I'll just say it now: SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER! If you don't want to read spoilers about forthcoming episodes of Gossip Girl, you should probably leave now or forever hold your peace (or something like that).
SPOILER!
Now, to those of you still here: set photos have shown Blair toting around a Harry Winston yellow diamond engagement ring the size of my head, apparently courtesy of Louis. I, as a Chair fangirl, began to get very irate until I was spoiler-ed on Tumblr that supposedly Chuck rushes to her side with some kind of speech prepared and stops her from jetting off to Monaco and becoming Mrs Attractive Extra. It was upon that premise that I decided to write this vignette, and got rather weepy in the process. Don't judge me, I'm obsessed.
Enjoy.

Self From Self

'Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.'
- Albert Einstein.

"I'll only be a minute."

She stretches up on her toes, kisses her childhood dream swiftly and sweetly on the cheek, follows him out of the room with her smile. The mouth she turns to face his face is closed, shut, tight like a trap.

"What do you want?"

Sunshine, glittering on the wrong finger.

"So it's true."

"Not that it's any of your business, but yes." The fingers on that hand flex, and she passes her thumb over the diamond to polish it.

"And this is your way of getting back at me."

"This has nothing to do with you!"

Her eyes are bright, brighter than all that gloss on her hand. He thinks there might be tears lurking there, caught behind a landslide of rejection and wounded pride. She pushed herself away from him but he flung her out further, spinning her into space and allowing her to continue to circle around him in a defunct little orbit which brought no pleasure, only pain. Those two should always be mixed, he feels, never felt alone.

"You're really going," he says, and now her cheeks are wet.

"I'm going."

That thing cuts into his palm as he enfolds her small hands almost to the wrist, plugging her into his thoughts as far as he can. "Please don't leave with him."

"Why? Give me a reason." Her pretty mouth twists. "And 'because I love you' doesn't count."

"What else is there?"

Even if these words weren't repeated, they'd still be his; what else is there to say, what further validation can there be? There is nothing greater than the floodwall in his chest, holding him up, no greater power than the rage behind it.

"There is nothing else. Nothing." She looks down as more tears fall, back up as one shivers on her lash and then on his knuckle. "Because he loves me too, and I actually believe that means something to him."

"It means something to me – it means everything to me!"

"Really? When you rope me into helping you win hearts and then you go ahead and lose your own and there is nothing I can do, because as far as you can see, this is my fault? I wanted time, I needed space, I didn't want to be your right hand or your left leg or whatever else you needed me for. I would have done anything for you!" Her thoughts are smothering her, and her pulse bangs beneath his fingers. "I did the worst for you."

"And we moved past that."

"To what? To clandestine corners or the life of a Stepford wife? No. No."

She shrinks as he pulls sharply on her hands, brings her close to him so she can see the ferocity, the lion which is tearing itself apart from the inside. "You think that isn't what he's going to give you? You think that's what I want for you?" He almost laughs. "I would have given you anything you wanted!"

"I don't want to be given anything, don't you understand?"

"No. No, I don't." He lets go of her, paces, because now this room is his cage and he's climbing the walls in his mind. "Because every time I'm not here, you look for someone who can give you something – the chance to lower yourself, the chance to better yourself, the chance to be anyone other than yourself – and I can't see why you would want to be anyone but you!"

"Why? Why would you think that?"

"Because I fell in love with you."

There is silence as they both look at their shoes, at each other's shoes, at the acres of floor stretching between them. She tries to laugh, and he watches her.

"It sounds so silly; 'falling in love', like one day you just trip over the person you're supposed to be with."

"Maybe that's how it's meant to be."

Her eyes snap to his. "I didn't trip over you."

"You might as well have."

More silence.

"I am..." She inhales, exhales, tries again, swipes angrily at her tears with the back of her hand. "Without you or with you or with Louis, I'm still..."

"I told you," he says, and then the cage has shrunk enough that he's holding her hands still over his beating heart, letting her look away and look all around and anywhere but at him, because knowing that he's alive and that it's her driving his body is very nearly enough to kill her. "I told you I'm not Chuck Bass without you. I never asked you to say it back, but it was always a given: you're not Blair Waldorf without me."

"I –"

"You're not a Humphrey."

"But I –"

"And you're not a Grimaldi either."

She raises dark eyes to his dark eyes, tilting her chin. "I'm not a Bass either."

"Shhh." He runs his fingers beneath her chin, traces the line of her jaw, and his mouth aches as he kisses her. There it is: the pleasure and the pain, pleasure from the butterfly pressure of her lips against his, pain from the salt he can taste from the tears he provoked. Her eyes close and his do too, and he thinks perhaps life is a cage in itself, but he doesn't mind so much if he gets to share captivity with her.

"We're Chuck and Blair," he tells her as they part, still so close that each word hovers on her lips as they brush against his.

She trembles, kisses him briefly, quickly, bittersweet sharply. "Blair and Chuck."

The walls close in around them, but above them there is breathing space.

Fin.