Prompt: What does it really feel like to be a ghost?
Title is taken from the Tegan and Sara song.
Danielle Sugg-Lopez died on a Friday. It was abrupt, an accident, and Dani felt like it was just a dream.
A flash of blinding light, then nothing. Then she woke up beside the love of her life like usual.
But it wasn't like usual. Dani was confused when she leaned to touch Santana and give the girl a good morning kiss, but found that her hand slipped right through the Latina. What the fuck? was her first concrete thought.
After that, things made a lot more sense. She was dead, and it was her ghost - spirit, entity? Whatever - that stayed with her family.
It had been fourteen months since Danielle Sugg-Lopez died. For fourteen months, she watched her family try to cope with her loss. She watched Santana cry throughout the nights. She watched her son slowly regress into depression. She watched as Santana tried to keep her memory alive to their infant that would never know Dani.
She watched it all happen, and she couldn't do anything about it. That fact hurt a thousand times more than dying.
xoxo
Brittany came to the Sugg-Lopez family as abruptly as Dani's death. In a typical cliche movie scene type coincidence, Santana bumped into the tall blonde dancer in a convenience store.
Santana had had her eyes trained into her grocery list, with one and a half year old Kathryn wailing from her seat in the cart. Brittany was browsing the contents of the top shelf. The two of them collided, and it really was a cliche.
Dani watched it happen.
She didn't know how long she cried.
xoxo
Tristan had hated Brittany at first sight. Dani loved her eleven year old boy because of it. He was loyal to his mother, and outright loathed the idea of replacing Dani.
But there were times when Tristan couldn't help but be swayed by Brittany's charm. The dancer could relate to him in more ways than Dani ever could.
And she was alive. Brittany was alive and making Dani's family happy.
Brittany was making Santana happy.
xoxo
When Santana began to cry in her sleep again, it had become a mantra of sorry to Dani. The Latina felt like she was betraying her dead wife.
Dani agreed with her.
xoxo
It was three months after that day at the convinience store that Brittany finally worked up the courage to ask Santana out.
She had been patient. She had been understanding. She had been supportive.
Dani wanted to slap her.
xoxo
Dani felt like an intruder in her own family.
Tristan still had moments where he missed his real mom. Kathryn was growing up with the dancer being the one at her side. And Santana still cried her mantra at night.
Dani felt her dead heart breaking even more at the sight of her family being torn apart again.
She wanted them to be happy. Really, that was all.
And if it was Brittany who made them happy, Dani knew she just had to suck it up and support them.
So she sat next to a crying Santana at night and laid her hand on her wife's shoulder. She knew Santana couldn't feel or hear her. It didn't matter. She had to say it.
"I'm setting you free," she whispered. "I want you to stay strong and be happy. I'm setting you free."
As if she could hear her, Santana's sobbing stopped. She turned and looked at Dani's eyes. Well, past Dani's eyes. She stared at the picture of them on the wall.
"I love you, Dani," Santana stated honestly. "I'm so sorry and I love you. But I think I love Brittany now too."
Dani couldn't help the sad smile that spread on her face. "I know."
xoxo
The wedding took place five years after Dani's death.
Brittany was smiling.
Tristan was smiling.
Kathryn was smiling.
Santana was smiling.
Dani was at peace, finally. She was smiling as the light consumed her, and gave her soul its eternal slumber.
Her family was happy. That was all that ever mattered.