Scatter or Another Story For Another Time
Scatter or Another Story For Another Time:
this one-shot is a companion piece to Our Love To Admire, but it's not essential that you read it. the only thing you need to know is that the character Mason discussed in the second half was Blair's boyfriend for ten months while she and Chuck were broken up in college. please enjoy!
Eight-year-old Blair Waldorf thinks red roses are the most perfect flower. Red roses play a crucial role in every great romance in history, even Beauty and the Beast (her current and secret obsession). On Valentine’s Day that year when Natie gives her eight pink roses she decides it is close enough to a fairytale because pink is really just red and white mixed together. Over time, she will realize that by diluting the red of a rose the entire essence changes.
For her ninth birthday, Chuck brings her a bouquet of hand picked daises and she feels…insulted. There’s a feeling in the pit of her stomach that he should have brought her the right rose, just like the Beast and Belle, and she’s even wearing a yellow dress. If Chuck had brought her the right flower, she would let him pull her close and lead her across the ballroom at the Plaza for at least one dance.
After she chastises him for his unsophisticated and plebeian gift, he mumbles something about butterflies and the French and prophecies, before snatching the flowers from her and stalking away. Blair adores everything French, just like her father, and follows him into the Plaza lobby, abandoning her guests. “May I have my flowers please? It would be simply horrid if you came to my birthday with no gift at all.”
Eight-year-old Chuck Bass, in his forty-year-old Chuck Bass suit, turns around and glares at her in her silly yellow dress that makes her look like a living, breathing fairytale. “I wouldn’t want to ruin your fairytale birthday with my plebeian gift.” He’s furious that she looks completely unfazed with the golden tiara resting on her chocolate curls.
She runs to where he stands by the oversized door attendant, her gold Dior Mary Jane’s clicking against the marble floor, echoing like her mother’s high heels. “If the French like daisies they must be terribly refined…”
Chuck shifts nervously, the corners of the small package in his trousers leaving tiny scrapes on his thigh. “The French call them Marguerite, you’re supposed to pluck off the petals, and as you pluck each petal, ask a question about your lover,” he blushes furiously when he says the word sounding so foreign in his very-sophisticated-for-an-eight-year-old mouth.
Blair reaches out for one of the stems, intent on asking this psychic flower about the depth of Natie’s love for her, but Chuck pulls them out of her reach.
“There’s something important I have to tell you first,” his voice alarmed as he shoves the flowers behind his small back and away from her reach. “The daisy is a girl.” He announces, just as Flavie his au pair told him when they picked the flowers together at his father’s greenhouse in White Plains.
She scoffs at him and tries to reach behind his back for the bouquet. “Of course they are, flowers aren’t boys…they’re much too delicate,” Just like she is, according to her father delicate and pure, like a pea-blossom.
“No, no, a daisy is girl not a woman,” he states. Of course, all flowers are womanly and fragile, not at all like him or his father, the perfect portraits of masculinity without feminine influence. “Daisies are insulted if you question their innocence, and they won’t answer you if they’re offended.”
Blair is exasperated with all this inanity, she only wants to know how deeply dear Nathaniel pines for her, so she cannot stop herself when she snaps at Chuck. “Daisies don’t have feelings but I do, and I need to know how Nathaniel feels about me, so give me the flowers,” Her insistent arm extends behind Chuck’s back attempting to wrestle the stems from his grip.
He stares at her intently while she rips the soft white petals away from one flower leaving nothing but a golden yellow disk. Chuck holds his breath when he realizes that she’s moved onto another flower, obviously not having gotten the answer she wanted.
The frustration passes on her features when she is forced to move to a third flower since the first two were obviously broken. Chuck thinks her plush bottom lip will start bleeding from the amount of pressure she’s putting on it with her teeth. Fat tears threaten to roll down her face when she pulls the last petal from the fourth flower, and she resignedly hands the bouquet back to Chuck. “I think I insulted the daisies, they aren’t working.”
Chuck wipes the tears from her cheeks with the ends of his scarf and places his coat around her shoulders before pulling her through the revolving door. He leads her down the red-carpeted steps and looks both ways before crossing the driveway to the benches and trees outside the extravagant hotel. When the arrive at an unoccupied stone bench, Chuck smiles when he sees her slip her small arms into the sleeves of his Armani cashmere blend coat before sitting down. “Would you mind if I tried?” he questions innocently.
Blair pulls her tiny body into a ball under Chuck’s heavy grey coat to fend off the cold. “Go ahead; I already know they hate me.”
Chuck repeats the chant under his breath, in terribly accented French, just like Flavie taught him, “Elle m’aime un peu...Elle m’aime beaucoup...Elle m’aime à la folie...Elle m’aime pas du tout…Elle m’aime un peu…Elle m’aime beaucoup,” Chuck drops the empty stem back on the pile of daises and fingers the box in his pocket. “It seems they hate me too.” He drops onto the opposite side of the bench, the battered flowers resting between them.
She furrows her brow when she looks at him, scooting her body closer to his. “I didn’t know you had a crush…who is she?”
Chuck ignores her question and pulls a distinct blue box from his trouser pocket. He hands it to her awkwardly even though her wide smile is unmistakably sincere. “Flavie helped me pick it out…she told me every girl loves flowers and jewelry.”
She unties the white satin ribbon from the box and knots it in a bow around her neck. “Flavie is very smart,” she announces before popping the box open. Blair doesn’t think it’s possible for her smile to get any wider without breaking the bones in her face but it does. She fingers the 18k gold link clasp bracelet, admiring the tiny beauty of the replicated Eiffel Tower she’s only seen in pictures, hanging from it. “Chuck…it’s beautiful, thank you.”
Chuck fidgets nervously under her tender gaze. “Maybe one day we’ll go there,” he implores quietly, but when his eyes reach up and meet hers, the smile is gone. “All of us,” he adds quickly and in his full voice, “you and me, Nathaniel and Serena, we would have a great time when we’re older…without any parents or nannies.”
Blair holds the $2,000 bracelet in her hand as she closes the gap between their bodies, she is close enough to radiate body heat, instinctively knowing Chuck must be freezing in just his suit and scarf. “What’s your crush’s name Chuck?”
“Marguerite,” he murmurs, knowing that she will hear him because of her proximity. He silently prays that she can’t hear the adrenaline pounding through his tiny body making his throat swell and heart hammer.
A smile is tugging at the corner of her lips as she leans in and places an innocent kiss on those of an eight-year-old Chuck. She knows that her first kiss was meant to be with Natie when he gave her a dozen long-stemmed red roses and maybe some expensive chocolates, but something about her kiss with Chuck whispers the promise of a thousand more.
*xoxo*
Sometime many years later or maybe a million lifetimes later, twenty-three year old Chuck Bass is laying against the pillows of his bed clad only in cotton boxers during a heat wave in New York. Pressed into his chest and caught between his thighs, is his twenty-four year old wife, wearing his cotton dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, a baby name book propped on her swollen belly.
“Lyndon?”
“Hey, that one isn’t terrible,” she laughs at the name she highlighted earlier while he was at work. They agreed to spend the night going through all the highlighted L names but Chuck was home early because of the rolling blackouts, so they are finished before they even need artificial light.
“Lyndon Bass…that sounds ridiculous,”
Blair shifts her body enough that she is looking straight in his eyes, “and somehow you think Finn Bass is normal?”
He pulls a lock of her hair and drags her mouth to his hungry lips. “It has flair,” he whispers, teasing her with his hot, hot breath across her jaw line.
“Fine, both are out,” she announces matter-of-factly, flipping the page to where the M names begin. “Oh this is so exciting; it’s the first letter we’re going through together.” Chuck decides that her smile is infectious, even though he can’t see it, as he buries his nose in the crook of her neck. “No, no, no…and no…what do you think of Mackenzie?”
“What were the first four no’s?”
“Oh,” she ignores him, hoping he won’t notice, “what about Magnus?”
“C’mon, what were they?” he laughs as he pulls the book from her hands. When his eyes scan the first few lines, his smile drops, and an elephant they thought long gone suddenly appears in their bedroom. “What’s wrong with Mack?”
“Chuck…” Blair sits forward, leaving a cold emptiness against his naked chest. “I’m sorry I just didn’t want to upset you by bringing him up.”
Splaying his palm against her swollen abdomen, under which two of his children are growing, he pushes himself so that he is wrapped around her body once again. “B, nothing in the past can upset me anymore…plus, whatever happened with Mason was my fault too.”
She wipes the salty tears from her face with one hand and interlocks the fingers on her left hand with Chuck’s against her belly. “I know, I just can’t help thinking about all the time we wasted.” Blair is cursing the hormones the babies are setting off in her system. “Macey is a dreadful nickname for a boyfriend, it sounds so-,”
“Feminine? Sounds very appropriate for Mason, if you ask me.”
“I was going to say juvenile,” she grounds out through a hearty laugh, dear god her emotions are out of control.
Chuck, who is still holding the thick baby name book in one hand, flips towards the end of the M names but stops when one catches his eye, “Marguerite.”
She clicks her tongue at him and tries to take the book back, “Chuck, we already have two girl’s names; Grace Lillian and Audrey Evelyn. We can’t change them again. And we need boy names, we’re already at M and we don’t have any boy names.”
“Audrey Marguerite Bass sounds beautiful, Blair,” he rubs the tight skin where two prefect little people that are a combination of him and Blair are growing and shifting and driving her crazy with happiness.
Blair leans back into his chest, knowing he is done for the night, and they fall into the pile of pillows again, her head resting on his frustratingly flat stomach. “Do you remember my birthday when you told me you had a crush on Marguerite,” she tilts her head backward and sees him nodding, “Did you know that was my first kiss?”
Chuck shakes his head because he knows that it wasn’t, “No, Valentine’s Day that year, Nathaniel was your first kiss Blair.”
She sits up and analyzes him before crawling up to straddle his hips. “Is that what he told you?”
The last thing Chuck wants to think about is Nathaniel when his pregnant and constantly horny wife is straddling him wearing nothing more than his shirt and her lace panties. “It wasn’t that hard to figure out, you were a bit of a slut when it came to cute guys giving you flowers.”
She pinches his nipple, hard, making his back arch in pain and he curses the goddess until she laps at his bruised skin with her tongue. “I’m not a slut…and I didn’t kiss Nate on Valentine’s Day because he was supposed to bring me red roses but he brought pink ones. So yes, the night of my birthday was my first kiss.”
“Mon marguerite, s'il vous plaît arrêtes de parler et fais moi l'amour.” Chuck’s elocution has certainly improved, and he sounds almost native. So Blair is more than happy to oblige her husband when he speaks French, because she still adores everything French, even daisies.
(EDIT: this translates to: "stop talking and have sex with me", thanks to my wonderful French translator lilas6210 on FF.net)
this one-shot is a companion piece to Our Love To Admire, but it's not essential that you read it. the only thing you need to know is that the character Mason discussed in the second half was Blair's boyfriend for ten months while she and Chuck were broken up in college. please enjoy!
Eight-year-old Blair Waldorf thinks red roses are the most perfect flower. Red roses play a crucial role in every great romance in history, even Beauty and the Beast (her current and secret obsession). On Valentine’s Day that year when Natie gives her eight pink roses she decides it is close enough to a fairytale because pink is really just red and white mixed together. Over time, she will realize that by diluting the red of a rose the entire essence changes.
For her ninth birthday, Chuck brings her a bouquet of hand picked daises and she feels…insulted. There’s a feeling in the pit of her stomach that he should have brought her the right rose, just like the Beast and Belle, and she’s even wearing a yellow dress. If Chuck had brought her the right flower, she would let him pull her close and lead her across the ballroom at the Plaza for at least one dance.
After she chastises him for his unsophisticated and plebeian gift, he mumbles something about butterflies and the French and prophecies, before snatching the flowers from her and stalking away. Blair adores everything French, just like her father, and follows him into the Plaza lobby, abandoning her guests. “May I have my flowers please? It would be simply horrid if you came to my birthday with no gift at all.”
Eight-year-old Chuck Bass, in his forty-year-old Chuck Bass suit, turns around and glares at her in her silly yellow dress that makes her look like a living, breathing fairytale. “I wouldn’t want to ruin your fairytale birthday with my plebeian gift.” He’s furious that she looks completely unfazed with the golden tiara resting on her chocolate curls.
She runs to where he stands by the oversized door attendant, her gold Dior Mary Jane’s clicking against the marble floor, echoing like her mother’s high heels. “If the French like daisies they must be terribly refined…”
Chuck shifts nervously, the corners of the small package in his trousers leaving tiny scrapes on his thigh. “The French call them Marguerite, you’re supposed to pluck off the petals, and as you pluck each petal, ask a question about your lover,” he blushes furiously when he says the word sounding so foreign in his very-sophisticated-for-an-eight-year-old mouth.
Blair reaches out for one of the stems, intent on asking this psychic flower about the depth of Natie’s love for her, but Chuck pulls them out of her reach.
“There’s something important I have to tell you first,” his voice alarmed as he shoves the flowers behind his small back and away from her reach. “The daisy is a girl.” He announces, just as Flavie his au pair told him when they picked the flowers together at his father’s greenhouse in White Plains.
She scoffs at him and tries to reach behind his back for the bouquet. “Of course they are, flowers aren’t boys…they’re much too delicate,” Just like she is, according to her father delicate and pure, like a pea-blossom.
“No, no, a daisy is girl not a woman,” he states. Of course, all flowers are womanly and fragile, not at all like him or his father, the perfect portraits of masculinity without feminine influence. “Daisies are insulted if you question their innocence, and they won’t answer you if they’re offended.”
Blair is exasperated with all this inanity, she only wants to know how deeply dear Nathaniel pines for her, so she cannot stop herself when she snaps at Chuck. “Daisies don’t have feelings but I do, and I need to know how Nathaniel feels about me, so give me the flowers,” Her insistent arm extends behind Chuck’s back attempting to wrestle the stems from his grip.
He stares at her intently while she rips the soft white petals away from one flower leaving nothing but a golden yellow disk. Chuck holds his breath when he realizes that she’s moved onto another flower, obviously not having gotten the answer she wanted.
The frustration passes on her features when she is forced to move to a third flower since the first two were obviously broken. Chuck thinks her plush bottom lip will start bleeding from the amount of pressure she’s putting on it with her teeth. Fat tears threaten to roll down her face when she pulls the last petal from the fourth flower, and she resignedly hands the bouquet back to Chuck. “I think I insulted the daisies, they aren’t working.”
Chuck wipes the tears from her cheeks with the ends of his scarf and places his coat around her shoulders before pulling her through the revolving door. He leads her down the red-carpeted steps and looks both ways before crossing the driveway to the benches and trees outside the extravagant hotel. When the arrive at an unoccupied stone bench, Chuck smiles when he sees her slip her small arms into the sleeves of his Armani cashmere blend coat before sitting down. “Would you mind if I tried?” he questions innocently.
Blair pulls her tiny body into a ball under Chuck’s heavy grey coat to fend off the cold. “Go ahead; I already know they hate me.”
Chuck repeats the chant under his breath, in terribly accented French, just like Flavie taught him, “Elle m’aime un peu...Elle m’aime beaucoup...Elle m’aime à la folie...Elle m’aime pas du tout…Elle m’aime un peu…Elle m’aime beaucoup,” Chuck drops the empty stem back on the pile of daises and fingers the box in his pocket. “It seems they hate me too.” He drops onto the opposite side of the bench, the battered flowers resting between them.
She furrows her brow when she looks at him, scooting her body closer to his. “I didn’t know you had a crush…who is she?”
Chuck ignores her question and pulls a distinct blue box from his trouser pocket. He hands it to her awkwardly even though her wide smile is unmistakably sincere. “Flavie helped me pick it out…she told me every girl loves flowers and jewelry.”
She unties the white satin ribbon from the box and knots it in a bow around her neck. “Flavie is very smart,” she announces before popping the box open. Blair doesn’t think it’s possible for her smile to get any wider without breaking the bones in her face but it does. She fingers the 18k gold link clasp bracelet, admiring the tiny beauty of the replicated Eiffel Tower she’s only seen in pictures, hanging from it. “Chuck…it’s beautiful, thank you.”
Chuck fidgets nervously under her tender gaze. “Maybe one day we’ll go there,” he implores quietly, but when his eyes reach up and meet hers, the smile is gone. “All of us,” he adds quickly and in his full voice, “you and me, Nathaniel and Serena, we would have a great time when we’re older…without any parents or nannies.”
Blair holds the $2,000 bracelet in her hand as she closes the gap between their bodies, she is close enough to radiate body heat, instinctively knowing Chuck must be freezing in just his suit and scarf. “What’s your crush’s name Chuck?”
“Marguerite,” he murmurs, knowing that she will hear him because of her proximity. He silently prays that she can’t hear the adrenaline pounding through his tiny body making his throat swell and heart hammer.
A smile is tugging at the corner of her lips as she leans in and places an innocent kiss on those of an eight-year-old Chuck. She knows that her first kiss was meant to be with Natie when he gave her a dozen long-stemmed red roses and maybe some expensive chocolates, but something about her kiss with Chuck whispers the promise of a thousand more.
*xoxo*
Sometime many years later or maybe a million lifetimes later, twenty-three year old Chuck Bass is laying against the pillows of his bed clad only in cotton boxers during a heat wave in New York. Pressed into his chest and caught between his thighs, is his twenty-four year old wife, wearing his cotton dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, a baby name book propped on her swollen belly.
“Lyndon?”
“Hey, that one isn’t terrible,” she laughs at the name she highlighted earlier while he was at work. They agreed to spend the night going through all the highlighted L names but Chuck was home early because of the rolling blackouts, so they are finished before they even need artificial light.
“Lyndon Bass…that sounds ridiculous,”
Blair shifts her body enough that she is looking straight in his eyes, “and somehow you think Finn Bass is normal?”
He pulls a lock of her hair and drags her mouth to his hungry lips. “It has flair,” he whispers, teasing her with his hot, hot breath across her jaw line.
“Fine, both are out,” she announces matter-of-factly, flipping the page to where the M names begin. “Oh this is so exciting; it’s the first letter we’re going through together.” Chuck decides that her smile is infectious, even though he can’t see it, as he buries his nose in the crook of her neck. “No, no, no…and no…what do you think of Mackenzie?”
“What were the first four no’s?”
“Oh,” she ignores him, hoping he won’t notice, “what about Magnus?”
“C’mon, what were they?” he laughs as he pulls the book from her hands. When his eyes scan the first few lines, his smile drops, and an elephant they thought long gone suddenly appears in their bedroom. “What’s wrong with Mack?”
“Chuck…” Blair sits forward, leaving a cold emptiness against his naked chest. “I’m sorry I just didn’t want to upset you by bringing him up.”
Splaying his palm against her swollen abdomen, under which two of his children are growing, he pushes himself so that he is wrapped around her body once again. “B, nothing in the past can upset me anymore…plus, whatever happened with Mason was my fault too.”
She wipes the salty tears from her face with one hand and interlocks the fingers on her left hand with Chuck’s against her belly. “I know, I just can’t help thinking about all the time we wasted.” Blair is cursing the hormones the babies are setting off in her system. “Macey is a dreadful nickname for a boyfriend, it sounds so-,”
“Feminine? Sounds very appropriate for Mason, if you ask me.”
“I was going to say juvenile,” she grounds out through a hearty laugh, dear god her emotions are out of control.
Chuck, who is still holding the thick baby name book in one hand, flips towards the end of the M names but stops when one catches his eye, “Marguerite.”
She clicks her tongue at him and tries to take the book back, “Chuck, we already have two girl’s names; Grace Lillian and Audrey Evelyn. We can’t change them again. And we need boy names, we’re already at M and we don’t have any boy names.”
“Audrey Marguerite Bass sounds beautiful, Blair,” he rubs the tight skin where two prefect little people that are a combination of him and Blair are growing and shifting and driving her crazy with happiness.
Blair leans back into his chest, knowing he is done for the night, and they fall into the pile of pillows again, her head resting on his frustratingly flat stomach. “Do you remember my birthday when you told me you had a crush on Marguerite,” she tilts her head backward and sees him nodding, “Did you know that was my first kiss?”
Chuck shakes his head because he knows that it wasn’t, “No, Valentine’s Day that year, Nathaniel was your first kiss Blair.”
She sits up and analyzes him before crawling up to straddle his hips. “Is that what he told you?”
The last thing Chuck wants to think about is Nathaniel when his pregnant and constantly horny wife is straddling him wearing nothing more than his shirt and her lace panties. “It wasn’t that hard to figure out, you were a bit of a slut when it came to cute guys giving you flowers.”
She pinches his nipple, hard, making his back arch in pain and he curses the goddess until she laps at his bruised skin with her tongue. “I’m not a slut…and I didn’t kiss Nate on Valentine’s Day because he was supposed to bring me red roses but he brought pink ones. So yes, the night of my birthday was my first kiss.”
“Mon marguerite, s'il vous plaît arrêtes de parler et fais moi l'amour.” Chuck’s elocution has certainly improved, and he sounds almost native. So Blair is more than happy to oblige her husband when he speaks French, because she still adores everything French, even daisies.
(EDIT: this translates to: "stop talking and have sex with me", thanks to my wonderful French translator lilas6210 on FF.net)