201. like an american
Blair might be his wife, but he is Blair's partner. AU.
Dan/Blair, Nate/Serena, Serena/Carter. pg-13.
NB: Canon is completely irrelevant. This fic is based on FX's super amazing go watch it right now!!!! series The Americans.
For Megan; happy birthday!! This is not the fic in its entirety because it has been slowly but surely developing into a real monstrosity, but it is the first chapter and I really hope you like it! (And I promise to make a real effort to provide some actual updates in the near future.) I also hope you have the most fabulous of birthdays with warm-but-not-humid weather and that someone gives you a kitten. ♥
Blair was so young.
When Dan looks at her face, her cheeks almost grey from lack of colour, her eyelids so heavy, that's what he thinks: she was so, so young.
Technically, truly, he was young too - younger than her, by a matter of months. They were barely more than kids when they were armed with lies and sent across the world. He remembers Blair's youth so distinctly, her knee-length skirts and her low ponytails and her soft, fabric headbands. Now she wears jeans and her hair loose and only their little girl wears headbands, but Dan remembers how she was before. He remembers how much she'd wanted to look right, even in a place with rules she didn't yet know.
She was so young that he thinks he could cry -
And across town, staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, Serena gives into that very temptation and starts to sob.
.SIX MONTHS EARLIER.
"Sarah!"
Dan winces slightly at the shrill tone in Blair's voice, even though she's calling their daughter, not him. He fastens his watch on his wrist as he walks down the hallway, and he raps lightly on Sarah's door on the way toward the staircase. "C'mon, Sal," he says. "You're going to be late."
Downstairs, James is sitting at the table, legs dangling off his chair, cereal half-eaten and his nose buried in a book. Blair is, of course, fully dressed in wool pants, a soft sweater, and two necklaces looped around her neck. Her hair falls around her shoulders in neat waves and her hands are busy placing sandwiches and juice and apples into the children's backpacks.
"Sarah!" she calls again, impatiently.
"I'm coming!" Sarah yells back in an identically irritated tone.
Dan kisses Blair's cheek. "She's coming."
She ducks away from him. "She'll miss the bus."
"It comes in four minutes," James reports from the table without looking up for even a second.
Dan smiles, going over to drop a kiss onto the top of his son's head and then ruffling his hair. "Whatcha reading, Jamie?"
James holds the book up to reveal the cover for a second and then returns to his place on page forty-three.
"Harold James," Blair says. "I told you five minutes ago to finish your juice."
James heaves a sigh, still not looking up, and Dan says, "He drank half; he's fine."
"Yeah," James says quickly, latching onto Dan's words. "I'm fine."
Blair frowns at them for a half-second, the quickest flash of dissatisfaction on her face, and then she turns toward the stairs again, yells, "Sarah. Now."
Their daughter appears on the staircase moments later, a grumpy little pout on her lips. "I'm ready, Mom, you need to relax."
Blair bristles. Dan looks at Sarah and sees his little girl, his baby, her hair in its neat braid with a headband that matches the rest of her outfit perfectly, but he also sees the way the height of the hems of her skirts has slowly began to rise and her developing antagonistic attitude - his wife and his daughter are far too much alike and to say that he's dreading Sarah's teenage years is putting it lightly.
"Alright, alright," he says. "The bus will be here soon. Let's move, you two."
James closes his book and Sarah pulls on her sweater and they both accept their packed backpacks from Dan.
"Thank you, Daddy," Sarah says, and he can't help but smile at her.
"You're welcome, Sally," he says, and shoos them out the door.
Both he and Blair are perfectly silent and relatively still while they listen to their children move down the walkway and onto the sidewalk, already playfully arguing about something. They wait another moment, until they hear the bus slowly come to a stop and pull away again, before the finally turn to face each other.
"I'll take the meeting today," Blair says.
Dan frowns. "I thought I was - "
"You should go into work. I'll take it."
"We already agreed that I'd - "
"Now I'm disagreeing," Blair snaps. "I want it. I'm sick of - " She looks around the kitchen, at the children's drawings plastered on the fridge, at the dishcloth she was holding a moment ago, at the dirty cereal bowls on the small table, and seems too overwhelmed with choice to say exactly what she's sick of. "It's a simple meeting, Dan. I'm going."
Sometimes Dan is in the mood to argue with Blair - sometimes it can almost be fun - but today is not one of those days and the mere thought of fighting this out with her seems exhausting to him.
"Fine," he says. "Go."
Serena spends the day unpacking. Nate is downtown, in the endless meetings that his new job as a member of City Council seems to require, and it's Liam's first day at his new school. Their things are still a complete mess - they've never exactly been the neatest family, but this, right now, their things spilling out of boxes everywhere, crowding all the rooms, is extreme, even for them.
She's still sitting on the kitchen floor around two o'clock in the afternoon, somewhat desperately trying to figure out where everything should go. She liked their old house - loved it, really - and this house, which is slightly smaller and decorated in an array of boring beiges, is not exactly where she wants to be. But Nate had needed to move. Her marriage had needed to move.
She decides to give up for the moment, hopping up from the floor and dusting off her dress. Liam will be getting home fairly soon and she wants to make him a snack and hear all about his first day of school. She wants to be that person again - not just his mother but his mom.
Serena makes oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, and after she pulls them out of the oven, she sees a car pull into the driveway of the house across the street. She watches curiously as a man gets out. She's met her neighbours on either side - an elderly couple with a sad-faced dog and a very young couple with twin baby girls - but she's hardly seen the people across the street. As the man from the car goes into the house she notices that he looks close to her age, Nate's age, so she impulsively sets half the cookies on a plate and goes over to introduce herself.
When he opens the door to her he looks suspicious and then startled, and she's sort of starting to regret her decision, but nonetheless, she says, "Hi, I'm Serena Archibald. My family just moved in across the street. I just wanted to introduce myself. And, um - bring cookies."
"Oh," he says, his expression clearing. "Wow, thank you. You didn't have to - "
"It wasn't any trouble," she says quickly.
"Well, thank you, again. I'm so sorry, we should have brought something over. We've just - "
"It's fine," Serena says. "We weren't expecting anything. I just wanted to say hello."
"Hello," he echoes, and smiles at her. He holds out his hand. "Dan Humphrey."
She shifts the plate of cookies in her hold so that she can shake his hand. "Nice to meet you."
"You too. Come in!" he says abruptly, stepping aside. "Sorry, I seem to have lost my manners."
Serena smiles, walking inside and looking around for a moment, noting all the décor, subtle but tasteful. "This is a beautiful house."
"Thank you," Dan says. "It's mostly my wife's doing, but I'll take credit since she isn't here right now."
"Have you lived here long?" she asks.
"Thirteen years. We moved in shortly after we got married."
She smiles again. "It's the same for us. I mean - the time we've been married. Thirteen years."
Dan lifts one eyebrow and then drops it, teases, "Lucky thirteen."
"Yes, I - I guess so."
Dan opens his mouth to say something but Serena turns at the sound of the school bus pulling up just outside. "Oh, I should go," she says. "That's my son's bus."
He nods, opening the door for her. "Mine too."
They both walk outside and Serena calls, "Liam!" to get his attention when she spots her son's blonde head. He moves toward her alongside two other children who must be Dan's, a girl her son's age and a younger boy. Liam and the girl exchange a slightly confused glance when they both continue to walk in the same direction.
"Liam," Serena says again. "This is our neighbour, Mr. Humphrey."
"Please, call me Dan." He shakes her son's hand and offers him a smile. "These are my kids, Sally and Jamie. Guys, this is Mrs. Archibald."
"Serena," she corrects quickly.
The kids all nod, and in unison, they say, "Hi."
"It's very nice to meet you," Serena says. "It's great that there are some other kids in the neighbourhood."
"I'm not a kid," Liam murmurs.
Dan grins at that and Serena smiles a bit, too. "Young people," she amends.
"Hey," Dan says. "You should come over for dinner tonight. My wife would love to meet you."
"Where is Mom?" the girl, Sally, asks.
"Still at work, honey."
"My husband will probably be working a bit late today," Serena says. "I wouldn't want to force you to delay your dinnertime."
"No, don't worry about it," Dan says easily. "What time would work for you?"
She considers it for a beat. "Seven thirty?"
He nods. "That's great. We'll see you then?"
"Sure," she says. "Thank you."
Dan smiles at her, warm and easy. "Welcome to the neighbourhood."
Blair arrives home later than expected, and Dan is internally riddled with anxiety as he calmly helps James with his math homework. Sarah disappeared upstairs after school as she tends to do these days, dragging the phone into her room, the cord of it stretched across the hall, causing everyone else in the family to trip constantly.
James is very serious about his homework, carefully writing down numbers and frowning deeply when he has to erase anything. Sarah is very much like her mother, and Dan knows that James is a great deal like him, but he loves it when he catches something of his wife in their son - when the slight jut of James' bottom lip reminds him of Blair, when James lifts his chin in Blair's stubborn way.
The second car glides into the driveway nearly an hour after Dan had expected Blair would be back, and he's overwhelmed with so much relief that he gives his son one of the cookies their new neighbour had dropped off.
"I'm going to go see Mom," Dan says. "Finish those problems, okay?"
James bites into the cookie. "You're going to kiss."
"Probably," Dan says lightly, ruffling James' hair. "And you wouldn't want to see that."
James wrinkles his nose, says, "Gross."
"Exactly," Dan says wryly, heading into the garage to meet Blair.
When he sees her, he releases an audible gasp. "Jesus," he says.
Blair looks up at him, her expression the picture of utter calm, as though she doesn't have a split lip and bloody hands.
Dan is moving toward her before he's even taken time to think. "What happened?" he asks, taking her wrists gently. "Are you alright?"
She shakes him off. "I'm fine," she says, but there's a slight tremor in her voice that betrays her.
"What happened?" he repeats.
"Nothing. I took care of it."
"Took care of what?"
She ignores the question. "I need you to distract the children so I can shower."
Dan is reminded of their middle-class American reality. "Fuck," he says. "I invited our new neighbours over for dinner. I'll have to cancel - "
"No. No, it's fine. I'm fine. We don't want to look…" Blair trails off. "It's fine. I'll get cleaned up and you can cook. You make better lasagne than I do, anyway."
He touches her bleeding lip very gently. "What happened?" he asks her yet again.
Blair looks at him with those unreadable eyes of hers, always just a little bit sad. "Nothing I couldn't handle."
Serena gets a phone call around four in the afternoon, the measured voice of her partner informing her that an occasional informant from the KGB has gone missing.
Dan makes lasagne, warms rolls, and chills the wine, all while supervising the rest of James' homework time. He tells his son that Blair has a headache and they need to let her rest; Sarah is wrapped up in her own world until Dan goes to tell her that their company will be arriving in fifteen minutes, at which point she shrieks at him for not telling her earlier so she could get ready. He closes the door softly on his panicking daughter and moves down the hall toward the master bedroom.
Blair is sitting at her vanity, very carefully applying lipstick. Her hair is freshly washed and dried and she's changed into a dress. Her hands are clean and her face looks almost entirely fine; Dan knows to look closely at her lips, but he thinks that if he didn't, he might not have noticed the extent of the cut in the bottom one.
"Are you alright?" he asks from the doorway, watching her worriedly.
She caps her lipstick, studying her reflection. "Yes." There's a pause, and then she adds, "Of course." She blows out a little breath. "Come in."
Dan moves into the room, closing the door behind him and going over to perch on the end of her bed. "We could bring the lasagne over to them, instead."
"I said I was fine, Dan." Blair's eyes are still on her reflection. "What did you say the woman's name was?"
"Serena."
Blair nods. "Was she pretty?"
The question makes him blink, taken aback. "I wasn't really looking," he half-lies; he wasn't looking, but Serena was the kind of pretty it was difficult not to notice. When those words are met with utter silence from Blair, he adds, "She was, I guess."
Blair nods again, once, briskly, and then begins dusting powder over her cheeks.
"You look beautiful," Dan says softly.
"You've always been an awful liar."
"And you've always been beautiful," he counters. "Sally's starting to look so much like you."
Blair huffs a little sigh. "I don't know why we gave our children names when you refuse to use them."
"I use their names. I just…modify them a little. Sometimes."
"Sometimes," Blair scoffs. "If I'd wanted a daughter named Sally, I would have had them put that on her birth certificate."
Dan doesn't respond to that; they both know that Blair had done her research and picked a set of common American names, Sarah Elizabeth, so that their daughter would never stand out. She hadn't been quite as careful when James had been born, but it's easy enough to blame the name Harold on family tradition.
She stands after a few beats of silence, moving toward him briskly. "Let me see you," she says. She smoothes the collar of his shirt and then runs a hand over his hair, a bit more tender with him than he's accustomed to her being. There's something wistful in her eyes that he wants to ask her about, but she won't give him any straight answers, so there's really no point.
The doorbell rings and Blair drops her hands to her side. "Our company's here."
It turns out that Serena's husband is a great deal like her, blonde and handsome and quick to smile. Blair is the perfect hostess, complimenting Serena's dress and thanking her for the cookies and making sure that everyone has something to drink. They sit down to eat almost immediately.
After several moments of small talk about the children's school, Blair asks Nate, "What is it that you do? It seems like you're very busy."
"Just at the moment," he says, taking a drink of his wine. "I just took a position with City Council, so I'm getting caught up on things. Hopefully things will calm down soon."
"I'm sure they will," Blair says politely, offering him a smile.
"What about you two?" Nate asks. "Do you both work?"
Dan nods. "We run a travel agency together."
"Oh, you work together?" Serena asks.
Blair nods. "We met through our jobs."
"Do you like it?" Nate asks. "The travel business?"
Dan smiles. "It's alright," he says easily.
Nate nods, seeming to understand. "Not all of can have exciting jobs," he says, sliding Serena a look.
"Only exciting sometimes," she says lightly, cutting into her lasagne.
"Oh, you work?" Dan asks, then realizes how that must sound. "Sorry, I just meant - you were home this afternoon."
Serena nods, seemingly unoffended. "I'm taking a few days off right now to sort out the house, but I'm still in touch with the office."
"And what is it that you do?" Blair asks.
"I'm a federal agent."
Dan can feel his entire spine tense, but he's very practiced at not letting that tension show on his face. He very purposefully does not look at Blair. "Wow."
"That's so cool," James says, awed.
Serena smiles at him. "You think so?"
He nods vigorously.
"That must keep you very busy," Blair says.
"It can," Serena says, her voice somewhat measured. "Right now things are quite busy, but I'm technically off, so I don't really have to deal with things."
"Must be hard to be off the clock with a job like that," Dan comments.
Serena nods. "It can be."
"Do you catch bad guys?" James asks.
Serena smiles at him again. "I try very hard to."
"That's awesome."
Serena laughs softly. "Thanks, Jamie."
Blair hands the basket of rolls down the table to Serena. "Please, help yourself," she says, and then changes the subject.
"They're a nice family," Serena says, walking across the street with Nate after Liam has run ahead to their house. "Don't you think?"
He nods, his hand settled against her hip. "They seem nice," he agrees.
"It'd be nice to have some friends in the neighbourhood."
"It would," he says in his easy, neutral voice, the one she associates with politics.
"Didn't you like them?" she prompts softly.
Nate looks at her, and he must register the sadness lingering at the corners of her eyes, because he presses an impulsive kiss to her cheek. "I like you," he murmurs, his breath warm against her ear.
"Do you?" she teases softly, but she knows beneath her smile that that question has taken on a more serious tone recently.
He kisses her in the middle of the street, palms against her cheeks. "I love you, Serena," he tells her.
She nods, their noses brushing. "I love you too."
She's going to call the office and say that she can't come in tonight. She just can't.
Into the darkness of their bedroom, Dan says, "Tell me what happened."
He can see Blair's profile only very hazily. Their curtains are two layers of thick material, blocking out the moonlight and the rest of the world. He is conscious of her next to him, ultra-aware of her breathing, but he cannot see her face.
"I," Blair says, voice measured as can be, "handled," a quick breath, "it."
"Blair," Dan says, and he touches her hipbone with his fingertips.
Half a second later he's pinned against the mattress, Blair's hand tight against his throat, flirting with the possibility of strangulation. They stare at each other in the dark, not quite seeing. Dan does not move.
Slowly, so slowly, the pressure of her hand against his windpipe fades. His breathing is twice as fast as hers.
"He raped me," she says.
Dan, who came first in every year of school, who passed every examination ever given to him with flying colours, does not understand.
And then he does.
It is his turn for a lightning-fast reaction, sitting up so fast his forehead knocks sharply against his wife's. "He - "
"When," she says, so softly he has to strain to hear, "I was eighteen."
"What - "
"In training." A beat. "In Russia."
Dan's mind catches up. "The man today - "
"I haven't seen him since."
"Today - what - today, when - "
"I killed him," Blair says, and the shiver those words send down Dan's spine is almost pleasurable.
"Blair," he murmurs.
The tension seeps out of her body - not all of it, of course, but the majority. "He's in the car," she whispers. "The trunk of the car."
Dan's hands come to rest against her waist. "Jesus Christ."
"I just need to find somewhere," she says. "I'll find somewhere. I'll get rid of the body and it will be fine. It's fine."
"It's fine?" Dan repeats, unable to keep the incredulity he's feeling out of his voice.
"I handled the job and I'll handle the clean up."
Dan tilts his head a bit, studying Blair's face, lipstick smeared over the raw cut on her mouth, the slight tremors in her lips whenever she exhales. "The job was information," he says softly.
Quietly but with venom, Blair says, "Fuck information."
He sighs, shifting so that he can ease Blair off his lap and onto the bed next to him. He leans over her without putting much pressure on her body, focused just on looking into her face as he leans a forearm on the mattress on each side of her head, creating a bit of a cocoon for them, a misplaced manifestation of his desire to make her feel protected - something she's never seemed to want from him. "I understand why you did it," he says. "If I had been there, and if I had known, I would have killed him, too. I wish I could've killed him years ago. I wish - "
"Don't do that," Blair says, pushing at one of his shoulders so that he'll move. She gets up off the bed, pacing over to the window, though she doesn't touch the curtains. "I hate when you do that."
"Do what?" Dan asks, remaining on the bed, feeling defeat coming on.
"You know what," she says. In the dark, the silk of her nightie seems to glisten. "When you - you get…emotional."
Dan would like to hold her. He would like to kiss her forehead and her collarbone and the shells of her ears. He would like to be Blair's husband right now, to share her anger and offer her comfort. But she won't accept that, and he knows it. Blair might be his wife, but he is Blair's partner, so he swallows all the pain he feels on her behalf and says, "Isn't that what you did today, when you killed him? Got emotional?"
"Yes," she says, her tone even and slow in a deathly way.
And he can't do it. He can't criticize her. All he can do is look at Blair's stiff back, her perfect posture, the delicate curve of her shoulders in the dark. Finally, he says, "Let me deal with the goddamn body."
.TBC.
Dan/Blair, Nate/Serena, Serena/Carter. pg-13.
NB: Canon is completely irrelevant. This fic is based on FX's super amazing go watch it right now!!!! series The Americans.
For Megan; happy birthday!! This is not the fic in its entirety because it has been slowly but surely developing into a real monstrosity, but it is the first chapter and I really hope you like it! (And I promise to make a real effort to provide some actual updates in the near future.) I also hope you have the most fabulous of birthdays with warm-but-not-humid weather and that someone gives you a kitten. ♥
Blair was so young.
When Dan looks at her face, her cheeks almost grey from lack of colour, her eyelids so heavy, that's what he thinks: she was so, so young.
Technically, truly, he was young too - younger than her, by a matter of months. They were barely more than kids when they were armed with lies and sent across the world. He remembers Blair's youth so distinctly, her knee-length skirts and her low ponytails and her soft, fabric headbands. Now she wears jeans and her hair loose and only their little girl wears headbands, but Dan remembers how she was before. He remembers how much she'd wanted to look right, even in a place with rules she didn't yet know.
She was so young that he thinks he could cry -
And across town, staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, Serena gives into that very temptation and starts to sob.
.SIX MONTHS EARLIER.
"Sarah!"
Dan winces slightly at the shrill tone in Blair's voice, even though she's calling their daughter, not him. He fastens his watch on his wrist as he walks down the hallway, and he raps lightly on Sarah's door on the way toward the staircase. "C'mon, Sal," he says. "You're going to be late."
Downstairs, James is sitting at the table, legs dangling off his chair, cereal half-eaten and his nose buried in a book. Blair is, of course, fully dressed in wool pants, a soft sweater, and two necklaces looped around her neck. Her hair falls around her shoulders in neat waves and her hands are busy placing sandwiches and juice and apples into the children's backpacks.
"Sarah!" she calls again, impatiently.
"I'm coming!" Sarah yells back in an identically irritated tone.
Dan kisses Blair's cheek. "She's coming."
She ducks away from him. "She'll miss the bus."
"It comes in four minutes," James reports from the table without looking up for even a second.
Dan smiles, going over to drop a kiss onto the top of his son's head and then ruffling his hair. "Whatcha reading, Jamie?"
James holds the book up to reveal the cover for a second and then returns to his place on page forty-three.
"Harold James," Blair says. "I told you five minutes ago to finish your juice."
James heaves a sigh, still not looking up, and Dan says, "He drank half; he's fine."
"Yeah," James says quickly, latching onto Dan's words. "I'm fine."
Blair frowns at them for a half-second, the quickest flash of dissatisfaction on her face, and then she turns toward the stairs again, yells, "Sarah. Now."
Their daughter appears on the staircase moments later, a grumpy little pout on her lips. "I'm ready, Mom, you need to relax."
Blair bristles. Dan looks at Sarah and sees his little girl, his baby, her hair in its neat braid with a headband that matches the rest of her outfit perfectly, but he also sees the way the height of the hems of her skirts has slowly began to rise and her developing antagonistic attitude - his wife and his daughter are far too much alike and to say that he's dreading Sarah's teenage years is putting it lightly.
"Alright, alright," he says. "The bus will be here soon. Let's move, you two."
James closes his book and Sarah pulls on her sweater and they both accept their packed backpacks from Dan.
"Thank you, Daddy," Sarah says, and he can't help but smile at her.
"You're welcome, Sally," he says, and shoos them out the door.
Both he and Blair are perfectly silent and relatively still while they listen to their children move down the walkway and onto the sidewalk, already playfully arguing about something. They wait another moment, until they hear the bus slowly come to a stop and pull away again, before the finally turn to face each other.
"I'll take the meeting today," Blair says.
Dan frowns. "I thought I was - "
"You should go into work. I'll take it."
"We already agreed that I'd - "
"Now I'm disagreeing," Blair snaps. "I want it. I'm sick of - " She looks around the kitchen, at the children's drawings plastered on the fridge, at the dishcloth she was holding a moment ago, at the dirty cereal bowls on the small table, and seems too overwhelmed with choice to say exactly what she's sick of. "It's a simple meeting, Dan. I'm going."
Sometimes Dan is in the mood to argue with Blair - sometimes it can almost be fun - but today is not one of those days and the mere thought of fighting this out with her seems exhausting to him.
"Fine," he says. "Go."
Serena spends the day unpacking. Nate is downtown, in the endless meetings that his new job as a member of City Council seems to require, and it's Liam's first day at his new school. Their things are still a complete mess - they've never exactly been the neatest family, but this, right now, their things spilling out of boxes everywhere, crowding all the rooms, is extreme, even for them.
She's still sitting on the kitchen floor around two o'clock in the afternoon, somewhat desperately trying to figure out where everything should go. She liked their old house - loved it, really - and this house, which is slightly smaller and decorated in an array of boring beiges, is not exactly where she wants to be. But Nate had needed to move. Her marriage had needed to move.
She decides to give up for the moment, hopping up from the floor and dusting off her dress. Liam will be getting home fairly soon and she wants to make him a snack and hear all about his first day of school. She wants to be that person again - not just his mother but his mom.
Serena makes oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, and after she pulls them out of the oven, she sees a car pull into the driveway of the house across the street. She watches curiously as a man gets out. She's met her neighbours on either side - an elderly couple with a sad-faced dog and a very young couple with twin baby girls - but she's hardly seen the people across the street. As the man from the car goes into the house she notices that he looks close to her age, Nate's age, so she impulsively sets half the cookies on a plate and goes over to introduce herself.
When he opens the door to her he looks suspicious and then startled, and she's sort of starting to regret her decision, but nonetheless, she says, "Hi, I'm Serena Archibald. My family just moved in across the street. I just wanted to introduce myself. And, um - bring cookies."
"Oh," he says, his expression clearing. "Wow, thank you. You didn't have to - "
"It wasn't any trouble," she says quickly.
"Well, thank you, again. I'm so sorry, we should have brought something over. We've just - "
"It's fine," Serena says. "We weren't expecting anything. I just wanted to say hello."
"Hello," he echoes, and smiles at her. He holds out his hand. "Dan Humphrey."
She shifts the plate of cookies in her hold so that she can shake his hand. "Nice to meet you."
"You too. Come in!" he says abruptly, stepping aside. "Sorry, I seem to have lost my manners."
Serena smiles, walking inside and looking around for a moment, noting all the décor, subtle but tasteful. "This is a beautiful house."
"Thank you," Dan says. "It's mostly my wife's doing, but I'll take credit since she isn't here right now."
"Have you lived here long?" she asks.
"Thirteen years. We moved in shortly after we got married."
She smiles again. "It's the same for us. I mean - the time we've been married. Thirteen years."
Dan lifts one eyebrow and then drops it, teases, "Lucky thirteen."
"Yes, I - I guess so."
Dan opens his mouth to say something but Serena turns at the sound of the school bus pulling up just outside. "Oh, I should go," she says. "That's my son's bus."
He nods, opening the door for her. "Mine too."
They both walk outside and Serena calls, "Liam!" to get his attention when she spots her son's blonde head. He moves toward her alongside two other children who must be Dan's, a girl her son's age and a younger boy. Liam and the girl exchange a slightly confused glance when they both continue to walk in the same direction.
"Liam," Serena says again. "This is our neighbour, Mr. Humphrey."
"Please, call me Dan." He shakes her son's hand and offers him a smile. "These are my kids, Sally and Jamie. Guys, this is Mrs. Archibald."
"Serena," she corrects quickly.
The kids all nod, and in unison, they say, "Hi."
"It's very nice to meet you," Serena says. "It's great that there are some other kids in the neighbourhood."
"I'm not a kid," Liam murmurs.
Dan grins at that and Serena smiles a bit, too. "Young people," she amends.
"Hey," Dan says. "You should come over for dinner tonight. My wife would love to meet you."
"Where is Mom?" the girl, Sally, asks.
"Still at work, honey."
"My husband will probably be working a bit late today," Serena says. "I wouldn't want to force you to delay your dinnertime."
"No, don't worry about it," Dan says easily. "What time would work for you?"
She considers it for a beat. "Seven thirty?"
He nods. "That's great. We'll see you then?"
"Sure," she says. "Thank you."
Dan smiles at her, warm and easy. "Welcome to the neighbourhood."
Blair arrives home later than expected, and Dan is internally riddled with anxiety as he calmly helps James with his math homework. Sarah disappeared upstairs after school as she tends to do these days, dragging the phone into her room, the cord of it stretched across the hall, causing everyone else in the family to trip constantly.
James is very serious about his homework, carefully writing down numbers and frowning deeply when he has to erase anything. Sarah is very much like her mother, and Dan knows that James is a great deal like him, but he loves it when he catches something of his wife in their son - when the slight jut of James' bottom lip reminds him of Blair, when James lifts his chin in Blair's stubborn way.
The second car glides into the driveway nearly an hour after Dan had expected Blair would be back, and he's overwhelmed with so much relief that he gives his son one of the cookies their new neighbour had dropped off.
"I'm going to go see Mom," Dan says. "Finish those problems, okay?"
James bites into the cookie. "You're going to kiss."
"Probably," Dan says lightly, ruffling James' hair. "And you wouldn't want to see that."
James wrinkles his nose, says, "Gross."
"Exactly," Dan says wryly, heading into the garage to meet Blair.
When he sees her, he releases an audible gasp. "Jesus," he says.
Blair looks up at him, her expression the picture of utter calm, as though she doesn't have a split lip and bloody hands.
Dan is moving toward her before he's even taken time to think. "What happened?" he asks, taking her wrists gently. "Are you alright?"
She shakes him off. "I'm fine," she says, but there's a slight tremor in her voice that betrays her.
"What happened?" he repeats.
"Nothing. I took care of it."
"Took care of what?"
She ignores the question. "I need you to distract the children so I can shower."
Dan is reminded of their middle-class American reality. "Fuck," he says. "I invited our new neighbours over for dinner. I'll have to cancel - "
"No. No, it's fine. I'm fine. We don't want to look…" Blair trails off. "It's fine. I'll get cleaned up and you can cook. You make better lasagne than I do, anyway."
He touches her bleeding lip very gently. "What happened?" he asks her yet again.
Blair looks at him with those unreadable eyes of hers, always just a little bit sad. "Nothing I couldn't handle."
Serena gets a phone call around four in the afternoon, the measured voice of her partner informing her that an occasional informant from the KGB has gone missing.
Dan makes lasagne, warms rolls, and chills the wine, all while supervising the rest of James' homework time. He tells his son that Blair has a headache and they need to let her rest; Sarah is wrapped up in her own world until Dan goes to tell her that their company will be arriving in fifteen minutes, at which point she shrieks at him for not telling her earlier so she could get ready. He closes the door softly on his panicking daughter and moves down the hall toward the master bedroom.
Blair is sitting at her vanity, very carefully applying lipstick. Her hair is freshly washed and dried and she's changed into a dress. Her hands are clean and her face looks almost entirely fine; Dan knows to look closely at her lips, but he thinks that if he didn't, he might not have noticed the extent of the cut in the bottom one.
"Are you alright?" he asks from the doorway, watching her worriedly.
She caps her lipstick, studying her reflection. "Yes." There's a pause, and then she adds, "Of course." She blows out a little breath. "Come in."
Dan moves into the room, closing the door behind him and going over to perch on the end of her bed. "We could bring the lasagne over to them, instead."
"I said I was fine, Dan." Blair's eyes are still on her reflection. "What did you say the woman's name was?"
"Serena."
Blair nods. "Was she pretty?"
The question makes him blink, taken aback. "I wasn't really looking," he half-lies; he wasn't looking, but Serena was the kind of pretty it was difficult not to notice. When those words are met with utter silence from Blair, he adds, "She was, I guess."
Blair nods again, once, briskly, and then begins dusting powder over her cheeks.
"You look beautiful," Dan says softly.
"You've always been an awful liar."
"And you've always been beautiful," he counters. "Sally's starting to look so much like you."
Blair huffs a little sigh. "I don't know why we gave our children names when you refuse to use them."
"I use their names. I just…modify them a little. Sometimes."
"Sometimes," Blair scoffs. "If I'd wanted a daughter named Sally, I would have had them put that on her birth certificate."
Dan doesn't respond to that; they both know that Blair had done her research and picked a set of common American names, Sarah Elizabeth, so that their daughter would never stand out. She hadn't been quite as careful when James had been born, but it's easy enough to blame the name Harold on family tradition.
She stands after a few beats of silence, moving toward him briskly. "Let me see you," she says. She smoothes the collar of his shirt and then runs a hand over his hair, a bit more tender with him than he's accustomed to her being. There's something wistful in her eyes that he wants to ask her about, but she won't give him any straight answers, so there's really no point.
The doorbell rings and Blair drops her hands to her side. "Our company's here."
It turns out that Serena's husband is a great deal like her, blonde and handsome and quick to smile. Blair is the perfect hostess, complimenting Serena's dress and thanking her for the cookies and making sure that everyone has something to drink. They sit down to eat almost immediately.
After several moments of small talk about the children's school, Blair asks Nate, "What is it that you do? It seems like you're very busy."
"Just at the moment," he says, taking a drink of his wine. "I just took a position with City Council, so I'm getting caught up on things. Hopefully things will calm down soon."
"I'm sure they will," Blair says politely, offering him a smile.
"What about you two?" Nate asks. "Do you both work?"
Dan nods. "We run a travel agency together."
"Oh, you work together?" Serena asks.
Blair nods. "We met through our jobs."
"Do you like it?" Nate asks. "The travel business?"
Dan smiles. "It's alright," he says easily.
Nate nods, seeming to understand. "Not all of can have exciting jobs," he says, sliding Serena a look.
"Only exciting sometimes," she says lightly, cutting into her lasagne.
"Oh, you work?" Dan asks, then realizes how that must sound. "Sorry, I just meant - you were home this afternoon."
Serena nods, seemingly unoffended. "I'm taking a few days off right now to sort out the house, but I'm still in touch with the office."
"And what is it that you do?" Blair asks.
"I'm a federal agent."
Dan can feel his entire spine tense, but he's very practiced at not letting that tension show on his face. He very purposefully does not look at Blair. "Wow."
"That's so cool," James says, awed.
Serena smiles at him. "You think so?"
He nods vigorously.
"That must keep you very busy," Blair says.
"It can," Serena says, her voice somewhat measured. "Right now things are quite busy, but I'm technically off, so I don't really have to deal with things."
"Must be hard to be off the clock with a job like that," Dan comments.
Serena nods. "It can be."
"Do you catch bad guys?" James asks.
Serena smiles at him again. "I try very hard to."
"That's awesome."
Serena laughs softly. "Thanks, Jamie."
Blair hands the basket of rolls down the table to Serena. "Please, help yourself," she says, and then changes the subject.
"They're a nice family," Serena says, walking across the street with Nate after Liam has run ahead to their house. "Don't you think?"
He nods, his hand settled against her hip. "They seem nice," he agrees.
"It'd be nice to have some friends in the neighbourhood."
"It would," he says in his easy, neutral voice, the one she associates with politics.
"Didn't you like them?" she prompts softly.
Nate looks at her, and he must register the sadness lingering at the corners of her eyes, because he presses an impulsive kiss to her cheek. "I like you," he murmurs, his breath warm against her ear.
"Do you?" she teases softly, but she knows beneath her smile that that question has taken on a more serious tone recently.
He kisses her in the middle of the street, palms against her cheeks. "I love you, Serena," he tells her.
She nods, their noses brushing. "I love you too."
She's going to call the office and say that she can't come in tonight. She just can't.
Into the darkness of their bedroom, Dan says, "Tell me what happened."
He can see Blair's profile only very hazily. Their curtains are two layers of thick material, blocking out the moonlight and the rest of the world. He is conscious of her next to him, ultra-aware of her breathing, but he cannot see her face.
"I," Blair says, voice measured as can be, "handled," a quick breath, "it."
"Blair," Dan says, and he touches her hipbone with his fingertips.
Half a second later he's pinned against the mattress, Blair's hand tight against his throat, flirting with the possibility of strangulation. They stare at each other in the dark, not quite seeing. Dan does not move.
Slowly, so slowly, the pressure of her hand against his windpipe fades. His breathing is twice as fast as hers.
"He raped me," she says.
Dan, who came first in every year of school, who passed every examination ever given to him with flying colours, does not understand.
And then he does.
It is his turn for a lightning-fast reaction, sitting up so fast his forehead knocks sharply against his wife's. "He - "
"When," she says, so softly he has to strain to hear, "I was eighteen."
"What - "
"In training." A beat. "In Russia."
Dan's mind catches up. "The man today - "
"I haven't seen him since."
"Today - what - today, when - "
"I killed him," Blair says, and the shiver those words send down Dan's spine is almost pleasurable.
"Blair," he murmurs.
The tension seeps out of her body - not all of it, of course, but the majority. "He's in the car," she whispers. "The trunk of the car."
Dan's hands come to rest against her waist. "Jesus Christ."
"I just need to find somewhere," she says. "I'll find somewhere. I'll get rid of the body and it will be fine. It's fine."
"It's fine?" Dan repeats, unable to keep the incredulity he's feeling out of his voice.
"I handled the job and I'll handle the clean up."
Dan tilts his head a bit, studying Blair's face, lipstick smeared over the raw cut on her mouth, the slight tremors in her lips whenever she exhales. "The job was information," he says softly.
Quietly but with venom, Blair says, "Fuck information."
He sighs, shifting so that he can ease Blair off his lap and onto the bed next to him. He leans over her without putting much pressure on her body, focused just on looking into her face as he leans a forearm on the mattress on each side of her head, creating a bit of a cocoon for them, a misplaced manifestation of his desire to make her feel protected - something she's never seemed to want from him. "I understand why you did it," he says. "If I had been there, and if I had known, I would have killed him, too. I wish I could've killed him years ago. I wish - "
"Don't do that," Blair says, pushing at one of his shoulders so that he'll move. She gets up off the bed, pacing over to the window, though she doesn't touch the curtains. "I hate when you do that."
"Do what?" Dan asks, remaining on the bed, feeling defeat coming on.
"You know what," she says. In the dark, the silk of her nightie seems to glisten. "When you - you get…emotional."
Dan would like to hold her. He would like to kiss her forehead and her collarbone and the shells of her ears. He would like to be Blair's husband right now, to share her anger and offer her comfort. But she won't accept that, and he knows it. Blair might be his wife, but he is Blair's partner, so he swallows all the pain he feels on her behalf and says, "Isn't that what you did today, when you killed him? Got emotional?"
"Yes," she says, her tone even and slow in a deathly way.
And he can't do it. He can't criticize her. All he can do is look at Blair's stiff back, her perfect posture, the delicate curve of her shoulders in the dark. Finally, he says, "Let me deal with the goddamn body."
.TBC.