Wishes Out of Airplanes (1/1)
I am working on Live Fast, Die Never. Promise. For now, here is some more angst!
Title: Wishes Out of Airplanes
Characters/Pairing: Nate/Serena, Chuck/Blair, Dan Humphrey, Eric van der Woodsen
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Character death
Disclaimer: Not mine. Title taken from that song that belongs to B.o.B. You know which song.
Summary: "The truth is this: Serena van der Woodsen has always guessed that she will die young."
The truth is this: Serena van der Woodsen has always guessed that she will die young.
She’s not going to say that she has always known, because frankly that’s a little morbid, and she’s always hoped that it won’t be true, but as years pass and things like Pete Fairman and waking up alone and roofied in Queens and wolves in Chappaquiddick happen, that hope just gets smaller and smaller until it becomes something abstract like the way she’s thought I hope my Dad comes home today since she was five.
She imagines her death in several ways, and all of them involve her either figuratively or literally crashing-and-burning. Overdoses, car crashes, suicide; none of them are strangers to her, and she is Serena van der Woodsen, after all. People will expect her death to be sudden and dramatic.
All of these thoughts run through her head now, as she sits in an exam room and weeks of shaking hands and sudden headaches. The doctor walks in with the test results, apologetic look on his face. “I’m sorry, Miss Van der Woodsen.”
She never gets this one quite right.
“The symptoms usually occur in middle age, but there is a form of Huntington’s that occurs earlier,” her doctor tells her.
The room is far too warm, and the leather of the chair she’s sitting on keeps sticking to her thighs. “How long do I have?”
Her doctor shifts, uncomfortable. “Well, in the usual case life expectancy is around twenty years following the onset of visible symptoms, but your case is akinetic-rigid and progression of symptoms is faster, so…”
She closes her eyes because she doesn’t need this; it’s bad enough knowing that she is going to die, having your physician talking about exactly how she’s going to die in excruciating detail is not necessary. There is only one thing that really matters, anyways, so she presses him. “How long?”
There is a forced exhalation. “Three years,” her executioner pronounces, “Maybe four.”
The first thing she does is break up with Dan.
She dumps him for once and his eyes are a deep walnut, swimming with uncertainty and sadness and disappointment. “You don’t think we can work anymore.”
He says it slowly, testing the words out and for a second she wants to snap and say, yes, I know it must be completely novel thing for me to break your heart for once but she knows that’s not really fair. So she settles for honesty. “Yes.”
And there is such confusion in his face right now, she almost tells him. “But you said-you were going to choose-and Colin, and Ben, and…”
She shakes her head as he trails off, and his gaze hardens somewhat. “Is it Nate, then?”
An extremely inappropriate laugh bubbles up in her throat at this, and it takes almost all of her restraint to bite it back. They’re supposed to be forever, they’re supposed to outlast everything and everyone, but it’s been four years and all she has to show for it is the same story: an inter-class romance that’s going to end in the most cliché it’s not you it’s me.
“It’s not Nate,” she hears herself say, and tells herself that this is the truth.
She doesn’t do anything else significant after breaking it off with Dan. There are classes to take, parties to attend, family messes to clean up, and things to fix, so she turns on the Rhodes part of her and makes herself deal, doesn’t tell anyone.
There’s no pretending this away, though, so she doesn’t even try; at night when Blair thinks she’s keeping a sleep schedule she reads through any information about Huntington’s she can find. She learns about autosomal dominant inheritance and trinucleotide repeats and chromosome four and how a small mutant protein causes people to sicken and die, just like that. Causes her to sicken and die.
Just like that.
She blurts out “I’m dying,” to Blair one night, flees, and there is something obnoxiously ironic about this.
There is no spontaneous downward spiral this time; she’s not sixteen anymore. Instead, she just checks into a room at the Palace under a false name, but there are some things that are constant. Blair is sitting on her bed when she wakes up the next morning while Nate stares from the doorway, and she doesn’t need to ask where Chuck is because he is making coffee.
She doesn’t hesitate (a part of her thinks that this might have been what she’s been waiting for, all along). “This doesn’t leave the room.”
Nothing has changed.
“We can fix this,” Blair tells her later, after Nate leaves in a cloud of confusion and Chuck leaves in a cloud of frightened fury that’s mostly just fear.
She smiles because the alternative is to break down. “Blair…”
“We can,” Blair insists, eyes flooding, “We will.”
She remembers how it used to be Blair saving her from tangible things like blackmail and married politicians and her saving Blair from intangible things like insecurity and I just threw up because I was stressed, okay. It’s a little sad, how their roles have reversed (they’re not very good at them anymore, too many blurred lines), and if she’s feeling spiteful she might have said now you know what it’s like to be me.
But there is no spite between them, never has been, and when Blair blindly grabs for her hand and squeezes hard enough to break bones Serena squeezes back harder and just says, “Okay.”
Blair needs this. They both do.
Nate barges into her bedroom on a night when she’s actually sleeping. “I booked us a flight to Nairobi,” is his greeting, and she laughs even though she can smell the single malt on his breath.
“Nairobi?” She asks, and he just shrugs. “When are we leaving?”
“Two hours,” he says, and picks her up-literally picks her up like she’s his sleeping beauty or something (though she supposes Snow White may be more appropriate). “Let’s go see the world.”
Nairobi ends up being kind of a disaster-their parents had hired quite a few language tutors in their childhoods but Swahili is kind of new-but Kenya has its own Central Park and Nate kissing her on top of the Times Tower gives her a rush that standing on top of the Empire State Building never could.
“I should have seen this coming,” she tells him when he drags her from bed after a night of giggling and really good sex and tells her that she has an appointment with the finest doctor in Kenya. “Really, when Blair didn’t object to us leaving her house at two o’clock in the morning? I should have known.”
Nate fidgets as he watches her furiously pace around their hotel room. “It was her idea,” he meekly offers, and she rolls her eyes but goes to see the doctor anyways.
(So, there is still a part of her that is naïve and sixteen and wants to believe in happy endings. Whatever.)
She checks Gossip Girl on the plane ride to Brussels, and what do you know, C and B were spotted leaving Barneys hand in hand. She’s not surprised; stranger things have brought them together, and for Chuck and Blair saving her (or maybe mourning her) has always been some sort of perverse aphrodisiac.
Still, she can’t help that little bubble of envy that rises up as she closes her eyes and leans back on her seat. Chuck and Blair’s will-they-or-won’t-they has been going on for forever and is probably never going to stop, but the they has always been constant makes her heart ache a little in longing.
Once upon a time, she thinks as she sneaks a peek at Nate through her eyelashes, she might have had a chance at that too, but intervening years of BlairDanVanessaJennyAaronGabrielCarterBreeTrippJuliet have left things at a permanent impasse, and now this.
Now this.
“Hey,” Nate whispers, and she can hear him smiling. “What ‘cha thinking about?”
She smiles back. Her lips find his, and there is something about this that will never get old. What they have is enough.
For nine months, they travel the world: Bangkok, Hong Kong, Berlin, Sydney, Rio de Janiero, Hanoi…the list goes on. For nine months she goes to every single noted neurologist in the world. She participates in a clinical trial, eats green paste, goes on an all-fruit diet, lets an unlicensed guy stick needles in her back. Nine months of her life and they are either her happiest or her saddest.
“I’m tired of all this,” she tells Nate, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand after some herbal medicine in Beijing made her hug the toilet for almost twelve hours.
His face is unhappy but his eyes are large and blue and so understanding she wants to throw something. “Serena…”
“No,” she shakes her head. “No more. You can’t just fix this, Nate. No one can. I can’t-this isn’t me after too many shots, this is me dy-
He stands up, eyes suddenly flashing. In nine months, he has never let her admit these words. “No,” he tells her, “This isn’t you.”
She doesn’t have a response to that, but maybe it doesn’t matter. He sits down next to her again after a few minutes and wraps his arms around her. “Let’s go home.”
Things have more or less remained the same in their absence. Lily and Eric wonder where they went and maybe believe her when she laughs and says everywhere, Jenny is still in Hudson, the Humphrey men still moon over the van der Woodsen women, and Chuck and Blair are off again because of some girl named Raina.
So she adjusts; the only sign that she had ever left is her jet lag and how she ignores Blair’s calls for two days because she knows her best friend means well but she still doesn’t like being manipulated. After that everything goes back to normal: she shops with Blair and complains about Chuck and avoids Dan and maybe kisses Nate once or twice or three or four or five or six.
Only this:
There is a gala or a ball or a party and one minute she is talking to Dean Reuther and the champagne flute in her hand is trembling slightly only because she’s nervous but suddenly the small pinpricks of light she sees sometimes blossom into bright flashes before a black veil drapes itself over the world.
She wakes up hooked to a heart monitor, her stepbrother sitting by her bed, smirking, “You always knew how to liven up a party, S.”
Only this:
She has a seizure and ends up in the hospital and now everyone knows and suddenly everything becomes too real.
Eric comes to her room first after she wakes up, just sits down next to her and takes her hand, doesn’t say anything.
After a few minutes, she whispers, “Sorry,” and she is apologizing for how she didn’t tell him but really she means more, means sorry I left I seem to do that a lot and sorry I make you worry and sorry you were so lonely you tried to kill yourself and sorry I couldn’t make our dad stay and sorry I’m dying.
He nods once, jerkily. “Okay.”
She smiles a little and squeezes his hand. “So.”
Another nod, a tiny smile, and he squeezes back. “So.”
They stay like that for a while, and if his eyes are shining a little too brightly and her eyes burn a little bit from unshed tears, neither of them will say anything.
She’s discharged the next day (because hospitals are supposed to cure people and her presence denies everything medicine stands for) with a bag of medication: tetrabenazine, valporic acid, anti-seizure medication. She reads all of the names and the labels and laughs. “How am I supposed to pronounce all of this?”
Blair’s face is pure determination and the kiss she presses lightly to the top of her head feels a little bit like forever. “When the time comes,” she promises and Serena knows she means when your words slur together and you’re convulsing on the floor, gosh isn’t this kind of familiar, “I’ll be there.”
Her mother makes some calls and talks to Eric and fights with Rufus and then her dad is in their living room, looking as if he’s never left.
“I don’t want you here,” she tells him. It only took a terminal illness for you to come back to me.
Her father flinches a little, but doesn’t run away. “I deserved that,” he says, “But I am here for you now.”
She laughs and there is no mirth and no bitterness, just a whole lot of nothings filling up a void. “You’re about fifteen years too late,” she replies, but takes his hand. “Tell me what you’ve been up to.”
Dan makes a beeline for her as soon as she says goodbye to her father (don’t be a stranger, she had told William, and the joke had fallen a little flat). “Serena,” he says, so concerned, so sad.
She tries to smile but it fades too quickly and he notices. “You’ve been sick.”
“Dan,” she says, “I am sick.”
“You are sick,” he repeats, and his gaze is forlorn, searching for the tragic heroine.
There is an urge to groan, because a headache is slowly building in her temples and somehow Dan has never been able to understand that she has never been anything and she has always just been. “I think I’ll sleep,” she tells him, but he grabs her hand.
“Serena,” he says again, and her name sounds like his lifeline.
“Dan,” she sighs, either setting him free or cutting him loose, “Dan.”
Chuck just shows up on one day, reeking of whiskey. “Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it,” he says, and is all over her personal space.
She bats him away. “Ew, no. Besides, Blair’s put a permanent claim on you.”
He scowls. “That’s never stopped you before.”
“I don’t repeat my mistakes anymore,” she tells him. I’m never going to get a chance.
“That day in the Palace. Do you remember?”
She doesn’t say anything. Of course she remembers, remembers grilled cheese with truffle oil and the best friend and the boyfriend.
“I would have thought that-you might’ve told Humphrey, or Eric, or-but you didn’t.”
“What would telling anyone solve?” she asks, curious. Why is he bringing this up now?
He looks away. “If I could sell Bass Industries,” he blurts out, “If I could sell everything I have.”
She blinks as she hears the unspoken I’d do it to save you in that declaration, and she thinks about thanking him, offering him the forgiveness that he seems to need, but there are too many lines here, and she’s not about to cross them, not now.
(Not ever.)
So she just shakes her head, tells him sentimentality doesn’t suit him, and waits until after he leaves to cry.
Carter Baizen flies back into her life on Christmas, bringing champagne and plane tickets. “Santorini again,” he tells her, “Just you and me, beautiful.”
There is a slightly desperate look in his eyes that makes her heart break a little, but she shakes her head. “I’m not that girl anymore,” she says, “You’re not that guy anymore. And we…”
He hugs her before she can finish, and presses a warm but chaste kiss on her lips. “Long shot, anyways,” he murmurs, and she laughs even though the medication makes her throat ache.
She sends him away and his eyes are a little wet when he promises that he’ll come back, but she knows that this is the last time he’s going to see her alive.
Blair finds her lying on the floor of the Waldorf kitchen one night, staring at the ceiling. “S?” she wonders, and Serena jumps.
“Don’t scare me like that,” she snaps at her best friend, and absently wipes her eyes. Her cheeks are wet.
“S, what’s wrong?” The hardwood is cold, but Blair doesn’t hesitate as she lies down next to her.
She keeps staring at the ceiling instead of answering. All the tiles are in neat rows; geometric perfection. She counts them, gets to forty-nine before she remembers why she’s even here. “I had a dream.”
“You had a dream.”
“Yes,” she says, and keeps counting the tiles. Fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three. And then no more. She glances at Blair next to her, patiently waiting, and she realizes that their bodies aren’t exactly parallel. Shifting a little to compensate, she continues, “About the Shepard wedding.”
For some reason Blair’s breath hitches a little at this. “S-
“What did I do that time again?” She wonders, and frowns because there are no more tiles. Maybe she counted wrong; she’s never been that good at math.
Blair’s arms wrap around her as she starts counting again.
Days melt into weeks melt into months. Some days she counts the days on her calendar and panics a little when she realizes that she’s lost another one.
Other days she doesn’t really care about that or about anything.
“You need to stop,” she tells Nate one day.
He stares at her over his mug of coffee. It’s one of her better days-she’s even put on makeup and gotten dressed and everything. They have plans today, but she can’t really remember what they were going to do. “Stop what?”
“Loving me.”
“Serena,” he sighs, “I already tried that, remember?”
I don’t, actually, she thinks, but she nods anyways. “You need to try harder this time.”
“Why?”
“Because,” she gets distracted in his eyes for a little bit, but this is important. “Because, Nate, I’m not going to hold you back.”
“You’re not-
“I need you to not be heartbroken when I die.”
His eyes harden a little like they always do when she mentions dying. “I’m going to be heartbroken anyways,” he says, “You’re one of my oldest friends.”
She licks her lips-they’re always chapped now. “I need you to be less heartbroken, then.”
“Serena-
“Nate,” she snaps, and then tries to calm down. He doesn’t understand, not yet. “Please, just promise me you’ll try to stop.”
He glares at her, but she ignores it and his gaze softens somewhat. (This is just another piece of his heart; he should be used to her taking those by now.) “If that’s what you really want,” he says, “I promise.”
It’s a lie, but she supposes that it’s as close as she’s going to get.
“You’re stupid,” she tells Chuck one night, and slurs her words. They’re alone together in the suite that he and Nate share, and if she imagines hard enough she can think that it’s the alcohol in her system that’s causing the speech impediment.
He raises his shot glass at her, a childish salute. “Well, you’re stupider.”
She giggles a little, because when has that not been true? “When are you going to propose to Blair?”
Chuck literally spits his Scotch back out. “What?”
“Or are you going to marry her after I die? That’d break her heart, you know. She’s always wanted me as her maid of honor.”
Her stepbrother hasn’t stopped sputtering, and it would be endearing if he isn’t Chuck Bass. “You’re seriously suggesting that I marry your best friend as a favor to you?”
She shrugs. He proposes a week later.
She wakes up to Blair smoothing her hair. “Hey, Mrs. Bass,” she murmurs.
Blair rolls her eyes. “I told you I’m not taking his name,” she says, but there’s something strained about her smile.
Serena frowns. “Shouldn’t you be on your way to Belize right now?”
“Yeah,” Blair lets a breath out slowly and her gaze a little too careful. “But last night…”
Last night. She suddenly remembers last night, at the reception. Screaming and crying. “Oh my God,” she whispers, “B, I’m…”
“Don’t,” Blair whispers back, expression fierce, “Don’t apologize. It’s okay. Chuck and I decided…we’re going to take a trip around the world
instead. You and Nate want to come with?”
She laughs through repressed sobs. I ruined my best friend’s wedding. “You’re asking us to go on a honeymoon with you?”
Blair says nothing, just holds her tight until she gets her breathing back under control. What is you is me. “Well,” she finally decides, “I’ve always wanted to see the world.”
Small spasms in her legs, her back, like someone’s pinching her over and over again, blinding pain behind her eyes, and she just wants-
“Serena,” Nate says, and she uses his voice to claw out of her personal pit of agony. “Serena.”
He forces her to swallow something bitter, and the pain recedes somewhat. She blinks, forces herself to remember. They’re in the shower, in a hotel in Mumbai.
Nate is literally holding her up under the showerhead. “Do you need someone?” he asks, worry written all over his face. “Chuck and Blair are-
No. “No,” she says, hears the way she drags that single syllable for way too long, so it sounds more like a moan. She’s exhausted and sore all over, even though she’s pretty sure she’s been in bed all day. “Just…”
She closes her eyes but can still feel Nate’s concern. “Sleep,” she manages, and lays her head on Nate’s chest. “Sleep would be…really nice.”
Drifting off as Nate wraps her in a towel and carries her back to their bed, she forces herself not to wonder if this is the last time she’ll be awake.
(A day later a flickering light on the plane distracts her, and there’s a blank in her mind. She leans across the aisle, whispers to Blair, “Shouldn’t we be in Mumbai already?”
Blair’s eyes fill with tears. “Sweetie,” she says quietly, “We already are.”)
Her mind feels like a funnel; the memories keep slipping away like water. Some of it she fights to keep: Eric’s smile, Dan’s stories, Chuck’s smirk, Blair’s laugh, Nate’s eyes.
Eventually, she forgets everything else.
One day she pulls herself out of bed and stands in front of the mirror and just stares at herself. Her knees are shaking from the strain (she’s been using a wheelchair for a while now) and the disease has cut a swathe through her body fat, leaving her impossibly thin.
(There is a moment where she wonders if Blair will be jealous, and then like most other things the thought disappears.)
Nate appears at her side with a sad smile. Once, their eyes had been almost the same shade of blue; now hers have faded into something dull and yellowish. “Who am I, Nate?” she asks. I look nothing like me.
“You are,” he tells her, and kisses her like he can still save her, “You are.”
There are things that she leaves behind: her family and her friends.
Their hearts, she decides to keep forever.
There is a split second when she can feel her heart stop-she’s a bit mystified first, and then what’s left of her vision blurs and she understands that she’s dying.
So she does, and it may be the most un-dramatic thing she’s done in her life.
This is how Serena van der Woodsen dies:
Too young, struggling for breath, betrayed by her own body, the victim of a horrifically debilitating illness. She dies a statistic, and it might be the saddest thing in the world.
But it’s not, because this is how Serena van der Woodsen dies:
Her parents are there, and Rufus, and Dan. Eric is sitting next to her bed, with Chuck, who holds a crying Blair while impatiently brushing away tears of his own. On the other side is Nate, whose eyes are swollen and whose hand is in hers.
So, this is how Serena van der Woodsen dies: she is happy, and that is the only thing that has ever mattered.
Title: Wishes Out of Airplanes
Characters/Pairing: Nate/Serena, Chuck/Blair, Dan Humphrey, Eric van der Woodsen
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Character death
Disclaimer: Not mine. Title taken from that song that belongs to B.o.B. You know which song.
Summary: "The truth is this: Serena van der Woodsen has always guessed that she will die young."
The truth is this: Serena van der Woodsen has always guessed that she will die young.
She’s not going to say that she has always known, because frankly that’s a little morbid, and she’s always hoped that it won’t be true, but as years pass and things like Pete Fairman and waking up alone and roofied in Queens and wolves in Chappaquiddick happen, that hope just gets smaller and smaller until it becomes something abstract like the way she’s thought I hope my Dad comes home today since she was five.
She imagines her death in several ways, and all of them involve her either figuratively or literally crashing-and-burning. Overdoses, car crashes, suicide; none of them are strangers to her, and she is Serena van der Woodsen, after all. People will expect her death to be sudden and dramatic.
All of these thoughts run through her head now, as she sits in an exam room and weeks of shaking hands and sudden headaches. The doctor walks in with the test results, apologetic look on his face. “I’m sorry, Miss Van der Woodsen.”
She never gets this one quite right.
“The symptoms usually occur in middle age, but there is a form of Huntington’s that occurs earlier,” her doctor tells her.
The room is far too warm, and the leather of the chair she’s sitting on keeps sticking to her thighs. “How long do I have?”
Her doctor shifts, uncomfortable. “Well, in the usual case life expectancy is around twenty years following the onset of visible symptoms, but your case is akinetic-rigid and progression of symptoms is faster, so…”
She closes her eyes because she doesn’t need this; it’s bad enough knowing that she is going to die, having your physician talking about exactly how she’s going to die in excruciating detail is not necessary. There is only one thing that really matters, anyways, so she presses him. “How long?”
There is a forced exhalation. “Three years,” her executioner pronounces, “Maybe four.”
The first thing she does is break up with Dan.
She dumps him for once and his eyes are a deep walnut, swimming with uncertainty and sadness and disappointment. “You don’t think we can work anymore.”
He says it slowly, testing the words out and for a second she wants to snap and say, yes, I know it must be completely novel thing for me to break your heart for once but she knows that’s not really fair. So she settles for honesty. “Yes.”
And there is such confusion in his face right now, she almost tells him. “But you said-you were going to choose-and Colin, and Ben, and…”
She shakes her head as he trails off, and his gaze hardens somewhat. “Is it Nate, then?”
An extremely inappropriate laugh bubbles up in her throat at this, and it takes almost all of her restraint to bite it back. They’re supposed to be forever, they’re supposed to outlast everything and everyone, but it’s been four years and all she has to show for it is the same story: an inter-class romance that’s going to end in the most cliché it’s not you it’s me.
“It’s not Nate,” she hears herself say, and tells herself that this is the truth.
She doesn’t do anything else significant after breaking it off with Dan. There are classes to take, parties to attend, family messes to clean up, and things to fix, so she turns on the Rhodes part of her and makes herself deal, doesn’t tell anyone.
There’s no pretending this away, though, so she doesn’t even try; at night when Blair thinks she’s keeping a sleep schedule she reads through any information about Huntington’s she can find. She learns about autosomal dominant inheritance and trinucleotide repeats and chromosome four and how a small mutant protein causes people to sicken and die, just like that. Causes her to sicken and die.
Just like that.
She blurts out “I’m dying,” to Blair one night, flees, and there is something obnoxiously ironic about this.
There is no spontaneous downward spiral this time; she’s not sixteen anymore. Instead, she just checks into a room at the Palace under a false name, but there are some things that are constant. Blair is sitting on her bed when she wakes up the next morning while Nate stares from the doorway, and she doesn’t need to ask where Chuck is because he is making coffee.
She doesn’t hesitate (a part of her thinks that this might have been what she’s been waiting for, all along). “This doesn’t leave the room.”
Nothing has changed.
“We can fix this,” Blair tells her later, after Nate leaves in a cloud of confusion and Chuck leaves in a cloud of frightened fury that’s mostly just fear.
She smiles because the alternative is to break down. “Blair…”
“We can,” Blair insists, eyes flooding, “We will.”
She remembers how it used to be Blair saving her from tangible things like blackmail and married politicians and her saving Blair from intangible things like insecurity and I just threw up because I was stressed, okay. It’s a little sad, how their roles have reversed (they’re not very good at them anymore, too many blurred lines), and if she’s feeling spiteful she might have said now you know what it’s like to be me.
But there is no spite between them, never has been, and when Blair blindly grabs for her hand and squeezes hard enough to break bones Serena squeezes back harder and just says, “Okay.”
Blair needs this. They both do.
Nate barges into her bedroom on a night when she’s actually sleeping. “I booked us a flight to Nairobi,” is his greeting, and she laughs even though she can smell the single malt on his breath.
“Nairobi?” She asks, and he just shrugs. “When are we leaving?”
“Two hours,” he says, and picks her up-literally picks her up like she’s his sleeping beauty or something (though she supposes Snow White may be more appropriate). “Let’s go see the world.”
Nairobi ends up being kind of a disaster-their parents had hired quite a few language tutors in their childhoods but Swahili is kind of new-but Kenya has its own Central Park and Nate kissing her on top of the Times Tower gives her a rush that standing on top of the Empire State Building never could.
“I should have seen this coming,” she tells him when he drags her from bed after a night of giggling and really good sex and tells her that she has an appointment with the finest doctor in Kenya. “Really, when Blair didn’t object to us leaving her house at two o’clock in the morning? I should have known.”
Nate fidgets as he watches her furiously pace around their hotel room. “It was her idea,” he meekly offers, and she rolls her eyes but goes to see the doctor anyways.
(So, there is still a part of her that is naïve and sixteen and wants to believe in happy endings. Whatever.)
She checks Gossip Girl on the plane ride to Brussels, and what do you know, C and B were spotted leaving Barneys hand in hand. She’s not surprised; stranger things have brought them together, and for Chuck and Blair saving her (or maybe mourning her) has always been some sort of perverse aphrodisiac.
Still, she can’t help that little bubble of envy that rises up as she closes her eyes and leans back on her seat. Chuck and Blair’s will-they-or-won’t-they has been going on for forever and is probably never going to stop, but the they has always been constant makes her heart ache a little in longing.
Once upon a time, she thinks as she sneaks a peek at Nate through her eyelashes, she might have had a chance at that too, but intervening years of BlairDanVanessaJennyAaronGabrielCarterBreeTrippJuliet have left things at a permanent impasse, and now this.
Now this.
“Hey,” Nate whispers, and she can hear him smiling. “What ‘cha thinking about?”
She smiles back. Her lips find his, and there is something about this that will never get old. What they have is enough.
For nine months, they travel the world: Bangkok, Hong Kong, Berlin, Sydney, Rio de Janiero, Hanoi…the list goes on. For nine months she goes to every single noted neurologist in the world. She participates in a clinical trial, eats green paste, goes on an all-fruit diet, lets an unlicensed guy stick needles in her back. Nine months of her life and they are either her happiest or her saddest.
“I’m tired of all this,” she tells Nate, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand after some herbal medicine in Beijing made her hug the toilet for almost twelve hours.
His face is unhappy but his eyes are large and blue and so understanding she wants to throw something. “Serena…”
“No,” she shakes her head. “No more. You can’t just fix this, Nate. No one can. I can’t-this isn’t me after too many shots, this is me dy-
He stands up, eyes suddenly flashing. In nine months, he has never let her admit these words. “No,” he tells her, “This isn’t you.”
She doesn’t have a response to that, but maybe it doesn’t matter. He sits down next to her again after a few minutes and wraps his arms around her. “Let’s go home.”
Things have more or less remained the same in their absence. Lily and Eric wonder where they went and maybe believe her when she laughs and says everywhere, Jenny is still in Hudson, the Humphrey men still moon over the van der Woodsen women, and Chuck and Blair are off again because of some girl named Raina.
So she adjusts; the only sign that she had ever left is her jet lag and how she ignores Blair’s calls for two days because she knows her best friend means well but she still doesn’t like being manipulated. After that everything goes back to normal: she shops with Blair and complains about Chuck and avoids Dan and maybe kisses Nate once or twice or three or four or five or six.
Only this:
There is a gala or a ball or a party and one minute she is talking to Dean Reuther and the champagne flute in her hand is trembling slightly only because she’s nervous but suddenly the small pinpricks of light she sees sometimes blossom into bright flashes before a black veil drapes itself over the world.
She wakes up hooked to a heart monitor, her stepbrother sitting by her bed, smirking, “You always knew how to liven up a party, S.”
Only this:
She has a seizure and ends up in the hospital and now everyone knows and suddenly everything becomes too real.
Eric comes to her room first after she wakes up, just sits down next to her and takes her hand, doesn’t say anything.
After a few minutes, she whispers, “Sorry,” and she is apologizing for how she didn’t tell him but really she means more, means sorry I left I seem to do that a lot and sorry I make you worry and sorry you were so lonely you tried to kill yourself and sorry I couldn’t make our dad stay and sorry I’m dying.
He nods once, jerkily. “Okay.”
She smiles a little and squeezes his hand. “So.”
Another nod, a tiny smile, and he squeezes back. “So.”
They stay like that for a while, and if his eyes are shining a little too brightly and her eyes burn a little bit from unshed tears, neither of them will say anything.
She’s discharged the next day (because hospitals are supposed to cure people and her presence denies everything medicine stands for) with a bag of medication: tetrabenazine, valporic acid, anti-seizure medication. She reads all of the names and the labels and laughs. “How am I supposed to pronounce all of this?”
Blair’s face is pure determination and the kiss she presses lightly to the top of her head feels a little bit like forever. “When the time comes,” she promises and Serena knows she means when your words slur together and you’re convulsing on the floor, gosh isn’t this kind of familiar, “I’ll be there.”
Her mother makes some calls and talks to Eric and fights with Rufus and then her dad is in their living room, looking as if he’s never left.
“I don’t want you here,” she tells him. It only took a terminal illness for you to come back to me.
Her father flinches a little, but doesn’t run away. “I deserved that,” he says, “But I am here for you now.”
She laughs and there is no mirth and no bitterness, just a whole lot of nothings filling up a void. “You’re about fifteen years too late,” she replies, but takes his hand. “Tell me what you’ve been up to.”
Dan makes a beeline for her as soon as she says goodbye to her father (don’t be a stranger, she had told William, and the joke had fallen a little flat). “Serena,” he says, so concerned, so sad.
She tries to smile but it fades too quickly and he notices. “You’ve been sick.”
“Dan,” she says, “I am sick.”
“You are sick,” he repeats, and his gaze is forlorn, searching for the tragic heroine.
There is an urge to groan, because a headache is slowly building in her temples and somehow Dan has never been able to understand that she has never been anything and she has always just been. “I think I’ll sleep,” she tells him, but he grabs her hand.
“Serena,” he says again, and her name sounds like his lifeline.
“Dan,” she sighs, either setting him free or cutting him loose, “Dan.”
Chuck just shows up on one day, reeking of whiskey. “Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it,” he says, and is all over her personal space.
She bats him away. “Ew, no. Besides, Blair’s put a permanent claim on you.”
He scowls. “That’s never stopped you before.”
“I don’t repeat my mistakes anymore,” she tells him. I’m never going to get a chance.
“That day in the Palace. Do you remember?”
She doesn’t say anything. Of course she remembers, remembers grilled cheese with truffle oil and the best friend and the boyfriend.
“I would have thought that-you might’ve told Humphrey, or Eric, or-but you didn’t.”
“What would telling anyone solve?” she asks, curious. Why is he bringing this up now?
He looks away. “If I could sell Bass Industries,” he blurts out, “If I could sell everything I have.”
She blinks as she hears the unspoken I’d do it to save you in that declaration, and she thinks about thanking him, offering him the forgiveness that he seems to need, but there are too many lines here, and she’s not about to cross them, not now.
(Not ever.)
So she just shakes her head, tells him sentimentality doesn’t suit him, and waits until after he leaves to cry.
Carter Baizen flies back into her life on Christmas, bringing champagne and plane tickets. “Santorini again,” he tells her, “Just you and me, beautiful.”
There is a slightly desperate look in his eyes that makes her heart break a little, but she shakes her head. “I’m not that girl anymore,” she says, “You’re not that guy anymore. And we…”
He hugs her before she can finish, and presses a warm but chaste kiss on her lips. “Long shot, anyways,” he murmurs, and she laughs even though the medication makes her throat ache.
She sends him away and his eyes are a little wet when he promises that he’ll come back, but she knows that this is the last time he’s going to see her alive.
Blair finds her lying on the floor of the Waldorf kitchen one night, staring at the ceiling. “S?” she wonders, and Serena jumps.
“Don’t scare me like that,” she snaps at her best friend, and absently wipes her eyes. Her cheeks are wet.
“S, what’s wrong?” The hardwood is cold, but Blair doesn’t hesitate as she lies down next to her.
She keeps staring at the ceiling instead of answering. All the tiles are in neat rows; geometric perfection. She counts them, gets to forty-nine before she remembers why she’s even here. “I had a dream.”
“You had a dream.”
“Yes,” she says, and keeps counting the tiles. Fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three. And then no more. She glances at Blair next to her, patiently waiting, and she realizes that their bodies aren’t exactly parallel. Shifting a little to compensate, she continues, “About the Shepard wedding.”
For some reason Blair’s breath hitches a little at this. “S-
“What did I do that time again?” She wonders, and frowns because there are no more tiles. Maybe she counted wrong; she’s never been that good at math.
Blair’s arms wrap around her as she starts counting again.
Days melt into weeks melt into months. Some days she counts the days on her calendar and panics a little when she realizes that she’s lost another one.
Other days she doesn’t really care about that or about anything.
“You need to stop,” she tells Nate one day.
He stares at her over his mug of coffee. It’s one of her better days-she’s even put on makeup and gotten dressed and everything. They have plans today, but she can’t really remember what they were going to do. “Stop what?”
“Loving me.”
“Serena,” he sighs, “I already tried that, remember?”
I don’t, actually, she thinks, but she nods anyways. “You need to try harder this time.”
“Why?”
“Because,” she gets distracted in his eyes for a little bit, but this is important. “Because, Nate, I’m not going to hold you back.”
“You’re not-
“I need you to not be heartbroken when I die.”
His eyes harden a little like they always do when she mentions dying. “I’m going to be heartbroken anyways,” he says, “You’re one of my oldest friends.”
She licks her lips-they’re always chapped now. “I need you to be less heartbroken, then.”
“Serena-
“Nate,” she snaps, and then tries to calm down. He doesn’t understand, not yet. “Please, just promise me you’ll try to stop.”
He glares at her, but she ignores it and his gaze softens somewhat. (This is just another piece of his heart; he should be used to her taking those by now.) “If that’s what you really want,” he says, “I promise.”
It’s a lie, but she supposes that it’s as close as she’s going to get.
“You’re stupid,” she tells Chuck one night, and slurs her words. They’re alone together in the suite that he and Nate share, and if she imagines hard enough she can think that it’s the alcohol in her system that’s causing the speech impediment.
He raises his shot glass at her, a childish salute. “Well, you’re stupider.”
She giggles a little, because when has that not been true? “When are you going to propose to Blair?”
Chuck literally spits his Scotch back out. “What?”
“Or are you going to marry her after I die? That’d break her heart, you know. She’s always wanted me as her maid of honor.”
Her stepbrother hasn’t stopped sputtering, and it would be endearing if he isn’t Chuck Bass. “You’re seriously suggesting that I marry your best friend as a favor to you?”
She shrugs. He proposes a week later.
She wakes up to Blair smoothing her hair. “Hey, Mrs. Bass,” she murmurs.
Blair rolls her eyes. “I told you I’m not taking his name,” she says, but there’s something strained about her smile.
Serena frowns. “Shouldn’t you be on your way to Belize right now?”
“Yeah,” Blair lets a breath out slowly and her gaze a little too careful. “But last night…”
Last night. She suddenly remembers last night, at the reception. Screaming and crying. “Oh my God,” she whispers, “B, I’m…”
“Don’t,” Blair whispers back, expression fierce, “Don’t apologize. It’s okay. Chuck and I decided…we’re going to take a trip around the world
instead. You and Nate want to come with?”
She laughs through repressed sobs. I ruined my best friend’s wedding. “You’re asking us to go on a honeymoon with you?”
Blair says nothing, just holds her tight until she gets her breathing back under control. What is you is me. “Well,” she finally decides, “I’ve always wanted to see the world.”
Small spasms in her legs, her back, like someone’s pinching her over and over again, blinding pain behind her eyes, and she just wants-
“Serena,” Nate says, and she uses his voice to claw out of her personal pit of agony. “Serena.”
He forces her to swallow something bitter, and the pain recedes somewhat. She blinks, forces herself to remember. They’re in the shower, in a hotel in Mumbai.
Nate is literally holding her up under the showerhead. “Do you need someone?” he asks, worry written all over his face. “Chuck and Blair are-
No. “No,” she says, hears the way she drags that single syllable for way too long, so it sounds more like a moan. She’s exhausted and sore all over, even though she’s pretty sure she’s been in bed all day. “Just…”
She closes her eyes but can still feel Nate’s concern. “Sleep,” she manages, and lays her head on Nate’s chest. “Sleep would be…really nice.”
Drifting off as Nate wraps her in a towel and carries her back to their bed, she forces herself not to wonder if this is the last time she’ll be awake.
(A day later a flickering light on the plane distracts her, and there’s a blank in her mind. She leans across the aisle, whispers to Blair, “Shouldn’t we be in Mumbai already?”
Blair’s eyes fill with tears. “Sweetie,” she says quietly, “We already are.”)
Her mind feels like a funnel; the memories keep slipping away like water. Some of it she fights to keep: Eric’s smile, Dan’s stories, Chuck’s smirk, Blair’s laugh, Nate’s eyes.
Eventually, she forgets everything else.
One day she pulls herself out of bed and stands in front of the mirror and just stares at herself. Her knees are shaking from the strain (she’s been using a wheelchair for a while now) and the disease has cut a swathe through her body fat, leaving her impossibly thin.
(There is a moment where she wonders if Blair will be jealous, and then like most other things the thought disappears.)
Nate appears at her side with a sad smile. Once, their eyes had been almost the same shade of blue; now hers have faded into something dull and yellowish. “Who am I, Nate?” she asks. I look nothing like me.
“You are,” he tells her, and kisses her like he can still save her, “You are.”
There are things that she leaves behind: her family and her friends.
Their hearts, she decides to keep forever.
There is a split second when she can feel her heart stop-she’s a bit mystified first, and then what’s left of her vision blurs and she understands that she’s dying.
So she does, and it may be the most un-dramatic thing she’s done in her life.
This is how Serena van der Woodsen dies:
Too young, struggling for breath, betrayed by her own body, the victim of a horrifically debilitating illness. She dies a statistic, and it might be the saddest thing in the world.
But it’s not, because this is how Serena van der Woodsen dies:
Her parents are there, and Rufus, and Dan. Eric is sitting next to her bed, with Chuck, who holds a crying Blair while impatiently brushing away tears of his own. On the other side is Nate, whose eyes are swollen and whose hand is in hers.
So, this is how Serena van der Woodsen dies: she is happy, and that is the only thing that has ever mattered.