A/N: I think you guys are going to like this chapter. =) It may be a little confusing on Chuck's end, but it's definitely the least angsty of the chapters thus far. I hope that doesn't disappoint some of you. I was a little sad when I wasn't getting as many reviews as before today; I thought it was b/c I didn't have enough angst in the last chapter! Anyways, I've gotten more reviews throughout the day, so clearly you all still love it & I was just impatient. Ha. Thanks again for all your amazing support. I definitely wouldn't be as inspired without it. Heheh. I've outlined this fic & it's going to be 11 chapters plus an epilogue. =) Hope you guys all love it till the end. Review! =D

*Pleeeeeeeeeeeeease vote on the poll on my profile!

*I own nothing. No copyright infringement intended. ;p

….

Ch.4—Unarmed in Battle

Serena was gone. The little note telling Blair she went to brunch with her family made her push aside the detail in an instant. Serena was not off doing stuff without her – she just hadn't wanted to wake her. That's what she'd be telling her now if she called her. She wouldn't call her. She was fine. She'd gotten back from the hospital in surprisingly good time going off of what Serena had said. In hindsight, Blair should not have been surprised. Her best friend was easy on the eyes and extremely convincing to the male gender because of it. Her flirting skills were top-notch too. She could be working as undercover spy for the government for all she knew.

She climbed of the bed, and then froze when she heard the ding of the elevator downstairs. Could Serena be back so soon? Had she really slept that long? No. She checked the clock. It was just past nine am. Her brows furrowed as she heard the soft padding of feet on the foyer floor. Dorota didn't call to her to inform her of who had just come. That was weird too. She slowly stood to her feet, as if the next move she made would be her undoing. A swirling uneasiness moved in the pit of her stomach. She closed her eyes as the sound of feet came up her stairs. When she opened her eyes, her suspicions were confirmed. Leaning against her doorframe was Chuck Bass in all his glory.

She looked at him once and then decided ignoring him would be the best plan. She walked across the room and started looking through her clothes in her closet, then in her drawers, then back again. She tried not to move too fast, but his constant unspeaking presence definitely made her nervous. She just wanted him gone. Finally, she sighed and turned to him, placing a hand on her hip.

"What do you want?" she demanded.

He chuckled and moved into her room. "You seem to be asking me that a lot lately," he observed. She rolled her eyes and gave up on looking for clothes. Her silk cami and shorts set more than covered her up. She would have crossed the room to toss her near transparent robe on, but then he would have been aware of her trying to cover herself up – from possible embarrassment? She pushed the thought aside. She shouldn't care what he thought of her, showing skin or not. If he didn't care about her, he certainly didn't care what she looked like. He's already 'had' her after all.

"That's because you declared war on me," she said. He looked at her and smirked. He slipped his hands into his pockets. She noticed a scarf dangling around his neck. It reminded her of high school, and how strangely enough things had been simpler, even if it didn't seem that way at the time.

"Usually both sides fight in a war," he said, eyeing her as if she were some strange specimen. She held up her hands in mock-surrender.

"I surrender," she said. He raised his eyebrows at her very unnatural voice. She was obviously not in a good mood.

"As I recall, in war, when one side surrenders, the winning opponent gets to take over them." He smirked. She glared at him. "If you really aren't going to fight back, then I'm just going to have to keep taking everything away." He paused in between each of the last few words. She pursed her lips tightly.

"You know what? Fine. Take away everything. Don't tell me why you're here. Why don't you just—"

He cut her off. "Actually, I do have a reason in being here." She raised her eyebrows and crossed her arms across her chest, sardonically amused. Her expression dared him to continue, her knuckles going white in the crook of her elbows told him not to dawdle. "I'm here to take you to brunch." He smiled charmingly.

Her jaw dropped and her eyes widened instantly. "What?"

"Brunch," he said, as if she didn't know what it was. "You know, it's something we all do on Sundays? Get together? Eat?"

She looked up at him and narrowed her eyes. "Used to," she snapped. He stopped talking but his open mouth still curved into a subtle smirk. She walked back to her bed and sat down on the edge. She saw him walking towards her out of the corner of her eye, but hell and heaven combined couldn't make her consent to him sitting next to her. She looked up at him and glared again. He halted, though there was no sign of hurt or confusion on his face like she'd hoped for. It was too much to hope for at this point, she gathered.

"What?" he asked. "Just because you and I are at ends with each other doesn't mean we can't go to a simple meal without sparring," he said, as if it made all the sense in the world. She looked up at him, her eyes still filled with venom.

"I'm not hungry," she ground out. He smiled and pulled a chair across the room for him to sit on.

"You fainted yesterday. Your body needs you to be hungry."

Her eyes narrowed, but once again it did not have the desired effect. She was running out of options. Yelling at him and cursing the day he was born wouldn't be anything he hadn't heard before, and it certainly wouldn't affect his cheery mood. She was pushing her luck if she thought he'd just leave if she was silent. And she was hungry. She hadn't eaten that much after she'd gotten back last night. She'd been too tired, even with the rest she'd gotten at the hospital. Plus, she'd been desperate for more visions of the Chuck in her dreams. That Chuck she craved for. He didn't try to hurt her, and he never did. It was like he was perfect, except he was hers, the Chuck she knew. He still had their history, and…hell, she couldn't explain it. It just seemed far better than the far cry from a man she had sitting in front of her.

"I'm not eating with you," she said matter-of-factly.

"Scared?" he taunted her.

"Terrified," she said, not even trying to hide the actual fear in her voice. She pushed fire out of her eyes, hoping that he would burn, but from what she could tell, the act had no effect on him. She unfocused her eyes, took a deep breath and stood to her feet. He grabbed her wrist before she could take a single step. Her fingers curled into her palm. She wondered if he would plead for her to come, if he would apologize, if he would force her to finally open up and tell him she still loved him. If only she could be so lucky.

"I always used to take you out for breakfast."

And her hand relaxed at the words. Her fingers uncurled. Her face softened. Because, yes, she remembered. She remembered just them going out to breakfast since they were six years old. When Nate was busy for him and Serena was busy for her, which was sometimes quite often, it was just them. And the way he said it just now made it sound like he'd been dating her long before Nate. She wanted to believe in that memory. It almost seemed like a stepping stone to rebuiliding them, even if 'them' was only as friends. She highly doubted that would work ever, but she was willing to go along with it now to avoid being directly tortured.

She exhaled, blowing out a puff of air. He let go of her wrist, his eyes waiting for her answer. His eyes plead with her to come and she could not understand. She could not understand this whole morning. He hadn't taken back the war or apologized or told her he loved her, and she hadn't done any of that either. This was so very close to the Chuck in her dreams that she just wanted to pinch herself to see if she was imagining this, because if she was then she would immediately tell him she loved him and kiss him like her life depended on it.

"Okay," she finally said. She could've sworn his eyes lit up. "Don't make me regret this, Bass." He smiled slightly and backed out of the room, telling her he'd meet her downstairs. She hoped Dorota would slap him. But she wouldn't of course.

Polish maids. Useless.

Much faster than she'd tried to do before, Blair went through her clothes and this time found just what she wanted in a heartbeat. It wasn't until afterwards that she realized she matched Chuck to the tee. On the way over to wherever he was taking her she told herself that she was doing it for the food. She needed food in her system to force herself to throw up properly. Because, when it was all said and done, everything would be the same, or maybe it would even turn into a hellish nightmare halfway through. She would need a release.

…

The brunch was awkward, to say the least. Well, at least for her it was. His face showed nothing of the heavy tension or stupidity she was feeling. He even drank orange juice with the meal instead of scotch. For someone who was trying to be worse than he'd ever been, drinking something without alcohol was laughable. She would have commented on it if the small talk hadn't made her want to scream.

"How about you tell me—"

She cut her hand through the air to stop him. He did stop talking but his mouth was still open. She realized he would not halt for long if she did not give a just reason for him to.

"Chuck, if you're trying to pry information out of me to use against me later, you can forget it," she said, going for icy instead of exasperated. She hoped she didn't fail at the attempt miserably. He slipped back in his chair, watching with her calculated precision. His chin was propped in his hand as if it was a golf ball. He smirked easily. He was either amused or impressed. She didn't want to know how she'd feel about either reaction.

"Now, Blair—"

"Chuck." Her eyes were wide as she looked at him intently. He was still smirking. She sighed. "Look, I don't know why you wanted to do this. The only thing we have between us is a stupid war that only you are participating in and painful, deep issues that are not going to be addressed. The small talk is annoying and pointless. I'm pretty sure you knew all this before you insisted we go out together."

His eyes were still lazily watching her. His face was unreadable. Her huffing speech had done nothing to move him in any direction. Nothing. She wondered if he would attempt small talk again. At this point she would even take a fistful of hurled insults just to get her ticket to leave. They had been there fifteen minutes and already she felt she was fighting for her life. She looked down at the plate that had only a few bites removed from it and sighed. She couldn't even puke to her heart's content because there wasn't enough in her to puke from. And her heart ached too much for her to physically make herself eat faster.

"You finished, Waldorf?"

She looked up at him, trying not to display all the feelings that were swarming within her. From the look on his face, it looked like she had succeeded. There had been a slight shift in his face that appeared as though he was trying harder to figure her out. She placed the fork that she had momentarily picked up down and crossed her arms over each other on the edge of the table.

"There was silence. I'm done," she assured him, bitching almost naturally.

"You sure?"

She didn't think until afterwards how significant that question was. She was too caught up in trying to leave to consider the fact that he might actually be trying to fix things. He'd been tormenting her for too long. There was no way this was for real. She just looked at him with her piercing dark brown eyes until he chuckled. Clearly, he had gotten the message.

"Look, I should go," she said, pushing herself up out of her chair.

"You've barely eaten, Blair. Sit down," he said nonchalantly.

"No, I'm done," she ground out, determined to leave. She had had enough of this unbearable non-talking talking experience.

"Sit down," he said, almost yawning. Was she actually boring him? She was about to storm out of a classy restaurant in a rage and he was just calmly suggesting she sit back down? Her eyes snapped back to his.

"Tell me one thing, Chuck." He looked at her expectantly. She sat back down in one big breath. "If I told you what you wanted to hear now, would it even matter?"

"I don't follow." He blinked innocently. What irritated her most was the fact that he actually looked confused. She resisted the urge to scream and met his eyes again.

"Let's pretend for one second you care about someone other than yourself, okay?"

He looked like he was about to argue that point. Maybe he would have argued that he cared about Eva, that he cared about a lot of people before she came in and ruined it. But apparently he stomached on and let her continue on in the hypothetical proposition she was beginning to explain.

"Okay…"

"Great." She folded her hands in front of her on the table, pushing the plate away. She would tell Chuck the truth, indirectly, take a grape and then head for the bathroom. She had purged on an empty stomach before. It would hurt more, but she could do it. And the best part was the fact that Serena wouldn't have the slightest clue when she got back. She knew telling her that she went to brunch with Chuck would open up a lot of questions she wouldn't want to answer, but getting around them with a few cleverly concocted responses was natural to her now.

"If something horrible happened to someone you know," His hands clenched on the napkin in front of him, but kept looking at her. "Someone you loved," she clarified, her voice sounding soft now. Her face echoed that deep curiosity laced with its gentle touch. "But there were several unresolved issues and soon everything went wrong, there was always anger—"

"Blair—"

He sounded very uneasy now, like he'd just clued in to the fact that she was talking about them. But she wouldn't let him ask questions. She'd make him sit and take everything she had to dish out, because she wasn't going to fight back. She was just going to tell him the truth. Sort of.

"Would it matter if she said what her feelings really were?" She looked deep into his eyes, pleading for her life. For a moment she forgot all about purging the second she left the table. She was back at the foot of her stairs, telling Chuck she still didn't love him. She was at that train station in Paris, telling him that she didn't love him anymore, her teary-eyed gaze screaming the opposite as she begged him to come back where he belonged. With her. Now, she was very willing to tell him she had lied about so earnestly and yet so very pathetically. All he had to do was say yes.

"No," he said. Her eyes closed and a tear slid down her cheek of its own accord. Her breath caught in her throat.

"I have to go," she made out, avoiding his eye contact and standing to her feet successfully. Just as she was halfway around the table, she heard him make a sound that could have been some sort of cursing. He called after her, telling her to stop, to come back, but she'd already stopped too many times, come back too often. He was her end all but she refused to believe it right now. She kept walking, passing table after table. Then, she pushed the swinging bathroom door open and locked it behind her. No one else was in the room thankfully. It would have been awkward to explain to some other woman why she'd just locked them in. She strode purposefully to one of the empty stalls and locked that door too. She got down on her knees and pulled her hair out of her face, wishing to hell that she'd been smart enough to bring some sort of clip or tie. Now she could only clutch the toilet with one hand and the transfer would have to be quick from her almost throat to the white U-shaped plate.

She managed.

…

She didn't come back ten minutes later and he knew that she wasn't going to. He looked at the food on the table and couldn't help but thinking what a waste it all was. Not the food. He could have cared less if that had been wasted, regardless of how long it had taken to prepare. It was the inviting Blair to brunch that he'd regretted the second she left the table. He should have gone after her. He should have thrown away his pride and his stupid need to get revenge, and he should have gone after her. He shouldn't have said no. God, what had he been thinking?

What was the reason he even invited her to come with him anyways? Was it to find out her secrets, how to destroy perhaps today, maybe the next? Sure, that's what he'd told himself. And most of himself had believed it. After his discussion with Nate the night before, he'd gone out and gotten drunk, gotten laid, and put together the perfect plan. It was probably not best to put together a decent plan at three in the morning when he was drunk off his high horse. He knew for sure he should have thought it through better when there was nothing to say two minutes into the brunch. Of course she wouldn't just tell him her secrets. She might not be fighting back, but that didn't mean she was stupid. Even if you know where to find the answers to the test doesn't mean the key will just come over and tell them to you. No, you have to maneuver a way to find them strategically. Today, he'd had no strategy whatsoever. He sucked.

Did she really still love him? She'd lied both times before? He'd believed her through and through when she'd told him twice that she didn't love him, teary-eyed or not. It was no doubt painful telling someone you'd loved for so long that the feelings were no longer there. That was more than enough to prove her declaration correct. After what he'd done, there was no reason for him to question her. But now he didn't know what to believe. The second time he'd asked her, the question had mostly been built up on fury for her destroying his relationship with Eva, the relationship that anyone would have called to be true, the relationship – the woman – that had come to define him. He had become a freaking philanthropist. The Chuck Bass he'd forced himself to turn back into would not – could not – believe that he had gone into that lifestyle willingly. It didn't matter what it had meant then and what it meant now. What was important was that Blair had destroyed that little piece of happiness he'd been able to create. If she didn't love him, then it meant that she hadn't been jealous. She'd just set out to hurt him. She'd just acted incredibly well when she pleaded with him to come back to New York. It had all been a scheme to hurt him like he'd hurt her. The realization of that made him almost think he deserved to lose Eva by the hand of Blair's schemes. She was just retaliating from what he'd done to her. And now he was fighting back because of what had happened at her hand. It was what they did. They hurt each other and they always fought back. No matter what happened, the pattern was still clear. All their "fights" were connected to the one before it. They would have never lasted even if he hadn't slept with Jenny Humphrey the night Blair decided to forgive him, the night everything went wrong and his life changed forever.

He tried very hard not to get depressed. He couldn't be depressed. Not after this. Not after all that had happened. Not even because of what had happened recently. He'd become a completely different person. He'd been proud of that person, and Eva was at the center of that. She'd given him a happiness that he'd never been able to achieve with Blair, despite her efforts. He didn't blame her for her inability to do so. He'd been a mess from the beginning. It wasn't her fault that Chuck Bass was impossible to fix. The question gnawing at him though, regardless of the fact that he'd been pushing it down fiercely from the beginning, was if all the feelings wrapped up in Eva had been real.

Twenty minutes. He'd been sitting there twenty minutes waiting for her, dwelling on thoughts that were not safe for him to dwell on if he planned on destroying Blair Waldorf to avenge Eva's place in his life. He had to have no sympathy. He had to stay focused, find her weaknesses, remember what it was like to manipulate the people who hurt him. He'd been ruthless and fantastic at it. People knew him for his schemes and manipulations. No one trusted him. Almost no one. Well, no one would now, not even Blair Waldorf, not even Nate. No one would be able to believe a single word that came out of his mouth or any action that looked like it came with good intentions.

"Your check, sir." A waiter approached him and placed a soft leather black case containing his check on the detail. Chuck didn't move, and after waiting one very long lingering moment for his customer to give some sort of sign of accepting, the waiter walked away.

Chuck opened the case and looked absentmindedly at the check. He'd go to the cashier today. It suddenly bothered him to stay at this table another second. He could still smell her. He couldn't smell Eva anymore, couldn't even remember what she smelled with, and it'd only been a week. It disgusted him. Three months with the woman that had changed his life and he couldn't even remember her smell.

He stood to his feet and handed the case and his credit card to the cashier at the front of the restaurant. The somewhat attractive girl smiled brightly at him and punched in some keys on the computer in front of her. Chuck sighed a little testily. He needed to get out of this restaurant. It already held memories he wanted to erase. A little noise just beyond the desk caught his attention though. It looked as if one of the employees was looking quite frantic as he babbled on about something leaving him quite distraught to his manager. The manager's eyes widened a little, but then he hastily gave him the instructions he needed and pushed him away. Chuck watched who must have been a new employee as he sped off.

"Excuse me…" he looked down at her nametag placed just above breasts that seemed insignificant and almost nonexistent in that moment. He would scold himself later for such lack of observation. "Brittany?"

She looked up at him and smiled brightly, handing his credit card back to him. "Yes, sir?"

"What is going on back there?" he asked, gesturing behind her. She turned her head to look at the slightly ruffled manager. She turned back towards Chuck.

"It's none of your concern, Sir. Just some minor employee complications." She laughed a little. "First day and all." She shook her head playfully, as if she were recalling her first day.

"Hmm."

She blinked at him, still smiling. He sighed, thinking how she was by far trying too hard to impress him, even if he was one of the richest men in Manhattan.

"Forgive me for being curious, but…" he trailed off, baffled by his behavior and trying very quickly to recover. He was practically apologizing to the 'trying too hard' cashier. She parted her lips, obviously torn between 'the customer is always right' and 'speak with discretion'. The manager walked up behind her just then and placed a hand on the counter. He looked up at Chuck with genuity.

"It truly is no concern of yours, Mr. Bass. There's just been a bit of a puking incident with a young girl in the ladies' bathroom. She has recovered though, said she just had the flu. The employee who approached me belatedly found out and was quite troubled. First day and all." He chuckled.

"Right."

"Is there anything else you need, Sir?" Brittany asked cheerfully. He looked to her once.

"No." He turned his head back to the manager. "Could you tell me what the lady looked like?"

The man scrunched up his eyebrows, trying to remember. He frowned when he couldn't recall right away, but then a smile lit his face, and Chuck strangely enough found himself greatly anticipating and hopeful for the answer.

"Brunette curls," he said. Chuck froze. His blood ran cold as ice as the man continued to describe her. There was no denying the identical description, and he knew Blair Waldorf had no flu. It was no coincidence she ran off to the bathroom right after he'd denied her either, he was sure. He mumbled a thank-you to the manager and walked away, eventually making his way to his limo.

Oh, shit. He'd made her relapse.

The door of his limo shut without him blinking an eye. Cold sweat burst onto his skin.

…

A/N: Thoughts? I know I made Chuck kind of almost have a pretty good-sized heart in that last scene, which might not seem normal going off of his previous behavior in this story, but Blair basically almost told him she still loves him, so I think that justifies it. Lol. Please review! And please please pleeeeeeeease vote on my poll on my profile! =D I shall try my very best to update soon. =)