Author's Note: Kat (bloodyhellgranger on tumblr) came up with idea. I just shamelessly asked to use it and ran with it. I can't make her a gif set so hopefully she will settle for my efforts at crafting a written version of what she wanted.
He slides his hand across the expanse of the bed; his fingers searching and reaching and seeking out her warmth to soothe him, her body to tuck within his embrace and keep safe. Her body to which he can mold himself around so that the beating of her heart becomes the only sound he hears, so that the steady rise and fall of her chest as she slumbers lulls him back to sleep.
And yet his fingers are met with clean yet cold sheets, with a pillow devoid of cascading curls. He pulls his hand back, runs it down his face with a groan as he tries to wick away the exhaustion. He briefly wonders why she didn't wake him, why she snuck out of their shared bed without a firm kick to his shin or a slap to his arm in retribution. And then he sits upright in bed with a sigh, throws his legs over the edge, and stands up. He stretches out his arms, palms himself through his pajamas as he jams his feet into slippers.
The door to the bathroom is ajar, and normally that would be the first place he would look. But it is devoid of light and therefore devoid of her. He shuffles out of their bedroom, shuffles towards the staircase because it is far too early and he is far too tired to stride around the house and play "Where's Waldorf?" tonight.
The staircase circles in a tightly wound coil in the middle of the house, spirals and leads him into the darkness below. He stops on the fourth floor, pads down the hallway towards the first door on the left. The door swings open in anticipation of finding her inside, of finding her seated in the well-cushioned glider. Because that's where she has been the last few nights, rocking back and forth with two hands cradling her belly and two eyes trained on the temporarily empty crib.
The room has become her escape, become the object of her fixation. After all, only the best for the child she carries. She'd spend hours in here if she could – adjusting the toys waiting to be played with on the shelves, straightening the neatly folded piles of freshly laundered clothes, and reopening the debate over whether blue or purple walls are more soothing to a newborn.
Tonight, however, she is not in her chair, not standing in the middle of the room fussing over the way Dorota has organized the closet or drawers or bookshelves. He sighs, wonders where she might be aloud and yet shuts the door to the baby's room with care and revere not necessary until its owner finally comes to claim it.
He skips the third floor, skips the guest bedrooms and barely used offices. They had made a pact that they would be better than their parents, that home would be home and work would be work and the two would not overlap. They still falter sometimes - her more often than him - but they are trying to be better than what they got, trying to place their little boy first and foremost in their lives.
His feet hit the landing of the second floor and his eyes roam over the living room. Blair likes to tease him. Calls the room the library when she gives visitors tours of the home because the shelves she planned to fill with photographs and sculptures and artwork had quickly been filled by the massive collection of books previously kept in the storage room at the Empire. Sometimes he'll find her asleep on the couch too tired to walk all the way upstairs, and sometimes he'll find her curled up in one of the chairs reading on of his books or watching an Audrey Hepburn movie on her laptop.
The room is dark save for the streetlights glinting off the windowpanes of the three French doors, save for the bright light shining in the periphery of his vision. He cannot help the sigh of relief that escapes his lips when he turns his head and spies her seated at the dining room table. He saunters into the room, and his eyes fixate entirely on her rather than anything else in the room.
Her tight, black leggings cling to every curve of her shape, and he would tease her about wearing tights as pants if he had a death wish. In the countdown to the end of Chuck and Blair and the beginning of Chuck, Blair, and baby, he knows better than to say about her attire because even a compliment can trigger a torrent of tears.
Her headbands lay forgotten upstairs and she has taken to tucking her hair behind her ear, to pushing the mass of curls out of her face while she works. Her normally perfect posture is slumped in concentration and her tongue darts out to moisten her lips as she reaches for a colored pencil in a different shade of red than the one in her hand now.
"Blair?"
She pauses at the sound of her name, at his beckoning call for both acknowledgement and help in understanding. She offers him a smile and her eyes light up in a way that is reminiscent of the way she looks in the middle of planning a scheme. But the malicious glint in her eyes is gone; replaced by one of genuine and deep happiness that doesn't have to come about at the expense of others. And her greeting comes out in a breathy whisper of excitement.
Chuck plants a kiss against the top of her head. His lips linger for a moment; his nostrils filling with her comforting scent as he waits for her to affirm that she is alright. And then he takes a seat in the chair closest to hers, and his eyes finally move from her to the paper and colored pencils spread out across the table in front of her.
Two leather bound books are stacked on top of one another. The pages of the one on the bottom are pristine white; still wrapped away in a protective coat of plastic. Small bursts of color from magazine clippings, photographs, and drawings peek out from between the faintly yellowed pages of the top one. He recognizes it immediately, recalls finding it under her bed one day whilst searching for his missing bowtie after their rendezvous between her satin sheets.
He quips an eyebrow in question, in a silent communication of what he wants to know. So much of that scrapbook is based around her dreams of life as Mrs. Nathaniel Archibald, as the perfect society wife, as the perfect addition to the very Blue Blood family of van der Bilts. And, years ago, he had tried to make her drawings and her dreams come true because seeing her happy, seeing her glow made him happy in turn.
But now he has traveled to the ends of the earth, he has tasted the drug that is being Mister Blair Waldorf, and he's so far addicted that the sight of childhood dreams of another man, of another life he cannot offer her is hard to stomach.
"I'm making a scrapbook for the baby," she informs him before he can fall too deep into the rabbit hole. She pushes the picture she had been working on in front of him, forces him to steady himself on the precipice and see the insignias she has painstakingly copied from the acceptance letters spread out on the table in front of her.
The green background, white banner, and golden eagle of Benedict School. The white background, maroon banner, and golden arrows of Clark Academy. The blue background, red banner, and golden torch of St. Jude's School for Boys. The Latin mottos of each school are written in her perfect script around the emblems, and arrows connect one to the next, connect elementary school to junior high to his alma mater to the blank space on the page that has given her pause for the last twenty minutes.
"No Yale?"
She shakes her head, her features hardening at the suggestion. Her own scrapbook has page after page dedicated to her father's alma mater, dedicated to moving to New Haven and attending her dream school. But her dream was snatched away from her, sending her on a path to the horrifically lit halls of NYU to Columbia and finally to her mother's company and life without the college degree she wanted so badly only a short time ago.
Her son should decide where he wants to go, should decide to attend Yale or Columbia. She will even support him should he decide to go to Harvard, even though her daddy would have a lot of say about that decision and Boston is too far away from the Upper East Side for her to even think about leaving her baby there alone.
"I'm not going to tell him where has to go for college."
"Just for every other part of his education," Chuck replies as he pushes the piece of paper away from him and back towards her.
She had called the most prestigious schools on the Upper East Side to get Baby Waldorf-Bass on the acceptance list even before they had found out the baby's gender, almost before the two lines had even turned a dark blue. Of course, Constance and St. Jude's had accepted the baby immediately, had been all too eager to get the prodigy of their most promising student and the surprisingly successful Chuck Bass on the roster for the Class of 2032.
"Is this scrapbook for the baby to plan his life in, or is it for you to plan his life in?"
A shadow of sadness creeps over her face at the dark tone of his voice. She enjoys planning, and her own scrapbook had been filled with lists and drawings of how her life would go – valedictorian of Constance, four years at Yale, marriage to Nate. But plans can change. She knows that better than anyone else, and this book isn't meant to manipulate her son in behaving a certain way or mold him into the image of the perfect child as her mother had done to her.
She gathers up the small stack of papers to her right, places them in front of him, and fans them out so he has no choice but to look at the drawings she has created. The first page has a picture of a man and a woman riding in what he can only assume to be the back of a limo with a car seat between them. The second shows a miniature version of Chuck adjusting the bowtie around a little boy's neck and a picture of a miniature version of Blair holding a baby and introducing him to the ducks at the Central Park duck pond drawn side by side on the same page. And finally, on the third page, the three of them walking hand in hand down the streets of Paris; the Eiffel Tower looms in the background.
"These are my dreams for him, for us. If calling them 'plans' makes them come true, than I will gladly call them such." She forcefully replies. And then she pauses, fingers the corner of her own scrapbook in fond recollection before dropping her voice into a low whisper. "I just want him to have a place where he can dream and know that those dreams can come true."
She slides her papers back towards her, slides them away from almost as though she now wants to hide them from his gaze and his questions and his judgment. Yet his hand reaches out, closes over hers to stop her in her movements.
"Can I add something?"
Her eyes snap towards his in a quizzical look, but she slowly nods her head and acquiesces to his request. She reaches across the table and snatches a blank piece of paper off the table, placing a protective hand across her rounded belly to prevent herself from bumping into the table in the process. He takes it from her with unreadable features and picks up the purple colored pencil. She watches him in anticipation, watches him curl his arm around the paper and move his head to the perfect angle to block her inquisitive gaze.
"No peeking, Blair."
She huffs in exasperation, slumps back against her chair in the expectation that this will take a while and the anticipation will kill her. When he is done, when only a few seconds have passed, Chuck sets aside his chosen crayon, moves his arm, and slides it in front of her for her appraisal. And written across in the page in block letters, in the way he writes his initials are two words, nine letters.
HENRY BASS
The letters of the first word form a memory in her head, throw her back to a train station in Paris so forcefully that she immediately reaches for the chain about her neck and the ring dangling between her breasts. The ring they both fought so hard to place on her finger has moved back to the position it was in this time last year thanks to fingers swollen from pregnancy.
"Chuck," she begins in a breathy whisper, beings in a hesitant question. She has no idea what he is after, what he hopes to gain with this suggestion.
"My dream for our son is for him to be a great man. He is already going to be a person someone can love because we will love him," he informs her as she slowly shifts her body, as she moves in her chair to face him.
His head hangs for a moment as his eyes narrow towards her belly, as his fingers reached out to touch and stroke and seek out a comforting kick. The active little boy stretches, responds to the press off fingers against the place he has chosen to rest his feet. Chuck lifts his head at the movement, lifts his weary eyes up to look at her.
"But I want our son to always face up to his mistakes. To know how to apologize and repent, and eventually become a braver man than I could ever be."
"You are a brave man," Blair quickly replies. Her hand moves to stroke to his cheek, to reassure him of her confidence in him. "There is no better man for me or our son than you. No better husband. No better father. You are a great man, Chuck."
"Maybe now, but there was a time I destroyed the only person I ever loved, and I don't want that for our son. I don't want him to go through what I went through and know that he caused it, that he can blame no one but himself."
"You're wrong," she replies with a shake of her head. She runs her hand over his jawline, drops the hand clinging to her ring to press his hand against her belly. "I'm not the only thing you've ever loved. You'll ever love. You love him just as much."
To her, this fact is obvious. His lips automatically curl into a smile at the mention of his son just as they pull upwards when someone mentions his wife. He falls asleep with his body molded around hers, with his hand curled protectively over their son. And now he wants to name his son for the great man he dreamed of becoming, for the great man he became.
"The great man you spoke of in Paris? The great man you dreamed of becoming? He sits right in front of me. You've already fulfilled that dream, but this is your new one than I want to make it happen because I can think of no one I would like our son – our Henry – to emulate more than you, Chuck."