fic: the way i see it
Rufus.
He sees them as a mismatched pair, as if they are pieces of two different jigsaw puzzles pushed, pressed and forced to fit together, resulting in a picture morphed and distorted beyond recognition and relevance. They are opposites in every sense, his son and her, and there’s no logic or sense behind them and what they have.
She’s from the Upper East Side, he from Brooklyn, living in two different worlds with different sets of social codes. They don’t belong in the other’s world. There’s no room or tolerance for that. But both being stubborn and persistent, they manage to shove themselves in, make themselves fit. There’s determination to make this work.
She still laughs at his inferiority, albeit a little more jokingly and less scathingly. He still thinks she’s the devil’s reincarnation who just happens to grow a heart on rare occasion. But it’s more of a pretense than anything, something to keep themselves grounded and not forget who they are and what the other is not.
He never says anything; doesn’t offer words of encouragement, never utters a word of doubt. He lets it be because it’s simply not his place. He doesn’t know where this may go, but he hopes that the melded puzzle with the chaotic image is better than the picture on the box.
Serena.
She never sees it coming. No one ever sees it coming, but she feels the impact of the blow the hardest. She’d always thought they hated each other.
She sees them together, holding hands and bickering, wondering if their relationship is more exciting than when he had been hers. When he was hers, it was comfortable but boring. Lackluster. No fireworks. Not even a tiny spark. She had been defying society’s expectations, rebelling against everything she’s known and she had anticipated it to be something it wasn’t. She had wanted more out of it than what it was. She’d unconsciously set expectations and was very consciously disappointed. There wasn’t the passion or excitement she sought, and no matter how hard they tried, they never seemed to be in grasping range.
But as she watches the two of them, she sees life and hope. There’s nothing dead and mundane about them. They’re both living in ways she’d never seen or expected of either of them, and it makes her sad to think about how she’s still living the way she always has, in whirlwinds and hurricanes.
She feels no anger, no contempt. She doesn’t consider it a betrayal. All she knows is that one moment he’s hers, the next moment he’s not. It’s the first time that she’s felt she’s really lost anything to the other girl. Losing is bittersweet.
Nate.
He understands that he’s never cared for her the way he should have, had always taken her for granted, thinking she’d forever be by his side, constant and never failing. He knows now that she’d deserved so much more.
He thinks about the tiny gold heart that had once claimed territory on his sleeve, the one that he can’t ever recall being stitched in. It had disappeared some time ago, torn out hastily and impatiently. He doesn’t know exactly when or how, clueless and distracted as he’d always been in pivotal moments of their relationship.
She’d taken her heart back when he hadn’t been looking. She’d claimed it as her own again, and for that he’d only felt relief. That heart had hung too heavily on his sleeve, like a weight he couldn’t carry. But more so, he’d known it never rightly belonged to him, feeling foreign and out-of-place whenever it would brush against his forearm.
He sees them (because whenever he sees her, she’s with him) on occasion and wonders if she’s happy, or at least happier than when she’d been with him, because for once she actually looks it, all genuine smiles and laughs. She laughs as if she’s finally broken free, like she no longer cares about consequences and aftermaths. She smiles like she’s keeping a secret, hidden from everyone’s sight save hers and the recipient of those smiles.
He can still feel the loose thread where the heart had once been nestled and wonders with vague curiosity if it has been sewn even more securely and with less effort on the sleeve of someone else’ sweater.
Chuck.
She could have been his, he knows. He’d wanted her, maybe even needed her on some animalistic level. But he didn’t know if he could have kept her happy, didn’t know if he could have loved her. The idea of loving her was more of a fanciful illusion than reality.
For a long time, he’d thought they were perfect for each other. They were one person appearing in two separate bodies. They were one in the same, hurting all those around them, scheming, plotting and manipulating. He thought if he had to love and be loved, why not with someone exactly like him? The need to apologize or forgive would never arise. There would be no need for falsities, niceties or pretenses, already aware of the flaws and faults they try to mask. They would know each other too well for judgment, disappointment or expectations. They knew what to expect of one another. He’d naïvely believed that there would be understanding, compassion from a bitch to a bastard and vice versa.
He had disappointed her. Whatever he may have believed, she hadn’t. She had expected him to change, to be less of the bastard she’d always known. He’d hurt her by reflex, pushing her away when she would come too close. He took from her hungrily and selfishly while she was made to ask and wait. That wasn’t love. It never had been. Merely a nice idea. Easy and uncomplicated. A flawed solution.
There’s no bitterness when he sees her with him. In fact, he feels nothing. He never wonders about what could have been simply because it was never meant to be. He only continues to sneer at his less than worthy Brooklyn upbringing and continues to banter and pull at her pigtails as he always has.
Jenny.
She remembers a time when her brother couldn’t be within a ten-foot radius of the “ninety-five pound, doe-eyed, bon mot tossing, label whoring package of girly evil” without making a face or wanting to gag. She thinks he’s come a long way since then because nowadays he willingly presses himself against said “girly evil” at every chance he gets. Hell, she’s pretty certain he’s dedicated an entire sonnet praising the beauty of her eyes and knows for a fact that he is her personal shopping-bag-carrier on weekends. The latter is done begrudgingly, of course.
He brings her to their loft and despite making snide comments half-heartedly about the size and décor, she claims the plushy, red, overstuffed armchair as her own. She navigates her way around their kitchen, constantly pulling out baked goods by the dozen out of the oven. She brings over her own Cabbage Patch doll and sits it beside Cedric for no reason other than that even dolls needed to mingle and have social interactions.
She never expected “them” to happen. It had come out of nowhere, with no warning and shocking everyone to a point where a collective gasp had washed over the city. Everyone has doubts. Hell, the entirety of New York City (or at least the portion religiously following Gossip Girl) even has doubts. Gossip Girl herself has a countdown of the number of days before the shit hits the fan or the relationship is revealed to be a hoax or stunt.
But despite this new development between them, they are the same two people she has always known. They don’t try to delude themselves into thinking otherwise and they don’t plan on giving up their identities for the sake of fitting better into the other’s life. They stubbornly grasp onto their places while kicking and elbowing to make room for each other. They exist in an interlaced world of both the high and low, a world twice the size of any other. There’s no pushing or forcing on either’s part, only compromises and in-betweens. Somehow they’ve managed to have this all figured out while the rest of the city’s inhabitants continue to scratch their heads in bewilderment. It’s an inside-joke only the two of them know.
***
The shit never hits the fan. It’s not a hoax or a stunt. It’s the real deal. Gossip Girl was wrong about Queen B and Lonely Boy.