bombshell
Serena. Serena/Blair, Serena/Nate, Serena/Carter, Serena/Dan. Appearances by Tripp, Aaron, Gabriel, Ben, and Max.
3338 words. PG13.
Summary: Serena leans into the mirror and looks at herself and smiles – it still comes easily, the smiling.
Note: HAPPY BIRTHDAY RIA!!!! (My computer constantly tries to autocorrect your name to Via.) May it be filled with maltipoos and cupcakes and a lack of Game of Thrones character death!
This exists in a sort of vaguely canon-adjacent AU. Similar events happened, but not in the same way or at the same time.
1. an overwhelming surprise or disappointment
2. a very attractive woman
3. an artillery shell
Serena leans into the mirror and looks at herself and smiles – it still comes easily, the smiling.
Carter gets her the pills, though he does it much more begrudgingly than he did when they were fifteen and nineteen, respectively. Then it was all in good fun. Now he prescribes them like a doctor. No more than four, he says seriously. No booze. And for god's sake, beautiful, eat something. He always looks bothered when he instructs her, because they both know she never follows orders.
"I just need to sleep," Serena tells him. "I'm so tired but I just can't sleep."
Serena takes one now, just one, and beams at her reflection.
The room is warm, still, sunshine-soaked, but the breeze slipping through the window is icy cold. Serena wonders if that means it will rain. She notices gooseflesh rising on Blair's just-washed skin but Blair doesn't shiver.
"Are you going?" Serena asks.
Blair is rubbing lotion into her legs, non-fragrant and creamy. "Yes. I have a dinner. You know that."
"You always have a dinner," she complains, tucking the sheet between her sides and her arms so she can sidle closer to Blair. Blair's hair, wet, curls slightly.
"You always have a premiere," Blair points out, smiling a little. "Or an interview or a party you must be seen at or a –"
"Shh," Serena murmurs and presses a kiss to Blair's mouth. "Don't remind me." She finds the tie on Blair's robe, unfairly knotted, and begins to work it open. Blair stills her hands.
"I can't, S," she says. "You know that."
When they were very, very little they would play house (or boyfriend-girlfriend, or some variation) and Serena always had to be the husband (or the maid or the dog, if Blair was cross with her). After a while it began to annoy her. It was so boring and Blair got to dress up in all the pretty clothes while Serena swam in an old tuxedo jacket of Harold's.
When Serena said she wanted to be the wife, Blair narrowed her eyes and pursed her mouth, pink with her mother's lipstick. "You can't be the wife, I'm the wife."
"We can both be," Serena said impatiently, eyeing the makeup.
"Girls don't marry girls," Blair snapped and that was that.
It was all pretend anyway, Serena told herself.
Carter has been giving Serena pills ever since she learned how to swallow them. It wasn't a dependency, then. Serena would argue it's not a dependency now, but with the door shut and the lights off, who's counting?
Carter knew the names of all the stars who had overdosed on pills, overdosed on other drugs, drowned, were murdered, disappeared. Carter told her about freak accidents as he rolled the first joint she ever smoked, seventh grade, and again on coke at a party in ninth and again as he lines up her pills for the night, smooth and white and nondescript.
"Can't you take a break, beautiful?" he asks, running fingers through her hair, trailing a touch down the bridge of her nose. She knew Carter before she'd gotten it fixed. He'd told her the doctor had done a damn good job.
She's not wearing any makeup. She's exhausted and she knows the skin beneath her eyes is thin and shadowed, but Carter still calls her beautiful.
"I don't want to take a break," she says. She's wrapping one film this week and starting another next, skipping from a light romantic comedy about a girl in culinary school who makes an accidental love potion to a career-making drama where she plays a bit-part drug addict. Substance abuse is just about everywhere Serena goes.
"Ever since the day I met you, you've been running around." He hands her one pill and a glass of water, watches her swallow a third of it.
"You have too," she points out. Serena knows better than anyone she's running on borrowed time, that she's not a good enough actress to make it through her thirties and still have a career. She's resting on pretty, on charm, on family. That's what all the reviews say about her, anyway.
Another pill.
"I have too," he agrees with a sigh. The next pill. She wonders if he thinks these are the only ones she's taking. "I worry about you, blondie," Carter adds. Another pill. The glass is almost empty.
"Don't." She hooks her fingers over the neckline of his t-shirt so she can pull him into a kiss, eyes falling shut so easily, too easily. "I always take care of myself, don't I?"
"Yeah you do," he says, sounding unsure, but Serena is already asleep.
Serena spent her sophomore year in boarding school and it just confirmed everything she thought she was leaving behind.
There was a teacher, tall and blonde and kindhearted, who treated Serena like she really had a brain. Still, when she batted her eyelashes with fifteen-year-old ineptitude and angled herself just so so he could look down her shirt, Ben gave Serena all sorts of As.
She had been hoping he was better than that.
Serena gets her very first role by accident. She's working as a production assistant on some mock-Warhol indie drama. One of the actresses flakes out and they need someone immediately and, well, Serena is there. After the movie premiered, everyone said they couldn't take their eyes off the blonde in the corner, the way she smiled and tossed her hair.
Aaron was her first taste of the cameras, not counting posed family portraits and paparazzi. Aaron was a photographer and he called her a muse, draped her in gauzy chiffon and perched silver sunglasses on her face, rumpled her hair. Aaron talked her into all sorts of things she shouldn't have said yes to, but she was eighteen and he was cute.
He releases the photographs to the world right before her second premiere, her first starring role. Serena laughs it off, answers a thousand questions about naked pictures with a different joke each time. There's nothing else she can do; public opinion has already formed on her.
It's not worth crying over.
They tell everyone she's been hospitalized for exhaustion. Serena wonders if anyone really believes that anymore.
Blair is not speaking to her, currently. Carter is in Costa Rica. Nate is in the middle of an election, but he sends her flowers every single day. Dan sits by her bedside and reads, occasionally glancing up to see how she's doing but never bothering her until she asks him to. Serena pats the space next to her, barely room enough for a thought, and Dan squeezes into it. He smells just like Dan, just like he should, coffee and some cologne he's been wearing since high school. It gives Serena more comfort than all the beeping machines echoing her progress back at her.
Dan kisses her hand, her wrist, her forehead. "One day I will find the right words," he says, "And they will be simple."
She smiles a little. "Yours?" she asks, because one can never be too sure with words.
"No," Dan says. "The good lines never are."
Tripp is elected the same day he turns thirty-five and Serena purrs a congratulatory birthday song over his cake. She's tone-deaf, always has been, but everyone is charmed regardless. Except for Maureen, who smiles so wide and hard and bright that it looks like her face might shatter into a thousand pieces.
Tripp is a Nate thing, at first. Then Serena just tries to get out alive.
His eyes are a close enough shade of blue and his smiles are just as guileless, but he's blonder in the sunlight and a good deal more ruthless. He is the product of a generation's worth of planning and Serena is just an actress in a too-tight dress.
She gets lectured across a mahogany desk like she's still thirteen and spiking the Vanderbilt punch.
"He's hardly the first politician to have an affair," she says, arms crossed, eyes cold. Old men in suits stopped scaring her when she found out what producers were really like.
"Subtlety is not a word in your language, Miss van der Woodsen," William says. "You have a way of…drawing unwanted attention."
"Tripp's a grown man."
"Tripp's always needed a helping hand in certain situations."
Serena rolls her eyes and blows it off, does not realize how easily accidents can happen.
At first Serena plays a series of similar parts: the popular girl who gets her comeuppance, the bitchy girlfriend who is thrown over for the smart-but-sweet ingénue, the wide-eyed romantic comedy leading lady who has just enough quirks to counteract her beauty.
The thing is, her past is on display for everyone to see. Even without Aaron's photos hanging over her head, there are a thousand similar (if less well-lit) shots on Gossip Girl. There are a thousand blasts about her drinking, her partying, her sleeping around. Everyone knows everything about Serena van der Woodsen – or at least they think they do.
Serena plays that part to the hilt and, when she falters, Carter always has a pick-me-up.
Max is almost normal. Almost. He's her consultant for the culinary school love potion movie, though all she does is stand around set in cute aprons so she's not sure why she needs him. But he's cute and nice and genuinely seems to think she's the kind of girl who could accidentally make everyone in the world fall in love with her. He can also cook.
Max falls in love with Serena van der Woodsen on film. The problem is she's all too real.
Serena falls in love with Max on paper. Turns out he's real too.
Serena opts out of two parts because of her accident recovery, lives between Blair and hospitals and Nate. Takes pills with and without prescriptions. Mixes with alcohol. Doesn't eat.
But they're used to this: Nate and Blair have cleaned her up a million times. They have it down to an art. Blair's cool fingertips are gentle as they wipe smudged mascara off Serena's cheeks, erase the mess her makeup has become. Nate's solid arm is around her waist every time she has to walk, his warm weight sure and unshakeable. They are always so careful, as though Serena will break. As though she is not already broken.
"You'll take care of me?" Serena asks, eyes closed, face screwed up. The dim room is too bright for her.
"Of course," Blair says briskly, followed by Nate's quiet murmur, "We'll always take care of you."
They weren't there after the overdose. They had other responsibilities then. Now maybe guilt binds them to her, or nostalgia, Nate apologetic for his family and Blair apologetic for not being apologetic.
Underneath the suits she can still see her boy-next-door.
Serena and Nate make a fort with the hotel chairs and blankets like they did when they were little, lie on their sides clutching pillows and facing each other. Their little makeshift tent glows faintly with the room's lamplight but is shadowy, breath-warm, intimate.
"Remember that time we got your cousin Bobby drunk by accident," she says, smiling. She inches closer. "And right after your grandfather gave his big speech, Bobby threw up all over the carpet?"
Nate huffs a little laugh, more reserved than he would have been fifteen or so years ago. The laugh just barely reaches his eyes. "I remember getting in trouble for that," he says.
"Me too." Serena's smile retracts somewhat. She traces shapes on his shoulder. "I was banned for a little while."
"I talked you back in," he says. His voice is soft, more like her Nate.
"I barely got to enjoy it, though," she murmurs.
He looks away then, down. His hair is so short now but she can remember what it used to be like, how it would fall into his eyes. "I'm sorry about that," he says.
"It was a long time ago," she says. She taps his cheek, drums perfectly manicured nails playfully across his jaw. "You're all grown up now, Natie."
"Nah," he says, trapping her hand with his. "Just looks that way."
Settling down will be good for you, her agent said. It'll look good. Gabriel looked good, princely and handsome, taller than her. For once. They looked like a matched set.
Gabriel leaves her with half her fortune and his wedding ring next to the sink.
The only screenplay Dan ever writes is just for her.
She drops onto their bed with breathless laughter, wearing a big sweater and panties, bare legs tucked underneath her, and watches Dan. He sits backwards on their desk chair in his unfastened trousers and a wife beater, hands full of pages, and reads her new part to her.
"What do you think?" he asks when it's done. He'd done all the voices, tingeing all the sorrow with humor and painting a different picture than the one she'll star in.
"I love it," she says, but she's already past thinking about it. She reaches for him. He stands, leans into the press of her hands, and receives a kiss.
"I wanted you to really show off," he says seriously, brow furrowed. "I wanted to make it up to you, for the other –"
For Sabrina. Serena softens, her hands against his cheeks. "You think I can?" she asks, when what she means to say is thank you.
"I know you can," Dan says.
Serena gets married three times: the chef, the conman, the playwright. None of them stick.
Nate pushes her back, away,hand on his mouth. "I'm not doing this again," he says.
Serena grips fistfuls of her skirt because her hands need something to cling to now that he's so far away. "Nate," she says softly. Blair accused her once of having a voice for boys, a voice for Nate, a soft whispery little voice designed to make her seem vulnerable. Serena had been furious, at the time. Blair was one who went into baby-voiced girlfriend mode. Serena was just herself. She was always just herself. "Nate…"
He shakes his head and finally meets her eyes, slumping against the wall behind him. "I asked Juliet to marry me," he says.
Serena blinks, quick and fluttery like there's something in her eyes. "Oh."
"I want to marry her," he says. Hesitantly, "I love her."
"I can guess, Nate," she says, somewhat snappishly. She wraps her arms around herself, hair falling over her face to hide it.
"I'm sorry," he says, stepping forward with sudden sheepish contriteness, like another Nate from another year. He touches her crossed arms lightly until she unwinds them, allows him to step into her space and hug her. "I'm sorry."
Stop being sorry, she thinks. Be anything else.
He kisses her temple and then her mouth, because Nate can never make up his mind. When Serena wraps her arms around him, she realizes how different he feels; structured suits beneath her hands instead of warm sweaters and t-shirts.
Later Serena trails her fingertips up Nate's spine, murmurs in a quiet sing-song, "The French are glad to die for love…they delight in fighting du-els…"
Nate mumbles, muffled by the pillow, and coughs, says, "Did you say something?"
"No," she says. She doesn't ask if this is the last time.
The part Dan writes for her gets her the best reviews of her entire career. A new chapter for Serena van der Woodsen, they say. Unexplored depths. A sudden shocking vulnerability beneath her pretty-girl veneer. What will her next step be?
The divorce goes through on the last day of shooting. Blair is visiting and Serena sees them, heads bent close together over a page, arguing in low voices. They look furious and then Dan laughs, which she can't remember him doing genuinely for weeks. Then Blair laughs and there was something in it – something in the way they look at each other that Serena remembers from years before, something she thought was dead.
"You okay?" Jamie, her makeup girl, asks, brow creased.
Serena beams. "Getting into character," she jokes. "Never too early." Jamie smiles and Serena is still smiling, magazine always say Serena has the best smile.
Dan's writing has always revealed itself to her slowly, piece by piece.
She's got a biopic coming up next and, for once, she is nothing like the woman she's playing.
Carter says, "I've been thinking lately of going straight."
"A house in the suburbs," Serena teases, bending to kiss him. "Two point five kids."
He smiles, slow and lazy. He's been giving her this smile since she was fourteen and it has never ended well. His hands sliding up over her knees and thighs to her hips. "Something like that."
"It'll never stick," she tells him.
"No," Carter says. "Probably not. Never stuck for you, did it, beautiful?" He doesn't mean anything by it but it still twinges. "We're not that kind, are we?"
"I don't know what kind I am," Serena says quietly. She tries on all different kinds.
"Don't be sad," Carter murmurs. He kisses her, slow and lingering. He feels bad, now. It's not always easy to tell with Carter, but Serena can read him just fine. "You want a little something?"
"Where's Nate?" Serena asks, foggy.
Blair purses her lips. "Am I not enough?"
Serena tries for a smile but it doesn't feel right on her face. "Where's Nate?"
"With his wife," Blair says. "Where he should be. Did Carter give you the pills?"
"I'm an adult," Serena mumbles, hiding her face in the pillow. "I know lots of different people who can give me lots of different things. Is Dan – where is Dan?"
"How am I supposed to know?" Blair says impatiently. "Serena, who –"
"Don't you always know?" Serena says. "You always know where people are. You always find people. You always find me."
Blair sighs. She'd been trying to get Serena out of last night's party dress, but it has too many zippers and cutouts. She gives up, drops onto the bed next to Serena. "I always find you."
Serena moves until her head is in Blair's lap, beaded skirt scratchy against her cheek. Blair begins to card fingers through Serena's hair, knotty from dancing. "You can't keep doing this, S. You can't."
"I just like to have fun," Serena says, which is the answer she's always given.
"You can't," Blair says again, much more sharply. "Do you know what you put me through?"
Serena knows what she puts herself through. She wonders if it's the same for Blair. They used to be close enough that it didn't make a difference who was hurting because they both felt it. But they grew up and out of the sandbox and it just wasn't the same.
Serena pushes herself to sitting, intending to stagger to her feet. "I didn't ask you to –"
"Just because you don't remember asking doesn't mean you didn't," Blair says. "And you don't have to, anyway."
"Aren't you busy?" Serena asks. She fumbles for her phone, sees a million missed calls from her agent and her stylist. Serena's so busy. "You're always busy."
"I cleared my schedule." Blair folds her arms. "And I'm going to clear yours too and then you're going to stay here with me until you dial down the Lohan a little."
Serena laughs, tripping slightly and catching herself on Blair for balance. She gives Blair a kiss. "That's funny," she says.
"It's not a joke," Blair says in that arch way of hers, her eyebrows raising, entire face stretching into comical disbelief. Underneath it, though, is something much more determined. Something much more serious. "Do you know what you put me through?"
Serena falters, drops the grin. "Yes," she says, voice small, "I know, but –"
"So just don't," Blair says. That serious-something slips into her voice, a little break. "Serena –"
Serena kisses her again, only this time not for joking. "I'll try," she says, and that's all she can say.
Serena. Serena/Blair, Serena/Nate, Serena/Carter, Serena/Dan. Appearances by Tripp, Aaron, Gabriel, Ben, and Max.
3338 words. PG13.
Summary: Serena leans into the mirror and looks at herself and smiles – it still comes easily, the smiling.
Note: HAPPY BIRTHDAY RIA!!!! (My computer constantly tries to autocorrect your name to Via.) May it be filled with maltipoos and cupcakes and a lack of Game of Thrones character death!
This exists in a sort of vaguely canon-adjacent AU. Similar events happened, but not in the same way or at the same time.
1. an overwhelming surprise or disappointment
2. a very attractive woman
3. an artillery shell
Serena leans into the mirror and looks at herself and smiles – it still comes easily, the smiling.
Carter gets her the pills, though he does it much more begrudgingly than he did when they were fifteen and nineteen, respectively. Then it was all in good fun. Now he prescribes them like a doctor. No more than four, he says seriously. No booze. And for god's sake, beautiful, eat something. He always looks bothered when he instructs her, because they both know she never follows orders.
"I just need to sleep," Serena tells him. "I'm so tired but I just can't sleep."
Serena takes one now, just one, and beams at her reflection.
The room is warm, still, sunshine-soaked, but the breeze slipping through the window is icy cold. Serena wonders if that means it will rain. She notices gooseflesh rising on Blair's just-washed skin but Blair doesn't shiver.
"Are you going?" Serena asks.
Blair is rubbing lotion into her legs, non-fragrant and creamy. "Yes. I have a dinner. You know that."
"You always have a dinner," she complains, tucking the sheet between her sides and her arms so she can sidle closer to Blair. Blair's hair, wet, curls slightly.
"You always have a premiere," Blair points out, smiling a little. "Or an interview or a party you must be seen at or a –"
"Shh," Serena murmurs and presses a kiss to Blair's mouth. "Don't remind me." She finds the tie on Blair's robe, unfairly knotted, and begins to work it open. Blair stills her hands.
"I can't, S," she says. "You know that."
When they were very, very little they would play house (or boyfriend-girlfriend, or some variation) and Serena always had to be the husband (or the maid or the dog, if Blair was cross with her). After a while it began to annoy her. It was so boring and Blair got to dress up in all the pretty clothes while Serena swam in an old tuxedo jacket of Harold's.
When Serena said she wanted to be the wife, Blair narrowed her eyes and pursed her mouth, pink with her mother's lipstick. "You can't be the wife, I'm the wife."
"We can both be," Serena said impatiently, eyeing the makeup.
"Girls don't marry girls," Blair snapped and that was that.
It was all pretend anyway, Serena told herself.
Carter has been giving Serena pills ever since she learned how to swallow them. It wasn't a dependency, then. Serena would argue it's not a dependency now, but with the door shut and the lights off, who's counting?
Carter knew the names of all the stars who had overdosed on pills, overdosed on other drugs, drowned, were murdered, disappeared. Carter told her about freak accidents as he rolled the first joint she ever smoked, seventh grade, and again on coke at a party in ninth and again as he lines up her pills for the night, smooth and white and nondescript.
"Can't you take a break, beautiful?" he asks, running fingers through her hair, trailing a touch down the bridge of her nose. She knew Carter before she'd gotten it fixed. He'd told her the doctor had done a damn good job.
She's not wearing any makeup. She's exhausted and she knows the skin beneath her eyes is thin and shadowed, but Carter still calls her beautiful.
"I don't want to take a break," she says. She's wrapping one film this week and starting another next, skipping from a light romantic comedy about a girl in culinary school who makes an accidental love potion to a career-making drama where she plays a bit-part drug addict. Substance abuse is just about everywhere Serena goes.
"Ever since the day I met you, you've been running around." He hands her one pill and a glass of water, watches her swallow a third of it.
"You have too," she points out. Serena knows better than anyone she's running on borrowed time, that she's not a good enough actress to make it through her thirties and still have a career. She's resting on pretty, on charm, on family. That's what all the reviews say about her, anyway.
Another pill.
"I have too," he agrees with a sigh. The next pill. She wonders if he thinks these are the only ones she's taking. "I worry about you, blondie," Carter adds. Another pill. The glass is almost empty.
"Don't." She hooks her fingers over the neckline of his t-shirt so she can pull him into a kiss, eyes falling shut so easily, too easily. "I always take care of myself, don't I?"
"Yeah you do," he says, sounding unsure, but Serena is already asleep.
Serena spent her sophomore year in boarding school and it just confirmed everything she thought she was leaving behind.
There was a teacher, tall and blonde and kindhearted, who treated Serena like she really had a brain. Still, when she batted her eyelashes with fifteen-year-old ineptitude and angled herself just so so he could look down her shirt, Ben gave Serena all sorts of As.
She had been hoping he was better than that.
Serena gets her very first role by accident. She's working as a production assistant on some mock-Warhol indie drama. One of the actresses flakes out and they need someone immediately and, well, Serena is there. After the movie premiered, everyone said they couldn't take their eyes off the blonde in the corner, the way she smiled and tossed her hair.
Aaron was her first taste of the cameras, not counting posed family portraits and paparazzi. Aaron was a photographer and he called her a muse, draped her in gauzy chiffon and perched silver sunglasses on her face, rumpled her hair. Aaron talked her into all sorts of things she shouldn't have said yes to, but she was eighteen and he was cute.
He releases the photographs to the world right before her second premiere, her first starring role. Serena laughs it off, answers a thousand questions about naked pictures with a different joke each time. There's nothing else she can do; public opinion has already formed on her.
It's not worth crying over.
They tell everyone she's been hospitalized for exhaustion. Serena wonders if anyone really believes that anymore.
Blair is not speaking to her, currently. Carter is in Costa Rica. Nate is in the middle of an election, but he sends her flowers every single day. Dan sits by her bedside and reads, occasionally glancing up to see how she's doing but never bothering her until she asks him to. Serena pats the space next to her, barely room enough for a thought, and Dan squeezes into it. He smells just like Dan, just like he should, coffee and some cologne he's been wearing since high school. It gives Serena more comfort than all the beeping machines echoing her progress back at her.
Dan kisses her hand, her wrist, her forehead. "One day I will find the right words," he says, "And they will be simple."
She smiles a little. "Yours?" she asks, because one can never be too sure with words.
"No," Dan says. "The good lines never are."
Tripp is elected the same day he turns thirty-five and Serena purrs a congratulatory birthday song over his cake. She's tone-deaf, always has been, but everyone is charmed regardless. Except for Maureen, who smiles so wide and hard and bright that it looks like her face might shatter into a thousand pieces.
Tripp is a Nate thing, at first. Then Serena just tries to get out alive.
His eyes are a close enough shade of blue and his smiles are just as guileless, but he's blonder in the sunlight and a good deal more ruthless. He is the product of a generation's worth of planning and Serena is just an actress in a too-tight dress.
She gets lectured across a mahogany desk like she's still thirteen and spiking the Vanderbilt punch.
"He's hardly the first politician to have an affair," she says, arms crossed, eyes cold. Old men in suits stopped scaring her when she found out what producers were really like.
"Subtlety is not a word in your language, Miss van der Woodsen," William says. "You have a way of…drawing unwanted attention."
"Tripp's a grown man."
"Tripp's always needed a helping hand in certain situations."
Serena rolls her eyes and blows it off, does not realize how easily accidents can happen.
At first Serena plays a series of similar parts: the popular girl who gets her comeuppance, the bitchy girlfriend who is thrown over for the smart-but-sweet ingénue, the wide-eyed romantic comedy leading lady who has just enough quirks to counteract her beauty.
The thing is, her past is on display for everyone to see. Even without Aaron's photos hanging over her head, there are a thousand similar (if less well-lit) shots on Gossip Girl. There are a thousand blasts about her drinking, her partying, her sleeping around. Everyone knows everything about Serena van der Woodsen – or at least they think they do.
Serena plays that part to the hilt and, when she falters, Carter always has a pick-me-up.
Max is almost normal. Almost. He's her consultant for the culinary school love potion movie, though all she does is stand around set in cute aprons so she's not sure why she needs him. But he's cute and nice and genuinely seems to think she's the kind of girl who could accidentally make everyone in the world fall in love with her. He can also cook.
Max falls in love with Serena van der Woodsen on film. The problem is she's all too real.
Serena falls in love with Max on paper. Turns out he's real too.
Serena opts out of two parts because of her accident recovery, lives between Blair and hospitals and Nate. Takes pills with and without prescriptions. Mixes with alcohol. Doesn't eat.
But they're used to this: Nate and Blair have cleaned her up a million times. They have it down to an art. Blair's cool fingertips are gentle as they wipe smudged mascara off Serena's cheeks, erase the mess her makeup has become. Nate's solid arm is around her waist every time she has to walk, his warm weight sure and unshakeable. They are always so careful, as though Serena will break. As though she is not already broken.
"You'll take care of me?" Serena asks, eyes closed, face screwed up. The dim room is too bright for her.
"Of course," Blair says briskly, followed by Nate's quiet murmur, "We'll always take care of you."
They weren't there after the overdose. They had other responsibilities then. Now maybe guilt binds them to her, or nostalgia, Nate apologetic for his family and Blair apologetic for not being apologetic.
Underneath the suits she can still see her boy-next-door.
Serena and Nate make a fort with the hotel chairs and blankets like they did when they were little, lie on their sides clutching pillows and facing each other. Their little makeshift tent glows faintly with the room's lamplight but is shadowy, breath-warm, intimate.
"Remember that time we got your cousin Bobby drunk by accident," she says, smiling. She inches closer. "And right after your grandfather gave his big speech, Bobby threw up all over the carpet?"
Nate huffs a little laugh, more reserved than he would have been fifteen or so years ago. The laugh just barely reaches his eyes. "I remember getting in trouble for that," he says.
"Me too." Serena's smile retracts somewhat. She traces shapes on his shoulder. "I was banned for a little while."
"I talked you back in," he says. His voice is soft, more like her Nate.
"I barely got to enjoy it, though," she murmurs.
He looks away then, down. His hair is so short now but she can remember what it used to be like, how it would fall into his eyes. "I'm sorry about that," he says.
"It was a long time ago," she says. She taps his cheek, drums perfectly manicured nails playfully across his jaw. "You're all grown up now, Natie."
"Nah," he says, trapping her hand with his. "Just looks that way."
Settling down will be good for you, her agent said. It'll look good. Gabriel looked good, princely and handsome, taller than her. For once. They looked like a matched set.
Gabriel leaves her with half her fortune and his wedding ring next to the sink.
The only screenplay Dan ever writes is just for her.
She drops onto their bed with breathless laughter, wearing a big sweater and panties, bare legs tucked underneath her, and watches Dan. He sits backwards on their desk chair in his unfastened trousers and a wife beater, hands full of pages, and reads her new part to her.
"What do you think?" he asks when it's done. He'd done all the voices, tingeing all the sorrow with humor and painting a different picture than the one she'll star in.
"I love it," she says, but she's already past thinking about it. She reaches for him. He stands, leans into the press of her hands, and receives a kiss.
"I wanted you to really show off," he says seriously, brow furrowed. "I wanted to make it up to you, for the other –"
For Sabrina. Serena softens, her hands against his cheeks. "You think I can?" she asks, when what she means to say is thank you.
"I know you can," Dan says.
Serena gets married three times: the chef, the conman, the playwright. None of them stick.
Nate pushes her back, away,hand on his mouth. "I'm not doing this again," he says.
Serena grips fistfuls of her skirt because her hands need something to cling to now that he's so far away. "Nate," she says softly. Blair accused her once of having a voice for boys, a voice for Nate, a soft whispery little voice designed to make her seem vulnerable. Serena had been furious, at the time. Blair was one who went into baby-voiced girlfriend mode. Serena was just herself. She was always just herself. "Nate…"
He shakes his head and finally meets her eyes, slumping against the wall behind him. "I asked Juliet to marry me," he says.
Serena blinks, quick and fluttery like there's something in her eyes. "Oh."
"I want to marry her," he says. Hesitantly, "I love her."
"I can guess, Nate," she says, somewhat snappishly. She wraps her arms around herself, hair falling over her face to hide it.
"I'm sorry," he says, stepping forward with sudden sheepish contriteness, like another Nate from another year. He touches her crossed arms lightly until she unwinds them, allows him to step into her space and hug her. "I'm sorry."
Stop being sorry, she thinks. Be anything else.
He kisses her temple and then her mouth, because Nate can never make up his mind. When Serena wraps her arms around him, she realizes how different he feels; structured suits beneath her hands instead of warm sweaters and t-shirts.
Later Serena trails her fingertips up Nate's spine, murmurs in a quiet sing-song, "The French are glad to die for love…they delight in fighting du-els…"
Nate mumbles, muffled by the pillow, and coughs, says, "Did you say something?"
"No," she says. She doesn't ask if this is the last time.
The part Dan writes for her gets her the best reviews of her entire career. A new chapter for Serena van der Woodsen, they say. Unexplored depths. A sudden shocking vulnerability beneath her pretty-girl veneer. What will her next step be?
The divorce goes through on the last day of shooting. Blair is visiting and Serena sees them, heads bent close together over a page, arguing in low voices. They look furious and then Dan laughs, which she can't remember him doing genuinely for weeks. Then Blair laughs and there was something in it – something in the way they look at each other that Serena remembers from years before, something she thought was dead.
"You okay?" Jamie, her makeup girl, asks, brow creased.
Serena beams. "Getting into character," she jokes. "Never too early." Jamie smiles and Serena is still smiling, magazine always say Serena has the best smile.
Dan's writing has always revealed itself to her slowly, piece by piece.
She's got a biopic coming up next and, for once, she is nothing like the woman she's playing.
Carter says, "I've been thinking lately of going straight."
"A house in the suburbs," Serena teases, bending to kiss him. "Two point five kids."
He smiles, slow and lazy. He's been giving her this smile since she was fourteen and it has never ended well. His hands sliding up over her knees and thighs to her hips. "Something like that."
"It'll never stick," she tells him.
"No," Carter says. "Probably not. Never stuck for you, did it, beautiful?" He doesn't mean anything by it but it still twinges. "We're not that kind, are we?"
"I don't know what kind I am," Serena says quietly. She tries on all different kinds.
"Don't be sad," Carter murmurs. He kisses her, slow and lingering. He feels bad, now. It's not always easy to tell with Carter, but Serena can read him just fine. "You want a little something?"
"Where's Nate?" Serena asks, foggy.
Blair purses her lips. "Am I not enough?"
Serena tries for a smile but it doesn't feel right on her face. "Where's Nate?"
"With his wife," Blair says. "Where he should be. Did Carter give you the pills?"
"I'm an adult," Serena mumbles, hiding her face in the pillow. "I know lots of different people who can give me lots of different things. Is Dan – where is Dan?"
"How am I supposed to know?" Blair says impatiently. "Serena, who –"
"Don't you always know?" Serena says. "You always know where people are. You always find people. You always find me."
Blair sighs. She'd been trying to get Serena out of last night's party dress, but it has too many zippers and cutouts. She gives up, drops onto the bed next to Serena. "I always find you."
Serena moves until her head is in Blair's lap, beaded skirt scratchy against her cheek. Blair begins to card fingers through Serena's hair, knotty from dancing. "You can't keep doing this, S. You can't."
"I just like to have fun," Serena says, which is the answer she's always given.
"You can't," Blair says again, much more sharply. "Do you know what you put me through?"
Serena knows what she puts herself through. She wonders if it's the same for Blair. They used to be close enough that it didn't make a difference who was hurting because they both felt it. But they grew up and out of the sandbox and it just wasn't the same.
Serena pushes herself to sitting, intending to stagger to her feet. "I didn't ask you to –"
"Just because you don't remember asking doesn't mean you didn't," Blair says. "And you don't have to, anyway."
"Aren't you busy?" Serena asks. She fumbles for her phone, sees a million missed calls from her agent and her stylist. Serena's so busy. "You're always busy."
"I cleared my schedule." Blair folds her arms. "And I'm going to clear yours too and then you're going to stay here with me until you dial down the Lohan a little."
Serena laughs, tripping slightly and catching herself on Blair for balance. She gives Blair a kiss. "That's funny," she says.
"It's not a joke," Blair says in that arch way of hers, her eyebrows raising, entire face stretching into comical disbelief. Underneath it, though, is something much more determined. Something much more serious. "Do you know what you put me through?"
Serena falters, drops the grin. "Yes," she says, voice small, "I know, but –"
"So just don't," Blair says. That serious-something slips into her voice, a little break. "Serena –"
Serena kisses her again, only this time not for joking. "I'll try," she says, and that's all she can say.