Chapter Text
Joining Cheerios is a risky enough move – Sue tells her so on her eighteenth first day of high school, even if the tyrant was the one who told her to put in the uniform in the first place – but joining Glee is pretty much going to end up being the final nail in the coffin.
Sue pulls her into what Santana has dubbed “The Trophy Office” and berates her for most of the school day, screaming about being irresponsible and being stupid and Santana sits there with her legs crossed and her hands over her knee, patiently waiting until, eventually, Sue takes a deep breath and sits down in her chair, leaning forward with her palms flat on her desk.
“Lopez,” she hisses, “this just might be the stupidest thing you’ve done this decade.”
Santana nods in agreement, but leans closer to the desk, too, unable to hide the excitement in her eyes. “But Glee. It’s actually happening.”
Sue shakes her head, scowling. “It’s dangerous.”
“I need this,” Santana says, suddenly seeing red. “I’ve been hanging around for years and finally, there’s a Glee club that actually has potential. The last time, if we had won Regionals…”
“I know,” Sue says, resigned. “If Shcuester hadn’t flubbed that line during ‘Staying Alive’ you would have gotten out of here. That pile of hair gel has always been useless.”
Impassioned, Santana rises out of her seat, staring down at Sue with a glare the Coach doesn’t back down from. “I joined, which is really only your fault,” she points out, “and I’m staying with it. And we’re going to win.”
She turns towards the door, her skirt spinning up behind her in pleats, her ponytail bouncing with intention. “And when we do,” she adds as she pulls the door, her face slipping into the all too-familiar scowl she’s had years to perfect, “I’m going to move on, once and for all.”
---
Every four years, Santana stands in front of William McKinley with the rest of the acne-riddled, over-excited, nervous freshman class, staring up at whatever Principal they have this year, bored out of her mind as they are given a speech written long before Santana’s first first day of high school.
She’s done this too many times to count now. (That’s a lie; she keeps a mental tally in her head and this is the fourth time she’s been a freshman at William McKinley High School.)
Every four years, she enrolls in the same classes – some with the same teachers as the first time she did this – and makes friends with the same type of people and dates the same type of boys. It’s a never-ending cycle of an endless dream.
This time, though, something feels different.
For the first time since she died, in 1992, this feels like the year she’ll break the cycle; this feels like the year she won’t have keep coming back to this same place and play these same games.
This time, she thinks she has a shot of getting out.
---
Sue, younger and a little less angry about everything, figures out her secret immediately. Sixteen, scared and not used to this ghost thing, Santana lurks in dark corners and avoids making eye contact with people, afraid that they’ll recognize her.
They don’t; it’s a weird side effect. Every time she restarts high school, it’s like no one even remembered she just graduated.
Sue, though, who probably made a pact with the Devil at some point in her youth, puts two and two together as quickly as it takes Santana to realize that she can’t walk through walls, which is quickly. She pulls the scared teenager into her very dull, trophy-less office and stares at her across her small, metal desk.
Santana isn’t sure what to think, because she’s always steered clear of Sue Sylvester.
Even in 1992, Sue Sylvester is a force to be reckoned with and if Santana was afraid of her alive, she’s even more afraid of her dead.
“So, Lopez. I see you went and got yourself killed.”
And if she weren’t so scared, Santana would be furious. It wasn’t like she asked for it. It wasn’t as if she begged those group of boys to toss her around like a ragdoll. She didn’t want this; it just happened.
Sue must see the fury in her eyes, because she lifts her hands defensively. “Okay, spitfire, relax. I was just saying.” The older woman shakes her head a few times. “Want to explain to me what you’re doing here? We all saw the body. It was in the papers.” Her voice is matter-of-fact and Santana can't find it in her to take offense to it.
Santana has been asking the same question since she woke up and looked down at herself, broken and bruised and bloodied on the sidewalk. She’s been asking herself that since she stumbled home to see her parents collapsed on the front porch, clutching each other while a policeman stood, uncomfortable, nearby. She’s been asking herself that since she decided to just go back to school and no one paid her any attention, just like the day before, when she alive.
“I don’t know,” she says honestly, staring at anywhere but Sue. “I just didn’t know where else to go.”
There’re a few minutes of silence until Sue nods and stands, pushing her metal chair across the floor with a loud scrape. “Well, Lopez. You can’t keep wearing that hideous outfit.” She rummages through an open box on the side of her desk, pulling out something and throwing it at Santana who barely catches it. “Here, put these on and report to the football field after school.”
She joins the Cheerios for the first time in 1992 and slips back into Glee completely unnoticed.
She moves in with Sue and they spend the rest of the school year trying to figure out what happened.
---
In ’94, she gets so close to what she thinks might be moving on.
They’re on stage at Regionals and even if they’re best shot at winning – Bryan Ryan, with his voice of an angel – has graduated, Will Schuester has grown into his own right.
They have a shot at winning if they can get through “Staying Alive” and it’s halfway through the song that Santana feels it.
She knows the big lights on the stage are white and bright, but the heat coming off them feels different than any other stage lights she’s been under. It makes her toes tingle and her fingers feel like they’re stretching towards something she can’t see, but it feels right. It feels like she should keep reaching towards whatever is calling out to her.
She should follow the light.
There’s a tugging in her chest that has nothing to do with their funk number or the odd un-Sue-like look on Coach Sylvester’s face in the third row of the auditorium. It’s a tug that says ‘follow me, follow me’ and when her line comes she nails it, bringing down the curtain around them.
As soon as they announce that William McKinley’s Glee club didn’t win, the tug inside her dies quickly, and she’s too angry, too upset, too intent on murdering William Schuester for his voice cracking in the middle of the chorus, that she forgets all about it.
It’s not until years later that she realizes that tug was the white light everyone talks about; that tug was her chance to get out and it stopped pulling the minute Glee lost.
It’s not until years later that she realizes if she wants to get out, she’s going to have to go down singing for the win.
---
“Status report,” Sue barks.
Santana turns coolly towards Quinn, awaiting the head Cheerios’ update. “We failed,” the blonde says, defeated.
Sue lifts her eyebrow, but she doesn’t look like she was expecting anything else.
“They banded together like some little merry clan of mythical creatures,” Santana cuts in, sneering. “It was gag-inducing.”
“Apparently,” Sue muses, tapping the tips of her fingers together, “this is going to be more work than I thought.” Santana, still looking at Sue, even though Quinn is staring at the ground, ashamed, watches as the Coach’s eyes get a glint to them only Santana has ever been able to read; she’s has enough time to figure out the different looks of Sue Sylvester. “The new Cheerio,” she says slowly, “the dim one. Next time you go to Glee, you bring her with you.” Sue laughs at her own cleverness. “With her there, she’ll distract that walking hair advertisement long enough for you two to do your jobs.”
Quinn, wide-eyed, nods frantically, relief of punishment practically radiating off her face.
“Dismissed,” Sue commands. “Lopez, stay.”
Santana nods discreetly at Quinn, telling her it’s okay to leave and the blonde doesn’t hesitate, breaking out of Sue’s door into the hallway where Finn is waiting, concern in his eyes.
It makes Santana want to throw up.
She turns back to Sue, a million questions running through her head, but the most important one is: “what the hell, Sue?”
Sue smirks at Santana and puts up a hand; a signal for Santana to shut up.
“I just want to know why,” Santana murmurs under her breath.
Sue leans over the desk and gives Santana something almost resembling a real smile. “She’s the best dancer on the Cheerios,” Sue says simply.
It takes Santana a few minutes, but eventually, she understands what Sue did; what Sue is doing, for her.
---
Her parents had warned her when she started high school, the first time: “Don’t join that singing club, Santana” and “Why don’t you cheer for the football team. That nice girl down the street is a cheerleader.”
She didn’t listen because it’s one of the rights of being a teenager, and she hated football games, and plus, she was really good at singing.
It put her on the bottom of the social ladder in school, obviously, and she had to deal with constant insult, but as soon as she started singing, it didn’t matter what people thought about her, or said to her, or did to her.
Apparently, though, when she wasn’t singing, it mattered.
“Hey loser,” they hissed at her as she walked down the halls. It didn’t matter that Bryan Ryan was one of the most popular guys she knew; she was still a little freshman and therefore, fair game for the upperclassmen, and they made her aware of it every day.
Every day until they became aware of how fragile she was.
In eighteen years, that’s one of the things she regrets the most: not listening to her parents and picking up those pompoms when she had the chance.
---
Sue was right; Brittany is the best dancer on the Cheerios and she distracts Mr. Schuester, but not for the reason Sue and Santana originally thought.
They thought, bring in the stupid girl and drive Schuester into a spiral of insanity. Instead, he completely focuses on putting Brittany in the forefront of all their numbers, reworking choreography for hours and it leaves an opening for Quinn to slip her claws into Rachel Berry and tear her a new one, all the while boosting the talent of New Directions.
Sue claims that was her original idea and Santana doesn’t correct her or roll her eyes; she’s too excited that they finally have a real chance at winning something.
---
Brittany is the first real friend she makes in eighteen years.
She’s had acquaintances, and teammates, and enemies, but her last friend was her cousin Maria, who, according to constant Google searches, is now married and has two small children.
Making friends, Sue tells her, is dangerous business.
Friends want to come and have sleepovers; friends want to go to malls on weekends; friends want to share their deep, dark secrets; friends expect you to help them to the top, not step on them to get there.
Sue is adamantly against friends, but Santana finds she can’t really help herself; Brittany is infectious.
The scowl she’s been perfecting for years – in the mirror, two times a day, per Sue’s recommendations – falters in the face of Brittany, who likes to smile so much Santana is sure her face is frozen that way. She’s less surly, too, and more friendly when Brittany’s around; more apt to let people touch her and less apt to scream at unsuspecting freshman, which never gets old, or not funny.
Brittany slips into her life for her to use, as an advantage. Sue only introduces them because Santana wants out of this cycle of terror she’s living in.
But the further Brittany intertwines into her life, the less Santana feels like she wants to move on.
---
Santana thinks it’s funny – in a not-so-funny sort of way – how the more things change, the more they stay the same.
When Will, no, Mr. Schuester now, gets the job as Spanish teacher, Santana almost hyperventilates, pacing the floor of Sue’s office and ranting - so loudly that Sue has to pull the blinds – about how her life is going to come crashing down on her since he’s here and who does he think he is, trying to relive his glory days through a mangy group of teenagers, just because he couldn’t hack it the first time.
People think its Sue yelling about Schuester and that’s how the rumors – the ones that Sue hates Schue – start. Sue doesn’t even try to correct them.
He doesn’t even recognize her.
She strides past him the halls, head held high, uniform snug in all the right places and he stares right through her, like she’s a ghost.
That’s she is a ghost hasn’t really escaped her, but it’s not the point.
The point is that she practically hero-worshipped him when he was all brace-face and acne-riddled and here he is, hair curlier than ever, staring her down with something like fear in his eyes. Sue, of course, is thrilled, but Santana mopes for a few days in her bedroom because she thought that maybe he would see her and recognize something, anything about her.
When she joins Glee, she sees that he’s still the same kid he was in high school, all bubble-gum dreams and married to that evil Terri woman who made Santana’s life hell those first last years of high school. He’s still high on the music, thinking he can solve all of the kid’s problems with a song.
A part of her is tempted to ask him which song can solve her problem.
Then there’re the Rachel Berry’s.
She’s just the last in a long line of divas; first there was Jordan Thomas, then Marissa Ryan, Lois Heller and now Rachel Berry. They’re always the same: obnoxiously talented and completely aware of it, with dreams and fantasies that stretch far beyond the town limits of Lima, and willing to take down whoever gets in their way, whether they realize it or not they posses that trait or not.
The main characters all remain the same (the sensitive jock, the little singer that could, the misunderstood kids looking for acceptance, the badasses who think they’re too cool for anyone, the queen bee and her band of minions).
The only things that change are the names.
---
Brittany isn’t the first girl she kisses.
The locker room isn’t even a new place to make out with someone.
Years ago, it was Jenny Fabray – and Santana feels a little sick to her stomach ever time she looks at Quinn, when all she can remember is how knobby-kneed Quinn was at eight years old, dirt smudged across her face while she played under the bleachers during the football games.
It was blonde hair and long legs, but Brittany kisses different than Jenny does, like she’s afraid she’s going to break Santana in two.
It reminds her of her first boyfriend – Hector Rodriguez got past his hair-pulling stage eventually, and picked her flowers to say he was sorry – and how he kissed her hesitantly behind the Church one Sunday when he told her that her dress was pretty.
At first, when Brittany kisses her quickly after their first Glee practice together, giggling nervously and shyly looking away before murmuring something about needing to go home, Santana hates the way Brittany kisses.
It makes her feel like she’s fading away; like she’s this thin wisp of air.
So she kisses Brittany harder, pushes her harder against the metal lockers, pulls harder on the hair wrapped around her fingers just to feel real and Brittany wraps her arms tighter around Santana’s waist, never complaining.
It makes her think, for mere seconds, as she traps Brittany tightly between her body and the door to the showers, that maybe she doesn’t want to disappear after all.
And then another day goes by – another day of being sixteen; another day closer to the end of another senior year where she’ll be another freshman with another girl or boy to hang off of for another four years – and all she wants to do is be gone.
Brittany or no Brittany, Santana wants to get out of this place.
---
Over dinner one night, she picks up her fork and puts it down again, pausing long enough for Sue to sigh and put down her own fork.
“What?”
Santana rolls the question she wants to ask around on the tip of her tongue, testing the letters against the back of her teeth before she allows herself to speak. “Have you ever been in love?”
Sue snorts. “Love? What do you know about love?”
“A lot,” Santana points out. “Technically, I’m thirty-four.”
“Technically,” Sue mocks, “you’ve experienced nothing but high school love affairs. Which mean nothing in the scheme of things.”
“I think that’s when it means the most.”
Sue glares at her for a long moment before picking her fork back up. “Eat your dinner, Lopez.”
“I think that’s when it hurts the most, too,” Santana adds before she takes another bite.
---
“Why are we trying to destroy Glee again?” Brittany asks, for only the seventh time this week. It’s a record low for the blonde, but Santana let’s Quinn field the answer, because Santana doesn’t feel like lying today.
She’s not trying to destroy Glee. Neither is Sue, for that matter, but Quinn gets a murderous glint in her eyes when she talks about Glee; the same glint her older sister Jenny would get when she talked about Mr. Fabray.
Santana thinks, for the safety of that whole family, that it’s a good thing Jenny left when she did.
“Because,” Quinn hisses. “That tragedy of a freakshow is trying to steal my boyfriend.”
Santana rolls her eyes at Brittany, getting a giggle out of the tall blonde stretched across the couch in her living room. She’s seen this play before; Quinn will get her precious boyfriend and social standing back soon enough, she just needs to be patient.
Except that Santana was right when she said this time felt different, because Quinn’s eyes go from hard to nervous to terrified in a matter of seconds and Santana is lifting off the couch, wrapping her arms around Brittany’s feet as she does so the blonde doesn’t roll onto the floor and peering into Quinn’s face.
She doesn’t like what she thinks she sees.
“Oh, Quinn,” she breathes out. “What did you do?”
Quinn tells them everything – Puck and Finn and the baby and the Chastity Ball – and Santana can only sit there with her mouth hanging open and her eyes wide, because this has never happened before.
She’s played this game so many times that little things like this – like Brittany and Quinn’s pregnancy and the sheer talent of New Directions – throw her so hard she’s sure that if she wasn’t already dead, she would be.
“It’s going to be okay,” she says, reflexively.
She said the same thing when Marissa Ryan broke her cheekbone in a car accident the week before Regionals in ’97; when Joey Lowry told her he was gay while his hand was down her skirt; when Jenny Fabray tried to kiss her in the girl’s bathroom; when Sue was distraught about Santana missing yet another chance to move on.
Quinn gives her a look that says, “oh, really?” and Santana doesn’t blame her for the skepticism.
For the first time in eighteen years, Santana doesn’t know what comes next.
---
She sees her parents again three years after she dies, at a gas station on the edge of Lima. A couple of Cheerios planned a trip to Cleveland for the weekend and they skipped school on Thursday to beat the traffic.
It’s Ohio, though, and the traffic is never really an issue coming out of Lima.
She’s sitting shotgun as they pull into the station and she volunteers to get the snacks because if she hears one more girl say “like, I know”, she might lose her mind. Pulling her jacket tighter around her body, she saunters into the convenience store and heads for the chips and all the unhealthy snacks Sue refuses to keep in the house.
Halfway through a bag of chips she opened while she was deciding what else to get, she sees her father standing in front of the drink coolers, holding a bottle of Coke, rolling it in his hands.
He must feel her staring at him, because he turns around and smiles sheepishly, embarrassed at being caught seemingly daydreaming. “My daughter,” he says, his voice thick with emotion she’s never seen from the man she knew as stoic, even hard, at times. “She drinks this.”
“Drank,” a woman corrects softly as she appears next to him, gripping his elbow. Santana doesn’t recognize her mother, with her heavy eyes and her graying hair. “Our daughter used to drink this. I always said-”
“It rots your teeth,” Santana interrupts, giving a small smile. “My mom says the same thing.”
Her father smiles at her sadly, eyes narrowed a little, but whatever confusion he was feeling, whoever he thought he was seeing, passes, and he hands her the bottle. “Here. We won’t tell her if you don’t.”
Santana holds the sweating bottle in her hands. “Somehow, I think she’ll know,” she says, almost laughing.
The woman who was her mother pats her gently on the shoulder as the people who were her parents pass her. “Mother’s always do.”
She follows them down the small, chip-filled aisle and stands at the counter while the boy behind it tries to get her attention, watching as the Lopez’s get into a truck she recognizes as her uncle’s, with a uHaul attached to the back of it. She watches them pull out of the station and drive away from Lima.
It’s the last time she sees them.
---
Sue stares at her from across the wooden desk; it’s been years since that first metal desk, with the dent in the side the approximate size of Santana’s foot.
“I still don’t understand what you want me to do.”
Santana raps her knuckles against the single paper on the desk. “Kick her off the team,” she says resolutely.
The Cheerios head coach doesn’t even glance down at the sheet Santana has assembled, full of indulgent information about why Quinn Fabray needs to be off the squad – almost every small infraction Santana can think Quinn might have violated.
All of these nondescript, insane reasons instead of the real one.
“You want me to kick our head cheerleader off the team for… jellybeans,” Sue says slowly. “Lopez, I thought that after all these years, you would have accrued some level of intelligence.”
Santana opens her mouth to protest, but Sue cuts her off, clearing her throat almost silently. “And you’re even more idiotic than I believed if you think I’d kicked Q off for,” she glances down, snorting, “eating a double cheeseburger.” She frowns. “But make a note that starting tomorrow, the entire squad is on a week of Master Cleanse.”
“Listen,” she commands Sue, rising to her full height in her seat. “She needs to get booted. Now.”
Sue eyes her evenly. “You won’t be head cheerleader. Not only is it too risky, but you don’t have the right stuff.”
Santana ignores the insults. “I don’t want to be head cheerleader.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
The words slip off her tongue before she can stop them, just like when she told her mother she loved singing; like when she told her lab partner that his girlfriend was cheating on him; like when she told Tammy Salton that her ass did look fat in those jeans.
“She’s pregnant,” Santana says quietly, hanging her head.
Later, when she sees Quinn’s face and the utter despair etched into her eyes, she’ll regret telling a secret that wasn’t hers to tell.
But for now, staring at Sue in a room that holds trophies and secrets and all of Santana’s accumulated yearbooks, all Santana can think about it is holding back the hair of too many cheerleaders who thought it was just a missed period; holding the hands of girls in cold clinic waiting rooms before the doctors calls names Santana hasn’t been able to forget.
This time, this year, this shot at high school is different.
Quinn is different too; Quinn will be different too.
---
Except Quinn hates her for it.
Quinn doesn’t know she hates Santana for it, because she doesn’t know it was Santana – it could never have been one of you, she had told Brittany and Santana, crying. You wouldn’t do that to me – but she hates who did it to her.
So she hates Santana without knowing she hates her.
It’s not like Santana can really explain it. She can’t just say “I’m sorry, but I had Sue kick you off so you could give yourself and this baby a chance” because Quinn will keep asking questions Santana doesn’t want to give the answers to.
She can’t say the other reason why she did it either.
Because really, getting Quinn kicked off Cheerios so she can focus on Glee one hundred percent is selfish.
And Quinn would hate her even more for that.
---
In the middle of Glee one afternoon, after belting out “Lean On Me” to a teary-eyed Quinn and a happy Finn, Santana catches herself laughing.
She has her arm around Brittany’s neck, pulling the taller girl into her and she’s laughing with her face pressed against sweet-smelling blonde hair and it’s the first time she’s laughed in years.
She’s smiled and she’s frowned and she’s did the occasional polite giggle when the head cheerleader of the year giggles first, but she hasn’t laughed since before she died; since before that last time, when the cute football player that lived on her street offered to walk her home and told her jokes the whole way.
Santana hasn’t laughed since that stupid “chicken crossed the road” joke but Brittany leans over and says something Santana doesn’t even hear and she’s laughing again like she never stopped in the first place.
The noise sounds foreign to her ears, like a record she thinks she might have heard once but can’t remember the words to.
Mr. Schuester, smiling at the piano next to Brad, stops and stares at her.
Santana can’t figure out from his expression whether it’s because he thinks it’s strange that she can actually do something other than scowl, or whether it’s because he thinks he might have heard that sound somewhere before.
When he shakes his head and his face clears, Santana goes back to laughing.
Now that’s she started, she forgets why she even stopped.