130. gossip girl comment!fic round-up
Title | your lipstick stains
Rating | pg-13
Characters | Blair/Nate/Serena
Summary | I knew I wouldn't forget you, and so I went and let you blow my mind. Written for the myjunk_is_you March 2011 Comment Meme.
Serena breaks Blair’s heart first, breaks it with no goodbye hug, with a box of letters never sent, with the severing of childhood promises, with an ache that she can’t find it in herself to forgive.
Nate breaks Serena’s heart the evening before, but no one stops to consider it until a year later when the landscape of the Upper East Side changes again and a girl stands in a courtyard with her heart locked away and words thrown like knives toward a boy who hadn’t run after her.
Blair breaks Nate’s heart, shreds it slow and bittersweet with a ring on her finger she no longer wants and a frank realization on a city sidewalk and the way she doesn’t make a move to stop it when another boy peels off her clothes; she breaks the pattern that had been tried and true, the one where she picked him first and always and he had grown accustomed to it.
-
College is strange.
Yale courts Serena for her big smile on society pages, courts Nate because it’s good but it isn’t Dartmouth, courts Blair because she can’t remember ever wanting anything else.
They gravitate toward each other on the first day. Blair hooks her arm through Serena’s and lets herself be pulled closer, reaches out with her hand and finds Nate’s already waiting. Over her head, blue eyes meet and flicker away.
They might not be as whole as they once were but they still fit the same ways.
-
Serena has a roommate with a boyfriend, and neither of them have any shame. Blair has a roommate who does not believe in bras or shaving or Chanel.
Nate’s roommate is perfectly fine, but when they ask him to move off campus with them three weeks into the semester, he says yes.
-
There is a housekeeper - not Dorota but close enough - and a pug named Handsome and Serena slips into Blair’s dark room every night at around two o’clock in the morning and cuddles up next to her to sleep.
-
Occasionally, Nate brings a girl home.
But it never feels right and she’s always intimidated by Serena and Blair. So he stops, and that’s okay, because Serena never brings home boys (tired of them looking at her name and her chest and little more) and Blair never brings home boys (tired of bow ties and secret societies).
It’s nice, to just be the three of them.
-
Blair kisses Serena first. She’s drunk at the time.
Nate stares at them with wide, wide eyes until Serena giggles and crawls into his lap and kisses him, too. She tastes the way she always has and sort of like Blair’s lipstick.
-
There are thunderstorms in November.
Both girls crawl into Nate’s bed in the very early morning, laughing mutedly and curling up on either side of him. They’re wearing his t-shirts with their underwear; they use the same shampoo and it fills his sense, their skin is too soft under his hands.
When they fall asleep Blair is cuddled up to his side, hugging his arm with her feet all tangled with his, and Serena’s nose is pressed into his neck while her arm reaches across him and her fingers tangle in Blair’s hair.
Nate lies awake for a while, sandwiched between them as he’s always been, and listens to their synchronized breathing.
-
They spend wedding season in Paris, as soon as their exams are done.
The sun burns too bright and Serena laughs too loud, Blair stops buying new dresses and stops sleeping in her own bed, Nate’s tongue traces patterns over their skin and around the edges of ice cream cones.
-
Serena and Blair take each other as dates to every function they attend. Nate goes stag and watches them from the singles’ table.
They touch him every time they walk by: hands grazing his shoulders, palms against his back, kisses brushed against his temples. He lets himself be marked by them - just as he has since he was five years old.
-
Nate dances a slow waltz with Blair once, at a reception under the stars. The skirt of her dress twirls when he spins her and her eyes sparkle when he pulls her close.
Serena sits in the grass and when they join her again her mouth tastes like champagne.
Let’s do this,, she whispers as she rests her head in Blair’s lap. She doesn’t follow up with details.
Nate traces the shape of her mouth with his thumb and catches the enigmatic tilt to Blair’s lips.
Okay, he says to them, like he always has, like he always will. Okay.
-
Hearts mend easy when the pieces are all present and accounted for.
Title | we'd share each other like an island
Rating | pg-13
Characters | Serena; Serena/Carter
Summary | I find the map and draw a straight line over rivers, farms, and state lines the distance from 'A' to where you'd B, it's only finger-lengths that I see, I touch the place where I'd find your face. Written for the myjunk_is_you March 2011 Comment Meme.
She runs first but he runs faster.
At fourteen she gives him her virginity, lays it out on dew-soaked grass in the Hamptons, puts herself in his hands. She leaves just past midnight with green-stained limbs and twisted bra straps and a quiet ache swelling in her throat, thrumming between her legs, and tells herself she is unchanged.
She is fifteen when he takes off to see the world.
-
Gossip Girl has a map.
She traces her fingers along the pathways in Algebra class, eyes focused on her phone rather than equations, wondering where he is and what he wants and who he loves.
A new push-pin appears on the map in Tokyo. Across the room, Blair reaches back to drop a note on Nate’s desk and smiles back at him sweetly.
Serena’s fingers shake so she sits on her hands and tries to concentrate on x + y. She’s never been to Tokyo.
-
In April, he disappears, off the map and off the radar.
She stays up late, biting her fingernails and typing her credit card number out on an airline’s website.
The last couple months of school can’t be all that important, anyway.
-
He runs and she follows.
Finds him in Peru on a balmy night, lets him push her up against a wall and kiss her breathless, barely registering the wolf-whistles of passersby.
You disappeared, she whispers, resentful.
His fingers trace her lips like he’s trying to commit them to memory. He smirks. Her heart flutters.
And he says, you first.
-
They are an official couple for the duration of her eighteenth year of life.
One year wiser, she unpacks her bags and boxes at Brown, and tells herself it was all a mistake.
She wakes up in the middle of the night every day for the first month. Her feet ache for the roads she never traveled.
-
It would be weak and shallow and childish to fall in love with someone who doesn’t know how to stay still. She is sure of this.
Blair elopes in the winter after she turns twenty-one. It is a scandal in society. Serena is there (because that has always been the plan). Mouths whisper stories and tabloids print rumours while Serena sits on the Met steps and thinks of Nate, who was not at the wedding.
She waits several months to mention this to Blair.
Stories have endings, S, is the response she gets. Sometimes those endings aren’t happily ever after.
Serena considers the weight of her heart. She feels unfinished.
-
She quits Brown two weeks before graduation and does not bother to say goodbye to her roommates.
The first-class seat on the plane feels strangely like home. She falls asleep before takeoff.
-
She runs and he follows.
Dancing in the Dominican Republic, she falls off a bar, right into his arms.
You found me, she remarks later, head against a mattress, still half-drunk. Her toes curl as he trails kisses down to her navel.
Why the hell wouldn’t I, beautiful?
That is the night that he whispers that he loves her, mouth pressed against his shoulder as he curls around her in the darkness. Morning comes and they both pretend it away.
-
Once, a plane crashes and she thinks that he’s on it.
Forty-five minutes of panic turns into relief when she finally finds out that he caught a later flight. There are still thirteen hours before she sees him again -
And when she does she makes a scene, flying through the airport like something in a movie, throwing herself as him and wrapping her arms and legs around him as tight as she can.
I hate you, she says against his neck, I hate you.
He laughs into her hair and holds her for as long as she needs him to.
-
He runs and she goes with him.
Carter winds his fingers into her hair while they lie together in the late-morning light. She likes the way his mouth fits against hers.
She buys a map in Barcelona and marks every place they visit together with a tiny heart, coloured in with the black ink of her pen.
-
She cries the morning she wakes up alone, tears soaking her pillowcase. She calls Blair with no regard for the time difference and sobs like someone has torn her apart.
The sun paints the room yellow and she spends all morning feeling lonely.
-
Phone calls are the stuff of her imagination: I love you, I’m sorry, I’d never leave you, beautiful.
He prefers to find her in person, a bouquet of calla lilies and his mouth over her heart.
This is just another step in their tug-of-war but she falls asleep on top of him that night, her head curled against his chest, her legs hooked around his. He whispers to her as she dreams.
-
She runs and he figures out how to catch her.
At twenty-four, his proposal is a worldwide scavenger hunt that it takes her nearly a year to complete. She uses the same map she’s had since Barcelona and marks his landmarks with red hearts instead of black.
She is twenty-five when she finds him in Santorini and says yes, yes, yes.
Title | however long i stay, whatever words i say
Rating | pg-13
Characters | Dan/Nate
Summary | Whenever I'm alone with you, you make me feel like I am home again. Written for the myjunk_is_you March 2011 Comment Meme.
This is how it goes -
Dan marries Vanessa. His father cries at the wedding. It last two years and twenty-six days.
He calls Nate the night after they sign the divorce papers. Nate calls it a phone-drinking situation, so Dan sits on the roof of his building and sips his beer and talks to Nate until he sees the sun rise into the sky again.
Nate proposes to Serena. They throw their engagement party on the beach in the Hamptons and they don’t wear shoes. She dies on a Tuesday.
He sees Dan at the funeral. He buries her engagement ring deep into the sand and they sit together in silence until the sunlight fades away.
For a long while, Dan sleeps in a guest room at Nate’s house. They eat breakfast together everyday.
“I think we switched lives at some point, man,” he says one day, voice still hoarse from sleep.
They both laugh, because he meant it as a joke.
Nate takes his coffee cup. When he drinks, his mouth lingers on its rim.
Three months seems like long enough. Vanessa sends e-mails from Peru and when summer fades away it takes Serena’s spirit with it.
When Dan kisses Nate, he is vaguely surprised to find that his mouth still tastes like whiskey and grief. He is blatantly surprised that Nate kisses back.
(Again and again and again.)
Nate finds the drafts of Dan’s excruciatingly embarrassing writing.
His hair is mussed and his eyes are purely blue when he points to the scratched out words. “What are you looking for?”
Dan nudges him gently, shoulder against shoulder, and asks where Nate keeps his stash.
He waits until they are both good and high, acting like teenagers again, to ask Nate what he thinks he tastes like.
“You taste like…I dunno.” Nate’s man-bangs are too long and they fall into his eyes. “Coffee, I guess.” He inspects Dan’s face. “Hope.”
Dan scrawls the words on the back of a half-burnt popcorn bag.
whiskey, coffee, grief, hope
He starts over: balance.
“I should move out,” he blurts one day. “Or at least pay rent.”
Nate grins his first genuine grin in a long, long time. “You can pay rent naked.”
Almost a year later Nate looks at him, blue eyes surprise-wide. “We live together, don’t we?”
Dan knocks his knuckles gently against Nate’s temple. “Looks that way.”
Nate just shrugs. “Sweet.”
Rating | pg-13
Characters | Blair/Nate/Serena
Summary | I knew I wouldn't forget you, and so I went and let you blow my mind. Written for the myjunk_is_you March 2011 Comment Meme.
Serena breaks Blair’s heart first, breaks it with no goodbye hug, with a box of letters never sent, with the severing of childhood promises, with an ache that she can’t find it in herself to forgive.
Nate breaks Serena’s heart the evening before, but no one stops to consider it until a year later when the landscape of the Upper East Side changes again and a girl stands in a courtyard with her heart locked away and words thrown like knives toward a boy who hadn’t run after her.
Blair breaks Nate’s heart, shreds it slow and bittersweet with a ring on her finger she no longer wants and a frank realization on a city sidewalk and the way she doesn’t make a move to stop it when another boy peels off her clothes; she breaks the pattern that had been tried and true, the one where she picked him first and always and he had grown accustomed to it.
-
College is strange.
Yale courts Serena for her big smile on society pages, courts Nate because it’s good but it isn’t Dartmouth, courts Blair because she can’t remember ever wanting anything else.
They gravitate toward each other on the first day. Blair hooks her arm through Serena’s and lets herself be pulled closer, reaches out with her hand and finds Nate’s already waiting. Over her head, blue eyes meet and flicker away.
They might not be as whole as they once were but they still fit the same ways.
-
Serena has a roommate with a boyfriend, and neither of them have any shame. Blair has a roommate who does not believe in bras or shaving or Chanel.
Nate’s roommate is perfectly fine, but when they ask him to move off campus with them three weeks into the semester, he says yes.
-
There is a housekeeper - not Dorota but close enough - and a pug named Handsome and Serena slips into Blair’s dark room every night at around two o’clock in the morning and cuddles up next to her to sleep.
-
Occasionally, Nate brings a girl home.
But it never feels right and she’s always intimidated by Serena and Blair. So he stops, and that’s okay, because Serena never brings home boys (tired of them looking at her name and her chest and little more) and Blair never brings home boys (tired of bow ties and secret societies).
It’s nice, to just be the three of them.
-
Blair kisses Serena first. She’s drunk at the time.
Nate stares at them with wide, wide eyes until Serena giggles and crawls into his lap and kisses him, too. She tastes the way she always has and sort of like Blair’s lipstick.
-
There are thunderstorms in November.
Both girls crawl into Nate’s bed in the very early morning, laughing mutedly and curling up on either side of him. They’re wearing his t-shirts with their underwear; they use the same shampoo and it fills his sense, their skin is too soft under his hands.
When they fall asleep Blair is cuddled up to his side, hugging his arm with her feet all tangled with his, and Serena’s nose is pressed into his neck while her arm reaches across him and her fingers tangle in Blair’s hair.
Nate lies awake for a while, sandwiched between them as he’s always been, and listens to their synchronized breathing.
-
They spend wedding season in Paris, as soon as their exams are done.
The sun burns too bright and Serena laughs too loud, Blair stops buying new dresses and stops sleeping in her own bed, Nate’s tongue traces patterns over their skin and around the edges of ice cream cones.
-
Serena and Blair take each other as dates to every function they attend. Nate goes stag and watches them from the singles’ table.
They touch him every time they walk by: hands grazing his shoulders, palms against his back, kisses brushed against his temples. He lets himself be marked by them - just as he has since he was five years old.
-
Nate dances a slow waltz with Blair once, at a reception under the stars. The skirt of her dress twirls when he spins her and her eyes sparkle when he pulls her close.
Serena sits in the grass and when they join her again her mouth tastes like champagne.
Let’s do this,, she whispers as she rests her head in Blair’s lap. She doesn’t follow up with details.
Nate traces the shape of her mouth with his thumb and catches the enigmatic tilt to Blair’s lips.
Okay, he says to them, like he always has, like he always will. Okay.
-
Hearts mend easy when the pieces are all present and accounted for.
Title | we'd share each other like an island
Rating | pg-13
Characters | Serena; Serena/Carter
Summary | I find the map and draw a straight line over rivers, farms, and state lines the distance from 'A' to where you'd B, it's only finger-lengths that I see, I touch the place where I'd find your face. Written for the myjunk_is_you March 2011 Comment Meme.
She runs first but he runs faster.
At fourteen she gives him her virginity, lays it out on dew-soaked grass in the Hamptons, puts herself in his hands. She leaves just past midnight with green-stained limbs and twisted bra straps and a quiet ache swelling in her throat, thrumming between her legs, and tells herself she is unchanged.
She is fifteen when he takes off to see the world.
-
Gossip Girl has a map.
She traces her fingers along the pathways in Algebra class, eyes focused on her phone rather than equations, wondering where he is and what he wants and who he loves.
A new push-pin appears on the map in Tokyo. Across the room, Blair reaches back to drop a note on Nate’s desk and smiles back at him sweetly.
Serena’s fingers shake so she sits on her hands and tries to concentrate on x + y. She’s never been to Tokyo.
-
In April, he disappears, off the map and off the radar.
She stays up late, biting her fingernails and typing her credit card number out on an airline’s website.
The last couple months of school can’t be all that important, anyway.
-
He runs and she follows.
Finds him in Peru on a balmy night, lets him push her up against a wall and kiss her breathless, barely registering the wolf-whistles of passersby.
You disappeared, she whispers, resentful.
His fingers trace her lips like he’s trying to commit them to memory. He smirks. Her heart flutters.
And he says, you first.
-
They are an official couple for the duration of her eighteenth year of life.
One year wiser, she unpacks her bags and boxes at Brown, and tells herself it was all a mistake.
She wakes up in the middle of the night every day for the first month. Her feet ache for the roads she never traveled.
-
It would be weak and shallow and childish to fall in love with someone who doesn’t know how to stay still. She is sure of this.
Blair elopes in the winter after she turns twenty-one. It is a scandal in society. Serena is there (because that has always been the plan). Mouths whisper stories and tabloids print rumours while Serena sits on the Met steps and thinks of Nate, who was not at the wedding.
She waits several months to mention this to Blair.
Stories have endings, S, is the response she gets. Sometimes those endings aren’t happily ever after.
Serena considers the weight of her heart. She feels unfinished.
-
She quits Brown two weeks before graduation and does not bother to say goodbye to her roommates.
The first-class seat on the plane feels strangely like home. She falls asleep before takeoff.
-
She runs and he follows.
Dancing in the Dominican Republic, she falls off a bar, right into his arms.
You found me, she remarks later, head against a mattress, still half-drunk. Her toes curl as he trails kisses down to her navel.
Why the hell wouldn’t I, beautiful?
That is the night that he whispers that he loves her, mouth pressed against his shoulder as he curls around her in the darkness. Morning comes and they both pretend it away.
-
Once, a plane crashes and she thinks that he’s on it.
Forty-five minutes of panic turns into relief when she finally finds out that he caught a later flight. There are still thirteen hours before she sees him again -
And when she does she makes a scene, flying through the airport like something in a movie, throwing herself as him and wrapping her arms and legs around him as tight as she can.
I hate you, she says against his neck, I hate you.
He laughs into her hair and holds her for as long as she needs him to.
-
He runs and she goes with him.
Carter winds his fingers into her hair while they lie together in the late-morning light. She likes the way his mouth fits against hers.
She buys a map in Barcelona and marks every place they visit together with a tiny heart, coloured in with the black ink of her pen.
-
She cries the morning she wakes up alone, tears soaking her pillowcase. She calls Blair with no regard for the time difference and sobs like someone has torn her apart.
The sun paints the room yellow and she spends all morning feeling lonely.
-
Phone calls are the stuff of her imagination: I love you, I’m sorry, I’d never leave you, beautiful.
He prefers to find her in person, a bouquet of calla lilies and his mouth over her heart.
This is just another step in their tug-of-war but she falls asleep on top of him that night, her head curled against his chest, her legs hooked around his. He whispers to her as she dreams.
-
She runs and he figures out how to catch her.
At twenty-four, his proposal is a worldwide scavenger hunt that it takes her nearly a year to complete. She uses the same map she’s had since Barcelona and marks his landmarks with red hearts instead of black.
She is twenty-five when she finds him in Santorini and says yes, yes, yes.
Title | however long i stay, whatever words i say
Rating | pg-13
Characters | Dan/Nate
Summary | Whenever I'm alone with you, you make me feel like I am home again. Written for the myjunk_is_you March 2011 Comment Meme.
This is how it goes -
Dan marries Vanessa. His father cries at the wedding. It last two years and twenty-six days.
He calls Nate the night after they sign the divorce papers. Nate calls it a phone-drinking situation, so Dan sits on the roof of his building and sips his beer and talks to Nate until he sees the sun rise into the sky again.
Nate proposes to Serena. They throw their engagement party on the beach in the Hamptons and they don’t wear shoes. She dies on a Tuesday.
He sees Dan at the funeral. He buries her engagement ring deep into the sand and they sit together in silence until the sunlight fades away.
For a long while, Dan sleeps in a guest room at Nate’s house. They eat breakfast together everyday.
“I think we switched lives at some point, man,” he says one day, voice still hoarse from sleep.
They both laugh, because he meant it as a joke.
Nate takes his coffee cup. When he drinks, his mouth lingers on its rim.
Three months seems like long enough. Vanessa sends e-mails from Peru and when summer fades away it takes Serena’s spirit with it.
When Dan kisses Nate, he is vaguely surprised to find that his mouth still tastes like whiskey and grief. He is blatantly surprised that Nate kisses back.
(Again and again and again.)
Nate finds the drafts of Dan’s excruciatingly embarrassing writing.
His hair is mussed and his eyes are purely blue when he points to the scratched out words. “What are you looking for?”
Dan nudges him gently, shoulder against shoulder, and asks where Nate keeps his stash.
He waits until they are both good and high, acting like teenagers again, to ask Nate what he thinks he tastes like.
“You taste like…I dunno.” Nate’s man-bangs are too long and they fall into his eyes. “Coffee, I guess.” He inspects Dan’s face. “Hope.”
Dan scrawls the words on the back of a half-burnt popcorn bag.
whiskey, coffee, grief, hope
He starts over: balance.
“I should move out,” he blurts one day. “Or at least pay rent.”
Nate grins his first genuine grin in a long, long time. “You can pay rent naked.”
Almost a year later Nate looks at him, blue eyes surprise-wide. “We live together, don’t we?”
Dan knocks his knuckles gently against Nate’s temple. “Looks that way.”
Nate just shrugs. “Sweet.”