plant lavender for luck
Blair, Serena, Georgina, Nate, Dan + others.
R. 13, 569 words.
W: abuse, character death, murder
A re-working of the film Practical Magic.
Summary: Blair is the oldest of the two by three minutes and she will hold on to that for the rest of her life, whenever things become the hardest between them: she was first. They come into the world together and that's how they plan to leave it too.
Note: I intended to post this for Halloween, but it sort of got away from me – it got waaaay longer than I planned, lol. And I owe this fic pretty much entirely to![]()
lookinglassgirl, since we originally came up for the idea to do it together, and all the original planning was done with her. But I got too impatient and ended writing it myself, lol! Anyway, as with any of my other re-working type fics, there is a lot of borrowing in terms of dialogue and the plot is entirely lifted. Hope y'all enjoy the belated Halloween treat!
Blair is the oldest of the two by three minutes and she will hold on to that for the rest of her life, whenever things become the hardest between them: she was first.
She looks like their father, dark hair and dark eyes, and Serena looks like their mother, sunny and fair. They come into the world together and that's how they plan to leave it too.
Blair doesn't conceptualize of curses for a very long time.
One day their father sits down very suddenly and says he's feeling dizzy, and two hours later he's dead in a hospital bed of an undiagnosed condition. Afterwards their mother stops eating, stops feeling, stops caring, stops living. After the funeral, in their matching black dresses with their hair plaited in matching double braids, Blair and Serena march hand-in-hand up the stone path to the house they have visited every single summer for as long as they can remember. Only now it's forever.
They're nine.
Aunts Eleanor and Celia have been around for as long as they can remember too, for as long as anyone can remember; they were aunts to the girls' mother and her mother before that. They are women frozen in time, Eleanor dark and Celia fair, with sardonic mouths and little patience for the ridiculous. They tell the girls about their great great great great times fifty grandmother who was hung for a witch but lived, who gave birth alone to twin girls, who was abandoned by her lover and cast a spell to punish every lover thereafter.
Blair realizes first and says, "That's what killed Daddy, isn't it? It was a curse. She cursed us."
Any man who loved them was bound to die.
"It was an accident," Aunt Celia says softly, but Blair doesn't believe her.
They're learning little spells, dressed up in princess dresses – Blair in blue and Serena in pink, chocolate smudging their mouths. Blair can blow on candlewicks and watch a flame burst into life but Serena is less adept, pouting and giggling by turns every time she fails.
"In time, my little one," Aunt Celia promises her with a smile. "In time."
A rapping at the kitchen door interrupts them. Blair and Serena are hustled upstairs but they peek between the bannisters anyway. The woman at the door is wild-looking, with red eyes and unkempt hair, a coat over her nightgown.
"I can't eat," the woman sobs, "I can't sleep, I can't – he has to leave his wife, he has to leave her now."
The aunts exchange a look, money is passed from hand to hand, and they go get the big book out of the greenhouse, the one Blair and Serena are not allowed to touch. (Though they had crept down at midnight once in the early days to peek, and Blair had seen a spell about the dead and cried so much she couldn't breathe.) The woman kisses something, a picture, and hands it to Aunt Eleanor, who also hold a long, thin pin. Unfamiliar rhymes are spoken, and she stabs the pin through the heart of a dove in Aunt Celia's hand.
Serena gasps, covering her face with her hands, but Blair doesn't even blink, watching blood spurt in a thin stream from the dead bird. After a while Serena's quiet murmurings become clear, over and over, "I hope I never fall in love, I hope I never fall in love, I hope I never fall in love –"
But Blair is thinking of the women in movies and novels, women torn asunder by their wrecked hearts. She's thinking of their beautiful mother wasting away with heartbreak. She thinks of that great depth of feeling, and of the relief on the sobbing woman's face when the spell is done.
Blair says, "I can't wait to fall in love."
Blair is twelve, moving slowly through the blossoms and herbs cluttering the greenhouses, her fingers moving with precision over petals and leaves. Later in her life it will be clear that the spell was the last gasp of her youthful romanticism. The petals collect in the oak bowl in her arms; Blair knows the names of each of them, all of their uses.
Taking bites from a brownie, Serena watches. "What's it for?" she asks.
"It's a true love spell." She knows the proper Latin name, studied the words for weeks out of the book she's not supposed to touch yet. The spell is copied down in her Tiffany blue journal in neat script, calling out for all the qualities of her soulmate, the man of her dreams. She's selfish first and foremost, so he'll have brown eyes, dark hair – like her, like her father. He'll know poetry, and be able to recite the lines of classic films in time with the leading men; he'll be able to play the piano, and something else besides; he'll be an intellectual type and he'll wear reading glasses in private. He won't be afraid to dance. He'll be able to cook, because Blair has no interest in it. He'll speak two languages, too, he'll be thoughtful, he'll be funny – he will kiss her by candlelight and he'll be able to see her magic when he looks at her.
"That sounds like a lot for one guy," Serena says, amused. "What if he doesn't exist?"
Standing at the threshold of the greenhouse and watching with satisfaction as each petal lifts into the sky, Blair says confidently, "Then I'll make him exist."
Six years of taunting, of shunning, of loneliness have taught Blair differently. She had been so naive as a child to think that her differences made her special instead of weird. Since then she's had rocks thrown through her bedroom window and words scrawled on her locker, her clothes stolen after gym, girls giggling behind their hands while she walks by. Witch, witch, Blair's a bitch.
It's not even clever.
It makes her angry and resentful. She joins every club in school just to spite them and runs half the organizations. She is the smartest girl in the entire year. She forces them to recognize her superiority even if they won't admit it. She forces them to deal with her. If they won't let her be normal, then she won't be normal. She'll be spectacular.
Spectacularly friendless, more like. There's Serena, always, and that helps; every name Blair is called in the hallways receives its little revenge from Serena – who changes grades with a thought, makes homework disappear, imparts skinned knees and paper cuts, fucks practically everyone's boyfriend, and even some of the girlfriends too.
But Serena leaves a week after their eighteenth birthday, a duffle bag of her clothes tossed over the balcony to Carter, her waiting boyfriend.
"I feel like I'm never going to see you again," Blair says, trying to keep the raw sadness from her voice.
"Don't be crazy," Serena says, gripping Blair in a tight hug. "I'll be back, okay? You and me, we're gonna grow old together, two old biddies in this crazy old house with a million cats. I bet we even die on the same day. At the same minute." She pulls back, eyes wet but smiling with such eager happiness that Blair smiles too. "I just can't stand it here, B. I want to go somewhere where no one's even heard of us, where there are no looks, no whispering –"
"I know," Blair sighs, "I know."
Serena searches her face for a moment and then, struck by an idea, calls down for Carter's pocket knife. Without so much as a wince, she slashes her palm, a bright red gash splitting her skin. Then she takes Blair's hand and does the same – and for some reason Blair thinks of that dove with the pin in its heart from all those years ago.
Pain pulses through the wound, but it's an odd relief, like it releases some of the pain from her heart. They clasp hands, blood mixing.
"I love you, B," Serena says. "I'll always be here with you. You know that."
"I love you too, S," Blair murmurs. They hug again, tightly, suffocatingly, and Serena goes.
Years will pass before Blair sees her sister again.
Sometimes while walking through town on her way to the library she sees Nate Archibald. He's everyone's golden boy, always has been, and his family owns the biggest house in town. He's beautiful, the kind of boy who grins easily and brightly and oozes comfortable charm. He has every reason to be as nasty as every other uppity townsperson but he isn't. He plays baseball with little kids in the town common on weekends, he helps old ladies with their groceries, he does yard work for whoever needs it; he always finds an odd, helpful job to occupy his time. He has never spoken to Blair, but sometimes he shoots her a shy grin.
Blair is so dazzled by him that it never dawns on her that the aunts see her looking. Only one day she's putting plates away in the cupboard and it's like everything coalesces inside her: all the wanting and waiting and burning to be a part of things, to have what everyone else has, to live. It all rushes up and settles somewhere in her chest at the base of her throat and she doesn't know what she's waiting for anymore.
She leaves the cupboard door open, leaves the kitchen door open, leaves the garden gate open – she finds herself running, running, running until she hits the middle of town and Nate is somehow waiting for her, that shy grin on his face. She leaps into his arms with an unselfconsciousness she's never known in her whole life and he wraps strong arms around her, kisses her like she always wanted to be kissed.
They're married within the year.
Serena sends letters home with more regularity than anything she's done in her life. This is what she says:
Serena leaves Carter behind in Santorini and takes the scenic route back to the States, passing through places she used to only dream about, her fingers tracing their shapes on maps in her textbooks. She settles for a while in California, wasting away days at the beach and by the pool, getting suntanned and even blonder. She has a million friends. Nobody calls her a witch, or a slut. Everybody loves her and she revels in it.
That's where she meets Georgina.
Georgina's the kind of girl who knows what it's like to get called a witch and a slut, and Georgina is the kind of girl who's labeled herself as one or the other at some point in her life. Serena meets her in the fluorescent dark of some club, Georgina's gray eyes flashing with the lights swirling around then, magenta and ice blue by turns. Her nails are black and her hair is black, and a recognizable stone hangs from a silver chain around her neck. Serena reaches out to touch it without thinking, the quartz sparking pleasantly against her skin.
"This is for healing," Serena says, "And for luck. My aunts used to call it a gambler's talisman."
Georgina watches her with intent eyes. "I guess it is lucky," she says. "Since it brought you over here."
Serena laughs but lets Georgina get her drunk afterwards, and as soon as Georgina touches her, she's a goner.
Blair had never planned on having children, but she and Nate have two little girls in surprisingly quick succession, and once she has them, she can't imagine it any other way. Antoinette is tall and willowy like Serena with dark blonde hair and Nate's blue eyes. She is a serious child from the day she's born. Sophie is petite and dark like Blair but she laughs more than Blair ever did and she has her father's easy charisma. Blair sometimes worries that she doesn't possess enough natural compassion to be a good mother all of the time, but Nate is so good that he covers all of her gaps. Blair is happier than she ever thought she could be.
But then she hears the beetle clicking.
After their parents' deaths all those years ago, Blair sat alone with Aunt Eleanor, who always told the truth. "Mommy died of a broken heart?" she asked, certain but checking.
"Yes," Aunt Eleanor sighed quietly. "She loved your father so much… She heard the deathwatch beetle calling for his death, but it was too late. There was nothing she could do."
Blair is asleep, Sophie tucked between her and Nate because she's afraid of sleeping by herself, and she jolts awake. She feels the clicking before she hears it, in the way Blair often feels things before they happen, a soul-deep certainty that has never failed her.
She does not sleep that night. In the morning Nate tells her not to be silly and presses kisses to her red eyes. She begs him to stay home even though she knows it won't make a difference, but he doesn't believe her. He doesn't understand. He thinks witchcraft is the special tea she makes to cure colds, a tool to help her multitask, a sexy costume she puts on at Halloween. He doesn't believe in premonitions or curses or fate.
The girls go to school and Nate goes to work and all day Blair is plagued by the clicking, clicking, clicking, the insect in question always out of sight. She rips the curtains down searching, pulls the furniture away from the walls, topples books from their shelves. If she finds the beetle she can kill it, and if she kills it maybe Nate will live.
At exactly two-fifteen the clicking stops. Blair shudders down to her bones, sitting in the wreckage of her home with nothing to show for it, and knows Nate is dead.
Blair walks up the old stone path to the aunts' house with two little girls trailing behind her holding hands, one blonde and one brunette with their hair in braids. She is certain of one thing, and it's that her children will never do magic.
She feels empty. She wonders how she ever thought her mother's wasting away was romantic. She doesn't eat. She doesn't shower or brush her hair or take care of her children. She just crawls into her childhood bed and stays there, still in her stiff black funeral dress. She lets whatever is withered inside her spread out over her limbs, turn her to dust.
One day she wakes to find Serena tucked close, face against Blair's neck. Serena always knows.
Blair tells Serena about how Nate always called her sweetheart. How he was kind. How he made her a part of the world for the first time and how her children are so like him that Blair can't bear to look at them.
Serena makes her laugh with tales of her escapades, the new girl she's fallen for with the dark hair and the dark soul, a witchy sort of girl who isn't a witch.
"What kind of name is Sparks?" Blair laughs.
Serena tells her how Georgina is consumed by her, worships her, how they dance and drink and fuck all night. Georgina is intense like none of Serena's lovers have ever been. Serena says sometimes she has to give Georgina herbal sedatives just so she can rest, and Blair is appropriately appalled.
They lie under Blair's unwashed covers like they used to do as children in their blanket forts. Serena says, soft, "You have to get up. You have to take care of your beautiful little girls and yourself too, you have to live the kind of life Nate would've wanted you to live. Okay?"
They clasp hands, scar to scar. "Okay," Blair says, and breathes.
Blair opens a small clothing boutique off Main like Nate had always been telling her to do, and hires employees who could probably pass as friends under different circumstances. In the morning she leaves the shop to them while she goes to classes at the local college. Once she'd had bigger dreams, but she put them aside both out of fear and for her family; Blair has never liked starting small, but it's better than not starting at all. She comes back to herself piece by piece.
And then Serena calls. Blair picks up the phone before the first ring has even begun to vibrate in the air and she knows this is bad news before Serena even speaks.
Serena's voice sounds small and unlike herself on the phone. "B?"
"Yes, it's me." Apprehension makes her grip on the phone tight, must show on her face; she turns slightly to avoid the concerned looks of her aunts and her daughters. "What's going on? What's wrong?"
"Nothing." Then, "I'm not okay. Can you come get me?"
It takes the day. Blair is at the door of Serena's motel room just as night is beginning to fall, deep and starless. The lock unclicks under her fingers and she steps inside the dim bedroom, the walls a tacky pink-and-teal that assaults Blair's eyes even in the dark. She doesn't notice Serena at first – but then there she is, tucked into the space between beside table and wall, half-empty bottle of something in her hands, mascara streaking down her cheeks.
She launches herself at Blair with force, bottle knocking against Blair's back.
"What happened?" Blair murmurs. "Is it that girl?"
"Nothing happened… Things are just getting kind of intense, I don't…" Serena trails off. "How are your girls?"
"I didn't come all this way to talk about the girls," Blair says impatiently. Serena pulls back, light from the neon pink sign outside falling on her face; for the first time Blair notices a bruise like a shadow on Serena's cheekbone. Blair's first instinct is always to get answers, but she can get those on the road. Right now she just wants to get Serena out of here.
Serena carries her shoes in one hand, packed bag in the other. Suddenly her hand gropes for her throat and she says, "My necklace – Mom's tiger's eye –" She turns around in a circle, helpless and messy. "I need it, it brings me luck –"
"It's probably in your bag," Blair says, "Just get in the car, okay, I want to get out of here –"
But the word car unlocks something in Serena's memory and she's darting across the parking lot. "I'll be right back –"
Blair believes in fate and signs and destiny, and she will never be quite certain, later, why it seems to have it in for her.
They miss their flight. They miss their flight driving too fast into the desert, Georgina narrating while she nudges a gun against Serena's ribs, touches Serena's cheek with black-tipped fingers. She'd been waiting for them in the back of the car. That's where she holds Serena while Blair drives them to nowhere, hands tight around the steering wheel.
Georgina grins at Blair in the rearview mirror. "Helluva first impression, huh?" she says.
Blair was never a very good driver, having little patience for it. She considers crashing the car briefly, very briefly, but she wouldn't do that to the two little girls asleep in their beds across the country, two little girls who just lost their father to a car gone off the road.
"Georgie," Serena says in a wavering little voice, "Georgie, if you want we can just forget all this and go back to the motel and it'll be like nothing ever happened –"
"It's a little late for that," she answers tartly. Then she leans forward, arms looped around the passenger seat, gun dangling from her fingers. She watches Blair with hyper-alert eyes, eyes that seem to see suspicion in everything. "So you're the sister."
"And you're the psycho," Blair says.
Georgina smiles. "Feisty," she says. "I like that in a girl."
Blair frowns, focusing on the road. But something catches her eye – Serena in the rearview mirror, leaning forward and saying, "There's belladonna in my bag."
But of course Serena hadn't spoken aloud at all, and never moved from her spot in the corner of the back seat. Blair's gaze strays to the leather bag in the passenger seat beside her, and seemingly by accident, a small vial rolls out. Georgina doesn't notice it. She's taken the half-empty bottle of tequila from Serena and is swallowing a mouthful.
Blair almost smiles.
"Let me tell you a story," Georgina says. "It's about a boy. A real playboy. We grew up together, matching penthouses and neglectful parents. We hated each other, but we hated everybody else more, so it seemed like a perfect match."
Acidly, Blair says, "Are you planning on boring us to death, because I think the gun would be quicker."
Georgina's fingers reach out to tangle in one of Blair's curls. "Don't be a bitch, B," she says, and yanks sharply. Then she leans back, presses the gun to Serena's cheek. "As I was saying… It was perfect, I thought. Until he thought he could just drop me…cast me aside. It's grotesque how people think they can abandon other people, isn't it, Serena?"
"I'm not abandoning you," Serena says. "Just let B go home and then I'll come back with you, okay –"
"No, see, you don't get to say that now," Georgina snaps, real anger entering her voice for the first time instead of just that cruel teasing tone. "You don't get to run off with your bitch sister and then try to placate me with bullshit –"
"I'm not, I promise –"
Just then Serena gives out a little cry and Blair nearly lets go of the wheel as she twists around on instinct, clawing for the gun Georgina has jabbed against Serena's ribs. It's terrifying, chaotic, the car swerves, the gun hits the floor, and Georgina just laughs, like it's immensely pleasing to her. "Calm down," she says, and when the car swerves again, "Eyes on the road, B."
"You're psychotic!" Blair exclaims furiously, shrill. She snatches the bottle and takes a burning sip. Her hands are trembling.
"Aren't you going to ask what happened to the boy?" Georgina asks playfully, but before anyone can answer she adds, "Pull over there. I need cigarettes."
They pull into a gas station and Georgina takes the keys before she heads into the small convenience store. Serena watches through the window, looking oddly dispassionate. When she speaks, the tremulous quality to her voice has vanished. "I used to think she was fun," Serena says. "Like nobody I'd ever met."
"Sure, like Lizzie Borden was fun," Blair mutters, shaky fingers scrabbling for the vial of belladonna. "Is this what you give her?"
Serena turns back to Blair, who is emptying the powder into the bottle of tequila. "Not too much," she warns. "Just enough to make her sleepy."
But Blair's tremors have not abated and quite a lot goes in, nearly half the bottle. Oh well, she thinks. "I still can't believe you poison your girlfriend just to get a little shut-eye."
"You should be glad," Serena says. "I just saved us."
"If you didn't fuck crazy people, we wouldn't need to be saved," Blair shoots back.
Serena tilts her head back. "Too bad the curse doesn't work on women."
It stings, but Blair swallows it down; Georgina's coming back.
An hour passes. It should've worked by now, Blair thinks.
Serena's mind answers her, with a clarity that hasn't existed between them since they were children. Maybe she's built up a tolerance.
Blair rolls her eyes. This is what you get for poisoning your girlfriend.
Abruptly, Georgina orders, "Pull over."
"There's nothing here," Blair says, easing the car off the road and cutting the engine.
"That's okay," Georgina says. Her voice sounds slow, slurred. "That's fine." Getting out of the car she stumbles and laughs. "Drunker than I thought."
She makes them both get out too, and they stand there on that desolate stretch of highway, desert wind whipping grit into their eyes. "Georgie, honey," Serena starts uncertainly, but Georgina shakes her head.
"Turn around," she says.
A chill runs down Blair's spine. Images flash quick through her mind – Nate's funeral, Sophie sobbing, Antoinette's expression much too pinched for such a little girl, and Serena once saying I bet we even die on the same day.
"Aren't you going to ask what happened to the boy?" Georgina says.
That's Blair's breaking point, a sob ripping its way out of her chest; immediately Serena has taken her hand, scar to scar. Their eyes meet. Blair is looking through a wash of tears but Serena is strong, resolute. Blair is sure Georgina is raising the gun. Serena's lips are forming silent numbers – one, two –
And then there is a thump, a collapsing sound like wet laundry dropping in a heap. Their hands break as they whirl around to see Georgina on the ground, passed out. Startling herself, Blair releases a choked laugh.
But Serena isn't laughing. She drops to her knees next to Georgina and turns her over, cups a hand over Georgina's mouth, feels her pulse, listens for her heartbeat. She looks over her shoulder at Blair, blonde hair wrecked and dirty. "She's dead, Blair."
"Don't be stupid," Blair says, more of an automatic reaction than anything else. "She can't be dead."
Serena starts breathing into Georgina's mouth, some kind of half-assed CPR she probably picked up that one summer she was a lifeguard. "Jesus, Blair, how much did you give her?"
"I don't know!" Reality is sinking in past denial. Blair twists her wedding ring anxiously. "I wasn't using a measuring cup, Serena, she was trying to kill us! It was self-defense!"
"Yeah, the old poison-them-to-death-slowly self-defense," Serena says. She presses her face into her hands. "What are we gonna do?"
"I –" Blair, who always has plans for every occasion, is entirely blank in this moment. She looks up and down the empty road, thinking only of what an incriminating picture they are, wide out in the open. "Get in the car. Until we figure this out, just get her in the car."
They start driving again, Serena behind the wheel and Blair tucked in the passenger seat, trying not to look at the woman sprawled out in the back with her hair over her face.
"No one can find out," Blair says tensely. "I can't – I can't lose my children, Serena, I can't –" This has always been Blair's go-to: swallow it, hide it, disguise it, pretend.
"I know," Serena says gently, "I know." But her expression is that oddly composed one again and Blair knows that means she's thinking of something.
"What?" she says. "What is it, what are you thinking?"
Serena glances at her, hesitant, and then says, "When Nate died, you went to the aunts and asked them to bring him back, right?"
Blair nods, a dark feeling coiling in her chest. The night Nate died, Blair had screamed and demanded and pleaded with the aunts to bring him back. "But they wouldn't."
"Wouldn't," Serena says. "But not couldn't."
"They said he wouldn't be Nate, not really," Blair says, "That he would come back as something dark and unnatural –"
"Georgina already is dark and unnatural!" Serena says. "It would be like erasing this whole horrible night – We wouldn't be guilty of anything so long as she has a pulse –"
"No," Blair says firmly, "No, no, Serena, we cannot do that – Logistically, even, we don't have anything we'd need and I'm not thrilled with the idea of bringing a corpse back to my house–"
A small part of her points out that the aunts have taken Antoinette and Sophie to the solstice. They won't be home for three days, at least. Blair had studied the spell for days when she was little, after their parents died, learning the words almost by heart even though she never dared to speak them aloud. It is possible. It could be done.
Stomach sinking, Blair adds, "And it's not like she's going to stay fresh, Serena!"
Determination turns Serena's mouth into a hard line. "I'll drive fast."
They haul Georgina onto the kitchen table where they eat dinner every night, where Blair's daughters do their homework after school. Blair is in her element now, barking orders and gathering supplies, her entire being narrowed to accomplishing her aims like when she used to plan high school dances.
Blair gets the big book out of the greenhouse, turning the ancient pages until she finds the one they need. They light beeswax candles and burn sage. With Serena's helpfully-procured white eyeliner they draw a star on Georgina's chest and then they lock eyes, the room around them feeling hushed all of a sudden. Blair knows how to do this. Following instructions to the letter is something she can do.
As one they begin to recite the spell, each holding a long, thin needle up in preparation for plunging them into Georgina's eyes, the thought of which makes Serena gag. Blair realizes Aunt Eleanor probably stabbed that long-ago dove with one of these very same needles. The thought is reassuring, somehow.
Their voices begin to build and echo; rain is splattering against the windows outside; Blair feels it in her, golden and powerful. Now, she thinks, lifting the pin.
But before either of them can make a move, they realize Georgina's eyes have shot open, bloodshot around the clouded-over gray iris. "Georgina?" Serena murmurs, breath bated.
With unexpected quickness, Georgina launches at Serena, death-white fingers going tight around Serena's throat, choking, Serena gasping as her own hands wrench desperately at Georgina's.
Blair acts without thought. She grabs the nearest pan and brings it crashing down on the back of Georgina's head over and over and over. She doesn't stop until Serena pulls her away, physically takes the pan out of Blair's hands. "It's over," Serena is saying, "It's over, she's dead."
Blair has never touched dirt in her life if she could help it, but that night they dig deep in the corner of the garden and bury a woman's body.
"Well," Blair says, drenched and filthy, "We needed an excuse to landscape."
PART TWO
Blair, Serena, Georgina, Nate, Dan + others.
R. 13, 569 words.
W: abuse, character death, murder
A re-working of the film Practical Magic.
Summary: Blair is the oldest of the two by three minutes and she will hold on to that for the rest of her life, whenever things become the hardest between them: she was first. They come into the world together and that's how they plan to leave it too.
Note: I intended to post this for Halloween, but it sort of got away from me – it got waaaay longer than I planned, lol. And I owe this fic pretty much entirely to
lookinglassgirl, since we originally came up for the idea to do it together, and all the original planning was done with her. But I got too impatient and ended writing it myself, lol! Anyway, as with any of my other re-working type fics, there is a lot of borrowing in terms of dialogue and the plot is entirely lifted. Hope y'all enjoy the belated Halloween treat!Blair is the oldest of the two by three minutes and she will hold on to that for the rest of her life, whenever things become the hardest between them: she was first.
She looks like their father, dark hair and dark eyes, and Serena looks like their mother, sunny and fair. They come into the world together and that's how they plan to leave it too.
Blair doesn't conceptualize of curses for a very long time.
One day their father sits down very suddenly and says he's feeling dizzy, and two hours later he's dead in a hospital bed of an undiagnosed condition. Afterwards their mother stops eating, stops feeling, stops caring, stops living. After the funeral, in their matching black dresses with their hair plaited in matching double braids, Blair and Serena march hand-in-hand up the stone path to the house they have visited every single summer for as long as they can remember. Only now it's forever.
They're nine.
Aunts Eleanor and Celia have been around for as long as they can remember too, for as long as anyone can remember; they were aunts to the girls' mother and her mother before that. They are women frozen in time, Eleanor dark and Celia fair, with sardonic mouths and little patience for the ridiculous. They tell the girls about their great great great great times fifty grandmother who was hung for a witch but lived, who gave birth alone to twin girls, who was abandoned by her lover and cast a spell to punish every lover thereafter.
Blair realizes first and says, "That's what killed Daddy, isn't it? It was a curse. She cursed us."
Any man who loved them was bound to die.
"It was an accident," Aunt Celia says softly, but Blair doesn't believe her.
They're learning little spells, dressed up in princess dresses – Blair in blue and Serena in pink, chocolate smudging their mouths. Blair can blow on candlewicks and watch a flame burst into life but Serena is less adept, pouting and giggling by turns every time she fails.
"In time, my little one," Aunt Celia promises her with a smile. "In time."
A rapping at the kitchen door interrupts them. Blair and Serena are hustled upstairs but they peek between the bannisters anyway. The woman at the door is wild-looking, with red eyes and unkempt hair, a coat over her nightgown.
"I can't eat," the woman sobs, "I can't sleep, I can't – he has to leave his wife, he has to leave her now."
The aunts exchange a look, money is passed from hand to hand, and they go get the big book out of the greenhouse, the one Blair and Serena are not allowed to touch. (Though they had crept down at midnight once in the early days to peek, and Blair had seen a spell about the dead and cried so much she couldn't breathe.) The woman kisses something, a picture, and hands it to Aunt Eleanor, who also hold a long, thin pin. Unfamiliar rhymes are spoken, and she stabs the pin through the heart of a dove in Aunt Celia's hand.
Serena gasps, covering her face with her hands, but Blair doesn't even blink, watching blood spurt in a thin stream from the dead bird. After a while Serena's quiet murmurings become clear, over and over, "I hope I never fall in love, I hope I never fall in love, I hope I never fall in love –"
But Blair is thinking of the women in movies and novels, women torn asunder by their wrecked hearts. She's thinking of their beautiful mother wasting away with heartbreak. She thinks of that great depth of feeling, and of the relief on the sobbing woman's face when the spell is done.
Blair says, "I can't wait to fall in love."
Blair is twelve, moving slowly through the blossoms and herbs cluttering the greenhouses, her fingers moving with precision over petals and leaves. Later in her life it will be clear that the spell was the last gasp of her youthful romanticism. The petals collect in the oak bowl in her arms; Blair knows the names of each of them, all of their uses.
Taking bites from a brownie, Serena watches. "What's it for?" she asks.
"It's a true love spell." She knows the proper Latin name, studied the words for weeks out of the book she's not supposed to touch yet. The spell is copied down in her Tiffany blue journal in neat script, calling out for all the qualities of her soulmate, the man of her dreams. She's selfish first and foremost, so he'll have brown eyes, dark hair – like her, like her father. He'll know poetry, and be able to recite the lines of classic films in time with the leading men; he'll be able to play the piano, and something else besides; he'll be an intellectual type and he'll wear reading glasses in private. He won't be afraid to dance. He'll be able to cook, because Blair has no interest in it. He'll speak two languages, too, he'll be thoughtful, he'll be funny – he will kiss her by candlelight and he'll be able to see her magic when he looks at her.
"That sounds like a lot for one guy," Serena says, amused. "What if he doesn't exist?"
Standing at the threshold of the greenhouse and watching with satisfaction as each petal lifts into the sky, Blair says confidently, "Then I'll make him exist."
Six years of taunting, of shunning, of loneliness have taught Blair differently. She had been so naive as a child to think that her differences made her special instead of weird. Since then she's had rocks thrown through her bedroom window and words scrawled on her locker, her clothes stolen after gym, girls giggling behind their hands while she walks by. Witch, witch, Blair's a bitch.
It's not even clever.
It makes her angry and resentful. She joins every club in school just to spite them and runs half the organizations. She is the smartest girl in the entire year. She forces them to recognize her superiority even if they won't admit it. She forces them to deal with her. If they won't let her be normal, then she won't be normal. She'll be spectacular.
Spectacularly friendless, more like. There's Serena, always, and that helps; every name Blair is called in the hallways receives its little revenge from Serena – who changes grades with a thought, makes homework disappear, imparts skinned knees and paper cuts, fucks practically everyone's boyfriend, and even some of the girlfriends too.
But Serena leaves a week after their eighteenth birthday, a duffle bag of her clothes tossed over the balcony to Carter, her waiting boyfriend.
"I feel like I'm never going to see you again," Blair says, trying to keep the raw sadness from her voice.
"Don't be crazy," Serena says, gripping Blair in a tight hug. "I'll be back, okay? You and me, we're gonna grow old together, two old biddies in this crazy old house with a million cats. I bet we even die on the same day. At the same minute." She pulls back, eyes wet but smiling with such eager happiness that Blair smiles too. "I just can't stand it here, B. I want to go somewhere where no one's even heard of us, where there are no looks, no whispering –"
"I know," Blair sighs, "I know."
Serena searches her face for a moment and then, struck by an idea, calls down for Carter's pocket knife. Without so much as a wince, she slashes her palm, a bright red gash splitting her skin. Then she takes Blair's hand and does the same – and for some reason Blair thinks of that dove with the pin in its heart from all those years ago.
Pain pulses through the wound, but it's an odd relief, like it releases some of the pain from her heart. They clasp hands, blood mixing.
"I love you, B," Serena says. "I'll always be here with you. You know that."
"I love you too, S," Blair murmurs. They hug again, tightly, suffocatingly, and Serena goes.
Years will pass before Blair sees her sister again.
Sometimes while walking through town on her way to the library she sees Nate Archibald. He's everyone's golden boy, always has been, and his family owns the biggest house in town. He's beautiful, the kind of boy who grins easily and brightly and oozes comfortable charm. He has every reason to be as nasty as every other uppity townsperson but he isn't. He plays baseball with little kids in the town common on weekends, he helps old ladies with their groceries, he does yard work for whoever needs it; he always finds an odd, helpful job to occupy his time. He has never spoken to Blair, but sometimes he shoots her a shy grin.
Blair is so dazzled by him that it never dawns on her that the aunts see her looking. Only one day she's putting plates away in the cupboard and it's like everything coalesces inside her: all the wanting and waiting and burning to be a part of things, to have what everyone else has, to live. It all rushes up and settles somewhere in her chest at the base of her throat and she doesn't know what she's waiting for anymore.
She leaves the cupboard door open, leaves the kitchen door open, leaves the garden gate open – she finds herself running, running, running until she hits the middle of town and Nate is somehow waiting for her, that shy grin on his face. She leaps into his arms with an unselfconsciousness she's never known in her whole life and he wraps strong arms around her, kisses her like she always wanted to be kissed.
They're married within the year.
Serena sends letters home with more regularity than anything she's done in her life. This is what she says:
Serena leaves Carter behind in Santorini and takes the scenic route back to the States, passing through places she used to only dream about, her fingers tracing their shapes on maps in her textbooks. She settles for a while in California, wasting away days at the beach and by the pool, getting suntanned and even blonder. She has a million friends. Nobody calls her a witch, or a slut. Everybody loves her and she revels in it.
That's where she meets Georgina.
Georgina's the kind of girl who knows what it's like to get called a witch and a slut, and Georgina is the kind of girl who's labeled herself as one or the other at some point in her life. Serena meets her in the fluorescent dark of some club, Georgina's gray eyes flashing with the lights swirling around then, magenta and ice blue by turns. Her nails are black and her hair is black, and a recognizable stone hangs from a silver chain around her neck. Serena reaches out to touch it without thinking, the quartz sparking pleasantly against her skin.
"This is for healing," Serena says, "And for luck. My aunts used to call it a gambler's talisman."
Georgina watches her with intent eyes. "I guess it is lucky," she says. "Since it brought you over here."
Serena laughs but lets Georgina get her drunk afterwards, and as soon as Georgina touches her, she's a goner.
Blair had never planned on having children, but she and Nate have two little girls in surprisingly quick succession, and once she has them, she can't imagine it any other way. Antoinette is tall and willowy like Serena with dark blonde hair and Nate's blue eyes. She is a serious child from the day she's born. Sophie is petite and dark like Blair but she laughs more than Blair ever did and she has her father's easy charisma. Blair sometimes worries that she doesn't possess enough natural compassion to be a good mother all of the time, but Nate is so good that he covers all of her gaps. Blair is happier than she ever thought she could be.
But then she hears the beetle clicking.
After their parents' deaths all those years ago, Blair sat alone with Aunt Eleanor, who always told the truth. "Mommy died of a broken heart?" she asked, certain but checking.
"Yes," Aunt Eleanor sighed quietly. "She loved your father so much… She heard the deathwatch beetle calling for his death, but it was too late. There was nothing she could do."
Blair is asleep, Sophie tucked between her and Nate because she's afraid of sleeping by herself, and she jolts awake. She feels the clicking before she hears it, in the way Blair often feels things before they happen, a soul-deep certainty that has never failed her.
She does not sleep that night. In the morning Nate tells her not to be silly and presses kisses to her red eyes. She begs him to stay home even though she knows it won't make a difference, but he doesn't believe her. He doesn't understand. He thinks witchcraft is the special tea she makes to cure colds, a tool to help her multitask, a sexy costume she puts on at Halloween. He doesn't believe in premonitions or curses or fate.
The girls go to school and Nate goes to work and all day Blair is plagued by the clicking, clicking, clicking, the insect in question always out of sight. She rips the curtains down searching, pulls the furniture away from the walls, topples books from their shelves. If she finds the beetle she can kill it, and if she kills it maybe Nate will live.
At exactly two-fifteen the clicking stops. Blair shudders down to her bones, sitting in the wreckage of her home with nothing to show for it, and knows Nate is dead.
Blair walks up the old stone path to the aunts' house with two little girls trailing behind her holding hands, one blonde and one brunette with their hair in braids. She is certain of one thing, and it's that her children will never do magic.
She feels empty. She wonders how she ever thought her mother's wasting away was romantic. She doesn't eat. She doesn't shower or brush her hair or take care of her children. She just crawls into her childhood bed and stays there, still in her stiff black funeral dress. She lets whatever is withered inside her spread out over her limbs, turn her to dust.
One day she wakes to find Serena tucked close, face against Blair's neck. Serena always knows.
Blair tells Serena about how Nate always called her sweetheart. How he was kind. How he made her a part of the world for the first time and how her children are so like him that Blair can't bear to look at them.
Serena makes her laugh with tales of her escapades, the new girl she's fallen for with the dark hair and the dark soul, a witchy sort of girl who isn't a witch.
"What kind of name is Sparks?" Blair laughs.
Serena tells her how Georgina is consumed by her, worships her, how they dance and drink and fuck all night. Georgina is intense like none of Serena's lovers have ever been. Serena says sometimes she has to give Georgina herbal sedatives just so she can rest, and Blair is appropriately appalled.
They lie under Blair's unwashed covers like they used to do as children in their blanket forts. Serena says, soft, "You have to get up. You have to take care of your beautiful little girls and yourself too, you have to live the kind of life Nate would've wanted you to live. Okay?"
They clasp hands, scar to scar. "Okay," Blair says, and breathes.
Blair opens a small clothing boutique off Main like Nate had always been telling her to do, and hires employees who could probably pass as friends under different circumstances. In the morning she leaves the shop to them while she goes to classes at the local college. Once she'd had bigger dreams, but she put them aside both out of fear and for her family; Blair has never liked starting small, but it's better than not starting at all. She comes back to herself piece by piece.
And then Serena calls. Blair picks up the phone before the first ring has even begun to vibrate in the air and she knows this is bad news before Serena even speaks.
Serena's voice sounds small and unlike herself on the phone. "B?"
"Yes, it's me." Apprehension makes her grip on the phone tight, must show on her face; she turns slightly to avoid the concerned looks of her aunts and her daughters. "What's going on? What's wrong?"
"Nothing." Then, "I'm not okay. Can you come get me?"
It takes the day. Blair is at the door of Serena's motel room just as night is beginning to fall, deep and starless. The lock unclicks under her fingers and she steps inside the dim bedroom, the walls a tacky pink-and-teal that assaults Blair's eyes even in the dark. She doesn't notice Serena at first – but then there she is, tucked into the space between beside table and wall, half-empty bottle of something in her hands, mascara streaking down her cheeks.
She launches herself at Blair with force, bottle knocking against Blair's back.
"What happened?" Blair murmurs. "Is it that girl?"
"Nothing happened… Things are just getting kind of intense, I don't…" Serena trails off. "How are your girls?"
"I didn't come all this way to talk about the girls," Blair says impatiently. Serena pulls back, light from the neon pink sign outside falling on her face; for the first time Blair notices a bruise like a shadow on Serena's cheekbone. Blair's first instinct is always to get answers, but she can get those on the road. Right now she just wants to get Serena out of here.
Serena carries her shoes in one hand, packed bag in the other. Suddenly her hand gropes for her throat and she says, "My necklace – Mom's tiger's eye –" She turns around in a circle, helpless and messy. "I need it, it brings me luck –"
"It's probably in your bag," Blair says, "Just get in the car, okay, I want to get out of here –"
But the word car unlocks something in Serena's memory and she's darting across the parking lot. "I'll be right back –"
Blair believes in fate and signs and destiny, and she will never be quite certain, later, why it seems to have it in for her.
They miss their flight. They miss their flight driving too fast into the desert, Georgina narrating while she nudges a gun against Serena's ribs, touches Serena's cheek with black-tipped fingers. She'd been waiting for them in the back of the car. That's where she holds Serena while Blair drives them to nowhere, hands tight around the steering wheel.
Georgina grins at Blair in the rearview mirror. "Helluva first impression, huh?" she says.
Blair was never a very good driver, having little patience for it. She considers crashing the car briefly, very briefly, but she wouldn't do that to the two little girls asleep in their beds across the country, two little girls who just lost their father to a car gone off the road.
"Georgie," Serena says in a wavering little voice, "Georgie, if you want we can just forget all this and go back to the motel and it'll be like nothing ever happened –"
"It's a little late for that," she answers tartly. Then she leans forward, arms looped around the passenger seat, gun dangling from her fingers. She watches Blair with hyper-alert eyes, eyes that seem to see suspicion in everything. "So you're the sister."
"And you're the psycho," Blair says.
Georgina smiles. "Feisty," she says. "I like that in a girl."
Blair frowns, focusing on the road. But something catches her eye – Serena in the rearview mirror, leaning forward and saying, "There's belladonna in my bag."
But of course Serena hadn't spoken aloud at all, and never moved from her spot in the corner of the back seat. Blair's gaze strays to the leather bag in the passenger seat beside her, and seemingly by accident, a small vial rolls out. Georgina doesn't notice it. She's taken the half-empty bottle of tequila from Serena and is swallowing a mouthful.
Blair almost smiles.
"Let me tell you a story," Georgina says. "It's about a boy. A real playboy. We grew up together, matching penthouses and neglectful parents. We hated each other, but we hated everybody else more, so it seemed like a perfect match."
Acidly, Blair says, "Are you planning on boring us to death, because I think the gun would be quicker."
Georgina's fingers reach out to tangle in one of Blair's curls. "Don't be a bitch, B," she says, and yanks sharply. Then she leans back, presses the gun to Serena's cheek. "As I was saying… It was perfect, I thought. Until he thought he could just drop me…cast me aside. It's grotesque how people think they can abandon other people, isn't it, Serena?"
"I'm not abandoning you," Serena says. "Just let B go home and then I'll come back with you, okay –"
"No, see, you don't get to say that now," Georgina snaps, real anger entering her voice for the first time instead of just that cruel teasing tone. "You don't get to run off with your bitch sister and then try to placate me with bullshit –"
"I'm not, I promise –"
Just then Serena gives out a little cry and Blair nearly lets go of the wheel as she twists around on instinct, clawing for the gun Georgina has jabbed against Serena's ribs. It's terrifying, chaotic, the car swerves, the gun hits the floor, and Georgina just laughs, like it's immensely pleasing to her. "Calm down," she says, and when the car swerves again, "Eyes on the road, B."
"You're psychotic!" Blair exclaims furiously, shrill. She snatches the bottle and takes a burning sip. Her hands are trembling.
"Aren't you going to ask what happened to the boy?" Georgina asks playfully, but before anyone can answer she adds, "Pull over there. I need cigarettes."
They pull into a gas station and Georgina takes the keys before she heads into the small convenience store. Serena watches through the window, looking oddly dispassionate. When she speaks, the tremulous quality to her voice has vanished. "I used to think she was fun," Serena says. "Like nobody I'd ever met."
"Sure, like Lizzie Borden was fun," Blair mutters, shaky fingers scrabbling for the vial of belladonna. "Is this what you give her?"
Serena turns back to Blair, who is emptying the powder into the bottle of tequila. "Not too much," she warns. "Just enough to make her sleepy."
But Blair's tremors have not abated and quite a lot goes in, nearly half the bottle. Oh well, she thinks. "I still can't believe you poison your girlfriend just to get a little shut-eye."
"You should be glad," Serena says. "I just saved us."
"If you didn't fuck crazy people, we wouldn't need to be saved," Blair shoots back.
Serena tilts her head back. "Too bad the curse doesn't work on women."
It stings, but Blair swallows it down; Georgina's coming back.
An hour passes. It should've worked by now, Blair thinks.
Serena's mind answers her, with a clarity that hasn't existed between them since they were children. Maybe she's built up a tolerance.
Blair rolls her eyes. This is what you get for poisoning your girlfriend.
Abruptly, Georgina orders, "Pull over."
"There's nothing here," Blair says, easing the car off the road and cutting the engine.
"That's okay," Georgina says. Her voice sounds slow, slurred. "That's fine." Getting out of the car she stumbles and laughs. "Drunker than I thought."
She makes them both get out too, and they stand there on that desolate stretch of highway, desert wind whipping grit into their eyes. "Georgie, honey," Serena starts uncertainly, but Georgina shakes her head.
"Turn around," she says.
A chill runs down Blair's spine. Images flash quick through her mind – Nate's funeral, Sophie sobbing, Antoinette's expression much too pinched for such a little girl, and Serena once saying I bet we even die on the same day.
"Aren't you going to ask what happened to the boy?" Georgina says.
That's Blair's breaking point, a sob ripping its way out of her chest; immediately Serena has taken her hand, scar to scar. Their eyes meet. Blair is looking through a wash of tears but Serena is strong, resolute. Blair is sure Georgina is raising the gun. Serena's lips are forming silent numbers – one, two –
And then there is a thump, a collapsing sound like wet laundry dropping in a heap. Their hands break as they whirl around to see Georgina on the ground, passed out. Startling herself, Blair releases a choked laugh.
But Serena isn't laughing. She drops to her knees next to Georgina and turns her over, cups a hand over Georgina's mouth, feels her pulse, listens for her heartbeat. She looks over her shoulder at Blair, blonde hair wrecked and dirty. "She's dead, Blair."
"Don't be stupid," Blair says, more of an automatic reaction than anything else. "She can't be dead."
Serena starts breathing into Georgina's mouth, some kind of half-assed CPR she probably picked up that one summer she was a lifeguard. "Jesus, Blair, how much did you give her?"
"I don't know!" Reality is sinking in past denial. Blair twists her wedding ring anxiously. "I wasn't using a measuring cup, Serena, she was trying to kill us! It was self-defense!"
"Yeah, the old poison-them-to-death-slowly self-defense," Serena says. She presses her face into her hands. "What are we gonna do?"
"I –" Blair, who always has plans for every occasion, is entirely blank in this moment. She looks up and down the empty road, thinking only of what an incriminating picture they are, wide out in the open. "Get in the car. Until we figure this out, just get her in the car."
They start driving again, Serena behind the wheel and Blair tucked in the passenger seat, trying not to look at the woman sprawled out in the back with her hair over her face.
"No one can find out," Blair says tensely. "I can't – I can't lose my children, Serena, I can't –" This has always been Blair's go-to: swallow it, hide it, disguise it, pretend.
"I know," Serena says gently, "I know." But her expression is that oddly composed one again and Blair knows that means she's thinking of something.
"What?" she says. "What is it, what are you thinking?"
Serena glances at her, hesitant, and then says, "When Nate died, you went to the aunts and asked them to bring him back, right?"
Blair nods, a dark feeling coiling in her chest. The night Nate died, Blair had screamed and demanded and pleaded with the aunts to bring him back. "But they wouldn't."
"Wouldn't," Serena says. "But not couldn't."
"They said he wouldn't be Nate, not really," Blair says, "That he would come back as something dark and unnatural –"
"Georgina already is dark and unnatural!" Serena says. "It would be like erasing this whole horrible night – We wouldn't be guilty of anything so long as she has a pulse –"
"No," Blair says firmly, "No, no, Serena, we cannot do that – Logistically, even, we don't have anything we'd need and I'm not thrilled with the idea of bringing a corpse back to my house–"
A small part of her points out that the aunts have taken Antoinette and Sophie to the solstice. They won't be home for three days, at least. Blair had studied the spell for days when she was little, after their parents died, learning the words almost by heart even though she never dared to speak them aloud. It is possible. It could be done.
Stomach sinking, Blair adds, "And it's not like she's going to stay fresh, Serena!"
Determination turns Serena's mouth into a hard line. "I'll drive fast."
They haul Georgina onto the kitchen table where they eat dinner every night, where Blair's daughters do their homework after school. Blair is in her element now, barking orders and gathering supplies, her entire being narrowed to accomplishing her aims like when she used to plan high school dances.
Blair gets the big book out of the greenhouse, turning the ancient pages until she finds the one they need. They light beeswax candles and burn sage. With Serena's helpfully-procured white eyeliner they draw a star on Georgina's chest and then they lock eyes, the room around them feeling hushed all of a sudden. Blair knows how to do this. Following instructions to the letter is something she can do.
As one they begin to recite the spell, each holding a long, thin needle up in preparation for plunging them into Georgina's eyes, the thought of which makes Serena gag. Blair realizes Aunt Eleanor probably stabbed that long-ago dove with one of these very same needles. The thought is reassuring, somehow.
Their voices begin to build and echo; rain is splattering against the windows outside; Blair feels it in her, golden and powerful. Now, she thinks, lifting the pin.
But before either of them can make a move, they realize Georgina's eyes have shot open, bloodshot around the clouded-over gray iris. "Georgina?" Serena murmurs, breath bated.
With unexpected quickness, Georgina launches at Serena, death-white fingers going tight around Serena's throat, choking, Serena gasping as her own hands wrench desperately at Georgina's.
Blair acts without thought. She grabs the nearest pan and brings it crashing down on the back of Georgina's head over and over and over. She doesn't stop until Serena pulls her away, physically takes the pan out of Blair's hands. "It's over," Serena is saying, "It's over, she's dead."
Blair has never touched dirt in her life if she could help it, but that night they dig deep in the corner of the garden and bury a woman's body.
"Well," Blair says, drenched and filthy, "We needed an excuse to landscape."
PART TWO