Author's Note: I'm prefacing this chapter with the warning that this story – a rewriting of Season Five following the car accident in 5x10 – is sad. It is going to be sad. I promise there will be a happy ending, but this is a journey and the destination – while on the map – is not currently in sight.
Dark clouds move her into the shadows; the darkness holding her gently in its embrace. And the parts of her that revel in the darkness rejoice because here she can allow her fears and pain to control her. No fight or flight but the comfort of a warm blanket being tucked around as the darkness entrances her to sleep, to let go of her worries and her pain.
The gentle lull is a mirage, a snake in the garden because just as it begins to sweep her away, sweep her power away, the riptide reaches out and tries to drag her asunder. The darkness threatening to overwhelm her tightens its embrace, tightens its control, and she has to kick and thrash and fight just be able to open her eyes.
Eyelids fluttering – lashes beating against lashes – as she tries to awaken, tries to place the silence in the context of the overwhelming odor assaulting her senses. She moves her right hand ever so slightly, and her fingers scream as they are dragged over shattered glass, as the slivers slide across her knuckles. And she stops, pauses when she feels a sticky wetness seep over her fingers because it is warmer than scotch and thicker than water.
Pain tears through her body, sends her back bowing into crumbled floorboards as her muscles contract and expel and wither in anguish. And the sticky wetness clings to her fingers only to drip onto the fabric of her dress that has become bunched by the inertia of movement and torn in the crumpling of metal and the shattering of glass.
Eyelids falling – lashes beating against lashes – as the pain cripples her further, as the crunching of glass beneath feet is met with the shake of car as the bystander pulls and pulls on the jammed door and curses the way his athletic prowess fails him in the moment that matters most. He calls out her name; letters reaching her ears in a slow march that causes her to lose the first as she strings together the third and fourth.
She cannot make her mouth move, cannot call out to him. Yet the concern that she cannot reassure him evaporates with the groan emitted from somewhere near her legs and feet. And the pressure, the weight of the mass draped across the lover half of her body finally registers in her head. Awareness coming like a splash of icy water to the face, forcing the darkness to recede as she slowly, painfully lifts her head.
It falls back against the shattered glass with a groan, with the color red permanently seared on her brain. The brightness of the color mixing with the darkness of the leather and paleness of his face; running not trickling from the gash across his forehead down a sculpted cheekbone to fall and pool on the leather below. Pain rips through her again yet the image remains, and she knows she will never be able to erase the image of him bloodied and broken beside her.
Sirens wail in the distance, increasing in intensity and decibels as they approach. Letters and syllables become words; become winged prayers flying off her lips for those sirens to be for them. For someone to be coming to wipe away the blood and piece the broken parts back together in a way she does not know how.
The flashes of red, white, and blue dance along the ceiling, reflect in the whites of her eyes as people in blue and dirty yellow swarm around the vehicle. Their words muddle; their shouting commands mixing like the filling to her father's famous pumpkin pie until words like 'neck injuries' and 'blood loss' become as indistinguishable as sugar and cinnamon in the final mixture. And her fingers – covered in a sticky mixture of blood and glass – strain to find his, strain to touch him as the firemen work to pry open the driver's side door.
But a paramedic interrupts her; a woman who tries to calm and assure her with eyes trained to betray nothing. Her neck is suddenly held stiff by a brace, and she wants to tell them that her lower body hurts more than her neck. But the paramedics are accessing the scene and deciding who to move first, and her concerns for herself morph into an anxious demand that they do not choose one man over the other.
Yet no one seems to listen to her; too busy assessing the scene and gathering statements from the single witness. She's known Nate for so long that his voice rises above the others; a beacon of light against the rocky shores created by fear and pain and an indescribable emotion that overcomes her when she is moved for car to stretcher so paramedics can take her position in the vehicle in an attempt to get closer to the critically injured.
There is no time for her to call out for Nate; no time for his best friend to reach her in the dash to the ambulance. Only then do they want to listen to her, want to hear her state her name and answer their questions. But the only letters she can string together are the ones that echo in the beating of her heart.
And the paramedics latch onto the name like talons on prey. She cannot shake them, cannot appease their relentless torrent of questions as she fills in last name and birthday and next of kin and relationship because the last one seizes her heart and renders her mute. How do you describe what they are to one another? How do you describe Chuck and Blair, Blair and Chuck?
She wants to dig her nails into their arms as they wipe away the blood and check to make sure it's not from her. She wants to push away the gauze being pressed against her forehead. She wants to scream at them to slow down as the large vehicle bumps and jumps over potholes at maximum speed.
But the pain comes in ebbs and flows, and she panics at the empty feeling of fingers holding air and a tongue stripped of cunning wit. And everything hurts and aches but she is far too afraid to close her eyes over what she might see, over what she might be forced to relive. So she lays their eyes wide open as the world above her moves in a blur of blue uniforms, silver interiors, and then dark sky.
The doctors that greet her arrival do so in a well-practiced rundown of cause and effect, of stats and conditions before jogging her through the automatic doors and jockeying for position with the other newly arrived case. And she isn't sure if it is him or the driver until her heart lurches at the sound of his name, until she forces herself to turn her head despite the stiff brace holding her down to look at him.
Gashes are covered under a layer of white gaze, and blood was wiped away along with the tough exterior until he is nothing but the innocence and pain she has always know lurks beneath. Striped and laid bare to wires and tubes and frantic hands trying to save him. And the echo of her heart pounds in her ears, slips past her lips in an anxious and desperate cry of five letters.
"Chuck."
The flash of desperation in his eyes are echoed in the way his hand slides off the gurney, the way his fingers strain to reach her. And all she wants to do is hold his hand one more time and hear the sound of his voice, but everything becomes muffled and lost and disappears as he is raced away from her to places unknown yet clearly not good. As the dark clouds roll in once more and move her into the shadows; holding her gently in darkness' embrace only to tighten as the color red runs down sculpted thighs to fall and pool on the gurney below.
The world is bleached white; cleansed and scrubbed until it shines in bright contrast to the darkness this place is supposed to save her from. Yet its brightness and whiteness makes it seem cold and harsh and stripped of the inevitable messes that occur with life. And not even some fanciful dream where she casts herself as Audrey Hepburn's character can breathe life into this moment. Can restore some of the darkness and pain she uses these dreams to escape from to her life.
Her best friend – sunshine and perfection – is dimmed in this setting. A set of lips pulled into a grim smile; a pair of eyes filled with unshed tears. Her best friend's arms wrap around her shoulders and her face burrows into messy, unwashed hair, but the transfer of warmth from the golden girl to the dark queen does not occur because her body is cold and aching with emptiness.
Because she is unable to feel even the squeeze of Serena's hand around hers as she takes the empty seat beside her bed and assures her that her mother and father, Cyrus and Roman are on the next plane to New York. Because she does not care about the family flocking to her bedside but rather is fixated on the family – the 'us' that includes her and him and her baby – carried inside her and born out of her heart.
The tiny upwelling of hope rages against the ache between her legs and the empty feeling inside her body when the doctor enters the room and looks at her with unreadable eyes. The tiny upwelling of hope that strings together syllables and letters into a prayer. The tiny upwelling of hope that dies like an extinguished flame – quickly yet with tiny embers that burn despite the lack of oxygen – at the first seven words the doctor offers her.
"I'm sorry, Blair. You lost the baby."
And the sound that escapes and echoes about the room is the agonizing, gasping sob of a dying woman. Of a woman whose chest is collapsing around the spaces where her heart beats and her baby grew. Her hand flies to press against her chest, to press against her body as she tries to find the strength to breath or to be done with it once and for all.
But the tiny embers find fuel in her falling heart as she reaches out to slip her hand in Serena's and feel the supportive squeeze of Serena's hand around her own. Billowing forth in another tiny upwelling of hope that spurs her to ask a question she is now terrified to voice because while she will always want to know if he is hurt, she doesn't know how she will be able to live as the 'us' that includes her and her alone.
"Where's Chuck?"
Patient confidentiality silences the doctor, and it falls to her best friend – sunshine and perfection – to offer up the world just a little more darkness. To speak slowly and search for the right words to impart upon her best friend the hope she and Nate and her mother are clinging to amidst the darkness.
"B, he lost a lot of blood, and he never woke up so – it's not looking good."
And despite the whitewashed settings, the only color she can see is the one seared onto her memory as another sob tears through her empty and cold body and her hand flies to her mouth to try and stop it.
"Can I see him?"
Her question is a desperate plea of softly-spoken yet broken syllables punctuated by frantic eyes searching and yearning and imploring the doctor to give into her demands. Her fractured and broken body aches with every moment of her limbs, but she will throw back the covers and walk the entire span of this hospital if she has to because Chuck is hurt and she feels his pain just as deeply as she feels her own.
A wheelchair is eventually dispatched to carry her, to move her down the bleached hallways past the darkness and pain sequestered in every room. And she thinks for a brief moment she can be the light to pull him from the darkness as her wheelchair stops in the doorway of his room, as Lily and Nate move from beside his bed to give her a moment alone. They press kisses against her cheek, press words of how grateful they are that she's okay to her ear as they depart to give her a moment alone with him.
But when the orderly pushes her to his bedside, when she holds his hand inside her own at the announcement that she can touch him, she cannot delude herself into thinking that the crooked smile on his lips is the result of some dream or that the coldness of his hands is a function of the flimsy material of the hospital gown because he needs his long-sleeve pajamas to keep himself warm at night.
She brushes her lips and her whispered apology for all that she has done to him against the knuckles of the hand that carried her, that she had hoped and prayed would be there to catch her once more because somewhere along the way she became the coward who runs away. And she realizes that she is not okay; that the lightness he claimed she brought into his life is now enveloped in and lost to the darkness that is wholly and completely her.
Dip, soak, wring. Repeat. And she wishes she could dip her whole body in; soak herself in the antiseptic liquid until all the dirt and grime under her skin is washed away and then squeezed from her body. Until her dark thoughts are removed from her sullen soul and sent swirling down the drain away to a place where they can no longer touch him and her.
Her hands still shake as she dips the sponge into the bucket despite how frequently she has performed this task. She still needs help rolling him onto his side and striping away his flimsy hospital gown despite how she has become the best of the best, according to his night nurse. But she is gentle and soft; always careful when cleaning the inflamed skin around the drainage tube in his left side or when cleaning around the gaze wrapped around his head.
Jealousy flared the first time she watched another woman slide a sponge across his naked chest, and she had nearly ripped the sponge from Angie's hand when the woman had the gall to move further and further up his inner thigh. But Angie had just smiled, held out the sponge, and offered to teach her how to perform this important task.
She had done this once before; when he hadn't been shot and playing nurse was just another one of their games. He had stirred against her ministrations then. Risen and harden so quickly that he rolled over on top of her and sent the yellow sponge falling to the floor beside his bed with her shrieks and gasps and laughter as the soundtrack to their afternoon.
Now – when the scar tissue over his bullet wound has torn open and a piece of his skull has been removed to accommodate the swelling of his brain – there is nothing. No movements or hisses of pleasure. No fun and games. Just the harsh reality that even her hand against his naked skin cannot make him wake, cannot make him stir, and cannot make him respond to her fervent demand that he just hold her hand.
The parade of nurses and doctors in and out of his room tell her how wonderful she is with him yet gossip amongst themselves at the desk in the center of the floor about the patient in room three-twenty-three and the woman whose photograph was on the cover over every rag printed in the city. Because she holds his hand for hours on end until a blonde man or a blonde woman shakes her shoulder and encourages her to go back to her room and sleep with a solemn promise to find her should anything change. Because she slips out of his room and slips on that gaudy, canary yellow ring as she pads her way down the long hallway to her room.
The ring is an illusion, of course. Meant to deter the paparazzi who sneak onto the floor and photograph her without any concern for what she has been through. Who sell their photographs of her sans ring to so-called journalists who write articles quoting so-called close friends saying that she's had a nervous breakdown or that the man she visits every day is her lover or that her fiancé abandoned her following the loss of their child.
The later, of course, is only half true. She was lost and adrift and confused over the change in her fiancé well before the accident; the dark clouds rolling in and ready to cast her out of the light well before the car slammed into a wall at high speeds. And now he does not come because she does not want him, because she does not know how to handle the darkness of him and her on top of the fracturing of the only 'us' she's ever really wanted.
But the monsoon comes as she cleans away the grime, as she runs the sponge gently down the arm of the man who was going to be lover and husband and father and is now nothing more than an empty shell. Broken and battered and tossed about in the storm that can only calm with his three words, eight letters and his fingers tangled in hers.
The sponge falls from her hand to his chest at the sound of the heavily accented voice, and the water trickles in bedded droplets. Angie nods her head and promises to take over for the young woman with the healing scrape in the right-hand corner of her forehead and eyes wide open in surprise. The hesitation catches Angie's attention, but she bites her tongue, averts her eyes, and concentrates on wiping away the excess water instead of watching her patient's most frequent visitor join the man beside the door.
She walks alongside him in silence with one arm lying across her chest and the other clutching the panels of her robe together. The canary yellow ring is missing from her finger – tucked away in the pocket of her robe – yet she feels no desire to slip it back on her finger. And the storm continues to brew, the dark clouds rolling in as they walk side by side yet miles apart back to her room.
The room where even the pungent smell of roses and lilies is not enough to remove the cloister of sorrow this place has become. The room she should have been discharged from days ago was it not for her body's refusal to heal. And no amount of flowers can cauterize the gaping wound inside her soul. Not even the purple hyacinth – a floral expression of sorrow and apology – whose petals he now fingers as he stares anywhere but at her.
"Hyacinth, particularly the purple variety, means—"
"My favorite flower is the peony," she interrupts in a reminder because white or red or pink, the peony can mean anything and everything given the moment and the giver. A wide variety of three words, eight letters – I like you; I miss you; I want you; I hate you; I am sorry; I love you.
And however soft she means the reminder to be, the darkness twists her words to be vicious and cruel. One last reminder that he will never know her or understand her, that she will trade more than just hyacinth for peonies tonight.
"Don't give up on your fact over someone else's fiction."
His words are spoken softly and with tight control and fall like the wilting petals slipping out of his fingers. She raises her brow, furrowing it in a confused look that tears at the healing scab in the corner of her forehead. A tiny trickle of blood slides down her temple yet he does not step forward to wipe it away and barely even bothers to look at her with a leveled gaze.
"You were on your way to the consulate."
A statement of fact confirmed by the driver who escaped with minor cuts and bruises thanks to a seatbelt and an airbag and was all too willing to sell his story to the highest bidder. He does not need her confirmation yet her hand still tightens around her robe as though she means to keep him from stripping her bare.
"The paparazzi—there are pictures of the two of you."
Blurry photographs of the future Princess of Monaco kissing Manhattan's King of Darkness snapped up by his mother's publicity team. Held in reserve should the relationship sour and the Grimaldi family need more than just a prenuptial agreement to keep the wayward American in line.
"You were going to take our baby and run away with him."
His sentence strips her bare and leaves her standing naked and bare under his gaze. The verbal reminder of her reckless plan that cost her everything and sent her back to where she started pressing down harshly on the bruises covering her body.
"These are my facts. The rest – you and I – is just fiction."
"Louis—"
She stutters out yet she does not step towards him, does not try to comfort him or assuage him with the touch of her hand to his cheek. And he interrupts her as he marches on with the diatribe he wrote in the time they spent apart where news of the 'us' that includes her, him, their baby, and her lover slowly trickled in.
"The light and perfect person you present yourself as is fiction. It's someone else's fiction. But this – the darkness and the scheming and the parts of you that love him – is fact. Your fact. His fact. My fact."
Her eyes close at his words filling her vision with darkness as she swallows the heavy lump in her throat that only adds to the burden carried in her chest. Her eyes open at her own words yet the darkness does not recede because there is nothing light about their situation.
"What are you saying?"
"I don't want to pretend anymore, to give up on your fact for my fiction because that person I thought I could love doesn't exist and I already lost my child to your darkness."
His words shred her; his blame tearing open wounds that have not even begun to heal. Because how will she ever get over what she has done? How can dispute the facts as fiction when everything he says is true? How can she dream about a life with Louis when she dreams about the 'us' that includes Chuck and her and her baby even in the midst of this nightmare?
"The consulate will release a statement explaining how the accident made us reevaluate our relationship and conclude that we are not meant to be. The paparazzi will probably continue for the next week or two given that I am leaving for Monaco in the morning."
And then he is walking away from her without a kiss goodbye to her forehead or a declaration of everlasting love as he makes her choice for her. She does not watch him leave. Only calls out to him to stop when her hand slides to her pocket and the ring brushes against her bruised knuckles. She holds it in the palm of her hand curling her fingers around it and squeezing tightly.
The ring drops from her hand to his palm and then is squirreled away in his pocket never to be seen on her finger again. Because the ring – despite its coloring – is not the beacon of light in her darkness and does not guide her through the rocky shores. She is already empty and cold and cast adrift in a dark, turbulent sea where the lifeboat offered by a man who only thinks he could love her is riddled with holes and sure to sink.
The door is left open in his departure and she stares out not to watch him leave but because her best friend is peeking her head around corner and staring back at her. The coffee the blonde left to buy so she wouldn't have to be present while her brother was stripped naked and wiped clean rolls in her belly – the hot contents scalding still – as she step into the room, as she sees the tears clinging to the corner of the brunette's eyes.
"You okay?"
"Louis and I aren't engaged anymore."
The broken confession sends her into Serena's embrace, and her tears fall onto the blonde's leather jacket as Serena coos in her ear her apology and tries to soothe her with the rub of her hand up and down her back. She feels tiny and weak and fragile and clings desperately to the blonde as she tries to make sense of her life. Her baby is dead, her fiancé is gone, and the love of her life-
"I don't—I have more important—"
"How is Chuck? Did he, uh, enjoy the sponge bath?"
The blonde's questions are breathed into her ear, and she can feel the grimace against her hair with the second question. It is meant to be funny; a joke repeated from the past where she would share and Serena would recoil in disgust.
And then Serena – sunshine and perfection – is passing along fanciful ideas that the lack of a ring might be more than enough to wake him as she cajoles Blair to leave this cloistered prison. An arm tucked around her shoulders holding her close and supporting her onward, she returns down the long hallway that gleams with the fiction of happy outcomes.
Yet her steps falter when she hears the frantic beeping of the machines and sees men and women running so quickly that their scrubs blur into streaks of blue before her eyes. The darkness in the form of helplessness consumes her as she watches with wide eyes brimming and filling with tears. A strangled sob wracks her body as the heart monitor flatlines, as the other half of their shared soul is pushed and prodded and shocked in attempt after attempt to reignite the flame. And as Serena pulls her back into her embrace and tucks her head to her chest in an attempt to shield her from the sight, a dark and desperate prayer escapes her lips.
"Please, God, you have my baby. You can't take Chuck, too."