Crazy and Reckless (4/4?)
He dreams again. But now it’s of the sand, red, hot, scalding.
He sees Micah smiling, blood dripping down his face (oh, God, oh God).
It shifts. The Sheppard Wedding.
Serena. Long locks of blonde hair.
His fingers. The taste of vodka on her lips.
Perfume. Chanel (Arabian nights? Desert Passion?).
It shifts. The ice rink of childhood.
Central park. Winter.
Blair in a pink skirt. Pink headband. Pink mittens. Pink. Pink. Pink.
(he could drown in pepto bismal and he would be pink forever.)
He’s so hot. He wants to stretch out his hand and touch the ice, touch the snowflakes that flutter on to Blair’s eyelashes. He reaches out. His fingers caress a single snowflake on Blair’s cheek.
She turns to sand. Collapses in a mutinous pile at his feet. He wants to scream (he can’t remember how)
“oh my god.”
Heels on tile.
“oh my god.”
Getting closer
“oh my god. I thought you said he was better?”
Blair.
“Chuck! You said he was better.”
Angry Blair.
“He was.”
A sigh.
“then what happened?”
A hand on Nate’s face. Cool, but not cold.
“the fever came back.”
Chuck. A sigh. (he wipes his hand across his face because things aren’t going according to plan. Because Chuck is tired. Because he’s been sitting here for days, watching his best friend battle something he cannot bribe.)
“I thought it was gone?”
Hand on Nate’s forehead, a ring on her finger, colder than the rest of her.
“it was, Blair. Then it came back. The doctors say it’s normal.”
“This isn’t normal, Chuck. He needs to be better. Now.”
Blair is queen and Blair demands (and all the little horses and all the little men put Nate back together again).
“He will be. Don’t worry.”
A whimper. The hand leaves his face (don’t go). The sound of two bodies pressed against each other. A hug, a release of emotion (his fault. Always his fault).
The hand is back. On his head. On his scalp. Inquisitive fingers.
“Dear Lord. What did they do to his hair?” disgust mixed with anger. Oh, Blair.
It was the army. He couldn’t really keep blonde bangs.
Chuck chuckles (pain meds, Nate realizes, are awesome awesome things)
“Relax Blair. It will grow out again.”
A sigh.
“such nice hair. I’ll have to call Gorza, he’s Roman’s hair stylist, and have him fly in.”
The hand leaves his short cropped hair, and rests on his arm.
Water on his face. A tear? But everyone knows that Queen’s don’t cry.
“Yes. I’ll do that right away. We can’t have him looking like this. It’s atrocious.”
“We should probably wait, Blair, until Nathaniel can keep his eyes open for more than three minutes before we subject him to a flamboyant hair stylist”
Chuck was always the smartest of them. Bravest. Most cunning. Protector. Suit Wearer.
“Oh? Does his hair go to sleep too, then Chuck? Honestly, sometimes I don’t think you care.”
About Nate’s hair. Probably not.
“I care Blair.”
“I know.”
The hand leaves his arm. It doesn’t return.
“Has he woken up at all?”
“Only the twice yesterday.”
Yesterday? Yesterday? It felt like only minutes ago.
“And he wasn’t awake for long?”
“Only a few seconds the first time, and few minutes the second. He seemed quite out of it. Could barely speak. He only managed to get a few words out before he fell asleep again.”
“I’d imagine. They have him on more drugs than most Upper East Side trophy wives. They’ve got him on some of the stuff that Poppy Straigthen was taking before they took her off to Betty Ford.”
“How scandalous.”
“Oh hush Chuck.”
Silence.
Nate can hear Blair’s breath, soft and raspy. Fear. It’s the sound of Blair’s fear. He heard it when her father left, when she lost control of her body, when Serena took his boat out when they were eight and she got lost. Blair fear he knows so very well. And he can’t stand to let it continue.
He opens his eyes. Slowly, because the whole world is sitting on top of them, but he opens them.
“Nate!” Blair squeal, jumping forward to the head of his bed to look down on him. “Hey.”
“Hi,” he grins sheepishly back, drugs hazing Blair in and out of focus.
“you’re going to be okay Nate. Don’t worry.”
Nate wants to question her, wants to tell her he heard what she had said, that he can feel her fear, her worry; but Blair just smiles down at him, matronly, like the mother that Nate has yet to see or hear from. And he smiles back at her, at Blair, at his past “novia” (as Jeff would have said), but always friend.
“Everything is going to be alright, Nate.”
And he believes.
They talk for a few minutes, her always regaling tales of triumph. He lets her build up her kingdom even though he knows the truth, happy to be with his friends once more. Chuck stays back, silently listening to her, content to hear her voice and Nate’s responses, even as they grow softer and softer as he drifts back to sleep.
Nate’s eyes begin to close, Blair in the middle of a fable of a fallen princess. He jerks away. fear. The dreams. The dreams. The dreams.
“Nate?”
Concern
“Nathaniel?”
Concern.
“ my dre’ms. Sand. An’ hot. don’ wan’ ‘o.” the promise of sleep slurs his already mangled speech. He’s so very tired. He’s so very afraid.
Chuck squeezes his ankle, the support and warmth circulating through his blood stream and filling his heart.
“It’s okay Nate. We’re here. No bad dreams allowed. It’s alright.” Blair promises, without a hint of condescending in her voice. He opens his eyes and looks at her; no eyes rolled, just concern projecting out, and sadness.
It’s childish, Nate knows. This fear of the dreams. But he only closes his eyes now, knowing that everyone and everything is afraid of Blair and Chuck together.
Once again Chuck’s baritone voice, “sleep Nathaniel,” sends him off into the blissful black.
He only dreams of the summer and of the Hamptons. No bad dreams haunt him that night.
He begins to heal. Slowly at first, each day feeling pained and agonizing. The hospital monitors his pain medication intake closely (the son of an addict and all) and some days his body is liquid lightening with pain. He grows antsy, wants to rip out the IVs that tether him to his bed. He tries once, and is stunned by the weak kitten like feeling that comes right before he collapses on the floor. The great Nate Archibald, son of a dynasty, solider of an unloved war, can’t even stand up straight without shaking.
The visitors begin to multiply. Dan comes one day, all the movies his girlfriend has ever been in with him “Dude. Just, don’t judge her okay? She’s a great actress. It’s the scripts, the writers, they all think their Hemmingway or Fitzgerald, or Vonnegut. But they’re not.” They watch them all (and if Nate falls asleep, he always finds that when he wakes, the movie has been paused exactly where he last recalls, Dan silently writing in his beaten up old notebook, but ready to begin watching again.) They both laugh at the campiness, and Dan tells him dirty little stories from college. He makes Nate so proud. Brooklyn has finally grown up.
Vanessa comes at first alone, bringing with her pictures from her backpacking across Europe (“everything deserved to be photographed Nate. Everything.”). She sits on the bed with him, and eats his jello and shows him Prague and Paris and San Sebastian in a way that he had never experienced it when he went with the family. The pictures are more vibrant, the people more real, more true that what he had ever seen from the Four Seasons and five star restaurants ( it reminds him of the sand box, how he had first discovered a world beyond what old money had allowed him to see).
Her stories encompass tasting things whose names she still doesn’t know, being stranded in a small German town where no one spoke any English, and watching the sun set in Rome. Her hands fly as she recounts her memories, fully made visible by her desire to capture every moment of it with her camera. She leaves photos scattered throughout the room. A hostel in London by his door, taped with a smiley face sticker; a canal of Venice next to his bathroom; by his window is a photograph of the countryside of Greece, where according to Vanessa; you could taste the olive oil in the wind. She never once asks him to tell her about what happened, why there’s a medal waiting for him when he’s ready to receive it. He just talks, and flips through hundreds of pictures, a smile constantly on her face.
Then one day, she brings with her, her boyfriend, Scott, a guy who he instantly likes. He promises to treat her well, she rolls her eyes, and he and him talk for a good hour and half about soccer and lacrosse. Scott comes by some times on his own, when the suffocating feeling of suddenly being a Humphrey and a VanderWoodsen is too much; he stays and helps Nate learn to hold things again in his bum arm, to walk across the room, to take tours down the hall.
Tripp visits once, followed by his press secretary and a guy with a camera. They talk for a little bit, Tripp commenting on the scrapes on his face, still angry and red, the sling that Nate still wears. Nate asks about Maureen, but Tripp waves it off. He wants to know about the war, about the enemy, about progress, and regress, and “your buddy, Nate, the one that died” and about things that Nate can’t, won’t, think about. Tripp mentions “heroism” and “looks good for the family name” and Nate gets so nauseous he almost vomits right on Tripp’s three hundred dollar linen shirt.
Tripp notices and gets the hell out, but not before the creep guy with the camera snaps a couple of more shots.
Nate’s not even surprised when a picture of Tripp leaving the hospital surfaces in several newspapers and magazines the next day. Headlines “The War Hits Home for Congressman” are just the beginning (Nate does notice the appearance the next day of a man in a suit by his door. He lets his friends in, but double checks the ID of all hospital staff.)
Serena’s absence is noticed, noted and then discarded. Nate’s been to war, watched his friends die. He doesn’t have time for her crisis of the moment or her secrets. He misses her blonde hair, and the way she could light up a room with her smile, but he knows that something is going on, something the Blair won’t talk about, so he lets it go. He knows she’ll come around when she’s good and ready.
So Nate has Dan and Vanessa and Scott there during the day, filling up the moments so he doesn’t have time to think back, to remember the heat of the moment, the desperation that over took every part of him as he raced to Micah. He simply begins to heal, to recover and renew. His cuts and bruises begin to fade, the pain begins to wean. He remembers how to stay awake for more than five minutes (a challenge during that first week home for sure.) He learns how to re-use his arm, one bullet and two surgeries later. He listens to Blair tsk at his scars, laughs as she calls her mother to get a recommendation for a good plastic surgeon and throws cups at her (with his good arm, the other one he has yet to gain full dexterity in yet) when she tries to schedule him an appointment.
She doesn’t understand (and he never wants her too) that the scars are there for a reason. They’re there because he did something, because he went where others could not go, and he survived.
He learns that they buried Micah on a sunny day in Georgia while Nate was in the midst of fevered dreams and delirium. He was laid to rest with his sisters’ watching, and the whole town too. He was honored and remembered, and Nate can’t ask for more. He plans in the future, when he leaves the hospital, and the watchful eye of his friend to visit Micah, to say goodbye.
His unit is still over in the sandbox. Two men down, but they’re still fighting. Nate wants to go back so bad, but his shoulder won’t ever let him join the fire fight again.
The nights though, Nate thought he was going to have a hard time with. Back over there, he always had the soft snores of Micah and the rummaging about of the other guys to listen to as he drifted to sleep; now they are achingly absent. But Nate shouldn’t have worried. Because at night, when the dark settles in, and the moon holds court in the sky, Chuck shows up to his room (rules and regulations have never held dominance in Chuck Bass’ life, why would visiting hours). Sometimes they don’t even speak, Chuck simply reads the newspaper (like the day Nate first awoke), or he looks over budget forms or the newest edition of Maxim and Nate sleeps, soundly, and protected. But other times, (because he knows his best friend) he brings the x-box and they play late into the night, Nate unable to close his eyes, the pain too much that day, or the memories to raw.
He’s released a month after he first arrived, two surgeries behind him (and another if Blair is left to have her way; but some battles a queen cannot win). He doesn’t go to the Hamptons though, or to the Brownstone (that somehow is back in the Archibald name), no, instead he is steadily helped out of the limousine outside of the Empire hotel (a massive monument to show the heavens that approval is not needed anymore). He smiles, tired but ready to be away from the hospital, and he walks through the doors into the lobby.
Chuck slaps him, gently, and carefully on the back.
“Welcome home, Nathaniel. Welcome home.”