Pairing: Chuck/Blair
Spoilers: up to about 2.14; general spoilers
Disclaimer: I don't own Gossip Girl. If I did, characters and their personalities would at least remain consistent.
A/N: I'm new. Bear with me.
Golden Spinning Wheels
He says that a lie -- any lie, even if it is carved into stone cave walls -- is just a poetic form of the truth.
She doesn't like lies unless they're perfectly-woven. She disdains those who gracelessly spin them.
He has always been one to take things less literally. She has a movie version of her life, but he is the one who always lives in that alternate reality. Truth does not exist in his world of perfections and drawn lines, and so neither do lies. All that exists is what he wants, what he allows, what he understands. She is included by default.
Destiny obviously had a run-in with the plotting talents of one Blair Waldorf, because fate is hating him right now. With a suicidal mother and an insane father both dead, he is a legal orphan. Where, he wonders, is his gang of twelve-year-olds to sing "It's a Hard Knock Life" with him? Nate's too stoned, Serena's too drunk, and Blair's voice makes even the most hated American Idols cringe. Lily's fucking a Humphrey. Other than flee to Japan like a coward, what else is an orphan to do?
Nothing is boring, but then nothing is exciting. He lives in a world of perfectly-manufactured neutralities. He prefers it over spontaneity, for now. He has never been fond of spontaneity and its tricks. It is easier to stay here in a haze of opium and scotch and petite brunettes with pink, untouched nipples that remind him of the old version of her. It is easier to stay than to go back and face the truth. He prefers his sloppily-spun lies, anyway. Riches don't buy you happiness, but they do buy you golden spinning wheels to create an alternate view of reality. One where he is happy, or at least content.
She has a fetish for French foods, she tells him, so she drags him out of Japan to Paris. French tarts, French croissants. Sometimes, only on occasion, French toast, French fries. She prefers French kisses, and she practically gets off by his talking dirty to her in the smooth cadences of the French language. Orgasm is even better in French: la petite mort, the little death. Of course, he muses, everything in their lives could be summarized by la petite mort.
The only reason she's here is because she gives a good fuck. That's what he tells himself, anyway, and with his golden spinning wheel, he manages to believe it.
He is not a philosopher, and he has no intention of being one. Life sucks, and then you die. That's all the philosophy he needs. That and his rule of the golden spinning wheel.
Reality is slowly coming back to existence, and reality's first name is Blair. He doesn't like it, but he doesn't care enough -- isn't strong enough -- to fight it. Blair Waldorf on a bad day is still a sumo wrestler compared to Chuck Bass on a good day. He may be a pansy, but at least he's not dead like the rest of his family. Or would that be better? This is why he's no philosopher. He prefers to go through life and then die, not theorize about the meaning of it all.
Blair takes away his drugs and his nameless brunettes. But Blair does provide him with alcohol, though it's not finely brewed scotch, instead some fancy champagne with a French name. Blair does provide him with a body with which to occupy himself. She lets him do whatever he pleases with her, and for this reason, he hates her. Self-sacrifice is one thing. Martyrdom is another.
It's easy to hate his father, but it's easier to understand him. Chuck is the younger version of Bart Bass, and that's okay. What's not okay is Jack Bass coming in, pretending to be a friend, taking over the business, and practically stealing Bart's identity as the Bass ruler.
If anyone deserves to be the Bass ruler, it's Chuck.
He vows to hate Jack forever.
She's not like most of the bitches at Constance. For one, she's clever -- not just book smart, but witty and resourceful. For another, she's got the body of a nymph -- begging to be fucked. By anyone, he guesses, which is why he's so pissed off when he finds out the truth about New Year's Eve and Jack.
His vow is definitely going to hold strong.
If this was a fairytale, she would meet up with him at the airport. But this is merely reality in all its gruesome details, and she is probably home watching Tiffany's or Holiday or in Central Park, feeding the ducks with the remnants of their fabulous foursome, while he is stuck in an airport.
The problem with spontaneity, he thinks, is that you often get stuck somewhere, and spontaneity precludes time for thought. He is regretting this decision already. He'd have taken the Bass jet, but he was trying to go fast. Calling up the jet would have taken too much time, too much thought.
And so he's sitting in an airport chair with scratchy material and next to him is an fat woman with dyed hair. Airports are the epitome of evil, comparable to one of the inner circles in Dante's Inferno.
The destination is worth it, though. France beckons.
In France, he spends his days drinking scotch and brooding while screwing the maids -- petite brunettes with pink, untouched nipples that remind him of the old version of her. His methods of comfort have not improved. He continues with his failed attempt at spontaneity until he receives the call from his sister Serena, and then he pulls himself out of the cave-carved lies, and he hurries back home to take care of what is rightfully his.
The first thing he does once he's back home is have a conference with the van der Woodsens -- the threesome of blonde optimists that apparently have volunteered to be his family. Strangely, he doesn't mind.
Serena fills him in. According to her, there is absolutely no chance that this is Jack's doing. Serena shakes her head when he asks how she knows this. Blair didn't give her any gory, graphic details of the rape on New Year's. It was a rape, she tells him. Not what he thought. He trusts Serena. He believes her. She has her own golden spinning wheel, but she is one of the fabulous foursome that they once were. She is an ally. A friend, if Chuck wants to do away with his rule of lies.
He tells himself that he'll go over to the Waldorfs' in the morning, but it really takes him a week to get up the nerve. He is the Cowardly Lion, and newly-pregnant Blair is the Wizard of Oz. He takes a while to get reacquainted with the surroundings of the city, of the blonde optimists, of the ever-present Humphrey clan, of the beautiful painting of a naked Lily van der Woodsen hanging on the wall in the hallway.
Cabbage Patch is still just as annoying, but slightly more tolerable. The sister, a former social climber with too much eye makeup and awful clothes, holds some teeny part of his memory, but he can't remember exactly how he knows her. Little Jenny Humphrey. Did they ever hook up?
The van der Woodsens are mostly a delight, though. Lily and her naked portrait, Eric and his scars on his wrists, Serena and her troubled past. Plus, the van der Woodsens -- his family, he supposes -- have really good jam.
Japanese drugs and French foods are great and all, but there's no place like home.
When he does go and see her, she looks bad. Awful, even. It's not so much her appearance, which is still better than most, but the absence of her nitpicks. Her hair is hanging loose. Her blouse isn't tucked into her skirt. She isn't wearing stockings, and her heels are only an inch or two.
She doesn't smile when she sees her, but her lips twitch a little, and she does play absentmindedly with the pendant on her necklace.
Looking closer, he notices that it's a white-gold butterfly, wings extended, ready to flutter off into a new universe.
The hardest part is apologizing, so he doesn't. She doesn't need it, anyway. Doesn't want it, even. Sorries don't exist in their world of imperfections. All that exists is unwanted bitterness, unwarranted love, and an unborn child that he desperately and inexplicably wants to protect.
He thinks of his dead mother, who almost died in childbirth, and his vision of his dead father becomes a bit clearer. If Blair were to die, leaving him behind a little baby that looked just like her, he thinks hate would be understandable.
He does kiss her, and despite her untucked blouse, she kisses him back. He does admit to himself that she is much better than the pale French copies of her. But he also wonders how his life could have turned out this way, with his child in the hands of a bulimic whose uterus is probably already messed up from the hours of vomiting. He wonders how he can be satisfied with this.
Then he looks at her and her butterfly necklace, and it becomes a little more clear.
There is a thin line between love and hate, they say. For him, the line doesn't exist. In his version of reality, hate and love is the same emotion. Sorries are just a way of getting out of honesty. Spontaneity may have worked out for him after all.
He stashes the golden spinning wheel away for the time being. It'll be needed again, but maybe he should try reality for a while. Carefully constructed lies can wait.
Sometimes the Big Bad Wolf eats the little pigs. Sometimes Gaston gets the girl. Sometimes Quasimodo overcomes the disfigurements. Sometimes Prince Charming dies a slow, excruciating death and nobody gives a damn. Sometimes the Wicked Witch gets her ruby slippers (and the little dog, too!).
Sometimes he gets the happy ending, and he is content with that level of probability. Considering how well this round has worked out for him, he has a lot to look forward to.