Disclaimer: I don't own Glee, I do however own this story, I'm just borrowing the characters.

A/N: Sorry about this guys, but it is necessary for me to start writing again!

I have a tale to tell...

The water of the bath had turned lukewarm and I could feel my skin begin to cool. The silence of the room - vacant and empty- just made more space for my thoughts to fill it up. I flipped through the stages quite quickly, from denial all the way to self hatred and blame. I pressed my fingertips harshly against my eyes clearing away the few remaining tears I had. I shuddered and saw the movement ripple out across the water, away from me. I wished life was as easy as that, anything bad and you could force it away from you to be forgotten. To fade.

I curled in on myself, the points where skin met skin was warm compared to my back – naked and cold to touch. I was trying to trap it all in. Everything.

A few more tears escaped as I had dared to uncoil myself and slick my hair back. I didn't want to leave the bathroom, it was the first time that day that I felt safe – unthinking maybe – but safe. It was an easy compromise to make.

I didn't need to glance around the room to know what it looked like. The walls had remained unchanged for my entire life, the purple light up duck sat haphazardly in the dish next to the soap. The walls were streaked white and yellow, the faucet dripped repetitively and the towels clung to the fractured rack in the vain hope they would dry somehow. It had never changed.

Unlike me.

But I have to acknowledge that there is a darkness in me. A darkness that had never existed before. A self loathing I never thought I was capable of.

Earlier that day I had sat across from her, staring blankly into eyes that I should've found comfort in. I can't remember the last time she smiled and I know it was my fault. Santana made me nervous in a way, my heart beat a little quicker and my palms were sweaty. There wasn't even a breath of a breeze on that cold dark winter's night, the moon – usually low and bright hid itself beneath a layer of clouds. Yet still we sat - me in a t-shirt and jeans, her wearing five layers and her beautiful face was streaked with tears. Somewhere in the distance I could hear voices, laughing, carefree.

I put those tears there because I couldn't... I can't. I can't say. I can't open my mouth and say what's on my mind.

I reached across, slowly, slowly, extending my thumb and ran it delicately over her cheek. That's what they do in movies, the ones we had watched together. I loved watching movies with her, curled up beneath her black, smooth sheets and holding each other as we watched those actors come to the rescue. Their pain was only temporary, and it always ended with some grand gesture. But the harsh reality is it doesn't happen that way. But those tears were all my own doing and it was so much easier to pretend that I didn't care.

She shrugged off my touch, twisting herself away from me and clamping her teeth down on her bottom lip. She shook her head as if she was talking, but she didn't. Neither one of us wanted to speak first. I wanted to smooth down the sharpness of her pain, I reached across once more – purely selfish reasons though. I wanted to soak in her warmth and hear her laugh again.

Santana began talking, blaming herself for something she has no right to blame herself for. But how was she to know? She's apologising and I don't why, she sobbed out a sorry like applying a band aid to our relationship. It was over. But Santana... she was clinging on to someone who didn't exist anymore.

"I'm sorry" I said, the words crisp, clear and final. She cried harder and I pinch at my thigh to stop myself from doing the same. I wanted so badly to be able to comfort her, but I couldn't. I was too emotionally stunted to know how to, so I sat there and continued to stare uncomprehendingly. I looked beyond her as if that was going to make it all the more bearable.

See it was moments like that that people assumed my lack of reaction was that I didn't understand what was going on. I did, I just didn't know what to say, what was appropriate... I didn't want her to see me as being weak. This is why I get called stupid a lot. Santana always stuck up for me, I never had to deal with things like this. She was my protector and I pushed her away. She seems to take offence to the word stupid more than I do, and she is always there with a quick retort, punchy and biting in her deliverance causing the most vulgar students at school to recoil from her words.

The way Santana would describe all of this is that she is the one who hurts me, takes me for granted and makes the wrong choices. But again that is just a projection. Those darkest of qualities reside in me, taking form and shaping me. These characteristics are moulding me and splitting me apart all at once.

I smiled thinly at her, and she halted her tears as if I was somehow a remedy to her sadness – rather than acknowledging that I was the cause. Her fingertips reached out to mine almost touching, barely there. But when she folded her hand around mine, trying to warm me, comfort me. But us breaking up then – that was my fault. I couldn't understand why she did it at the time.

I bowed my head, my stare rested upon our entwined fingers and I wanted to force the words back into my mouth. I wanted to take every flinch, every broken promise, every hurtful thing I had ever done and untwist it like thread. But those months I had been someone else and I couldn't keep doing that to her. I focussed back on our hands and watched as I splayed my fingers apart and pulled away.

Santana said once that the way I spoke was as if I thought I was above it all, I wasn't, not in my mind anyway. I was a realist, she was the dreamer. She was the one who dreamed of ways out of town, dreamed of being accepted, dreamed of true love. I scratched the word "dream" out of my vocabulary; it wasn't something I could connect to. It was too vapid, too hazy a thing for me to cling onto and just like that I let it go.

Santana didn't talk much more. But I knew she was trying to reconnect with me in any way she could. But I remember thinking at the time, if I'm her dream maybe it's time she let go of that word too.

I have a tale to tell...