Title: Crazy and Reckless (1/3?)
Author: Lora Perry
Rating: T/PG-13 (for now, at least)
Spoilers: Through the finale of season 2.
Disclaimer: I don't own, so don't sue.
Parings: C/B
Word Count: 1,330
Summary: AU. Nate does what no one expects, but he does it for him, and that's all that matters. One of those, "Nate joins the army after graduation" stories. Slightly inspired by dae_dremeers awesome AU where Nate leaves the UES after graduation
He does something crazy after graduation. Crazy and reckless, but it doesn't involve girls losing their tops or tequila and cocaine. No, Nate does something reckless and crazy and completely not him, but it doesn't involve Cozumel or the cabaña. He has to escape. Has to leave these past two years behind; years where he lost his father, his home, his girlfriend, his best friend, and his sanity. He needs to find himself again (who was he anyway?) before he can even consider college and higher education and the political career that they have been shaping for him behind the scenes since he was ten (since you were born Nate, don't fool yourself). He figures that if he had told his grandfather what he was doing before he did it, he probably would have pulled some strings (the same strings he pulled to get Nate into Columbia), and Nate would have arrived at Annapolis or West Point in the fall. But Nate doesn't want that, doesn't want four years of learning and simulations and being around where his name has all this idiotic influence. He wants now, and to get away, and, God damn it, he will do it himself. So he enlists. At this sketchy place that has probably never seen an Upper East Side kid before. The sergeant in charge shakes his hand after-wards, and Nate has this indescribable goofy grin on his face, like this is completely normal, and so not way out of his realm that he should be trembling. But he's smiling. He's grinning big and the Sergeant is slapping him on the back and congratulating him, and telling him to show up to basic in four weeks, and it's all so surreal that it must be real.
"Get your affairs in order, boy," he says, gruffly, like all good army men should do.
And Nate smiles.
He doesn't tell anyone for three weeks. They make plans for college (they do, he doesn't. he just nods, and smiles, and rolls his eyes when Blair talks about domination and coronation). But one day, three days before Basic, he calls Chuck and they go out for drinks.
"So," he says, liquid courage down his throat to help him, "I, uh. I enlisted. In the army. I enlisted in the Army."
It's out. There's no going back. He's ready for the rage and the denial, and the demand that this is a joke. (And maybe the idea that Chuck can get him out of this if he wanted him too.)
"I know you did Nathanial." But then again, his best friend is Chuck Bass. The guy's protected him since kindergarten when another kid tried to push him down. He's the same guy that has probably had a private eye following him since freshman year. Not out of trust, no, no, he's Nathaniel, but out of protection.
"How? How did you? I haven't told anyone. Grandfather doesn't even know yet."
And Chuck just smiles that smile that has lead him into the pants of more Upper East Side girls than Nate could count (but, of course, this was before he settled down with Blair); "I'm Chuck Bass, Nathanial. Don't ever forget that."
He doesn't. Ever.
His meeting with grandfather isn't as genial or as friendly. He is told how stupid he is, how this will hurt his mother, how this might affect Tripp's campaign. And just as he predicts, his grandfather mentions West Point and Annapolis, hell even the Coast Guard Academy. But Nate, for the first time in a very long time, is steadfast. He says he leaves tomorrow. That he loves his family, he loves his grandfather. But he is going.
Chuck tells Blair. Nate tried to contact Serena, but he can't find her anywhere.
Basic is anything but. He is sore and he hurts and more than once he wishes that this idiotic plan of his could be called off. But he finds a sense of enjoyment in the camaraderie that forms, the dirty jokes that are said, the courage that all the men and women around him have. By God, they love this country so much, and they won't ever let Her fall. He puts on a set of fatigues ever day, and he anticipates the day he is sent overseas.
He leaves on a hot summer day for a land that is equally as hot and as equally repressive as the Upper East Side ever was. Blair and Chuck write letters. The first few from Blair are so angry. Her script is as beautiful as ever, but her anger is imminent. She calls him an imbecile and an idiot and so many other words, and why Nate? Why? But he doesn't ever answer her questions (he doesn't even really know, either. But this experience, if anything, is showing him the world in ways he never would have seen it from the windows of his family's or even Chuck's Gulfstream.). No, instead of trying to explain himself, he writes about the way the sun sets on the desert at night, how it reminds him of the perfume Blair had so desperately needed in middle school, something called Arabian Nights or something like that. He doesn't mention that the smell where he is is really a mix of fear and hate and death all wrapped up in bloody courage.
He simply says the sun glistens as it falls behind the dunes, and did that perfume ever smell good? Blair gets the hint (she was always so much smarter than him). She simply states that the perfume was called Desert Passion, "and really, Nate how could you forget? It was designer", and from then on, she begins to write about her triumphs and tribulations at NYU; of dorm rooms and drama and classes that bore her and the ones that excites her. Blair, for all her crazy schemes and yogurt yearning, is wonderfully home to Nate. She writes once of how the leaves are changing colors, but how the leaves at NYU are "honestly pathetic and cheap compared to the ones that fall outside Constance." He never manages to sum up the courage to tell her that the leaves are all the same color, no matter how expensive the water that is given to them is.
And while Blair is a sense of home and a sense of how life still goes on, Chuck is simply Chuck. He receives a letter every first and fifteenth of the month; each time it is a description of a different position that has opened up inside Bass Industries. A chairperson here and junior executive there, each one has a six figure starting salary and the promise of home and no deserts ever again attached to it. But Nate is starting to see the reason why he is here, why the men he serves with are here, and he can't give it up. He writes instead to Chuck about meaningless things that happen overseas; how one time, they raided a suspicious home in some city on the outskirts of nowhere, with a warning that there might be an armory inside. But what they found instead are a couple of teenage boys, scared out of their minds and trying to hide marijuana plants. His unit acted stern and commanding as they turned over the juveniles to the city's local police, talked the boys down for commencing in such illegal and illicit activities, but once they got back to the base, they laughed so hard their sides hurt for days.
"It's good to know, buddy," Nate writes that night, to a friend halfway around the world, "that no matter what, some things never change, no matter where we are."
Serena never writes. He never writes her. He still has no idea where she is, or if she knows where he is.