No Escape Necessary
She skips through the streets of New York like she owns it. As she holds onto his arm, he can feel her allowing herself to be pulled back. It’s a crazy/messed up/magical world she’s entered and she doesn’t want to get lost in it. She doesn’t want to escape.
But as Blair Waldorf and Co strut ahead of them, wearing dresses designed for women much older and much wiser, he imagines her life of art shows and concerts and real family bonding.
A brother who’s there for her. Truly there for her. Not just when things fall apart, but when the cracks start to appear.
No one ever saw his cracks.
She’s a flash of gold, smiling and laughing and grasping firmly onto reality. She giggles and stumbles in to-high heels and smiles shyly when he catches her.
He escapes in her smile.
---
He loves her, but doesn’t know it. Because he’s fifteen and recovering; emotionally and physically, and the cracks are still visible for the world to see. He doesn’t know fully what he feels towards her but it’s enough.
He thinks of ‘Rufus roots’ and for a moment wonders what life would’ve been like if Rufus was his father.
He imagines baseball and bike riding, guitars and cooking, groundings and father/son hugs. It’s all too much to take in and his wrist hurts with the reminder of what ‘could have been’.
He doesn’t fool himself into believing that it wouldn’t have happened. Because he knows it and that hurts more than any knife could.
So he settles for a ‘how you doing, Eric?’, a clap on the back and a smile. Because that’s really all he ever really wanted.
---
The summer of his sixteenth birthday he grows five inches and the weight set his father bought him for Christmas starts showing some effect. The beginning of his junior yeah, he’s been accepted into the varsity swim team and named co-captain of the lacrosse team.
He’s every bit the van der Woodsen dreamboat he was born to be.
And before he knows it, he’s the most sought after guy at school; the title goes to him without so much as a whisper.
He’s never really wanted it. While his sister took to the van der Woodsen allure like a duck takes to water, he flounders, unsure and out of control.
She’s tall and blonde and confident and her years of being told ‘you can do anything’ have helped her slip into his world. But she’s her mother’s daughter, and his uncertainties are met with her insecurities and she firmly holds onto him.
To keep him from escaping.
But her grip has always been loose enough to break free and even though he could, he’s never wanted to.
They’re both in this together.
---
He realised long ago what his mother and sister couldn’t see -
The van der Woodsen allure works like the Humphrey charm and he had her at ‘hello’.
The cracks are smaller now, barely noticeable through the way he carries himself like he was born for this. He was born for this, but never acted like it. In a world where money is the norm and society is the be all and end all it’s sometimes nice to be different.
But his time in ‘Miami’ still lingers in the back of their minds and he has to convince himself everyday that if they were to end tomorrow that he wouldn’t fall apart.
It won’t. It’s not something that can escape overnight or be lost like a bracelet. It’s their namesake; their past, present, future. If anything, it’s genetic.
They have a lot of history to learn from.