if my heart was a compass, you'd be north, a gossip girl fanfic

A/N: Yeah, just...don't ask. My muse has fallen in love with them. Reviews are love!

if my heart was a compass, you'd be north

She is her mother's daughter.

Flighty and indecisive, beautiful and spoiled, desperately frightened of real emotion (hearts are victims, never victors), filled with the irresponsible impulse, a consistent beat in her blood, to run, run, run away.

And she can't shake it off. It's the example she was raised with, an unbreakable habit. Never me, she used to say stubbornly, and when that failed her she pushed down her disappointment, turned to her little brother and said, never you.

One of them was going to get out of there unscathed.

But you don't, as she now knows so well, you don't escape the Upper East Side without scars.

You don't get to come back without reopening your wounds.

Blair looks at her with eyes of ice, and Serena can see the cracks beginning to appear, the fissures no one's supposed to notice.

They make her throat ache. She didn't come back to ruin Blair, she came back with the hope that leaving had fixed her.

Pretty, silly girl. She should have stuck to the script.

"…I get it, I don't want to take any of that away from you…"

"Because it's just yours to take if you want it!" It's biting but it doesn't match the movement of Blair's mouth, the quaver, the vulnerability in the curve of her lips.

Because it is Serena's to take. If she wants it. All of it could be hers. They both know it, as well as they used to know each other's secrets. This was one of them.

She looks at Blair.

I don't want it. I want you.

And Blair's icy eyes crack, a shattering that Serena feels in her own heart, baring an ocean of heartbreak that floods out, engulfing them both.

(Run away…)

Her heartbeat begs her.

If a beautiful butterfly, flying away from home, flaps its wings in Connecticut, does it change the weather in New York City?

There is a boy.

It's nothing epic. Ninety-nine percent of Serena's stories begin with a boy.

Once upon a time, there was a girl with golden hair.

She sleeps most nights curled up in the arm chair by Eric's bed at the Ostroff Center.

"I don't want you to be alone," she tells him whenever he protests.

Her little brother sees right through that one. "Uh-huh."

She kisses the top of his head, ruffles his highlighted hair. "I love you," she says.

The wonderful and horrible thing, with Eric, is that he recognizes her truths just as easily as her lies.

Once upon a time, there was a girl with golden hair. She fell in love.

No one told the princess she wasn't supposed to love the prince.

"I didn't come back for you!"

She runs away, but only to her bedroom. And she cries, but not the unstoppable way she used to in her first days at Hanover.

Serena decides that this is what progress must feel like.

She tears the Band-Aid off her heart – it's supposed to hurt less that way – and let's herself feel it all for a minute. Her childhood and her yellow dress with the champagne spilled onto it and the smiles that could have split her cheeks.

This is letting go.

Well, it's not, not really, but love is overrated.

There is a boy. Another one. A new one. A fresh start.

He's different. He's all hers. If she wanted to, maybe –

(It's nothing epic, she lectures herself.)

She hasn't read this story before, but he has. He's written it, though she won't know that for a while.

"You're not who I thought you were," he says. His eyes are sad, disappointed.

Something makes her stomp down the urge to turn her back, to walk (run) as far away as fast as she possibly can. Instead, she says it back.

It's a bargain. I'll be yours if you'll be mine.

Seven words, and she can see how he wants to believe in her.

The next time they trade significant phrases, there will be three words, and she will doubt him.

Once upon a time there was a girl with golden hair.

Scratch that.

10.08.05.

Their first date is a mess and she fidgets the whole time. Her mind is racing away, down sidewalks, to airports, over seas, and her feet want to follow.

But then when they're talking on the street, under the moon and the stars it feels easy, and natural, and everything starts to slow down a bit. She's teasing and he's smiling and –

He kisses her and it's like gravity.

Serena resigned herself to her role when she was about twelve years old. She is a daughter and a sister and a friend, sometimes a hook-up and rarely a mistress, but she is never a girlfriend.

And then all of a sudden she is.

Fresh starts, and all that jazz.

At first it is difficult, while she tries to balance out this new life she's trying to form, family and friends (Blair, really) and now Dan. They figure each other out carefully, fit their lives together as best they can, and it surprises her – how easily the puzzle pieces fit.

She has a boyfriend. She's a girlfriend.

And she's not gonna lie, she kind of rocks at it.

Vanessa Abrams makes her nervous.

She chuckles at times, when that thought enters her mind, because really, it's ridiculous. Vanessa Abrams, of all people. In another lifetime she wouldn't have thought twice about this girl.

But now. Now she is pretty and witty and she's got all this history with Serena's boyfriend.

She can't, she won't, compete with some other girl. Not over him. Not this boy.

"Not with you," she tells Dan, and it comes as a shock, how vulnerable and…and jealous she feels.

Which is really ridiculous, because this is nothing epic. He's a boy and she's a girl and that's how the story always goes.

(Even if she forgets, sometimes, like when he pulls her close for a kiss. She forgets when he does things like make promises about tomorrow.)

She doesn't get nervous about sex. Not anymore. Not for a long time.

But she doesn't realize, not until she's naked in Dan's bed and he's looking at her, just looking at her in a way that makes her shake, that maybe this isn't – maybe it's more than –

"I'm scared," she says, and tries to explain and doesn't want him to be mad.

Dan wraps her up in his arms and she's safe, just like that. The ease of it would alarm her, but something about the way he's holding her makes it impossible for her to be afraid.

Her heartbeat is echoing in her ears, and she tries to ignore it.

Until she realizes that it's changed its tune.

Stay, stay, stay…

He sweeps her off her feet one night.

Literally.

But this, this isn't –

She can't lie to herself when he spins her around and her heart goes soaring off to somewhere she can't catch it.

Doesn't want to, either.

Once upon a time there was a boy who accidentally got invited to a birthday party. He met a girl (with golden hair). She spoke two sentences to him. But he never forgot her.

Serena reads Dan's story, cuddled up against him under a white blanket.

She sighs, leans over to kiss him languorously, and then relaxes against him with her eyes closed.

"This is the best Christmas…ever."

"In the history of Christmas," Serena agrees.

Her throat feels strangely tight, his story still gripped gently in her hands. Her eyes are stinging, too, and she blinks furiously because she's being an idiot.

It's not like she thinks there's a difference between having sex and making love.

It's not like she believes in fate or anything.

There are things about Serena van der Woodsen that he will never quite be able to understand. Flaws that she has that he can't quite comprehend. Things she does that don't (won't ever) make sense to him.

But he cares about her. Deeply. Maybe in spite of all those things she can't explain to him yet. He still cares about her enough to take the blame for her mistakes.

This, Serena thinks, when he tries to say he's guilty for the whole school-pool incident, is not love. But whatever it is, it's not overrated.

Silly, pretty girl. Should've known that even fairytales have roots in reality.

When she needs to escape the Basses, she goes to Dan.

He was right, about why she didn't get kicked out of school. But he doesn't say I told you so.

She spends the night in his bed. Just sleeping.

In the morning, she doesn't want to go home, so he makes her waffles and they take the bus to school and she holds his hand until they go their separate ways .

For just a minute, it feels domestic.

But whatever, they're sixteen. Just a boy and a girl.

He says, "I love you," and she wishes he hadn't.

This is nothing. Just -

She knows the lie so well by now she doesn't even have to tell it to herself.

"Love is overrated," she tells her reflection in her mirror at home. She tries to look herself in the eye as she says it.

(Exactly eleven years from this day, he will publish a short story.

For every time that you fall in love and there's no one to catch you, there will be one person who will get you a trampoline and a safety net and a parachute. For every time it hurts, there will be one person who will love you enough to heal it. I wanted her to know that.

I wanted to be her parachute.)

"Tell me why," she requests. Blair is twenty minutes from fleeing the city and Serena is mentally packing (Jimmy Choos, the dress she wore to the Ivy Mixer, her favourite mascara). She is twenty minutes from boarding that helicopter, too.

Dan tells her. He tells her and he's looking at her like that. Like he wants her to understand how he sees her. Like she is all the things he says she is.

She almost, almost can.

And it surprises her, that it's enough to keep her there. Her packing list disappears from her mind, replaced by all the reasons that this boy loves her.

"I love you, too," she says, and her heart jumps in approval.

Two weeks later they are lying on the couch at his loft. She loves the Humphrey home. When she was a little girl she had dreams about living somewhere like this, cozy and away. It's become the perfect hideout for her as she avoids what Dan has dubbed the "van der Bass merger".

They're watching TV, lazy and comfortable. It's How I Met Your Mother. Serena's head is in Dan's lap; she's half-asleep but she still manages to giggle.

He touches her cheek and she leans into his hand instantly. He still touches her, sometimes, like she might break. She doesn't mind it. Likes it, even. It's nice to know someone's protecting you.

"You took my I-love-you-ginity," she explains, gazing up at him.

He leans down to kiss her and they end up on the floor.

It still happens sometimes.

She will be laughing with Blair and there will be this abrupt little pause in their giggling. It is always followed by a smile, or let's watch Tiffany's, or some other version of forgiveness.

But still.

She will see Nate across the courtyard and feel a pang, deep down, that lasts all of one second.

But still.

Once upon a time a princess went into self-imposed exile, only to find, when she returned, that her kingdom was no longer hers. Once upon a time there was a golden girl who was tarnished.

New York is a city of big dreams and limited fulfillment.

Serena feels like a girl without a home.

Sometimes, she asks herself. If it weren't for Eric, where would she be right now?

"I believe in you," Dan encourages her one day, when they are joking around over hot cocoa and SAT words that she's awful at remembering.

She kisses him across their café table.

"I wish you'd found me again. After that party. I wish you had talked to me again."

He looks amused. "What would that have changed?"

A tear traces a line down her cheek. It falls into her mug. "I would have had you two years sooner."

Once, she makes her confession to him. It's evening. They're in her bed.

His fingers get tangled up in her hair. She talks about Blair and Nate, things that Dan already knows.

"I just think…I think I might have wrecked us." Her lip hurts but she doesn't stop biting it. "I don't think we'll ever be the same."

"Nah." He kisses her forehead; his eyes are drowsy, at half-mast. "Things like that, relationships like that, they don't end. You changed it, you didn't wreck it."

She tilts her chin up. "Things like us don't end either."

Dan grins softly and kisses her, hard but sweet, his body pressing hers into the mattress.

Mentally, she apologizes to him for the day when she will inevitably change them, too.

It's not that she really dislikes Bart Bass. He's kind of stoic and a little boring, successful and serious, but he seems like a good enough person.

It's not even that she dislikes Chuck. They were really good friends, once upon a time (when she was a not-so-golden girl, and he liked her that way).

It's not that she's bothered by her mother's impending marriage – she's used to those by now.

It is the atmosphere in the penthouse that makes her panic. Her family and Chuck's, wealthy and renowned, merging together. It feels more like a business deal than a marriage. It reminds her of where she lives. It reminds her of all the ways her life can go, the versions of herself that she doesn't want to be.

Oh, the Upper East Side. In or out, it doesn't matter. You don't go without acquiring some damage.

Love is a battlefield, you know. Here, everything is done in excess. It's war.

And she's bleeding.

(Run, run, run…)

Her feet carry her to Brooklyn for the second time. She lets herself into Dan's room via the fire escape and his window rather than the door.

She pauses, right before she goes in. She almost turns around. But she doesn't, in the end.

"Serena…"

"I know." She laughs, but it sounds choked. "It's Vanessa's move. I won't steal it again."

"What happened?" He's sitting up, his book abandoned at his side.

"I just…I wanted…" She exhales in frustration. "I wanted some place that would feel like home. Because I'm tired of…" She shakes her head. "Sometimes I just want to run away again."

He looks her over – worriedly, probably, but she can't really read his eyes (her own are too wet for her to see through properly). He clears his throat, gestures over to his shelf where is Cabbage Patch doll sits. "Well. Cedric and I would be very happy to have you. And we'd…we'd hate to see you go."

She shrugs off her coat, picks Cedric up, and sits down neatly next to Dan. Neither of them speak for a minute.

And then she leans into him, face buried in his shirt and Cedric clutched under one of her arms, and he lies back, letting her curl into his side. They're lying across his bed the wrong way, sprawled out over the middle, but it doesn't matter. He rubs her back; slow, soothing circles, and she does not cry.

She doesn't move for a long time. She doesn't feel like she has to.

Once upon a time there was a tarnished girl. But there was also a boy who still thought she was made of gold.

She watches him sleep. His curtains are open and they're bathed in moonlight, a soft, hazy, dreamlike glow.

"Love you," she whispers, and it is precisely one-half a thank you and one-half an I'm-sorry.

It's nothing epic. It's not forever. (But, god, there are moments when it feels like it is, so much so that she'd scream it from the rooftops, that she'd agree to never leave again.)

Stay, her heart beats, a steady thrum: staystaystay.

Once upon a time. The princess fell in love with pauper.

Eleven years later he will publish a short story.

There is something untouchable about first love. I believe that it changes you. I'd like to think that it makes you stay. That it fills you up when you're certain you're empty. That it heals you when you're broken. That you hang on to a little piece of it forever. It can take years to let go of.

Sometimes first love is like salvation.

Sometimes it's like a parachute. It makes you brave enough to take the leap. Jump, fall.

And let it catch you. Let someone catch you. Maybe they've been waiting to do just that.

If I'd caught her two years sooner, maybe we would have been different.

But that's not the important part.

She will read it in an airport halfway around the globe, waiting for the boarding call for her flight back to Manhattan, and she will dwell on the last lines for a little longer than she intends to.

"Happily ever after" is not a requirement for a fairytale.

Not this one, anyway.

It's just a boy and a girl and a story.

fin