Full Summary: Before theirs became an epic love story, he was just a boy falling for the one girl he couldn't have and she was everything he'd forgotten how to be: innocent, vivacious, true. From a world of lies, games, and pretending to be anything and everything except who you really are emerges a Chuck Bass no one believed he had in him. No one that is, except for her— Blair Waldorf.

Chuck Bass doesn't do memoirs—but if he did? Well, then, I suppose it would go a little something like this…

Charlatan, a Memoir

PROLOGUE

{Apologia}

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man –

the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

- Mark Twain

I dedicate this memoir to a one-time friend, for I know of no better apology than the unadulterated truth.

I've never been the kind to try and pass off my personal failings in life as some cruel or unwarranted twist of fate, but I'd be lying if I said there aren't times that I am utterly convinced that the dice was loaded from the start. It seems almost naïve to think that, of all of the turns my life could have taken that year—of the many more unpleasant and shameful directions that it was headed in—it just happened to abruptly change course and take me on a journey that I had never before conceived of.

No, I must say, everything that has happened to me since that year goes so far above the most vivid of my imaginings that I cannot pass it off as mere fluke, as happenstance.

I think back on how easy it would have been to simply drop out of senior year like I had been considering doing for some time then and explore the orient in every lurid way a teenager could have imagined (after all, who was there to stop me and what good was more money than I could count if I couldn't buy myself a few spurts of happiness in between the lonely stretches?).

I've also considered the very real (if frightening), possibility that, in my effort to find any and all viable means of escaping my harsh reality, I might finally have one day snorted a little more coke than my blood vessels could accommodate and ended up bleeding out through my ears in the second floor boy's room at St. Jude's.

I even get to thinking about all of the times when I was too drunk to remember my own name but was just as insistent on betting everything I had on a poker match. And, every so often, I think about Jenny Humphrey—pretty, little, toxic Jenny Humphrey—and it blows my mind that I somehow managed to bypass every single one of these catastrophes to end up where I am today.

Some—perhaps you—might call my escape from these undoubtedly tragic outcomes an outright miracle, or else, an act of sorcery and, quite frankly, you won't hear any arguments from me. I don't know how I suddenly got so lucky either…I am only grateful that I did.

Now, please, hear me out, because I can practically see your fingers moving to close the pages of this journal. (Yes, my friend, I feel that I still know you well, in spite of everything that has happened between us).

You see, in spite of my conviction in a higher plan—in a little something called destiny—I don't want you to misconstrue my reasons for writing this piece.

I do not intend to take this trip down memory lane to absolve myself of responsibility or to pass off the niggling guilt that I have lived with for ten years now on capricious notions like fate and miracles and reversals of fortune. I would not be so crass as to suggest that I am anything but morally reprehensible for knowingly taking what did not belong to me or hurting the people that I hurt. I'm just saying that some things in life cannot be helped…and that, sometimes, there are things we are not expecting to happen to us that prove to be, nonetheless, right.

Look, I know what you are thinking, (what you have probably always thought)…that perhaps if I had been a little more honorable and less selfish and she had been a little less beautiful and more reticent, or—I don't know—if she had been a little more unaffected and less impressionable and I had been a little more brotherly and less in love with her, then…well, then everything would have wound up differently. But you and I both know that I was none of those things and she was all of those things and that it's quite likely that someday, somehow, we would have all found ourselves in exactly the same position as we did all of those years ago. It's the law of inevitability, my friend…it will always bring us full circle.

I never took it for granted that things would stay forever as they were the year that I turned seventeen, but, if I'm to be completely honest, there were a few things in my life that I had naïvely counted on to hold fast against the tides of time. In my conviction in the monotony of life, with the assurance of its slow-spinning tomorrows, I guess I had come to believe that some things could actually stay unchanged forever…my friendship with Nathanial Archibald was at the top of my list.

When we were kids, Nathanial and I stood against life's barrage of catastrophes with unquestioning togetherness, a silent pact forged between us to wear our indifference like armor, an oath of loyalty sworn into decanters of alcohol and written into the folds of a joint.

Water used to run just a little bit thicker than blood through our veins, we used to say.

We were fast friends by high school…like brothers in no time. Masculine bonds were forged by a taste for escapism and decadence and sealed with our burgeoning daddy issues. We shared little and, yet, probably shared everything we had. We said little, but we understood each other perfectly.

We were also as different as night and day in most respects—he the prince and me the rogue; he the star of the lacrosse team and me, the self-proclaimed outcast—but it was in a silent creed of clandestine rivalry, long silences and delinquency, camaraderie and shared secrets that we found our balance, our merging points.

I've been accused of selfishness more times in my life than I can count—and I can hardly deny the charge in good conscience—but there was little that I was not willing to do for Nathanial in those days of bona fide brotherhood.

It even went so far as to become an unspoken rule that if ever one of us took home the trophy at the all-star game or, say, the home-coming queen, the other would immediately, by rule of friendship and law of manhood, deconstruct himself into his most unappealing qualities in an automatic show of support and disclaim, of envy and self-sacrifice.

(That, after a while, Nathanial's star was shining so brightly that the burden of appearing 'less-than' fell squarely on my shoulders, I think, escaped both of our notice.

By then, I had become quite accustomed to falling short really.)

Nathanial was a quiet kid in those days, reserved in a way that contradicted his poster-boy looks and effortless popularity, and almost a shell of a boy when I met him. He was moving through all of the actions of being star-athlete and the guy everyone wanted to sit beside in class—joking, laughing, winning—but without any substance or conscious acknowledgement that suggested he did the things that he did because he wanted to.

Not that he was some kind of wilting flower or anything of that sort. No, even at the worst of times that boy shone like he was made of glitter and gold; but he was locked in a choke-hold of over-achievement that I could know nothing about and it was plain to see that it was taking its toll on him, wearing him down until he felt foreign in his own skin and every success felt like another bar across the proverbial cage.

His was a life of complex duality, I suppose you could say; a contest between who he was and who he had to be.

Me on the other hand—well, I was always a little worse off than any of that.

I had no mother. I had a father who only cared for me with his checkbook, and I had never been provided a foundation over which to build my self-respect. There was no handsome, celebrated frame to contain the hollowness spreading inside of me…I wasn't lost and lonely, looking for freedom or fighting for air like Nathanial was. I was damaged…rotting on the inside before I'd even reached my teens.

Mine, you see, has always been a life of indefinable guilt.

It was, after all, my violent intrusion into this world that had sent my father into a tailspin of alcoholism and disillusionment and my mother to an early grave. It was my failures and misdemeanors that kept Father drinking, the drinking that dampened his reflexes, and the dampened reflexes that made him plow into the side of an eighteen wheeler one fateful, winter day.

It was a domino effect of disaster, really, with me standing stupidly at the start.

I never have truly gotten over that if I'm to be completely honest. Even after all of the therapy sessions and finding a pretty-haired, pouty-lipped saving grace to kiss my unseen wounds, being the catalyst for so much devastation still weighs heavily on my heart.

I can't say that the old man was ever deliberately cruel to me in the years following my mother's death, either, even if the mere impression of him leaves a bitter taste in my mouth and a coldness that seeps into my bones. He didn't really have to be. It was everything about the way he looked at me on those rare occasions he was actually near enough to put me in his line of vision—as if I was some sort of marauder lying in wait, ready to strike at the first show of weakness. It was the forced way that he said "son," as if the word was sticking in his throat and choking him that confirmed my worst fears and building sense of shame.

I was responsible for the death of my mother and my father hated me for it.

There simply was no other explanation in my youthful perception for the absence of affection in his dealings with me; in the way he foisted me off on one au pair after another from the time that I was born as if he wanted nothing to do with me, or the way he locked himself inside of his office with a bottle of scotch when I surprised him with a hug or a tantrum and he would be forced to look into my eyes (my mother's eyes) and actually see me: needy, dejected, proof that one can never be truly free of one's past.

I would have killed to have been in Nathanial's shoes in those early years when we were struggling to find our places in the world—no matter how hard he tried to dissuade me from it and no matter how badly he wished to escape it himself. I wanted to feel for just a moment like my life was purposeful and profound…like it meant something to someone what I did with it.

I guess you could say that the grass wasn't only a beautiful, lustrous green on Nathanial's side from my vantage point…it was made of gold.

That was, perhaps, where the first spark of rivalry struck between us, though it certainly wasn't the last.

What a dreary pair I sometimes think the two of us must have made with all of our emotional deficiencies, identity crises, and futile rebellions…

We were always so determined to fight against the lonely days and the scorching heat of the spotlight with our own brand of dissolution that we didn't see how self-destructive we were becoming.

Oh, I got to be especially good at it.

We took the Upper East Side by storm in those early years though; walking around with our invisible force field of wealth and stature for protection, thinking we had it all figured out…imagining ourselves somehow invincible now that we had formed an impenetrable alliance against everything that threatened to box us in or tame our rebel-without-a-cause dispositions.

We fought everything back-against-back, us against the world, thinking we could stave off any enemy who dared oppress us; figuring that, together, we could do anything.

It never occurred to us that one day we would have to fight each other.

I've personally always considered it life's greatest shame, an injustice of the first degree, that the line between love and hate should be so disconcertingly thin, so fragile and fluid.

It seems the strangest thing to be able to look up to a person—to admire them and love them and wish them all of the best that the world has to offer—and yet resent them what they so easily possess and you have want of.

It seems petty and, at times, cruel that I should have so greatly valued the companionship of Nathanial Archibald and still hated living in his shadow, cast time and time again into darkness by the light of his glory.

There was, even then, something foreign and tactless in standing against him, (he who was the closest I ever came to having family), though we both understood that there was no way to win save at each other's expense…

After all, there was but one Blair Waldorf.

It's been ten years since I last saw Nathanial Archibald. Ten years since I last called him 'friend.' A decade has passed during which I have wondered constantly where he might be, what he might be doing, and whether he's considered this trifling dissonance between love and hate as deeply as I have.

Since that last time that I saw him in the lobby of the Empire, standing just steps above me but a world apart, his eyes burning blue and ominous and hatred etched into every line of his mouth—ever since he leaned in, looked me dead in the eyes and said he wished he'd just let me go down with the Vanderbilt yacht—I have spent nearly every day thinking about how things between us could have ended so badly. How we could be completely different people playing a completely different game before we'd even realized the rules had changed.

I think I've deliberated ad nauseam on how to set things right…

Lately, I've gotten to wondering if the solution isn't lurking somewhere beneath the surface of the very problem, waiting to be unearthed in its re-telling, waiting for wiser eyes and a mature mind to revisit it and set it free. Perhaps redemption is no farther than these very words.

There is, really, only one way to know…

But, I am getting ahead of myself now, I think. What I set out to do here was to tell you my story and I seem to have left out the most important part.

You see, none of what I am about to tell you would hold any significance at all if I were to leave out the one other person who helped shape me into the man I am today. The one who stepped into my shattered world and made me question everything about myself that I had once held true.

Though I would rather have died than have admitted it to her then, she made things better; dark seemed lighter when she was around and she made me forget how fucked-up the world could be, because in her bubble, under her wing, it was safe.

Her name was Blair Waldorf and, before either of us knew how it had even happened, she was everything to me.

But things hadn't always been that way…

For instance, she was very much Nathanial's trusty girlfriend by the time we were fifteen and for that reason and, because she reviled the very sight of me, we avoided each other like the plague even while we were constantly cruising the same social sphere.

Now, what more I could simply tell you about Blair that could possibly do her justice—that could paint a picture in your mind of the girl who blew me away every day that I knew her, I honestly do not know.

She was an enigma to put it quite simply.

I mean, the girl was a firecracker if ever I did see one—feisty, sharp-tongued and with an apparent mean-streak that could only rival my own—but she was every bit as different from me as she was the same.

She was better. She faced the bullshit the rest of us were hiding from and she fought it, tooth and nail and all six inches of her stiletto heels.

She was a fighter that way, but she was innocent too—good where it counted, vulnerable around the people that mattered and she was so far out of my league that I don't know how it even came to be that we spoke one word to each other during our entire high school careers.

No…

That isn't exactly true. I know precisely who it was that brought us together though I wish it had happened some other way.

I wish it had been simple and easy and perfectly honorable.

I have many regrets, so many "what ifs" and "if onlys." Nearly all of them have to do with what happened eleven years ago during that fateful year Serena Van der Woodsen bought a one-way ticket to repentance and the rest of us—me, Nathanial, and of course Blair—opened our eyes to a world we didn't recognize…to a world we'd long avoided—to the real world.

That was the year we finally understood—really understood—the meaning behind the words 'love' and 'betrayal.' We were just seventeen.

I am not saying that I would change anything even if I could, even if it were to somehow magically make everything okay. All I am saying is…

I am sorry.

The last thing I wanted—then, now, ever—was for the people that I loved to get hurt or to lay ruin to yet another treasured facet of my life.

Sadly, what one wants and what one gets have always been two intrinsically different things.

Believe me, I would know…

I'm Chuck Bass.

A/N: Thoughts? Love it, hate it, want me to continue? Please let me know.