"I'll prove it to you," she says. "I'll prove it like I did last time, like I've done a hundred times. I'll prove I love you, Chuck," Blair vows, tears welling in her eyes. Her jaw is taught, attempting to stave off the wibbly-lipped collapse into sobs that she feels coming, feels it desperately swelling in her heart like the tense, vast swelling beginnings of waves that turn into tsunamis. He makes me so weak, she thinks desperately. This must be love, to be so broken. To need someone so much.
She proves it. Of course she does. When she says she will do something, she will. She said she'd be someone, though, and that one thing… well, somewhere in there, all the priorities went wrong. She's 24, and her and Chuck's 18-month-old daughter is in a distant room of the loft, being made invisible thanks to a well-paid nanny. Chuck is at a meeting, doing business in that vague business way, with the cards and the networking and his low voice making sultry moneyed promises to the right people. Blair thinks she could be doing anything, anything, other than what she's doing, which is thinking of all the things she could be doing. She should've been someone by now. She's Blair-fucking-Waldorf. Day-drinking mother of one. She loves her daughter, but she needs a life, too.
Chuck comes home a few days later. Sits heavily on the leather chair in his dark mahogany office. Pours a scotch. Blair doesn't meet him. She wants him to come to her. She's tired of proving things to him. She loves him, of course she loves him, will always love him. They are dark, spinning galaxies, caught in each other's mystic gravity. Something like this. It had more meaning when she was nineteen, but still. She will always love him. Chuck and Blair is the definition of love. The bar-setters, the epitome, the top paper on which soulmate was first written, and only then pressed into the others, the faint carbon copies. Chuck and Blair, Blair and Chuck. Blair.
"Blair!" He calls for her from his study. He's sitting there, with a gun in his hand and his hand to his head, and his eyes are red and tired. "Chuck, what are you doing?" she whispers, desperately. "Please," she begs, "please put the gun down." He doesn't. "Claire is sleeping upstairs," she begs again, "she needs her dad."
But, he doesn't hear her, ears muted by profound depression, by his own desperation. The darkness will not be silenced by pills, nor by drink, nor by love. He is surprised he's lived this long, in the interminably long shadow of sadness left by his father, left by his mother, left by his own inadequacy, his own failure. The world would be better. I would be better. Claire would be better. And I'm so tired, he thinks. So tired. "Kiss her for me," he says finally, and pulls the trigger.