In A Glimmering Gotham
Summary: A smattering of one-shots centered around Manhattan's endlessly long-legged and impossibly ethereal Aphrodite. She's the Upper East Side's glorious Golden Girl, a femme fatale seductress and fresh-faced ingénue all at once. Her charisma, that special combination of charm and sophistication and effortlessness that cannot be replicated, is the defining essence of who Serena van der Woodsen is. It is so easy to see that she shines just a bit brighter, glitters just a bit more radiantly than the rest, that we forget her soul is just a bit darker, charred just a bit blacker than the rest too. Without doubt, she is a bewitching enigma, a fascinating object of intrigue and allure.
A/N: Another in the series of I-don't-really-know-what-I'm-doing-with-my-life-writing mediocrities. Tbh I should probably go back to Polaris but don't really feel like it atm. Also, I don't really know what it is with the non-English-sounding-but-still-in-the-English-language titles. Maybe it's my subconscious telling me I deserve a vacation (preferably to Santorini because hello Greece is just beautiful but at this point pretty much anywhere with the clichéd white-sand-turquoise-clear-waters beach would do).
Anyway, this one's for Iris – kid-who-loves-spain on tumblr. Sorry I'm not some Ernest Hemingway, bby gull.
Persona Non Grata
I want to figure out
Before it's too late
Before you find out
How you really feel
He can't believe it. Just can't believe himself.
He's lost her.
He lost her. Just five minutes ago – he lost her.
(Lost her lost her lost her lost her lost her.)
Forever. (So maybe he's being a drama queen, but he really couldn't give a shit right now.)
Lost her.
For someone as sharp and clever and intelligent as himself, his brain is struggling immensely to wrap itself around those three words. Granted, they're three simple little words – Basic English really, an easy conjugation. And yet he's still standing there, still on the pavement trying and failing magnificently to grasp this new concept.
He's a fool. If he knows one thing for certain, it's that. He's the biggest fool on the face of this earth – even more of a fool than Nate Archibald, because if Nate was stupid for thinking his girlfriend was actually going to breakfast with the Humphreys, then Carter was an idiot for believing Serena would forgive him for withholding vital information from her.
But you see though, he's not just a fool. He's a drowning fool. And because he's a drowning fool, suffocating in an ocean of silken gold and bright blue eyes, Santorini night air and Ralph Lauren Romance every single fucking night of his life, is it really his fault he'd clung onto this information like a lost sailor to driftwood? The fact that he'd done this shouldn't really have been that much of a surprise. He's only human, after all, and a flawed one at that. Moral conscience hasn't ever been his forte. This had been his last chance, his golden key to the chocolate factory, his lifeline and his everything. Most of all, though, it had been the only way back home, back to her. His one and only chance, and he'd managed to ruin it, like everything else he'd ever touched in his existence. (He's like a reverse Midas, he thinks to himself bitterly, though they've got the same curse still and the same lust for golden things.)
There's a pain in his chest, aching left and low, and Carter's sure all the drugs and scotch and cigarettes have finally caught up with him. He self-diagnoses it as heartburn, curses the toxic addictions because now he's going to die tragically young in his prime – because there's no way that the stupid nuisance he's feeling is anything else. (He refuses to allow himself to think of it any other way, because he's Carter fucking Baizen and he's most definitely immune to that other kind of ache in his chest.)
And yet. The ache grows every time he remembers every little detail that just happened, and it makes him absolutely loathe reality. (Because he lost her. Again, over and over.)
As he's walking, finally mobile again, tearing himself from the memory of her and resuming his emotionally handicapped playboy persona, he notices a light-mint-coloured piece of stiff stationary fluttering in the wind, stuck between the crack of the sidewalk and looking so out of place that he can't help but bend down and pluck it from its location. He's seen the stationary before, only he can't for the life of him remember where. It's an unconventional colour for a traditional method of communication, not the somewhat garish and overrated Tiffany's blue, but a more faded, frothier shade. The word sea foam keeps recurring in his mind, even though it doesn't really make any sort of sense in this context.
Turning the card over to decipher the loopy writing, the elegant yet carefree scrawl reads, "for whatever we lose (like a you or a me) it's always ourselves we find in the sea. – e. e. cummings."
Carter can't help but let out a muffled laugh at the irony of the quote. He's about to let it fall to the wind again to be discarded to another square of cement, but there's something about the card that keeps him from being able to. Instead, he opts to stuff it inside his coat pocket and decide what to do with it later. For now though, he's going to get enough alcohol in his system to feel like a god, and then he'll pick some desperate tramps up and flirt his ass off like it's the last day of his life. (Because his life kind of had ended today, if you think about it.) Maybe he'll screw a girl or three, too, because he can and because he's not one to mope about anyone, no matter how beautiful or special or golden.
After his sixth scotch on an empty stomach, when he's feeling like the king of the world and no doubt doing embarrassing things he'll regret come morning, he realizes why he didn't throw away the card.
They'd been out on a walk around the villa one afternoon during the summer, and Serena had eyed a set of note cards in a Greek boutique. She'd wrinkled her nose at the utterly conservative yellow-tinted material, announcing she'd have gotten it had it been in "the colour of the dress SJP wore one year to the Oscars and dubbed barely mint. It was either Dior or Chanel, I can't really remember. She'd had some crazy Treacy hat on, obviously. Could you imagine me walking around with a giant piece of art on my head, too? It'd probably fall off my head every twelve minutes." He'd laughed at such a Serena statement, ruffling her hair and pressing a kiss to her cheek. (She'd always hated the orthodox and been a bit of a bohemian, a non-conformist and dreamer.)
The fact he's even thinking about Serena and something that happened nearly a year ago when he's got another strikingly hot blonde practically crawling in his lap with her impressive rack in his face and ass on his crotch, tan legs barely covered by her garish dress, prompts him to call over the bartender a seventh time tonight. The man gives him a sympathetic smile, pushing the scotch forward and barely acknowledging the hussy sitting on top of him. "Whoever she is, she's worth it," the middle-aged man speaks softly. "I was you once upon a time. You'll scoff and say something snide about how you'd never work in a bar or how you have better shoes, but the thing is, at the end of the day, we're the same. We both had it all before, ruled the world and were on top of the world, but then we lost the girl, and everything else because of it. Her name was Sally. I lost her when I was twenty-six, because I thought I'd have plenty more like her, and that I was too good to stay, too good to commit, too good to chase her down –"
"Look, old man," Carter interrupts in an annoyed tone, "I really couldn't care less about your sob story. I get it, you think I'm hurting over a girl but -"
"Fate's awfully ironic, though," the bartender continues on calmly, as if the younger man hasn't disrupted his story. "Turns out, she was the one who had plenty more like me. She married a year later, and never looked back. And here I am working a bar –"
"I don't care," the blue-eyed elitist bites harshly, tired of the tête-à-tête he's been forced into and desperate to get out of the monologue so he can get on to the whore of a socialite in his lap.
"-regretting a decision I made as a hotheaded young man twenty-two years ago" – apparently this man is intent on finishing his memory – "telling some blueblood playboy my story in foolish hope he'll actually remember this in the morning. I don't care if you forget the story, son – stories are meant to be forgotten. It's the tale they tell you're meant to keep with you for the rest of your life. Don't do what I did. Give your ego up so you can see how much more pride you'll have with her standing by your side than in this fleeting moment, with some floozy in your lap."
The grey-haired bartender picks up his towel again, giving the floozy an unappreciative eye before sighing and turning to go back to work, leaving Carter suddenly frozen in his stool, stunned by his last few words and mind scrambling to make sense of it all, to sober up and attempt to process everything he's just said. (The bartender looks like a pathetic, ignorant fool, but he's really not one once he opens his mouth.)
The man pushes his glasses up, looking back at the young man he'd once been himself, and says, "And son?"
Carter twists around to face the fatherly figure, effectively dumping the faceless skank unceremoniously off him. (He swears the old man smiles briefly, but then again, he's probably just seeing things.)
"Yeah," he prompts, mind surprisingly sharp after being trashed with Johnny Walker.
"Don't get her any of that flower and jewelry bullshit. Give her a quote or something."
The first thought that crosses the young hedonist's mind is that this worker has no right telling him what to do, ordering him around like that, but in a rare and brief out of character moment, Carter holds his hubris in check and processes the suggestion as what it is.
"I will," Carter promises, surprisingly genuine, the e.e. cummings quote in mind. He feels the need to know this man's name – he's been more of a father to him in the past five minutes than his own biological father has been in his entire twenty-one years of life – so when he asks for the bill, he makes sure he reads the name plaque of the guy, tipping a couple of Ben Franklins to him, satisfied when the bartender nearly jumps forty feet into the air when he tells him to keep the change.
He wants to stay and talk some more, but there's simply no time to waste. He's got a mission, and he's going to come out victorious. After all, Carter never was one to back out of a high-stakes game when the prize was so worthy and golden and meant for him.
A/N: Ugh, so I literally spent like…an hour on this so apologies for if it's way less than par. Considering that I'm too lazy to tweak it to absolute flawless perfection, I'm going to hope it's not as bad as my brain is telling me it is? Thoughts are always welcome though, leave a message and review!
To each their own,
VSF.