A/N: I'm not pushing music on you or anything, but I wrote this to "Satellite heart" By Anya Marina and I think it fits the mood well for this chapter (if you want to check it out.) Other than that, You know that you guys are the best readers and please review! You know I love them.

Chapter Nineteen:

The singer was sultry; her woes were touchable silk, block words behind red lips, full and mysterious. She stroked the mic stand, swayed her hips, pulled back her long hair with pale spindly fingers. It was a ballad, a broken heart, something to do with nothing.

Blair nursed her drink, licked her wounds, stared at the woman, wondered how she played the part without betraying herself.

It was so hard to lie and hadn't she always promised to be true?

She was lost in the dark, under the glare of the club lights, the soothing jazz.

The day had been long, thoroughly tiring, every muscle ached, every movement was rough, carved out of exhaustion. She bent her head, scuffed her own hair, the short ends tickling her fingertips.

Soon, she would need to dig for the words, hollow out herself to give him what he deserved.

"Would you like another glass?" A faraway voice questioned, strained.

She looked up, blinked at the bartender in front of her, forgot about thinking.

"Please," She wasn't going to try being brave, she would need to be thoroughly drunk for this. There was no sense in sobering herself up, in being completely present at the moment where her own foolishness ripped apart everything.

Where could she begin, what would even describe enough? How could she tell him that she loved him but that he was right? There hadn't been much he could have owned, not enough to say that he knew every single piece of her, of her life. She had been storing away bits like treasures, hiding them.

Eventually, she managed to slide off the barstool and into a more comfortable booth. If she were Audrey Hepburn, the small frame and petite reasonings, how would she do this, how could she bring elegance into any word? It felt impossible.

She was bulky, a liar. Obvious.

"Blair?"

She looked from her empty glass, the fourth and up at the voice. Soft as cream, wonderment.

She was startled, he was earlier then she thought he might be.

Mark sat down, took her cold hands in his, warmed them with friction. She smiled.

"Mark," She said, "Hi."

"What's up?" He asked. Still in his suit, hair slicked back, the slacks that she loved.

Let's go home, his eyes told her, but she didn't know where that was anymore. The only place she could find it were Tula and Henry.

The only other one she had known was Chuck and that had been so long ago.

"I need to talk to you," She murmured, "And I figured this was just as good a place as any."

"Alright," He seemed slightly confused already, "What about?"

What about? Everything. Her heart, his heart.

I'm sorry love, I've sold you down the river but I just could have told you any other time.

"A lot of things," She sighed, "And I feel like you're going to hate me and I just don't want that to happen. So, I need you to know that I love you and this has nothing to do with that. This is just me respecting you by telling you the truth, because I feel like lying to you any longer would betray us in some way and I don't want that."

She had been rehearsing it all day, the way she would tell him, but she hadn't imagined herself drunk like this, a little sloppy.

He looked at her, "I won't hate you, whatever it's about."

She wasn't convinced. "Oh, I don't know."

He leaned in, serious. "You've dragged me away from work, you've been drinking and it's barely five o'clock. Let me know what's going on."

She finished her scotch, drew her finger around the crystal glass.

"I was in a relationship with Chuck, a long time ago."

She wouldn't pause, wouldn't give him time to interject. All or nothing.

"I mean, I was madly truly deeply in love with him. We were together for so long and so close to getting married and then we broke up, things just fell apart. I moved in with you and Tess, I don't know if you remember or not, probably not, but he was that guy."

Mark had gone silent, still, she wasn't sure that he was even blinking. Her hands were still cupped in his but his smile was gone. He had shifted.

She took a breath, faltered. See, she was telling him, I'm not what you think I am. I don't know who I am anymore.

"I was childish and hurt, looking for something else to focus on and you were there. You were so sweet. You were there and things just went as they went and I didn't have any time to find regrets, to dig them up because you had helped me to forget about Chuck and that was all I had asked, all I thought was important at the time, moving on. I didn't know I was pregnant and when I found out, when we found out, I -"

She stopped, wondered if she could really do it, tell him the truth, lay all the cards flat and still be able to look him in the eye.

She imagined their relationship like plastic twines that binded his wrists together, dissolved at the first word out of her mouth. She had always been the one to leave, never the one left, how would it feel?

Stop, she reminded herself, I owe him this much. I owe myself this much. I owe everyone involved this much.

Her throat was dry, she wished she had more alcohol to smooth things over. She wanted to scream.

"I didn't know who the father was. I honestly didn't. I thought of going back to Chuck and you were just there for me, always there for me. And, you were so different from him, so much more intriguing to me, I knew you wouldn't hurt me like he might and I acted in some childish way to preserve myself at the expense of romance, at the hope that maybe I was pregnant with your child and we would magically be able to be together without fault. You stayed and I never got up my nerve to explain it to you because I found myself in love with you, I scraped away enough space in my heart and it just fit perfectly, you and I. I started over. I grew up, I tried to be less spiteful, more of the woman you saw in me. "

The color drained from his face, his lips pressed together.

"I just knew the moment they put Tula and Henry into my arms, I knew that it wasn't you and I understood that I would have to make do with that. I wouldn't get the life you had promised me, I wouldn't be the mother of your children, but I knew we could be a patchwork family, that I loved you too much to let you know that what you had been waiting for didn't have anything to do with you."

He pulled his hands away, turned.

"But you have everything to do with my heart," She pleaded, "And that was enough. And I know this is the biggest of all lies and I know that you probably hate me and that you'll never forgive me and that I'm a bitch and I'll agree with you on all of that. But you are their father and no matter how much you hate me, how much you despise me, the only person they've ever known is you and that has to count for something."

She was trying to feel him through bubble wrap, to translate a foreign language but he was already so far away she could barely see him anymore. He flinched at her graze, withdrew further until he was barely sitting.

Perhaps he would never speak to her again, never utter a word in her presence, but he hadn't stormed off, hadn't disappeared. He was still in front of her, begging somehow, on the verge of tears, she could feel her own sorrow at all of it.

"How could you?" He whispered, so low she could barely hear it above the music.

And he was really asking, wanting to know but she didn't have an answer.

And in one fluid motion he was up and out the door, the keys to the car jingling in his hands. Not another word, nor a question. She dropped her head into her hands, wiped away the tears.

"What a pity, what a sham, what's the matter with you man? Don't you see it's wrong, can't you get it right? Out of mind and out of sight."

What else could she have said? I'm sorry, I'm so sorry? That wouldn't have been enough. There was more to them then that. She wasn't Audrey Hepburn, she didn't run into the rain, she didn't follow her man, she left in the quiet of night, dispensed heartbreak in tiny booths in the early evening.

Time passed, ebbed and flowed, she stretched and cried, walked into the bathroom, cleaned off all her make-up, sighed. There wasn't much of anything to think about. The scotch gave her a headache.

Blair fumbled through her purse for her umbrella, criss-crossed the club and stood outside under the canopy in the rain. Her flats were gold, sparking under the lights. She was walking, joining the crowd, heading somewhere with no specific place in mind.

The twins were at a birthday party for the weekend, the house would be empty and the thought of it made her ache. She didn't want to be alone. All she imagined herself doing was thinking about Mark, wondering if he would come home, if she could possibly reach across and touch him, really feel him, apologize in a way that made it matter.

But what did it matter? He would have to break it down, digest it in bits, come back to it when he felt ready.

She knew the feeling all too well.

It wasn't until she was standing in front of Constance Billiard that Blair realized she'd been leading herself there. The rain pounded against her almond colored umbrella, dripping into the puddles, seeping into her shoes. She swished together, shaking lightly.

It seemed like so long ago, the day she had first seen Charles Bass as a young man. She had been sitting on the steps, leafing through her textbooks, surrounded by the excited squeal of Penelope and Serena as they talked about their new classes. It passed by her but she hadn't been paying attention to the syllables.

The bitter wind pressed itself to her thick stockings and when she looked up from her shoes, a sleek black limo had pulled up to the entrance.

Penelope and Serena didn't seem to notice him as he climbed out of the car, stepped onto the street in a pair of shiny oxfords, the scarf wrapped around his neck. She had been confused, he was Chuck but he wasn't, there was a rougher quality to him, his cheekbones were sharper, more prominent. He had changed. And when he caught her eye, Nate not far behind, she had flushed and turned away.

It was the beginning, under the veiled clouds of winter. Under the cloaks of her naive heart as it fell before it even knew it had fallen. And she had hated him then, just as she hated him now.

Right?

So pretty, so smart, such a waste of a young heart. Call on all your girls, don't forget the boys, put a lid on all that noise.

Long shadows slid across the floor, pools of faded lamplight. He pressed his forehead against the wall, one hand on the windowpane and tried not to think about anything. The alcohol was making that easier at least.

The rain fell from the clouds, formed puddled far below. The first real signs of winter.

Chuck loosened his bow tie, peeled his jacket off, lazily mulled about the apartment.

At night he dreamed of Tula and Henry, the way they smiled and Blair as she had stood beside him, hesitant but strong in a way he hadn't seen before, couldn't have known without all of this. He dreamed that she had translated into someone else and the only thing keeping them together became the thread of lost connections that hardly spanned between them.

He tried not to think about her but in the two weeks since Cooney Island, he had only managed to go a few minutes without.

He didn't know what he was waiting for, the moment she would give him her hand, her heart even? Or at least give back everything he had left with her, his love like a cherished mailing stamp, the pompous ass he used to be.

The things he had lost the night he had chosen everything else over her, what he wouldn't give back to be anything to her, the rock she could have relied on.

But they were just two children with an idealized view of love, of the sacrifice it took to really maintain. With all the pieces in place, with every time line fitted onto its axis, he couldn't blame the Chuck and Blair they had been for falling to pieces in each other's hands.

There was a sharp knock on the front door, jolting him into the reality of his empty living room, the cold air that filled the space. He set his drink down, turned up the heat and stumbled to the door, drunk enough not to bother with wondering why the doorman hadn't called up.

He slid the lock back, leaned against the frame.

The woman turned around, looked at him and froze, re-thinking her own actions as she made them.

Blair.

She reached up, touched the bow on the side of her head, seemed to forget that her hair was short and stuffed it awkwardly into her coat pocket.

"It hasn't changed much in here," She said, gesturing to the hallway.

He was baffled, if anything by the way she had greeted him. It had been said in a way that seemed to imply that it wasn't unusual for her to show up on an old lover's doorstep past midnight. Maybe it wasn't. He didn't know anymore.

When he didn't say anything, she pressed further.

"May I come in?"

He swallowed; let her pass by him and into the apartment that shared their history. One of many things, he mused. One place he could barely think of without feeling as though he needed something from her, he just didn't know what.

I'm a satellite heart, lost in the dark. I'll be true to you no matter what you do.

A/N: Alright. This note is because I'm getting some reviews all concerned with how terrible Blair has seemed these last couple of chapters. Normally my response would be, "just let the story unfold," but I guess at this point a little bit of an explanation is needed. Chuck is a few steps up the ladder from Blair in compassion right now, simply because he never really let himself be with anyone else so he's had all this time to figure things out and in light of recent events, everything simply seems to click into place from all the years without her that he spent trying to carve out explanations. However, for Blair:

She went from one serious relationship to another and unlike Chuck, she became a parent, a mom. And yes, while I have been portraying her with a harder edge than you see in most ff stories, i'm sure that most of you know I do not write from plot. What I mean by that is, I follow the characters thoughts mostly and the slow transformation of action in relation to those thoughts. Action is derived from thought not the other way around (at least not in my writings) and while she hasn't been the greatest, she's simply done what she had to do, in the most realistic way possible. So don't be quick to judge and ... although I said I wouldn't say this ...

just trust the story and let it unfold!

I hope that answers some of your questions and perhaps gives you enough room to try and appreciate what Blair's character is doing right now.