Rating: T
Warnings: Major Character Death, Single Mention of Blood
Summary: They could summarize how Brittany worked in three of her paintings.
Disclaimer: I don't own Glee, nor am I affiliated with any of its owners.
Brittany liked painting. She didn't take art class anymore because she'd taken it freshman year and found out that the teacher only liked your art when it was pencil lines and then an apple in black and white on your page. Brittany didn't want to do that, so she had got Santana to teach her how to pick the lock to the art supply closet after school halfway through the year so that she could paint in the gross sweater colours of the girl in her French class, the colour of Santana lighting up whenever she linked pinkies with Brittany, and the colour of the shimmer in the eyes of the boy her last boyfriend and the boyfriend before that liked to toss in the dumpsters.
Santana got the paint out for her, and cut out three meters of card for her to use and then Santana sat in the art room all night and watched Brittany spread paint across the page and she never said a word when some of the paint got on her best jeans even though when Puckerman had touched them she'd threatened him with loud words in Spanish and then he got the message to back off and didn't touch them anymore. She was finished at six in the morning and she gave the painting to Santana, who drove home just so she could put it up in her bedroom.
She forgot how during the next lesson and the closet broke and she got a two day suspension because the school thought she was stealing, and she wasn't allowed in the art rooms anymore. Some of the other kids thought she was cooler now, so she took it in her stride and asked for some paints for Christmas.
She didn't get to paint again until December of her sophomore year.
She started on her bedroom wall, because she liked having the space and her walls were white and she always thought that white was a colour that needed to be filled up. Her little sister came up the stairs halfway through and told on her to her mom, who took the paints away but agreed that they could paint over the walls in bright pink, but Brittany took a picture of the wall and posted it on Facebook and it got 60 likes and Santana downloaded it onto her computer and sent the picture to Brittany to prove it.
The next time she got to hold a paintbrush, it was because Coach Sylvester graffiti-d on the walls of the choir room and Mr Schue wants them to paint over them again as a bonding exercise. He gave them odd, big brushes that rolled when she used them, and there was just white paint so she painted up the walls and then dabbed her fingers in it so that there was something more than white, and then Mr Schue told her to stop and then looked up at what she had done and told her that actually, it was okay, they wouldn't paint over it.
When she moved in with Santana, she bought her own paints and Santana said that she could have the bedroom wall to paint on whenever she wanted, so Brittany spent any time she wasn't finding the biggest prime number (she'd done it three times in the past month, so they had $30,000) or leading dance sessions for Weight Watchers or having sex with Santana painting on it.
Halfway into February Brittany got sick, and she was coughing up red mud in heatwave and Santana found her cross legged on the floor smearing it across the walls and called an ambulance and-
Some art people took the wall out, really carefully, and gave Santana $1500 to put it up in their gallery with a note on its creator, and Santana agreed and then moved back in with Rachel and Kurt and Blaine and they took her back in with all sympathetic smiles and gentle touches and suddenly Brittany's legacy is going to be remembered because of the math and the paints because Brittany was a genius and everyone else was just a naysayer but Santana refuses to let anyone have the freshman painting and she displays it on the wall of the HummelAnderson-Berry-LopezPierce home.
Nothing else is said about it.
Author's Note: This is a warm-up fic - as in - I haven't published any fanfiction for Glee since I was 12 (13?) and I'm just getting back into the swing of it. I can think of a million directions that would make this about 100 times more meaningful and 100 times less needlessly depressing, but unfortunately I only thought of those after I'd finished writing more introspective deathfic.
And pretty much you should tell me how to improve for future fic-purposes because
a) I'm rusty
b) I'd like to get back into the swing of it all
and
c) I want to write something worthwhile
So, in short, this is less a fic and more a gauge of where I need to improve. Thank you if you've read this, friends!
