Not An Inch More Room To Self-Destruct
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or the show. Lyrics and title from Spring Awakening.
Summary: Serena van der Woodsen does not deserve the good in her life, but she certainly deserves the bad. - Oneshot.
There's a moment you know you're fucked
Not an inch more room to self-destruct
No more moves, oh yeah, the dead-end zone
Man, you just can't call your soul your own
Serena van der Woodsen is not a good person. She knows it; she lives her whole life knowing it. She makes mistakes and watches as the people who are supposed to love her turn her away. Her mother looks down on her with judgmental looks; her father runs away; her best friends think she's a disaster.
But she doesn't know how not to be so tragic.
She parties too much and she fucks strangers and she skips class and does everything that good people don't do.
So she doesn't understand why people love her, adore her. She hurts the people who she loves the most; she destroys everything that is good in her life.
People should not aspire to be her. She wouldn't want to be her. She doesn't want to be her anymore.
You take everything from me. Nate, my mom – you don't even have to try, it's who you are.
Serena takes everything from everyone without thinking, without caring, without apologizing.
She is selfish and demanding and cruel – maybe even more than Blair because at least her best friend doesn't pretend she isn't. Serena goes through life acting as if she is noble and honest and nice, when it is far from the truth.
She knows that she outshines her best friend; knows that she steals Blair's light away whenever she is around. She knows that she takes everything that belongs to her.
She doesn't want to hurt the person she loves best, but she can't help it. She loves the way people look at her, her golden hair and blue eyes sparkling with every turn or look. She loves that girls envy her and boys lust after her.
The attention is like an addiction, and once she gets a hit she cannot control herself.
She loves that people notice her. All she really ever wanted was to be noticed. Noticed by her mother, instead of being abandoned in favour of a new beau. Noticed by her father, instead of being left without one for so many years. Noticed by a boy whose eyes were as blue as hers, instead of being the other girl.
She knows she can take everything she wants away from the girl who is like her sister, but she knows that Blair already has too much pain in her life and Serena doesn't want to cause her any more.
Serena grows up, but never grows wiser.
She makes the same mistakes over and over, and she still gets away with it.
She does what she wants when she wants with whomever she wants and she tries to convince herself that this is actually what she wants.
But then she has sex with Nate and she thinks she killed Pete and Georgina wants to pretend that it is not their fault, but Serena knows the truth:
Everything is all her fault.
So she runs away and tries to save the people she has destroyed.
Serena flees to boarding school without looking back. She has lived a lifetime of mistakes and regrets – now she just wants to move on.
She can barely look at herself in the mirror anymore; she can barely remember who she was before she became this mess of a girl.
She can't believe the person she has become. She can't believe she did all of this. She can't believe what she has done and how she has ruined everything.
Nate was, is, will always be Blair's and she destroyed the only good thing in her life by taking him from her.
Blair, her best friend; the only person who accepts her for who she truly is and loved her no matter what.
She can't believe she ran away and left sixteen years of destruction and chaos and mess to be cleaned up by someone else.
When did she become this person?
But she doesn't want to dwell on these thoughts any longer. They hurt too much, and she doesn't want her heart to ache like this anymore.
So she pulls on her million-dollar smile and makes the best of the situation.
Because Serena van der Woodsen always gets her way.
Boarding school is new and exciting and different. She has even more freedom in Connecticut than she did in New York.
She parties with her friends and stays out late and wins drinking games and catches the eyes of every boy in sight.
It is almost exactly like home, only now she doesn't have the eyes of Gossip Girl and everyone she knows watching her, hoping she'll mess up and cause a scandal.
Now she doesn't have to suffer through Blair's worried looks or Nate's adoring glances and she doesn't disappoint anyone because they don't really care about her and they don't really know who she used to be.
It would have been a fresh start if she didn't ruin it from the start and fall back into her old habits.
But the novelty wears off. Late at night, when she curls in bed, she wishes she were home, wishes she wasn't so alone in the world, wishes she hadn't wrecked everything.
She misses New York and the city lights and the seasons and the museums and the shopping and every good memory she experienced there. She misses the streets and the skyscrapers and all the places her life and her memories and her name has been engraved.
She misses her distant mother and her absent father and her lonely little brother. But most of all, she misses her friends.
She misses Audrey films and sleepovers and the Met steps and schemes and a girl with doe-brown eyes.
She misses scarves and bowties and smirks and pub-crawls and a boy with a not-so black heart.
She misses sailboats and boyish grins and sandy-blonde hair and lacrosse games and a boy who makes her heart race.
She misses her best friends so much that it makes her heart ache with a pain she doesn't remember ever experiencing. She misses them so incredibly much that she wants to cry and she wants to die for hurting them all.
When she receives the desperate call from her mother, informing her of younger brother's attempted suicide, it is both a tragedy and a salvation.
He could have died, she repeats it a million times and it still doesn't seem real. This couldn't have happened. This isn't true. It's not, it's not, it's… real. Completely, utterly, horrifyingly real. It's real and it's all your fault and you know it.
Her mind doesn't stop racing and her heart doesn't stop pounding and she can barely breathe and she feels like she will be sick constantly.
She can't believe this has happened. Not to him, not to Eric.
Eric is the good one. He is smart and funny and amazing and the perfect brother that she doesn't deserve.
She can't believe that she has destroyed him too. Of all the things she has done, this is the worst. Serena has too many regrets for such a short life, but this is the biggest.
She wishes she could pretend that this didn't happen, like Blair or mother do when something doesn't fit into their perfect lives, but she is not Blair and she is certainly not her mother so she gains all her courage and prepares to face all the repercussions of her past mistakes.
She is ready to atone for every sin she has ever made, so she buys a ticket for the next train to New York.
She returns to Manhattan when all the pieces she left broken a year ago have finally fallen back into place.
Her best friend is queen, and she rules with an iron fist.
Nate and Blair are still the perfect couple.
Chuck is still Chuck. (At least some things never change)
Everything is as it should be, but Serena doesn't feel the happiness she wishes she could.
Because her mother is pretending nothing has happened and Eric resents her for leaving and Blair doesn't want to be friends anymore and Nate won't talk to her and she has absolutely no one.
Atonement is not as easy as she hoped it would be, and – as always – she fails miserably at it. She can't tell the truth so she pretends like she didn't sleep with Blair's boyfriend on a bar-stool at a wedding where he was her best friend's date and she didn't sort of-maybe-possibly kill a man who she was doing coke with.
If Serena tells Blair the truth then she will be destroyed and she will hate her and she will hate Nate and her whole life will go up in flames and Serena doesn't want one more thing weighing down on her, even if it is all her fault.
And she can't talk to Nate because he still looks at her in a way he is not supposed to.
I didn't come back for you.
She didn't. She came back for Eric and she wants to be a different, better person. She cannot be a better person if she is sneaking around with her best friend's boyfriend.
But Serena's heart is thumping too loudly because Nate wants to be with her but it is all so wrong because he is not supposed to love her.
Blair's my best friend and you're her boyfriend. And she loves you. That's the way things are supposed to be.
Serena will not ruin this again.
Blair doesn't know the truth and she desperately wants it to stay that way. Serena is happy she has her best friend back and pretends that it doesn't break her that she is keeping so many secrets from her former confidant.
Serena would rather be alone forever than to have her best friend hate her the way she knows she would if she knew the truth.
But Nate tells her anyway and he destroys everything that Serena was rebuilding. Now Blair hates her again and has forbid Nate from seeing her and even Chuck Bass thinks she is a terrible person.
Serena wants to run away again, but she will no longer be selfish like that. She will fight until she has Blair and Nate and Eric and everyone she loves back into her life.
Then she meets Dan Humphrey. He is different, enthralling, and so completely out of his comfort zone around her.
But he looks at her with adoration like a not-so-similar boy used to. He is self-righteous and intelligent and not what she expected, but she really likes him in a way she never thought she would.
But he learns the truth about who she really is and now when she looks in his eyes all she sees is disappointment.
Blair takes her back and she is once again in her good graces and Nate is allowed to talk to her even though he still has feelings for her and even Dan learns to accept her; and Serena doesn't want to disappointment another person so she tries to be a better person.
But in true Serena van der Woodsen fashion, she cannot help but disappoint.
Serena knows it's the truth, but she can't stand hearing it from someone else. She knows she is horrible and awful and disconcerting, and she knows that she does not deserve the people in her life.
Not Blair, with all her insecurities and endless devotion; or Eric and his open heart and his ability to forgive and forget; not even Dan, who is judgmental but honest and sincere.
Serena doesn't deserve the good in her life, but she certainly deserves the bad.
Hope you enjoyed. Comments are loved.