Work Text:
Serena says, "It's okay."
Serena says, "I love you."
The second chapter is enough for her to forgive Dan. He talks about her the same way, all fondly, remembering her drunk and silly, fourteen years old. He tells her that he's loved her since that day, that he's loved her always, and it's enough for her – she hugs him and then kisses him.
They decide to move in together two months later. There's not much point in wasting any more time.
In their new apartment there is an office space, two desks and big windows with lots of light. They both spend a lot of time working there. Dan works on his new novel, which Serena never asks to read, and she fiddles with editing software now that Nate has rehired her onto the Spectator staff and she's taken on the role of amateur photojournalist.
Her magazines collect in piles next to his newspapers. The kitchen is Dan's territory; Serena paints and decorates the living room, painting the walls a bright, teal blue. The couch becomes infested with popcorn and spare change. They never make the bed.
Serena wakes up every morning to find a cup of steaming coffee waiting for her, and at night Dan's arm curls around her gently, holding her close. Things start to feel very settled, like this is going to be the rest of her life, and that's not so bad at all.
Blair doesn't tell anyone she's pregnant until she's four months along. Serena squeals at the news, as expected, and once she's done hugging Blair she finds herself seeking Dan out, searching his face with her eyes. His smile is neutral, not too polite but not too invested. She wishes she could read his mind.
He asks her to marry him three months later, snowflakes hanging all around their apartment, candles burning. When she cries, he teases her that it's good she's here to be a sprinkler, because it's probably all a huge fire hazard. She kisses him hard and they make love on the kitchen floor.
Henry's born late on a rainy Monday. Serena's half-asleep in bed, curled up against Dan as he reads in the dim lamplight, when Chuck calls them to let them know. They get up and get dressed and go to the hospital.
Blair looks tired and just a little unsure with a baby in her arms. Serena kisses Blair's forehead and whispers congratulations while Dan does the man-handshake thing with Chuck for lack of anything else to do.
Then Blair says, "Do you want to hold him?"
Serena nods, her gaze settling on the tiny little person, hazy-eyed with wisps of brown hair on his head. She holds out her arms, accepting him from Blair carefully, in awe of his smallness, his realness.
Something happens to her then, when she holds that baby, that she'll never be able to explain, but it's the reason she gives Dan his ring back two weeks later.
Dan sits on the couch and Serena sits on the coffee table and she holds her hand out between them, diamond ring in her palm.
Serena says, "I'm sorry, this just isn't – it's not – "
"It's not what you're looking for," Dan says softly. "Anymore."
"Yeah," she murmurs. "Not anymore."
She doesn't have the words to explain to him how it's different now, how her dreams of them seem more surreal than achievable now, but it seems like he might understand. He takes the ring back easily, quietly, holding it between his thumb and his forefinger.
Serena looks at her knees and then at his hands. "Do you love me?" she asks quietly, a genuine question.
He looks at her, tucking the ring into his pocket. "I'll always love you."
After they split, they both get new apartments, selling the one they shared. Serena packs boxes in the teal blue living room, her hands steady and sure. Dan tosses old newspapers and magazines into garbage bags a few feet away.
He gets a loft on the Upper West Side, a sprawling place according to her mother, who went over to give Dan unwanted advice about the pieces of art he should put up. Far too many bedrooms for a single man is Lily's assessment, but Serena figures Dan needs room to write, room to stack his countless notebooks. She opts for something smaller, in Brooklyn of all places. She paints the kitchen the colour of the sun and her bedroom the colour of the sky, the bathroom the deep blue of the sea. In the doorless room she'll use as a work space she covers the walls in photographs and cork boards. The spare room she leaves mostly untouched, except for the pink and green flowers she stencils on the walls one sweltering summer afternoon.
It does not occur to Serena to date. Some of her coworkers flirt with her but it's a bit obvious that Nate doesn't like it, so they stop. She asks Nate, her smile wide and teasing but her eyes utterly solemn, if he wants to keep her for himself, and he laughs, touching a kiss to her forehead.
"You're my best friend," he says, meeting her serious blue eyes with his own, and she buys him his coffee for the rest of the week.
Serena spends her time taking pictures: of the sunset, the sunrise, the chalk drawings of children on the sidewalk, of newsmakers, of stormy clouds, of her own painted toenails, but her favourite subject is Henry.
She falls head-over-heels for Blair's little son. She likes his small smile, his wispy hair, the weight of him in her arms. She likes the light in his eyes when he plays or when she tickles him. She adores Henry with a completeness that she's never felt toward anyone but his mother.
Legs crossed neatly at the ankle and a single eyebrow arched, Blair says, "I think he might like you better than me."
"Oh, totally," Serena says breezily, grinning as Henry tries to place a large wooden piece into a puzzle. "But he loves you more than anyone," she adds just as Henry struggles with the piece and then drops it, looking to Blair in mild distress. Blair is his person, his keeper and his guardian, his source of sustenance and affection. Serena can love Henry as much as she wants, and she always will, but Blair – Blair is his mother.
She wrestles with herself after that, unable to tear her eyes away from diaper commercials, enchanted by the tiny shoes she sees in the windows of boutiques. There's an emptiness in the pit of her stomach as though she's always hungry, and when Lily invites her to brunch and proceeds to offer a casual critique of Serena's life choices through the meal, she can't shake it off, leaving instead with a heavy heart.
Unexpectedly, she comes to the end of a packet of her pills, and her period never arrives.
She makes an appointment with her doctor for the end of the week and spends the rest of the time sneaking onto the internet at work. She knows how impossible it is – she hasn't been with anyone since Dan and that was months ago. But she goes to the main page of the search engine and over and over again she types sentences that begin with is it possible and can you be.
Her doctor calls it a fluke, blames potential stress at work, the potential stress of a failed relationship, says that bodies simply need to adjust sometimes. Still, Serena makes sure her plastic cup of pee is tested twice.
As she's leaving the doctor's office her phone rings. Dan's picture flashes on the screen and she answers it because she thinks that right now his voice might be a comfort.
"Hey," he says once she picks up. "How are you?"
"Good," she lies, "You?"
"Good," he echoes. "Have you got a minute to talk?"
Stupidly, Serena thinks maybe he'll ask if she wants to get back together, and even more stupidly, she thinks that she'd say yes. "Sure."
"Okay." He pauses and for a moment she thinks he really might tell her that he loves her and that this has all been a mistake. Then he says, "I'm seeing someone."
She's totally still for a moment. "What?"
"I'm, um…I'm dating. Dating someone. Monogamously. We never talked about whether we'd…tell each other, when we started seeing other people, but I thought…it's just common courtesy, right? And we're still friends. Right?"
"Right," she says very softly, sitting down on the building's steps.
"Okay," he says again, his voice rich with relief this time. "Okay, good."
"Who?" Serena asks. "Who are you seeing?"
"Uh – Nelly," he says. "Nelly Yuki."
"Nelly Yuki?" she repeats.
"Yeah," he says on a soft laugh, the laugh of a happy guy. "Crazy, I know, but we ran into each other a few weeks ago and it just…it clicked. We clicked."
"That's…great," Serena says. "I'm happy for you."
"Thanks," he says, and he just sounds so much like Dan, her Dan, the one she almost married, his voice warm on the other end of the line, that it makes her start to cry. "Serena?" he ventures after she makes a soft gasping sound, trying to stifle a sob. "Serena, hey…are you okay?"
"Not – " She swallows. "Not really."
"I'm sorry," he says softly. "I thought it would be best if you heard it from me, instead of Nate or someone else. And I thought…you wanted for us to…"
"I do," she murmurs, her throat clogged with tears. "I do."
Dan's quiet for a moment and then he says, gently, "I know it's hard."
"I'm so sad," she tells him, the words abrupt, just spilling out of her, the simple truth. "I'm so sad."
"Oh, baby," he says softly, the comforting phrase a vestige of their relationship that only makes her cry harder. "What can I do?"
"I don't know," she says, and hangs up.
That night she drunk-dials an old, familiar number, two bottles of wine open on her kitchen countertop.
"Well, well, well," the owner of the number answers, his voice a lazy drawl. "Long time no talk."
"You know me," she says softly. "Busy causing mayhem."
He laughs. "That's my girl."
"Where are you?" she asks.
"Shanghai."
"Far away," she comments.
"Want to join me? I've got a king-sized bed."
She smiles faintly. "I'm engaged," she says, because as far as he knows, she is.
"Don't lie to me," he says, a smile in his voice. "I heard you dumped that Humphrey kid."
"Where'd you hear that?"
"I have my sources, beautiful," Carter says easily. "Come over here so I can throw you a congratulatory party."
"I'm not…really in the mood," Serena says, and she must really be drunk if she's about to talk to Carter, who's half a world away, about her feelings.
All he says, though, is, "You find me when you are."
Serena holds the phone close to her cheek. "I always do."
Every morning she wakes up and gauges just how much of an ache she feels. The days seem long when she starts them that way but somehow times flies by. Henry grows. The paper flourishes. Blair travels to Europe and back. Dan asks Nelly to marry him.
"Congratulations," Serena tells him at the engagement party thrown by Nelly's parents, a sweet but serious couple.
"Thanks," he says, a hint of caution in his voice.
She smiles and nudges him. "Really. Congratulations. You guys seem great together."
"Thanks," he says again, and grins, more relaxed. "Really," he echoes, teasing her. "Means a lot, from you."
"I'm always available to offer my approval," she teases.
Dan rolls his eyes slightly. "Are you…seeing anyone?" he ventures.
She shakes her head. "Nope."
"Focusing on yourself?" he teases.
Serena thinks of a small future being, still vague in her mind but grower clearer everyday. "Not quite."
At work, taking advantage of her status as Nate's favourite employee, she explores her options online. She reads PDF files and endless FAQs about in-vitro fertilization. She peruses the all of the search results for "Manhattan sperm banks." She can feel the challenges, the potential complications, piling up in front of her, but she thinks that she could do it – she knows that she wants to, more than anything.
That night, too wired on hope to sleep, she reads up on adoption, local and international. She reads as if she's already made up her mind – she thinks she wants her own baby, wants to carry it and give it her DNA, but then one of the sites has a seemingly endless gallery of pictures of infants who have run out of hope already, and her heart melts. The time difference works in her favour and nearly an hour later she's dialling numerous countries in Asia for more information.
The adoption process is made easier by Serena's money and her family name, but she doesn't have a key component for ease in the process: a husband.
She e-mails Carter a one-line message, sans subject line, hey, want to get married?
His reply is a single line, too: where and when, beautiful.
They get married at city hall on a balmy sunny afternoon. It's a quiet affair, rings exchanged and vows said softly. Carter kisses her for a moment too long and then they sign the papers.
They have sex in the building's washroom, in the car on the way home, in the elevator of her building. Serena smiles against his skin and he calls her beautiful.
Carter moves into Serena's apartment on a temporary basis that's meant to look permanent. His toiletries take up space in her medicine cabinet, his clothes take up residence in her closet, his favourite foods start appearing in her kitchen cupboards. Serena finds photographs from their youth – the two of them on the beach in Fiji, at a restaurant in Istanbul – and frames them in the living room. Together they buy a crib and a changing table and a rocking chair and turn her spare room into a bedroom for a very small person. When a representative from the agency arrives for a home visit, they look like the perfect couple.
Between the phone calls and the paperwork and the endless waiting, Dan tells Serena that Nelly's pregnant. He looks thrilled about it, and she knows how he feels. She congratulates him and he thanks her and when he asks her how things are going she says, "Oh," as an afterthought, "I got married."
The joy on his face turns into bafflement. "You what?"
She shrugs. "It was kind of spur of the moment."
Dan looks vaguely worried about her. "How long have you known this guy?"
"Longer than I've known you, actually." She pats his shoulder as she starts to move around him. "Congrats about the baby."
Dan watches her go with a certain amount of confusion, and she can't help a small smile.
The day the agency calls to say they have a baby for Serena, Carter breaks out the champagne, which they drink out of tumblers, getting tipsy fast. At the bottom of her glass she finds a sapphire ring.
"Thought you should have the real thing," Carter says, wiping it off on his shirt and sliding off the ring she's been wearing on her left hand, a diamond one she's had for years, and putting on the sapphire one instead.
"It's beautiful," she says, looking into his face.
He smiles at her faintly, kissing her forehead. "Like you."
Blythe Allison Humphrey is born on July twenty-eighth. Serena misses it because she's busy being too hyper to sleep on a flight to Beijing, but she hears about it via a phone call from Blair shortly after she lands.
She sends Dan a text message that says Congrats!!! :)
Then Carter's reaching for her hand and they're getting into a taxi and she forgets how to breathe for several minutes.
This is it. She's about to be a mom.
One of the workers at the orphanage hands Serena her daughter in a courtyard next to the building and it's like her entire life flips around and settles exactly where it was always supposed to be.
"Hi," she whispers to her three-month-old daughter whose dark eyes are looking at her sleepily.
She cries, something she's always seen new parents do in movies and not really understood until now. She always figured she'd be crying in a hospital bed somewhere, exhausted and thrilled, but instead she's standing in the shade of a tree on the other side of the world, jet-lagged like hell and beyond exhilarated.
Carter kisses her cheek softly, a rare gesture of true tenderness, and she asks him amid sniffles, "Do you want to hold her?"
He smiles at her and calls her bluff, "Do you want me to hold her?"
Serena looks back at the baby. "In a minute," she says, rocking the little girl gently. "Hi," she says again. "Hi, Marley."
Serena secretly thinks Blythe is a slightly ridiculous name for a small girl, and she calls her new kind-of niece B, much to the annoyance of Dan and Nelly.
Marley picks up the habit from her very early childhood. The first time she ever writes a Valentine's Day card for Blythe, in their kindergarten class, she spells the name out carefully in her five-year-old writing: Bee.
And that's who Blythe is, from that moment on.
Marley and Blythe grow up in tandem, glued to each other, much like Serena and Blair were when they were small. From the back they look nearly identical in their school uniforms, and once or twice they are mistaken for twins. Serena can always tell them apart when she watches them walk into Constance together – Marley's hair is sleek and straight, whereas Blythe's has some of Dan's Humphrey curl in it, and Marley, who is the more rambunctious of the two, tends to have fading bruises on her elbows, while everything about Blythe is delicate. It amazes Serena, the way she can see the repetition of her childhood in the girls.
When the girls are five, Dan and Nelly have another baby, another little girl. They name her Jordan, and shortly after her birth Blair tells Serena that she can't have any more children. Her marriage with Chuck is rocky at best, but Serena knows that this is still a snag in all of Blair's childhood plans – Blair was supposed to have the daughter who would hold the role of Serena's best friend. Blythe is like Blair, right down to the nickname, but she is not Blair's, and something about that seems wrong.
Serena hugs Blair and pours her a glass of wine and promises her that it's not the end of the world, reminds Blair that she has Henry, and Henry is wonderful. Blair sees Marley with Blythe and sees an error in the universe, but Serena sees them together and sees something oddly symmetrical – how odd, how pleasantly weird, that she and Dan, who were almost so many times before, ended up with inseparable daughters. How odd, and how fitting.
Carter visits more than Serena thought he would. He's fond of Marley, who lights up when he appears with gifts for her from around the world. She calls Carter Daddy, seeming to take for granted even as a very little girl that since he seems to be her mother's partner he must be her father; she is used to his pattern of appearances in her life, happy when he appears and offering him easy goodbyes when he goes. Carter looks at her with small, affectionate smirks and tells Serena once, "She's so much like you."
"You think?" she asks softly.
"I know," he says, and she kisses him.
Marley's asleep and they stumble into bed together like they always do, tearing at each other's clothes, shoving her duvet on the floor. Serena relaxes against him, kissing him slowly as he presses her into the mattress. She reaches toward her nightstand, fingers groping for a condom, and Carter reaches for her hand, pulling it away and kissing the center of her palm.
She looks at him, breathless. "What's wrong?"
He kisses the tips of her fingers. "Let's not."
She blinks. "You don't want to – "
"No, I mean, let's…forget the condom." In response to her baffled look, he adds, "And just see what happens."
Serena stares at him, her fingers resting against his bottom lip. "A baby," she says softly, slowly. "A baby is what could happen."
He kisses her fingers again. "So what if it does?"
She can't stop staring at him. "You want a baby?"
He shrugs a little, his hips pressing against hers. "The first one's kind of great."
"She is," Serena says softly, and then just looks at him expectantly.
He makes a disgruntled sound. "Fine. Yes. I want a baby. Maybe."
"Carter," she says very softly, fingers tracing the line of his jaw.
He looks vaguely annoyed, still, but he's looking at her with eyes as soft as her voice. "I'm not going to put out unless you tell me you love me."
She rolls them over, straddling his hips. "I love you," she tells him, and means it.
Carter stays with her and Marley for nearly two months before he returns to the other side of the world for the same amount of time. He sends a postcard per month and Marley proudly uses magnets to stick them on the fridge, at her eye level, so Serena has to bend down to reread them.
When he comes back, Serena pulls him into her bedroom the moment Marley's asleep and tells him that she's almost three months pregnant.
He kneels down in front of her where she's sitting on the edge of her bed, regarding her stomach for a moment before he tugs her shirt up and smoothes his fingers over her skin. He presses a kiss to her bellybutton, his nose nudging her stomach, and then tugs down her pyjama pants and her panties and puts his mouth on her, his fingers inside of her as she lays back against the bed, her own fingers tangling tightly in his hair. After she comes he trails his sticky lips up her belly, kissing almost every inch of it before he moves his mouth between her breasts and up her neck before he finally lands on her mouth.
"Beautiful," he murmurs. "I love you," he adds, and her legs wrap around his waist.
It's the middle of the night when Serena wakes up in a dim haze of pain only to discover that there's blood on her bed sheets. Carter is in Dubai, finishing up business, so she has no choice but to call someone – and she ends up calling Dan, sniffling and brokenly telling him that she needs to go to the hospital. He's sleepy at first but he wakes up at those words, tells her softly, "Okay, you'll be okay, it's okay."
Serena walks carefully toward the door, feeling simultaneously achy and numb, and unlocks it. She sets two folded towels on top of one of the couch cushions and sits down again.
Dan shows up twenty minutes later, Blythe half-asleep and leaning against his side, Nelly right behind him with Jordan in her arms. Nelly doesn't say anything, just gives Serena a gentle look and reaches for Blythe's hand, steering both kids toward Marley's room.
"Hey," Dan says very softly, moving toward her, taking in the towels she's sitting on and the blood on her pyjama pants.
And then Serena starts to sob in front of her high school boyfriend, whose job is not to be here right now. She ducks her head down, embarrassed, as her hands ball into fists.
He sits down next to her very carefully, his arm going around her and pulling her a little closer to him. He rubs her arm gently, murmurs, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
He doesn't tell her that they need to leave and he doesn't tell her that it's okay; he just waits until she's ready and then he helps her to her feet, even helps her change.
Marley hovers in the doorway of Serena's bedroom once she's home, big brown eyes all wide and worried. "Mama?" she asks quietly.
Serena gives her a small smile, the best she can do for the moment. "Hey, baby."
Marley inches closer. "Uncle Dan said you're resting."
Serena nods, reaching a hand out to her. "I'm a little tired," she says softly.
Marley leans against the side of the bed for a moment. "And sad?"
Throat aching, Serena nods. "A little sad."
Her little girl crawls up onto the bed and under the blankets, cuddling as close to Serena as she can, head tucked under Serena's chin, her breath warm against Serena's neck. "Don't be sad, Mommy," she whispers.
Serena takes a deep breath and kisses Marley's forehead. "I feel better already," she murmurs.
Carter gets in three hours later, discarding his shoes in the doorway of the bedroom and getting into bed next to Serena, curling around her gently. He presses a series of kisses to her cheek, whispers, "How are you doing, beautiful?"
She watches Marley's sleeping face, the sweep of her lashes against her cheeks, her perfect nose and chin and cheeks.
And she says, "Okay."
They don't try to have another baby, but Carter starts spending more time in the city. It's hardly noticeable at first, just a few extra days here and there, and then all of a sudden he's there more and more until he's there all the time, leaving every two or three months for only a week or two in order to deal with the demands of his business.
"Are you moving in with me?" Serena asks one night, teasing, while she's washing dishes and he's drying.
"If you'll have me," he says, setting a bowl in the cupboard.
"I've had you for a long time," she says. "Haven't I?"
He wraps his arms around her from behind, his damp hands on her hips. "S'long as I can remember, baby."
Serena leans back against him, turning her face to give him a kiss, just as Marley walks by.
"Ugh, gross," she mumbles, shielding her face as she walks by them, hurrying off to her room.
Serena laughs softly, turning in Carter's hold to kiss him again, dish soap bubbles dripping from her hands and down his back, and it feels like the television sitcom definition of family as his hands slip just under her shirt at her back, holding her close as they kiss.
Motherhood, Serena learns, is not the ideal job. It has its downfalls. Marley is a person and she has moods; she gets cranky and huffy and sometimes for no discernable reason she'll slam her bedroom door or fling a teddy bear at the wall. She exhausts Serena on some days and irritates her on others and as Marley gets closer and closer toward adolescence Serena feels fear creeping up on her, fear that she will hit some wall of incompetence – that Marley will turn twelve or thirteen and suddenly Serena will not know how to handle her teenager, that she will give into the same temptations her mother did and choose to label Marley as okay the way Lily did to her, that as long as her daughter appears in her peripheral vision or snaps at her occasionally, she's entirely fine.
It doesn't happen, though. Marley grows up and Serena grows older but the way she loves her daughter, the pure ferocity behind that emotion, doesn't change. She feels like she can breathe easier after Marley's fourteenth birthday, as if there was a deadline set in stone, as if she's passed some kind of test. She confesses her fears to Carter once, late at night in the space between their pillows, and he laughs at her softly, says, since when've you been such a worrier, beautiful?
Serena smiles softly into the kiss he gives her, knows the answer to be since I became a mom.
Marley comes home when she's fifteen years old, allegedly from seeing a movie with a bunch of her friends, completely and totally aglow.
"Hi, Mom," she says in an airy voice, breezing by the living room on her way to her room.
"Hi, honey," Serena says, slightly startled. She's sitting on the living room floor next to the coffee table, which is covered in the prints she's trying to choose from. After a few moments she gets up and moves slowly toward her daughter's room. Marley's left the door a few inches open and Serena pushes it inward slowly, carefully.
Marley's lying on her back on her bed, staring at the ceiling, a silly, blissed-out smile on her face.
"How was the movie, babe?" Serena asks her, leaning against the doorjamb.
Marley starts, then smiles again. "Good," she says. "It was good."
For a moment, Marley lays there and Serena just stands there, the two of them both silent and still. Then Marley hops up off her bed and says, "I'm gonna get changed for bed," as she moves forward and gently closes the door in Serena's face.
Serena stands in the hallway for several more minutes, wrestling with the idea that her daughter might've lied to her about where she was going and who she was with, but two days later when she runs into Dan at a party Blair's throwing as a fundraiser for a committee, he mentions how much Blythe loved the movie the other night, and her worry turns into bafflement.
Three months later Marley comes home in tears. Carter's in the city and Serena's slumped against his arm on the couch, the pale blue sheen of the action in the movie they're watching casting a dim light over them. She straightens up the moment she sees her daughter, mother bear instincts kicking in full force.
"Marley?" she asks softly.
"Mama?" Marley returns, her voice choked up with tears.
"Baby," Serena says. "Come here…what is it?" She stands up and reaches for her daughter, settling Marley on the couch and sitting on the coffee table in front of her. "What happened?"
"I think – " Marley begins, and then breaks off, words giving way to sobs.
Serena touches her daughter's hands. In her peripheral vision, she sees a crease appear between Carter's brows, sees his hand venture out to gently touch Marley's back. She leans in close to her daughter, prompts, "You think what?"
Marley looks at her, eyes surrounded by dark smudges of makeup. "I think – " She swallows several times. "I think maybe I love somebody," she finally says.
Carter gets up but Serena doesn't move, gaze focused on her daughter's. "Baby, that's – that's great. That's amazing. Why are you crying?"
A beat later Carter returns with a shot glass full of tequila and sets it down in front of Marley. Serena frowns faintly but Marley reaches for it without hesitation, downs it in one smooth swallow. "It's Bee," she blurts right after.
Serena blinks at her and then she feels the significance of this moment. It's a sober and terrifying feeling, the way it's always been when she realizes that whatever she's about to say or do will define her, define Marley, define their relationship – but just like when Marley cried on her first day of kindergarten, she feels sure of the right thing to do, the right words to say. She curls her fingers around Marley's wrists very gently. "Baby," she says again, firmly, "that's amazing."
Marley starts to sob again and Serena doesn't know if the nature of her tears has changed. She glances at Carter briefly and he meets her eyes.
"Did you tell her, honey?" she asks Marley, trying to find the source of all this sadness.
Marley shakes her head, pulling one of her hands back to rub at her eyes. "No. No, how am I supposed to – "
"Did you sleep with her?" Carter asks, his tone even and measured, casual, as if they're discussing what to have for dinner.
Marley's shoulders tense and she looks at him and Serena watches her daughter measure the man who's technically her father and then find him up to snuff. She nods, breaking into sobs all over again.
"It's okay," Serena murmurs, wiping at Marley's cheeks.
"It's not," Marley mumbles. "She's pretending it never even happened."
"Oh, sweetie," Serena sighs, shifting back onto the couch to hug her daughter.
Carter touches the top of Marley's head gently, the way he used to when they were very young and he was being affectionate with Serena while simultaneously pretending not to. "More booze?" he offers.
Marley chokes out something between a laugh and a sob and Serena reaches across her, finding Carter's hand with her own.
Several days later, Dan calls and says, "Do you, uh – " He coughs. "Would you like to come over for coffee?"
Serena thinks for a moment before she asks, purposefully vague, "Bee told you?"
"Yes," Dan says with immense relief. "Well, she told her mother. We're, uh – we're talking about the same thing, right?"
"Yes," Serena says. "The…thing."
"The gay thing," Dan says after a long pause.
Serena laughs softly. "Yeah, that thing. I'll come over."
"Carter can come, too."
"He's in the UAE," Serena says. "But thanks."
"Sure," Dan says, and they hang up.
Over coffee at the kitchen table, Dan and Nelly and Serena discuss what their daughters have told them. It turns out that Blythe's account, which was a rehearsed speech rather than a tearful outburst, had happened the night before and echoed Marley's almost exactly.
"I think," Nelly says, "that it's…quite terrifying for them. They've loved each other for their whole lives and admitting…an extension of that love…"
"It could hurt their relationship," Serena agrees with a small nod. "But it won't."
They both turn to look at Dan, who's been uncharacteristically silent for several minutes.
"I'm not ready for Blythe to date anyone," he says. "She's fifteen. And fifteen's just – fifteen, you know? And she's my…kid. My baby. But if it has to be someone…Marley's the right one."
"They'll be okay, Dan," Serena says softly. "Better than," she adds, instead of not like us.
He sighs a heavy sigh, a fatherly sigh, a Humphrey sigh. "At least no one can get pregnant."
Blair kicks Chuck out, at last, a week after Henry goes off to university in England. Serena is so thrilled that she wants to throw a party, but Blair's answer to that idea is a very firm, thoroughly exhausted no, so they buy several bottles of wine and simply sit in Blair's living room, relishing the lack of Chuck. Serena feels a little sad that Blair wasted so much of her life with someone so awful, but the sadness is overpowered by relief and something similar to joy.
Serena spends the night and the next morning Marley comes over, giggling at their hangovers and making them breakfast simultaneously. Blair and Serena both slump over the dining room table, giddily exhausted and watching Marley flit around the kitchen with a warm sense of pride.
"She should go visit Henry sometime," Blair says. "Once he's settled. He'd love that."
"I'm sure she would, too," Serena agrees. Marley is a traveller, just like both her parents.
"I'd love that," Blair says, full of honesty in the wake of the final breakdown of her marriage. "I've always hoped that they might fall in love. Wouldn't that be wonderful?"
Serena looks at Blair and thinks of telling her about Marley's relationship with Bee, but she doesn't want to ruin one of Blair's fairy tale ideas right now, not when so many others have already died. "Wonderful," she says, and gives Blair's hand a squeeze.
Marley and Blythe take each other to cotillion. By pure coincidence, they both choose golden dresses, Marley's clingy and Blythe's loose and flowing. They walk down separate staircases into the ballroom and meet to be one another's escorts. Their smiles are a perfect mixture of shyness and giddiness and the polite ease that this event is supposed to encompass; it's enough to make Serena's heart ache.
Afterward, they sit close to one another and drink tea out of the same china cup, talking to Nelly while Dan spins a giggly Jordan around the dance floor. Serena feels abruptly old when she watches them all – it seems like so, so long ago that she was in this room with her arms wrapped around Dan's neck, so very convinced of a future that was much different than the one she's living right now.
Carter's arm snakes around her waist and he plants a kiss on her mouth. She smiles against his lips, suddenly feeling much closer to her adolescence. "Hi," she murmurs.
He presses a kiss to the corner of her mouth, trails his lips gently down her neck. "You look so good."
Serena touches his stubbly cheek, feeling a burst of affection for him. "You clean up pretty nicely, too."
Dan coughs as he walks by them. "Get a room."
Serena rolls her eyes and Carter laughs, tugging her even closer and pressing a kiss to her cheek. They both watch Dan navigate his way through the crowd and sit down next to Nelly, his arm slipping around her as he takes her hand.
"Let's do it," Carter says.
Serena slides him a look, giving his chest a gentle shove. "This is Marley's night," she reminds him.
"No, not – " He tugs at the knot in his tie, a very old nervous habit. "Let's make it fucking official already."
Her brow furrows. "What?"
He shrugs, his fingers drumming lightly against her hip. "Marry me."
Serena blinks. "What?" she asks softly.
"We did it…for her, before," he says, tilting his head toward Marley but keeping his eyes on Serena. "And I'm – I'm really glad – I – I'm really glad we did because she's…"
Her fingers curl into his collar lightly. "She's our kid."
Carter nods. "She's our kid. I'd marry you a million more times for her. But now I want to marry you because I love you."
Serena's throat tightens a little and there's a beat of silence before Carter says, "Jesus, don't look at me like that. I'll do something embarrassing like cry."
She smiles a little and then presses a fierce kiss to his mouth. "Yes," she murmurs. "Yes."
He runs his knuckles over her cheek. "Now."
"It's – it's almost midnight on a Saturday."
"I'll call in a favour."
"Marley – "
"She's already dressed for the occasion."
Serena looks at him with a certain degree of incredulity and then laughs softly, nodding before she leans in to kiss him, her arms winding around his neck.
Serena marries Carter for the second time at one-thirty in the morning in Central Park with her daughter's cotillion corsage on her wrist. Marley and Blythe are their audience, bright-eyed in their gowns, and Serena, who never wanted to get married when she was their age, cannot think of how a wedding could be any more perfect than hers is.
Marley and Blythe go to Berkley. Serena knows they'll have a blast in the sun, that Marley will drag Blythe to the beach every weekend and that Blythe will force Marley to study in the evenings. She knows they'll be happy and brilliant together.
Still, saying goodbye is hard. Carter gives Marley a tight hug and a bottle of Patron the week before, when he has to go to Qatar, and Nelly says goodbye to Blythe in the morning since she has an important morning at work. Serena and Marley meet Dan and Blythe at the airport; the adults hover and worry while the girls roll their eyes and smile with shaky lips.
At the entry point to security, Serena can't quite bring herself to let go of Marley's hand.
"Mom," her daughter says. "Mom. I'm eighteen."
You're a baby, Serena wants to say. "You're my baby," she says again, and presses about twenty kisses to Marley's face while Dan nearly suffocates Blythe in a hug. They trade girls and Serena says, "Bye, Bee," while she hugs Blythe tightly, watching Dan touch the top of Marley's head and say, "I kind of love you, kid."
"It'll be okay," Marley says, smiling at him and then at Serena. "We'll see you at Christmas."
Serena and Dan hug their own daughters one last time, and then they let them go.
They watch the two dark heads of hair until they finally disappear, and Serena pretends not to be crying when Dan tiptoes up to kiss her forehead.
Serena's diagnosed with ovarian cancer when she's forty-two, the legacy of genetics that caused the breast cancer that took her mother and her grandmother. Her doctor suggests monitoring things and Serena says she's not very good at slow; the best and most proactive option is ultimately a hysterectomy.
The operation's not all that long and she wakes feeling only a little woozy, her mouth very dry. Carter is holding her hand, elbow pressed into the mattress of her hospital bed. His eyes are red around the edges and she realizes, through the haze of fading anaesthetics, that she's never before seen them that way for reasons unrelated to drugs.
"I love you very much," she tells him softly, her voice airy and dry all at once.
He laughs. "Baby," he says, "that's the drugs talking." But his grip tightens on her hand.
Marley gets to the hospital the next morning, her hair tied up in a very messy ponytail, her sweater falling off of one of her shoulders. There are spots of pink high on her cheeks and she says, "Mama," her voice as small as it was decades ago, before she presses her face into Serena's shoulder.
"It's okay," Serena says softly, a hand slipping into her daughter's hair. "I'm okay."
Marley cries against her for a moment and Serena rests her cheek against her little girl's hair. Blythe is standing in the doorway of the room, looking more put together than Marley, a steady force, a hand to hold. Serena smiles at her and gets a smile, Dan's smile, in return.
She rubs Marley's back and says, "Honey, I'd never leave you."
Against Serena's shoulder, shaky but assured, Marley says, "I know."
Dan and Nelly come to visit once Serena's home, Carter frowning at her suspiciously every time she says she's fine. Jordan tags along, gives Serena a card and flowers and tells her about school before she disappears off into a corner with a book. Nelly pours glasses of water and cuts pieces of lasagna and Dan gives Serena a box of movies that he cannot believe she did not watch sooner, and insists that now that she's got a week of mandatory rest on her hands, she has to watch them. She laughs and nods and says, okay, okay.
Serena wonders sometimes how this happened – how after the mess of their parents' relationship, after the mess of their own relationship, after one thousand different hopeful scenarios, Dan became her family.
When the girls graduate, they both fumble in their robes, both pull out rings, and both abandon planned speeches in favour of a kiss. It feels very surreal to Serena as she watches the scene unfold before her, Jordan jumping up and down and throwing her arms around her sister, Nelly crying as she pulls Marley into a tight hug, Dan enveloping them all.
Carter's hand presses into the small of her back, pulling her into the moment as Marley asks, softly, "Mama?"
Serena looks at her daughter's hopeful face and her throat aches so badly that she can't quite speak. She touches Marley's cheeks and though she plans to say you're going to, she can't manage to get those first words out, and all she says, voice hushed and tender, is, "Be happy."
Marley goes to hug her, pressing her face right into Serena's shoulder like she has since she was only a toddler. Serena brings her hand up to cup the back of Marley's head, holding her very close.
After a long moment, Carter's fingers tangle gently in her hair and his other hand goes to Marley's back. "You're too young for this shit," he says to Marley, and she laughs, makes a face at him, says, "You're too old."
Serena wishes there was some sort of permanent marker in life, wishes she could colour in the bright smile on her daughter's face and make it stay forever.
Marley wants a big wedding, and Carter gives it to her, doling out money for flowers and catering and the dress. Serena watches them laugh together over cheesy pictures in a photographer's sample album.
"I'll take your pictures, baby," she says.
Marley gives her a doubtful look. "Won't you be too busy crying?" she asks, making Carter smirk.
"No," Serena says, making a face at her and sitting down next to them on the couch.
"Are you sure?"
She nods. "I'm the official Marley van der Woodsen photographer," she says, tapping Marley's nose lightly. "I have been for your whole life."
Marley chews her bottom lip. "Would you be mad if I took Bee's name?"
"No," Serena says softly. She thinks of herself, as young as Marley, dreaming of the vey same thing. "I wouldn't be mad."
"You shouldn't worry so much," Carter says. "You were barely older than her when you married me, and that turned out alright, didn't it?"
"Of course it did," Serena says, looking up from her book and over at him. "I'm not worried."
"You're terrified," Carter says. "Is it because she's going to be a Humphrey?"
"No," she says, looking at her book. "I'm not terrified; don't be stupid."
"Serena."
She stills, then shrugs. "How am I supposed to let her belong to someone else?" she murmurs.
Quietly, he says, "She'll always be yours, beautiful. You know that."
"Ours," Serena corrects absently, automatically.
"Ours," Carter agrees. He pauses. "And you still have me."
She looks up at him with the shadow of a smile. "I always have you."
He smiles back at her and she feels fond toward the lines emerging in his face. "Damn right, beautiful."
Serena gives her daughter away, hands on Marley's cheeks, a kiss on her forehead.
"I love you, Mama," Marley says softly, everything about her seeming to glow.
Serena nods. "I know," she murmurs. She feels like she's done something right.
The reception is bright with small lanterns strung between trees and buzzing with the clinking sounds of champagne flutes and the chatter of the guests. Blair attends the wedding with Nate, whom she refuses to acknowledge as anything other than "my friend Nate," but Nate keeps teasing her by introducing her as "my almost-wife, Blair," so there is clearly something going on there, and it makes Serena lift her eyebrows and laugh.
Blythe and Marley look radiant together, beaming and giggling and getting all wrapped up in each other on the dance floor. Serena watches them as she sips champagne, smiling faintly and imagining herself at Marley's age, remembering what she had wanted so badly then – Marley.
"It finally happened," Dan says, appearing at her side with his own flute of champagne. "A van der Woodsen became a Humphrey."
Serena smiles. "Miracle of miracles."
He shakes his head. "It was supposed to be them. It was like you knew that, when you dumped me."
"I didn't dump – " She stops when she sees that he's teasing. "I knew she was…it," she says with a small shrug. "I spent so long convinced of us but then one day it just changed. I knew my kid would be my forever thing."
"You've been an amazing mother to her."
She smiles at him. "Thanks."
"They took our dysfunctional legacy and made it work," Dan says wryly. "Our kids are really something."
Serena watches their daughters laugh as they dance. She hooks her arm through Dan's, feeling the past rise to meet the present and the future surpass it all. "Really something," she agrees.