Soul Fragments

Present

Santana has always had very vivid dreams. Nightmares if she is being honest. They are worse when she goes through something bad. They always come back. And they are always the same.

In one dream she sells a beautifully carved box to a man. Later she sees the man preaching on a forum about how he hates her and calls for the gods to kill her. She wakes up with flared nostrils from heaving, covered in sweat, and too scared to go to sleep again; Afraid the man will come and kill her.

In the second dream she is having a strong argument with a princess in a rose garden. When she wakes up she never knows what they were fighting about only that it ended with not only souls being crushed, but roses as well. The deep feeling of regret and shame haunts her for days.

In the third and last dream she is anxiously waiting in the dark. The world around her sways back and forth but she stays stuck in the same spot. Like she is in a boat without direction. The nauseating swaying is endless. She wakes up grieving a terrible loss, though she never remembers what she lost in that dream.

They used to be just that; dreams. A faint memory after she rose and remembered she was safe in her bedroom. Her vanity unchanged and messy with half opened make-up palettes and lipstick thrown around.

On one fateful afternoon that all changed.

It started when the world slowed down. Finn's tall stature was behind her in the hallway. His voice echoed through her head. "Why don't you just come out of the closet?" With that very sentence he crushed her soul and disintegrated her spirit. Her heart stopped beating. Or she wished it would. Death is better than dealing with people hating your guts just for existing because you like caressing round breasts, and kissing lips covered with lipstick instead of feeling the sandpaper of stubbled lips. Has art not taught us to covet female sexuality?

Solely on survival instincts she scraped by that day. Even managed to not bash Finn's face in when he won the rock-paper-scissors duel which meant the New Directions could perform their mash-up of two songs first.

The second she dropped her bag on the floor and plopped down at her desk at home it all came out. She was an inferno of anger as she wrote down every single insult she could think off. Brittany, all bright eyed and freckled, chimed in from her bed from time to time. She concocted a list she could use to rip him to shreds after The Troubletones performed their mash-up.

She never ended up using that list.

Moments before their perfectly orchestrated rendition of Rumour Has It/Someone Like You she got called into Coach Sylvester's office where her soul got ripped out of her body and smashed into a thousand tiny pieces. Three pairs of eyes were on her as she watched a malevolent congressional candidate expose the very secret she wasn't even ready to accept herself. With a one minute clip the whole state of Ohio would persecute an eighteen year old lesbian who isn't even out of high school.

She slapped him after their mash-off. Finn deserved to feel the same stinging she carried in her heart.

By the time she got home, everything had turned grey. Tears blended blacks and reds of her bedroom together until she was laying in a disconsolate blob of smouldering coal.

Brittany fought to come home with her and hold her through everything. To wipe the tears from her eyes and stroke her hair. All she got in response was yelling and being shoved away. She let Santana go home alone.

Santana didn't come out of her room all day. When her mother knocked on the door to tell her dinner was ready, she pretended to be asleep. Which eventually wasn't pretend at all. Silently sobbing for hours had drained her.