The first thing she feels is the icicle – like pain in her abdomen and she knows. She knows the horror that is awaiting her.
It is her fate, she thinks, to be constantly reaching and straining for her happiness only to have it swiped away from her with the flick of a wrist, the turn of a steering wheel.
She hears a wailing sound, like the cry of a child, pries open her eyes and sees neon red, blue, white above her and shuts her eyes again.
She comes to in the hospital, blinding light above her again and looks to her left. She can only breathe out relief when she catches his eyes, those eyes that bore into her soul with the gaze that she has sunk into a thousand times before. They are soft and imploring when they look at her from just a few feet away.
His hand, which just an hour before had lifted hers to his lips and kissed it with the promise of a million more kisses, reaches out for her weakly and for just a moment her heart is temporarily healed, she can taste the promise of happiness once again – but then it falls back to his side and she is lost all over again.
She blocks out what she knows in her bones is true so that when the nurse tells her that her baby is dead she refuses to believe it. She can only cry like she did when she was a child. She is suddenly six years old again and Nate has looked at Serena across the playground as the sun shines on her blonde perfection.
When she first discovered she was pregnant she felt pulsing anxiety, a rush of fear and excitement but one emotion that overruled it all was hope. She hoped for the fairytale to come true, willed it to be Louis' baby so that her heart's indiscretion would not derail her entire plan. She repeated it like a mantra in her head every night as her fiance slept – she would not let this ruin her fairytale. This was her movie and she would be damned if the seed of a Bass changed the direction of the script.
Of course, the voice she quelled was the one she has tried to hush for the past four years of her life. The one that loves the boy who has hurt her more than anyone else has or ever could, yet has loved her with a fire that she has never known. The one that shoved him into an abandoned room at a stranger's Bar Mitzvah, pulled off his jacket, his shirt and unbuckled his trousers to have at him like her body was attuned to – and in kind, he gathered up the reignited flames of their love and made her come alive again.
That voice yearned for the baby to be his like she had wished for in private dreams gone by. The idea that bloomed over a glance at his stepmother's wedding, lying on his chest in bed, in a train station in Paris.
The voice that only became louder and more unignorable once it became clear that he was not the father - a cruel irony that spattered across the portrait of her fairytale as the edges blurred and the image of her prince began to smear on the canvas. When she saw him becoming the man that she always knew he could be, when she was too far up in a castle that was quickly becoming a cage.
The voice that escalated to a scream of protest as her eyes met his and he told her that all he wished for was her happiness, even if it was without him.
The voice that she employed in a breathless phone call where she implored him to tell her what the next step was as she prepared to leave her fairytale and take a leap into the possibility of happiness.
Her unbidden joy and fervour as he shirked off the confines of his armour and promised her the safety of his love and they allowed themselves to be unashamedly selfish once again and seek out a future together. He clasped her hands, this man she loved, and his eyes shone as she could only tell him the God's honest truth: that the only thing she would ever be certain of in her entire life was that she loved every single part of him and wanted it all forever, until her last breath, her last heartbeat.
Although her fairytale had become even more complicated, she knew without a doubt that as long as the darkness of his gaze held hers, she would be okay.
Now, she places her hand to her stomach and feels hollow inside and out, bereft of a thousand dreams. Butterflies that once beat their wings against her abdomen have gone silent and still.
She puts her hands to either side of herself and pushes Blair Waldorf back up again, sits upright in the creaky bed and asks, not for the first time in her life, where Chuck Bass is.
Serena's clammy hand takes hers and the icicle pain returns as she glances between her best friend and the nurse, who nods.
'B, he lost a lot of blood' says Serena. 'And he never woke up. So it's not looking good.'
What else can she do but excuse herself and go to the only room in the hospital that does not remind her of where she is and where her reckless abandonment of duty and responsibility has led her? She doesn't quite recall the process and has to remind herself of the religious protocol.
The last time she was near an altar like this was when she walked into a confessional booth after surrendering her virtue to a self absorbed ass.
But four years later and she can only laugh bitterly as that same self absorbed ass has become the only thing anchoring her to this world and the mere suggestion that she go on living without his heart beating somewhere in her city is unfathomable.
So she kneels. And she asks for divine intervention. She would beg, barter and steal to have him open his eyes again, even if it is not to look into hers. She would give up her own life if needed.
She was selfish in her pursuit of happiness – she sees that now. So she finds herself promising that she will never see that self-absorbed ass again so long as his life is spared.
Suddenly, the doors open and the nurse has returned, and she can only blink as she informs her that Chuck Bass is asking for Blair Waldorf.
Barely comprehending it as her movements still and she stares into the bright light that the doors provide. Her heart clenches and calls out to him.
The nurse guides her to the direction of his room but it is nearly not necessary – they have been operating on a magnetic field for some time now, and she feels him before she sees him, head wrapped in gauze and sleepy.
His eyes are still closed.
She knows what she must do.
"Just because we can't be together doesn't mean I won't love you."
The flight to Monaco feels surreal. She is leaving her city behind her, leaving him in the hospital bed as she knows she must do. Her fiance is beside her and he squeezes her hand lovingly.
Loving, because that is what he is – a prince, image slightly smudged, but still well meaning. He has been kind and gentle with her since he collected her from hospital. Has allowed her to cry on his shoulder, unaware that she is not just crying for their baby, but for the plans that she made without him.
But she swallows the words that keep threatening to spill out of her mouth like the bile that plagued her first months of pregnancy.
She does not have the heart to tell him that he may be a prince and may love her, but that there are deep, dark depths to her that he can never reach. There is only one who ever could – who found the darkness beautiful and kissed it all over like it was found treasure.
Every day as soon-to-be Princess Grimaldi is a mask, but she is a pro – she channels a Blair Waldorf from days gone by and acts the part of doe-eyed royalty for so long that even when she takes off her makeup at night, she does not recognise who stares back at her. She only knows that she sees him behind her in her reflection – gaze as black as night, lips curled in a smirk – and she clenches her eyes shut again.
Every night, she fears sleep as she slips into dreams of him, of her, of the Us that he fought for with passion and love and light in the darkness of a candlelit room. Sometimes they are together in a Manhattan townhouse, a broken fairytale stitched together to create something even more beautiful than not even she could have dreamed up. Sometimes she is watching from the door of a small bedroom painted yellow as she watches him tuck their child into bed with a kiss on their forehead. Sometimes he is guiding her hips over his in their private world of Egyptian cotton and she can once again feel her fingers winding through his hair, smell scotch, tobacco and oud as he moves inside her.
She wakes up in a sweat each time and feels the licks of guilt and shame as her French prince puts his arms around her in a comforting gesture, believing her sweet dreams to be nightmares.
Monaco's lights glimmer from the palace window and she can only wonder what he may be doing at that moment. Hopefully Lily is taking care of him, and he is letting Nate walk Monkey. Hopefully he is taking the medicine and staying away from the scotch.
She switched off her phone the first time it buzzed with a notification the first night after she fled New York – One new Message, Chuck Bass – and has had it switched off ever since because Louis, Beatrice and Sophie have next to no clue that she was planning on disgracing them all with the man they consider a disgrace to society and proper order.
That night, Louis must make an appearance at a charity event and he sweetly kisses her as she watches him as he dons his royal sash, waves him goodbye and then closes the door after him. Now allowed a few spare hours alone in her quarters, she unlocks the drawer of her bedside table and underneath her diary, she finds the Blackberry and turns it on. Suddenly, dozens of messages and voicemail notifications flood her screen. 88 messages - Chuck Bass. 52 voicemails - Chuck Bass.
She is reminded of a more innocent time not long ago when she was steeped in a bubble bath and pressed 'IGNORE' on thirty-one of his insistent, horny calls to her in a statement of resolve until he appeared before her lounged on her bed and dressed in her purple velvet robe, holding a macaroon to his lips before leaping up like a dog to make his insistent play for her. The same velvet robe she wrapped around herself as she left him in the hospital just two weeks ago.
She presses play on his thirty-first voicemail.
"Waldorf." She closes her eyes at his familiar timbre as he drawls her name the way he has done a thousand times before. "If you would care to drop me a line...it would be most appreciated. My address is the same, if you were wondering...in case you were worried.
"You needn't worry, however. Nathaniel is the perfect nurse. He plays that role almost as well as you do. Although he doesn't look nearly the same in the uniform."
She snorts at this; her heart hurts at the glimmering memory of games past.
"I think of you, you know..." he trails off, and suddenly she is scared how his tone his shifting to one more vulnerable, less self-assured. "Where did you go, Waldorf? Why did you..." She clenches her eyes shut again, knows what he is wondering before he wonders it at all. "I don't even know if you'll listen to this one. I've left you so many of these." He stops, and she thinks the message has stopped before he begins again and undoes her entire heart.
"I dreamed of us last night. I felt you against me. I know you were there."
She allows herself a sob against the receiver as she cannot help but keep listening.
"Sometimes I feel like you're really there. Do you feel that too?" She hears him snort a mirthless laugh. "I'm sorry. I'm not making any sense."
Tears roll freely now, silently as her chest starts to heave.
"Sometimes I see our child. Sometimes I can hear them cry."
Her chest feels as though it might burst now; it is everything she has been feeling and the fact that he has been feeling it too makes her body scream in another wave of pain.
"Blair" his voice is suddenly steady and no longer meandering. "I love you. Please, I'm so sorry. I love you. I love you. I-"
She presses the red button on the phone to hang up. She turns off the phone and drops it on the bathroom floor beside her.
Being brought back into reality was no good, and here she is back where she was at the hospital – a shaking heap of grief. It is pathetic, she decides.
She shakes off her emotions and rises from the floor of the bathroom – resolute in forgetting the words that she has just heard, words that jabbed at her heart like pins and needles and long, jagged knives.
She is Blair Waldorf, and if she must coat herself in ice to survive this, she will. She made a promise to save the love of her life from the jaws of death and no matter what he says to derail her, she will not waver and will hold steady. Then she will never run the risk of falling apart again.
Louis returns from the charity event and as she is fresh clean from the shower, she practically wafts over to greet him with a kiss, asks how the event went and his puzzled face suddenly smoothes out as he is glad to see her happy once again. She silently lets out a breath of relief as he believes her performance.
She listens with a plastered-on smile as he regales her with tales of the characters present at the gala and she nods her head at each anecdote, laughs and hums in all the right places, while quelling the voice in her head that is still sobbing uncontrollably for the Us that she abandoned at the back of a town car.
A/N: I hope everyone liked this addition. It was longer obviously, because I think Blair's POV needed a bit more context. Please do leave a review!
