union and prior | mercedes; santana
"You always want to come to the most depressing places," Santana says. "Would it kill you to find some kind of ancestral connection to a bar, or a park, or I mean hell, I'll take a picturesque back alley at this point?"
"Quit exaggerating. It's not that bad." Mercedes keeps walking, looking around, and after a moment's lag Santana catches up to her. She has to admit -- Hogan's Alley may not be much to look at these days, nowhere near how it must have been in its heyday when there were chicken shacks and cathouses, when Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong rolled on through -- but the gravitas Mercedes is giving it, Santana can't help but feel a little bit of the same reverence. "If you took the Black Atlantic course with me, Ms Lopez, then you'd know the significance."
Santana gives a light snort, tossing her eyes but not with any real annoyance. "I'm just fine with all my Women's & Gender Studies crap, thanks," she says, scuffing the toe of her sandal against a dropped Hawkins cheezie to grind it into the dirt. "Even though there's a wave of garlic that wafts through the air at the start of every class when everyone opens their tubs of hummus. I used to hold my breath but now I just breathe in deep and let it clear my sinuses."
That gets a laugh out of Mercedes, and she shakes her head and reaches for Santana. She doesn't take her hand, instead latching onto Santana's wrist, and her fingers snug against the pulse there. "You and me," Mercedes says, "if we'd been around then, this is where we would've been. Down here with the porters and the singers, and the steak shack owners and the bootleggers--"
"And the hookers, they were important, don't forget them."
"--and the sex workers too, yeah." Mercedes has come a long way since high school because she doesn't even falter, even though she rephrases Santana's term. "All the musicians. Jimi Hendrix's grandma lived here."
"Ooooh. Foxy," Santana smirks, but she does look across the lot to the sign on Nora Hendrix Place, and thinks past her abuela, to her grandmother on the other side who had died well before Santana had even been a possibility. Her father's never talked much about his family and Santana had learned not to ask, that some things needed to stay buried. She presses the ball of her foot hard against the ground, feeling the broken twigs through the sole of her sandal, looking at the way the sunshine plays along the dirt. If she looks up, the sunshine will be falling on Mercedes, the open awe on her face as she soaks in the history of this place through her skin, and Santana's afraid she won't feel it, she never will.
She grabs Mercedes' wrist with her free hand and Santana's fingers find the other girl's pulse without trying, a rhythm exchanged and twinned, borrowed and left waiting. "I don't wanna be here anymore," she blurts, and then covers quickly with, "--Britt needs me to meet her at the Skytrain. Otherwise she gets into fights with that Canada goose that hangs out there."
"Girl," Mercedes says, but nothing more than that. She squeezes down hard on Santana's wrist before moving on, and again, Santana follows.
[ gleecouver: an au where they all live in the metro vancouver area of british columbia ]
-come what may challenge-
