Chapter 6: A Normal Day at the Circus

Thursday, June 30th, 1898: Correctionville, Iowa

Santana won't remember it when Puck comes in late and she wakes to see him silhouetted against the flaps of the tent, which stand partially opened, showing the starry sky. She won't remember that he breathes in wet, cold puffs, his exhalations visible against a backdrop of Ursa Major and Draco. She'll see the outline of his hat but not the features of his face, and nothing about the moment will linger in her mind. She won't recall how Puck pauses when she stirs or their conversation after that.

"What time is it?"

"After midnight. Get some rest, ladybird."

"You never sleep."

His long silence following her observation won't print into her memories. She won't remember turning on the cot or him, quiet, still, crouched beneath the threshold. She won't recall how he waits, watching her suspended between dreams and doing, between somewhere faraway and being here, with him.

She won't remember any of it—and especially not the part when she closes her eyes again.

Her first recollection of the day will come what seems like just a moment later, when Puck sets a hand on her shoulder.

"It's four o'clock, ladybird. Time to wake up," he says.

(She remembers Brittany the way dry earth remembers rain.)


Puck has brought Santana coffee and hotcakes in bed, and he sits on the grass, watching her eat, wearing a reverent expression. The fact that Puck watches her unnerves her; she doesn't know why Puck seems so interested in her today, like he can't puzzle her out, no matter how long he remains at her feet. Santana feels glad for the darkness, shrouding her and Puck from each other, hiding her ill-at-ease blush from him beneath shadows, and particularly as she knows she wounded Puck's ego yesterday in the big top, ignoring him while he talked to her about pillars of light and tourist spots in Paris.

The strange thing is that it seems as if Puck has forgiven her for that now—or at least forgotten about it.

Puck's unexpected ease around her causes Santana to feel awkward for her unease around him.

Puck wears a softness under the morning dark. He takes Santana's plate and cup from her when she finishes her meal and sets them gently on the grass before sitting up on his knees, leaning toward Santana where she sits on the cot.

"G'morning, ladybird," he says, his heat warming her space, his body pressing close to her. "Did you have sweet dreams? You kept smiling in your sleep."

He doesn't wait for Santana to answer his question before he presses a kiss below her ear, his lips hot on her skin, his chin rough from shaving. He smells like the almost-mint of menthol, and, beneath that, choking tobacco chaw and sweat. His lips slide from her ear to her cheek, ungraceful, and she swallows and feels his breath against her skin. His mouth works over Santana's temple and along her jaw line, and she remains as still as grass stalks with no wind to disturb them. Something closes inside of Santana, and she doesn't breathe and doesn't curl to him.

Puck seems to notice her stillness. He sits up on his knees, closer to her ear. "It's okay to like what you like, ladybird," he whispers, his voice husky, fat with something that Santana doesn't want to think about.

He smells and feels warmer now than he did a second ago. Santana can't look at his face. She stares straight ahead, an animal tremble running through her breastbone, all the way down through her fingertips. There's just too much of Puck everywhere; his smell and heat and mass overwhelm Santana and make her want to gag.

Just as Puck moves to kiss her mouth, the morning bell rings, jarring him away from her.

Santana lets out the breath she held all at once.

The doors inside her remain closed and locked.

(Puck will never have the key.)


Of course, Santana searches for Brittany on the way to the train depot, and, of course, she doesn't find her. It hardly matters, though—not when it takes the circus less than forty minutes to make it from Cherokee, Iowa to Correctionville, Iowa via train, and especially not when Santana dozes through most of the ride, tired to her bones.

Puck calls Correctionville a little piss of a town, and, despite his crassness, Santana can't help but agree.

Correctionville's main street boasts shops, a post office, various businesses, and a pharmacy, but very few side streets. Overall, the place seems sparse and less settled than some of the other towns Santana has visited since joining the circus.

Based on what Santana observes, Correctionville itself only encompasses about twenty or so houses on the whole—though, judging by the crowds that line the street, it wouldn't surprise Santana to learn that the population of Correctionville also includes the occupants of some countryside farmhouses beyond the town proper.

Despite the early hour, many dozens of people line the main street along the parade route, and they whoop and holler for the circus when they see it. The awe and excitement bright upon their faces suggests that Correctionville has seldom encountered anything quite as exciting as the J.P. Adams & Son Traveling Circus & Menagerie. Santana feels a strange swell of pride in bringing a thrill to the hoi polloi, though she knows she personally plays but a very small role in creating the circus mystique.

Santana hadn't expected anything exciting to happen during today's parade—and particularly considering the fact that she doesn't even get to spend it with Brittany, like she did yesterday—so it comes as a complete shock to her when a loud bell rings out over the triumphal march, and a half-dozen wagons not belonging to the circus pour onto the street just in front of the circus processional.

The wagons emerge from a large wooden shed at the side of a brick building and take to the street in a mad rush. At first, Santana thinks that the new wagons must be an intrusion and a mistake, but then she realizes that none of the other circus performers seems startled to see the wagons joining the file. Instead, they just continue on as usual, as if they had expected the wagons to appear.

Upon her second glance, Santana realizes that the wagons belong to the Correctionville Fire Brigade, for so it says written in pretty gilded print all up and down the barrel sides of their biggest apparatuses.

The wagons resemble no wagons that Santana has ever seen before, even traveling with a circus which transports all manner of bestiary and the trappings necessary to construct a whole tent city wherever it should settle; all of the fire brigade wagons look jigsaw queer and utterly alien, like something one of Mr. Verne's mad inventors dreamt up in the haze of an opium reverie, with ladders, hatchets, leather buckets, and cabinetry attached to them.

The wagon that rides at the head of the processional reminds Santana of an open-backed landau, except for the fact that it features a large brass boiler rising up from its carriage rather than seats for passengers. Various levers and valves protrude from the boiler, which shines so brightly against the morning glare than Santana finds she can't look directly at it, lest it blind her, its own small sun.

A great, leather drum sits high alongside the driver on his seat, pivoting on a hanger, so that it can move here or move there, but Santana cannot for the life of her ascertain the function of the drum by observation. A helmet-like silver bell dangles from the side of the car, ringing out as the wagon rollicks over the uneven street.

Three fat-rumped chestnut horses pull the wagon along, and the driver wears a uniform, sharp in gray, complete with a peaked cap with a badge on it. The people lining the streets seem just as enthused to see him as they do to see the circus clowns cavorting or even the mighty elephants galumphing down the street behind him. They wave frantically to the fellow and whistle at him as he drives his wagon by where they stand.

Santana suspects that he might be the fire marshal.

Two ladder wagons follow after the first coach, all trussed up with steps and rungs and with thick wooden wheels painted in smart reds and yellows, as bold in color as does Sam's clown makeup.

Several uniformed men hang from the sides of these wagons, and a smiling, hairy dog pants from atop the ladder wagon farthest to the back of the parade, his tawny coat shining in the morning brightness. Sprockets and whirligigs spin at the sides of the wagon box, and twin python coils of canvas hose curl at the trunk of the wagon traveling on the left side of the street.

Behind the ladder wagons roll the two vehicles which interest Santana the most: namely, the water wagons, which both boast great wooden drums on the backs of them, with each drum as round and voluminous as Methuselah's midsection. These wagons must contain several hundred gallons of water each. A spigot apiece protrudes from the backs of the barrels, ready to hook to a hose. It takes a team of six draft horses per vehicle to pull the wagons along.

The fire brigade leads the circus all the way down the main street in town, sounding off bells and whistles over the trump of the circus music and eliciting wild applause from the crowds as they do so. The parade takes its course all the way out of town, past the last houses, to a great flat of green land bordering both a river and a sparse wood. The white city stands only partially erected in the midst of the wilderness.

Somehow, Santana suspects that the fire brigade will turn around and head back to town once they escort the circus into camp, but that's not what happens. Instead, the fire wagons stop in the grass beside the circus wagons, and the firemen debark from the fire wagons as if they intend to stay with the circus.

Santana would perhaps feel more hornswoggled about the fire brigade joining the circus for the morning if it weren't for the fact that something distracts her from watching them the instant she jumps from her rambler—namely, a pretty voice.

"Hey, darlin'!"

(The prettiest voice.)

Before Santana can turn around, Brittany sidles up behind her and sets a chin on her shoulder, arms wrapping around Santana's waist. Santana flushes with a warm, familiar waking, remembering the Brittany-feeling from yesterday and tuning to Brittany, very much obliged.

Brittany smells windswept, like campfire and outdoors, the faintest hint of tallow soap, apples, animal heat, and life. Brittany's cheek brushes against Santana's, and suddenly it seems to Santana that Brittany has situated herself right where she belongs.

"I had a dream about you last night," Brittany all but purrs into Santana's ear. "Do you like sarsaparilla?"

"What?" Santana says, almost forgetting to breathe.

Brittany giggles. "What do you think of the fire brigade?" she asks, releasing Santana's waist and moving around to face her. She grins her cheeky cat grin, pleased as pudding pie to see Santana so early in the day. Her fingers traipse down Santana's arm until their pinky fingers link.

"What are they doing here?" Santana asks stupidly.

"They're here to wash the damn elephants," Puck interjects, hopping off the rambler, landing heavily on the earth as he steps up beside Santana.

Santana tenses.

She had forgotten about Puck as soon as Brittany appeared. Now she feels not so much remiss as she does caught.

She considers what Puck says. "Do they do that often?" she asks, scrunching up her brow as she envisions a professional fire brigade employing their equipment to hose down an African elephant in the same way that they would a house blaze.

"Sure thing, darlin'," Brittany says sweetly, swinging her and Santana's hands between them.

Puck's eyes shift between Santana and Brittany, thirsty for the former and distrustful of the latter. Santana doesn't know why Puck acts so wary of Brittany, who seems nothing but upright to Santana, but she wishes he would quit scowling at her, whatever his reason for doing it. Santana shoots Puck a warning look, but he ignores it.

"I'm going to go put our things in the tent and then head to town to buy me some more aftershave," Puck says gruffly. "If Ken asks after me, tell him I won't be an hour or two."

"All right," Santana says, wary under Puck's attention.

Puck spares Santana another long look before turning in the direction of their tent and departing for it, pulling his hat brim down as he goes.

(Santana immediately feels lighter upon his leaving.)

She gives Brittany's pinky finger a little squeeze.

"How's your ear?" she asks, quietly enough that no one around them will overhear her.

Brittany gives a one-shouldered shrug. "It's all right. I had this pretty swell nurse wash it out for me last night," she answers jokingly, her expression a smirk but also incredibly fond and sweet.

"Well, your nurse wants you to take it easy," Santana says earnestly.

She glances at Brittany's injured ear but can't see it beneath the sunshine curtain of Brittany's hair. She wishes that she and Brittany could go someplace quiet to talk, but she knows that Ma Jones and Mrs. Schuester will probably have chores for them soon and would never allow it. She settles for swinging Brittany's hand closer to her.

"Did she tell you that?" Brittany teases.

"Yeah," Santana says, "and she made me promise to take care of you."

Brittany bites her lip and looks at Santana so, so carefully. "That's just decent of her," she says, a strange reverence in her voice.

(Her words sound so much like something else.)

Just then, a loud trill rings out over the camp, and Santana turns to see the three elephants all in a flutter, their handlers prodding them toward a patch of sparse grass, the fire wagons circling up around them. Santana watches with wonder as the firemen cinch hoses to the barrels atop the water wagons, screwing them into place with strong hands and great effort.

At the same time as the firemen assemble their apparatuses for usage, several supes troop into the wagon circle from the camp, coming from the direction of the mess pit. Most of them bear buckets filled with water, heavy at the ends of their arms, though one fellow carries a basket stocked with several bars of tallow soap, of the same amber hue as that which stays beside the shower stalls behind the camp.

Though washing the elephants seems to be a usual event at the circus, most of the company turns up to take in the proceedings all the same. Several women, including some of Mrs. Schuester's seamstresses and Mrs. Evans, come around with their little children, who seem more genuinely fascinated with the firefighting equipment than they do with the everyday elephants.

Sam's little brother and sister tug at their mother's skirt and point at the shiny badges upon the firemen's hats, awed, and Santana finds herself sharing their feeling as the elephant handlers and supes souse up the tallow soap and approach the elephants with it.

It had never occurred to Santana in the first place that elephants needed scrubbing, let alone with soap bubbles, and she must smile at the thought because Brittany nudges their hips together, wearing a giddy smile herself.

"Just wait until you see it, darlin'," she says excitedly.

The supes and handlers surround the elephants, three or four of them around each beast, and begin to rub the soap bars up and down the elephants' arboreal legs and hull-like sides. A fatty, white lather spreads over the elephants' skin, which is the same color as a corroded penny, greenish-brown and soured. The workmen massage the soap deep into the furrows of the elephants' thumbprint kneecaps and pouched neck flaps, scrubbing it behind the elephants' great fanning ears and working it along their tails.

It takes the men over one quarter-hour to cover as much of the elephants as they can, and they have to use long-handled brushes off the back of the ladder wagons in order to reach the elephants' spines and the backs of their heads. Santana watches the whole process, reverent, and Brittany watches her, the same. When the men finish their job, the elephants look ghostly, like apparitions of themselves, eldritch even in the morning sunshine.

Methuselah cranes his trunk toward the sky, and the sight of him, burnished white and massive against the horizon, steals Santana's breath away.

Brittany must hear her gasp because she gives a short laugh in response.

"It's kind of beautiful, isn't it?" Brittany whispers.

(Santana wholeheartedly agrees.)

Once the workmen finish sudsing the elephants, the firemen loose the valves on the water wagons. Jets of water erupt, white and pressurized, from the hoses, shooting nearly twenty feet into the air in long, feathery rays. As they do so, the circus company cheers and chatters. The little children clap, and Santana claps, too, before she remembers to mind herself.

Apparently, Brittany likes Santana's reaction.

She grins at Santana like Santana is the grandest thing in the world.

The water splatters against the elephants' sides, rebounding from their hard hides in a spray of mist, which catches on the sunlight, scattering prisms over the grass, rainbows winking here and there. The wind picks up some of the water droplets, dispersing it over to where Santana and Brittany stand. It wets their skin, cooling them, feeling like a bit of heaven as the day heats. The elephants smell of damp mulch and aliveness. Santana stands on her tiptoes, to get a better view of them and the fire brigade.

When one of the handlers yells out a Hup! Hup! to the herd, the three elephants all lean forward onto their front legs, tipping so as to balance mostly on their trunks and knees, with their back legs elevated into the air so that they suddenly resemble overturned teapots. As the elephants enact their stunt, the firemen aim their hoses at the elephants' exposed underbellies and tails. Deborah lets out a groan of gratitude.

Though Santana has seen the elephants perform this trick before during circus shows, it still makes her gasp to see it now, executed so trustingly and for such an unusual reason.

"Never a normal day at the circus," Brittany observes, voicing Santana's thoughts.

Once the elephants set back down on all fours, Santana tears her gaze away from them for long enough to look at Brittany and finds her grinning at her like she has a secret.

"You want to help them out with the best part, darlin'?" Brittany asks conspiratorially.

"Help out whom? The elephants?" Santana asks, not following.

"Well, they can't wash their trunks all by themselves," Brittany explains, as if it's just commonsense.

(Maybe it is, at the circus.)

Brittany walks in the direction of the elephants, gesturing for Santana to follow her.

Immediately, the same kind of nervous concern Santana felt watching Brittany scale the elephant pen in Mankato spreads through Santana's chest. Santana shakes her head, holding back and dropping Brittany's hand. Though she finds the elephants strangely beautiful from a safe distance, she still doesn't like the idea of getting close to something as immense and powerful as they are.

"I think I'll just watch this time," she mumbles.

Brittany offers her a kindly smile, neither surprised nor upset that she prefers to keep her distance from the great beasts. "All right, darlin'," Brittany says, continuing toward the elephants, as fearless and happy as ever.

Santana tenses with nervousness, watching Brittany go. Even though Santana trusts that Methuselah and his cows like Brittany well enough, she still worries for Brittany's safety in their presence. She watches with both trepidation and excitement as Brittany treks over to where the elephants bathe, stooping to pluck up a cluster of wild chamomile along the way.

The firemen and handlers don't seem to mind Brittany getting close to the elephants at all; in fact, several of them greet her as she draws to within a few paces of where Methuselah sways, leaning into the water stream as a cat would lean into an ear-scratch.

As Brittany approaches Methuselah, many of the little children run at her heels, including Sam's younger brother and sister. The children chorus Brittany's name and point out the firemen to her, as if she doesn't see them. Brittany wears a grin as bright as the daylight and laughs when Sam's little sister fits their hands together.

(Something tugs in Santana's chest, following after them, though Santana remains rooted in one place.)

Brittany leads the children to within five or six paces of Methuselah and extends her chamomile offering to him. Methuselah makes an appreciative snuffing noise and stretches out his trunk to eat the weeds straight from her hand.

Santana holds her breath, thrilled and anxious, as Methuselah curls the nub of his nose over Brittany's fingers, accepting the flowers from her with surprisingly dexterity and gentleness. While he has his trunk stretched out, the firemen turn their hoses on him, splattering his nose with a cascade of water, also catching Brittany and the children in the process. In a trice, Methuselah's skin turns from saponaceous white to a dark, slated gray.

Santana can hear Brittany's golden laughter ring out, even from a distance.

(Tug, tug, tug again.)

When Brittany reaches forward to scrub the soap from Methuselah's trunk with her hands, Santana presses a hand to her heart, checking to make sure that it hasn't fluttered right out of her chest. Brittany moves like water and light, all ease and grace, standing on tiptoe to rub the round of Methuselah's face, laughing when he wraps his trunk around her waist to hold her upright and steady. She itches her fingers into the deep furrows on Methuselah's face, scratching him the way a boy would his hunting hound. Her arms work in deep, careful circles, reaching everywhere.

(Brittany is so much more for the circus than only a human not-a-target.)

The little children at Brittany's side repeat her trick with Deborah and Bathsheba, feeding them clumps of grass and flowers while the firemen douse the elephants from a distance. Water droplets spangle the children's clothes and faces, and they splash in the puddles forming around the elephants' feet, happy in the grass, happy in the daylight, happy at the circus, happy with Brittany.

Santana feels the same as them.

(Her heart tugs and tugs and tugs.)


It takes over an hour and a half to bathe three elephants.

In the end, white suds foam over the grass and muddy puddles fill the divots in the earth where the pachyderm bathers once waded. The elephant handlers move their charges to dry ground and wipe the elephants' legs with terry towels. The elephants themselves bellow, relaxed and grateful, in response.

For all the care their handlers give them, Methuselah, Deborah, and Bathsheba almost gleam, as dustless and well-tended as Santana's grandmother's cherry wood coffee table at the bachelor cottage, their hide the same color as wave-slicked rock on a beach, their rough edges wetted down, mannered and strangely elegant. If Santana didn't know better, she would say that the elephants knew how handsome they look, considering how high they hold their heads and how regally they unfurl their trunks against a backdrop of blue sky.

Unlike her elephant friends, Brittany comes away from the bath dirtier rather than cleaner, her thin, tatty sundress saturated with water so that it all but hangs from her lanky frame, her hair slicked and unevenly wet, with a lock of dry, corn silk-blonde here and a lock of damp, goldenrod blonde there. Weeds and stray shoots of grass cling to her bare legs. She couldn't look happier for the mess, though.

"Maybe you should ask Mr. Methuselah if you can borrow one of his towels," Santana teases as Brittany sidles up to her.

"Maybe I should use you for a towel," Brittany teases back. "Your skirt looks nice and dry..."

She makes a feint grab for Santana's waist, and Santana screams, dancing away from her, feeling giddy all of a sudden and sweeter on Brittany than ever before. Santana laughs as Brittany only manages to catch hold of one of the scarves tucked into her belt.

"I thought my nurse told you to take good care of me," Brittany whines.

"That was before you decided to become an elephant groomer. Now that you've taken on such a dangerous profession, there's really nothing I can do for you—your nurse would understand," Santana smirks, and Brittany's mouth falls open in a little gasp.

(She still smiles, though.)

"Come here!" Brittany says, snatching at another one of Santana's scarves, and Santana shrieks, dodging away from her into a patch of tall grass.

"Help!" Santana yelps, already laughing so hard that she can scarcely speak. "Get me the police! The fire brigade!"

"They might hear you, darlin'," Brittany warns, glancing over toward where the firemen coil their hoses atop their ladder wagons. "You don't want to cause a big scene, do you?" She chases Santana further away from the assembled company, her eyes bright with laughter, too.

"You're the one who's chasing me!" Santana reminds her. "Brittany Pierce! If you put muddy handprints all over my costume, Mrs. Schuester will tan my yeller hide!"

"No, she won't. Ken's the one who does the hide-tanning around here—Mrs. Schuester will just stand by and make crazy eyes at him while he does it," Brittany jokes, quickly stooping to wipe her hands against the grass and then grabbing again for Santana's waist.

Both girls laugh, and Santana yelps. They take tall, loping strides over the grass seed heads, running farther away from the wagon bay, deeper into camp, both smiling so widely that their cheeks almost ache from it. Santana knows that Brittany could easily catch her if Brittany had a mind to do it, but the delight is in the chasing, so Brittany dutifully keeps a stride aback from her, both girls tripping through the prairie weeds until they stumble into the white city, still mostly at is foundations.

Breathless, they jog down what will soon be tent rows, hopping over bundles of canvas and poles, laughing like loons at each new stride, and veer toward the trisection of tents where first they spoke to each other, finding it standing, though only a few of the tents around it do the same. Shadows catch them up, suffusing their skin with coolness, painting the angles of their smiling faces. Santana peels to a stop, and Brittany latches onto her by the hands, twirling Santana around in a dizzy circle.

"Caught you, darlin'!" Brittany singsongs, closing the space between them.

Before Santana can say anything about it, Brittany leans forward and presses a quick, light kiss to Santana's lips.

After so much deep kissing yesterday, this quick kiss feels different—like a single dollop of sugar in a full cup of coffee, sweet and special, livening Santana all the way down to her toes. Both girls pull away from it grinning. Brittany's lips are wonderfully cool and wet in contrast to the dry heat of the day.

(Not for the first time, Santana wonders if there will ever come a time when Brittany Pierce doesn't surprise her.)

"What was that for?" Santana asks stupidly.

"I wanted to say hello without putting getting you too wet, darlin'," Brittany says sweetly—so sweetly, in fact, that Santana's heart all but collapses at the sound of Brittany's voice.

Before Santana can make a reply, Brittany spins her again, taking them deeper into the shade between the largest tent in the trisection and the smaller tents beside it. They dance toward Mr. Adams' business tent, stopping within a few steps of it. Brittany stares at Santana with that same keen knowing as always, and Santana shivers, wondering how much of her Brittany can truly see, feeling as if she could truly be anything, just for Brittany's looking.

Santana almost gathers up the courage to kiss the question against Brittany's lips, except that the sound of nearby conversation distracts her.

"... and you really should hear my Lucy sing and play the piano. When we get back to the hotel for the evening, she can put on a recital for you and your son," says Russell Fabray.

"Daddy!" Quinn interjects in the same airy, affected manner that she used when Santana read cards for her father. "I-I really don't think they'd want to listen to little, old me or—"

"Nonsense!" comes Mr. Adams' lion boom. "My Arthur loves music! Just the other day, he determined a new harmonic series using complex mathematics, something about intervals. I'm sure he would find a performance quite diverting."

"I-It's all right, really," Arthur stammers, sounding as gentle and painterly as he did yesterday. "She doesn't have to sing if she doesn't—"

"Lucy doesn't mind!" Mr. Fabray says. "You two really ought to get accustomed to each other. Lucy, you'll sing for Arthur and play the hotel piano for him, too. Maybe a hymn? You do know how I like it so when you sing 'Lead Kindly Light.'"

"Yes, Daddy," Quinn consents in a muffled voice.

Brittany and Santana can't see any of the people involved in the conversation—just hear them through the thin walls of Mr. Adams' business tent. Based on the tinkling sounds of steel spoons setting on bone china and the smells of sweet scones, salted eggs, cured bacon, and marshy tea wafting through the tent canvas, Santana would guess that the Adams and Fabray families have gathered for brunch together. She would also guess that neither Arthur nor Quinn has found this shared meal very agreeable.

"I don't think Lucy and I will stay for the morning show today," says a new voice—a woman whom Santana can only suppose is Mrs. Fabray. "They have a lovely little milliner's shop in town, and I'd like Lucy to have a new hat for Independence Day. I thought it might be quaint if we were to buy a hat from one of these frontier towns, while we're traveling with the circus."

Mr. Fabray answers with a scoffing laugh. "Minnesota and Iowa are hardly the frontier anymore, sugarplum! But I agree: Lucy ought to have a new hat. Make sure to get it with a green ribbon—you do know how I like it when her ribbons match her eyes. I'll send you with some spending money while Mr. Adams and I stay behind. We have some terms to negotiate."

"Yes, concerning rail routes," Mr. Adams chimes in.

Santana imagines both Quinn and Arthur sitting in perfunctory silence for this part of the conversation, neither one of them daring to look at the other or speak as they take dainty bites of egg and sip from their tea cups. Just thinking of how the rules weigh upon them causes Santana to shirk.

When she shudders, Brittany seems to notice it, giving her hand a gentle tug, pulling her toward the business tent.

At first, Santana resists the motion, wondering what Brittany means by taking them nearer to a place where they ought not to trespass, but then she sees Brittany's destination: a plain cloth satchel sitting propped against the outside wall of the tent, several books poking out of it. It occupies the same space that Quinn Fabray did yesterday while she eavesdropped on her father's discussion with Mr. Adams.

Before Santana can mind her face, her eyes widen with excitement. Brittany must catch Santana's look because her expression shifts into her mischievous grin.

"See something you like, darlin'?" she asks quietly.

(It amazes Santana how Brittany can sound so perfectly impish, even at a whisper.)

As soon as the girls draw up close to the satchel, Santana determines that it belongs to Quinn Fabray. Middlemarch shoulders its way out of the bag, and another book rests beside it: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, with a cover of light lavender-colored cloth, its title stitched in golden thread across the face. Both books appear well-worn.

(Well-loved.)

Santana has never read Middlemarch, but she did read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland twice when she was twelve years old. She remembers the story quite fondly; it provided her life with some silliness at a time when nothing else in her life seemed sufficiently silly.

Brittany observes Santana's expression, watching Santana look over the book, her own eyes turning strangely soft as she does so. Brittany still wears her mischief-making smirk when she reaches down and snatches up the lavender-colored book from the satchel, turning it over in her hand with a flourish.

Santana starts to protest, to tell Brittany that she oughtn't to touch something which doesn't belong to her—which belongs to someone over her, someone who has the rules on her side—but Brittany just shakes her head.

"We'll put it back before anyone even notices that it's missing, darlin'," Brittany whispers. "Just reading it won't hurt anything at all."

In any given situation, Santana's first instinct is to follow the rules—to not disappoint anyone or cause trouble, to blend in and stay quiet, to make herself no more intrusive than wallpaper or a rug in a well-furnished room—but the wily look on Brittany's face stirs something bold and devil-may-care in her.

She takes the book from Brittany's hands and grins, gesturing Brittany away from the business tent to the northernmost border of the circus camp. Santana thinks it best that she and Brittany find someplace private to go together because, really, if they're going to borrow Quinn Fabray's book, they might as well read it, and if they intend to read it, they ought to go somewhere where they can do so aloud.

The girls take the first several steps in restraint and silence before breaking into a full run and then—once they make it far enough away from Mr. Adams' business tent—a fit of giddy giggling, pleased with themselves for their daring and drunk on bending and hurdling the rules that might otherwise confine their day.

Santana glances over her shoulder at Brittany and sees Brittany's face, sun bright and graced with the most careless grin. Brittany laughs and something flips over in Santana's belly, thrilling her.

Between bathing the elephants and stealing a book, Brittany has never looked more beautiful than she has today. Her hair has begun to dry in the wind, wavy in ribbons, and her eyes shine with something Santana finds familiar but which she couldn't name, even to the price of one-hundred dollars. Brittany wears happiness like the finest clothing and couldn't be freer if she were a bird taken to wing.

The girls traverse the last bit of circus pitch before emerging beyond a final row of tents into a great, unoccupied part of nature, where low hills roll. Brittany finally outstrips Santana and leads her up a sloping hammock spangled with wildflowers and carpeted with verdant cutgrass. White shooting stars, pale purple beardtongue, and little belled Jacob's Ladder scale the hammock, crushing under the girls' feet until they collapse at the hammock's crest, out-of-breath but still laughing.

Santana opens the book in her hands to a random page.

"You know what Mr. Carroll would have to say about all this, don't you, Britt?" she teases, mastering her breath.

Brittany stares at Santana, her mouth open in a grin.

"'You may not have lived much under the sea'—'I haven't,' said Alice—'and perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster'—Alice began to say 'I once tasted...' but checked herself hastily, and said 'No, never'—'so you can have no idea what a delightful thing a Lobster Quadrille is!'" Santana reads and both she and Brittany laugh.

"Lobster Quadrille?" Brittany repeats after she sufficiently recovers from her giggle fit, quirking an eyebrow, turning the sound of the words over on her tongue.

"When I first read this," Santana admits, "I thought that quadrille must be a sort of French food. I had to ask Abuela what it was, and she told me it was a dance."

Santana flushes a little, admitting her gaffe to Brittany, but Brittany only looks at Santana as if Santana has just said something sweet.

"It sounds like a card game to me," Brittany offers. She glances between Santana and the open book. "You've read this book before?"

The awe in her voice causes Santana to blush.

Rereading a book wasn't such an unusual practice at the bachelor cottage, but it probably does seem peculiar to someone who lives a circus life, surrounded by colors and elephants and audiences, with more to entertain her than just printed words on a page.

"It's not my favorite," Santana says, looking down at the flowers at her elbows, rather than at Brittany, whose warm attention will only cause Santana to blush more deeply. "But it is droll. It's a fun story to imagine."

"So you like to read?" Brittany asks gently, looking as curious as Alice to hear Santana's answer.

With anyone else, Santana might feel too embarrassed to admit how much she loves reading, but with Brittany, she only blushes a little bit and shrugs, shy but not ashamed.

"I like reading very much," she answers softly, looking down at the worn cloth cover of the book in her hands. "Abuela and I got along well enough at the bachelor cottage, but things could be lonely with just the two of us there, excepting the old gardener. Books gave me company—I always felt like I had somewhere to go and someone to go with when I had something to read."

She checks Brittany's reaction and finds Brittany watching her with the deepest eyes Santana has ever seen, looking somehow faraway, as if she's remembering something, but also so, so close to Santana, like she can feel the meaning behind Santana's words almost better than she can hear it.

"You must have read a thousand books," Brittany says, and it's less a question than an observation. She sounds utterly reverent.

Santana smiles. "Something like that," she avers.

"So you've had a thousand adventures," Brittany says, and Santana almost starts at the unexpectedness of hearing a knife thrower's daughter refer to something as utterly ordinary as a book as a bonafide adventure.

(To someone who grows up in the circus, the mundanity of the bachelor cottage must somehow seem a mystery.)

(To someone who grows up in the bachelor cottage, the girl who grows up in the circus is a mystery in herself.)

Heat blooms over Santana's skin, and she feels squirrelly from Brittany watching her so closely. She tucks a lock of hair behind her ear and laughs a bit at herself for being so flustered.

"Alice has a good adventure," she says, hoping to draw Brittany's attention from herself and back onto the book, if she can. "Here," she flips to the sixth chapter and searches through the pages until she finds a particular passage. She passes the book to Brittany for inspection. "Read this."

Brittany doesn't accept the book from Santana. Instead, she glances between where Santana's finger presses on the page and Santana's face—her eyes, then mouth, then eyes again—her expression still strangely reverent.

"You read it, darlin'," she says in a low voice.

Somehow, she sounds like she's never wanted anything quite as much as just to listen to Santana read. She stares into Santana's face, seeing Santana in the sort of fathomless way that no one else has ever done before her. She licks her lips and waits.

Under Brittany's attention, the moment feels hot and thick, like melted honey.

Santana swallows and tears her eyes away from Brittany to observe the page. Sunlight glares upon the paper, so that Santana has to squint to read.

"'Cheshire Puss,' she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. 'Come, it's pleased so far,' thought Alice, and she went on. 'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'
'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.
'I don't much care where-' said Alice.
'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.
'-so long as I get somewhere,' Alice added as an explanation.
'Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, 'if you only walk long enough.'"

Santana pauses to check Brittany's response to the passage and finds Brittany staring at her with the same peculiar, adoring expression that she wore yesterday after Santana sneezed on the train, her mouth open in a little o and her eyes so soft that Santana could sink into them.

When Santana catches Brittany's eye, Brittany laughs her silent laugh, amused at something, and glances quickly away, too bashful to stare any longer. Her long, graceful fingers curl around a tuft of Jacob's Ladder, and she plucks the flowers up by the stem.

"You're really good at that," she says, giving another one of her artless compliments.

(Something squeezes inside Santana's chest.)

"Thanks," Santana says stupidly.

Brittany smirks. "Alice really shouldn't ask a cat for advice, though," she says matter-of-factly, as if it's the most obvious thing in the world.

"Is that so?" Santana laughs, eager to hear Brittany's reasoning.

Brittany nods. "Cats are like walking riddles," she explains. "You can't expect something so slinky to give you a straight answer about anything. She should have asked a mule instead. Or a Jersey cow—they're sturdy."

Santana almost can't stand it, adoring Brittany so much, and falls back where she sits, collapsing onto a blanket of wildflowers.

"Britt!" she whines, complaining because Brittany is so perfect.

Brittany continues to play with the Jacob's Ladder, twining it between her fingers. "What?" she says innocently, though she knows very well that she's delighted Santana and even blushes because she has. She tries to suppress her pleased smile but fails most wonderfully.

"You're not fair sometimes," Santana pouts.

"You should keep reading," Brittany says, shaking her hair over her face in a vain attempt to hide her pinked cheeks and thrilled expression.

For a second, Santana considers sitting up to kiss Brittany—on the nose and cheek and finally at her lips—but then she feels too shy to do it, even though she kissed Brittany yesterday inside the tent. She settles for nudging her toes against Brittany's leg instead, teasing Brittany as she wishes herself braver all the while. Reluctantly, she starts to read again, promising herself that she'll work up the courage to kiss Brittany before they return the book to its satchel, jittering a little just at the thought of it.

Brittany braids garlands of wildflowers while Santana recounts to her the events of the Mad Hatter's tea party, the fanciful tale of the Dormouse, and the Queen's gardeners painting the royal roses red.

Just as Santana reaches the line where the Queen appears and the gardeners panic, Brittany reaches up to Santana, crowning Santana with her handiwork, her funny cat-smile quirked at the corners of her mouth.

"Her Majesty Queen Cleopatra," Brittany announces regally.

Santana laughs and claps the book shut, keeping her thumb in it to hold her place. The flowers feel cool and light on her brow. When she looks up through her eyelashes, she can see little blue and white wisps of them. She straightens her neck, so as to keep the crown upon her head and Brittany seems delighted at her for doing so.

"Do you want a turn to read?" Santana asks, extending the book to Brittany, tempting her to accept it. She sets the book down on the grass beside Brittany's hand.

(Santana loves listening to Brittany talk about anything.)

(She can only imagine how much she would like listening to Brittany talk of mad croquet matches and mock turtles.)

Brittany's eyes shift from Santana's eyes to Santana's mouth to the book and back to Santana's eyes again. Brittany bites her lip between her teeth, pinking it, and shakes her head, modest, no.

"I can't read, darlin'," she says quietly, fingers curling around a patch of grass shoots at her elbow. She looks away from Santana to her own knees, still stretched out on her side, as if reclined on a fainting couch.

Though Santana has only known Brittany a very few days, she already knows Brittany well enough to discern Brittany's embarrassment. Somehow, Brittany's embarrassment piques Santana's embarrassment—not because Brittany ought to feel embarrassed that she can't read, but because Santana oughtn't to have asked Brittany something that would embarrass Brittany for not being able to. Santana's father taught her better than to assume that everyone has enjoyed the same school lessons as she has, after all.

Santana reaches for something to say, like a child scrambling to pick up marbles spilled from a bag before they can all roll off in all different directions, disappearing under furniture and tucking into corners.

"I could teach you someday," she blurts, but then she worries the she sounds condescending and adds, "—if you like."

Brittany looks at Santana as if Santana is some sort of miracle, such deep devotion in her eyes that Santana thinks she could melt for it.

"I'd like that a lot, darlin'," Brittany says in a low, fervent voice Santana has never heard her use before. It tugs at that place in Santana's chest again. For a long while, Santana and Brittany just stare at each other, forgetting the sun overhead and the book lying between them and anything except for the fact that they've just made a promise to each other.

(For Santana to teach Brittany to read.)

(It feels like something else.)

"Give it back."

The sound of Quinn Fabray's throaty voice returns Santana to the moment, recalling to her the world outside of her and Brittany's promise, reminding her that there exists a circus and people at the circus and that she and Brittany stole Quinn's book.

Her heart beats so fast that she worries it might run away from her.

"I suppose you two think you're very funny, don't you, stealing my book?" Quinn says, arriving at the summit of the hammock, holding her skirt up at her ankles and wearing a knife-sharp expression. She stares down at Brittany and Santana, reclined upon their bed of wildflowers and grass. "Well, you're not even amusing. Give the book back."

She holds out a hand to them, like a bridge-keeper waiting for a traveler to pay some toll.

For a second, Santana remains supine and flabbergasted on the ground, feeling terribly caught and guilty for stealing from the daughter of the man who intends to buy the circus, but then Brittany scrambles to her feet at Santana's side, and Santana remembers how silly it is to stay sitting when a standing person requires one's attention. She scrambles to her feet, as well, Brittany's flower garland drooping down over her right ear but remaining on her head otherwise.

If Quinn tells her father or Mr. Adams about Brittany and Santana's indiscretion, they may well fire Brittany and Santana from the circus or even have them taken to jail.

Or at least they might do that to Santana.

"We were going to put it back!" Santana blurts, as much to remind herself as to explain herself to Quinn Fabray.

Quinn just raises one of her perfect eyebrows, her expression steely. She scrutinizes Santana from head to toe, truly acknowledging Santana as entity for one of the first times since they first met each other the other day in Worthington.

"Let me guess," Quinn says flatly, "you two just happened to find my satchel outside the tent, and you thought you would borrow my book without asking so that Miss Pierce could read while you shirked off whatever kind of chores it is you're supposed to be doing before the morning show. Is that it?"

She sounds entirely disbelieving and entirely accusatory and has almost everything right except for just one thing.

"I wasn't reading to Santana," Brittany says, as if the distinction makes all the difference in the world. "She was reading to me."

Apparently, it does make some difference in the world, at least, because Quinn's mouth actually falls open in the same way that it did when Brittany refused to give an interview to her at the trisection of tents. Quinn gapes at Santana as if she's never seen Santana or even anyone like to Santana before.

(Maybe she hasn't.)

"You can read?" Quinn asks Santana, astounded.

She sounds distinctly impressed.

Before Santana can answer Quinn, Brittany sidles up beside Santana.

"Santana loves to read," Brittany says in her just-so way. "She's read about a thousand books, and she can still remember the best parts, even from books that aren't her favorite."

It's the kind of observation that only someone who watches a person carefully for a long time and learns her secrets can make. A strange note rings through Brittany's voice. Santana would almost call the note pride, except that she can't think of a reason why it would be that.

"Is that true?" Quinn asks, not as a challenge but genuinely seeking confirmation. She glances between Brittany and Santana, awed.

"I love to read," Santana says quietly, looking down at her toes tangled amidst the Jacob's Ladder and beardtongue.

"She's really good at it," Brittany confirms.

(It sounds so much like something else.)

Quinn couldn't look more reverenced if she were to learn that Santana was actually a long-lost Spanish princess. Her pretty green eyes sweep over Santana again, seeing her anew. Momentarily, Quinn resembles a toddler recognizing her own reflection in the mirror for the first time in her life. She takes a step back from Brittany and Santana, situating herself further down the hammock from them.

"I didn't know that your people could—," Quinn starts but then trails away, perhaps remembering the indignation with which Brittany reacted when she made reference to such conventions before.

Brittany stoops down, retrieving Alice's Adventures in Wonderland from the grass. She offers it to Quinn, totally docile.

"Thank you for letting us borrow your book," she says kindly. "I liked the part with the talking cat."

Quinn takes the book back, staring at the cover as if she's the one in Wonderland and her book is the only thing she brought with her from home when she fell down the rabbit hole. Her usual walls seem in a state of disrepair; Santana can read Quinn's every emotion written plainly on her face.

"Thank you, Miss Fabray," Santana says quietly, as well, and that seems to break the spell.

Quinn jolts.

"Good day," she says shortly, offering Brittany and Santana a single curt nod before retreating down the hammock, disappearing as quickly as she had appeared, seeming quite a bit smaller going than she did coming.

("Drink me.")


It catches Santana off-guard when, in the next instant after Quinn takes leave, Brittany curls around Santana's body, setting her head on Santana's shoulder in the same way that an old dog might set his muzzle on a front porch, comfortable and worn-in. Brittany wraps an arm around Santana's waist.

Suddenly, everything is Brittany all over—her windswept scent, the hard and soft places of her body, the slight dampness lingering in her clothing and the tips of her hair. She holds Santana from behind, taking a deep breath against her, and relaxes slightly. It's the second time today that Brittany has gathered Santana up in this way.

At first, Santana tenses, thinking about rules and being unaccustomed to sharing her space with anyone—and perhaps especially Brittany, who has such an intense effect on her person that she can scarcely account for it—but then Santana sinks into the closeness, finding it wonderfully agreeable.

(It feels so much like being home.)

"I didn't mean to scare you, darlin'," Brittany mumbles, lips so close to Santana's skin that Santana can feel the barest hint of them upon her.

"Scare me?" Santana repeats, stupid with so much Brittany all around her.

"I really thought we'd get the book back in the bag before she saw it was missing," Brittany explains, nuzzling a bit closer to Santana. "I know you don't like getting in trouble with anyone, darlin'. You're so sweet that when someone acts sour to you, you don't know what to do about it."

Even though no one else but Brittany would call Santana sweet—or at least no one at the circus, or no one living—Santana can almost believe that she is sweet, just for the sound of Brittany's words in her ear. The tugging feeling in Santana's chest grows more insistent, as if Brittany has Santana's heart on a string and leads it along after her wherever she goes.

"I didn't mean to make Quinn sour at us. I'll try not to get us in trouble so much," Brittany continues, making a promise to Santana just as Santana made a promise to her.

(It feels so much like something else.)

(Santana strokes the thread ring on her finger, absentminded.)

"It's all right," Santana purrs, allowing herself to close her eyes, just for a second, and sink further into Brittany, memorizing the feel of Brittany's arms around her, Brittany holding her safe and sound. "You didn't do anything wrong. I'm the one who read for so long anyway."

It catches Santana off-guard again to feel Brittany shudder behind her then, like she held in some worry and Santana just named it, setting it free.

"Are you sure?" Brittany asks in a very small voice.

Santana turns a bit in Brittany's arms and finds Brittany pouting at her, looking so concerned and forlorn that Santana wonders if her own heart might break just for seeing Brittany's face. Clearly, Brittany thinks that what Quinn said upset Santana more than it did.

"Oh, Britt," Santana says. "It's all right—honest. I don't think Quinn will even snitch on us anyway."

And it's the truth.

When Quinn first approached Brittany and Santana, she traveled by way of the warpath, but by the time Quinn quit Brittany and Santana's company, she seemed to have softened. It would surprise Santana if Quinn even mentioned the borrowed book to her father or Mr. Adams at this point. Santana wishes that Brittany wouldn't fret about it and tries to tell Brittany as much just by looking at her.

At first, Brittany's pout remains firmly in place, even when Santana offers her a reassuring smile, but then Santana spots the faintest ghost of a grin starting at the corners of Brittany's mouth. Santana crosses her eyes at Brittany, making a funny face for her, and finally Brittany's lips twitch, giving her away.

Now that Santana knows that she can coax Brittany to smile if she tries, she adopts a mock seriousness. "Britt," she says solemnly, "you know I get in trouble no matter what I do around here."

And that's what really does it.

Brittany's pout breaks into a smile that reaches all the way to Brittany's eyes, and Brittany's laughs into Santana's hair, her fingers digging into Santana's waist, tickling her.

"You are trouble, darlin'!" Brittany teases.

Santana shrieks and squirms away, the flower garland slipping down almost over her eyes as she twists to the side.

"You're not fair!" she yelps, snaking away.

"Of course I'm fair, darlin'! I gave you a head start!"

And so Brittany and Santana race.

Their momentum carries them all the way down the hammock, and they continue across the ley, running so quickly that they scarcely crush any wildflowers underfoot. Somewhere along the line, Santana's garland falls to the grass, but neither she nor Brittany stops to retrieve it.

The girls reenter the camp at a sprint, finding the white city much more established now than it was before they made off with Quinn's book. Eventually, they skitter to a stop just outside the mess pit, probably because they both know that they really ought to do some chores today now that they've had their fun and also because Brittany promised that she would keep Santana out of trouble.

(And also because they're out of breath.)

"You up to making lunch?" Brittany pants, doubled-over, her hands resting upon her knees, her cheeks a rosy, vivid pink.

Santana nods her consent, too winded and exhilarated to offer a real reply.


Ma Jones fails to hide her incredulity when Brittany and Santana turn up in her mess pit looking for work to do.

"Y'all want to help make lunch?" she repeats, as if she can't quite make sense of their words.

She looks up from the cast iron pot she scrubs with a fat-bristled brush, glancing between Brittany and Santana like she's never seen them before.

"Does a Jersey cow want to tell it straight to Alice?" Brittany replies, wearing her blank joking face.

(Santana laughs; Ma Jones doesn't.)

Ma considers Brittany and Santana carefully, searching them for any hint of funny business. When she can find none on them, she stands up from her bench. Though Santana might expect Ma to ask where she and Brittany spent their morning hiding, Ma does nothing of the sort. Rather, she gestures toward a basket sitting on one of the tables and shows the girls its contents: namely, a bushel of carrots.

"Well, I could use some more hands around here," she says charily. "If y'all wouldn't mind peeling these, I'd be much obliged."

She rustles some paring knives and an aluminum bucket out of the chuck for them.

"You can sit over there," she says.

She gestures to a bench far away from her and her kitchen girls, then pauses for a second, mustering something. Her gaze shifts between Brittany and Santana, lingering briefly over Brittany's injured left ear, just barely visible with Brittany's hair parted around it, before it settles upon their two faces.

"You did get your supper last night, didn't you?" Ma asks.

(If Santana didn't know better, she would say Ma sounded concerned.)

"We did," Brittany confirms. "Sam brought it to us."

"Thank you for sending him," Santana adds.

Ma peers at Brittany and Santana for a second longer. The shadow of some unnamable emotion passes over her face, and she seems almost as if she wants to ask them another question. As it is, she simply nods in approval and resumes scrubbing her pot, indicating that Santana and Brittany should start their work. Maybe Santana imagines it, but she could swear Ma mutters a muffled You're welcome as she and Brittany start to walk away.

Santana would attribute Ma's sudden new kindness toward her and Brittany to pity for Brittany's injury, except that Ma's good mood seems to extend beyond that. As Brittany and Santana situate themselves, their basket of carrots, and the aluminum bucket on the designated bench, Ma returns to her own work, humming as she goes.

(She has a surprisingly pleasant voice for someone who spends so much of her day snapping at people.)

Whereas normally Ma remains somewhat aloof from her girls' gossip, today she happily joins them, prattling on about how Mr. Adams sent a commission of hostlers to Correctionville a full day in advance to ask the fire brigade to help out with washing the elephants and did so in grand style, sounding airy and light as she talks. Santana has never seen Ma Jones so pleasantly affected before; she can only conclude that something must have happened to put her in such a fine mood—or, rather, that someone did something to do so.

Seeing Ma in gay spirits amuses Santana. She smiles as she sinks her paring knife into the waxy rind of a carrot, carving away from her body and into the bucket. Under the bench, her toes and Brittany's toes nudge together in the grass. Brittany smiles at Santana from across the way, and the tugging feeling in Santana's chest returns. She entirely misses the bucket with the first peeling, dropping it onto the ground instead.

(Brittany only laughs at her a little.)

A warm, eager feeling washes over Santana at the sound of Brittany's voice. She can't believe her luck to have spent two mornings in a row with Brittany. Everything that happens seems so much nicer with Brittany involved in it. Santana wishes that she and Brittany could stay together always and that Brittany never had to disappear to wherever it is that Brittany goes between the performances and at mealtimes.

"Are you planning to eat lunch with the company?" Santana asks, fluttery and nervous all of a sudden.

Brittany quirks her head to one side, reading Santana in the deeply thoughtful way that is her province. She scrunches up her nose and Santana feels a sweet pang play through her whole self.

"If you'd like that, I will," Brittany says and Santana nods because she would like that very much, feeling all wrapped up in Brittany and entirely sweet on her. Santana can't think of anything better than having Brittany around at mealtime. She grins, brimming over with a feeling she can't quite name.

In a cavern, in a canyon,
excavating for a mine,
dwelt a miner forty-niner
and his daughter Clementine

When Ma Jones starts to sing, it causes Santana to jolt—mainly because Santana had forgotten that there was anyone else in the world aside from herself and Brittany for the moment.

Ma Jones has the voice of a goddess.

Whereas Rachel Berry clearly benefits from years of training, Ma's singing seems unpolished and like the best kind of accident. Santana hadn't known that Ma could sing at all, let alone like this—like the rumble of thunder, deep from inside her chest. While Rachel Berry sings in a high, agile soprano, Ma Jones sings like fire, her voice full and robust in timbre.

(Santana hadn't known that two like things could be so different, and yet each one beautiful in its own way.)

The song Ma sings sounds both happy and sad at once. It tells the story of the daughter of a miner—light she was, and like a fairy—who falls into some water driving ducklings out to swim and drowns because her beloved can't come to save her. Though the song seems serious enough at first, Santana quickly realizes that it's a parody. It isn't familiar to Santana at all.

Oh my darling, oh my darling
Oh my darling, Clementine!
Thou art lost and gone forever
Dreadful sorry, Clementine

Ma seems almost oblivious to her own singing, but everyone else stops for the sound of it, transfixed.

Two supes enter the mess area just as Ma finishes the chorus, carrying a bench between them. They arrange it at the side of the fire, grunting as they work.

"That's an awful pretty song, Ma," one of them—Shane, the wagon driver—says.

Shane tips his hat to her as he and his companion—the yeller supe who tackled the preacher on the midway—shuffle the bench into place. Shane wears an affable smile, the corners of his pencil mustache turned up. Ma Jones smiles back at him, though not brightly.

"Thank you kindly," Ma mumbles.

The supes leave the mess area once they get the bench in place, and Ma takes up her song again, though she sings more quietly than she did before. Santana seeks out Ma's voice over the babble of the camp—above the gossipy giggling of Ma's kitchen girls, the bone-snap crackling of the mess fire, the skittering whine of bug wings, ghost voices carried on the wind, twittering birdsongs, the iron knells of hammers ringing out near the big top—feeling it almost more than she hears it.

The song rousts something deep within Santana; she doesn't think she's ever heard anything so beautiful before, even when Rachel sings for her act.

Eventually, Brittany seems to notice Santana's shift in attention. She nudges Santana's foot, playful, coaxing Santana to look at her. When Santana does just that, she finds Brittany fixing her with a delighted grin.

(Bright.)

"How's Wonderland, darlin'?" Brittany teases.

"Swell," Santana says, entirely serious.

"She sings prettier than Rachel does, most days," Brittany says reverently and both she and Santana listen, enraptured by Ma's song.


Ma makes it through two more verses before none other than Sam Evans appears on the edge of the mess area, holding his hat in his hands, his face already made up in show paint and looking especially bright and eager.

Rather than announcing his presence outright, Sam takes a few steps toward Ma, who has her back turned to him, and begins to sing along with her, lending his voice to her tune.

One day the wind was blowing awful
I took her down some old rye wine
and listened to the sweetest cooings
of my sunflower Clementine

Oh, my Clema! Oh, my Clema!
Oh, my darling Clementine
Now you are gone and lost forever
I'm dreadful sorry Clementine

When Sam's voice joins Ma's, Ma straightens where she sits, but she doesn't turn around or stop from her singing. Her girls giggle, chattering like starlings. Sam's song seems different than Ma's, just a shade off in melody, telling a story similar to hers but not the same. It surprises Santana how well the two disparate tunes blend together, Sam's warm baritone braiding with Ma's pleasant thunder.

At the last note, Ma finally turns to look at Sam.

"Ken says you could use some help shifting barrels," he says sweetly, wringing his hat between his hands.

(It sounds entirely like something else.)


Somewhere between Ma instructing Sam on how to combine the various barrels of beans to her satisfaction and Sam almost tripping over his outsized clown shoes to snap to the job, Brittany devises a game wherein she and Santana attempt to fling their carrot peelings into the bucket from a distance, and she proves immeasurably better at her own device than does Santana.

"Are you sure you've got both eyes open, darlin'?" Brittany teases when Santana manages to drop another wet carrot peeling at her own toes rather than into the aluminum bucket sitting two feet away from her on the grass.

Brittany flings her carrot peeling into the bucket with ease.

Santana pouts. "What's your secret, Britt?"

Brittany shrugs, wearing her mischievous smile. "Good aim just runs in the family, I guess," she says slyly. Something flickers behind her eyes and then fades.

Santana would argue, but Brittany's answer seems reasonable enough. Santana tosses another carrot peeling, missing her mark spectacularly.

"It's harder for lefties," she grouses, and Brittany laughs and laughs.


It takes longer peeling the carrots while playing the game than it would otherwise, so that by the time Brittany and Santana finish with their chore, it's nearly lunchtime. Ma orders them to pick their wayward carrot scraps out of the grass before she'll allow them wash up and scolds them—albeit much less harshly than she usually would do so—for wasting time with their horseplay.

Sam refills his last barrel from the chuck just as Brittany and Santana make it over to the steel tubs to wash the wet, orange carrot castoff from their hands. They listen as he asks Ma Jones if he can do anything else to help around them kitchen and she teases him that he only means to stick around so that he can steal some food before the bell rings.

Santana feels strangely guilty listening in on Sam and Ma talking to each other, even about something as harmless as lunch. She looks down at the ground so as not to intrude, focusing on the little beetles crawling in the grass, trying to forget the bright way in which Sam and Ma look at each other and remember the rules instead.

When the company finally assembles for their meal, Brittany and Santana are some of the first persons to fill their plates. Today, Ma Jones serves a mash of cabbage, potatoes, carrots, and dried apples, all which appears a dull, flushed-out white in color, save it were the few carrot coins that Brittany and Santana peeled. The girls take back their seat on the far bench and sit facing across from one another, stirring at their food and waiting for it to cool.

"You didn't grab me a plate, ladybird?"

Santana had forgotten that Noah Puckerman existed until he spoke.

She jumps as Puck sits down on the bench beside her, wearing a pout and looking enviously at her and Brittany's plates. He squints through the intense noonday sunlight, sweating around his brow and eyes.

"Where have you been?" Santana asks, voice coming out much more harshly than she means it to.

Brittany glances between Santana and Puck, pretty cat eyes vivid with a reaction Santana can't read.

"Just got back from town. I told you before I left," Puck rebuffs. "I'll have you know that you're famous around here, ladybird."

"Famous?"

Puck nods, satisfied that he seems to have won Santana's attention now. "You sure are. I heard all the bitties at the store and all the fellas at the bar talking about 'the mystical Madame Rossetti' who predicted the death of the Minnesota millionaire."

At Puck's word, a panic starts to build in Santana; her pulse picks up and she feels wobbly inside. "Were they really talking about me?" she asks, hoping that maybe Puck only means to tease her.

"They sure were," Puck says, seeming pleased, as if he finds Santana's new celebrity favorable.

It takes Santana a second to remember that to Puck—and to Mr. Adams and to the circus, in general—any fame Santana wins for herself means an increase in sales. Puck doesn't wait for Santana to respond to his news before he stands up from the bench, setting a heavy palm on her shoulder.

"I'm going to go grab myself a plate," he says, stepping away from the bench with nary a nod to either Santana or Brittany.

"You all right, darlin'?" Brittany asks as soon as Puck disappears into the lunch crowd. "You look green."

Santana tries to swallow her apprehension, but when she speaks, her voice still shakes: "I'll have to read cards today," she says warily. "I'll have to tell someone he's going to die."

Brittany's mouth falls open in a little o. It obviously alarms her to hear Santana speak so frankly concerning the cards and their effect. Brittany's eyes dart between Santana's, like Brittany doesn't quite know where to look at her. After a second, they settle. Brittany closes her mouth and fixes Santana with an even stare.

"No, you won't," she says, strangely sure.

Santana knows that Brittany wants to comfort her, and she adores Brittany for her kindness, but she also cannot shake her dread just for Brittany's word. The Correctionville crowds will clamor for Santana to read tarot, and chances are that no trespassing preachers will appear on the midway to save Santana from her fate today. Santana will have to read, and when she reads, she'll draw Death. When she draws Death, her patron will die.

Suddenly, Santana doesn't feel hungry at all.

"But I will, Britt. It always happens that way," Santana says glumly.

Brittany shakes her head and starts to smile a bit. Her sudden shift in demeanor surprises Santana, who can't reckon why Brittany seems so pleased with herself, at this particular moment. Brittany nudges her knee against Santana's at the side of the bench.

"It doesn't have to happen that way, though," Brittany says excitedly. She leans in closer to Santana—Santana gasps at the new proximity and wonders for a second if Brittany means to kiss her, even with so many other people around—and lowers her voice. "You're in the circus now, darlin'. So why don't you put on a show?"

Santana scrunches up her brow. Brittany seems to have some sort of idea, and though Santana doesn't understand what it is yet, she feels a thrill realizing that Brittany does have an idea all the same.

"What kind of show?" Santana asks, matching Brittany's whisper.

Brittany grins her troublemaking grin and leans in even closer to Santana, so that their cheeks nearly brush together. "What if you lost your cards today?"

It isn't a question as much as a suggestion.

Realization dawns over Santana.

"Brittany, I couldn't!" she demurs. "Mr. Adams paid for them—!"

"You wouldn't have to really lose them," Brittany interjects. "You could just hide them and pretend to lose them when you get to the fair. Ken and Mr. Adams would never have to know. You could pretend that someone stole them—that way, no one could get mad at you," she says knowingly. She shrugs one shoulder, "You can't read cards if you don't have cards, right?"

Santana tries to think through the potential liabilities to Brittany's plan, not because she wants to reject it, but because she has it in her nature to worry and to not want to get herself into trouble.

Of course, it would be a lie for Santana to tell Mr. Adams and the others that someone had stolen her cards when really she had only hidden them herself. But, then again, everyone at the circus seems to carry around a lie of some sort, and this lie would prove particularly harmless—benevolent, even—perhaps even more so than the lie wherewith Santana pretends to be Noah Puckerman's wife.

(Puck says that the truth doesn't matter anymore.)

Momentarily, Santana wonders what would happen if Mr. Adams were to discover her falsehood, but then she reasons that he never would discover it, if she hid her deck away deep inside her valise where no one ever looks but her—not even Puck.

At the very least, pretending to lose her cards would spare Santana from having to read them today, and that in itself might save a life. Surely Santana could feel justified telling one lie if it would prevent her from drawing Death for a day.

"Right," she says slowly, Brittany's mischievous smile catching at her mouth, as well.

For a long moment, she and Brittany stare at each other, grinning like fools for Brittany's cleverness and for Santana's renewed hope.

It's only when Puck returns bearing his plate that Santana realizes that Brittany's hand had slid over hers on the bench and shifts away from Brittany's touch, suddenly conscious of rules, rules, rules. Puck eyes both Brittany and Santana, wary of whatever secret they keep, but doesn't ask them about it.

(What he doesn't ask can't hurt him.)

"You'll steal the show, darlin'," Brittany promises. She wears delighted expression, like the child who managed to sneak candy from a Christmas tin without her parents catching her at it. Santana finds that she can breathe again just watching her.

Thank goodness for Brittany saving her.

(Thank every star in the sky.)


Eating lunch beside both Puck and Brittany proves strangely amusing for Santana. While Puck jaws on about how the general store in Correctionville only carries two brands of aftershave, one of which smells like "horse piss," according to him, Brittany and Santana mostly ignore his ranting, with Brittany drawing shapes in the grass with her toes and Santana guessing what the shapes signify, mouthing her answers to Brittany while Puck keeps his back turned.

"So I ask the shopkeeper if they've got anything other than the stuff on the shelf—"

A cat?

Yes.

"—and he says that he can check in back. Turns out, they have the brand I prefer, they just hadn't stocked it out front yet. He charged me a whole dollar for it, but I'd say it's worth it if it means I don't have to smell like a barnyard—"

The moon?

No.

"—so I paid him square for it. I tell you, ladybird, sometimes it's expensive, just to be civilized."

A heart?

Yes.

"Ladybird, are you even listening?"

(No, no, no.)


Saying goodbye to Brittany is a tragic affair, even though Brittany and Santana promise to meet up with each other at the show, if they can, and even though they've spent the whole morning in each other's company. The girls stand in the shadow of the chuck while Puck takes their plates to the wash tubs for them, and Brittany throws her arms around Santana's neck, burying her face in Santana's hair.

"I'm jealous that you get to spend all day with you. I miss you before you even leave," she mumbles.

Santana sinks into Brittany's body, warm even in the shadow of the chuck, and breathes in Brittany's summer day scent, wanting to memorize it, to carry it with her always.

She nods, "Me, too."

When the warning bell rings and Puck comes to lead Santana away, Brittany slips her hand down Santana's arm, linking their pinky fingers, and gives Santana's pinky a little squeeze.

"Remember: You're gonna steal the show, darlin'," she says in her just-so way.

Santana hopes that Brittany is right and that her plan will work.

(Brittany has never given Santana bad advice before.)


Puck steers Santana down the tent rows, holding her by the elbow with one rough hand. His touch feels off, like it doesn't belong, but Santana doesn't shake him from her; she just keeps walking. Santana mutters to Puck that she needs to adjust her costume before the show and so Puck waits outside the tent, letting her alone inside, presumably to change her clothing.

(What Puck doesn't ask can't hurt him.)

Santana shuts the tent flaps behind herself. She sinks into the shade and privacy of the tent. With shaking breath, she crouches down beside her belongings, removing her tarot deck from its beaded sack and then hiding the cards in the belly of her valise beneath her old street clothes and inside one of her shoes. She feels like she's trespassing somewhere where she ought not to be, doing this, and trembles with anxiousness, willing Puck to remain out-of-doors for as long as she needs to work her deception.

With the cards most definitely "lost," Santana cinches up her peacock-colored knapsack, drawing a deep breath as she prepares to put on an act keen enough to fool Puck, to fool Ken, to fool her patrons, and to fool the whole circus.

"You ready, ladybird?" Puck asks as Santana emerges from the tent, knapsack in hand, and she nods, more in hope than affirmation.

It turns out to be surprisingly easy for Santana to convince Ken and her audience that someone stole the cards.

Santana milks the time leading up to the fair, setting up her booth, unfurling her knapsack and spreading it as a tablecloth, setting the now-empty beaded sack at the corner of the table, smoothing down her skirt, rearranging the bangles at her wrist, and finally setting down to read just as the first patrons crowd into a queue at the front her booth. She swallows her apprehension, eyes flickering between Ken and the crowd.

She's in the circus now.

Today, Santana draws a queue so long that it stretches down the midway. It includes probably over three-hundred people—a thoroughly impressive number, considering Correctionville's modest size.

Just as Puck reported, the crowd babbles with talk of what happened in St. James, whispering Mr. Hammond's name and making mention of Santana's powers as a diviner of the future. They stare at her with wide, wary eyes, checking for the devil on her shoulder and the angel at her back. Santana wonders what they see; she knows what she feels.

"Soy una actriz," she whispers to herself as the first patron steps up for his reading.

When he asks her for a card reading, she nods dutifully and reaches for the beaded sack at the edge of her table. Her hand falls over the fabric, collapsing it. The sack clearly holds nothing. Santana furrows her brow, painting confusion across her face as one might paint watercolor swatches across a canvas. She lifts the sack from the tabletop and shows it, clearly empty. When she speaks, she remembers to mind her accent.

"What? The cards!" she says, slinging a helpless look to Ken as the crowd around her begins to murmur.

"Is something the matter, miss?" asks her patron.

"The cards!" she repeats. "My cards—they are missing!"

The crowd erupts with interested babble, every patron looking at his neighbor with wide, curious eyes. Ken waddles to Santana's table and snatches the sack out of her hand, checking its emptiness for himself. His little piggy eyes narrow, and he checks under the table, as if the deck could have simply fallen into the grass without Santana noticing it.

"What did you do?" he accuses, fixing Santana with a furious glare.

"I didn't do anything!" Santana lies, trying her best to act scandalized and frightened concerning this new and unexpected turn of events. She widens her eyes and pats at the tablecloth, as if the cards could have crept under it like a mouse hiding under a blanket.

"Where are they?" Ken bellows.

"I don't know! I don't know!"

"Did you leave them back in your tent?" he asks, moving closer to Santana from over the table, speaking through clenched teeth.

"They were in the sack before!" she says frantically. "Someone must have stolen them!"

At Santana's word, the crowd brims over, its excited whispers changing into excited whoops and hollering. The prospect of theft seems much more intriguing than fortunetelling ever could. The people stand on their tiptoes and gawk at Santana, Ken, and the empty sack that should hold the cards. It amazes Santana how quickly their attention seems to shift. It amazes her even more when they begin to tell her lie better than she ever could, with gossip circulating through the crowd like fire wending through dried grass.

"—I saw a shifty looking fellow hanging around the gazebo —"

"—he ran off down the midway—"

"—should have known there was something afoot, by the way he looked—"

"—a foreign feller—"

"—her spurned lover, back to steal her livelihood—"

Ken looks between Santana and the crowd, gauging the severity of the situation. He seems pleased with the crowd's interest in Santana but nervous about the prospect of what the purloined cards might do for Santana's business. He gives the beaded sack one last half-hearted squeeze and shoots Santana a warning look.

"She'll still read palms!" he shouts over the gossip. "Her renown as a diviner of palms stretches all over the Old Country! Come see her look into your future, even without the cards!"

(Santana lets out the secret breath she was holding.)


Santana has never experienced such a pleasant fair. The news of her stolen cards spreads rapidly across the midway so that no one even asks her to read tarot. Her patrons seem to find her even more mysterious than usual now that they view her as the potential victim of a crime. They hang on her words, a wondering sort of fear and intrigue glinting in their eyes, drinking in her accent and her vague promises with fervent attention.

The show bell rings.

Brittany.

Just as quickly as Santana slipped into the character of Madame Rossetti, she emerges from it, becoming giddy Santana Lopez, the silly girl who wants nothing more than to find Brittany Pierce, the knife thrower's daughter.

A thrill builds deep inside her, one that swells and spills over, carrying her quickly from her booth around the curve of the big top to where she expects to discover Brittany in the backstage area. Her heart beats to the thrum of Brittany, Brittany, Brittany, and she feels so much and so intensely that she wonders that her chest doesn't simply burst open from trying to contain all of it. She wants so much to tell Brittany about her success on the midway and also so much wants Brittany herself that she can't help but grin for it, buzzing with happiness from crown to foot.

When she happens upon Brittany waiting for her at the center of the backstage, the feeling in her chest grows too big and too bright and too wonderful.

"Hey, darlin'," Brittany smiles, dressed in her show costume and looking surprisingly shy, one foot tucked daintily behind the other. "I heard you were a big hit at the fair." Her cheeks pink as if she's said something overbold.

And, suddenly, though Santana thought she had a thousand things to say to Brittany, she finds that she can say none of them at all. She just adores Brittany too much and words seem so small in the face of such a vast feeling. She bounds over to where Brittany stands and takes hold of Brittany's wrists.

Brittany grins at her. "You got an idea, darlin'?" she teases, and Santana nods, tugging Brittany along after her, back toward the dressing tents, moving quickly over the shaded grass, drunk on so much excitement that she can hardly abide it.

She leads Brittany into the alleyway between the men's and ladies' tents—into the selfsame alleyway where Brittany kissed her in St. James.

"Darlin'?" Brittany starts, perplexed.

But then Santana kisses her, still holding Brittany's wrists in her hands, her pulse beating so hard that she knows Brittany can feel it through her skin. At first, she kisses clumsily, her mouth catching more of Brittany's chin than Brittany's lip as she stands on her tiptoes and leans in, but then she nods and works her lips around Brittany's, taking in Brittany's wet-hot-soft-sweet. The kiss sends a perfect jolt through her whole body, and Brittany must feel it, too, because she lets out a little voiced gasp, like Santana surprised her in the best way possible.

Brittany holds her mouth just slightly opened and the kiss nudges her lips apart. She livens in response to Santana's touch and starts to kiss Santana back, exhaling shakily into Santana's mouth, like she had forgotten to breathe until now.

Santana slips her tongue into Brittany's mouth, running it along Brittany's wet velvet tongue, and the lit feeling from last night returns to her, flaring like the flame in a kerosene lamp's belled jar. Brittany seems to like the kiss and lets out a muffled sigh in response to it, sinking further into Santana until Santana forgets about almost everything else in the world but her.

They only pull away when they need to breathe.

"What was that for?" Brittany asks dopily, and Santana smiles.

(Because Brittany is absolutely perfect.)

"Thank you," Santana says, breathless, moving her hands from Brittany's wrists to Brittany's waist, wrapping Brittany in an embrace, so that their bodies run flush against each other.

(It's such a small thing to say when Santana means so many infinite things.)

Brittany must understand Santana's sentiment because she kisses Santana back, stealing Santana's bottom lip between her own two lips and nipping it.

"We have to go perform, darlin'," she says against Santana's mouth, probably more to remind herself than Santana.

"Sure thing," Santana says.

(The girls stay where they are until Ken bellows for them, his voice carrying all the way to the dressing tents from the backstage.)


If Santana thought the knight sketch droll yesterday, she finds it even more so today, for now she has the pleasure of experiencing the sketch with Brittany. After Mrs. Schuester dresses them, Brittany stands clad in a royal blue veil and Santana in red. They caper into the big top together, linked pinky finger in pinky finger.

Brittany holds a sprig of beardtongue—of the same shade of ghostly, purpling blue as a vein running under pale skin—and Santana a cluster of wild quinine, bursting like little white stars upon a country sky.

Rachel Berry sends Brittany and Santana a strange look as they enter the ring, almost as if she doesn't recognize them. Her eyes dart to their lips, then to their eyes, and Santana feels suddenly as if she must explain herself, though she doesn't know wherefore.

Santana holds tightly to Brittany's finger as they spin under the stage lights. The audience cheers for them in all their pretty colors, as their skirts fan around their legs. They dance until the black knights make a run for them and the whole of the big top gasps, alarmed. Santana doesn't notice Puck charging for her, clad in his black shift, until Brittany's eyes show her where to look, and then Santana screams and Brittany too, both of them dodging away.

Puck flashes his devilish smirk, pleased with their mock horror. He lifts his wooden sword high to the rafters, and Brittany grabs for Santana's hand with a full hold rather than only with her fingers. The girls' hands tangle up together, and the audience shrieks for them and they for the fun of it until the blue knights appear to repulse their foes.

Santana takes more amusement from watching Brittany watch the sword fight than from watching the sword fight itself, smiling every time Brittany bounces on the balls of her feet and laughing as Brittany makes the most comical expressions in response to this blow or that parry.

"Woo-hoo! Knock him down!" Brittany crows.

"Knock who down?" Santana asks, squeezing Brittany's hand in her own, their flowers twined between their tangled fingers.

"Anyone!" Brittany cheers, grinning and pumping her fist in the air.

(The tugging feeling in Santana's chest grows so strong that Santana gasps a little, surprised.)

The blue knights vanquish their foes one by one, and then the music changes. The black knights raise themselves from the floor and bow before their conquerors, and the crowd cheers so loudly for their act of surrender that Santana wonders if the tumult won't deafen her. She feels the sound as well as hears it, shouts buzzing through her sternum, applause beating at her back and temples, becoming part of her, thundering in her blood.

Brittany leaps at Santana's side, taking Santana up with her.

For the briefest instant, it feels like they could fly.

They laugh, circus lights catching at the whites of their eyes, illuminating the rounds of their cheeks and sparkling over Santana's bracelets. Santana feels her pulse thrum against Brittany's skin and shuts her eyes just as they reach the greatest height of their jump, trying to remember everything as if her mind were a photographer's camera and she could make an image of this moment there forever.

When the knights all line up together, blue and black, standing broad shoulder to broad shoulder, all bowing to the "fair maidens," Puck fixes Santana with his thirsty look from across the way, and she quails, unsure of what to do with it.

Luckily, Brittany saves her, tugging Santana by the hand over to Sam in his handsome blue shift. Both Brittany and Santana give their flowers to Sam, and he grins, dopey and canine, in thanks. Puck's mouth falls open in indignation, and Santana laughs and Brittany with her. The girls both go skipping away to join the parade file, laughing at their joke and at everything.

Santana feels so, so happy that she thinks that she could cry for it.


The remainder of the matinee performance goes off seamlessly and without any excitement except for the usual circus sort. Santana dances particularly gracefully around Puck and Rachel during the gypsy act and then watches from the aperture at the back of the big top as Brittany mugs for the crowd while her father takes aim at the target behind her, outlining Brittany in knives without a single waver in his throws.

After the show, Santana walks back to the residential side of camp with Puck and Rachel, trying not to smile too widely as Puck complains that she presented her favor to Sam instead of him.

"Well, Sam did best you in battle, Noah," Rachel says helpfully.

"But Brittany already gave him her favor!" Puck complains.

(Santana tries and fails to bite down her grin.)

"He bested you soundly," Rachel amends.

(Santana laughs so loudly that the patrons leaving the midway probably hear her all the way down the pitch.)


Puck waits for Santana outside while she stashes her props and washes her face inside the tent. Once Santana emerges into the light, Puck meets her, taking her by the hand and kissing at her knuckles, as romantic as Mr. Hardy's Oak, except with less grace and more slaver.

"Ken needs me and the boys to mend the zebra fences," he says, by way of apology. "I hate leaving you alone all the time."

"I'm not alone," Santana blurts, so adamant that she seems to startle Puck, who looks at her as if she's mad. Santana struggles to say what she means. "It's just—that is to say—I won't be alone. I can always go with Brittany. And I'm sure that Ma Jones or Mrs. Schuester will have work for us. We'll have somewhere to be," she falters.

Puck searches Santana, concern etched into his brow, as if he thinks Santana might be putting on a brave face for his sake. He seems grateful in a way that makes Santana squirm under his gaze.

(She isn't his wife, no matter what he thinks otherwise.)

(She plays at the thread ring around her finger, absentminded.)

"There's a good ladybird," Puck says, thumbing over Santana's elbow before he starts away down the tent row. "I'll meet you for the evening show," he promises. He tugs his hat down over his eyes and squints into the afternoon sunlight, giving Santana one last careful look over his shoulder before he disappears down a side alley.

Santana forgets Puck almost as soon as he goes and returns to thinking of Brittany instead.

(Santana can't remember what she used to think about before she met Brittany.)

(She must have felt lonesome then.)


Santana wishes that she had arranged to meet Brittany somewhere after the show, for, as it is, she can't seem to find Brittany, no matter where she searches for her. After checking at the trisection of tents and along the billboard partition, Santana even dares to venture down Brittany's tent row, calling Brittany's name without regard as to whether Mr. Pierce might hear her doing it or not.

After shouting for Brittany several times and receiving no reply, Santana waxes bold enough to press her ear to the Pierce's tent flap, checking to see if the Pierces are at home; when she hears nothing on the inside of the tent—only the camp sounds outside of it—she can't help but wonder to where the knife thrower and his daughter might have disappeared. She decides to explore the mess area, hopeful that she might find Brittany waiting for her there.

Brittany isn't there.

But Ma Jones is.

"Girl, either pick your slack jaw up off the ground and start working or else get your lazy behind out of my kitchen!" Ma says, noticing Santana standing at the peripheries of the mess pit, disappointed and confused to discover Brittany nowhere in sight. When Santana doesn't move right away, Ma furrows her brow, annoyed. "What do you think you're doing?" she asks, crossing her arms over her apron.

Santana stammers, "I was... uh... looking for Brittany."

Ma rolls her eyes, as if she both expected Santana's answer and disapproves of it. "Well Miss Brittany ain't here right now, so either you best start peeling these potatoes for supper"—she gestures to a lumpy burlap sack propped against a nearby table—"or you best get yourself out of here and stop taking up space that could be used for working."

(Santana feels surprised that Ma gives her the choice.)

(Santana can't help but notice that Ma sounds mild, like she did this morning.)

Briefly, Santana considers leaving the mess area while she has a chance, but then she considers that sometimes it's best to stay in one place when hoping to meet up with someone lost. Brittany has always had better luck finding her than she's had finding Brittany anyway.

"I'll peel potatoes, miss," Santana mumbles, and Ma nods at her, clearly pleased.

It isn't so bad, working in the kitchen—not when Ma Jones and her girls let Santana alone, giving her time to think and to wait for Brittany. Santana sits at one side of the mess table, they at the other, with neither of the two parties speaking to each other, though Ma Jones' girls chatter to one another and Ma as usual.

Santana skins her potatoes into an aluminum bucket, same as always, carefully rounding the knife over the earthy curves of the tuber, digging out the rooted eyes and carving the pale, brown bruises out from the plane of slick white.

(If Quinn Fabray were to interview Santana about her position at the circus, Santana could say fortuneteller, gypsy dancer, and professional vegetable peeler.)

Though Santana handles the knife with vigilance, the task at hand doesn't actually require much thought on her part, and she quickly and easily wanders away into daydreaming about Brittany.

Ever since the knight sketch ended, Santana has felt absolutely silly for Brittany, like she might never stop smiling because Brittany is her secret. She still can't believe that someone as perfectly delightful as Brittany would want to be her friend—and especially not such a dear friend, and one who devotes so much time to keeping her company.

The longer Santana thinks of Brittany, the more the big, bright, wonderful feeling in Santana's chest threatens to outgrow its space, to overrun its garden and spill out like zealous flowers reaching toward the sun.

I looked on the singer fair,
my heart was at her feet
She sang of love, the old, old theme
in accents low and sweet
And then she sang a song
that made the teardrops start
She sang a song, a song of home,
a song that reached my heart

Home, home, sweet, sweet home
She sang the song of "Home, Sweet Home,"
the song that reached my heart

Santana doesn't realize that she sings until she bends to retrieve a stray potato peeling from the grass and rights herself from her stoop to find Ma Jones grinning at her from the other side of the table.

"Mr. Puckerman is one lucky fella," Ma says, suddenly looking much more interested in Santana than she ever has before. She wears the kind of smile that turns her whole face bright, the dimples deep in her cheeks, her pretty lips pursed like she keeps some delicious secret.

Santana startles, embarrassed that she started to sing aloud without realizing it. Papa always told Santana that she had a lovely voice, and so did the old gardener, but Santana knows that there exists a vast degree of difference between entertaining friends and family in the parlor at the bachelor cottage and singing like Rachel Berry or even Ma Jones do for the whole circus. She also feels confused as to what her singing has to do with Noah Puckerman, when he hasn't even heard her sing before.

"What makes Puck lucky?" Santana asks, her cheeks heating in the face of Ma's unrelenting smile.

Ma laughs like Santana asked a foolish question, and Ma's kitchen girls laugh as well, honing in on the conversation. Santana flushes even more deeply. "Because you got it so bad for him!" Ma crows, and her kitchen girls giggle loudly at Santana's expense.

"Got what?" Santana asks, feeling dreadfully uninformed.

Ma gives Santana a meaningful look, reveling in her superior knowledge over Santana. She grins and practically croons, "Girl, only a fool in love sings a song with a woodenheaded grin like that on her face! You're silly in love, and there's no use denying it! You're in love with your mister!"

I'm in love with Brittany Pierce.


The birdsongs seem to hang in the air. The quiet sibilance of the fire dies away. The blood in Santana's veins almost halts in its flow, and her heart itself skids to a sudden standstill, stopped in the race it has run all day. If the world turns on, Santana would hardly know it.

Santana Lopez loves Brittany Pierce.

Suddenly, Santana has the answer to all the questions she never thought to ask herself, and she knows that she loves Brittany as surely as she knows her own name. It isn't the simple devotion of a friendship, but a storybook love like in Shakespeare and Malory—though somehow even deeper and better and realer than those loves, to the point where Santana can't even remember a time before she loved Brittany, though she and Brittany only met each other four days ago.

Except that Santana can't love Brittany.

Santana can't be in love with Brittany—not in the storybook way—because Brittany is a woman, just as Santana is.

Women don't fall in love with other women.

Just as surely as Santana's heart knows that it loves Brittany, her mind can't comprehend the fact that such is the case. Santana has never heard of any woman loving another woman beyond friendship, never read about it in any book, and never even imagined it on her most fevered nights. Women don't bring other women bouquets of flowers or give other women pretty rings.

(Except.)

Women don't go a-courting to other women.

Women don't marry each other in churches or anywhere else at all.

Santana must be the most foolhardy and malfunctioning woman in the history of the world to fall in love with another woman. She must be the only woman to ever find herself in such a predicament. Suddenly, Santana feels like Alice tumbling head over heels down the rabbit hole, bamboozled as to which way is up and sure that she might never reach solid ground again.

"Are you all right?"

Santana had forgotten that such a person as Ma Jones existed or that anyone other than herself and Brittany existed, actually. Ma Jones fixes her with a concerned expression, eyebrows drawn together and mouth hanging open just a bit. Ma's kitchen girls sit, worried into silence, at Ma's back.

"You look a little green," Ma says, searching over Santana's face.

"I don't feel well," Santana manages, though that isn't half the truth of it.

Ma's face turns as soft as Santana has ever seen it. "Well, you peeled enough potatoes. Why don't you take a rest before the show? Ken'll have something to say about it if he thinks I worked you into your sickbed before tonight's performance," she says, only thinly veiling her kindness behind a last bit of snap.

"Thank you," Santana mumbles, setting down her knife on the tabletop and standing, as machinated in her movements as Robert-Houdin's clockwork tricks.

She scarcely registers herself leaving the mess pit or stumbling her way back to her tent, so caught up in her thoughts that she can do little else but wrestle with them, her heart a knot inside her chest, her stomach flipped and flipped again.

Women don't love other women.

Santana has never felt so positively stupid about anything in her life. How could her heart betray her in such an extraordinary way? How could it betray Brittany, who has never shown Santana anything but the purest kindness?

Oh God.

Brittany.

Santana had only just begun to imagine what her love for Brittany would mean for herself, but suddenly she wonders what it might mean for Brittany. If Brittany were to find out that Santana had stupidly fallen in love with her, what would she say? How might she react? The fact that Santana does love Brittany is the most unbelievable thing in the entire world. How would Brittany even know what to say about it? Santana's stomach clenches, and, for a second, she worries that she might be sick.

No sooner does the thought cross Santana's mind than does Santana turn a corner down an alleyway between two tents and see a flash of corn-silk blonde and tatty cobalt blue.

Brittany.

Santana all but throws herself back out of the alleyway from which she just came, moving so quickly that she hardly leaves footprints in the grass. Her heart leaps into her throat and her pulse pounds like the great circus band drums upon her temples. The names of all her grandmother's saints scramble in her mind.

San Isidro de La Guardia, El Santo Niño Labrador, Nuestra Señora el Abad, San Antonio de la Candelaria.

Santana doesn't breathe as she listens for Brittany's movements—for the shuffle of Brittany's feet on the grass or for the sound of her voice calling Santana darlin'.

(Santana feels a dull ache in her chest.)

Though she strains her ears to hear, Santana divines nothing except the manic beat of her own heart, her breathing—hurricane-hard—and the sounds of camp and summer wind. She can't linger for Brittany to find her, not when she has so much to explain that she could never explain, ever.

On a normal day at the circus, Santana can't manage to find Brittany anywhere, no matter how she searches for her, but today Santana has happened upon Brittany by accident at the one time when she would do anything to avoid Brittany entirely.

She has to run.

With her whole body on high alert, Santana starts to creep back the way she came, back toward the mess pit. Once she makes it halfway up her alley, she bolts, allowing her feet to carry her in a wide circle around the white city instead of through it. Tears prick at the corners of her eyes, and her throat tightens from her shame, confusion, anger, and love for Brittany, which still blooms vast, bright, and deep within her chest, impossible to ignore, no matter how much Santana would to God and all her devils that she could smother it.

Brittany will hate her.

Brittany will hate Santana, just like everyone hates Santana in the end. Brittany will see that Santana does have a curse—the most foolish, impractical curse that has ever blighted any one soul—and Brittany will call Santana goddamned just like everyone else does.

Santana chokes out a sob just as she reaches her tent, throwing open the flaps and stumbling her way inside to the cot, where she flops down, spent.

Brittany was Santana's friend—Santana's best and first and only—and then Santana had to spoil everything by falling in love with her.

Santana aches inside, like the hollow of a scraped bone.

She can hardly breathe.

Her body rings like a bell, every part of her trembling, though she tries to still herself and set her jaw and hold her own hands. She lowers herself onto the cot as slowly as a new mother would her babe into a cradle and rolls onto her back, sweating through her shirt and swallowing and swallowing and swallowing to no avail, trying to dislodge the lump swollen in her throat.

"I'm in l—," she starts, but can't bring herself to say it, lest the words make it real, like one of Mr. Malory's fairy spells. She shuts her eyes, blocking out everything, trying to breathe.

She feels like a madwoman or someone lost at sea.

If Santana could only clear her mind, she could think of something to do for her situation, but, as it is, Santana can think in nothing but circles, with everything returning to the fact that she loves Brittany Pierce and that she can no more imagine not loving Brittany than she could imagine a world without rules. Santana longs to sleep, exhausted down to her bones. She wonders if she might slip away into dreaming if only she keeps her eyes tightly closed and focuses on smoothing out her uneven respiration.

I'm in love with Brittany.

I'm in love with Brittany.

I'm in love with Brittany.

She plays at the thread ring on her finger, knowing that she ought to take it off and throw it away and forget that Brittany ever gave it to her because Brittany only meant it as a joke, no matter how serious it felt to Santana when it happened.

(No matter how much it feels like something else.)

For the briefest second, Santana wonders if maybe it isn't such a bad thing, loving Brittany, because nothing so happy could be bad, but then so wondering causes Santana's throat to tighten again as she remembers all those falling-and-suddenly-fallen-into-love moments with Brittany and hates herself for not realizing that her heart had chosen its course before she could even realize that it had.

"I'm in l—," she starts again, but the words stop on her lips, like so many of the unkissed kisses Santana had meant to give Brittany over the last few days.

A single choking sob breaks Santana's throat.

(She won't remember falling and suddenly being fallen-to-sleep.)

(She won't remember the dreaming when it comes.)

(She won't remember dreaming kisses for Brittany.)


What seems like just a moment later, Puck sets a hand on Santana's shoulder.

"It's a quarter after six o'clock, ladybird. Time to wake up," he says gently, rustling her out of bed.

(Santana remembers Brittany instantly and at once feels as sick and conflicted as she did before she went to sleep.)

In the next instant, Puck produces a canteen from some unseen place and draws it to Santana's lips, holding it as she drinks. He pouts his lip at her and furrows his brow, a broad, careful palm set on her thigh.

"How are you feeling, ladybird?" he asks softly. "Ma Jones said you took sick after the matinee. If you still ain't all right, I'll tell Ken you can't go on tonight, and I'll fight him if he tries to get you."

Santana has seldom heard anything so sweet and so stupid in her entire life.

She almost starts to cry for it and also for Puck, as she realizes for the first time that it's him she ought to love and not Brittany because he is as close a thing to a husband as she ever will get, and he's been nothing but kind—or as kind as a Puck can be—to her since the day her father died.

Why when she looks at him does she feel nothing?

"I'm fine," Santana chokes out, though she really isn't.

She lies mostly because she can't stand to stay in the tent alone with her thoughts.

She stretches out her hand to Puck, allowing him to guide her up from her bed.

Puck treats Santana with surpassing gentleness as he leads her from the tent, carrying her peacock-colored knapsack and her tambourine with him and steering her by the elbow in the same way that he did on the first day when she arrived at the circus—back before she had met Brittany Pierce and before any of this nonsense about falling in love had happened.

He sneaks concerned glances at Santana every time they turn a corner and half-shields her with his body when they enter the midway, making sure that none of the other performers jostle her on the way to her booth.

When they reach Santana's gazebo, Puck pulls out Santana's chair for her and coaxes her to take a seat, then stalks over to Ken, pressing in close and addressing him in a gruff, hard whisper. Ken's beady, black eyes widen at whatever Puck tells him, and he glances quickly between Puck and Santana.

Though Ken looks as if he has a mind to argue with Puck, he quickly swallows his fight when Puck leaves him with one final scathing word and a shake of his fist. A threat. Fear floods Ken's face like ink spilling out of a cracked fountain pen. His usual ruddy color blanches out, and he nods to Puck, who leaves him with a curt shake of the head.

Puck slings one last look to Santana at her table.

"If you need anything, you just holler, ladybird," he says, earnest.

Puck departs, and Ken takes up his post beside Santana's sign but doesn't say a word to her, even when the opening bell for the evening fair rings.

Santana's time on the midway passes in a haze. Luckily, with her cards still "missing," she doesn't have to read tarot to anyone, though both her reputation from St. James and her stellar performance from the morning fair attract a large crowd to her booth for palm readings.

She mumbles through each interaction with her patrons, promising absurdities and worse, stopping in the middle of her sentences and completely forgetting to put on even the barest sham of her grandmother's accent. She thinks that someone yells at her once, but she doesn't hear a word of the chastisement, if that's even what it is. When she looks into the crowd, she wonders if they can see it on her—that the mysterious Madame Rossetti loves the knife thrower's daughter—and quails.


Santana presents an even poorer performance in the big top than she does on the midway.

Just before the show bell gives the knights their cue to take the stage, Santana imagines Brittany finding her under the lights and feels her stomach heave. Not wanting to be sick in front of everyone, Santana scurries away from the backstage area to just beside the elephant pen, doubling over and clutching her stomach. Something jogs in her stomach, and her throat burns, but nothing comes up.

"Santana?"

It isn't Brittany because she didn't say darlin'.

(Santana's chest aches.)

Santana turns to find Rachel Berry standing behind her, already clad in a deep red veil and holding a lazy stalk of drooping wild columbine in her hand, as a little girl might hold her dolly to her breast upon a thunderstorm night. Rachel searches Santana with circus lonely-eyes and stretches out a hand toward her, as if to set it on Santana's shoulder, but then Rachel draws it back, thinking better of such boldness.

"Puck said you weren't feeling well," Rachel says in a small voice. "Should I call Mrs. Evans to take care of you? She's the best nurse in camp."

Santana feels as if she runs one pace behind the pack in a footrace. She stares at Rachel. "Did we miss the second show bell? What about the knights—?"

Rachel interrupts Santana: "If you aren't well, you don't have to go on." She takes a step closer to Santana across the grass, entering the shadow that the elephants' wooden palisades cast over the earth. She still wears a timid expression, like Santana is an injured animal who might bite her if she dares to draw too close.

"But what about Ken?" Santana counters, standing up to her full height and wiping her mouth, though she has no reason to do so. She feels dizzy from moving so quickly.

"He won't miss us for the knight sketch, at least. With the equestrienne coterie in the show, we have more maidens than knights anyway, so no one will miss us gypsy women, at least until our act," Rachel says kindly.

If Santana misses the gypsy act, Brittany will look for her after the show. Brittany will come to find her because Brittany is too caring and too generous and too concerned about how Santana feels. Santana has to go on so that Brittany won't fret about her, if only so as to avoid speaking to Brittany.

"I'll go on," Santana says firmly, overpowering Rachel when she tries to interrupt. "I'm fine!"

Rachel flinches when Santana snaps, fear replacing her concern in an instant.

"Well, we've already missed the knight sketch and grand processional," she mumbles, looking at anywhere but at Santana, the sadness in her countenance more acutely noticeable than it had been a second ago.

"Just call me when it's time for the gypsy act," Santana orders, and Rachel nods, obedient.

She spares Santana a last hurt look before she goes away.

For a long while, Santana stands in the shade of the empty elephant pen, relearning how to breathe and be. She leans against the palisades and tries to map the quickest escape route from the big top after the show in her mind. If she skips supper, maybe Brittany won't talk to her—maybe they can just always miss each other in passing from now on.

After all, sometimes the circus seems like the biggest, loneliest place in the world.

(The part of Santana that feels but doesn't speak still only just wants Brittany.)


Santana doesn't know if minutes or hours pass before Rachel Berry calls her name, motioning her over to the big top from afar, but when Santana returns to herself and her faculties, she finds that the sky has changed to heart-blood red, shadows quickly overtaking the firmament. Bugs dot the air, and crickets sing sad songs from the weeds. Somewhere in the distance, Methuselah or one of his cows heaves up a mournful cry from the waiting wings of the big top.

(Santana remembers Brittany moving like light and water, all ease and grace, helping to bathe the elephants.)

(Her heart aches, and she feels circus-lonely for the first time in days.)

Santana barely makes it to the big top entrance in time to join Puck and Rachel for the act. Puck gingerly offers Santana her tambourine just as Ken ushers them onto the stage through the tent flaps. All the while, Puck stares at Santana like the little boy who always awakens in him during his kindest moments.

Though Santana can tell that he might like to do it, Puck doesn't get the chance to ask her how she feels before they debut inside the big top to thunderous applause and fabulous windjammer music, halting at the center of the ring with their backs turned to the audience.

"Ladies and gentlemen, from the darkest regions of Europe, I present to you a trio of gypsies most skilled in the arts of pyrotechnic artistry! To them, the touch of flame feels as but a friendly caress! They feed upon fire and bathe themselves in brimstone! Don't be alarmed by what you are about to see. Our gypsies are fire-proof! Watch them tame the flames!"

The darkness lifts, and new music plays, mysterious and sinuous, wending as a serpent. Santana moves on her cue, spinning to face the bleachers with a flourish of her gypsy skirts and a shake of her tambourine, feeling immediately off-balance, like nothing in her quite sits right.

(Like she tries too hard to want one thing when really she wants something else.)

Santana's feet tangle beneath her, and her knee gives out, unstable at an instant. She doesn't have time to scream before fire passes before her face, so close that she can feel its flush and smell its hot, metallic kerosene scent in her nose and throat. A shock of red and angry yellow stains the air just beyond her eyes, and Santana falls through the heat trail, landing hard on her wrist and over the tambourine, which she still clutches in her grasp, as though it's important.

The crowd shrieks and Puck rushes to the buckets at the back of the ring, dousing his staff in a trice. He dashes to Santana's side before it even registers with her that she fell, his hands catching her up at the elbows, tugging Santana to her feet.

"You all right, ladybird?" he asks, solely concerned and not angry at all.

Santana wonders if she is all right.

Her hands and wrists ache, and her knee burns with a fresh scrape. Her insides wobble from the fall, but she doesn't feel singed anywhere. The fire didn't touch her. The image of the flame's red tail sears into her mind, and she hates it and herself for being so foolish.

(She hates because she fears.)

"Yeah," Santana says shakily, and even though the audience can't hear her small reply, they still cheer for seeing her upright—and particularly once she nods her head.

"Let's have some applause for our gypsies! She's all right!" Will encourages the crowd.

(Santana doesn't know that she is all right.)


Santana curses herself for not knowing that she had fallen in love with Brittany and for not knowing how to fall out of love with Brittany, either.

The truth is that some stubborn something in Santana doesn't want to fall out of love with Brittany and that's the worst part of it all: that Santana always wants everything too, too much, even and especially those things that she cannot or must not have.

For as much as Santana feels foolish for loving Brittany though it should be impossible for her to do such a thing, she also feels deeply and unfailingly attached to Brittany, too. The more Santana attempts to chide herself for comporting her heart so carelessly, the more the quiet rebel in her argues that it's hopeless, hopeless, hopeless, so why not just give in?

Really, how could anyone help but fall in love with Brittany when Brittany is better than the hero in any book and so beautiful and kind? Though Santana wishes she could perhaps say otherwise, she wouldn't want to trade her time with Brittany at the circus away, even if it meant she could escape this strange and impossible love.

(Santana can't remember who she used to be before she loved Brittany.)

(She must have felt lonesome then.)

However Santana would deny it, she still registers that persistent tugging at her heart that connects her to Brittany as if by some invisible string—which is perhaps why Santana finds herself stealing away to the aperture in the tent to watch for the knife throwing act, though she knows she absolutely ought not to do it, taking her usual spot at the back of the big top, cloaked in darkness, waiting to find Brittany, though she would do better to run.

"Thank you, thank you! Our Little Malibran, everyone! Now that we've had our music, how about a little danger? Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you a frontiersman skilled in the art of knife throwing, whose precision goes unmatched in these fine United States! I give to you Mr. Daniel S. Pierce and his beautiful daughter, Brittany, straight from the heart of Appalachia to the J.P. Adams & Son Traveling Circus!"

For Santana's desperation, Brittany looks even more beautiful tonight than perhaps she ever has before. Whereas normally Brittany's pretty flaxen hair hangs straight around her face, tonight it boasts a subtle wave, as if it were recently dampened and drying. It shines under the stage lights, illuminating Brittany's face. The faintest flush of sun heat lingers in Brittany's cheeks, and Brittany smiles her real smile to the crowd rather than only her performance smirk, true happiness putting a spark into her eyes that Santana can see even from so far away.

(How could anyone help but fall in love with Brittany Pierce, the most beautiful girl in the world?)

The tug in Santana's heart feels more like a galling ache. Santana wants so much without knowing exactly what it is she wants.

And then.

Brittany mugs to the crowd, performing her daintiest curtsy to them before turning to take her place at the target board—before turning toward the back of the tent and blowing a kiss to the darkness.

A kiss to Santana.

The sweetest ache plays through Santana's heart, violin-sad and a held out at a quaver. Brittany flashes Santana her most winning and golden smile—her real, true Brittany-smile—a rose flush pinking her cheeks as she rushes to take her place for the act.

Santana finds her own hand at her heart.

She gasps.

(She thinks it's because she's surprised.)


Santana only makes it through the final processional because Puck holds her up by the elbow with one hand while lazily swinging the spare fire flail with his other. Each time the flail draws close to Santana, she flinches, hating the flames as a priest would hate sin and wishing that she could be anywhere in the world but at the J.P. Adams & Son Traveling Circus & Menagerie, if only just for one night.

After the show, Puck ushers Santana out-of-doors.

"Breathe," he commands her.

(She didn't realize that she had stopped again.)

Puck watches Santana with genuine concern, and she wonders if he isn't truly seeing her for the first time. He smoothes a lock of hair back from her face and sets one of his broad, flat palms against the back of her head, drawing her close to him so that she rests against his chest, close enough that she can smell the musk of his sweat and feel his heat all over her skin. He presses a kiss into her hair.

"Just breathe, ladybird," he says. "Tomorrow, I'll have Mrs. Evans look after you while we put on the show. We'll get you feeling better in no time—"

"I'm not sick," Santana says loudly enough to stop Puck from speaking. His hand stills against her hair, but he doesn't say anything. "I'm just tired," Santana explains. "And I want to go back to the tent."

"All right," Puck answers stupidly. "I can take you back to the tent and you can go straight to bed, or I could bring your supper to you—"

Santana doesn't think Puck understands.

"No," she says firmly. "I want to go back to the tent with you."


Girls don't fall in love with girls, but it's okay to like what you like.

The paradox plays over and over again in Santana's head, like she song that just won't leave her, though the band ceased to play it hours ago. She leads Puck through the grass by the hand, the new darkness of the night encroaching on them from every side. They pass by the shadows of other performers but thankfully not Brittany. Santana feels a searing burn where Puck's skin touches her own.

Santana fell in love with another girl, and she can't like what she doesn't like.

But still.

She needs to fall in love with Puck as quickly and as easily as she fell in love with Brittany. If the house in her heart takes up a new owner, then she can breathe and learn to be again and not have to worry about Brittany hating her. If Santana falls out of love with Brittany, then she and Brittany can remain friends. If Santana learns to love the man who purports himself her husband, then everything will be simpler, everything will be right.

Puck is the boy who saved Santana from the streets, who made certain that her father's lawyers hadn't the opportunity to evict her from the bachelor cottage before she had someplace else to stay. Puck arranged for all her travel, for her new job and new life and new name—for his name to become her name. Puck is the boy who wants to journey with Santana to Paris and who shows her kindness, though it's foreign to him to mind anyone except himself.

He's the boy who loves the circus and Mr. Adams more than he can say.

He's the little boy with the idiot smile, stupid-looking in his floppy black hat and gypsy duds.

He saved her life.

Santana ought to love him because Puck is the person it should be easy for her to love.

(But she doesn't.)

When they reach their tent, Santana rustles the flaps apart and yanks Puck inside with her, pushing him deep into the most colorless dark and not bothering to close the tent flaps after her. She shoves Puck down onto the cot by his shoulders, eliciting a surprised grunt from him for her force. Though Santana fusses at Puck more than she does at anyone else in the world, she has seldom treated him so roughly.

"Ladybird?"

If Santana fell in love with Brittany by kissing her, she can fall in love with Puck by kissing him, as well. All the storybooks talk about it. All the storybooks talk about how wonderful it should be.

Santana sets her hands flat against Puck's chest, feeling the swell of his breathing, and pushes him back farther onto the cot until he sits at the sling of it. Without a word, Santana clambers atop Puck, sitting in his lap, facing him, her hands taking hold at his gypsy vest. She smells the sour and dirt and peppery sweat on him.

He opens his mouth to speak again, but Santana doesn't wait before she crashes her mouth against his so hard that their teeth clack together and a jolt of pain runs through Santana's jaw. Puck makes a muffled whimpering noise in response, but Santana quiets him, slipping her tongue into his mouth, where she tastes nothing like Brittany's sweetness—only stale, herbal chaw and heat.

(Santana's body feels library-silent and closed-off as she presses closer, closer, closer.)

Though Puck soon livens to Santana's kiss and begins to kiss her back, his wet mouth working against hers, his tongue storming her mouth, and his hands sliding up to hold Santana at the hips, keeping her flush against him, Santana feels none of that stoked Brittany-feeling in her belly or anywhere. Santana works to ignite it, kissing Puck even more fiercely, focusing on the sensation of his tongue against hers and his small, delighted noises upon her lips, but no matter how she struggles at it, she can't seem to strike her fire into being.

(She closes her eyes more tightly.)

(She hadn't realized she had closed them at all.)

"Ladybird," Puck says in a low, lupine growl.

And then.

She feels pressure and heat against the inside of her thigh, not from her, but from him—a brush of solid warmth through fabric. Puck's hips jockey up to meet hers where she straddles him, and the solid warmth moves with him, poking at her leg.

Santana stops.

At first, Puck doesn't seem to notice her reaction. He continues to slather kisses onto her lips and against her jaw, running the wet of his lip along her cheek and guiding her waist down to meet his while he pants out the word ladybird in staccato, his voice a growl in his throat. He starts to guide Santana down onto the cot, laying her out like a sleeping princess below him, but he halts mid-motion when his knuckles brush over her cheek.

"Ladybird, are you crying? Jesus! You're trembling."

Santana hadn't noticed she was until Puck said so.

Puck lifts his finger to Santana's face and brushes away a tear from it. She can't see him with her eyes cinched so tightly shut, but she feels something in him die down at once.

"Please don't cry, ladybird," he entreats, suddenly the little boy that Santana likes so well.

"I'm sorry," Santana sobs, and she means more than she could ever say—more things than she has words to explain. A tremor passes over her, and she lies back onto the cot, wrapping her arms around herself just to keep the thing in her chest from unraveling. Her legs form a clumsy knot over Puck's lap.

She just wants Brittany.

"I'll get you a drink of water, ladybird. How about that?" Puck says, a note of helplessness in his voice. He shifts out from under Santana without waiting for her answer. "I'll be right back," he says soothingly, and Santana opens her eyes a peek as he rises from the cot, sliding her legs over to take his place.

She watches Puck through the blear of her tears, seeing him silhouetted against a backdrop of Castor and Cancer through the opening of the tent. He crouches even more than he usually would under the tent frame and keeps his back to her.

"Just give me a minute," he says in a funny pinched voice, and Santana closes her eyes again, still shaken to her bones.

The last thing Santana will remember is the swish of canvas flaps closing after Puck a while later as he emerges from their tent and then the deep tremble than runs through her whole body, from her toes to her teeth. She muffles down an aching cry and holds herself more tightly, feeling cold even for the warm night.

(When Puck returns with his promised water, he finds Santana sound asleep.)

(And dreaming.)


Author's Note: I dedicate this chapter to my dear friend the Good Reverend, whose Jazzverse delights me so, so much.

Other Author's Note: Also, I would like to offer a special thanks to the lovely and talented virginiaburton on tumblr for producing such fine art to accompany the story. I'm in love with her tarot series, not gonna lie.

And, finally, I know I say this every chapter, but it is especially true here: I could not have written this chapter without the help of my amazingly talented and patient beta Han at socallmedaisy on tumblr, whose good judgment, keen eyes, and thoughtfulness are crucial to my writing process with this story. #brotp: head protection


Spanish translations:

"Soy una actriz" : "I am an actress"

San Isidro de La Guardia, El Santo Niño Labrador, Nuestra Señora el Abad, San Antonio de la Candelaria : The names of various Spanish and Latin American Catholic saints scrambled and with mismatched epithets