Hey everyone. Sorry for the delay, but I'm on vacation and there are a million other things going on. The next chapter after this one should hopefully make it sometime this weekend. A lot of people have asked for more on Rachel's backstory to this story, and so I've shuffled things around and plan to get into that in the next chapter, just so everyone knows. :)
As always, thank you so much for the reviews and alerts. They mean the world to me. I get this big smile on my face and want to start writing immediately. kiarcheo – you don't have private messaging enabled, so I just wanted to thank you on here for your review.
This chapter is dedicated to ApathyandEmpathy, for indulging my need to talk about Pezberry and reminding me of the double-edged nature of the glee club. If anyone isn't reading "When Darkness Falls," then they should go check it out, along with any of her stories. She will definitely give you your Pezberry fix.
chapter fourteen
"Pizza! Pizza!" Cassie yelled, running up to Sam as he carried in several large cardboard boxes.
"Calm you must become, young Padawan," he laughed, putting the boxes down on the table and gesturing for everyone to come help themselves.
Santana let Rachel pull her up out of her chair and lead her over to the food. Puck and Quinn trailed along behind them and when Santana glanced back, Puck was smirking. Quinn had that odd look on her face again, like either she was trying to figure something out and like she knew something but just wanted to be sure. Santana knew that look on Quinn - like she was up to something – and Santana felt discomfort settle in her stomach. She dropped Rachel's hand.
When Rachel looked up at her, her eyebrows raised in question, Santana just shrugged. Rachel's face dropped and Santana leaned over, nudging her and giving her a small smile. She winked and watched as Rachel's face brightened up slightly. Something about that sad look on Rachel's face made her want to change the world just to get a smile. Where did that come from? she wondered with a frown.
She grabbed a paper plate and decided not to think about it too much. Her stomach grumbled and she decided that food was her most important priority at the moment; she could analyze whatever it was that was happening with Rachel Berry later.
Some tables got moved around and umbrellas were adjusted so that they could all settle together on the patio. Santana ended up sitting between Quinn and Tina. Puck was on the other side of Quinn, sitting next to Rachel. They chatted amicably, all getting roped up in separate conversations.
Cassie was flitting around, waving her pizza in all directions, greeting all of her parents' friends – both the ones she knew already, like Quinn and Puck, and the ones she had only met a couple of other times, like Lauren and Mercedes. Santana watched her giggling as she announced to each of them what her mommy and daddy had said about them. Mike tried to stop her, but he could only watch with great chagrin as she went to every single person.
Finn was "sorta dumb." Santana practically choked on her pizza because she laughed so hard. Finn had the good grace to chuckle along with everyone, but his face turned bright red in embarassment. Rachel put a hand on his arm in comfort and Santana couldn't help the glare that overtook her features. She caught herself and grabbed another piece of pizza.
Artie was "definitely not a robot." Cassie went on to say that she wasn't sure if she believed her mom about that. This caught Brittany's attention and she piped up to tell the young girl that he was actually a Transformer. Santana chuckled and Brittany glanced over at her, her expression soft. Santana held her gaze for a moment before she had to look away. That look – it was just too much.
Rachel was "the best singer ever" and also "the biggest diva ever." This drew laughs from everyone. Tina made to apologize and Rachel stopped her by declaring that it was, unfortunately, very true of her teenage self. "And sometimes your current self," Santana chimed in, drawing even more laughs. Rachel mock-glared at her and Santana stuck her tongue out.
She felt multiple pairs of eyes on her and decided to finish her current slice of pizza. Her face burned and she blamed it on the heat. Cassie came around to her and she was grateful for the distraction.
She (and many others) smirked expectantly. There were so many things about Santana Lopez that Mike and Tina could have told Cassie, and she was eagerly awaiting to hear what they might have been.
"Hi," Cassie chirped. "Who dis be?" she asked, in a perfect impersonation of Artie.
"Dis be Santana," she answered, laughing at the little girl.
"Oh," the girl said, frowning slightly. "Mommy says you lefted and then everybody got real sad."
There was silence and Santana felt the blood rush from her face and her heart seemed to falter. She couldn't escape – even the little girl who didn't even know her wanted to talk about it. They were all looking at her and she could feel their expectations sweeping over her.
"The kid's nothing if not honest," she heard Puck mutter.
Santana grabbed another slice of pizza. "You told your kid about me?" she asked after swallowing a bite of her newest slice. She didn't know what else to say, had no responses for Cassie, who had wandered out in the yard when none of the adults said anything. She took another bite.
"Of course we did," Tina answered. "I lost my songwriting partner. We wrote Trouty Mouth together, remember?" she jokingly answered, trying to ease some of the tension on the patio.
"It's true, though," Mike shrugged before Santana could say anything.
Santana rolled her eyes as she felt anger rise inside her. Tina had been trying to lighten things again and Mike had made a mess of them. She glared at him first, and then swept her gaze out over all of them. This was another thing about the glee club that she had always hated – they couldn't leave well enough alone; they were so bad at that, in fact, that even their offspring had picked up where they left off.
Her anger rose and she let it take her over. There were a lot of emotions that Santana Lopez had cycled through since Rachel Berry had come back into her life, and while anger had been one of them, it had been too long since she had embraced it. The thought that Rachel would be disappointed in her briefly flitted through her brain but she forced it aside.
"So what? Why does it matter? Can't it be enough for you vultures that I'm here now?" she scoffed. "Look! I'm not dead. Yay," she spat sarcastically.
There was another moment of silence and just when she thought she had pushed far enough to make them stop, Brittany spoke.
"It matters because we missed you. We were so worried about you. You hurt us, San. And then you didn't say anything about it," she said sadly and Santana's heart thudded against her chest. If it had faltered earlier, it was working itself to death now. "I even tried those soup cans that we used when we were little kids and I couldn't come outside to play. But you never answered me."
Santana softened at Brittany's words. "That's because you had both cans, Brit," she said affectionately.
"If you had come to me, I could've given you the other one," Brittany responded.
Santana's heart seemed to pound even harder and she forgot that she was supposed to be glaring at everyone. This conversation was trying to happen again and she was no more ready for it than she had been an hour ago.
She shrugged, focusing on the first part of what Brittany had said. "We all hurt each other all the time, though. Finn hurt Rachel, she hurt him; Quinn hurt Sam and Finn hurt her. Artie hurt B and I hurt him physically," she answered. "That's always been who we are."
She glanced around her then. Cassie and Benny were playing out in the yard and she watched them for a few seconds. Cassie was so young and carefree. It should have been rejuvenating, but it filled Santana with regret instead. She had been young and carefree once, had been innocent and full of a love for life; all she had now was anger and frustration, pain and longing. She looked around the patio tables at her former teammates – they had all been young once and life had only brought them down.
"It's not the same," Rachel said, breaking the silence hanging over the group. "This isn't you stealing Quinn's boyfriend from her. It's different and you know it."
Santana's jaw dropped. Four and a half years ago, perhaps Rachel Berry would have called her on her attempts to deflect. But the Rachel Berry sitting a few seats away from her was supposed to be different. This Rachel had found her in New York City and brought her all the way home, had held her close and wiped away her tears and kissed her, kissed her just a couple of nights ago. Santana needed that Rachel with her, not the one who was going to call her out in front of everyone.
"Don't push me, Rachel," she practically growled. She wanted to add in an old insult just for good measure, but she couldn't make herself.
"Someone has to," Rachel shot back, clearly exasperated.
Santana's anger grew and she let it consume her. "I don't know what you're expecting from me," Santana said, glaring at her.
"Honesty," Rachel responded immediately. "While I would never deign to speak for others-" she started, pressing on when Santana snorted, "I think I speak for everyone here when I say that I expect honesty."
Santana rolled her eyes again. "Can't it all just be water under the bridge?" she sighed. "We're not in high school anymore, okay? Let's just move on."
"It's not water under the bridge if you've built a dam ten miles upstream," Rachel said, her voice rising in both pitch and volume.
"What the –" she scoffed. "Drop the stupid analogy."
"Wait," Brittany chimed in.
"You started this 'stupid analogy,' Santana," Rachel said.
"A dam?" Brittany interrupted again. "San, are you a beaver?"
"What?" Santana tore her eyes away from Rachel, glancing over at Brittany. "No, B, I'm not a beaver."
"She might as well be," she heard Rachel mutter.
"Shut up, Rachel," she finally snapped.
"No," Rachel snapped back at her. "You need to say it, Santana."
Santana flung her plate away from her and stood up, ready to storm off. She was so angry. Rachel had led her so sweetly and carefully into the lion's den, had been with her every step of the way. And then suddenly she had morphed into one of the lions, ready to pick her to her bones and then spit out whatever was left of her.
She felt a hand grab hers before she could move and she stopped. Brittany was standing beside her. The blonde's fingers skirted across Santana's palm and she linked their pinkies. She stared at their hands between them. The way it felt, Brittany's pinky wrapped firmly around hers in comfort, was so familiar and it made her heart ache. "Santana-"
The sound of Brittany's voice pulled her out of her trance. She ripped her hand away. "What do you want me to say?" she cried. "That I left because I didn't have anyone to go to? That you people were the only friends I had and I still treated you like crap?"
"What else could I have done?" Santana yelled at them. "If I had shown up at any of your houses crying in the middle of the night, you would have called me a drunk and slammed the door in my face! And I can't even hold that against you! Because I would have deserved it!"
"Santana, that's not-" someone started. It might have been Finn or it might have been Sam but Santana couldn't pin it down. She was too angry to focus on who was saying what, but she was fully prepared to pounce on the speaker when a voice stopped her.
"Momma, what's a drunk?" Cassie asked.
Tina stood up and grabbed the girl, leading her inside the house. "Nothing to worry about sweetie," Santana heard her say, her voice growing softer as she moved into the house. "How about some cartoons?"
"Now you know that's true," Mercedes said bravely. "You were Satan, but you were our Satan."
"You didn't even give us a chance," Finn said next.
Santana scoffed. "Oh, please, you wouldn't have even answered the door, Frankenteen."
"Well, I would have," Tina told her, sitting back down in her chair.
Santana saw Rachel nod and she saw red. She wanted the plates they were using to be porcelain so that she could break them, wanted their cups to be glasses so she could throw them against the brick house.
Rachel said, "They're right, Santana. You never gave any of us a chance."
"I gave you all a million chances!" she spat out immediately, throwing her hands up in Rachel's direction. "I gave you so many chances and you never did anything!" Rachel went to say something, but Santana stopped her. "And that's my fault because I wouldn't let you!"
"You don't think I get that, Rachel?" Santana yelled. "You don't think I wake up every day and realize the mistakes I made? You don't think I wake up every single fucking day and hate myself for pushing away the only people who might have cared about me?"
"And that's a really big might," she added. Santana halfheartedly realized that she was ranting now, but she couldn't stop anymore. Years of frustration had built up inside her and they weren't stopping. "Because you can all sit around here now years later and tell me all the things you would have done for me, but it doesn't mean anything anymore. We can't take it back. I can't take it back."
"Maybe you guys would have been fucking saints," she hissed. "Or maybe you just would have been judgmental bitches. Can you blame me for now taking a chance on a bunch of people who didn't even like me? All any of us did was fight and hurt each other. And you're going to get on to me because I didn't want to put my faith in you? I don't think so," Santana spat.
She could feel her body shaking. Her breathing was labored and a light sheen of sweat covered her body. Words were spilling out of her unbidden and she couldn't stop them. She wondered if this was what hysteria felt like. She was sixteen again, letting Finn and Puck and countless other boys use her for sex, always trying to make herself feel normal but always ending up feeling worse. She was seventeen again, being singled out and ganged up on my every single one of the people who claimed to be her friends.
"I wasn't going to put my faith in a bunch of people who were always the first ones to make sure that everyone knew that all I was good for was sex," she told them. She heard her voice shake and that just made her angrier. She growled. "I wasn't going to trust anyone who told me that all I could do was be a stripper."
She laughed mirthlessly, her head shaking. "And the best part of all of this, the best fucking part, is that I did. That's what I grew up to be," she directed at Rachel. "So I get to wake up every day and regret that I didn't take a chance on people who didn't care about me and I get to regret that they were fucking right about everything they ever fucking said about me."
"There?" she shouted at Rachel. "Is this what you wanted? Are you happy now?"
Santana stormed off then, only getting through the gate before breaking down. She made it to the front porch before she had to sit down, tears forcing their way out of her eyes and down her face. She wiped at them angrily as she let herself drop to the front steps. She pressed her palms to her eyes and tried to stop herself from crying.
She cursed Rachel Berry. She had kissed her, she had fucking kissed her. And then it had blown up in her face. "God," she muttered, shaking her head as she realized what she had done. She had told them so much, unleashed so much of her anger at them. It was all out in the open and it was all out there for everyone to see and all she could do was cry.
"Now what?" she murmured harshly.
She buried her head in her hands. She had been right to wonder if this trip would be a regret; it already was. She was a just few days into it and it was already something she wished she could take back.
Santana wanted to be back in New York, in her horrible appointment. She wanted to go back a few months, before Rachel had shown up at the club, when everything was sad and miserable. It had at least been stable and consistent in its relentless pain. Everything with Rachel was new and volatile. She never knew what she was supposed to expect. Nothing was consistent and she hated it. She hated Rachel for putting her in that place.
And yet Santana Lopez had never respected Rachel Berry more than she did at that moment, crying on the front porch of their high school glee club coach's house. Rachel had pushed her, fought her and baited her because she knew that everything Santana had yelled at them otherwise never would have come out. Rachel knew how to push every single one of her buttons until she was spewing out all of her secrets.
"Fuck," she cursed.
"Are you okay?" a voice asked.
She sobbed. "Fuck," she repeated. "What do you want, Brittany?"
"I just wanted to see if you were okay," Brittany responded softly. She pulled one of Santana's hands away from her face and linked their pinkies again.
Santana didn't pull away this time. "I hate Rachel," she muttered with a shake of her head. She could feel Brittany's pinky connected with her own. She should have pulled away but it was comforting in a sense, to have such a familiar gesture of consolation directed at her. Like so many things with Brittany, it both hurt her deeply and helped her immensely.
"No, you don't, San," the blonde said softly. "You really like her. And she really likes you."
Santana sighed. "I know," she whispered. "But look what she made me do."
She wanted to tell Brittany to leave her alone, to just go away. But Brittany was sitting next to her, holding her pinky like her life depended on it, looking sad and heartbroken and Santana couldn't send her away. Brittany had been her best friend for almost her entire life and she couldn't make her leave.
"Rachel got you to be honest," Brittany muttered. "That's what you needed to do."
Santana shrugged. "Maybe. Or maybe we could have just eaten our pizza in peace," she said bitterly.
"But then we wouldn't know all that stuff you told us. And we needed to hear it," Brittany nodded. "Like when you would hear a new song and you'd make me listen to it because you said I just had to hear it."
Santana chuckled despite herself. "Yeah, I guess it's kind of like that," she said, humoring her former friend.
Brittany smiled at her sweetly and then turned to the side. Rachel was coming towards them, a sheepish look on her face. The blonde beckoned Rachel forward and the brunette sat down on the other side of Brittany. Santana wanted to be angry at her, wanted to start screaming at her on sight. She decided she would do it in Spanish because then she could say some of the more harsh things on the tip of her tongue without feeling bad, justifying that Rachel couldn't be hurt by words she didn't even understand. And then she decided against it; it just didn't feel right. All of the adrenaline that had been rushing through her in the backyard was draining now. Santana closed her eyes for a few seconds, then reopened them.
"We have to talk, San," Brittany said to her. "Just you and me."
Santana nodded. "I know, B."
"Duck pond?" Brittany asked knowingly.
"Yeah, Britt. Duck pond," she humored again. There was nothing else for her to do. She wanted to be angry, but she was already starting to feel drained. She had cycled through so many emotions that she didn't know which one to settle on anymore.
Brittany let go of her pinky. Santana wiped at the lingering tears on her cheeks as she watched the blonde stand up in front of her. She watched Brittany lean in to hug her, but she ducked her head and moved back slightly. Brittany stood back up sadly and Santana's heart panged. Brittany always had such an effect on her – even when she wanted to be angry at her, the moment Brittany looked sad, she wanted to do anything she could to make the other girl happy again.
"Bye, Santana," she murmured gently.
Santana didn't say anything, just nodded at her again before the blonde walked away from them, heading around the house to the back yard.
Rachel cleared her throat and Santana turned her attention to the brunette sitting near her. Santana watched her warily.
"I hate you," Santana muttered halfheartedly, looking away from Rachel towards the bright green grass on the lawn in front of them.
"I know," Rachel said simply, looking out over the street with her. "I'm sorry."
"Are you?" Santana shot back, unable to stop herself from sniffling. She should have been screaming at Rachel, should have been fighting her with everything she had.
"I am," Rachel answered. "I know you're angry about what happened back there, and you have every right to be. But it needed to be done, and we both know that if I hadn't pushed you like that, you never would have said anything."
"No, I wouldn't have," Santana hissed. "Because it's none of their business."
Rachel shrugged. "Maybe you're right."
Santana looked at her curiously. "Then why the hell did you –"
"Do you remember why we're here?" the shorter girl interrupted her. "We're here because you need to heal. And you can't do that unless you get everything out. It doesn't matter if you think it's their business. You still needed to tell them."
Santana just shrugged. Rachel made a good point, like she always did, and Santana couldn't refute it. She could have tried, but she didn't have the energy to even make an attempt. When she looked over, Rachel had moved even closer to her, sitting right against her. Rachel wrapped an arm against her waist, squeezing her slightly.
"I still hate you," she muttered.
"I know," Rachel whispered, standing up and pulling Santana up with her. "Let's go home. You can hate me in a place with air conditioning."
Santana just nodded and let herself be led to the car. "You're wrong," she whispered quietly, sure that the girl in front of her couldn't hear her. "I don't feel better," she murmured inaudibly at Rachel's back. Rachel gave her a gentle smile before she walked around to the other side of the car. "I don't feel anything."
Rachel started up the car and turned to her. "That's because it's not over yet," Rachel told her.
Santana's eyebrows raised and she stuttered. She felt Rachel place a hand on her cheek and she felt her eyes slip closed. She shuddered. It didn't feel right – she had exploded at all of them, including Rachel. It didn't feel wrong, either, to let Rachel comfort her.
"There are still many things that need to be said," she heard Rachel whisper, her voice deep and soothing. "There are still so many things that we need to say to one another."
Santana didn't say anything for a long moment, couldn't bring herself to respond. She felt tears starting to build up inside her again. She had already said so many things and she was so wound up from them that she couldn't make heads or tails of what she was feeling.
When Santana opened her eyes, Rachel was watching her carefully, her eyes raking over every inch of Santana's face. "I'm going to be there for all of them, okay?" the shorter brunette said, trailing her hand down Santana's face.
"I still hate you," Santana muttered, having to look away from Rachel's intense gaze.
She felt Rachel take her hand, lacing their fingers together before turning to face the road. "I know," she said. "But I'm still going to be there."
A few tears fell down Santana's face. "I know."