Title: Nothing's Changed
Inspired By: Insomnia
Word Count: 1k - ish
Disclaimer: Glee and its characters do not belong to me.
Summary: Santana was different now, she just couldn't see how.
Description: Preseason 1, Brittana first time reflective. Santana's POV. Ficlet
Though we falter, we don't have to fall
And I can see that nothing's changed at all
- The Calling
Santana tipped her chin down then up. She rotated her head about to try and catch her face at different angles, watched her eyes as they darted across the reflective surface and bounced back and forth and yet, no matter how she changed her point of view, she couldn't see anything different about her own face. She stepped back from the sink, dark brown focus still on the image in the mirror above it and untied the robe she'd just thrown on haphazardly moments before. She tilted her head one way then the other, pressed her lips in a facsimile of a frown and let the terrycloth material fall off her shoulders and pool on the mat at her feet. She turned, looking first over her left shoulder then her right, but again no matter how she viewed herself she couldn't see it.
There was absolutely nothing visibly different about her.
That realization upset her more than it had the right to and her face twisted itself into a legitimate frown at the audacity of it. Her hands went to her hair out of habit and she'd half twisted the waves of it into a ponytail before she remembered it was the middle of the night and that while Sue Sylvester's reach was long, it couldn't touch her here. Here, in the safely of her own home at three in the morning with Brittany half a dozen yards away asleep in her bed.
With Brittany half a dozen yards away asleep in her bed.
Panic hit her hard in the chest, squeezing the breath from her lungs and setting the organ between them into a flurry of motion that had convinced her for a second that she was having a heart attack. What have you done? she hissed at her reflection, curling her fingers around the lip of the sink and holding on for dear life. She bowed her head and watched the tan skin of her knuckles turn pale under the pressure she put on them. What have I done? she whispered this time, feeling it catch in her throat and tumble passed her lips heavily.
She glanced up and watched the emotions break across her face through the screen her own eyelashes. She had to fix this, had to change it back to the way it was. She had a reputation to protect, an image to portray. She couldn't be this person, be that girl in high school. She couldn't.
Slowly- because the sudden rush of blood back into the digits made her fingers tingle something fierce- she let go of other ceramic piece she'd been using as a anchor and stepped back, bending just slightly to pick the robe up off the floor. Like a puppet on a sting being controlled by an amateur, her movements were unsure and jerky as she put her arms through the sleeves and slid the material over her shoulders but it wasn't her fault. Her mind was elsewhere on more important things like, how did one kicked their best friend out of their bed? What was the protocol in that situation? Was there a protocol?
And, moreover, what if said best friend was one Brittany S. Pierce?
She clicked off the bathroom light and opened the door, trying to be as quiet as possible, but she got no further than a step over the threshold into her room before she was struck into immobility. The light of the moon whitewashed the normally vibrant colors of her room and made the whole place look like a setting from a dream. A particularly vivid dream with colorless Cheerios uniforms thrown about the room, a pair of spanks hanging precariously from her upright guitar in the corner and Brittany hugging a pillow under her head while she slept soundly in the middle of Santana's queen sized bed. The darker girl trailed her eyes over the pale, smooth planes of her back, watching it rise and fall with each breath she took. She traced the curve of her spine from where it stared under the mess of blonde hair, along over the ridges of her vertebrae just visible with the help of shadows thrown by the moon to where it disappeared under the stark black bed sheet that had bunched at her hips, just below the dip at the small of her back. Her palms itched and the muscles in her forearms clenched as she suppressed the urge to let her fingers follow the trail her eyes had just taken, wanting desperately to walk her fingers over every curve and trace every dip with her tongue.
Santana blushed at the places her mind went and while she didn't know exactly what it meant she did know that she wouldn't be kicking Brittany out of her bed. It very well might have been that she couldn't even if she wanted to. It was there in the way that she knew Brittany smiled in her slept because it was the way her face relaxed, or in the way that she could see the beat of her heart along her skin and the way it hurt that she was so far away that she couldn't lay her hand there and feel it in the warmth created when she touched her best friend.
She pressed her fingers against the lifeline at her throat, feeling the way her blood rushed doubly as subtle muscles under pale skin coiled and Brittany shifted in her sleep, uncurling one hand from its place at her head and reaching out to where Santana normally slept at her side. It landed softly, absently, and Santana's breath caught for an entirely different reason as she took in the scene. She couldn't see, but she knew from the almost disappointed twist in Brittany's hand that she was frowning and her heart once more gave that odd forward feeling lurch that she'd experienced a dozen times or more in the hour preceding this moment.
Something had changed in those hours she'd been with Brittany and it had made her different somehow. And despite the fact that there was nothing obvious about it, she felt it in every fiber of her being. The only thing she didn't know was if it was a good thing or not.