I didn’t do one of these last year because, lbr, it feels kind of useless on LJ these days, but I watched/read/enjoyed a lot of great stuff this year (esp. TV) so I thought it would be fun to throw together a post using other people’s gifs, which lessens the effort on my part considerably. And who doesn’t love low effort? (It actually was still a fair amount of effort, oop.)

For a more complete but less chatty list, feel free to peek at my 2015 Scrapbook.




I don’t know why it took me so long to watch Penny Dreadful because it was basically made in a lab specifically for thirteen year old goth me and I mean that as the highest of compliments. I did do a post about this a little while ago. I’ve been an Eva fan since The Dreamers and, like many amazing actresses, TV is where she has finally been able to land a role that is both awesome enough to be worthy of her and allows her to show off the full range of her not inconsequential abilities. And lbr, I loved Josh Hartnett as a tween because who didn’t love him in 2003?

There are things that the show has done that I don’t agree with (SEMBENE) but on the whole it is just such a joy, for me personally. A lot of the shows on this list have given me that feeling of THIS IS JUST FOR ME which is such a nice thing to feel about a television show; it isn’t that it satisfies my littlest whims but that I know that I can totally trust in the show. I don’t have to worry about the rug getting pulled out from under me because I know more often than not I will like the things that it does. I’ve seen some people say that s2 wasn’t as good as s1, but honestly I thought it was better. WITH THE EXCEPTION OF SEMBENE, like I understand why that narrative choice was made but that does not mean I have to LIKE it.





This show… This show. Is my show. And I proselytize for it whenever the occasion arises, desperately, because I love it so. Every season I save up all the episodes and then binge them over two or three days because I CANNOT ABIDE the stress of waiting. It’s another show I loved from the pilot (from the advertising, lbr; FX does great ads for shows) and have continued to love and trust in and know that it will do shit I could not have predicted. One of my favorite things about The Americans is how long they will let a storyline burn. In season one, Philip enters into a second fake marriage with a woman they need to use for spying purposes. They are STILL FAKE MARRIED in season three and the plot hasn’t become tired or overstayed its welcome. This show is masterful at slow burns while still providing arcs contained by season. I can imagine that as an actor this show must be so fun, because you get to do all the badass actiony spy stuff but then it’s also a very well done character study and then it is ALSO an incredible marriage drama. I love marriage dramas, personally. And Elizabeth is probably one of my favorite fictional characters ever. I love women who are cold and capable and dedicated and ruthless and PISSED.





Lol. Just L O L. I have complicated emotions re: this show, because obviously there is something about it that appeals to me since I keep tuning in yet it can also vacillate between incredibly boring and incredibly rage-inducing. Also, like, why have I not learned from my Ryan Murphy mistakes? My favorite season was Asylum (which had P L E N T Y of issues), which I think Murphy had less involvement in, and last year’s Freak Show as the absolute worst, the worst, it was the worst. But I…am…loving…this…season. I DON’T KNOW. I love vampires! I love Old Hollywood! I love a Clark Kent looking motherfucker, and there are like eight of them on this season (oh god do I have the same taste in dudes as Ryan Murphy????)! Once upon a time I loved Lady Gaga, and I do still possess fond feelings for Stefi G. I don’t know. There is still time for betrayal (the end of the season is where AHS always goes belly up) but so far, so good for me.





I didn’t click with Jane the Virgin at first but I’m so, so, so, so, so eternally glad I stuck with it, because it’s one of my absolute favorite things on TV right now. It’s just so COMFORTING. I think there is a lack (at least, for me there was) of just a good, heartwarming, fun show. And a family-centric show too! It sort of fills a little bit of a combo Gilmore/Ugly Betty void for me, but I wouldn’t necessarily say it is like either of those shows; I might group them all as of a type, though. And the great thing about JtV is that it does the heartbreaking as well as it does the really broad telenovela stuff. It is really masterful at walking the fine line between wildly different tones and at the same time making them feel cohesive. Plus Gina Rodriguez is literally the puppetmaster of my emotions. She is on another level. When she cries, I cry. When she laughs, I laugh. (Tho tbh I mostly just cry when I watch this show no matter what is happening because it fill me with SUCH EMOTION.) Also how fuckin cute is that goddamn baby? I think JtV might be one of the more successful shows at integrating a baby into the fabric of the show without being dumb or irritating.





Like, with the title of this and the horrible promo, did anyone think that this would be a good show? I certainly didn’t, but a friend whose taste I trust (whenihithefloor) encouraged me to try it and I really love it so much! Mondays on the CW are my happy place, who could have ever guessed? This show is so weird – and I mean that in the best way – that I don’t even know what network would be a good fit for it, because it seems totally at odds with most of the CW’s programming. I thought the lead actress (plus writer and creator!) would be irritating based on commercials, but she is actually very talented and very charming. The songs are SO GOOD and SO HILARIOUS, you will be singing them for DAYS (I will linktosomemore). Plus it handles mental health stuff really well too!
I tried Looking when it first aired out of lifelong dedication to Jonathan Groff but it reallllly did not click for me – it just seemed like hip nonsense, beardy hipsters talking quietly in lowlit rooms. BUT then I accidentally caught some of s2 when it started (god help me, I think it came on either before or after Girls, which I was hatewatching at the time) and it finally did click for me, so I went back and rewatched the entire thing. I still don’t love s1 but IMO s2 was REALLY AMAZING which makes it even more disappointing that it’s been cancelled. The finale of s2 was one of my favorite episodes of TV of the last year, and maybe ever (?!?!??!), it was just such a great bottle episode. Groff is an absolute poodle and delight even when Patrick is being a total tragedy. I am at odds with most viewers, it seems, in that I do not care for the Favored Romance of the show, but tbh because the show keeps them apart (presumably for slowburn reasons?) a lot, it has no effect on me and I get to see more of the relationships I do like, lol.





A show both staggeringly hilarious and so relevant 2 my life, even if me and my bestie don’t get into half the zany shenans that Abbi and Ilana do. I don’t even know what to say besides listing glorious moments of the past season. Manuka honey! Trey’s porn career! THE EPISODE OF MANY PARTIES. VAL. V A L. Abbi getting stuck in that random hole and fantasizing about going to an extravagant flea market with Mark Ruffalo! I love that the show doesn’t consign Abbi to being the straight man to Ilana’s crazy, she’s just as absurd in her own way. Also love that their apartments look realistic and their jobs are shitty and they never have enough money for anything.

Pour one out!!!! Do you want to know something very embarrassing about me? I might have already told this story, because it seems all I do on the internet anymore is talk about how much I cry. But at some point, weeks ago, I was driving in my car and I started thinking about the finale of Mad Men and then I started thinking about how there would never be a new episode of Mad Men ever and I started CRYING like a total EMBARRASSMENT. I feel like that’s all I really need to say in relation to my dedication to this show. I still can’t believe it got SNUBBED at the Emmy’s and sweeped by Cesspool of Thrones and that neither Elisabeth Moss nor Christina Hendricks ever won an award for their work on this show. BULLSHIT. Mad Men is just the exact kind of thing I like – stylish, painful, and full of characters who only express about 15% of what they’re feeling at any given time. GIVE ME THAT SWEET, SWEET AMBIGUITY.





Okay, but who would ever think that a show about a cartoon horse would be a) this good, b) this emotionally SHATTERING? Another whenihithefloor rec that served me well, and a show that is maybe in a similar genre to CEG now that I think about it – just in combination of absurdity and pain, though BoJack is both a lot nuttier and a lot more poignant. When I first started watching it, I was like “eh, funny enough I guess” but then around episode 6 or 7 you start to feel a TURN and then by the end of s1 you are weeping, and then every episode of s2 is gold. I think that the animation/surrealism of the show is maybe what allows it to hit so hard when it comes to the Real Stuff. One thing I love about BoJack is how much it refuses pat conclusions, especially considering the show’s main character (BoJack, of course) made his fame on the kind of show that is nothing BUT pat conclusions. So I think he keeps looking for that, and we as people who are raised on television also can find ourselves looking for that, but we’re never gonna find it. So BoJack’s unhappy, BoJack gets everything he wants, BoJack is still unhappy, BoJack keeps trying, BoJack is continually unable to fill that void. And maybe he will never be able to. The show deals so much in what makes someone a good person / what makes someone TRY to be a good person, and most of the time it doesn’t come up with an answer.





It has been long enough that I kind of forgot the specifics of this show, lol, and all I am left with is a vague, pleasant feeling. I have gone on before about my love for Hayley Atwell (almost the whole reason I ever watched Cap in the first place, and thus became the tragedy I am today) and I love Peggy so much (I have Thoughts of a sort about the growing proliferation of the kinds of female protagonists that people often like to call Mary Sues, and how Mary Sues are actually pretty gr8) and I love lipstick and I love dresses. I like watching Hayley Atwell as Peggy kick butt in her nice dresses wearing her red lipstick. I loved the little cast of characters (minus the office dudes, which, very sadly, includes my darling Enver) and how they played off each other (my darling Jarvis & darling Angie & upcoming darling Jarvis’ wife!). So: a vague, pleasant blur. I didn’t think Deep Critical Thoughts about it for the most part but I loved watching it and that is enough 4 me.





Alright, so. I was COERCED by my sister into watching the first season of this show as it was airing, and I hated it. I hated every minute of it. I resolved not to watch s2 at all, but (apparently I easily fall prey to HBO’s programming schedule) it came on one day after John Oliver and I got hooked without knowing what I was watching. Season two opens with this pregnant woman in what appears to be prehistoric times losing her people in a cave collapse, then having her baby ALONE, then trying to save the baby, then getting bitten by some kind of poisonous snake, then dying slowly, and then the baby is found by another tribe (????). I was sitting there watching this unfold wondering what the fuck I was even watching, and when I finally checked to see what it was I was really surprised. And it really set the stage for what would be an utterly bizarre, very compelling, VERY risk-taking second season. The entire first episode of s2 didn’t follow ANY of the regular cast! They mains showed up towards the middle/end and it only focused on how they figured into the story of these new characters, who by that point I was already totally in love with (a couple played by the glorious Regina King and Kevin Carroll). The rest of the season continued to live up to the promise of that premiere for me, pretty much following a different character every episode but managing to make each highly compelling – even for characters I had not cared about previously. It spent an entire episode in the AFTERLIFE for god’s sake. It was truly weird, so so so weird, and I loved that. I love when shows just go off the fucking wall.





I had never seen any of the Mad Max movies and generally did not give one fuck until I heard the movie was making neckbeards uncomfortable, at which point I knew I had to support it monetarily. But I was really surprised by how much I genuinely loved it! (For the record, I do think the ~ultra so much very feminist~ claims are reaching, but the fact that all it took was a movie saying “oh yeah btw women are people and not things” for people to get all worked up is TELLING – that said, it was great to watch a film with such a female-heavy cast!) I really like highly visually stylized movies and it was very much a feast for the eyes, plus I thought it moved along at a great clip and managed to be very fast WITHOUT being straining to the eyes. I actually watched a making of type video about that – how they always made sure the important focal point of the scene was dead center so things could flash by very quickly but you would only need to look at one spot, so your eye wouldn’t get overwhelmed or confused. (TAKE NOTE, WHEDON, WHOSE FUCKIN SHOTS HAVE NO SENSE OF COMPOSITION ANYMORE.) The fact that it was basically a two hour chase scene and I was totally compelled speaks volumes to me, because usually I don’t care about that kind of thing. Big fan.




This was so good. First of all the cast was amazing (looove Tessa Thompson but really everyone was so good) and it just felt…fresh? Like so full of energy and passion, you could tell everyone involved felt so strongly about it. I would have loved it as a TV show, I really liked all the characters and felt like there was so much room for their stories to be ongoing. Really good movie, would recommend.





I have been really loving non-period piece Keira (though of course I still love period piece Keira!) and perhaps over-identified with her character in Laggies as a gal in her mid-20s who doesn’t know what the fuck she is doing. I thought she was very charming and normal and against all odds I was into the romance too.
Going to see Carol was one of the most luxury experiences of my young life. I only say so because it added to the movie watching experience; I saw it at the Angelika (where they SERVE COFFEE, all I ever want when I go to the movies is a goddamn cup of goddamn coffee) and my friend and I snuck in huge deli sandwiches and Laduree macarons. It was BEYOND. It may sound like I enjoyed the food more than the film, but this is not the case; it was truly a wonderful experience all around, merely enhanced by the delicious goodies. I have been a huge Todd Haynes fan since I was a wee lass and I continue to love his films for the same reason: the incredible eye for detail and his ability to craft such distinct atmospheres for each of his films that is unique and serves the story each film is telling. It was beautiful to look at and to listen to. I loved Rooney Mara in it, surprisingly, having not had very strong feelings for her prior. And tbh every day since I have seen it I have thought about it.





I really loved this. It had its iffy moments but I thought it was sharp and fun, and Chris Rock did a really great job all around. Rosario was straight perfect like she is in literally every project she deigns to put her name to (even the shitty ones) and I thought her character was great, plus she and Chris played off each other really well. They were very…exciting? to watch together. You know when chemistry is just so THERE? I would have enjoyed the movie if it was just the two of them walking around New York shooting the shit, but I really liked Chris’ character’s personal story/growth too. I love Hollywood movies – as in, movies about Hollywood and celebrity – and I think this was one of the better ones.
Get ready for the rest of the movies on this list to be Alicia Vikander movies. The first thing I saw her in was The Man from U.N.C.L.E., I guess? But I was definitely aware of her. And then after that I just started busting through her entire filmography and loving basically every movie of hers I watched. I just adore her. A Royal Affair was a movie I had heard a LOT of buzz about and a lot of fawning, so I went into it thinking it couldn’t possibly live up to the hype, but tbh it exceeded it. Just absolutely gutting. Wrenching. I had never seen Mads Mikkelsen in anything before and I was really blown away by his acting. You know, previously, when I saw gifs of him and stuff, I was always like, “Why is everyone losing their shit over this dude who looks like Voldemort?” But now I totally get it. The scene (spoiler alert) before he goes up to be executed, when you can see him realize exactly what is going to happen and that no one is going to save him – wow. Where was his Oscar for that? I wept so much watching this movie, and then I googled afterwards and was surprised to see that it seems to have been mostly factual! Which is like NEVER the case with historical dramas based on real events.





Speaking of ME CRYING (if I make it sound like I cry a lot, it’s because I cry a lot). I did not know anything about this movie before I watched it, and I honestly thought it was like a Titanic-style sweeping romance set against the backdrop of WWI, which is NOT WHAT IT WAS. It was actually an incisive portrait of war and grief from a totally female perspective. I am not sure I have seen many war movies from women’s PoVs, but bear in mind I am not a person who watches a lot of war movies. Gone with the Wind, I guess? If there are any great ones, please let me know! But I very much loved this movie, and I was ugly crying for most of it and then had a terrible headache. It was very beautiful. Jon Snow’s acting wasn’t bad, either.





I was pushed to finally watch this thanks to a great article by Genevieve Valentine that discussed it in relation to the recent Cinderella film and how both dealt with the topic of feminine transformation. Not being a general fan of things to do with robots but a fan of the cast, I wasn’t totally sure how I would feel about it. But I loved the look of it, and most of all the deeply unsettling atmosphere. I love movies where you don’t quite know what’s true and what’s false. I also love (I feel like this is creepy to say?) body horror, even though I also mostly can’t look at it, and indeed had to close my eyes through the entire scene of Caleb digging into his arm. I also LOVED the end, Ava using Caleb for her freedom and then fucking LEAVING him there, amazing.





This movie was just fun. Sometimes that is all you want or need! It was stylish, had an incredible soundtrack, great costumes, and was filled with beautiful people. Cut & print tbh. I know it bombed, but can it please get one sequel anyway? They’ll give sequels to anything these days! I just want ooooone more swanky 1960s spy movie! Just one more! Is that too much to ask, Guy Ritchie??? Is it??????


Honorable Mentions:
Bessie (2015)
I was pretty disappointed this didn't win any awards because I thought the movie was WONDERFUL. It really showcased an incredibly fascinating woman. I don’t remember hearing much buzz about it, but I liked it A LOT A LOT and would very much recommend it! Gorgeous 1920s outfits, great acting, interesting subject! I thought Queen Latifah was great, too.

The Danish Girl (2015)
I typed out a huge paragraph about this but then decided I didn't really want to get into it. I know a lot of people didn't care for it, and it got pretty mixed reviews, but I really enjoyed it. When the movie ended, all the ladies in the theater (me included) were crying and we literally ALL (like, a theater-full amount of people) had to sit there collecting ourselves and dabbing our tears for like ten minutes, lol.

Biggest disappointment:
Lady Chatterley’s Lover (2015)
Ugh. UGH. U G H. I read the book this year (see below) and I was terribly excited for the film, being as I am a big fan of both Holliday Grainger and Richard Madden. And I do think they were well cast and did as good a job as they could considering what they were given to work with. My issue with this adaptation was that they foregrounded the stories of the men (the husband and Ricard’s gamekeeper) when the book is 1000000% about Connie (Lady Chatterley) and entirely from her perspective. It is HER STORY and the goddamn movie didn’t even introduce her until like 10-15 minutes in! Connie got ZERO backstory, as though she did not exist before she married Clifford. The movie was too busy building up the manpain of the two male leads and building up some nonexistent relationship between them for…what purpose? So it could be all about how Clifford was betrayed by Mellors fucking his wife? I saw a LOT of sympathy for Clifford on the internet after this came out, which is so not the fucking point I could scream. Nothing like watching a book you love get shit all over!




The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, Holly Black
I loved Holly Black books when I was an actual tweenager, and in the last year I decided to read a couple of her more recent releases. And I really enjoyed them! I thought The Coldest Girl in Coldtown was actually a very unique and interesting take on vampires, which is few and far between these days. I think Holly Black is pretty good at creating very tangible worlds populated with fun, interesting characters.

Caucasia, Danzy Senna
I read this on the recommendation of a friend, and I am so glad I did. The story follows a biracial girl in Boston in the 70s who is forced after her parents’ divorce (and some illegal activity her mother is involved in) to spend years passing as white. It is very much a coming of age story complicated by a lot of other things, and it was rich and beautifully written. I’m not really doing it justice. It was fantastic.

Summer, Edith Wharton
A relatively short novel by my girl Edith about a young girl, Charity Royall, who is desperate for some excitement in her REALLY VERY sleepy town, and ends up embarking on this affair with a visiting rich boy. It is a surprisingly sexy book! A period novel focused on a young woman’s coming of age and sexuality! There is a scene where she goes to the rich boy’s house to talk to him but she ends up just sort of creeping on him through the window and it is yes, creepy and you should not creep on people through windows, but it’s also hot? I really loved Charity too, she was such a strong and forceful presence, which makes it even sadder when she’s sort of crushed at the end, because Edith Wharton won’t leave anyone ALONE, goddammit Edith.

The Fever,Megan Abbott
I went HAM on Megan Abbott this year, and I sort of wanted to pick one book as a representative, but it was hard because I’ve loved every book of hers I read. I do think I may have particularly loved The Fever (oh man, Queenpin though), which revolves around a mysterious illness that seems to be afflicting girls at this high school, and the mystery of what’s going on/how much of it is hysteria/etc. I just love Megan Abbott’s whole deal, the way she writes, the themes of her novels, all of it. One of my favorite writers.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence
I always suspected ol D.H. and I would have our day together, and I was not wrong. This is the only book of his I’ve read so far but I’m eager to read more. I was really quite taken with it. I even found it kind of scandalous still – not because of the sex, hello, it’s 2015/6 – but because it was SO blunt about sex and romance and relationships, in a way that would be startling NOW, let alone in 1928. And, you know, for a male writer in the 1920s writing from the point of view of a woman, I was…not half as offended as I thought I would be? Lol that seems like a bad way to phrase it. But I really loved Connie and loved her perspective and thought she actually felt quite real.



WHEW that was a lot of me saying stuff. Please throw me recs if you got ‘em! I have been watching Mr. Robot lately and enjoying it, which I did not expect.

COMPARED  TO  WHAT
the man from u.n.c.l.e. gaby & napoleon.
gen. 1459 words. ao3 link.

summary: Her first instinct will always be to crack things open and figure out how the insides fit together, determine what makes them run. What makes Napoleon Solo run, outside of self-interest?

note: For ms_mmelissa! I hope you enjoy it! :)







They get drunk in New York on New Year's Eve. No missions, no covers, no responsibilities, no parties – just drunkenness. Gaby likes vodka on the rocks; Solo's an old fashioned man.

"There is a word for you," she says, slurs. "With your sharp suits and your slick hair and those gaudy watches. That ring. They would call you a snake oil salesman. A man like you, they would take one look and say, he is selling something."

"That's very harsh, Gabrielle," Solo replies mildly. The only sign in him of tipsiness is a slight loosening of the collar, a hint of red in his cheeks. One strand of black hair dips over his forehead and tries valiantly to curl. "That's also more than one word. And who exactly are the they of this scenario?"

"Everyone. Anyone. Me and Illya," Gaby says stubbornly, ignoring the conventions of grammar, and jerks her chin towards Illya, who is by now dozing on the chaise lounge, his legs hanging off the end. They have passed the evening in Solo's luxury penthouse, an ostentatious collection of rooms in a rundown neighborhood at the top floor of a derelict-looking building. Gaby found it very strange place to find him, but Solo only remarked that the rent was negligible and hadn't he done a wonderful job of fixing it up?

He fed them too, fussing around the kitchen with an apron tied over his shirt while Illya critiqued his cooking and Gaby helped herself to the wine. Solo was a good cook, but Gaby and Illya made a point never to compliment him for anything because it went directly to his already overstuffed head.

Now Gaby reaches for one of the leftover canapés, gone cold but perhaps more delicious for it. "Where did you learn to cook?"

"Now hold on, I'm not off the topic of my alleged swindling – "

Gaby gives him a pointed, pursed-lips look.

"Oh, alright. I learned because if one doesn't learn to cook, one generally doesn't eat. Isn't that the way?"

"It's different. You enjoy it. When I have to feed myself, the best I can do is toast with butter or a potato in the oven. You make prime rib for people you still won't call friends."

"You're co-workers," Solo says.

Gaby rolls her eyes.

"And did you know it's quite rude to interrogate your host? Do I pepper you with personal questions, hm, Gabrielle? No, I do not."

"No, only because you think you already know everything."

Solo smiles then, just a quick flash of teeth behind the amber liquid in the glass he holds to his mouth. "I don't mind being told I'm wrong. In fact sometimes I rather like it."

"That sounds like a challenge," she says.

Solo's grin lingers. "I'm certain you could rise to it."







"You know, Teller, I've been rather bothered about something."

Solo sidles up to her casually at the museum gala they're attending today, speaking more to the painting than to her so they won't look too involved.

"Speak now, or…" Gaby says, lips against her cocktail and eyebrow angling upwards slightly.

"Well, it's just that business about the snake oil," he says. "Whatever would make you say that?"

"Because you're a thief and you're working off your jail time as we speak," she says. "And also you stole my bracelet within ten minutes of our arrival."

Guiltily, Solo's hand slips into his pocket and emerges with said bracelet, which he then drops so effortlessly into her purse that she probably would never have noticed if she wasn't looking. "It wasn't because I wanted it. I was trying to help you."

Amused, "Oh?"

"The thing was just terribly ugly," Solo says, and Gaby actually lets out a startled, affronted laugh despite herself. "I don't know who chose it, you or Peril, or which would make it better. But honestly, Teller, just because you're a mechanic doesn't mean you have to accessorize like one."

"Are you just being mean because you're upset I called you a thief?"

"I have been called a great deal worse," Solo says, unperturbed – at least on the surface. "I am merely a connoisseur of style. Don't tell me you wouldn't wear those horrible coveralls every day if you could."

There is truth to the idea that Gaby is more at ease in her jeans and jumpsuits, scarf tied around her head, engine grease smeared over her cheek. It's the life she knows best, after all, and as much as she may enjoy the stylish dresses and heels they never quite stop feeling like a costume.

"They are both comfortable and functional," Gaby tells him. "Now leave me alone, I'm working. That diplomat will never come anywhere near me with a man like you hovering."

The idea seems to please Solo immensely – he is such a peacock, after all – but before he confirm that Gaby is very indirectly implying that he's handsome, Illya has appeared to wrap an arm around his bicep and haul him off.

"Honestly, cowboy," Illya grumbles. "You have attention span of child."







"I suppose you don't make sense to me," Gaby tells Solo.

"It does seem very debonair to be considered an enigma," is his reply.

They've spent the better part of the afternoon perched on a bench outside the Greek Embassy, marking the comings and goings of key figures while they pretend to read the paper or share lunch, just two attractive strangers on a midday date.

Solo follows up his remark with, "Let's play a game. You can tell me something about myself, and I'll tell you if it's true or not."

"You're so conceited that a game of Napoleon Solo trivia is your idea of a good time," Gaby says sardonically, giving him a mean smile. She likes being mean to Solo just to see if he really is unflappable. It's like skipping a stone across the placid surface of a lake.

He returns the smile, but without the sarcastic edge. "True."

Satisfied that he will be honest as long as he also thinks he is being funny, couching the truth in that toothpaste advertisement smile, Gaby really considers her next statement. Her first instinct will always be to crack things open and figure out how the insides fit together, determine what makes them run. What makes Napoleon Solo run, outside of self-interest? Is he like an elegant sports car that breaks down the first time you take it out of the garage, or is there something more to be found in him?

"You crave luxury because you grew up in poverty," she guesses next. After leaving Berlin, she herself had gone a bit mad with consumerism and now she has trunks full of gorgeous things she no longer cares about.

"Hard-hitting, Miss Teller," he says. "But false."

Gaby frowns. "You grew up pampered, lost your money, and are now trying to regain the life to which you were accustomed."

"False again," he says. "You're really not very good at this, are you?" He leans slightly closer. "I've heard that the real truth usually lies in the middle of such extremes."

She gets a new picture of Napoleon Solo then: young and impossibly handsome and always in trouble for some charming little indiscretion, a perfectly ordinary upbringing, the son in cereal commercials surrounded by his happy family. He probably got away with a lot because of his looks. He probably got used to that.

Seeming to sense the cogs turning, Solo offers up information about himself for the first time in Gaby's memory. "I was raised by my mother, who was a schoolteacher, in my grandparents' home in Queens. I have a younger brother; we no longer speak."

It all seems rather too ordinary, put forth in his clear, well-modulated voice. She studies him, attempts to make all the pieces fit together. "True or false?"

Solo grins at her, but the next words out of his mouth aren't connected to the matter at hand. "Our man, twelve o'clock." Gaby casts a glance sideways to just in time to see the man they're tracking round the corner in the opposite direction. "Best get a move on."

He rises, dusting off his trousers and folding his paper before extending a hand to her. Gaby takes it, getting lightly to her feet. "Now, my turn," Solo says, almost softly. "Gaby Teller is capable, terribly pretty, terrifically short tempered, and has abysmal taste in clothes when left to her own devices."

"Don't angle for a slap," Gaby tells him, and she makes sure to step on his foot as she passes, hopefully scuffing the expensive leather. "If we lose him, it's on you."

She can feel Solo's amusement as he follows her. "I take full responsibility."

For bond_girl! I am starting to feel like all my mixes have the same songs on them, lol, so apologies if this overlaps with anything else I have already done. It's not my fault Jeff Buckley doesn't have more albums!!!

Also I know "Take Me to Church" is kiiiind of cliché by now, but it might as well be Donovan's anthem, so. I had to stick it on here. Well, actually, "Love Me Please Love Me" might be his anthem slightly more. That was almost the mix title. Love me pick me choose me!!!!

WHAT HAPPENED AT THE SNOW QUEEN'S PALACE AND WHAT HAPPENED AFTERWARDS
american horror story: hotel.1921 words. ao3 link.
donovan/the countess, donovan/ramona, even a lil donovan/sally.

summary:Donovan had one lover and she lived in his veins.

note: for stainofmylove! Thank u for this glorious prompt, this fic was something I very much needed to write. I hope you enjoy it. <3 <3 Pls consider my Donovan mix a companion to it.







It was like a baby duck imprinting on its mother: she was the first thing Donovan saw when he opened his eyes. He was the little boy in The Snow Queen all grown up, snatched willingly from his mother by a woman carved from ice.

He had gone to bed with a needle in his arm, his body unwashed and unshaved, clad in thrifted denim and stolen flannel. If asked, he would not have been able to remember the last time he looked in the mirror or even what he thought of the person he would have found there. Donovan had one lover and she lived inside his veins.

When he woke up, he was clean. It was like he had been prepared, a human sacrifice, his skin buffed and hair brushed. He was lying naked under a silken silver sheet on her round bed, on his back with his arms at his sides. She was waiting, and when he opened his eyes, she smiled.

Donovan had one lover.







He met Sally at a concert. Dumb and human and jonesing, he'd been scratching at the insides of his arms and asking around for anyone, anything, isn't there something he could shoot inside himself? Sally was a magnet. All the way across the room, Donovan found her eyes waiting, rimmed in sooty black and wet from crying. Their eyes met and Sally smiled.

"You're beautiful," she told him first thing, but Donovan had heard a lot of that in his life and it didn't mean anything anymore. He didn't look as good since he'd been using, anyway.

"You holding?" he asked her first thing, and Sally dimmed a little. She'd heard a lot of that too.

Sally always administered herself and she liked to fool around during. Donovan didn't care. She ran her bruised plum mouth all over his neck while he held his arm out, waiting and waiting, and eventually she put the needle in him. Donovan moaned when she pressed down on the plunger and he kissed Sally right on the mouth, which made her burnt smile blossom at the edge of his vision.

"I've got better stuff than this," Sally told him. "I know a place where we can go."







"Would you like to look in the mirror?"

But Donovan was looking at her. When he woke up, he did not take stock of his surroundings or his own body; that would come later, learning the new flawless elasticity of his skin, the joints that rarely felt pain, scratches that could heal in an hour. When he woke up, he was only looking at her.

She was very still, watching him with unreadable eyes, unremarkably hazel under glossy lids but hypnotic, somehow. Her hair was long, white blonde, only slightly cooler in tone than her white skin, and it made her unreal. A movie star, maybe a singer. She was too luxurious to be anything else, opulent even just sitting there. Her hair was long and loose, and she only wore a robe of heavy red satin, voluminous enough to trail on the cold gray floor. Her nails were very long, filed to points.

Donovan wondered if he would die here.

"No," he answered finally, his voice surprisingly strident and firm. "Who are you?"

Her mouth moved in a way that might have indicated a smile on anyone else. "Where am I," she offered, mockingly. "What do you want with me?"

She slid out of her seat and made her way to him. Her heels made quiet and distinct clicks, each step measured and secure. When she reached the bed, she crawled onto it on her hands and knees, not submissive but like a cat, slinky and predatory. Her robe slipped open, revealing a bodysuit of glittering silver. She pushed on Donovan's chest until he lay flat and then she crawled over him too. She bent until her lips, soft and pink, hovered over his.

She asked, "Don't you care where you are?"

But that was something Donovan knew. "I'm with you."

Something in her expression shifted, opened up. "You can call me the Countess."

Strangely, against all odds, Donovan felt himself smile. "Is there a short version of that?"







Ramona didn't understand.

Ramona thought she understood, but she couldn't possibly; Donovan was the only one who knew, the only one. Ramona spent twenty years by her side looking for a way out. Donovan spent twenty years never looking anywhere else.

"You sure are a sad little boy," Ramona snarled. Her contempt was at odds with her easy sprawl, legs thrown over the side of the leather chair in her foyer. "You just want to lick her boots for eternity."

"When push comes to shove, I don't see you getting much done either," Donovan countered. "Bartholomew, the children – the Countess. Nobody's suffered as much as a scratch."

She got to her feet quick, her body one long line of threat. "Maybe if I had a partner who was worth shit."

Donovan gave her a careless shrug, a smile. "All you got is me."

Ramona looked him up and down, lip curling and eyes lingering. "Wish I'd kept the receipt."

Ramona didn't understand. She couldn't.







Donovan spent the first two weeks of his immortal life in the Countess' bed. By the time he left her room he was shocked to find he was still inside the Hotel Cortez. Donovan was remade, and not just in tailored suits and perfect skin; it was the first time in his life he had purpose, straight and true as an arrow to the heart. It was a strange and exhilarating thing to be useful, to have use.

He couldn't remember the taste of her blood splattering over his lips the first time, but there were enough times after to make up for it. She drew the sharp points of her black nails over her ribs, back arching, and left thin rivulets of blood in their wake. Donovan affixed his mouth to each in turn, chasing the burn of her blood, the whiskey and cherry of it. He kissed her fingers and her breasts and her cunt, there was not a part of her body he did not bend his head in service to.

He began to live for the feeling of her scratching through his hair.

"I was born far from here," she told him. "I came here like you, to be young and beautiful for the cameras."

"I could barely land a commercial." He moved blunt teeth over her thigh, her knee, her calf.

"Me either," she laughed, and it was a gift: her first hint of vulnerability. "Well, in a manner of speaking; they didn't make commercials then. But I looked very fetching standing behind some rather artistic scenery on movie sets."

"I bet." Donovan sank his teeth gently into her ankle.

"I was infected by a very beautiful man, like you," she said. "And I lost him. He left me."

At that, Donovan surged up to kiss her so hard he could have tasted blood in it. "I'll never leave you," he swore.

"Oh, baby," she sighed. "That's what they all say."







"Useless," Ramona seethed, "Goddamn spineless, goddamn waste of a man."

Another attempt had left no one dead, and the farce of it was wearing thin on everyone involved. Ramona pushed him hard against the white marble of her palatial home, the inverse of the Countess' castle, the darkness of the Hotel Cortez. Donovan allowed Ramona to shove him, to bruise him, to hurt him; he missed it.

"You're a lot of sound and fury, Ramona," he said, head tipped back to bear the line of his throat. "What was it that signified?"

Ramona slapped him hard, the quick sharp bite of it turning to tingling, overflowing heat. She slapped him once on either cheek and Donovan kept the backs of his wrists pinned to the wall by willpower and nothing else. She hit him and then she kissed him, which Donovan had been counting on. He'd wanted Ramona like this from almost the first minute, but it would be good, too, in the long run to have done this now.

The Countess kissed like a tease and then a killing; Ramona kissed like a forest fire. She dragged her hands down his chest until the buttons of his shirt split from their bindings, then she dragged her nails back up until his skin burned. He grabbed her by the hips and moaned, let his mouth open for her, go slack for her.

"Too bad I always had a weakness for a beautiful man," she muttered, then pushed hard on his shoulders so he'd buckle to his knees. Donovan looked up at her, grinning.

He rolled her skirt up and tested the skin of her thighs with his teeth. He wanted her to come before she fucked him. "That's what they all say."

He still had Ramona's scent on him, her lipstick and saliva and slickness, when he went back to the Hotel. He took the elevator all the way up, and when he found the Countess there, he said, "Let's make a deal."







How exactly did she determine when his time was up?

That was what Donovan wanted to know, just what went into that decision, what made her grow bored with him, dispose of him like a body down the laundry chute. He came to recognize the exact moment it happened, later: it was before Tristan, and Donovan was on the couch with her above him. She ran her fingers over his face, gripped his chin and drank him in with her eyes, and if he'd been smart, he'd have known right then it was over. But he didn't know why.

Twenty years brought with it a lot of ups and downs, and Donovan had watched her fade before. She always came back. He was always able to ignite the fire, make her burn again. Maybe he would have been able to if it hadn't been for Tristan. Tristan, who didn't even love her. Not like Donovan did. His love was singular.

"What was it like, when you made me?" he asked that very first day, when he was new and everything was still beautiful. He never could remember it.

"My love," she said, and licked at his lips, "It was like drinking in the very light of God."

When she kicked him out, he had reminded her of that – and she laughed. She laughed at him like he was a one night stand that got too clingy and not her lover, her beloved, her everything for two decades. The pink neon light was in her white hair, and her face looked young – younger than his.

Desperate, he pleaded, "Elizabeth."

Her expression shuttered and, without another word, she slammed the bedroom doors. Just like that, they were severed.







Revenge didn't taste like much when all was said and done, so Donovan could think of no sweeter thing than this: a final smoke, a last drink, one more look at her, and death. He imagines her rage, the metallic claws of her glove ripping his throat open. He imagines her playing him, making his death last, dragging the silver pain on for hours. But the way it happened was better than any of his visions: her tears, a spray of bullets, his life for hers. It was the best way to die. It made him more hers than ever.

Donovan had one lover and she lived in his veins.

For prefectlives! I hope you like it. :) This was v. fun to do (it was actually the first thing I finished for the month), she has had so many good looks. I think my favorite pictures are her on the TV and the last one.

NSFW, as I imagine might go without saying.

I ALLOW MYSELF
marvel. 1475 words. gen.
natasha. clint, steve, sam, wanda.
ao3 link.

summary:Natasha was the only one in control now.

note: for thecruelone! My goal with this was to sort of check in with Natasha in the in-betweens – after she left the Red Room, after she joined SHIELD, in between each movie. Natasha's downtime, and the people she connects with during. (Also Clint is comic!Clint not movie!Clint ofc.)




The life Natasha was born to was regimented, and sometimes hungry, and often cold. Natasha was not the kind of person who dwelt on disparities or fished for pity, but she could state those simple facts. It was easier not to think when you had a series of specific goals to hit minute by minute, day by day. Hunger never really became easier to ignore. The cold kept your mind sharp, and work warmed you up.

She would admit that at times her upbringing had made it difficult to indulge in small luxuries.







When she first came to SHIELD, she would get breakfast in the cafeteria. Black coffee, a protein shake, and dry toast. Clint would tag along, though whether it was for company (a notion of responsibility for Natasha that she would disabuse him of in a year's time) or because he likely would neglect breakfast unless someone else was providing it. Clint was the kind of person who thought of nutrition in terms of whether four day old pizza was too old or not.

One day Clint set a cinnamon bun on their table, dripping icing. Natasha looked from it to him and raised an eyebrow with all the slowness of a glacier. "What am I supposed to do with this," she said.

"Eat it," Clint told her. He cut it down the middle with a plastic knife, and then fitted his entire half into his mouth like a snake unhinging its jaws. Through crumbs he sputtered, "S'good."

Natasha looked at it again, and all she could think was that it was so frivolous, so absurd, a pastry for breakfast. She had been all over the world, on missions and alone, so it wasn't exactly a surprise, but it felt at that moment strangely like she was Alice in Wonderland.

Natasha ate it.







When she and Steve got sent down to D.C. Natasha knew only that he would be professional and dedicated, which was all she needed to know to work with him mission to mission. He was certainly more reliable than Clint, but she imagined a good deal less fun too.

But she got curious about Steve. It was impossible not to. He showed up to work every time with his game face on, his jaw clenched and shoulders squared, determined and direct. He smiled when someone made a joke and was free with his own unexpected sarcasm, but Natasha was good at learning people's tells and she knew none of it was touching him. He was removed. He had been removed from the world for a very long time.

Once, early on, Clint had asked what she did on the weekends. Drills, she had said. Exercises. Clean my guns. Research. Clint said she could do better than that, couldn't she?

Once, early on, she asked Steve what he did on the weekends. Oh, I run, he said. I walk. I learn the neighborhood. I study. I go to the gym.

Natasha gave him a slight smile. "You can do better than that, can't you?"

There was a little bit of a shift in his face then, a clearing of the eyes that Natasha interpreted as the first time either of them looked beyond the co-worker blinkers. "I don't know, you tell me," Steve said with a shrug and a disarming smile, right back into his Nice Boss routine. Well – maybe not entirely. "Got any ideas?"







Sam called her once a week from wherever it was he and Steve had ended up, occasionally from a different number, often on a shitty connection. But Natasha appreciated it.

"How you doing?" he always asked first, in greeting, often sounding warped or staticky due to distance. Natasha appreciated that too; it was a question not everyone asked.

"Good, but I've been better," she said, or some variation thereof, and, "How's the search?"

"Searching," Sam might have said, with a laugh, if it had been an unremarkable day. If it had gone badly, she would receive a sigh that spoke volumes.

Sam wasn't a guy who was after a pep talk and there was something about his easy openness that defied the need for chitchat. Sam was the kind of person you had deep conversations with over coffee in rooms with intimate lighting, which had put Natasha ill at ease sometimes, privately. There was still something in her that resisted that.

At first she wasn't sure why Sam was calling her, exactly. It wasn't to talk about Steve, not really; Sam would mention him, keep her updated, but they could also go whole conversations without his name coming up. Talk of their search was kept veiled and minimal. He did not solicit Natasha's advice or dig in for information.

It took her a stupidly long time to come to the conclusion that Sam just liked her conversation. And after that realization, just like she feared, Natasha gave in to it.

Even with people she dated, Natasha had never been particularly forthcoming, not in the way of daily confessions of minutiae. But Sam appeared genuinely interested in Natasha's stories of a woman who was rude to her at the grocery store, or the book she was reading, the really good food she'd gotten one night. Natasha had never dealt in trivialities. She never placed any importance on them. But Sam's sure and consistent interest in the nonsense of her life was, in a strange way, comforting.







Sometimes Natasha would catch Wanda in the cafeteria of the new base very early in the morning. She didn't paint a lonely picture; Wanda was always visibly busy, reading or toying with something, plastic cutlery floating around her or saltshaker dancing along the tabletop. She ate oatmeal, toast with a thin spreading of butter, coffee with whole milk. It was not the same.

But all the same Natasha found herself repeating past patterns.

Natasha put down a cinnamon bun, then peeled off a segment for herself. "So what do you do on weekends?"

Wanda lifted her eyebrows. "I wouldn't bother trying this kind of casual therapy on me. Wilson already does it every chance he gets."

"Sam's just nice," Natasha said. "Believe me. I know that's like someone telling you unicorns exist, but it's the truth. God's honest."

Wanda was already softer than Natasha had ever been, but that wasn't a dig; she knew Wanda was not to be trifled with. It was only that Wanda had grown up with someone who loved her and her grief was fresh and no one had ever taught her that it was better not to feel anything. Sugared icing on pastry would not be a turning point for her.

"Are you?"

It was not a question Natasha expected. "Am I what?"

"Nice," Wanda said. "Is this casual therapy, or are you here as a spy, to figure me out?"

"None of the above," Natasha told her. "But a little bit of mystery is sort of my thing."

"Sometimes I wonder if you and the Captain try to play good cop/bad cop," Wanda mused. "But he is always too good and you are never bad enough."

"I could do worse if you think it would be effective for you."

Wanda smiled a little. Wanda didn't reserve smiles, but they never took away the gleam of sadness in her eyes either. "No, I'm alright."

"I keep telling Steve we ought to put up a suggestion box," Natasha said, dry as toast, and Wanda's mouth gave another amused twist.

Natasha respected Wanda's ability to carry so much suffering around with her and still survive. She thought that might be the thing that banded them together more than silly costumes and global tragedies.

"I'm trying to be nice," Natasha said. "Is that good enough for now?"

Wanda smiled again. "I suppose we'll see."







Natasha's life was quieter than one might expect from an international spy and former assassin. She kept spare, undecorated apartments because she changed them often. The things she carried from place to place could fit inside one suitcase. In the mornings she ran and went to early yoga classes, picked up tea and a protein muffin from wherever was nearest this week. Natasha was good at going unnoticed, had trained in it, and she was able to keep her daily life unhampered even with a public profile.

It was indulgent for Natasha to do these things, to live like a person and not a soldier. There were times when she caught herself getting angry over it, sniping at herself for stupid things, wanting a blueberry muffin instead, sleeping in for fifteen extra minutes. She had to remind herself that normalcies were something she had earned, though such things did not really need to be earned. She could just have them if she wanted. That was her right.

Natasha was the only one in control now.

For ladymercury_10! I had been hoping to write a fic for your prompt, but I could not get my shit/inspo together enough to make it happen, so I hope you will be satisfied with a picspam! And I hope you will be as satisfied as you might have been before that whole spiel. First quote is from Double Indemnity, subsequent quoting is from Roger Ebert; it's one of my favorite noir-related things, so I thought the two could blend nicely. :)

SAY  A  LITTLE  PRAYER
gossip girl. 8886 words. inspired by/based on my best friend's wedding.
serena, blair, carter, dan. one-sided serena/blair. dan/blair. serena & carter bros 4 lyf.

summary: Blair's birthday came first, of course, and they'd celebrated drunk in Paris, giggly and silly, and Blair had teased, Now if you don't get married in the next year, you're mine.

note: For anonymous! My deep apologies that this is a day late, but as you can see it ended up being...longer than anticipated, haha. I wrote this fic in something of a fugue state; I busted through it in the last three days in such a fever that I barely even remember doing it. So...that was weird. But I hope you like this! It was a v. fun prompt and I love this movie.






"You're in a good mood tonight," Carter observes.

Serena makes a face at him but even so she can't quell the little flutter of excitement she feels every time she looks at her phone, sitting face-up on the table to the left of her plate. "I'm always in a good mood."

She and Carter have been in Ibiza for a week so far and it's been a good week, all sun and sand, dancing at night, taking cute outfit pics for the blog against a backdrop of picturesque streets. It's one more stop on the European tour that never seems to end, and it's been at least a month since either of them was really home – though home is a tenuous concept at best.

Finally, Serena tells him, "Blair's supposed to call me tonight."

Carter just lifts his eyebrows, waiting for more. "Is that it? I wasn't aware talking to Blair made it a national holiday."

Serena flicks an olive at him. "It's not just that." It's something she's been thinking about a lot, actually, and it's giving her a fiddly, romantic feeling that might just be the result of too much champagne on foreign coasts – or might be something more. "Okay, so, when Blair and I were little… Really little, I think we were in the first grade, we made this pact that if neither of us were married by the time we were twenty-eight, we'd get married." Twenty-eight had seemed so old then, so impossible to think that they'd ever be grown up women with glamorous lives, like something out of a movie.

"And your birthday is next week," he supplies. "Beautiful, forgive me if I never took you for the marrying kind."

"I don't know what kind I am," she defers, swirling her wine around her glass a little. But she has been thinking about it. It had turned into something of a joke between her and Blair throughout the years whenever a boyfriend or girlfriend called it quits, a silly little promise reaffirmed in the middle of ice cream cries and movie marathons. Blair's birthday came first, of course, and they'd celebrated drunk in Paris, giggly and silly, and Blair had teased, Now if you don't get married in the next year, you're mine. "You know those kinds of things always meant more to Blair."

Making a deal with Blair, even and perhaps especially a casual one, was like signing your name in the devil's book with blood. Binding and non-negotiable.

"Yeah, but I'm not sure she's gonna propose to you over the phone because of something a six year old decided."

"I'm not saying she is," Serena protests, but there's that fiddly feeling in her stomach again. "It just seems like a coincidence, that's all." Carter still looks awfully disbelieving, so Serena decides to steer away from the topic. "Now shush, I have to vlog dinner."

"Oh shit." Carter drops the fork that had been about to dive into his chicken. "Let me put on some concealer first."

Serena hums You're So Vain pointedly while she gets her camera out.







Serena arrives at her hotel room tipsy – as in, tipping sideways on her dangerously high heels – and fifteen minutes shy of her phone call with Blair. She debates the merits of being able to squeeze a shower into that little chunk of time, and the result is that she's half naked trying to drunkenly brush her hair and teeth at once when the phone goes. Blair's ring is, as ever, Robyn's Call Your Girlfriend.

Serena abandons the toothbrush on the television stand so she can grab for her phone. "B!"

Blair's voice is low and warm and already laughing on the other end. "I can tell you're drunk with just one syllable."

"I'm on vacation," Serena says breezily. She strokes absently at the ends of her hair with the detangler, making faces at her oily foundation and dissipated lipgloss in the mirror above the dresser.

"Your life is a vacation," Blair says. As a lawyer her own life is anything but, and Blair particularly likes lording her hyper-responsible adulthood over Serena's shiftless existence.

"I know you didn't call just to give me a hard time."

"Nope, that's a bonus." Blair very audibly takes a breath, like she's steeling herself, and it immediately piques Serena's interest. "Okay. Are you sitting down?"

A slow smile starts to curl Serena's lips, like the bow on top of a present. "I'm a big girl, I can handle good news standing up."

"Are you so sure it's good?"

"I sort of have an idea," Serena admits.

Blair laughs again. "You're suddenly a psychic?"

"C'mon, B, just spit it out."

"First tell me if you're going to be back by the end of next week."

Serena's birthday. She'll be back by then. "Of course. Just tell me already!"

"Okay." Another pause, this one with something of a breathless giggle in it, and Blair announces, "I'm getting married!"

Serena sits automatically, though she misses the bed by a good four feet and goes sprawling on the floor, knocking her tailbone pretty hard for good measure.

"S? S, are you alright?"

Serena scrambles to right herself, heart beating much too wildly for a little spill. "Getting married? To who?" Suspiciously, "This isn't like that prince thing again, is it?"

"You're never going to let me live that down. I was twenty years old, I was an idiot." Blair releases a huffy little sigh. "It's not like that. It's – well, it's Dan."

If Serena wasn't already on her hotel room floor, that would've dropped her there. For a second she doesn't comprehend English anymore. "My Dan?"

She realizes what a dumb thing that is to say when the silence stretches too long on the other end.

"Your Dan, I mean. I guess I mean," she says. "You and Dan? You hate Dan."

"You know we've become very close over the years," Blair says.

"No, I don't," Serena says stubbornly. Sure, she remembers them having that weird little friendship affair however many years ago, but everyone was a mess then, and Blair seemed to drop it as soon as she got back with Chuck. Serena can't remember either of them mentioning the other in the intervening years. And, okay, she may not be in the country often, and she may not be kept abreast of every little update in her friends' lives but surely – surely they wouldn't have kept something like this from her?

"I hope you're not upset. Dan thought you might be. And I don't want you to think – we hadn't been seeing each other, not really, not more than usual, and we certainly weren't dating. But one day, out of the blue, he was going to visit his mother and I was seeing him off at the train and I was looking at him and I just thought – well, I just knew. It came out of my mouth before I even knew what I was saying." Blair laughs a little, softly, at the memory. "I asked him to marry me. And he said yes. So we're doing it – in two weeks." Her voice turns very earnest. "I understand if it might be strange, but I want you to be there. I want you to be my maid of honor."

Serena is still having some trouble grasping the basics of language right now. "Two weeks?"

"I've been trying to get ahold of you for the last month. I didn't want to tell you in a text."

Serena's heart starts hammering as she thinks of every call she'd missed or put off or blithely didn't pick up over the last four weeks. "But isn't that soon?"

Blair is both certain and damning on the other end. "Why wait?"







"Two weeks! Two weeks! Has Blair ever been the kind of person who would jump into something like this? The Blair I know would take like a year just to plan the most ridiculous wedding known to man. Two weeks!"

Carter is sprawled across Serena's unmade bed, passively watching as she stomps around the hotel room throwing things into her suitcase. He lights a cigarette. "Maybe he knocked her up."

Serena pauses, heels in one hand and makeup bag in the other. "Please don't put that out into the universe."

Carter gives her an amused little smirk as he puffs away. "You know Little Waldorf has always been a sucker for romance. Didn't you say something to that effect just the other night?"

"No," Serena says tightly, embarrassed. "I meant that Blair likes – she likes tradition and ritual and fate and –"

"Now you're just arguing semantics. Even I know Waldorf is a girl after a fairytale, and if there's anything more romantic than taking your time planning a Princess Di ordeal, it's being so in love you can barely wait a couple of weeks."

"Oh, what do you know about romance," Serena grumbles, stuffing a cocktail dress into a garment bag. "You pick up a different guy every night. Sometimes two."

"I'm just friendly," Carter says mildly.

"The point is–" Serena sits on top of her luggage so it'll close, then gestures Carter over to work the zipper. He groans and drags himself up reluctantly, cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. "The point is, they're all wrong for each other. They spent the last fifteen years hating each other's guts and, what, I go away on a couple trips and suddenly they're soulmates? Whatever Blair's peddling now, they were not friends."

Carter is giving her a curious look.

Serena frowns. "What?"

"Maybe…" He takes a slow, thoughtful drag and wets his lips. "Well, maybe they never told you because they thought you'd react like this."

Serena glares at him. "Can you call a car? I don't want to miss my flight."

He holds up his hands defensively. "Don't shoot the messenger, beautiful. I'm just sayin'."

She hauls her bag up off the bed and onto the floor. "Yeah, well, try saying less."







Serena took the earliest flight she could, so when she lands in JFK she's overtired and half-regretting begging the cutest flight attendant for a third mimosa. She drops her sunglasses on over her dark circles and fluffs up her hair a little, but no amount of primping is really going to help.

Blair is meeting her at baggage claim, so Serena hurries through the crowd with her oversized purse and carryon, eager not only to see Blair but to get some time alone to ask her about this whole marriage thing. To gauge Blair's seriousness. She scans signs and arrows, dodges Germans tourists and French toddlers, and then the crowd parts. Serena stops dead in her tracks. She swallows so hard it feels like her heart lands in her stomach.

Blair is standing over by the slowly rotating luggage carousel with Dan, though it would be more accurate to say she was leaning into him, her chin tipped up on his shoulder. They're talking about something that makes Blair smile. On its own that might be nothing, but it's Blair's best smile, the one people rarely get to see; it breaks over her face and wipes away the wryness and the snootiness and the sarcasm so she just looks happy. Blair's best smile, and she's giving it away to Dan in the middle of an airport.

Serena's stomach clenches but she bulldozes forward, pasting a smile on her face. "Guys!"

They turn to her as one, still easy and happy, and they step apart but don't separate entirely, fingers still tangled together. "Only you still look like a supermodel after nine hours on a plane," Blair says.

"Oh, stop," Serena says good-naturedly, reaching out to hook Blair into a hug. Once she releases Blair she pulls Dan over. "You too, mister."

Dan smiles. "I'm glad to see you."

"He's been having some kind of prolonged anxiety attack over the whole thing," Blair sniffs. "I told him it would be fine."

"Blair is grossly over-exaggerating."

Serena thinks her smile might be going a little thin and frayed around the edges, but she still pushes on. "Well, here I am. Feeling fine."

"Good," Dan says, and smiles a little, but his doesn't look entirely solid either. The moment lingers awkwardly until Dan steps forwards suddenly; Serena freezes, with no idea what he's doing, but he's moving past her to haul her seafoam green DVF luggage onto the ground. She hadn't even noticed it coming around.

"You remembered," she says.

"Hard to forget," he replies simply.







Serena barely gets a chance to have a single conversation with Blair, despite the fact that Blair is demanding Serena stay at her apartment instead of a hotel, because she is almost immediately plunged into hectic wedding preparations. It seems every branch on the Waldorf family tree has decided to show up, including Blair's bitchiest second cousins and the genuinely terrifying Granny Waldorf, who usually will only show up if someone's died.

Jenny is there, which surprises Serena (Jenny has been making good time as a London transplant for the last decade, at least), but what's even more surprising is that Jenny is making Blair's wedding dress.

"Very homespun," Blair says dryly. "Family-oriented. See what marrying a Brooklynite is doing to me?"

"Gotta say I'm pretty shocked." Serena winces as one of Jenny's assistants, a petite and plump girl with neon pink hair, stabs her yet again with a pin. "Do you really have time to have all this made? Can't I get something off the rack?"

Blair closes her eyes and puts her hand over her heart. "I don't know why you want to hurt me, Serena."

She laughs. "I just mean – two weeks, B."

"I know, it is a little crazy," Blair muses. "Oh well."

Serena's eyebrows crawl towards her hairline. Oh well? She's not sure she's ever seen Blair so unruffled about anything ever in her entire life. There was that one time she and Nate got Blair to smoke a joint freshman year, but even then Blair just got panicky and paranoid. "Okay, Pod Person Blair, where's the real one?"

Blair smiles before getting up to tug at the bodice of Serena's gown, fiddling with the way it lays. "I just want to be married. We almost eloped, you know." She lifts her gaze up to Serena's, still smiling and sparkly, and Serena feels crushed in a vise. "But I couldn't imagine doing it without you."

"That's sweet, B," Serena says, but she feels distanced from it all of a sudden. It's like when she left New York the last time she stepped into some kind of portal where time moved more slowly than in the real world, and now that she's back everyone's moving in double-time. It is always faintly startling how much things move on without her.

Serena's not so sure she's willing to take it lying down, either.







By the end of her first week back, Serena is cranky and over it. She's sat through too many bridal brunches and family dinners, made small talk with visiting Humphreys and spent nearly an hour at the mercy of Roman's niece, who is apparently a dedicated fan of Serena's channel. The girl was only satisfied when Serena promised to do her hair for the wedding, an oath she has no intention of keeping. Thankfully Blair is too much of a control freak to delegate much to anyone else, but she's been pestering Serena about those somethings borrowed and etcetera, so Serena will have to deal with that at some point.

Today is yet another event in her calendar: Blair's bachelorette party, though it hardly counts as one at all. Blair turned down all attempts to make it trashy or fun, so it's just another dinner out with people Serena isn't interested in spending time with. And Blair and Dan decided to combine the bachelor/bachelorette festivities, another unbearable layer on the entire endeavor. At this rate she's never going to see Blair alone again for the rest of their lives.

She gets a little – just a little, barely even at all, she might refer to herself as delicately smashed if anything – drunk on Blair's signature cocktail, some non-mojito cucumber mint gin nonsense. So, delicately smashed, she finds herself getting a little clingy, arm looped through Blair's. "And do you remember the time," Serena is saying, laughing, "that we went on that double date in Paris and you pushed me into a fountain?"

Blair gives her an indulgent smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes, and it seems obvious that the rest of the table is losing interest in the retelling of the Adventures of Serena and Blair. Dan is over at another table with Nate and Jenny and some other people who must be his friends, but halfway through Serena's story of stealing champagne from Harold and Roman's wedding, Dan makes his way over to squeeze into the seat next to Blair.

He doesn't so much as glance at anyone besides Blair. "Hi."

Blair turns away from Serena already smiling, though her arm is still linked with Serena's. "Hi. Are you having a good time?"

"B," Serena interrupts. "B – do you remember when – Dan, you wouldn't know, this was before we met you – do you remember that time we were dancing on that bar – well, okay, I was –"

Blair and Dan have both turned to look at Serena and she realizes right then exactly what's bothering her about the two of them; they have this almost condescending air about them, people who have found themselves settled and are now looking down on their poor single messy friend with benign pity.

"I actually think that was Georgina," Serena finishes weakly. She's not sure why she can't work up any of the things she means to say: Sundays with cappuccino and Audrey, Blair braiding her hair at night during sleepovers, putting her arms around Blair while she was crying and making all the bad stuff go away. It's too intimate to say so messily.

The conversation mellows into awkwardness again, and Dan tries to crack it with a joke, as usual. "Drinking a lot?" he wonders, brows drawn together, amusement on his face.

And even though it's nothing really, Serena's stomach sinks. It's just that way Dan has about him, this thing he does, where he can casually and without ill intention say something that makes Serena feel like total crap.

"It is a bachelorette party," Serena says. "Sort of. I think I'm going to go get some air."

Their faces fall a little, Dan's regretfully, but Serena isn't interested in any of it just now. She didn't do anything she came here to do tonight; she didn’t get Blair's full attention, she didn't really remind Blair of their friendship, their good days. She was just the same old Serena she always is, ridiculous and trashed.

Serena flops down onto the curb like she used to do when she was fourteen outside of bars, when she couldn't find it in her to care about anything, especially herself.

Blair comes outside to find her after a few minutes. She lays down what must be Dan's jacket and then perches gingerly on the curb beside Serena. She smiles a little, but it's that indulgent smile Serena doesn't like, the one that makes it seem like Blair is humoring her. "You were pretty shocked when I told you, huh?"

"Shocked? No." Serena shakes her head and offers up her own fake smile. "Alright, maybe a little… A lot." She drops her gaze, expression warming. "I fell off the bed."

"I knew I heard a thump!"

"This all seems really…out of left field for me," Serena admits.

"I know," Blair says sympathetically. "It's harder now to be close. Getting older, the distance –"

"That's not what I mean," Serena murmurs.

Blair falls silent, and after a minute she shifts closer and puts an arm around Serena, head on her shoulder. It lasts half a second and then she's pulling away again. "Come on, let's go back in. I have it on good authority that there might be cake."

Serena nods but doesn't move. "I'll be there in a minute."

After Blair goes back inside, Serena digs out her cell phone and calls the only person who would even halfway get how she's feeling right now.

"Carter? I need you."







Carter arrives by the next morning, rumpled and sleepy. He looks good otherwise, tan and mussed and effortlessly hot, drawing the gaze of passersby just standing there waiting by the line of taxis in his white t-shirt and shades. Serena pokes her head out of her car.

"Baizen!" she calls. "Look sharp!"

He looks towards her with a lazy grin before scooping up his solitary duffle bag and walking over. "Girl can barely handle a week without me. You know I left a very promising one night stand for you."

She pushes the door open. "I'm sure you'll find another."

Once they're driving back towards Manhattan, Carter pushes his sunglasses up and takes her in. "Okay, honey. Shoot."

Serena rolls her eyes a little but it ends up spilling out anyway. "This has been, without fail, the worst week of my entire life. Blair hasn't been this obnoxious about a boy since Nate when we were thirteen, except it's about a million times worse because it's Dan. And, you know, at the risk of sounding like a total psycho, he was my Dan first."

Carter is looking at her with something akin to mounting horror. "Oh god, are you in love with Humphrey again now?"

Serena is silent. Then she says, "Not with Dan."

Blair was hers first, too.

Carter covers his face with one hand. "Serena."

Stubbornly, and very fast, Serena says, "Blair is my one constant. She's always been there. I can't lose her." She bites her lip. "It was always her and me – always, it was always us, I always came first."

Carter sighs as he loops his arm around her, pulling her against him. "Oh, beautiful. You got yourself into a fine mess, didn't you?"

Serena brings Carter along to that day's pre-wedding event – and for a quickie wedding, there really are a lot of them – which is a family brunch and, thankfully, the last bit of nonsense until the day of. Blair's face falls the minute she sees them swagger in together.

She grabs Serena by the arm and pulls her off a few feet. "Can you please explain to me what Carter Baizen is doing here?"

"He's my friend," Serena says. "And business partner!"

"Your YouTube channel is not a business," Blair says impatiently. Carter is across the room making small talk with Harold and Roman, and Blair glares at him over Serena's shoulder. "You know how I feel about Carter."

If asked, Serena would not be able to explain her behavior in the following minutes. There are three things floating around her head – one, she's still smarting over the bachelorette party; two, she has confusing tummy-swimming feelings about Blair; three; she has the sudden urge to catch Blair as off guard as she herself was caught – and they coalesce into one incredibly questionable decision.

"I didn't want to tell you like this, B," Serena says. "He's my fiancé."

She thinks if Blair tried to sit down in this moment, she'd probably miss the chair.

"What?"

"Yeah," Serena says with false bravado. "We were going to announce it on the vlog, you know, do a whole cute thing – and I didn't want to steal your thunder –"

Blair stares at her. "I was under the impression both you and Carter had edged towards opposite sides of the sexuality spectrum."

Serena laughs, waving a hand. It's true that she can't remember the last time either of them dated someone of the opposite sex, but it's not like they were never involved; Serena's interest in men has gone the way of Carter's interest in women, but it was still there, somewhere. Probably.

"These things are fluid, B," Serena says.

Blair gives her a doubtful look, but it's nothing to the narrow-eyed fury she shoots in Carter's direction.

As they take their seats Serena sidles up next to Carter and mutters through her teeth, "We're engaged, by the way."

The look Carter gives her speaks to how well they get each other; he knows immediately what's going on and he is not happy about it. But as soon as they sit he's turned on the full Carter charm, all lazy grins and attractive sprawl. He slings his arm around Serena's shoulders.

"Serena has an announcement," Blair says, sounding rather brittle. "S?"

"Oh, B –" Serena shakes her head. "I don't want to take away from –"

"She and Carter are engaged!" Blair announces. "Isn't that something?"

Everyone all down the table blinks for several minutes before breaking into customary congratulations – all except Dan and Blair, who look disconcerted and huffy.

"My goodness, Serena," Eleanor says. "We didn't think you'd ever settle down!"

"I thought Carter was gay now?" Kati stage-whispers to Iz.

"I thought Serena was gay now?" Iz stage-whispers back.

"I for one am glad to see both my girls so happy," Harold offers. "And both at once!"

"How did you two meet?" Roman interjects.

"Serena did coke off his abs when we were fourteen," Blair says snidely.

Eleanor immediately chastises her. "Blair!"

Blair does not appear abashed in the slightest. "Well, it's true."

"We had something of a troubled time growing up," Carter says smoothly. He looks at Serena, deeply into her eyes, and for a second it feels like when they would play good at galas when they were teenagers – a game that they're in together. He must feel it too, because he smiles, and Serena returns it. "But we grew out of it together."

Everyone oohs and ahhs.

"Charming," Dan mutters.

"Like a fairytale," Blair adds.

"I remember the first moment I saw her," Carter continues. "The light – neon strobe – catching in her hair. The dress she was wearing – scandalously short, of course. Our eyes met across the dance floor, and with that one look, I was hooked. We moved towards each other. If I think about it, I can almost hear the song that was playing – can you, beautiful?"

Serena shakes her head minutely with big panic eyes. When Carter gets going about something it can be near impossible to stop him. Serena has a feeling this is one of those times.

He gives a deep, resonant hum. Then he parts his lips and sings, slower than the tempo of the actual song, "Oh, when you walk by every night, talking sweet and looking fine, I get kind of hectic insi-i-ide –"

Carter has many talents, but music is not among them. But he looks good, and he purrs the lyrics more than anything, so by the time Kati and Iz kick in with backup vocals, everyone is entirely swept up.

Serena thinks the song that was actually playing when she met Carter was Beyoncé's Naughty Girl, so at least this isn't that. Her eyes meet Blair's helplessly across the table while Carter croons away – drawing the attention of the whole restaurant by now, and at least one enterprising tween who seems to recognize him and Serena – and gives an embarrassed little shrug. Blair returns the look with a disbelieving one of her own, utterly unimpressed with this entire situation, and something in Serena feels distinctly satisfied.

Then Dan nudges his nose against Blair's cheek and mutters something in her ear that has her letting out a surprised laugh. And just like that, Serena's momentary victory is quashed.







Later, on the cab ride back to Carter's hotel, Serena punches him in the arm. Carter, for his part, can't stop laughing.

"Do you think the Mariah Carey sold the heterosexuality or hindered it? I could've sworn I saw Roman giving me an up-and-down."

"You are an idiot," Serena huffs.

"Blair was jealous, at least," he muses. "Isn't that the whole point of this?"

Serena fidgets, crossing her arms and shrugging. "No."

"Oh, come on, beautiful," Carter says. "Maybe you're opaque to everyone else, but I can see right through you. You want Waldorf. You're trying to make it happen."

"No, I'm just – All I'm trying to do is show her that she's rushing into things. That maybe the ending she's supposed to have isn't the one she's setting herself up for."

"The one she chose, you mean," Carter says pointedly.

"Blair's heart gets her into trouble," Serena insists. "I don't want her to get hurt."

"All our hearts get us into trouble, beautiful. Trying all these things, these little games, getting in the way – all you're gonna do is make it worse when she finds out."

"What's your point?"

"My point is that you should be honest with her." Carter is looking at her intently but Serena doesn't want to be looked at, so she's keeping her gaze trained anywhere else. "Look, honey, if there's one thing I learned in rehab, it's that. You have to come clean. It's the only way anything halfway decent is going to come of this."

Serena gives him a half-hearted little push. "I hate when you act all wise."

Carter grins at her. "Would you rather I try and fuck the groom?" Serena starts laughing. "That would put an end to it, huh?"

Serena pushes him again, then pulls him in so she can rest her head on his chest. "Let's make that Plan C."

Carter presses a kiss into her hairline. "You got it, beautiful."







The next morning, Serena takes Blair out for an apology breakfast to make up for Carter turning her brunch into a singalong. They take their pastries and coffee to Bethesda Terrance and sit on the steps facing the fountain, the sun bright on their faces.

"You know," Serena starts, then stops. She swallows a burning mouthful of coffee. "Carter and I aren't actually engaged."

Blair gives her a faint look of curious surprise, her eyebrow arching. "Is that so?"

"I don't really know why I said that," Serena admits. "I think I'm just feeling…weird about everything. To say the least."

"Yes, I have noticed that a bit. I can't say I'm disappointed about Carter – that is one mistake you could do without making."

"Yeah." Serena ducks her head. "I just can't believe you're really getting married. And to Dan."

Blair half-smiles. "He's utterly hopeless, you know. Gets dressed every morning like he's doing it in the dark. Never remembers to shave or get a haircut. Plays the most egregious music; he will literally play the same song for six straight hours if he's writing. And he gets emotional during cheesy commercials. Isn't that embarrassing?"

Serena laughs softly, wistfully.

"I've been thinking a lot, too. I know the wedding is taking up so much of our time, but I haven't forgotten you, you know." Blair studies her slightly. "I miss you, Serena. I've missed you for months. We get these little moments like we're having now, where it's just us, and I can't help but realize how it's been missing from my life – and how much I needed it. This might be the last time for a while we get to be like this, just the two of us."

Serena's throat constricts a little. "Yeah."

"Dan said to me once… It was so long ago now, before everything. He told me that when you have something to say to someone, you have to say it – even if it doesn't change anything, because then they would know how you felt." Again the smallest smile curves her lips. "I think it took more than ten years for that to really sink in for me."

Serena swallows hard as she meets Blair's steady gaze. "What happens if you don't tell them?"

Blair's shoulder lifts and falls, a graceful little shrug. "I suppose the moment just passes you by. And then you can never really get it back."

They look at each other for a long moment. Blair's expression is more gentle and open than Serena thinks she has ever seen it in their entire life together, but Serena's throat is so choked with words none of them can complete the journey to her lips. So she doesn't say anything. And Blair doesn’t say anything. And that's that.







It's a dumb thing to do.

Serena's one major maid of honor task is to acquire things for Blair that are old, new, borrowed, and blue, because there are some nonsense traditions that Blair apparently cannot do without. So Serena goes uptown to her mom's place to dig through her old boxes of high school garbage with the idea of finding some cutesy trinket that could cross more than one attribute off the list. She finds a gold bracelet studded with blue stones that might do nicely. She also finds the story.

Sometime in the lengthy up and down relationship she had with Dan, which Serena is resolutely not thinking about in the lead-up to the wedding, Serena ended up with a couple of his old notebooks. He would leave stuff at her place, she would borrow things, occasionally he'd even ask her to read something. Serena would always joke about holding onto his scribbles and selling them on eBay once he was famous.

These days, Dan is sort of famous.

It's a story dated from the end of their senior year. Serena remembers it as soon as she scans the first line, because she'd found it by accident all those years ago too, and she and Dan had a fight about it. He swore he was never going to show it to anyone and he gave it to Serena just so she could be sure, and then they kissed and made up as was their wont.

It's a story about a bitchy popular girl at a high school that is definitely not at all Constance Billard, a girl whose parents ignore her and friends hate her and gets walked all over by the boys in her life. It's satirical and mocking and mean, but even back then Serena had been a little jealous that he wrote about someone besides her.

So maybe that is one of the many factors motivating Serena.

Inside put Dan on the map but he's done well for himself since, with a string of popular books and movies based on those books and a handsome face that lends itself well to televised interviews. It never hurt that his misbegotten teen years were so heavily observed, a funny little phenomenon that gets attention on the internet now and again, articles popping up about that weird Gossip Girl thing that went down in New York.

The fact that this story is about Blair before Dan loved her and that they're getting married imminently only means that when Serena submits it, Vanity Fair online is eager to publish.

It's a stupid thing to do, but Serena does it.







The story comes out the day of the wedding. To say that Blair is furious would be putting it mildly.

"I don't understand what this is supposed to accomplish," she fumes, snapping her laptop shut with a painful sound. "Is some derogatory juvenile diatribe about me supposed to be a grand romantic gesture? Because if it is, I'm missing the romance."

"Did he say why?" Iz wonders, nose wrinkling. "I mean, did you ask?"

"No," Blair says bluntly. "I'm not speaking to him."

Kati worries her lip, then exchanges a worried glance with Iz. "What about the wedding?"

Blair doesn't answer.

Serena is jittery and on her third espresso of the morning, wishing she had some kind of bad habit like smoking to escape into. She shouldn't have done it, but hasn't decided yet whether she regrets it or not. That's entirely dependent on Blair.

"Let's go for a walk, huh, B?" she asks, hands gentle on Blair's tense shoulders. "Just give yourself a little time to think?"

They walk down Fifth towards the Met, Central Park to the right, sundrenched and leafy. It would be a nice place for a wedding, Serena thinks absently. If she ever got married, she would do it right by the fountain. Dan and Blair are getting married at the Plaza; Serena never thought she'd see the day Dan Humphrey got married at the Plaza. But maybe he won't.

While they walk Blair unloads a steady stream of vitriol about Dan, about how stupid it was that she even decided to do this, about every foolish romantic decision she's ever made her in life. By the time she's done they're at the steps, where Blair collapses in an elegant heap of worn-out rage. Serena sits gingerly beside her.

"So are you still going to go through with it?"

Blair deflates. "I don't know. I just don't understand. I didn't think he thought about me like that anymore." More stridently, she adds, "I'm not like that anymore."

Serena sees then that this is about more than feeling embarrassed on an important day. "You never were, B."

"Yes I was," Blair sighs. "I was awful. I was awful to everyone all the time because I hated myself."

Serena has never heard her speak so bluntly, and she counters it with increasing softness. "Never to me."

Blair snorts, looking at her with disbelief. "Especially to you. Has all that time with Carter destroyed your brain cells by osmosis?"

"No," Serena says. "I know you, Blair. I always have. And maybe it's been hard for you and maybe you've handled things the wrong way, but it's just because you're too – your heart is too –" She takes a deep breath. "Delicate."

Blair smiles slightly. "You let me get away with too much."

"I love you," Serena says.

"Dan never lets me get away with anything," Blair continues. "It's the most irritating thing. I think it's why I pushed him away for such a long time, but now it makes me feel so –"

"No," Serena interrupts, more urgently, her heart beating so hard in her chest and those three espressos sparking her veins. "Blair, I love you."

"I heard you, S," Blair says, amused. "I love you too."

"No," Serena says for the third time in as many minutes, feeling herself get desperate now. "I have to say this quick, okay, or you'll never hear it. Which you need to. Remember?"

She has Blair's attention now. "Serena, what's –"

Serena just says it. "I love you. I've loved you forever, but I was stupid, I took it for granted that you would always be there and I was scared, because I knew it was real. And I'm always scared of anything real. I know this is the worst time, I know I always have the worst timing but – choose me. Marry me. Let me make you happy."

Anything else that might have been in Blair's expression is blotted out entirely by her shock, though there is the hint of something else forming, something that will probably decide Serena's fate. Before it can crystalize, she cups Blair's face in her hands and kisses her, which she hasn't done since they were teenagers pretending it was nothing – though there was a moment during Blair's birthday trip, a moment that hung between them like champagne bubbles, that Serena thinks she will always regret not taking.

"Blair?"

Blair pulls away from Serena, turning in the direction of the voice, and there's Dan, standing there at a total loss. He opens his mouth to speak but doesn't manage it, instead turning sharply and getting almost immediately swallowed by the crowd thronging the streets, tourists and people in suits on their lunch break and teenagers killing time. In a blink, he's gone, and Blair is up without a second thought, calling his name as she surges after him. Serena is half a step behind her.

"Blair!" she calls, but Blair doesn't turn, instead weaving through passersby, calling Dan's name. It goes on like that for more than three blocks, this futile chasing, until Serena sees Blair get into a taxi heading downtown. Fuck, Serena thinks, but she waves down a cab too, barreling into it and keeping her eyes on Blair's, something out of the stupidest movie known to man. "Follow that car!"

Serena fumbles for her cell phone as traffic slows them to a painful crawl. "You would not believe," she starts as soon as Carter picks up. "This is what comes of telling the truth, Carter!"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down – What have you done now?"

"I told Blair I loved her! And we kissed! And Dan saw, and now she's chasing him downtown somewhere, and I'm chasing her, and I don't even know why people bother trying to drive in New York City–"

"Blair is chasing Dan," Carter repeats. "And you are chasing Blair."

"That's what I just said!"

"Serena, who is chasing you?"

Serena, busy glaring at the surrounding cars, falters. "What?"

"You kissed her and confessed your love and put yourself on the line – very admirable, we should all be so stupid – and now you're running her down in Manhattan. But she's not running towards you, Serena."

Serena doesn't know what she's supposed to say to that. "This is all your fault!"

"Who's chasing you?" Carter says again. "Nobody. That's your answer."

"I'm hanging up on you," Serena snaps, but she doesn't.

"Just because you love her doesn't mean you're the one." He doesn't say it unkindly, but it still stings. "Serena, would you even be doing this if there wasn't someone else?"

Serena does hang up then.

Blair and Dan would never have known each other if it wasn't for Serena; she was the bridge that crossed the gap between them, the one thing they had in common. Only apparently that isn't true. Apparently behind her back, for who knows how long, they've been building other bridges, tons of them, so many that the Serena-shaped one has been rendered entirely obsolete.

Would she even be doing this if the someone else wasn't one of them?







Blair gets out of her taxi at Penn Station, so Serena throws whatever cash is in her wallet at her own driver and takes off after Blair. The throngs inside the building are even worse; Serena has to dodge piled-up luggage like jumping hurdles, and she startles more than one wandering brunette who she mistakes for Blair. Stations are stations to Serena, each busy and shiny and overwhelming in its own way, but Blair has always hated it here, preferring the romance of Grand Central.

She finally spots Blair standing hopelessly under the big departures board, scanning the crowd and looking lost.

"I have another confession to make," Serena begins. "This one's worse."

Blair starts, hand going up to her heart. "Serena, I can't right now. Dan isn't answering his –"

"Just listen." Blair takes a breath and does so, giving Serena her attention. "The story? That caused this whole big…mess. Dan didn't send it in. I did. He wrote it when we were like seventeen, I found it in a box of old stuff and I – I sent it."

Blair stares at her.

"I'm sorry," Serena says. "I'm so sorry, I wasn't thinking and I just –"

"You did that?" Blair's voice is low, deadly. "You? Do you even realize what you –" She's picking up speed as her anger grows. "Of course you do, that's why you did it, I –"

"I've been acting like a total lunatic since I came back to the city, just trying to –" Serena presses her lips together. "Trying to make you pick me instead. Trying to win some kind of tug of war that no one was playing except me. And all I ended up doing was ruining everything."

Blair is still looking at her.

"But I'll fix it, I will," Serena promises. "I – Let's find Dan, we can find him and I'll talk to him and I'll tell him that it was all me, that you had nothing to do with it. And he'll believe it because, let's face it, he knows me. He knows just how stupid I can be."

Blair sighs. "Serena –"

"No, don't. Just let me make it up to you."

"Serena, all these cringing apologies aren't very attractive."

Whatever Serena has been expecting, it wasn't that.

Blair goes on to say, "You have never, presumably, served a girl at Nairtini, or outed someone's non-existent drug problem to every Ivy league college in the country, or treated everyone you ever met like they were a servant, or spray painted offensive epithets on someone's fashion line –"

"You were a teenager," Serena protests weakly. "I'm old. I should know better."

"And you will," Blair says. "Next time." This new level of patience and understanding in Blair is perhaps more chilling than when she loses it. "You know, it's pretty flattering. That you love me that much."

Serena looks at her with something like amazement. "Except it turned me into a neurotic psychopath."

"I've heard love can do that under the best of circumstances," Blair says, and she even smiles a little.

It's too much for Serena's tender heart to take, at least right now. It's too much to be forgiven; she'd rather she hadn't been. "We should find Dan… Why do you think he came here?"

"It's where I proposed," Blair says, and Serena knew that, she remembers now. "There's something terribly romantic about train stations. They always make you feel like someone is going off to war."

Serena would laugh, but she can't yet. "Is that why you did it?"

Blair meets her eyes again. "No. I just suddenly knew that if I didn't say it, I'd regret it."

Serena takes a deep breath. "Let's go find him, okay?"







They go their separate ways to locate Dan, who is answering neither calls nor texts, and could quite literally be anywhere in the cavernous station – or anywhere beyond it, really. Serena has never wished for the return of Gossip Girl in her life, but she does still have a coterie of little teenagers hanging on her every word. So she tweets a picture of Dan and asks her NYC followers to let her know if any of them see him.

And what do you know? Thanks to modern technology and fangirls, Serena locates Dan leaning moodily against a wall eating a pretzel. He does not seem surprised to see her.

"I knew it was you," he says. "Who sent the story. You had the only copy, because you never wanted it to see the light of day, in case it hurt Blair."

Serena wets her lips. "Yeah. I've been struggling with some questionable logic lately."

"I'm aware," Dan says. "I am not sure you've spoken directly to me more than twice in the last two weeks."

Serena steps up next to him and leans back, reaching out to snag a bite of his food. "Well, you did steal my girl."

"Is that what happened?"

"I never thought of myself as a jealous person," Serena says. "I saw people get jealous all around me. It was so toxic, and I always thought: at least that's not me."

"But it's everyone," Dan says.

"It's everyone," Serena agrees. "Is that why you fled the scene?"

"I… Any time I'm around you guys, it's like I'm a visitor from another planet. It's like you're speaking a language only the two of you know. If anyone was going to come between us, it'd be you. So…is that what you did?"

When they look at each other, there is genuine apprehension in Dan's expression, real nerves and worry that he's keeping bottled. Dan so casually leaning here, eating, nondescript and unnoticeable; inside, a storm.

"Dan," Serena says finally. "She loves you. Go get married."







The wedding goes on without another hitch. Serena walks down the aisle and stands there while her friends exchange their I do's. She leads them into the reception, hand-in-hand with Nate, Dan's best man. When the moment comes, she clinks her fork gently against her glass and waits for everyone to quiet down, then gives a thoughtful and loving speech right off the top of her head.

It's only when Dan and Blair are leaving late that night with plans of getting right on a plane for an Italian honeymoon that Serena feels a little crack in her placid façade. Everyone is hustling for a last glimpse of the bride and groom, and Serena feels buffeted by the happy partygoers yet at the same time totally removed from them, engulfed and unable to catch her breath. She turns to push through to the other side, away from the line of goodbyes, and then she feels a hand on her arm turning her back.

Blair pulls her in close and Serena is crushed against the tulle and satin of her tea-length wedding dress, like a 1950s prom queen. Or Audrey Hepburn. She's flushed with happiness and she smells like Blair, the same perfume she's been wearing since they were eighteen years old. That perfume will never belong to anyone else. "I love you," Blair murmurs in her ear, sound almost swallowed up by the noise. "I'll see you soon."

Then she's gone, back in Dan's arms underneath a shower of environmentally friendly flower petals being tossed by the guests. She doesn't turn back once, but Dan does, raising a hand in a wave. Serena returns it.

Then she goes to get a cocktail.







Serena stays late at the wedding, maybe later than she should, helping herself liberally to the open bar. She watches the crowd thin out, listens to the band, and just – feels. She lets the entire experience wash over her and doesn't shy away from it, and it's not too bad, really.

Then her phone buzzes, Carter flashing across the screen making a kissy face. His ringtone has been officially changed to Mariah Carey.

"You never gave me an update," he says.

"I did what I had to do."

"Split them up? Are you Mrs. Blair Waldorf now instead of Dan?"

She smiles. "No. I said goodbye."

"I'm proud of you," Carter says. "You're like a real grownup. Though I'd feel better if you were dancing."

"Oh, maybe in another thirty or forty years," she jokes. "Maybe I'll feel like dancing then."

"Oh, beautiful," he sighs. "I can picture you sitting there all alone at your table, sparkling in your black dress, haven't touched your cake –"

"Did I tell you my dress was black?"

"Looking so lovely and sad, like an album cover or a Sofia Coppola movie –"

"Carter, I don't think I ever told you what color my dress was."

"And just like a movie, suddenly the perfect pop song starts playing, the one that encapsulates your exact shade of mood and heartbreak." The band starts kicking up a slow, jazzy version of Fantasy. "Okay, maybe not that song, but –"

Serena stands up immediately, a laugh bubbling just behind her lips, turning in place to try and spot him.

Carter continues to narrate, a low, smooth voice in her ear. "And you're off your chair, wondering, searching, feeling him there but unable to see him. Questions race through your mind in time with the pounding of your heart. Will you find him? Will Cinderella dance again? Is it just a sweet, sweet fantasy?"

"Carter," Serena says, laughing now, and then the crowd parts and there he is: sitting at the bar and smiling at her, waiting.

"There he is," Carter says. "Sleek. Stylish. Radiant with charisma. Bizarrely, he's on the telephone – but then, so are you." He slides off his stool and moves in her direction, free hand in his pocket. He's wearing a tux, and even Serena would be hard pressed to say he doesn't look a little debonair. "And he comes towards you, the moves of a jungle cat…" Carter reaches her, plucking the phone from her hand and dropping it into his pocket, then doing the same with his own. "You assume, quite rightly, that he is gay, like most devastatingly handsome single men of his age. But then you think, what the hell. Life goes on."

Carter holds out a hand and Serena gladly gives him hers, still smiling, feeling light and fragile all at once.

"Maybe there won't be marriage," Carter says, making a face. "Maybe there won't be sex." He waggles his eyebrows at her. "But by God, there will be dancing."

Carter spins her out in time with the music and Serena grins, spinning back. It didn't go away; she's still sad, still wrung out, still lonely – but not alone. No feeling is forever, however much it seems like it is.

"You know I have to 'gram you in that tux," she tells him.

"Ha," Carter says. "Two steps ahead of you. I'm already wearing foundation."

Serena laughs, burying her face in his shoulder. "How does the song go? You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you–"

No feeling is forever, and there's no telling what the future might bring. Serena will have to wait and see.

ANYBODY  ELSE  WOULD  BE  LONG  GONE
gossip girl. 1500 words. serena/carter.

summary: "I don't know what kind of life I want," Serena confesses. "All I know if that I don't like any of the ones I try."

note: For sing_song_sung! A little early because I had this one done first. I was legit thisclose to doing your DS ghost prompt, because who am I to resist such potentially romcom-esque shenanigans, but then I saw this post on tumblr and it felt like it kind of tied into your Serena/Carter prompt, so I ended up using it for the structure of the fic. ANYWAY, I hope you like it! :) Love these two messed up idiots.






Beaches are a Carter place, up until the point Serena leans her head against Dan Humphrey under the fireworks one Hamptons summer. But before that, beaches are a place she always goes with Carter – never fancy ones, never the type Blair likes, not resort beaches with white sand and clear water. Carter takes Serena to Rockaway and Asbury Park, up to Montauk in the winter. Regular beaches crowded with regular people, or lonely with icy wind in the off-season.

Carter scoops her up before the end of the school day, to Blair's eternal irritation and Nate's quiet envy, giving her no more than ten minute's notice via text. Serena takes to keeping a bikini in her locker all through sophomore year. Carter waits for her by the school gate, her skulking bad boy non-boyfriend, chain-smoking in his leather jacket. "He's a cliché," Blair sneers.

"So's everybody," Serena replies flippantly, but she doesn't really think of people like that, not how Blair does. Blair likes everyone to fit their movie counterpart: princess, jock, basketcase. Serena likes to let people surprise her.

With Carter she descends into the subway and gets on the train, which she never takes unless she's with him. He dodges the fare if he's got no money that day, telling her to cause a distraction with a wink as he hops over the turnstile. He never pays for Serena, which she kind of likes; she has to pay for him a lot, and she doesn't mind that. Carter is always getting cut off by his parents but he does what he can, he buys her pretzels and slushies and ice cream cones, he swipes little trinkets for her, puka shell bracelets and hemp necklaces. Boardwalk nonsense.

He gives her drugs, too.

In the warmer months they dive into the waves. Carter picks her up and throws her into the ocean, Serena shrieking. They drag each other under the water and emerge dripping, laughing. In the winter they huddle on the sand, shivering together. Carter tells her about all his plans to get out of New York City, forceful with hope, brittle with it.

Right before he leaves for good (he comes back, but no return will ever be more than temporary), he takes one of his rings off and puts it on her. It's a chunky silver skull with blacked out eyes. "To remember me by, beautiful," he says.

But she was never worried about forgetting.







Carter is the only person Serena can stand to see her in pieces. She's not sure why that is, except that that's how they found each other, two people carefully glued together but with so many visible seams. She goes to Carter when things are bad. He never cares that she's not the girl in the picture with the hair and the smile. Carter knows what it's like to be poison inside too.

It usually works out that they're not off the deep end at the same time, some kind of weird luck. She never gets Carter at his worst but she's seen the aftermath – his glassy eyes, his bruises, the rambling that never makes sense. He keeps the most toxic part of himself private, so she's never privy to the events that have brought him to that level, spilled his pain out all over everything, but she's been there herself enough times that she can imagine. When she's like that, Carter gets suddenly very responsible, very adult. He cleans her up and gives her water, gives her something to make her sleep, makes her food when she wakes up and rubs her back when she vomits. She wishes he'd let her take care of him once in a while.

"You wouldn't like me like that," he says. "I don't like me like that."

They're looking for her father. Carter is clean, for now. Serena is doing a lot of things for attention. She's drunk now, having this conversation; she spent her evening doing tequila shots with supermodels and she's giggling even as Carter tries to be serious. She leans up to kiss the very tip of his nose. "I like you all the time," she says.

He smiles a little but his eyes are cold, cold, cold. "You don't see me all the time."

She gets sick that summer, actual sick and not hungover sick. She feels made of glass, breakable bones and sugar-spun insides. Her eyelids hurt. Everything hurts. She gets a fever; nausea riles through her; it's like there's a knife buried in her skull. She gets sick-crazed and panicky about it, nervous and crying and wanting Blair, because her mother was never the one to take care of her when she was sick.

Carter is cool and patient. He goes to the pharmacy to get over the counter medicine for her in garbled half-fluent Greek, comes back singing the praises of foreign pharmacies. He lets her snuggle into his side when she's cold or push him away when she's feverish; he keeps the TV on, narrating and occasionally translating Greek talent shows or cartoons. By the end of the week she's mostly okay again, just a little tender. She can't stop looking at him with soft, soft eyes.

"Now, see, this is why you can't play nurse with somebody," Carter says sternly, but his eyes are grinning. "Do you think I should get the little white outfit?"

"Uh-huh, it'd look good on you, great legs," Serena says.

"Oh, beautiful, you flatter me," he says, dramatic, with his hand on his heart.







Serena calls Carter when her marriage goes belly-up. Though to be honest, she'd called him long before the official diagnosis was set; he was one of the symptoms of her divorce.

Serena's not a teenager anymore but she doesn't feel much like an adult either. She's not even thirty but she's already an ex-wife, and all she can think about is that by this time her mother was already on her fourth husband. The mind reels. Serena still feels too young for responsibility.

She calls Carter and Carter says, "You know I've never seen this great nation with my own two eyes?"

Carter always had something of a Kerouac boner (Dan too; Serena sure knows how to pick 'em) so they rent a car and set out that way. Serena never learned how to drive so Carter teaches her once they get out to the empty highways and dusty roads, laughing at her pre-drive jumpiness and proud when she proves herself a natural. They alternate behind the wheel and Serena grows to love the gentle buzzy rumble of the car underneath her, rocking her to sleep. She sleeps with a sweater balled up under her head and her cheek pressed against the cool window, landscapes zipping across outside like spin art.

The radio always plays, podcasts and audiobooks and bands she's never heard before.

Days and nights become slow and meaningless, marked more by when she sleeps and doesn't than the sun or the moon. They get hotel rooms when they're too tired, but mostly they drive. Mostly they check out national monuments, parks, important landmarks of history. "Fuck if I know what any of it means," Carter says with a shrug, and gets back in the car.

Serena is adamant that they stay in no tell motels instead of five star joints just because she thinks it fits the aesthetic of the journey better. That's Carter's style, so he doesn't care. They each sleep on their own full-sized bed with uncomfortable blankets, and even after they fuck Serena slips out and into her own bed, luxuriating in her aloneness after years of sleeping beside someone.

"I don't know what kind of life I want," Serena confesses. "All I know if that I don't like any of the ones I try."

"At least you try," Carter says. He doesn't smoke anymore. She hadn't realized how much of his composure had been wrapped up in one bad habit, because without cigarettes to occupy his hands and punctuate his sentences, he's fidgety and impatient. His fingers are always tapping, fiddling with his bracelets. She remembers he was made to learn the violin when they were children but he always hated it, smashed his sometime in a fit of teenage rebellion. He could use something to occupy his hands. "I think I'm living on a loop. I just do the same things over and over."

"What do you think would be different?"

Carter thinks about it. "Staying," he guesses. "Being a person. Being normal. But I can't do that." He doesn't say can't like won't; he says can't like am not capable.

"I don't know if I can either," Serena says.

He gives her one of his rakish grins, the ones that are all surface. "Looks like we're two of a kind then, huh, beautiful?"

She wonders if he'll still call her that when they're very old. "Yeah," she says, half-smiling. "Looks like we are."

as the hours and the days and the weeks
gossip girl. 4045 words. 1940s au.
dan, nate, serena, blair. mostly gen with some romantic vibes.
w: general wartime sad stuff, character death, suicidal ideation.

summary:They meet in the trenches.

note: For lookinglassgirl! I know this is nothing you asked for, but once I had the idea I couldn't quite let it go, so I hope you like it! Tried to do as much research as I could in a few days but I'm sure there are still inaccuracies, haha. This idea ended up more ambitious than I realized. Thanks @ sing_song_sung; a couple of lines of this originally came from a joint fic that didn't quite pan out.






They meet in the trenches – so to speak. They meet in the field, they meet on the front lines, they meet in the war, they meet when Dan is lower in spirits than he ever knew he could be. He has his gun in his hands and dirt on his face and he has killed people, other people, men, he's killed them. He's supposed to be in school. He had been studying literature with an eye towards becoming a novelist.

"I might kill myself after this," Dan says, with no feeling in it. "I should."

It's an unformed decision he's come to, not exactly premeditated or planned, but certain in its own way. He will probably die, and he doesn't quite mind that now because if he doesn't he'll have to do it himself.

He doesn't know Nate's name yet, but these are the grounding details of the moment Dan will always remember: Nate's blue eyes sharp in a dirt-spattered face, everything around them green and brown, trees and uniforms and dirt, even the sky a muddy grey. Sometimes an explosion of red. But Nate's eyes are very blue and he looks at Dan like he knows him already.

"You can't think like that," Nate says. "Not here. You just can't."

Dan is grateful, but all the same he never really shakes it.







He learns a lot about Nate after that.

Nate is from New York City too but unlike Dan he's a Manhattan prep school boy, though he's got no attitude, no arrogance. He shows a lot of interest in Brooklyn, but Dan doesn't like to talk about it out here. If he thinks about home while he's here, it becomes a part of this.

Nate doesn't seem to mind Dan's lack of sharing. He does enough talking on his own. He tells Dan about his best friends in the world, Serena and Blair, and it takes weeks before Dan figures out which one is Nate's girl. He keeps letters from both of them tucked in the pocket above his heart at all times. Nate shows him a picture once of the both of them, pretty girls shielding their eyes from the sun on some beach somewhere in happier times. Nate taps a finger on the brunette's face. "We're engaged," he says. "Right before I left. I'm gonna marry her as soon as I get back."

From Nate's stories, Dan would have guessed he was seeing the blonde.







They get shipped back to England ("Lucky dogs," Nate says) where leave has given them enough time to maybe get drunk, maybe forget for a few hours. The first surprise of the evening is an appearance by Nate's girls, who Dan had been picturing like they were on that beach, far away on home soil, waiting.

"See, Blair had been going to school in Paris, living with her father," Nate says, "Until – well, you know. Serena was tagging along. Now they're waiting here until they can get back stateside, but lucky for us we can see them before they go."

"Do you think luck runs out?" Dan wonders, but Nate tells him to quit being such a pessimist.







In person Serena is even brighter than she is on film, more beautiful and vibrant than anyone or anything Dan has seen in a long time, USO girls included. Blair is more sedate in her smart gray suit with her hair tucked back and her lips a perfectly red bow; Dan's mother would call her sophisticated. Blair has a rock on her finger big enough to sink the Titanic.

Dan is somewhat ill at ease back in a civilized world full of neat sidewalks and girls in heels and lipstick. It feels impossibly foreign to him after all that time spent in dirt, tents, marching. He keeps his focus on Nate because that's what helps him when they're out there.

He can feel himself staying too quiet during dinner and drinks, but Blair is too quiet too. Nate tells sanitized stories like they might tell in a radio drama, all heroism and no bloodshed. "You should have seen it," Nate is saying. "I was about to be shot– there was a German soldier in the woods we were marching through and I didn't even see him, but Dan did. He saved my life!"

"That's an exaggeration," Dan interjects. He notices Serena's gaze shift towards him for the first time, studying him a little more closely.

"He's modest," Nate says. "I'd be dead without him."

"Anyone would have done the same," Dan says.

"But anyone didn't," Serena points out. "Sounds perfectly heroic to me."

Blair leans in to Nate's side, slipping her hand into his. "You sound perfectly heroic to me."

"You ought to try to be more impressed with Dan, he's the crack shot," Nate jokes.

"Of course," Blair says, gaze flicking towards Dan. "What was your family name again? Or don't you have one?" Dan tells her, and just like that finds himself entirely dismissed. "I don't know any Humphreys."

"We're not exactly society," he says, but her full attention has returned to Nate.

"I can't wait until this whole thing is over," she says, arm twining through Nate's like a vine.

Dan says, sarcastic and mean, "Why, can't get good nylons in wartime?"

She looks at him again, red lip curling. "That's rude."

Dan looks right back at her. "You started it."

Serena laughs, a little delighted, and that makes Nate laugh. The moment passes, but Dan feels like he does when a gun goes off a long ways away, his heart racing.







"I'm sorry I neglected introductions before," Serena says when they're all saying goodbye. She and Dan are standing a few feet away to give Nate and Blair their privacy.

"It's fine," Dan says. "I caught your name alright."

"You must think she and I are the worst kind of snobs."

It makes Dan smile, a rare sensation. "Not you."

"You'll have to cut her a break. Blair doesn't do too well with newcomers," Serena says. "She's protective. And scared, but she doesn't like to show it. We're leaving in a few days and she's terrified the ship's going to be blown up or something."

Dan looks over towards Blair with a tentative thread of sympathy. "Aren't you afraid?"

"Of different things," Serena says with a vague little smile. She really is something, her golden hair curling over one shoulder and a jaunty flower pinned above one ear; the kind of girl a man lives through a war for.

"Don't think I'm too forward," Dan says. "But would you mind if I wrote you sometime?"

Her smile widens. "I like forward."







December 17 1943

Serena –

This might be worse than forward, but the promise of your letters is one of the few things that gets me through the day. Your last letter gave me my first real laugh in a long time. I don't think you talk of too many frivolous things. In fact I like it. You remind me the world's still going on, and not in the way my family does, which only makes me feel guilty. I appreciate your offer to go see them, though. I think my sister will like that a lot.

I'm sorry I made such a bad impression on your friend that you didn't hear the end of it. I hope to see you again, and when I do I'll be on my best behavior.

I hope you have a good Christmas and a good New Year's,
Dan







"Blair's like that, I guess," Nate says. The night is quiet and cold; they shiver while they walk. "Army ought to pick her up for interrogations. She'd crack the toughest Nazi in a second."

"I always found girls like that intimidating," Dan admits. "Rich girls."

"I don't know if that has anything to do with it. Blair's one of a kind; picked me out when we were six years old and that was the end of my say in it." Nate laughs.

Dan wonders about that. "Maybe you're right. I suppose I don't have much experience with it. Serena's changing my mind."

Nate seems surprised. "Serena?"

"She writes to me," Dan says.

Nate is at a loss momentarily. "She never said."

"Not much to say. Not yet, anyway."

Nate nods and smiles a little, but the uncertainty does not leave his expression.







April 15 1944

Hello Dan!

You and Blair might agree on more than you'd think. You tell me I help just by being myself, and Blair's got it in her head that the best way to support the war effort is in entertainment, only she won't go out to Hollywood because she's too afraid of getting a tan, I guess. Right now she's got a line in radio, voicing commercials and looking for dramas. So much for the education, right?

I keep thinking I ought to do more than what I'm doing. I don't like the idea of sitting around while so many people work, and you and Nate out there in the thick of it. My mother won't hear of my working, so maybe the best I can do really is just cheering up soldiers with my bad penmanship.

Please tell Nate to write more so Blair stops complaining to me about it.

S







The letters Dan gets from home make him feel worse instead of better – his mother talks of keeping his room for him just how he left it and his dad writes about Dan picking up his schooling right where he left off. Dan knows they're trying to keep him going but it just feels like they're blotting out the here and now, as though his time in Europe is a deviation and he will be able to slide seamlessly back into his life should he ever return to it. Dan knows that is not the case.

Dan thinks of picking supplies off dead men. He thinks of talking to another soldier whose name he hadn't even learned, being right in the middle of a word when a sniper catches the other guy in the throat and that's the end. Dan thinks about being eye to eye with a German just around his age and not hesitating to kill him.

Serena says she wants to know these things, that she doesn't care about ugliness, but Dan doesn't write them down, and it's not just out of fear of censorship. As a teenager he had been obsessed with the idea of preserving himself and his ideas but now he simply doesn't care. Maybe one day it will all be written down. Maybe one day Dan will be dead.







It happens very fast.

Dan is already at the hospital before he comes back to himself, and even then it's not – he's not ¬–

His arm is strapped down because the bullet hit him in the shoulder. They dug it out and stitched him up but they don't know the extent of the damage yet. He's got a concussion but worse than that (apparently) are the words that make the doctors and nurses exchange shifty eyes. Shellshock is what they used to call it. Combat fatigue is what they call it now.

"We'll fix you up, son," the doctor says, but his eyes are already straying towards the other beds, beds upon beds of men suffering as badly or worse than Dan is suffering. There are too many people. There are not enough people.

Dan keeps looking at his hand, the one not wrapped up, because he thinks they didn't clean the blood out from under his nails enough. He can still see it. "I need to write a letter," he tells the nurse, resolutely, over and over until she gets him some paper.

He was lucky he was shot in the right shoulder. He can still write.







June 7 1944

Dear Ms. Waldorf (I figured you wouldn't appreciate it if I were too familiar),

I'm sure you're surprised to hear from me, but I felt this news would be best delivered from someone you knew and not just a formal letter without any feeling in it. Nate was killed four days ago (though I'm not entirely sure how long it will be until this letter reaches you). He has been buried; I'm sure the official letter will award you more particulars. I will refrain from tormenting you with gruesome details, but suffice it to say he did not suffer much. I did what I could to put him at ease. He was not cognizant of much at the end, and I cannot offer you the comfort of last words.

It had been my wish to return him home to you and to his parents; apparently my vehemence on this issue resulted in something of a fit, because I am writing to you now from a hospital, where I am to recover (and recover quickly, they hope) from afflictions both seen and unseen. I am having trouble remembering time between these events. I know my state of health is of little concern to you, but I would appreciate it if you could hand this letter over to Serena when you are done reading it, because I am not sure I could relay these facts twice, for my own sanity.

With sincerest regards and condolences,
you have no idea how much,
Dan Humphrey







After he proves himself unable to be recuperated, Dan is discharged from the United States Army. The official reason is something like psychoneurotic disorder or personality defects, because the shoulder ended up not being too bad, though they guessed it might ache for the rest of his life. The real reason is that Dan's cracked up, he can't handle it, he is a bad soldier and no longer useful even as a body holding a gun. He couldn't go back to the front lines and he was taking up space in the hospital all those many weeks. By the time he's back in New York it is much too late to attend Nate's funeral.

He spends time in the hospital there too. When all's said and done Nate has been dead for over three months.

"We sent flowers," Jenny tells him hesitantly. He is back at home, sitting on the edge of his bed. He never thought he would be here again.

"That was nice," he says.

"We didn't think it would be right to go, but his – your friend Serena came by a few times. She was really nice."

"That's good," Dan says. "I'm glad."

Jenny shifts her weight, hands twisting until she puts them behind her back, fingers locked. "Are you alright? Do you need anything?"

"No," Dan says, without specifying, and gives her a wan smile.







September 15 1944

Dan –

I really regret not being home to greet you; I was really looking forward to seeing you again on familiar soil. I don't want you to feel bad about this. You served your country, Dan. You've done your duty. Plenty of men get sent home hurt.

I don't know if you'd have heard by now, but I'm going to try and do something about that – I've joined up with the Women's Arm Corps. Blair thinks I'm nuts reckless but you know I couldn't stand sitting by, and with Nate gone it's even worse. If I could do something – just my own small part – then shouldn't I?

I'll see you when I see you. Don't stop writing me & know that I love you lots. Don't be afraid of dropping in on Blair from time to time. I really worry about her and I know she could use the company.

Your friend,
Serena
(Nurse van der Woodsen to you)







Dan sees Blair again at the cemetery. Nate is still overseas, but his parents put up a headstone anyway in their family plot. It's funny. It's kind of a farce. Dan understands it but he can't help thinking about how there's nothing in the ground.

He brings some flowers and a letter he wrote, but he stops about ten feet off when he registers Blair, a small and somber figure in a mink coat with a straight spine. He must crunch some leaves or something, because she looks over her shoulder at him.

"It's alright," she says. "I'm not as bad as all that."

Dan takes a deep breath before he moves forward. "Who said you were?"

"Most people," she says. "And our first meeting didn't go so well."

"Our second one isn't exactly auspicious either."

Dan finally comes level with her and bends to put his suddenly substandard-seeming gifts down against the marble. He assumes the other bouquet, comprised of perfect white lilies, is Blair's; the daisies cut from Dan's mother's window box certainly look lacking in comparison.

"What did you say to him?" Blair wonders, then clarifies, "In that letter."

"Oh," Dan says, rubbing the back of his neck. "That I was sorry, mostly. Do you want to read it?"

She pauses, but then she shakes her head. "Let's get a coffee."

Before they go, she leans in and presses a kiss to the stone, leaving behind a cherry stain.








"I gave the ring back to his mother," Blair says. "She told me Nate would've wanted me to keep it, but what was I going to do with it?"

"Mourn?" Dan suggests.

"It was a family ring." Blair moves her shoulders in something not quite a shrug, not quite a shiver. "It wouldn't have been right for me to keep it."

They're at a small café nearby that isn't too crowded, though Blair keeps glancing around anyway as though she expects to be jumped at any moment. Dan wraps both of his hands around his warm mug. It isn't very cold out yet but he feels it acutely anyway. He looks out the window at the people passing by and tries not to think badly about them, people just living their lives, probably suffering in ways he doesn't know. There's nothing wrong with them for going on about their day.

Then Blair says, "I tried to see you in the hospital right when you came back."

This surprises Dan.

"I wanted to…" She clears her throat. "You were with him…when. I wanted to know everything that happened."

Ah, he thinks. "Do you still?"

She meets his gaze, her eyes large and brown under a fringe of soft black lashes, and he knows that she does. Still, she says, "I'm not sure. No one will tell me how long feeling this way is supposed to last."

He frowns, curious and confused. "What do you mean?"

"I loved him my whole life," Blair murmurs. "I don't think he ever loved me quite as much."

"He did," Dan says, because this is something he can tell her. "He talked about you all the time."

"No." Blair's gaze lifts again. "He talked about us all the time."

That silences Dan.

"And now she's gone too, because she can't stand to be here, to feel…whatever she's feeling," Blair says, voice growing ever smaller. "And I'm alone. They've both left me utterly alone." One of her hands clenches on the tabletop, oval nails with their half moon manicure biting into the soft flesh of her palm. "What if she goes too?"

Dan flounders. "You can't ask me something like that," he says finally. "I'm not two weeks out of the psych ward."

Blair's eyes widen and then she sort of laughs, her fingers coming up to cover her lips. "I'm sorry."

But Dan finds half a smile pulling at the corners of his lips. The absurdity of it, sitting here after it all with Nate's girl – no. With Blair. "That's rude."

"I said I was sorry," she says loftily.

"So you did." Dan unhooks his hands from the mug and sits back in his seat. He raises a questioning eyebrow before reaching for Blair's golden cigarette case, which sits on the table between them, and at her nod he opens it to take one. Her initials are engraved on the front in whirling script. B.C.W. "I don't know what to tell you about things like this. I'm not handling them very well myself."

"I can tell, Mr. Humphrey."

"I think Dan would be alright."

Blair looks at him, then takes a cigarette for herself and leans across the table so he can light it. "Alright."







He and Blair go to the cemetery together once a week on Saturdays, then twice a month, and then Blair is talking about the important days that can't possibly be missed – holidays, birthdays, deathdays – without reference to the unimportant ones in between. They always go to the coffee shop after. At first they talk about Nate, or sometimes Serena; he tells Blair about how he was going to kill himself before Nate, and how much he wanted to after. He tells her about how Nate was so skilled at keeping the other men in good spirits though he made it seem like nothing at all. It was just how he was. She tells him that the very first time she saw Nate she knew he was the one she wanted to marry, even thought they were children. She tells him about Nate's golden boy days in high school, captain of every team and apple of every girl's eye.

Gradually they learn to talk of other things. Blair invites his opinions on the scripts she is planning to audition for. Once, offhandedly, she mentions that the station is hiring new writers. "I'd heard that's something you do. Are you any good?"

"I used to think so," Dan says. "Best find out if that's still the case, huh?"







November 30 1944

Dan –

Not much time these days. Happy to hear you and Blair have become friends. I'd say you couldn't imagine what it's like here, but of course, of course you could – it's only me that couldn't imagine. Now I'm here.

Wish me luck,
Nurse Serena







Blair calls him on Christmas Eve crying, so Dan leaves his first holiday at home in who knows how long to take the train into Manhattan and uptown, where he is ushered up to her family's penthouse apartment. A large glittering tree dominates the sitting room but Blair is in the kitchen nursing a highball and weeping.

"It's good," he tells her. "It's good to cry. It means there's still something in there."

"Yeah, well, it feels like hell," she spits back.

"I don't think I've cried since before I shipped out," Dan says. "At least, not that I remember."

It's odd that he finds it so easy to make confessions of this nature to Blair when she is essentially a stranger, and a highly armored one at that. Maybe that's why.

Blair observes him with her wet red eyes, her mascara streaking down her cheeks. "That doesn't mean there's nothing there."

"Tell me that a few more times." He pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and presses its clean white edge to her face. "Maybe one time it'll stick."







On New Year's Dan is conscripted to service once again, though this time the task is a more pleasant one; Blair demands him as an escort to her mother's party. "You're the only one in the whole damn city I can stand to be around," she tells him. "Don't let it fluff up your ego too much; I'm very bad company."

"Me too," he says. "I think that's why we get along. Neither of us has to be very nice to each other."

"I don't know." She glances up at him with something of a knowing look. "You do alright just the same. Now do this up for me."

She holds her hand out and lets a gold bracelet pool in his open palm. Then she turns her arm, tender underside exposed, so Dan can wind the bracelet around her wrist and fasten it. He does so, but his fingertips linger for just a moment too long.

"Do you need to hear it again?" she wonders. Her hand falls back at her side, jewelry glinting.

"No," Dan says, looking at her. "No, I think I've got it."

THIS IS A FRENCH HOUSE
the overnight. 5600 words. alex, kurt, emily, charlotte. everyone/everyone.
ao3 link.

summary: The only thing keeping their tenuous friendship going is that no one talks about The Night unless it is in the most veiled of terms. Repression is good, repression is familiar, repression is something Alex will happily return to like a warm blanket at the end of a cold night.

And it works just fine up until he kisses Kurt again.

note: This movie was v. cute (and barely longer than an hour, so go check it out!) but it ended on a TERRIBLY HETERONORMATIVE note so obviously that had to be fixed.




They still talk every now and then at the park, the kind of small talk all yuppie parents make: trading recipes and work anecdotes, restaurant recommendations and kid worries. Alex figures out Kurt and Charlotte's regular park days and he never takes R.J. those days unless Emily's with him. It's a stupid little thing, but he can't help it; he's not sure when he'll be ready to face them alone.

But one day when he and Emily are standing with Kurt and Charlotte, watching their sons tussle over Kurt's homemade date and coconut balls ("Spheres?" Alex wonders. "Can't we call them spheres or something?"), they mention that R.J. is going to the Rosewood School nearby. Kurt and Charlotte react as one, widened eyes and shared glances.

"Max goes there," Charlotte tells them, and everyone makes surprised faces, shares facts, gets reassured over what a good school it is.

Then Kurt says, "We could carpool."

It's Alex and Emily's turn to exchange uncertain looks. "I don't see why not," Alex says.






When the car pulls up on Monday morning Alex isn't sure if it's going to be Charlotte or Kurt behind the wheel, but he's kind of hoping for Charlotte. She at least seems to possess embarrassment sensors most of the time, offering sheepish smiles and apologetic laughs when Kurt gets a little overly honest. Alex's life isn't that easy, though. Why would it be?

Kurt sits in the driver's seat, big flat-brimmed black hat on like a Hasidic hipster cowboy, with one elbow sticking way out of the open window. "Hey there buddy," he calls, and to R.J., "Hey, little man."

R.J. scrambles into the car eagerly, where he and Max immediately start on a lengthy dialogue with their action figures that seems to reference prior plotting Alex was not privy to.

"Morning," Kurt says, too chipper by far for the early hour. "Got some matcha for you in that thermos there, not sure if you're a coffee man in the morning or not, but buddy – buddy, believe me when I say you cannot beat the antioxidants. It's like doing a bump of cocaine. I'm kidding! And I'm sure you took care of ol' Richard Jeremiah back there, but just in case, I've got a backup –" As he makes the turn, he reaches over without looking to tap two small canvas bags sitting by Alex's feet. They're emblazoned with a logo of a bright blue water droplet cut through with a slash, on the other side of which are a dozen tiny water droplets. "We've got some homemade hummus–" Which Kurt over-pronounces to the point of the word losing all meaning. "With carrot sticks to dip, of course. ALTs – that'd be avocado, lettuce, and tempeh wraps – god, the things you can do with tempeh these days, you'd never know it wasn't bacon. And a fruit salad for dessert – unsulfured and organic, of course."

Alex is not quite a morning person, except by necessity, and this takes him a minute. "Richard Jere– That is not his name."

Kurt gives him a quick, grinning glance that makes Alex's stomach turn over. "There's a breakfast burrito for Dad in the top one, too."

"What happened to good old fashioned bologna, huh?" Alex wonders wryly, thinking of the lunch he packed for his son: peanut butter and jelly, cheez doodles (that would be cheese-with-a-z), and some fruit leather as a nice nod to California.

This is evidently the wrong thing to say, because the rest of the car trip is taken up with a monologue about the dangers of deli meats.







It goes like that for the whole first month of school, Kurt rolling up with something new and ridiculous to feed the kids. Mason jar salads, sweet potato quinoa burgers, spaghetti squash pad thai, rainbow spring rolls, zoodles and meatless meatballs – "Or should I say meatspheres, am I right?" Kurt jokes, reaching over to clasp Alex on the leg, rather high up on his thigh for not even eight a.m.

"What in God's name are zoodles?" Alex asks.

Kurt gives him a pitying look.

It's giving Alex a complex, so he starts making double lunches too, but doing it on the sly, slipping them into R.J.'s backpack secretly with one labeled for him and the other for Max. Normal lunches in brown bags, wholesome but with just a little bit of junk food, just a couple of treats. Sandwiches. Potato chips. Rice Krispie squares. Store-bought chocolate chip cookies. He tries really hard not to think about sending two little boys to school every single day with four lunches between them.

Then one night R.J. requests zoodles for dinner and Alex knows he is fighting a losing battle.

"What in God's name are zoodles?" Emily asks.

The look Alex gives her contains enough pity for the both of them.







Friendship settles into something akin to normalcy. Emily and Charlotte sign up for some yoga class on Sunday mornings. They do kids-friendly couples brunches. There is the aforementioned carpooling. Once in a while they even revisit pizza night, though Alex and Emily always leave early. Kurt gives them a painting as a token of this new leaf they've all turned over. It's nice. Ish.

Emily says, "I am not putting a painting of a butthole above the couch. I don't even know where you would hang a painting of a butthole."

"Proctologist's office?" Alex suggests, tilting his head sideways to look at said painting, but mostly he agrees. "I think this is one of the self-portraits."

Emily tilts her head the opposite way. "Is it kitschy ironic or tacky ironic to put it in the bathroom?"

"The question philosophers have been asking for generations," Alex replies.







"I like that you shaved it," Kurt says out of the blue just after the kids have ambled out of the car. His expression is guileless, honest. He reaches out and just brushes his fingers over Alex's chin, scritching just a little over the stubble there. "I can see your face."

Alex doesn't respond only because his heart has racketed up from baseline to just-ran-a-marathon. Kurt must interpret this as discomfort, because he adds, "Sorry. I know that's not exactly above board, totally appropriate behavior."

Alex is still just staring, aware that it's rude but unable to get the thought out of his head that it would not be above board, totally appropriate behavior to drag Kurt into the backseat of a car in broad daylight in front of their kids' school.

It would also be bad to do this as a married man having something of a sexual renaissance with his wife in the wake of giving another man half a handjob one time.

"Oh, no, it's cool," Alex says belatedly. "Thank you."

Kurt smiles.







The only thing keeping their tenuous friendship going is that no one talks about The Night unless it is in the most veiled of terms. (Sometimes in bed he can nudge Emily into dirty talking about Kurt's huge dick, which is just…another thing entirely that doesn't warrant discussion, no siree.) Repression is good, repression is familiar, repression is something Alex will happily return to like a warm blanket at the end of a cold night.

And it works just fine up until he kisses Kurt again.

They're having a guys' night, whatever that means – when he told Emily, she looked at him askance, and he wasn't sure how to reassure her that by guys' night he didn't mean making out with guys night. Except apparently he did mean that.

They're at some bar that Kurt knows. It has a back garden with benches made up of artfully scuffed wooden slats, little tea lights on every table, and drooping branches heavy with flowers sneaking over the wooden fence. It's beautiful, it's cool, and it looks an awful lot like the kind of place you'd pick for a first date. "Have a seat," Kurt says. "I'll get you a beer."

Craft beer, of course.

"I'm glad things are good for us now," Kurt says. Today he's wearing a deep V-neck t-shirt with at least three necklaces and a cardigan made out of some super thin fabric that clings to him. "I was really worried – and not just for me! Max really is discerning; that wasn't a line. He doesn't like most people. And all of Charlotte's friends and family are still in France, so I think she feels really alone here. I'm happy we can all be friends, and even though I don't regret anything that happened, sometimes I worry that maybe I messed it up, bringing sex into it – it was just when I saw you, you know, in the park? Man. I just had this moment, I know I made a total idiot of myself inviting you guys over, I thought I was being such a fuckwit, I just knew I had to do it. I saw you there and it wasn't just that you guys looked so – so how do I put it? Wholesome? Like the kind of couple anyone would want to be. It was you, you know? Cute and awkward and not really sure of yourself, like the new kid on the playground, which I guess is you were – I couldn't help myself, I had to –"

Alex remembers Charlotte saying sometimes the only way to shut Kurt up is to kiss him. So that's what he does.

It's one thing to kiss someone drunk and stoned after a night of skinny dipping and secret sharing, when it's almost six in the morning and you've been up for twenty-four hours Jesus, that's like not even knowing what you're doing. That's like pure id instinct. Alex has only had one sip of beer so far, he hasn't smoked pot since That Night, and the closest he's come to water was his shower before he left the house. He is well rested and fully in control of his faculties. And yet when he kisses Kurt it feels exactly like it had the first time, startling and sudden and perfect. Exactly what he wants to be doing.

"Shit," Kurt says when they pull apart.

Alex takes a deep breath. "You're telling me."







"I just thought…" Emily says, but she doesn't finish.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"No, come on, what is it?"

"I just thought that it was…enough, whatever it was, that you were over it, that we had – had fully expanded. I mean, hasn't it been good since?"

It has been good since. They're not as afraid to share things with each other. After you've faced the biggest fears of your marriage head-on, what is there to be scared of?

"I don't know if it's about that, necessarily," Alex hedges.

"Is it me?" Emily puts a hand on her chest. "Is it something about me, that you feel like you can open up with Kurt and Charlotte in a way you… can't with me?"

"No, I – that's not –" Alex shakes his head a little and pulls her over, puts his arms around her and feels her smush against his chest. It does sometimes feel easier to talk to Kurt and Charlotte only because he doesn't know them as well, or because of the weird way their relationship got started. Maybe it's just the French house. But any way you look at it, that's not what this is about. "I think I'm just finding a new…part of myself that I didn't want to deal with before."

"Oh god," Emily says. "This feels like the intro of some self-help book. What To Do When Your Husband Realizes He's Bisexual."

"This isn't about that." Alex nervously clears his throat. "Come on, are we supposed to stop growing as people just because we got married when we were twenty-five? Isn't there a whole world out there to experience?"

Emily gives him a look that mixes suspicion and uncertainty, but she says, "So this is a thing we're doing, huh?"

"If you want to."

She gives him a wry little smile and leans up to kiss him half on his mouth. "I think it's already happening, hon."






Emily waits until Sunday morning when Charlotte is unrolling her yoga mat beside her to say, "So our husbands are dating."

Charlotte lets out a loud, bright laugh that attracts the attention of everyone in the studio for a moment. "Kurt hasn't been so excited in ages. Every day is Christmas to him, I think."

Emily studies her, Charlotte's smile that is always a touch too wide and her eyes that are always slightly sad. "How about for you?"

Emily likes Charlotte but she feels a little intimidated around her too, with her effortlessly tousled hair and sex in the south of France and handjobs in massage parlors. Emily will never stop thinking Charlotte and Kurt seem perfect for each other, the platonic ideal of the Sexy Exciting Couple; when they talk about how they got together, they talk of the kind of courtship Emily has only experienced in the most tasteful of arthouse sex films, about as far removed from her reality of dorm flirtations, carrying books to class, puke and rally as one could get. Emily still can't really wrap her brain around the dysfunction in their relationship.

"Kurt says he wants me to be happy too," Charlotte tells her. "I just have to figure out…how to be."

Emily and Charlotte start hanging out on the nights the guys are together, both unwilling to left behind as lonely babysitters. Once Max and R.J. are asleep they climb up into Charlotte's absurdly comfortable bed with a sleeve of Oreos between them, put a movie on in the background, and complain. God, it feels good to complain.

"Kurt is sometimes so embarrassing," Charlotte admits. "Always talking, talking, talking. He gets all these new projects and then has to tell every person he meets every single detail, he can never tell when they are getting bored."

"Alex whines," Emily says. "Sometimes I don’t know who's worse, him or our six year old. It's like, I'm not everyone's mommy."

Charlotte gives her a pleased little smile. "It feels good to say, doesn't it?"

It shouldn't. Emily shouldn't like bitching about her husband, airing every little grievance. She should feel satisfied, completely and totally.

But she supposes that goes out the window when your husband is out on a date with someone else.

Later, after a glass of wine each, their heads sinking into goosefeather pillows, Charlotte notes, "You made a face, before."

"Did I?"

"Mm." Charlotte nods, observing her. "You don't have to feel guilty. It helps to talk." She makes a face of her own, silly, her tongue out and eyes rolling up. "I learned that in therapy."

Emily smiles. "I don't know. I have everything I want, I should be… I shouldn't need to do this."

"Everything?" Disbelieving, but not unkind.

"Well…yes. I love my husband and my baby and my job, I have a great house – I don't have room to complain."

Charlotte eases onto her back, expression thoughtful. "Yes. To be grateful is good, of course. But to say this – it ignores that people change. That a need being met one day can be unsatisfied the next just because of something that has changed in us, inexplicably, for no reason. We aren't able to just be plugged in and charged up. It takes more than this." She tips her face back in Emily's direction. "I used to hate sleeping alone. Now I hate if someone sleeps beside me." Her lips lift at little at one corner. "Tell me a secret of yours."

Emily can't keep from looking directly in her eyes, an almost marbled green. "I like masturbating more than any other kind of sex thing," she tells her. "Like, more than Alex going down on me. It's my favorite thing."

Charlotte laughs. "Good! That's good." Her expression turns a little mischievous. "Maybe one day you'll show me."

Emily feels a flush from her temples to her collarbones. It's not unpleasant. "Maybe I will."







Sometimes Alex feels like Charlotte is sort of strange around him. It's not like they aren't in weird, unchartered territory already, but it's this kind of winking familiarity that makes him feel like he's starring in a play with her but forgot all his lines. She'll slide her arm into his, rub her hand over his back, and make all these little jokes as though they're both in some secret club together. People Who Have Messed Around With Kurt's Dick; meetings are every Tuesday, she's the president, Alex is the treasurer.

The dick thing is, incidentally, something Alex is still figuring out.

There was some talk originally of taking it slow but that kind of went out the window about fifteen minutes into their second solo outing. Kurt did that little knowing grin he did sometimes ("Just kidding!") and Alex just felt helpless. So they fumbled around in the backseat of Kurt's car like teenagers, except they had to squeeze between car seats and there was a toy truck digging into Alex's back the entire time. The whole thing was kind of artless and absurd but the cork was out of the bottle, so there was really no turning back.

But things are progressing perhaps a little bit faster than Alex is prepared for.

"Put your finger in my butt."

"…Right in there?"

"Yes."

"In your butt?"

"Yes, Alexander, please put three to four of your fingers in my butt."

"Three to four?"

At first Alex tried really hard to determine which part of it was a suppressed thirst for dick and which part of it was Kurt, specifically and solely Kurt, who always pauses to reassure him with utmost sincerity, who has sixteen different hobbies and forty-five different hats. Alex wanted to break it down like algebra: x over 100 is equal to the exact percentage of his sexuality he's been keeping under wraps this whole time.

"I don't think there's an equation for it," Kurt tells him with an indulgent smile. His hair is swooping over one eye rather attractively and his oversized eyebrows draw together as he gives Alex his full focus. "It's just a feeling."

"Yeah, well, how long have you had the feeling?"

"Always," Kurt says. "But sometimes I didn't realize, and sometimes I had other feelings that took precedence."

"It seems exhausting to be this relaxed about everything."

That makes Kurt laugh, head tipping back.







When they leave the boys with the boys, Charlotte drags Emily out. "Good riddance!" Charlotte shouts.

"I have to say, this swinging thing is really useful for childcare options," Emily says.

Emily hasn't gone out like this since she was eighteen years old, fresh out of her parents' house and going a little wild at college. She never thought she would miss it – getting stupid drunk in a short skirt with another girl laughing into the shell of her ear, but as it turns out she missed it so much their first night out together makes her breathless.

They go to clubs and dive bars. They go to roller derby, they go to strip clubs, Charlotte gets on stage somewhere for an amateur burlesque night. They go on a midnight cemetery tour once, jumping at shadows and cackling like witches. They load up on candy and go to a drive-in movie, but they talk through the whole thing and are completely, hilariously lost by the end. They go to the Museum of Death but Charlotte has a panic attack so they end up on the sidewalk outside, Charlotte slow breathing while Emily offers joke after joke until Charlotte finally laughs.

Charlotte has a new boyfriend for a while (Marcel) and then a new new boyfriend (Alejandro) and then a third boyfriend (who remembers names at this point?) and then a girlfriend and then another, until it seems like she's just juggling a harem of them. Sometimes they tag along on nights out or nights in, and they get along fine with everyone, but there is a kind of cagey jealousy amongst the four of them when it comes to outsiders. It's ridiculous, but there it is.

One night Charlotte's second girlfriend Issie and first boyfriend Marcel both come along to this shitty bar next to a gas station where they drink margaritas and eat dollar tacos. Emily ends the night sitting in Marcel's lap, goes home with him, and then comes back the next morning feeling –

Feeling.

"Have fun?" Alex asks, yawning into his coffee. His hair is sticking up in the back just like R.J.'s does and Emily feels like her heart could burst she loves him so much.

"Yeah," she says, tiptoeing up to kiss his cheek. "Yeah, I really did."







Charlotte has started letting Emily sleep in her girls-only bedroom on the nights they stay in The French House and when Emily asks about how much she enjoys sleeping alone, Charlotte only waves a hand. "I don't mean that about you. I like being with you."

Emily might like it best when it's just her and Charlotte and the Oreos in that big bed.

"You're lovely, you know, Emily," Charlotte says, and Emily loves the way her name sounds in that accent, Em-ih-lee. "I know you were sort of thrown together with me but I'm glad about it."

Emily doesn't even know what to say to that, shaking her head and pushing up to sitting, cookie crumbs under her hands. "Char, no. It's not like that at all, it's –" And it's something she realizes as she says it. "You're my best friend."

She hasn't had a best friend besides Alex in so long.

Charlotte's face lights up, but shyly, and all Emily can do in response is kiss her. She kisses Charlotte until she smiles and then kisses her until smiles are forgotten in favor of gasps. She remembers promising to show Charlotte once, but this is more of a share, hand slipping between Charlotte's thighs, lips tracing the curve of Charlotte's breasts. Which are pretty amazing up close and personal.

They tell their husbands at breakfast, very quietly, with Max and R.J. in the next room watching cartoons.

"Oh," Alex says, pink.

"That's –" Kurt starts, considering. "Good for you!"

"How was it?" Alex wonders, and Kurt thwacks him a little, but Charlotte starts laughing and it seems easy, natural, perfect.







They start experimenting more after that.

More than they were already, that is.

Alex says, "It's okay to be curious. And honestly, it's worth the hype –" Which leads to him and Char taking the kids to the zoo so Emily can fuck her husband's boyfriend, a preplanned date that leaves her with a nervous stomach and prickling skin.

She remembers everything Charlotte said and wonders aloud, "Will you even be able to –" But then realizes that might be crazy rude and zips it. Kurt, of course, only laughs.

"Get it up?" he supplies. "Emilia, you are a beautiful person. Between your problem solving and my creative thinking, I'm sure we can figure something out."

A jump cut montage of sex shop paraphernalia runs through Emily's head automatically: comically large dildos, strap-ons with extra hardware, handcuffs, blindfolds, breast pump porn. It makes her start laughing hard enough that she snorts wine through her nose, and Kurt smiles, brings a napkin up to dab at her face. It's tender and thoughtful and somehow makes Emily feel immediately at ease with whatever is going to happen.

It's good – not mindblowing, but good, though Emily admittedly does get a little carried away. Kurt is packing heat, and out of everyone she's been with (because by now there have been enough to call it an everyone) he's the biggest, which is something of an experience; her nails leave scores down his chest that he spends the rest of the night bragging about.

Alex and Charlotte happen with Emily there, holding court and feeling a little smug about being everyone's favorite. Alex is fumbling and embarrassed like he's woken up inside a wet dream and doesn't know how to handle it. But Charlotte, as Emily has found, is too calm and kind to be nervous around for long; her hands are too gentle, her smiles too real. That night ranks among the best of Emily's entire life, up there with her and Alex's first date, the night R.J. was born, and that time she went to a Pearl Jam concert when she was seventeen and Eddie Vedder looked right at her.

Not putting herself into impossible positions and teeny tiny boxes has made Emily feel freer than ever, and she realizes after all is said and done that she doesn't really need to ever sleep with Kurt again. She's been wondering how much she needs to sleep with Alex anymore, too. It's not that she doesn't like it or doesn't want to – she loves him, she loves being close to him, loves going to sleep with her head on his chest. It's just the expectation is gone. She could fuck him every day if she wanted or she could never fuck him again and it would be fine either way. She can do whatever she wants.

Lately she feels like Alex's roommate, like college before they hooked up, back when they were just beer buddies who would sit in the last row of their intro to cinema classic cracking jokes about everything. And she likes that, honestly. He's still her farm boy; nothing can change that.

Maybe it's okay for him to have a farm boy of his own and her to have a farm girl, or a milkmaid, or whatever. The metaphor has kind of gotten away from Emily.

Maybe there really aren't any rules.







"I fucking love this. I fucking love you. I fucking love fucking you."

"Thank you, Alex."

"It's so good. It's so fucking good."

"I agree."

"Tell me I have a big dick. Tell me –"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Kurt says, right in the middle of it, right from where he's under Alex, like they're having a chat over the dinner table. He puts his hands on Alex's shoulder's to pause him, different from how he does it to urge Alex on, which involves hands wrapping around Alex's back, fingers digging into shoulders. "What is that about?"

"Am I saying 'fucking' too much?"

"No, no, that's great, love that. I was talking more about the dick business."

"Oh." Alex blinks and then mentally rewinds, because he didn't even realize he'd said that. "Right. Okay."

"I'm not averse to saying what you need to get off, except anything obviously offensive, I'm sure you can remember our talk about limits and –"

"Kurt."

"Right. All I mean is…I thought we were sort of past the whole dick thing?"

"We are, we are, it's not – it's like a habit, I guess. You don't have to say it."

"It's not saying it. It's, you know, the principle of the thing."

"…The principle of the thing."

"You know, we had the talk, you took off your pants, you love your dick."

"I do, I do, I know –"

"Because you know I love your dick. And Emily does. And Charlotte does."

"Yes, thank you, Kurt, I know there is a My Dick Just As It Is fanclub."

"So I'm not gonna say it."

"Okay."

"Are you mad that I brought it up?"

"Kurt."

"Okay, okay, okay. Let's do this." He pauses. "I love your dick, just as it is."

Alex laughs, dropping his head and pressing his face into Kurt's neck. "Okay."







The thing that Alex likes best is when Kurt cups the base of his skull to pull him into a hug or down into a kiss, or just so Kurt can murmur some nonsense in his ear that probably doesn't even need to be made so intimate, so secret. Kurt does it because he's short, maybe, which Alex also likes; the weirdest thing is that Kurt is so short but he feels so all encompassing. Kurt does it with the dumbest things, like just to say, "You look great today, man, you know?" or "By the way, I love you," and it feels suddenly of utmost importance, it gives Alex butterflies.

Alex always used to be skittish when it came to guys like Kurt: guys that were open and friendly, quick to compliment and casually handsy. They intimidated him because he couldn't do that, he didn't have it in him to be that comfortable in his own skin, or that skilled at pretending he was comfortable in his own skin. But now he likes it. He likes the way Kurt gestures big, hands gesticulating and arms sweeping wide. He likes how Kurt makes eye contact too intently, and how he always touches Alex, reassuring and unthinking.

Kurt is the opposite of everything Alex thought he'd ever want, and isn't that straight out of a stupid romantic comedy?







Things come to a head when Kurt and Charlotte announce that they're getting divorced. They break the news to Alex and Emily over dinner out at Primitivo as though they're children who need to be assured very gently that this is not their fault. The room is dim but made intimate by candlelight and soft conversation. Alex and Emily are agape.

"But things are going to so well!" Emily says. "We've all been so happy!"

"They are," Charlotte agrees earnestly. "We are."

"Nothing has to change," Kurt promises. He has one arm low around Charlotte's waist. "We're still going to live together. We still want to be with you guys. But marriage, that's –" They exchange a look. "That's not where we are anymore."

"It's because things have been so good that we're finally able to accept it," Charlotte says. "We are the best of friends, but not husband and wife, not anymore."

Alex and Emily drift around in a daze for a few days after, unsure as to what they're supposed to do now. Nothing is supposed to change and, indeed, nothing does as Kurt and Charlotte go through with the paperwork. They still live together, they still take care of Max, Charlotte still kisses Kurt when he talks too much. But whatever tenuous ties were holding them together officially are gone.

It starts to make Emily feel prickly. At best, she and Alex have lazy sex once or twice every couple weeks, but is that what makes a marriage? They have all their meals together. She turns the coffee on first thing in the morning for him. They complain about bills and plan how to redecorate. They laugh over stupid movies and fall asleep cuddling on the couch. Kurt and Charlotte had all of that too, but for them it didn't equal a marriage.

"Do you think…" Emily struggles to articulate herself. "Are we supposed to…"

Alex's lips lift a little at one corner, half a smirk, but his eyes are certain, maybe sad – she can't tell, and that seems critical, somehow. She should be able to tell. "You know," he starts, "That first night, the very first night, Kurt told me –" Emily moves to interrupt but Alex holds her off with a lifted hand. "He told me that you and I were going to grow old together, ninety years old sitting on a porch together. And Em – I still want that. When I think about my future, that's what I see. You and me: wrinkles, porch, maybe one of those small fluffy old people dogs."

Emily's eyes are a little wet and she smiles. "I want that too."

"I don't want to get divorced," Alex says. "I don't know if marriage is just a social construct and it doesn't mean anything or it means whatever we want, I don't know. But I still want to be married to you."

"I want that too," she says again. "I want that too."

She moves forward to slide her arms around his waist, to tuck her face into his neck that smells warm and familiar and Alex-y.







They rearrange, they settle again. Kurt and Emily take up rock climbing, which makes Alex and Charlotte nervous, but they put up with it. Kurt tries to teach Alex to paint but he is not, as it turns out, good at it. Eventually Alex is informed of The Porn Empire that funds the life to which they are all rapidly becoming accustomed, and he needs to go away for an hour to come to terms with that. Emily comes up with marketing tips.

Charlotte bakes with Max and R.J. She teaches them how to make martinis, to Emily and Alex's absolute horror. Emily streamlines the homework process so that there is no more shouting Spanish across dining room tables while sons run in circles. Max throws a temper tantrum one night in response and she has to break it to Kurt and Charlotte that he might need to be grounded; after some mandated room time, Max emerges shy and sorry. She and Alex try not to be too smug about it, but they mostly fail.

Emily also has some notes on the occasional necessity of gummy worms.

It get to the point where R.J. asks them to put him to bed "like Kurt does" and Max won't do his math homework without Alex and Charlotte is best at playing pretend and Emily explains things the easiest.

"I think I'm going to write a book," Kurt says thoughtfully. "On unconventional parenting."

"What are you going to call it?" Emily wonders, checking vocabulary homework, before she adds sarcastically, "'It Takes a Village'?"

Kurt laughs so long and so loud at that that they all start laughing, and then he says, "Well, I am now."

Here are all my holiday prompt fics & spams (+ one) so if you missed one, or missed yours, then here it is!

FIC
twentieth century boy. ahs: hotel. liz/tristan. for dancinbutterfly.
compared to what. tmfu. gaby & napoleon. for ms_mmelissa.
what happened at the snow queen's palace and what happened afterwards. ahs: hotel. donovan-centric, multipairing. for stainofmylove.
I allow myself. marvel. natasha-centric. gen. for thecruelone.
say a little prayer. gossip girl. serena-centric. for anonymous.
anybody else would be long gone. gossip girl. serena/carter. for sing_song_sung.
as the hours and the days and the weeks. gossip girl. dan-centric. 1940s wartime au. for lookinglassgirl.
this is a french house. the overnight. fix-it fic. everyone/everyone.

PICSPAMS & MIXES & ICONS
alicia vikander. for earnmysong.
sweet serial killer. ahs: hotel. donovan. for bond_girl.
dita von teese. for prefectlives.
we're both rotten. only you're a little more rotten. jessica jones. noir-inspired. for ladymercury_10.

And I did a Best of 2015 post, for anyone interested.

UPDATE
I also wanted to say that I’ll be taking a little break – two or three weeks, depending on how I feel. I’m a little burned out, as I always get in the aftermath of my November/December/January fic writing fury (why am I always so productive at that time of the year?), and I have some personal stuff to catch up on. But honestly, mostly I am in desperate need of a break from the internet. You know how that just happens sometimes? I need to remove myself from it for a little while. If anything happens, feel free to drop me a line in this post. Otherwise, I’ll see you all sometime in late February!

My vacation from the internet is over! It was not even a real one, because I still lurked on ONTD and I was fully updating my scrapbook lol and also Galentine’s <3, but let me tell you – I needed SOMETHING to soak up the boredom. However, boredom aside, with less internet in my life, I got a staggering amount of things done: I cooked! I cleaned! My sink never had dirty dishes in it! Everything was spotless! My work was finished promptly! My laundry was done! I went to bed earlier AND woke up earlier! I read like 4-5 books! I even finished those myriad nonsense tasks no one ever thinks they will actually do, like combining all the loose floating recipes in your kitchen into one adorable book. So based on this month I gotta say: what old people say is true, the internet is ruining our lives.

That said, I have very much missed this joint and I am glad to be officially back. I was going to wait until March 1st but what the hell. I've missed y'all!


Tell me what you’ve been up to! Link me to any stuff you think I ought to see! Talk to me about TV! I am feeling quite fandomy lately (perhaps it was all bottled up?) so I might do a prompt-y thing soon, we’ll see!

Stealing this idea from stainofmylove because it's super cute! Except instead of lyrics I decided to do quotes from movies I love, because I tend to take the most inspiration from movies. So here are a bunch of prompts I'm going to try to tackle over the coming months! Feel free to comment with suggestions for ships / fandoms / whatever!

Also I posted an angsty as fuq Dan/Blair mix on 8tracks! Feel the pain!

You live in terror of not being misunderstood.	The world changes, we do not; therein lies the irony that finally kills us.	I’m not in love with you anymore. I didn’t know you ever were.
You know what I want, babe? Cool guys like you out of my life.	I think you put the toughness on to save your skin. I know a little about that.	‘cause with all the changes you’ve been through, it seems the stranger’s always you
Give me the strength not to sit on his lap.	Loyalty is important to me. Can you be loyal?	Do you think beautiful girls are gonna stay in style forever?

Hey everyone. I realize that my return from hiatus has still been very...hiatus-y and I haven't been around a lot. I have had a very crummy and stressful month so far with more stress on the horizon. I also had the flu, which I'm still getting over. I've just been laying in a very quiet heap for days. So I...probably will continue to not be around that much but I wanted to post a little something just to prove that I'm, you know, alive. Which I mostly am.

Also due to technological mishaps I had to replace my old Photoshop with the new one and then RE-LEARN how to make gifs so if they look shittier than their normal level of shittiness (I am byno means a gif expert) then that is why.




potentially relevant links:
+ the last recap
+ links to watch
+ other links + subs


I re-read my last recap and it was hella boring so I have come to a decision in an effort to combat that & also to actually get through all of these episodes (I like to finish shit, goddammit). For the episodes that are boring or really close to the original, I’m just going to do sort of quick hits & shits posts (potentially covering more than one episode at a time) that are like: here is a hideous thing Sofia wore, here is Dan looking hot, etc. And save the in-depth reviews for the episodes that are really fun or really different. How does that sound? Does that work for the two of you that are still reading these?

I’ll try it this go around and y’all can tell me which way you prefer.

+ This episode and the last one are sort of a stretched out 1x13 (The Thin Line Between Chuck and Nate) but I feel like they also snagged some stuff from future episodes (was Jenny/Asher this early? I no longer remember).

+ The hair girl clearly watched some YouTube braiding tutorials because everyone is BRAIDED TO FUCK this episode but only like a third of the hairstyles are cute. Like, look at this monstrosity on Jenny’s head:






+ The product placement is also CRAZYPANTS, with a lot of pointed zoom-ins on Always tampons and Sony speakers. For example, this shot, where main character Jenny is fuzzy in the background and a package of tampons sits full center frame like a goddamn queen:






+ Remember how at the end of last episode, both Barbie and Sofia threw their phones in the trash? And I made a big fuss about how wasteful that was and how hilariously slowly the garbage can closed? Well this episode makes like fifteen thousand jokes about it to the point that it ceases to have comedic cache, and really it was all just a set up to hock Sony products a billion times because everyone needs to get new phones. Get money, I guess.

+ This episode also seems like it’s trying to fill time, which results in a lengthy wankbait montage of Daniel squeezing himself into a wetsuit that I have included in gif form at the end of this post. You’re welcome.

+ Stray thought: this show came out around 2013 if I remember correctly so it’s ALL ‘BOUT THAT TWITTER, like GG was all about that trashy gossip website because it was 2007, and I’m just thinking that if there was a 2016 version then Gossip Girl would just be an Instagram account.

+ This episode is actually very weirdly separated into segments that barely hold together or flow, which made it a less fun watch, but makes it easier to sum up in the new way I’m trying. Let’s go kid by kid!





Barb spends most of the episode crying while wearing extremely ill fitting clothing but looking cute anyway, because she is cute. Everyone at school is really nasty to her about having dared to fuck two boys in her life and the mean girls cast her out, which I guess is the cherry on the shit sundae of B's life. Barbie weeps some more and flings herself into Eleanor’s arms; Eleanor shortcircuits out of panic and agrees to Barbie’s request to leave Acapulco as long as Barbie stops touching her.




Also Max and Barbie have the whole “I only have you” / “actually you don’t even have me” thing. He makes her cry, but it’s less hardcore because he doesn’t compare her to a horse. He does tell her that updating his new Sony Xperia Z1 or whatever the fuck it is is more important than her. Which, lolz, honestly.




For once they’re not fighting at all! They exchange their first I love you’s this episode but unlike ours it’s really not a big deal at all. Daniel very adorably lets it slip at school (“Did I think it or say it?” he says after, which is PRECIOUS) and Sofia gets all beamy and teases him about it a lot. No one cares that she doesn’t say it back instantly, and Daniel sort of tries to brush off that he said it at all (but in a cute way). She is the one to bring up his slip-up throughout the episode and it’s always very light and teasing and doesn’t really delve into her relationship issues at all.

He gives her one of those embarrassing “this is why I love you!” speeches that I hate no matter when or why or where or what the content is (the original one on our show that Dan gives Serena makes me want to DIE CRINGING every time I even think about it and guess what I also hate the vows Dan wrote for Blair). She says she loves him, they spend the rest of the episode making out. Fighting or making out, that is all they do.




Blah blah same stuff: “Stay and I’ll fight with you!” They are cute but it’s not really anything revolutionary. Serena and Blair are…better. I love everyone at this bar, but Serena and Blair are better. For all the rumors that they didn’t get along, those girls had great chemistry, and I always especially loved Blake’s body language in SB scenes – very comfortable and sisterly and familiar. I mean, these girls are cute too, but y’all feel me.




Anemic Matt Bomer aka Nico is sleeping on a mattress in the middle of his empty home, which looks like a garage. He spends the episode trying to violently pretend he is totally fine when he is super not. At one point Nico loiters outside school dressed like a rentboy and Dan runs into him and in the course of the conversation it seems to come out that Nico just hasn’t been going to school at all? No one has been wondering where the hell he is??? Whatever. He is there to try to beg money off Sofia because he's hella broke (broke Nate is possibly my favorite? I always wanted all those socs to go broke.), so he asks Dan where she is; instead, Dan very sweetly just hands over whatever money he has in his wallet, not knowing the real extent of Nico’s issues. It’s super cute (but spoiler: they’re not gay roomies in GGA).

Since this failed, Nico calls up Busted Freddie Prinze Jr aka Poncho aka Carter who gets Nico involved in some gambling nonsense that loses him not only whatever cash he had, but also his grandfather’s prized watch. Nico looks adorably out of sorts in his Newsies outfit amongst the threatening gambler types. Nico then tries to borrow ten grand off Sofia but she’s a little too concerned for his secretive ass so instead he calls up the Duchess of Acapulco to peddle said ass for cash. It is a very conscious decision on his part, unlike our Nathaniel who was really caught up in a shitty, abusive relationship. Nico fully decides to engage in some casual prostitution but at the same times it’s because he’s so sad and so desperate that he does not know what the hell else to do. It is pretty heartbreaking. Maybe it’s time to just call up Abuelo?


Now that Barbie has been kicked out of the mean girls, Jenny has risen in minion status and is well on her way to queen bitch. She mooches funds off her minion pals and has terrible hair and is delightful. She meets her Asher Hornsby, who here has the much more awesome name Paolo San Román, and he is one of the minion’s brothers, which is a nice twist that pays off later in a cool way. The show makes so may gay references and jokes and winks about him that I don’t even know where to START. He is introduced wearing pink shorts, with heavily waxed brows, and immediately bonds with Jenny over the fact that they both “love fashion.” Now, anyone who has ever seen a classic Hollywood movie made during the Hays Code era knows what it means when someone “loves fashion” and/or “is an interior decorator.” He and Jenny go on a montage of dates where they ride in helicopters and faff about the beach and giggle and take selfies and kiss while managing to not physically touch at all in any way. It’s pretty miraculous. Gossip Girl even voiceovers, “Love at first sight is so romantic that sometimes we lose sight of what we’re really looking at.” In other words, HE GAY.

Also, when he stops in to meet Rufus, Paolo compliments Jenny’s purse and Rufus makes a “hmmm” face in the background. Then as soon as Jenny and Paolo leave, Rufus sort of shakes his head to himself like, “Wow, my daughter has no gaydar at all.”



+ And no one cares about Max the end. No, genuinely, outside of taking a huge shit on Barbie’s life (with product placement!), he goes away for the whole episode. No one even mentions him, except Vanessa, and that’s only so she can make fun of his neckerchiefs while she and Dan cackle.

+ As promised, wankbait:
See you next time, kids.

hey y'all go post prompts @ stainofmylove's journal
if you wanted to prompt some shadowhunters...i wouldn't be mad about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

stainofmylove is the gift that keeps on giving. She's hosting another prompt thing, so go forth! I'm really in the mood to write lately but short on ideas.

all of this then back again
shadowhunters. magnus/alec.
2282 words. set during 1x11. pornography.

summary: Magnus is joking when he says, "You," but Alec says, "Okay."

note: does writing fic mean i've crossed the line from guilty pleasure to genuine pleasure? dear god i hope not

( I won't say it if you won't say it first )

music to watch girls to
shadowhunters. clary/izzy.
1219 words. pre-relationship.

summary: They're both laughing, helpless and stupid with it. Izzy doesn't remember half as much of this before Clary came here. She remembers smirks and side-eye and the occasional chuckle but never gasping laughing over something that isn't even that funny, when you think about it.

( you’ve got a good heart / I like that about you / you’re always in trouble / and I like that too )