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Wires

Santana wakes when she hears her wife calling her name.

"San, something is wrong. I have stomach pains."

The worry in her wife's voice instantly wakes Santana up. She turns to face her and places a hand on her stomach.

"The doctor told us about that Braxton Hicks thing, could it be that?" Santana asks.

"I don't know. I never had them with Barbara. I think we should go to the hospital to be sure."

"Okay, let me get dressed."

Santana jumps out of bed and grabs the closest clothes available, she pulls on a pair and jeans and a discarded t-shirt. As she pulls the t-shirt over her head she hears Rachel call out in pain.

"I'm bleeding"

"What?"

"I'm bleeding, San. I'm bleeding" Rachel cries.

"Okay, don't worry. Everything is going to be okay" Santana says taking her wife's hand and helping her out of the bed.

The truth is she's terrified that things aren't okay but there is no way in hell that she's going to let Rachel know that. She has to be strong not just for Rachel, but for her child too.

She isn't sure how she manages to concentrate as she drives to the hospital and she isn't even sure that she parks legally since she just parks outside of the hospital and abandons her car there.

She wraps a reassuring arm around her wife and takes most of her weight as she walks through the automatic doors into the reception. Her heart is thumping in her chest and she lets her mask slip for a second and lets her weakness show.

"My wife needs help. She's seven and a half months pregnant but she's complaining of stomach pains."

A nurse appears with a wheelchair and Santana helps her wife to sit down. The nurse then wheels her wife away as Santana tries to keep up grabbing her wife's hand for reassurance.

Everything turns into a blur, they tell her that Rachel will have to an emergency cesarean and the next thing she knows she's being taken into a room to get scrubbed up.

They then take her into a room where Rachel was lying on a bed. She immediately takes her wife's side and places a kiss on her forehead.

"Everything will be okay, I promise."

"You can't promise me something like that Santana."

"I know." Santana whispers and places another kiss on Rachel's head.

It takes everything Santana has to stay strong in that moment. She never lets go of her wife's hand and she constantly whispers reassurances into her ear. They don't hear the sound of a baby crying like they did when Barbara was born and they only get a quick glimpse of the baby as the nurses rush around the room doing everything they can to help.

Once it's all over a nurse comes over and explains that they have taken her to the neonatal ICU and that's when they realize they have another daughter. They never knew the sex of the baby, Rachel always wanted it to be a surprise but now they know. They had another beautiful baby girl.

Rachel is wheeled out of the room so the nurses can clean her up. They tell Santana that she's probably going to sleep for a while after the ordeal her body had just been through so all she can do is sit and wait.

Eventually a nurse approaches her and says that she can see her daughter for a couple of minutes since they've got her stable.

Santana stands next to the large plastic box that is keeping her daughter alive. Her hand is pressed against the side in what was the cruelest case of "you can look but you can't touch".

She would do anything to hold her daughter in her arms for the first time.

She looks so tiny alone in that box. The sight of the small wires connecting her to the machines outside and the small oxygen tube attached her tiny nose that helps her breath causes the tears to slide down Santana's face. The thing that breaks Santana's heart the most is that Rachel hasn't seen their daughter properly yet.

Santana had left her wife whilst she slept. She would also need time to recover just like their daughter. This was supposed to be a happy day, the birth of their second child, she didn't expect this to happen.

She'll have to call her parents and tell them what's happened. She felt herself lucky that they had taken Barbara for the weekend. She wouldn't have known what to do if she had to deal with a three year old in the middle of all of this.

She bends down so she's face to face with her newborn daughter whose eyes open.

"I love you" Santana whispers against the plastic.

The baby's eyes close again and even though they were only open for mere seconds Santana feels as if it was a response. A calmness washes over her as she knows deep inside that her daughter will be okay.

It takes weeks before they can take newly named Zoe home. The hardest part in those weeks is only being able to visit Zoe at specific times and at the end of the day when the visiting times were over they had to go home and leave their daughter at the hospital.

Santana watches with a smile on her face as Rachel sits on the couch cradling Zoe in her arms. Barbara is sitting as close as possible to her mother and her new sister that has her tiny hand wrapped around Barbara's finger.

Santana walks over to her family and takes a seat on the arm of the couch, wrapping an arm around her wife and placing a kiss on her head. She looks down at Zoe who stares back at her with those deep brown eyes. She looks at Santana the same way she did in that hospital for the first time, all those weeks ago.


Song: Wires by Athlete