she's your lover now
12,906 words. R.
Serena, Dan, Nate. Some Blair.
Summary: It's a relationship that's always had three people in it, since the day it started.
Note: I actually wrote most of this fic over a year ago, but lost steam with it before it was all sewed together.![]()
polybigbangthankfully gave me the push to finally get it finished.
I'd been wanting to write some super bitchy DSN for a long time, in which they are all really awful to each other and basically all at their absolute worsts. That is…not exactly what this ended up being. It was kind of a reaction to when I was writing a bunch of threesome-y fic that was fairly light and more in the vein of everyone-has-sex-and-it's-grand; instead I wanted to focus on how things could be unfair and hurtful and uneven and confusing. Also this is based very heavily on the song from which the title comes from, by Bob Dylan. It's like the most perfect love triangle song of all time (and probably more suited to the Dan/Blair/Chuck situation than Dan/Serena/Nate but DSN is nicer and therefore gets nicer things).
So here you go - angsty mess with hardly enough sex to make up for it. I would say it deviates from canon somewhere around mid-season four; basically, Dan and Blair's relationship never happened.
oh, your mouth used to be so naked
your eyes used to be so blue
your hurts used to be so nameless
and your tears used to be so few
now your eyes cry wolf while your mouth cries,
"I'm not scared of animals like you"
she's your lover now; bob dylan
Serena finds Nate halfway to drunk. The bar is emptying and Nate's been there for, oh, hours.
She sets her purse beside him and says grimly, "I know how you feel."
He doesn't doubt that she does.
There's something about Dan being so very done with him that's worse than it was before. Nate doesn't think anyone's been so disappointed in him since his father, which is a thought so uncomfortable he wouldn't even bring it to his therapist to untangle.
"We broke up," Nate tells her, unnecessarily. Underneath Dan's fury there had been almost a kind of revulsion – and expectation too, like it was only a matter of time until Nate fucked it all up.
Serena nods. "What happened?"
Nate makes circles in the condensation on his glass, over and over. "He said it was the last straw."
"Natie," she says softly. "What happened?"
He presses his cool fingertips to his temple. "You did."
Once, years ago, drunk at some stupid party, Dan had stumbled into her arms and slurred, "I love him," and his eyes were already half-closed, drunk-exhausted.
He hadn't said who and she hadn't asked, heart frozen in her chest. She brought him back to their apartment and they went to bed like nothing had happened.
It was an isolated incident. Dan didn't keep anything to himself, which Serena had grown to think of as a blessing and a curse. It wasn't always fun, but they didn't have any secrets anymore (not like the first, third, sixth time around).
Well, she'd thought so, anyway.
Dan always offered up so much – too much – and so easily, too. Sometimes she wanted to press her hands against his cheeks and tell him to lock some of it up, to protect himself, to hide away his weaknesses. Don't give the world a million ways to hurt you, she'd think.
Dan didn't think like that. He put his heart right in your hands and begged you to break it.
Dan could hear himself bringing up the same things over and over again, the accusations sharp in his mouth. He doesn't think he's ever been as cruel to any girl as he's been to Serena and he always thought it was because he loved her the most, but he becomes less and less sure of that as time goes on.
Sometimes he hears his parents' divorce in himself, the same complaints. You don't love me as much as you love him. You never loved me at all. You don't care, you don't, you've never cared about anyone but yourself.
I do, Serena always says, I do, I do.
She does fuck Nate again, of course, and later will imply it's because Dan accused her of wanting to so often. She sleeps with Nate sober, in full possession of her faculties, at a funeral – Nate's father's funeral, so it's like Dan isn't even allowed to get mad.
Mixed in with the anger and the resignation, the contempt and the choking heartbreak, is envy.
Serena's spent so long trying to be good. She'll be out partying with the other girls after a job and she'll turn down drinks and drugs, thinking of her mother and Eric and Dan and Blair and Nate, all the people she has to be new, good, shiny Serena for.
But sometimes she just forgets.
Serena misses the forgetting, misses the pure hazy fun she used to have when she didn't think about anybody else – when it was just her, dancing or laughing, when she wasn't responsible for anything and she knew Blair would take care of her. And if Blair didn't, then oh well.
It happens rarely now because she is so decidedly reformed but whenever it does, they always call Dan to come get her. It doesn't matter who she's with or where she is, Dan will always show up with that little sigh in his voice and take her home. It doesn't matter that their apartment is more silent than it used to be or that they haven't really, honestly, truly touched each other in months – Dan will always come get her.
"Why do you do this to yourself, huh?" Dan asks, brushing sweaty blonde hair off her forehead, looking at her with frustrated affection.
"Why do you?" Serena counters, winding her arms around his neck. She kisses him all messy and drunk, lipgloss going unattractively everywhere, and he kisses back anyway, just like she knew he would.
Dan shows up on Nate's doorstep with a bottle of tequila and says, "My lease is up. And Serena's gone."
"Gone?" Nate echoes, rubbing sleep from his eyes as he ushers Dan in.
"I am intrinsically unlovable," Dan says. The way he slurs his s's tells Nate he's already had more than a few.
"How is that you still talk like that when you're trashed?" Nate muses, extracting the bottle from Dan's grasp and putting it away. He sets water in front of Dan and begins to fuss with the coffeemaker.
Dan says, "I have a poet's soul."
Nate snorts.
Which is how Dan moves into Nate's one bedroom. He stays there that night and the night after, cocoons himself in Nate's blankets to churn out his next novel or whatever else. He just doesn't leave.
The sex comes later.
It's a relationship that's always had three people in it, since the day it started.
Dan toys around with that line for a few days: moving commas around, taking out words, staring at it in mild annoyance. He's not sure if it's the start of something or the end of it, or the middle, or nothing.
Nate's been seeing a therapist on and off since his father died, usually in the vain hope of scoring some kind of pills. Mostly he just says a lot of things he'd rather not say, feeling pressed by the formality of the couch and the well-dressed older man staring at him expectantly.
Rationalizing is what Nate is told he does, a lot. Nate listens to the therapist's explanations and later goes on Wikipedia, but he still doesn't think it sounds like him. Nate's aware he's got some emotional roadblocks, but he doesn't think it's that bad.
He's getting used to sharing the apartment with Dan too. It's nice, actually, to come home and find dinner waiting, someone there besides the dog. Dan is working his way through some kind of breakup depression fugue so Nate respectfully steps back, allows Dan into his space. He assumes Dan doesn't know about what happened at the funeral or he wouldn't be here, but Nate doesn't know what other problems Dan and Serena had. They always seemed all right, but Nate should know better about seeming by now.
Nate finds the story purely by un-rationalized accident, grabbing Dan's laptop to look something up because it's closer. He's done it a million times before and usually he just ignores whatever file Dan is working on – he's always working on something – but he reads this one.
Dan's fiction is easy to see through, even for Nate.
"I thought we were happy," Dan says quietly into the phone. "I really thought we were."
"We were," Serena says, voice soft and uncertain. "Sometimes."
"You knew?" Nate asks Dan, much later, once he's sure he can keep the pitch of his voice casual enough.
"Knew what?" Dan doesn't look up from his work, seemingly oblivious to whatever Nate is getting at.
"About –" Nate struggles to say it. "When my father died."
Dan pauses, the pitter-patter of his typing coming to an abrupt stop. "Yes," he says, and looks up. "Yeah. She told me."
Nate is utterly confused. "Then why did you come here?"
Dan holds Nate's gaze for a long moment. "I guess I held you less responsible than her. You were grieving."
"Still," Nate says, watching Dan uncertainly.
Dan's lips purse, like he's debating what he's about to say. Finally, though, he says, "I always thought she really wanted you." Nate fidgets at the thought. "She said…She said maybe I was accusing her so much because I was really…accusing myself."
Nate furrows his brow. "What?"
For a moment it looks like Dan might smile but he doesn't. He says, "I kept saying she wanted you because I wanted you."
"Oh," Nate says, brow still furrowed, then, "Oh."
"Oh," Dan agrees, nodding.
"Was she…right?"
Nate doesn't understand Dan sometimes, how he could meet Nate's eyes straight on and say, "Yeah," like it wasn't going to change everything about them. Like this is something they can just talk about, in the open, and not something they allocate to the subtext, to being drunk or lonely. After a pause, Dan adds, "I'm sorry, I shouldn't –"
"No," Nate says automatically, intending to say something friendly and helpful, but unsure how to follow up once he's spoken. "It's cool, I just – I can't."
Dan bites his bottom lip, dropping his gaze. "Yeah, no, I – I figured, I just – you asked, so I thought you should – you should know."
"It's good," Nate says, not really meaning it, "that I know."
"Right."
Nate nods but Dan is already turning back to his computer, effectively ending the conversation with the way his entire everything shuts off. Nate's grateful.
Dan was in the main room, sitting uncomfortably at the very edge of a couch with a drink in his hand, trying not to attract the attention of any of Nate's relatives. It was like when a little kid stands perfectly still and thinks that makes him invisible. Serena knew Blair was somewhere in the crowd so she didn't worry about leaving Dan alone as she went to look for Nate. She hadn't seen him since the church.
She found him in the room the Vanderbilts usually used for lesser occasions, like drinks with guests or pre-Christmas Eve celebrations. It had a built-in bar along one wall, comfortable leather chairs and couches; it was decorated perfectly, to within an inch of its life. There was no dust on any surface.
There was no family on Nate's father's side but she doubted the Captain would have appreciated the influx of Vanderbilts anyway.
"Nate," she said softly. "We missed you out there."
He looked up, seeming somehow small in his now-rumpled suit and the big leather armchair. His eyes were red but showed no sign of tears. "Hey," he said, low-voiced and blank.
"Hey," she echoed, crouching tentatively next to him. "You okay? Want me to go get –" What was his new girlfriend's name? Amanda? Ashley? She finished lamely, "Someone?"
Nate shook his head. He leaned forward onto his knees, studied his folded hands. "I should be more upset," he said. "Right?" He looked at her. "Maybe it hasn't sunk in yet?"
Serena tilted up to rub his back, wrapping her free hand around his. "Give yourself some time," she soothed. "It was sudden. You may not know how –"
"I don't feel anything about it," Nate said. He was still looking at her, right in her eyes, demanding some kind of answer. All Serena could think about was how close he was, suddenly. "Anything." He pulled one hand free of hers and rubbed his eyes, breaking their point of contact. "He was a shitty father. That's all I think."
"That's okay," Serena said. It was so silent in the room that it felt sacrilegious to break it every time she spoke. "Whatever you feel is okay."
"Is it?" Nate laughed, a harsh little noise. "No one ever taught me that."
"Me either," Serena said, laughing a little too. "You just have to figure it out."
He smiled and it seemed almost genuine, almost sweet. Serena leaned in to hug him but instead their lips met; she placed a gentle hand on his chest to push him back.
"I can't," she murmured. "You know I can't."
That may be who Dan thought she was, but Serena knew she wasn't that girl anymore. Her boyfriend was waiting in the other room and she was happy with him (as happy as she could be when their fighting had begun to outweigh their kissing, when she was half-convinced he looked at Nate in a way he definitely shouldn't). Serena had resolutely not chosen Nate, over and over again, and she was with Dan, she was happy with Dan.
The room was so silent, just yards and yards of silent air giving every motion and noise an edge. Any little anything was so disruptive. Like herself, Serena remembered thinking, always so disruptive.
Inside her head she chose Dan but the hand she pushed Nate away with caught in his tie and pulled him back. It was almost practiced, the ease with which she clambered into his lap and he found the zipper of her dress. His hand slipped between her legs and her moan shattered the silence, finally, and after that nothing much felt sacred.
Serena wonders now if she was just looking for a way out.
Nate stops going to the therapist.
It's late; the room is comfortably dark, softly dark. The window is open half an inch and cool air drifts in every so often, bringing with it sounds from far down below, the muted honking of cars and chatter of people. Nate rests his hand flat on Dan's back, fingertips finding the odd freckle. People don't usually stay over with Nate, after the sex; Dan doesn't usually stay over with Nate, especially since he moved out.
"Go to sleep," Dan mumbles and Nate smiles. "I'm tired and I have a meeting in the morning. Early in the morning. Also you work."
Nate's hand slides over Dan's side, gently enough to raise gooseflesh, and comes to a stop in the center of Dan's chest. "What's your point?"
Dan leans back into Nate. "My point is we are sleeping, not fucking."
"No fun," Nate chastises, pressing his mouth to Dan's shoulder. "Not even a –"
"No," Dan says. Nate's eyes are closed but he can tell Dan is trying not to smile just from his voice. "Well. Okay. But if I'm late tomorrow it's your fault."
Serena finds Nate halfway to drunk. He paints a pathetic figure, head on his folded arms. The bar is empty, luckily. She sets her bag down. "I know how you feel."
"We broke up," Nate mumbles, all blue eyes. Almost apologetic, that he's saying this to her of all people.
"What happened?"
He shrugs, looks away. "He said it was the last straw."
"Oh, Natie," she murmurs, brushes his bangs back. "What happened?"
He meets her eyes. "You did."
Wounded, she says, "Nate, Dan and I have been broken up for –"
"No," he says. "You and I."
"Oh." She blinks down at her hands, folded in her lap. "He still thinks –"
Nate's hand slides between hers. She knows that he's drunk and lonely and angry and that's the only reason he's doing this. That and some twisted kind of revenge; she's been there, after all. She knows exactly.
Still, when he says softly, "Is he wrong?" she doesn't stop herself from leaning into the kiss.
When Dan spits, "Why don't you fucking marry her," he doesn't expect Nate to take him at his word.
Surprisingly, Blair chooses to sit out the event with him. They get drunk on champagne, appropriately, and Dan waltzes her around her apartment to Debussy. They collapse onto her bed laughing. Dan forgets for an hour or two that he wants to kill himself and falls asleep with Blair's hair in his mouth and her pearls tangled around his wrist.
"I hate them," Dan had slurred, drunk, and he'd meant it.
Later they wake up close enough that a kiss only seems natural, and sex more natural still. He wonders if Nate and Serena are saying their vows. If he'd gone, he wonders if either of them would have looked at him or if his presence would have been inconsequential, like a centerpiece.
"It won't change anything," Blair says, after. She's smoking a thoughtful cigarette, sitting up against the headboard. She doesn't protest Dan's head in her lap; she even runs her fingers through his hair. "It never does."
"You talking about us or them?"
"Either or." Blair scratches behind his ear like he's a housecat.
He wonders briefly when they became such good friends.
Nate and Serena last for six allegedly blissful, heavily photographed months and then Serena disappears. She's spotted a few weeks later on someone's yacht in France, topless, head thrown back in laughter.
Nate shows up on Dan's doorstep with a bottle of vodka. Dan's on his knees before the door shuts.
After, Nate's fingers tangled up in Dan's hair, Nate tells him, "She said that's not who she is." Half-listening, Dan presses his mouth to Nate's collarbone, follows the line of it with his teeth. "She said she didn't want to be anyone's wife."
Dan nods but he's not listening, thinking only about the taste of Nate's skin.
It was good, for a while. That's pretty much how everything is, though, isn't it?
She and Nate went from bars to bedrooms to trains, took a lengthy trip to the beach and only informed their respective jobs after the fact. They're similar, her and Nate: they're always jumping from one to the next and never quite clicking with anyone. He was still upset over Dan, she could tell. She was still upset over him and Dan too.
They woke up curled beneath white hotel sheets and spent their days in the sun, feeling distantly photographed. Serena got a tan and Nate got blonder. Back in their room he pulled at the ties of her bikini and kissed the pale, sensitive skin untouched by the sun. She shivered under the rasp of his stubble and it started all over again.
It was good, for a while. They got tricked into thinking it might last.
It lasted until reality set in. Nate had to return to work, put his old skin back on, dress up in his suits and say his polite hellos to all the same people. They complimented him on his tan and his vacation, made passing remarks about how pretty Serena was while seeming to want to ask more. Anything Dan had left in his apartment was gone, but that was to be expected.
Nate thinks of Dan's story, the one he read once by accident; the three of them have been doing this forever. At least it feels like it. And it's tiring, it's exhausting, it's always waiting for someone to make a choice and feeling bad when you're not chosen and feeling bad when you are chosen, someone always left out. Nate just wants things to be settled and finalized.
Rings seem like a pretty good way to go about that.
So he says, anyway. There are other things too, things he'd rather not address because they echo all the complexities he's trying to avoid. Things like whatever he doesn't have with Dan anymore, cut off before he could even begin to figure it out; things like whatever he's always had with Serena, undefined because they never really talked about it.
Nate wants definitions.
Everything stops coming so easily for Serena. She's not sure about the whens and hows and whys, only that one day it…stops. Maybe she's not young enough for her specific brand of bubbly to be cute anymore. Maybe everyone sees her, finally, for real.
The jobs stop rolling in. No one wants her in their print ads or their marketing campaigns, giggling her way through television guest spots or interviews. Redheads are in this year, they tell her. Maybe in six months. Maybe in twelve.
She goes home to New York, where Blair shakes her head and sighs and says again that if Serena had just gone to college, she would have a trade to fall back on.
Serena makes Dan take her out, half to find out what Nate's up to and half because she really misses Dan. She never realizes she misses him until she sees him again after months have passed and everything about him becomes familiar all over again. The way he smiles when he sees her, like they're still sixteen and he's staring up at her waiting on the balcony. Serena loves that. It doesn't matter how much they hurt each other, Dan never stops looking at her like that.
"How long are you back for?" he asks.
"Indefinitely." She smiles brightly, tucks an arm through his. "You know I have to ask about my ex-husband."
Dan presses his lips together. "Why'd you have to marry him?" he says, more to the bottom of his glass than to her.
What a pretty picture it made, not-quite-childhood-sweethearts tying the knot after all that time. Forget Blair, forget Dan – it just made the prettiest picture, the copy wrote up so nicely. "I loved him."
She hadn't ever been the type to dream about weddings (weddings, in her estimation, usually turned out to be nightmares) but it was Nate. Nate was special. Every morning she thought that maybe she'd wake up the next wanting to sign Mrs. Archibald on all her papers or something. But then one day she was looking at the Vanderbilt diamond on her finger and she remembered that this was not a dream she ever had.
"You broke his heart," Dan says. She imagines he's only too happy to try and help Nate mend it.
"He's broken mine too," she says softly. "It's not a bad thing to realize you want something different."
"Someone," Dan corrects.
"No," Serena says, "It's not about someone at all."
It's always about someone. Serena's out of the city in a week on the invitation of some billionaire and Dan wakes up to a fucking text that says Nate's gone with her.
He guesses that's all he ever is to Nate, someone to fuck until Serena blows back into town.
Dan considers having a drinking problem. All the good ones do, right?
Nate's not sure why he went with her, except he's always had some difficulty when it came to saying no to her sunny smile. He's got a goldfish memory with Serena.
They're in Italy by the time he calls Dan, gut twisting with guilt as the phone rings and rings.
When he finally picks up, Dan informs Nate very calmly that he is an asshole.
"I just went on a trip," Nate protests. "You could've come."
"Oh could I? Is that why you didn't ask me?" Dan's voice is pure condescension. "You went to fuck Serena, let's not pretend."
Dan always says thing like that when they fight. Let's not pretend. Nate is his mother's son, he could build a career on pretending, but sometimes he thinks it's just hard for Dan to accept a truth different than his own.
"It's not like that," Nate says, annoyed.
"Tell me what it's like, then," Dan says.
Hi husband, Serena said, laughing, when she showed up on his doorstep. Miss me?
Of course, Nate said, like she hadn't left him, family ring just sitting there on his bedside table with no one to claim it. She hadn't ever really moved in, either. She blew into his life and made him crazy for six months and then she left, like she'd never been there at all. He reminded her, I'm not your husband. They were just being idiot kids when they got married, as though it was some quick fix that would make everything fall into place – a beach wedding with Blair as the maid of honor and Dan as the best man, what a joke.
When she hugged him, tight and secure, her hair in his face smelling like her familiar shampoo, Nate kind of wished everything could fall into place. So they did their old dance: he kissed her and she kissed back, they tumbled into his bed, and he followed her back out. He couldn't help following her. He doesn't want to regret not doing it ever again.
"I love her," Nate says. "I do."
Dan's silent for a really long time. Finally, he says, "You're both so fucking selfish." He doesn't sound furious like Nate expects, just resigned. There's something else in his carefully controlled tone too, something hidden and broken. "You deserve each other."
Dan goes on a book tour, but mainly he drinks.
He's in San Francisco by the time it catches up with him. He's been in however many cities and they've all left no impression, just hotel rooms and signings and bars and boys and girls. Dan doesn't discriminate.
Eventually he looks in the mirror and sees how very wrecked he looks, gaunt and off-color. He realizes he's been an asshole, an idiot, whiny and self-absorbed. No amount of wallowing is going to reverse the facts. The fact is Nate loves Serena and he always has; Serena will never know what she wants; Dan will only know what he wants when he can't have it anymore.
So he wants Nate now. He'll just have to live with it.
The director who invites Serena to Italy plies her with champagne and compliments, complains about how hard it's been to cast his most recent film and find funding. Serena preens, waiting for the expected offer until he catches her utterly off-guard.
"I've heard you're friends with her," he says, naming some little blonde ingénue Serena met at a party once, at least seven years her junior. "I wondered if you could put in a word –"
He adds that it would be wonderful if she could make a monetary contribution – he'd be forever grateful.
Serena gets all kind of drunk and falls into old habits, dials up Dan even though he's so many miles away.
"You're drunk," he notes.
"This trip isn't what I expected," she sighs. "Dan –"
"Serena," he interrupts. "Why don't you get your damn husband to deal with it?"
He hangs up. Serena blinks hazily at her phone for a moment, not understanding. But there it is: call ended.
Nate is studying the curve of Serena's side as she lays beside him, her back to him. The sheets are snagged low on her hip. Her hair tumbles between them, catches the light all golden.
"Something's missing," she says, upset and quiet.
"Yeah," he sighs. Something always is.
Serena is thinking about endings. Before he fell in love with Nate and after she did, she and Dan would lie nose to nose in their bed, talking about what they were going to do after they got married. At that point, it seemed inevitable that they were going to get married.
"The suburbs, really?" Dan said doubtfully. "We are not moving to the suburbs."
"The country," Serena corrects. "I want to have a swing set. For the kids."
A backyard with a swing set in it, a little girl who looked just like her and a little boy who looked just like him, a perfect little television family. Dan could write, or teach like he was always threatening; it didn't matter what Serena did, she could just take care of the kids, be a mom like her mother never was. Serena would learn how to bake, make frosting roses on birthday cakes, do laundry, be boring.
Dan's face had softened and he nudged into a kiss. "I don't know what the suburbs'll do with you," he said. "Marilyn in Schenectady."
Dan had been drunk, but he'd spoken so clearly. I love him. Clear and yearning, hopelessly hoping. Serena had put him to bed and went into the bathroom, studying her face in the mirror, flaking mascara leaving a gray shadow under her eyes that made her look unspeakably tired. Absently she grabbed a Q-tip to clean it up, even though she was only going to bed.
He never seemed to remember having said it.
She and Nate had talked a lot too, about travelling everywhere, sailing, seeing a million different sunsets. Never sleeping, doing nothing but sleeping, making love on the beach.
Sometimes she'd gotten the sense that Nate was looking through her instead of at her. She blames Dan for being too good at seeing, giving her a yardstick by which to measure others, an impossible guideline. Nate was just always looking for something, some kind of sign that he wasn't his father's son or that he was, that he was useless or he wasn't. Serena got it. She was always looking too. And at the end of the day, that's all they were doing together. Looking for an answer that was impossible to grasp.
(Later she will realize not even Dan really saw her, that no one ever has, and it counts amongst the worst realizations of her life.)
Serena thinks she's given up on dreaming, for now.
There's a party (there's always a party). Dan attends alone. To his surprise, so do Serena and Nate. Serena's got someone on her arm, this massively tall blond athletic type. Dan wonders if she's trying to win a genetic lottery or something.
Nate doesn't bring anyone. "I'm not dating," he says lightly and Dan can only laugh. "It's true!" Nate protests, smile tugging at his lips. "I'm not."
(Sex isn't dating, Nate told him once, after one of their earliest trysts. He set the rules right there, Dan thought later.)
"Well, whoever he or she ends up being, tell her congratulations and I'm sorry," Dan says, giving Nate a slightly condescending shoulder pat as he moves past.
Nate catches his arm. "Dan," he sighs. "I'm sorry. I really am."
"There's nothing to be sorry for," Dan says, because there really isn't. "It's already done."
"I didn't want to hurt you," Nate tries.
"Yeah, well." He wishes Nate would let go of his arm. "Only sociopaths want to hurt people."
"Dan," Nate says again. Dan wishes Nate wouldn't say his name, it's one of those things that tugs at him in some hard-to-categorize way (like the pressure of Nate's fingers around his arm, the blue of Nate's eyes, his smile, his earnestness).
"It's done," Dan says softly. "I can't do it again, okay?"
Nate loves Serena; Serena loves Nate. Dan's not even sure what he was doing there in the first place.
"I need to stop thinking about you," Dan adds. "Because you're not thinking about me and it's just – it's fucked. I can't do it, Nate. I can't."
"I think about you," Nate says. "I think about you all the –"
A little helplessly, "Nate."
"I do," Nate says stubbornly.
"Then stop," Dan says firmly.
Sometime down the line, far away but not far enough, at a bar (it's always a bar):
Nate says, "We're not even friends anymore." His eyes are just a little glassy with alcohol but he's watching Dan's face too intently to be that drunk.
Dan is uncomfortable at the scrutiny. "It's hard to be friends with people you used to be in love with."
"In love with?" Nate's still staring but his gaze goes slightly vacant, perplexed. "You loved me?"
Dan makes a series of tiny, panicky gestures – he shakes his head, shrugs, nods, bites his lip and looks away.
"When did you get over me?"
I didn't, Dan thinks but what he says is, "You're drunk. We shouldn't be having this conversation at all, but we definitely shouldn't have it while you're drunk."
Impatiently, Nate says, "I'm not drunk. Tell me. When?"
Dan's mouth tightens. "You can buy the book when it comes out."
"No," Nate says, and it surprises Dan, surprises him to see Nate assert anything. "Tell me when you got over me."
He sighs, offers finally, "I'll tell you as soon as it happens, alright? Is that good enough?"
The confusion lingers on Nate's face half a moment longer before it clears and he's grasping fistfuls of Dan's shirt, hauling him in for a kiss. It aches, somewhere deep in Dan's body, in his bones.
"Never got over you either," Nate mumbles, as much of a confession as Dan's ever going to get out of him.
Serena's spent half her life sure only of what she doesn't want, or isn't supposed to want. Everything else just fell into her lap, happy accidents. She never needed to want anything.
She sits in her bought-and-paid-for apartment with the great windows everyone's always jealous of and the hard wood floors, sits against the glass with a blanket around her shoulders and watches the street below. She sips slowly from her glass of white wine and feels like her mother.
Acting was a bust. Modeling was a bust. Producing, professional party girl-ing, photography. None of it ended anywhere. Marriage, she failed at that too. It's a good thing she never got pregnant.
The window is cold against her cheek. Outside, lights glitter everywhere.
She calls Dan because he's the only person she knows who's had one goal his entire life and is actually out there living it.
"Hey there," he answers, hesitant and lacking the venom of their last phone call.
"Hey yourself," Serena says quietly. "Where are you?"
"Where am I always?" he says. "Home. Where are you?"
His home is still in Brooklyn as far as she knows. She hasn't seen him since she came back to New York, though. "Same." Her home may be the same city but lately it feels like it's swallowing her up. "How are you?"
"I'm alright."
It's not what she called to ask about, but it always comes up anyway: "How's Nate?"
Dan's tone is a little guarded. "Fine." She expected him to say he didn't know, maybe. But of course he's still speaking to Nate. Or maybe –
"You're sleeping with him," Serena says, not a question, the again implied.
"I'm not." He pauses and she can almost hear the hint of a smile there. "Making him work for it a little."
Serena almost smiles too, despite herself, despite everything. The smile feels incongruous with the way her eyes are prickling. "Why?"
Why would any of them bother anymore?
Dan is quiet so he must be really thinking about it. "Sex is an easy way to connect," he says at last. "It can make you think all kinds of things. That you're in love. That what you’ve got is real, even if it's not."
She tilts her head, watching New York zip around. "Is that so bad?"
"It's messy," Dan sighs. She wishes they were face-to-face, suddenly. He's so easy to read in person, always has been. "I'm trying to avoid messy."
"You told me you loved him once," she muses suddenly. It feels so long ago. It feels so long ago that she was in love with Dan, that love like that existed between the two of them. When she was sixteen she thought the sun rose and set with him. She thought that he would guide her into being the kind of person she felt she should be. She thought that they could even be together forever. It feels like such a little girl's promise now. Forever. Nothing's forever.
"Did I?" Dan asks uneasily. He clears his throat. "You okay, Serena?"
"Yeah," she sighs.
"You don't sound okay."
"How did you know what you wanted?" she says, clarifying, "With your life. How did you know you wanted to write?"
"I always had too much to say," Dan says flippantly. When she's quiet, he adds, "I just…I like words. I like what they can do. What I can make them do. And I just…knew how to use them."
"That sounds nice," she says. She doesn't know why she's so upset tonight. Maybe she should have gone out, distracted herself. She could have picked someone up and made this lonely apartment exciting for a night. Her voice catches. "I don't know what to do, Dan."
Sounding worried, he says, "About what?"
"About me." She laughs a little but she doesn't mean it. "I don't know what to do with myself. I don't fit anywhere. You – you write and Blair has her magazine and even –" She laughs again, a little choked. "Even Nate figured himself out. Why can't I?"
"Your life's not over yet," he says gently. "You have time to figure it out."
"I'm twenty-nine," she says. "And I'm still acting like did I when I was eighteen. I shouldn't – I wasn't supposed to be this lost, still."
Serena presses her face into her hand and listens to Dan's silence. She doesn't want to cry.
"No one can tell you what your path is except you," he says. "It sounds like bullshit and I wish I could help, I wish I could do it for you, but you just have to figure it out on your own. Whatever it is, you just have to find it."
"I don't know how," Serena says quietly. Everything always finds her.
"Figure out how," Dan says.
She sighs. "Dan."
"It's not easy for anyone," he says. "But if you're the one who isn't happy, you're the only one who can fix it."
Serena opens her eyes, pulling her blanket more firmly around herself and tucking her knees under her chin. "You make a better gay best friend than you do a boyfriend," she tells him.
"Ha ha," Dan says dryly.
Part Two
12,906 words. R.
Serena, Dan, Nate. Some Blair.
Summary: It's a relationship that's always had three people in it, since the day it started.
Note: I actually wrote most of this fic over a year ago, but lost steam with it before it was all sewed together.
polybigbangthankfully gave me the push to finally get it finished.I'd been wanting to write some super bitchy DSN for a long time, in which they are all really awful to each other and basically all at their absolute worsts. That is…not exactly what this ended up being. It was kind of a reaction to when I was writing a bunch of threesome-y fic that was fairly light and more in the vein of everyone-has-sex-and-it's-grand; instead I wanted to focus on how things could be unfair and hurtful and uneven and confusing. Also this is based very heavily on the song from which the title comes from, by Bob Dylan. It's like the most perfect love triangle song of all time (and probably more suited to the Dan/Blair/Chuck situation than Dan/Serena/Nate but DSN is nicer and therefore gets nicer things).
So here you go - angsty mess with hardly enough sex to make up for it. I would say it deviates from canon somewhere around mid-season four; basically, Dan and Blair's relationship never happened.
oh, your mouth used to be so naked
your eyes used to be so blue
your hurts used to be so nameless
and your tears used to be so few
now your eyes cry wolf while your mouth cries,
"I'm not scared of animals like you"
she's your lover now; bob dylan
Serena finds Nate halfway to drunk. The bar is emptying and Nate's been there for, oh, hours.
She sets her purse beside him and says grimly, "I know how you feel."
He doesn't doubt that she does.
There's something about Dan being so very done with him that's worse than it was before. Nate doesn't think anyone's been so disappointed in him since his father, which is a thought so uncomfortable he wouldn't even bring it to his therapist to untangle.
"We broke up," Nate tells her, unnecessarily. Underneath Dan's fury there had been almost a kind of revulsion – and expectation too, like it was only a matter of time until Nate fucked it all up.
Serena nods. "What happened?"
Nate makes circles in the condensation on his glass, over and over. "He said it was the last straw."
"Natie," she says softly. "What happened?"
He presses his cool fingertips to his temple. "You did."
Once, years ago, drunk at some stupid party, Dan had stumbled into her arms and slurred, "I love him," and his eyes were already half-closed, drunk-exhausted.
He hadn't said who and she hadn't asked, heart frozen in her chest. She brought him back to their apartment and they went to bed like nothing had happened.
It was an isolated incident. Dan didn't keep anything to himself, which Serena had grown to think of as a blessing and a curse. It wasn't always fun, but they didn't have any secrets anymore (not like the first, third, sixth time around).
Well, she'd thought so, anyway.
Dan always offered up so much – too much – and so easily, too. Sometimes she wanted to press her hands against his cheeks and tell him to lock some of it up, to protect himself, to hide away his weaknesses. Don't give the world a million ways to hurt you, she'd think.
Dan didn't think like that. He put his heart right in your hands and begged you to break it.
Dan could hear himself bringing up the same things over and over again, the accusations sharp in his mouth. He doesn't think he's ever been as cruel to any girl as he's been to Serena and he always thought it was because he loved her the most, but he becomes less and less sure of that as time goes on.
Sometimes he hears his parents' divorce in himself, the same complaints. You don't love me as much as you love him. You never loved me at all. You don't care, you don't, you've never cared about anyone but yourself.
I do, Serena always says, I do, I do.
She does fuck Nate again, of course, and later will imply it's because Dan accused her of wanting to so often. She sleeps with Nate sober, in full possession of her faculties, at a funeral – Nate's father's funeral, so it's like Dan isn't even allowed to get mad.
Mixed in with the anger and the resignation, the contempt and the choking heartbreak, is envy.
Serena's spent so long trying to be good. She'll be out partying with the other girls after a job and she'll turn down drinks and drugs, thinking of her mother and Eric and Dan and Blair and Nate, all the people she has to be new, good, shiny Serena for.
But sometimes she just forgets.
Serena misses the forgetting, misses the pure hazy fun she used to have when she didn't think about anybody else – when it was just her, dancing or laughing, when she wasn't responsible for anything and she knew Blair would take care of her. And if Blair didn't, then oh well.
It happens rarely now because she is so decidedly reformed but whenever it does, they always call Dan to come get her. It doesn't matter who she's with or where she is, Dan will always show up with that little sigh in his voice and take her home. It doesn't matter that their apartment is more silent than it used to be or that they haven't really, honestly, truly touched each other in months – Dan will always come get her.
"Why do you do this to yourself, huh?" Dan asks, brushing sweaty blonde hair off her forehead, looking at her with frustrated affection.
"Why do you?" Serena counters, winding her arms around his neck. She kisses him all messy and drunk, lipgloss going unattractively everywhere, and he kisses back anyway, just like she knew he would.
Dan shows up on Nate's doorstep with a bottle of tequila and says, "My lease is up. And Serena's gone."
"Gone?" Nate echoes, rubbing sleep from his eyes as he ushers Dan in.
"I am intrinsically unlovable," Dan says. The way he slurs his s's tells Nate he's already had more than a few.
"How is that you still talk like that when you're trashed?" Nate muses, extracting the bottle from Dan's grasp and putting it away. He sets water in front of Dan and begins to fuss with the coffeemaker.
Dan says, "I have a poet's soul."
Nate snorts.
Which is how Dan moves into Nate's one bedroom. He stays there that night and the night after, cocoons himself in Nate's blankets to churn out his next novel or whatever else. He just doesn't leave.
The sex comes later.
It's a relationship that's always had three people in it, since the day it started.
Dan toys around with that line for a few days: moving commas around, taking out words, staring at it in mild annoyance. He's not sure if it's the start of something or the end of it, or the middle, or nothing.
Nate's been seeing a therapist on and off since his father died, usually in the vain hope of scoring some kind of pills. Mostly he just says a lot of things he'd rather not say, feeling pressed by the formality of the couch and the well-dressed older man staring at him expectantly.
Rationalizing is what Nate is told he does, a lot. Nate listens to the therapist's explanations and later goes on Wikipedia, but he still doesn't think it sounds like him. Nate's aware he's got some emotional roadblocks, but he doesn't think it's that bad.
He's getting used to sharing the apartment with Dan too. It's nice, actually, to come home and find dinner waiting, someone there besides the dog. Dan is working his way through some kind of breakup depression fugue so Nate respectfully steps back, allows Dan into his space. He assumes Dan doesn't know about what happened at the funeral or he wouldn't be here, but Nate doesn't know what other problems Dan and Serena had. They always seemed all right, but Nate should know better about seeming by now.
Nate finds the story purely by un-rationalized accident, grabbing Dan's laptop to look something up because it's closer. He's done it a million times before and usually he just ignores whatever file Dan is working on – he's always working on something – but he reads this one.
Dan's fiction is easy to see through, even for Nate.
"I thought we were happy," Dan says quietly into the phone. "I really thought we were."
"We were," Serena says, voice soft and uncertain. "Sometimes."
"You knew?" Nate asks Dan, much later, once he's sure he can keep the pitch of his voice casual enough.
"Knew what?" Dan doesn't look up from his work, seemingly oblivious to whatever Nate is getting at.
"About –" Nate struggles to say it. "When my father died."
Dan pauses, the pitter-patter of his typing coming to an abrupt stop. "Yes," he says, and looks up. "Yeah. She told me."
Nate is utterly confused. "Then why did you come here?"
Dan holds Nate's gaze for a long moment. "I guess I held you less responsible than her. You were grieving."
"Still," Nate says, watching Dan uncertainly.
Dan's lips purse, like he's debating what he's about to say. Finally, though, he says, "I always thought she really wanted you." Nate fidgets at the thought. "She said…She said maybe I was accusing her so much because I was really…accusing myself."
Nate furrows his brow. "What?"
For a moment it looks like Dan might smile but he doesn't. He says, "I kept saying she wanted you because I wanted you."
"Oh," Nate says, brow still furrowed, then, "Oh."
"Oh," Dan agrees, nodding.
"Was she…right?"
Nate doesn't understand Dan sometimes, how he could meet Nate's eyes straight on and say, "Yeah," like it wasn't going to change everything about them. Like this is something they can just talk about, in the open, and not something they allocate to the subtext, to being drunk or lonely. After a pause, Dan adds, "I'm sorry, I shouldn't –"
"No," Nate says automatically, intending to say something friendly and helpful, but unsure how to follow up once he's spoken. "It's cool, I just – I can't."
Dan bites his bottom lip, dropping his gaze. "Yeah, no, I – I figured, I just – you asked, so I thought you should – you should know."
"It's good," Nate says, not really meaning it, "that I know."
"Right."
Nate nods but Dan is already turning back to his computer, effectively ending the conversation with the way his entire everything shuts off. Nate's grateful.
Dan was in the main room, sitting uncomfortably at the very edge of a couch with a drink in his hand, trying not to attract the attention of any of Nate's relatives. It was like when a little kid stands perfectly still and thinks that makes him invisible. Serena knew Blair was somewhere in the crowd so she didn't worry about leaving Dan alone as she went to look for Nate. She hadn't seen him since the church.
She found him in the room the Vanderbilts usually used for lesser occasions, like drinks with guests or pre-Christmas Eve celebrations. It had a built-in bar along one wall, comfortable leather chairs and couches; it was decorated perfectly, to within an inch of its life. There was no dust on any surface.
There was no family on Nate's father's side but she doubted the Captain would have appreciated the influx of Vanderbilts anyway.
"Nate," she said softly. "We missed you out there."
He looked up, seeming somehow small in his now-rumpled suit and the big leather armchair. His eyes were red but showed no sign of tears. "Hey," he said, low-voiced and blank.
"Hey," she echoed, crouching tentatively next to him. "You okay? Want me to go get –" What was his new girlfriend's name? Amanda? Ashley? She finished lamely, "Someone?"
Nate shook his head. He leaned forward onto his knees, studied his folded hands. "I should be more upset," he said. "Right?" He looked at her. "Maybe it hasn't sunk in yet?"
Serena tilted up to rub his back, wrapping her free hand around his. "Give yourself some time," she soothed. "It was sudden. You may not know how –"
"I don't feel anything about it," Nate said. He was still looking at her, right in her eyes, demanding some kind of answer. All Serena could think about was how close he was, suddenly. "Anything." He pulled one hand free of hers and rubbed his eyes, breaking their point of contact. "He was a shitty father. That's all I think."
"That's okay," Serena said. It was so silent in the room that it felt sacrilegious to break it every time she spoke. "Whatever you feel is okay."
"Is it?" Nate laughed, a harsh little noise. "No one ever taught me that."
"Me either," Serena said, laughing a little too. "You just have to figure it out."
He smiled and it seemed almost genuine, almost sweet. Serena leaned in to hug him but instead their lips met; she placed a gentle hand on his chest to push him back.
"I can't," she murmured. "You know I can't."
That may be who Dan thought she was, but Serena knew she wasn't that girl anymore. Her boyfriend was waiting in the other room and she was happy with him (as happy as she could be when their fighting had begun to outweigh their kissing, when she was half-convinced he looked at Nate in a way he definitely shouldn't). Serena had resolutely not chosen Nate, over and over again, and she was with Dan, she was happy with Dan.
The room was so silent, just yards and yards of silent air giving every motion and noise an edge. Any little anything was so disruptive. Like herself, Serena remembered thinking, always so disruptive.
Inside her head she chose Dan but the hand she pushed Nate away with caught in his tie and pulled him back. It was almost practiced, the ease with which she clambered into his lap and he found the zipper of her dress. His hand slipped between her legs and her moan shattered the silence, finally, and after that nothing much felt sacred.
Serena wonders now if she was just looking for a way out.
Nate stops going to the therapist.
It's late; the room is comfortably dark, softly dark. The window is open half an inch and cool air drifts in every so often, bringing with it sounds from far down below, the muted honking of cars and chatter of people. Nate rests his hand flat on Dan's back, fingertips finding the odd freckle. People don't usually stay over with Nate, after the sex; Dan doesn't usually stay over with Nate, especially since he moved out.
"Go to sleep," Dan mumbles and Nate smiles. "I'm tired and I have a meeting in the morning. Early in the morning. Also you work."
Nate's hand slides over Dan's side, gently enough to raise gooseflesh, and comes to a stop in the center of Dan's chest. "What's your point?"
Dan leans back into Nate. "My point is we are sleeping, not fucking."
"No fun," Nate chastises, pressing his mouth to Dan's shoulder. "Not even a –"
"No," Dan says. Nate's eyes are closed but he can tell Dan is trying not to smile just from his voice. "Well. Okay. But if I'm late tomorrow it's your fault."
Serena finds Nate halfway to drunk. He paints a pathetic figure, head on his folded arms. The bar is empty, luckily. She sets her bag down. "I know how you feel."
"We broke up," Nate mumbles, all blue eyes. Almost apologetic, that he's saying this to her of all people.
"What happened?"
He shrugs, looks away. "He said it was the last straw."
"Oh, Natie," she murmurs, brushes his bangs back. "What happened?"
He meets her eyes. "You did."
Wounded, she says, "Nate, Dan and I have been broken up for –"
"No," he says. "You and I."
"Oh." She blinks down at her hands, folded in her lap. "He still thinks –"
Nate's hand slides between hers. She knows that he's drunk and lonely and angry and that's the only reason he's doing this. That and some twisted kind of revenge; she's been there, after all. She knows exactly.
Still, when he says softly, "Is he wrong?" she doesn't stop herself from leaning into the kiss.
When Dan spits, "Why don't you fucking marry her," he doesn't expect Nate to take him at his word.
Surprisingly, Blair chooses to sit out the event with him. They get drunk on champagne, appropriately, and Dan waltzes her around her apartment to Debussy. They collapse onto her bed laughing. Dan forgets for an hour or two that he wants to kill himself and falls asleep with Blair's hair in his mouth and her pearls tangled around his wrist.
"I hate them," Dan had slurred, drunk, and he'd meant it.
Later they wake up close enough that a kiss only seems natural, and sex more natural still. He wonders if Nate and Serena are saying their vows. If he'd gone, he wonders if either of them would have looked at him or if his presence would have been inconsequential, like a centerpiece.
"It won't change anything," Blair says, after. She's smoking a thoughtful cigarette, sitting up against the headboard. She doesn't protest Dan's head in her lap; she even runs her fingers through his hair. "It never does."
"You talking about us or them?"
"Either or." Blair scratches behind his ear like he's a housecat.
He wonders briefly when they became such good friends.
Nate and Serena last for six allegedly blissful, heavily photographed months and then Serena disappears. She's spotted a few weeks later on someone's yacht in France, topless, head thrown back in laughter.
Nate shows up on Dan's doorstep with a bottle of vodka. Dan's on his knees before the door shuts.
After, Nate's fingers tangled up in Dan's hair, Nate tells him, "She said that's not who she is." Half-listening, Dan presses his mouth to Nate's collarbone, follows the line of it with his teeth. "She said she didn't want to be anyone's wife."
Dan nods but he's not listening, thinking only about the taste of Nate's skin.
It was good, for a while. That's pretty much how everything is, though, isn't it?
She and Nate went from bars to bedrooms to trains, took a lengthy trip to the beach and only informed their respective jobs after the fact. They're similar, her and Nate: they're always jumping from one to the next and never quite clicking with anyone. He was still upset over Dan, she could tell. She was still upset over him and Dan too.
They woke up curled beneath white hotel sheets and spent their days in the sun, feeling distantly photographed. Serena got a tan and Nate got blonder. Back in their room he pulled at the ties of her bikini and kissed the pale, sensitive skin untouched by the sun. She shivered under the rasp of his stubble and it started all over again.
It was good, for a while. They got tricked into thinking it might last.
It lasted until reality set in. Nate had to return to work, put his old skin back on, dress up in his suits and say his polite hellos to all the same people. They complimented him on his tan and his vacation, made passing remarks about how pretty Serena was while seeming to want to ask more. Anything Dan had left in his apartment was gone, but that was to be expected.
Nate thinks of Dan's story, the one he read once by accident; the three of them have been doing this forever. At least it feels like it. And it's tiring, it's exhausting, it's always waiting for someone to make a choice and feeling bad when you're not chosen and feeling bad when you are chosen, someone always left out. Nate just wants things to be settled and finalized.
Rings seem like a pretty good way to go about that.
So he says, anyway. There are other things too, things he'd rather not address because they echo all the complexities he's trying to avoid. Things like whatever he doesn't have with Dan anymore, cut off before he could even begin to figure it out; things like whatever he's always had with Serena, undefined because they never really talked about it.
Nate wants definitions.
Everything stops coming so easily for Serena. She's not sure about the whens and hows and whys, only that one day it…stops. Maybe she's not young enough for her specific brand of bubbly to be cute anymore. Maybe everyone sees her, finally, for real.
The jobs stop rolling in. No one wants her in their print ads or their marketing campaigns, giggling her way through television guest spots or interviews. Redheads are in this year, they tell her. Maybe in six months. Maybe in twelve.
She goes home to New York, where Blair shakes her head and sighs and says again that if Serena had just gone to college, she would have a trade to fall back on.
Serena makes Dan take her out, half to find out what Nate's up to and half because she really misses Dan. She never realizes she misses him until she sees him again after months have passed and everything about him becomes familiar all over again. The way he smiles when he sees her, like they're still sixteen and he's staring up at her waiting on the balcony. Serena loves that. It doesn't matter how much they hurt each other, Dan never stops looking at her like that.
"How long are you back for?" he asks.
"Indefinitely." She smiles brightly, tucks an arm through his. "You know I have to ask about my ex-husband."
Dan presses his lips together. "Why'd you have to marry him?" he says, more to the bottom of his glass than to her.
What a pretty picture it made, not-quite-childhood-sweethearts tying the knot after all that time. Forget Blair, forget Dan – it just made the prettiest picture, the copy wrote up so nicely. "I loved him."
She hadn't ever been the type to dream about weddings (weddings, in her estimation, usually turned out to be nightmares) but it was Nate. Nate was special. Every morning she thought that maybe she'd wake up the next wanting to sign Mrs. Archibald on all her papers or something. But then one day she was looking at the Vanderbilt diamond on her finger and she remembered that this was not a dream she ever had.
"You broke his heart," Dan says. She imagines he's only too happy to try and help Nate mend it.
"He's broken mine too," she says softly. "It's not a bad thing to realize you want something different."
"Someone," Dan corrects.
"No," Serena says, "It's not about someone at all."
It's always about someone. Serena's out of the city in a week on the invitation of some billionaire and Dan wakes up to a fucking text that says Nate's gone with her.
He guesses that's all he ever is to Nate, someone to fuck until Serena blows back into town.
Dan considers having a drinking problem. All the good ones do, right?
Nate's not sure why he went with her, except he's always had some difficulty when it came to saying no to her sunny smile. He's got a goldfish memory with Serena.
They're in Italy by the time he calls Dan, gut twisting with guilt as the phone rings and rings.
When he finally picks up, Dan informs Nate very calmly that he is an asshole.
"I just went on a trip," Nate protests. "You could've come."
"Oh could I? Is that why you didn't ask me?" Dan's voice is pure condescension. "You went to fuck Serena, let's not pretend."
Dan always says thing like that when they fight. Let's not pretend. Nate is his mother's son, he could build a career on pretending, but sometimes he thinks it's just hard for Dan to accept a truth different than his own.
"It's not like that," Nate says, annoyed.
"Tell me what it's like, then," Dan says.
Hi husband, Serena said, laughing, when she showed up on his doorstep. Miss me?
Of course, Nate said, like she hadn't left him, family ring just sitting there on his bedside table with no one to claim it. She hadn't ever really moved in, either. She blew into his life and made him crazy for six months and then she left, like she'd never been there at all. He reminded her, I'm not your husband. They were just being idiot kids when they got married, as though it was some quick fix that would make everything fall into place – a beach wedding with Blair as the maid of honor and Dan as the best man, what a joke.
When she hugged him, tight and secure, her hair in his face smelling like her familiar shampoo, Nate kind of wished everything could fall into place. So they did their old dance: he kissed her and she kissed back, they tumbled into his bed, and he followed her back out. He couldn't help following her. He doesn't want to regret not doing it ever again.
"I love her," Nate says. "I do."
Dan's silent for a really long time. Finally, he says, "You're both so fucking selfish." He doesn't sound furious like Nate expects, just resigned. There's something else in his carefully controlled tone too, something hidden and broken. "You deserve each other."
Dan goes on a book tour, but mainly he drinks.
He's in San Francisco by the time it catches up with him. He's been in however many cities and they've all left no impression, just hotel rooms and signings and bars and boys and girls. Dan doesn't discriminate.
Eventually he looks in the mirror and sees how very wrecked he looks, gaunt and off-color. He realizes he's been an asshole, an idiot, whiny and self-absorbed. No amount of wallowing is going to reverse the facts. The fact is Nate loves Serena and he always has; Serena will never know what she wants; Dan will only know what he wants when he can't have it anymore.
So he wants Nate now. He'll just have to live with it.
The director who invites Serena to Italy plies her with champagne and compliments, complains about how hard it's been to cast his most recent film and find funding. Serena preens, waiting for the expected offer until he catches her utterly off-guard.
"I've heard you're friends with her," he says, naming some little blonde ingénue Serena met at a party once, at least seven years her junior. "I wondered if you could put in a word –"
He adds that it would be wonderful if she could make a monetary contribution – he'd be forever grateful.
Serena gets all kind of drunk and falls into old habits, dials up Dan even though he's so many miles away.
"You're drunk," he notes.
"This trip isn't what I expected," she sighs. "Dan –"
"Serena," he interrupts. "Why don't you get your damn husband to deal with it?"
He hangs up. Serena blinks hazily at her phone for a moment, not understanding. But there it is: call ended.
Nate is studying the curve of Serena's side as she lays beside him, her back to him. The sheets are snagged low on her hip. Her hair tumbles between them, catches the light all golden.
"Something's missing," she says, upset and quiet.
"Yeah," he sighs. Something always is.
Serena is thinking about endings. Before he fell in love with Nate and after she did, she and Dan would lie nose to nose in their bed, talking about what they were going to do after they got married. At that point, it seemed inevitable that they were going to get married.
"The suburbs, really?" Dan said doubtfully. "We are not moving to the suburbs."
"The country," Serena corrects. "I want to have a swing set. For the kids."
A backyard with a swing set in it, a little girl who looked just like her and a little boy who looked just like him, a perfect little television family. Dan could write, or teach like he was always threatening; it didn't matter what Serena did, she could just take care of the kids, be a mom like her mother never was. Serena would learn how to bake, make frosting roses on birthday cakes, do laundry, be boring.
Dan's face had softened and he nudged into a kiss. "I don't know what the suburbs'll do with you," he said. "Marilyn in Schenectady."
Dan had been drunk, but he'd spoken so clearly. I love him. Clear and yearning, hopelessly hoping. Serena had put him to bed and went into the bathroom, studying her face in the mirror, flaking mascara leaving a gray shadow under her eyes that made her look unspeakably tired. Absently she grabbed a Q-tip to clean it up, even though she was only going to bed.
He never seemed to remember having said it.
She and Nate had talked a lot too, about travelling everywhere, sailing, seeing a million different sunsets. Never sleeping, doing nothing but sleeping, making love on the beach.
Sometimes she'd gotten the sense that Nate was looking through her instead of at her. She blames Dan for being too good at seeing, giving her a yardstick by which to measure others, an impossible guideline. Nate was just always looking for something, some kind of sign that he wasn't his father's son or that he was, that he was useless or he wasn't. Serena got it. She was always looking too. And at the end of the day, that's all they were doing together. Looking for an answer that was impossible to grasp.
(Later she will realize not even Dan really saw her, that no one ever has, and it counts amongst the worst realizations of her life.)
Serena thinks she's given up on dreaming, for now.
There's a party (there's always a party). Dan attends alone. To his surprise, so do Serena and Nate. Serena's got someone on her arm, this massively tall blond athletic type. Dan wonders if she's trying to win a genetic lottery or something.
Nate doesn't bring anyone. "I'm not dating," he says lightly and Dan can only laugh. "It's true!" Nate protests, smile tugging at his lips. "I'm not."
(Sex isn't dating, Nate told him once, after one of their earliest trysts. He set the rules right there, Dan thought later.)
"Well, whoever he or she ends up being, tell her congratulations and I'm sorry," Dan says, giving Nate a slightly condescending shoulder pat as he moves past.
Nate catches his arm. "Dan," he sighs. "I'm sorry. I really am."
"There's nothing to be sorry for," Dan says, because there really isn't. "It's already done."
"I didn't want to hurt you," Nate tries.
"Yeah, well." He wishes Nate would let go of his arm. "Only sociopaths want to hurt people."
"Dan," Nate says again. Dan wishes Nate wouldn't say his name, it's one of those things that tugs at him in some hard-to-categorize way (like the pressure of Nate's fingers around his arm, the blue of Nate's eyes, his smile, his earnestness).
"It's done," Dan says softly. "I can't do it again, okay?"
Nate loves Serena; Serena loves Nate. Dan's not even sure what he was doing there in the first place.
"I need to stop thinking about you," Dan adds. "Because you're not thinking about me and it's just – it's fucked. I can't do it, Nate. I can't."
"I think about you," Nate says. "I think about you all the –"
A little helplessly, "Nate."
"I do," Nate says stubbornly.
"Then stop," Dan says firmly.
Sometime down the line, far away but not far enough, at a bar (it's always a bar):
Nate says, "We're not even friends anymore." His eyes are just a little glassy with alcohol but he's watching Dan's face too intently to be that drunk.
Dan is uncomfortable at the scrutiny. "It's hard to be friends with people you used to be in love with."
"In love with?" Nate's still staring but his gaze goes slightly vacant, perplexed. "You loved me?"
Dan makes a series of tiny, panicky gestures – he shakes his head, shrugs, nods, bites his lip and looks away.
"When did you get over me?"
I didn't, Dan thinks but what he says is, "You're drunk. We shouldn't be having this conversation at all, but we definitely shouldn't have it while you're drunk."
Impatiently, Nate says, "I'm not drunk. Tell me. When?"
Dan's mouth tightens. "You can buy the book when it comes out."
"No," Nate says, and it surprises Dan, surprises him to see Nate assert anything. "Tell me when you got over me."
He sighs, offers finally, "I'll tell you as soon as it happens, alright? Is that good enough?"
The confusion lingers on Nate's face half a moment longer before it clears and he's grasping fistfuls of Dan's shirt, hauling him in for a kiss. It aches, somewhere deep in Dan's body, in his bones.
"Never got over you either," Nate mumbles, as much of a confession as Dan's ever going to get out of him.
Serena's spent half her life sure only of what she doesn't want, or isn't supposed to want. Everything else just fell into her lap, happy accidents. She never needed to want anything.
She sits in her bought-and-paid-for apartment with the great windows everyone's always jealous of and the hard wood floors, sits against the glass with a blanket around her shoulders and watches the street below. She sips slowly from her glass of white wine and feels like her mother.
Acting was a bust. Modeling was a bust. Producing, professional party girl-ing, photography. None of it ended anywhere. Marriage, she failed at that too. It's a good thing she never got pregnant.
The window is cold against her cheek. Outside, lights glitter everywhere.
She calls Dan because he's the only person she knows who's had one goal his entire life and is actually out there living it.
"Hey there," he answers, hesitant and lacking the venom of their last phone call.
"Hey yourself," Serena says quietly. "Where are you?"
"Where am I always?" he says. "Home. Where are you?"
His home is still in Brooklyn as far as she knows. She hasn't seen him since she came back to New York, though. "Same." Her home may be the same city but lately it feels like it's swallowing her up. "How are you?"
"I'm alright."
It's not what she called to ask about, but it always comes up anyway: "How's Nate?"
Dan's tone is a little guarded. "Fine." She expected him to say he didn't know, maybe. But of course he's still speaking to Nate. Or maybe –
"You're sleeping with him," Serena says, not a question, the again implied.
"I'm not." He pauses and she can almost hear the hint of a smile there. "Making him work for it a little."
Serena almost smiles too, despite herself, despite everything. The smile feels incongruous with the way her eyes are prickling. "Why?"
Why would any of them bother anymore?
Dan is quiet so he must be really thinking about it. "Sex is an easy way to connect," he says at last. "It can make you think all kinds of things. That you're in love. That what you’ve got is real, even if it's not."
She tilts her head, watching New York zip around. "Is that so bad?"
"It's messy," Dan sighs. She wishes they were face-to-face, suddenly. He's so easy to read in person, always has been. "I'm trying to avoid messy."
"You told me you loved him once," she muses suddenly. It feels so long ago. It feels so long ago that she was in love with Dan, that love like that existed between the two of them. When she was sixteen she thought the sun rose and set with him. She thought that he would guide her into being the kind of person she felt she should be. She thought that they could even be together forever. It feels like such a little girl's promise now. Forever. Nothing's forever.
"Did I?" Dan asks uneasily. He clears his throat. "You okay, Serena?"
"Yeah," she sighs.
"You don't sound okay."
"How did you know what you wanted?" she says, clarifying, "With your life. How did you know you wanted to write?"
"I always had too much to say," Dan says flippantly. When she's quiet, he adds, "I just…I like words. I like what they can do. What I can make them do. And I just…knew how to use them."
"That sounds nice," she says. She doesn't know why she's so upset tonight. Maybe she should have gone out, distracted herself. She could have picked someone up and made this lonely apartment exciting for a night. Her voice catches. "I don't know what to do, Dan."
Sounding worried, he says, "About what?"
"About me." She laughs a little but she doesn't mean it. "I don't know what to do with myself. I don't fit anywhere. You – you write and Blair has her magazine and even –" She laughs again, a little choked. "Even Nate figured himself out. Why can't I?"
"Your life's not over yet," he says gently. "You have time to figure it out."
"I'm twenty-nine," she says. "And I'm still acting like did I when I was eighteen. I shouldn't – I wasn't supposed to be this lost, still."
Serena presses her face into her hand and listens to Dan's silence. She doesn't want to cry.
"No one can tell you what your path is except you," he says. "It sounds like bullshit and I wish I could help, I wish I could do it for you, but you just have to figure it out on your own. Whatever it is, you just have to find it."
"I don't know how," Serena says quietly. Everything always finds her.
"Figure out how," Dan says.
She sighs. "Dan."
"It's not easy for anyone," he says. "But if you're the one who isn't happy, you're the only one who can fix it."
Serena opens her eyes, pulling her blanket more firmly around herself and tucking her knees under her chin. "You make a better gay best friend than you do a boyfriend," she tells him.
"Ha ha," Dan says dryly.
Part Two