Work Text:
1
It wasn’t that Jenny hadn’t known that Dan had been struggling; she had. And he’d known that she was struggling, too. She’d forgotten to clear the browser history, and he’d opened the computer to see the forum and the discussion there, recognised her username in a heartbeat. And he’d been inexplicably kind and gentle.
They’d gone out to get smoothies together, and Dan had said, clinking his blueberry against her strawberry like they were champagne flutes or something equally fancy, giving her a soft smile, “We’re Humphreys. We don’t give up.”
Jenny had looked at him and seen no judgment in his gaze. Only understanding, and empathy. A feeling of grief she was familiar with too; that was how she began to suspect that he woke up with it every day.
Until he didn’t.
2
In the corridor with bleached light, Jenny’s sitting in an uncomfortable seat, her back hurting from the angle as Nate hands her a coffee. The pain in her back is easier to deal with than the hurt from everything else, the ache.
She hadn’t wanted anyone to be here with her, and had asked Eric to give her some space. But Nate looks haunted in the same way she does, like someone shattered the foundation of the house they were living in and now they don’t know where to stay, so she thinks he might be a distraction, and she lets him sit next to her.
He tells her, quietly, that he’s sorry, that he can’t imagine what she’s going through, and Jenny wonders why it is that the words feel so different, coming from him.
Around the corridor she can see her father, and her mother, talking to each other, their body language in itself an indicator that something has happened.
This is all wrong, she wants to scream. Dan wasn’t supposed to give up. If there was ever a Humphrey we expected this from, it was me.
She sips the coffee, and scowls. Nate’s made it the way Dan likes it.
She watches him sip his own coffee and make a similar face, so it’s clearly unintentional.
She thinks she gets it.
3
People who didn’t know and didn’t check, didn’t ask after him, didn’t call him back; all these people show up with sad faces and impeccable make-up, their grief sanitized for the show. Blair shows up, carrying a bouquet of flowers, not a single peony or hydrangea. Every flower is one of Dan’s favourites; Jenny wonders if Dan even knew that Blair knew which flowers he liked, and wonders if his knowing would’ve made a difference. Serena looks like she’s been crying.
Eric wants to give Jenny a hug. Jenny feels spiteful, hurt, strangely jealous of him. Eric may have lost a step-brother, but he still has his elder sister. He can’t know how she feels; for once, this is an area that he cannot empathise with. She hugs him, because it feels like the thing to do. She knows Serena left him, that year she went to boarding school, but Serena came back. She hopes Serena will always come back. She doesn't want Eric to share this grief, to know how it feels to lose the central part of your family, the only person you can depend on regardless of everything.
Vanessa’s there, with Rufus, and Jenny thinks that maybe they were grieving a different Dan, thinks of Dan-her-elder-brother, the part of Dan that nobody else saw, that nobody else has ever had.
Dan who brushed her hair on her first day of school and braided ribbons into it, Dan who sang her to sleep when she was four and had nightmares, even though their parents were in the next room, Dan, who she could wake up in the middle of the night for anything, without needing to worry about his response, Dan who just held her in his arms when she came out to him as lesbian at seventeen, asked what he could do, Dan who didn’t mind accompanying her to shops he'd never visit alone if she asked, and Dan, who could be snarky and judgemental and mean and childish, but if Jenny was hurting, really hurting, would put everything aside to be there for her, to make her feel less alone.
Jenny wonders if maybe, all this while, there was something she needed to do, something she should’ve done, too. Maybe in another universe there was a Jenny who did these things for him. A Jenny who told him to share his grief with more than just his laptop and Microsoft Word, Jenny who saw the warning signs, Jenny who didn’t find him too late for help to be effective, Jenny who could do all the things for him that he did for her, holding him when he couldn’t sleep and letting him cry into her shoulder and telling him that he would endure this too, because they were Humphreys, and Humphreys don’t give up. Maybe in another universe, there was a Jenny who saved him.
She gets high with Nate after the ceremony. It doesn’t help, but it’s fine. She hadn’t been expecting it to.