METAMORPHOSIS
Author: Sky Samuelle
Summary: Post 1.10 - Chuck is in Monaco, but even there he can't escape himself and a growing awareness about how things and people change, and how it doesn't matter how hard he wills them not to.
His hotel suite in Monaco is all white: white walls closing in on him, white sheets on his bed, white roses in a glass vase on his dresser.
All the purity might hurt his eyes if it didn't make this a perfect setting to deflower a virgin.
The girl he has picked downstairs can't be older than 15, but it's hardly a concern to him. He has had younger ones.
She's pretty, but nothing special really: heart-shaped face, chubby cheeks, thin and glossy lips, azure eyes and caramel coloured locks reaching her jaw.
She looks nervous and her hands can't stop wriggling in her lap, so he takes them in his and gazes deep into her cerulean eyes.
He has moves for moments like this one, when smoothness draws the line between getting laid and not: a practiced smile, reassuring in its vapidity, a fatuous promise that it won't hurt.
It barely fazes him that his lips won't move now: all that he sees reflected in her pale, anxious face is Serena's anger from that night in the Palace's kitchen, the fear he glimpsed on Little J' s visage as her brother tore him off her.
His actual predicament has nothing to do with those particular episodes, of course. He loathes admitting, even to himself, how much he has risked with those two lapses of violence: moral considerations aside, raping a Van Der Woodsen isn't exactly a deed he would have been able to get away with.
Plus, pouring copious amounts of alcohol over an occasional taste of coke? Upper Crust party boys with less experience than him would have known better. It's probably a good thing he has laid off the heavy stuff since then, because control i–
Why is he even thinking of this when he has a virgin to warm up, a few steps away from his bed?
Rather than filling his mouth with fake promises, he stays silent and twists a tendril of her short hair around his finger, almost gently. Stalling.
The girl shivers as the back of his finger grazes her earlobe and her eyes are wide and so blue, but with flecks of green he hasn't noticed before.
She bites her bottom lip and in his head it becomes an echo of Blair's grimace of anger and betrayal as she hissed at him that they were over.
It hasn't taken her long to betray him back.
Suddenly, the long line of nameless women of his pre-Blair debauched nights feels so very distant in both time and space, insignificant and insubstantial in front of the fading glory of his more recent fling with his best friend's ex. Their faces and bodies all blur together in a vague recollection of unconnected places and times.
"You should go. Get out of here," he says to the girl, his voice dismissive but- much to his horror- more weary than cold.
He steps back and turns his face away from yet another virtual stranger, willing himself not to glare at her as she wipes away her crocodile tears.
This shouldn't be awkward and he shouldn't feel this tired and rotten.
He's supposed to feel pretty much nothing.
He stalks to the bathroom, splashes fresh water on his face. Over the sound of the water running, he hears the door slamming shut, announcing to him that his guest has fled.
Breathing out his relief, he faces his reflection in the mirror and studies his visage with a critical eye, like it belongs to a stranger. Challenging himself to find a fault, a crack, a hint of change.
Nothing is different, naturally.
Darksome, cunning eyes. Important, classic nose. A mouth which can pull off with the same ease soft smiles and cruel smirks. Deceptively delicate features which manage to stay masculine while portraying a picture of intriguing ambiguity he has relied on for years.
Staring back to him is the same handsome, arrogant jackass as always.
His features gradually relax and if his visage feels a bit more exposed, his expression looks a little different.
Deflated, defeated. Hurt?
No, let's not joke about it.
He's Chuck Bass.
He's not in love.
Love is a palliative, an idealistic concept the weak and witless use to discharge on someone else the responsibility of their well-being or unhappiness.
Chuck Bass is a master of self-sufficiency and instant gratification, he doesn't need it. He has learnt the lesson from Bad Bart a long time ago, the same man he despises and admires for not having ever allowed anything and anybody to hinder him, not even his son or his needy wife.
It's not a big deal if he enjoyed fucking Blair Waldrof too much to let her slip away.
It's not a big deal if it pissed him off to watch her throwing herself at Nate less than six seconds after throwing him away like yesterday's newspaper, all slobbering and open, vulnerable like he had never seen her.
It doesn't need to mean anything, the way that frankly unnatural grin on Nate's triumphant face had frozen him on the spot as the blonde winked and wrapped his arms around Blair's back.
Experience has taught him that it's way easier being Nathaniel Archibald's trust-worthy friend if Chuck can feel superior, and so far he has never been short on reasons. Now, with that vivid snapshot of Blair slobbering all over his friend as her Prince Charming took her away… it isn't so easy anymore.
What's easy is blaming it all on Blair.
That stupid, beautiful, hypocritical, hot, slut.
He is not in love with her and, as a matter of fact, the very idea of laying a hand on her flesh after her little stint revolts him.
The bitch has texted him twice already, but he hasn't quite worked up the stomach to read her messages.
Not like anything she has to say might make a difference.
Although he wonders at the irony of her contacting him so soon after the cataclysmic event of her holy union with her first and only love.
Maybe the grand moment has not lived up to her hallmark expectations?
As much as the idea amuses him, it's more likely that the Not-So-Virgin-Queen only wants to mollify him before he can rain on her sunny parade.
How well she knows him.
Rationally Chuck understands he has no right to feel cheated, because, honestly, it was obvious from the beginning it would have turned this way.
He knew Blair Waldorf has always been desperately, psychotically in love with Nathaniel Archibald when he started pursuing her. He was after her body, not her heart.
He knew their arrangement was more or less temporary, not that he wasted any time elaborating over the notion. It was more of a subconscious awareness. Chuck Bass lives in the moment and he likes it that way.
Considering all this doesn't dispel his restless, resentful dissatisfaction. He stares accusingly at his reflection, analyzing the face which glares back at him from behind the mirror. Taking in every detail like it was that easy to capture the source of his misery, or to elude the real reason he feels so out of sorts.
Fuck all the drama.
What is he even doing here? He hasn't dragged his moody ass to Monaco so he could be free to sun himself to be gloomy about it.
Yet here he is, feeling somewhat deprived, like some sort of exotic plant which, after spending all its existence in the darkness, has discovered the sun it was meant to enjoy, only to be shoved back in a damp, windowless cupboard.
Fuck, that sounded almost sentimental.
This might be love?
He quickly tucks the thought away in the deepest recesses of his mind, before panic strikes once again. It can't be happening to him.
He's Chuck Bass and –it doesn't matter how often this line has been used up in reference to every one of his outrageous exploits- it still means something.
AN: Using coke induces impulsive, paranoid and\or aggressive behaviour. The association of alcohol and coke causes a chemical reaction in the user' blood stream which produces coke-ethylene, a metabolite of coke with a longer lasting effects.
Don't kill me just yet. I would never dare to justify a rape attempt, it doesn't matter how much I love a certain fictional character. Simply, I struggle to reconcile the aggressive, impulsive Chuck in the first two episodes of Season 1 with the control-loving, calculating, less impulsive and anything-but-irrational Chuck we see later on. Sure, Love changes people and all that, but not so fast.
Plus, getting furious and violent with DHump for the dubious offence of defending his sister was more than a little irrational. Bordering on paranoia actually.
I'm studying to be a Medical Doctor and since we got the hint that Chuck isn't a total stranger to occasional using of heavy drugs during a wild party, I let my professional deformation kick in and here's my diagnosis.