Chapter 9
On Love, On Life
(Santana & Brittney)
"Hey San, can you help me with this?"
Brittney shrugged her attention casually away from the form of Kurt Hummel seated at her left, turning instead towards her opposing side where she dangled before Santana Lopez a prominent envelope that she had found waiting for her inside of her mailbox that morning, an envelope that she had been struggling to make heads or tails out of ever since her locating of it.
"Yeah," Santana replied, using the back of her hand to wipe the remnants of her half-eaten sandwich from her mouth before extending it in order to retrieve the envelope. "What is it?"
"I got it in the mail this morning." Brittney explained, watching as her best friend peeled back the letter's lid before carefully extracting its contents. "It's something about sitting."
"Sitting?" Santana questioned suspiciously, glancing upwards and over the top of the mysterious paper in order to shoot a confusedly arched eyebrow towards Brittney's general direction.
"Yeah, it said sat on it." Brittney confirmed, nodding her head towards the familiar S.A.T. logo emblazoned across the envelope's upper left hand corner so that suddenly, for Santana, things became much clearer.
"Don't you mean S.A.T., Britt?" Santana asked in her attempt to reason with the girl before her.
"Yeah," Brittney spoke in a matter-of-fact tone as if this was what she had been trying to convey this entire time. "That's how you spell sat, duh."
"Oh, Dios mío…" Santana sighed in her native Spanish, rolling her eyes prominently as she begged herself to make use of the deep breathing exercises that she had always found allowed her to carry herself through any conversation with Brittney. "No Brittney, that test that we took last month… Don't you remember? The day that you had to wake up early on a Saturday morning…"
"No…"
"It was the same day that you had to take Lord Tubbington to the vet because he ate all of your cotton balls." Santana explained slowly in terms that she knew that Brittney would understand, emphasizing the patience about her, the Latina knew she only possessed with Brittney, of all people.
"Was that the night that we went to Breadsticks together?" Brittney asked, scrunching her face in an expression of deep thought.
"Yeah," Santana smirked towards the idea that Brittney chose to measure the passing of her days in terms of the dates that they had been on. "That's the day."
"So why did they send me mail?" Brittney asked, still impossibly confused by the entire situation. "I mean, if I already took the test and all?"
"These are probably just your results." Santana shrugged, searching for Brittney's test scores amidst the paper below, tracing the contents with her finger, intrigued to see what it was that she might find.
Her eyes scanned the multitude of B.S. contained within the letter - as if anybody actually wanted to read anything but the results anyway – analyzing the numbers presented to her within the score box before pausing only briefly to allow her eyes to bug outwards twice their normal size as she took a simultaneous inward gasp that nearly caused her to choke on the bolus of turkey and cheese sandwich still lodged inside of her mouth.
"What is it?" Brittney asked, watching carefully as Santana's face transformed into an expression that made it seem as if she'd just seen a ghost within the paper before her.
"San…?" She questioned again when Santana didn't immediately respond to her inquiry, her voice dropping with an air of concern as she watched Santana merely shake her head back and forth in her shock, her mouth agape, yet continuously silent.
But her reaction had been just as warranted as dramatic; this had to have been some sort of mistake, a misprint, one of the largest errors to have ever been made in the history of SAT scorings…
After all, there was no way in hell that a letter could have been delivered to the home of Brittney S. Pierce early on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010 telling her that she had just scored a 2300 on her SAT's.
"Holy shit Brittney, you got a 2300…" Santana sputtered her results towards the blonde, wonderment prevalent on her voice as she watched Brittney's unexpected reaction; a dramatic sinking of her shoulders as her lower lip protruded outwards in an obvious pouting manner.
"Oh crap…" She sighed, her eyes lowering with disappointment towards her feet in exactly the same manner that Santana always noticed she projected whenever somebody commented negatively on her intelligence.
"What do you mean oh crap?" Santana asked, staring Brittney down as if she were crazy for being angry at herself for something that she had performed so remarkably in. "Britt, that's amazing!"
"Is it really?" Brittney asked, tilting her head back upwards to face Santana, her expression slowly lifting hopefully towards the idea that maybe this wasn't as terrible as she had previously believed.
"Brittney, a 2300 is like, almost a perfect score."
"I thought that you could only go up to 100…" Brittney thought aloud, her eyebrows raised in an expression of the fact that she was still clearly confused towards what Santana believed to have been obvious.
"Not on the SAT's," Santana waved her off quickly. "Do you have any idea what this means?"
"I got a 23 on a test once." Brittney shrugged in her response, still clearly not grasping the magnitude of the situation. "My teacher called me stupid so then they made me have a meeting with my parents and that weird guidance counselor."
"Well you're not stupid, Britt…" Santana smirked upwards towards Brittney, squeezing her knee tightly beneath the lunch table in her emphasis of the fact that absolutely everything that the blonde had ever done – whether intelligent or not – simply made it easier for Santana to fall more in love with the girl. "I don't think that anybody can call you that anymore. Not after this."
"Thanks San." Brittney smirked, her eyes falling upon Santana's in a manner that allowed the contact to linger for an extended series of comfortably silent seconds.
But ultimately, it had been a subconscious reflex that had pulled them away, a simultaneous jerk of the head towards the direction of the cafeteria doors as a sharp echo pushed its way inward from beyond the depths of the hallway in a manner that proved to hold the capacity to silence even the loudest of students.
"What was that?" Brittney asked in a hushed tone, directing her question towards Santana although each occupant of the glee club lunch table turned their heads towards her in their entirety; a direct response to the cafeteria having just fallen so silent that even the kids seated at the opposite end of the room probably could have heard her.
But Santana could only shrug in her silence, offering Brittney the softest shake of her head in her indication towards the fact that she knew just about as much as Brittney seemed to in this moment in regards to what it was exactly that had just befallen their crowded high school.
In fact, she had been so anxious, so stiff in her continuous vigilance, that by the time Finn had pushed himself harshly from the table, his chair scraping painfully against the floor tiles with an ear-splitting screech, Santana had been so tense with awareness, that she flinched despite herself, the softest of gasps emitting from between slightly parted lips in a motion that was caught rapidly by Brittney, who grabbed protectively at Santana's hand, their fingers interlocking and squeezing so tightly together that their knuckles turned white within one another's.
"Finn, where are you going?" Quinn's soft, patient voice addressed the towering football player as he stood to his feet, turning his back towards the rest of them without so much as an explanation before rushing towards the direction of the exit.
"Get out of here."
"What?" Puck sounded just about as taken aback towards Finn's orders as Santana had been, the feisty Latina scoffing slightly towards the idea of anybody, especially Finn Hudson, trying to order her around.
In her subconscious attempt towards lightening the mood, she turned towards her best friend, expressing her feelings on the matter to her with a soft eye roll that Brittney immediately responded to with a muffled giggle that she suppressed only by holding the sleeve of her sweatshirt up against her mouth.
"Just do it!" His tone sounded harsh, severe enough to wipe the ghost of amusement off of both Brittney as well as Santana's faces as they watched him disappear in his entirety beyond the other side of the cafeteria doors.
"He's crazy." Puck shrugged, responding to the abrupt disappearance of their male lead in the only manner that he knew how; through his compensatory sense of humor. "It must be from dating Rachel; I think that she's starting to rub off on him."
Brittney and Santana couldn't help but to chuckle simultaneously in response to Puck's statement, never missing an opportunity to laugh at the sake of Man Hands, even with the undertone of impending tragedy filtering around all of their heads.
"Hey, look over there." Brittney nudged Santana suddenly against the ribs with her elbow, pointing towards the cafeteria doors so that Santana's eyes danced quickly across them, offering a flash of what Brittney was trying to get her attention about; the image of Jacob Ben-Israel and Suzy Pepper sauntering amidst the passing students.
"Why do they always have to travel in packs?" Santana sneered through a harsh laugh, her eyes rapidly averting back towards Brittney's. "It's like they want to make it easy for us to make their lives a living –"
But Santana merely choked on her final word, her throat burning with the residual pain caused by her abrupt silencing as a successive array of gunfire made her ears throb to the extent that she was practically forced to lift her hands up to cup her palms over her ears in an attempt to protect her sensitive eardrums from the deafening noise before her.
Her vision, improved by a rush of adrenaline, latched onto the scene before her so that she managed to catch a fleeting glimpse of the scene responsible for such a sudden display of pandemonium; a man that had simply made the mistake of being assigned lunch duty in the wrong place at the wrong time staggering backwards in a flash of red before falling motionless to the ground at the feet of Jacob Ben-Israel and Suzy Pepper…
Santana felt her lungs immediately begin to enclose all around her, leaving her panting and out of breath as she vaguely registered Brittney's hand reaching down to clutch her own with a strength indicative of her desperation to protect them both.
But Santana couldn't seem to avert her eyes from the doorway, the forms of Jacob and Suzy, which she had previously perceived as puny and weak suddenly registering to her with a staggering dominance, a terrifying presence…
It was the image of two teenagers that she had been laughing silently behind the backs of mere moments before that had suddenly rendered the girl completely and utterly silent for the first time in her entire life with the recognition that Jacob Ben-Israel and Suzy Pepper hadn't come alone… this time, they had brought friends.
The only friends, it seemed, they had ever managed to hold onto in their entire lives.
Santana could only guess that based on their lack of success with their own kind, Jacob and Suzy had finally figured that they might as well try their luck using the assistance of firearms.
And by the looks of things, it had worked… At least, people were finally starting to notice the two of them for the first time, well… ever.
Suddenly, heads had begun turning from every which direction towards them, a thousand sets of eyes following their every movement as if they had managed to achieve celebrity status in a manner of seconds simply by sauntering from the hallway towards center stage – directly in the middle of the cafeterias boundaries.
And with one rapid, single movement, Suzy Pepper found herself moving each and every student within the room; one gunshot in one split second igniting frantic teenagers so that they pushed upwards simultaneously, pounding across the length of their enclosed quarters in their pandemonium.
Santana recognized the fact that her glee club had scrambled; shooting upwards and out of their chairs so quickly that they seats overturned, performing impressive back flips in mid-air before landing harshly against their sides. She recognized the fact that said chairs' previous occupants were flinging their bodies down against the ground in tandem with each other, pressed so tightly against one another beneath the alluded safety of their lunch table that their skin seemed to mesh together into one single, tangible unit.
All except for one…
"Santana…" Brittney muttered with a heart wrenching screech from her position beneath the table, her head swiveling desperately for any sign of the girl although her range of vision was impossibly restricted with the idea that she was currently crushed so tightly up against Quinn on one side and Mike on the other that she could barely so much as move.
"SANTANA!" She screamed suddenly in a manner that made it so she could feel the people besides her jump, her tone reeking with desperation towards the realization that her best friend, that the girl she loved wasn't amidst their ranks.
She could hear her voice sweltering above the heads of her friends just before the bullets began to rain down upon them, stifling even her loudest of cries, leaving each and every one of them to swivel chaotically in their panic in a desperate search for their fiery friend…
"Where'd Santana go?"
"Has anybody seen her?"
"Where is she?"
The various questions filtered through Brittney's ears, but she knew for a fact that not a single one of them was as desperate to find Santana as she was… In fact, she was so determined to find the girl that she found herself completely prepared to scramble out into the open in her search, prepared to embark on a suicide rescue mission without so much as a second though on the manner…
She was already halfway out from underneath the protection of her table when she collided; bone-on-bone with something very stiff, something very hard… a set of muscular legs that had left her head aching painfully for but a brief second before the relief that had suddenly swelled through her heart erased any notion of discomfort.
"Santana…" Brittney sighed in her relief, wrapping her arms quickly around the backs of the girls' knees before pulling downward with all of her might… of course, for being as small a girl as Santana Lopez was, she was much more muscular than one could ever perceive at first glance so that despite her best efforts, Brittney's motions didn't cause Santana to so much as budge.
"Santana come on, get down here and hide!" She pulled at the girls' legs once again, her biceps flexing impossibly as she put all of her strength into pulling Santana downwards, only to fail once again.
"Santana! Santana what are you doing, come on!" Brittney cried; tears stinging at the backs of her eyes as she begged the girl to comply, her actions resulting in nothing but failure.
But Santana had indeed registered the movement, she'd identified the fact that Brittney was currently below her, trying to help, trying to save her life, but no matter how much her brain was currently screaming at her to follow Brittney's orders, to duck down beside her, to clutch at the girl and hold on for dear life, she couldn't bring herself to move.
She'd found it too difficult to focus on a state of logical motion amidst all of this doubt currently swirling relentlessly across her mind.
So with her brain sparking various instructions at her in all different directions, she settled to adapt to her haze by simply staying still, sitting firmly in her seat with her muscles tense and her body stone stiff as she stared straight ahead towards the scene before her, praying that somebody would come swoop down to save her, but knowing that the actual chances of that happening were slim to none.
She couldn't help but to feel as if no matter how hard she covered her ears with her hands, no matter how long she closed her eyes for, she was still taking the scene in as a whole as it unfolded all around her… No matter how many of her senses that she blocked off, it was always there.
The crowd before her was sweltering, a thousand students packed into the tightest ball that they could possibly muster all pushing towards the center of the room in a desperate attempt to use their peers, their classmates, their friends as a human shield that would hopefully protect them as the bullets continued to fly overhead although the only foolproof method they could truly rely on was hoping and praying that the next slug wasn't the one that was destined to strike them.
Ultimately, Rebecca Andrews became the first to fall.
Exhibiting a method of escape that vaguely resembled crowd surfing at a rowdy metal concert, she had been clawing her way through the shoulders of all of those around her, literally prepared to climb directly over them if she had to in her bid for the door when the first bullet rendered her shoulder into a mere firework show of blood and fragmented muscle tissue, peppering everybody within a five person radius of her in its aftermath.
And suddenly, Rebecca Andrews' scream of pure agony overwhelmed even the loudest of noises throughout the room…
Santana knew Rebecca Andrews, all right… in fact, she knew her well; or, at the very least, she knew about her…
Rebecca had been a junior when Santana entered William McKinley High School a mere freshman, and at the time she had been the girl that everybody had wanted to be friends with, the girl that everybody had wanted to be – Santana included.
A popular Cheerio, Rebecca was notorious for being the constant center of attention – she had all of the lead parts in Cheerio routines, all of the boys, all of the friends, all of the everything, really… There was not a single soul within the vicinity of the William McKinley High School district that didn't associate her name with booming popularity.
And then, during last year's end of the year blow out at Dustin Graham's graduation party, Rebecca had hooked up with some kid from Dayton who's name she probably couldn't even remember and found herself chin deep in a pregnancy that no girl her age could ever have possibly been prepared for.
Both of her parents had tried to keep the abortion as much of a secret as humanly possibly throughout the entirety of the summer but William McKinley High School hadn't been nicknamed Gossip McKinley High School for any old reason… The entirety of the world knew, in every gory detail, what had happened before it even did, and suddenly, nobody talked to Rebecca Andrews anymore, nobody wanted to be her, and nobody cared, or even so much as noticed when one day, she quit the Cheerios, resigned as class president, and ultimately became a nobody.
Santana could only guess that this scandal was the reason by which she had found herself so surprised to see, after a second bullet to the elbow sent Rebecca flying facedown against the floor bleeding and writhing with pain, a decently sized group of students actually caring enough to briefly pause in their motions and pick the girl that had already lost everything up and carry her out of the door towards safety.
But the reciprocation was nearly simultaneous; an abrupt substitution occurring instantaneously so that just as Rebecca Andrews' body had been lifted upwards and from the ground, a second staggered forward and replaced it, staggering forward and landing in exactly the same spot as Rebecca had previously fallen so that Santana couldn't help but to pause and reflect upon the irony of it all…
Like Rebecca, Rory Montgomery was also a senior Cheerio at William McKinley High School… and that ironic aura that Santana had currently found herself experiencing had stemmed from the fact that up until last summer, Rory had always found herself falling a mere second best to Rebecca Andrews' first… always.
That was why, when Rebecca had met her ultimately downfall amidst the strict totem pole of popularity, Rory had swooped down like a hawk, taking Rebecca's place before anybody else, including Rebecca, ever could.
The idea that these two former best friends, now arch enemies had been shot together, nearly side-by-side, and on top of that, had damn near fallen directly on top of each other in the process sent shivers straight up and down the length of Santana's spine so that, had she not known any better, she would have believed that Jacob had planned things to happen that way.
In fact, the only thing that hadn't come as a surprise to Santana upon watching Rory fall to the ground was in fact the thing that had surprised her about Rebecca the most – Rory being lifted gracefully into the air by three bypassing football players, her bleeding foot dangling awkwardly to the side, hanging by a mere few stray tendons of her ankle, her face grimacing with pain as she was carried through the impossible crowd.
Directly in front of her eyes, she was sidetracked by a flash of red – her vision interlacing with the familiar pair of pain riddled brown orbs of a kid in her grade, Jason Ruiz as he took an elbow directly beneath his nose alongside a high-pitched shriek that Santana could have easily tortured him endlessly about had the situation been different.
He was so close to her that she could literally hear the sound of the bones defining his nasal passage shattering with the impact, could see every muscle of his neck flex as he reeled backwards, his flat-brimmed Chicago White Sox hat spinning in a full 360 degrees atop his head before flying clear off, falling to the ground alongside his flailing body, shooting geysers of blood continuously from each nostril.
Santana was eleven years old when her and Jason had become the talk of Lima Elementary School's Class of 2006 following their becoming of the first two people to ever hook up with each other amidst their classmates at Claire Horton's twelfth birthday party…
Coincidentally, that very same night, the unsuspecting class had been faced with another scandal upon witnessing their class's first fist fight mere hours later between Jason and Leo Kane, a kid who had had a crush on Santana for as far back as any of them could even remember…
Leo had managed to sock Jason square between the eyes that night, breaking his nose so harshly that the blood had destroyed poor Claire's graduation cake while simultaneously disfiguring the good looks that Santana had always swooned over Jason about permanently.
Now watching him fall to the ground, blood pooling around his face as he slammed his head against the linoleum so hard that the blow rendered him unconscious, leaving fleeing students to trample across him without so much as a second glance behind them, Santana couldn't help experience the sense of déjà vu that she was currently feeling, almost embracing this sense as she allowed herself to slip backwards in time, back to a phase of time when things had been so much easier, so careless… a phase of time that seemed so long ago, so impossible now.
But not even her detachment from reality could manage to stop the bodies from falling.
Despite the fact that she had only been a freshman, Santana still knew who Lauren Marley was quite well, mainly due to the fact that they had played on the same recreational soccer team together from the age of five up until Santana had graduated middle school following the eighth grade.
Lauren had been a star from a young age; anybody could see that; a fact that hadn't changed upon her entry into high school where she breezed through to the varsity squad before she'd so much as began her freshman year.
Santana had spent a large majority of her extreme childhood swelling with jealousy towards Lauren Marley and all of her talent… In fact, Lauren had been a huge reason towards why Santana had entered high school swearing off sports permanently, instead choosing to fall into the grasp of the Cheerios.
That was why the second that she had watched the spark of Suzy Pepper's shotgun, listened to it booming with a power indescribable even compared to the likes of Jacob's Tech-9, and followed the trajectory of the thick shell as it travelled across the length of the cafeteria directly into Lauren Marley's spine, the first thought that had entered Santana's head was how much of a shame that all of those years of training for a long term career in soccer had now been wasted.
With the briefest of whimpers, the young girl was thrown forwards, sliding a mere inch across the slick floor before coming to a dead halt; silent, unmoving, and by the looks of things, seemingly un-living as well…
Nobody bothered to pick Lauren up from off of the ground… They, it seemed, like Santana, had come up with a definitive conclusion based upon a quick glance that their efforts wouldn't have been affective anyway…
The girl looked to have been killed, and as much as it must have stabbed at their heartstrings to simply run straight over her, or even, as with some cases, directly on top of her, it seemed as if they'd concluded that the time and effort that it would have taken to carry her with them simply wasn't worth it.
"Somebody come over here!" Brittney's voice rang through Santana's ears with a sudden urgency, full and prominent so that the first response that Santana managed to process was a sense of relief towards the fact that her best friend, the girl that she was impossibly in love with was safe… for now. "Somebody help me!"
Santana couldn't see her, but she could tell just from her voice that Brittney had tears in her eyes… She could identify that pain, that sorrow easily from all of the other times that she had heard it being emitted from the girl; an event that, Santana was ashamed to admit, occurred with a much higher frequency than either of them would have liked.
It had been there the first time that Brittney had called Santana in the middle of the night crying because a boy at school had called her a slut.
It had been there every time Brittney stopped Santana in the hallways to tell her how sick she was of people calling her stupid all of the time.
It had been there when Brittney had tried desperately to convince Santana that they should stop hiding their love behind closed doors simply out of fear of what everybody else might say or think…
Santana couldn't stand to hear Brittney so upset, in so much pain… After all, the blonde was easily one of the most generous souls that Santana had ever been blessed to have met…
But either way, Santana had somehow or another managed to fall in love with both Brittney's; the lively, charismatic one known to the entire world, as well as the emotional, sensitive one known to nobody but her, which is why, even in her most prominent of catatonic states, she recognized that her best friend, the girl that had been by her side since preschool, the woman that she loved was asking for help, why she was willing to do absolutely anything that she could in order to provide the girl with the assistance that she was currently crying out for.
She recognized her need to help Brittney, recognized that she had to adhere to the girl's calling… She had just relaxed her tense muscles, had just prepared her body to slink beneath the table where she knew Brittney to be so that she could gather the blonde into her arms and tell her that everything was going to be okay when a single, wheezing breath of ominous welcome from the red-headed, bespectacled boy in front of her sent a shuddering in a manner that had left her frozen once more…
"Hi, everybody!"
Jacob's voice filtered across her ears, remarkably distinct from the usual tone and stagnation that she had found herself so used to hearing from all of the times that she had simply stood idly by, listening to him cowering and whimpering in for mercy from yet another dumpster dive.
She could practically hear that voice in the back of her head right now… Soft and high pitched, pleading as he begged Santana's friends to spare him, just this once, tiny limbs flailing and red curls flapping in the wind as his pleas fell upon deaf ears…
This image circled across her mind, over and over again until she finally realized that every single memory that she had of Jacob Ben-Israel involved his resting within the pit of a dumpster… and suddenly, she understood what it was that was happening all around her right now.
Or more importantly, she understood why.
Theoretically, she had always known what it was that the consequences could be, what it was they could mean…
She had taken all of her required health classes; she had attended all of the assemblies and seminars warning the students of William McKinley High School against the potential dangers of bullying, but still… It was just difficult to believe the scope of the mistake that she had made – years in the making now – and the consequences that it had resulted in this time around.
They had all gotten in their laughs at Jacob Ben-Israel, while meanwhile the boy was left to pay with a defiled sense of pride and a couple destroyed articles of clothing… But ultimately, Jacob had gotten the last laugh on them all, and they were all left to pay with their lives…
It finally became starkly obvious to Santana, who the clear winner of this situation was here.
"Santana! Santana, come on!" The young Latina inhaled suddenly; a gasp of oxygen that she had damn near choked on as one of Brittney's multiple, frantic addresses towards her finally pulled her so rapidly from her thoughts that her brain scrambled between two distinct phases of thought for several seconds before the familiar blonde appeared directly in front of her, leaving her remarkably okay with being pulled fully back into this terrifying reality.
"Santana," The girl hissed in an abrupt whisper, grabbing her best friend by the shoulders in order to physically shake her from the daze that she had allowed herself to fall into.
"What are you doing?" Brittney asked the girl harshly, just as the Latina's muscles finally began to relax beneath her best friend's touch, her eyes dilating once more as the sudden rush of Cortisol that had previously entered her veins began diluting throughout her bloodstream.
"Come on, we have to hide!" Brittney insisted incessantly, achieving the goal by which she had entered this so blatantly dangerous mission to begin with as she grabbed Santana harshly by the shoulders and made her first harsh attempt towards pulling her downwards…
"No, please don't do it, please! No!"
Santana had every intention upon following her friend into hiding. She had every intention on saving the both of their lives from this seemingly imminent death, but then a voice rang out along the distance, familiar in all aspects other than the fact that it was currently pleading for mercy, begging for its life…
And suddenly, she found her muscles rendered, once again, positively useless, unable to cooperate with every action that her brain was currently yelling at her to perform.
"I can't do this…" She was hyperventilating, her breathing growing rapidly more and more ragged so that she could practically feel her face bluing from lack of oxygen. "I can't, Brittney, I can't!"
"It'll be okay, Santana…" Brittney whispered into the older girl's hair, a surprising calm beneath her voice as she squatted downwards until she was directly in front of Santana, the two lovers at an identical eye level. "I'll make sure that it's going to be okay; I promise."
Their eyes interlocked, laced together by Brittney's words of comfort, seeping through Santana's head to the point that even as the blast of a gunshot rang through her ears, even as the now familiar sound of a slug striking flesh indicated to her that whoever had previously been begging for his life had obviously failed to convince Jacob Ben-Israel that it had been anything worth saving, and even as newfound screams filtered over their heads, followed immediately by a scrambling that told Santana that there were people all across the cafeteria currently risking making a run for it, she still felt safe.
And she knew that she always would as long as Brittney continued to be the only thing that she ever looked at ever again.
Her heart swelled with the safety that she felt inside of Brittney's arms. Her eyes saw for the first time strictly focused upon the blue ocean's defined by the blonde's. And finally, her legs found the capacity to produce locomotion once again – as long as they followed her.
"What do we do, Britt?" She begged the girl before her, crouching below the cramped table, succumbing to the motion that her friends had been begging her to perform from the very beginning.
She was only vaguely aware of the fact that she was currently emphasizing the fact that she had placed absolutely all of her comfort and trust towards the blonde in front of her, vaguely aware of the fact that her sanity positively relied on Brittney's coming up with an effective solution towards their problem…
Which is why she was so relieved when she actually did.
Completely wordlessly, and with one swift motion, Brittney was able to tell Santana exactly what to do; reaching down, she grabbed at her fellow Cheerio's hand, interlacing their fingers together before squeezing as tightly as she possibly could, warmth sinking down throughout the innermost depths of her veins as she reciprocated the motion with the idea that she would never let go ever again.
A thunderous beat of her heart radiated with a pressure that sent vibrations down the entirety of the length of Santana's arm, transferring straight down through her fingertips and into Brittney's – a silent message that had sent them both turning into each other's eyes, pupils filled with a precisely even combination of both fear and doubt relaxing upon the contact in the silent promise that no matter what happened to them today, they would always wait for each other, they would always remain together, no matter what tried to separate them along the way.
And as much as neither of them particularly enjoyed it, the fact of the matter was that their wings had already been spread, now it was merely their hands, interlaced in order to hold each other down, that was leaving them stuck firmly on the ground, inhibiting one from taking without the other…
But Santana had quickly composited a sufficient theory towards the idea that she could never die if she simply never quit, so she pulled herself together, she decided that in that moment, she would live as if she would never live again, knowing that as long as her and Brittney stuck together, they would be alright…
So she took a leap, closed her eyes, crossed her fingers and hoped for the best as she leaned forward and pressed her lips firmly into Brittney's permanently entwining the two together in a measure that they both could only hope could last forever.
Bullets soared and swerved dramatically above their heads, ringing relentlessly amidst the screams of their fellow classmates, but in that moment, the two of them might as well have been sitting on a blanket in a picturesque summer night amidst a thunderous firework show… And in their bid for one final, fleeting moment of hopeless romanticism, they allowed themselves to believe in this ideal … For a little while, at least.
But nothing can last forever, especially not these seemingly most perfect of moments… Santana knew this just as much as the rest of them did, especially in regards to the fact that these moments had a tendency to end way before you're actually ready for them to.
It was an idea starkly prevalent to them all, especially Santana and Brittney as their lips slipped away from one another's, hands remaining firmly interlaced as they re-entered the world that they had actually managed to forget about for a few brief moments anyway…
But their forgetfulness only made their reminder that much more painful, a fact emphasized by the image of the senior co-captain of the Titan ice hockey team, Stephen Good, resting with his back pressed up against his girlfriend's chest as blood flowered from a bullet wound directly between his breastbone while mere feet in front of him, Azimo Addams lay motionless, his body eerily devoid of any signs of life.
Santana couldn't take her eyes off of him. It was as if she were waiting for something… a subtle motion of his back, rising in an indication of breath, a twitch of the hand, a groan escaping the back of his throat…
But it never came… She knew that it would never come, but still, she waited.
Beside her, she could feel Brittney tugging her body closer into her own, squeezing her hand gently where it rested firmly between them, but all Santana could manage in response was to gently reciprocate the motion of Brittney's palm beneath her clammy one, her eyes never leaving Azimo's prone form until finally, and very abruptly, a sudden movement directly adjacent to his still body distracted her attention effectively.
She saw Mercedes fly upwards from underneath their neighboring table before she'd heard the familiar, high-pitched wail of their male soprano, Kurt Hummel, and despite the fact that she couldn't actually see where he was sitting; there was no mistaking the unique nature of that voice…
"Mercedes, stop!"
The first thought that had rushed through Santana's mind was a notion of overpowering guilt; guilt towards the fact that she hadn't even noticed her two friends cowering beneath this table directly besides them, guilt towards the fact that she hadn't even considered them, haven't even considered anybody other than Brittney before this very moment…
This sense of remorse practically forced her head aside on its own accord; her neck naturally swiveling from side to side, desperate to pick up on any lingering traces of the other companions that she had left behind in their greatest moment of desperation without so much as realizing it…
There was Quinn, buried protectively beneath Puck's muscular bicep, Matt and Mike circled casually around them, and of course Brittney directly beside her…
But where were Tina and Artie? And where had Finn run off to so abruptly what seemed like so many hours ago although it couldn't have been more than five or ten minutes…? And okay, so she would never actually admit aloud to her final concern, but she couldn't help but notice that she hadn't seen hide or hair of Rachel Berry all lunch period.
But it was just as this guilt-ridden concern slowly began to filter deep down to within her very bones that it was transferred once again, this time upon one person and one person only – her body's prominent response towards her identification of the fact that Jacob Ben-Israel currently had his weapon pointed directly towards Mercedes' chest; arm steady, face neutral, body positively relaxed in his preparation to shoot to kill at a moment's notice.
He was going to shoot her. There was not a single doubt in Santana's mind that this deranged boy was going to shoot her so that now, the only question left to ask was whether or not Mercedes would be able to find it in her to withstand the blow.
"Please Jacob," Santana heard the air of her friend's pleas, barely emitting beyond a whisper so that Santana couldn't help but to compare the current feebleness of her voice to all of the times that she had heard the powerful belter nail the most impressive of ballads, hit all of the seemingly impossible high notes with a spot-on quality…
But right now, Mercedes merely sounded scared, uncharacteristically silenced, completely devoid of all of the confidence that Santana knew, that they all knew best defined their self-described diva.
"Please don't do this. Just walk away… there's still time, Jacob… Just walk away."
There was a single moment, a hesitating second in time in which it seemed as if the entire room was holding onto their breaths for dear life, just waiting to see what would come of this interaction, waiting for something, anything to happen at all.
And Santana was convinced that it had been this stillness, this thick quality brewing across the entirety of the length of the air surrounding them that had caused them all such a remarkable shock when suddenly, Kurt had jumped up from out of nowhere, scrawny limbs flailing and eyes squeezed tightly shut in his emphasis towards the fact that amidst this grand leap of faith that he was taking, he didn't want to see what the result would be.
"Mercedes, no!"
To Santana, the motions of time had suddenly sped up to a proportion that vaguely reminded her of a time in her childhood where she used to get a kick out of putting on movies and watching them in fast forward just to see how humorous her favorite characters looked moving in double time…
But there was absolutely nothing humorous about this; nothing humorous about an array of gunfire, especially when those rotating slugs were being plunged in tandem, straight into two of Santana's closest friends…
It was up until this exact moment, that Santana had actually been able to successfully retain her sanity… Up until watching two figures that had become so prominent in her life over the past year fall to the ground atop each other in a blubbering heap where she finally fell, forcing her mind back into that familiar state of regression; a catatonic no man's land identical to that by which she had experienced mere moments before, a blank stare that had left her mouth stammering incomprehensibly, her body moving completely void of her brain's instruction.
"No, no, no…" Santana muttered under her breath to herself, her body trembling as she scrambled to pull herself back out from underneath the confines of her lunch table once again, performing an awkward spider crawl back into the open cafeteria
"Oh God, I have to get out of here…" She muttered to herself the entirety of the time that she was shuffling backward. "Alguien por favor, sácame de aquí!"
"Santana, come back here!" She recognized the hiss of Brittney's command, masked beneath the cries of her remaining friends, all similar in their pleas for her to stop, to remain where she was…
But she merely ignored their calls, failed to adhere to any of their advices as she ducked underneath all of the hands reaching, yet failing to pull her back, grasping for any part of her body that they could grab onto but coming up with mere air each and every time.
But they didn't see it; they didn't understand as Santana understood that none of them were any safer underneath this damn lunch table than they would have been rotating circles around Jacob and Suzy, poking at them like sleeping bears with a neon sign that said "Shoot Me" dangling directly above their heads.
They were dead either way – and Santana's sharp personality preferred this inevitability to occur alongside her actually putting up a fight rather than simply standing idly by.
In her shuffling, she could feel the distance between Brittney and herself growing wider and wider with each extended inch, their arms, connected firmly between interlaced fingers, extending their maximum length until the joints of their shoulders screamed at them in protest and their hands slipped entirely away; fingertips slowly detaching so that at the exact second that they lost contact, Brittney hadn't even be able to decipher what it was that Santana was doing before she was praying for her to just come back to her already.
But Santana was beyond the realm of rational thought, she was beyond the point of adhering to the rest of her classmates' waiting it out policy, so instead of listening, she sustained her strict mindset of autopilot, crawling continuously towards the front door, eyes firmly affixed upon her good friends the entire time, heart pounding in her chest, swelling with every additional inch she achieved so that for a split second, she actually believed her motives to be successful, she actually believed that for her, freedom might just be a possibility…
And then she hit something solid; something that brought her sharply back towards reality so that in an instant, she realized that she hadn't made it nearly as far as she had initially believed herself to have had…
In fact, she would have been surprised if she'd made it any more than a single foot.
She was so close to Brittney, that she could have reached out and touched her, and she would have had it not been for the fear currently rendering her body frozen stiff, unable to move, unable to so much as breathe...
For the briefest of seconds, Santana's eyes deterred sideways, locking with the sparkling blue of Brittney's iris', glistening in her fear so that Santana already knew what, or more importantly, who was directly behind her without even having to look… so she chose not to.
After all, she didn't have to look down the barrel of a gun to know that it was currently facing her, in fact, she didn't want to, because she knew, if given the choice to decide what the last thing that she would ever see in her life would be, she would always pick Brittney's eyes, hands down.
But still, she couldn't help but to wish for one single, additional moment; at the very least, enough time to allow her to profess her undying love for the best friend that had supported her through her every hardship, the best friend that she was terrified to expose her true feelings to for fear that they would interfere with her reputation… her stupid reputation that didn't even matter anymore, not nearly as much as her love for Brittney did anyway.
She just wished that it hadn't taken her until her final, fleeting moment to realize this. She wished that she could stay longer, do more, see more, live more… But it became obvious to her in a split second that she would have sworn lasted hours that she couldn't, that she wouldn't, that it wasn't possible… not anymore, not ever again.
And Brittney had picked up on this; she had realized it all because she had seen it all… The smears created by the glistening, fresh blood of Kurt and Mercedes still shined brightly, hadn't even faded into that dull copper color yet before Jacob had targeted his next victim; Santana.
Brittney had already watched him accurately target two of her closest friends, and now that he had chosen his third in the form of a carefully aimed bullet being directed straight into her girlfriend's head, she recognized the fact that there was nothing that Brittney could possibly do to prevent this.
But more importantly, she recognized the fact that Santana needed her right now; that even if there was absolutely nothing that Brittney could possibly do to save her life, Santana still needed her; she needed her contact, she needed her comfort, she needed her eyes to remain upon her own; averted, poised, never breaking…
And they never did.
For Brittney and Santana, the world had slowed down to create an impossible speed that they would have been both content with spending the rest of their lives at.
There was nothing more than the two of them, transformed from beyond the depths of reality, connected with the mutual understanding that neither could so much as blink, just in case this happened to be the last split second that they would be given together here on this Earth.
In a fleeting moment of unconditional love and loyalty shared between the two teenagers, everything that they had ever feared, everything that they had ever been too afraid to share had vanished so that Santana's previous belief towards the idea that love was merely a weakness expressed by the foolish left her content to fall into the trap of becoming a hopeless weakling.
But nothing could ever last forever… Brittney knew that now.
It was a lesson that she had been taught abruptly; a lecture served with a flash of reality brought on by the spark of a gunshot; a reminder that beyond the façade of perfection, will always be a world full of things that are far too dark for anybody to ever truly comprehend.
She had watched the life dissipate from beyond the depths of Santana's eyes; that gentle nature that nobody but Brittney had ever managed to see behind her solid shell fading into nothingness.
She had felt the warm splash of blood, travelling an impressive distance to permanently stain Brittney's skin as it flooded in an endless river that originated from the base of Santana's skull, split in half with the force of the bullet.
She had identified with the notion that as Santana slumped dead directly besides her, she might as well have done exactly the same.
It took a long time for Brittney's body to register physical feeling again, but once it actually had, it had done so with such a storm of colors, a force that had nearly knocked her clear backwards, that the only thing that she could possibly think to do in order to keep her body upright was to hold onto the closest thing that she could possibly find – the dead body of her best friend, her lover – and pray to God that by some miracle, Santana, that any of them would actually be able to walk away from all of this still intact.
Brittney squeezed her eyes closed firmly; barely registering Jacob Ben-Israel's lingering form as he circled the circumference of the glee club lunch table like a hunting Great White, slowly evaluating which method of attack would be the best approach.
She willed this feeling, this unbearable pain rapidly settling deep down within the pit of her very stomach away before hesitating slightly with the understanding that it never would… And suddenly, she realized that in order to ever truly survive a tragedy, you had to allow yourself to lose control every once in a while.
So that was exactly what she did.
Clutching at the girl that she loved so desperately, terrified to let her go for fear that had she done so, she would never truly possess the power to bring her back from the world that she had since escaped to, the world that for Brittney, seemed impossible to comprehend…
But Brittney now knew that she didn't hold the capacity to argue with what fate had offered the two young lovers so that all at once, she found herself left impossibly angry with time itself for choosing to wait until the very last second to allow her to come to this realization. So she fought it; she begged, and she pleaded with the very clock to give her a mere second to act upon this sudden, mutual understanding…
But it didn't; and she knew that she shouldn't have expected it to; after all, it never did anything to her benefit, but still, she sobbed relentlessly, tears streaking her cheeks, highways of rainfall marking their territory in a perfectly straightened pathway across her face without a single regard towards who could see her, who could hear her…
And finally, she prayed, however worthless her words might have been, for the one girl that had ever managed to teach her what it meant to love and to be loved in return to come back and remind her of this fact before she forgot all over again…
No matter how impossible she now knew that to be.