Title: Leave Out All The Rest
Author: Sky Samuelle
Spoilers: For 2.13 only
Summary: Sometimes it takes seeing your world to shatter before you realize which strings keep it together. A post 2.13 story about Chuck rediscovering the meaning of words like family, friendship, and love. An occasion for those around him to realize the impact he had on their lives and to stop his freefall into darkness .
Rating: Mature
Pairings: Chuck/Blair , Nate/Vanessa, Georgina/Carter
PART FOUR: TODAY'S LOVERS
Carter sits with his back against the bedpost, a long haired brunette wrapped in his arms, her back resting against his chest, her locks tickling his nose. A blanket barely covers their naked bodies. Her eyes are closed and her face is relaxed. It's a rare event, and Carter is fascinated by the way placidity transforms her visage. With her soft, delicate features enhanced by an aggressive make up, his lover usually resembles a ravenous predator. But in those rare moments, when she lies bare and exhausted in his arms, he can see a careless fragility in her. His father had once told him- around the time Carter was playing the smartass rebel card – that someone who cares about nothing can be very strong on surface, but is also very easy to break once you move past that.
Part of his obsession with her springs from the fact that all his attempt to slip underneath her hard shell have failed. She is unfazable, cynical to a fault, and there's this cold, disgusted anger at the world she wraps around herself like a mantle. Yet, at the current moment, all he wants is to preserve that peculiar, rare expression on her face.
He leans his head around, lingeringly kissing first her cheek and then the bottom of her ear. She sighs, not in contentment, he knows, but in annoyance.
Nothing riles Georgina Sparks up more than casual gestures of gratuitous affection. For some probably masochistic reason, he adores pissing her off, regardless of the often unpleasant consequences. His smirk presses on her skin, inviting her to lean her head over to expose her neck. Never the one to give up a free opportunity, he places several – not gentle , he reassures himself- open mouthed kisses along her neck, stopping to nip at her shoulder. She growls softly.
"Tired ?"
Georgina 's eyes stay closed, but he can see her licking those nice lips of hers before speaking, her voice low, throaty and sultry, the way he favours it.
"Are you?"
"Never" he promises, his hold on her hips tightening.
She shifts, rubbing lazily against him as her upper body turns to face him. Carter smirks wider, enjoying the friction, the sensation of her breath on his face…and just when he is about to kiss her, her hands levers against his chest and she's lifting up, distancing herself from him.
"Too bad. I can't stay."
Carter leans in, unwilling to let her go so easily. Her malicious grin, he convinces himself, must just be provocation. As a precaution, he lets his fingers to dig in her lower back' flesh , just enough to build her appetite. His little wildcat can never resist the promise of a little of pain, and he is a fan of anything which will keep her in his bed longer.
"Of course you can"
From the sheer amount of sleazy bravado in his tone, you would never guess he has doubts.
Her spine arches, pushing her breasts to an uncomfortably intimate contact with his chest .
"I got people to see" she purrs, pursing her mouth in a mimicry of severity.
"I'm sure Charlie won't lack of ways to kill his time without you "
It's something to loath himself for, the resentment that exudes freely from his use and pronouncement of Georgie' s exclusive nick-name for the Bass orphan but hell, she is been so focused on her 'assignment' those past two weeks, that he has hardly seen much of her.
She chuckles, amused by the power they both like pretending she doesn't have over his moods.
They hang around occasionally, scheming a lot and fucking for the rest of time, and it doesn't need to be complicated. It's simple. At least, it's simple when there are enough miles between Georgina and her first…first whatever .
She kisses him deeply, taking his face between her smooth, cool palms. Then, in pure Sparks-style, just when he's getting into it, just when his mind is going hot and cloudy, she draws back abruptly.
"That's exactly why I should hurry." She singsongs, disentangling herself from him with swift ease. When Carter recovers, she's already on the opposite side of the room, picking her dress from the floor. His gaze narrows on her slim figure as she slides it back on with feline grace, ignoring completely her underwear and moving in front of the mirror to check if any marks are visible on the pale column of her throat. New marks, that is because she would hate to upset Charlie.
Suddenly irked by the prospective of his…well, of Georgina jumping out of his bed and straight in the next one ,not to mention disgusted to be passed over in favour of a whining, intoxicated boy, Carter feels compelled to irritate her.
"You are losing your touch, G."
"I'm not."
She deadpans seriously, fingers combing her messy tresses. Not so rushed, now- he notices with a certain satisfaction.
"You were supposed to be done ages ago."
It isn't a complicated plan to execute. Get Chuck nicely wasted, keep him company and encourage his attachment to chemical drugs. Push him on a plane for any European capital and cause enough of a public scene to give Jack Bass solid justification to lock his nephew inside a mental home.
Georgina half-turns back toward him, giving him a smile that looked remarkably like a threat.
"Oh, that. I was perhaps a bit precipitous to get into business with Senior Bass. Entertaining or not, it isn't worth losing such an old friend. "
Carter rolls his eyes, unimpressed. Does she really believe that he's so stupid to buy that load of bull? "Please. You were looking forward to getting even with your old pal for exiling you to Penance"
Indifferent to his sarcasm, she shrugs and wraps a green foulard loosely around her neck.
"I was, but it's ancient history by now, it isn't? There's no vindication in kicking Charlie when he's already so pathetic. Besides, his exclusive attention has made up for his misstep. There's something so hot in how dependent he is on me right now. It would be a shame to ruin it. "
His hollow laughter falls between them, and although it meant to be derisive, it feels surprisingly self-depreciating instead.
"So you will do what, tell Jack you changed your mind and want to keep his nephew around as a pet?"
" Jack can go and fuck himself. What is he going to do? Sue me for not getting his nephew institutionalized? I'm sick of his pitiful calling me and ordering me around like he's someone important and not a whimpering, overcompensating cretin. Ugh. I think I might get Charlie sober only to piss him off. "
"Are you serious?"
Normally, an annoyed Georgina would turn him hard in a matter of seconds, but today there's something about disturbing about it all.
He shakes his head, not quite ready to accept that she is truly obsessed with Basses. Again. Where is the appeal, anyway?
"Always"
It feels like forever until she's gone, but when the door closes soundlessly behind her back, he doesn't need to think.
His eyes still burn on the closed door, but his hand reaches for the cell phone on the nightstand.
Oh, Serena will love to hear about what her fuck up of brother has been up lately.
"Where have you been?"
Drink in hand, his back is to her when she enters. He is watching out of the window, but not really seeing anything.
Her silence irks him, and when he finally turns his face toward her, the motion vaguely jerky, she remembers there's nothing quite like the way Chuck stares at her.
Restless desperation, angry hunger, a sense of impeding tragedy. They are all written in those hard lines of his body, in those feverish eyes.
It's a mesmerizing sight, although it tightens her gut with something that is more like anxiety than lust.
Chuck hasn't looked at her like this since… since that time she can't forget nor remember. They were fourteen and there were four pregnancy tests in his suite' bathroom, all positive, and a list of potential fathers they had drawn to pass time while they waited. She had forced him to wait with her, of course, after enticing him away from a party with the promise of sex. He had laughed at her antics, mocked her for having picked him as her 'bestest girl friend of the day'.
Oh, the fury she had unleashed on him that day, while she felt so dirty at the idea of another life growing inside her womb, while she strived to hold at bay her anguished panic at realizing her body was no longer hers. She hissed and threw things at him, punched him until he blocked her flailing arms. Even then, she had not cried. But he had kissed her neck and she had sighed.
"I can get rid of it easily, right?"
"Or we might keep it and be different than our parents"
He said it like a leering joke, but the shadows behind his gaze spoke differently to her. She kneed him in the groin.
Unwilling to focus on the past, or to dwell on the bile she can taste in her mouth, Georgina unzips her dress and sways her hips as it falls sensuously down.
Those famished eyes never leave her: it's just like falling back in days long time gone, except she can still smell Carter on herself. Promiscuity has never bothered her before, so why should it do so now?
No, she isn't bothered. Carter is nothing but a toy, a pawn. Chuck is only the mirror of her darkness. The twisted ghost-of-yesterdays who stares her unkindly, fiercely.
His arms encircle her; her lower body is pushed roughly into his.
I would do anything for you, Chuck told her once, when he was high, sand scraping between their entwined bodies, his gaze just as raw as it is now. And because she was high, too, she believed him and hoped the violence of their coupling would consume them just enough. She wished that if it could rip his flesh from his bones she would be able to melt inside him and know some kind of peace .
Who can know today, if he has promised the same to her, his Ice Queen?
Georgina decides that Chuck has probably done so as she wraps her thin arms around his shoulders. Chuck always was the kind of person who either withholds everything or nothing, often in the span of the same night. Or hour.
Lack of moderation will be his downfall someday, in one way or another.
In New York, precisely two hours later, the Van Der Basses penthouse is erringly quiet.
Eric and Nate are sitting on Serena's bed, strangely fascinated by the striking contrast two girls standing in front of them pose to each other.
Serena is restless, even now she stopped babbling and looks up to her brunette counterpart for guidance: she keeps rubbing her upper arms like she is cold and nothing can quite warm her up.
Her blonde hair are in a stylish disarray, and Eric knows it's because she kept brushing them obsessively while they waited for their actual companions to arrive.
Blair is impossibly still, and nothing in her perfectly made-up face shows the agitation so openly displayed by the other's expression.
"At least we know where he is." Nate pipes in, if anything else because he has always hated tense silences, it doesn't matter how well he is acquainted with them, and this one is beginning to make him to hitch.
As if on cue, both girls turn toward him, rolling their eyes.
"With Georgina Sparks!" Serena remarks exasperatedly, snapping her hand to her forehead. After last year, this was truly last thing she expected or hoped for.
"Leave to Chuck Bass to run from a mess to run straight in a bigger mess." Blair follows up, it's the first comment she is been able to formulate since her best friend gave them a full report of Carter's phone call and it tastes bitter on her lips.
If she was a better person, she would be more worried than angry, but she isn't and the danger Chuck's in is entirely a result of his bad choices. He could have stayed. She would have kept him from falling apart…she would have protected him, from himself or from Jack. He never gave her the chance to try. He chose to seek his escape elsewhere, and it was laughable his choice fell on Georgina. He could have predicted that she would sell him out .
Part of her – a feral, petty one she usually chooses to not acknowledge- is almost glad he'll be punished for hurting her, for leaving her behind so easily.
It's easy to be ashamed of those feelings: she still loves him - in a wilful, wild way she has never imagined herself capable of before him- and she hates what it will do to him, to know that his last living vestige of family is plotting to institutionalize him with the collaboration of his first lover.
Still, it's easier to be angry than devastated. Not a single aspect of this situation is looking up.
Erik sighs, his gaze wandering around the room and registering dubiously Nate' s frowning placidity, Serena's plain frustration and Blair's cold disapproval.
He has spent a lifetime watching the Fabulous Foursome from outside in, and he's faintly surprised to notice he's no longer the weird kid on the sidelines. He became part of them somehow, even if he suspects he'll never get around to liking Nate all that much ( it might be because there's just a limited amount of vagueness he can digest, and his mother and sister already fill the quota, or maybe it's something else he can't quite pinpoint). So when everyone seem to hesitate to step in any direction, for once he doesn't feel self-conscious. He grabs his phone, clears his voice and says loud and clear : "So, are we all booking the next flight?"
Last year, having all their attention so focused on him so suddenly would be too much. He used to have a hard time with simply standing up at the centre of his classroom to read in public. He used to hide that uneasiness behind a stoic mask. Nobody noticed, nobody saw anything until he imploded. Chuck's fast, hard fall is both an echo and the antithesis of his own, and that's why Erik can't resent his actions or words. He remembers when nothing was okay inside and he was trying so very hard to not show it. He hated himself for pretending and for not pretending well enough, and that is an unbearable torture he wouldn't wish on his worst enemy.
This year he has a brother, his sister is back and his mother sees him. They all see him and he doesn't mind the attention so much because finally he has learnt to not be afraid to look at himself.
"Obviously"
Chuck awakes coughing up water, a powerful water jet on his face, hitting his eyes and nose.
His first thought is that he must to be drowning.
His second one, slightly more lucid, is that he'll murder Georgina for this stunt.
Then he manages to squint enough to actually see anything, and it almost kills him.
The hard tile his naked ass is sitting on had almost persuaded him that he was awake and in a bathtub, but evidently that is not possible. No way he was really being washed by Erik Van Der Woodsen and Nathaniel Archibald.
But Nate is scrubbing his back furiously, his face beet-red and his blue eyes huge, and Erik is washing soap off his shoulders. It feels very realistic and slightly pleasing.
"I'm a sick, sick person" Chuck mutters, shaking his head to clear the illusion away. It just makes him incredibly dizzy.
"Believe me, we know"
He swears he is sensing an embarrassed smile in Nathaniel voice.
"Mph. This is perverse. Even for me. "
Georgina and her fleeting homosexual urges are rubbing off on him. Fucking perfect.
The water jet sprays on his mouth, forcing him to sputter.
"This is not a fantasy. It's real, okay? "
Chuck would argue, but his brother's appearance has something so impassively serious than it disturbs him. It's like the younger boy is sad , and that is not good. He never liked even the idea of an upset-Erik, and it's downright unnatural to Chuck because anyone's else misery has amused him since forever.
However puzzling the compulsion to erase Erik's discomfort, Chuck decides to satisfy it and play along.
"How?" he asks, tilting his head aside to lean into the hands that are shampooing his wet, matted hair.
"Blair corrupted a maid to let us in."
Blair. The thought of her burns.
"She and Serena threw out Georgina, by way" Nate adds, after awhile.
"Nate!" Erik glowers , before Chuck can do much more than blinking dumbly at the news.
"What?"
"Don't you think this is not the best moment to spill ? "
Nate raises his chin defiantly, put off by the fact that Serena's little brother is bestowing on him a pretty decent imitation of Blair's bossy attitude, but any reply he might have voiced is interrupted by his best friend, who is looking much more sober and looking back and forth between the other two boys with a suspicious expression:
"There's a story to spill?"
"Not yet" "Yes"
"The two of you are hilarious."
When Georgina is upset, she likes playing billiards. The geometry, the precision required of the game help her to keep her thoughts in order.
This evening it's not working as well it usually does, but she is still trying for the right angle when Carter finds her.
"What has possessed you to get out dressed like that? Did you forget where are we?"
She doesn't answer him, just glaring harder at the balls on the green table. Her shot is uncharacteristically poor.
She stands up to her full height, anger radiating off her.
"They grabbed me and threw me out!"
"Should I know what are you talking about?"
"Don't even try, Carter. I know it was you who warned Serena! No one else knew!"
"What can say? I have a conscience too, G."
Like if someone could ever buy that load of crap when he's gloating like that, reeking of condescendence and self-importance. It annoys her to no end that he never bothers to cover his tracks once he gets what he wants. Moron.
"Fuck you. What you have is a misplaced sense of propriety. The only reason you nosed in was because I told you I wasn't going through with the deal."
And she counted on that. This is exactly what she wanted. She couldn't have fixed Chuck when she can't fix herself. It doesn't spare her from suffocating. They came for him, and her Charlie will hate her, and if she hasn't him anymore, it means she has nothing.
Carter shrugs, relaxed and smiling as he scoots closer to her. "I don't share"
He states it as fact, and Georgina hates him for it. It makes her to feel so dirty, and she spent years teaching herself to not feel that way anymore. She needs sex to be either morbidly good or painfully bad, but men are meant to be washed off her body easily, without leaving stains or scars.
Nothing has ever terrified her as much the possibility of being contaminated inside by another human being. Charlie used to pollute her that way, just a little but enough to drive her insane with fear or want. She isn't sure she ever stopped mourning that tentative trust they shared and she worked so intently to fray.
Today she lost anyone she could have had, except Carter, who is here, who wants her. It scares her shitless.
He saunters behind her, encircling her waist like he wants to guard her against the attention of every old pervert who is watching them from the barstool.
"You can't be all that upset with me."
He whispers in her ear, tongue darting out to caress her earlobe. Like he could placate her with so little.
Yet she doesn't elbow him in the gut, although she wants to-very much- and that impulse's marginally reassuring.
"I wouldn't bet on it"
Carter kisses her nape, brushing his stubble on the skin of her neck. "Come on. Don't see how dull that scene was becoming? So I spiced it a little, big deal! I was bored, baby."
"I'm going to give you a very good reason to never be bored again" she threatens him, surprising him enough to pause in his ministrations. All those women he has had, and she is the only one who can make him stop feeling her up because of a compulsive need to pay attention to what she is saying or how her face looks when she says it.
"Do that. In Barcelona, maybe?"
"You're irrepressibly shameless " Georgina groans, turning her eyes upward. Indeed there's not much else to be said about the mess they are going to leave behind. Spain might do for a change of scenery, she missed Europe anyway.
The dim light can't hide the mess his hotel room is, with clothes and sheets and few dirty magazines thrown around on the floor, but nobody among his friends seems to pay attention to THAT. Their eyes are been trained on nothing but him since the instant Erik and Nate pushed him out of the bathroom,
They keep looking at him like they can see through him and he can't stand it. They say that they will bring him home, that they want to help him to kick Jack back to Australia, that Bart could have a weird way to show it, but really loved him enough to leave Bass Industries in his hands, but mostly that they don't understand why he felt he had to lie about his mother.
Chuck feels like one of those children kidnapped by elves and returned to their world millennia afterwards. The sudden, unexpected exposure to every and each person he ever held close is terrifying, humbling. He wants to run from them again and never look back, but it's too late. Reality is catching up to him finally, and he can't no longer ignore it, not when it means the backstabbing son of bitch who happens to be his uncle will win. It feels so farfetched, to think his father believed in him, after all, and that his uncle was ready to literally drive him mad .
And they dare to call *me* evil. Guess it's genetic.
He can't quite put the idea of Georgina setting him up together with the girl who held him from hurting himself the last days they spent here. Something in her eyes seemed new and sad when she tucked them in and settled against his chest just yesterday, and he can't believe he was so much of an idiot to fall for her tricks a second time around.
Everything is so confused and humiliating than he has no idea of what he 's supposed to do, but he knows he needs protecting himself so he uses up his last defence and lashes out. He mocks Serena's humanitarian streak, because how can she possibly save him when her life is even more purposeless, directionless than his? He claps at Nate jumping her defence, reminds his sister to not get too used to that, since dearest Nathaniel has no real loyalty to no one but himself.
So the discussion escalates in a yelling contest between himself and the other boy, but it fails to come at a fist-fight when other hands and arms pry the two away from each other.
Reality blurs once more in a fast sequence of insults and denials, and the rush of verbal violence grounds him until Blair and Erik push himbackwards , to the wall, and it's unfortunate his rage just can't find a path of expression toward them. He can't even stomach to look into their faces. Out of everyone, their eyes are the ones he fears the most, because in front of them , he feels the most naked, and it's all more difficult if he remembers why it was their good opinion he used to search for, thus he tries to stay forgetful and numb.
"Stop playing the wife" he spits in Blair's beautiful face as she is muttering low that Nate is useless and adjusting his skewed shirt, trying to get him to calm down with her touch on his arms.
"Stop playing the hysterical child. You are too old for the part."
Her determined, cool expression is at once a relief and a curse, a reason for gratitude and loathing. He hates that she can see him like this low – broken, stupid, dragged down by his father , Georgina, his uncle- but he hates even more that she got to know that he never meant anything to anyone. He was never good, never important except in his own mind, certainly not to his father, not to his mother, not to Jack or Georgie. He is broken and now she can clearly see the cracks break fully apart.
Chuck hears the door clicking shut and realizes Serena has dragged Nate out of the room. Erik and Blair's hands drop off his shoulders, let him move freely away from them, still averting their too focused gaze.
Behind him, Erik swallows an imaginary knot and does what he has learnt best, aka pretending he's doing okay . It usually helps in calming a family imploding neurosis, and there's at least a slim chance this trick will work once more. "You can't stay away forever, Chuck. Perhaps you don't want a family, but you have one. Bart and Mom were drawing adoption papers before the accident. If you come home and sign them, you can still get everything back. From what Mom gathered, it's not like Jack made a good impression on the Board."
Chuck laughs at the idea. It's effing ridiculous but it might be his last option left. "Do you think I would want a lying whore as my mother? That I trust her enough to put all that my father worked for in her hands? Sure, why not! And while I'm at it, why don't we merge households with Humphreys! "
"You don't have a choice" Blair snipes in, arms crossed defensively, straight and proud like the princess she is.
"Mom is inconstant and messed up in her right. - the younger boy adds, more kindly- She's often egocentric, and a bit slutty, but so are you, and it's not like people get to pick their parents, biological or adoptive. They are just there. You need to make lemonade out of their lemons "
"How poetic"
"She has a good heart and she really wants to help. Come home, talk to her at least."
Erik's gentle brand of insistence isn't easy to shake off. Chuck wants to give in, leave this hovel and rest somewhere clean and familiar. He wants back those days when Lily was at his table for breakfast, when he and Serena annoyed each other for sport and there was a little brother following him anywhere.
Maybe it's possible and maybe it's not, but he cannot accept it unless it's real. He's weary of doubts and illusions, even if he doesn't deserve more.
"We can't help if you won't allow us" Blair challenges her fortune again, not too content about being excluded by the ongoing conversation. It gives her a silly suspicion she might not be necessary.
But of course, Chuck being the usual impossible Basshole he always is, he must smell her weakness and dig in the bruise.
"Is this the part where you remind me how you love me and are ready to withstand anything by my side? I thought I made clear my opinion on that subject."
Erik cringes at the harshness of the statement, especially because he has a feeling Chuck is using his presence between them to weaken the girl's resolve. It makes no sense that his step-brother would diminish so crudely those words that mean the most to him, but it was to be expected. Just like the earlier scene with Nate.
Blair waves Eric's mouth shut before he can dare deflect the attention from her, even if only to defend her.
She appears regal in her transparent effort to hold herself together. "Your opinion doesn't change my feelings. I don't care if you think I deserve better or that you deserve Georgina Sparks and the Hell's pit. I can forgive you for being so pigheaded because obviously you have not much experience with it, but when I say I love you, it doesn't mean I expect you hold my hand and reveal all you dirty secrets to me. It only means I need you to be okay to be okay myself. "
She stares into his brown eyes, notices his jaw squaring and his neck tensing as his bravado melts into a momentary vulnerability. For a moment, his features flutter to give away the most beautiful expression she has ever seen: it's sad and confused and hopeful and lost, but it has a tender, endearing childishness. Then his mouth thins and his eyes grows harder, dissolving the evidence of how close she had been to victory.
"Blair- Chuck sighs, mockingly- come on. I thought you were smarter than that. Don't buy that bullshit. You aren't in love. This is not a fairy tale. You are a pathetic slave to this fantasy of changing me, saving me. Like you are convinced that if you are the only one who can, then it will make up for everyone else tossing you aside. You are so…obsessed with being wanted, do you really think I didn't notice? That's what kept you coming back to me the first time around, after Nate finally made clear he didn't need you. It wasn't me you were after… it was the idea of someone worshipping your body like it deserved, wanting you more than anyone else because everyone else chose otherwise. It wasn't about me then, and it isn't about me today. So stop boring me to death and go cultivate some self-respect. "
It hurts. She can feel her heart swelling until she's choking on her anger and misery. How can he be so right and so wrong at the same time, she will never understand.
The pain in her eyes slices through him so violent and deep than he has to look away from it, from her. He should be saying that she's nothing to him, and that would send her away quickly enough. So he might stop hurting her with sharp-pointed truths , but he knows he can't . He's not sure he even wants it.
She's everything and he's nothing. How come she doesn't see that?
Erik steps back and refuses to intervene, chooses to let them pretend they are alone. He'll pretend all along with them until it's needed. There's a rawness to Chuck and Blair now as he watches them warring that renders completely senseless the distance between them. The symmetry between their expression and reactions to each other has an unique, crude physicality. He has no words to describe the feeling that hangs between Chuck and Blair and tangles their lives so effectively. He might say his friends look like poetry in motion, like every theatrical romance made flesh and bone, but it would sound like trite exaggeration.
The truth is that after all the men Lily took home and into his life, Erik came to consider love as either a caprice of the mind or an addiction of a weak heart. It strikes him now that love must be more real than that, more like the sweet darkness between two fragile people who bark more than they bite.
"I bet you would like that. You would love nothing more than sending me scurrying away, tail between legs, so you could keep repeating to yourself that nobody can really stomach you long enough to truly love you and never try to be more than you are now? I'm not Nate, Chuck! I won't bend because you use big words! I'm not afraid to say you are a coward. Who do you think you are, to talk to me about self-respect? You, who are too fuckingly scared to even try to hold on anything! Guess what? You are going back with us, willing or unconscious! We didn't come all this way for nothing. You need to man up enough to live with the fact we care about you! Not one of us is letting you out of our sight until you show a resemblance of sanity!"
When she screams at him, Blair is full of fire. Indestructible, fierce, pure. She is all Chuck has never fathomed and more.
It shocks him how much little that is changed: to touch her, to be consumed by her ire is still all he wants and fears .
" Is that so? "
"Yes!"
"Fine!"
"Fine!"
Just like that, the fight drains from them. Shoulders hunch and features relax even if glares keep on clashing. The couple turn toward Erik simultaneously, twin annoyed sneers on.
The younger boy steps back and looks up to them with a slight, placating smile, deciding that the best strategy is going to be ignoring the tension lingering the room and offering a fresh start to this conversation.
"Do you need any help with the luggage?"
Chuck cringes, shaking his head " I'm not taking anything with me except my wallet. I value my personal hygiene."
"So much that you picked this classy corner of paradise to play hide and seek."
Never a Waldrof' trait to let such an obvious opportunity for a sarcastic dig to pass unobserved.
"You are officially uninvited to play"
"A simple 'thank you' would do, Bass."
"Thank you, my queen"
The theatrical bow that accompanies the words seriously undermines their credibility, but it adds a new shine to Blair's answering smirk.
"You are welcome"
Erik steps in between them, hoping to stop them from vomiting further shots and acerbic barbs over each other.
"Let's just go down, okay? Serena and Nate should be in the lobby"
But as soon the door is open, Serena and Nate are just here, like they never moved and just waited the storm out in the hallway.
Typical – Blair snickers in distaste, imagining they've probably overheard whole the yelling contest from the safe side of the door.
She glances aside to Chuck, who is glowering half-heartedly at his best friend.
"So you are ready to come back?" Nate inquires, looking a little more uncertain than usual.
Chuck shrugs indifferently under Serena's incredulous stare. "Apparently life is too boring for you to contemplate without me to be snide about it"
"That's right" Nate nods, grinning wide and guileless, while the two girls exchange silent frowns of disbelief. How could they just to forget the earlier little accident? Their nearly coming to blows over every wrinkle in their friendship over the last two years?
Incredible but true. – Serena considers, overcame by a fit of hilarity- Blair and I would torture each other for days before putting aside an argument like that. .
Of course, Serena doesn't envy the boys for that. At least a true row gives you the chance to sweep away any issues once for all…but anything that keeps Chuck from antagonizing them all to their deaths is good. Her step-brother looks sickly pale and uneasy, and she wonders if this might be her, one year ago, if Georgina had revealed her secret to her friends before she had the chance to confess, to trust them. Chuck is harder than she is ever been, but under some aspects, he is also more fragile, more easily frightened. Parts of her-the part who raised Erik when Lily couldn't be bothered, the part who got used to have another brother, the part who used to sense that Chuck, not Bart, was the missing tassel meant to complete their dysfunctional family, the part who remembers running away because she felt broken and nauseated with herself – wants to reach out and hug him.
He would probably push her off and run over her if she dared. It would be too much, too soon, and she respects his fragility enough to wait until he can accept their affection without fearing the exposure that comes with their newfound knowledge of him. In the meanwhile, their loyalty shall do.
She steps closer to him, blue eyes meeting dark chocolate, willing him to see her affection in her bright, apologetic smile.
Chuck doesn't say anything nor she does expect differently, but the way he stares steadily back to her, appearing a bit dazed as he tilts his head slightly back to take in his surroundings better- to imprint the sight of those four improbable rescuers standing around him on the bottom of his personal Rabbit's Hole- somehow it convinces her that he understands. This is his family.
END
