I don't really know what this is. The title expresses, I suppose, my belief that the queen and her dark knight - failing diamonds or hearts, I always see Chair as the Queen and Knave of Spades - will be together someday, somehow. It's a little about Blair's understanding of Chuck, and a little about the way she sees herself. It's about sex. It's about symmetry, mirrors between two people. It's about comparing one love with another, and dreams, and whether your dreams or your love are more important.
Enjoy.

Dark Before Dawn

He was what she knew, and what she knew of him was calculation.

The way he worked was non-linear, always – with Chuck Bass one could begin with the cut and thrust of an action and end with foreplay, with the dark growl of suggestion which set her teeth on edge and her skin singing. He liked not finishing what he'd started and leaving her to dwell on it, but he was still deliberate; every time since the first time and ever after, horizontal or vertical or free-floating in some little world of their own, everything he did was deliberate. It was what made him different for her, special, that he'd already decided to put them to the test before there had even consciously been a 'they' in her mind.

She liked it when he was deliberate.

She didn't like it when he was frantic.

The truth was that he was like her, deep down, and being frantic denoted panic, and panic denoted – not that he was lying to her (let him try to lie to her, and not watch her smell it out) – but at least that he was concealing some truth which would otherwise come out and hurt her, crawl into her belly and nest. He had deep and dirty secrets, and there was only so far she could dive.

It scared her.

That was when the nails came out, and the teeth (not that they didn't usually anyway). That was when sex, fucking, screwing, making love drained her and left her empty rather than glowing. Sometimes, it felt like he was so desperate to protect her from whatever was festering inside him that he tried to touch her for as short a time as possible, only seeking her warmth and her familiarity and her rhythm like a child without a mind of its own. If he had his way, he would leave her alone, and burn alone.

She wouldn't let him.

And that was why it scared Blair when the pattern became linear, when words ran to lips ran to bodies ran to aftershocks. He couldn't deal with ease so she refused to, and the linear lifestyle lined up problems which made her reminisce about Nate and their linear problems, Marcus and their filthy, abhorrent linear problems, Cameron and their never-to-be or not-to-be linear problems. She missed being wound up before she was ready, snarled at before she was ready, hated being the enemy when she herself wanted to be instead of when she wanted to be a heroine. She liked her topsy-turvy world. It was safe in her topsy-turvy world, where she was used to eyes in the dark, still looking at her, for her after so long. It was as safe as it was dangerous, a world where two cars colliding could hand you an empire and a matter of blood could take it all away.

It wasn't topsy-turvy, someone putting a crown on her head.

It was fate.

Linear.

Coincidental.

It was a simple matter that everyone fell in love with the world's Blair Waldorf: selfish, glamorous, the secret dreamer, ever scheming. That girl ran to straight lines, fuses, simplicity. She hated and preferred the sick one, the one who hid in dark corners, the one who sometimes needed to save rather than be saved. She liked being the beauty required to break a beast.

Her reflection was wonderful in the gilded mirror at the prince's party, but she smiled when he, the uninvited knight without armour gripped her neck and wasn't frantic, was still touching her.

Didn't they have all the time in the world, after all?

Fin.