fic: elevator repairs at the eiffel tower (gog)
elevator repairs at the eiffel tower
gossip girl. she isn't going to rise above this; he already hopefully figured that into the equation. blair; chuck/blair. 1492 words. rated pg. future-fic.
notes: spoilers through all of season one. also, for ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
killzmeded!!!
if i had a place
and space for your little boy eyes
(king rides by; cat power)
-
The first time they meet again, there is a funeral.
Such is as it goes, Blair thinks as her coat is checked and she steps across the threshold. The funeral parlor is too quiet, oppressive in that sense. The flowers spill everywhere, the large wreaths, the giant potted plants and the floral arrangements from those expensive New York florists. The green leaves of the plant next to her shine waxy in the muted lamp light and Blair wipes the pad of her thumb down and across one.
Neither of them personally knew the dead girl, but appearances are to be made all the same.
“Loosest cunt in all of the Upper East Side,” Chuck says, near reverent but more along the lines of amused and Blair only scowls.
“What? You know that from, like, personal experience? Your own private excavation? Cave-dwelling? What do they call it, spelunking?” Her scowl deepens into an almost pout and she can’t decide who she’s more disgusted with: Chuck for just being Chuck or herself, reverting back to her younger, more sensitive self. The words just kept spilling, her mouth a totally and completely cracked dam. Jealousy leaves a thumbprint, she guesses, but it really doesn’t have a place here. “I thought you said you didn’t know her.”
He shrugs. “I didn’t.” He starts to smile, sinister, and she wonders on an internalized pause if she really did miss any of these people. “Just because you fuck someone it doesn’t mean you know them,” and now Blair is sure she didn’t miss a one of them, especially him – this penchant for condescension and statement of the obvious.
She arranges her face into an expression of bored tolerance.
“How was it that she died?”
Chuck shrugs again. “The usual, I’d imagine.”
Empty pill bottles, a bathroom, Blair can see it all, and she doesn’t know why she’s still talking to Chuck Bass of all people. A quiet moment passes there and there’s a dead girl in a coffin with lace cuffs on her sleeve. A woman sniffles instead of sobs and Blair takes her for the mother.
“Spelunking?” Chuck asks after a beat.
“I know things,” she huffs, and turns to leave.
He doesn’t call after her, and as far as parting shots go, it certainly isn’t her best.
But it’ll do; she signs her name with a flourish of Waldorf just beneath his name.
-
The funeral is approximately one year after their respective high school graduations, after they had swapped the Upper East Side for something more Ivy League, something seemingly more serious.
After the ceremonies and after her black cap soared up in the air, she made promises and swore things solemn and up and down.
There would be no repeats of Nate, no repeats of Chuck. No Tuscanys to be endured, no hopeful wishes and caviar dreams, or whatever. None of that.
“Two can play that game,” she had said with a sneer after that long and marginally disappointing summer. It was August and it was the first time Blair and Chuck had met in person, had communicated in ways other than text messages and caps lock and other than careless, drunken things like FCK U DIE INA FIRE or simply WHORE.
He had smirked, like he took the word game literally or something and inclined his head slightly to the left: a skinny blonde with wallpaper samples. “Score one for the Bass then.”
“Martha Stewart hardly counts, and besides, what the hell? This isn’t the plot of some banal romantic comedy where I’m going to match you tit-for-tat in casual liaisons simply to prove a point. Do I make myself clear?”
“Crystal. So long as I get to be tat, and you can be – ”
“Stay out of my sight.”
“I live here.”
“I came to see Serena.”
“A likely story,” and he was leering again, like before – BT, Before Tuscany – and there was a nice hot second in which Blair realized with the upmost clarity how much she hated him.
She had backed away, her hip colliding with an errant end table.
“Stay away from me.”
And he had.
-
The second time they meet again, there is a wedding.
It is Serena’s mother and she calls this one Husband Number Five.
She spots him during the reading of the vows, his head cocked across the aisle. She frowns.
They don’t speak until the reception, and it is there she decides Lily nee van der Woodsen is some kind of devil’s spawn:
Blair Waldrof’s name plate is just to the right of one Chuck Bass’s. She glowers quietly while she fingers her cloth napkin, shivers when she feels the brush of fingers against her bare shoulder.
“Milady,” and he has the gall to actually bow.
“Chuck,” she stamps out in kind.
His drawl of “fancy seeing you here” goes unanswered for a long moment by her while she arranges the silverware framing her plate. When she looks up, he is watching her – all slanted eyes and too much confidence. Something like ire rises inside her.
“Isn’t this sort of, like, a conflict of interest? You know, the former stepson attending his former stepmother’s wedding to a man who is certainly not his father? Sort of has the trappings of awkward written all over it.”
“And since when have you concerned yourself with my emotional stability?”
“…since never. And that’s beside the point. If anything, I was demonstrating my concern for everyone’s enjoyment of the occasion. If you turn this into some kind of weird British comedy of manners or errors or whatever, no one will have fun. Except maybe the narrator.”
He quirks an eyebrow.
“You’ve gotten weirder since I last saw you.”
“You’ve gotten fatter.”
“Ouch, B. Hit a man where it hurts, why don’t you?”
“With pleasure,” and there is a moment of true horror where she realizes that she is actually enjoying herself. With him. She is talking to Chuck Bass. They are engaged in conversation. And she is enjoying herself.
She downs her flute of champagne in one heady gulp, a gulp which does not go ignored by the man in question.
“Thirsty?”
She doesn’t answer; she is far too marooned in the strange, the uncharted and the unknown.
She scrapes her food around her plate in ever shrinking circles and he eats beside her in silence. Later they will dance (one song) and she will watch him smoke a cigarette in the cold night air (her own visible breath mixing with the exhaled smoke).
Not once will they mention the past and not once will either inquire about their lives outside the city.
“I’d like it if we could be strangers,” she says at the end of the night and he almost laughs.
-
The third time they meet again, it is an accident.
It is Italy but not Tuscany. It is Florence and she claims she is there for the art. He claims he is there for a woman, and she quietly prays he does not mean her.
She never asks. Instead they share bottles of red and she insults his striped sweater while he grills her on her travels, on art, searching for any discernible holes in her story.
“Why would I lie about why I’m here?” she finally asks and he only shrugs.
She gets what he is doing, and she sets her mouth tight against the glare of the setting sun. He is trying to sink her, though she can’t figure why. What she doesn’t tell him, what she will never hint at, is that he already did that once.
Drunk and reeking of smoke, he asks, condescension and confidence blending into a rough timbre: “Do you ever think about me? I bet you think about me.” There is still all that messy hate that keeps her heart warm and it clutches at this, his real intent masquerading beneath this bravado and she wonders if worn by any other men would she feel bad? She thinks not, she thinks Nate. She thinks how disgustingly prickly this question is and she hates him for asking it. To her, he hums presumptuously like unfinished business.
“I think about what my life would have been like if I never met you. A fantasy of sorts, if you will.”
He kisses her, and it is the most unromantic thing she could have said to him.
He always liked that though.
She kisses back.
-
The next morning she slips away.
It is hardly unexpected.
Blair leaves with the arc of an airplane across the empty sky and Chuck doesn’t try to watch.
He leaves later that afternoon.
-
fin
cold
