Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Premise: Serena didn't leave town quickly enough to avoid the consequences of her actions the day and night of the Shepard wedding. It is eleventh grade, and the morning of Bart Bass's brunch. But the Non-Judging Breakfast Club is at an emotional crossroads. Do they need to reunite?
The Queen and I
Serena and Nate, from different sides of the ballroom at the New York Palace Hotel, watched as their former friends grinned at each other. Blair and Chuck's relationship had notably grown closer since Serena had been dragged into questioning the day after the Shepard wedding.
The socialite's exploits leading up to Pete Fairman's death splashed across the Post and Gossip Girl, and Blair immediately and publicly dumped Nate. Serena was sent to rehab, and returned to discover she was a persona non grata above 61st Street.
Nate and Serena tried to give it a go, but as Blair's social stock rose, their relationship failed.
Blair hadn't spoken to either of them since then, and she hadn't dated anyone in particular for that matter. Now the reigning queen of the junior class, she stood, lithe hips posed between Chuck's palms at Bart Bass's annual brunch as he whispered something into her ear. Her Cheshire smile widened.
Eric quirked his eyebrows, turning his gaze away from them as he approached his miserable sister. "What is that all about?"
"Nothing, I'm sure." Serena replied. Blair was still famously protective of her virginity and Chuck had yet to show any signs of the kind of patience his father's money couldn't buy. "Why are we here?"
"Well, Mom's started using the words "special" and "partner" again, so presumably Mom's next husband is somewhere in this room." Eric replied, his eyes scanning the room. Who among the Who's Who of Manhattan was their next daddy?
The Mean Girls were gathering like ducks and approached their queen in a V formation. Chuck's hands trailed off Blair's hips and he headed for the bar, taking Blair's champagne flute with him.
Nate couldn't help but have mixed feelings as his friend approached the bar. Chuck had quickly established a "No Talking About Blair" rule after Nate's relationship with Serena had fallen apart.
In Nate's experience, Blair's icy veneer could give way to unspeakable depths, not unlike the enigmatic abyss that Serena was, at least in terms of scale. But when Nate had been on the ledge for both girls, looking into Blair's darkness had frightened him while Serena's had intrigued him.
In a sense, Chuck seemed to be just the adventurer prepared for such darkness, so the puzzle seemed to fit when Nate stared at them together. Their rapport had no pretenses, and they always looked like they were the only ones in the room.
But it was an eerily perfect match, one that was clouded in unrequited tension, and was flooded with danger. That explained the clench in Nate's gut, but he didn't particularly understand the pressure closing in around his heart.
He approached his friend, who for once was taking care with his father's hotel. "A Tanqueray Vesper and a Macallan neat." Chuck drawled, "He'll have an Old Fashioned, light on the syrup."
"It's... one o' clock. A bit early for hard liquor." Nate observed as the martini arrived first on the bar.
"I'm meeting Stepmother Number Umpteen today, Blair's mother sent her as an emissary since she signed the divorce papers last night and is in seclusion, and the Captain's deal is falling apart as we speak." Chuck replied lazily, seizing upon his scotch as it hit the bar. "Enjoy your Old Fashioned."
Nate watched as his friend practically strutted over to his ex, presenting her with the complex martini that Nate himself had introduced her to. They'd broken up before the new Casino Royale had hit theaters, and he could hear her acidic defense of her choice as predating any French actress's popularity. But in a time when he could pretend to be happy with her, he'd really enjoyed a long James Bond marathon with her Thanksgiving leftover pies.
Chuck was glowing like a hunting dog with a large quail in his mouth, and Blair turned away from her minions, placed her hands somewhere between his chest and his abs, and kissed him on the cheek.
"He's very attentive." Growled Bart from beside Nate, taking the Old Fashioned Nate hadn't touched and finishing it in a swift sip. Nate studied the expression on Bart's face, knowing neither the tone nor the construction of the billionaire's features would lend him any clues as to Mr. Bass's thoughts.
As Bart strode away, Nate couldn't help but agree with his assessment. Blair had yet to dismiss the billion-heir who stood in an intimate proximity behind her.
New Message From: Assibald
I'm sorry about ur parents.
Blair looked down from reapplying her lipstick when her phone lit up. She read the message and rolled her eyes. Her femme fatale pout was more important than her ex's attempts at empathy. She padded out a reply as she pressed a tissue between her lips.
New Message From: Blair Waldorf
Thanx?
As she exited the downstairs powder room, Chuck pounced on her, closing the space in a dark corner and nuzzling against her cheek. "You're getting more ridiculous by the second, Bass." Blair giggled.
The flirtation between them had gotten increasingly heated over the summer, lazing at Blair's mother's country house, going to parties, occasionally jetting off to the French Riviera.
In the ballroom, Chuck had placed his hands at the apex of the curves of her hips, close enough to her waist to look far more innocent than they did now, clutching desperately to the fullest part of the arcs. "Don't you have someone else to date rape?" Blair asked impatiently, frustrated with her inability to physically rebuff him. She hated that her hands trailed down his back, and that as he peppered her neck with just innocent and light enough kisses that she exposed more of it.
"Come on. I have a room upstairs." Chuck whispered against her neck, and even though his breath was warm against that exposed skin, she felt goosebumps pop up.
"I bet you tell that to all the girls." Blair managed to grit out of her teeth, finding the emotional strength to pull her hands up from his back, place them onto his shoulders and push him away. "I just touched up."
She dusted herself off, but as she returned to the ballroom, she felt Chuck's presence behind her.
"Someday you're going to stop dressing up like you're the vamp and you'll actually be her. When that day comes, talk to me." Chuck spat in her ear, and Blair's eyes lit up in flames, not because the accusation was off-base, but because as Chuck departed from his stalker stance, she felt his chilly absence envelop her.
Her phone buzzed again.
New Message From: Assibald
You wanna get out of here?
Blair looked around the crowded room, filled to the brim with people she'd grown up with all her life, and she was not willing for a second to feel vulnerable now that the one person in it that she trusted was off throwing a temper tantrum.
New Message From: Blair Waldorf
Call your car around.
Blair didn't know precisely where she was going in her brunch clothes with her ex, but she was going somewhere. Her minions flocked to her as soon as they registered her reappearance, but she waved them off. "See you at school. Early. Make sure I have my yogurt."
Across the room, Bart approached his brooding son at the bar while he was in the middle of ordering another scotch. "Nice temper tantrum, jackass. You were winning."
Chuck turned incredulously to his father, unable to defensively mask his shock. "What are you..."
"The Waldorf girl. The one whose mother is about to debut a lingerie collection with Victoria's Secret as they start to move past basic underwear, who just completed her divorce proceedings yesterday. You were about to win. And unless you don't want to, I suggest you stop throwing down gauntlets." Bart hissed, giving his son advice for the first time in many years. "Gauntlets are for negotiating with the people you know you've already won."
The last part he said with the slightest wink, and the surprise on Chuck's face only deepened as his father swaggered away.
"God I feel drunk." Blair said as they got out of the car somewhere in the Village. Nate figured that the best place to be was away, and Blair seemed to be so emotionally disoriented that her usual snobbery didn't seem to kick in. "Something about being away from all the drunk people makes you realize you're drunk."
"Wanna grab a hot dog?" Nate offered, and Blair sobered up pretty instantly.
"A what?" Blair's face wrinkled with the exaggeration of her three Bellinis and one Vesper. Nate laughed.
"You know, some people recognize New York for its availability of hot dogs." Nate said. They wandered in no particular direction.
"And some people don't vacation in Florida, they're actually from there." Blair replied. "I'm drunk, not a tourist."
"Come on." He turned them onto Avenue A. "You might like this place. It has an element of exclusivity."
"Oh, so it makes a three-second evaluation of someone before giving them herpes?" Blair retorted, rolling her eyes. "St. Mark's Place..."
"Really?" Chuck had never felt so disgusted in his life. "You want to bring in the tramp of the Upper East Side and her social pariah daughter and..." Chuck lingered then, not having the black heart to mock the youngest van der Woodsen's latest public turmoil, at least not to his face.
After the party had concluded, Chuck noticed the van der Woodsen family was doing more than their fair share of lingering and his father pulled them to a table the servers had just cleared off and had unceremoniously announced to them they were going to become a family.
"Charles." Bart said with warning in his voice.
"No. She's social suicide. She is the whore of Carnegie Hill. As for her mother..." Bart's eyes grew dangerously narrow.
"CHARLES." Bart bellowed. "Find something nice to say or we're going to add family counseling to your SAT prep course load. You'll have no time to do the things that you enjoy and that make you a hypocrite for criticizing your stepsister."
"She isn't my stepsister until the ink is dry on the pre-nup. Good luck with that." Chuck snarled, and he stalked out of the ballroom.
Moments after he slammed the door behind him, he heard a soft knock at the door of 1812. His father could come in whenever he liked, and if he knocked it would certainly be harsher than that, so it had to be a van der Woodsen.
He opened the door, a glare still on his face when it revealed the freshman Eric. "I wouldn't want them for family either." He admitted quickly, unsure of who precisely that anger was directed at. "They're pretty much the same person though they wouldn't like to admit it, and they're not easy to live with."
Chuck stepped aside to let Eric in. "And you are?"
"I'm definitely the easiest to maintain." Eric said with a smile.
Chuck returned the smile as their phones buzzed.
A photo of Nate and Blair laughing as they exited Crif Dogs appeared with a caption.
Spotted in the Village: B and N slumming it downtown with hot dogs. I hear that B and C's friendship is heating up but there's nothing like too many cocktails and an ex to cool things down, right C?
Chuck scowled again, tossing his phone onto his bed. Eric studied his future stepbrother's face. Claus (the most recent departure, in spring), Klaus (the cokehead), and the others never had any children of their own, thankfully, though Lily once came close to hooking up with a former Olympian with six children, which would have been a nightmare of sitcom proportions. It was actually, in Eric's mind, Bart's redeeming quality.
Eric hated living in hotels and with the increasingly wealthy and increasingly ridiculous excuses for father figures Lily picked out, but Chuck seemed to be as fed up with that as he was, and that was more than he had in common with Serena, minus the beautiful if troubled DNA.
"Feeling angsty?" Eric asked, dragging his finger along the glass tabletop in the entryway. "Doesn't seem very Bass-like."
"It's not." Chuck admitted in a pained tone, walking through the suite. "Neither is the broadcast of one's failures on a blog."
"Failure?" Eric replied, throwing himself onto Chuck's bed. "The prim princess of the Upper East Side was letting you molest her in front of her friends and her parents' friends."
Chuck grinned with half-hearted victory. "She was, wasn't she?"
"When was the last time you saw her?" Eric asked, and Chuck's face darkened.
"In the ballroom, right after I cornered her outside the powder room." Chuck said miserably. He unscrewed the top of a Macallan bottle.
"You realize that you just described a predator-prey relationship." Eric observed as Chuck quietly lifted an additional glass. He shook his head. "No thanks."
"That's what it feels like. I've tried wooing her. Flowers, jewelry, chocolates, vacations." Chuck listed. He turned on his heel and sat next to Eric on the bed. "I'm close but I can't cross the threshold."
"Maybe because those things, while I'm sure they were nice." Eric scanned the room. "You have impeccable taste. But those are things that don't mean anything to you because you can buy whatever you like."
"Are you gay?" Chuck asked matter-of-factly, turning to meet the young boy's troubled gaze.
Eric didn't look away. "Yes." Eric wasn't sure what to expect.
"Does anyone else know?" It wasn't the follow-up most people would've asked.
"No." Eric said.
"Is it lonely?" Eric couldn't figure out when Chuck had put down his scotch, or when his arm, so comforting and light, had rested on Eric's shoulders.
"Serena's been home more since she got back from rehab, so not really. I'm just not ready to tell them." Eric said plainly. "I think Bart knows, because I think Bart's having us followed."
Chuck grinned. "You're very astute."
"Yeah, that's why I noticed you changed the subject to another elephant in the room."
The future step-brothers sat in silence for a moment.
"Still trying to figure out what you can get that'll actually mean something?" Eric asked.
"Yep."
Blair never sobered up that day. She wandered through the streets of downtown Manhattan with Nate for the rest of the afternoon, stumbling from bar to bar, trying different types of alcohol she would never have considered, even in her days chasing after Serena. One establishment only offered vodka martinis; she threatened to report them to the Better Business Bureau and Nate, drunkenly laughing, apologized for her.
"You sure know your way around." Nate remarked as they ducked into a place in Lower East Side that Blair knew for a fact would let her throw up in their bathroom at five in the evening. He held back her hair in the unisex bathroom, though he knew he ought not to be so careful with her designer dress; she may never wear it again.
"Chasing after Serena at all hours of the day and night will familiarize you with this island." Blair said, wiping her mouth ungracefully on the back of her hand. "You two picked up the slack, but it used to be my primary responsibility. It was exhausting."
Blair sat down on the floor against the brick wall. Nate noticed this bathroom was exceptionally clean. No wonder Blair had chosen this place. He sat down next to her. "I've never really apologized sincerely, have I?"
Blair turned her smudged eyes to meet his nervous ones. "No, but I forgave you anyway."
Nate quirked a brow. "I wasn't aware dictators were capable of forgiveness."
Blair slapped him on the chest. "You don't know a lot of things." She inspected the toes of her shoes. "I couldn't believe how much easier my life was. No more chasing after her after a bend with Georgina, no more wondering and worrying about when you two would act on your attraction. I didn't have to throw myself into a ridiculous frenzy to get your attention, and I found I was quite attractive to people. I don't know what it was. I guess I was less stressed, I guess I was beautiful enough to compete with her all along. That and my STD screen wasn't published on Gossip Girl."
Nate put his hand over Blair's and squeezed it. Blair squeezed it back. "Thanks for apologizing, though. I didn't think I needed to hear it."
Their phones buzzed. Nate downloaded the Gossip Girl message that pictured their retreating backs towards the bathroom.
Spotted: N and B making a bee line for the bathroom at brown cafe. They've been in there for ten minutes and they still haven't come out. Hot dogs in broad day light didn't worry the great C. But does this?
"What's going on there?" Nate asked. Blair was still looking at her shoes.
"I don't know." Blair hated the feeling washing over her, the sadness that often indicated she was in the process of sobering up.
She didn't know what she was thinking, it was so out of character for her to stay drunk all day. Who was she turning into, Serena?
"I'm really confused. He pays attention to me, stuff I shouldn't like at all. The girls haven't gotten out of line yet, because they're pots and I'm a kettle." Blair shrugged. "And the worst part is, that once he gets what he wants, he's just going to stop. And I like it too much to let it stop."
Her phone buzzed again and she rolled her eyes.
To: Queen B
Letting him swipe your V-card in a bathroom? clASSy.
Blair read the text out loud for Nate, and he quietly laughed. "Lashing out is Chuck's way of showing you he cares."
"How do you know that?" Blair replied skeptically.
"Oh, any time I spend too much time with a lacrosse teammate or a new girl, he'd try to blackmail me with something stupid I'd done when I was high." Nate admitted, shrugging sheepishly.
"So sending me pictures of his penis and taking me to Monte Carlo was..." Blair trailed off.
"Foreplay." Nate answered with a laugh. "This should make me uncomfortable. But he's kind of cute. You're still a virgin?"
"Is this conversation odd or what?" Blair replied. "The last place I expected to be on a Sunday afternoon is on the floor of the bathroom talking about the status of my virginity."
Blair was definitely sober now; both of them knew it. Her icy tone was only the first sign.
"Well, you've dated some of the most legendary players of Manhattan. Whitneys, Dalton sports team captains. Sure, not long enough to melt the chastity belt off, but one would think--"
"I'm not disappointed in them." Blair snapped. "I know what they are, I'm not going in blind. As for them, they like the hunt for Constance Billard's most elusive virginity. So they lay it on thick. I've been to St. Bart's, shopping trips in Paris, and not a single one of them was sincere, but I didn't expect them to be."
No one was more surprised than Nate that his eyes were filling with tears. "I'm so sorry."
"You know what Chuck says?" Blair asked by way of reply. "He says that I needed someone to break it to me that life isn't some fantasy. And they have. Every single scenario is out of a dream, a film, and I have never even come close to a happy ending, not for them and not for me. So thank you."
"That's how you forgave me? That's sick. And only someone like Chuck would think that me cheating on you with your best friend is a silver lining." Nate found himself emotional still, but he was getting angry instead of sad. "I don't want your forgiveness, not if it means you can't be happy."
Blair studied Nate's face. "It's funny that you say that. Because even after all those boys, I'm still queen, and the only reason I'm not letting him have his way is because if he does, I won't be queen, and that makes me happy."
Nate narrowed his eyes warily. "That's not the only reason. You said you were scared that he'd stop paying attention to you."
Someone knocked at the door. "Are you done in there? There's a line!"
"I have the runs!" Nate shouted, and Blair giggled. "I'll flush and be out of your way!"
Nate stood up and offered his hand to Blair. She took it. They washed their hands, flushed away the vomit, and stepped out of the bathroom with identical grins. There was indeed a line, and the person at the front of the queue glared at them.
Someone snapped a photo, and Blair grinned back at Nate. "It's a good thing you're still hot real estate, Archibald, or the girls would never forgive me."
The posts of Blair and Nate filled the inboxes of the Van der Basses as they sat in an awkward silence as their engaged parents conversed.
"Eric." Bart barked suddenly, and the currently blond freshman raised his head. "Would you mind telling me why your siblings look so miserable?"
It was true, Serena as well as Chuck had barely pushed any of her food around her plate.
"Well, Blair Waldorf left brunch early and since then has only been spotted with Nate Archibald." Eric explained, and Bart's disapproving gaze swept over his son.
"And Serena is upset because?" Bart asked, clearly frustrated that Eric's blunt explanation couldn't make sense of Serena's behavior.
"Likely because she thinks Blair is making a mistake, because 90% of her is still concerned about Blair because she doesn't seem to have any real friends, and 10% is jealous because she and Nate never worked out." Eric scooped up a large portion of broccollini.
Both juniors glared at the blond boy.
"How do they even know this?" Bart sighed with exasperation.
"Gossip Girl." This time, it was Lily who answered. "It's a website."
"And what do you suggest that they do about it?" Bart asked, his intense gaze still directed at his future stepson.
"About the website?" Eric asked wearily, hoping his recommendation for his siblings would not be the next topic of discussion. Bart shook his head. "I think they should repair their bridges. They are highly more functional as a foursome." A nasty image popped into Eric's head and he scowled. "Well, you know."
Four phones buzzed- Serena's, Chuck's, Eric's, and Lily's. The Gossip Girl blast revealed that Nate had just taken his ex upstairs to her penthouse and had emerged soon after that. For the first time since the meal began, Chuck smiled.
"Pardon me." Chuck drawled. "I have a hangover to heal."
To be continued.