Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, etc through 52nd cycle. Now cycle 53!

THIRD ANNIVERSARY CYCLE: It's late October again, and within this cycle I will be completing my third year of daily gleekathon stories and commencing a fourth! As in previous years, this means special things happening. I've selected my favorite stories from throughout the year, and I'll be treating them to something special. In previous years this included Prequel, Sequel, and POV Swap, and then Additional Scenes and Alternate Endings. This year I'm adding two new treatments: Genre Swap (I think that's pretty straightforward) and Element Change (I change one thing in the story, see how it affects the rest). Note that in both these cases and some of the others, there may excerpts directly transferred from the story it references. Also, since this year saw the addition of 'shift days', and since I suck at picking, I have selected 42 stories, to be treated two per day! So here we go!

This story is a Genre Swap to A Flash of Darkness, a Brittana story, originally posted on January 14 2012.

This is a double shift day. There will be one more upload today: Must Love Dogs.

"Fear As Sentence"
Santana/Brittany

Genre: Sci-fi

(Author confessional: The original pre-swap story is possibly my favorite thing
I've ever written, and the swap version is just as special to me... Yep ;))

They would all be there to witness her break. It was their right, she guessed, to treat what was about to happen to her as a spectacle. No one would clap, or cheer. They would stand there quietly and just watch. She had no way to contest it. She had done the crime, and this was how they saw fit to punish her.

It didn't actually kill you, but it made you wish it did. As sentences went, this was the one that could get the hardest souls pleading for mercy. Santana Lopez wouldn't plead. It wouldn't save her, nothing could.

Within the hour, she would be led into the chamber, strapped to a bed. The straps were necessary; the process was a traumatic and violent one. The implants would be set via two needles, inserted at either side of her head. They would burrow deep, find the place where they would settle, and then... and then at the stroke of midnight they would be activated.

Once the implants became active, those who were in attendance, her witnesses and the implantation staff, would all stand back to watch. They would see her lose her grip with reality.

The implants were set to connect with the parts of her brain where fear and love resided and then make them join in the most frightening way possible. No one knew what it would do to any one individual, it always depended. But the results spoke for themselves. The sentence was only handed in very specific cases, some would say 'when death just isn't enough.' Seeing the implanted, years, even months into their sentence, it was enough to put the fear in anyone that it should happen to them. If you were lucky, your body would give out before the end of your sentence. She didn't have to worry about that: she had three consecutive sentences to go through... she was never getting out.

There was only one moment where she honestly could say she had been afraid, but no one would know. Because the moment she had felt herself plead was the second after she had felt the needles. And then the pulse came and her eyes trembled shut.

At first, she saw nothing. Complete darkness. Was she still alive, had she died? It wasn't unheard to have had a condemned person die before the process reached completion. Their hearts would give out from that fear alone, before their volitions took a backseat.

Then she heard it.

Laughter. Her laughter. Deep down she had known, she really had. She knew they would use her to break her psyche. Of course she said that, but the fact was they had no say in the matter. That was how it worked. They created their own nightmares, and her own was about to come to life.

Brittany had been the one infallibly good thing in her life, the one who gave her reason to keep hoping, keep moving, when everything else in the world told her there was no such thing as joy, only sorrow. It had been losing her which had led her here, the trigger to her own personal hell.

Was she alive or dead, she didn't know. They wouldn't tell her, and her attempts to find this out had created a path of destruction, both physical - to others - and psychological - to herself.

The first sound had been followed by the first image, and if her laughter had been unsettling on its own, to see her face, in all its brightness, was enough to turn her repentant. She had almost forgotten the effect of her smile, almost, because she could never be completely out of her mind. Being apart from her though, all she'd had left of her was an idea, a memory. She had no idea her memories could be as clear as this, but then these were accessed by virtue of the implants, so they would be stronger... What she was seeing now was proof positive of this.

As of yet, there was nothing like pain, not the kind she would expect from her sentence, and now that she knew the weapon it had chosen, she knew one thing: she would have welcomed her heart giving out before it started.

If she had been experiencing the slow climb, then the big fall was about to begin. All of a sudden it was like she was living several lives at once, there were just too many images at once. They would be one place and then another, her and Brittany, sometimes Brittany alone... everything would be perfect, in ways she hadn't experienced in so long, or ever... and now the fear augmented. That was the thing, it wasn't just about presenting memories to you, that would be too easy. Instead, the implants fabricated events. It was so close to what they knew and, after a while, it would be impossible to tell if what they were seeing was theirs or part of the implants' creation.

And now she discovered what it would be doing to her, for the rest of her life... because now her precious memories were being invaded by darkness.

She saw her die. She saw it over and over again, in every terrible way she had caused others to lose their life, now it was passed on the one she had always sworn to protect. Sometimes it would play with her, let her think maybe she could save her, but always she would fail, and the blonde would die at her hand, those blue eyes looking at her, even when she shouldn't have been able to, with confusion, pain, and betrayal. There was no way to stop it. One would end, only to be replaced by another.

If they intended to have her fall, then she would plummet, on and on...

"Santana... Can you hear me? Santana, please wake up... Can you hear me?"

She couldn't count how many times she had lost her, how many... But there had been so many variations that she had lost count. Now in this one her face was swimming blurily overhead... She could only know it was her from the sound of her voice. She tried to tell her to get away from her, like she always did, for what little good it did. Only her throat felt unmovable, and words wouldn't come. Still when she felt her hands, she tried to push her away, as best she could, before the inevitable took its course. She knew how it would end, but she had to try.

"Stop, Santana, listen to me!" the voice begged. "I've deactivated your implants. You're waking up." This was a new one, she had to say, but all the new ways the implants found to mess with her felt that way the first time they played out. "Please, you have to come with me, we have to get out of here before they realize something's up. I'm going to give you a shot, I... I'm sorry..."

Why Brittany was apologizing, Santana didn't know, especially since she was the one about to be killed ag...

She felt fire in her veins, in every part of her, and she shot bolt upright with a ragged gasp. She panted, looking around, and then her eyes fell on the figure standing there, covered head to toe. She pulled the mask from her face though, and...

"Brittany?" her voice sounded like she had swallowed glass. Her hand reached out, frightened, hesitant... But she touched her face and... In her mind, the nightmares always felt real, but only because of how detached it had made her from actual contact. Feeling the real thing, it could never compare, especially now... Unless they had reached sadistic new lows...

The blonde had removed one of her gloves, pressing her hand over the one laid on her face, and now Santana knew... This was real, she was awake, and Brittany was alive, here in front of her. She could only reach to bring her arms around her.

"We have to go," Brittany cried.

"How long?" she had to ask.

"Took me two years to find which center they kept you in, one more to figure out how to get you out."

"Three years..." she breathed.

"We have to go."

She still expected to have the rug pulled out from under her. Even as they evaded the center, even as they went to the surgeon who would remove the implants, even as they ran and began their life again, from nothing, with nothing, because they could never be found. She still expected to turn around and kill her and realize this had all been a cruel ruse. Even as years passed, with happiness all their own, she lived with the shadow hanging overhead.

And she would until the day she died.

THE END

A/N: This is a one-shot ficlet, which means that signing up for story alert will not bring you any alerts.
In the event of a sequel, the story will be separate from this one. And as chapter stories go, they are
always clearly indicated as such [ex: "Days 204-210" in the summary] Thank you!