I'm back! It's a juicy one…
Fi- I know you said you hoped I wouldn't go for the crazy cliché shock factor when it came to the pregnancy, and I've thought about what you said ever since. I totally agreed with you, and I hope this lived up to those standards.
Caitlyn, Rosetta, Rosalie, Jennie, the usuals- I CANNOT WAIT TO HEAR WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT THIS.
Santana walked briskly, but the chilly winter air hit her at full blast, despite the Burberry scarf wrapped around her neck. It was nearing a truly New York Christmas, and Santana stopped by a little café for a cup of coffee. Who cared if she was late to dress rehearsal? As long as she wasn't late to the real, live show, it would be okay.
She got in line behind a woman and her young daughter. The woman was frantically searching her bag for some change, while the barista looked annoyed at her for holding up the line.
"Are you sure that card was denied?" the woman asked, rummaging deeper into the tote. It was only when the woman turned on her side a little bit that Santana noticed that the tote was decorated with a US Army logo, with the words "Army Wife" under it. The little girl tugged at her mother's coat, obviously antsy from cold and a lack of hot chocolate.
"Yes, ma'am. Have you found some cash?" the barista deadpanned.
"Just a minute, I'm sure I have some quarters in here…"
Then Santana spoke up, "Here, let me get it." She pushed past the woman and handed the man her AmEx, before telling him her own order. The barista just looked glad to receive any type of payment and didn't refuse.
But the woman did. "Oh, I can't let you do that."
"Really, it's fine. It won't break the bank, promise," she joked. It was obvious that this woman didn't know who she was, and she was glad.
"Are you sure?"
"Absolutely. It's the least I can do, considering what your husband does for this country," Santana pointed out, gesturing towards the woman's bag.
"Well, thank you then. Not many people would do that. Do you have someone in the forces?" the woman asked while they waited for their drinks.
"Sort of. My boyfriend used to be," Santana admitted. She wondered for a moment if Puck would ever consider going back to the military. She wasn't sure if he could, but she also wasn't sure if he would want to if given the opportunity. She didn't understand why anyone would put themselves in that kind of danger so selflessly, but she didn't have to. She appreciated him the most she could, but without experiencing war firsthand, she didn't know if she could be there for him fully. He didn't like to talk about the army, and she didn't prod him because it was easier for the both of them. She wouldn't understand, and he preferred her that way.
"Well, if you two ever decide to get married, make sure he promises you no more tours. They all say they're done when they get out, but next thing you know, you're going to end up like me here, without a husband half the time and raising a daughter that just misses her daddy," the woman said with a chortle.
"If we ever get married, I'll be sure to let him know." Santana laughed it off. The possibility of the two of them lasting that long? The possibility that he would ever go back to the army? The possibility that she would be left alone again? The possibility that he could get hurt?
It was all absolutely outrageous. But kind of terrifying.
Before the woman could ask about her again, Santana reached up and grabbed her now-ready drink.
"Well, I have to go. Bye now, take care," she said hastily and walked away as the woman returned the goodbye.
She walked the five blocks to the venue, and before she got five steps in the door, an assistant ran up to her.
"Santana, where have you been? Get naked!"
"I'm dating Puckerman," she explained flatly.
"No, you're getting naked with Puckerman," Quinn replied pointedly. Bitch. Who asked her?
"You know what, Q? For someone who claims to have her legs locked at the knees, I could've said the exact same thing about you last year."
It was a low blow, because she saw Quinn flinch ever so slightly, but it wasn't like she wanted to bring it up either. Still, it was the truth, and neither of them had forgotten (or forgiven) it yet. Either way, both of them resented it the fact that this was just one more thing they had to share.
Puck walked around the apartment, toothbrush in one hand, The Things They Carried in hardback in the other. Santana had been gone a couple hours now, and he was bored. She would be home soon though. But at least he had his book to keep him company. Ever since Santana got back from Italy, he had been going through his list of books to read, books that they were assigned in high school but he had never bothered to care with. But now he realized the enlightenment and importance in them. Wow, he was proud of himself. Look at that character growth. Him, of all people, reading.
He walked down the hallway towards the bathroom to spit out the toothpaste, but as he made an abnormally long stride, he felt the sole of his foot come in contact with a slinky material. Before he could look down to see what he stepped on, he was already on the floor. He rolled over and saw that he had tripped over Santana's stupid silk robe. God damn. Santana really needed to pick up her shit.
His face was throbbing after having slammed into the hardwood floor, not to mention the sharp corner of his book. He reached up and discovered he was bleeding. He walked to the pink-decorated bathroom, rinsed his mouth, and started looking for Santana's Band-Aids. Where did she keep them?
He opened up the mirror to peek into the medicine cabinet. All mini bottles and samples of random beauty products. No luck.
Maybe under the sink. He kneeled down and opened up the little door. A rush of empty shampoo bottles (because she never knew what to do with them, since she was always unsure if they were recyclable or not), loose hair rollers, and random boxes flowed out. Well, at least he found the Band-Aids (Hello Kitty ones, no less), even if he was surrounded in a pile of her junk now. He better clean it up, or else Santana would bitch at him about it all night when she came back. Like she could talk though, since it was her messiness that got him in this position anyways.
He started to clear the area in the space under her sink, brushing the remaining items to the side so he could just shove everything back in. But as the back of his hand stroked all of the plastic objects, he felt it hit a cold, metal object. What the fuck? He rummaged around, and brought his head down to get a better look.
It was a box.
He pulled it out, and saw that it was quite old. It looked like it hadn't been opened in a while. He shook it around a bit, and heard a clanging from inside. It wasn't locked, but Puck was apprehensive about opening it. Was it considered an invasion of privacy? But he lived here too, and what was hers was his too, right? Still, what if it was so important that Santana wanted to hide it away? But then again, if it was that important, why would she leave it in a corner and never touch it again?
Unfortunately, his curiosity got the best of him and he decided to open it. He was never good with willpower anyways. And she had always been his weakness. It made perfect sense to open it.
He snapped the hinge and lifted the top off the metal box. There was a photograph that was slightly blurry, a sign that it was more than a decade old. It was of the two of them, actually, at the homecoming dance, before they even joined Glee Club, before emotions and the future and obligations complicated everything. He had his hand way too low down her backless red mini, and she looked radiant, despite the tacky photo background.
In the bottom of the box, there was an old pregnancy test, the kind you had to pee on, and it was a positive one. And an ultrasound picture of a fetus.
His heart skipped a couple of beats before dropping into his stomach and it was like he was an archeologist uncovering a great underground discovery. Except he felt way shittier.
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.
He frantically searched the bottom of the ultrasound for a caption, hoping that maybe, Santana had stolen these things from Quinn, maybe as a guilty pleasure kind of thing to one-up her. But no, the tiny print on the bottom: Lopez, S. 5 weeks. 12/2/2011.
He quickly did the math in his head (he suddenly realized how good at arithmetic he could be when it really mattered), and his calculations reaffirmed his suspicions. They were together then. Yeah, she cheated all the time and fucked around, but there was no one else she could have been with. He was positive, because he didn't measure time in terms of hours and minutes and days and years. He measured it in terms of Santana. She was the chronological marker in his life. They were good then, so it was the beginning of senior year. Late 2011.
Which meant, she had been pregnant with his baby. And conveniently decided not to tell him. But there was no way she had the baby, that he would have noticed…
That bitch.
He felt like punching a wall, but instead he walked out calmly into the living room with the box, sat on the couch. While he waited for her to return, he gradually collected all the anger that was bubbling up inside of him and resisted letting it out. He was going to save it in a little spot in his throat and hold it there. Save it for when she got home, save it for when it really mattered.
Which turned out to be shorter than he expected, because she busted through the door about twenty minutes later, having given him plenty of time to digest the news.
"Oh my god, you wouldn't believe how many times I had to get naked today, and no, I'm not being sexual," she sighed as she dropped her bag on the kitchen table, the contents of it sprawling onto the glass. When she finally noticed he still had his back turned to her and he hadn't said anything back, she walked into the living room area and stood in front of him, her hands on her hips. "Way to acknowledge my presence here, Puckerman."
Then she saw what he was holding in his lap.
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. (That seemed like to be the theme of the day, no?)
"What, what are you doing with that?" she stammered. The ground started to shake and it was not because she had been wearing six-inch heels all day. Her exhaustion and fed-up-ness was quickly replaced with fear. He was never supposed to find that. She was never supposed to have to deal with that again. Not that she could ever forget about it though…
He looked up at her darkly, and for the first time in her life, she was scared of him. Not scared of him actually, but scared of how he would react, what he would do. What he would do to her, to them.
"When were you going to tell me? Huh? In another decade, maybe? Jesus fucking Christ, Santana. Were you ever going to tell me?" he said evenly.
"I—I-" she didn't know how to respond, because she honestly never thought she would ever be having this conversation with him.
"You're not even going to explain yourself?" he demanded in disbelief, standing up abruptly to square off with her. She jumped backwards at his outburst. She didn't say anything and braced herself for the punishment she deserved.
"Why wouldn't you tell me? You didn't even give me a chance! How could you keep something like this from me?" he cried.
Then she finally found her voice, "It wouldn't have mattered." It was shaky at first, but it had the famous Santana fight behind it.
"Wouldn't have mattered? We had a fucking kid!" he accused, looking at her like she was the lowest scum of the earth. It was the first time he had said it out loud, so direct like that. Now that he had acknowledged it, she would have to too. There was no equivocating around this one.
"Don't get all Catholic on me, I get enough of that from my mother," she snapped, but instantly realized the wrong in her choice of words.
"Are you really fighting me on this one? You went and fucking killed our baby!" he raged. She had no right to do anything that she did, not without him at least. She was a murderer.
"I killed it? No, you can say I'm a bitch for everything else because I deserve all of that, but you don't get to say that. It died on its own, okay? It died on its own," she repeated, breaking into tears.
She awoke in the middle of the night in a panic. She was drenched in sweat and only realized that she couldn't focus her vision that she was shaking. She knew something was wrong and Santana felt something warm pooling by her abdomen. She quickly jumped up and turned on the crooked lamp on her night table.
Her suspicious were confirmed. She was sitting in a pile of blood.
Maybe it was the fifteen basket tosses she did in practice last week, maybe God knew that they didn't have a shot in hell at surviving if they had a kid, or maybe it was even the crazy amount of orange juice she had been drinking inadvertently lately because she heard somewhere (the Internet) that excess Vitamin C caused miscarriage.
She felt a little sad, she supposed. She felt a little empty, she supposed. But above all, she felt relieved.
Did that make her a bad person?
Evidently not, because her prayers had been answered.
"Why would I bother to tell you, if it wouldn't have changed anything except for making everything worse? There wasn't a baby. Just a 7 week fetus that died," she cried.
"You still should have told me, I had a right to know and I had a say! It was my kid too!" He did. He was the father of that baby. He had contributed to ½ of that baby. He didn't like how they were already referring to it in past tense, even though it would have been ten years old by now, if things were different. It would have been old enough now to play Little League or sing every Journey song.
"There's no way in hell I would have had that kid anyways, and you know would have hated me for it. I wasn't going to let it fuck everything up between us when we were going so good. As much as it hurt me, I know what happened with Beth hurt you a million times worse, and I wasn't going to make you go through that again for nothing. Did you think I wanted to keep this secret? I did it for us," she explained in desperation.
"No, don't you dare make yourself the hero, don't you dare try to justify what you did," he gritted through his teeth, "What you did was wrong and you're too immature to even see it." Or was he too immature, too blinded by bitterness to see his immaturity?
"Why is that so wrong? Why was it so terrible of me to not burden you with a problem that didn't even exist anymore? So you could go off on your stupid redeeming babydaddy rampage? So you could turn me into your second chance Quinn Fabray?" She knew she should have been swallowing her pride and just let him rip into her, because she had indeed did something horrible, but she couldn't stop defending herself to distance herself from the situation. It was a defense mechanism she had built up over years of letdowns. She would never stop being a fighter, even if it was for the wrong side.
"Are you seriously mad at me right now? You're unbelievable. You're fucking unbelievable." It wasn't the first time anyone had ever said that to her, but this time came without that kicking sense of accomplishment. He started to head towards the door.
"Wait, it wasn't supposed to happen like this," she cried, following him, trying to retract all the snippy comments she had just made in a last ditch effort to keep him.
"No, Santana. It wasn't supposed to happen at all, and that's the problem," he said finally, giving her one last disgusted look.
"No, no, don't leave," she sobbed, trying to grab onto him. She sounded pathetic, she was begging, she was hysterical. He shook her off while he gathered his wallet and coat. He left his keys behind.
His phone blasted at full speed while he laid in a state of torpor on his bed, reading the latest issue of GQ that he had swiped from his dentist's waiting room last week when he went in for a filling. He automatically knew it had to be her, because honestly, no one called him. Texting was for the few casual friends he had, and booty calls were a rarity these days. No one wanted the Puckerone when he was "looking perpetually mopey" according to Ms. Pillsbury, who had given him a pamphlet on depression shortly afterwards. He found his phone hiding in the folds of his comforter and held it to his ear.
"Hey," he greeted, trying not to sound too excited. They hadn't talked since last Tuesday, when they had Skyped. She seemed distant. She wouldn't talk about New York, even though she had been gone for two months.
Only one more month until she came home. Not that he would admit he was counting down the days.
"Hey." Her response was dejected and flat, but then again, every time she opened her mouth, she sounded blasé and tired of it all. It was a Santana-ism, one he missed witnessing in real life.
They made small talk, and talked about the most trivial things, like the latest WMHS gossip and which mall stores had closed out because well, it was Lima, Ohio, and exciting things didn't exactly happen there. They both knew they were growing apart, but they didn't know how to assuage the situation other than to keep going.
It was only until they had exhausted their list of remedial topics that he asked her when she was coming home exactly. "Not that you're missing anything, but when are you coming home? Miss you, Lo." It was as genuine as he was going to get, and if she had been with him at that moment, her heart would have skipped a beat.
"Listen. About that..."
"Yeah?"
"I'm going to stay here longer than I expected."
"Like how long?"
"Forever." Her answer was short and fleeted, as if she huffed it out in a breath rather than actually speaking the words.
"What? Wait, you're coming back in a month right?"
"No. I don't think I ever will, actually."
"Santana! You can't do this!"
"Stop yelling at me, you're making this harder than it needs to be!" she cried. Why couldn't he just say "okay" and hang up the phone? Why did he care so much now, when all the other times, he didn't care what she did or what other people did to her? If he wanted her there so much, he could have said that before any of this shit went down. She wished it didn't have to happen like this, but it did, because she wasn't strong enough and too proud to go back and do it in person.
"You're the one making everything harder. You're supposed to come back! You're supposed to be here with me. And now you just spring this on me that you're not coming back when you promised you would?"
"Oh come on, you knew it would happen eventually. One of us is always leaving the other." She made it seem like she was leaving him behind, not her life in Lima, even though when in reality, the two were synonymous. So their relationship was over, not just her old life.
"No, not like this."
"I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Goodbye, Puck. Good luck with everything, really. Good luck." The way she was repeating things gave her words a tone of formality and finality, and he knew that she was done. He hung up the phone on her for the last time, and sat in silence on the bed. He had been abandoned again.
He couldn't stop her from leaving, because she was already gone.
"Now you know what it feels like, huh? Like no matter what you say, nothing will change the other person's mind." They had always functioned this way. No matter the time, situation, or circumstances-in every ebb and flow of their relationship, one of them was always holding on tighter. Both had held that position before, but never at the same time. And now, it was her.
"Where are you going?" she screamed. He couldn't leave her behind, not again. She was always alone. Maybe this was her punishment for the one time she left everyone else behind. But what was she going to do without him? She needed him because she loved him, not the other way around, which was how she knew this was real.
"It doesn't matter. You wouldn't come if you knew."
And then he was gone.
PHEW! Got that all over with. I've been planning this chapter since the very beginning, and I know its not as well written as the others, but Ive been in a really creative funk lately. But now we can move forward, now that you know the whole story, or at least the important bits.
Think about it…(and tell me your thoughts if you want to make me really really happy)
1) Is Santana a bad person for what she did about the baby? She says she did it for the two of them, but she kind of did it to hold on to Puck selfishly too. But on the other hand, is Puck making a mountain out of a molehill? Is this even an important issue? Like Santana said, does it even matter since there was no baby and there wasn't a point in putting the two of them through that? Are you Team Puck or Team Santana? (I'm a little of both, because I see both sides, but then again, I think of this crazy stuff)
2) Pointless, insignificant question that I'm just curious about: Where do YOU think Puck went? And what do you think she'll do about it?
Super bonus) Who knows what The Things They Carried is about?