Fic - And Through the Leaves and Concrete You're Gonna Grow (Serena, Dan/Serena) pg-13, 1/2
Title: And Through the Leaves and Concrete You're Gonna Grow
Summary: It's funny how things work out. Serena just keeps moving.
Rating: pg-13
Author's Notes: 6,500 words. Spoilers up to, and veers off in AU land after, 1x13 A Thin Line.... This has been in the works since, I don't know, January? It's kind of my baby. Title borrowed from Rocky Votolato's Silver Trees. Big thanks to nemo_88 for the excellent beta and handholding. You are all kinds of awesome and I adore you. Split into two parts because LJ is being a bitch. Enjoy. Feedback is love.
There are acceptance letters stacked high on her desk and she’s sitting there, feet tucked underneath her, Dan’s Dartmouth sweatshirt nestled around her like a security blanket, thinking about Bart Bass and all the things his money could buy (because really there was no way Brown would have taken her after last fall, anyway, and she’s far from naive) and wonders if this is really it for her. The Ivy Leagues? The life they planned for her once upon a time when she was too young to have a choice? She wants more, always has. Serena always knew she was destined for something bigger than the ivory walls of the Upper East Side.
Senior year is halfway over and Serena feels guilty because she has made her decision, made it the day she stepped foot back on the marble stairs of Constance a year ago, if she really thinks about it, but things are different now than they were last fall. There are things (people) she has now that didn’t figure into the equation then. Things that make her heart ache deep in her chest, swallowing her whole, when she thinks about leaving them behind.
She hopes he will understand.
+
Her decision that college just isn’t for her coincides, roughly, with her mother’s divorce. Another promise made by a wayward daughter about not becoming their mother. Serena knows all about vicious circles and vows to not be a part of it any longer.
+
Serena tells her mother about her grand plans for South Africa and teaching kids English and an acceptance letter of sorts that she got on her own merit over coffee the next morning. She foots the bill and sits up straighter and tries to act like the adult she so desperately yearns to be.
Lily merely smiles tightly and says, “If that’s what you think will make you happy, Serena,” like it’s the hardest thing in the world.
+
Graduation comes in a blur of early summer heat, hugs and kisses and faux promises that Serena knows none of these people plan on keeping. Dan’s hand is in hers, holding on, never wanting to let go and she buries into his chest, diploma under her arm as she watches her mother watch Rufus with a look she recognizes all too well. There’s a guilt that settles in the pit of her stomach, just momentarily, and when Lily turns back to her daughter, Serena gives her a small, fleeting smile that hurts the corners of her mouth. It’s in lieu of an ‘I’m sorry,’ and all Serena can think is South Africa can’t come soon enough.
That night they lay together hands trailing over muscle and bone, memorizing, making memories that will carry them through long months and lonely nights. Serena kisses him and wraps her arms around him bone-crushingly tight, never wanting to let go. She memorizes the feel of him on top of her, the taste of kiss, and the feel of his fingers between hers. Traces the outline of his face, every dip and contour of his body. They make love and it’s slow and sweet and her heart hurts something unbearable at the thought of leaving him, but knows what she has to do at the same time. She needs Dan, but she needs herself more.
“I can’t believe you’re leaving,” he whispers hours later when they’re still tangled together, her hand on his chest, rising and falling with every breath.
She can’t either. She wonders if they’ll make it through this.
+
A few weeks later he takes her to the airport, her hand is wrapped tightly around her carryon (afraid that if she let go, just for a mere second, that she’d rethink this entire thing) and Serena turns to Dan and smiles a wary smile.
“Tell me I’m making the right choice,” she asks, because while they’ve talked about everything else in the past few months, she needs his approval. Needs know that he knows she’s making the right choice.
“Does it feel right?” Dan asks instead, that Humphrey smile on his face. It’s not the answer she’s looking for and she sort of feels like crying. “I got you something,” he continues a moment later, pulling something out of his pocket. He places a camera in her hand, silver and small, a red bow wrapped around it. Dan waits a second, rocking back and forth on his heels, looking sheepish. She falls in love with him all over again. “It’s so you can take pictures of everything you see and show them to me when you get back. So it’s like I’m there, too… only not.”
Serena laughs and sniffles. God, she’s going to miss him. “That’s awfully sentimental of you, Humphrey.”
“What can I say?” Dan smiles effortlessly. “You bring out the worst in me.”
She finally drops her carryon to the ground, takes a step forward and wraps her arms around him. Ask me to stay she wants to whisper, because she’s wouldn’t be human without a few last regrets, and she’s scared, so, so scared. He hugs her back and kisses her once, just once, and she can taste the promise underneath it - bittersweet, barely there, saying, we’ll make it through this with an amount of surety only he can manage.
A kiss to her cheek and he finally pulls away. “This isn’t goodbye,” he says looking at her like he’s seeing her for the first time. She thinks she’s going to miss the way he looks at her the most.
Serena smiles through her tears. “It’s just a ‘see you later’?”
Dan kisses her again. “Exactly.”
She cries the entire plane ride, the camera firmly clutched in her hands.
+
It’s hard at first.
She trades in high fashion for oversized shorts and a cruddy wife beater (it’s too hot for anything else). She goes days without showering. Half the time she can barely remember what day of the week it is, when the last time she shaved her legs was. Serena doesn’t miss the looks; the ones that size her up and down, taking in her manicured nails, expensive sneakers, the golden hair. She screams money and privilege to anyone who cared to look and she knows it.
Everyone takes bets on how long she’ll last. It just makes her more determined to prove them all wrong. She adjusts.
Letters are written to Eric and her mother, Dan, even Blair some weeks. Dan’s letters back are always filled with longing and rambling about the most mundane things. He’s surprised that he adjusts so well at Dartmouth. She’s really not - Dan has that personality that could take him anywhere. And sometimes, late at night when that Dartmouth sweatshirt is balled up as a pillow under her head and she’s missing Manhattan just a little too much, she worries that those places he’s going don’t include her.
“I miss you,” is always the first thing Dan says during the rare times when satellite phones are actually working, his voice raising her spirits in even the darkest hours. It’s such a striking contrast to her mothers, patient, ‘you’re doing okay then, I take it?’ Which Serena really knows is Van der Woodsen code for ‘I love you. I miss you. Come home soon.’
“I miss you, too,” she laughs and asks how school is and they count off the days until the week she’s planning to come home during December and tells him she loves him before the time is up or the connection is lost.
Their conversations are never long enough, not at all frequent enough, but always have the ability to keep her floating for days. She keeps a tally of days left until Christmas, until she gets to return to her family and him and feels his arms around her, next to the bed. Each night she marks off another day and feels that much happier.
Serena takes pictures of everything and anything and stores them on her computer under a file named ‘Dan’.
+
Six months in, her year is halfway over and things start to shift.
The smell of money and privilege has long since faded and the people around here are actually nice once you get to know them. She has a group of five or six kids that she and a girl named Kate take care of that she’s grown quite fond of. Kate’s no Blair, but she’s nice and sweet and they bond one night early on over a bottle of cheap whiskey and things were just never the same afterwards. She left a boy back home, too. She understands.
Phone calls with Dan come few and far between. The satellite phone is never working when it’s her day, they play phone tag for weeks on end. Spring Semester is in full swing by now, and she knows he’s busy, but she also knows that if they wanted to, they would both try a little harder.
The letters still come, but each one is shorter than the last and do nothing for her but give way to the fact that he’s changed (it lurks underneath his hasty scrawl in-between the love and miss yous she used to find solace in) and it’s okay, she knows, because she’s changed, too. It’s hard not to when time and distance is all that stands between you and looking forward to a future you never know is certain at eighteen is all you’ve got.
Kate gives a ridiculously good speech as to why she should stay for the holidays (not that Serena needed that much convincing anyway; she’s grown quite attached to her kids, these people, and feels committed to them) and when she calls home and tells her mother she isn’t going to make it back for Christmas, deep down she knows it’s the final straw.
She writes Dan a letter that will get there a day too late. She doesn’t hear back from him for a month.
+
Mid February is the next time she talks to him. The bitterness isn’t completely masked by his happiness to hear her voice. She touches her fingers to her lips and tries to picture the last time they kissed and she remembers the airport, his lips on hers, soft and sweet, and even then, it tasted something like a goodbye. She just didn’t want to see it.
“So it’s only, what, four months now?” He asks, and she hears the uncertainty in his voice, like he knows without her even saying. It amazes her that they’re still on the same page, even now.
“Actually,” she draws out the word and looks toward Kate, lurking in the corner, for support. If it’s meant to be, it’ll be Kate had told her weeks earlier, trite and clichéd and they’d both laughed afterwards, because stuff like that just seems so stupid now. “I think… I think I might stay.” She waits for the shock, the outrage, the argument. But there’s nothing. She’s only really half surprised. “There’s this college near Cape Town and I could still do this and I could take classes and study photography. I really love it, Dan. Like really, really love it.”
“You can study photography here, you know.” The ‘with me’ goes unsaid, but she knows it’s there.
There’s a long pause between them that says everything.
“I don’t expect you to wait.”
“And if I want to?”
Something catches in her throat. She swallows it away hastily. “I feel like this is where I’m meant to be, Dan. Maybe not always, but for right now. You understand that don’t you?”
He sighs and she can feel in ripple through her. “I do love you, Serena, but it’s -“
“-too hard. I know.”
They talk until it’s time to go and when she hangs up the phone, she feels resolved in her decision.
+
Her birthday passes in a blink of an eye; there’s no big celebration, no lavish Blair Waldorf event, just a toast over dinner - rice and dry chicken, same as always - and it’s the first time since she’s been here that she lets herself miss home. Her mother and Eric sent a card and care package consisting of money and the makings for a cake - icing, candles and all. Blair sends a new pair of Manolos (she laughs at this because, really? But sobers at the I miss you written in the card). She gives the money to the foundation she works for, makes a cake for her kids, and hides the card Dan sent, unopened, under her pillow.
It may have been her decision, but it still hurt.
She cuts her hair that night (it’s too hot to keep it so long anymore). Cries a little. It’s time for a change.
+
A year in now and Kate and her move into a small flat in Cape Town. It’s a one bedroom they can barely afford and in-between classes and working with her kids, she picks up a job as a bartender to help pay the bills (She refuses to take her mother’s money because what was the point of being on your own if you really weren’t doing it on your own?) and for the longest time they sleep on the floor and eat off of lawn furniture and she can only imagine what Blair would say if she could see her now, oak tables and lavish sofas traded in for good, clean simple living. Serena can barely believe it half the time.
But there’s a payphone outside that always works and that childish part of her likes that after an entire year, her mother is really only a phone call away.
She doesn’t make it home for Thanksgiving, or Christmas either.
“Serena,” he mom sighs, another holiday passed, more distance put between them. “We miss you.”
“I miss you, too.” And she does, God help her she does; she misses Eric and her mother and her bed, too, but this is a part of growing up isn’t it? Moving past the missing and the longing and moving forward, building your own future. She misses Manhattan, but she like it here, too. And she wants this, feels like she has something to prove (to her parents, Blair, herself), and for the first time in her life she feels like she’s where she’s meant to be.
“I have some free time coming out, I’m going to come out -“
“No, Mom. Don’t. I’ll,” she pauses. “I’ll be home soon.”
They both know it’s a lie.
+
“You are really good at this,” Kate says one night as she flips through the pictures on Serena’s dying computer - it’s scratched and missing more than a few keys and has a tendency to click off in the middle of writing a paper. “Like really, really good.”
Serena looks up from the book she’s reading for class. Chaucer. Even in South Africa. She wonders what Dan would say. “You think?”
“I know this guy who is looking for freelance photographers. I could give them your name.”
Serena looks up, “You know a guy? Since when? I don’t even know a guy here,” Serena turns and raises a suspicious eyebrow towards her friend. “Have you been adjusting without me?”
Kate blushes all kinds of red. “Do you want me to help you out or not?”
“Sure. I guess,” she thinks about it for a long second. “Why not?”
Serena doesn’t know it yet, but this marks the beginning of an entirely different chapter in her life.
On To Part Two
Summary: It's funny how things work out. Serena just keeps moving.
Rating: pg-13
Author's Notes: 6,500 words. Spoilers up to, and veers off in AU land after, 1x13 A Thin Line.... This has been in the works since, I don't know, January? It's kind of my baby. Title borrowed from Rocky Votolato's Silver Trees. Big thanks to nemo_88 for the excellent beta and handholding. You are all kinds of awesome and I adore you. Split into two parts because LJ is being a bitch. Enjoy. Feedback is love.
There are acceptance letters stacked high on her desk and she’s sitting there, feet tucked underneath her, Dan’s Dartmouth sweatshirt nestled around her like a security blanket, thinking about Bart Bass and all the things his money could buy (because really there was no way Brown would have taken her after last fall, anyway, and she’s far from naive) and wonders if this is really it for her. The Ivy Leagues? The life they planned for her once upon a time when she was too young to have a choice? She wants more, always has. Serena always knew she was destined for something bigger than the ivory walls of the Upper East Side.
Senior year is halfway over and Serena feels guilty because she has made her decision, made it the day she stepped foot back on the marble stairs of Constance a year ago, if she really thinks about it, but things are different now than they were last fall. There are things (people) she has now that didn’t figure into the equation then. Things that make her heart ache deep in her chest, swallowing her whole, when she thinks about leaving them behind.
She hopes he will understand.
+
Her decision that college just isn’t for her coincides, roughly, with her mother’s divorce. Another promise made by a wayward daughter about not becoming their mother. Serena knows all about vicious circles and vows to not be a part of it any longer.
+
Serena tells her mother about her grand plans for South Africa and teaching kids English and an acceptance letter of sorts that she got on her own merit over coffee the next morning. She foots the bill and sits up straighter and tries to act like the adult she so desperately yearns to be.
Lily merely smiles tightly and says, “If that’s what you think will make you happy, Serena,” like it’s the hardest thing in the world.
+
Graduation comes in a blur of early summer heat, hugs and kisses and faux promises that Serena knows none of these people plan on keeping. Dan’s hand is in hers, holding on, never wanting to let go and she buries into his chest, diploma under her arm as she watches her mother watch Rufus with a look she recognizes all too well. There’s a guilt that settles in the pit of her stomach, just momentarily, and when Lily turns back to her daughter, Serena gives her a small, fleeting smile that hurts the corners of her mouth. It’s in lieu of an ‘I’m sorry,’ and all Serena can think is South Africa can’t come soon enough.
That night they lay together hands trailing over muscle and bone, memorizing, making memories that will carry them through long months and lonely nights. Serena kisses him and wraps her arms around him bone-crushingly tight, never wanting to let go. She memorizes the feel of him on top of her, the taste of kiss, and the feel of his fingers between hers. Traces the outline of his face, every dip and contour of his body. They make love and it’s slow and sweet and her heart hurts something unbearable at the thought of leaving him, but knows what she has to do at the same time. She needs Dan, but she needs herself more.
“I can’t believe you’re leaving,” he whispers hours later when they’re still tangled together, her hand on his chest, rising and falling with every breath.
She can’t either. She wonders if they’ll make it through this.
+
A few weeks later he takes her to the airport, her hand is wrapped tightly around her carryon (afraid that if she let go, just for a mere second, that she’d rethink this entire thing) and Serena turns to Dan and smiles a wary smile.
“Tell me I’m making the right choice,” she asks, because while they’ve talked about everything else in the past few months, she needs his approval. Needs know that he knows she’s making the right choice.
“Does it feel right?” Dan asks instead, that Humphrey smile on his face. It’s not the answer she’s looking for and she sort of feels like crying. “I got you something,” he continues a moment later, pulling something out of his pocket. He places a camera in her hand, silver and small, a red bow wrapped around it. Dan waits a second, rocking back and forth on his heels, looking sheepish. She falls in love with him all over again. “It’s so you can take pictures of everything you see and show them to me when you get back. So it’s like I’m there, too… only not.”
Serena laughs and sniffles. God, she’s going to miss him. “That’s awfully sentimental of you, Humphrey.”
“What can I say?” Dan smiles effortlessly. “You bring out the worst in me.”
She finally drops her carryon to the ground, takes a step forward and wraps her arms around him. Ask me to stay she wants to whisper, because she’s wouldn’t be human without a few last regrets, and she’s scared, so, so scared. He hugs her back and kisses her once, just once, and she can taste the promise underneath it - bittersweet, barely there, saying, we’ll make it through this with an amount of surety only he can manage.
A kiss to her cheek and he finally pulls away. “This isn’t goodbye,” he says looking at her like he’s seeing her for the first time. She thinks she’s going to miss the way he looks at her the most.
Serena smiles through her tears. “It’s just a ‘see you later’?”
Dan kisses her again. “Exactly.”
She cries the entire plane ride, the camera firmly clutched in her hands.
+
It’s hard at first.
She trades in high fashion for oversized shorts and a cruddy wife beater (it’s too hot for anything else). She goes days without showering. Half the time she can barely remember what day of the week it is, when the last time she shaved her legs was. Serena doesn’t miss the looks; the ones that size her up and down, taking in her manicured nails, expensive sneakers, the golden hair. She screams money and privilege to anyone who cared to look and she knows it.
Everyone takes bets on how long she’ll last. It just makes her more determined to prove them all wrong. She adjusts.
Letters are written to Eric and her mother, Dan, even Blair some weeks. Dan’s letters back are always filled with longing and rambling about the most mundane things. He’s surprised that he adjusts so well at Dartmouth. She’s really not - Dan has that personality that could take him anywhere. And sometimes, late at night when that Dartmouth sweatshirt is balled up as a pillow under her head and she’s missing Manhattan just a little too much, she worries that those places he’s going don’t include her.
“I miss you,” is always the first thing Dan says during the rare times when satellite phones are actually working, his voice raising her spirits in even the darkest hours. It’s such a striking contrast to her mothers, patient, ‘you’re doing okay then, I take it?’ Which Serena really knows is Van der Woodsen code for ‘I love you. I miss you. Come home soon.’
“I miss you, too,” she laughs and asks how school is and they count off the days until the week she’s planning to come home during December and tells him she loves him before the time is up or the connection is lost.
Their conversations are never long enough, not at all frequent enough, but always have the ability to keep her floating for days. She keeps a tally of days left until Christmas, until she gets to return to her family and him and feels his arms around her, next to the bed. Each night she marks off another day and feels that much happier.
Serena takes pictures of everything and anything and stores them on her computer under a file named ‘Dan’.
+
Six months in, her year is halfway over and things start to shift.
The smell of money and privilege has long since faded and the people around here are actually nice once you get to know them. She has a group of five or six kids that she and a girl named Kate take care of that she’s grown quite fond of. Kate’s no Blair, but she’s nice and sweet and they bond one night early on over a bottle of cheap whiskey and things were just never the same afterwards. She left a boy back home, too. She understands.
Phone calls with Dan come few and far between. The satellite phone is never working when it’s her day, they play phone tag for weeks on end. Spring Semester is in full swing by now, and she knows he’s busy, but she also knows that if they wanted to, they would both try a little harder.
The letters still come, but each one is shorter than the last and do nothing for her but give way to the fact that he’s changed (it lurks underneath his hasty scrawl in-between the love and miss yous she used to find solace in) and it’s okay, she knows, because she’s changed, too. It’s hard not to when time and distance is all that stands between you and looking forward to a future you never know is certain at eighteen is all you’ve got.
Kate gives a ridiculously good speech as to why she should stay for the holidays (not that Serena needed that much convincing anyway; she’s grown quite attached to her kids, these people, and feels committed to them) and when she calls home and tells her mother she isn’t going to make it back for Christmas, deep down she knows it’s the final straw.
She writes Dan a letter that will get there a day too late. She doesn’t hear back from him for a month.
+
Mid February is the next time she talks to him. The bitterness isn’t completely masked by his happiness to hear her voice. She touches her fingers to her lips and tries to picture the last time they kissed and she remembers the airport, his lips on hers, soft and sweet, and even then, it tasted something like a goodbye. She just didn’t want to see it.
“So it’s only, what, four months now?” He asks, and she hears the uncertainty in his voice, like he knows without her even saying. It amazes her that they’re still on the same page, even now.
“Actually,” she draws out the word and looks toward Kate, lurking in the corner, for support. If it’s meant to be, it’ll be Kate had told her weeks earlier, trite and clichéd and they’d both laughed afterwards, because stuff like that just seems so stupid now. “I think… I think I might stay.” She waits for the shock, the outrage, the argument. But there’s nothing. She’s only really half surprised. “There’s this college near Cape Town and I could still do this and I could take classes and study photography. I really love it, Dan. Like really, really love it.”
“You can study photography here, you know.” The ‘with me’ goes unsaid, but she knows it’s there.
There’s a long pause between them that says everything.
“I don’t expect you to wait.”
“And if I want to?”
Something catches in her throat. She swallows it away hastily. “I feel like this is where I’m meant to be, Dan. Maybe not always, but for right now. You understand that don’t you?”
He sighs and she can feel in ripple through her. “I do love you, Serena, but it’s -“
“-too hard. I know.”
They talk until it’s time to go and when she hangs up the phone, she feels resolved in her decision.
+
Her birthday passes in a blink of an eye; there’s no big celebration, no lavish Blair Waldorf event, just a toast over dinner - rice and dry chicken, same as always - and it’s the first time since she’s been here that she lets herself miss home. Her mother and Eric sent a card and care package consisting of money and the makings for a cake - icing, candles and all. Blair sends a new pair of Manolos (she laughs at this because, really? But sobers at the I miss you written in the card). She gives the money to the foundation she works for, makes a cake for her kids, and hides the card Dan sent, unopened, under her pillow.
It may have been her decision, but it still hurt.
She cuts her hair that night (it’s too hot to keep it so long anymore). Cries a little. It’s time for a change.
+
A year in now and Kate and her move into a small flat in Cape Town. It’s a one bedroom they can barely afford and in-between classes and working with her kids, she picks up a job as a bartender to help pay the bills (She refuses to take her mother’s money because what was the point of being on your own if you really weren’t doing it on your own?) and for the longest time they sleep on the floor and eat off of lawn furniture and she can only imagine what Blair would say if she could see her now, oak tables and lavish sofas traded in for good, clean simple living. Serena can barely believe it half the time.
But there’s a payphone outside that always works and that childish part of her likes that after an entire year, her mother is really only a phone call away.
She doesn’t make it home for Thanksgiving, or Christmas either.
“Serena,” he mom sighs, another holiday passed, more distance put between them. “We miss you.”
“I miss you, too.” And she does, God help her she does; she misses Eric and her mother and her bed, too, but this is a part of growing up isn’t it? Moving past the missing and the longing and moving forward, building your own future. She misses Manhattan, but she like it here, too. And she wants this, feels like she has something to prove (to her parents, Blair, herself), and for the first time in her life she feels like she’s where she’s meant to be.
“I have some free time coming out, I’m going to come out -“
“No, Mom. Don’t. I’ll,” she pauses. “I’ll be home soon.”
They both know it’s a lie.
+
“You are really good at this,” Kate says one night as she flips through the pictures on Serena’s dying computer - it’s scratched and missing more than a few keys and has a tendency to click off in the middle of writing a paper. “Like really, really good.”
Serena looks up from the book she’s reading for class. Chaucer. Even in South Africa. She wonders what Dan would say. “You think?”
“I know this guy who is looking for freelance photographers. I could give them your name.”
Serena looks up, “You know a guy? Since when? I don’t even know a guy here,” Serena turns and raises a suspicious eyebrow towards her friend. “Have you been adjusting without me?”
Kate blushes all kinds of red. “Do you want me to help you out or not?”
“Sure. I guess,” she thinks about it for a long second. “Why not?”
Serena doesn’t know it yet, but this marks the beginning of an entirely different chapter in her life.
On To Part Two