092. if you want love, we'll make it [4/11]
Title | if you want love, we'll make it
Chapter | 4/11
Rating | hm. r-ish.
Characters | Blair/Serena (Blair/Nate, hints of Blair/Chuck)
Summary | Sometimes she forgets how long they've both been playing the same game.
She comes home early one afternoon, about a week into school - her professor is sick, her class cancelled, and she could do with a nap or an Audrey movie.
What she gets is Serena, a whirlwind in her house, bags and boxes: packing.
"Oh," she says faintly.
Serena barely spares her a glance, busy folding dresses. "You're supposed to be in class."
She feels herself grow defensive and lifts her chin. "You're supposed to be at Brown."
With a defeated sigh, Serena throws a pair of shoes toward a box. They don't go in, landing instead on the floor close by. "I'm just picking up my stuff, Blair. I didn't think you'd be here."
"It's my house."
"I know that." The words are sharp and Blair cringes the slightest bit. "I'm trying to get out of it."
She leans back against the wall, hips jutted out a bit, legs crossed at the ankle. She would leave, but she just can't. "Moving in with Chuck?" she inquires, her voice trembling with forced nonchalance.
"Stop."
"Stop what?"
"What you're doing." She tosses a few pairs of jeans into a bag, unfolded, bound to get wrinkled. "I went to Prague because he needed someone. He was hurt."
"You don't owe him anything."
Serena meets her eyes, her gaze measured. "He's my brother."
"Only when it suits you."
"Classy, Blair," she mutters, turning back toward the closet.
"Classy?" Her voice cracks. "You just…you went to him! You forgave him! Getting shot isn't a reason for absolution."
Serena's quiet for a long moment, and then she says, "I know it hurts. I know. But what happened with Jenny - "
"It's not about her!" Tears burn at her eyes but she blinks them away. "You don't know what he did!"
Silence engulfs them, heavy and stifling.
"You didn't tell me - "
"That doesn't matter! You're my friend, you're - you're supposed to take my word over his, you - "
" - and I hardly had a good reason to stay in Paris."
"I…" She doesn't know what to say. She leans into the wall more, her back pressed flat against it.
"It doesn't matter, okay? It's done. Just let me get my stuff and go." Serena bends over, reaching for another suitcase, and her little cotton shorts ride up considerably, giving Blair a glimpse of her ass - which is totally irrelevant to this whole conversation, except that she reacts.
And blurts out, "You don't have to…" But she trails off, hesitant. Admitting defeat has never really been a skill she's possessed.
"Don't I?" Serena grabs a handful of her underwear and drops it in the suitcase. She smiles, but it's bitter, not pretty at all. "I thought you and Nate would want your privacy."
Blair swallows. "Jealous?"
It's like she's hit a trigger word, or something. The fire dies abruptly in Serena's eyes and she abandons her underwear drawer, dropping down onto the mattress like she's been defeated, her eyes on the floor.
"Yes," she breathes.
Blair knows what she means, she does. She wants to take it at face value, wants to walk across the room and sit next to Serena on the bed. She wants to hug and wants to help S unpack. But her anger and her fear and all those months apart take precedence in her mind and she twists the confession unfairly: "You've always had a thing for him when he's mine, haven't you?"
Serena stares at her for a moment, and the hurt is evident all over her face, in her eyes and the curve of her lips and the pinkness in her cheeks, but she doesn't say anything. She hunches forward a little, curling in on herself, her hands pressed to her face.
Blair leaves to cry in her own room.
When she wakes up late that evening, after a nap that wasn't all that refreshing, every trace of Serena is gone.
"You're quiet." Nate tilts his head, trying to catch her eye.
Blair sighs. They're in her living room, on her sofa, watching a movie of Nate's choosing. She's leaning into him, head resting against his shoulder, and she feels all of thirteen years old again.
He shakes his shoulder, jostling her a little. "What's wrong?"
"Serena left today. She just…packed up everything and left."
Nate absorbs this. "Why?"
"We fought." Blair picks at an invisible thread on the sleeve of his button-down shirt. "You know that."
"You two always fight." He can afford to be cavalier about this. "And you always make up."
She blinks, hard. "This was different."
His tone softens; he reaches for the remote and mutes the movie. "Different how?"
"I just…" Her throat swells. "I don't know how to explain."
"You'll be okay." Nate wraps his arm around her and pulls her closer. "Serena loves you." A pause, and then he adds, "More than anyone."
She lifts her eyes to his face. "Yeah?"
"Yeah," he teases. "What do you mean, yeah? Of course."
Her lips curl a little, almost a smile.
"Let's talk about something else," Nate suggests, kissing her gently.
She giggles, relaxed and understanding. "Or not talk."
Blair fidgets in her seat in her poli sci class, un-crossing and re-crossing her legs.
"You know Serena?" she whispers to Nate, scribbling a note about game theory down.
He smirks a little, but he also looks tired - he's probably sick of discussing his ex-girlfriend with her all the time, but Blair can't help the way she's always thinking about her. "Yes," he mutters back. "I do."
She taps the end of her pen against her notebook page. "She looks…lonely." Every time Blair's seen her, anywhere on campus, she's been alone and quiet, very…not-Serena-like. "And I…" I'm worried.
Nate stares straight ahead. "I don't know what you want me to do about it."
"Can you…can you talk to her?"
He turns to look at her. "Why can't you?"
"Nate." She pouts at him, leaning a little closer.
Huffily, he tells her, "I already did."
She's not quite sure what to make of that, what to take away from Nate noticing Serena the same way she is, but she's too greedy for information to dwell on it. "And?"
"And…she said she's fine."
"She said? Or she was?"
He peeks at her notes and starts copying them down, zero-sum: participant's gain or loss is balanced by the gain or loss of the other participants, leaving a constant (zero) sum. "She said," he admits.
Blair gets to her feet, steps over his legs and into the aisle with a whisper of, "Washroom, be right back," and marches right out of the classroom.
Like she's summoned her, Serena is standing in the hallway.
She's leaning back against a wall, her hair braided and twisted into a complicated updo that's hardly meant for daytime. She's wearing a shirt too big, so that the neckline drops off of one of her shoulders, and a skirt that hits her mid-thigh. She's reading, a novel in her hands, the pages folded back, her blue gaze fixed on it.
Blair brushes by her as if she hasn't noticed any of this. "You should have gone to Brown." She means it, sincerely, but it comes off like an insult.
"Fuck off, Blair."
She spins around at those words, eyes widening, mouth falling open.
"I don't care." Serena doesn't look up from her book. "I really don't. You can chalk it all up to me being your experimental, European phase. You can laugh about this in ten years when you're wearing Nate's stupid heirloom ring and raising his kids. We're done, I get it, and I don't care - if you would just fuck the hell off. Please."
Anger bubbles up from her chest, filling her throat and her mouth, spilling from her lips. "You kissed me," she hisses.
"I've kissed you countless times." She's still pretending to read. "And you've always kissed back."
"It just…" Blair flounders for a moment, feeling heat rise to her cheeks. "We can't be the same, not now that I've gone to bed with you."
Serena shrugs. "So we won't be the same. We won't be anything." She flips her book closed, goes to move away - but Blair reaches out, wrapping her fingers all the way around S's wrist and pulling her back sharply.
"Blair - "
"I'm worried about you," she says firmly. "You don't…you don't look happy, and you're the happiest person I've ever known and I just…think you should have gone to Brown."
Serena tries and fails to shake her off. "I'm perfectly happy here."
"You say that, but you're not. You should have - "
"Stop saying that. Stop telling me what I should have done. I want to be here." She looks younger all of a sudden, with her hair pulled back from her face and her eyes wide. She twists her wrist in Blair's grasp again. "My dad went to med school here."
The heat of the anger she's feeling dissipates, giving way to something else. "Oh, honey…" she says very softly; so long ago, she started crossing that thin line between hate and love with Serena, and love kept winning out until it became the default value.
"Don't," Serena says, still trying to move away.
And Blair can't quite understand how what happens next happens at all, but her hands slip under Serena's skirt and her mouth lands on Serena's neck like it belongs there, or something, and her fingers are knuckle-deep inside Serena and there are hands, on her shoulders and arms, nails digging into her skin and this quiet, sweet little gasp of, "C'mon, B…" right by her ear - and Serena comes against her hand, eyes squeezed shut and breathing shaky.
Blair is shaking, too, when she pulls her hand away. She thinks she might leave but then Serena's gripping her wrist in turn, pulling Blair's hand toward her mouth, licking her slick fingers clean. And Blair stands there for a moment, frozen, because they're in the hallway of a building where anyone would see them (ohgodohgod, are there security cameras?) and this cannot be happening.
Except for the fact that it is, and she pulls her fingers away from Serena's lips and tongue so she can kiss her instead, tasting strawberry lip gloss and, well, Serena. She moans a little, right at the back of her throat, and Serena breaks the kiss, sucking in air like she hasn't been able to breathe in days.
Blair watches, still and shaking, as Serena puts herself back together - underwear pulled back up to her hips, the hem of her skirt down once again - and picks her book up from where it had fallen to the floor. She looks back at Blair, uneasy, licking her lips.
"I kissed you," Blair murmurs, breathless. Her lips curve upward like she wants to smile. "And you kissed me back."
It's as close to I'm sorry as she's going to get right now.
Serena stays quiet. There's a flush all over her skin, over her one bare shoulder and her collarbone and her neck and her cheeks. Then she whispers, "B…" like she doesn't know where they go from here.
Blair points, extending a finger toward the left. "I have class."
When she slips back into her seat next to Nate, smiling angelically, he reaches for her hand and she flinches.
"Hello?" she calls when she steps out of the elevator and into Nate's suite at the empire. She brought éclairs from his favourite bakery; she really needs to talk to him.
There's total silence for a moment, and she's about to call out his name again, but then Chuck walks out of his room - Chuck - and smirks at her like this is any other day.
It's the same as it always is, a lingering glance during which he undresses her with his eyes and then he says, in a voice more gravelly than she remembers it, "Waldorf; always a pleasure."
She drops the éclairs on the floor.
tbc.
Chapter | 4/11
Rating | hm. r-ish.
Characters | Blair/Serena (Blair/Nate, hints of Blair/Chuck)
Summary | Sometimes she forgets how long they've both been playing the same game.
She comes home early one afternoon, about a week into school - her professor is sick, her class cancelled, and she could do with a nap or an Audrey movie.
What she gets is Serena, a whirlwind in her house, bags and boxes: packing.
"Oh," she says faintly.
Serena barely spares her a glance, busy folding dresses. "You're supposed to be in class."
She feels herself grow defensive and lifts her chin. "You're supposed to be at Brown."
With a defeated sigh, Serena throws a pair of shoes toward a box. They don't go in, landing instead on the floor close by. "I'm just picking up my stuff, Blair. I didn't think you'd be here."
"It's my house."
"I know that." The words are sharp and Blair cringes the slightest bit. "I'm trying to get out of it."
She leans back against the wall, hips jutted out a bit, legs crossed at the ankle. She would leave, but she just can't. "Moving in with Chuck?" she inquires, her voice trembling with forced nonchalance.
"Stop."
"Stop what?"
"What you're doing." She tosses a few pairs of jeans into a bag, unfolded, bound to get wrinkled. "I went to Prague because he needed someone. He was hurt."
"You don't owe him anything."
Serena meets her eyes, her gaze measured. "He's my brother."
"Only when it suits you."
"Classy, Blair," she mutters, turning back toward the closet.
"Classy?" Her voice cracks. "You just…you went to him! You forgave him! Getting shot isn't a reason for absolution."
Serena's quiet for a long moment, and then she says, "I know it hurts. I know. But what happened with Jenny - "
"It's not about her!" Tears burn at her eyes but she blinks them away. "You don't know what he did!"
Silence engulfs them, heavy and stifling.
"You didn't tell me - "
"That doesn't matter! You're my friend, you're - you're supposed to take my word over his, you - "
" - and I hardly had a good reason to stay in Paris."
"I…" She doesn't know what to say. She leans into the wall more, her back pressed flat against it.
"It doesn't matter, okay? It's done. Just let me get my stuff and go." Serena bends over, reaching for another suitcase, and her little cotton shorts ride up considerably, giving Blair a glimpse of her ass - which is totally irrelevant to this whole conversation, except that she reacts.
And blurts out, "You don't have to…" But she trails off, hesitant. Admitting defeat has never really been a skill she's possessed.
"Don't I?" Serena grabs a handful of her underwear and drops it in the suitcase. She smiles, but it's bitter, not pretty at all. "I thought you and Nate would want your privacy."
Blair swallows. "Jealous?"
It's like she's hit a trigger word, or something. The fire dies abruptly in Serena's eyes and she abandons her underwear drawer, dropping down onto the mattress like she's been defeated, her eyes on the floor.
"Yes," she breathes.
Blair knows what she means, she does. She wants to take it at face value, wants to walk across the room and sit next to Serena on the bed. She wants to hug and wants to help S unpack. But her anger and her fear and all those months apart take precedence in her mind and she twists the confession unfairly: "You've always had a thing for him when he's mine, haven't you?"
Serena stares at her for a moment, and the hurt is evident all over her face, in her eyes and the curve of her lips and the pinkness in her cheeks, but she doesn't say anything. She hunches forward a little, curling in on herself, her hands pressed to her face.
Blair leaves to cry in her own room.
When she wakes up late that evening, after a nap that wasn't all that refreshing, every trace of Serena is gone.
"You're quiet." Nate tilts his head, trying to catch her eye.
Blair sighs. They're in her living room, on her sofa, watching a movie of Nate's choosing. She's leaning into him, head resting against his shoulder, and she feels all of thirteen years old again.
He shakes his shoulder, jostling her a little. "What's wrong?"
"Serena left today. She just…packed up everything and left."
Nate absorbs this. "Why?"
"We fought." Blair picks at an invisible thread on the sleeve of his button-down shirt. "You know that."
"You two always fight." He can afford to be cavalier about this. "And you always make up."
She blinks, hard. "This was different."
His tone softens; he reaches for the remote and mutes the movie. "Different how?"
"I just…" Her throat swells. "I don't know how to explain."
"You'll be okay." Nate wraps his arm around her and pulls her closer. "Serena loves you." A pause, and then he adds, "More than anyone."
She lifts her eyes to his face. "Yeah?"
"Yeah," he teases. "What do you mean, yeah? Of course."
Her lips curl a little, almost a smile.
"Let's talk about something else," Nate suggests, kissing her gently.
She giggles, relaxed and understanding. "Or not talk."
Blair fidgets in her seat in her poli sci class, un-crossing and re-crossing her legs.
"You know Serena?" she whispers to Nate, scribbling a note about game theory down.
He smirks a little, but he also looks tired - he's probably sick of discussing his ex-girlfriend with her all the time, but Blair can't help the way she's always thinking about her. "Yes," he mutters back. "I do."
She taps the end of her pen against her notebook page. "She looks…lonely." Every time Blair's seen her, anywhere on campus, she's been alone and quiet, very…not-Serena-like. "And I…" I'm worried.
Nate stares straight ahead. "I don't know what you want me to do about it."
"Can you…can you talk to her?"
He turns to look at her. "Why can't you?"
"Nate." She pouts at him, leaning a little closer.
Huffily, he tells her, "I already did."
She's not quite sure what to make of that, what to take away from Nate noticing Serena the same way she is, but she's too greedy for information to dwell on it. "And?"
"And…she said she's fine."
"She said? Or she was?"
He peeks at her notes and starts copying them down, zero-sum: participant's gain or loss is balanced by the gain or loss of the other participants, leaving a constant (zero) sum. "She said," he admits.
Blair gets to her feet, steps over his legs and into the aisle with a whisper of, "Washroom, be right back," and marches right out of the classroom.
Like she's summoned her, Serena is standing in the hallway.
She's leaning back against a wall, her hair braided and twisted into a complicated updo that's hardly meant for daytime. She's wearing a shirt too big, so that the neckline drops off of one of her shoulders, and a skirt that hits her mid-thigh. She's reading, a novel in her hands, the pages folded back, her blue gaze fixed on it.
Blair brushes by her as if she hasn't noticed any of this. "You should have gone to Brown." She means it, sincerely, but it comes off like an insult.
"Fuck off, Blair."
She spins around at those words, eyes widening, mouth falling open.
"I don't care." Serena doesn't look up from her book. "I really don't. You can chalk it all up to me being your experimental, European phase. You can laugh about this in ten years when you're wearing Nate's stupid heirloom ring and raising his kids. We're done, I get it, and I don't care - if you would just fuck the hell off. Please."
Anger bubbles up from her chest, filling her throat and her mouth, spilling from her lips. "You kissed me," she hisses.
"I've kissed you countless times." She's still pretending to read. "And you've always kissed back."
"It just…" Blair flounders for a moment, feeling heat rise to her cheeks. "We can't be the same, not now that I've gone to bed with you."
Serena shrugs. "So we won't be the same. We won't be anything." She flips her book closed, goes to move away - but Blair reaches out, wrapping her fingers all the way around S's wrist and pulling her back sharply.
"Blair - "
"I'm worried about you," she says firmly. "You don't…you don't look happy, and you're the happiest person I've ever known and I just…think you should have gone to Brown."
Serena tries and fails to shake her off. "I'm perfectly happy here."
"You say that, but you're not. You should have - "
"Stop saying that. Stop telling me what I should have done. I want to be here." She looks younger all of a sudden, with her hair pulled back from her face and her eyes wide. She twists her wrist in Blair's grasp again. "My dad went to med school here."
The heat of the anger she's feeling dissipates, giving way to something else. "Oh, honey…" she says very softly; so long ago, she started crossing that thin line between hate and love with Serena, and love kept winning out until it became the default value.
"Don't," Serena says, still trying to move away.
And Blair can't quite understand how what happens next happens at all, but her hands slip under Serena's skirt and her mouth lands on Serena's neck like it belongs there, or something, and her fingers are knuckle-deep inside Serena and there are hands, on her shoulders and arms, nails digging into her skin and this quiet, sweet little gasp of, "C'mon, B…" right by her ear - and Serena comes against her hand, eyes squeezed shut and breathing shaky.
Blair is shaking, too, when she pulls her hand away. She thinks she might leave but then Serena's gripping her wrist in turn, pulling Blair's hand toward her mouth, licking her slick fingers clean. And Blair stands there for a moment, frozen, because they're in the hallway of a building where anyone would see them (ohgodohgod, are there security cameras?) and this cannot be happening.
Except for the fact that it is, and she pulls her fingers away from Serena's lips and tongue so she can kiss her instead, tasting strawberry lip gloss and, well, Serena. She moans a little, right at the back of her throat, and Serena breaks the kiss, sucking in air like she hasn't been able to breathe in days.
Blair watches, still and shaking, as Serena puts herself back together - underwear pulled back up to her hips, the hem of her skirt down once again - and picks her book up from where it had fallen to the floor. She looks back at Blair, uneasy, licking her lips.
"I kissed you," Blair murmurs, breathless. Her lips curve upward like she wants to smile. "And you kissed me back."
It's as close to I'm sorry as she's going to get right now.
Serena stays quiet. There's a flush all over her skin, over her one bare shoulder and her collarbone and her neck and her cheeks. Then she whispers, "B…" like she doesn't know where they go from here.
Blair points, extending a finger toward the left. "I have class."
When she slips back into her seat next to Nate, smiling angelically, he reaches for her hand and she flinches.
"Hello?" she calls when she steps out of the elevator and into Nate's suite at the empire. She brought éclairs from his favourite bakery; she really needs to talk to him.
There's total silence for a moment, and she's about to call out his name again, but then Chuck walks out of his room - Chuck - and smirks at her like this is any other day.
It's the same as it always is, a lingering glance during which he undresses her with his eyes and then he says, in a voice more gravelly than she remembers it, "Waldorf; always a pleasure."
She drops the éclairs on the floor.
tbc.