Author's Note: What began as an excuse to write some creepy Brittana smut turned into a story with an actual plot. Whoops. These ain't your Twilight vampires. Vampires aren't real and most behaviors described herein would be highly immoral in real life.
Rating: M, for explicit sex, violence, and gore. Trigger warnings: Dubious consent. Character death.
When I could move again, the first thing I did was open my eyes. I guess that's not surprising, since it's the first thing I do every morning when I wake up. But this was different. This time, I was dead. It wasn't what I was expecting. I mean, being dead or opening my eyes. What's the first thing you plan on doing when you die? Nobody had ever asked me, probably because it was the kind of question that only I would ask.
I don't remember how I died. I do remember being dead though. My senses came back to me, one at a time. Hearing first, I remember my family's voices. Then feeling. I felt somebody cut me out of the clothes I died in. Change me into something new. I don't know what clothes they were, because somebody had already closed my eyes. Hearing, feeling felt different than they had before, but that makes sense. I'd never heard or felt anything when I was dead before. They felt better. More. I just remember these sensations, but at this point, there was no me to put them together, no me to think about them.
I think me surfaced when Santana stood over me at my funeral. Like I needed to orient my consciousness around somebody else before I could put myself back in my brain. That's when I realized I was dead. I am dead, I thought.
I had done a lot of thinking about dying a couple of years ago, when Coach Sylvester wanted to shoot me out of the cannon. What would it feel like? Would it be scary? Who would miss me? Would I miss anyone? Would I fly out of my body? Would I go somewhere else? But here I was and now I could start to answer all those questions.
Santana stood over me, and my new self slid into place around her. I listened to her with my new ears and felt the air with my new skin and my new self put it all together. It was like painting a picture. Or like the way that a dolphin clicks around the ocean. I've never been a dolphin, but I imagine the way that everything came together in my head was even better than what they can do. Like an image, but it was much better than that.
I am dead, I thought, because Santana is crying and shaking and holding herself up by putting her hands on this thing I'm in. And I realized I was in a coffin, and the scene came to me, the beautiful image, of Santana, standing alone at the front of a room, trying to hold herself up. I felt and heard the vibration and the rumble of other people in the room, and I realized, they were all back there, giving her space. And I thought that was even more beautiful, because Santana was so scared to show her feelings sometimes.
My coffin must have sealed out a lot of what I could have sensed in that moment, and that's probably a good thing. The way everything came through my brain was so, so much. More than anything I'd ever felt before in this world.
Even through the box, I felt Santana's heat. I sensed her smell, even without taking a breath. It flamed out inside me, starting on my face, behind my eyes, curling all the way down through my toes, and wrapping itself in my chest. It tightened there and I had a feeling for the first time that I've had many times since then. It's a mix of being hungry and horny and jealous and excited. I'm pretty sure there isn't a word for that.
Before I died, if I had seen Santana crying like that, I would have reached out and held her and listened to her. I would listen really hard. But dead me was different. First of all, I couldn't move. And second of all, I didn't care. I guess that doesn't sound nice. But at the same time that Santana was snapping the new me into place and tightening my chest, I knew very, very certainly. Santana was going to die too. The crying was only temporary. I could see that coming in the future, sometime soon, sure as I could hear Santana's heart keeping her alive.
They lifted my coffin up. I felt my body shake with the motion and my new mind pieced together all the shaking and all the smells and the heat and sounds into an image for me. I heard the rumble of my Dad, Peter, Mike, Rory, Finn, holding my coffin and walking it to the ground. Felt myself get lowered down. And then the thud of dirt, as they covered me up. And through it all, I listened to Santana's heart and all the other heartbeats, until the soil covered me up so thoroughly I couldn't hear or feel anything but the shifting of all the little dirt crumbs as bugs ran through them.
Like I said, my new senses were different. Better. I noticed things that I didn't notice before. And I had always noticed a lot.
Then I was in the ground. I waited.
It's hard to say how much time passes when you're conscious but you can't see. I wondered if I'd ever be able to move again. Was this what being dead was like for people in Glee Club? You were just frozen, like an ice block, until the end of time? No dancing? Had I missed some kind of bus? Maybe someone was supposed to pick me up. Probably when they called role, they would realize I was missing and come get me. That's how it always happened on field trips. To pass the time, I thought about Santana and the feeling that I got when new me surfaced at my funeral. I liked that feeling. It felt like, like, the moment before you slid yourself down on a boy. Breathless. Wanting. Out of control. But also in control, because you're on top. The harder I thought about that new feeling, the harder I felt it.
Until, like I said, I opened my eyes. I couldn't see anything. It was dark and I was still trapped underground in a box. But I could move.
My hands twitched on top of my chest. Now that I could squeeze them, I felt that I was holding something. I hadn't noticed it before because it was the same temperature as me. With my new touch, I felt it, like the pads of my fingers were eyes.
It was Santana's friendship bracelet. I recognized her on it, little traces left behind by her skin. Like leftover heat on a seat at school. I grasped my wrist. I was still wearing mine. I slid my hands down my body. I was in my Cheerios uniform. I felt the soft, worn material against my hands, and I felt my body underneath it. I felt so good. It felt so good, partly because of the relief that I could finally move and partly because I felt different and dead and so good. That hungry, tight, possessive feeling got even tighter, and my muscles clenched, as I dragged my hands up my bare legs. Then I stopped. Because the first thing you do when you wake up dead is not touch yourself, even if it feels really good. First, you get out of the ground.
I held Santana's bracelet tight in my hand, pulled back my arms, and slammed them as hard as I could against the top of my coffin. And to my surprise, it cracked. After that, it was like running the mile in gym class. You go as fast as you can and afterwards you can't really remember any part of it except that it sucked. I don't know if you've ever been buried underground before, but it's not fun. I reached and I dug and I pulled myself up, until my torso was above ground. Then I stopped for a second.
It was night. But it wasn't like any night I had ever been awake for before. The ground was dusted lightly with snow. And everything was...bright. No, that word wasn't good enough. There was a big difference between night when you're alive and night when you're dead. It was bright and everything moved. I felt like my brain was sparking in a way that it never had before. Everything looked patterned and swirling.
I would say it took my breath away, but I realized then that I hadn't been breathing, which was weird, considering I had just dug myself out of the ground. I tried it. I puffed my chest out and blew my cheeks out like a fish. I let the air out slowly. I felt absolutely no desire to inhale again, the way I might have if I had just surfaced from the deep end of a pool.
I smiled. Yup. I'm dead.
I kicked my legs and pulled myself the rest of the way out of the ground. I stood up. The ground that I had just emerged from looked messed up, so I jumped on the soil to pack it back down. There. Just like making my bed. I put Santana's bracelet on my wrist, next to my own.
Just as I finished making my bed, I was seized by the Feeling. It was worse than it had been in the ground. I needed...something. What was it? I could almost feel it, at the corners of my new senses. No. I could feel it. And hear it and smell it. What was it? I started walking toward it. As I walked, I realized that the new me extended even into the way I moved. I felt like I was gliding. Experimentally, I did a few twirls. Briefly, I wondered why there weren't more dead people dancing, but that smell wafted back into my brain and my heart clenched in my chest. I couldn't pay attention to anything else. I kept walk-gliding. It was so easy to guide myself towards it. I left the cemetery. Went through the streets of Lima. It was quiet. There was no one around. I moved fast, faster than I ever had when I was alive.
There were houses. The streetlights didn't do too much to brighten the street. Not that it made a difference to me. I heard her heart beat before I saw her. Smelled her, rich and floral. It was obvious she didn't hear me coming up behind her. I guess that's because she wasn't dead. I felt sorry for her. But mostly I felt the Feeling.
I didn't know what to do about it. I didn't know how she could help me with it. So I said, "Hi Rachel". It was the first time I had spoken since I had been dead. Speaking without air felt strange. But somehow my new body knew how to do it. My voice sounded different too. No rush of wind. The words just gliding past my throat, the same way I had walked across the ground to get here.
She turned around.
Everything felt really still for a second.
Her face dropped. "Oh my God. Brittany?" I watched her silently, while she tried to figure out what was going on. "I thought you were dead! Are you okay?" I nodded. I wasn't sure what to say. I was dead. And okay.
Then I started moving. I didn't recognize what the Feeling was driving me to do, so I just went with the part of it that I was familiar with. The horny part. I walk glided up to Rachel, and put one arm around her, and the other hand on her face. I think I must have moved really fast, because she suddenly looked terrified.
"What are you doing?" I just looked at her eyes. She was so short, compared to me. Shorter than Santana. Definitely the shortest person I had ever held like this. "Brittany. What is this? Let me go." She tried to push against me. I didn't let her. "Let me go! Something is wrong."
See, I think alive me would have let her go. I really don't want to hurt anybody. And I was obviously scaring her. But dead me had a different idea. My body needed something. The Feeling was so strong and I needed to satisfy it. The heat from her body honestly felt like it was killing me again. But it wasn't, it was just heating me up.
"Let me go. Stop it! Stop it." Rachel kept pushing against me, trying to turn her head away from me, to kick her legs out, to affect my balance, but she couldn't. I was too strong now.
I lowered my head to her ear and said, "Rachel. Be quiet. I need to..." She stopped fighting me, but I couldn't finish my sentence. Getting close to her made me feel something. My new senses could hear her heart racing under her skin, and with each pulse, I could practically see her veins flush with it, with...blood. It was strongest at her neck. I could even see it in the dark. It sparkled, like a stream...
So I sank my teeth into it.
When I fed Lord Tubbington all that glitter and he pooped a candy bar, I told Santana that I ate it, and she rolled her eyes and said, "That's gross, Britt." But I explained that what bodies do is never gross, especially when there is magic involved. And I think that's probably true still. Blood is sticky but it's what keeps things alive. Everything that's alive has some blood in it and that's pretty amazing, don't you think? And now that I know what being dead is like, I can tell you that there is definitely some magic in being alive. Probably in being dead too. But blood seems like a way you can touch life, because you can't touch ideas. You can only touch things that represent them. That's why people get each other wedding rings. Or friendship bracelets.
When I bit her, I broke the skin easily. I was surprised by that. It was like cracking the top of my coffin. Simple. Rachel started and whimpered, and then her body melted into mine while I held her. I was surprised by that too. I mean, I've bitten people on their neck before, but I'd never drawn blood. I would expect it to hurt. But Rachel stopped fighting me altogether, and just, let me.
My tongue darted out and licked the wound I'd created. Her blood was already streaming out of it, so there was more than enough for a swallow. Oh my god. It was so good. I pulled Rachel tighter to my body and kept drinking. It was like there was nothing between us. I felt her hips against my hips and her breasts against my breasts, and I hadn't ever really held a girl this close and this tight except Santana so it felt new and good and hot. But then it seemed like there was really nothing between us, like I had stepped into her body with my own. I felt the heat of her breath against my neck, and then between licks, I would take a breath too. Even though I hadn't needed to breath before, I needed it now. And even though I could hear and feel and taste her heart beating, all of a sudden I realized that mine had started beating again too. It was like I was dead, but I was alive, and it felt so good to feel like I was alive with all of my new dead senses. It felt even better. How could I keep feeling better and better even though I had died?
Rachel and I were hurtling towards something powerful, and I didn't know what it was but I had to get to the end of it, I had to.
Rachel was limp and she wasn't holding herself up at all anymore. Her breath slowed and it rattled in her throat and then her blood stopped too. I took the last of it I could find and swallowed. I felt so good. I felt like I could do a thousand back flips, or jump 10 feet in the air, or run 10 miles in 10 seconds. I was alive and dead and my heart was beating and I could breathe or not breathe, and I could do whatever I wanted.
I felt more powerful than I had when I became senior class president, that's for sure.
I let Rachel go. She collapsed to the ground. I didn't care. I was content to just stand there, while my heart beat and my breath heaved. Until it slowed and I was dead again.
Wow.
Rachel was on the ground, looking pale and...well, dead. I guess she was dead. I guess I killed her. I hadn't even noticed that that was what was happening. There was such a pounding in my ears and that Feeling was holding on to my heart so tightly it had started to beat again. I felt like I had put my head under a waterfall and pulled it out again. But the Feeling was gone. I could think again. I felt less compelled to act not like myself. Or was I acting like myself, now that I was dead? It was confusing. It was hard to tell what was me and what was new. To avoid it, I turned my attention to Rachel. Now that she was dead, I needed to wait for her to wake up. But I couldn't wait here, on the street in Lima. We had to go somewhere, somewhere where no one would find us. I thought I might have trouble explaining that I was dead, and so was Rachel, and everything was fine because being dead wasn't as bad as you think it was.
That seemed more difficult than explaining things to Lord Tubbington. Because he's a cat and I'm a person, and we didn't always see eye to eye, you know. I think it must be the same being a dead person explaining things to an alive person.
I gathered her up in my arms. Her head lolled back. The bite mark on her neck looked ragged. Briefly, I felt a touch of pride at it. I had done that. I had done that and it was so easy and it had made me feel so good.
I wasn't used to being dead yet, and so I wasn't used to thoughts like that. They still made me uncomfortable. I pushed it away.
Which way to go? I needed somewhere quiet. I walked as quickly as I could, quick enough to strain even the new power of my dead legs.
It took me like 20 seconds to walk two blocks. I threw Rachel over my shoulder, the way my dad used to carry me up the stairs when I was a little kid. I remember his shoulder digging painfully into my stomach as I laughed and screamed, half mad that he was hurting me and half delighted that he was picking me up. Having been recently dead, I decided that Rachel would forgive me if I was hurting her like that. She'd tell me in a day or two if she minded.
I broke into a jog. It felt normal to my body but my head hadn't adjusted to moving at these speeds yet. I felt like I imagined being strapped to the bottom of a racecar felt. Really, really fast. In not much time at all, the street lights were gone and I was out past town, where the farmland started to stretch out. Where the sky got really big. The plants poked through a thin layer of snow, making the ground look like someone had dragged a wrecking ball through a building made of cornstalks. I guess that's kind of what happened.
My eyes took it in. With Rachel's body weighing on my shoulder, it was probably better to go across the fields. That way if someone came across us on the roads, they wouldn't get the wrong idea. Where I could, I ducked into the patches of woodland.
There was a cell phone tower in the middle of a field. That would help me figure out where to go. I dropped Rachel at the foot of it and started scaling the handhelds. Not super high, just high enough to see out past the landscape. I didn't need to go very far. My new eyes cut through the air. Up so high, I felt a little bit like an eagle. Then, I spotted it. A shed, out by a pond. Probably a place where they kept hay in the summer. We didn't need much, just the promise of a roof and a door and some privacy. That way, Rachel didn't have to wake up in the ground, like I had.
I scrambled back down the tower, jumping down when I wasn't too high up anymore. I picked Rachel up again and started moving towards the shed I had seen.
When we got there, it wasn't perfect. I mean, it was a shed. But it was next to a pond and my eyes were still bright with the glow of my new vision. I mean, for being the first place I was ever going to spend a night without adults around - that wasn't a hotel or the backseat of a car - it was okay. The inside was empty, except for one corner filled with some boxes and some farm equipment. I laid Rachel propped up against a wall, supported by one of the boxes. Her limbs had started to stiffen out, so she stayed up easier than you might think. Easier than I thought she would, anyway.
I stood up and smiled. She looked so peaceful. "Good night, Rachel," I said, before I walked out and shut the door - gently - behind me.
I stood next to the pond, and looked out over the fields. I don't think it was just my new vision that made everything bright. There was snow on the ground and not many clouds that night. I smoothed my skirt out and sat down. The nice thing about being dead is that I didn't have to worry about dying from the cold. I grasped my knees to my chest and hummed a little. The wind rustled my hair. It was quiet. I thought about Santana and I thought about my family. I wondered if they missed me. They'd be so surprised when I came back. I couldn't wait to tell them that being dead wasn't as scary as they thought. I mean, waking up was scary. That's why I had to stay with Rachel, for when she woke up. I could help her not be scared. It's not like we were best friends or anything, but I couldn't just leave her there, alone, to deal with the Feeling. Plus, I suspected that Rachel wasn't like me. She wouldn't see the good parts in being dead, not right away. She'd probably say something like, "Brittany, how could this happen? I've worked for years to perfect my breath control and now I can't even breathe! This has serious implications for the timbre of my voice!" But that's Rachel. She's always alarmed about imaginary things.
After a while of watching the sky, I got a new feeling. It wasn't The Feeling. It was a different one. It was less like a feeling, more like...a thing I had to do. I stood back up and went back to the shed. I found a chair and propped it against the door. I was glad the shed had no windows. That way, no one would bother us. I didn't think anybody would.
I got on the floor next to Rachel. It wasn't so bad. It was good to have a friend there, in a strange place. It didn't even bother me that the floor was hard. I guess I was tired, cause my eyes shut and I passed into sleep without trying too hard at all.
When you're alive, and you sleep, it's like a little death. You lie there and don't think of anything in particular. But your brain ticks away for you, building its own little worlds. Sleeping when you're dead is not like that. You're just dead. When you wake up, you sort of have the sensation of what happened outside of you - the sun rose, a bird sang a song somewhere close by, and far away, too far away to worry you, cars drove on a road - but inside you? Nothing.
Even though I like most parts of being dead, I do miss dreams.
I waited for Rachel to wake up. I waited for 3 days. I'm pretty patient. I waited for Santana. I took care of Lord Tubbington. I babysat my sister. I think most people would lose their patience with those three, but not me. Now that I was dead, it was easier. I could really just sit there, really still. I made a game out of it. I never felt the same urge to twitch that I had felt when I was alive. All my movements were just, deliberate. That included my not movements too.
During the time while I waited, I always slept through the day. I guess I had started to realize what had happened to me after the second day I slept through. I'd never been much of a night owl. Early Cheerios practice got me up at dawn, sometimes before. You'd go to sleep early too if you wanted to be cheerful by the time Coach was yelling at you through a megaphone. But now I slept right through the sun. It was strange. I had always loved the sunshine. On the surface of my brain, I thought, "Gee, I miss the sun." But deeper inside, in the very center, it felt right to only be awake at night. It was that deeper feeling that alerted me to something being different inside me, that maybe I wasn't just dead. Maybe something else had changed.
I think it was too cold for bugs, but the body started to change. And after 3 days, it occurred to me that those changes hadn't happened for me. No. I'd gotten stronger, paler, colder, more sensitive. But I hadn't actually started to feel dead. And I didn't smell dead. Rachel did. Her body was decaying. I remembered it from an experiment we had done in science class.
The worst part was that it didn't even gross me out. I knew that it should but it didn't. And every once in a while during those 3 days, I'd stare at the mark on her neck. And I knew that, that, I had made it with my teeth. Without thinking about it. Because I'd been hungry. Hungry for, for...
In that moment, I hated her. I had hated her before and I hated her right then. How could she have been outside? How could she be the one who I did it to? And then, twisted, I hated her too for all the other feelings that bubbled up in me. The pride I had felt at killing her. The way that finishing her off had been like sex. The way that I had enjoyed the power of it.
Worst of all, the sense of justification. That she had deserved it. Hadn't she? The things she let Finn do to Santana. The things she had done to Santana. And to me. The way she ridiculed us when she should have known better. Didn't she deserve it?
"I hate you," I said to her body. It didn't say anything back. Because she was dead. I wasn't dead. She was dead. "I hate you. I hate you." It felt good to say it out loud so I did it again. "I hate you, Rachel Berry." And then all the anger that I felt, just came out of me. Hard. Through my hands. I grabbed her body like it was 40 pounds instead of however much she really was and I heaved it against the wall. It made a sickening smack. I picked up the tools and the other random crap in that shed and I threw it all against the walls. The metal bent over the force of my throws. God, I was so much stronger. I didn't cry. I just kept throwing things. Finally, I walked up to a wall, and I just started punching it. Hard. And every time my knuckles split, not enough blood came out. And then I'd watch it seep back into the skin and the split would heal itself right back up. And I'd punch the wall, until it happened again.
I knew what I was. I'm not stupid.