according to keats and fitzgerald
Serena van der Woodsen + everyone.
4071 words. PG13.
W: underage sex/drugs, Lily being a terrible mother
Summary: Contrary to popular belief, she doesn't always get what she wants.
Note: Happy birthday!!!!! Lol, I actually started this fic like three years ago? And it has been only half done this entire time but then I dusted it off for your bday and I hope you enjoy it!!!!
neither movement from nor towards,
neither ascent nor decline. except for the point, the still point,
there would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
On the first day of first grade, a girl with brown hair and an electric blue headband sits next to Serena.
"I don't like anyone here," she announces. She sticks out her hand. "I'm Blair Waldorf. Your hair is pretty."
Serena wonders if she counts as anyone; she hasn't learned yet that she's always Blair's exception.
Serena's mother is supposed to pick her up that day (an unexpected treat) because the nanny had been fired just that morning for being in Mommy's room with Uncle Scott (who is not even Serena's uncle) when Mommy wasn't there.
Serena waits eagerly for her, trying to imagine how she'll look in the crowd of nannies in their black uniforms. She'll be in her long white wool coat with a cloud of wavy blonde hair, wearing big sunglasses and red lipstick.
Serena's mother is always late wherever she goes, so when the little hand is already past the three, Serena doesn't worry. She sits still, which is hard for her, and waits and waits; it's past five when her grandmother shows up, harried, tugging Eric along behind her.
"Your mother's in Los Angeles," she says with that touch of grandmotherly disappointment. She flashes Serena a smile as she takes her hand. "You'll be sleeping over Grandma's tonight."
Mr. Waldorf gets Serena and Blair a huge map of the world that they stick up on the wall of Blair's playroom. They put bright pink pins in every place Lily goes.
Wedding no. 1: Serena is present, abstractly, beneath the bodice of her mother's gown, a collection of chromosomes, a secret nobody knows yet.
The first time Serena's baby kicks, she's standing along at her kitchen counter cutting avocado for a salad. She stands there in the sunny California stillness and smiles, presses her hands against her stomach and feels her baby press back. The moment belongs to her, just her, and she likes that more than she ever knew she would.
In the third grade, Serena and Blair are not in the same class for the first time ever. Serena doesn’t have a snack because her mother is in Nice and Grandma's in Montecito and the nanny's slacking with no one to watch her.
A boy with dirty blonde hair breaks his cookie in half and gives her the bigger piece. His name is Nate.
Serena is so strangely proud of her new friend until she tells Blair, who says, "Oh, Nate? We've been playing together since we were born."
Serena doesn't know how she didn't know that.
Wedding no. 2: Serena only remembers wearing an itchy dress and being taken out halfway through. Samir didn't really like kids.
Some of the things Serena learns from her mother's boyfriends are as follows:
Kev (always Kev, never Kevin) teaches her how to flip pancakes. He can also make them into funny shapes and sneaks in chocolate chips when her mom isn't looking. For the three months he lives with them, he makes sure Serena and Eric have dinner every night. He has a food thing.
Carlos teaches her how to play poker and calls her little miss. He always lets her win.
Marco shows her how to ride a bike. Serena doesn't remember much about it besides zooming through the park as he ran after her shouting. She felt like a bird, or a ribbon caught on the breeze; she was moving, she was flying, it was faster than running, faster than she could ever remember. It was perfect. She has no idea where her mother was at the time.
Anton is a ballet dancer. He lifts Serena into the air like she weighs nothing at all. He spins her around and teaches her all the positions, first to fifth. He laughs and calls her a natural.
Johnny is much younger than her mother, unemployed, and a film school dropout. He shows Serena all the films of Martin Scorsese and is the first of her mother's boyfriends to look at her inappropriately. He isn't the last.
Claus (Klaus?) teaches her six different kinds of kielbasa and Serena will remember them all for the rest of her life, for no apparent reason.
Jeremy shows her a razor and a mirror and how to make a perfect line.
Wedding no. 3: Following on the heels of the second and by far the most beautiful. It's in Tuscany and her mother has flowers in her hair. It's the first wedding Blair attends and Serena demands they go down the aisle together, hands clasped on the same basket of flower petals. Lily agrees only because Blair's dress already matched her color scheme, because even then Blair was on top of things like that.
Georgina gives Serena vodka when they're nine. Previously all of Serena's experience had been sneaking a sip from her mother's martini on a dare once – and champagne, of course. Serena was raised on champagne.
Five years later Georgina does her makeup and takes her to a high school party. They end up looking like each other's evil twins, dark winged out shadow and clumpy mascara.
Serena loses her virginity to Carter Baizen at that party, though she's not entirely sure he remembers – hours later, smiling instead of crying, she saw him pressing some other blonde girl into the mattress of the master bedroom.
When she was with Carter (different bedroom, people outside the door, someone vomiting in the bathroom that joined their room to the next) his eyes were bloodshot. He did another line of coke first and she was already high off something Preston Williams gave her when they were dancing. She was probably drunk too – she remembered doing shots and bright lights and Carter taking her hand – and now here she is, kissing him, letting him push her dress up.
She knows Blair wouldn't approve and she knows Blair will lose her virginity to Nate in a candlelit room, so when Carter pauses Serena says yes yes keep going yes.
Dan lights candles for her.
He gives her a sea of little flickering lights and quiet music and his heart on a plate when she would've asked for much, much less. He kisses her like he's trying to make each one count. His hands don't shake when they take off her clothes but they do when he touches her, when he moves the sheets aside for her to lie down. He pulls them back over her immediately, making sure she's covered even though there's no one there to see but him.
He looks at her and doesn't close his eyes.
Serena wants, possibly more than she has ever wanted anything, to be a virgin even though that kind of thing has never meant anything to her. Sex and love existed in two separate spheres in her mind, ones that floated next to each other but rarely overlapped. She didn't want the love part, anyway; she saw where that got people. She saw where it got her. But now she wishes she were a virgin and she kind of feels like one: she's so nervous and it's all so new and she just wishes, impossibly, that Dan could be first.
It's terrifying. No one's ever looked at her like Dan looks at her. She doesn't even know how to catalogue it, what to do with it, where to put it and how to label it.
They don't have sex and he doesn't even care. Serena doesn't know what to do with that either.
Wedding no. 5: It's the first time Dan really breaks her heart and, unfortunately, not the last.
Serena is fifteen when the newest uncle-who-isn't-her-uncle puts his hand on her thigh, curving inward so close to the hem of her skirt.
He calls her baby and kisses her and she lets him but doesn't know why; it's not until he tugs free the first button of her shirt that she jerks back. Before she can think she jumps up and runs from the room, locking her bedroom door behind her. She can hear him shouting, faintly, but she just sits against the door and cries. She doesn't call Blair or Nate or even her mom, wherever she is.
Serena is fifteen when she overdoses on Nate.
His smile is too much, too perfect. He makes her heart beat hard and fast in her chest, like she's been dancing even though she's standing perfectly still. It's the only time she's ever felt like that. Normally she can never move fast enough, feeling still even if she's running.
Nate is too much for her. He's not skinny anymore, he's tall and filled out and his shoulders in t-shirts are torture, and his hands holding glasses or blunts or books are entirely unfair. She tries to quiet all the wanting in her head and her heart and elsewhere but she can't; he's taking her over, she forgets friendship and Blair and sisters and everything, forgets everything, and fucks Nate.
He kisses like she wants him to and he's unsure in a nice way, running better on instinct than a lot of other boys do. His eyes are closed. He keeps saying her name like he just learned it.
When it's over he pulls away and staggers onto the next stool, mumbling an astonished fuck under his breath. Serena suddenly wants to vomit (and Serena never vomits, not even during her worst hangovers). She grabs his shirt off the floor next to them and jams her feet into her heels, darting out the exit before Nate can stop her.
She throws up by a bunch of trashcans, wipes her mouth with her pretty gold dress, and hails a fucking cab.
Serena is fifteen when she sees a boy die. Serena is fifteen when she runs away.
Serena is fifteen.
Wedding no. 4: Is in the winter. Serena brings Blair and Nate and Chuck; they steal champagne and get drunk. It's the most fun out of all of them.
"I only got one up on you in pretend," Blair said to her once, recalling a million scenarios where Blair was the princess and Serena the maid, the prince, the family dog. She always went along with whatever Blair wanted to play, because Serena could usually find a way to make it fun. "Only then."
Blair always fumed about the praise she got, the attention from classmates and passersby and even Blair's own mother, but Serena knows all about attention and how it works. To her face everyone loves her but behind her back they all call her a slut.
When Serena finally sleeps with Dan, she expects it to not be a big deal. They've done everything else. Still, her own hands are trembling as she undoes her dress and pushes his jacket off his shoulders, pulls him down on top of her.
It's a little uncomfortable. He leans on her hair a few times and he can't get her bra unclasped so she has to do it for him. But with the fake snow falling and the blanket around them, it feels right; she doesn't wish for anything, except maybe for time to pause for a little while.
Considering she doesn't really get nervous, Serena is probably more anxious than she's ever been in her life. Dan breathes her name and his eyes are always open; he grins at her and kisses her and Serena could probably cry right then but instead she laughs.
It's not quite perfect but it's as close as it could get.
Wedding no. 6: Dan becomes her brother. It's not the last time she'll say goodbye to Carter.
She meets Carter again in LA. It's actually not on purpose for once, not a ploy or a plot – she's grabbing a post-yoga iced vanilla latte from Coffee Bean and he's yammering on his cell phone and wearing a suit and they just collide.
She gives him a critical up and down, raising her eyebrows and taking a slow sip, silently asking really, Carter?
He grins, abashed. "I have a real job now. No kidding. It's nifty, as long as I don't get arrested for possession and I wear a suit, they give me money."
Serena smiles. "Funny how those things work."
He looks healthier than she remembers him, if a little harried. "I hear you just show up these days and they're throwing millions at you."
She smiles a little, shaking her head. "Not quite," she says. "I work just as much as you do – I bet more. Or haven't you seen my last three romantic comedies?"
"Oh, I see them all, beautiful." His smile turns a little more Old Carter and, a little more Old Serena, she flushes slightly.
"So," she says, "what is this so-called 'nifty' operation you're a part of?"
"Advertising." He looks both proud and embarrassed to say it. "Funny thing, it's actually more soul-sucking than it looks."
"I think you can handle it," Serena tells him.
"So far so good." He tilts his head a little, studying her, and says, "Look, you call me sometime, alright? If I don't hear from you I'll be offended."
"Okay." Serena laughs and nods again. She thinks she might actually mean it. "I'll call you sometime."
They go on in their separate worlds for a long time. Serena buys a house for herself by the beach and realizes she has no desire to share it with anyone. Carter has a sleek, expensive apartment that's not really to her taste. They visit but they never stay long. He teases her about going granola; she teases him about being responsible.
When she gets pregnant, she sees no reason to change what they've got. It's the only thing that's worked so far.
She does yoga until she's about to pop. She buys what feels like fifty baby name books and scans them endlessly, makes list upon list – lists even Blair would be proud of. Blair probably expects her to name him Sky or River but her lists are full of names like Wyatt, Hunter, Aiden. None of them are quite right, though. She tries to picture herself calling for her son across a playground, shading her eyes from the sun as she scans for his blonde head, yelling, "Hunter, time to go!"
"What do you think, hmm?" She looks down at her stomach and predictably receives no response. "Maybe I should just call you River."
"I still can't believe you're having a baby," Blair says on the phone. It's probably because Blair has hardly seen her pregnant, only on a few visits before Serena really started to show. The distance between them now is not entirely physical. They've grown up and apart, settled into different lives on different coasts. Serena wonders sometimes how these nine months would've gone if they were still like they used to be, back before Blair chose Dan and Serena left and everyone just found lives away from each other.
Still, habits are hard to break. She told Blair about the baby before she even told Carter and Blair had been surprisingly emotional about it, sounding almost teary over the phone when Serena had expected a snide comment, or maybe a polite congratulations. Serena was already hormonally on edge and she'd cried too, both of them stupidly sappily crying at each other and that - that felt like nothing had ever changed.
Serena goes into labor at five a.m.
It's mid-August, hot as fucking hell and she's a week past her due date and she can't sleep. Everything is irritating. She's stripped the bed of blankets and herself of clothes; the air conditioning is broken and she wriggles around in her bed in a bra and panties unable to find comfort of any kind. Her tits feel huge and her entire body aches like she ran six miles, her hair keeps coming out of her messy braid and all she wants is to sleep.
She gets up for some iced green tea and then, just as she's considering calling Carter to come over and amuse her, her water breaks.
Blair is the first person she calls. No surprise there.
Serena names her son Luca, for no particular reason at all.
Lily visits her in the hospital, Husband Number Seven trailing close behind. Lily holds the baby, touches his soft peach fuzz head, and her smile seems genuinely pleased. "He's beautiful, Serena."
She hands him back and runs a hand over Serena's hair in a way she never has before – like Serena is fragile. Lightly, Lily continues, "You're so at ease with him. I was never like that." She laughs, an airy little sound. "No instincts for it."
Serena hates her mother's brittle little moments of honesty. They've been coming more frequently since her mother's been sick, like the compression of time is making her have to spit out the truth before it's too late.
"You weren't that bad," Serena says, laughing and rolling her eyes. "You were a good mom."
"Oh honey." Lily smiles sadly and presses a kiss into Serena's hairline. "Don't think I don't know when you're lying."
Wedding no. 7: Paul is twenty years her mother's junior, the son of a friend from some committee. They seem to get along, and he doesn't disappear when Lily gets sick, so that's something.
Dan and Blair get married. Serena attends and is normal, cheerful, genuinely happy for them despite the lump in her throat, despite finding their relationship so strange even now. She supposes being happy and being discomfited are not entirely mutually exclusive, as long as you've grown up with really fucked up parents and are excellent at compartmentalizing.
Luca is two and goes down the aisle with her, very well-behaved despite his natural inclination to cause as much mischief as possible. The ceremony is luckily short, Serena fidgeting slightly on her heels, trying to focus on her son instead of the vows – but the thing is, she sort of can't avoid them. She can't help her eyes prickling, can't help getting just a little swept up in the stupid sentimental romanticism of weddings, the kind of stuff she always preferred in theory.
Dan and Blair are in love and it always hits her like a ton of bricks, they're in love and neither of them need her so much anymore and that was always the part that hurt the most.
She blinks away tears (she can always pass them off as a result of Luca pulling her hair, which he just loves to do lately), inadvertently meeting Nate's eyes on the other side of the altar. He looks briefly concerned but then makes a face at her, silly and contorted, and inclines his head towards the happy couple with a joking roll of the eyes. She stifles a little laugh, feeling suddenly a whole lot better. Nate always had a way of doing that.
Serena knows that huge stretches of Carter's memory are blank, erased by too much bad behavior and substance abuse. He's told her as much. She doesn't fault him; there's a lot she's forgotten too.
"Beautiful," he says when she tells him as much, with that smile of his, "I remember everything."
Serena is about to roll her eyes but he's up in her personal space, tilting her back towards the bed. "You looked too young for me but I didn't care," he says, "and your hair was straight because you wore it straight then. You had on this long tank top thing as a dress even though it wasn't one. You had all these bracelets on your wrists –" He traces a finger up the veins on the delicate underside of her wrist. "I remember the sound they made, that clicking."
He touches her mouth, smoothes a finger over her brow. "Too much eyeliner. Big clunky shoes you lost ten minutes after you got there. I'd just done a line in the bathroom with Graham and I knew you were stoned as shit and I was taking full advantage but I didn't care about that, either. I wanted you." He looks a little serious then, a rare look on Carter, and there is something apologetic in his eyes. "I always want you, beautiful."
"I think you just have a knack for saying the right thing at the right time," Serena says, eyebrows raised doubtfully. "And to be honest, you still come off pretty creepy."
He laughs.
She'd known guilt and betrayal like any committer of crimes ever does, but she'd never tasted it so clearly as she had upon finding Dan and Blair in bed together.
Dan was a door that was never really shut. For so long she'd been convinced that he would grow up a little and she would grow up a little and then they'd find each other all over again, better than before. They would be like Lily and Rufus, only less eerily parental and without the divorce.
So seeing him next to Blair, naked except for sheets, had been that door slamming shut.
She and Blair share everything, she supposes. She should have seen that day coming.
Sometimes it hits her, at strange times, that they're grown ups. They've forgiven each other so many things and now they never speak of them.
"It's weird, isn't it," Dan notes, watching her study her children playing. His daughter is asleep in his arms, face smushed against his shirt. "It's weird for me."
"It's weird," Serena confirms. She offers him a half-smile. "When I was sixteen I used to wonder if it would be you and me, in the end."
"Me too." They share an awkward little laugh. "And look at us now."
She tucks her hand into the crook of his arm. "Yeah, look at us."
Serena bakes cupcakes for her little boy's birthday and frosts them with supermarket frosting and an everyday butter knife.
She hadn't really expected Luca to feel like hers. He has her nose (the old one) and her mouth and Carter's sleepy blue eyes; his blond hair is always tousled and he laughs at everything. She tells him stories with a hundred different voices and does silly things to make him smile. He's hers, he belongs to her in a way no one else ever has.
She had been a little afraid that she wouldn't know how to take care of him. That she would love him but be unable to cross that divide between them, unable to ever give enough.
She worries about when Luca gets older. She worries about him being fifteen and possibly having a string of stepfathers and a mother who is too busy to be his mother. She worries that she will fail him just by being herself and he'll grow up so deeply angry at her that no matter what she does it'll never be fixed.
But when she looks at his little upturned face, determined as he sticks his fingers in the cupcake frosting, the worry recedes a little bit.
It's the first day of first grade and they've only been back in the city a month so far, Serena and Carter and Luca trying the cohabitation thing for the very first time. Everything is still kind of a mess, the apartment not properly set up and Serena pregnant again, so she's late going to the school. Her doctor's appointment ran over, then she'd had to go shopping for furniture, and she's so insistent about doing everything herself that she loses track of time.
She darts up the steps, past the last few kids being picked up, and into the main hall where her son is waiting patiently on a chair, sitting very still even though it's hard for him to do so. Serena smiles, pushing her sunglasses to the top of her head, and crouches in front of him.
"Sorry I'm late," she says. She could promise it won't happen again, but she's trying to do this thing where she doesn't lie to her children. "Make it up to you with ice cream?"
Luca smiles back, a curly little smile like Carter has. "Okay," he says.
"Okay," she repeats, reaching for his hand to lead him out.
Serena van der Woodsen + everyone.
4071 words. PG13.
W: underage sex/drugs, Lily being a terrible mother
Summary: Contrary to popular belief, she doesn't always get what she wants.
Note: Happy birthday!!!!! Lol, I actually started this fic like three years ago? And it has been only half done this entire time but then I dusted it off for your bday and I hope you enjoy it!!!!
neither movement from nor towards,
neither ascent nor decline. except for the point, the still point,
there would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
On the first day of first grade, a girl with brown hair and an electric blue headband sits next to Serena.
"I don't like anyone here," she announces. She sticks out her hand. "I'm Blair Waldorf. Your hair is pretty."
Serena wonders if she counts as anyone; she hasn't learned yet that she's always Blair's exception.
Serena's mother is supposed to pick her up that day (an unexpected treat) because the nanny had been fired just that morning for being in Mommy's room with Uncle Scott (who is not even Serena's uncle) when Mommy wasn't there.
Serena waits eagerly for her, trying to imagine how she'll look in the crowd of nannies in their black uniforms. She'll be in her long white wool coat with a cloud of wavy blonde hair, wearing big sunglasses and red lipstick.
Serena's mother is always late wherever she goes, so when the little hand is already past the three, Serena doesn't worry. She sits still, which is hard for her, and waits and waits; it's past five when her grandmother shows up, harried, tugging Eric along behind her.
"Your mother's in Los Angeles," she says with that touch of grandmotherly disappointment. She flashes Serena a smile as she takes her hand. "You'll be sleeping over Grandma's tonight."
Mr. Waldorf gets Serena and Blair a huge map of the world that they stick up on the wall of Blair's playroom. They put bright pink pins in every place Lily goes.
Wedding no. 1: Serena is present, abstractly, beneath the bodice of her mother's gown, a collection of chromosomes, a secret nobody knows yet.
The first time Serena's baby kicks, she's standing along at her kitchen counter cutting avocado for a salad. She stands there in the sunny California stillness and smiles, presses her hands against her stomach and feels her baby press back. The moment belongs to her, just her, and she likes that more than she ever knew she would.
In the third grade, Serena and Blair are not in the same class for the first time ever. Serena doesn’t have a snack because her mother is in Nice and Grandma's in Montecito and the nanny's slacking with no one to watch her.
A boy with dirty blonde hair breaks his cookie in half and gives her the bigger piece. His name is Nate.
Serena is so strangely proud of her new friend until she tells Blair, who says, "Oh, Nate? We've been playing together since we were born."
Serena doesn't know how she didn't know that.
Wedding no. 2: Serena only remembers wearing an itchy dress and being taken out halfway through. Samir didn't really like kids.
Some of the things Serena learns from her mother's boyfriends are as follows:
Kev (always Kev, never Kevin) teaches her how to flip pancakes. He can also make them into funny shapes and sneaks in chocolate chips when her mom isn't looking. For the three months he lives with them, he makes sure Serena and Eric have dinner every night. He has a food thing.
Carlos teaches her how to play poker and calls her little miss. He always lets her win.
Marco shows her how to ride a bike. Serena doesn't remember much about it besides zooming through the park as he ran after her shouting. She felt like a bird, or a ribbon caught on the breeze; she was moving, she was flying, it was faster than running, faster than she could ever remember. It was perfect. She has no idea where her mother was at the time.
Anton is a ballet dancer. He lifts Serena into the air like she weighs nothing at all. He spins her around and teaches her all the positions, first to fifth. He laughs and calls her a natural.
Johnny is much younger than her mother, unemployed, and a film school dropout. He shows Serena all the films of Martin Scorsese and is the first of her mother's boyfriends to look at her inappropriately. He isn't the last.
Claus (Klaus?) teaches her six different kinds of kielbasa and Serena will remember them all for the rest of her life, for no apparent reason.
Jeremy shows her a razor and a mirror and how to make a perfect line.
Wedding no. 3: Following on the heels of the second and by far the most beautiful. It's in Tuscany and her mother has flowers in her hair. It's the first wedding Blair attends and Serena demands they go down the aisle together, hands clasped on the same basket of flower petals. Lily agrees only because Blair's dress already matched her color scheme, because even then Blair was on top of things like that.
Georgina gives Serena vodka when they're nine. Previously all of Serena's experience had been sneaking a sip from her mother's martini on a dare once – and champagne, of course. Serena was raised on champagne.
Five years later Georgina does her makeup and takes her to a high school party. They end up looking like each other's evil twins, dark winged out shadow and clumpy mascara.
Serena loses her virginity to Carter Baizen at that party, though she's not entirely sure he remembers – hours later, smiling instead of crying, she saw him pressing some other blonde girl into the mattress of the master bedroom.
When she was with Carter (different bedroom, people outside the door, someone vomiting in the bathroom that joined their room to the next) his eyes were bloodshot. He did another line of coke first and she was already high off something Preston Williams gave her when they were dancing. She was probably drunk too – she remembered doing shots and bright lights and Carter taking her hand – and now here she is, kissing him, letting him push her dress up.
She knows Blair wouldn't approve and she knows Blair will lose her virginity to Nate in a candlelit room, so when Carter pauses Serena says yes yes keep going yes.
Dan lights candles for her.
He gives her a sea of little flickering lights and quiet music and his heart on a plate when she would've asked for much, much less. He kisses her like he's trying to make each one count. His hands don't shake when they take off her clothes but they do when he touches her, when he moves the sheets aside for her to lie down. He pulls them back over her immediately, making sure she's covered even though there's no one there to see but him.
He looks at her and doesn't close his eyes.
Serena wants, possibly more than she has ever wanted anything, to be a virgin even though that kind of thing has never meant anything to her. Sex and love existed in two separate spheres in her mind, ones that floated next to each other but rarely overlapped. She didn't want the love part, anyway; she saw where that got people. She saw where it got her. But now she wishes she were a virgin and she kind of feels like one: she's so nervous and it's all so new and she just wishes, impossibly, that Dan could be first.
It's terrifying. No one's ever looked at her like Dan looks at her. She doesn't even know how to catalogue it, what to do with it, where to put it and how to label it.
They don't have sex and he doesn't even care. Serena doesn't know what to do with that either.
Wedding no. 5: It's the first time Dan really breaks her heart and, unfortunately, not the last.
Serena is fifteen when the newest uncle-who-isn't-her-uncle puts his hand on her thigh, curving inward so close to the hem of her skirt.
He calls her baby and kisses her and she lets him but doesn't know why; it's not until he tugs free the first button of her shirt that she jerks back. Before she can think she jumps up and runs from the room, locking her bedroom door behind her. She can hear him shouting, faintly, but she just sits against the door and cries. She doesn't call Blair or Nate or even her mom, wherever she is.
Serena is fifteen when she overdoses on Nate.
His smile is too much, too perfect. He makes her heart beat hard and fast in her chest, like she's been dancing even though she's standing perfectly still. It's the only time she's ever felt like that. Normally she can never move fast enough, feeling still even if she's running.
Nate is too much for her. He's not skinny anymore, he's tall and filled out and his shoulders in t-shirts are torture, and his hands holding glasses or blunts or books are entirely unfair. She tries to quiet all the wanting in her head and her heart and elsewhere but she can't; he's taking her over, she forgets friendship and Blair and sisters and everything, forgets everything, and fucks Nate.
He kisses like she wants him to and he's unsure in a nice way, running better on instinct than a lot of other boys do. His eyes are closed. He keeps saying her name like he just learned it.
When it's over he pulls away and staggers onto the next stool, mumbling an astonished fuck under his breath. Serena suddenly wants to vomit (and Serena never vomits, not even during her worst hangovers). She grabs his shirt off the floor next to them and jams her feet into her heels, darting out the exit before Nate can stop her.
She throws up by a bunch of trashcans, wipes her mouth with her pretty gold dress, and hails a fucking cab.
Serena is fifteen when she sees a boy die. Serena is fifteen when she runs away.
Serena is fifteen.
Wedding no. 4: Is in the winter. Serena brings Blair and Nate and Chuck; they steal champagne and get drunk. It's the most fun out of all of them.
"I only got one up on you in pretend," Blair said to her once, recalling a million scenarios where Blair was the princess and Serena the maid, the prince, the family dog. She always went along with whatever Blair wanted to play, because Serena could usually find a way to make it fun. "Only then."
Blair always fumed about the praise she got, the attention from classmates and passersby and even Blair's own mother, but Serena knows all about attention and how it works. To her face everyone loves her but behind her back they all call her a slut.
When Serena finally sleeps with Dan, she expects it to not be a big deal. They've done everything else. Still, her own hands are trembling as she undoes her dress and pushes his jacket off his shoulders, pulls him down on top of her.
It's a little uncomfortable. He leans on her hair a few times and he can't get her bra unclasped so she has to do it for him. But with the fake snow falling and the blanket around them, it feels right; she doesn't wish for anything, except maybe for time to pause for a little while.
Considering she doesn't really get nervous, Serena is probably more anxious than she's ever been in her life. Dan breathes her name and his eyes are always open; he grins at her and kisses her and Serena could probably cry right then but instead she laughs.
It's not quite perfect but it's as close as it could get.
Wedding no. 6: Dan becomes her brother. It's not the last time she'll say goodbye to Carter.
She meets Carter again in LA. It's actually not on purpose for once, not a ploy or a plot – she's grabbing a post-yoga iced vanilla latte from Coffee Bean and he's yammering on his cell phone and wearing a suit and they just collide.
She gives him a critical up and down, raising her eyebrows and taking a slow sip, silently asking really, Carter?
He grins, abashed. "I have a real job now. No kidding. It's nifty, as long as I don't get arrested for possession and I wear a suit, they give me money."
Serena smiles. "Funny how those things work."
He looks healthier than she remembers him, if a little harried. "I hear you just show up these days and they're throwing millions at you."
She smiles a little, shaking her head. "Not quite," she says. "I work just as much as you do – I bet more. Or haven't you seen my last three romantic comedies?"
"Oh, I see them all, beautiful." His smile turns a little more Old Carter and, a little more Old Serena, she flushes slightly.
"So," she says, "what is this so-called 'nifty' operation you're a part of?"
"Advertising." He looks both proud and embarrassed to say it. "Funny thing, it's actually more soul-sucking than it looks."
"I think you can handle it," Serena tells him.
"So far so good." He tilts his head a little, studying her, and says, "Look, you call me sometime, alright? If I don't hear from you I'll be offended."
"Okay." Serena laughs and nods again. She thinks she might actually mean it. "I'll call you sometime."
They go on in their separate worlds for a long time. Serena buys a house for herself by the beach and realizes she has no desire to share it with anyone. Carter has a sleek, expensive apartment that's not really to her taste. They visit but they never stay long. He teases her about going granola; she teases him about being responsible.
When she gets pregnant, she sees no reason to change what they've got. It's the only thing that's worked so far.
She does yoga until she's about to pop. She buys what feels like fifty baby name books and scans them endlessly, makes list upon list – lists even Blair would be proud of. Blair probably expects her to name him Sky or River but her lists are full of names like Wyatt, Hunter, Aiden. None of them are quite right, though. She tries to picture herself calling for her son across a playground, shading her eyes from the sun as she scans for his blonde head, yelling, "Hunter, time to go!"
"What do you think, hmm?" She looks down at her stomach and predictably receives no response. "Maybe I should just call you River."
"I still can't believe you're having a baby," Blair says on the phone. It's probably because Blair has hardly seen her pregnant, only on a few visits before Serena really started to show. The distance between them now is not entirely physical. They've grown up and apart, settled into different lives on different coasts. Serena wonders sometimes how these nine months would've gone if they were still like they used to be, back before Blair chose Dan and Serena left and everyone just found lives away from each other.
Still, habits are hard to break. She told Blair about the baby before she even told Carter and Blair had been surprisingly emotional about it, sounding almost teary over the phone when Serena had expected a snide comment, or maybe a polite congratulations. Serena was already hormonally on edge and she'd cried too, both of them stupidly sappily crying at each other and that - that felt like nothing had ever changed.
Serena goes into labor at five a.m.
It's mid-August, hot as fucking hell and she's a week past her due date and she can't sleep. Everything is irritating. She's stripped the bed of blankets and herself of clothes; the air conditioning is broken and she wriggles around in her bed in a bra and panties unable to find comfort of any kind. Her tits feel huge and her entire body aches like she ran six miles, her hair keeps coming out of her messy braid and all she wants is to sleep.
She gets up for some iced green tea and then, just as she's considering calling Carter to come over and amuse her, her water breaks.
Blair is the first person she calls. No surprise there.
Serena names her son Luca, for no particular reason at all.
Lily visits her in the hospital, Husband Number Seven trailing close behind. Lily holds the baby, touches his soft peach fuzz head, and her smile seems genuinely pleased. "He's beautiful, Serena."
She hands him back and runs a hand over Serena's hair in a way she never has before – like Serena is fragile. Lightly, Lily continues, "You're so at ease with him. I was never like that." She laughs, an airy little sound. "No instincts for it."
Serena hates her mother's brittle little moments of honesty. They've been coming more frequently since her mother's been sick, like the compression of time is making her have to spit out the truth before it's too late.
"You weren't that bad," Serena says, laughing and rolling her eyes. "You were a good mom."
"Oh honey." Lily smiles sadly and presses a kiss into Serena's hairline. "Don't think I don't know when you're lying."
Wedding no. 7: Paul is twenty years her mother's junior, the son of a friend from some committee. They seem to get along, and he doesn't disappear when Lily gets sick, so that's something.
Dan and Blair get married. Serena attends and is normal, cheerful, genuinely happy for them despite the lump in her throat, despite finding their relationship so strange even now. She supposes being happy and being discomfited are not entirely mutually exclusive, as long as you've grown up with really fucked up parents and are excellent at compartmentalizing.
Luca is two and goes down the aisle with her, very well-behaved despite his natural inclination to cause as much mischief as possible. The ceremony is luckily short, Serena fidgeting slightly on her heels, trying to focus on her son instead of the vows – but the thing is, she sort of can't avoid them. She can't help her eyes prickling, can't help getting just a little swept up in the stupid sentimental romanticism of weddings, the kind of stuff she always preferred in theory.
Dan and Blair are in love and it always hits her like a ton of bricks, they're in love and neither of them need her so much anymore and that was always the part that hurt the most.
She blinks away tears (she can always pass them off as a result of Luca pulling her hair, which he just loves to do lately), inadvertently meeting Nate's eyes on the other side of the altar. He looks briefly concerned but then makes a face at her, silly and contorted, and inclines his head towards the happy couple with a joking roll of the eyes. She stifles a little laugh, feeling suddenly a whole lot better. Nate always had a way of doing that.
Serena knows that huge stretches of Carter's memory are blank, erased by too much bad behavior and substance abuse. He's told her as much. She doesn't fault him; there's a lot she's forgotten too.
"Beautiful," he says when she tells him as much, with that smile of his, "I remember everything."
Serena is about to roll her eyes but he's up in her personal space, tilting her back towards the bed. "You looked too young for me but I didn't care," he says, "and your hair was straight because you wore it straight then. You had on this long tank top thing as a dress even though it wasn't one. You had all these bracelets on your wrists –" He traces a finger up the veins on the delicate underside of her wrist. "I remember the sound they made, that clicking."
He touches her mouth, smoothes a finger over her brow. "Too much eyeliner. Big clunky shoes you lost ten minutes after you got there. I'd just done a line in the bathroom with Graham and I knew you were stoned as shit and I was taking full advantage but I didn't care about that, either. I wanted you." He looks a little serious then, a rare look on Carter, and there is something apologetic in his eyes. "I always want you, beautiful."
"I think you just have a knack for saying the right thing at the right time," Serena says, eyebrows raised doubtfully. "And to be honest, you still come off pretty creepy."
He laughs.
She'd known guilt and betrayal like any committer of crimes ever does, but she'd never tasted it so clearly as she had upon finding Dan and Blair in bed together.
Dan was a door that was never really shut. For so long she'd been convinced that he would grow up a little and she would grow up a little and then they'd find each other all over again, better than before. They would be like Lily and Rufus, only less eerily parental and without the divorce.
So seeing him next to Blair, naked except for sheets, had been that door slamming shut.
She and Blair share everything, she supposes. She should have seen that day coming.
Sometimes it hits her, at strange times, that they're grown ups. They've forgiven each other so many things and now they never speak of them.
"It's weird, isn't it," Dan notes, watching her study her children playing. His daughter is asleep in his arms, face smushed against his shirt. "It's weird for me."
"It's weird," Serena confirms. She offers him a half-smile. "When I was sixteen I used to wonder if it would be you and me, in the end."
"Me too." They share an awkward little laugh. "And look at us now."
She tucks her hand into the crook of his arm. "Yeah, look at us."
Serena bakes cupcakes for her little boy's birthday and frosts them with supermarket frosting and an everyday butter knife.
She hadn't really expected Luca to feel like hers. He has her nose (the old one) and her mouth and Carter's sleepy blue eyes; his blond hair is always tousled and he laughs at everything. She tells him stories with a hundred different voices and does silly things to make him smile. He's hers, he belongs to her in a way no one else ever has.
She had been a little afraid that she wouldn't know how to take care of him. That she would love him but be unable to cross that divide between them, unable to ever give enough.
She worries about when Luca gets older. She worries about him being fifteen and possibly having a string of stepfathers and a mother who is too busy to be his mother. She worries that she will fail him just by being herself and he'll grow up so deeply angry at her that no matter what she does it'll never be fixed.
But when she looks at his little upturned face, determined as he sticks his fingers in the cupcake frosting, the worry recedes a little bit.
It's the first day of first grade and they've only been back in the city a month so far, Serena and Carter and Luca trying the cohabitation thing for the very first time. Everything is still kind of a mess, the apartment not properly set up and Serena pregnant again, so she's late going to the school. Her doctor's appointment ran over, then she'd had to go shopping for furniture, and she's so insistent about doing everything herself that she loses track of time.
She darts up the steps, past the last few kids being picked up, and into the main hall where her son is waiting patiently on a chair, sitting very still even though it's hard for him to do so. Serena smiles, pushing her sunglasses to the top of her head, and crouches in front of him.
"Sorry I'm late," she says. She could promise it won't happen again, but she's trying to do this thing where she doesn't lie to her children. "Make it up to you with ice cream?"
Luca smiles back, a curly little smile like Carter has. "Okay," he says.
"Okay," she repeats, reaching for his hand to lead him out.