i'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints
Title: i'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints
Characters: Carter/Serena
Rating/Word Count: R / 1, 355
One-Line Excerpt: Now, he knows that Serena's clothes come off a hell of a lot easier than the thick, dirty coating of armour locked tight around her heart.
Sometimes (more often, lately) he thinks that his life is a romantic comedy written by someone with an extremely twisted sense of humour.
Once, baked out of her thirteen-year-old mind and giggling on his bed, face against his pillow, Serena said to him, B thinks her life is a movie.
He'd scoffed, and she'd taken such personal offense to that comment that she sat straight up, completely dislodging his valiant attempts to unhook her neon-pink bra, and levelled him with an uncharacteristically serious stare.
It's not stupid. Don't say it's stupid.
Okay, beautiful. There had been hot, open-mouthed kisses pressed down her neck and a teasing offer of ecstasy; that was the time when there wasn't much of anything he wouldn't do to get her naked. It's not stupid.
Now, he knows better.
Now, he knows that Serena's clothes come off a hell of a lot easier than the thick, dirty coating of armour locked tight around her heart.
Now, he knows that everybody wants to believe in that stupid fairytale ending, when the music swells and the audience sighs and the kiss tastes like finality.
Flashback -
He'd be a kid, just a kid in a suit and an uncomfortable bow tie, and she'd be a little thing darting between the legs of the adults around her. Her hair would glow under the sharp light of the winter evening's sunset.
Fingers hooked into her collar, pulling her to a stop, a calm voice: Serena, this is Carter. Say hello.
Hi. She'd run off hand-in-hand with a brunette girl around her age. She would forget about him in a moment.
Later, in the kind of romantic speech no one ever makes in real life, he'd cite it as the moment he knew she was meant for him.
Half of the time he hates her.
All fluttering lashes as she steals a joint right out of his hand, head tipping back after she snorts cocaine and hair spilling down her back and chest rising and falling in a contented breath, mouth pressed against his like she lives to kiss him, crying on a rooftop halfway around the world because nobody's ever loved her the way she wanted them to.
Fuck you, he whispers. The air in Egypt at this time of year is so thick that it seems to absorb his words. He's kneeling on the rough ground and they are god-knows-where, her back against a wall and her hands in his hair, shaking and gasping with his hands on her thighs to steady her and he ripped the skirt of her dress in his urgency to get it out of the way - this is the kind of thing he can get arrested for, but with her he's never quite been able to care.
His name is a scream when she says it. She sinks down against the wall, curling in on herself right in front of him, half-naked and sweat-soaked, knees pulled up to her chest and her eyes still in some far-off place.
He grasps her chin, presses his forehead into hers, wants to pull her back to him. Fuck you, he tells her just before he delves his tongue into her mouth. Fuck you for making me love you.
(The audience should pity him here: he's loved her since he was old enough to know better than to love.)
Flashforward -
She's laughing, smiling, arms around the neck of another man.
Jealousy is not becoming. He goes home and breaks glasses.
He's had other girls but he's never flaunted them.
I love him, she tells him. I love him, I…I don't know how not to love him.
He thinks of her fifteen-year-old self, drunk almost to the point of oblivion, falling into his lap and laughing into his neck and the way she'd dragged him from the room, kissing all the while, the moment Nate Archibald showed up.
You don't know how to love.
Tears pool in her eyes, giving him a convenient mirror in which to see his own regret.
Flashback -
He takes her virginity (takes it, takes her) in the summertime when she is fourteen.
She is different, quiet and breathless and almost delicate, and he - admittedly, he is different too.
She flees afterward, clothes rumpled and grass-stained and flowers tucked into her hair, and he watches her go, every single step until she's out of his sight, and he thinks he would have held her, if she had stayed.
There are pictures from her cotillion.
Her grandmother sends them to him. He keeps one.
They are laughing: he is smirking, she is giggling. He did something right, that day, before Nate Archibald punched him in the face.
Ripped into pieces, he throws the rest of the photographs away.
(This is the point where the girls in the audience will use their boyfriend's sleeves as tissues.)
Flashforward -
She is smirking at him, easy and careless, when she finds him in London. She strips off her coat and lets it fall to the floor, revealing a dress so white it is almost translucent.
You're not going to marry her.
He glares. Don't be cocky.
Serena sits on the edge of his pool table, knees pressed together like she's some kind of lady. The pretence annoys him - and he's sure that she knew it would.
You don't know how to love, she says, low and sultry.
He fucks her on that pool table, twice.
(Yes I do.)
His engagement is called off.
Flashforward -
He accosts her once in Manhattan. The day is dreary. They are both wearing black. The pitter-patter of the rain disguises his footsteps until he reaches her.
Kiss me for Gossip Girl to see, beautiful.
She slaps him.
(Here, the audience sighs.)
Thunder claps in the skies over Santorini and they laugh.
They're on the run, breathless and grasping each other's arms. Serena kneels in the middle of the street and tugs him down with her, asks, D'you think we lost them?
I sure as hell hope so. I can't afford to get arrested in this country again. He grins at her.
Her smile turns soft and wistful and her fingertips trace his cheek like she's trying to commit him to memory. Thank you for this.
He shrugs. Anything, he says, and he means it.
When he leans forward, he kisses her fiercely enough that she melts against him, falls back against the soaked pavement as he leans over her.
I'd run forever with you, he promises, and when she kisses him back she swallows his words.
She tries to kill herself (sleeping pills, and the cynical part of him sneers at it, typical socialite escape) when she's twenty-four.
He punches Nate Archibald out, just because fair is fair. He makes no attempt to see her.
The Eiffel Tower is her backdrop and her head is tipped back, her face exposed to the sun, drinking in the day.
He's just left a conference and he feels overdressed for the occasion, tugging at his tie as he approaches her - she's in torn jean shorts and her hair is everywhere, she's as haphazard as she's always been.
She blinks several times when she sets her eyes on him. Hi.
Their kiss is soft and not nearly long enough. Je t'aime, he tells her.
She bites his lip. You don't know how to love.
Blair appears out of nowhere, a disapproving look on her face as she hooks her arm through her friend's and pulls her gently away.
Flashback -
A little boy in a snow-covered garden watching her run away.
This time, he follows.
(The audience cheers, encouraging.)
It ends with a kiss. She laughs into his mouth and he holds her tight against him, one hand in her hair and the other pressed firmly into the small of her back.
The taste is not of finality but simply of her, and he takes that for all it is worth.
It'll still be a year before she agrees to move in with him.
Credits roll anyway.