Santana Lopez (sg_santana) wrote in supergleerpg, @ 2011-11-22 21:05:00 |
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Entry tags: | !type: thread, -2011: november, wanted character: artie abrams, wanted character: santana lopez, ~complete |
thread: Artie and Santana's paths collide (pun intended...)
When: Tuesday 22 Nov, afternoon
Who: Artie and Santana
Where: Downtown Lima
What: Disaster strikes, and Santana sees it coming.
Warnings: Description of injury
With his phone plugged into a tape adapter, Artie belted along with Adele, having recently discovered karaoke tracks on YouTube. The car was a used 1996 Sedan, Artie's belated birthday present and early Christmas present from his family. Once upon a time, they would've been installing hand controls and working out the logistics of Artie's transfer into and out of his wheelchair, but that time was gone. He felt a little less at ease behind the wheel of his own car than he had driving the driver's ed car and Puck's "Sheila," the beat-up pickup truck. Maybe it was the knowledge that he'd recently been drained of the power that had both healed and protected him that past several months. Maybe it was the lack of passenger in the seat beside him, the absence of any other person to influence him as he navigated his route down the highway. Whatever it was, he felt oddly jittery and did his best to shake off his nerves.
Artie wasn't headed anywhere in particular, but having just received his license the day before, a celebratory drive was in order. He decided he might do some early Christmas shopping. Any excuse to get behind the wheel and venture out on his own was good enough for him. As he expertly yielded the right of way in a four-way stop, he commended his own skill. It was strange, going places on his own, but it was a good feeling, too. Once upon a time, it had been hard to imagine a life of being totally self-sufficient. Now, however, that life was his for the taking. In just a couple of years, he'd be graduating, going off to college, starting a career, maybe getting married and starting a family. Nothing was going to come between Artie and his dreams now, nothing, because life was an open road.
It happened when he came to another intersection, this one controlled by a traffic light. Artie's had just turned green, so he hadn't even needed to slow down as he approached. Slowing down might have enabled the other car, the one that disregarded its own red light, to miss him. Later, he'd experience an ominous revelation. He'd remember that the first accident had happened at an intersection, too, and that his mother had also been innocently passing through a green light when the tiny car was hit, way back in July 2002. As the other car made a direct hit, Artie's spun out, a full 180-degree turn in the middle of the road. Artie's forehead hit the dash with a sickening crack, and everything went black.
-
Santana was at Cheerios practice when it happened. The vision hit her suddenly – a blinding flash of white that she’d almost become accustomed to. The dreams had decreased in frequency lately. Jumbled glimpses of people or places that struck once or twice a week instead of every day, and usually brief and tame enough that if she was awake at the time, she could cover up what had happened without anybody getting suspicious. If they ever did wonder why she zoned out in the middle of a conversation, she could always blame it on Sue’s potent new Mastercleanse formula.
But not this time. The white had barely faded back into color before she saw it happen: a lightning-fast collision of metal on metal as one car T-boned another in the middle of an intersection. Tires screeched and glass shattered as the car that had been struck crumpled inwards.
Shit.
Even with the obstruction of the smoke billowing from the front of both cars, it was clearly horrific. The car that was hit didn’t even resemble a car anymore. It was just a blackened heap of metal.
And just as quickly as it had started, the dream was over. Santana was standing in the middle of the football field and Coach Sylvester was shouting at her through her megaphone.
Santana wanted to throw up. That alone was impressive given that she basically had no gag reflex. She recognized the first car. The one that’d been hit. She’d been standing by it in the parking lot just a few hours ago before school, telling anybody who’d listen what a bomb it was. And okay, it had been petty. By the standards of a bunch of teenagers in the middle of Ohio, it was just a car. Nothing special. No Mini Cooper, but it was a car, and there was nothing particularly different about it that gave Santana reason to diss it so publicly.
Except that it belonged to her sworn enemy. Who also happened to be her BFF’s BF. And she’d just seen it be completely decimated in the main street of Lima.
The nausea only got stronger. Why was this happening again? Santana had barely had time to forget seeing Tina almost die in a horror car wreck, and now she had to go through it again with Artie? So not cool. But she’d been able to stop it from happening to Tina, and she’d just have to do the same for Wheels.
Her bag was with the rest in a pile by the bleachers. Ignoring Sue’s increasingly vocal protests, she broke into a jog, crossing the field to get there. She wasted an entire minute digging through her bag for her phone before she remembered: she didn’t have it. Schuester had confiscated it in an exasperated attempt to make her pay attention as he slaughtered the Spanish language. It was probably still sitting in the drawer of his desk. Fuck.
She shoved her sports bag aside and grabbed Brittany’s instead, hoping Britt had left her phone in there and not in her locker or tucked into her bra. Nobody else on the squad would have Artie’s number... and come to think of it, Santana wasn’t entirely sure she did either. But Britt was a sure thing. The only real challenge was figuring out what name Artie was listed under in her contacts.
Maybe luck was on her side for the first time ever. Britt’s phone was wedged into the side pocket, and not even password-protected. She found Artie’s number and hit the call button. It went straight to voicemail. As if Artie would miss a call from his beautiful blond girlfriend. Either he couldn’t answer his phone, or his phone was in no condition to be answered; smashed to bits.
Santana wasn’t about to wait for him to call back to get her answer. She hit the call button again and grabbed her bag, taking off across the field to the parking lot. It wasn’t far to the center of town, and then she could see for herself that it was just another stupid dream.
The urge to contact Artie was getting stronger with every passing minute. She kept the phone to her ear as she drove, and the heavy feeling in her stomach grew every time she heard his voicemail greeting. It’d been the same deal with Tina. A horrible, awful vision followed by the need to stop it from happening. She’d managed to talk Tina into pulling over off the road the last time. But as Santana drew closer to the intersection and flashing lights and smoke came into vision, it seemed she’d been too late to help Artie.
-
The lines blurred as Artie tried to sort out memories from present-day experiences. In his memories, Artie could recall being eight years old, waking up in a hospital to learn that two weeks had gone by without his knowledge, but more importantly, that his whole future had been forever altered by another person's recklessness. As his eyes fluttered open, yet again surrounded by the coldness of empty white walls and metal machines, Artie wondered if he was drudging up old memories or experiencing something new.
Wait, but he had been the one driving this time. And the other car, it had come out of nowhere. He remembered being pinned in, trapped, screaming. And then a man's voice - "Hold on, kid, we're getting you out." 2002 or present-day? It was hard to tell.
A young nurse entered the room to find him waking up, startling and jumping into action upon realizing that her patient was conscious. "You're in the hospital, sweetie," she said, coming up beside his bed. She pursed her lips, glancing at a clip board in her hands before going on. "Bad concussion, but you're alert now so that's a good sign. Stay as still as you can, you're in traction, see...?"
She pointed out his legs, which dangled comically in front of him - or, it might have been comical, if it hadn't terrified him to death. No, surely not, not a repeat of his own history? Artie blanched, his face matching the walls.
"Did I break my back?" he half-whispered it. "My spinal cord, did I injure it-" He wisely left out the word 'again,' cutting his question short.
"No, hun, but you've broken both legs," she reported, not knowing that these words were music to his ears, just to know that he hadn't done something permanent to put himself right back where he'd started. "You won't need surgery, but we're waiting on a couple of casts. In the meantime, how's about I up your morphine? Most people don't fight me on that."
"Mmm, meds, good." He realized he was in an awful lot of pain, and that the pain had been the thing to restore him to consciousness. But before he let himself succumb to sleep again, he realized he needed to get in touch with a few people, if they weren't already on their way.
"Are my parents-?"
"On their way, yes," supplied the nurse. "Oh, and your cell phone fared better than you did, Arthur, only a cracked screen. You have several missed calls. Here it is..."
The caller appeared to be Brittany. Artie assumed that maybe she had already talked to his parents, after they'd been informed of the accident. With a heavy heart, he struggled to stay away as he returned the call, deciding he should personally let her know that he was fine. Well, not fine, but not paralyzed or dead.
-
Santana had shoved her way through the growing crowd of rubberneckers in time to see a paramedic finish loading a stretcher into the back of an ambulance. He pulled the doors shut and the ambulance took off, sirens wailing.
They didn’t turn the sirens on for dead people. They didn’t even put them in ambulances - they traced round their bodies with chalk and waited for the coroner to turn up and put a skewer thermometer thing in the liver to determine time of death. Santana watched CSI. She knew how it worked. So that had to be good. Artie wasn’t dead. But you wouldn’t know it, looking at the crash.
It was even worse seeing it outside of the dream-haze. The smell of rubber and the thick smoke that hung in the air made her nose run. Police had already cordoned off the area. The two cars were practically melded into one. If she hadn’t seen Artie’s rustbucket before, she wouldn’t have been able to know it was a sedan. It just looked like... well, a wreck. That was the only way to describe it.
The pressing urge to seek out Artie had disappeared the moment she’d arrived on scene. Almost as if her crazy mind realized it was too late to do anything to stop the crash from happening. Instead, the feeling had been replaced with one of worry. It wasn’t a sensation Santana was used to. Taking one last look at the roped off scene, she forced herself to turn and head back to her car. Just because Artie hadn’t died didn’t mean that he wouldn’t. Even if she didn’t really like him, Santana still had to know how he was. Everyone else needed to know too, but there was no point calling anybody before she knew what was actually happening with Artie. The hospital people’d call his parents. Britt would still be busy with Cheerios practice, plus Santana still had her phone. Getting anybody else involved would just cause panic, and Santana had no desire to spend the rest of her afternoon listening to Rachel’s whiny voice recite car crash statistics in the middle of a crowded waiting room.
She headed for the bigger of Lima’s hospitals; the one most likely to receive trauma cases. She didn’t make it past the emergency triage desk before she was stopped. The ancient hag refused to let her through, even when she told them she was Artie’s big sister.
“Bitch,” she muttered under her breath, dropping down into a hard plastic chair as far away from the gross sick people in the waiting room as possible. She totally made a convincing Miss Abrams. Just because she was from one of the two Latino families in town. What a joke. The old lady’s eyes were trained on her from behind the desk, anticipating that Santana would try and sneak past. She crossed her legs and tugged her skirt hem lower, sending an icy glare at the goatee’d Finn-lookalike at the end of the row who was openly staring at her legs. Then she picked up Britt’s phone again. Time to play some tetris.
What seemed like hours later, an Incoming Call message popped up just as Santana was going for the high score. The phone started to trill and she ignored the irate look the woman at the counter was giving her. Artie’s face filled the screen and Santana hit the ‘call accept’ button, completely forgetting that the phone belonged to Brittany. That proved he wasn’t dead, at least.
“Artie?”
"Brittany?"
Oh, right. “No, it’s Santana. Are you okay?” It was probably the dumbest question she’d ever asked.
"Not... exactly." He sounded confused. "Is Brittany there? Did my parents call her or something?"
“No, I’ve got her phone.” Why did she feel so flustered? Artie was alive enough to talk on the phone, at least, but her heart was still racing. And how could she even explain what she was doing there? Of all the people to be holding vigil, she was the last one either of them would pick. “I - I saw the crash. And I had Britt’s phone with me. I followed you to the hospital. I don’t know if Brittany knows yet.” She doubted it. “I just. I had to know how you were before I could call anybody, and they wouldn’t tell me anything at the desk.”
That wasn’t even close to a real explanation, but she didn’t expect Artie to be in the state of mind to question it fully. It wasn’t like Santana had exactly enjoyed hanging out in the hospital waiting room playing mind-numbing cell phone games while she waited for news about Brittany’s boyfriend. And really, Brittany was better off in the clutches of Coach Sylvester’s brutal Tuesday training session than waiting anxiously for news about the boy she loved.
There was silence on the other end of the line, initially following Santana's half-confession. Then: "Oh. Um. My legs are broken, something about a concussion." He paused, and maybe it was the heavy dose of medication, but the next words out of his mouth were, "I was supposed to break my back again. I was supposed to be back in my chair, someone wanted it that way, I know they did."
“Okay, now you’re talking crazy,” Santana told him, rolling her eyes and focusing on the earlier part of his statement. Broken legs. That was... well it was nothing, considering what could’ve been. She had what she came for; she could send out a mass text, leave Britt’s phone with a nurse to pass on to Artie and split. But that was heartless, even for her.
“They must have you on the good stuff, Wheels,” she said, trying to keep her voice as it usually was whenever she spoke to Artie - bitchy and superior, mostly. It was her style. “So I’ve been sitting out here with the drunks and the dying old people with pneumonia because the manatee of an orderly doesn’t think I look enough like your sister. Think you can swing it so I can get back there?” At least until his parents showed up. Or Britt, once Santana got in touch with her. It didn’t feel right to just take off and leave him all alone. But Santana didn’t want to spend any more time in the waiting room either.
"You'll keep me company?" He sounded half-surprised and half-relieved at the request. She could picture his groggy, stupid little face brightening at the offer. "Sure, I'll tell the nurse." And with that, he hung up.
And in a few minutes, the young nurse came down the corridor to the waiting area and asked if a 'Santana Abrams' was there to see her little brother. She rightly located Santana, the only person in the area whose physical description seemed to match the name.
Santana stood up, casting a smug glance in the direction of the orderly, then followed the nurse back up the corridor. As they walked, she scrolled through the contacts list of Britt’s phone until she found Brittany’s home number, then, pausing outside of the room the nurse had led her to, called the number and left a message on the Pierce family answering machine. Britt would show up soon; practice had to be almost over. Her breath caught in her throat as she turned to enter the room. Artie’s legs were suspended in traction; his skin was paler than Gracie’s and, as she slowly walked closer, she could see that his skin was littered with bruises and cuts. Yikes. She’d always kind of pitied Artie - first for the whole wheelchair thing, and then later just for his fashion sense, but she felt nothing but strange relief flood her body as she looked down at his sleeping form. He looked broken and frail - but very much alive.
Who knew she’d be so glad to see that. She’d spent many, many algebra classes doodling pictures of his violent death. Go figure. Her eyes fixed on his steadily rising and falling chest and she silently dropped into the chair beside his bed. Artie’s parents would turn up soon; no doubt rushing to the hospital in a mad panic. But she would keep him company until then.