holiday fic: pusher love girl (serena/carter)

pusher love girl
serena/carter. 2305 words. post-s5.

summary: Serena never believed in love at first sight but as soon as she looked at Carter, she thought: yes. You're for me.

note: for sing_song_sung! love u boo <3 basically this fic is one of those 'I wish this had happened instead' sort of things lol. actually more friendshippy than shippy, not sure how that happened, and pretty angsty which I imagine you'll enjoy. also bless your prompt I love that song.








Serena calls Carter from a payphone and says, "Let's get fucked up."

"You're fuckin' kidding me, there are no payphones in service any more," Carter says. "You're pulling my goddamn leg."

"I'm in the Midwest." Serena casts a cursory look at her surroundings, but there's really nothing to be seen there. She doesn't know exactly where she is.

"Shit, honey," Carter says. "You really do need me."







Serena still remembers the very first time she saw Carter, which is saying something because she'd had a lot to drink that night. She was all of fourteen years old and Carter was older, freshly kicked out of St. Jude's for some infraction that had already been spun into legend. He had a brick of heroin in his locker, she heard. He fucked the headmaster's kid on school grounds, they said.

He told Serena he just bombed all of his tests and stopped going to school. Even his parents' hefty monetary contributions couldn't wave away all the work he'd missed.

But that was later. That first night she saw him, they'd never exchanged a word, though she'd heard of him as he'd presumably heard of her. It was at a club. Carter was dancing in the middle of a pack of people – sweaty, shirt sticking to him, looking wild-eyed and dangerous. Serena will always remember how her heart went crazy, thump thump thumping in her chest.

She'd never believed in love at first sight but as soon as she looked at Carter, she thought: yes. You're for me.







She calls Carter because of the whole mess back in New York. She calls Carter because he's her rock-bottom guy. She doesn’t mean that in a bad way, exactly: he's the one who understands. She met him there, all the way down on the rockiest of bottoms.

"We're not staying in the goddamn Midwest, Jesus Christ," is the first thing he says when she meets him at the airport. So they just get right on another plane heading further west. He doesn't ask her why she called because he doesn't really need to know – not yet. He's answered a dozen calls like that before. He knows the drill.

In Los Angeles Carter catches her up on what he's been doing. They're at a diner. "So I spent – and I'm not lying now, beautiful, cross my heart – a good year in school, got my G.E.D. and everything, all in the hopes that Daddy and Mommy might love me. But you know how that gets old. I flaked out and shacked up with an old guy out in Venice who liked to pay for everything and –" Carter's expression turns thoughtful as he dabs a fry in ketchup. "Well. I didn't mind him so much, but I fucked it up, you know. So I went out to this yoga retreat in Nepal and dried out for a while, but we must have a psychic connection, sweetness, because you caught me just as I was leaving." He pauses. "Now you got anything to share with the class?"

A day by the water has left Serena sweetly sunbaked and almost feeling okay – as long as she doesn't think too hard about anything. She shrugs. "Dated some guys, sort of went to rehab, dated some more guys, Blair got married, Blair got unmarried, I fell for Dan again, he shot me down, I filmed us having sex, and he told me I was nothing."

The words hurt in a dull way, like a bruise under the nail.

Carter looks at her for a long moment. Then he says: "Can I watch it?"

She throws her napkin at him.







Carter used to wear silver rings on almost every finger. In high school she used to cut class at the end of the day to go to the beach with him and she remembers holding his hand on the long train ride, tapping her finger against each ring. He gave her one once, a silver skull with blackened eyes, and she wore it on her thumb whenever he was out of town.

It seems stupid to think of how crazy she was for Carter once. She was crazy over so many boys, what made him different? And what made him fall out of her head as soon as Dan Humphrey reached back for her hand at a party neither of them were invited to?

These are the mysteries of life, and Serena cannot solve them.







"Still hate me, beautiful?"

They're on a little plane going out to Hawaii. L.A.'s baked beauty and cheerful vapidity had left Serena unsatisfied. She craves distance. She craves big flowers and blue water and nice hotels.

In L.A. they mostly went to clubs, did gross amounts of coke, and made out for the paparazzi. Serena never had a drug of choice (she chose all the choices) but coke had always been Carter's true love, long before she ever met him. It made her feel kind of brittle. She preferred booze bubbling in her chest, MDMA making her light up.

She got the feeling at first that Carter wasn't going to do it. She watched indecision crawl over his face, his hands clenching, and she felt suddenly guilty. "You don't have to," she said, like the peer-pressuring boyfriend in an afterschool special.

"I promised you a party, didn't I, honey?" he said, bent down and did the lines.

She was reminded, in a sudden and strange way, that she was no longer fourteen and Carter was no longer her older, dangerous hook-up. They were just two messy people stumbling towards some inevitable future they couldn't seem to see clearly. Carter was an addict who had been clean until she called him. Serena didn't know what she was. She was a big fat question mark. She was a whole lot of nothing.

In the plane he holds her hand. He doesn't wear rings anymore. "Still hate me, beautiful?"

She leans her head onto his shoulder. "I don't hold grudges very long."







Together they have lived a life on beaches. Tonight they drive out somewhere secluded enough to see the stars, a powdered-sugar sneeze across a blue-black sky. They lay together on the hood of the car.

"How'd you fuck it up?" Serena asks. Carter raises an eyebrow with a laugh already on his lips, question clearly implied: which time? So she specifies, "With the old guy. In Venice."

"He wasn't really that old," Carter hedges. Then, "He had a kid our age. A daughter. She came to visit and, well." He shrugs. "That's how I fucked it up."

Serena tilts her head curiously. "You liked him?"

"Yeah, I liked him fine."

She doesn't recall ever thinking much about Carter's bisexuality, just accepting the fact of it with little fanfare. Blair used to say he was gay a lot, but Blair said stuff like that, always trying to present some kind of made-up worst-case scenario to crush Serena's buzz. But Serena messed around with girls sometimes too, so she figured she understood it pretty well.

"What was his name?"

This is how she knows it was something real: Carter's eyes get crinkly at the corners and his mouth goes sad and wistful at once, the name leaving him on a sigh. "Matteo."

"Hot?"

Carter seems almost offended. "Obviously."

Serena smiles but her next question is relatively serious. "So why'd you do it?"

Carter laughs but she doesn't hear a trace of humor in it. "Well, you get what you pay for, don't you, beautiful?" He takes out his cigarettes and lights one. "He shouldn't've been surprised."

She's not sure what makes her say it right then, or at all, but that's the moment she chooses to say, "Dan's in love with Blair."

Carter gives her a look of appropriately cartoonish surprise, each eyebrow a parenthesis over his widened eyes. "That kid of yours from Brooklyn?" he says. "Little Waldorf?"

Serena nods. She returns her gaze to the stars.

"There's a twist," Carter says. She waits for a Carter-typical insensitive remark, probably about the size of Dan's dick or something, but instead Carter slips his arm around her and pulls her to him. "No room for you then, huh, honey?"

He says it so sympathetically, so unlike himself, that Serena starts crying a little, without sound, tears slipping from her cheeks and soaking into his white t-shirt.

"I know," he says, still so sympathetic, "I know, Serena."

She is so used to him calling her everything else that the sound of her own name is alien in his voice, like a foreign language.







Serena genuinely does not know how many people she has been with, most of them people she didn't know and didn't care about. Maybe that's bad for someone as young as she is, or maybe it's super depressing like Dan used to say. Maybe it's just a fact of her life. She slept with a lot of people to try and assuage that empty feeling inside of her, but it always just made her feel emptier.

She thought she'd changed, but it doesn't really seem like it. She's still sleeping with people trying to chase some imaginary sense of fulfillment, only now she mostly pretends to love them.

"Is that better?" she asks Carter.

"Does it feel better?" he says.

"Sometimes," Serena murmurs, but the times she's thinking of are the times it was real: with Dan in a faux snow storm, with Nate on a borrowed couch by borrowed coats, even with Carter, in the shower at Blair's.

"I was never really scared of falling for somebody." Carter sits by the window of their darkened hotel room, shirt off, smoking. The light from outside falls on his right side, but the rest is dark. "And I almost always felt good when it went to shit, like – ha. Got what's coming to you." He takes a drag. "Maybe good's the wrong word."

"Who have you loved?" she asks. "Really loved."

She can count that on one hand. That's a number she knows.

"Ah, a few people, in my day," he says with that put-upon wise voice he does when he's being evasive. She thinks that's all he'll say on the topic when he adds, "You. But you know that."

She's heard him say it before, that's true. But she's learned to take everything Carter says with a grain of salt.

Still, she isn't exactly surprised.

"I know, Carter," she says. "I know."







"So why Dan, exactly?"

"What do you mean, why Dan?"

Their days are lazy and nice, off the grid. Carter surfs – for about six seconds before crashing into the water and then emerging, soaked but grinning. Serena almost gets a dramatic haircut but chickens out. She doesn't have a phone. She doesn’t go online.

"I get it, he's a good-looking pseudo-intellectual with a not ass-backwards sense of humor," Carter says, waving a hand. "But I don't mean the shit you tell your friends when you've got a crush. I just mean… Why him?"

Carter is generally too blunt to ask roundabout questions based in personal interest; basically, if he was asking why Dan instead of him, he'd probably just ask that to begin with. So Serena tries to really think about her answer.

"Well," she finally comes up with, "I love him."

But he shakes his head at that. "Ain't no reason to love someone who don't love you, kiddo."

Serena rolls her eyes. "I don't think it works like that."

"Yeah, but it's not like you're fine just loving him. You're not, you know, looking at him with fond affection as you let him do as he pleases. You want love back. You want proof." Aware of how he sounds, perhaps, he adds, "That's not a bad thing, honey."

Serena has never liked being told how she feels. Who does? "Everybody wants to be loved back."

He looks at her intently. "Sure," he says. "But not everyone expects it."

She frowns at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means…" Carter blows out a breath, thinking. Sand sticks to his wet skin. "Some people need love to survive. Any kind. Real or not real. Good or bad. Some people don't."

"And that's better, I guess?" Serena huffs, staring at him. "A better, more evolved person would hand Dan off to Blair wrapped in a bow?"

His lips quirk in a half-smile. "Maybe," he says. "I'm not trying to make distinctions, though."

Annoyed, Serena says, "She doesn't love him."

"That sounds like Dan's problem," Carter says.

Serena looks at him for a long moment, impossibly irritated, and then gets up, stalks off across the beach with her arms crossed. A real bratty walk-off, though as far as she's concerned, she earned it. She walks close to the waves so they lick at her ankles. And she replays their conversation in her head again and again: that sounds like Dan's problem.

She was never trying to make it hers.







Serena returns to the hotel room late that night and finds Carter just getting out of the shower, toweling his hair. "Fuckin' sand," he says.

No apologies, not even for hurting her feelings, no hellos: just fuckin' sand. It doesn't bother her, somehow. It's honest. Carter isn't sorry and he doesn't necessarily have to be.

"I want to move on," Serena says firmly, ignoring double meanings. "Let's go somewhere. Let's go to Tokyo."

Another person might ask what her plan is, if she's ever going back to New York, if she's okay, if this is what she really wants, if this is the smart thing to do. But Carter just grins at her, wide and toothy, and says, "I'll pack my bag, baby."

Serena smiles back at him, more tentative but just as true. There is something to be said for being understood.