Summary: Georgina, Chuck/Blair. Post-finale, Georgina remains in the aftermath, and in the calm manages to reignite Chuck and Blair's dwindling relationship--if only to watch its final destruction.
Spoilers: Slight spoilers, including Georgina's religious infused return, Nate and Blair's relationship, and the Gabriel conflict. However, they are all my own interpretations of the bits of information we've gotten.
Author's Note: So I've gone and started another fic. And this time it's a multi chapter one. I hope to finish it before the slew of April episodes start on the 20th, but it might be wishful thinking. I'll still be updating TWAH, for those of you reading it. Huge thanks to Lynne for the basic premise that my muse ran away with, and to Nes for the encouragement and suggestions for POV. Please read and review and tell me what you think! I'm aching to know.
His limo was traveling upstate and the foliage seemed to become increasingly overgrown and wild with each passed mile. Branches were bare, but the twisted ways in which their bark churned and dug and latched, like leeches, was all that required the forest to seem thick and heavy with brush.
"Mr. Bass, we should be pulling up in about fifteen minutes."
"Thank you, Arthur," he replied and the window slithered back up and sealed the barrier between the front and back once again.
Chuck tilted his tumbler and forced the ice cubes to clink together within their bath of malt liquor. This was going to work. This had to work, he thought.
Serena was living such a fantastical life set in denial and false happiness that even Blair was alarmed at her behavior. Her new boyfriend, Gabriel, was the picture of class and society, and yet, there was something off-putting about him. Something that was too quick, too focused—even more so than most rich, European society men. Of course, Serena wouldn't notice that, no one expected her to, but it was in the way that she was so quick to defend him when Blair raised the most minute concern, and when Chuck insulted him, that made it clear she was under his direct influence. So much so that Serena had even stormed out and refused to answer her phone for seventy-two hours. Page six had become her oasis—from Dan, from Rufus and Lily, and she was rejecting everything that was her former life, and Gabriel was behind it all.
A background check confirmed that he was no saint, but there was nothing to condemn him except shadows of murky possibilities. Serena wouldn't listen to her brothers' red flag and threw his manila folder in the trash.
There was no way to convince her except to prove it. And yes, Serena had come to matter this much.
"We're here, sir," Arthur announced.
It was time to unleash the dragon.
Paperwork, a fake ID, a forged doctor's note and even a notarized legal clause regarding the rights of an eighteen year old were presented and all was let loose. The air smelled like cedar and the iron wired gates creaked open at Camp Watanooga.
"I have everything I need to do this. I just need to know that you're with me on this," he said.
"Of course I am. I just don't see why it has to be her. I'm sure we could have recruited someone local," she said haughtily.
"Scared, are you?"
"Yeah right."
"She can do it," he said into the phone a little too harshly.
"But why would she?" she bit back.
"I have ten thousand dollars in cash that can give almost anyone incentive."
"Except me."
"As always, an exception to the rule, Waldorf," he sneered and snapped his phone shut.
Out of the rusted iron gates and the village smelling of cedar came Georgina Sparks, in the flesh.
In the generic blended fabric t-shirt and regularly washed jeans. In the braided hair and the lack of makeup. In the smile and in the skip to her step.
"Chuck Bass?" she asked, gleefully, and in the true, unadulterated voice of a pleasant surprise.
And then she hugged him.
His throat closed and his spine stiffened.
She pulled back, "Have you been saved too?" And her eyes were wide and innocent and…honest.
Not quite, he thought. In fact, far from it. Though he was about to tell her that he needed her to save his sister.