Authors Note: This is my first attempt! Please review!
At 5am it always started with the sound of light rainfall. Twenty minutes later the soft chirp of birds began, followed by increasingly loud meditation music. Brittany had purchased the alarm clock for Santana six years earlier in the hopes that it would make Santana's evil morning wake up ritual a little more manageable. The problem was that it was only really effective at waking Brittany up; Santana tended to stay peacefully asleep until Brittany forced her out of bed.
This morning was no different. As the meditation music set in, Brittany was fully awake and Santana continued to sleep like a rock. Brittany decided to take a moment to savor this image of her best friend sleeping peacefully with the morning light gently caressing the side of her face. It was nice to see the last glimpses of the happiness of the summer on Santana's face before her school year scowl would set in permanently. Eventually, though, Brittany knew she did have to wake her up so they could get to Cheerios practice.
"San," Brittany whispered in a singsong voice, brushing the hair out of Santana's eyes. "Saaaaan." Santana stirred slightly, burying her head further into her pillow. Brittany tugged at the oversized t-shirt Santana was wearing to bed and gently traced her fingers up and down Santana's arms until the brunette turned and begrudgingly opened one sleepy eye.
"Why, Brit, why would you be waking me up so early?" Santana moaned into her pillow.
"It's the first day of our senior year!" Brittany grinned, sheepishly. "You know however you begin the New Year is how you're destined to spend it! I don't want to spend the year always running late, hungry with no breakfast, with you driving like a maniac trying to get us to school before Coach Sylvester makes us run 8 laps for being tardy!"
"I think that saying only applies to the actual New Year, B, not the beginning of the school year," Santana said, still not removing her face from the pillow. Brittany looked confused.
"I don't know…I'm going to take a shower, and when I'm done, you'd better be up and ready to go!" With that, Brittany hopped out of bed and excitedly into Santana's bathroom.
Santana laid on her back in bed, contemplating how she was supposed to begin this new year. She had been fully awake, ever since the birds began to chirp on that alarm clock that Brittany had bought her, so many years earlier. So much had changed this summer. Her abuela's death, and their extended vacation in Los Angeles had shaken her up. She wanted to go back to being the old Santana, the one who knew who she was and could terrorize anyone who crossed her path at McKinley High School. She couldn't shake the lingering feeling, however, that that Santana had disappeared. When Brittany emerged from her shower, Santana thought it best to pretend to still be asleep, to avoid any conversation that might emerge about the upcoming school year. She couldn't help but keep one eye open as she watched her Brittany slip into her spanks and Cheerios uniform, and tie her hair back into that tightly fitted ponytail.
The first day of the new school year proved to be pretty much like every year they had spent at McKinley High School. Coach Sylvester complained that her Cheerios had become "flabbier than a first episode of The Biggest Loser", Rachel feigned enthusiasm for the new recruits for Glee, the smallest freshmen were slushied by the biggest football players, and Mr. Schue optimistically ranted about their odds for winning Nationals this year. Santana and Brittany compared their new schedules, linked pinkies while walking between classes, and made fun of Rachel's new style, which supposedly was "all the rage in New York" where she had spent the summer in musical theater camp.
Normally, Santana would have loved it. She spent the day walking around the school knowing that her facial expression alone put the fear of god into the underclassmen. It wasn't that she wasn't enjoying herself. She mocked Berry and Finn, and threatened to punch Tina for looking at her oddly. She scowled at Mr. Schue's painful rendition of Fleetwood Mac's Say You Love Me, his introduction to his first weekly assignment of the year: to sing about the most important event of the summer. He had finally proposed to that doe eyed freak Emma and was clearly feeling sappy.
After this summer, however, Santana didn't know how she was supposed to feel about anything. She felt like a zombie, reenacting the usual events Santana was supposed to enjoy, but she knew inside it felt empty. Pretending to be someone she was not was slowly eating Santana from the inside out.
