Totally shameless plug for other glee hilarity and nonsense I've written, if you'd like to see Sue duel someone in one of my fics, I suggest Lord Tubbington: Private Eye. I love writing Sue. Also a lot of you mentioned you enjoy the Santana/Mercedes friendship, if you want more of that, then definitely check out The Ark: Is It a Crime? Both of those fics are what I would consider ensemble pieces with lots of glee characters in funny situations, similar to this story.

Once again, thank you everyone sending reviews or PMs or reblogging the posters on tumblr or just reading. I'm having a great time writing this and reading your reactions.

Now we return to…

DJ Snowflake and Scrooge

December 17
11:03 pm

Last Christmas I gave you my heart
The very next day you gave it away

I'll be home for Christmas
You can count on me

Sir, I wanna buy these shoes,
For my mama please

"Okay, Britt. I was fine when you played Wham! It's a classic and it has a nice beat. Really it's a great song – no problem. I was okay when you played that total downer about not making it back for Christmas, but really, Britt? Christmas Shoes? That's what you're going with?" Holly rolled her eyes into the back of her head and groaned obnoxiously. "You're killing me, Snowflake!"

"You don't have to listen." Brittany spoke into her microphone and smashed a button on the dashboard. She had at least five callers on the line and she had a feeling none of them were Santana. The red lights kept blinking, but she hadn't answered a single call yet.

"Brittany, I know you're a little upset about this whole thing, but Scrooge is the best thing that's ever happened to this station. I need you to pull it together, play along with your fans, and answer some calls."

"It's been two nights and all they do is ask for Scrooge."

"So give Scrooge a reason to call!" Holly frantically suggested. "Give the listeners and yourself what you want!"

Brittany glanced down at the red blinking lights once again.

"Caller! You're on the air wit-"

The person on the other line cut Brittany off and immediately asked their question. "When's Scrooge calling in? My friend said this show's hilarious but all I've heard are Christmas songs and oth-"

Brittany dropped the call and shot Holly a look of exasperation through the glass window.

Santana leaned over Doris's desk and furrowed her brow in concentration. It was late, dark, and eerily quiet in the town records. Santana knew her uneasiness had nothing to do with being alone or the fact it was dark. She did that most nights. It was the silence, which she normally penetrated with the sound of the radio, that made her shoulder blades pinch and her mind wander when she wanted to focus.

After the night at Mercedes' house, Santana woke up early in the morning and found her car where she parked it and drove back to Hummel's Bed and Breakfast.

She had ignored Kurt's insistence that he could make her feel better with a cup of special (Bailey's) coffee or that she could talk to him. She had also ignored Mercedes's messages that ranged from compassionate to tough love.

But after a day spent with only the portraits of Rachel Berry as companions, Santana had been going stir crazy. It was much better to work and find a way to register Hummel's Bed and Breakfast. The sooner she found something to give Kurt and Burt, the sooner she could get out of this town.

Santana ran down her handwritten notes on the Hummel's Bed and Breakfast from the 1890s, a few decades before Rachel had been born. But there was no connection she could make between the Berry family and what at the time had been the Hummel's inn. She needed at least fifty years to separate Rachel's significance from present day.

Santana scanned over the documents she printed out for the tenth time: "properties that have achieved significance within the past 50 years shall not be considered eligible for the National Register."

But did it apply to persons of significance? Could Rachel even be considered a person of significance for her Christmas music?

What was so great about Christmas music anyway?

Santana glanced up again to the radio on Doris's desk and frowned. Obviously, she shared a different opinion on the whole matter from the rest of the town. Brittany was probably laughing at her little prank from the lighting ceremony on the air.

Fuck it.

She dropped her pencil to her notepad and leaned across the desk.

"This is DJ Snowflake and you're rocking to all of your favorite holiday hits until Christmas morning on WMHS 97.3. Now before I get into my next song, I want you to know that I won't be taking any more requests until Scrooge calls in. That way you can all stop asking me what went down at the tree lighting. Let me tell you, nothing went down and it wasn't a gimmick or something we planned at the show. I um-"

Santana lowered herself back into her chair in complete disbelief. What the hell was Brittany doing?

"I'm sure you're all wondering how I'm going to know it's Scrooge calling me. Well one time – Scrooge told me that the number I had been giving out to all my listeners was the wrong number. Well I hope she's listening now because only she has the right number to call in now. It's the only number that matters to me. I hope she'll give me a second chance, but until then, I am shutting down all of the call-in numbers to the studio."

Santana couldn't believe what she had just heard. Brittany wanted to "give her a second chance?" A second chance for what?

All she could remember was the way everyone seemed to know they were DJ Snowflake and Scrooge. And yet it was Brittany who looked more surprised that Santana when Sugar started yelling about DJ Snowflake and Scrooge. Maybe Mercedes had been right? She looked down at her notepad and leafed through the top twenty pages or so until she found what Brittany had scribbled on at the bed and breakfast.

Brittany

570-953-4213

Brittany switched her mic off and played the next song.

"Brittany…what are you doing?" Holly quickly asked.

"You said to do something to get Santana to call in."

"I said get Scrooge to call in! That's what the advertisers want."

"I'd rather talk to Santana. We have the advertisers."

"We have two! Only two advertisers. That's enough to make the New Year, but February? March? We need more and lasting advertisers and this is the way to get them."

"Holly – I just can't keep being DJ Snowflake if I know that I ruined someone's Christmas. I don't care if she's Scrooge or not. You should have seen her face." Brittany fiddled with the cord attached to her headset. "I'm sorry, Hol-"

Her pocket started vibrating. Brittany jerked forward in her chair and lost her balance. Her headset tilted over her face and toppled onto her dashboard. She ripped her cell phone from her jeans.

Unknown

Brittany looked up at Holly, but without her headset, she couldn't hear what her boss said. Her heart beat a little faster. Did Santana hear her announcement? Had she been listening?

Jingle bells. Brittany dropped her head a little. That meant Santana had probably heard the hundreds of calls about Scrooge the past two nights.

The slide on her phone didn't connect at first. Brittany ran her finger over her phone a dozen more times before it picked up.

Uncertainty and hope interwove into her voice. "Santana?"

"You know...it's not fair that you can say anything you want on the air and I just become some crazy Scrooge lady when I don't call in. Who not only doesn't want to listen to Christmas songs, but now is stopping everyone else from making a request for whatever they want to hear."

Taken aback, Brittany struggled for words to defend herself. "That's not what-"

"Well what else could you have possibly wanted?"

This time Brittany knew exactly how to answer because she knew exactly what she wanted. "I just wanted to talk to you."

The sincerity and quickness in Brittany's answer halted Santana's assault. She paused. It was just enough time for Brittany to try to explain. "I didn't know you were Scrooge or that I would see you at the tree lighting. I mean I wanted to see you. I just wasn't expecting that. I swear on all of Santa's reindeer, I would have done something different."

"Oh like dedicate more songs to me?" Santana bit into Brittany's apology and shook her head. This had been a bad idea. She should have taken Mercedes' offer for a cd player and turned off the radio completely. "I don't even know why I called."

"I don't either, but –" Brittany allowed herself to genuinely smile for the first time since the debacle at the town square. "I'm really happy you did. I didn't want to leave things like we did."

"Oh you mean leave it at the mob of fans screaming your name and running after you - us?" Santana asked with more than a touch of sarcasm. "Because I didn't even know people listened to your ridiculous Christmas talk show until I was fleeing from them."

"Yeah, but you listened to it." Brittany lightly teased.

"Because it was the only thing on, Snowflake." Santana quickly snapped and said her name like she would if she was calling to complain about the song selection.

"You know…" Brittany couldn't help her smile. There was something in the way Santana said Snowflake that made it different than the hundreds of times she had been called that the past two days. Her voice had a way of deepening and adding emotions and memories Brittany only shared with her the past two weeks. It felt like a life time. "You can just call me Brittany now."

"I'm not sure what I'm calling you now."

"You can call me anything, as long as you call me again." Brittany suggested.

"I haven't decided if I'm going to do either." Santana threatened, but her tone was much different from when they had started their conversation.

"Hey, could you hold on a second? I need to change the song, but don't hang up, okay?" Brittany waited, but Santana remained silent. "Please, Santana?"

After a moment more of reluctance, Santana simply answered. "Fine."

"That was Amy Grant's Sleigh Bells and now here is Josh Groban singing Believe."

Brittany barely gave the song an introduction before she flipped her headset back to the dash and put her cell phone to hear ear again. "Still there?"

"Maybe." Santana answered the same way she had at the bed and breakfast.

"I'm gonna be honest...I pictured you as something totally different."

"You mean you're disappointed that I'm not a nasty old Scrooge woman?"

"I don't know if disappointed is the word I would use for it. I definitely thought you would be crouched over with a scowl on your face. And maybe you would be telling your employees they couldn't go home for Christmas. I definitely didn't think you'd be scrunching your nose taking notes in a bed and breakfast." Brittany smiled playfully. "And I definitely didn't think I'd be trying to get your lips to do more than a song request."

Heat erupted through Santana's body as Brittany instantly switched from playful to direct. Santana hadn't been sure she was going to stay on the line a moment ago. With only a few words from Brittany, Santana couldn't imagine herself hanging up.

"You can think about my lips all you want, but you're still not going to get a song request from them - no matter how many different ways you ask."

The pause between them wrapped around Santana's words. The challenge in the air remained for only a second longer before Santana could silently hear Brittany accept it. Without saying anything, Brittany made it clear she would do anything necessary to get what she wanted. Santana would have been lying if she didn't admit she looked forward to the effort.

Brittany shifted the conversation. "So, you know I have to ask. Why don't you like Christmas?"

"I have to have a reason?"

"You do realize you are the now infamous Scrooge of Midtown? You fought me over every song I played and complained about repeat songs when I only have a limited playlist to work from. There has to be a reason."

"What? I have to have some traumatic childhood experience?" Santana rolled her eyes. "Not everything has some deep back story. I just –" Santana leaned back in her chair and stared up at the ceiling. " – I just haven't had a reason to like it. It's full of hypocrites and shopping and families pretending they're happy. I mean this town's only claim to fame is Rachel Berry, a Jewish girl, who left to make it big on Broadway and instead ended up recording an album for a holiday she doesn't even celebrate and from everything I've learned about her in the past two weeks, she could never shake that label. She was and will always be associated with Christmas. If that's not cruel irony, I don't know what is."

Brittany didn't say anything at first and Santana assumed that she had a revolutionary effect on her. Maybe Brittany had never thought of the terrible cruel joke of Rachel's life.

"Yes, it was pretty ironic how her life worked out, but –" Brittany agreed, but she continued. "-have you read anywhere in all of that research that she complained? Or regretted it? Sometimes I think life likes to throw snowballs at us to see if we're going to duck or if we're going to get hit, laugh, and throw one back. I think it's much harder to take what you're given and transform it into something else. It's definitely a risk."

Santana swallowed hard. The DJ had quite literally stolen away any of her objections to the Christmas season and specifically Rachel Berry. She didn't know Brittany could be so articulate for a woman who spent most of her night saying the same words over and over again: WMHS 97.3, Christmas, song requests, and snowflake. Once again, Brittany had caught her off guard.

Unnerved by the way Brittany had exposed her to a different perception, Santana deflected. "So you're saying people should just enjoy getting hit by a random snowball?"

Whether Brittany knew she had an effect on Santana, she didn't reveal it. Instead Santana could practically feel the way the DJ's mouth curved into a smile on the other end of the phone. "Or a random snowflake."

At Brittany's playful suggestion, Santana rolled her eyes. "I guess I've just never had a reason to enjoy a snowball or a snowflake before."

"Maybe we can change that…" Brittany glanced down to the time. "Give me a second. I need to announce the next song. Okay?"

Brittany couldn't wait for Santana's response. She quickly switched her mic on and projected her voice over the broadcast. "Hope you're enjoying this extra long set of Christmas music brought to you by our sponsor Motta's Automotive! Here is our very own Rachel Berry and her version of O Tannenbaum from her first Christmas album."

She barely switched the song before she had the cell phone back to her ear.

"Santana?"

But nothing came back.

Santana had hung up.

Brittany puffed out a sigh. "Jingle bells."

It was the second time she swore that night.

Tap Tap

Brittany looked up. Holly gave her a conciliatory smile. She touched the side of her eye, then placed her finger over her heart before she pointed to Brittany. A soft smile graced Brittany's lips at Holly's attempt to cheer her up. She placed her headset back on her head. "I heart you too, Holls."

"You never know, Britt. She could call back. I think you guys are more electric like that than you are as DJ Snowflake and Scrooge."

"Ha." Britt shrugged it off. "I know you want DJ Snowflake back."

The red light on her dashboard flashed with one caller.

She had promised her listeners that she would start taking requests if Scrooge called in. It was time to keep her promise. Brittany waited until the end of the song before she pressed the button down.

"You're on the air with WMHS 97.3! What song can I play for you?"

"You're still not going to get a request from me, but maybe I wouldn't mind getting hit by a snowball or a snowflake again."

The call cut off before Brittany could say another word. Her pout instantly transformed to a smile she couldn't contain. She looked over to Holly who was waving her hands in excitement in her office.

"This next one goes out to everyone looking for second chances and a sign that everything's going to be alright!" Her voice once again bounced with joy and energy.

It's the most wonderful time of the year
With the kids jingle belling
And everyone telling you "Be of good cheer"
It's the most wonderful time of the year
It's the hap-happiest season of all
With those holiday greetings and gay happy meetings