033. take these broken wings and learn to fly
Title | take these broken wings and learn to fly
Chapter | 1/1
Rating | pg-13
Characters | Nate. Nate/Serena
Summary | If you're a bid, I'm a bird.
Notes | Written for dae_dreemer 's birthday.
if you’re a bird, i’m a bird.
-- Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)
One of Nate's first memories of Serena involves grass so vividly green it stained the bottoms of his feet, sunshine indistinguishable from the colour of her messy golden hair, and a midnight blue skirt.
It is summertime, probably in the Hamptons, a blissfully warm day. They are young - five or six and uncomplicated - and Serena is spinning. Bare feet padding against the ground, arms outstretched, head tilted back and eyes closed against the glare of the sun in the cloudless sky.
Nate's watching her, sitting with his own bare feet dangling off the side of a wooden deck, squinting across the expanse of the lawn.
She's beautiful, then, has always been beautiful, but at the time it was in the way only a little girl can be. She is messy and disobedient and she makes Nate laugh all the time, even (especially) when he isn't supposed to be laughing. But that does nothing to change her big blue eyes and rosebud lips and or the fact that her limbs are long and lithe and strikingly delicate. A lot of the time, as her playmate, Nate kind of forgets how much of a girl she is, until moments like this, when he remembers how very pretty she is.
As she spins, her colours blur, yellow hair and peachy skin and her gauzy white shirt and her deep blue lightweight skirt, it has a flirty hemline that lifted as she twirled, billowing out around her hips and giving him glimpses of her polka-dot underwear.
He watches her spin and spin and spin, feels mesmerized, spellbound. He thinks she might never stop. And when she finally does, it's because she collapses, a pile of blue fabric and limbs in the dewy green grass.
It takes a long time for her to move; she is still motionless when Nate's heart leaps up and he scrambles to his feet, running toward her as fast as he can.
Her eyes are closed and she is breathing hard, big gulps of air, when he drops to his knees beside her.
“Serena?” He takes in the sight of her, legs all tangled up in her skirt, grass-stained elbows, laboured breathing, blonde hair splayed out around her hair like a halo. For a silly split-second, he genuinely thinks that she looks like an angel. “Did it hurt?” he probes worriedly when she doesn't acknowledge him.
She blinks her eyes open oh-so-slowly, like she's waking up for the first first time. Her fingers dance up his arm as she confides, abruptly, “Sometimes I just want to fly away.”
Nate flops down into the grass next to her lazily. “To where? Heaven?”
“That's where you go when you die, Natie.”
He points upward. “But it's the only place to fly to.”
Serena turns her head toward his, cheek pressed against the grass. “You think it's in the sky?”
“I think it's in the clouds. You can jump on them and stuff.”
She smiles a little, the smallest quirk of her lips. “That sounds fun...”
Nate grins at her. “Yeah.”
She sighs, tilting her chin up and soaking in the sun's rays. “No clouds today though.”
He slips his hand between their bodies and finds hers, threading their fingers together. “That's why you fell. You couldn't fly today, there's nowhere for you to go.”
She smiles, squeezes his hand. “Tomorrow, then.”
Teeth clenched a little, he studies her face. “Hey, S?”
“Mm?”
He sighs in turn, swallowing hard. “Next time, I'll come with you.”
A wind sweeps over them, her skirt brushing against his legs.
“Okay,” Serena says.
It isn't as simple as that. He keeps wanting to be where she is, to go where she goes, but the distance between them stretches further and further, longer than the length of his lawn in the summertime, longer and longer until he doesn't know where she is at all.
She falls into his arms like she belongs there.
And then she runs away.
The morning after the Sheppard Wedding, his mother drags him to church with her, and he sits there, hurt and hungover and a hypocrite.
He texts Serena all through the service.
The lord giveth and the lord taketh away.
She doesn't text back.
When she disappears he curses her, kicks a dent into his bedroom well, thinks she’s nothing but a pretty girl with poison lies, swears he’s not going to care again.
(And his heart laughs at him, haughty and rhythmic, who’s the liar, Nathaniel?)
He watches her come back and fall apart and carefully piece herself back together. He waits and waits until that's it, no way, he is not waiting anymore - but the reality is that he will wait forever, like it or not.
He watches her fight to be worthy of the halo she was born with, yellow-gold hair from the very start, fight to live up to what it demands of her. And when she can't he watches her rebel against it, try to be everything that isn't perfect.
But he's always thought she was worthy, he's never seen her as anything but.
It takes seventeen days for them to have an actual conversation, just in passing, but at least it is one that's not weighted down by their heavy history, one that doesn't hurt afterward but instead eases that perpetual sting he's felt since that first day she was back and their confrontation in the courtyard of The Palace.
He says hey first. He owes her, after what happened at the Ivy Mixer.
Serena smiles. “Hey back.”
Nate takes a deep breath, fully intends to say something socially acceptable like “how are you?” or something to keep her smiling like “your boots are different colours”, just to make her look down in surprise and then laugh at his fib. Instead, he blurts, too wistfully, “Look at you.”
And she laughs, shifting her pile of books from the crook of one arm to the other, holding the edge of her empty coffee cup in between her teeth as she attempts to smooth the wrinkles in her white shirt. Her tie is hanging loose around her neck, just like Nate's is, which is stupid, because that shouldn't make his throat tighten.
“Yeah, look at me,” she says, a little breathlessly. “Huge mess, huh?”
He opens his mouth but no sound comes out. The bell rings.
“I'll catch you later, Nate,” she tells him hurriedly, but genuinely, elbowing him lightly as she rushes by, on her way to some class.
He stares after her, repeats it to no one, his voice soft: “Look at you.”
Serena has her boyfriends, so Nate has his girlfriends.
And they're happy, sure they are, both of them, with other people.
That's the party line.
(Here is the truth: he watches Dan Humphrey come out of nowhere and, like, literally sweep Serena off her feet, and he remembers Blair, and he loved Blair, and he likes the way that Vanessa laughs and he spends an entire summer watching Serena wallow over someone who isn't him and wondering, did she ever miss him like that? And Jenny's got this soft blonde hair and she's right there, living in the same place he is, and then he remembers Vanessa, remembers Blair - and Serena, she remembers Carter Baizen and she discovers Tripp, and Bree Buckley uses him and Nate thinks they are ridiculous, thinks that they are entirely fucked-up if they are going to date everyone else just to avoid dating each other.
The truth is that sometimes when smiles at Serena, on those occasions when they bump into each other, he always says, “Yeah; I'm happy!”, if only to see her smile back at him.)
And then one day she’s his.
He says I loved you, of course I did, and she looks like, just maybe, she might be ready to hear it.
(She doesn't pull away when he leans in to kiss her.)
But there is a car crash and her blood on a windshield and the highway spins around him; there can't possibly be a world in which they get together only to have her stolen away. He thinks about it sometimes, in quick flashes, her unfocused eyes and the way she'd reached for his hand when she'd woken up in that hospital bed, and he thinks, okay. If this is what it took to get them to come to their senses, then, okay. Okay, but never again.
But that's not the important part.
What is important is that it's them and it's so good and not exactly slow, but she’s his.
“I love you,” he tells her, present tense, blurts it out, far too early. He expects her to run, to weave her way through half-lit city streets, to board a plane, to steal a boat, to take off to the ends of the earth and beyond.
But she kisses him, kisses him and he ends up awake in the smallest hours of the morning with her next to him, tangled up in his sheets, wondering if he’s dreamt it all up.
(She can't really be his. History has proven that.
They are never simple.)
“Where do you think I’m going to disappear to?” Her eyes are blue fire, scorching hot, no oxygen to be found.
Nate gasps for air anyway. “I don’t know.”
She stomps her foot; looks four years old again, her hair in a long, wispy braid. “I have nowhere to go.”
Silence lingers between them, lasts too long.
“Great,” Nate says heavily.
Serena comes back to him like it is gravity’s work.
“That’s not what I meant,” she says. She’s wearing one of his old lacrosse shirts, knotted at the side so that it clings tight to her body and shows her belly-button. She pulls at the hem nervously, tugs it sideways a bit, so that Nate’s initials, NFA, are stitched onto her heart. “I meant…”
“What did you mean, Serena?” She makes it so hard to love her sometimes, but he just keeps on doing it anyway, like struggling in quicksand even though it makes you sink faster.
She starts to cry then and he thinks it’s okay - he’ll drown if she drowns, too.
“I meant that that I love you, Nate.”
It takes a moment, but he reaches out to her, the most tentative of movements. But that’s all it takes for her to be in his arms all of a sudden, clutching at him like he’s her life-raft, her anchor, like she’s the one who’s been drowning all along.
He kisses her cheek, tastes the salt of her tears.
For the first time ever, he thinks that she belongs to him as much as he belongs to her.
It’s not a fairytale, not outlined and scripted and happily ever after.
(Once upon a time, it might have been, when they were five or six and uncomplicated, when he asked her to take him along, but then they were sixteen and tangled, and she left without even a goodbye and put an abrupt end to any notions either of them ever had of love stories.)
She hurts him and he hurts her; they match each other in heartbreak warfare, point for point. When they’re together it’s bliss, it’s perfect, it’s meant to be - and when they’re apart it’s bitter and raw and bleeding. He doesn’t know how Dan deals with her for those two months, doesn’t know how any of his girls put up with him, doesn't even know why Vanessa agrees to meet him for coffee, not when he and Serena are so busy trying to love each other less.
He keeps waiting for her to leave. He pulls her into a closet at Blair and Chuck’s rehearsal dinner, hisses I love you against her neck as her nails scratch against his skin; I love you, I love you, what more do you want from me? and when she shows up at the wedding the next day, the picture of perfection in her bridesmaid’s dress and her arm hooked through Carter Baizen’s, Nate is so genuinely surprised that he forgets to hate (lovehatelove, it's the thinnest line there is) her for a full twenty seconds.
They fight in the hallway of his apartment building one night after she throws a rock at his second-floor window and it breaks; she’s yelling accusations that aren’t true and every girl in this city wants you, Nate, why the hell do you bother with me? It ends with the two of them, exhausted, sitting on his building’s steps as the sun peeks slowly, cautiously into the sky. Serena’s crying as though she doesn’t even realize it, tears trailing down over her cheeks in zig-zag pathways as she breathes, I’ve always loved you but I don’t think I’ve ever done it right.
He sees her across the street a week later and lets out a breath he didn't know he was holding.
There is one dizzy night that he can’t remember much of, when he sees her at a party and they don't speak for what seems like forever and then they argue, like they always do, and they end up making out in a rooftop hot-tub, clothes still on. She sees him on the sidewalk one day with some girl and then all of a sudden they’re whisper-yelling at each behind the shelves of a used bookstore. At a club one night, he sees her, alone and beautiful, stares at her until she feels the weight of his gaze and their eyes lock, and when she paces over to him purposefully the last thing he expects her to do is grab his hand and drag him to the nearest hotel, but that’s what she does, and when he wakes up the next morning she’s gone.
His phone rings once in the middle of the night, and it’s her, nothing but hey and quiet breathing on the line. And he guesses, she and Dan got back together. She and Dan broke up. We were never together, she says. And we were; you and me, we were? he retaliates. There is silence, stretching and pulling but not breaking, until he finally asks softly, where are you?
She never leaves. And that makes it harder and easier, all at once.
Just like always. It's the thinnest line, and they keep crossing it only to backtrack again.
By the time he’s twenty-three he feels ragged, corners cut and edges rough, an obscure piece of a puzzle.
Serena’s still the one that fits him.
He begins to realize they’ve shaped each other that way, that he’s been carved this way by his want of her, his love of her.
“I choose you,” he says to her one day, voice deep and words full. “Even if I had a million other choices, I would choose you. I already have. I always have.”
“And why me?” They are sitting with their bare feet in a fountain, their hands braced at their sides, fingers impossibly close to touching.
“Because -”
“I’m the worst choice, Nate. Look at you and look at me. You can have anyone. Don’t pick me. Pick better than that, you deserve better than that. I’m screwed up, don’t you get that?” She doesn’t look at him, just kicks her foot out, creating ripples in the water. “I’m screwed up,” she repeats.
“I’m the worst choice, too,” he says in a rush. “Don’t you see it? Dammit, Serena, if you are screwed up then so am I, and that’s okay, because I’m the worst choice, too. No one should pick me, and I can’t pick anyone, not when I love you like I do.”
“Because of me,” she retorts, words torn from her mouth. “I did that to you.” Her feet are still in the water, her toes clenched.
“Because of wanting you,” he corrects her gently. “You haven’t screwed me up, S; you’re the only one who can fix me.”
She sniffs. “Guess I’m stuck with you, then.”
Nate almost smiles. “Guess you are.”
With a nod of her head, she swivels around on the edge of the fountain, slips her damp feet into her shoes and walks away.
He exhales, watches her hair bounce against her shoulders, the subtle swing of her hips.
Serena turns, hands on her hips. “You might want to start keeping up.”
His smile re-emerges, stretches all the way to a grin. “I’ll catch you next time,” he calls to her, a promise.
“Gotcha,” he whispers to her when he tugs her into the coatroom during a dinner at one of the Bass empire's hotels. He feels eighteen years old again.
Serena lets him unzip her dress.
“Took you long enough, Archibald.”
It ends the morning he wakes up with the worst hangover of his life, lying on Serena’s hardwood floor in nothing but his boxers, the sun glaring mercilessly at him through the lilac curtains that hang over her picture windows. She’s sitting on the couch in his shirt, crossed-legged, cradling a mug in her hands.
“Hi,” he greets her, squinting. His voice sounds like gravel.
“Hey.” Her fingers drum against her mug, a nervous staccato pattern. She sighs, whispers, “Why does this hurt so much?”
He groans as he sits up. “Fourth round of pĩna coladas, if my memory serves. Which is probably doesn't.”
“Natie.”
His heart twists. “I don’t know. I don’t…know. I love you, Serena.” He looks into her eyes, the blue he knows and loves best. “I don’t know what else there is.”
She licks her lips. “I love you, too.”
They stare at each other for a beat, don’t blink. If you say it enough, you start to wonder what it ever meant in the first place.
He reaches up, pries the fingers of one of her hands off her mug and threads his own fingers through them slowly, hanging on tight. “I love you,” he tries again.
She leans toward him a little. “God, Nate, I -”
The mug tumbles then, spills lukewarm coffee onto her legs and her couch and his hand, and Nate gets up, nauseous all of a sudden, bolts to her bathroom and throws up everything in his stomach.
Serena edges into the room when he’s done, perches on the edge of the bathtub.
“Oh my god,” he says gruffly, running a hand over his face as he leans his head back against the wall.
When he finally drops his hand, Serena’s feet are bouncing impatiently against the floor, and she’s smiling. Smiling.
“What?” he asks, orders himself not to hope.
She bites her lip, head tilted to the side. “Brush your teeth so I can kiss you.”
He reaches out, grabs her ankle, and pulls her onto the floor with him. She giggles, falls partially into his lap, wraps her arms around him.
“I love you,” she says against his shoulder, eyelashes fluttering in butterfly kisses against his skin, and he feels it through his whole body and even through hers, the pulse it carries.
“Love you, too.”
When she lets him love her?
It's the simplest thing in the world.
History will prove that, too.
In the summertime, nearly two years after they first start dating - exclusively, fully, officially, perfectly - they stay at his family’s Hamptons house, and she sits on the counter while they drink their morning coffee and ties her hair back with pretty, filmy scarves that he’s always unknotting and they eat cereal and ice cream for most of their meals, and he’s done with waiting.
(She is his. She always has been.)
He watches her run down the beach, her feet against the sand, little white shorts over her dark blue bikini. She splashes into the water, laughing and calling to him over the sound of the waves - and then she falls over, crashes back into the water.
Nate runs in after her, finds her giggling and holding out to hands for him to help her up. His heart gives a thump of relief as he joins in on her laughter, leans down and slips his hands under her arms instead, lifts her up and spins her around; lets her fly.
She throws her head back for a second, toward the sunshine, and there is a silly, dizzy thought that crosses his mind as he whirls her around - for just a moment he thinks she looks angelic, she really does, thinks that he could take every single mess she’s every made, every heart she’s ever broken, even his own, and find the beauty in the fault lines, the pieces that are just waiting to align again.
“Nate…” She says his name like a prayer and he takes it, smiles at her as she wraps her legs tightly around his waist. Her body’s soaked with salt water and his clothes and his skin are absorbing their fair share of that moisture, almost greedily. She’s a natural disaster, this girl, equal parts beauty and destruction, but Nate has always wanted both, has always wanted the lightning of her thunderstorms and to be caught up in the whirlwind of her tornadoes.
Serena presses her forehead to his, breathes in deep. “You make me feel like I could fly,” she whispers.
He takes his own deep breath, clutches her a little tighter instinctively.
And her legs tighter around him in turn, one of her hands sinks into his hair, and her lips brush his when she says, “But I don’t want to; I want to be here with you forever.”
Nate kisses her, recklessly, lovingly; they tumble back into the water.
“Run away with me,” he proposes on her twenty-sixth birthday, lying in his backyard, her white dress smudged with dewy green. They are drunk in the middle of the afternoon, caught in a haze of tequila and sunlight.
Serena sighs, and he plucks a blade of grass, winds it around her finger to make a ring.
“Let’s go to the clouds. See if they’re really marshmallow trampolines.”
“And if they’re not?” She turns to him, blue eyes half-closed.
He shrugs. “Guess we'll fall together.”
“Maybe tomorrow.” She shifts in the grass, presses her body closer to his. “Let's stay here right now.”
A wind picks up around them, unravels the blade of grass from her finger, sweeps it up into the air; it flies away.
Nate kisses her, grounds her there, with him.
She kisses him back, tastes of watermelon and liquor and yes.
fin
Chapter | 1/1
Rating | pg-13
Characters | Nate. Nate/Serena
Summary | If you're a bid, I'm a bird.
Notes | Written for dae_dreemer 's birthday.
if you’re a bird, i’m a bird.
-- Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)
One of Nate's first memories of Serena involves grass so vividly green it stained the bottoms of his feet, sunshine indistinguishable from the colour of her messy golden hair, and a midnight blue skirt.
It is summertime, probably in the Hamptons, a blissfully warm day. They are young - five or six and uncomplicated - and Serena is spinning. Bare feet padding against the ground, arms outstretched, head tilted back and eyes closed against the glare of the sun in the cloudless sky.
Nate's watching her, sitting with his own bare feet dangling off the side of a wooden deck, squinting across the expanse of the lawn.
She's beautiful, then, has always been beautiful, but at the time it was in the way only a little girl can be. She is messy and disobedient and she makes Nate laugh all the time, even (especially) when he isn't supposed to be laughing. But that does nothing to change her big blue eyes and rosebud lips and or the fact that her limbs are long and lithe and strikingly delicate. A lot of the time, as her playmate, Nate kind of forgets how much of a girl she is, until moments like this, when he remembers how very pretty she is.
As she spins, her colours blur, yellow hair and peachy skin and her gauzy white shirt and her deep blue lightweight skirt, it has a flirty hemline that lifted as she twirled, billowing out around her hips and giving him glimpses of her polka-dot underwear.
He watches her spin and spin and spin, feels mesmerized, spellbound. He thinks she might never stop. And when she finally does, it's because she collapses, a pile of blue fabric and limbs in the dewy green grass.
It takes a long time for her to move; she is still motionless when Nate's heart leaps up and he scrambles to his feet, running toward her as fast as he can.
Her eyes are closed and she is breathing hard, big gulps of air, when he drops to his knees beside her.
“Serena?” He takes in the sight of her, legs all tangled up in her skirt, grass-stained elbows, laboured breathing, blonde hair splayed out around her hair like a halo. For a silly split-second, he genuinely thinks that she looks like an angel. “Did it hurt?” he probes worriedly when she doesn't acknowledge him.
She blinks her eyes open oh-so-slowly, like she's waking up for the first first time. Her fingers dance up his arm as she confides, abruptly, “Sometimes I just want to fly away.”
Nate flops down into the grass next to her lazily. “To where? Heaven?”
“That's where you go when you die, Natie.”
He points upward. “But it's the only place to fly to.”
Serena turns her head toward his, cheek pressed against the grass. “You think it's in the sky?”
“I think it's in the clouds. You can jump on them and stuff.”
She smiles a little, the smallest quirk of her lips. “That sounds fun...”
Nate grins at her. “Yeah.”
She sighs, tilting her chin up and soaking in the sun's rays. “No clouds today though.”
He slips his hand between their bodies and finds hers, threading their fingers together. “That's why you fell. You couldn't fly today, there's nowhere for you to go.”
She smiles, squeezes his hand. “Tomorrow, then.”
Teeth clenched a little, he studies her face. “Hey, S?”
“Mm?”
He sighs in turn, swallowing hard. “Next time, I'll come with you.”
A wind sweeps over them, her skirt brushing against his legs.
“Okay,” Serena says.
It isn't as simple as that. He keeps wanting to be where she is, to go where she goes, but the distance between them stretches further and further, longer than the length of his lawn in the summertime, longer and longer until he doesn't know where she is at all.
She falls into his arms like she belongs there.
And then she runs away.
The morning after the Sheppard Wedding, his mother drags him to church with her, and he sits there, hurt and hungover and a hypocrite.
He texts Serena all through the service.
The lord giveth and the lord taketh away.
She doesn't text back.
When she disappears he curses her, kicks a dent into his bedroom well, thinks she’s nothing but a pretty girl with poison lies, swears he’s not going to care again.
(And his heart laughs at him, haughty and rhythmic, who’s the liar, Nathaniel?)
He watches her come back and fall apart and carefully piece herself back together. He waits and waits until that's it, no way, he is not waiting anymore - but the reality is that he will wait forever, like it or not.
He watches her fight to be worthy of the halo she was born with, yellow-gold hair from the very start, fight to live up to what it demands of her. And when she can't he watches her rebel against it, try to be everything that isn't perfect.
But he's always thought she was worthy, he's never seen her as anything but.
It takes seventeen days for them to have an actual conversation, just in passing, but at least it is one that's not weighted down by their heavy history, one that doesn't hurt afterward but instead eases that perpetual sting he's felt since that first day she was back and their confrontation in the courtyard of The Palace.
He says hey first. He owes her, after what happened at the Ivy Mixer.
Serena smiles. “Hey back.”
Nate takes a deep breath, fully intends to say something socially acceptable like “how are you?” or something to keep her smiling like “your boots are different colours”, just to make her look down in surprise and then laugh at his fib. Instead, he blurts, too wistfully, “Look at you.”
And she laughs, shifting her pile of books from the crook of one arm to the other, holding the edge of her empty coffee cup in between her teeth as she attempts to smooth the wrinkles in her white shirt. Her tie is hanging loose around her neck, just like Nate's is, which is stupid, because that shouldn't make his throat tighten.
“Yeah, look at me,” she says, a little breathlessly. “Huge mess, huh?”
He opens his mouth but no sound comes out. The bell rings.
“I'll catch you later, Nate,” she tells him hurriedly, but genuinely, elbowing him lightly as she rushes by, on her way to some class.
He stares after her, repeats it to no one, his voice soft: “Look at you.”
Serena has her boyfriends, so Nate has his girlfriends.
And they're happy, sure they are, both of them, with other people.
That's the party line.
(Here is the truth: he watches Dan Humphrey come out of nowhere and, like, literally sweep Serena off her feet, and he remembers Blair, and he loved Blair, and he likes the way that Vanessa laughs and he spends an entire summer watching Serena wallow over someone who isn't him and wondering, did she ever miss him like that? And Jenny's got this soft blonde hair and she's right there, living in the same place he is, and then he remembers Vanessa, remembers Blair - and Serena, she remembers Carter Baizen and she discovers Tripp, and Bree Buckley uses him and Nate thinks they are ridiculous, thinks that they are entirely fucked-up if they are going to date everyone else just to avoid dating each other.
The truth is that sometimes when smiles at Serena, on those occasions when they bump into each other, he always says, “Yeah; I'm happy!”, if only to see her smile back at him.)
And then one day she’s his.
He says I loved you, of course I did, and she looks like, just maybe, she might be ready to hear it.
(She doesn't pull away when he leans in to kiss her.)
But there is a car crash and her blood on a windshield and the highway spins around him; there can't possibly be a world in which they get together only to have her stolen away. He thinks about it sometimes, in quick flashes, her unfocused eyes and the way she'd reached for his hand when she'd woken up in that hospital bed, and he thinks, okay. If this is what it took to get them to come to their senses, then, okay. Okay, but never again.
But that's not the important part.
What is important is that it's them and it's so good and not exactly slow, but she’s his.
“I love you,” he tells her, present tense, blurts it out, far too early. He expects her to run, to weave her way through half-lit city streets, to board a plane, to steal a boat, to take off to the ends of the earth and beyond.
But she kisses him, kisses him and he ends up awake in the smallest hours of the morning with her next to him, tangled up in his sheets, wondering if he’s dreamt it all up.
(She can't really be his. History has proven that.
They are never simple.)
“Where do you think I’m going to disappear to?” Her eyes are blue fire, scorching hot, no oxygen to be found.
Nate gasps for air anyway. “I don’t know.”
She stomps her foot; looks four years old again, her hair in a long, wispy braid. “I have nowhere to go.”
Silence lingers between them, lasts too long.
“Great,” Nate says heavily.
Serena comes back to him like it is gravity’s work.
“That’s not what I meant,” she says. She’s wearing one of his old lacrosse shirts, knotted at the side so that it clings tight to her body and shows her belly-button. She pulls at the hem nervously, tugs it sideways a bit, so that Nate’s initials, NFA, are stitched onto her heart. “I meant…”
“What did you mean, Serena?” She makes it so hard to love her sometimes, but he just keeps on doing it anyway, like struggling in quicksand even though it makes you sink faster.
She starts to cry then and he thinks it’s okay - he’ll drown if she drowns, too.
“I meant that that I love you, Nate.”
It takes a moment, but he reaches out to her, the most tentative of movements. But that’s all it takes for her to be in his arms all of a sudden, clutching at him like he’s her life-raft, her anchor, like she’s the one who’s been drowning all along.
He kisses her cheek, tastes the salt of her tears.
For the first time ever, he thinks that she belongs to him as much as he belongs to her.
It’s not a fairytale, not outlined and scripted and happily ever after.
(Once upon a time, it might have been, when they were five or six and uncomplicated, when he asked her to take him along, but then they were sixteen and tangled, and she left without even a goodbye and put an abrupt end to any notions either of them ever had of love stories.)
She hurts him and he hurts her; they match each other in heartbreak warfare, point for point. When they’re together it’s bliss, it’s perfect, it’s meant to be - and when they’re apart it’s bitter and raw and bleeding. He doesn’t know how Dan deals with her for those two months, doesn’t know how any of his girls put up with him, doesn't even know why Vanessa agrees to meet him for coffee, not when he and Serena are so busy trying to love each other less.
He keeps waiting for her to leave. He pulls her into a closet at Blair and Chuck’s rehearsal dinner, hisses I love you against her neck as her nails scratch against his skin; I love you, I love you, what more do you want from me? and when she shows up at the wedding the next day, the picture of perfection in her bridesmaid’s dress and her arm hooked through Carter Baizen’s, Nate is so genuinely surprised that he forgets to hate (lovehatelove, it's the thinnest line there is) her for a full twenty seconds.
They fight in the hallway of his apartment building one night after she throws a rock at his second-floor window and it breaks; she’s yelling accusations that aren’t true and every girl in this city wants you, Nate, why the hell do you bother with me? It ends with the two of them, exhausted, sitting on his building’s steps as the sun peeks slowly, cautiously into the sky. Serena’s crying as though she doesn’t even realize it, tears trailing down over her cheeks in zig-zag pathways as she breathes, I’ve always loved you but I don’t think I’ve ever done it right.
He sees her across the street a week later and lets out a breath he didn't know he was holding.
There is one dizzy night that he can’t remember much of, when he sees her at a party and they don't speak for what seems like forever and then they argue, like they always do, and they end up making out in a rooftop hot-tub, clothes still on. She sees him on the sidewalk one day with some girl and then all of a sudden they’re whisper-yelling at each behind the shelves of a used bookstore. At a club one night, he sees her, alone and beautiful, stares at her until she feels the weight of his gaze and their eyes lock, and when she paces over to him purposefully the last thing he expects her to do is grab his hand and drag him to the nearest hotel, but that’s what she does, and when he wakes up the next morning she’s gone.
His phone rings once in the middle of the night, and it’s her, nothing but hey and quiet breathing on the line. And he guesses, she and Dan got back together. She and Dan broke up. We were never together, she says. And we were; you and me, we were? he retaliates. There is silence, stretching and pulling but not breaking, until he finally asks softly, where are you?
She never leaves. And that makes it harder and easier, all at once.
Just like always. It's the thinnest line, and they keep crossing it only to backtrack again.
By the time he’s twenty-three he feels ragged, corners cut and edges rough, an obscure piece of a puzzle.
Serena’s still the one that fits him.
He begins to realize they’ve shaped each other that way, that he’s been carved this way by his want of her, his love of her.
“I choose you,” he says to her one day, voice deep and words full. “Even if I had a million other choices, I would choose you. I already have. I always have.”
“And why me?” They are sitting with their bare feet in a fountain, their hands braced at their sides, fingers impossibly close to touching.
“Because -”
“I’m the worst choice, Nate. Look at you and look at me. You can have anyone. Don’t pick me. Pick better than that, you deserve better than that. I’m screwed up, don’t you get that?” She doesn’t look at him, just kicks her foot out, creating ripples in the water. “I’m screwed up,” she repeats.
“I’m the worst choice, too,” he says in a rush. “Don’t you see it? Dammit, Serena, if you are screwed up then so am I, and that’s okay, because I’m the worst choice, too. No one should pick me, and I can’t pick anyone, not when I love you like I do.”
“Because of me,” she retorts, words torn from her mouth. “I did that to you.” Her feet are still in the water, her toes clenched.
“Because of wanting you,” he corrects her gently. “You haven’t screwed me up, S; you’re the only one who can fix me.”
She sniffs. “Guess I’m stuck with you, then.”
Nate almost smiles. “Guess you are.”
With a nod of her head, she swivels around on the edge of the fountain, slips her damp feet into her shoes and walks away.
He exhales, watches her hair bounce against her shoulders, the subtle swing of her hips.
Serena turns, hands on her hips. “You might want to start keeping up.”
His smile re-emerges, stretches all the way to a grin. “I’ll catch you next time,” he calls to her, a promise.
“Gotcha,” he whispers to her when he tugs her into the coatroom during a dinner at one of the Bass empire's hotels. He feels eighteen years old again.
Serena lets him unzip her dress.
“Took you long enough, Archibald.”
It ends the morning he wakes up with the worst hangover of his life, lying on Serena’s hardwood floor in nothing but his boxers, the sun glaring mercilessly at him through the lilac curtains that hang over her picture windows. She’s sitting on the couch in his shirt, crossed-legged, cradling a mug in her hands.
“Hi,” he greets her, squinting. His voice sounds like gravel.
“Hey.” Her fingers drum against her mug, a nervous staccato pattern. She sighs, whispers, “Why does this hurt so much?”
He groans as he sits up. “Fourth round of pĩna coladas, if my memory serves. Which is probably doesn't.”
“Natie.”
His heart twists. “I don’t know. I don’t…know. I love you, Serena.” He looks into her eyes, the blue he knows and loves best. “I don’t know what else there is.”
She licks her lips. “I love you, too.”
They stare at each other for a beat, don’t blink. If you say it enough, you start to wonder what it ever meant in the first place.
He reaches up, pries the fingers of one of her hands off her mug and threads his own fingers through them slowly, hanging on tight. “I love you,” he tries again.
She leans toward him a little. “God, Nate, I -”
The mug tumbles then, spills lukewarm coffee onto her legs and her couch and his hand, and Nate gets up, nauseous all of a sudden, bolts to her bathroom and throws up everything in his stomach.
Serena edges into the room when he’s done, perches on the edge of the bathtub.
“Oh my god,” he says gruffly, running a hand over his face as he leans his head back against the wall.
When he finally drops his hand, Serena’s feet are bouncing impatiently against the floor, and she’s smiling. Smiling.
“What?” he asks, orders himself not to hope.
She bites her lip, head tilted to the side. “Brush your teeth so I can kiss you.”
He reaches out, grabs her ankle, and pulls her onto the floor with him. She giggles, falls partially into his lap, wraps her arms around him.
“I love you,” she says against his shoulder, eyelashes fluttering in butterfly kisses against his skin, and he feels it through his whole body and even through hers, the pulse it carries.
“Love you, too.”
When she lets him love her?
It's the simplest thing in the world.
History will prove that, too.
In the summertime, nearly two years after they first start dating - exclusively, fully, officially, perfectly - they stay at his family’s Hamptons house, and she sits on the counter while they drink their morning coffee and ties her hair back with pretty, filmy scarves that he’s always unknotting and they eat cereal and ice cream for most of their meals, and he’s done with waiting.
(She is his. She always has been.)
He watches her run down the beach, her feet against the sand, little white shorts over her dark blue bikini. She splashes into the water, laughing and calling to him over the sound of the waves - and then she falls over, crashes back into the water.
Nate runs in after her, finds her giggling and holding out to hands for him to help her up. His heart gives a thump of relief as he joins in on her laughter, leans down and slips his hands under her arms instead, lifts her up and spins her around; lets her fly.
She throws her head back for a second, toward the sunshine, and there is a silly, dizzy thought that crosses his mind as he whirls her around - for just a moment he thinks she looks angelic, she really does, thinks that he could take every single mess she’s every made, every heart she’s ever broken, even his own, and find the beauty in the fault lines, the pieces that are just waiting to align again.
“Nate…” She says his name like a prayer and he takes it, smiles at her as she wraps her legs tightly around his waist. Her body’s soaked with salt water and his clothes and his skin are absorbing their fair share of that moisture, almost greedily. She’s a natural disaster, this girl, equal parts beauty and destruction, but Nate has always wanted both, has always wanted the lightning of her thunderstorms and to be caught up in the whirlwind of her tornadoes.
Serena presses her forehead to his, breathes in deep. “You make me feel like I could fly,” she whispers.
He takes his own deep breath, clutches her a little tighter instinctively.
And her legs tighter around him in turn, one of her hands sinks into his hair, and her lips brush his when she says, “But I don’t want to; I want to be here with you forever.”
Nate kisses her, recklessly, lovingly; they tumble back into the water.
“Run away with me,” he proposes on her twenty-sixth birthday, lying in his backyard, her white dress smudged with dewy green. They are drunk in the middle of the afternoon, caught in a haze of tequila and sunlight.
Serena sighs, and he plucks a blade of grass, winds it around her finger to make a ring.
“Let’s go to the clouds. See if they’re really marshmallow trampolines.”
“And if they’re not?” She turns to him, blue eyes half-closed.
He shrugs. “Guess we'll fall together.”
“Maybe tomorrow.” She shifts in the grass, presses her body closer to his. “Let's stay here right now.”
A wind picks up around them, unravels the blade of grass from her finger, sweeps it up into the air; it flies away.
Nate kisses her, grounds her there, with him.
She kisses him back, tastes of watermelon and liquor and yes.
fin