Inescapable
Title: Inescapable
Fandom/Pairing: Gossip Girl - Blair/Nate/Serena
Summary/Prompt: You Were Inside Me Like My Pulse
Rating/Word Count: T/636 words
A/N: Written for theburnthe_city challenge
Blair, Nate, Serena.
You couldn’t have one without the others. Since the days their parents had put them in the same nursery, under the care of a nanny or an au-pair, while a dinner party was being hosted outside, they were inseparable. A complete package.
Nothing would tear them apart. Nothing could tear them apart.
When Lily would take another spontaneous trip, with men that would soon become Serena’s new step father, Blair and Nate were there to give Serena and Eric somewhere to sleep. The first time Serena called them, drunk and crying, they were there without question to make sure she would do nothing she’d come to regret once she sobered up.
When Harold and Eleanor first started fighting, the beginning of the end for the Waldorf couple, Nate and Serena were there to give Blair a reprieve from the raised voices and slammed doors. When Harold finally left, boarding a plane to France, Serena was there to hold her friend’s hair back and Nate was waiting in her bedroom with her favorite chocolate and Audrey Hepburn movies.
When the pressure of expectations from Howard and Anne Archibald began to crush down heavily on Nate; Serena and Blair were there, being themselves, enough of a distraction - a welcomed distraction, for Nate.
Nothing would tear them apart. Nothing could tear them apart.
Except for themselves.
Blair, Nate and Serena became Blair&Nate and Serena.
“Nothing will change,” Blair promised her closest friend.
That was half the problem. Almost nothing changed between them. The quiet flirtation that Nate and Serena had been playing with for the last two years continued. Covert smiles, quiet laughs, Thanksgiving . There might have been Blair&Nate but they were still Nate and Serena.
Serena tried to stop. She told herself every single night before she went to bed that he was Blair’s boyfriend . He was one of her oldest friends, Blair her other. If she ever found about them their friendship would be ruined into oblivion. It was something that Blair would never forget, much less forgive.
But she could laugh with him, and have fun with him and together they could forget the pressures and expectations that their names brought upon them; and every time they did Serena forgot that he was Blair’s boyfriend.
Serena started to ignore the expressions that flashed across Nate’s face every time she had a new boy. She needed him out of her mind, and out of her thoughts. Her relationship with him wasn’t healthy - even she could see that at fifteen, and she craved the distance that their relationship was lacking.
Nate was fifteen years old. Growing up, he’d always had the complete attention of both Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen. His girls. As a child, he’d believed that they would be his girls forever, because within the innocence of childhood it was that easy, wasn’t it? He loved them both, he could have them both.
That was until Blair became his; and Serena became someone else’s, everyone else’s. But in a way, she was still his . She still looked to him for support, for the approval of the guys they both knew were essentially his replacement.
And while he was distracted by the freedom and carefree attitude Serena flaunted, there was Blair. The refined and graceful Blair, who needed him just as much as he needed her, who would always need him; Blair who his parents had loved for as long as he could remember, who they had quietly expected him to marry one day in the future.
Nate couldn’t escape Blair, any less than he could escape Serena. His girls.