Character: Chuck
Rating: PG13
Summary: Every year, on this day, he takes her flowers. Any more and he would fall apart.
AN: One shots are always a lot more difficult to do, and so I am duly impressed by people who can make astounding one-shots. Here is another one of my efforts to craft a one-shot. This is 19th century Romanticism, Bronte and Byron characteristics combined into a Faustian mess. But please bear with me. This is NOT a historical fic.
Beautiful Dreamer
He barely even heard the knock on his door, but he saw the light on the floor widen its scope, so he looked up. Serena leaned by the doorway, her hair a golden halo that recalled angels in his head. She had one a small smile, an inviting one.
"You off?" she asked, even thought she knew, out of anyone else in the world, that he was.
"What are you doing here, Serena?"
She cocked her head to the side, and regarded him now with a frown. She needed to stop frowning, really. All of them were getting old. "We're having dinner, Chuck, and you're welcome to join us."
"You have a phone. Use it. You didn't need to come all the way up here."
His stepsister—she hadn't been his stepsister for a while, but he did not know why he still called her that—sighed, and said, "Because it would be harder to refuse if I come in person."
"Harder," Chuck admitted, "not impossible."
"It's Christmas, Chuck," she said. And only when she mentioned the word did his surroundings seem to adjust from black and white and shades of gray to a multicolored clutter. From out his glass walls he recognized a seven-foot tall tree that sparkled with silver and blue ornaments. Out his window, there were lights, brilliant ones that were yellow and orange and red and green. "Turn off your monitor and let's go."
"I know very well it's Christmas eve," Chuck said coldly. He knew the date. It was branded in his head like hot iron of flesh. "I never forget." But he never could see the colors. Never could for some time now.
"Chuck, don't go. This year, can you not go? It's my son's first Christmas." Serena's eyes landed on the roses sitting on the display case at one side of the room. "They're already wilting."
"Doesn't matter," Chuck responded, his words cutting short. "I can have a fresh new batch in an hour."
What money could do.
"They always ask for you."
They would. If only for an extreme sense of loyalty on their part, they asked for him. They called him sometimes to check up.
"Say hello for me," Serena said in defeat.
When Serena had left, failing again in her annual attempt to draw him into that whirlpool, Chuck took out the folder of newly printed documents from his drawer. He reached for his pen and signed at the bottom, then scrawled a note on a Post it. "DNC." It was December 24. His secretary would know. Do not contact.
Chuck strode towards the flowers and inspected them. They were still dewy and fresh, but then again, it was night. He hoped they would hold until morning, just so that they did not look poor and sad under the sunlight. He stepped into the elevator and out of the lobby doors, nodding to the night guard on the way out. He tightened his red scarf around his neck, because she loved that scarf. Even if it no longer fit in with his life now, he took it out to show her every year.
It was almost midnight when his limo stopped. He had almost dozed off in the backseat. His driver opened the door and Chuck stepped out into pitch blackness that made the chauffeur shiver.
"Sir."
Chuck accepted the lightweight folding chair. It was a ritual, and they all knew their part. By now, it was executed flawlessly. "You can go."
The man nodded and pulled out. He would be back, like always.
Chuck ran up the marble steps, as rich as anything he had seen before. The floors shone, as if he was expected. He probably was. The space echoed as he trudged inside. There was no breeze there, and it was good. It was as cold inside as it was outside. He placed the chair down, then he walked towards her, presented the flowers that despite his stepsister's comment, still remained fragrant and beautiful.
They never wilted.
Looking at them, honestly, Chuck thought they would never wilt, never wither, never die.
"They're your favorite even if you say they're too common."
Even in the winter.
"Missed me, Waldorf?"
She did not speak. She had not responded in years. For the first few he would hear her whispered answers, and he would argue, or agree, or he would simply listen. But even if she had not replied, he still knew she was grateful he was there. She loved attention, especially his. He adored her and she knew it. Even when he ran away, she knew he loved her. It was the only reason why she followed.
And so he was the one who talked.
"Serena gave birth this year." He shrugged. "But you were there, right? I didn't see you, but I know you were there. She named the boy Bass." Chuck grunted his amusement. "I'm serious here." He swore he heard her laugh, if only in his mind. "Your best friend is towing a kid around town—a kid named Bass Humphrey. I would be completely insulted but seeing Humphrey pissed off is more than enough."
Serena did always try her very best to make up to him the chaos that was his father's funeral, when afterwards she talked to Blair.
"Pain is a private experience," Blair had told her. And within a week after that, Serena had found out how very true it was.
And so her first son, she named after him.
"Nate's getting married. He knocked up Jenny Humphrey." He smirked. "But he actually seems happy about it. After that debacle with Vanessa, I can't predict Nathaniel anymore. I never read him better than when he was with you."
Then again he was so finely tuned to her that he could see through her boyfriend.
"Cyrus and your mother adopted twin boys from Korea." He paused for effect. "Ping and Pong. It cracks me up too."
He closed his eyes for a moment, waiting to see if she would let him know what she thought, waiting to feel her come to him, wanting to smell her.
"Nothing new with me this year. There's never anything interesting anymore."
He rested his elbows on his knees, then hung his head. He waited, and waited, urging her, silently pleading. "Why won't you talk to me anymore? Blair, I need to hear your voice again. Say something."
Silence.
"Anything."
A small breeze managed to enter, too small to make a difference, but he felt it against his cheek.
Long moments later, he opened his eyes. Chuck looked out the high windows, then turned to face her again. "Merry Christmas, Blair."
His Christmas had not been merry for long enough. He stood up and felt his legs stretch from his uncomfortable position. "I don't know how long I can do this," he admitted. "Sometimes I wake up and it doesn't hurt as bad anymore and I begin to think that maybe I'm okay. And then I wait to hear you tell me that."
"You shouldn't have come." Then again, what did blaming her accomplish?
They had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for years so people could come in and out of his life to tell him, while he lay on a black leather couch, that it was not his fault. She flew in to find him, and he sent her back because he had not been ready.
He had handed her the ticket, bought and paid for, scheduled and booked by his own drunk hand controlling the cursor. He had chosen the flight, the airline, the time, the seat.
She loved the window seat, and he gave her first class.
"I'm sorry."
He pressed the pad of his thumb and his pointer finger to the ducts of his eyes. "I want to hear you say you forgive me." There was nothing but stillness and that small breeze lingering on his cheek. "Today?" he rasped. "Tomorrow? Next year, Blair?"
He walked over to the flowers. To occupy his hands, he removed the plastic. He crumpled it, and the noise was welcome. "I've been coming here for five years and I would never hear them."
She never heard the words she wanted either. But ever since he said them, one, twice, four dozen times each year.
Chuck squeezed his eyes shut, drew himself so close the freezing coldness of marble radiated to his hot skin. "I love you."
Her name was embossed in gold, and the first time he saw them he asked why they did not use platinum. The marker was white, and oddly enough the combination reminded him of a dress she pointed to in a bridal magazine, a lifetime ago, when she talked his ear off about what her wedding to Nate would be like. He had no doubt Jenny Humphrey could recreate the dress, now for herself, when she walked down the aisle with the fiancé that used to be Blair's.
But no one had cheated her of a lifetime the same way he did.
She followed him, promised him she would stand by him, and he sent her off only to later watch from an LCD monitor in a foreign airport when the Boeing 747 lit the night sky in blue, orange, red and yellow. He could not see color after that.
His world fell into black and white.
"I'll come back. Next year. The year after that. Every Christmas, Blair."
He wrapped his red scarf tight around his throat. Holding the edges he wondered how difficult it would be to jerk the ends quickly and forcefully enough so that lights would explode in his eyes. He strode out without a goodbye.
The last time he said goodbye was Christmas of 2008 in a Bangkok airport, a response to 'I love you.' A cutting way to make her turn around and board.
He emerged out into the cold biting gray. It was almost dawn, and he saw Serena and Dan standing outside, parked behind his limo. His stepsister gave him a smile, and her husband nodded at him.
"You couldn't join us for dinner," she said. "I thought you might want company for breakfast."
His throat closed. "Yes," he said. Despite the chill, the small breeze teased his ear, brushed against his cheek. Chuck turned his head, and he felt the breeze blow up his chin. He glanced up and saw the lone butterfly flutter away and to the sky. His eyes adjusted and saw the horizon on fire—layers upon layers of purple and red, of orange and blue, of deep yellows and brilliant white.
"The sky," he said.
"Oh look at that, Dan," Serena exclaimed.
The colors of sunset emblazoned overhead, right when the sun was about to rise. Colors. He could see colors.
Maybe tomorrow he would hear her voice.
fin