Author's Note: Apparently, I feel the need to manifest my feelings with angst. Since I'm not really down with the D, this will the first and last time she will be making any kind of appearance in anything I write. I'm just going to go ahead and say that I'm dedicating this to my own personal pain in the ass, the lovely Chuckleshan, who's been on me about writing this since the minute we heard about the not-Brittana situation. Title comes from Adele's Someone Like You.
Being a genius isn't all it's cracked up to be. Apparently, inventing a code that was somehow supposed to change the world was like, a really huge deal. Honestly though, I didn't see how those numbers, the now famous (if you're in the type of circle where people discuss those things, I'm really not) Brittany Code even mattered. It was impossible for me to feel like a genius, not when I couldn't even figure out the one thing that ever really mattered, not when I kept letting it be destroyed time after time. No one expects me to feel sad about things like that, about her, half of the world thinks my mind is consumed by unicorns and rainbows, while the other half thinks it's numbers and formulas. No one realized that what it was really consumed with, what it's always been consumed with, even when I'd managed to pretend otherwise for everyone's sake, was her.
With all of the classes they had me taking at MIT, all of the homework I had to do, all of the books that I had to read and re-read until my mind went so numb that they actually started to make sense, I hardly ever had time to do anything I wanted to do. I didn't have time to make friends there, didn't have time to talk to my old friends, didn't have time to talk to the one person I really wanted to speak to, even if she had responded to one of the thirty-eight text messages I'd sent her (she hadn't). But every Sunday morning, I did manage to find time to do something for myself, something that I always knew I was good at, even before it was decided that I was better at something else. The big, old, hallowed classrooms of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were empty every Sunday, and each week, I picked a different one, hit the shuffle button on my iPhone and just let myself dance.
When this particular Sunday started, nothing seemed to be different about the day. I put on one of my old Cheerios t-shirts and a pair of sweatpants, pulled my hair back into a bun, snuck into one of the classrooms in the Aerospace Engineering building, and prepared to start my usual routine. I should have known that the day was going to be very different when the second song, the one that started after Mirrors, was one I hadn't heard in more than two years. I wasn't even sure how the song got on my playlist, maybe some weird computer glitch (I was in a place where people programed computers, maybe a virus transmitted to my phone somehow? I don't know, I wasn't really sure how any of that worked) or maybe a weird act of fate, but the song that began to play was one that I hadn't wanted to hear, not since my head stopped allowing the voice that sang it to register like banana cream pie, but instead, the purest form of human pain, a sound worse than every last unicorn in the world dying at exactly the same time, the sound of her voice as she suffered.
The force of trying not to remember knocked me from my feet, and I sat with my back against the wall, just listening. It physically hurt me to hear it, and I grabbed my chest, seriously convinced that I was having a heart attack. Maybe it would have been better if I'd been in the Biology building, maybe there would have been some doctor type who could have checked my heart, you know, just in case. After a minute and fifteen seconds, I finally realized that I wasn't dying, I was just feeling all of the heartbreak all over again, everything that I'd been through with her, everything that I so desperately regretted. I didn't realize that I'd been crying, and that I'd been blocking out just how much I'd truly missed her, first with another stupid boy, and then with the school that she had encouraged me to go to. I didn't want a boy, I didn't want school, the only thing I had ever really wanted was her.
Long after the song ended and Robin Thicke started playing, I still hadn't moved from my spot on the floor. I wasn't even sure just how long I'd stayed there, but at some point, my phone buzzed with an incoming message and I hoped against all hope that it was her, finally answering any of mine. I shouldn't have been surprised when it wasn't, I shouldn't have been surprised when it was Tina Cohen-Chang, who had probably sent a greater number of unanswered messages to me about ridiculous gossip that I couldn't bring myself to care about, and I probably shouldn't have been surprised when I finally processed the single word that showed up on my screen. Actually, it wasn't even a word, and even as someone who'd once made up her own secret language, I couldn't believe that a horrible made up word, a portmanteau, I think the actual genius word is, could hurt so much. There, taunting me from the screen, was a word that ended with Tana and did not start with Brit. All at once, completely beyond my control, every time one of us caused the other (and our own self, in the process) unbearable pain flashed through my mind.
Sex is not dating.
I'm not making out with you because I'm in love with you.
I would totally be with you if it weren't for Artie.
I honestly don't know what I was thinking.
I'm dating Karofsky now.
I said 'I love you' and you didn't say it back.
I can't.
I'm not graduating.
We should just do the mature thing.
I miss you.
This is my girlfriend, Elaine.
I'm not breaking up with Sam.
I shook my head, trying to erase all of those memories, all of the heartbreak. That was the thing that all of the genius in the world couldn't figure out, how it was possible that Santana Lopez and I could love each other so much, she'd promised me more than she'd ever love anyone else, and I knew the same was true for me, and yet we just couldn't stop breaking each other's hearts?
It was impossible to stop myself as I dragged myself up off of the floor, grabbed my phone, grabbed the bag full of books that I'd been planning on reading in the library later and half sprinted the entire way to the bus station in Cambridge. The rational part of me knew that I wasn't being fair, that I'd been the one who officially ended our relationship, been the one who had told her to go to New York, told her to find a girlfriend, and I thought I'd been doing for the most unselfish reasons possible. But I couldn't be unselfish anymore, I couldn't lose her to someone else. If there was one thing I knew more than almost anything else about Santana Lopez was that she didn't open her heart up easy, but when she did, she was all in. If I was too late, if I'd wasted too much time not figuring it out, then I'd lose her for good, and every single dream I still had stored somewhere in the back of my mind, even after everything, would go up in flames.
After four hours, two-hundred-twenty-two miles, a forty-three dollar cab ride and a ridiculous amount of stairs later, I was pounding on a heavy wooden door. I wasn't surprised at who answered the door, not in the slightest. The extremely loud, extremely short girl standing there shrieked with excitement first, then got miraculously quiet as a dark look crossed her face. It was that look that terrified me more than anything ever had in my life, the look that told me, without words, that Santana was home, and that Santana wasn't home alone. Somewhere in the distance I heard Rachel calling out her name frantically, but wasn't really listening as I pushed past her and ripped back the red sheets that hung from a curtain rod, the red sheets I knew were hers, the red sheets I'd slept on, the red sheets I'd done more than sleep on.
I fought the urge to throw up the Skittles I'd eaten for breakfast, in what felt like another life, as I took in the scene. Red and white uniforms draped over a chair, so similar to a different set of red and white uniforms, taunting me, making me feel, for the first time in my life, the urge to physically harm someone. When I finally let my eyes shift over to the bed, I silently thanked the evil dwarf in the sky for the fact that the woman staring at me with burning black eyes, and her friend were fully clothed, sprawled out watching a movie. Of their own accord, my eyes narrowed as I saw the other blonde girl's hand on my Santana's thigh, and I understood the degree of her rage when she came back to Lima and saw me with Sam. Maybe it wasn't natural, maybe it wasn't healthy, but the two of us had always felt this entitled possession when it came to the other, no matter who we were dating. I looked back and forth between the two of them, my scowl never fading, and I knew, deep within my heart that the hadn't slept together, and I knew that she didn't love her, at least not yet. I wasn't too late.
"Brittany." She finally spoke, her voice housing both anger and fear. "Why are you here?"
"This." I nearly hissed, shifting my gaze between the two of them.
"Hi." The other girl said, far too cheerily, and that's coming from me. She was obviously trying to diffuse the awkward situation, but I was having none of it. "I'm-"
"I don't care." I said holding up my hand and closing my eyes, maybe if kept them closed long enough, the entire past year would just go away and I'd be back, laying in Santana's arms, getting to tell her every day that I loved her, not having to hide that fact for a million useless reasons.
"Alrighty." She chirped, looking at me strangely. "Well I'm gonna go, obviously you two have some issues to work out."
"That's a good idea."
"You don't have to go." Santana pleaded at exactly the same time.
"Yeah, Santana, I do. This is something you have to deal with on your own. Call me later, okay?"
"I will." She promised and those words stoked the fire of my rage even further,
The two of us watched, both for different reasons, as the girl who's name I hoped I never had to learn shoved her uniform in a backpack, grabbed her guitar case (seriously, she was that type? The kind of girl who walked around with a guitar?) and scampered out the door, shooting one last meaningful look, a look that I wanted to slap off her face, back at Santana. She said something to Rachel on the other side of curtain wall, and Rachel shrieked about 'getting out before the fireworks started.' When the door slammed, then slammed again, I knew we were alone in the apartment and Santana and I regarded each other cautiously. As I looked in the eyes of the woman I loved so much, I saw a fury there that I'd seen countless times, but never directed at me.
"I'm going to ask you one more time, Brittany." She spat. "Why are you here?"
"I miss you." It wasn't what I'd planned to say, but most of the time, when I open my mouth to speak, I don't get to control what words come out.
"You can't." She said simply, her voice lacking the bite it had just a moment earlier. My words softening her without intending to.
"I can't miss you? Well I can't control that, Santana, I'm always going to miss you when you're not-"
"No." She cut me off. "You can't just show up here like this. It's not fair to me."
"None of this is fair. None of this has ever been fair. I've loved you since the day I met you, and I waited for you for years. And when I finally got you, I screwed it all up by being stuck at stupid McKinley, feeling bad for myself because all I wanted was to be good enough for you. And I wasn't, I couldn't even graduate high school, and you're you, you just radiate this awesomeness, and I couldn't hold you back." I could feel the tears running down my cheeks and I couldn't look at her, couldn't let her stop all the words I was trying to get out in a single breath. "But now, I'm trying to be good enough, trying to be the kind of girl you should have, and I've been trying to talk to you. But you ignore me, and then Tina sent me a text message, and I'm so scared that now I don't get a chance to prove that I am."
"You always were, good enough, better than good enough." Her words were hardly a whisper, and I finally let my eyes meet hers. "But it doesn't change anything."
"Why? Why does it always have to be so hard?"
"My mom said if it's not hard, then it's not worth it. Britt, I love you, but we can't be together, not right now. We tried the long distance thing, it doesn't work. I'd come to Boston in an instant, if I thought that was going to solve our problems, but I think we need to learn how to be ourselves, without each other, before we can really be together."
"But what if...?" I trailed off, not able to voice my fears about the girl who'd left the room not ten minutes earlier.
"She's just some girl, no more important that all the stupid boys. I like her, she's fun to be around, but she's not everything." Santana grabbed my chin between her thumb and forefinger. "You, Brittany Pierce, are everything. No one else has ever stood a chance in my cold, unfeeling heart. You're going to go back to Boston, and I'm going to stay here, I'm going to learn how to be Santana, and you're going to learn how to be Brittany. We'll date people, we'll sleep with people, but I already know how our story ends."
"How?" I asked, barely daring to hope that she still had the same dreams I did.
"We'll find out way back to each other, because we always have, and I know that the next time we do, it will be for good, all the heartbreaking will finally stop. We'll get married in an apple orchard in October, like we've always said, we'll have babies together, you'll teach them to dance and I'll teach them to sing, and every day, we'll tell them that they are so lucky, because their moms always knew they loved each other even when the time wasn't right to be together. And when we're old, and some smart ass grandson of ours, a little boy who looks just like me, comes to our nursing home and says 'abuela, stop kissing grandma," I'll threaten to smack him on the mouth, and then you'll tell him the same thing, that he's so lucky to be around two people who love each other so much. That's where our story ends Britt, when we are old and grey, and we die in each other's arms."
"You still believe that." I marveled, unable to break away from her gaze.
"I don't just believe it. I know it, it's the only thing I've ever known."
"And the other people?"
"They'll know too. Sam knew, D-the girl who's name I can tell you don't want to hear, she knows. It's like our names are written right here." She pressed her fingers against my chest and I felt a spark at the contact. "I don't know when we'll get it right, but I know we will."
"Yeah, I know it too. I just got scared today."
"I know. I got scared last year too."
Without another word, Santana covered my mouth with hers, and even though the kiss was chaste it was the seal on a promise. It wasn't like the kiss I'd given her last year, when I had to convince her to leave, this one was real. We didn't have to be scared, we didn't have to ever worry that we'd lose one another. Everyone else was just there, while we were forever, in any universe, under any circumstances. When we finally pulled apart, I squeezed Santana's hand one last time and turned to walk without looking back. I didn't need to, I needed to look ahead, keep moving towards the moment where we'd finally get it right. I will never let you go, I heard her whisper, but it wasn't with words, it was her heart telling mine, and mine was saying back I will never let you.
End Note: And there you have it. Keep shipping Brittana, everyone, because they're forever! And until they're back together and it's (relatively) safe to watch Glee again, go watch the Me Against the Music video or something. Better yet, go read ishlheard2day's My Kind of Love (second shameless plug in as many days) the best part of anti-SHITtana week (totally needs to be a thing!)