A/N: Omg. This is SO bad. I have to get to bed like pronto, like right now. But I know I won't get to this oneshot if I wait till tomorrow, too many other things to do. So, this is a possibility of how that CB scene in the Canadian 4x04 promo might go down. Enjoy and please review. =)
*I own nothing. No copyright infringement intended.
…
The elevator bell chimed and she could feel the thick tension even as she walked into the room. It was palpable, almost as if she reached out into the air, she could feel her arm being pulled down to the ground. It was more powerful than gravity. She wondered if she should have come tonight.
"Nate?" she called out doubtfully, though her voice did not betray the thought. She heard a glass being set down on a table and knew her suspicions had been correct. Chuck was here, alone, and somewhat intoxicated no doubt.
"He's gone," she heard him say as he walked into the room, adorned in his fine silk robe. She looked warily at him.
"Oh," she said, feeling almost scared seeing him in his sunken angry mood. She somehow knew he'd direct his anger at her. It wasn't her fault that his new girlfriend had ended up being a prostitute, but she was as good a scapegoat as any. She certainly had the motive, except for the fact that she'd told Chuck he didn't love anymore.
"Well, okay, I'll just go then. Tell Nate I stopped by." Chuck looked blankly at her. "I volunteered to be Serena's go-to person for fixing the communication with Nate, so…" The lingering silence was starting to make her uneasy, more than before. "Okay, bye," she said quickly. Now was not the time to start up some big argument or witty debate. Chuck was not in a good state and she didn't want to go home feeling the need to cry. Serena would understand that a run-in with Chuck and an absent Nate more than qualified for the fall-through of her plans. She had been against it from the start anyways.
"He's with Juliette," he told her as she turned for the door. She looked back at him and watched as he walked across the room to the bar and grabbed another glass, pouring it with scotch.
"I think I'll spare her that bit of knowledge," she muttered, staying put expectantly to see if he had anything more to say. When he just slipped onto a bar stool and proceeded to drink his liquor, she started for her exit again.
"Do you enjoy it?" he asked mockingly. She halted in her steps. "Making me suffer?" She turned back to look at him and felt her temper rising just a little. Her brows furrowed.
"What?" She knew what he meant but daring him to say it out loud would mean verbally hurting her. She wondered if he'd fall into the trap.
"You just had to go hunting down some flaw. Had to find something wrong with her." He slid off the stool, set his glass down a little too softly and walked purposefully towards her – too slowly. "You just couldn't let me be happy, because I had hurt you."
Now her anger was heated. He had no right to say this to her. So what if she was still hurt? She had a right still to be angry and increasingly sad. He was the one flaunting his precious French girl in her face as if she was the best thing to ever happen to him. She hadn't moved on. Just because she told him she didn't love him didn't mean she didn't still have feelings of some sort. She tried to tell herself that it was just the alcohol talking but she couldn't seem to contain her rising emotions.
"Excuse me?"
He scoffed. "Don't act so innocent, Blair. I know you. You are a manipulative, deceitful bitch and you couldn't just accept that I was happy, and you weren't." Anger exploded on her face and she slapped him hard. The smack could be heard throughout the entire suite. He recovered quickly, lightly patting at his cheek. He turned his face to look at her. "Well, it's not like that hasn't happened before."
She huffed. "That's it. I'm going. I don't have to deal with this." She tugged her purse strap farther up her shoulder and finally made the turn for the elevator. He watched her as she stood and waited.
"Fine. Go. Leave. Just like you always do."
She spun around, purposefully walked to him in two long, quick glides and slapped him again. She ignored the elevator bell when it dinged and let the doors open and close. She stared at Chuck fiercely in his hazy, angry hazel eyes.
"I didn't turn your girlfriend into a prostitute. Don't go blaming me for something that isn't my fault," she whispered harshly. It was loud yet simultaneously quiet at the same time. She couldn't explain how she accomplished it. She just knew she was trying very hard not to scream. It looked like he had accepted her statement for a moment.
"You told me—"
"And you didn't believe me anyways," she cut him off, her eyes daggers into his soul. He could not look away, though his defense was still stubbornly grounded on the surface. "You had to wait until Nate confirmed the knowledge to you." She gave him a once-over, scoffing at his appearance. "And yes, maybe I was trying to look for a fault in her because I didn't like that you'd moved on, but what I found was not a manipulation or scheme of any sort on my part. I just discovered something that I thought you might want to know, so you wouldn't stumble in on it some night and feel betrayed."
He looked at her intently, trying to make sense of her words, and no doubt trying to see in what way he could contradict her, or hurt her. "I was fine," he finally said, drunken slurs sinking a bit into his voice. "We were fine, me and Eva. She was perfect, innocent, carefree, everything I needed to start over. And then, you…" He pointed his finger directly at her, though it drifted a little lower than the center of her chest, which he'd probably originally meant to point. "You had to go and ruin everything. Just like—"
"Like I always do?" She asked, almost laughing. "Give me a break, Chuck. You were the one always running, always screwing up. I was just an idiot to keep looking out for you, making sure you were okay, seeing past all the mistakes you made, loving you." She shook her head, hardly grasping the fact that she'd just spilled out something important. But he'd recognized it. He was frozen cold. She looked back at him and started walking towards him, seemingly unable to stop herself from going on.
"You can forget us, Chuck. You can forget what we had, what we gave each other, how I loved you so much I couldn't think straight, I couldn't even have a moral compass." Her eyes widened in intensity. "I thought I did something for you. I thought maybe I even saved you a little bit. But, yet again, you prove me wrong. You proved to me I meant nothing to you when you came back with that little blonde tramp and professed to the world how she'd saved your life, and how everything you'd done before her was just a big mistake and something you wished you could erase. Well, I'm sorry you couldn't achieve your goal and have your perfect princess, but that is not my fault." The silence held for what seemed like an eon. Then she turned for the elevator one last time, pausing right after she'd pressed the button to go down. "You broke my heart, Chuck. I have every right to still be upset at you."
She was turning her head to the elevator when he finally spoke. "Do you still love me?"
She was frozen cold, but unbeknownst to her conscious actions, she turned towards him. She hesitated for too long. She hadn't expected him to bring up this topic. She hadn't really expected to talk to him at all, but it had happened. She used to know Chuck so well but he was quickly becoming unpredictable. She didn't like it. She felt like she was losing the Chuck she knew even though she'd told him not to forget who he was and he had wordlessly seemed to agree.
"How could I still love you after what you did?"
It was her best defense, and she said it genuinely because she herself wanted an answer to the question. She didn't know how she could still be loving him. It wasn't right. It wasn't decent. It didn't make any sense at all. She saw his face shift into guilt like he'd done at the train station in Paris. Part of her felt victorious because she'd felt so very awful and alone with him appearing to be in love with someone else.
"I don't know," he finally said. She swallowed hard in an effort to calm herself for what might happen next. "But for someone who's convinced she doesn't love me, you just gave a very convincing defense that you do."
She blinked and then scoffed to recover herself from his blatant statement. She didn't like that he could still see through her so easily even though she was finding it hard to see through him. "I have feelings too, Chuck," she said. "Just because I'm not in love with you, doesn't mean I'm not hurt when after only three months since we broke up, you've fallen in love with someone else. I have no one, Chuck. There was a guy here and there over the summer, but they hardly meant anything to me. Eva means something to you, even if she is a prostitute." She crossed her arms across her chest. "It hurts to see that. It hurts to hear you talk about me as if I'm a disgusting specimen that once upon a time you involved yourself with. I have feelings, Chuck. Just because you want to start over doesn't mean you can openly regret everything you did before."
"There's only one other reason you would try to take Eva down besides the fact that you still love me." She almost gaped at him. He was not listening to her. He was ignoring everything she said that didn't answer her question. The guilt was now gone from his face and he looked nothing but inquisitive. Why was he torturing her like this?
"And what is that?" she asked, trying to keep her temper on a tight leash. She decided not to trail off onto her intense emotions like she'd just done. That would be the easiest way to not slap him or burst into tears before she finally stepped into the elevator.
"You hate her. You don't want to see me happy. You want to avenge the misery you went through by making sure I suffer far worse than if I had been gutted to death in that street in Prague." She shuddered from his description. "That's the real reason you made me come back to—"
"I didn't make you do anything."
"You made a pretty good show of it, getting all teary-eyed, telling me your world wouldn't be the same without me. You're quite the actress, Waldorf." She restrained herself from slapping him again. The need was very great in her. It was either that or burst into tears. She fought herself desperately to avoid both. She gaped at him, in disbelief of everything he was saying. It cut her to the core and gasping noises escaped her. She felt so helpless and hopeless and she wanted to move but she didn't. Finally, she managed to pull herself together.
"Are you finished?" she asked, hating how small her voice came out.
"Eva left." She couldn't find it in her to care, but she let him keep talking. Whatever it took to make him retreat into his room so she could finally leave and let Serena hold her as she cried. "I broke up with her. Obviously I'm not person to justify dumping her just because she's a prostitute. But having a relationship with someone who is forever unfaithful to you is usually a recipe for disaster."
She said nothing, just looked at him with vulnerable brown eyes.
"I blame you," he confirmed. "I could have lived in that little perfect world, oblivious to everything, never needing to know my girlfriend was cheating on me for money, if you hadn't gone to great lengths to destroy that little piece of happiness I had left, that I had carefully created for myself."
Her temper took awhile to revive itself, but it did rise to the occasion. "So, go find another girl. Pretend to be something you're not. You obviously already believe you're someone else and you've decided to ignore everything you were before, even the good parts, except to apologize so fights don't break out." She shook her head at him in disdain and scoffed. "You're a joke, Chuck Bass. Go find yourself another perfect life. Nothing here matters to you. That's obvious to me now, but then who are you to even recognize that? You've ignored everything I've said tonight."
She told herself it was going to be the last time she walked to the elevator, but still he stopped her again, taking two steps toward her.
"You didn't give me a direct answer." Her irritation and overwhelming broken hearted feelings ebbed through her in great amounts. Why wouldn't he just let her leave? Or better yet, why wasn't she just storming out instead of seeing where the conversation would lead? "Do you still love me?" She turned around to face him. "Or are you just out for revenge?"
Her mouth opened but she could not seem to produce noise out from it, not even a single gasp could escape her lips for what felt like an eternity. He took a few more steps in her direction.
"Because I still love you," he said. She swallowed hard. "And I wasn't trying to hurt you or flaunting Eva in your face on purpose. You told me you didn't love me. I was trying to move on.'
He was a breath away from being just inches in front of her, probably holding her hands in his own. The possibility was too much for her to handle. She took a step back and watched as worry started to etch across his face. He was going in all different directions. It was a complete sensory overload for her. She couldn't handle it. She wanted to blame it on the alcohol he'd clearly had several glasses of tonight, but she needed to believe some of what he was saying was true, that he did still love her. It would give her some hope when she slept that night, even if he hated her every day for the rest of his life or she could never forgive him.
"I will never forgive you for what you did to me with Jenny," she said.
His eyes were pools of darkness that she found herself unable to turn herself away from. She heard the elevator doors mysteriously open right then. She wondered if they just hadn't opened and closed from the last time she'd pressed that ever present button beside the doors. It didn't matter though. It was the perfect exit and she would finally take hold of it, of the escape those doors offered.
"How I feel about you otherwise doesn't change that."
She turned to the elevator, quickly got inside and pressed the button for the doors to close faster. He never came after her, never called her later that night to ask for more questions or another in-depth conversation, not even to yell or torture her with some ignorance about how they'd been. But more treacherous than anything was how he hadn't denied her accusations about him wanting to forget them. It cut her to the core, despite any assumptions she maybe she would have made from him demanding the answer to where she stood with her love. Of course she still loved him. She would always love him. But he couldn't know that, not directly at least. It would make everything worse. The thought made her want to fly away to some distant land and become a nobody herself. When she remained in her thoughts too long the only thing that mattered was Chuck, and he was the one thing she would never let herself have ever again. Because he had destroyed her, but she couldn't live without him.
…
A/N: More realistic than my last oneshot I think, but it comes sooner in S4 than I believe the other one would have, so maybe that's why. Lol. I finally got my heartbreaking angst in! Hahaha. I'm thinking of doing a second part of her feelings finally spilling out in detail, but it'd probably be too much like the other oneshot I wrote today. Lol. Anyways, review! =D
