Monday came and went pretty much uneventfully for Santana Lopez. The school year had ended the week before and she could finally allow herself to indulge in her freedom and laze around the house days on end.
This particular evening, she lay on the giant bed thumbing through loads of magazines while drinking iced coffee. The activity was, of course, heavenly and Santana was definitely grateful, but there was still something nagging at her even in her lazy bliss. That something was the absence of one blonde, blue-eyed cheerleader and since quite recently her proud girlfriend, Brittany S. Pierce.
She sighed, scowling at the unsuspecting picture of Jennifer Lowrence staring up at her with a goofy smile. Where was Brittany anyway? When Santana had asked her to hang out she gave a strange excuse involving unicorns and something about some dude named Bertie. This would've sounded a little, or maybe more than a little, odd coming from anyone other than her beloved Britt-Britt, but what can you do? (She shrugged involuntarily with a smile) Her girl's awesomely strange like that. And she wouldn't have it any other way.
Distracted as she was with the thoughts of her dreamy girlfriend, Santana didn't notice someone crawling through the window into her room, that is until that someone's foot got caught on the windowsill and the person came flying through head first and right into the hardwood floor.
"Ouch ouch ouch." The intruder wailed clutching to the forehead.
Santana, who had shot up from the bed, was staring as the person, the unfamiliar boy, rolling around her floor finally stopped whimpering and tried to stand up.
"You stay right there!" She found her voice at last, her eyes desperately trying to find any kind of subject in her room that could've been used as a weapon. Cold dread raced through her veins, freezing her up, but she still managed to grab the pepper-spray from the drawer near the bed. "Who the fuck are you?! What are you doing in my room?"
The boy held up his hands in surrender, staring at her with wide eyes. "Wait, San, I'll explain everything." He rushed, taking a step forward.
"Don't move!" She yelled, pointing her weapon right to his eyes. "Don't move or I'll call my parents."
"I thought Maribel and Diego had a date night?" The boy stared at her with confusion.
"What? Who told you that? Have you been spying on me, you little deprived perv?" Santana was definitely pissed, how dare this, this... she quickly scanned the boy before her to come up with a good epithet.
He seemed the same age as her, taller than average, with short blonde hair and blue, cat-like eyes. It didn't take to be Sherlock Holmes to know that the clothes in which he was dressed were not his own. The short-sleeved button-up was hanging on him loosely, but was apparently too short, as it barely reached his waist. As were his dark-green track pants, that only reached the middle of his calves. On his feet were pink flip-flops that looked several sizes too small. And were definitely feminine.
How very odd, Santana thought, eyeing him with more interest. His eyes caught her attention. Something about them seemed strangely familiar. Where have I seen him before? She wondered.
His voice shook her out of her musings.
"Whoa, that's mean, Santana." The boy shook his head with obvious disapproval. "Why would I spy? You told me this morning, when you invited me to hang out. Besides," he added moving closer, "that spray's empty. You used it up on the raccoon last week, remember?"
Santana paused, 'fuck, he's right', she thought, remembering the raccoon incident.
"How do you even know about that?"
"Duh, you were on the phone with me when it broke into your room. Still can't hear anything in my right ear." He grabbed his ear subconsciously, remembering the inhuman scream Santana had released that night at the sight of the intruding animal.
The situation was growing stranger and stranger with each passing minute.
"Who the fuck are you?"
"Okay, don't freak out now, but I'm Brittany."
Santana stared at him for a moment and then burst into fits of laughter, "yeah and I'm the Pope."
"No, you're not." His eyebrow quirked in confusion. "Or are you..?"
"Dude, whatever you've been smoking, you need to lay off. You can't handle that shit." Santana shook her head and set down in an armchair. Somehow the boy, while a little crazy, didn't seem all that threatening. "Little pothead," she started, even though the boy was well towering over her. "don't you think I would know what my girlfriend, who's, you know, a girl, looks like?"
"Santana, Just let me explain." The boy pleaded.
"Fine," Santana conceded. This should be interesting, she thought as she leaned back. "Prove it. Prove that you're really Brittany."
"Okay, lets see," he tapped his chin thoughtfully, "oh oh, I know; you tell everyone your middle name's Marie, but really it's Marisol. I don't know why you do that, by the way, Marisol is a pretty name. And you secretly watch telenovelas, because you used to watch them with your abuela and now they remind you of her. And you have a lightning-shaped birth mark on your left boob, that's why we call it Harry. And first time we kissed you pretended you were drunk, but you weren't."
"Okay okay! That's enough!" Santana exclaimed. No one knew about Harry. "Britt, it's really you?"
"Yes!" The boy's - Brittany's - eyes sparkled with excitement and relief that she could actually move on to the really important subject now.
"What the hell..." Santana mumbled, dumbfounded, "Brittany, what did you do?"
"You know how I've been working on a project in my basement?"
"What, the time machine?"
"No, I put that one on hold for now. I need to figure out how to overcome the speed of light," he plopped down on the bed casually and rubbing his forehead in frustration, crossed his legs exactly like Brittany would do when she was thinking about something. Oh my god, Santana thought, it's really seriously her!
"And then I need to figure out how to do that and avoid being flattened out like a pancake. Anyway, not that one, the other project."
Santana shook her head. She didn't know about any other projects.
"I didn't tell you? Are you sure? That's strange, I thought I -"
"Brittany, focus!" She snapped, getting impatient now. It's not every day your girlfriend turns herself into a boy after all.
"Right, right. Well, I made a machine that can change form of things!"
"Brittany Susan Pierce, you crawl into my room looking like a tramp who hasn't shaved for days after you somehow managed to miraculously change your sex and that's your explanation? You made a form changing machine? Why would you even..?"
"Well, actually I was originally going for a unicorn. I was going to prove to Mrs. Davis I totally didn't deserve that F she gave me for writing about unicorns as my favorite animals."
"B, that was in the first grade..." Santana frowned remembering that fail Brittany got for writing about imaginary animal. Mrs. Davis was a really bitch, though. Who the hell fails a first grader anyway?
"So? But that doesn't matter now. Didn't really work out. Not the way I expected it would anyway. I mean, I'm sort of a unicorn now too, right?" Brittany giggled at her own joke.
"Huh?" Santana looked lost.
"A unicorn? You know with a single horn?" The girl turned into a boy raised her eyebrows expectantly.
"Ew, oh my god! Really, Brittany? Really?" The young girl's nose scrunched up in disgust. Trust Brittany to be making weird penis jokes already.
"What? I thought it was funny." Brittany shrugged.
"Do you want to, I don't know, explain how you even managed?" Santana tried to get back to the previous subject.
"Oh, of course! I didn't know if you'd be interested." When Santana assured her she very much was, Brittany went on, "You remember there used to be a little booklets 'physics with uncle Bertie'?" Brittany set up and waited for any sign of recognition on her girlfriend's face, but if anything Santana appeared even more confused than she had been the whole evening. She decided to go on, "they came with broccolis and other vegs? Loved reading those when I was little. They were the only reason why I ate vegetables at all."
"I have no idea what you're talking about." Santana shook her head.
"No? Well anyway, there was this man named Bertie and he said that energy and matter are basically the same thing and that matter is only energy that vibrates really slowly, so slowly that we can actually see it, and touch it. Fascinating, right?" Brittany was getting excited, she sprung to her feet and started pacing back and forth, waving her hands as she spoke. "The idea's a little difficult for us to grasp, but the whole world, the whole Universe is a giant pool of energy. We don't see it that way exactly because of how differently everything vibrates.
"So I thought, if we're all made of energy and look like we do because of on what frequency we vibrate, then we can change that frequency and with that we can change ourselves! I came up with this hypothesis a few years ago, but only managed to complete the capsule and mechanism today. And it totally works!"
Santana stared, she opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. She stared some more. Brittany waited.
"San?.." she asked tentatively, her gaze never shifting from her girlfriend's stunned face.
"Oh my god." She finally whispered.
"Right?!" Brittany nodded shining with excitement. "I swear, I didn't think it actually would. I mean, I had tried and tried for hundreds of times but something always went wrong. Then this morning I had sort of a revelation and I changed some stuff and poof! It worked like a charm! First I tried it on my dad's parrot, but then I remembered I can't actually tell male parrot from female, so I couldn't tell if the machine worked or not, but the bird didn't melt on the spot so that was a huge success in itself. And I was like, Yay! Score for me! And then my dad volunteered. I was a little hesitant in the beginning, because humans are more complex and they have bigger mass than parrots, you know? But he insisted so I was, okay, and it worked! I apparently have two moms now." She giggled. "I should totally tell Rachel. Anyways, after that I tried it out myself and here I am." She finished finally taking a much needed breath and stared at Santana with open arms to better demonstrate her point that she was actually there and she was actually a he.
Santana was speechless. Probably for the very first time in her life she actually couldn't find any word. And really, what do you say when you're faced with a discovery of this caliber? How do you react? How do you even cope when someone comes and challenges everything you ever believed to be possible. People don't just change sex like some sort of a clown fish or an exotic toad. That's so far out of the frames of possibility, something that only ever happens in films. But here she stood, her genius girlfriend, looking more male than actual boys she knew.
Santana took a step forward. Tentatively at first, but then with more purpose. She reached out, her fingers grazing Brittany's stubbled cheek. "Oh my god," she said again. "It's real. You're a real boy."
"Yup." Brittany replied with obvious pride, while Santana was getting bolder with her touches, mumbling 'oh god' over and over. Her fingers ran over Brittany's cheeks, her chin, down her neck and broad, muscled shoulders.
"Hehe, that tickles." Brittany giggled when Santana reached her ribs.
"I need a drink," she said at last. "What the hell are you wearing by the way?"
"Oh, these are my dad's. He's not a very tall man... or very smart... anyway, can I sleep over tonight? My parents were behaving kinda strangely when I left. Dad said something about how people on the other side lived?"
"Yeah, sure." Santana replied, trying not to imagine what Mr Pierce meant by that.
Santana lay on her stomach facing her girlfriend while clutching her pillow tightly, almost on the verge of falling into blissful sleep when Brittany's whisper broke into her hazy thoughts.
"San?"
"Huh?" She hummed, not bothering to open her eyes.
"I lied." The blonde mumbled, "I wasn't trying to turn into a unicorn. Even though that would've been really cool. I... I sort of got this idea back when we had just started hanging out, like more than friends. I saw how much you were suffering that we had to hide our relationship. I saw you struggle. I knew you were hurting, so I sometimes dreamed about what it would've been like if one of us had been a boy. I mean, that would literally put an end to all our problems, right? So I thought about it a lot. Then one day I was going through my stuff, I stumbled upon those little booklets that literally screamed at me that my dream could become reality, I only had to reach out and grasp it. Of course, it seemed difficult to the point of impossibility, but as Walt Disney once said, 'if you can dream it, you can do it'."
"Oh, Brittany..." Santana breathed.
"I love you so much, San. I'd do anything for you. Even become a stupid boy if it means I'll get to see you smile. Hey, please don't cry. Don't be sad, be happy instead." She tried to sound lighthearted, but her voice still shook from emotions. She swallowed, a half-smile grazing her thin lips and wiped away tears from her girlfriend's eyes.
"Oh, B..." The girl kept mumbling, unable to everything she felt into words. She wasn't even words powerful enough even existed. Words that would tell Brittany how much Santana loved her. How much she worshipped her and everything that she was.
She took Brittany's larger hand in her own trembling one and pressed her lips tightly against her girlfriend's knuckles. "I love you so much, too. Brittany." She said after she calmed down enough to speak. "I love everything about you. I love that you're a girl. And I'm happy I got to fight my fears for us and because of that grow stronger, become better. I wouldn't change a single thing about you Brittany S. Pierce, because you're perfect just the way you are.
"And you're probably the only boy in the universe I could ever love." She added with a laugh, scratching the stubble on Britt's chin teasingly. "Hell, I wouldn't even care if you were an alien from outer space!"
Brittany laughed too, wiping away her own tears. "That's good."
"Yep, but you should totally convert yourself right back, because I'm starting to miss my girlfriend's pretty face. I'm really proud of you, by the way. You're too much for this stinkin world." With that Santana settled back against her pillows, ready to say farewell to the strangest day of her life.
"Yeah, about that... um the accumulator sort of blew?.. And I'm sort of stuck..."
"What?!"
"Only until I build a new one. Couple of weeks tops. Promise!"
"Brittany..."
"By the way, did you know my dad's Stephen Hawking?"
"..."
AN I've had this idea for some time now and I thought I might as well do something with it seeing as other stories are not coming along very well.
