Well, we've come to the end at last. It's been a long ride, and it hasn't been without its bumps, but here we are and that's something, at least. I know that not every one of your questions has been answered, and I'm going to try and reply to everyone who reviews this last chapter, but you should know that I don't always believe that life is made up of easy answers. Life is a journey built on questions and for every answer you think you get, you'll usually end up with still more questions. And that's okay. It's okay not to have all the answers, to just sit back and enjoy the ride. How does that saying go? "The answer is in the seeking."

Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to review or alert this story. It's been lovely talking to many of you and getting to know some of you. Special thanks to ApathyandEmpathy for all of her encouragement. I owe the biggest thanks to tiny-sized, for putting up with me and for not letting me drunkenly abandon or give this story away, and also, for making me hate her a little more every day.

Chapter Fifteen

"The boat slipped and slid across the mirror-surface of the underground pool. And then Mr. Ibis said, without moving its beak, 'You people talk about the living and the dead as if they were two mutually exclusive categories. As if you cannot have a river that is also a road, or a song that is also a color.'

'You can't,' said Shadow. 'Can you?' The echoes whispered his words back at him from across the pool.

'What you have to remember,' said Mr. Ibis, testily, 'is that life and death are different sides of the same coin. Like the heads and tails of a quarter.'

'And if I had a double-headed quarter?'"

Neil Gaiman, American Gods

They buried her on a Wednesday, just a couple of days after what had been labeled "the incident," which Santana found to be completely ridiculous because the loss of her best friend and the girl she was in love with was more than just an incident. It was a heartbreak, the kind that settled deep in her insides and burrowed there, clenching around her heart every time she took a breath.

Hiram and Leroy stood solemnly next to one another, hands clasped. They were crying. Hiram's face was stoic but for the tears that fell down his cheeks and Leroy was openly sobbing. Santana stood across from them, watching the way Hiram's grip on Leroy's hand tightened and his eyes closed heavily. She watched the way Leroy inhaled deeply, trying to pull air into his lungs.

"It's useless," she wanted to say, wanted to scream and cry out. Instead, she was silent.

Santana felt a hand on her arm and looked over, finding her mother staring at her. Marco was clinging to her legs, his small fingers digging into her muscles as he cried. He kept asking her when Rachel was coming back and she kept trying to find a way to explain the idea of never to him, but she came up empty.

"It'll be okay," her mother said softly, voice hoarse and eyes watering.

"You're a liar," Santana wanted to reply. She shook her head and brushed her hand through her brother's hair instead.

There were students present, many of them friends, most of them in tears. Rachel had touched everyone she ever met in some way and even the kids who were there just to miss school looked affected. Her presence had been so strong that her absence could be felt in the very air around them. Or at least, that's how it felt to Santana - like all of the air had been sucked out of her lungs and out from around her, stolen away with Rachel.

"You didn't know her like I did," she wanted to yell at them, sending them away and telling them to take their looks of sympathy and pity with them. All of their eyes were on her, the girlfriend of the dead girl, and she could feel them burning her skin, setting her aflame with questions and accusations.

A man was speaking, his voice deep and grave. He said words that she couldn't understand and words that she could understand but didn't want to. He said things like beautiful life and tragic loss and too soon and will be missed. Santana shut him out. She didn't need to hear his dime-a-dozen condolences. He didn't know Rachel, either.

She breathed in shakily, her hands trembling as she tried to find the pieces of herself that she had lost. No, the pieces that had been stolen from her. Santana closed her eyes, looking for Rachel, for her face and her lips and her bright eyes tired with sleep at the end of a long day spent lounging in bed or in the park. All she could find was blood. It stained Rachel's clothes and it spread out across the grass as she fell, eyes wide and face contorted in pain.

Santana heard sobbing and opened her eyes, wishing that the sight of blood and that man's face weren't in her head when she closed her eyes. Sometimes, she swore she could hear him near, just behind her or just next to her, whispering. She could picture his face, smiling and ageless but for his eyes, which stared directly at her as he kept shooting.

And she realized that she was the one sobbing. She was crying loudly, her brother still clinging to her leg and her mother's hand on her arm as she released a sob from deep in her chest.

People started singing, something slow and mournful. It was full of regret (or maybe that was just her heart) and it made her weep. She had decided when they were twelve that there were only two people who were allowed to do the singing: Rachel and her. Her fingers curled in Marco's hair at the realization that she would never get to hear Rachel's voice again, never listen to her hum under her breath while she worked on homework or sing in the shower or whisper words against Santana's skin between kisses. And she would never get to sing with Rachel again.

"Come back," she whispered, voice cracking. "Come back," Santana repeated. The fingers of her free hand clenched, nails digging into her palm.

Her father's hand gripped her shoulder and the choir continued to sing as they lowered Rachel Berry into the ground.

She had spent most of her life with Rachel Berry by her side and now there was no one.

Looking into his eyes was like looking up at the stars, seeing them shine and twinkle in the night sky, small and from a greater distance than could be fathomed. He looked at her like he knew her, who she was and who she wasn't. She could see his face, pale and thin, peering at her from over Rachel's shoulder. She could see him, blood spattered across the hem at the bottom of his pressed white pants.

He was standing in the corner of the room, smiling at her.

"I'm so sorry for your loss."

Santana blinked, shaking her head quickly and glancing back at the corner, seeing no one. She pulled her attention back towards the woman in front of her, the woman who had been Rachel's dance instructor when she was a little girl. She was shaking hands with Hiram, brow furrowed and a frown on her face. She was looking at all of them sympathetically, the same way that everyone who claimed they understood did.

"She was so young," the woman said.

"We know," Santana snapped, scoffing. "You don't have to tell us. We fucking know that she was young and that she had her whole fucking life ahead of her."

Leroy brought his hand up to her shoulder, fingers curling over it and squeezing. She glanced over at him, memorizing the grief that was permanently etched on his face in the lines of his forehead and the downward curve of his lips. He sighed softly, eyes fluttering closed, and shook his head at her.

"Santana," he started. "Please." He offered nothing further.

Guilt. She felt incredibly guilty. Santana was sitting shiva with them, at their invitation, and she was filling it with anger and bitterness. She hadn't been able to save their only daughter – her best friend, her girlfriend – and now she was only disappointing them. Her fingers and her heart were permanently stained with the blood of their child and she was still hurting them.

Santana looked away from Leroy, clenching her fists as she stared at the ground, eyes immediately finding the space where she and Rachel used to lie next to each other and draw pictures for each other in crayon. Nearby was the space where they played cards on rainy Sunday afternoons, both of them on their stomachs with their legs swinging in the air; and then there was the space where they would spread out a blanket to lie on, Santana sometimes rolling over to kiss Rachel in the middle of a movie that she couldn't even pretend to watch.

The room was full of empty spaces that had once belonged to them.

Santana stood up abruptly, shrugging Leroy's hand off of her shoulder. The room was too much, the memories it held too close to her heart and soul for her to breathe without her heart clenching uncomfortably. She could see those eyes again, the ones belonging to the man whose name she didn't know but whose face she would never be able to forget.

She walked out, stepping out into the cool fall air and letting it wash over her. "Fuck," Santana muttered, scuffing the heel of her shoe over the pavement of the Berry's front porch and stomping over the space where she and Rachel had sat together in the middle of the summer, eating vegan ice cream and exchanging lazy kisses.

She meandered across the yard, starting down the street towards the cemetery and trying to ignore the tears stinging the backs of her eyes. She felt her bottom lip start to tremble, but she pressed on, forcing in vain for her features to still and calm. They had walked this very street together, she and Rachel, almost every single day, and now she walked alone.

Santana pushed on the gate of the cemetery, arriving after what felt like only moments but could have been hours. She swung it open angrily, letting it collide with the fence as she stepped inside.

She knew the exact location of Rachel's grave, striding purposefully through rows of tombstones that she had memorized. Her vision was blurry, eyes swimming with tears, and the path she walked was so second-nature to her that she arrived without having seen most of the grass she tread on and the grave markers she moved past.

And then Santana was there, standing in front of her grave, staring at her name etched in stone and in her soul.

Rachel Barbra Berry

Santana cried then, releasing a low whimper and hating how weak it sounded. "God," she said breathlessly. Her voice was raspy, rough from her tears and from her pain. Santana was sure that she could feel Rachel's blood fresh on her hands and her arms until she wiped the tears from her eyes and found herself in the dirt.

She dropped unceremoniously to the ground, sitting back on her legs with her knees bent. Her fingers clenched in the freshly dug-up soil beneath her. It wasn't blood that she felt; it was the earth. Or maybe it was both.

"Fuck," she said, her speech rising from a low whisper to an anguished cry. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

It was wrong. She could feel it in her bones, the wrongness.

Santana continued to sob, her entire body shaking. Tears fell down her face, sticking to her cheeks. "Rachel," she choked out. "What the fuck did you do?"

She dug her fingers further into the dirt, feeling it slide under her fingernails. "You're so stupid," she said. "I don't even know what you did, but you're so fucking stupid," she went on, voice cracking sometimes. "You - we were - fuck, I love you. I fucking love you. I was - I was going to marry you one day, Rachel. We were going to go to New York and go to college," Santana continued, pulling her hands up and sliding her palms over her dress. "We were going to graduate and then we were going to start our life together. I always figured that the night you won your first Tony, I would propose to you. It would be fucking romantic, too, because you love that stuff."

"Loved," Santana corrected herself with another sob. "You loved that stuff. And now what? Now you're gone."

The cemetery was silent for a moment but for the rustle of leaves and the crisp autumn wind that blew them from the trees. And then she heard it, ringing in her ears and making her heart pound.

"You really think we would have been married one day?"

Santana Lopez knew the sound of Rachel Berry's voice like she knew the soles of her feet and the tips of her fingers. Even when Santana didn't want to hear Rachel, and even when she wasn't supposed to, Rachel's voice was still with her.

Santana raised her head, pulling herself up and shaking her head. She had gone crazy. Her girlfriend and best friend had been murdered and now she was actually insane, hearing a voice that she should never have heard ever again.

"Santana?" she heard from behind her. "You think that we would have gotten married?"

Santana spun around then, eyes wide as they took in the sight of Rachel Berry, her ashen skin and dark eyes framed by even darker circles. The flesh of her cheeks was slightly sunken in and she was an unnatural grey color that stood out against the rich blackness of her dress.

"R-Rachel?"