It doesn't take you long to get to sleep that night. When you close your eyes all you see are visions of Brittany; past, present and future. You can see her at five years old playing with you in the sandbox, you see her at fifteen looking vulnerable and naked the first time you slept with her, you see her at twenty-five with a ring sitting perfectly on her finger. Each and every thought you have is of Brittany, and it soothes you and keeps you warm like a blanket. You fall asleep with ease, a smile on your face.

All your dreams are of Brittany, too, but you don't even realise you're dreaming until you're awoken from your sleep by something that is far too noisy for this time of night. When you come to your senses you realise it's coming from your apartment door, the metallic knocking ringing in your ears. It is persistent and loud, and you sigh to yourself as you pull back the blankets and get out of bed to open it.

"Kurt, for God sake what have I told you about leaving your key in the apartment when you go out!" you shout at him as you walk to the door. "How hard is it to just put the goddamn thing in yo-"

You stop talking mid sentence when you open the door to see Dani standing there in a state you've never, ever seen her before. She looks like she hasn't stopped crying since she left earlier, she's extremely drunk, and her clothes are dirty like she's fallen over more than once. Your first instinct is to get her in your apartment so the neighbours won't come out and complain. Your second instinct is to yell at her, but you're aware that it's the middle of the night so you keep your voice hushed.

"Dani, what the hell?" You look her up and down as she wobbles on the spot where she's just about standing.

She looks at you and shakes her head. "I loved you, no, I love you. I need you, babe. I can't-" She stops herself when she stumbles to the side, almost falling over. You rush to her side to hold her up, you don't want to have to deal with her injuring herself.

"Let's get you sitting down, huh?" you say, guiding her to the sofa. "Don't want you hurting yourself."

Dani laughs mirthlessly. "Bit late for me getting hurt, isn't it?"

You don't reply, just help her to the seat and make sure she sits down. "I'm going to get you a glass of water."

"Why are you acting like you still care?" she says, her speech slurring slightly. "You don't care about me. Or you wouldn't have done this."

You pour her a glass of water and bring it over to her, placing it in her hands. "I do," you tell her. "I do care about you. Trust me, I do. But, it's not fair on either of us to be in a relationship when I'm in love with someone else."

"Don't you dare talk to me about fair! Fair would have been you telling me you loved her from day one, before we even started dating! Fair would have been breaking up with me after our third date! Not almost four months, Santana. Four months!"

"I know. I know, and I'm sorry. I thought I could get over her, I honestly thought I could. I thought I could love you."

"All those times you told me you did. Were you lying?" Dani asks.

"I… I don't know," you tell her, and god, you wish you could just go to bed. "I loved spending time with you, I loved laughing with you, I loved things about us. But I don't think I loved you. So, maybe I did lie."

"I didn't," she says, with conviction. "I didn't lie, and I'm not lying now. Why can't we just try one more time, baby?"

You see the pain in her eyes, and you feel awful for doing this to her but your heart just doesn't lie with her. "There's no point, Dani. It's always going to be her."

"You could learn to forget her. You could! I could help you, we could get you over her together," Dani's tone turns to begging. "Just please give me one more chance." She's crying now.

You know what it feels like to be told no by the girl you love. "No," you say, firmly. "I'm in love with Brittany. Dani, I'm going to go to bed now because you're drunk and you need to sleep."

"I'm not-" she begins to protest.

"You are. I'll get you a blanket and you can sleep here. I'm not making you go home right now." You look at the clock. "God, Dani, it's half four in the morning. Just… get some sleep, and when you wake up in the morning you can get your stuff and go."

"I don't want to say goodbye to you," she cries. You know she's given up. She's accepted it.

"We all have to do things we don't want to do sometimes," you tell her. She breaks into a new round of sobbing, and you walk away. It's all you can do really, you can't attach yourself to her or she'll get the wrong idea. She has to let you go.

As you lie in bed, you can still hear her quietly crying on your sofa. You lie awake, not listening to her cry so much as you want to make sure she doesn't do something stupid like trash your apartment in the middle of the night. After about ten minutes the crying quietens until, a few minutes later, there's silence. You know she's fallen asleep, and you allow yourself to do the same.

It doesn't feel like you've even slept at all when your alarm goes off four hours later. You groan as you roll over to hit it off. Then you remember that your ex-girlfriend is sleeping on your couch. You groan even louder.

The blanket that was draped over her the night before now lies abandoned on the ground beside the sofa, you can see it from your room. You get up to see if she's still even there. When you get to the door of your room you can see that she is, and by the looks of things she has no intention of waking up any time soon. You take advantage of the fact, and start to pack up all of Dani's things that had somehow taken up residence in your apartment. It's weird that you don't even remember half of these things being brought over, but somehow they've ended up here.

Twenty minutes later, you have a bag of clothes, and a box of odds and ends - books, DVDs, make-up - ready for Dani to take when she wakes up. You decide not to wake her. Being hungover is bad enough without being woken up four hours after you've stopped drinking.

You make a cup of coffee to try to wake yourself up enough to face this day, and the inevitable drama that's going to happen when Dani wakes, and sobers, up. She must hear you in the kitchen because she stirs and sits up, rubbing her eyes, confused.

"How did I…?" she asks, looking around.

"You turned up at my door at four a.m.," you tell her. "You were a mess, I didn't want to send you home."

She looks down at her clothes, noting the state they're in. "I'm sorry," she says quietly. "I didn't mean to. I'm just… It's just hard, Santana."

You decide she could use a cup of coffee too, so you pour a second. "I know. But it's for the best," you tell her, taking her the coffee. She mutters a quiet thanks. "This was inevitable. It was always going to happen. Even if Britt didn't want to get back together, it would always have been her. I was just trying to convince myself it wasn't so I could move on."

"I think I might be like that for a while," Dani admits. "With you."

You give her a sad smile. "In this great big world, Dani, I am not the be all and end all of your relationships. There's a girl out there somewhere who's gonna love you more than you can even imagine right now. She's gonna be everything you could ever want, and more after that. Trust me, you'll find her. You're hot property in the lesbian market," you joke. "Look at you! You're not gonna be single for long."

Reluctantly, she gives you a laugh. "I guess you're right," she says, taking a sip of coffee. "I am pretty hot."

"You'll be okay."

"We can be friends, right?" she asks, timidly. "I mean, I still wanna know what's happening in your life, even if I'm not really a part of it anymore."

"I'd like that," you tell her. "I don't have many decent friends in New York. We'll give each other space for a while and then see if the friends thing can work."

"I hope it will," Dani says, with a smile. She drinks the rest of her coffee and gets up off the sofa. "I guess I'll pack my stuff up and go."

"It's all ready for you, beside the door." She looks slightly hurt. "I just didn't want you to have to do it yourself with a hangover."

She smiles. "My head is pretty sore." She lifts the box and grabs the bag with her other hand. "Little help with the door?"

You open it for her, and you're grateful that her arms are full with her stuff so you don't have to awkwardly hug her. "Goodbye, Santana," she says with finality.

"Bye, Dani," you reply. There's a split second where Dani just smiles at you and then she makes her way out of your building. She doesn't look back.

Twenty minutes later, you're seriously considering going back to bed for a few hours when the same metallic knocking comes from your door. You reluctantly pull yourself away from the TV, sighing the whole way to the door. You pull it open without even as much as a smile.

"Hi," is the first thing you hear, and your whole body wakes up. You understand what she meant in the choir room when she kissed you.

"Britt!" you exclaim, rushing forward to wrap your arms around her, and kiss her. "What are you doing here?! You're supposed to be at MIT!"

She looks at you proudly. "I quit."

"You.. what?! Britt, you quit MIT?!" You can't believe it.

"It wasn't good for me. It wasn't what I wanted," she tells you. "Or what I needed."

You're so happy to see her, you just kiss her again instead of speaking.

"Not that I don't love all this attention you're showering me with," she says against your lips."But would it be possible for us to do this inside?" Brittany asks. "I feel like the neighbours are gonna spy on us."

You pull away, laughing. "I'm just happy to see you," you defend. "Let me get your bag."

Once she's inside you realise she hasn't been to your apartment before. You've lived here nearly a year and this is the first time she's been here. It blows your mind a little.

"Want a tour?" you ask her, noticing her looking around.

"It's cute," she says. "Very New York. But the tour can wait. I just want to be close to you for a while first."

Your heart melts. After this long you'd think you'd be immune to it, but it's like it affects you more each time. "Let's go to my room," you say, taking her hand. It's twenty steps from the door to your room, twenty five max, but you're not going to deny yourself holding her hand for even a second when you've spent a year trying to remember how it feels. From the way she looks at you, you can tell she feels the same.

You both climb onto the bed, and just like second nature, Brittany rests her head on your lap as you sit up against the headboard. Your fingers find her hair automatically and start playing with it unconsciously. "Britt, I can't believe you quit MIT!"

"I had no intentions of going back," she says, looking up at you. "Even before we came back to say goodbye to Mr. Schue for what feels like the millionth time, I had no intentions of going back. I kept up the work and kept up the front, just in case, but as soon as I saw you and you saw me - I mean, not like the others did, but when you properly saw me - I knew I couldn't go back. That was it."

"Don't tell me you left MIT for me, Britt," you say. You don't want to be responsible for her giving up something so huge.

"I did it for me," she reassures you. "It wasn't the place for me. They were acting like what I was doing was hard, when every day all I did was show up and work out these equations for no reason. It was pointless. Nothing mattered. It wasn't like McKinley where we had an assembly or regionals to perform in, or a cheer competition to work for. It was just numbers."

"That sounds awful."

"I thought it would get better, but it was just the same all the time. Nothing ever changed. Then you came back to Lima and it was like you'd plugged me back in after my batteries had gone flat. You recharged me."

You don't know what else to do than to lean down and kiss her forehead.

"I felt more alive in those few days in Lima than I did in months at MIT and that's when I knew I had to leave."

"But you told me yesterday you were going back," you remind her.

She smirks. "It wouldn't have been much of a surprise, me showing up here, if I'd told you I was coming, would it?"

You laugh. "Okay, I guess not."

Brittany suddenly looks more serious. "When I asked you if you wanted to get back together, I was terrified. I didn't know anything about your life here or your life with your girlfriend." She looks shy. "I'm sorry I kissed you while you were dating someone. You know how much I hate cheating."

"I know."

"But I'm not sorry for kissing you. I just… I needed to. I needed to remind myself of how it felt, how you felt." You know that feeling. It's why you held her hand earlier. It's why you're running your fingers through her hair now.

"I'm glad you did," you admit. "I was terrified, too. I was terrified that you'd moved on. I didn't know how you felt and that terrified me. I tried to get over you, I tried to encourage you to date because I wanted to do what was best for you if you'd already gotten over me. But deep down it was killing me thinking of you starting to date someone else."

Brittany looks you right in the eye and says, "How do you think I've felt for the past four months?"

You know she doesn't mean it harshly. She doesn't mean it to make you feel guilty. She genuinely just wants you to know how she's felt while you were dating Dani. You give her a sad smile. "I guess I didn't think of it like that."

"I'd go on Facebook and you'd have uploaded more photos of both of you on a night out, or you'd check in at your apartment saying it was date night with a selfie of you both. Every time, I just kept thinking that could have been us. It would have been me with you if I hadn't have had to stay back an extra year in school."

You swallow to stop yourself from crying. "Hey, we can't think like that, not now. We can't look at the 'what ifs' in the past, we have to look at the 'what nows?'"

"Well then... what now?" Brittany asks you.

"I just want every day to be like this," you tell her sincerely. "Just like this. Just us. Together."

"You don't even know if I'm staying here," Brittany laughs. "What if I don't want to move to New York?" she says, more seriously.

You panic. Have you been moving too quickly? After all, you both said you needed to discuss things before you got back together properly. And here you are basically asking her to marry you before you're even properly together again. You still haven't answered, but Brittany's laughter breaks the silence.

"I do, though," she says. "Want to move to New York." You relax slightly. "If that's okay?" And you feel like you need to tell her that she doesn't need your permission to move to the city. The city is big enough for both of you. But you know she's asking if she can move in with you. And you don't know if you can say yes - even though you want to - because, at the end of the day, this apartment is Kurt's, too.

"I'd love you to," you admit. "But we need to run it past Kurt first." You stroke your fingers along the side of her cheek. "I have no idea where he is right now, he didn't come home last night. But when he does, I'll talk it over with him and explain to him why it's a totally wonderful idea."

"Really?" She looks at you like she doesn't want to believe it could happen, just in case it doesn't.

"Really."

She taps her lips with her fingers motioning for you to kiss her. You laugh and oblige. "We're not doing very well at this 'discussion before things get serious' thing, are we?" you say.

"But we're discussing now. And I think we're doing a really good job. Usually by now you'd have, like, one item of clothing left on. If any."

You can't help but laugh at how accurate that is. "If any," you echo with a wink. "I think we should have tha talk now though, somewhere less… distracting."

"You mean, somewhere where I'm not lying in your lap."

"That's exactly what I mean," you giggle. "C'mon, up!" you say, moving your legs to force Brittany to move. "Sofa."

"Can we eat first? I'm starving."

And as you get up off your bed to make your way to the kitchen, you laugh to yourself and shake your head, because it doesn't matter how many things change, or how much times passes, Brittany is always going to be Brittany, and you're always going to love her with everything you have.

Quick A/N: I'm going to Scotland until the 12th April, so the next update might take a little longer, but it will come! Just be patient :) p.s. the timeline has been changed - let's just say Dantana lasted four months. Glee's timeline is shitty.