she says quietly, surprising herself with the words. He looks up from his plate, casually working at indifference, like he doesn’t know where this is coming from.
“Sorry?”
“Britt. The blonde chick. It just…I tried. We tried. But I could never quite make myself…and she just isn’t like that, you know? Never was. Love wasn’t a game for her, or a shame, or something to hide. It was just joy. Pure joy. Everything she did was like that, and for me…” She trails off, stabbing a bite of fish viciously and plunging it into her mouth. His mouth twitches sympathetically.
“It was hard for me, too,” he admits when she doesn’t speak again. “I didn’t come out until halfway through college. Still haven’t really talked to my dad about it. I tried for years to pretend it didn’t exist, wasn’t real; like sleeping with random guys on drunk nights was something every straight dude did. But Luke…he just got through, you know? He’s good at stuff like that, and being gentle about it. I think you’d like him.”
She will never meet Luke, she knows. It’s not even that she doesn’t care; it’s simply that, put in the most straightforward terms, seeing Dave like that-happy, grown up, secure-will damage her in a way she can’t define. It will make all of this, the sham life she’s so carefully constructed, feel unreal and worthless. And if that final brick were to come down-
She doesn’t want to think about that.
“It’s never too late to do it, you know,” Dave says carefully, watching her. “The coming out thing. It’s a lifelong process, and-“
“Cut the routine,” she snaps, perhaps a little more harshly than intended. His mouth closes on the next word, strangling it. She sighs. “It is too late. It’s not…it’s never been women. I mean, yes, it’s not men, so-but the women part of it isn’t the part that counts. It never was. It’s the woman. The one. The best friend I ever…and I lost her a long time ago. She’s probably married now, probably has triplets and a pet duckling, and probably doesn’t think of me-“
But that part isn’t true, is it? Brittany isn’t like that, isn’t bitter and cruel, would never force memories of her best friend out of existence just because. Brittany couldn’t do that, because there was a time when she loved Santana more than anything in the world-she even said so flat-out, gave truth to a fantasy with those exact words-and…
“You should try anyway,” Dave tells her, voice low and comforting in a way she never could have imagined from him. “You should give it a shot. Facebook, or phone, or whatever. Someone has to know where she wound up.”
“She doesn’t want-“ Her voice cuts out, aware of how untrue that is as well. Brittany would still want to hear from her. Brittany will probably always want to hear from her, no matter how the communication comes. Brittany’s just that kind of person.
But Santana can’t handle knowing.
They finish dinner and part ways with a handshake and an awkward half-hug. As she walks towards the door, she can feel his eyes on her back, drinking in her sadness and her pathetic failure to cope. Thanking God, perhaps, that he isn’t her.
He so easily might have been. Their positions could have-should have, would have-been reversed, and then…
God, everything would be so perfect.
She makes it back to the room in record time and sinks into its borderline-hostile sterility, its clean white sheets and careless atmosphere. The hotel room couldn’t give a shit if she’s happy, or in love, or so longing for the past that she could give it all up on the spot. Hotel rooms don’t form opinions of their occupants; they simply sit, prepared to give only what is needed, the bare essentials. Hotel rooms are built exactly for people like her.
Dave Karofsky is happy. He’s happy, and he’s found love, and he knows himself. And Santana? Is seated on crisp, unused sheets, her head bowed towards her knees. Nauseous, not nearly close enough to drunk, and too exhausted to do anything but feel the weight of what her life has become.
It’s pathetic.
Her hand slips the phone from her pocket and turns it over and over without thought. An old habit, a sick, sad habit that she really should have kicked by now: flick open, thumb through the contact list, hover over the third slot under ‘B.’ Dance with death, tapping the touch-screen too lightly to get through-
Then a little harder.
And harder.
The phone is against her ear before she can stop it, each ring thudding out another step towards the end. She swallows. The number will be disconnected, she tells herself. It’s been so many years, there’s no way it still works. There’s no way she’ll answer.
“Hello?” a voice chirps. Santana’s heart threatens to stop. It belongs not to the ghost of her past, but to a child-a boy, by the sounds of it. She has a boy?
“Hello? Uncle Finn, this isn’t funny.” The voice goes as stern as a child’s is able, almost comic in its seriousness. “I’m gonna tell Mom. You know she hates it when you mess with-“
Santana feels lightheaded, her hearing bouncing in and out of some cosmic tin can. The boy’s words seems jumbled, inarticulate, and she knows she could make sense of them if she just tries, but-
“Hey,” she croaks. The tirade on the other end of the line abruptly ceases.
“Oh. You’re not Uncle Finn.”
“No,” she manages. “Who…who is…”
“Jack,” the boy says proudly. “Jack Chang.”
Oh God, she married Mike? That’s just perfect, that’s just great, why did she even try this in the first-
“Mom says I’m supposed to ask why you’re looking for Aunt Brittany, miss,” he tells her politely. “And take a message. Are you in her class? She’s not here right now, she forgot her phone here last night, but she’ll probably come for dinner, so-“
Her head is whirling, a top on the dangerous edge of a table, threatening to cycle off and smash to bits on the hardwood floor. She presses a palm to the center of her forehead.
“I…um. You’re Mike Chang’s son?”
“Sure,” he replies, ever cheerful. A pause, then, “Mom wants to know who’s calling. She’s getting that angry eyebrow look.”
Tina never had angry eyebrows. Santana marvels at how much has changed since she left, that the world’s quietest Asian could have developed any scolding expression at all.
There’s a thump, a muffled protest, and then a new voice is demanding, “Who the hell is talking my son’s ear off at this time of night? I swear to God, Puckerman, it better not be you. You tell him one more dirty story, and I’ll cut your balls right off-“
“Fabray?” Santana chokes out. Quinn’s familiar raging pauses. The name hovers between them.
“Santana?” she says at last, soft and surprised, her voice filled with something like awe. “Santana, are you-seriously? It’s you?”
“It’s. Yeah.” Santana rubs at her eyes ferociously, shocked by the tears pooling upon her lashes. “What the fuck, Fabray? You’ve got a kid? A real one, I mean, not-I mean. You know.”
“Thanks, Santana,” Quinn replies dryly, sounding precisely like she did in senior year when Santana accidentally poured cranberry juice all over her Macbook. “I’ll make sure to tell Beth she’s loved and appreciated by her far-and-away fairy godbitch.”
She’s in contact with Beth. And she’s got a boy. And it’s with Mike.
Santana’s beginning to think she drank a lot more than she realized back there.
“I saw Dave today,” she coughs out compulsively. “You know, Karofsky? I saw him. We had dinner.”
“How is the puckhead?” Quinn asks, with no venom whatsoever. Santana can imagine her in a kitchen, leaning back against the counter with a dishtowel slung over her shoulder. Her face is probably a little older, a little more worn, but forever beautiful and forever on the edge of a brilliant insult. Her old friend with a new life, a husband, a whole world Santana was never there to even imagine the construction of. It’s astonishing.
“He’s good,” she says, her voice echoing uncomfortably. “Advertising. And he’s got a guy.”
“Good for him,” Quinn replies calmly. A beat comes, long and heavy over the line. Santana’s heartbeat drums in her ears. “You going to tell me the important part now?”
“The-“
“Why you’re calling Britt,” Quinn fills in, not impatiently. Santana swallows.
“I have no idea.”
“Figured,” Quinn tells her. “Hang on.” Her hand comes down over the mouthpiece, followed by a muffled, “Jack. Don’t you dare feed that to Star. Don’t you dare.”
“Star?” Santana asks numbly. Quinn chuckles.
“Stupid Berry. Her idea of a present when we got pregnant was a frickin’ puppy. The idiot is ruling Broadway with an iron fist, and she still manages to stick that big nose of hers in at random.” It’s strange how fond Quinn’s voice sounds, speaking of her old archenemy. Santana nearly smiles herself.
“You’re still in touch, then. With everyone.”
“Nope. Just those guys. Finn, Puck, Rachel. And...” She trails off, hesitating. “Santana, you better have a plan here. I’m not saying it’s a terrible idea, but-“
“I don’t,” Santana admits. “I have nothing. It was fuckin’ Karofsky’s idea, you know, he fuckin’…he’s happy, Fabray. Super happy. Annoyingly happy.”
“Been there,” Quinn muses. Santana can hear her half-smile, see the eyebrow arch in her mind’s eye. She swallows.
“I don’t know if I can do it.”
“Well, you called,” Quinn observes, shuffling what sounds like pans in dishwater. “That’s the first step.” She hesitates again, then presses on: “Santana, Brittany’s going to be here in half an hour. Mike’s bringing her back for dinner and a movie night with Jack. And…I’m going to have to tell her you did this.”
“Yeah,” Santana replies, letting her body fall backwards on the bed. Her head strikes the remote control she doesn’t remember tossing onto the mattress with a hollow cracking sound. She winces. “Yeah.”
“Even if I didn’t, she’d look at the call history,” Quinn goes on hurriedly, like she’s making excuses. “She’s still Britt, but she’s Britt with a little more technical know-how nowadays. So. I have to tell her.”
“Yeah,” Santana says a third time, rubbing her forehead distractedly. Quinn clears her throat.
“I’d like to be able to tell her more.”
“Like what?” Santana demands. Quinn sighs.
“Like you’re going to call again. Like it’s going to actually work out this time. Like she hasn’t been waiting all these stupid long years, living above her dance studio with a cat and a prayer for nothing.”
Santana’s heart really does stop this time, and when it starts again, everything seems to crawl into bright, clean focus. The breath on the other end of the phone seems to tickle her ear, Quinn’s voice reaching down deep and punching her square in the gut.
“She hasn’t-?”
“She tried,” Quinn informs her firmly, sounding marginally annoyed. “With Artie again, and then with a couple of girls from school, and then with-“ She makes a strangled sound that Santana thinks might be Rachel, but it’s hard to tell for sure. “Anyway, it never works. She’s constantly…she’s waiting, Santana. Probably never stopped. She really isn’t the brightest bulb in the closet, is she?”
Santana laughs, her head pounding with all of this new information. “You’re such a good friend, Fabray.”
“I am,” Quinn insists, voice level. “You know I am. And Santana, part of being a good friend is kicking the living shit out of anyone who fucks with my people.”
Santana nods stupidly. “Yeah. You swear in front of your kid?”
“He’s still trying to feed Star part of a mango.” The strain in Quinn’s voice is hilariously placed, like she can’t decide whether to laugh or scream at her son. “He’s a brat and a half. Sometimes I think Puckerman snuck in one night instead of my husband, because…”
Santana closes and opens her eyes, staring up at the ceiling. Her head feels too heavy, her limbs all shivery and gross. Every breath seems to echo.
“She’s coming over, huh?”
“Twenty minutes,” Quinn confirms. “Or an hour. Her sense of time always kind of blew.”
Not with me, Santana wants to say. Instead, she swallows hard and mumbles unintelligibly. Quinn makes a noise of irritation.
“Try that again, Lopez.”
“Call when she gets there? This is my new number, obviously, and-I mean, you should probably take it down anyway, but-“
“Done and done,” Quinn drawls. “Seriously, cutting all ties to Lima was really fucking annoying, Santana. I mean, I get the point and everything, but did you really have to change your email address and everything?”
Yes, yes, she did. Because Brittany was still sending her things, Brittany was still penning sweet, hopeful letters of love and courage and admiration. Brittany was still there, always, and Santana found herself sitting up on more than a few nights, scrawling whole novels in response before deleting them in brief fits of four-a.m. sanity. Email was dangerous. Everything was dangerous.
But she kept the number.
“Call me,” she says again. “When she gets there. I want to talk to-I want to-“ She sucks in a breath, warm and sharp. “I’m thinking about visiting, Q.”
“Good,” Quinn says without missing a beat. “We’ve got a guest room. Whenever you want.”
The urge to cry strikes her between the eyes, filling her up and exhausting her all over again. “Yeah. Okay. Just. Don’t forget, okay?”
Something bangs on the Fabray-Chang end of the line, followed by, “Jack. I swear to God, if you let another bird into this house, I will-“ Then: “She’ll be here soon, Santana. I’ll point her your way.”
“You think she’ll actually call?” Santana asks, sounding to her own ears like a little kid desperate for reassurance that there are no monsters beneath the bed. “You think she’ll want to talk to me? For real?”
Quinn’s voice goes unexpectedly gentle. “Santana, she’s been wanting to talk to you since the day you left. Every day. You know Britt.”
Yeah. She knows Britt. Knows her, and loves her, and wants her still. Santana’s eyes close again, her chest squeezing tight.
“Okay. Thanks, Fabray. I’ll, uh. I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Guest room,” Quinn repeats. “Any time. Seriously.”
They say their goodbyes and hang up. Santana clutches the phone against her ear, the muscles in her arms too taut to bring it down again. She sees Dave’s happy eyes, imagines Quinn’s looking just as bright, pictures Mike twirling his son in the air, Puck sneaking firecrackers into a birthday bag, Finn stubbing his toe on a comfortable couch in an easily beautiful living room. She sees Brittany, grasping her hand, pulling her close and whispering a thousand little welcomes. She sees home.
Maybe hotel rooms are not for her after all. Maybe it’s finally time to crawl out of bed, to peel the covers back and rejoin the world she ran from at eighteen.
When the phone rings again, Santana steadies herself, draws in a deep, cleansing breath, and taps the accept button.
Brittany’s hello is the most glorious note she has ever heard.
Pairing: Santana Lopez/Dave Karofsky friendship, Santana Lopez/Brittany Pierce
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Spoilers: Through S2, though only mildly.
Summary: A version of this prompt, though largely altered: post Brittana (or maybe they never quite happened, your call). Santana and Dave cross paths in a hotel bar whilst on a business trip. They reminisce about their days at McKinley, and they end up having dinner together. They’ve both mellowed and Dave is comfortable with himself now, but Santana’s still doing what she does best, pretending everything is fine …
A/N: Title from Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence.”
She feels sometimes as though she’s been in bed for years. Which is stupid, of course; at twenty-six, she has achieved all sorts of dreams that can’t be made real from under the covers. Graduating university with honors, slipping off to a heady little slice of Boston and immersing herself in fairly gratifying work (which mostly consists of wearing business suits and ordering underlings around; it’s Cheerios without the back-breaking effort)-she’s an adult now. An adult who does adult-type things.
And does not, as she so heartily desires, lay in bed with the sheets pulled up over her head at all hours.
Still, she feels sometimes-on days like this one, with the sky churning out gray cloud after gray cloud, darkening and drifting without purpose-like adulthood is the furthest thing from her grasp. She’s not a grown-up, and maybe she never was. Santana Lopez, for all her bark and bite and threats of razor blades, is still…
But she’s not. She has to remind herself of this entirely too often: she has grown up. She has left behind all of those little niggling worries, the ones that snake in under her skin and wrap talons around her heart and squeeze until the life drips, moment by moment, to the floor. She has left everything behind.
That was the point.
When she spots Dave Karofsky in a Los Angeles bar, it’s the kind of blast from the past that, by all regards, should be unpleasant. It should make her skin quiver on her bones, her scalp prickle with distaste. Had he been anyone else from Lima-Finn, or Puck, or Rachel Berry-this would undoubtedly have been the case.
Especially if he happened to be-
The fact that it’s Dave actually works in her favor, however, twisting her lips into a long-familiar sneer. Dave was a mess in high school, the kind of trainwreck that could only make someone like her feel better about life. Threats and hidden scars made him a sad, easy target, an escape from the struggle of-
She doesn’t think about that.
It’s tempting to snicker at him from afar before slinking away and finding a drink of her own, but Dave has always had a strange sense of observation. She assumes it comes from spending his life in a state of terror, hyper-aware of who might be lurking in the shadows, ready to rip away his mask. It’s sad, really, sad and familiar, and-
“Santana!” He’s waving, one elbow propped on the bar next to his drink, a broad smile distorting typically-angry features. He looks smaller, somehow, than he did in school; his shoulders seem less rigid, his jaw looser. His eyes, she notes as she makes short work of the space between them, are missing that hard, beetle-shell quality they always used to carry.
He looks rather happy.
Her heart sinks.
“Karofsky,” she greets him coolly, seating herself beside him and raising a hand towards the bartender. “You doing the L.A. thing full time?”
He nods and sips his drink. “Got into advertising. A little place, all things considered, but we do all right. It’s kind of great.”
“Just kind of?” she snips, hating herself for it. He’s being perfectly polite, all smiles and open arms, and here she is wielding the same old barbs. God help her if he had been someone else, someone she once cared about, and not just an old beard-
Nope. We still don’t talk about that.
Dave takes it in stride, like it’s all he’s ever expected from her-which, truthfully, sort of pisses her off. He seems so warm and cheerful, and she’s just…Santana.
Always been, always gonna be.
“How about you?” he asks, rapping a finger against her arm lightly. “Doing anything fun with your life?”
“Fun?” She laughs, a cold sound that seems too loud to her own ears. “Beating men’s self-esteem out of them one client at a time, mostly. So, yeah. Tons of fun.”
His eyebrows raise, mouth grinning in a way she’s never seen him do. “That’s very you. I like it.”
Very you. As if he has a singular clue about who she was or who she’s grown into. Dave Karofsky never was very bright.
He’s already off, bouncing to the next topic with a gesture at her drink. “You have anything in you to offset that? We could do dinner. Play catch-up.”
She has no idea why either of them would want something like that; “catch-up” would involve nothing better than fake relationships, lies, bitter struggles to escape who they were meant to be-
But hell, food doesn’t sound bad.
She allows him to lead her across the room to a table; a waiter meets them promptly, all genial smiles and flourished menus. She orders the perch, less because she likes it and more because it seems like a very adult thing to do at a time when she wants nothing more than to slipslide back down the ladder.
She can feel high-school-Santana down there, pacing back and forth, all too willing to claw her way out. It’s an unacceptable desire, the kind that can only be brought on by old acquaintances and long-murdered memories.
“You seem…different,” she lets herself observe cautiously, mostly because she doesn’t want to be sitting here in awkward silence until the food arrives. Dave shrugs modestly, hands folded in front of him.
“Like I said, I’m doing all right for myself. Good job, nice place, enough to pay the rent and catch a game every now and then.” He hesitates for a second, reaching up to rub his jaw, then plunges ahead. “And I’ve got a guy.”
It takes considerable effort to arrange her features into an expression of unaffected calm. Dave Karofsky, the boy who beat up every member of Glee at some point or another, who threatened the life of Kurt Hummel, who went to Prom with her to prevent the truth from coming out-Dave Karofsky is out and proud? And happy?
Why should that even be astonishing? They’re nearly thirty, after all; high school’s wear and tear has long worn off, replaced by the routine and pressure of adulthood. Dave is on the opposite side of the country from everything he ever had back then, living in a world he never knew existed. Why shouldn’t he be out? Free? Happy? He has nothing to hide from anymore.
Great logic. What about-
“And you?” he presses, bringing her back to reality. “Whatever happened with you and the blonde chick? You finally wore her down, right? Got all U-Hauled or whatever?”
U-Hauled. Right.
“No,” she replies shortly, jaw twitching around the next sip of her martini. “So you’re in advertising, huh?”
His eyes skim across her face, reading the tight sadness between the lines. He smiles thinly, and in the expression, she sees a shadow of high school. Of hidden dreams and terrifying desires, things you know you’re never supposed to want, though they prevent you from sleeping night after night. He knows, she realizes, far more than she ever would have given him credit for.
You and that blonde chick? You finally wore her down, right?
“Advertising is great,” he tells her as the food arrives, already sawing into his steak with abandon. “I never thought about that sort of thing before college, but it’s really cool. There’s a whole psychology to it, you know? Getting at what people really want. You have to get what makes them tick to do it well.”
And he does, she observes, judging from the way his eyes flick casually around the room. It’s not the expression of a paranoid man so much as a connoisseur of the human race. Admirably, impossibly, David Karofsky understands people-can read them like the dessert card in front of them. She never would have guessed.
Meanwhile, what does she do? Breaks people’s wills. Cuts them into tiny, bite-sized pieces. All but tricks them into paying more than they would like for services they don’t need. She should have just kicked the dream entirely and gone straight for law school; all the bloodthirsty joy, plus a bigger paycheck. Might as well.
He eats slowly, reverently, brows relaxed over curious eyes. This isn’t the boy she dated in high school. He’s a man she’s never met.
She wishes she had picked any other bar, hotel, conference in the city.
“It never worked out,” she says quietly, surprising herself with the words. He looks up from his plate, casually working at indifference, like he doesn’t know where this is coming from.
“Sorry?”
“Britt. The blonde chick. It just…I tried. We tried. But I could never quite make myself…and she just isn’t like that, you know? Never was. Love wasn’t a game for her, or a shame, or something to hide. It was just joy. Pure joy. Everything she did was like that, and for me…” She trails off, stabbing a bite of fish viciously and plunging it into her mouth. His mouth twitches sympathetically.
“It was hard for me, too,” he admits when she doesn’t speak again. “I didn’t come out until halfway through college. Still haven’t really talked to my dad about it. I tried for years to pretend it didn’t exist, wasn’t real; like sleeping with random guys on drunk nights was something every straight dude did. But Luke…he just got through, you know? He’s good at stuff like that, and being gentle about it. I think you’d like him.”
She will never meet Luke, she knows. It’s not even that she doesn’t care; it’s simply that, put in the most straightforward terms, seeing Dave like that-happy, grown up, secure-will damage her in a way she can’t define. It will make all of this, the sham life she’s so carefully constructed, feel unreal and worthless. And if that final brick were to come down-
She doesn’t want to think about that.
“It’s never too late to do it, you know,” Dave says carefully, watching her. “The coming out thing. It’s a lifelong process, and-“
“Cut the routine,” she snaps, perhaps a little more harshly than intended. His mouth closes on the next word, strangling it. She sighs. “It is too late. It’s not…it’s never been women. I mean, yes, it’s not men, so-but the women part of it isn’t the part that counts. It never was. It’s the woman. The one. The best friend I ever…and I lost her a long time ago. She’s probably married now, probably has triplets and a pet duckling, and probably doesn’t think of me-“
But that part isn’t true, is it? Brittany isn’t like that, isn’t bitter and cruel, would never force memories of her best friend out of existence just because. Brittany couldn’t do that, because there was a time when she loved Santana more than anything in the world-she even said so flat-out, gave truth to a fantasy with those exact words-and…
“You should try anyway,” Dave tells her, voice low and comforting in a way she never could have imagined from him. “You should give it a shot. Facebook, or phone, or whatever. Someone has to know where she wound up.”
“She doesn’t want-“ Her voice cuts out, aware of how untrue that is as well. Brittany would still want to hear from her. Brittany will probably always want to hear from her, no matter how the communication comes. Brittany’s just that kind of person.
But Santana can’t handle knowing.
They finish dinner and part ways with a handshake and an awkward half-hug. As she walks towards the door, she can feel his eyes on her back, drinking in her sadness and her pathetic failure to cope. Thanking God, perhaps, that he isn’t her.
He so easily might have been. Their positions could have-should have, would have-been reversed, and then…
God, everything would be so perfect.
She makes it back to the room in record time and sinks into its borderline-hostile sterility, its clean white sheets and careless atmosphere. The hotel room couldn’t give a shit if she’s happy, or in love, or so longing for the past that she could give it all up on the spot. Hotel rooms don’t form opinions of their occupants; they simply sit, prepared to give only what is needed, the bare essentials. Hotel rooms are built exactly for people like her.
Dave Karofsky is happy. He’s happy, and he’s found love, and he knows himself. And Santana? Is seated on crisp, unused sheets, her head bowed towards her knees. Nauseous, not nearly close enough to drunk, and too exhausted to do anything but feel the weight of what her life has become.
It’s pathetic.
Her hand slips the phone from her pocket and turns it over and over without thought. An old habit, a sick, sad habit that she really should have kicked by now: flick open, thumb through the contact list, hover over the third slot under ‘B.’ Dance with death, tapping the touch-screen too lightly to get through-
Then a little harder.
And harder.
The phone is against her ear before she can stop it, each ring thudding out another step towards the end. She swallows. The number will be disconnected, she tells herself. It’s been so many years, there’s no way it still works. There’s no way she’ll answer.
“Hello?” a voice chirps. Santana’s heart threatens to stop. It belongs not to the ghost of her past, but to a child-a boy, by the sounds of it. She has a boy?
“Hello? Uncle Finn, this isn’t funny.” The voice goes as stern as a child’s is able, almost comic in its seriousness. “I’m gonna tell Mom. You know she hates it when you mess with-“
Santana feels lightheaded, her hearing bouncing in and out of some cosmic tin can. The boy’s words seems jumbled, inarticulate, and she knows she could make sense of them if she just tries, but-
“Hey,” she croaks. The tirade on the other end of the line abruptly ceases.
“Oh. You’re not Uncle Finn.”
“No,” she manages. “Who…who is…”
“Jack,” the boy says proudly. “Jack Chang.”
Oh God, she married Mike? That’s just perfect, that’s just great, why did she even try this in the first-
“Mom says I’m supposed to ask why you’re looking for Aunt Brittany, miss,” he tells her politely. “And take a message. Are you in her class? She’s not here right now, she forgot her phone here last night, but she’ll probably come for dinner, so-“
Her head is whirling, a top on the dangerous edge of a table, threatening to cycle off and smash to bits on the hardwood floor. She presses a palm to the center of her forehead.
“I…um. You’re Mike Chang’s son?”
“Sure,” he replies, ever cheerful. A pause, then, “Mom wants to know who’s calling. She’s getting that angry eyebrow look.”
Tina never had angry eyebrows. Santana marvels at how much has changed since she left, that the world’s quietest Asian could have developed any scolding expression at all.
There’s a thump, a muffled protest, and then a new voice is demanding, “Who the hell is talking my son’s ear off at this time of night? I swear to God, Puckerman, it better not be you. You tell him one more dirty story, and I’ll cut your balls right off-“
“Fabray?” Santana chokes out. Quinn’s familiar raging pauses. The name hovers between them.
“Santana?” she says at last, soft and surprised, her voice filled with something like awe. “Santana, are you-seriously? It’s you?”
“It’s. Yeah.” Santana rubs at her eyes ferociously, shocked by the tears pooling upon her lashes. “What the fuck, Fabray? You’ve got a kid? A real one, I mean, not-I mean. You know.”
“Thanks, Santana,” Quinn replies dryly, sounding precisely like she did in senior year when Santana accidentally poured cranberry juice all over her Macbook. “I’ll make sure to tell Beth she’s loved and appreciated by her far-and-away fairy godbitch.”
She’s in contact with Beth. And she’s got a boy. And it’s with Mike.
Santana’s beginning to think she drank a lot more than she realized back there.
“I saw Dave today,” she coughs out compulsively. “You know, Karofsky? I saw him. We had dinner.”
“How is the puckhead?” Quinn asks, with no venom whatsoever. Santana can imagine her in a kitchen, leaning back against the counter with a dishtowel slung over her shoulder. Her face is probably a little older, a little more worn, but forever beautiful and forever on the edge of a brilliant insult. Her old friend with a new life, a husband, a whole world Santana was never there to even imagine the construction of. It’s astonishing.
“He’s good,” she says, her voice echoing uncomfortably. “Advertising. And he’s got a guy.”
“Good for him,” Quinn replies calmly. A beat comes, long and heavy over the line. Santana’s heartbeat drums in her ears. “You going to tell me the important part now?”
“The-“
“Why you’re calling Britt,” Quinn fills in, not impatiently. Santana swallows.
“I have no idea.”
“Figured,” Quinn tells her. “Hang on.” Her hand comes down over the mouthpiece, followed by a muffled, “Jack. Don’t you dare feed that to Star. Don’t you dare.”
“Star?” Santana asks numbly. Quinn chuckles.
“Stupid Berry. Her idea of a present when we got pregnant was a frickin’ puppy. The idiot is ruling Broadway with an iron fist, and she still manages to stick that big nose of hers in at random.” It’s strange how fond Quinn’s voice sounds, speaking of her old archenemy. Santana nearly smiles herself.
“You’re still in touch, then. With everyone.”
“Nope. Just those guys. Finn, Puck, Rachel. And...” She trails off, hesitating. “Santana, you better have a plan here. I’m not saying it’s a terrible idea, but-“
“I don’t,” Santana admits. “I have nothing. It was fuckin’ Karofsky’s idea, you know, he fuckin’…he’s happy, Fabray. Super happy. Annoyingly happy.”
“Been there,” Quinn muses. Santana can hear her half-smile, see the eyebrow arch in her mind’s eye. She swallows.
“I don’t know if I can do it.”
“Well, you called,” Quinn observes, shuffling what sounds like pans in dishwater. “That’s the first step.” She hesitates again, then presses on: “Santana, Brittany’s going to be here in half an hour. Mike’s bringing her back for dinner and a movie night with Jack. And…I’m going to have to tell her you did this.”
“Yeah,” Santana replies, letting her body fall backwards on the bed. Her head strikes the remote control she doesn’t remember tossing onto the mattress with a hollow cracking sound. She winces. “Yeah.”
“Even if I didn’t, she’d look at the call history,” Quinn goes on hurriedly, like she’s making excuses. “She’s still Britt, but she’s Britt with a little more technical know-how nowadays. So. I have to tell her.”
“Yeah,” Santana says a third time, rubbing her forehead distractedly. Quinn clears her throat.
“I’d like to be able to tell her more.”
“Like what?” Santana demands. Quinn sighs.
“Like you’re going to call again. Like it’s going to actually work out this time. Like she hasn’t been waiting all these stupid long years, living above her dance studio with a cat and a prayer for nothing.”
Santana’s heart really does stop this time, and when it starts again, everything seems to crawl into bright, clean focus. The breath on the other end of the phone seems to tickle her ear, Quinn’s voice reaching down deep and punching her square in the gut.
“She hasn’t-?”
“She tried,” Quinn informs her firmly, sounding marginally annoyed. “With Artie again, and then with a couple of girls from school, and then with-“ She makes a strangled sound that Santana thinks might be Rachel, but it’s hard to tell for sure. “Anyway, it never works. She’s constantly…she’s waiting, Santana. Probably never stopped. She really isn’t the brightest bulb in the closet, is she?”
Santana laughs, her head pounding with all of this new information. “You’re such a good friend, Fabray.”
“I am,” Quinn insists, voice level. “You know I am. And Santana, part of being a good friend is kicking the living shit out of anyone who fucks with my people.”
Santana nods stupidly. “Yeah. You swear in front of your kid?”
“He’s still trying to feed Star part of a mango.” The strain in Quinn’s voice is hilariously placed, like she can’t decide whether to laugh or scream at her son. “He’s a brat and a half. Sometimes I think Puckerman snuck in one night instead of my husband, because…”
Santana closes and opens her eyes, staring up at the ceiling. Her head feels too heavy, her limbs all shivery and gross. Every breath seems to echo.
“She’s coming over, huh?”
“Twenty minutes,” Quinn confirms. “Or an hour. Her sense of time always kind of blew.”
Not with me, Santana wants to say. Instead, she swallows hard and mumbles unintelligibly. Quinn makes a noise of irritation.
“Try that again, Lopez.”
“Call when she gets there? This is my new number, obviously, and-I mean, you should probably take it down anyway, but-“
“Done and done,” Quinn drawls. “Seriously, cutting all ties to Lima was really fucking annoying, Santana. I mean, I get the point and everything, but did you really have to change your email address and everything?”
Yes, yes, she did. Because Brittany was still sending her things, Brittany was still penning sweet, hopeful letters of love and courage and admiration. Brittany was still there, always, and Santana found herself sitting up on more than a few nights, scrawling whole novels in response before deleting them in brief fits of four-a.m. sanity. Email was dangerous. Everything was dangerous.
But she kept the number.
“Call me,” she says again. “When she gets there. I want to talk to-I want to-“ She sucks in a breath, warm and sharp. “I’m thinking about visiting, Q.”
“Good,” Quinn says without missing a beat. “We’ve got a guest room. Whenever you want.”
The urge to cry strikes her between the eyes, filling her up and exhausting her all over again. “Yeah. Okay. Just. Don’t forget, okay?”
Something bangs on the Fabray-Chang end of the line, followed by, “Jack. I swear to God, if you let another bird into this house, I will-“ Then: “She’ll be here soon, Santana. I’ll point her your way.”
“You think she’ll actually call?” Santana asks, sounding to her own ears like a little kid desperate for reassurance that there are no monsters beneath the bed. “You think she’ll want to talk to me? For real?”
Quinn’s voice goes unexpectedly gentle. “Santana, she’s been wanting to talk to you since the day you left. Every day. You know Britt.”
Yeah. She knows Britt. Knows her, and loves her, and wants her still. Santana’s eyes close again, her chest squeezing tight.
“Okay. Thanks, Fabray. I’ll, uh. I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Guest room,” Quinn repeats. “Any time. Seriously.”
They say their goodbyes and hang up. Santana clutches the phone against her ear, the muscles in her arms too taut to bring it down again. She sees Dave’s happy eyes, imagines Quinn’s looking just as bright, pictures Mike twirling his son in the air, Puck sneaking firecrackers into a birthday bag, Finn stubbing his toe on a comfortable couch in an easily beautiful living room. She sees Brittany, grasping her hand, pulling her close and whispering a thousand little welcomes. She sees home.
Maybe hotel rooms are not for her after all. Maybe it’s finally time to crawl out of bed, to peel the covers back and rejoin the world she ran from at eighteen.
When the phone rings again, Santana steadies herself, draws in a deep, cleansing breath, and taps the accept button.
Brittany’s hello is the most glorious note she has ever heard.