Chapter Two: Don't be afraid (be very afraid)

"Goddamn shitting motherfucking fuck!" Santana caps her outburst with a sharp glare at the offender—her reconstructed shoulder and elbow. "I fucking hate your fucking painful guts, you asshole!"

"Are you finished?"

Slowly, pointedly, Santana turns her head, fixing her glare on the shaggy-haired blonde man standing beside her. "No," she says. "And if you interrupt me again, Evans, I don't care how much you're helping me, I'm telling everyone about your illegal lip injections. Steroids kill, Trouty."

Sam doesn't bother to respond; too well-trained or too bored or just plain used to her ranting to pay attention. Instead, he steps forward, moving in front of her, standing between her legs. "I'm just asking, because we need to get you stretching out, and if you're not done bitching, I can go get some ear plugs until you're finished." He grins at her, and she has to restrain herself from rolling her eyes in the face of that dopey Southern boy smile. "These Christian ears of mine are very sensitive."

Now she does roll her eyes. "Oh, bullshit, Sammy. I heard what you said when you caught that foul ball with your junk last season." Her eyes widen, and she sticks out her right hand, tapping his chest with her open palm. "Wait, is this the first time you've been between a woman's legs since then? 'Cause if you're trying to see if it still works, you know I'm not into that."

"Morals clause, Santana," he chides, ignoring the glower darkening her features as he cups her left elbow with one hand and her left shoulder with the other, and begins to manipulate and loosen the tight joints.

"Yeah. No asking, and definitely no telling." She winces as Sam rotates her upper arm forward and up, extending her surgically-repaired rotator cuff to its current limit. "How long, do you think?"

"Until you can come out?" He shrugs. "Ten years after you retire."

Santana kicks at him. "No, idiot. Until I can play."

Sam steps back to meet her eyes. "Honestly?" Santana nods. "Santana, we're working with two badly dislocated joints here. If it were just the fractures, or just the ligament tears, I'd have an answer for you. But these two, with the amount of damage you sustained…" He pats her shoulder and elbow. "I'm not asking, and they aren't telling."

This time, he can't ignore how her jaw sets, or her eyes narrow. "I'm sorry, Santana. You're lucky you're—"

"Alive?" She scoffs. "Yeah, I'm overjoyed." After the accident, everyone—doctors, nurses, her family, both Schuester and Beiste, that douchebag Abrams from WSPN—kept saying it, over and over again, as if the more times they said it, the more likely she was to believe it. Instead, the phrase and the message behind it has stopped meaning anything at all.

"I was going to say you're lucky that you're going to play again. It might not be as soon as you like, but your career isn't over. As long as you keep up with your rehab exercises and take it slow…"

"Right." All the light has left her eyes; she has no more patience for Sam's platitudes and reassurances. "Ice me up, Sam. I've had enough for today."

He wraps her in ice and leaves her for fifteen minutes to count ceiling tiles she has counted a dozen times before. Santana lets out a breath through pursed lips and scoffs.

Lucky. Maybe on a good day, being pulled from that car with only a mangled arm, a concussion and severe bruising was lucky. She isn't dead, she has all four limbs, Sam and Beiste and Schuester think she still has a shot at playing ball, and she's not permanently disabled, unlike the bastard who hit her.

But on the bad days, Santana thinks that how she wound up isn't any kind of luck at all. Bad days, when there were strangers bathing her and cutting her food and teaching her how to write chicken scratch that vaguely resembled her name right-handed. Bad days, after all of the nurses left, when she didn't bother changing her clothes for three days, because pulling shirts and sports bras over her head one-handed was too hard. Bad days, like laying on a table under fluorescent lights, arm wrapped in ice, while her teammates are outside in the fresh air and sunshine, running laps and running their mouths, catching balls and catching up after the break, loose and laughing, healthy.

On days like today, she hates that there is still no answer to when, only hard work in preparation for a day no one can guarantee will come. On days like today, both retiring and pushing forward spark that anxious pounding in her chest and she can't tell which is more terrifying: finding something else to do with her life after all of these years or getting out on the field again with these two patchwork joints. On days like today, when the scars scored over her skin aren't proof of her health but reminders of grotesque angles and more pain than she thought possible, she thinks that luck would have been to lose the arm, to know she was done playing, to have not made it out of that wreck at all, anything other than this limbo.

She pushes the thoughts out of her mind when Sam returns. "Everyone is on the field," he says. "Locker room is clear if you want to go change."

"Thanks." She hoists herself into a sitting position with hip and abdominal power alone—at least her core strength is more or less the same, even if she can barely write her own name—and allows Sam to unwrap her. When he's done, she scoots off the table and heads for the door.

"Santana." She turns around, raising an eyebrow in question. "If you're feeling up to it, I can release you to catch. Beiste needs an extra glove to shag balls during BP."

"Seriously?"

Sam nods. "Yeah. But catch only. No throwing, no diving, no chasing after anything. Elbow brace on at all times." He jabs the rolled bandages at her in warning. "And don't even think about going around me—I already told all of the coaches what you're allowed to do. We're not pulling a Mariano Rivera and busting you up worse, got it?"

Damn Trouty. It's hard to have a full-on bad day when he reaches out and finds a way to get her on the field. Given the choice, batting practice would be more fun with a bat in her hand, whacking easy pitches into the high Arizona sky, but if the choice is standing in the outfield with a glove catching lazy fly balls or staying inside and doing the same set of rehab exercises she's been working on for months, she'll play outfielder for the afternoon. She nods. "Got it."

Santana pokes her head into the locker room before she goes in, listening for signs of activity. Sam said it was clear, but people are in and out of here all the time, trading out gloves or getting more sunscreen or hunting down a spare set of laces for their cleats. None of her teammates have seen her arm outside of her sling and various braces since the accident, and none of them will if she can help it. She has done her best to keep eyes away from her scars: she only changes in here if she's alone and will take clothing to the showers if she isn't, and she selected a locker on the opposite end of the room from the pitchers, who—bullpen and starters together—move as one large, noisy, attention-drawing herd. Just as they do on the field, the rest of the team spirals out around the pitchers, generally keeping in groups by position during spring training. The organization breaks down a bit in San Francisco, where the locker room is larger and more of a high class lounge room, but outfielders stay with outfielders, pitchers near pitchers, and so on.

Santana, by virtue of her injury and her temper, stays on the periphery, both in Scottsdale and in San Francisco. So she is quite surprised when she rounds the corner to her locker (more of an oversized, open-doored closet than the clanging metal of her youth) and sees that the locker next to hers has stuff in it.

A black duffel bag, a rolling suitcase, and—holy crap—rainbow mittens accompany a brand new set of dark gray spring training uniforms on hangers. There are two different spring training unis: gray practice t-shirts with orange sleeves and ridiculous orange shorts, and the gray button-down jerseys and cream-colored pants reserved for games. One hanger is empty. She checks again for signs of life in the room—doesn't matter why you're doing it, looking into your teammate's locker is a creeper move and shouldn't be observed by others—and tugs a fistful of game uniform towards her so she can see who's set up shop next door.

Pierce.

She knows all about number 13. Over the break, if the writers and analysts weren't talking about her accident, they were gushing over Brittany Pierce: her defensive skills, her offensive skills, her speed, her magical ability to go from college ball straight into the majors. Brittany Pierce is supposed to be the second coming of Ozzie Smith, or Omar Vizquel, with better offensive production. A five-tool player in a position that doesn't produce five-tool players. Brittany Pierce is supposed to be the missing piece to the Specters' lineup, as if one player alone can make all the cogs fall into place and run the machine to a championship.

Writers and analysts don't know shit. Ninety percent of them have never seen Pierce play in person. If they had, if they'd gone beyond the highlight reels and sat in the stands on a warm spring day and watched her—really watched her—they'd know she wasn't the second coming of any of the great shortstops.

Brittany Pierce is the first coming of Brittany Pierce.

Last April, arm still in a sling and doped up on painkillers, Santana had met Beiste and Schuester in Schuester's office.

"I need you to do me a favor." Schuester slid a file across the desk to her. "We're thinking of drafting Brittany Pierce, but we want you to go see her first."

"We're not asking you to do any real scouting, Santana," Beiste clarified. "We just want you to get a feel for her."

Santana bit back the wanky on her tongue. "Why me?"

"We don't intend for her to go to the minors. She's a very good ballplayer, she is absolutely capable of playing at this level, but she is young, and we need to know if you can work with her. We need you to make this pick work. On the field when you're ready, of course, but off the field too."

Santana hated rah-rah speeches on principle, especially ones that implied that she was difficult and a shitty teammate (true), but capable and worthy of mentoring a baby player in spite of it (what?), but fuck it, she didn't have anything better to do but sit around watching bad daytime television until it was time for her next pill. And maybe it was lame of her to fall for Schuester's conviction that she'd play again (and soon), but she did, and before she knew what she was doing, she'd opened the file and started reading.

The file was full of stats: average, OPS, OBS, fielding percentage, strikeouts, walks, slugging, stolen bases, all the usual numbers that simplified a human being into a series of equations. A couple of pictures of Pierce in action, a flash drive labeled 'Pierce highlights 2011' and a plane ticket.

The next afternoon, she was easing herself into a seat along the third base line, just behind the Buckeyes' dugout. In the morning, afraid she would get spotted so far away from home and hounded for autographs or harassed with stupid questions about the accident and why she was in Ohio, Santana had left her hair loose and put a Buckeyes cap over her head. She tugged the brim low, hiding her eyes

Losing the ponytail and changing her cap made her anonymous, despite the sling-confined arm and years of national coverage. Funny how people only knew what she looked like in uniform or in Specters colors; out of it, fans barely recognized her. For the first time since the accident, she felt like herself, not Santana Lopez, San Francisco Specters, who was probably done as a player and who (rumor had it) was drunk out of her mind that night on the bridge.

(It didn't matter that it was the other driver who was fucked up and who had probably destroyed her career, or that he had pled guilty to the criminal charges. It was her fault, had to be, because she played aggressively and questioned the eyesight of umpires more frequently than any of her contemporaries and didn't have the patience for the same moronic questions from the beat reporters night after night. Last time she checked, being a bitch didn't total her car or blow up her arm.)

The team took the field to a rousing cheer from the crowd. Santana took one look around and, for the sake of keeping her anonymity, clapped along unenthusiastically. Even clapping was hard, right hand to thigh, again and again. She couldn't wait for sentencing next month; after the judge heard that she couldn't even clap correctly, the son of a bitch would go away for years.

It didn't take long for Santana to see why Beiste and Schuester wanted Pierce so badly, badly enough to see if Santana was willing to play with her. (As if she had any idea how to figure that out. Chemistry was something you worked out on the field by playing together, not something you could assess from the stands.) In the top of the first inning, Pierce fielded a difficult bounce barehanded, tapped second and winged the ball to first in plenty of time to catch the runner, pumping her fist in celebration. Bottom of the second, Pierce pounded a double down the right field line, and two pitches later she stole third standing up, mugging at her teammates in the dugout.

There was something in the way Pierce followed the ball, on defense and offense, with a grace, an attentiveness, a restlessness—as if, if she wasn't dead-focused on the ball all the time, she would be lost—that Santana was intimately familiar with. Pierce played with all the intensity Santana did, only she was loose, goofy, joyful.

Santana eased her phone from her pocket and clumsily accessed her contact list. Her weak right thumb almost sent Beiste "Sink here" but she backed up the autocorrect and sent "Sign her," just as Pierce crossed the plate, looked into the stands, and met her eyes.

Goddamn.

The Specters keep the locker room cool in Arizona, but it's remembering Pierce's smile all those months ago that sends gooseflesh over Santana's skin just as it had then. Santana lets go of the jersey and swivels back to her locker, eager to shake that smile, her own fascination, that moment where Pierce looked up at a stranger but saw her.

Santana slips her hinged elbow brace on, fitting the stabilizing disc over the joint, and tugs the straps a little too tight, to remind herself of where she is and who she is and that any kind of fascination she feels, or thought she felt for a second when she was still full of Vicodin, doesn't get to happen.

No way.

Nothing beats a ballpark. The sun shining, the warm air, the light breeze wafting the smell of fresh-cut grass and wet dirt through the sharp scent of sunscreen, the crack of solid wood launching balls, the snap of balls popping into leather gloves. All the senses of her youth, of hours spent outside with her family and her friends and her coaches, of the highest points of her life—when a well-timed hit left her buried nose-deep in the grass under a pile of ecstatic teammates, when she twisted way out of position and snagged a ball to end a game to sweep a series, when she completed her first unassisted double play, when she hit her first homer—all of these things, these moments, her life, are here.

Brittany hadn't realized how nervous she was until she puts on her practice uniform—shorts and a t-shirt, both emblazoned with Specters symbols—for the first time and steps out of the dugout. As soon as her cleats hit the grass, she relaxes, lets go of the little voice in her head taunting her, saying you can't do this, you're not good enough, you're not ready. How can she not be ready? This is her home.

Even if her home is all of a sudden not the cozy three-bed-two-bath house she grew up in, but the biggest mansion she's ever seen.

The field isn't that much bigger than a college field, or even the minor league field she played at the summer before her senior year. But everything else is: the stands, the scoreboard, the walls covered in ten-foot-tall ads, all towering over the field. The loudspeakers blaring classic rock. The sheer number of people here for practice: the coaching staff, the trainers, the players both signed and trying out, the smattering of press allowed, the team's scouts in the stands, the owner, general manager and family.

She's never seen so many kids running around an official practice.

It's also about ten degrees cooler than the parking lot, which is awesome, because she doesn't want to sweat all over her new gear until she's actually done some work.

"Pierce!"

Brittany turns towards the sound of her name coming from the edge of the outfield grass. Quinn is standing with Mike Chang, the team's infield coach, who lifts his head from a bucket of baseballs when Quinn calls her name. She and Mike have been communicating all winter. He's responsible for half of those brutal workouts and a whole series of agility exercises she hadn't seen before, and she's been looking forward to working with him. Brittany trots over to them, tucking her glove into her armpit and extending her hand for Mike to shake. "Hey, it's great to finally meet you."

"Likewise," he says, taking her hand. His palms are callused but his grip is soft; the kind of hands that have been in this sport so long that he shakes hands the same way he would field a ground ball—nice and smooth and easy. Brittany can tell just from that handshake that he has plenty to teach her. "You stretched out?" When she nods, he smiles. "Great, take your position and let's get you fielding, see what you got."

Mike starts her off easy. From the back of the pitcher's mound, he throws bouncing balls up the middle for her to glove, switching to harder bounces, higher hops as they go. He watches with trained eyes as she moves back and forth, positioning herself in front for one ball, moving to a backhand for the next, studying the way Brittany handles tricky hops and balls thrown nearly over her head. When he's emptied the bucket—and when she's filled the bucket behind her—he calls her over. "Nice hands," he says. "Let's start on some double-plays, covering second. I'll be hitting this time, so expect a little more speed. I want to see how you move. Fabray—stand in for Lopez."

As Brittany moves into short, Quinn takes the field at second—halfway between first base and second base on the edge of the outfield grass, leaving the actual base open to run the drill. Brittany adjusts her glove and waits for the first ball.

"Well, well, well, look who's here."

Quinn's sarcastic amusement pulls Brittany's attention away from Mike and towards the dugout stairs, where a dark-haired figure strolls onto the field and heads straight for Beiste, who's supervising some running drills in left field.

There are two things she notices about Santana Lopez, the first time she sees her in person.

The first: Santana doesn't reach out to anyone. No hugs, no touches on the arm, not so much as a smile, the exact opposite of every other player who has come on the field. She nods when coaches and reporters come over or call out to her, but she's intent on her conversation with Beiste, game-face on. Not that very many people are coming up to her or welcoming her back; Brittany's pretty sure half of her teammates are ignoring her and the other half haven't noticed she's on the field.

The second: Santana Lopez has a robot arm. Brittany couldn't see it until Santana heads for right field, but the sun catches her elbow and sparkles. With the tan leather glove on her right hand and the black composite lines framing her left arm, she looks like a seal with a prosthetic fin. So cool.

"Santana!"

Santana stops in place, seems to consider whether or not she's coming over for a long moment, and finally shakes her head, reverses direction and comes in, stopping on the edge of the outfield. "Hi, Chang," she says. "Quinn."

"Lopez." She and Quinn share some kind of formal nod-plus-staring thing Brittany doesn't really understand—it's awkward, like they both know that maybe they could be friends if they were less similar, but they just aren't.

Mike puts a hand on her shoulder and turns her towards Santana. "Santana, have you met Brittany Pierce yet? She's our new shortstop."

Santana arcs her eyes over Brittany, looking her over the same way she would look at a stop sign or a rock, all cool and uninterested and not a little bit friendly. "Yeah, she's all over WSPN. Me, too." She tilts her head, silently challenging anyone to comment on why exactly she'd been on TV so much, until a sharp whistle from right field pulls her attention away. "Nice to meet you, rookie. I have to go."

(The third thing she notices is that Santana moves so, so fast when she's running away that she probably doesn't even know what she's running away from.)