1. One Night On Fifth

Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York
1899

Sometimes, the sheer amount of artifice in her world amused Blair Waldorf; at other times, it sickened her. Looking around the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, her dress an improbably deep green silk trimmed with golden fringe, she was inclined to favour the former. For every old Dutch family the room could boast, there was a Schwartz turned Sparks, a Hazmat become Hayes, and that was diverting. So many coats turned, so many pretty faces covering for stabbed backs – was it any surprise that she gained a certain amount of satisfaction from the fact that her own name had given rise to one of the most elegant addresses in the city?

Blair felt that familiar triumph now, though she had long been wanting out of this crush. The terrace called to her, bathed in blue moonlight, bringing her pretty profile into relief as one from the line of never-ending Vanderbilt boys lit her dyed green cigarettes (Blair only smoked to please the gossips, but she was damned if she would do so without some class).

"B!"

Serena van der Woodsen turned as she floated past in the arms of one Aaron Rose, forcing the young man to pull up short when she came to an undeniable halt. Serena beamed to gloss over the awkward moment, patting her partner lightly on the arm as one might a dog upon the head. Blair raised her gloved fingertips to her rouged lips as if she were shocked, but in truth she was concealing a smile.

"Blair!" One fair tendril had already slipped from the confection Serena was sporting atop her head – liberally dotted with fresh flowers and what might have been diamonds – and it bounced on Blair's shoulder as they embraced. Serena, the taller of the two, took the opportunity to whisper, "Not only does Mr Aaron Rose think very highly of himself and speak of nothing but his 'art', but his dancing has ensured that my poor toes are crushed to death! Never again!"

Therein lay the major difference between the two girls, height and appearance excluded. Serena, who was willowy and blonde with eyes the colour of a late summer sky, liked to 'take the waters' by dancing with every vaguely eligible bachelor she could find in the hope of one day hitting upon a good combination. If a dance was not enjoyable and the partner was no better, she would simply decline thereafter; Blair, however, was different. Even now she was aware of her mother's watchful gaze upon her, and dropped a neat little curtsey to the bumbling Mr Rose, just in case his feelings had been at all wounded by Serena's flagrant disinterest. The lady in question rolled her eyes to Heaven, and Blair rose smartly and took her arm.

"Thank you so for the dance, Mr Rose," Serena called back over her shoulder as they left him. It hardly mattered, for society would let Serena van der Woodsen get away with just about anything, so long as she did not withdraw herself from its sphere and make the young men contentious and surly as a consequence.

"That was rude," Blair remarked as they reached the relative privacy of a crushed velvet settee. Serena flopped onto it with one hand on her laced stomach, searching for its contours beneath her peacock blue gown.

"Larissa pulled me in so tight, I can barely breathe."

"You were still very rude."

"I was, wasn't I?" She sat back with a sigh, then laughed at Blair's appalled face. "Ah, poor appropriate B. What is life without someone to make sport of, to leave hanging?"

"The period between birth and death," her friend replied wryly. "And one day, S, you will slight the wrong gentleman and get yourself into a world of trouble."

"So may I be rude until then?"

Out of the corner of her eye, Blair noted the rapid fluttering of her mother's fan. With a quiet word to Serena, she rose and glided seamlessly away through the crowd, acknowledging their greetings and repetitions of her name with a well positioned smile which hid all her thoughts.

"Mother."

Eleanor Vervelde Waldorf had bestowed her great beauty upon her daughter and then promptly lost it herself, remaining elegant but pinched and lemon sour as the years went on. Her gown tonight was lavender, with a wide lace collar and a sash which looked to be cutting her in half; she was the Madam Guillotine of society mothers, not only determined that her daughter should be the belle of it all but also that she should care for nothing and no one but doing so.

Now that lady smiled sharply and spoke behind her hand. "Darling, I know that Serena is your very particular friend, but it would do you no harm to visit with Penelope Needhold for a while." She gestured circumspectly at a dark haired girl across the room, resplendent in sugar pink and ostrich plumes direct from Paris. "She has, after all, just this week returned from her honeymoon, and must be eager to gossip with a girlfriend such as you." Eleanor's voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. "Not to mention that Needhold Senior has struck black gold – oil – out west. You could do much worse than to associate with someone with those connections."

Blair flicked open her own fan, a construction of stunning gold lace which matched the fringe on her dress, and used it dexterously to obscure her expression. She longed once again to be out on the terrace, breathing in the night air and tasting its sweetness. She doubted, however, whether she would ever have any control over her life while her mother still lived and reigned as mistress of their household. Eleanor's dearest wish was for Blair to marry, and from time to time it was Blair's too. She knew she would, someday, but was it worth trading in her domineering mother for an equally domineering husband?

Penelope Needhold was far from lucky in the eyes of Blair Waldorf, though one would not have known it as the latter showed her small white teeth in a perfect smile for the former.

"You look wonderful, Mrs Needhold, utterly French."

The new Mrs Needhold was a handsome girl with strong, fine features, formerly known as Shafai. There was mischief written on her face as she regarded Blair. "But you, dearest Blair, are New York through and through." She slipped her arm through Blair's, murmuring as they started back to Serena, "Lord preserve me from one more moment with Mr Needhold! I miss Henry –" Henry Buckland, her former and ever favourite beau. "More than words can say."

"And he misses you," Serena told her slyly as Blair resumed her seat and Penelope took the centre of the cushion, allowing herself to be flanked on both sides. Their wide skirts overflowed, azure over flamingo over emerald. "His sister Gemma wrote me that all he does nowadays is play cards and drink beer, not wine, and go to the races with Teddy Evander."

Penelope preened. "Poor Henry."

"Poor Henry," came the echo from two sets of reddened lips.

The third parted in a little laugh, and then Penelope leaned forward to set to the job at hand. The neat puffs of feathers around her shoulders rose and rippled as she spoke. "You will never believe who has made their fortune digging oil wells with Mr Needhold, a complete social nonentity! Just last week I saw him, and recognised him immediately, though it has been two years or more since he was last seen among us. Oh –" Irreverent of everything, her knees bounced a little. "I've been so longing for someone to tell!"

"A Cutting?" guessed Serena. "A van der Leyden?"

"Better!"

"A Ladew? A Holland?"

"Better still!"

"The Almighty?" Blair guessed from the corner of her mouth, and Serena made an odd sound and bit down on her lip. Her blue eyes glowed with brilliance.

"Bass!" Penelope cried, rather aglow herself now that she had found someone to titillate with her gossip. "He's wealthier now than most of the Vanderbilts, and quite as handsome – not smiling and blue eyed like Carter or William, perhaps, but certainly attractive enough. He was most charming to Mr Needhold and myself when we – oh, but I forgot." Her dark gaze was suddenly filled to the brim with trouble. "There was something between you and the Bass boy, wasn't there?"

"Maybe on his side." The current of Blair's voice ran smoother than silk, though there was a queer dull set to her eyes. "Though I doubt we ever exchanged more than two words with each other."

'Is that all I am to you, an accessory?'

'On me, you'd be so much more.'

What came next was burned into her brain: slow kisses that were like ripe plums pickled in liquor, sweet and tart and full of promise. Laughter, his heart beating against hers as they escaped the stifling rooms of society to lie beneath the stars.

The wicked shape of her mouth when he stirred her first to pain, and thence to pleasure.

"He's coming back to the city, you know," Penelope prattled on, unaware that Blair was so caught up in her own recollections as to be oblivious. "In fact, I'm surprised he isn't here already. He left California when we did, although he did say he had some business to attend to..."

Beneath the concealment of many layers of heavy silk, Serena's hand found Blair's and gripped, holding on too hard and trying to convey as much as she could through the medium of two pairs of evening gloves. The other girl's spine was ramrod straight, her profile proud, and Serena quietly thanked the Lord for Blair's propensity to steel and iron in times of crisis, instead of dissolving into tears as she herself would. With such serenity already in situ, their next move was choreographed perfection: Serena would draw Penelope aside for a quiet word about the long suffering Henry Buckland, and Blair would drift naturally towards the empty terrace and the opportunity to compose herself.

For the first time in her life, Blair turned to tobacco for genuine relief. The moonlight she had dreamed about half an hour ago – half a lifetime ago – dappled her white arms, and her fingers shook as she lit the scented Turkish cigarette and inhaled deeply. Smoke curled upwards from its shimmering orange tip, and a little ash fell to earth and was lost in the gloom. Blair stared out into the dark gardens and could see no further than her own fair hands hovering over the balustrade.

An explosion of cut flowers was artfully arranged to resemble nature an inch or so to her right, and she reached out to touch one papery stemmed bloom and ensure that it was real.

"Peonies – your favourite, as I recall."

"I prefer roses now."

"And here I thought I knew you better than I know myself."

It wasn't enough to turn and stop and stare, because he had grown older and not changed at the same time: the same sweep of dark hair back from his brow; the same cryptic, exotic black gold eyes that nobody called hazel because there was no green in them; the same elegant lines and planes to his face that spoke of quality, of a nobility that he did not possess. His father's father had worked until death in a shipyard, and now the grandson of that immigrant docker wore a snowy white skirt and equally immaculate bowtie beneath his sharp black evening dress, and he stood in the doorway like a memory made flesh.

Chuck Bass.

"Hello, Blair."

"Hello, Chuck."

The memory came closer, and she smelt that familiar scent: scotch and pomade, cigar smoke and cologne, the underlying note of male musk binding it all together and into an aroma which made her mouth dry and her tongue lie thicker than a side of beef between her teeth. He was gleaming in the moonlight as she knew she too must be, but he had grown taller, and now she was forced to stand in his shadow.

"I paid my compliments to your mother," Chuck said offhandedly. "Do you know, I think she honestly believed that banishing me from her presence would cast me straight into the bowels of Hell."

"She never banished you."

"No," he conceded. "But I don't doubt telling that me over her dead body was a nobody with no Dutch name and no old Dutch gold going to marry her daughter and that I was never to so much as look at you again amounts to pretty much the same thing."

The blood pooled in Blair's cheeks, and she longed to cool them with the back of one of her icy hands. She looked up at him, confused and made anxious by the shadows on his face; there was a flicker of uncertainty, of conflict in her expression, and Chuck pounced.

"Don't run," he growled, and her heart jumped as she did, dropping the delicately dyed cigarette. It skittered away across the tiles, and she raised her chin.

"I'm not afraid of you."

"No." He put his face close to hers, so close that he could watch her eyes catch as the next words blazed across her skin more intimately than a caress. "You're afraid of what I know, which is...let me see." It was insulting, the way he played with her, the way he pretended to think about it, and he was immature enough to enjoy it. "That Blair Waldorf is susceptible to proposals, firelight and rainstorms, and that you are definitely not the beleaguered maiden you so adore pretending to be."

Blair closed her eyes and searched for the dignity that had up until recently been smacking through her body, braced herself for the blow that she knew was coming. It was as evident to her as it was to him, but still it drove the air from her laced-in lungs like a physical blow.

"That you gave your precious, God-given virginity to me."

"So that's why you're back." Whalebone busks and steel weren't enough to create the illusion of a spine, so she held tight to her own torso and risked, "Is there no one in California you can torture?"

"Yes, but I choose you."

Perhaps this was all a dream – a terrible, forbidden dream of things she was supposed to have forgotten. Blair blinked hard, then blanched to find his face still so close to hers, too near to miss the trembling of her lips.

"Blair Waldorf," said Chuck Bass with satisfaction and scorn. "Society's darling, the belle of the ballroom...the virgin queen." His smile was a line of bared teeth, wolfish and white. "I'll call on you tomorrow, that we might discuss exactly what is owing to whom by a pretentious little princess who allowed herself to be persuaded out of love."

"It's been two years, Chuck. Time should have granted me your forgiveness."

"Forgiveness comes at the price of penitence, and I don't think you're sorry enough yet. But never fear." He traced a line across her flushed cheek, did nothing but stare as she shuddered. "You will be."

He turned then, a handsome prince with two dark faces like a theatre mask, and his footsteps echoed long after he had disappeared back through the French doors and into the crush of the ballroom, to be out of sight but never out of her mind.

There was a wreck of Blair when he was gone, her eyes glassy with heat. She sank down into the glorious layers of dress and left them to engulf her, to swallow her as the whale had swallowed Jonah. There was no longer any substance to her arms, her legs, her bound body, slimmer than a reed. She willed herself to faint, for blackness to eat away at the corners of the grand vista before her and, when it did not, pressed her cool hands against her flaming cheeks and cursed herself for ever having fallen in love with the only man in New York who could match her for sadism.

The stars above were cool and silent, and all around her, flowers rose from their planters and breathed the night air. In the velvet blackness, the peonies were brightest, best; it was their colour that Blair found so hard to forget, even after she had banished every one from her home and hacked apart her garden with a steady hand and an unsteady heart.

Two years.

'I choose you.'

So many petals, scattered on the ground.

With such a tremendous response, I felt I couldn't leave you hanging. Thanks to: SaturnineSunshine, ggloverxx19, Star-crossed92, MegamiTenchi, Arazadia, issabell, Rf, Krazy. Once, Poinsettia, lulubelle2010, blackheart4life, abelard, Curious Blonde, QueenBee10, Lil Miss Chuckles, louboutinlove, Chuckandblair1234 (to answer your question of what Blair was doing...hmmm, have you ever heard the phrase 'dancing with myself'?), Bellemme, flipped, dreamgurl, mlharper, teddy bear, jamjar, CBfanhere, lisottina81, and notoutforawalk.
This story and its sequel - my first duology, psych! - are loosely based on both the Luxe novels and Jane Austen's Persuasion, so do read them if you feel so inclined (though you won't need them to understand this fic). The Luxe is like Gossip Girl, only Chuck is called Henry, Blair is called Diana and Serena is called Elizabeth and keeps biting her lip.