Title: "About a Girl"
Author: Lila
Rating: PG-13
Character/Pairing: Lily
Spoiler: vague references to everything through "Hi, Society"
Length: one-shot
Summary: Lily falls back on the one thing she knows will last.
Disclaimer: Not mine, just borrowing them for a few paragraphs.
Author's Note: Apparently I can't stop writing "Gossip Girl" fanfic, even though I have other, far more important things to do like grade papers and finish my BSG epic. Still, the lack of R/L fic has inspired me to write my own and provided an outlet for getting in touch with my middle school self. Enjoy. Title courtesy of Nirvana.
The night Lily finds her son floating in a tub of pink-streaked water, twin streams of fading crimson pulsing from his wrists to the beat of his heart, she listens to Lincoln Hawk in repeat on the old tape player she bought years ago in a used record store on St. Mark's.
The tape skips a little the third time "Rosewood" sings through her bones, and she taps a steel-toed combat boot in tandem with the bass. She knows the words, even if she pretends she doesn't, and her fingers twist the hem of her pink-flowered babydoll dress as his voice breaks on the bridge and stories of lost love slip from his lips.
She wraps the green plaid flannel tighter around herself, and it smells like him, youth and lust and love wrapped up in its folds. She breathes in and the woodsy taste of the pot sinks into her lungs. She found it in Serena's sock drawer when she packed up her daughter's things for the move to The Palace, when she thought she could box up her life and her mistakes and store it in the back of her closet the way she did her past. She feels woozy and a bit light-headed, kind of like the first time she heard his song on the radio and almost plowed her Beamer into the semi up ahead from the rush of it all.
She closes her eyes and leans back against the mahogany door of the master suite's his and her walk in-closets – she doesn't know which one – and wills herself to a time and a place where the only pain she knew was when she stubbed her toe the first time she slid manicured feet into a fresh pair of Doc Martens without breaking them in. Instead she sees her baby lying in a pool of his own blood, staining his hair and the tub and the part of her heart that still had faith.
Her eyes open, shoot open, and blink rapidly to erase the images of her baby in pain. She reaches for the camera that was lovingly nestled in the folds of his shirt, and kicks open the balcony door with a scuffed black boot.
The night air is cool on her face and it blows her hair back behind her ears, and it catches on the wind and twines around her throat the way it did when she was young and weak and she kept it long so he'd bury his face in the crook of her neck and breathe her in and tell her how he'd never let her go. It's shorter now and barely touches her shoulders, because her mother told her, when she pressed her future into the palm of her hand, no well-bred lady leaves the house channeling Lady Godiva. She'd cut her hair and donated the clothes to Goodwill and driven the So-Cal from her voice with every tap of a spiked heel on Fifth Avenue pavement, but she'd kept the outfit she wore the night her mother pressed a cool hand to her forehead as she'd ducked her head through the door of a towncar and she'd watched the only life she'd chosen for herself fade through the windshield.
She doesn't remember the camera's weight, and she nearly drops it as she cradles it between sweaty, shaky palms. She leans against the balcony, the lights harsh and mean against her eyes, and her bare thighs rest against a cold metal railing. The dress blows in the breeze and catches in the moonlight, like petals on the wind, and it reminds her of the first time she brought him home and showed him around the ranch and he'd laid her down in a patch of wildflowers and done all the things that made her mother's hair turn prematurely gray.
She breathes in deep, night air coating her lungs and masking the pot and the pain, and for a moment she can breathe easier again. She raises the camera and peers through the peephole, the world impossibly tiny through the narrow confines of distorted glass. She remembers when her own world was that small, when everything she was consisted of music ringing in her ears and laughter catching in the air and painting the crappy walls of her apartment with life and love and photos of what used to be. She watches the city around her and it's big and foreign even though she's lived on the Upper East Side for half her life.
She misses the hay on the breeze and dust catching in her hair and the way she couldn't stop smiling. She remembers the first time she came to New York without her mother dragging her down, and he'd opened her eyes to a world that didn't include Bergdorf's or Bendel's or lunch at Barney's. She had liked the way uneven pavement felt under her brand new boots, or how she'd clung tighter to his hand as they'd navigated Bowery enroute to Talking Heads at CBGB's. He'd pulled her closer, buried his face in the long, blonde hair that nearly reached her waist, and promised to always keep her safe.
"Forever?" she'd asked, the dingy lights of Bleecker bringing out the gold tones in his hair, blinking around his face like a halo in the night.
"Lil, I'm not going anywhere," he'd said and kissed her on the street corner, back pressed against a shabby telephone pole that left paint chips imbedded in the fine cashmere of her coat.
She'd learned her first lesson about him right then and there, because she hadn't been the only one crying the night she told the lie that became her life.
She peers through the lens of her camera again and this time her index finger doesn't hesitate on the button. She captures the lights and the buildings and the money in grainy black and white, a hazy vision of her world before him. Her finger presses again, and again, and each image is a slightly different version of the first. She remembers dance practice for cotillion, twenty-four blonde heads in a row, and running from the studio so hard she lost a Bruno Magli in her rush to breathe. He'd been the one to find it, as he trudged home from a school that was nothing like him, and slip the three-inch heel under the arch of her foot. She'd looked into dark eyes and seen the smile there, and when he'd stood up clumsily, the guitar strapped to his back weighing him down, she'd known she could lose herself in those eyes forever.
Her camera clicks as the roll of film runs out and she can't bear to look at the glaring proof of what her life has become. The film slips out easily and she watches it twist and coil around her pale fingers. When she crushes it beneath the sole of her steel-toed boot, she wishes she banish her mistakes the same way.
The hotel room feels stuffy and crowded when she goes back inside, and the boxes and suitcases make her shudder. Her life was never supposed to be temporary – happiness was supposed to last forever.
Her fingers hesitate on the dialpad and she wonders if she should call him, just to hear his voice, just to know that forever isn't over yet. Except she remembers the night she ruined her own life and she knows his forever isn't hers anymore.
When the night nurse reports that her baby is still breathing , she knows her own forever isn't over yet either.
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