The Knife Thrower's Daughter

by themostrandomfandom

In the summer of 1898, Santana Lopez joined the J.P. Adams & Son Traveling Circus & Menagerie as it toured the states of the Upper American Midwest. She also fell in love with the knife thrower's daughter.

10. Full Moon on a Sunday Night Part I

Chapter 9: Full Moon on a Sunday Night, Part I

Sunday, July 3rd, 1898: Storm Lake, Iowa

Santana can still feel Brittany worn into her muscles and bones, humming somewhere inside her, when she goes to sleep at night and when she awakens in the morning. It is as if Brittany left a piece of herself somewhere at Santana's quick, engraving it there as a child might engrave her own name upon the underside of the floorboard in her room, claiming space for herself eternally, though no one knows of it. Somehow, Brittany seems to have given her secrets over to Santana, treasuring them up within Santana's locket heart. If Santana will only take the time to learn those secrets, they'll be hers to keep.

(Forever.)

Santana always felt guilty snooping through things that didn't belong to her when she was a child—Abuela's tiny tin filled with strange coins and keepsake trinkets from San Juan, the silver clutch hidden in Papa's surgeon's bag, an unlabeled photograph of a pretty, dark woman whom Santana never met sheaved secretly inside it—and so she eventually outgrew the habit altogether.

Examining the gift that Brittany has given her doesn't feel like snooping to Santana at all, though.

It feels like a trust.

Santana doesn't know what to call what happened between her and Brittany in the tent yesterday, but she can't stop thinking about it—not just about the sensations but about how ineffably close she felt to Brittany as they touched each other.

(Brittany acted like she could see for miles when she looked into Santana's eyes.)

Though Santana can't especially explain it, she somehow feels two conflicting things at once: in the first wise, as if Brittany found her hiding in the sunny bay window at the bachelor cottage, reading a book, and curled up there with her, resting upon her shoulder and listening to her breathe; in the second, as if Brittany led her on another circus adventure, tugging her down some bright, dreamy back alley on the midway that she never noticed before, clasping her by the hand, laughing.

The important thing Santana has forgotten lingers just at the peripheries of her consciousness. It feels heavy on the tip of her tongue, like the word she can't manage to conjure to her mind, though she knows its definition and intends to use it in her sentence. It dances just beyond her sightline, a glimmer of light, there and then gone every time Santana tries to fix it in her focus.

Puck hovers over Santana's shoulder while she washes her face and teeth in the steel basin, his expression heavy and eyes clouded with something dark and petulant, like a thunderstorm brewing way off on the horizon.

"You sure you're awake, ladybird?" he asks, smirking as Santana splashes her face with water once, twice, and then three times in a row.

(Santana doesn't know how to tell him that she feels both more awake and more asleep than she ever has before in her life.)

(Puck hardly hears a word Santana says, but Brittany hears Santana, even when Santana says not even a word at all.)

---

Brittany waits for Santana on the edge of the mess pit, holding a hot breakfast plate, a quiet excitement written into the upswing of her smile. The lucky penny feeling in Santana's belly flips, and Santana returns Brittany's grin and breaks away from Puck, running to meet her.

Santana forgoes a proper greeting. "Will I ever get the chance to bring you breakfast?" she teases instead, breathless and grinning as she joins Brittany on the edge of the mess pit.

"Only if you wake up before I do someday, sleepyhead," Brittany replies in a happy whisper.

Brittany isn't the only person nearby who speaks softly.

Whereas normally the mess pit buzzes with conversation during mealtimes, today it seems almost preternaturally quiet, charged with an eerie, nervous energy, only the barest hints of voices snaking through the assembly.

Everywhere Santana looks, the company members hunch over their food, sneaking furtive glances at the world around them, watching over their shoulders as if they expect some unwanted visitor to arrive at any moment.

Ken rubs his thumb over something brown and furry hanging from a chain at his belt, muttering darkly to himself under his breath; it takes Santana a full minute to recognize the nub as a graveyard rabbit's foot, dried and preserved.

(She shudders.)

Mr. Berry repeats a hard k-sounding word to himself and his household between bites of porridge, his quadroon manservant sitting close to him on the bench and Rachel seated across from the pair of them, doe-eyed, nodding along dutifully to her father's chant. Mr. Berry's hand twines with his manservant's and Rachel's on the tabletop, skin atop skin atop skin. If Santana had to guess, she would say that the Berry family was praying.

(Cuidado con el mal de ojo, Santana.)

True to her just-so nature, Brittany seems not to notice any strangeness in the company's behavior, or, if she does, it doesn't fuss her. Though she answered Santana in a whisper herself, her eyes remain wonderfully bright.

Brittany gestures to a spot on the ground where she and Santana can sit, and both girls set down together, Brittany fitting the plate between them, indicating that they'll share. She either forgot a second fork again today or didn't care to collect one. In either case, Santana doesn't especially mind that, once again, she and Brittany will have to trade off their single fork between bites.

The people around Brittany and Santana—a few supes, some freaks from the sideshow, and the Flying Dragon Changs, sipping their usual coffee—watch the two girls, thoroughly distrustful of them. Their wariness grates on Santana. She swallows, an unsettled feeling creeping up inside her.

"Britt," Santana says, adopting a whisper herself, "what's the matter with everyone? Why is it so quiet?"

Even in a whisper, Santana's voice slices through the morning air, loud enough for everyone nearby her to hear it.

"Oh," Brittany says, as if she hadn't even noticed the quiet before, despite speaking so softly herself. She scrunches up her nose. "It's just on account of the full moon tonight. Circus folk are very superstitious about omens. They don't mean to act unfriendly because of it, though."

Were they more at liberty to converse with one another, Santana might explain that no one at the circus besides Brittany really speaks to her anyway, full moon or not, but, as it is, Santana only nods, observing the way various company members glance up at the dark morning sky. Everyone acts keenly disconcerted, even the Flying Dragon Changs, whose Chinese superstitions apparently match those of their American cohorts. The moon wears a round face, half-obscured behind cloud-cover overhead.

"Is the full moon a good or a bad omen for the circus folk?" Santana asks, curious and somewhat nervous in spite of herself.

Brittany shrugs. "It depends on how today turns out, I think," she says wisely. Then, "Do you want some eggs, darlin'?"

(Santana never has experienced a good omen yet before in her life; she wonders if there isn't a first time for everything.)

---

Though everyone else eats breakfast with their hairs on end, Brittany and Santana share their meal in pleasant silence, trading glances with each other, their backs rested against an overturned bench, their legs stretched out side by side in the cool grass.

At first, Santana wonders if Brittany remembers what happened between them in the tent yesterday in the same way that she does, the memory glowing deep inside her, as warm and insistent as a lit ember, but then Brittany rubs her thumb over the crook of Santana's elbow, looking at Santana in that way, and Santana knows that Brittany does.

Suddenly, Santana couldn't keep from grinning if she were to try it. She leans back where she sits, infinitely pleased, and Brittany watches her, curious.

The ground feels damp and cold underneath the girls, still saturated from yesterday's rainstorms, but the glow from the nearby kitchen fire keeps them warm enough. They pay close attention to each other, Brittany tracing her fingers over the patterns on Santana's skirt whenever she isn't eating and Santana rubbing at Brittany's bare ankle with her thumb whenever she is.

Despite the company's weirdness, Santana thinks that she and Brittany are perfect just as they are and feels even more in awe of Brittany than ever before. Brittany doesn't feed Santana like she did yesterday at breakfast, but she does cut bites from their food for Santana each time she passes Santana their fork, and Santana adores her for it.

When the girls finish their meal, Brittany offers to take their dirty place settings to the washtubs, and Santana watches her go, loving everything about Brittany from her careless hair to the way she slips so easily through the human traffic, cat-graceful and liquid in her movements. Santana melts seeing Brittany mouth out a polite Excuse me to every person she passes, though Brittany disturbs no one and no one even notices Brittany's good manners in the end.

All the while, Santana feels closer than ever to remembering her forgotten thing.

(Something about waking to bright lights and feeling the best kind of surprise—)

When Brittany returns to Santana a minute later, she greets Santana with a curious expression, tilting her head to one side, examining Santana as one might examine a painting newly hung upon a wall, checking it for balance. Brittany stares into Santana's eyes as if she's noticed something fascinating deep within them.

"What?" Santana asks, bashful under Brittany's attention and so sweet on Brittany she can scarcely stand it.

Brittany laughs her little silent laugh, though Santana hasn't said anything particularly droll, and glances down at her own toes, her expression changing from curious to caught in a second. Brittany bites her lip and shakes her hair down from behind her ear so as to hide her face.

(Her blush?)

"Nothing, darlin'," she says dreamily, only it doesn't sound like nothing at all.

Brittany gestures for Santana to follow her away from the mess pit, toward the wagon bay, and Santana does so. They keep a perfect pace together.

"What?" Santana tries again, grinning now, shaking her own hair down to curtain her face. She feels wonderfully warm all over, and she only mostly knows why.

"I—," Brittany starts, serious, and then stops. She glances at Santana and changes her tack, suddenly jocular. "I think you had syrup on your nose," she says playfully, reaching up toward Santana's face.

Santana ducks away before Brittany can touch her nose, laughing. "What? No way!" she says, grabbing for Brittany's hand. "I'll have you know that I'm a very dainty eater, Britt."

"Like a princess?" Brittany says, suddenly not teasing anymore.

(Santana knows what Brittany really means, of course, but somehow her ears only hear that Brittany just likened her to a princess for the second time since they've known each other.)

Brittany's compliment nearly causes Santana to forget her line of inquiry but not quite. Santana fixes Brittany with a serious look. "BrittBritt," she pouts, "come on. What is it?"

She reaches down and tangles their pinky fingers together, giving their hands a little swing. The air around them feels humid, though still cool before the sunrise, and the white city falls to canvas ruin, pooling at their feet as they move further and further out from the mess.

"Sometimes I think you know exactly what," Brittany mumbles. She doesn't meet Santana's eyes, though she wears her secret smile, somehow hopeful, sweet, and reserved all at once.

(Her words are the perfect riddle.)

Santana's heart gives a flutter in her chest, except it doesn't stop after only a second. "Know what exactly?" she presses, suddenly just as nervous as she was when she saw Brittany naked in the tent yesterday or when she first climbed the ladder up to the trapeze platforms in the big top.

Brittany glances between Santana and their destination. Only one-hundred yards stand between the girls and the wagons and the rest of the circus company.

"I love kissing you," Brittany blurts out.

(Santana's heart takes wing and flies away at Brittany's second word, and, though Brittany's third and fourth words aren't quite what Santana might have hoped, Santana doesn't bother to call her heart back to her from its heightening heights.)

(They're just a different kind of wonderful than Santana had expected, that's all.)

"I love kissing you," Brittany repeats, talking quietly and quickly, as if she can't help but say such a big thing, even given the short amount of time in which she has to say it.

She speaks in little upswings and looks at the air just above her head, like she pulls her words from the ether there. She says, "I can't stop thinking about yesterday and how much I love kissing you. I'm wild about it, darlin', and if I don't think about it enough now, I'm worried that I'll start thinking about it again during the first show, and I'll just stop in the ring and think about it forever and ever, and everyone will just have to stage the rest of the show around me, and Will and Ken and Mr. Adams probably won't know what to do with me at all."

Brittany pauses briefly, though not even long enough for Santana to begin to say anything in reply to her, before continuing, "You probably haven't thought about what happened yesterday as much as I have because you don't know how good it feels to kiss you—you only know what it feels like to give your kisses away. I think you're the perfect kisser, Santana, but you probably already know that because you're so good at everything you do."

Santana isn't sure if Brittany stops speaking lest she actually blush herself to death for saying another word or because she and Santana have finally reached the wagon bay, where other people suddenly surround them, but, in either case, Santana doesn't think she has ever seen Brittany's ears pinker or that she herself has ever felt more entirely wide-eyed and stupid in response to something Brittany has said.

She gapes at Brittany, wondering if she didn't just imagine Brittany's every perfect word.

Her whole mind stalls, blank, except for a single thought.

Brittany Pierce loves to kiss me.

Brittany searches Santana's face, waiting for her to say something, holding her breath. Santana searches for words but can't find anything inside herself except for the desire to kiss Brittany breathless.

Santana rocks up on tiptoe, almost brave enough to do just what she pleases, only to feel something collide with her back the second that she does so.

An elbow.

"Sorry, ladybird!" Puck says, spinning to see Santana just at the same time she spins to see him.

Santana feels jolted all over, not just from the contact but also from remembering that someone else exists in the world outside from herself and Brittany—and particularly Noah Puckerman, about whom Santana had forgotten as soon as she caught sight of Brittany at the edge of the mess pit earlier this morning, before Brittany even called Santana's kisses perfect.

It occurs to Santana that she doesn't know where Puck sat to take his meal or with whom. Apparently, it occurs to Puck, too.

Puck glances between Santana and Brittany at her side. "You weren't planning to ride to Storm Lake with me, were you?" Puck observes, his voice dull.

It isn't really a question.

Santana knows what the rules would tell her to do, but she also knows that Brittany Pierce just confessed to loving her kisses, which seems like an infinitely more important thing than any arbitrary, killjoy rules ever could at all. Santana shuffles where she stands, Brittany paused at her shoulder, and Puck seems to take her stoppage for her answer.

His face falls, all brightness leaving it. The petulant thunderstorm from this morning returns to his eyes.

(Santana wonders if Puck won't blame her reluctance to follow him on the bad news moon.)

(He doesn't.)

"Have fun with Brittany, ladybird," Puck says curtly, offering a terse tip of his hat to both girls, gritting his teeth.

Only just then does Santana remember how she refused to dance with Puck at first last night so that she could dance with Brittany instead, earning Puck a ribbing from his friends, who laughed at him about how his "wife" preferred Brittany's company to his own.

She cringes.

Now Santana has wounded Puck's ego for the second time in as many days. She doesn't mean to treat Puck discourteously, of course—and especially not when he cares for her so well—it's just that indebtedness isn't the same thing as love.

(Santana owes Puck more than she'll ever repay him.)

(Brittany gave Santana her every secret for free.)

Brittany fidgets behind Santana, awkward. "You don't have to ride the train with me," Brittany says in a very small voice.

Puck waves Brittany's propriety off before Santana can even fret about it. "She might as well," he growls. "I've got a card game to sharp anyway."

He doesn't wait for either Santana or Brittany to rebut him before he stalks away, pulling his hat brim down over his eyes. Santana knows it's a mistake to let Puck go, but, at the same time, she can't bring herself to chase Puck when he doesn't seem to want her to catch up with him anyway. Despite all her resentment of them, Santana finds the rules buzzing through her mind like swarming gnats, suddenly unavoidable, and feels guilty for breaking them. She pinches the bridge of her nose between her fingers.

Brittany shuffles behind her. "I'm sorry to get you in trouble again, darlin'," she says quietly. "I promised I wouldn't do that anymore."

Santana shakes her head. "You didn't do anything wrong," she says truthfully, knowing that it's all her own fault that she can't bother to show Puck any kindness, though he saved her life, bringing her with him out of New York City to Mr. Adams' circus.

(Really, how could it be Brittany's fault that Santana loves her when Brittany doesn't even know that Santana loves her in the first place?)

"Puck doesn't like me very much," Brittany admits, setting a hand on Santana's shoulder.

Santana looks up at the touch, meeting Brittany's gaze. Somehow, it comes as a surprise that Brittany knows of Puck's dislike. At once, Santana feels ashamed on Puck's behalf and also angry at him. She also feels sad to think that Brittany might have hurt feelings from Puck's curtness.

An overwhelming and largely inexpressible need to protect Brittany from anything that could harm her—even unkind words from Santana's own would-be husband—surges in Santana's chest.

On the one hand, Santana wants to tell Brittany that Puck is just surly and that he doesn't dislike Brittany more than he dislikes anyone else around the camp. On the other hand, Santana knows that Brittany is right.

Puck has always seemed wary of Brittany at best and resentful of Brittany at worst, and Santana's preference for Brittany's company over his own has done nothing to improve his feelings toward Brittany over the last week.

All of it amounts to Santana feeling guilty—for liking Puck less than she ought to, for making Puck dislike Brittany more than he already did, for allying herself to Puck in the first place, though she had no choice but to do so, amongst a thousand more confused reasons.

"But why doesn't he like you?" Santana asks, not really to Brittany, but to Puck himself or maybe the universe at large.

Brittany gives a short, embarrassed laugh, obviously flattered that Santana thinks so highly of her. She gestures for Santana to join her in the bed of a Studebaker farm wagon, and both girls scramble up the shiny, red axel, gripping the box sides, nestling into the hull, setting down hip to hip.

They find the wagon occupied by the three Flying Dragon Changs. A supe Santana doesn't recognize sits on the driver's bench.

Despite her and Brittany's company, Santana doesn't mind continuing their conversation, knowing that the Flying Dragon Changs don't speak a word of English between them and that the supe won't bother to listen to talk taking place so far below and behind him.

"I'm serious!" she complains. "How can anyone dislike you, Britt? Puck may have a wooden head, but I didn't know it was hollow, too."

Brittany almost chokes on her laughter. She covers her mouth with both hands, trying to stifle the noise. "Darlin', I can't believe you would say that!" she splutters, somewhere between incredulous and pleased as both Judy and Punch all at once.

Santana pretends not to blush.

"Says the most unfair girl in the world," she teases, sounding much more collected than she actually feels.

(Brittany Pierce likes to kiss her.)

"I'm not unfair," Brittany defends lamely, snuggling down beside Santana, resting her head upon Santana's shoulder.

The sudden contact surprises Santana, though only in the most pleasant way possible. Brittany sighs and sinks against Santana, turning soft, her body settling against Santana's corners and rounds. After a minute, Brittany mumbles, "Puck doesn't like me because I told him he kisses like a fish."

The wagon jolts into motion.

Santana just jolts.

---

Santana's brain can't decide which one amongst its one-thousand questions to ask Brittany first, so it chooses the simplest thing.

"Wait, how does Puck kiss like a fish? What do you mean?"

"You know, like a fish," Brittany says, just so. "Wet and slimy?"

Brittany puckers her lips a few times against the air, loud and exaggerated, mimicking the way a fish might breathe underwater, and Santana catches it in her peripheral vision. No girl pretending to be a fish has any right to look as adorable as Brittany Pierce does just now—and especially not when she has just said the most confusing thing in the world.

Brittany has kissed Puck?

Puck has kissed Brittany?

(When Santana thinks about Brittany kissing anyone but her, she feels strangely startled, like she did when she was a small child and she would suddenly fall down.)

Really, it shouldn't surprise Santana to learn that Puck and Brittany have kissed.

After all, Santana knows that Puck is something of a scoundrel, for Mr. Adams revealed as much when Puck first introduced Santana to him in Tekamah when she joined the circus, and Santana's father opined as much when he first hired Puck as his gardener. It only makes sense that Puck kissed other girls at the circus before he met Santana. Since Puck and Brittany grew up together at the circus, it also only makes sense that Brittany might be one of those other girls, as well.

Come to think about it, Puck has probably kissed scores of circus girls, from Rachel Berry all the way through the whole Sylvesteri Equestrienne Coterie, and Brittany has probably kissed other fellas at the circus aside from Puck, too. Maybe Brittany has kissed Sam Evans or Blaine the trilby tramp or even stupid, stun-faced Finn Hudson.

Somehow Santana had assumed that since she had never kissed anyone herself until last week, Brittany hadn't, either.

Brittany rustles against Santana's body. "Are you sore at me, darlin'?" she asks in the smallest little voice Santana thinks she may have ever heard.

"Sore at you?" Santana repeats, trying the words out for size.

Is Santana sore at Brittany for kissing Noah Puckerman, or at least for allowing Noah Puckerman to kiss her for long enough to know that he kisses like a fish?

No.

(Not even a little bit.)

"It was a long time before you came to the circus," Brittany says apologetically. She doesn't quite manage to hide the nervousness in her voice.

"Brittany—," Santana starts, so sweet on Brittany she can hardly stand it.

Santana wants to explain how she finds it strangely easy to abide the idea that Brittany and Puck kissed a long time ago, but that she hopes that they'll never kiss again. She also wants to tell Brittany how much she herself dislikes it when Puck kisses her, even just on the cheek, and that she wishes that he would give up on doing so altogether. Even beyond that, she wants to say that she only ever wants to kiss Brittany from now on, now that she knows the wonder of Brittany's kisses.

Santana also wishes that she could tell Brittany the truth, which is that while Santana would pay absolutely any fee to make it so that she had given Brittany her first kiss and that Brittany had given her hers in return, she also doesn't especially care whom either she or Brittany kissed first as long as they both continue kissing each other often and for the rest of always, for as long as they're together.

Mostly Santana just really wants to kiss Brittany.

Santana's breath catches in her throat, and Brittany seems to sense it. Brittany lifts her head from Santana's shoulder. For a second, the two girls stare at each other through the darkness. Brittany's eyes turn soft and fervent and Santana starts to lean in. Their hands tangle together in their laps. Santana feels Brittany's eager breath curling over her skin. Brittany waits for Santana, and Santana tilts her head, already opening her mouth, tuned to Brittany in yesterday's key.

Something shifts inside the wagon. Someone clears his throat.

The Flying Dragon Changs.

Santana and Brittany spring apart, suddenly remembering their traveling companions for the first time since the Studebaker started toward the Onawa depot. The girls look up to discover three sets of dark, curious eyes staring at them.

No one says a word.

At first, Santana's heart races and she waits for the Flying Dragon Changs to voice some complaint, but then she remembers that they couldn't say anything to her that she would understand anyhow. Santana wonders what the Flying Dragon Changs must think, knowing that Santana and Brittany were about to kiss, but not having the faculty to say anything about it to anyone, except to each other in Chinese. Santana tries to read their faces. Are they appalled? Disgusted? She can't seem to parse it out.

The two oldest Flying Dragon Changs—the pair who are either brother and sister or man and wife—exchange glances with each other. The youngest furrows her brow. Her mouth hangs slightly ajar.

After a minute, Brittany starts to laugh, a bright, golden sound that bubbles up through the early morning darkness, filling it like sweet cream in black coffee. Her laughter catches at something in Santana, and Santana giggles, too, suddenly overcome. She and Brittany tangle their hands more inextricably together, and the Flying Dragon Changs stare and stare at them, not quite sure how to regard two people as silly as they are.

It takes another minute before all the laughter and nerves in Santana's belly flutter away on butterfly wings. She and Brittany lapse into silence, and Brittany lowers her head to rest upon Santana's shoulder again.

Santana hadn't realized that she and Brittany needed to discuss Puck together at all, but now she feels very glad that they did so, like their conversation silenced some doubt inside her that she hadn't even known she harbored before today. She rests her head against Brittany's and closes her eyes for a long while, enjoying Brittany's warmth and the lazy, trusting way that Brittany leans against her body.

"You know I could never be sore at you, right?" Santana asks in her smallest little Brittany-voice just as the Studebaker rambles up to the depot.

Brittany just smiles, her lips so close to Santana's skin that Santana can feel the contentedness in her expression. "You're not fair, darlin'," she mumbles, sounding dreamy and half asleep.

She presses a quick kiss to Santana's collarbone, even though the Flying Dragon Changs might see it, at the same instant that the wagon rolls to a stop. A warmth blooms over Santana's whole body and something awakens inside her.

(Suddenly, Santana remembers the exact important thing that she had forgotten before.)

---

It comes to her, clear as instant waking from a dream.

Santana remembers Brittany kissing her under pillars of white circus light. She remembers that Brittany kissed her before she was ever brave enough to kiss Brittany back. She remembers so many little things—hitches in Brittany's breath and Brittany's bashful silent laughter and the way that Brittany so often can't restrain herself from staring at Santana like she can never seem to see Santana enough, no matter for how long she looks at her.

Santana remembers all of this and wonders about it, feeling poised on the edge of something vast and deep and almost too perfect to name.

(She names it.)

---

(Is it somehow possible that Brittany loves her back?)

---

Santana carries her new recollection deep inside her and jitters because of it, feeling like she can't sit still knowing such a perfect, vibrant secret. When Santana and Brittany disembark from the Studebaker wagon at the Onawa depot, Santana lands with a flourish in the dirt, skipping a few extra steps to a stop, and hums a happy note, surpassingly pleased with herself for finally solving such an important puzzle.

(It's the most important puzzle she might solve all day or maybe even ever.)

Of course, Santana still can't know for certain that Brittany does love her, but she has a good idea about it and a thousand more good ideas to consider on its account. She waits for Brittany to catch up with her, grinning all the while.

"Ma Jones must have given the coffee pot a few extra stirs this morning, huh, darlin'?" Brittany teases, watching the way Santana swivels on her spot.

(Can Santana see it there in Brittany's face? Hear it in Brittany's voice?)

Brittany reaches for Santana's little finger, but Santana twines their whole hands together instead, guiding Brittany in a circle to stop directly in front of her. It seems different standing close to Brittany today than it did yesterday, with one-thousand new memories painted upon Brittany's every inch of skin in Santana's mind. Brittany tries to keep a polite talking-distance from Santana, but Santana won't have it. She pulls Brittany to within an inch from where she stands and rests their foreheads together, not caring who might see them.

(Santana's heart feels like a magnetic compass, Brittany her true North.)

Even just this little bit of contact feels wonderful, like Santana's body had waited for it all day. She counts out the pulse in her skin and in Brittany's and sinks into the touch, feeling for the moment that she would do anything for Brittany and considering with less fear in herself than usual whether or not Brittany doesn't perhaps feel the same way about her.

"Hi," Santana says.

"Hi," Brittany says back, giggling.

Santana stares deeply into Brittany's eyes. She can't see any tiger gold or unpaintable blue in Brittany's irises. Instead, she finds only dark upon dark and darker still shadowing Brittany's face. Dawn has yet to break along the horizon, but the silver moon that will be full when next it rises hangs overhead, setting a bare and gossamer light over the rail yards. Santana feels Brittany's breath catch behind her lips and wonders if Brittany hopes that they'll kiss.

Anyone else in the world might flinch away from Santana, standing so close to her in a public place, playing the fool with so many people to see it, but Brittany doesn't. Brittany only waits, breathless, allowing Santana to search her out and to learn her morning eyes in the same way one might learn a new room in the dark dead of night with no lamps to light the way before her, by guesswork and sensation alone.

Santana gives the most imperceptible nod, and Brittany returns it, following Santana's lips, though not kissing her.

Has Santana really just figured out one of Brittany's biggest secrets?

(Is it really a secret at all? Was it ever?)

Santana wonders if she can see it in Brittany's face. Do traces of it linger along the graceful bow in Brittany's lips? Is that it, there, in the darkest deep of Brittany's eyes? Can Santana feel it in Brittany's breath against her skin or pulsing through Brittany's fingertips, set at running pace?

For a second, Santana considers simply asking Brittany her question.

Do you love me, BrittBritt?

Santana feels almost certain that she wouldn't mind hearing Brittany's answer, but somehow she can't bring herself to speak to break the spell that binds them for the moment—and especially not in such a public setting. It feels like the kind of question Santana ought to ask Brittany when they're alone together, when it's just them.

(When they're their own secret.)

A bell clangs from the platform and suddenly both girls remember where they stand. Brittany's pulse quickens and Santana can feel it, strong.

"What do you think about catching the train?" Brittany asks, glancing toward the station. She doesn't move at all.

"We should probably do it," Santana consents, not moving at all, either.

"Mr. Adams did buy us tickets," Brittany says wisely, and when she smiles, Santana feels it rather than sees it, almost like a kiss.

"Well, then, let's go, Miss Brittany," Santana says, almost kissing Brittany back.

The girls peel apart. The world around them seems no different for their exchange, but Santana's hope that Brittany might love her thrums much stronger in her breast than it did at first. Though Santana can't know for sure if Brittany does love her until Brittany says the words herself, Santana feels surer about Brittany on the whole than she ever has before. People rush around them, finding open places to ride along the train. Brittany leads Santana toward a middle car, and Santana follows, willing.

(What if Santana and Brittany are just special? What if they can love each other, though it should be impossible for them to do it?)

"How do you feel about blue today?" Brittany asks, pointing to a blue boxcar.

"Blue's my favorite," Santana says honestly, thinking of one-thousand things that have nothing to do with the color of the train, and Brittany nods, pleased.

The two girls help each other scramble into the cabin, pulling each other up at the elbows and holding back each other's skirts so that they don't snag on the hitches along the door. The car carries only a handful of other circus folk so far: Rachel Berry, still wearing her plainclothes from yesterday; her father and his quadroon manservant; the Famed Giantess of Akron; and the young, dopey clown who shares Blaine's tent, whose name Santana has yet to learn, despite the fact that he lives next door to her. A few supes clamber into the car behind Brittany and Santana, jawing and joking with one another as they find places to sit.

Right away, Brittany points Santana to a corner and they take a seat together, resuming their position from the Studebaker wagon, their heads rested against each other and their hips bumped up close. Brittany breathes in deep pulls, and Santana wonders if Brittany won't fall asleep along the way to Storm Lake.

Unfortunately, she doesn't get the chance to find out before Rachel Berry interrupts the moment, scrambling over to join Brittany and Santana in their corner just as the signalman at the station sounds his whistle and the train lurches into motion.

"I see you're not riding with your father today, Brittany," Rachel says by way of greeting, setting down in front of Brittany and Santana, crossing her legs and daintily arranging her skirts around her knees, her actions prim and careful.

Rachel obviously intends to stay put for a while.

Santana immediately dislikes Rachel's tone; Rachel sounds vaguely accusatory, as if Brittany has somehow shirked a duty. Santana bristles, holding Brittany close to her. Now that Santana knows how very much Brittany dislikes it when Rachel bosses her, Santana intends to prevent Rachel from bossing Brittany however she can.

"And I see you've decided not to sit with your father today," Santana says acidly, fixing Rachel with a look that she hopes will make it plain that Rachel isn't welcome to intrude upon her and Brittany's private company.

Though there's no way Rachel didn't hear Santana, she certainly acts as if she didn't.

"You two have become very fast friends, haven't you?" Rachel says.

She seems as pleased with herself for noticing Brittany and Santana's fondness for each other as if their fondness were some heretofore undiscovered island in the Pacific and she an explorer who had just navigated her way to it by her own genius, planting her personal flag upon its soil.

The way Rachel searches Brittany and Santana up and down with such bright eyes causes Santana to squirm. Santana doesn't know what Rachel's getting on about, but she knows that she certainly doesn't like Rachel's mounting interest in her and Brittany's friendship.

(Or whatever it is, really.)

(Being in love with each other?)

Brittany doesn't seem to like Rachel's interest in it, either.

"Friendship isn't a race, Rachel," Brittany says matter-of-factly, and, even though Santana can't see Brittany's face given their sitting arrangements, Santana knows that Brittany wears her blank, joking expression, feigning total seriousness to cause Rachel bafflement.

It works.

At first Rachel blinks at Brittany, not precisely certain as to how to respond to her, but then Rachel shakes her head, clearing her confusion.

"No, Brittany," Rachel says, her tone somewhere between pitying and put-upon.

When she next addresses Brittany, she does so in the way one might a very small, very unreasonable child, loudly and with an exaggerated precision to her words.

"I didn't mean you raced to become friends," she explains. "I just meant that you and Santana have become quite inseparable very quickly and that it surprises me to see two such very different people as yourselves so inexplicably fond of each other, and especially considering that you've only known each other for one week altogether."

"We separate sometimes," Brittany says blankly. "Like when we go to sleep at night. And Santana doesn't come onstage during the knife act. That would be dangerous."

Even though Rachel has known Brittany for her whole life, she apparently doesn't know enough about Brittany to understand Brittany's jokes.

(And maybe Brittany likes it that way.)

Rachel pulls a face and looks to Santana for help; Santana doesn't offer any.

Instead, she shrugs. "Once, it took me until just before the matinee to even find Brittany," she says seriously. "That was awful."

"Harrowing," Brittany agrees.

(Santana shouldn't feel so thrilled to hear Brittany say so, but—)

Rachel seems to realize then that she won't get a genuine answer out of either Brittany or Santana, no matter how she precisely phrases her questions. She gapes at them. Santana would like to think that their almost professional degree of unhelpfulness may somehow impress Rachel, though mostly she just hopes that it will teach Rachel not to pry into matters that don't concern her, and especially not with such condescension mixed into her prying.

What does Rachel mean that Brittany and Santana's fondness for one another is inexplicable anyway? They fit perfectly together—even Ma Jones seems to think so. Santana resents Rachel for implying anything concerning Brittany and Santana otherwise and so hardly feels guilty for saying something that she hopes will end their conversation.

"In fact, it was almost just as wretched as when certain persons offer us unsolicited critiques about our friendship," she says, mimicking Mrs. Schuester's best acid-honey voice.

"Almost just," Brittany agrees.

Rachel at least has the decency to blush.

Her mouth falls open a little bit. She seems more confused at Brittany and Santana than hurt by their rudeness, though she is quick to say, "I think I had better go keep my father company," before she scoots back toward the wall where her father and his manservant sit, huddled up close together.

Santana knows she should feel remorse for dealing with Rachel so harshly—and not for the first time, either—but she doesn't.

Rachel shouldn't be so nosy, for one thing, and she shouldn't presume so much about Brittany and Santana's friendship with each other, for another. The way that Rachel talks to Brittany as if Brittany were a child rankles at Santana. It's Rachel who can't keep up with Brittany's quick wit and not the other way around, after all. And just because Brittany and Santana aren't entirely similar to each other doesn't mean they shouldn't be inseparable.

What does Rachel Berry know anyway?

(After all, Rachel has never been in love with the most perfect girl in the world and maybe, possibly, had that most perfect girl love her back.)

---

Once the train gets rolling, no one pays attention to Brittany and Santana—and especially not now that they've confounded Rachel Berry so thoroughly that she no longer wishes to speak to them and probably won't for some time. Brittany nestles deeper against Santana's body and whispers to her, wicked.

"Last Christmas, Rachel told me I might make more friends if I just stopped talking around camp," she says.

Santana gasps. "She didn't!" she says, scandalized. "Rachel Berry honestly told you to stop talking?"

Brittany giggles.

"Yup, she did," she nods. "It was at the Christmas Eve dance, too. Finn Hudson asked me to waltz, but he takes bigger steps than Methuselah and always crushes my toes, so I told him I couldn't dance with him because he has elephant feet. After that, Rachel got sore with me and said I shouldn't talk so much because I always say things I don't mean. I did mean what I said about Finn's feet, though, or otherwise I wouldn't have said it."

Santana laughs and strokes Brittany's hair, just behind Brittany's ear, delighted. Brittany's story does pique her curiosity, though. "The circus has a Christmas Eve dance?" Santana asks, trying and failing to keep any hopefulness from seeping into her voice.

(Is the dance part of a show or a tradition on a down day? Does everyone dress up in fine clothing and Christmas ribbons? Brittany would look so beautiful—)

Santana's only experience with Christmas Eve comes from holidays spent at the bachelor cottage, the air inside the parlor warmed by the stove and sweet with the scent of pork pasteles cooking in the kitchen. Santana remembers looking out the bay window frosted over with cursive rime toward the rooftops of Manhattan, softer and somehow dreamier than usual under clouds and condensation and cold, beyond the garden walls.

Though she tries to envision it, Santana can't picture what the white city at the circus might look like, blanketed beneath a quilt of pure December white.

"How does the circus perform in the snow?" Santana wonders aloud before Brittany can even answer her first question.

(Would the big top sag if there were a blizzard? Would the zebras all but disappear except for their black stripes against the winter brightness of their pen?)

Brittany sits up and turns to face Santana. She wears a small, fervent smile, like the fact that Santana would even wonder such a particular thing about the circus somehow delights her.

"We spend winters down in Rapides Parish, Louisiana. There isn't ever snow at Christmas, which is probably a good thing, since I don't think the elephants would like it very much if there were," she explains. "Mr. Adams and Arthur visit the Carolinas to take in some sea air, and the company spends a few months working on new acts and resting up in the meanwhile. We stop traveling in October and start up again in April once the weather gets nice. Some of the fellas take jobs in Le Compte during the winter months, and Daddy does some trapping in the bayou and sells his catches to the gillies. There's still plenty to do around camp, though, even without the shows."

Santana has never experienced a winter without snow, but, then again, she's never experienced a winter with the circus, either. She spent so many years learning all her grandmother's winter works and so many Puerto Rican traditions that she finds it hard to envision a winter filled with anything else but them.

"I can't imagine Christmas at the circus," Santana admits.

Brittany reaches for Santana's hand, squeezing it. "It's all right, darlin'. I'll show you everything once we get there," she promises, sweet and sure.

Santana can't help but grin at Brittany's word.

When Puck first brought Santana away from New York, Santana dreaded spending even a day at the circus, let alone a whole season there, but now she finds she can hardly wait to spend her first Christmas with the circus—her first Christmas with Brittany, really.

Santana knows nothing about Louisiana or the bayou or what it will feel like to go though seven whole months of down days all on end, but she finds herself thrilled at the prospect of learning all about those things from Brittany and about staying at the circus with Brittany for good. She gives Brittany's hand a squeeze in return.

I love you.

How easy would it be for Santana to just say it? As easy as Brittany's promise to help Santana navigate the circus come winter?

"Okay," Santana says, sweet and so, so sure.

---

Santana and Brittany watch the sun rise beyond the open boxcar door, painting the sky in searing ochre and vivid pink. Bright light burns their eyes, and, despite the early hour, the temperature inside the boxcar soars. The men doff their jackets and roll their shirtsleeves, wiping their brows with handkerchiefs, cleaning away their sweat. The women peel back their skirts, uncovering their ankles and calves in hopes that they might catch a breeze, modesty be damned.

A pink tinge rises to Brittany's cheeks, and Santana finds herself hating her own thick gypsy costume. The boxcar may as well be an oven. Brittany fans Santana with her flatted hand, and Santana returns the favor, though to not very much effect. Their conversation waxes sluggish, almost stilling in the heat. On the other side of the cabin, Rachel Berry complains loudly about how dehydration isn't good for her voice. No one even has the energy to shush her from saying so.

---

It takes nearly two hours to reach Storm Lake from Onawa.

By the time the train rolls into the station, Santana feels almost melted. Though she had anticipated that the air outside the stuffy boxcar would be cooler than the air inside it, when she hops onto the platform, she finds herself sorely mistaken.

Storm Lake may as well be the third ring in the seventh circle of Dante's Hell.

The ground at the train station sears the bottoms of Santana and Brittany's bare feet until they search out some shade in which to stand. Jesse St. James' big cats complain loudly, bellowing from the kiln-like belly of their wagon cage. Sam and Blaine attempt to apply clown make up to one another's faces only to have it melt down their cheeks almost right away, turning them from sad buffoons into grotesque madmen in an instant, creating them as deranged characters out of one of Mr. Stevenson's tales. Someone reports that the thermometer at the depot reads ninety-two degrees, with the temperature still climbing.

"It's not even noon yet," Santana grumbles as she and Brittany pull themselves onto the side of a buggy, panting.

Yesterday's rainstorm cool-front seems one-thousand miles away.

Storm Lake proves a substantial town, much bigger than Onawa, with tall, Gothic buildings made from red and yellow brick, some of them several stories in height. An imposing county courthouse with pointed spires rises up from the heart of town, casting long, sharp shadows down the main street. The whole settlement borders a sparse tree line and, beyond that, a sizable lake with deep, cobalt waters.

Santana hopes that maybe the circus will make its camp beside the lake, if only because she knows that temperatures tend to drop along shorelines.

The people of Storm Lake appear well-dressed and rather well-to-do, not dissimilar to Santana's former neighbors at the bachelor cottage in Gramercy Park. Some of them stand leaned up against bicycles, others of them gather beside handsome carriages with well-groomed horses.

Storm Lake certainly doesn't seem like the typical farm town.

(When Santana spots a sign in one of the store windows advertising the "Storm Lake Resort at Kinge's Point," she suddenly understands why.)

The circus parade into town starts out far less lively than it usually might, with the circus folk too hot to put much energy into their performances and the townspeople too hot to properly applaud their meager efforts.

As the sun rises ever higher in the sky, the metal bars on the side of the buggy begin to burn Brittany and Santana's palms like hot irons, so they jump down to walk on the street. The girls try their best to wave to the townspeople, but even Brittany's typically resplendent show-smile seems less animated than it normally would under the oppressive heat. Santana's dark hair soaks in sunlight, trapping it close to her skin, causing her neck and head to sweat profusely. The boys shuffle along in their knight costumes beside Brittany and Santana, miserable in their felt shifts, not even bothering to stage sword-fights.

The heat exhaustion must show on the circus folks' faces.

But.

Just as the circus passes the post office, Santana feels liquid spatter on her skin.

Water.

For the briefest instant, she wonders if it isn't another sunshower, like the one from yesterday, but then she looks up to see an old woman hanging halfway out a second story apartment window, posed in a casting motion, her arms extended, holding a recently-emptied bucket. The woman waves down to the street, pleased that someone noticed her attempted hospitality.

"Britt," Santana says, grabbing onto the sash at Brittany's waist and tugging her to a stop, pointing up to where old woman waves down from the open window. Sam and Santana's young, dopey-faced clown neighbor shamble to a halt behind the girls, pausing to look up, too.

Another window opens, this one with a girl not much younger than Brittany and Santana hanging through it. The girl waves down to the circus performers gathered below her on the street before hefting a steel washbasin to the sill, water sloshing over its side. Instinctively, Brittany, Santana, and the clowns move closer to the window, hovering just below its ledge. The girl tosses the contents of the basin down over them in one jerking pull.

The water falls in a drove rather than a spatter, most of it dousing Brittany's left shoulder, but some of it rebounding onto Santana's face and through her shirt in a spray. It isn't exactly cold, but it still feels a bit like heaven.

More and more windows start to open on either side of the street and so do some doors, with townsfolk rushing outside carrying pails and washtubs filled with water.

Santana can't help but grin.

She shares her smile with Brittany.

In the next instant, Brittany reaches out, linking her pinky finger to Santana's. With a rapscallion grin, she tugs Santana toward the next window, spinning them in a circle, so that they almost seem like dancers. Their motion must delight the people in the windows because no fewer than three bucketfuls of water rain down on them almost right away, splattering over their skin and saturating the scorched earth beneath their bare feet. Brittany strikes one of her lively poses from the knife throwing act, and Santana gives a little curtsy alongside her; the townsfolk in the windows clap.

Santana feels much cooler and better than she did before already.

All around Brittany and Santana, the other circus performers seem to catch on to the game; if they perform, the townspeople reward them with cooling showers.

The clowns take heart and begin to chase one another; the acrobats turn somersaults along the sidewalks. The boys in their knight shifts jab at one another with their swords, waging wooden war just beneath the nearest open windows and along the edges of the crowds, within a few feet of the closest buckets. With circus music playing up and down the street, it suddenly feels like a proper circus parade again. Jesse St. James' lions roar in their cages, and Deborah lets out a mighty harrumph from the head of the procession.

By the time the circus reaches the end of Storm Lake's main street, Santana is drenched from head to foot, with water dribbling down her hair, soaking her shirt and skirt, and glistening on the tips of her eyelashes. Brittany fares the same.

"That was really nice of them," Brittany says, jogging along to catch up with an unoccupied buggy, pulling Santana behind her until they can hop onto the wheel wells.

"It was," Santana agrees, smoothing locks of wet hair away from her face.

For a moment, she and Brittany grin at each other, enjoying the water still slicking their skin and the fact that the circus hasn't encountered any major disasters yet today, never mind the could-be malevolent moon. They loop their elbows around the bars on the back of the buggy, hanging there and breathing heavily.

The buggy passes a final building in town before trundling into the more open countryside, and something shifts between the two girls in an instant. Brittany's eyes turn fervent and deep, like they always do before Brittany kisses Santana, and Santana's body responds automatically, softening and leaning in, hopeful for Brittany's even slightest touch, a flower opening its petals to sunlight. Brittany's gaze darts from Santana's eyes to Santana's mouth and then back again. She licks her lips and swallows.

"Santana, I—," Brittany starts, looking nowhere and everywhere on Santana all at once. She pauses, stuck on her next word.

Santana's heart beats so loudly that she almost can't stand it.

"Yeah, BrittBritt?"

(Penny for your thoughts.)

(One-thousand pennies, really.)

Santana's voice sounds high and flighty, even in her own ears. Everything inside Santana livens. She knows why she would pause in a moment like this one and wonders, in spite of herself, if Brittany doesn't do it for the exact same reason. The more Santana considers the possibility, the harder her heart beats. She tries not to get ahead of herself, but she can't help it.

(Please say you love me back.)

Brittany draws a deep breath, reaching inside herself, scraping for some courage she doesn't seem to find, as one might do for a last scoopful of sugar at the bottom of an empty pantry jar. The bright, hopeful light that filled Brittany's eyes evanesces in an instant, replaced by something far more somber and clouded.

In a trice, Brittany changes tack, glancing one more time at Santana's face. "I think the water finally washed that syrup off your nose, darlin'," she mumbles, bashful all of a sudden.

Though Brittany flashes her cat-smile at Santana, somehow, she seems rather disappointed in herself. Brittany intended to talk about something else besides just maple syrup when she first opened her mouth, Santana knows it, she knows it, she knows it, and if Santana thinks too much about what that something else could be, her heart may well beat clean out from her chest.

Santana gives a short laugh, not from mirth but from surprise.

"Brittany Pierce!" she shrieks, almost more shocked than she would have been if Brittany had just said what Santana expected her to say—or wanted to hear, rather.

"What?" Brittany asks.

Brittany feigns blankness but speaks with that same strange twinge in her voice from yesterday. Though Brittany could perhaps fool Rachel Berry, playing unawares, she can't fool Santana, who's taken the time to learn this part of Brittany forward and back. Brittany leans toward Santana along the back of the buggy, staring as deeply into Santana's face as she did when she and Santana were alone in the tent together, touching.

For the briefest instant, Santana feels Brittany almost daring her to speak the unspoken words between them, though Brittany herself durst not, but then Brittany's daring humor changes into one that Santana almost doesn't recognize in Brittany because it reminds Santana so much of her own self.

Longing.

Brittany looks at Santana the same way that Santana looked at that old wishing star in the sky two nights ago, the unfathomable quick of her eyes even deeper than usual, with hope and want and a silent plea sewn in amidst tiger-flecked blue. It almost startles Santana to see the kind of yearning she herself so regularly feels written all over Brittany's face in such a plain script.

Though Santana had come to the conclusion that Brittany might love her, it somehow had yet to occur to Santana that Brittany might long for her in the same way that she longs for Brittany.

(Please say you love me back.)

It seems that the girl who always seeks Santana wants to know if she's actually found Santana for once.

Brittany has wrought her and Santana's every other first together—their conversation at the trisection of tents, their kiss on the trapeze platform in the big top, their touches in the rain-beaten tent, their dance between firefly stars on the ground and faraway stars in the sky—because Brittany is brave and Brittany is generous and Brittany doesn't mind rules or rainstorms or anyone else's devils.

Santana wants so much to be like Brittany.

For the briefest instant, everything in Santana rises to meet Brittany's challenge. Since Brittany has given them their every other first together, Santana should be the one to first say the word love and she should do it bravely, fearless for the girl who always runs to find her. She wants to say the words and can almost feel them on the tip of her tongue.

I love you, Brittany Pierce.

But.

Then Santana looks into the deepest part of Brittany's eyes, and something in Santana falters, like a footfall in the dark that fails to connect with its anticipated stair. What if Brittany doesn't love Santana back? What if Santana has imagined what she only wishes were true? She can't say her secret, not right now, not without rehearsing it until she has it perfect, just for Brittany.

She needs just a bit more bravery that she doesn't yet have.

She needs to know for certain that Brittany loves her back.

Santana offers Brittany a sympathetic smile. She feels something strain, fragile and wanting, in her heart. "Sometimes I think you know exactly what," she says softly, reaching out to twine her little finger to Brittany's at the edge of the buggy.

It's so close but still so far from exactly what she means.

---

Santana frets all the rest of the way to the campgrounds that she's said the wrong thing or at least failed to say the right thing and hates herself for being such a coward, but then she checks Brittany's face and finds Brittany looking wonderfully—almost suspiciously—happy, smiling so widely in the sunlight that Santana can't help but smile, too.

The buggy rolls to a halt.

The circus does indeed make its camp bordering what Santana must assume is Storm Lake itself, the white city standing half-constructed upon a stretch of flat, green grass and little paintbrush trees poking up between the tents, the water so close that Santana can smell it, fishy and fetid, stale under the harsh, hot sunlight. Cicadas sound their otherworldly alarms from every tree, and other innumerable insects dart through the air, obnoxious wings beating. Company members swat at the bugs and cuss, complaining about both the heat and the pests as they hop down from their wagons.

Brittany offers Santana her hand and holds Santana's skirt out of the way of the buggy's wheel wells as Santana jumps to the earth, landing upon the grass. Santana hardly gets her footing before Brittany twirls around her, fitting their bodies up against each other, never mind the heat, snug as interlocking puzzle pieces. Brittany moves with a kind of giddy energy, practically bouncing on the balls of her feet. She stops right behind Santana and clasps her arms around Santana's middle, hugging her in close from behind.

"I like it when I get to spend the mornings with you," she whispers, as if it's a secret.

(Maybe it is.)

Santana sets her arms over Brittany's. She hums, happy. "I couldn't tell," she teases, allowing Brittany to sway her on the spot, dancing her across the parched grass.

She laughs when Brittany's hair brushes her shoulders, tickling her skin, and sinks into Brittany's touch, feeling Brittany's belly against her back, Brittany's hips locked against her hips. She remembers yesterday and wants, knowing exactly what.

"We should go see the elephants," Brittany mumbles, resting her head against Santana's, rocking them back and forth like a small boat out at sea.

"Why?" Santana asks, closing her eyes, forgetting everything but Brittany for the moment.

"Because they act livelier in the heat than they do usually," Brittany says plainly, as if this fact is common knowledge, shrugging so that Santana can feel her ribs lift. After a second, Brittany adds, "I think it's because the heat reminds them of Africa, even though they haven't ever visited Africa. Isn't that strange?"

Santana quirks an eyebrow. "Isn't what strange?" she parrots back.

(As usual, Brittany doesn't seem to mind that Santana knows nothing about elephants.)

Brittany sways Santana again, moving her by the hips. "How they can remember somewhere they've never been," she explains patiently. At that, Brittany turns their rocking steps into forward-walking ones, and the invisible string tugs taut in Santana's chest.

"I don't think that's strange at all," Santana says quietly, meaning every word.

(Until one week ago, Santana had lived her whole life lonely for someone she'd never met.)

Brittany nods, rubbing her head against Santana's, their hair slipping together, and gives Santana a little squeeze around the middle. "I've never been to West Virginia," she admits. "I used to want to go there because that's where my father's father came from."

"You don't want to go anymore?" Santana wonders aloud, filling in what Brittany hasn't said and loving every minute when Brittany will tell new secrets about herself.

"Nope," Brittany says, lackadaisical, walking Santana a few more steps forward, away from the wagon bay. "Now I just want to see the elephants."

Even though Santana knows that she and Brittany oughtn't to shirk their chores, she still allows Brittany to lead her away, wanting to go where Brittany wants to go, loving Brittany's touch and loving Brittany so much that she can hardly do anything for it. She only feels vaguely guilty as they slip past the last vehicle, separating themselves from the rest of the company. She holds on tightly to Brittany's arms.

"Okay," she says.

"Okay," Brittany says back.

---

The girls make it all of ten steps before Mrs. Schuester catches up with them, materializing as suddenly as one of Mr. Poe's apparitions, turning a corner around a congregation of wagons. Mrs. Schuester stands in the blazing sun, Brittany and Santana in shadow.

Though Mrs. Schuester usually appears somewhat made up, today she appears particularly unkempt and frantic, and Santana doesn't know whether to blame heat or impending deadlines for her obvious discomfiture.

Stray hairs poke out from Mrs. Schuester's typically well-maintained bun, and Mrs. Schuester's face shines with perspiration, the slight rouge on her cheeks dripping like Sam and Blaine's clown make up. Wet spots ring Mrs. Schuester's blouse under her arms and around her shirt collar, and her wide, unblinking eyes seem even more restless than usual, darting here and there between Santana and Brittany, quick and furious as lightning.

"Where do you two think you're going?" Mrs. Schuester snips. "You're not about to sneak off again, are you? There's work to be done around here, and it's no fair that the rest of us should do it when you two won't even lift a finger!"

Brittany and Santana peel apart from each other and turn to face Mrs. Schuester.

Santana hates that Mrs. Schuester thinks that she and Brittany are lazy because, really, they aren't. It's not that they want to avoid work—it's just that sometimes they want so much to spend time with each other that they can't find time to do both that and their work at once. A guilty feeling nags at the pit of Santana's stomach.

"What would you like us to do, ma'am?" she asks, staring at her toes.

If her question pleases Mrs. Schuester at all, Mrs. Schuester certainly doesn't show it.

Mrs. Schuester huffs. "The elephant blankets have very nearly lost all their sequins and beads. My seamstresses haven't any time for embroidering them, what with finishing up the touches on all the new costumes for the extravaganza, so I need you two to do it," she says. "But I can't have you fouling things up! How is your beadwork, Santana?"

The truth is that though Santana hates beadwork—which is even more tedious a task than regular sewing—she actually has quite the accomplished hand when it comes to embroidery, for she and her grandmother spent many hours decorating pillows and table runners in the bachelor cottage with seed beads and millefiori.

As much as Santana might like to lie about her own accomplishments with beadwork and downplay them, she knows she oughtn't to do so when Mrs. Schuester seems so desperate for her help, and especially not when she and Brittany have already gotten themselves into trouble today.

"Fair," she mumbles, shuffling her toes in the grass.

(Brittany stirs beside her, interested.)

"All right," Mrs. Schuester says. "Then it will be your job to make sure that Brittany doesn't botch the work with her clumsy stitches. I want these blankets to look handsome, mind you, and you need to finish them in time for the extravaganza tomorrow night—so no lollygagging!"

"Yes, ma'am."

Santana and Brittany answer together, but Santana can't help but notice how forlorn Brittany sounds in comparison to herself. Suddenly, Santana hates Mrs. Schuester for causing Brittany to feel so inadequate. Brittany's stitching isn't clumsy at all—certainly not to the degree that Mrs. Schuester makes it out to be. Brittany doesn't need Santana to babysit her at chores. Santana bristles but knows that she can't say anything to refute Mrs. Schuester according to the rules.

"Come along to the dressing tents," Mrs. Schuester instructs. "I'll give you your work there, and then you can take it someplace else, so you don't bother my seamstr—"

"Brittany! Baby girl!"

Santana flinches at the sound of Daniel Pierce's ragged voice.

He emerges from the wagon bay, just as haggard as usual. Instead of his typical buckskins, he wears plainclothes, dressed like a yeoman farmer in a white work shirt, cotton slacks, black galluses, leather boots, and a flat-brimmed hat. A Bowie knife hangs from his belt in a brown leather sheaf, long and dangerously sharp. He squints against the sunlight despite the shade his hat affords him and grimaces, seeming somehow pained.

"Mr. Pierce!" Mrs. Schuester says, as surprised to see him as Santana is.

"Mrs. Schuester," Mr. Pierce returns, tipping his hat to her. He still wears his pained expression. He nods to Brittany. "Come on, baby girl. We've got to go to town."

He seems either oblivious to the fact that Mrs. Schuester just commissioned Brittany to do work for her or apathetic to it. In either case, Mrs. Schuester makes no attempts to dispute his claim over Brittany. Rules are rules are rules, Santana supposes, even for the ringmaster's wife. Brittany glances between Mrs. Schuester, her father, and Santana, biting her lip between her teeth.

"Daddy?" she says gingerly. "May Santana come to town with us?"

Oh God.

Santana's eyes open wider than before, and she all but starts. Though she very much wants to remain with Brittany, she can't imagine that either Mr. Pierce or Mrs. Schuester will permit her to do so. Suddenly, she feels both very embarrassed and very nervous all at once, though also very flattered because Brittany never seems to see any of her innumerable deficiencies, despite how everyone else in the world very easily does so.

(Brittany always sees Santana, just so, just so, just so.)

Of course, there are rules about where Santana can go and with whom, and even though Brittany likes to ignore them, Santana doesn't suppose that Brittany's father will do so, too. Though Santana realizes that the worst thing Mr. Pierce can say in response to Brittany's question is no, she somehow feels as if this moment has so much more at stake in it than just a simple trip into town.

Mr. Pierce looks from his daughter to Santana. His squint lifts and, for a second, Santana sees the inimitable blue of his eyes, cattish and so like Brittany's. He swallows, Adam's apple bobbing in his throat.

"Oh," he says, clearly taken aback by Brittany's request. He eyes Santana up and down. "I suppose, if she likes," he says, a funny twinge in his voice. He sounds somehow younger and brighter than usual.

Santana's heart immediately floods with relief, happiness, and a certain dizzy sensation. She feels quite like she imagines Alice might have felt in Wonderland when floor and ceiling switched places and doors moved and nothing stayed in place as it ought to have done. She can't hide the grin on her face and also can't help from glancing at Brittany, who mirrors her excitement.

It's almost as if Santana has won some prize, though she doesn't know what that prize is exactly.

Except.

Mrs. Schuester exhales noisily and crosses her arms over her apron. Though she doesn't voice any outward complaints, it couldn't be more obvious to everyone that she dislikes the idea of Santana accompanying the Pierces into town.

Mr. Pierce meets Mrs. Schuester's eyes. "Is there something the matter, ma'am?" he asks plainly.

Mrs. Schuester feigns surprise that Mr. Pierce would notice her displeasure but can't entirely mask the covetousness in her eyes when she looks at Santana.

"Not at all," she says airily, though it couldn't be plainer that what she really means is Yes, of course and I want Santana to stay here to work for me.

Santana supposes that this is the way that Mrs. Schuester badgers her husband Will into doing things for her—by insinuating favors rather than asking for them outright until Will can't help but feel guilty enough to give in to her at last, though he may not genuinely feel inclined to do so. Mrs. Schuester shifts her weight between her feet and waits for Mr. Pierce to relinquish Santana back into her charge. She wears a self-satisfied smile.

Mr. Pierce doesn't relinquish Santana to Mrs. Schuester's charge, though.

Honestly, Santana would believe that Mr. Pierce simply didn't catch on to Mrs. Schuester's scheming backwards talk except that Santana knows Brittany and can't help but wonder if Brittany didn't inherit her talent for baffling people from her daddy, now that Santana sees him in action.

Mr. Pierce's face blanks. "Oh," he says. "All right, then. Good day, Mrs. Schuester"—he tips his hat to her—"Come on, girls. You best wear shoes into town. You do have shoes, don't you?"

Mr. Pierce has never spoken directly to Santana before now.

Santana jolts.

"Oh, yes, sir," she says quickly. "I do, sir."

Santana looks again to Brittany and finds Brittany eager and breathless, wearing an open-mouthed smile that lights her whole face. Something flitters in Santana's chest. She feels her lucky penny feeling all over her skin and deep inside her.

"Okay," Mr. Pierce says. "Hurry up, then. I'll wait here for you."

He doesn't need to tell either Santana or Brittany to go twice.

Brittany latches onto Santana's pinky finger and leads her in the direction of the white city, only partially constructed, still at its knees. Santana watches over her shoulder just long enough to see Mrs. Schuester stomp off in the direction of the midway, thoroughly miffed at losing both Santana and Brittany's help all in one go. Though Santana should perhaps feel guilty for shirking the work that Mrs. Schuester would have given her, she really can't fuss about it—not when the prospect of accompanying Brittany into town thrills her so very much.

Once she and Brittany pass the first row of tents and find themselves alone, they break into a run.

"I can't believe you asked your father if I could come to town with you!" Santana teases.

"And I can't believe Daddy said that you could!" Brittany teases back.

Both girls laugh, though nothing seems particularly funny between them, and a swell of carefree rises in Santana. Maybe Brittany does love her after all. Maybe it would be okay to tell Brittany her secret. Maybe once they get back from town, Santana will just say it. Maybe it will make Brittany happy to know the truth.

(Santana wants nothing more than that.)

The girls careen around a corner. "I told Daddy all about you the other day," Brittany says, as artless as if she were discussing the weather. Santana's eyes must bug because Brittany quickly amends, "Well, not everything-everything about you. I just mean that I told him that you came from New York City and that you've read all kinds of books and that your daddy was kind of like him."

Of all the things that could catch Santana off-guard about Brittany's statement, it's the last part that does it. Santana scrunches up her brow, confused. "How?" she asks.

"Because their trades both use knives—you know, because your daddy was a surgeon," Brittany explains, matter-of-fact.

(Sometimes Brittany's logic is so wonderful that Santana can't help but want to kiss her for it.)

Santana allows the idea that Brittany would tell her father all about Santana to sink into her mind. Something flutters in her chest, but something in her also fears that Mr. Pierce may not have liked the things that Brittany told him about her. Santana wants to ask Brittany what her father said during the course of their conversation but can't quite think of how to word her question, for she couldn't explain why it feels so important to her that Mr. Pierce not dislike her if she were to try it.

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

Santana never gets the chance to ask her question anyway because, in the next moment, Brittany releases her hold on Santana's pinky finger, stepping away from her once they reach Santana's tent row. Brittany beams at Santana under the sunlight.

"You get your shoes, darlin', and I'll go get mine. I'll meet you back at the wagons, okay?"

"Sure thing."

Santana doesn't wait for Brittany to fully disappear down the alleyway before hurrying in the direction of her own tent, eager to fetch her shoes, don them, and get back to the wagon bay as quickly as possible, so as not to disappoint Mr. Pierce.

Though Santana realizes that Mr. Pierce will probably never feel fond of her, Santana hopes that Mr. Pierce might at least learn to tolerate her friendship with Brittany. Her own father would find Brittany very agreeable if he were still alive and he and Brittany could meet, Santana feels certain about it; Santana just wants Mr. Pierce not to hate her, if she can help it.

She arrives at her tent to find it still in a heap, not yet erected, with the poles lying in a pile, horizontal to the ground, and the canvas flattened over the grass, taking on sun heat. Luckily, someone has set her and Puck's things upon the canvas.

Santana wastes no time in riffling through her valise to produce her shoes, carefully setting her "missing" tarot cards aside within the bag. Everything on her burns with heat, and her heart skips around in her chest like a little bird hopping from branch to branch, anxious and hopeful all at once.

Today, Santana remembers to wear stockings along with her shoes, though apparently not how to dress herself in them; her fingers fumble as she pulls the stockings up over her ankles, and she bites her tongue between her teeth, willing herself to work faster. Her leather shoes feel hot to the touch and take entirely too long to lace. After a few frustrating attempts at threading the laces through their proper eyeholes, Santana decides to simply stuff the laces inside her shoes without actually tying them first. She stands and brushes the grass from her skirt, still flighty inside.

"Come on," she commends herself, setting off at a sprint to meet Brittany at the wagon bay, all aflutter with nerves.

Except.

Brittany isn't at the wagon bay when Santana arrives there.

Only Mr. Pierce is.

Mr. Pierce waits alongside a farm wagon, leaned up against the back fender. He doesn't notice Santana approaching him at first—indeed, he seems rather oblivious to his surroundings altogether. He stares at his boots and mumbles words that Santana can't particularly discern under his breath, his cracked lips moving as if in private prayer. His hands curl around the edge of the wagon bed, and something in his posture strikes Santana as boyish, though he must be nearly fifty years in age.

At first, Santana doesn't know how to alert Mr. Pierce to her presence or even if she ought to say anything to him at all, considering that she doesn't want to bother the man or cause him to somehow dislike her, but then Mr. Pierce catches sight of Santana's shadow stretched out over the dry grass. He looks up, startled, but recovers in an instant.

"Brittany ain't back yet?" he asks, squinting, though he must already know the answer to his own question.

It takes Santana aback to hear Mr. Pierce speak to her.

The truth is that Santana doesn't know what to make of Mr. Pierce and that she isn't sure how to engage with him in conversation, either, even with him being the one to speak to her first.

Based on everything Santana has observed of him, Mr. Pierce is a sullen man, as rough as his daughter is beautiful. He doesn't seem especially fond of his job as a knife thrower at the circus and shows no particular enthusiasm for performance, unlike his daughter or even Puck or Rachel. He also doesn't seem especially skilled at his job, considering how often he seems to botch his throws and put Brittany in danger. He's laconic, scarce, and not particularly friendly toward anyone at the circus. He never eats with the company during mealtimes, and he seems to avoid everyone except for Brittany, if he can help it.

And he boxed Brittany's ear.

He hurt his poor baby girl.

(He hurt Santana's poor Brittany.)

Despite all of his surliness and even his violence, Brittany still seems to love him, though—and she inexplicably seems to trust him, both with her life and with her secrets, for whatever such trust is worth to him.

Santana swallows the parch in her throat and searches for something to say to Mr. Pierce, feeling suddenly like she did when she first met Mr. Adams—which is to say as if everything is wrong with her, like she's either too much or not enough in every possible way. She shivers, fearful without knowing what she fears.

She only manages a nod, but Mr. Pierce seems to accept that as a passable answer from her.

He returns the gesture and adjusts the brim of his hat, thoughtful. Quiet prevails, save for the sounds of Mr. Pierce's breath and Santana's against the windless day, the soft snuffing of the mule hitched to Mr. Pierce's wagon, the insect chatter in the air, the circus din in the distance. Santana shuffles, uncomfortable under the sun. She wishes, as she so often does, that she could be invisible.

Then.

"She makes friends real easy."

It takes Santana a full second to realize that Mr. Pierce addresses her, even though they're the only two people in sight. It takes Santana another full second to realize that Mr. Pierce refers to Brittany.

Santana never would have imagined prior to this moment that Daniel Pierce would have anything to say to her about Brittany—though, really, Brittany is the only thing that Santana and Daniel Pierce have in common.

She's their most important thing, actually.

At first, Santana's surprise that Mr. Pierce would speak to her prevents her from realizing the exact nature of what it is he said. She takes a full second to process his words.

She makes friends real easy.

Except that Brittany doesn't.

Ma Jones told Santana that Brittany hasn't many friends at the circus at all, and Puck claims that Brittany and her daddy are as strange as anyone comes. As of lately, even Santana, who is so new at the circus, has begun to perceive traces of circus loneliness in Brittany—in Brittany's trains always leaving but never returning to station, in the heartbroken blue of Brittany's eyes, in the way that Brittany longs for a home where she's never yet been.

(The lonely girl finds light in empty corners of the circus when she wanders there searching for a far-off something else.)

(Someone else, really.)

Though Santana adores that Brittany so often saves the best parts of herself for Santana, whom she never attempts to confound in the same way that she does everyone else, Santana regrets that so few people seem to realize what apparently only Santana and Mr. Pierce know about their girl.

The thing is that what Mr. Pierce means isn't that Brittany has many friends but rather that Brittany herself is easy to love.

It isn't a secret, but somehow it feels like one.

Suddenly, it seems to Santana as if she's seeing Mr. Pierce for the first time. Her mouth falls open a bit. She searches for words and finds them surprisingly quickly, and then speaks before she can think better of doing so, wanting to say the right thing for once, her heartbeat pounding out her nervousness loudly in her ears.

"She's my best friend," she says softly.

(Santana has never been so happy just to tell the truth.)

---

Every spell has something that will break it—magic words, a slain dragon, true love's kiss, or, in this case, Brittany appearing from just beyond the tent rows, wearing a pleased cat-smile as she approaches her two favorite people in the world. She doesn't say it aloud, but Santana hears it anyway.

Hey, darlin'!

Everything in Santana rises to meet Brittany, and Santana shuffles a bit upon the grass, suddenly fluttery inside for a different reason than she was before. Mr. Pierce stands up from against the wagon, adjusting his hat brim again. The pained expression he wore when he first called to Brittany during her conversation with Mrs. Schuester returns to his face. He nods a greeting to his daughter but doesn't speak to her before rounding the wagon, heaving himself up onto the driver's box and taking the reins to the mule. Brittany gestures for Santana to follow her into the wagon bed.

Santana can't help but sneak a glance at Brittany's shoes as she follows Brittany over the fender, for she doesn't know when she might ever get the chance to see Brittany wearing them again.

They're old-fashioned boots with pointed toes and buttons up the sides instead of laces. The leather along their edges appears well-worn and almost threadbare. Santana imagines that the shoes could have been fine ones when someone first purchased them from the Sears Roebuck Catalogue maybe a decade ago, though now they just appear shabby, not unlike Brittany's tatty, blue sundress. Their conservative style hardly seems apropos of Brittany and her typical carefree. Somehow they remind Santana of her grandmother.

Santana must make a face at them.

Brittany seems to notice it.

"They belonged to my mama," Brittany says, offering Santana an almost apologetic shrug. "They're too small for my feet." She scrunches up her nose.

(Santana feels a sweet pang play through her chest, like a high, clear note on a piano.)

"Pobrecita, Brittany," Santana pouts, sticking out her lip.

The girls settle into the wagon bed, sitting across from one another. Mr. Pierce gives the reins a crack, and the mule pulls the wagon forward with a lurch. Without thinking about it, Santana reaches for Brittany's legs, guiding them into her own lap so that Brittany's feet sit just in the motley hammock of her skirt. Brittany bends to her touch, pliant and relaxed.

As the wagon rumbles out of camp and onto the dirt road back to Storm Lake, Santana gathers Brittany's ankles in her hands and begins to thumb them through Brittany's shoes, rubbing little concentric circles upon Brittany's heels, absentminded, working over the bone before moving up toward Brittany's toes, much in the same way that her grandmother used to rub away her growing pains when she was a child. She hums an old San Juan song, massaging over Brittany's joints, one by one by one, falling into the same trance that binds her at her stitch work.

"You're really good at that, darlin'."

Santana looks up to find Brittany staring at her, eyes as soft as the reflection of a hunter's moon wavering upon clear water and perfectly blue, with no heartbreak in them at all. Though Brittany's mouth remains even across her face, something in Brittany seems to smile.

"At what?" Santana asks stupidly.

Brittany gives a little shrug that somehow doesn't seem little at all. A flush rises to her cheeks. "At just—," she stops short from whatever it is that she had intended to say, suddenly changing tack. "You're just good," she says.

If Mr. Pierce weren't around, Santana might shuffle onto her knees and lean forward to kiss Brittany, right in the open sunlight. As it is, she flusters, heat rising to her cheeks. She wants to explain to Brittany that she isn't good—that no bad omen is—but somehow in the moment she finds that she can't argue with Brittany's statement.

The truth of the matter is that when Santana is with Brittany, she does feel good somehow—or at least like she could be good if Brittany needed her to be so.

Santana bites her lips into her mouth and glances behind the wagon, watching the wheels kick up dust as it jostles along the uneven road, the white city growing smaller and smaller in the distance as they ride away from it. She flutters inside, the squeezing feeling in her chest tight and sweet.

"Does it help?" she asks, desperate to change the subject from her own alleged goodness, glancing down at where her hands work over Brittany's ankles.

Brittany nods enthusiastically. "Heaps," she says earnestly.

"I'm glad," Santana giggles, thumbing over Brittany's ankles.

Brittany grins and leans back against the edge of the wagon. She sighs, contented, and shuts her eyes, tilting her face up toward the sunlight. She seems sleepy and satisfied, like she did on the way to the train depot in Onawa, as comfortable as a cat in an afternoon windowsill. The day glow overhead brings out the brightness in her fair complexion; she's the kind of beautiful that an author could never capture in prose, no matter how long his book, and she only seems more so for her comfortableness at the moment.

"You could just do that forever, if you liked," Brittany mumbles, dreamy.

Santana nods. "Okay," she says.

She means it like a promise.

---

Mr. Pierce drives the wagon straight into the downtown area of Storm Lake and parks it alongside one of the promenades, driving the mule a few extra paces to straighten out the wheels before he stops.

In the next moment, he hops down from the driver's box and unhitches the back flap on the wagon bed—Santana hadn't noticed it had a hinge—allowing Brittany and Santana down onto the street. The two Pierces and Santana squint heavily against the fierce sunlight, and they're not the only ones who do so; Storm Lake looks like a city roasting in the heart of a furnace fire, with harsh glares reflecting from the shop windows and the metalwork decorating the streetlamps.

Very few people roam the main street, and those who do hide in what little shade there is under the storefront awnings, shielding their eyes with their hands and fanning themselves with handkerchiefs and scraps of folded paper. Dogs plod along, open-mouthed, high stepping over the hot dirt beneath their paws, their tongues long, pink, and dried out. Nearly everyone in sight sports great wet spots around their collars and underarms, even the ladies in their pretty Sunday dresses.

Once Brittany and Santana step out of his way, Mr. Pierces closes up the flap on the wagon and fixes Brittany with a serious look, ignoring Santana entirely.

"All right," he says, mumbling as if speaking around a plug of chaw, though he has nothing in his mouth that Santana can see. "I'm going to visit the cobbler"—he gestures to a shop somewhere in the distance—"to see if I can't have my boots resoled, and then Mr. Adams has asked that I procure some supplies from town for the company. Go ahead and see the town, but listen for me to call you because I might need an extra pair of hands at the store. Here"—he fishes in his pants' pocket and produces a whole shiny Liberty Head nickel for his efforts—"You go on and buy yourself some sarsaparilla, baby girl. Don't say nothin' to no gillies now."

"Yes, Daddy," Brittany says sweetly, accepting the gift, biting at her lip so as to contain her excitement.

(Her eyes look wide and Santana supposes that her own eyes must look wide, too.)

(A whole nickel!)

Mr. Pierce nods in reply, reaching up to stroke a lock of Brittany's hair away from her face, and she obliges him, tucking it behind her ear as one might tuck away an afterthought or a penny for a rainy day. Mr. Pierce seems to approve of her action; he cradles the back of Brittany's head in one of his broad, weathered palms, thumbing over her hair until she meets his eye.

For a brief second, it seems that Mr. Pierce might say something more to Brittany than he did at first, but instead he fixes her with a deep look, searching out something in her face hidden in amongst her lonely, starlit blue, well behind the boundary where most people stop with her.

Though Santana might flinch under such intense attention from anyone—even her own father, were he still alive—Brittany remains perfectly still where she stands, allowing Mr. Pierce to see her, and, moreover, seeing him in return.

Father and daughter hold each other's gazes for a few seconds past just a simple goodbye, unpaintable blue mirroring unpaintable blue, before each one of them suddenly seems to arrive at the destination of his and her search all at once. Mr. Pierce nods again, as if he and Brittany have come to some sort of unspoken understanding, and he gives Brittany's hair a final stroke before turning away from her.

Santana isn't sure what she's just seen.

Brittany seems entirely oblivious to Santana's confusion, though.

As Mr. Pierce approaches a young boy crouched alongside the promenade and asks him if he won't watch after the mule and wagon in exchange for a penny while Mr. Pierce attends his errands, Brittany meets Santana with a grin.

"Would you like to split a sarsaparilla with me, darlin'?" she asks, rocking up on the balls on her feet, so breathless and dizzy that Santana almost has to laugh at her for it.

"Only if you want to share," Santana says, trying and failing to suppress a dizzy grin of her own.

"Do I ever," Brittany says, taking Santana by the pinky.

(Santana allows Brittany to lead her away.)

(She'd follow Brittany anywhere, down any road, really.)

---

As soon as Brittany leads Santana into the general store, Santana realizes two things: first, that no one in Storm Lake has ever seen someone like her before, and, second, that Storm Lake is the most affluent city that the J.P. Adams & Son Traveling Circus & Menagerie has visited along its present route since she joined its number.

While the general store in Onawa was small, cramped, and overstocked with goods, the general store in Storm Lake sprawls with many tall wooden shelves and glass cases up against the counters.

Unlike the store in Onawa, Storm Lake's store hardly sells a lick of farm equipment. Instead, its merchandise consists mostly of household appliances, like Seely electric flatirons and "fully modern iceboxes," China dishware with pretty blue markings all along its edges, riding gloves for ladies, bathing trousers for gentlemen, and a vast array of toys for children, all conspicuously placed at waist-height along the shelves, right where a toddler might grab for them.

The sheer abundance of all the goods both delights and daunts Santana, who scarcely knows what to look at first, until she happens to glance across the room and spies the stout shopkeeper and his wife.

Both persons fix her with the kind of glare that she never encountered prior to her stay in the Tenderloin district, and their mouths stretch as if they've just tasted something particularly sour. They keep their arms folded over their chests, forming a solid barrier between them and Santana, the object of their distaste.

Even so, a certain curiosity shines through their repulsion; they follow Santana around the room with their eyes, learning the texture of her hair without touching it, the color of her skin without liking it, and everything else about her without actually knowing her at all.

They see everything and nothing about Santana all at once and seem particularly interested in the way Brittany tugs Santana along by the pinky finger, distrustful of, appalled at, and also secretly awed by it.

(Santana spies a set of child-shaped saltshakers upon a shelf, their faces black like slate, their lips red, their eyes wide and oblong—$1.05.)

(She hasn't seen anyone with a complexion darker than Brittany's in town so far.)

Santana holds her breath all the way to the front of the store, where Brittany greets the shopkeepers, making no apology for Santana's presence and neither any special mention of it.

"G'morning! Do you sell sarsaparilla here?" she asks gamely, moseying up towards the counter, Santana following along behind her, a kite attached to Brittany's wrist by a string.

Brittany smiles widely, but the shopkeeper and his wife don't return her amiable look.

They furrow their brows at her and the shopkeeper makes a brusque gesture toward a sign on the wall behind the cash register: ICE COLD SARSAPARILLA, 3¢ PER BOTTLE. The sign features an etched illustration of a full bottle of sarsaparilla tilted on its side and pouring into a little tonic cup, with a round logo beside that. Upon closer inspection, Santana sees that the logo reads: AYER'S, THE ONLY SARSAPARILLA ADMITTED TO THE 1893 WORLD'S FAIR, CHICAGO.

(It's an impressive boast.)

For the briefest second, Santana feels nervous, knowing that she can read the sign while Brittany cannot, and she wonders if she oughtn't to whisper to Brittany what the sign says so as to avoid any confusion between Brittany and the shopkeepers, but then Santana remembers that the sign features an illustration, which means that Brittany can probably understand it very well on her own, never mind the print.

Sure enough, Brittany offers the shopkeeper a smile.

"We'll take one bottle, please," she says, and Santana can't help but wonder if she didn't choose her words precisely with the intent to ruffle the shopkeepers, who glance at Santana warily as Brittany extends her nickel to them and they accept it.

The shopkeeper's wife bustles off, disappearing through a door behind the counter, while the shopkeeper himself wrestles with the register, entering the total for Brittany's purchase and pumping the lever to open the drawer to provide her with the appropriate change. The whole time he works, he never says a word to Brittany, and he never takes his eyes off Santana.

(As if she might do something uncivil, standing all of two feet away from him.)

For her part, Santana pretends to find something very interesting on the floorboards and diverts her eyes, waiting for Brittany to finish her transaction with the man while keeping tight hold to Brittany's little finger all the while. When the door behind the counter opens again, Santana looks up to see the shopkeeper's wife emerge clutching a tall, clear glass bottle filled with brown liquid, the bottle's contents sloshing from side to side with her every step. In her other hand, the shopkeeper's wife holds what looks like an overly large key head—a bottle opener—which she uses to dislodge the flat, tin bottle cap from Brittany's purchase.

After checking with her husband to ensure that the transaction is complete and that Brittany has paid for the sarsaparilla in full—all done at a glance—the shopkeeper's wife offers the bottle to Brittany, along with the tersest smile Santana has ever seen.

(The woman could give Mrs. Schuester lessons.)

"Fresh out of the icebox," she says in a pinched voice.

"Thank you, ma'am," Brittany replies, returning grace for ungraciousness.

"Thank you," Santana mumbles so quietly that it would surprise her if Brittany could even hear it, standing inches away.

(Though Santana's grandmother always taught her to be polite, Santana doesn't quite know for certain what the rules would have her do, given the situation.)

Santana watches Brittany's shoed heels as they lead her away from the counter, out the door to the store, and back onto the promenade.

It's only when Brittany stops walking that Santana dares to look up and meet her eyes.

She finds Brittany considering her, wearing an almost guilty expression.

"You get the first sip of sarsaparilla, darlin'," Brittany says. "Or you can have the whole thing, if you like. If I had another penny, I'd buy another one and give them both to you, actually."

What Brittany says sounds an awful lot like an apology for something that isn't Brittany's fault at all, but it also like something else than makes Santana's heart beat on bird's wings. Santana's mouth falls open, nearly in a smile.

"When you look so sad, it breaks my heart, you know," Brittany whispers, leaning in far more closely than would strictly be necessary to hand Santana the sarsaparilla bottle. Something glints in the blackest quick of Brittany's eyes.

(Is that it, there?)

(Santana sees it like the flash of a fishtail through clear water before suddenly it swims away again, nervous, to the deep.)

"I'm not sad," Santana says, accepting the bottle, which feels marvelously cold to her touch on such a hot day. Immediately, she realizes how lame her rebuttal sounds. She amends it, "I'm never sad when I'm with you—unless you're sad, that is."

Something passes over Brittany's face, too quickly for Santana to read. Brittany gives Santana's pinky finger a little tug and begins to lead her down the promenade, window-shopping like they did yesterday in Onawa once more.

Brittany mulls over Santana's words for a moment before replying. "Well, if I'm only sad because I thought you were sad, but you're not sad unless I'm sad, then are either one of us really sad right now, darlin'?" Brittany asks, checking Santana's face to see if it's okay to smile yet.

Santana gives Brittany's question a moment of thought before she answers, "We don't have to be, I don't suppose," and breaks into a smile, her discomfort from the store all but forgotten now that she's alone with Brittany again—which is her favorite way to be, after all.

Brittany nods, thoughtful. "Well, we do have sarsaparilla," she says, as if no one who has sarsaparilla could ever truly feel sad.

Santana remembers the bottle in her hand and gives it a sip. The sarsaparilla tastes sweet and syrupy all at once but also herbal and savory like a root vegetable, with just a hint of sassafras. This Western brew boasts a stronger flavor than the Eastern kind which Santana grew accustomed to drinking in New York, and it almost causes her to cough on account of its thickness. All the same, it isn't foul to the tongue at all—indeed, quite the opposite. It just tastes vaguely medicinal in addition to being sweet, really.

(Never mind what Santana's father might tell her about how sarsaparilla couldn't cure a cold, no matter how pretty its container.)

"How is it?" Brittany asks.

Santana nods, swallowing down the last of her sip. "Swell," she says honestly. Then, "Thank you for sharing with me."

"You're welcome," Brittany says easily, giving Santana's finger a little squeeze. "Had you ever tasted sarsaparilla before today? I hadn't until last year when we stopped in Vermont and a vendor set up shop at the end of the midway and gave us all free samples. Sam and I went wild for it. Blaine didn't like his very well, though, so Sam and I split his between the two of us."

Santana nods, in total agreement. "Papa used to bring me sarsaparilla sometimes from the corner store on Friday evenings if I'd behaved myself for Abuela all week," she says, surprised at herself for revealing so much information about her life at the bachelor cottage when Brittany hadn't even asked to hear about it from her. She checks Brittany's reaction out of the corner of her eye.

(If it were Brittany who had told a secret to Santana and not the other way around, Santana knows exactly how she would feel about the matter.)

A new smile curls over Brittany's lips, one that makes her look like she's the one sipping sweet sarsaparilla rather than Santana. She swings her and Santana's hands between them and hums a note in a clear major key.

"You don't talk about your daddy very much," she notes, just so, before quickly adding, "—not that you have to talk about him, if you don't want to."

Santana hadn't realized how very little she had told Brittany concerning her father since arriving at the circus—and particularly given how very much her father has lingered on the peripheries of her mind ever since his passing. When she searches herself, she can't reckon an especially cogent reason as to why she hasn't spoken concerning the Good Doctor at length, except that she doesn't have any real answers about him, only questions, in her own mind.

She bites her lips between her teeth and passes the sarsaparilla bottle to Brittany, shrugging as she looks for the right words. "It's just," she says, speaking very slowly, her eyes tracing over Brittany's shadow upon the floorboards on the promenade, "I feel like I didn't know him as well as I thought I did. He was always just my papa, but to everyone else, he was Dr. Lucas, and I—I don't know quite what to make of that, really."

Brittany waits for Santana to say her piece, silent and attentive. She takes a sip from the sarsaparilla and then nods. "Sometimes it can take a while to figure out how to feel about big things," she says wisely.

"It can," Santana agrees.

The girls meet each other's eyes, slowing to a stop along the promenade. Suddenly, Santana's throat feels very dry, despite the fact that she just drank a sip of sarsaparilla. She wets her lip, her heart beating out strong love to Brittany against her breastbone. Brittany's eyes turn soft and fervent, like a child's prayer in faith. Santana's body responds automatically, blooming—

"Thank you," Santana says again—and quickly—just to stop herself from kissing Brittany on the sidewalk in Storm Lake, "for the sarsaparilla."

"You already said that, darlin'," Brittany grins.

"Oh," Santana says stupidly.

Brittany holds her gaze for a long while, seeing something in Santana that Santana feels certain no one else has ever—or will ever—see in her again. Brittany wears a delighted smile at the corners of her mouth, and her whole face seems bright.

"You're very sweet," she says approvingly, offering her elbow to Santana so that they can walk hip to hip alongside each other.

Santana gladly accepts her offer, laughing. "I'm not sweet to anyone but you, though," she protests. "Just ask Rachel Berry—"

"—doesn't count—"

"—or Puck—"

"—he's not sweet to you, though—"

"—or anybody at the circus, really," Santana tries to explain.

(It's difficult to explain anything with that lucky penny feeling in her belly turning somersaults like an acrobat, and especially when Brittany keeps looking at her in that way.)

Brittany shakes her head, stubborn. "I'm at the circus, darlin'," she says logically. "Why don't you ask me what I think?"

Santana giggles again, her lucky penny feeling giving another half-dozen flips. A blush burns all over her cheeks and ears. She can't very well refuse Brittany anything, even to save her own composure, in this case.

"What do you think about it, then, Miss Brittany?" Santana relents.

"I think," Brittany says very slowly, drawing out each word for effect, "that you are... the sweetest person in the whole wide world... and that Mr. Adams should put it on the marquee and charge people five dollars just to see you smile."

"Britt!"

"If we were at the circus, I'd kiss you," Brittany whispers conspiratorially, leaning in closely to Santana's ear.

"And if we were at the circus, I'd let you," Santana whispers back, finally in on the plot.

"You're not fair," they both say at the same time, dissolving into a fit of giggles.

(How is it possible that each day gets just a little bit better than the last one, as long as Santana spends her days with Brittany?)

(She's in love with the most perfect girl in the world and she's absolutely certain that the most perfect girl in the world somehow loves her back, which is just as wonderful as a wonderful thing can be.)

---

Brittany and Santana spend a long while walking the streets of Storm Lake, searching out shade wherever they can find it, trading the bottle of sarsaparilla back and forth between them until they drain it dry. Brittany elects to save the bottle—"It's pretty," she says, holding it up against the sunlight so that it refracts rainbow lattices upon the street and over her skirt—and tucks its neck under her sash, pinning it in place at her hip.

When the girls pass the town bank, they overhear a businessman complain about how the temperature in town has reached one-hundred and three degrees Fahrenheit, according to the thermometer at the train depot, and Santana can easily believe it.

"Maybe if we do more tricks, someone will throw a bucket of water on us," Brittany says, glancing wistfully up at the second story windows overlooking the street.

"If we see a creek, I'll push you in it," Santana teases.

Brittany laughs. "I wouldn't even holler at you if you did," she says, nudging her hip up against Santana's. "I feel like I can't remember what rain is like, even though it rained all day yesterday. It's like the opposite of the elephants and Africa."

"Like you've forgotten something you already knew about?" Santana says knowingly.

(Santana remembers the exact important thing that she had forgotten before—she remembers, she remembers, she remembers.)

"Right," Brittany nods. She turns her face up toward the sky, as if she's talking to it, "I could sure do with a reminder. You know, any time, really."

"Brittany!" Santana laughs, her heart squeezing in her chest. She nearly doubles over, except that she remains linked to Brittany at the elbow. Instead, she stumbles along the sidewalk, allowing Brittany to steer her wherever she lists, her body pressing in close to Brittany's.

"Howdy, Miss Brittany!"

Santana had forgotten that there were other people in the world aside from herself and Brittany and jerks as a new voice—an unfamiliar, male voice—cuts into their conversation, turning to find its source.

Pirates.

That's Santana's first thought—that somehow the boys look like pirates.

There are five of them altogether, all probably between seventeen and five-and-twenty years in age, or at least old enough to shave, Santana supposes. Two of them are very short, two of them are of average height, and one is very tall—perhaps even more so than towering Finn Hudson.

The tall boy sticks out to Santana as the probable leader of the little band, for he walks in front of the group and is not only the tallest but also apparently the oldest out of the lot of them. Like his fellows, he goes shoeless over the dirt and wears his clothing almost haphazardly, the legs of his pants torn and dirty and his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows. Though he sports galluses, he hasn't bothered to tuck his shirt in at the waist or even button it to the top button, despite the fact that he has no undershirt that Santana can see.

Something about him seems decidedly rough, to the point where Santana can't help but think that even Puck would cross on the other side of the street from him.

The boy—if Santana can call him a boy, given his apparent age—has a ruddy complexion, sneering mouth, narrow nose, tall forehead, with hair the color of a copper spittoon, clear and bright after a long polishing, so vivid that it reflects the sun. Santana pins him at some long shot over twenty years of age in her mind because he already boasts very faint crow's feet at the corners of his eyes and also because he appears to be balding, with tall widow's peaks climbing up along the edges of his brow, though he otherwise wears his hair long enough to pull back into a ponytail.

He and the other boys remind Santana very much of the crew of Mr. Stevenson's Hispaniola, though not in a comforting literary way.

At first, it confuses Santana that one of the boys called Brittany by her name, and she wonders—foolishly—if Brittany doesn't somehow know the fellow from somewhere or another.

(Maybe he's a supe at the circus whom Santana has yet to see or meet?)

But as the gang of boys draws closer to Brittany and Santana, Santana suddenly realizes that not a single one of them knows Brittany at all; they only overheard Santana saying Brittany's name and snatched it for themselves, like magpies stealing up dropped shiny coins from a sandy beachfront, where would-be bathers have dropped them.

A nervous chord thrums through Santana's body. She doesn't like how the boys look or talk at all. Immediately, she glances to Brittany to see how Brittany will react to the boys' attention.

Right at that moment, a shadow comes over Brittany's face, all her sunshine for Santana suddenly replaced by perturbation and something else that seems decidedly unfriendly toward the boys. Brittany returns Santana's glance and tightens her hold on Santana's arm, pulling Santana in more closely to her body, but she doesn't stop walking and doesn't respond to the boys saying her name.

(Santana clings to her like a man overboard will cling to the flotsam keeping him afloat.)

"Hey, Miss Brittany, we're talking to you!"

This time it's the ringleader who says it—the tall, redheaded ruffian with the untucked shirttails. Though Santana knows she oughtn't to dignify his catcalling by looking at him, she can't help but turn her head at the sound of his voice; she finds him sneering, a more sinister kind of devil in his smile than any that twists Puck's smirks or sits upon Santana's shoulder.

Immediately, Santana's heartbeat speeds and she looks up and down the street, wondering if anyone might hear her and Brittany if they were to shout for assistance. She thinks of the Tenderloin district and of the two supes who tugged her ankles on the train to Mankato and of the boys in St. James, running alongside the circus wagon and yelling Hey-o, Gypsy Santana!, and recoils because the boys here in Storm Lake somehow seem more dangerous than all the other ones who came before them.

Brittany doesn't stop walking, but when it becomes apparent that the boys won't relent from following her if she doesn't somehow acknowledge them, she says, just loudly enough for them to hear it, "My daddy says I oughtn't to talk to strange fellas"—which is almost true, if strange fellas and gillies are all the same thing to a circus girl.

Several of the boys laugh but not in a mirthful way.

The tall, redheaded one takes a half-dozen long strides, situating himself just behind Brittany and Santana in a trice. Again, Santana glances at him, knowing better than to do it. The boy smirks.

"Well, Miss Brittany, how about I introduce myself to you, and then I won't be a strange fella no more? My name is Richard Nelson. How do you like my name? You can have it, if you're partial to it," he says unctuously, pleased with what he must suppose is his own cleverness.

(Santana twitches. Her skin suddenly feels filthier than if she hadn't bathed in a week, just for hearing Richard Nelson speak.)

One of the younger boys crows, "Ooh! Dicky's in love!"

Richard Nelson grins. "What do you say, Miss Brittany?" he asks.

Brittany's lips thin on her face, pursed tightly together, and she stiffens at Santana's side, though she continues to walk away from the boys and doesn't ever turn to face them.

"We're still strangers because you don't know my family name," Brittany says in a way that might sound placid to the boys, who don't know her, but which seems absolutely acid to Santana, who knows Brittany very well.

Some of the boys laugh, including Richard Nelson, amused with Brittany's pertness.

Richard Nelson bites, "Well, how about you tell it to me, then, so that we can get better acquainted?"

Santana's heart pounds out thunder against her breastbone.

Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.

She doesn't like the course of this conversation at all. The more the boys follow in her and Brittany's footsteps, the more they seem like jackals and the less they seem like pirates—in fact, pirates would be too good for them.

Santana's stomach churns, and she wonders if she won't be sick. Though she and Brittany have the whole town of Storm Lake before them, she feels hopelessly trapped and almost claustrophobic.

What would happen if she and Brittany were to run? Where could they even run to, when the boys know the town better than they do? It would be foolish to bolt down a side street or alleyway. Could they make it to a shop? Where is Mr. Pierce?

She checks Brittany's face again and isn't surprised to find a nervousness hiding at the corners of Brittany's mouth and deep in Brittany's eyes.

Brittany doesn't say anything in response to Richard Nelson's question.

Instead, she gives the slightest shake of her head.

No.

"Ooh!" the younger boys hoot, thrilled to see their ringleader cast down before them, amused at Brittany's audacity to do it.

Richard Nelson doesn't seem half as delighted as his compatriots do. The smirk instantly fades from his face, and his mouth turns tight. It takes a full second for him to recover from Brittany's rebuff; he obviously hadn't expected her to make it. He halts where he stands, allowing Brittany and Santana to put a few extra paces between themselves and him, to the point where Santana wonders if he won't simply just watch them walk away without further harassing Brittany.

She turns to check Brittany's face again.

(She feels herself as if she'll cry at any moment and frets that Brittany might feel the same.)

(When you look so sad, it breaks my heart, you know.)

"Hey, cookie, why don't you tell me your miss' family name, huh?"

Santana had forgotten that other people than Brittany could see her. She had forgotten that other people could speak to her. She had forgotten herself altogether, so great was her concern for Brittany's wellbeing, in fact.

Now she wishes that Richard Nelson had forgotten all about her, too.

Santana stops walking, suddenly cold, despite the one-hundred degree temperature in Storm Lake.

Oh God.

Brittany gives Santana's arm a tug, urging her along, but Santana can't move—can't find it in herself to even breathe, let alone to shuffle her feet.

There are rules about this, and there are things that will happen to her if she breaks those rules. So far, Brittany hasn't broken any rules in her dealings with the boys, but Santana could—and easily. Anything she says or doesn't say in this situation will inevitably be the wrong answer.

And she could get Brittany in trouble for it—and not just with the shrewish Mrs. Schuesters of the world, either.

Santana wants to scream no. She wants to yell at Richard Nelson and his boys to leave Brittany alone and to not talk to her ever again. She wants to loose a tide of Spanish from her tongue, scaring them with her alleged gypsy magic as easily as she scared the supes and all of Puck's circus friends in the past. She wants to pound the boys with her fists if they come anywhere near herself or Brittany.

She can't, though.

She can't do any of that.

She pauses, statue-still where she stands, looking at her own toes, and waits.

Oh God.

"Hey, pickaninny!" Richard Nelson barks. "I'm talking to you! Tell us Brittany's name!"

It's an order.

Santana can see Brittany in her peripheral vision, an unreadable expression upon Brittany's face. Her own heart beats so loudly that if she isn't careful, it might spell out Brittany's surname for Richard Nelson and his boys to hear.

The rules say that someone like Santana can't refuse to follow an order from a man like Richard Nelson, even if he is a ruffian, but everything inside Santana shouts at her to refuse him. Santana promised herself that she would protect Brittany whenever she could—from boxed ears and a hurt heart and from anything else that could harm her—and Santana never intends to break her promise.

Briefly, she considers pretending to be a mute, like Mr. Crusoe's Man Friday when Mr. Crusoe first rescues him, but then she decides against it, knowing that such a pretense could perhaps induce Richard Nelson's gang to do violence to herself and Brittany. What if she were to offer the boys a false name—her father's alias, Lucas—as Brittany's? What if she were to just grab Brittany by the wrist and run for Mr. Pierce's wagon down the street?

Santana hears Richard Nelson's feet fall heavy along the floorboards of the promenade as he approaches behind her.

"Hey, ni—"

"Britt! Baby girl!"

Before Santana can even register her own relief at hearing Daniel Pierce's voice, Brittany moves beside her, taking Santana by the wrist, stirring Santana from her panic.

"That's my daddy," Brittany mumbles, either to herself or to Santana. Then, somewhat louder so that the boys will hear her, "That's my daddy!"

Brittany's magic words break the spell, jolting Santana from her stupor. Santana stares at Brittany with wide eyes, and Brittany gives Santana's wrist a little jig, enticing Santana down from the promenade onto the hot dirt road after her.

Without waiting for anyone else to say another word, Brittany starts to lead Santana away from the boys and toward her father, who stands a ways off, alongside the circus wagon, waving his hat to beckon his daughter back to him.

For their parts, Richard Nelson and his boys appear absolutely flabbergasted at this sudden turn in events, but none of them makes an immediate move to detain Brittany and Santana or to further antagonize the girls as they make their exit, perhaps due to surprise.

When he boys follow the sound of Mr. Pierce's voice with their eyes, the smirks immediately fade from their faces. For as much as Mr. Pierce intimidates Santana, he must intimidate the boys more, for they all shrink where they stand for seeing him—even cocky Richard Nelson. The boys observe his great stature and the wicked Bowie knife hung at his hip, and, in a trice, they appear to make their decision: such a rough-looking stranger is not someone whom they want to cross, if they can avoid it, no matter how beautiful his daughter may be.

Rules are rules are rules, after all, even for ruffians, Santana supposes.

Santana allows Brittany to tug her across the street towards where Mr. Pierce stands waving to them, not far from the wagon. She feels a moment behind the times and almost dizzy for the sudden turn of events. Will it always be Brittany protecting her and not the other way around?

"Come on, darlin'," Brittany whispers in Santana's ear as soon as they're far enough away from the promenade that the boys won't overhear them. "You look green."

"I feel green," Santana mutters.

Brittany just nods, understanding. "Good thing Daddy showed up when he did, huh?" she asks, and Santana can only nod in response, more grateful to Daniel Pierce and his perfect timing than she could possibly express.

Before Santana can stop herself, her fingers slide down to twine with Brittany's fingers, and she holds fast to them, her own heartbeat pounding so strongly through her veins that Brittany can undoubtedly feel it where their skin touches.

(Santana can't explain herself to Brittany in any other way, at the moment.)

Santana can't help but fault herself for shutting down back on the promenade in that same helpless way that she always does whenever something upsets her too much. Just a few days ago, Santana vowed to always protect Brittany, no matter what, and now not only did she fail to do so, but she also actually put Brittany in danger with her foolish, slow tongue. Santana finds no malice at all behind Brittany's eyes when she searches them, but she still hates herself a bit for turning mum during such a white hot moment.

Brittany must intuit it.

Just before they reach Mr. Pierce, Brittany nudges Santana's hip with her hip and gives Santana's hand a little squeeze. "Don't let them bother you, darlin'," she says, thumbing over Santana's palm before releasing it from her grip.

(Whom should Santana not allow to bother her—the hooligan boys on the promenade or the devils that sit on her shoulder, whispering shame into her ears?)

As the girls approach him, Mr. Pierce resituates his hat upon his head, wiping sweat from his brow and neck with the back of his hand as he does so. Perspiration glints amidst his stubble, and his whole face appears ruddy, almost as with fever. If possible, he wears an even tighter squint now than he did when Brittany and Santana parted ways with him a bit more than an hour ago. He wipes the tip of his nose between pinched fingers and swallows what must be day heat at the back of his throat.

"All right," he says thickly, foregoing a greeting. "Let's get over to the store to pick up that order for Mr. Adams." He mutters something else beyond that, but Santana doesn't catch it.

(Santana thinks she hears him say the words go home tucked in amongst others.)

(A bright, quick feeling fills her chest.)

(Home is a person Santana remembers and remembers and remembers.)

---

Mr. Adams' "order" amounts to five barrels of beer and four of cider, all brought up from a cool trapdoor cellar located beneath the side street foundations of the general store.

The stout shopkeeper and his wife seem none too pleased to see Brittany and Santana back on their property again, but they refrain from showing any overt discourtesy to the girls in Mr. Pierce's presence. A shop boy—their son, Santana guesses, based upon his likeness to them—helps roll the barrels up from the cellar alongside the shopkeeper, hefting them to Mr. Pierce at street level with considerable effort.

After a while, the shopkeeper's wife disappears back inside the store, presumably to tend other customers, or maybe just to spare herself the unpleasantness of having to look at uncivilized circus folk for a second longer than she has to. As she goes, she leaves her husband with a curt reminder to make sure he tallies the ledger and "takes in a full payment," as if Mr. Pierce—as Mr. Adams' proxy—might somehow shortchange their business otherwise.

While the men work to empty the cellar of its brews, Brittany and Santana crouch in the wagon bed, receiving the barrels as at first Mr. Pierce and then Mr. Pierce with help from the shopkeeper and the shop boy lift the barrels from the ground to the tailgate, grunting under the weight of them and the oppressive heat of the day.

As each barrel touches down on the tailgate, the girls take charge of it together, tipping it over on its side, usually with help from one of the men, on account of the barrel's great heaviness. They must be nimble in their work, lest they crush their fingers beneath the barrel's wooden sides or pinch them in the barrel's belly planks. They also must take great care not to allow the barrel to roll back on the men after the men set it onto the tailgate, as gravity would will it.

Once Brittany and Santana successfully tip the barrel, they roll it toward the front of the wagon bed, as close to the back of the driver's box as they can get it, spinning it under the palms of their hands and guiding it along with their knees.

Thankfully, whatever wainwright built the wagon had the good sense to set the bed on a slight slope, so that the fore of the wagon actually sits slightly lower than the back. The incline helps Brittany and Santana immensely in their work, which they do stooped over like beet-diggers.

Honestly, Santana doesn't think she has ever worked harder for the circus than she has today—and especially not in such extreme heat.

Both Santana and Brittany pant like dogs, unable to cool themselves enough otherwise. Santana would gladly trade this job for embroidering Mrs. Schuester's damnable elephant blankets or for peeling all the root vegetables that Ma Jones could find for her, if only it meant that she could sit down somewhere and not have to wrestle barrels that weigh almost as much as she does on a one-hundred and three degree day.

Never has Santana so hated her heavy gypsy costume. Never has she wished that she could doff her shirt and corset in public like she wants to do right now, decency be damned.

The shopkeeper supplies Mr. Pierce and the girls with enough rope to tether the barrels securely to the wagon bed, so they won't shift too much in transit. Brittany masterminds all the tether knots and Santana adores the way she does so, her pretty pink tongue pinched between her teeth as she finds a hook for this length of rope here, a wood knot for that length of rope there, clever, competent, and sure-handed.

When finally Mr. Pierce asks, "You got 'em down, Brittany?" Brittany can only reply with a nod of her head, her breath already spent.

While Mr. Pierce settles the payment with the shopkeeper, Brittany and Santana flop down upon the barrels, utterly exhausted, their arms and legs draped haphazardly over the bed of barrel bellies, their skirts splayed out like wilted flower petals, withered under the sun. They lean their heads back and take in great gulps of air.

(Santana wonders if Brittany has a headache, too.)

Their eyelids begin to flutter closed, not in sleep, but in sheer fatigue. While the barrels aren't as cool against her back as Santana might have hoped, they certainly aren't as sunbaked as everything else that surrounds Santana, either.

"You circus girls sure work hard," says a young, male voice just a little to the side and below the wagon bed.

When Santana opens her eyes, she finds the shop boy smiling at her and Brittany through the wooden slats, awed. He stands on the street, hanging back while the shopkeeper tallies the ledger and records Mr. Pierce's receipt of sale. Santana doesn't know what to say to the boy or even if she can say anything to him at all.

(Rules and breathlessness, that's it, really.)

Brittany offers the boy a nod. "Thanks," she says simply, to the point as always, before leaning back onto the barrel behind her head and closing her eyes, just breathing and being, trying to stave off the heat. Santana follows suit, closing her eyes and wishing more than anything for Onawa's rain to visit Storm Lake.

A minute later, the wagon shifts as Mr. Pierce pulls himself onto the driver's box. Though Santana might normally flinch in response to such a movement, at present, she can't even force herself to open her eyes to see it for herself. The sun shines through her closed eyelids, choreographing a ballet of orange and yellow rods before Santana's shut eyes. She feels Mr. Pierce's weight settle onto the driver's bench.

"Hold them barrels down," Mr. Pierce's dust-dry voice says from somewhere above and ahead of her.

"Sure thing," Brittany mumbles, though she makes no effort to move.

Santana can imagine that Mr. Pierce nods at his daughter before giving the mule's reins a flick. She hears something slice—knife-quick—through the air and then an animal snuff before the wagon starts to roll. Beer and cider sloshes in the barrels beneath Santana's body, the barrels' wooden sides taking in heat by the minute. Despite the bumpiness of the road leaving Storm Lake, Santana all but slips into a stupor for her tiredness, going.

After a minute, she feels skin on her skin, at first as light as yesterday's forest rain.

Brittany fumbles to find Santana's hand across the wagon bed from her—her eyes presumably closed, too—fingertips ghosting over Santana's knuckles. Once Santana recognizes what Brittany intends to do, she helps Brittany's touch along, groping until she grazes over Brittany's palm and then weaving her fingers between Brittany's fingers, where they ought to be.

She and Brittany clasp hands, and Santana suddenly feels at home and relaxed in a way that she didn't before. Of course, Mr. Pierce remains none the wiser of it.

(Neither Brittany nor Santana speaks a single word.)

(Santana smiles freely, half-hoping that Brittany will open her eyes just long enough to see it.)

---

As they draw closer to camp, Santana begins to dread that Mr. Pierce might require her and Brittany's help to unload the barrels from the wagon, just like he required their help to load them.

If he does, Santana worries that she honestly might swoon or contract a brain fever because she already feels a bit lightheaded as it is, and she knows that the rules won't allow her to decline the work, if Mr. Pierce bids her to do it.

Briefly, she considers playing dead when the wagon rolls up to the white city and even allowing the circus supes to bury her if they like for it, as long as it's cooler underground than it is above it, but then she remembers something very important.

Circus supes.

Once she arrives at the realization, Santana begins to laugh, a throaty giggle escaping her lips before she can think to mind it.

"What?" Brittany says, tired and amused somewhere to the side of her. She gives Santana's hand a little squeeze.

"The supes will move the barrels," Santana giggles again.

Brittany shifts where she lies and begins to giggle, too. "You're crazy, darlin'," Brittany says around little golden hiccups of laughter. She sounds slightly addled; Santana probably does, too. "I think you baked your head in the sun and made yourself screwy."

"I think you might be right," Santana chuckles, her ribs shaking against the barrel behind them. Her mouth falls open in a lazy smile, and she plays with her and Brittany's twined hands between them, tugging them a bit closer to herself.

If Mr. Pierce can hear her and Brittany's jibber-jabber conversation behind him, he certainly makes no indication that he can, and, really, Santana wouldn't care if Mr. Pierce could hear it anyway. She laughs again, tickled.

"Not fair," Brittany says at her side, still laughing, too.

"Not fair that I baked my head?" Santana teases. "It's because I have black hair, you know. Black hair traps in the sun. You're lucky your hair's gold."

"Straw-yellow, you mean," Brittany says quickly.

"Nope—gold," Santana avers.

Brittany lets out another short laugh, though it sounds different from her laughter before. "How would you know?" she counters. "You baked your head."

"I can tell the future, Britt," Santana says, lazily, suddenly enjoying herself very much, despite the heat and her exhaustion, feeling somehow beyond herself and wonderfully careless, like she has the only thing that matters in the world at her side. She laughs again.

(Loopy.)

"What does that have to do with what color my hair is right now, darlin'?" Brittany retorts, laughing, too, and sounding more than certain that Santana has baked her head.

"Well, you have to know some things about the past to know the future," Santana explains, as if it's all very plain. "For instance, since I know that in the future, you'll have snow white hair, I must also know that in the past—which would be right now, in case you're counting—you have gold hair, which is very different than straw-yellow hair, thank you quite a lot."

She tries to speak very seriously but has trouble stopping her laughter now that she's started it.

"Will you still like me when I have snow white hair, darlin'?" Brittany asks suddenly, not laughing at all, her voice very sweet and soft, perhaps so Mr. Pierce won't overhear her question from the driver's seat, perhaps due to something else. She sounds like she very much wants to know Santana's answer—and not jokingly at all.

"So much," Santana says truthfully, suddenly not joking at all, either.

A pause.

Then.

"Okay," Brittany says, content.

(It sounds somehow like a promise.)

---

The wagon clatters to a halt, and the barrels jostle, shifting against the change in momentum. Santana jostles, too, and groans. Brittany stirs at her side, dropping Santana's hand before clambering to her feet. For the first time since leaving Storm Lake proper, Santana dares to opens her eyes, wincing at the glare.

Brittany hovers just above her, the sun forming an aureole behind her head, her hair casting tendril shadows, long, upon her face. Maybe Santana did die in the back of the wagon. Maybe Brittany is the angel arrived to greet Santana into the heaven her grandmother told her she would never get to see.

(The truth of the matter is that when Santana is with Brittany, she does feel good somehow.)

Santana gasps at Brittany's beauty, worshipful, and suddenly recalls what she had wanted to do when she and Brittany returned to the circus from town—which is to say, to confess her love to Brittany, plainly and honestly, for the first time. Briefly, Santana considers saying the words as soon as she and Brittany can steal away to some private corner in camp, but then Brittany extends two hands to her, interrupting her considerations.

"Hup, hup," Brittany says, locking Santana's fingers with her own and tugging Santana to her feet.

All of a sudden, a wave of wooziness washes over Santana. She stumbles as if drunken or wearing sea legs on the land. White sears behind her eyes, and she nearly keels over for being so lightheaded.

Brittany hurries to catch Santana under the elbows before she falls. "Whoa," she says, supporting Santana's weight. "You all right, darlin'? You didn't really bake your head did you?"

She sounds genuinely concerned, if blunt, as always.

(God, Santana loves her!)

For a second, all Santana's inhibitions leave her, along with her sense of balance. Brittany is just so wonderful, and the sun is just so hot. Their bodies fall flush against each other, and Santana loves the feel of Brittany and everything about Brittany, really.

"Britt," she blurts out. "I have to tell you something—a secret. It's very important."

Brittany rights Santana in her arms. "I'm sure it is, darlin', since you baked your head and all," Brittany says kindly. "We ought to get you a drink of water. It's been too long since we had that sarsaparilla hasn't it?"

Her reaction isn't what Santana would have expected.

Before Santana can process what Brittany just said to her, Mr. Pierce appears at the back of the wagon and unhinges the flap, gesturing to Brittany and Santana to come down from where they stand. Brittany all but passes Santana into the hands of her father, who holds Santana very lightly around the waist as she jumps down from the tailgate using his shoulder as a point of leverage, almost in reverse of how a man might lift his partner as part of a ballroom waltz.

It feels strange to Santana to have a man like Mr. Pierce touch her, even if only briefly and with nothing improper about the contact at all. Santana flinches, holding her breath until her feet meet the grass. Immediately, she scurries away from Mr. Pierce a few steps and turns back to the wagon to wait for Brittany, feeling dizzy again all of sudden and confused in a way that maybe she wouldn't be if she were to have a drink of water, like Brittany says.

Mr. Pierce takes Brittany by the waist and guides her to the earth, too, a shooting star of cobalt blue.

(Santana makes a wish.)

"We're going to go see if Ma Jones needs some help in the kitchen, Daddy," Brittany says brightly—though Santana suspects that what she really means is that they're going to go sneak a drink of water from around the back of the chuck and hope no interrupts them from doing it by putting them to work first.

Mr. Pierce nods but doesn't state a reply. He suddenly seems very far away.

Brittany wraps her pinky finger around Santana's and tugs her away from the wagon bay in the direction of the mess pit. As they go, Santana can't help but feel as if she leaves the careless bravery she felt in the wagon bed behind her.

She still has a secret, of course. She just doesn't know how to tell it.

The white city stands tall now, all its pennants and canvases unfurled and brilliant under the sun, and the further Brittany and Santana progress into it, the more Santana considers that maybe she oughtn't to confess her love to Brittany right now—not when she still feels so lightheaded and can't seem to choose the right words to say for the life of her.

She doesn't want her confession to seem silly or addled. She doesn't want Brittany to think it comes from sun exhaustion or on a foolish whim.

The perfect girl whom Santana loves deserves a perfect love confession.

"You okay, darlin'? You're awful quiet," Brittany says as they come up around the far side of the mess pit, heading in the direction of the chuck wagon.

Santana nods. "Swell," she says dully.

(Will Santana ever not be a coward when it comes to Brittany?)

---

The girls arrive on the far side of the mess pit and Brittany rustles them up two tin cups from the back of the chuck wagon without anybody intercepting her at it, as deft in her thievery as one of Mr. Dickens' London pickpockets.

The water the girls draw from Ma Jones' kitchen barrels tastes foul and scalds their throats like hot soup broth, but at least they have a nice time standing in the shade at the back of the chuck wagon, where it probably feels five or ten degrees cooler than it does upon sunlit ground. Neither Brittany nor Santana says much as they sip their pilfered refreshments, in the hopes that if they maintain silence, no one will discover their hiding place behind the wagon.

"Santana Puckerman! Brittany Pierce!"

(No such luck.)

Mrs. Schuester blusters up to them, coming from the direction of her dressing tents toward the mess pit, holding her skirts up around her ankles, already clucking her tongue at Brittany and Santana in disdain before she even reaches their loitering place. She looks perhaps even more frazzled now than she did this morning, with all the rouge washed from her cheeks by perspiration and the tips of the flyaway hair stands escaping her bun curling in the hellish heat. She opens her eyes so widely that Santana wonders if she ever intends to close them again in the future.

"Your father said I might find you here!" Mrs. Schuester snips. "Those elephant blankets won't embroider themselves, you know! There's work to be done before lunchtime! Get a move on! Snap, snap!"

She clicks her fingers at Brittany and Santana, gesturing for them to put their tin cups away back inside the chuck. Brittany quirks an eyebrow at Santana. Santana quirks an eyebrow at Brittany. Sometimes it really does seem that some force in the wider universe would do anything to keep them from their private moments—and, moreover, that Mrs. Schuester works under the employ of that force, its devoted special agent.

"Yes, ma'am," both girls say at once, sighing.

Once Brittany returns the cups to the wagon, she and Santana follow Mrs. Schuester out of the shade, back toward the commercial side of the circus camp, parched, yellow grass matting under the soles of their feet, the cicadas in the brush somehow even more obnoxious than usual for the high temperature.

As they go along, Santana's whole body feels sluggish and heavy, and when they reach the ladies' dressing tent, she finds she can hardly bother herself to listen as Mrs. Schuester loads her and Brittany up with both materials and instructions for decorating the elephant blankets. Mrs. Schuester's voice drones, incessant as the buzz of mosquito wings, and Santana drifts away, not really thinking of anything, tired down past her bones.

"Yes, ma'am," Santana mutters at what must be appropriate intervals, or at least passable ones, given that Mrs. Schuester doesn't shout at her for speaking when she does.

Soon, Santana finds herself following Brittany out of the dressing tent and back into the oppressive sun. She carries two sewing kits herself and Brittany all the blankets, which bunch like the petticoats Santana used to leave strewn over her bedroom floor at the bachelor cottage until her grandmother harped at her to put them in their proper places, por favor, Santana, mi querida, por el amor de Dios.

At first, Santana and Brittany seem to amble, not headed to anywhere in particular. Briefly, Santana considers offering up her tent as a place from them to take their work, but then she decides against it, remembering how stuffy her tent can be during the hottest part of the day.

(Honestly, if she and Brittany don't find a place to set down soon, Santana feels liable to faint.)

If it was one-hundred and three degrees in Storm Lake earlier in the day, it must be nearly one-hundred and ten degrees at present, for the sun has nearly reached its apex in the cloudless sky.

Santana's feet clench, sore in her shoes, and the headache she felt brewing in the back of the circus wagon now throbs, fully formed, at her temples and around the orbits of her eyes, as if her skull had fissured like dry earth or stale cake.

"Let's sit down there," Brittany says suddenly, shrugging in the direction a little paintbrush witch-hazel tree poking up at the end of the tent row closest to them. The tree's sparse branches don't afford much shade, but even slim shade seems better than none, at the moment.

"Okay," Santana agrees, following Brittany under the tree's thinly leaved branches.

Immediately, Brittany drops the elephant blankets in a heap upon the ground, collapsing atop them, and Santana follows suit, tossing the sewing kits aside, nearly flopping down atop Brittany. Both girls groan, the ground hard and hot underneath them. Brittany lies on her back, Santana on her front.

"We should take off our shoes," Santana mumbles, her face pressed into the blanket beneath her. She breathes in and smells elephant hide and fetid, processed grass. Further beneath that still, she smells dust and unwashed fabric, old age, and faded heat.

(Is that Africa, she wonders?)

(Someplace she's never been?)

"That's a good idea, darlin'," Brittany says, though neither she nor Santana moves at all from their places.

Instead, their bodies start to settle against the earth, their bones sinking to rest against this divot here and that depression there. Shadows trace lacey patterns over their skin and hair. As long as they lie still, it really does seem cooler beneath the tree than it does beyond it, never mind the slim shade and never mind anything else, either.

Santana's breathing starts to change—to come less from the top of her lungs and more from down around her belly. Her breastbone rows against the earth in a gentle cycle, and her heavy eyelids start to droop.

She listens to Brittany's breath turn slow and deep at her side, the same as hers does, and though she can't see Brittany's face, given their positions, she can imagine it relaxing, the creases in Brittany's brow smoothing out, the great bother of existing in such heat slowly easing as Brittany gives herself over to rest.

---

When Santana wakes, she doesn't know for how long she slept—only that Brittany still sleeps at her side and looks like a fairytale princess under a spell doing it.

White light plays through the translucent tips of Brittany's eyelashes and spangles diamonds down her cheek that dance and disappear to the swaying of the branches overhead, moving with them and the sun. The pale pink of sunburn blushes under Brittany's skin. Brittany's hands rest folded just beneath her breasts, and her chest rises and falls on a steady rhythm. She wears a serene expression, her lips slightly opened, pretty, berry-hued, and bowed with that slightest soupçon pout Santana never can seem to kiss away, even for all her trying.

(Brittany's beauty so often bears an almost-sadness to it. It lingers around Brittany's teardrop eyes and at the corners of her dainty mouth.)

Santana leans over Brittany, fascinated at the way Brittany's eyelids flicker with dream-seeing, close enough that she can nearly breathe Brittany's breath. The squeezing feeling in Santana's chest turns tighter than ever before. Her mouth falls open.

"I love you."

It doesn't count, of course—not with Brittany asleep, not right now—but Santana says it all the same, barely at a whisper, more breath behind her words than voice. Immediately, she stiffens and wonders if Brittany won't wake.

(She doesn't.)

After a second, Santana whispers again, this time more deliberately than before.

"I love you, BrittBritt, so much."

She presses a kiss to Brittany's forehead, and Brittany sighs in her sleep but doesn't stir. Slowly, Santana peels back from where she leans over Brittany and sits up straight, pressing a hand to where her own heart should beat in her chest, curious as to whether she'll still find it there or not.

(Or did she just give it away to Brittany?)

She breathes butterfly breaths and blinks in the sun. Will she ever feel brave enough to tell Brittany her secret when Brittany is wide awake, too? She glances down at Brittany's sleeping body, S-curved over the grass, knees bent at an angle and hips turned on their side. Her gaze settles upon Brittany's mother's boots.

Santana bites her lips into her mouth.

Without thinking about it, she reaches for Brittany's legs and drapes them over her lap. As quietly and gently as she can, she begins to unbutton Brittany's boots, starting with the right and moving to the left. With great care, she peels the threadbare leather away from Brittany's sockless skin, first from Brittany's ankles, then down to Brittany's toes, removing each shoe and setting it aside, deep in the shade, so that the shoes will feel cool if Brittany decides to wear them again when she finally wakes.

Though Brittany twitches slightly while Santana works, she remains rapt in dreaming, sleeping so deeply that she doesn't notice Santana whispering love to her under a witch-hazel tree and removing the boots from her feet. She lets out a little whimper as Santana rearranges her legs, laying them out more comfortably upon the grass.

(Santana feels a sweet pang play through her chest, like a high, clear note on a piano.)

While having two sets of hands at their work would certainly make it go faster, Santana finds that she can't bear to wake Brittany, and so begins embroidering the elephant blankets herself, opening up a sewing kit and a small jar of green and yellow beads and drawing the one blanket that isn't somehow buried under Brittany up into her lap, arranging it over her skirt so that she can trace out its patterns.

It doesn't take long for Santana to fall into her usual trance doing needlework, her thoughts interweaving with the beads upon the fabric, disappearing in one hole, reappearing, quarter-stitched, through another.

"I just had the best dream about you."

Brittany's voice jolts Santana from her daze, and Santana's needle slips, pricking her finger.

(Like Perrault's Briar Rose at her spindle.)

Honestly, the needle prick surprises Santana more than it hurts her, but still she gasps and flinches, dropping the needle as though it had bitten her, shaking her hand against the air. A bead of blood forms bright upon her fingertip.

"Santana!" Brittany squeaks, covering her mouth with both hands, her eyebrows raised so high on her forehead that they almost disappear into her hair. She immediately leans forward, reaching for Santana's hurt hand, and pulls it to herself, examining the wound.

(She acts as if Santana really might die under some evil fairy's curse.)

"I am so sorry, darlin'," she says, her voice close to breaking. "I didn't mean to scare you."

If Santana didn't know better, she might think that Brittany were about to cry.

(When you look so sad, it breaks my heart, you know.)

(The girl who's taken knife blows cares far too much about Santana's little needle stick.)

"BrittBritt," Santana pouts, heart all but melting in her chest—and from nothing to do with the heat of the day. "BrittBritt, it's fine. I'm okay," she promises, so sweet on Brittany that she almost can't abide it.

"Are you sure?" Brittany asks in a very small way, returning Santana's pout, still cradling Santana's hand in her own.

Of course, Santana is sure. All the same, a blush rises to her cheeks, and she glances between Brittany's eyes and the ground, finding her dropped needle twined amidst the grass. "Well, you could kiss it better, if you liked," she says in her tiniest Brittany-voice.

Brittany's whole face lights. "If it will make you feel better, darlin'," she says seriously.

With exceeding gentleness, Brittany curls Santana's fingers toward Santana's palm and lifts Santana's hand to her face, pressing her warm, sorry mouth first to the knuckles on Santana's hurt finger and then to the thread ring, still tied with a bow and an unspoken promise, further down Santana's hand. Her eyes turn fervent, deep, and so impossibly blue. She allows her kiss to linger for several seconds before pulling away.

Santana's heartbeat speeds, and the stoked feeling ignites in her belly.

"Better?" Brittany says, pouting out her lips.

"Mhm," Santana nods.

"Are you sure?" Brittany presses.

Santana laughs, taking her hand back to herself, wiping the droplet of blood away on the grass at her side. Santana doesn't think she's ever seen Brittany quite so concerned about anything. Really, Santana couldn't feel better, though.

(She's had the best medicine in the world for her wound.)

"Tell me about your dream, silly goose," Santana says warmly, not wanting Brittany to fret about her anymore—and especially not over something as harmless as a poked finger that stopped bleeding almost before it started to do it.

Santana reaches for her discarded needle with her injured hand and taps Brittany's kneecap with her uninjured one. When Brittany doesn't speak right away, Santana fixes her with a look.

"What?" Santana says, suddenly nervous, though she can't exactly explain why.

Brittany smiles a bashful smile and shrugs. "I—," she starts, glancing up at the tree branches overhead, like they might provide the words for which she searches. A pause, then, "I don't remember, darlin'," she says quickly. Color floods her cheeks and rouges her ears. She looks down from the tree branches but away from Santana.

There's that funny twinge in her voice again.

The mess bell rings.

(Of course, it does.)

---

Brittany wears the queerest smile all the way back to the dressing tents and keeps stealing glances at Santana, guiltily, in the same manner a child might steal sweets from a Christmas spread while her mother works, back turned to the table, always trying for just one more success before someone catches her thieving. Whenever Brittany's eyes meet Santana's, Brittany bites her lips into her mouth between her teeth. She almost skips, rather than walks.

Santana laughs. "Did Ma Jones give those water barrels a few extra stirs this afternoon, too?" she teases, amused at Brittany's energy.

Brittany grins at her and bounds a few steps ahead, the elephant blankets and her shoes almost slipping from her arms.

"I'm just really happy," she says simply.

(Santana resists the temptation to ask Brittany if there isn't any particular reason for her happiness, though she yearns to know Brittany's answer to the question.)

Luckily, Mrs. Schuester has already vacated the ladies' dressing tent by the time Brittany and Santana arrive there, so she can't yell at them for doing so little work under the witch-hazel tree.

Without quite knowing what else to do in Mrs. Schuester's absence, the girls deposit the elephant blankets and sewing supplies amidst so many new costumes for the upcoming extravaganza. Afterwards, they hurry back toward the mess pit for lunch, stopping only briefly by Brittany's tent so that Brittany can put her shoes away, before running all the way to their destination, despite the soaring temperature, so as not to get any search parties out looking for them, should they take too long to report for lunch after the bell.

Whereas in the morning, the mess pit seemed charged with a silent and nervous kind of energy, now it buzzes with chatty excitement, the whole company in a kafuffle over some anticipated happening, the specific nature of which Santana can't seem to ascertain, though she opens her ears to the gossip.

Wisps of conversation—some of it about the extreme temperature in Storm Lake, some of it about the full moon, some of it about the minutiae of camp life—float over the mess pit, like so many catkins from cottonwood trees, buoyant in the air, but no one topic of discussion seems more likely a cause for the camp's commotion than any other, as far as Santana can surmise.

While most of the company members ultimately seem fidgety, Ma Jones seems something between frantic and galvanized as she marshals her kitchen girls and anyone else she deems competent enough to take orders even more quickly, snappily, and desperately than usual, sending this pot here and that plate there, declaring a certain dish "cold as the Klondike" at the center, and then another one "so bland it ain't fit for underside of a dead dog's tongue." If Santana didn't know better, she would swear she could see a flush forming at Ma Jones' cheeks.

(A wooden spoon has never waved with so much gusto.)

Of course, Brittany and Santana know better than to step underfoot of Ma with her in such dizzy state, and so they slip in amongst a group of sweaty supes in the chow line to avoid her, keeping their heads low as they spoon food onto their plates.

For all Ma's nitpicking, lunch today does indeed turn out even more sumptuous than usual. While Ma might typically serve a single entree and one or two sides with it, today she's filled the whole table with all sorts of slow-roasted vegetables and gravy meats, plus more biscuits than Sam could shove into his pockets over the course of a whole week.

Unfortunately, Santana finds that she herself doesn't feel especially hungry, given the heat, despite the fact that she and Brittany have already put in some hard labor for the day. No matter how fine it smells, steaming hot food seems unappealing when the air around it may as well be its own oven.

Ultimately, Santana settles for taking just a helping of hominy and some biscuits and Brittany does the same.

With the benches in the mess pit already claimed, for the most part, the girls take a seat on the grass, balancing their plates in the laps of their skirts. It isn't until they sit down that Santana even thinks to look for Noah Puckerman around the kitchen; she finds him sitting with his back to her, already halfway through his meal by the looks of it.

"Do you think he's still sore at us?" Brittany asks, tracing Santana's gaze.

"I think," Santana says slowly, "that right now he's probably just pleased to have so much food on his plate. And I don't think he really minds about me as much as he makes it out that he does. He just likes having someone to follow him around, is all. It doesn't especially matter if it's me or someone else."

Brittany nods. "We should put Rory on that," she says thoughtfully.

Santana quirks an eyebrow, unfamiliar with the name. "Rory?"

Brittany points her fork in the direction of the round-faced young clown who shares his tent with Blaine the trilby tramp—Santana's next door neighbor—and shrugs. "He hero-worships all the older boys," she explains, smirking.

"Poor kid," Santana says, only mostly joking.

Brittany takes a bite of homily and swallows it. "We should get him to live in your tent with Puck, so that they can get used to each other. It would be like when Mr. Adams first bought Bathsheba and the elephant trainers had to keep her in a separate pen next to Methuselah and Deborah's pen so that Methuselah and Bathsheba could get used to the smell of her before they moved them all in together, so that they could be a family," she says smoothly.

"Oh?" Santana says quirking an eyebrow. "Well, if Rory moved in with Puck, where would I go, BrittBritt? My tent only has room for two."

Brittany smiles her cat smile and opens her mouth to answer something sly, by the looks of her, but she doesn't get the chance to speak before something changes in the atmosphere of the mess.

The excited chatter turns momentarily louder and then dies off in an instant.

When Santana looks around for whatever silenced the company so quickly, she finds the answer striding into the kitchen from around the back of the chuck.

Misters Adams and Fabray march into the dining area, their families just behind them, Mrs. Fabray holding a pretty lace parasol to shade herself from the sun, Arthur in his rolling chair, a manservant at his back, pushing him along, and, last of all, Quinn Fabray, clothed in the prettiest Kelly green dress and gold neckerchief that Santana has ever seen.

They look like the cover illustration on a Harper's Monthly magazine, so handsome that they can hardly be real.

Amongst everyone in the company, only Ken, the Schuesters, and Ma Jones don't seem one whit surprised to see the two families in the mess area, which is perhaps why Ma Jones seemed so frantic before, Santana realizes.

(Because she knew what would come.)

Before the company can start back up with its inevitable chatter, Mr. Adams draws to a halt, just beside the chuck, Mr. Fabray at his side, and their families lined up behind them. Mr. Adams wears his widest jocund grin, his eyes all but hidden behind his upturned cheeks. He claps Mr. Fabray loudly on the back and leans in to say something in his ear. When Mr. Fabray nods consent to whatever Mr. Adams just suggested to him, Mr. Adams faces the company and clears his throat.

"They say," he begins, his voice booming out over the assembly, no one daring to speak while he does, or even to move their spoons against their plates, lest the metal squeak, "that when a man has good news, the best thing he can do for himself is to share it with his friends. Well, friends, today Mr. Russell Fabray and I come to share with you the happy tidings that our two families will be soon be united through the sacred bonds of matrimony! Much to our great delight and ceaseless satisfaction, my son, Arthur, has proposed marriage to Mr. Fabray's most accomplished and delicate daughter, Lucy, and she has accepted Arthur's proposal for them to wed! Because young love is impatient and neither Mr. Fabray nor I are men who believe in wasting time, the nuptials shall take place next Saturday evening, in the most delightful town of Kenyon, Minnesota, where Mr. Fabray's boyhood friend, a minister of some repute, will marry Arthur and Lucy in the sight of our Lord. Of course, you are all invited to attend!"

Immediately, the company begins to applaud most enthusiastically. However, almost just as immediately, Mr. Fabray signals for everyone to quiet down again. Since rules are rules, the company complies.

"Now, let's not get too far ahead of ourselves, Jonah!" Mr. Fabray says in his blustery way, clapping Mr. Adams on the back. "Go on and tell these good folks what you've gone and done for them!" When he smiles, his eyes droop, like those of a dog with hanging jowls. He looks proud, like he's posing for someone to make a statue of him, even though he praises Mr. Adams' virtue and not his own.

Mr. Adams laughs, lionish. "Oh, of course!" he says. "I almost forgot: In celebration of our children's engagement, I took the liberty of purchasing some spirits for all you good people about the camp. Ma Jones assures me that they'll help to wash down your supper most splendidly, and, of course, I wouldn't be the man to doubt her"—beside the hearth, Ma Jones smiles in a way that Santana would almost call shy, if Santana didn't know better—"I've beer and cider for everyone!"

At Mr. Adams' word, Santana notices several things all at once.

First, Santana observes that though Puck, his friends, and many of the younger company members clap and hoot most raucously in response to Mr. Adams' announcement, some other company members, and especially some of the older performers, grumble in displeasure at it.

("He can't fill our paychecks but he can spend his money on vile drinks for the whole crew, can he?" someone complains within earshot of Santana.)

("Woohoo! We'll make ourselves merry tonight!" someone else crows right beside the complainer, exuberant.)

Second, Santana can't help but see that while both Mr. Adams and Mr. and Mrs. Fabray couldn't be more pleased at their own news, neither one of the two young "lovebirds" seems to find it particularly agreeable.

Arthur looks like some very thoughtful person just gave him a gift that he couldn't want less, though he's far too polite to say as much. He pinches his lips together, and his hands fidget over the flannel blanket over his lap. He glances at his father, at Quinn, at the circus company, and at the ground, seeing everything, but unseen himself. He seems impossibly small in his chair and also impossibly young.

Quinn fares even worse.

From the first time Santana set eyes on Quinn, she thought that Quinn looked like a tragedy, and now she sees—it's true.

While Misters Adams and Fabray, Mrs. Fabray, and even Arthur all look toward the company, taking in their reaction to the news, Quinn faces away from the crowd so that she stands in profile before the broad, yellow side of the chuck wagon, her mouth open as though she would either shout without saying anything or laugh without feeling happy. She appears, in a way, wounded, as if something had stabbed clean through her—some ghost dagger, thrown by an invisible hand, lodged deep into her belly flesh, right below where she would breathe.

Though Quinn stands quite a distance away from Santana—at least ten yards, if not more—Santana perceives an unmistakable tightness at the hinge of Quinn's jaw and in the round bones about Quinn's eyes and finally, at last, over the bridge of her nose and at her temples, as plainly as if Santana lingered right at Quinn's shoulder. It is an expression Santana knows on her own face by sensation and by heartbreak, though she has only known it for such a short time.

Quinn's trying most desperately not to cry.

(Because she knows that if does cry, she might never stop.)

(And she has no Brittany to find her.)

Quinn's eyes start to shine, and she closes her mouth, swallowing hard, closing her eyes and turning her head even further away from the crowd and her family, less, Santana thinks, so that no one will see her, and more so that she won't have anything to see.

Santana squeezes Brittany's hand tight in her own.

(She hadn't realized she'd gotten hold of it.)

Of course, Santana knew that Misters Adams and Fabray were planning an engagement between their two children, and Quinn knew it, too, maybe even before she eavesdropped on that conversation at the tents in Cherokee. All the same, there is something about hearing a thing you dread to hear spoken aloud for the first time that makes the thing so much more awful than if it remained unspoken or at least private.

In the crowd, more folks start to complain about Mr. Adams spending money on something as frivolous as beer. Many people get up from the tables, not waiting around for any sort of dismissal, clearing their places and heading back toward the white city. The Adams and Fabray families retreat from the mess, Quinn following along last of all.

("There's a bad moon tonight," someone says.)

(And just when Santana had thought that she had almost come to know the circus, something about it feels changed and changed and changed.)

---

Author's Notes: I dedicate this chapter to my dear friend Kelly at littleoases because she is now twenty-four years old of age. Holla! As always, I couldn't have gotten through this chapter without the guidance of my awesomesauce beta Han at socallmedaisy, who is basically the world's biggest rock star, just so y'all know.

---

Spanish translations:

(Cuidado con el mal de ojo, Santana.) : (Beware the evil eye, Santana.)

"Pobrecita, Brittany" : "Poor little thing, Brittany"

... por favor, Santana, mi querida, por el amor de Dios : please, Santana, my sweetheart, for the love of God.