The Shadow and the Soul
By Catheryne
P: Blair and Carter
AN: Fair warning that this is not a Chuck and Blair piece, and to leave now if you cannot live with that because there is absolutely less than zero chance for this to end Chair as will be apparent in the Prologue. I am also working full time and will not be able to update daily as in my older fics.
Summary: A story about second chances in love and life.
Prologue
She had no time to be fascinated by the way that the condensation clung to the outside of the crystal, but still her eyes were caught, as if she was watching an accident unfold before her as one by one the droplets sought each other, magnetized unabashedly, molding into larger and larger ones until the weight of their togetherness grew too heavy and down they crawled—fell down the smooth surface in spite of all their will to remain.
Blair reached for the glass, needing to wet her throat lest she choke—or tear her insides from the scream of fury that she tamped down.
She had all the reason to believe that even if she finally broke and let it free—the scream would be a silent one. No one else would hear. Except her. Every fiber of her that thrummed. Every bit of her.
Many women in her place would face the world behind a black veil, the son and heir to an empire in tow, and stand in the front pew of the memorial and allow those that had known him to drone on and on about the greatness of a man who turned his own name into a title—a designation—a sound as if it was more than a set of letter to denote him.
But she had believed him, lulled herself into the life she had made with him.
Were she another person, she would have gotten at least a modicum of privacy. But she was not an ordinary person. She never was in high school, a queen among common heiresses. She certainly was not in the last few years, after building a name of her own and a company to proud of.
Not now, not in the future. Definitely not as the widow of a billionaire whose face was plastered on the covers of magazines and whose death was retweeted twenty eight million times in the last twenty four hours. Not when her discovery would soon be a global event. Not when his betrayal would put the news cycle on steroids.
She took a sip, and even the cool liquid was painful to swallow. Apparently the throat could be raw untouched. Blair could feel the eyes of those looking at her. They were the same set of eyes that always came to her in these times of need. In their lives, it was the same people that came and stayed with her in her refuge away from the world. All the same people except one.
Who was gone. Who she loved to the point it ruined her, and who loved her until to the time she rebuilt herself. Loved, but not really. But he did, yet he did all the things that meant he did not.
Did he?
"Blair, what do you want to do?" asked Serena, standing at the window, a silhouette of an angel drenched in the golden sun, so completely incongruent to what was real.
And she fiercely wanted Chuck to tell her, but he was dead. He was dead and he left her holding the bag. He could have handled this. He handled the mess of the world when she needed the time to build up her company, to focus on Henry, to tend to their marriage. She fiercely wanted him alive now to handle this, and to tell him to go to hell.
And Nate, dear precious Nate, took the wheel in a way he did not use to in their time together, honed so well by the path he had taken. "You need to put out a statement. You want privacy, would appreciate their respect and to let you and Henry take time to grieve."
Henry.
Henry who idolized his father. Henry who thought Chuck was a superhero. Henry, who was her forever, and a forever that she could not grieve to. Not truly. As devastating as Chuck's betrayal was, Blair would have to spend forever giving her son the image he would treasure.
"I'm not grieving," she finally responded, managing a firmness in her voice that her heart certainly did not have. "Why would I grieve?" she meant it rhetorically, but it sounded like a question, even to herself.
"You don't," Serena offered. "We don't grieve for liars. We don't grieve for adulterers."
She closed her eyes. Blair heard the break in her best friend's voice. Her heart splintered along with it, taking her back to the fragment of memory just two days before, listening to sweet nothings in her ear, from a husband so enamored of her they had spent the last half hour before his trip cuddled in the back of the black limo. He had taken her hand and peppered kisses into her palm.
For much of her life she loved him so uncontrollably, so unbelievably. And she had believed he loved her. He did. Truly.
Did he?
They were inevitable, he had told her.
She should have known, a love so large and unwieldy was inevitably doomed.
And a personality like her husband, the love she had so fiercely believed in, could just as easily be reduced to Serena's words.
Could he?
She cursed herself for her indecision. He did not love her? How could he have, yet done this? But every word, every memory, every bit of those days together told her he did.
And now every piece of information that drifted to her ultimately told her about a man she truly could not have known.
And then there was a warm arm over her shoulders, and like so many years ago it was easy to retreat and become a young woman again, barely out of her teens, and melt into Nate. He handed her a clean handkerchief. The silhouette moved and then Serena settled into the seat on her other side, and like before she was ensconced by two of the people who knew her the most. She left Serena's lips on her temple, and heard her best friend whisper, "We aren't grieving for him."
And wrapped in their embrace, finally shedding tears as she played back memories of her marriage, his words, the time he spent with Henry, Blair realized.
They were grieving. They were grieving for her. They were grieving for the life she lost.
"Kill it," she whispered.
"What?"
She pulled herself up to sit and faced Nate. With her free hand she clutched at Serena's. "I don't care what you need to do, how much you need to pay her family. Throw as much as you think it will take at them. Kill it. Kill the story, Nate."
"Lie," Nate stated starkly.
She had a son, the heir to everything that Chuck had built. She had Henry who still, at five, was brokenhearted and could not possibly have another burden to his already shattered soul.
"What's one more lie to cap off a marriage built of them?" she returned.
She would be a grieving widow to the world, a woman whose world was swept from underneath her, a woman who lost the love of her life. Blair stood, unsteadily at first, until she found her footing and made her way to the dresser. She shoved away the black and white photographs scattered on top of the veil, unable to ignore the images so sharply focused.
His death would transform her entire future.
Those photos changed her past.
"Kill the story, Nate. This is between me and him. It belongs in the grave."
She held the black veil together and when she turned, Serena held out her black pillbox hat for her. "Now let's bury that son of a bitch," Serena said softly, for her, without malice, the words in desperate endearment.
tbc