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hosiesameena · 2 months ago

Text

only love is all maroon

"It was hard to say, however, when exactly she knew. Like, she’d always known, because anyone who even looked at them could see the tie between their souls, but there had been moments, small and insignificant in that second that when layered together painted a picture she could not unsee."

or; The evolution of Brittana from the perspective of Quinn Fabray.

chapters: 1/1

rating: T

pairings: brittany/santana

characters: quinn fabray, santana lopez, brittany pierce, minor rachel berry

tags: brittana from quinn’s pov, somewhat introspective, implied lesbian quinn fabray, blink and you’ll miss it faberry, but it’s there!, young brittana, lots of feelings, internalized homophobia

ao3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/59989144

When Santana is forced to come out to everyone their senior year of high school, she doesn’t tell Quinn – or at least not explicitly.

The day the commercial airs, Quinn invites Santana and Brittany over to her house. They sit in her basement and down bags of chips they know they’ll pay for at practice next week. They don’t turn on any live TV, instead they watch movies on DVD until the late hours of the night. Brittany falls asleep first, curled around Santana, who runs an absent-minded hand through her hair. Quinn watches them, boldly, and Santana doesn’t shrink from her gaze. Instead, she smiles softly, and Quinn smiles back.

Later, when Quinn and Santana finally lay down to go to sleep and turn off the movies, Santana turns to her. She can’t see her face, but she can imagine her expression. She wonders if one day it’ll be mirrored on her own.

“I really like her,” Santana whispers in the thick cover of darkness. “Actually, I love her.”

“I know.”

“When?”

Quinn doesn’t know the right way to answer that. She doesn’t think Santana would like her answer — she wouldn’t like it if someone told her this either — but her love has always been plastered across her face. Santana has always worked tirelessly to hide her feelings, even if it meant being labeled a bitch, to keep herself safe. You can’t hide some things though.

“Freshman year, that Cheerios party. I saw you two in the bathroom,” Quinn half-lies. She did see them then. But that wasn’t when she knew.

Quinn Fabray has known Santana Lopez and Brittany Pierce were in love for as long as she can remember.

Or, well, more accurately, as long as she can remember being Quinn Fabray. When she transferred to McKinley at the start of her Freshman year, she knew a spot on the elusive Cheerios was waiting for her. She had become the sort of girl who did not ask things, or want for them, she simply had them. So she got a spot on the team and when she read her name on the list she just shrugged, and turned back to the other wide-eyed, squealing girls and appraised them in all their brazen fulfilled desire with mild disinterest.

Only one other girl was silent, her frown deep despite her name – Santana, she recalled from tryouts – being on the list, as if she’d expected it to be higher, scrawled across the very top. Quinn saw a familiar glint in her eyes, something she recognized. Something raw and hungry and built , not given. So she knew she was the same as her, in the ways that mattered. They had fought and clawed to be where they were and they knew they would only continue to rise because they had to. There was no other choice.

A lithe blonde bound over, her face cheery, and Quinn watched as her pinky linked with Santana’s like they’d done it a million times. Maybe they had. Interesting , was all Quinn thought. Santana shifted, until half her face was shadowed from the fluorescents, so she was fully facing her, and let out one, small smile, reserved only for the other girl. When she cocked her head and the lights of the locker room fully illuminated her face again, it was like it had never been there at all.

Quinn liked that. She didn’t relate to the other girls her age who wore their hearts plainly on their sleeves and embarrassed themselves where anyone could see. She preferred to have emotions in a controlled setting – nobody wants to see their idol snotty-faced and red as they cry over a dumb boy. And that’s what she needed. To be their idol. To be on the top of that pyramid, both on the Cheerios and at McKinley as a whole. She knew she would have both.

And she did.

Later on, when they’d become the Unholy Trinity, Quinn knew the ins and outs of Santana and Brittany like the back of her hand. While Brittany was sort of the human embodiment of what left a sour taste in Quinn’s mouth – bubbly, kind to everyone, and not afraid to cry in front of a room full of girls – she also sort of admired her for it. On Brittany, it worked, because you could tell she meant every word she said – and if she hated you, you’d know. She could appreciate the honesty at least. Plus, Santana had threatened to cut her the first, and only, time she laughed at Brittany for getting overly excited.

So if it made her a hypocrite to judge other girls for their emotions and still be friends with Brittany, she didn’t actually give a fuck.

Someone once asked Quinn, later, if she and Santana and Brittany were even actually friends. She supposed it was a fair question. They stepped on each other’s backs to ascend higher and higher and just laughed when they left the others below them. They were clawed skin and headaches from yanking each other's ponytails, but they were also a heap of body warmth collapsed together on a bed, drunk, and fizzy, jabbing fingers wiping sweat-smeared mascara from beneath each other’s eyes.

They were everything to each other in the way that made them best friends but also terrible friends. They were closer than close. But Quinn also knew that Brittany was everything to Santana in a way she would never be. She didn’t think Santana knew, even, but Quinn could read them like a book after years forged in fire together.

It was hard to say, however, when exactly she knew. Like, she’d always known, because anyone who even looked at them could see the tie between their souls, but there had been moments, small and insignificant in that second that when layered together painted a picture she could not unsee.

There was the first Cheerios practice, when Coach Sylvester reamed out Brittany for forgetting a hair tie. Quinn saw the way Santana bit down on her lip so hard a deep, maroon-y red pearled around the white of her teeth. The next day, in the locker room, when Brittany inevitably had forgotten a hair tie again, Santana pulled one off her wrist silently – she’d been wearing two.

Then there was Christmas, freshman year still, when they had one day off of practice – even though school was closed for two weeks, they still had Cheerios – and all three of them had a sleepover and trekked out into the snow in the middle of the night to make snow angels. The moon was heavy and full, and the sky glowed pink and orange with the promise of fresh snow in the morning. Brittany tilted her face up to the sky, tongue out like she might catch a snowflake.

“It’s not even snowing right now,” Quinn had said.

Santana glared at her and told Brittany to close her eyes and focus really hard. Then, while she was doing so, Santana scooped some snow off the ground and stood on her tippy toes to reach above Brittany’s face and gently let a little bit filter through her gloved fingers. Brittany laughed as each flake touched her tongue, then turned and looked at Santana with the silver of the moon glistening in her blue eyes.

Quinn felt like maybe she was intruding, felt like she should turn and give them some space. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t look away.

“There could’ve been, like, unicorn pee on that snow, San,” she said, humor lacing her words.

“Hey!” Santana had said, holding her hands up and laughing. “That wasn’t me! It was snowing for a second!”

“Right,” Brittany said, as she hip-bumped Santana, sending her giggling as she stumbled through the snow.

Santana never giggled like that at school, or really anywhere, other than when she was with Brittany, and it was easy to forget how truly young they were. Quinn wondered sometimes, late at night, if she had made a mistake. By the time the morning light burned the dew off the grass in her front yard, however, she remembered why she had done everything she had. Why she could never go back.

So it scared her, a lot more than she’d admit, the way Santana and Brittany acted together. She knew they could get away with a lot just from the red shells and skirts they donned in the halls every day, but that protection only extended so far. It scared her that she sometimes thought that maybe her and Santana were more alike than she’d ever initially imagined. She could barely admit that to herself, refusing to accept it. She had a lot of practice with that, it wasn’t hard.

But either way, she knew she would be better than Santana because she knew how far she could fall so, subsequently, she knew how far she could push without toppling over her carefully crafted world. She settled instead, when things felt too overwhelming, for clutching her cross necklace in her fist and squeezing until her skin was indented and bruised.

She knew Santana would not be able to control herself much longer, no matter how many boys she let stick their tongues down her throat at parties. And she worried she’d be caught in that fallout.

A lot of people thought Brittany was really dumb. There were times Quinn would be inclined to believe that too, but then she’d do something or say something astute and it would send you reeling.

2 months after that night in the snow, as Valentine’s day rolled around, when she first set her sights on Finn – the perfect cheerleader needed the perfect football player boyfriend – Quinn, who had stayed after school to practice more until her legs were aching and she could barely catch her breath, walked past an art classroom, then stopped when she recognized Brittany sitting inside.

She was cutting hearts out of green cardstock, nodding along to some song only she could hear.

“Brittany?” Quinn called, stepping into the room.

She looked up at her, tilting her head to the side and smiling, like she’d been expecting her.

“Hi!”

“What are you doing?”

She hummed noncommittally. She cut into a new piece of paper.

“Waiting for Santana,” she decided on, finally.

“Where is she?” Quinn asked, brow furrowing.

“With Puck. Behind the bleachers.”

“Why?”

Brittany looked up from her work again, cocking a brow. “Why do you think, silly?”

Quinn knew the two had been fooling around recently, Santana’s own answer to the same problem Quinn was beginning to face. She just didn’t think Brittany knew.

“And you’re… okay with that?” Quinn asked, cautiously. The last thing she needed was for her to burst into tears – a very real possibility.

“Of course,” Brittany said. “I’m not in charge of her. I’m not like a mean Santa Claus forcing all the elves in the North Pole to work, even if they’d totally rather be doctors, or something.”

Quinn shook her head, losing the thread of the conversation. Brittany seemed to notice, setting her pink, kid-sized scissors down on the table and shifting to more fully face Quinn.

“Things are… not easy for Santana,” she said, solemnly, like a eulogy. “They will never be easy,” she looked away for a second, considering. “Even though people sometimes say she’s easy…” she shook her head and continued. “Sometimes, people have to do things they don’t really, in their hearts, want to do. I want Santana to be happy. She’s not ready for things to be hard yet, and that’s okay. She can’t know who she is yet. But I know her. And so it doesn’t matter what she does because nobody else understands why she has to do what she does.”

Quinn was silent.

“Well,” Brittany continued, fixing a pointed stare on Quinn. “Some people do understand. But things can’t be hard for them yet, either.”

Quinn swallowed down a wave of nausea and gripped her necklace, harder, harder, harder.

“What are you doing with all those hearts?” was the response she settled on. She couldn’t manage anything else right then. Brittany, to her credit, took the subject change in stride.

“Green’s Santana’s favorite color,” she said. “But don’t tell her I told you. She likes people to think it’s red. I’m gonna put them in her locker on Valentine’s Day.”

“Oh,” Quinn said. “That’s thoughtful.”

That’s when she knew that the feelings weren’t one-sided.

The end of Freshman year, the senior Cheerios threw an unsanctioned party at one of their houses and invited the whole team. Quinn, Santana, and Brittany arrived together and were instantly swept into the chaos – the invite list spiraled at some point until it felt like the entire school was packed into one single-family house.

Someone shoved a cup into her hand and Quinn gratefully downed it, not even wincing at the burn. At some point, she got separated from Santana and Brittany, but she didn’t mind. The drinks continued to flow and she stumbled around the rooms, laughing like no one else could hear her. In the kitchen, there was a gaggle of kids Quinn knew were capital-N Not popular. She wondered when they got there. She wondered if she should be mean to them or kick them out, but with liquor coursing through her veins, she couldn’t remember why exactly that would be a good idea.

There was a girl with them, dressed in the stupidest outfit she’d ever seen – a plaid skirt and knee socks and a god-awful sweater. But she locked eyes with Quinn and didn’t look away, like she wasn’t scared and Quinn found herself daunted, recoiling. She wasn’t used to this reaction. And she couldn’t fully tell how that made her feel – but mostly it made her feel like she needed to get away, fast, before she did something really stupid. So she did.

She stumbled upstairs, searching for an unoccupied bathroom and preferably one not already riddled with vomit and empty solo cups. She slipped past an “Off Limits!” sign taped to a door, into what must have been the master bedroom. It was dark, but the attached bathroom had a light on, shining white in the black of the rest of the room. She cursed under her breath and started to leave, before the silhouettes of two familiar builds slid into her view.

It was Santana and Brittany, backlit by the light-up vanity. Santana trailed a hand over Brittany’s cheek, tucking her fingers firmly beneath her chin. Then, she leaned in and kissed Brittany – hard. Brittany kissed her back, wrapping her arms around Santana’s waist and pulling her closer as the kiss deepened. One of them – it was impossible to tell who – made a small sound and Quinn realized she hadn't breathed once. She had to get out of there, and fast.

She slipped out of the bedroom and gently shut the door behind her. She leaned against the wall, everything spinning. She’d known – but that was when she knew it was more than just pining, secret, don’t-touch-them-with-a-10-foot-pole feelings . A million Bible verses whizzed through her mind, but in her drunken state, all that stuck was the girl in the kitchen downstairs and a resounding Good for them.

Summer came and went and suddenly it was Sophomore year. Things were different – Quinn was different. Just like she feared that first week of Cheerios, she fell. But it was okay. She knew how to build herself up again. She got what she needed, really, for a moment. She had Finn and then lost him. She had sex with Puck because she wondered how it felt for Santana (it made her feel empty, she realized). She joined Glee Club with that girl from the party. Things happen the way they’re supposed to, she decided.

Junior year she reclaims her throne with a sort of mild satisfaction. Still, like she did all the way back in Freshman year, she watches Brittany and Santana, still all linked pinkies and skin brushing in the halls, but things aren’t different for them yet.

She decides that’s okay. She thinks they’ll figure it out one day.

She thinks she will too.

#brittana #fanfic #faberry #ao3 #my fic #glee #oneshot #brittana fic #inspo creds to forevrwillast on twitter!

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