This is a one-shot story I wrote a while ago and rescued from my hard drive while editing another fanfiction. It's about Serena's thoughts as she comes back to the city before the pilot aired.
Hope you enjoy!
[September, 2007]
I get off the train from Cornwall to the screech of the announcer.
"Welcome to Stanford. The time is four twenty five. The four thirty one train to New York will depart in approximately five minutes from track two, arriving at Grand Central at approximately five thirty."
At the sound of the city name, the memories came flooding back of that horrible night nine months ago. Through the haze of Merlot and old cocaine shooters and overtaxed hormones emerges panic, building.
"Pete?"
Eyes, glazed like carrots, look out at me, pleading. My heart beats like a drum.
Thump.
Thump.
"He's seizing - GEORGINA!"
Foam, white as the waves that crash on Mediterranean shores, drips out of his mouth.
"Where's his phone?"
"911 Emergency-"
"Hi, we have an emergency… there's a guy, he's having seizures, I don't know what's wrong…"
I shake my head and pull up the Louis Vuitton suitcase I carry as I wait for the train to pull up. Only a week ago I carried boxes and boxes of things to Connecticut. And yet none of it mattered. I barely had time to throw my clothes in. And yet, as much as I try to look forward to the future my mind continues to drift back over the last nine months. To that night that seems both a yesterday and a lifetime ago...
What the hell was I thinking?
Well, I wasn't. I see that now. Nothing in my life at the time mattered after that moment. Decades of friendship were stripped away along with months of parties, alcohol, sex, that filled the void. What was I left with? No one would ever understand.
I took a taxi started out alone. Again. Standing in front of the Metro-North railroad, bags in hand, guilt crushing on my conscious. The rain did nothing to wash away the guilt of that moment. The next few months, I tried everything I could think of to do.
Exile was my self-inflicted punishment. And the nine months I tried to serve my penance as best as I could. Connecticut was not that bad, it turned out. More of a garden of rest than Dante's fifth circle of hell I assumed it would be. In fact, I would have served the remainder of my high school days, and then happily gone away forever. Today, however, my sentence was commuted under circumstances I never could have forseen.
Eric - I am so, so sorry. I don't know... I wasn't thinking, leaving you.
The lights on the platform began to blink.
"The 4:31 to Grand Central is now arriving. Please step behind the yellow line."
Running away, some would argue, was a cowardly move. I would call it a selfish one. That almost destroyed my family. But I did not deserve that, no, I deserved much worse. I understand that now. I deserved to suffer in silence, to suffer the guilt of the escapee. Telling no one, it lingered, sank its teeth into my shoulder from its constant presence just behind my consciousness.
The train rushes passed in a whirl of steel and the blaring horn, whipping the blonde hair out of my face.
I will find a way to make it up to you.
I know from experience living with the weight of that guilt every day doesn't make it go away. It does, however, transform a part of it into something else. It became a fire burning all the crap out of my life.
The doors open in front of me.
"This is the train to Grand Central. The next stop is, Grand Central."
I decided to turn my life around because of that night. Because in that moment, watching his body come down the steps, I realized how much I hated being the person standing there, unable to move, to speak, to do anything. I couldn't live with myself being that person.
The train is almost empty at this hour, and I flop down onto the first window seat available.
I did not know it then, but in exile I would make myself anew. I would turn my life around, become a person who I could live with. And, surprisingly, found other people I could live with in return...
But the guilt remains.
And now it seemed I was starting over yet again. My mind drifts back to the last nine months. The lessons learned. The people I knew. The boy who has haunted my dreams for the last nine months.
"Serena"! Nate called after me, waving. "Don't go. Please."
"I can't, Nate... I just can't."
I stared out the window and the Connecticut skyline, unseeing. Allowing myself this train ride to relive those nine months of happy and painful memories where I changed my life. Knowing that once I stepped off the train, I would put Connecticut behind me as I had New York. Seal that guilt of abandonment into my subconscious, and hope to God I wouldn't make the same mistakes again. But this time, I doubted I would return.
We will arrive in New York in approximately one hour.
Eric's pain have secured my deliverance from Connecticut. But it remains to be seen what is the price I have to pay for redemption from mine.