Epilogue
New York
1932
"You should have married Penelope," Diana Astor whispered to her husband in the early light. No maid had come in to open their bedroom curtains because they couldn't afford a maid yet. The only house staff within their budget was the struggling cook and they would breakfast in the kitchen later, because the poor woman could no longer make it up the stairs.
Henry pressed himself up against the soft white cotton of her nightgown and yawned tiredly. "Why would I marry that harpy?" he played along, throwing his arm over her waist so he could thread their fingers together.
"You could have restored your fortune in one move. Her father would be coaxed into a much larger dowry."
She worried, about their future and what they would do.
"Mmmm," he buried his nose in the back of her neck. "What would be the point of a fortune if I didn't have you to share it with?"
"We will have to work," Diana swallowed the distasteful word. "Very Hard. It won't be easy for many years to come."
"No," he agreed quietly. "Not easy, but worthwhile. To wake like this for the rest of my life is all I could ask for."
"Well not exactly like this," she huffed.
Henry's hand crept free of hers and instead caressed her swollen stomach from behind.
"Yes," he decreed. "Exactly like this. With you, Diana Astor, full to the brim with all of my little Astors. We shall make one every year until there are so many mouths I will have no way to feed them all," he laughed.
"Henry don't joke," she softly begged. It was her greatest fear, that their little one would go hungry in their current state of poverty. Some nights she softly cried, so horribly distraught that the world her baby would enter was so different from the one she'd been born to herself.
His lips kissed her bare shoulder and snuggled her close into his arms.
"Don't worry Di," he whispered. "I will make it better. You will never regret marrying me. It will all come good in the end, you'll see."
New York
2008
When Blair was small, and imagined Cotillion, she'd never quite imagined it like this. Her beloved father not attending. Her distant mother leaving the country in a huff, days before. Nate Archibald escorting a random. Serena with someone from Brooklyn.
Of course she'd always planned to have the hottest guy in the room escort her. And in her fantasies he'd always been unable to take his eyes off her. They danced perfectly across the floor and attracted the attention of the entire room.
All those fantasies came true.
Not once, however, had the fantasy guy been Chuck Bass. She'd never predicted she would be holding his hand as they ascended to the honeymoon suite, lips slowly exploring one another. Her childish fantasies hadn't imagined decadent champagne, chilling in ice beside the fire. Or the length to which a strawberry with whipped cream on the end could be used to taunt a lothario high school junior. Even two months ago she could never have foreseen the very long, slow bout of what could only be called love making that dragged out well into the next day. The way Chuck's hands covered her skin and she touched his, like they knew each other.
Her mother had explicitly told Blair that this relationship with Chuck was going to destroy her reputation. But as he lay beside her in the rumpled sheets at dawn, staring at her with that adoration he was desperate to keep hidden, Blair realised something. That she was finally becoming her own, independent person. Who wasn't scared to admit that she was falling in love and it was scary and wonderful and she wasn't at all afraid.
She was growing into herself and so was the boy beside her. Which proved that Eleanor Waldorf and Bart Bass knew absolutely nothing.