What Sarah Said
Summary: But Rachel's thinking of what Sarah said: Love is watching someone die.
Disclaimer: I do not own Glee, Lord of the Rings, Alice in Wonderland, or the song- What Sarah Said by Death Cab for Cutie- from which this story's title was taken and plot was inspired.
Approximately four people had a red Volkswagen in Lima, Ohio. Depending on the day, or even the hour, seventy-two people were given the honor of adorning the left rear bumper of a car with a Cheerios bumper sticker in Lima, Ohio. There was only one person who had a Cheerios bumper sticker on the left rear bumper of a red Volkswagen in Lima, Ohio. When Dr. Lopez heard the police radio call requesting paramedics to the scene of a car crash, he knew it could be no one else:
We have a red Volkswagen Beetle. Hit on the driver's side by a large truck. Driver is still in the vehicle, looks to be unconscious. Air bags are deployed. Possible head or spine injury. Send a crew immediately and have a team waiting. Cheerios sticker on the left rear, looks to be a blonde wearing a pink dress. We're tracking the license plate right now.
Santana was wearing a pink dress when he left for the evening shift. There was some wedding or something, he wasn't quite sure because she would always start going off into a rant-about stupid hobbits, their giant trees, and something about a lemon or berry or some type of fruit-and most of the time his daughter didn't even know what she was actually saying.
There was only one thing to do, really. It had to be Quinn. And no matter the times his daughter would shout about her or the number of injuries he would have to tend after a well placed hit or an extended practice, Dr. Lopez knew his daughter would need to know about the accident.
All of New Directions was in the waiting room at the ICU when Dr. Lopez made his way down after calling in a surgery room. They had apparently arrived twelve minutes after his call to Santana ended and the city hall (it was a wedding after all) was over twenty minutes away, so they must have sped. And that speed seemed to carry over because only one person was sitting when he arrived. He was bombarded with questions of what happened and who to beat up and where she was now. The answers seemed to flow easily and without much thought (t-boned, pickup, unknown drunk, surgery, wait to see) as he stared over at a small brunette in a white dress, a veritable White Queen, who was directing his stare towards her shoes.
Quinn must have been on her way to the wedding. She must have been planning, she must have been praying, but Father Time must not have been listening, like no father ever seemed to listen to her, and that tiny brunette was left waiting to stare at her shoes as though they held the answers. And if the answer was keep breathing to keep peaks raised on a far off LCD, then they might have (slowly in and out and eyes blinked blindly one two three clear).
Actions and reactions, words collided from magazines strewn about the room as these kids' lives slowly bled apart with everything Nurse Sarah told them of their teammate's fate. They all had different methods of being in a waiting room, braced with no comfort for bad news they never wanted to have to hear.
As he watched the scene in front of him, set to a backdrop of the television playing to itself, his daughter's rants started to unravel. Surely it was the giant tree his daughter spoke of who was kicking the vending machine now. And the hobbit might have been the white gowned brunette, engrossed in her wedding shoes. And maybe hobbits were never meant to stay in their hometowns, maybe the giant trees were only a small part of the journey, maybe one ring could destroy them all.
Though he preferred stumbling down a rabbit hole over a journey to Mount Doom, there was no doubt his daughter was a master of metaphor, likening Middle-earth to High School. Perhaps it was possible that the two metaphors could merge, because as the White Queen refused the help of anyone, it became clear that it was her champion, her Alice, laid out on the table. For as much as the White Queen-the hobbit-needed Alice to raise arms for her, it was the also White Queen who gave Alice her armor and the will to fight. It is only each faulty lens inside the human head that lacked the clarity to see it; though, from the eyes on the ground, and the blank page look, it seemed the White Queen was finally beginning to spot what could have been her story to live by, the truth she had never lain beside at all.
As he withdrew from the waiting room to do his rounds, he saw the White Queen stand and begin her campaign. And when the giant tree asked where the hobbit was going, he could only think of what Sarah said: "Love is watching someone die."