Today is the last time there’ll be a last time [R] for artemis_sparks
Title: Today is the last time there’ll be a last time
Author: dysenchanted2
Pairing: Agnes/Serena
Rating: light R
Word Count: 2,051
Recipient: artemis_sparks
Disclaimer: I don’t own GG.
Warning(s): n/a
Author/Artist Note(s): Set in an AU world (partly inspired by THG). I know you didn’t want her but there’s a brief mention of Jenny. Sorry about any confusion with the setting/narration. The voice is a bit shaky, but hopefully my Serena & Agnes is up to par. This is only going off Agnes in S2 as I didn’t watch her episodes in S3.
Summary: Her smile bleeds onto the streets and it is her anthem they blast from corner to corner.
today is the last time there’ll be a last time
so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
-
The war changes things (as all wars do).
-
Serena gets by on beauty. There’s a famous photograph of her that they still parade around the city from time to time. The girl with the flaxen hair, cheeks rosy and lips red, army gear slathered on like paint, a too-real gun slung across her shoulders.
Her smile bleeds onto the streets and it is her anthem they blast from corner to corner.
The soldiers line up one by one to be her war hero.
-
The only thing Agnes has by the time she finds her way to the outskirts of town is her voice. She’s starved those first weeks, wandering through the empty streets after curfew, her hands shaking uncontrollably as she searches through the trash.
When she finds the bar, she’s skin and bones, throat raw from hunger and thirst, and the first song she sings breaks mid-way through, but the audience doesn’t stop staring back, mesmerized. She’s almost beautiful for a war orphan. Almost. A voice can only make up for so much.
The voice is manufactured, of course. They gave it to her at the hospital when they sewed her back up, pushed her insides in and made her flesh, blood, and bone again. She escaped before the experiments could start, stabbed the head nurse with a needle, and ran.
Her mouth still burns from time to time when it fills with music. It’s unnatural what they did to her, what they were going to do to her.
The crowd that gathers doesn’t care so much about the past because no one asks; they just stare up the stage, sobered by her song.
The President appears one night. It’s ten minutes after her shift and she’s two blocks down, her heels clicking against the still wet pavement. Her first instinct is to run, because he knows, he knows, and he’s here to take her back to those cold sterile walls. Instead, she shivers against the streetlamp, eyes watching the shadows in the darkness as she fumbles for a cigarette.
As she extracts one and presses it between her lips he smiles, teeth eerily white. He offers her a light and she stares, wondering where those strings lead. But even if she could refuse, there’s nowhere to run.
The fire flickers between them.
She tilts her head forward and takes it.
-
It turns out her voice is too precious to dispose of. They bring her to headquarters, a tall grey building surrounded by a barb wire fence in the middle of nowhere. The guide they assign her is a scrawny guy named Drew who smiles and shakes her hand and tells her he’s such a big fan.
She ditches him five minutes later and stumbles into the nearest dressing room-Serena’s dressing room. Agnes’ lip curls when she spots the familiar halo of hair. Serena smiles back, surprised.
“Agnes, right? We met just the once, remember? My sister, step-sister, Jenny, before she… before, she hosted that big party and-you’re my replacement?” There is no malice in her voice. It makes Agnes sick inside.
“No. They’ve got someone younger and prettier for that. I’m just the voice,” she responds and then tucks back the curtain of hair hiding the long scar on the left side of her face.
“I’m sorry. I mean, how are you?”
Agnes hates how soft Serena’s voice is, how apologetic. “I got it from the fifth bombing day, two years ago. Fire rained from the sky. Actual fire… do you know how hot it has to be to make human skin melt, Serena?” Agnes laughs into the silence, like she’d hit the punch line. “Thanks for sending the soldiers.”
“I don’t-they don’t let me,” Serena begins. She never manages to finish; the guide is at the door ushering Agnes out.
Later, when she finds a bouquet of lilies in her dressing room with a note from Serena, Agnes reminds herself that Serena van der Woodsen is the war. It’s all an act.
-
Her dressing room is smaller and absent of the rack of dresses and extensive makeup packs that populated Serena’s.
Agnes would’ve been envious once upon a time, back when she still cared about things, when she modeled clothes, trespassed backyards, when tulle was essential and pants were not, when she loved being photographed.
She remembers burning Jenny Humphrey’s dresses and watching as the fat tears rolled down Jenny’s cheeks. She remembers not caring. And now little Jenny is dead in a ditch somewhere, buried alive in ash and smoke.
She forgets so easily nowadays, names and places and faces. Her mother’s, her father’s, her sister’s, her own. Sometimes she traces the scar from her temple down to her chin and tries hard to remember herself unmarred. The only face she’s never managed to forget is Serena’s. It came to her in dreams, nightmares, descending down, down. Serena’s golden hair windswept and beautiful, blinding, until she got closer and Agnes’ awe turned to horror as she realized it wasn’t hair at all but a curtain of flames.
And just when she thought she couldn’t sink lower…
Agnes sits down at the vanity, squinting at her reflection behind the thin film of dust. In two days, everyone will know the sound of her voice. In two days, she, too, will be the war.
-
The day after her induction, Agnes meets the new girl, the new face; she’s too perfect, too jarringly beautiful. The new girl is proud and cruel, her lips coil easily around ugly words. Her name’s Helen, which Agnes finds endlessly ironic, the face that launched a thousand ships. Agnes hates her instantly.
Serena’s retirement is a big deal in the city-men and women and children line up for days upon days to catch a glimpse of her face. There are dozens of parties and Agnes watches as Serena disappears into the darkness each night with a different body to keep her warm.
A bitterness forms on her tongue each time she watches Serena leave the room. In a few years, that’ll be her, keeping from the madness by fucking everything in sight. Agnes wonders how heavy the guilt is (Serena’s guilt must be the heaviest costume in the world).
A part of her already understands what it’s like to be impossibly weighed down. She carved revenge into her heart years and years ago, so she can almost imagine it.
She knows, though, guilt has always been heavier.
-
They take her voice and Helen’s face and they build the bombs and the airplanes and the ships. Three years pass before the bombings start again.
The earth rattles hundreds of miles away, but is Agnes’ hand that shakes on bombing days. She sings a different song each time for the recording. Those in the city hail it as some great act of mercy, as if giving each target a unique funeral song is compassion.
She drifts from day to day, song to song.
She tries to kill herself five times during that year. Agnes is force-fed for three months before she decides to live again. They insert a tracker into her spine anyways. Just to keep you safe, the President says with his blood-stained grin.
-
The last time Agnes sees Serena, it is two weeks and three days before the first attempt. She isn’t sure that it’s Serena for five whole blocks, but she follows, slipping away from the safe-zone and traipsing after Serena’s shadow.
When they’re a good distance away from the main roads, Agnes calls out to her.
“Van der Woodsen.”
Serena turns. “What-were you following me? Is anyone following you?” Her words are hushed and hurried; she’s hunched and small against the moonlight. Yet radiant beyond belief.
“Paranoia doesn’t suit you,” Agnes replies. “What are you doing in the city? You’re supposed to be on a permanent vacation in the tropics.”
“I came back to pick up some things I left behind.”
“Three years and that’s all you have to say to me?” Agnes inhales sharply, wondering if maybe she’d been insane about nothing this entire time.
“It’s good to see you,” Serena finally says.
“No, it’s not. Don’t lie. It doesn’t go with your brand of beauty.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t explain, but I need to leave now. I’m sorry.” And then Serena’s clutching at Agnes’ arm. “Please don’t tell anyone you saw me. Promise me you won’t.”
Serena sounds like exhaustion and Agnes feels pity welling up inside her, but she knows she won’t ever be able to forgive Serena. Vengeance is still inside her; the nightmares still come; nothing has changed.
For a moment, she allows herself to imagine what would happen if she called the guards now. They would both be punished, but Serena would get the brunt of it-they don’t need her to be beautiful anymore.
She’s outlived her usefulness. It’s this thought that stops Agnes from doing anything at all.
“Do I look like I care enough to gossip?”
“Thank you.”
As Serena turns to leave, Agnes calls out, “Wait. My apartment. It’s still the same number. Just if you want-” She stops abruptly. “Forget it. Go before I change my mind.”
-
Agnes tells herself she isn’t waiting for Serena to come (after all, why would she?) but she frowns the next night when the day passes, uneventful. And the next. And next. And on and on and on until another year goes by.
It was probably all a lie. Serena played Agnes with her blue eyes and false sincerities. Yet, something in their dynamic remains changed. She thinks about Serena an alarming amount that year. Not just about their encounter in the street. Not just the way Serena looked, all glossed up in her nightmares. Not just her face, her hair, her smile.
Some nights, when the sky is too dark for a moon or stars, when she can forget that there are bars across her windows and her body sighs against the mattress, Agnes moves her hands south. Five years since they’ve taken her body from her; it doesn’t happen often because she’s scarred, but just often enough because she’s young. Sometimes she dares herself to wonder if Serena had been forced, too. Perhaps the one night stands had been a cause of the disease, not a symptom.
She always fumbles at first, remembering the last transgression. Each last one would be the cruelest simply because of its closeness. But eventually Agnes finds herself again in the darkness and tugs her underwear aside, fingers trembling as she burns up in a completely different way. More often than not, she imagines Serena, grinning above her, urging her on. Serena would lean down, and her golden hair would spill across Agnes’ thighs; she would press kisses against Agnes’ rough skin, smoothing out the scars with her lips.
When she wakes in the morning with the harsh light in her eyes, the scars are still there.
-
There is one real night, during Serena’s retirement tour.
These are the things that stay with Agnes:
(1) Serena kisses sloppily, stopping every so often to burst into giggles, her champagne breath warm against Agnes’ skin.
(2) There are dozens of real fireflies pinned in her hair that light up every so often, dimming into the night. Even after their glow left, Serena’s never faded.
(3) The way Serena stares when Agnes sings, as if the words would break her into a million pieces.
(4) Waking up in the morning to an empty bed and torn stockings
(5) Hating herself.
(6) Hating Serena more.
-
She figures it out towards the end-that she can run away again. There’s not much anyone can threaten a war orphan with besides death, and Agnes is no longer afraid of that. Not anymore. The best thing about being broken is that there’s nothing else left for them to take.
-
The strange thing is, despite everything Serena represents, everything the war has done to Agnes, the one image of Serena that stays with her is not that of the soldier. What Agnes remembers is blinking profusely as Serena stumbles towards her, the glow of fireflies scattered in her hair, and thinking that this must be what an angel looks like.
gossipwriter is the account the mods use to post gifts, it has not authored or created any of the gifts.
Author: dysenchanted2
Pairing: Agnes/Serena
Rating: light R
Word Count: 2,051
Recipient: artemis_sparks
Disclaimer: I don’t own GG.
Warning(s): n/a
Author/Artist Note(s): Set in an AU world (partly inspired by THG). I know you didn’t want her but there’s a brief mention of Jenny. Sorry about any confusion with the setting/narration. The voice is a bit shaky, but hopefully my Serena & Agnes is up to par. This is only going off Agnes in S2 as I didn’t watch her episodes in S3.
Summary: Her smile bleeds onto the streets and it is her anthem they blast from corner to corner.
today is the last time there’ll be a last time
so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
-
The war changes things (as all wars do).
-
Serena gets by on beauty. There’s a famous photograph of her that they still parade around the city from time to time. The girl with the flaxen hair, cheeks rosy and lips red, army gear slathered on like paint, a too-real gun slung across her shoulders.
Her smile bleeds onto the streets and it is her anthem they blast from corner to corner.
The soldiers line up one by one to be her war hero.
-
The only thing Agnes has by the time she finds her way to the outskirts of town is her voice. She’s starved those first weeks, wandering through the empty streets after curfew, her hands shaking uncontrollably as she searches through the trash.
When she finds the bar, she’s skin and bones, throat raw from hunger and thirst, and the first song she sings breaks mid-way through, but the audience doesn’t stop staring back, mesmerized. She’s almost beautiful for a war orphan. Almost. A voice can only make up for so much.
The voice is manufactured, of course. They gave it to her at the hospital when they sewed her back up, pushed her insides in and made her flesh, blood, and bone again. She escaped before the experiments could start, stabbed the head nurse with a needle, and ran.
Her mouth still burns from time to time when it fills with music. It’s unnatural what they did to her, what they were going to do to her.
The crowd that gathers doesn’t care so much about the past because no one asks; they just stare up the stage, sobered by her song.
The President appears one night. It’s ten minutes after her shift and she’s two blocks down, her heels clicking against the still wet pavement. Her first instinct is to run, because he knows, he knows, and he’s here to take her back to those cold sterile walls. Instead, she shivers against the streetlamp, eyes watching the shadows in the darkness as she fumbles for a cigarette.
As she extracts one and presses it between her lips he smiles, teeth eerily white. He offers her a light and she stares, wondering where those strings lead. But even if she could refuse, there’s nowhere to run.
The fire flickers between them.
She tilts her head forward and takes it.
-
It turns out her voice is too precious to dispose of. They bring her to headquarters, a tall grey building surrounded by a barb wire fence in the middle of nowhere. The guide they assign her is a scrawny guy named Drew who smiles and shakes her hand and tells her he’s such a big fan.
She ditches him five minutes later and stumbles into the nearest dressing room-Serena’s dressing room. Agnes’ lip curls when she spots the familiar halo of hair. Serena smiles back, surprised.
“Agnes, right? We met just the once, remember? My sister, step-sister, Jenny, before she… before, she hosted that big party and-you’re my replacement?” There is no malice in her voice. It makes Agnes sick inside.
“No. They’ve got someone younger and prettier for that. I’m just the voice,” she responds and then tucks back the curtain of hair hiding the long scar on the left side of her face.
“I’m sorry. I mean, how are you?”
Agnes hates how soft Serena’s voice is, how apologetic. “I got it from the fifth bombing day, two years ago. Fire rained from the sky. Actual fire… do you know how hot it has to be to make human skin melt, Serena?” Agnes laughs into the silence, like she’d hit the punch line. “Thanks for sending the soldiers.”
“I don’t-they don’t let me,” Serena begins. She never manages to finish; the guide is at the door ushering Agnes out.
Later, when she finds a bouquet of lilies in her dressing room with a note from Serena, Agnes reminds herself that Serena van der Woodsen is the war. It’s all an act.
-
Her dressing room is smaller and absent of the rack of dresses and extensive makeup packs that populated Serena’s.
Agnes would’ve been envious once upon a time, back when she still cared about things, when she modeled clothes, trespassed backyards, when tulle was essential and pants were not, when she loved being photographed.
She remembers burning Jenny Humphrey’s dresses and watching as the fat tears rolled down Jenny’s cheeks. She remembers not caring. And now little Jenny is dead in a ditch somewhere, buried alive in ash and smoke.
She forgets so easily nowadays, names and places and faces. Her mother’s, her father’s, her sister’s, her own. Sometimes she traces the scar from her temple down to her chin and tries hard to remember herself unmarred. The only face she’s never managed to forget is Serena’s. It came to her in dreams, nightmares, descending down, down. Serena’s golden hair windswept and beautiful, blinding, until she got closer and Agnes’ awe turned to horror as she realized it wasn’t hair at all but a curtain of flames.
And just when she thought she couldn’t sink lower…
Agnes sits down at the vanity, squinting at her reflection behind the thin film of dust. In two days, everyone will know the sound of her voice. In two days, she, too, will be the war.
-
The day after her induction, Agnes meets the new girl, the new face; she’s too perfect, too jarringly beautiful. The new girl is proud and cruel, her lips coil easily around ugly words. Her name’s Helen, which Agnes finds endlessly ironic, the face that launched a thousand ships. Agnes hates her instantly.
Serena’s retirement is a big deal in the city-men and women and children line up for days upon days to catch a glimpse of her face. There are dozens of parties and Agnes watches as Serena disappears into the darkness each night with a different body to keep her warm.
A bitterness forms on her tongue each time she watches Serena leave the room. In a few years, that’ll be her, keeping from the madness by fucking everything in sight. Agnes wonders how heavy the guilt is (Serena’s guilt must be the heaviest costume in the world).
A part of her already understands what it’s like to be impossibly weighed down. She carved revenge into her heart years and years ago, so she can almost imagine it.
She knows, though, guilt has always been heavier.
-
They take her voice and Helen’s face and they build the bombs and the airplanes and the ships. Three years pass before the bombings start again.
The earth rattles hundreds of miles away, but is Agnes’ hand that shakes on bombing days. She sings a different song each time for the recording. Those in the city hail it as some great act of mercy, as if giving each target a unique funeral song is compassion.
She drifts from day to day, song to song.
She tries to kill herself five times during that year. Agnes is force-fed for three months before she decides to live again. They insert a tracker into her spine anyways. Just to keep you safe, the President says with his blood-stained grin.
-
The last time Agnes sees Serena, it is two weeks and three days before the first attempt. She isn’t sure that it’s Serena for five whole blocks, but she follows, slipping away from the safe-zone and traipsing after Serena’s shadow.
When they’re a good distance away from the main roads, Agnes calls out to her.
“Van der Woodsen.”
Serena turns. “What-were you following me? Is anyone following you?” Her words are hushed and hurried; she’s hunched and small against the moonlight. Yet radiant beyond belief.
“Paranoia doesn’t suit you,” Agnes replies. “What are you doing in the city? You’re supposed to be on a permanent vacation in the tropics.”
“I came back to pick up some things I left behind.”
“Three years and that’s all you have to say to me?” Agnes inhales sharply, wondering if maybe she’d been insane about nothing this entire time.
“It’s good to see you,” Serena finally says.
“No, it’s not. Don’t lie. It doesn’t go with your brand of beauty.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t explain, but I need to leave now. I’m sorry.” And then Serena’s clutching at Agnes’ arm. “Please don’t tell anyone you saw me. Promise me you won’t.”
Serena sounds like exhaustion and Agnes feels pity welling up inside her, but she knows she won’t ever be able to forgive Serena. Vengeance is still inside her; the nightmares still come; nothing has changed.
For a moment, she allows herself to imagine what would happen if she called the guards now. They would both be punished, but Serena would get the brunt of it-they don’t need her to be beautiful anymore.
She’s outlived her usefulness. It’s this thought that stops Agnes from doing anything at all.
“Do I look like I care enough to gossip?”
“Thank you.”
As Serena turns to leave, Agnes calls out, “Wait. My apartment. It’s still the same number. Just if you want-” She stops abruptly. “Forget it. Go before I change my mind.”
-
Agnes tells herself she isn’t waiting for Serena to come (after all, why would she?) but she frowns the next night when the day passes, uneventful. And the next. And next. And on and on and on until another year goes by.
It was probably all a lie. Serena played Agnes with her blue eyes and false sincerities. Yet, something in their dynamic remains changed. She thinks about Serena an alarming amount that year. Not just about their encounter in the street. Not just the way Serena looked, all glossed up in her nightmares. Not just her face, her hair, her smile.
Some nights, when the sky is too dark for a moon or stars, when she can forget that there are bars across her windows and her body sighs against the mattress, Agnes moves her hands south. Five years since they’ve taken her body from her; it doesn’t happen often because she’s scarred, but just often enough because she’s young. Sometimes she dares herself to wonder if Serena had been forced, too. Perhaps the one night stands had been a cause of the disease, not a symptom.
She always fumbles at first, remembering the last transgression. Each last one would be the cruelest simply because of its closeness. But eventually Agnes finds herself again in the darkness and tugs her underwear aside, fingers trembling as she burns up in a completely different way. More often than not, she imagines Serena, grinning above her, urging her on. Serena would lean down, and her golden hair would spill across Agnes’ thighs; she would press kisses against Agnes’ rough skin, smoothing out the scars with her lips.
When she wakes in the morning with the harsh light in her eyes, the scars are still there.
-
There is one real night, during Serena’s retirement tour.
These are the things that stay with Agnes:
(1) Serena kisses sloppily, stopping every so often to burst into giggles, her champagne breath warm against Agnes’ skin.
(2) There are dozens of real fireflies pinned in her hair that light up every so often, dimming into the night. Even after their glow left, Serena’s never faded.
(3) The way Serena stares when Agnes sings, as if the words would break her into a million pieces.
(4) Waking up in the morning to an empty bed and torn stockings
(5) Hating herself.
(6) Hating Serena more.
-
She figures it out towards the end-that she can run away again. There’s not much anyone can threaten a war orphan with besides death, and Agnes is no longer afraid of that. Not anymore. The best thing about being broken is that there’s nothing else left for them to take.
-
The strange thing is, despite everything Serena represents, everything the war has done to Agnes, the one image of Serena that stays with her is not that of the soldier. What Agnes remembers is blinking profusely as Serena stumbles towards her, the glow of fireflies scattered in her hair, and thinking that this must be what an angel looks like.
gossipwriter is the account the mods use to post gifts, it has not authored or created any of the gifts.