We're Made Out of Blood and Rust, Looking For Someone to Trust (part 2/4)
Title: We're Made Out of Blood and Rust, Looking For Someone to Trust (part two)
Author: spentnights
Pairing/Character(s): Blair-centric, Blair/Carter, hints of Blair/Chuck.
Rating: pg-13.
Word Count: around 1700.
Spoiler: None.
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters or Gossip Girl. The title comes from Honey and the Moon by Joseph Arthur.
Summary: So she packs her bags and books a hotel and takes a flight to Paris. For once, it feels like she is actually living.
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(A/N: Part two. As you can tell by the summary, Carter Baizen will be making his first appearance in this part. Hope you enjoy, and please comment - it makes me happy)
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The summer before her senior year at Columbia she goes to Paris. Blair has always loved Paris, and every time she visits she never wants to leave.
This time she is not there to visit Daddy or to take in the sights or to go shopping. Once again, she is nursing a broken heart.
(Blair would find it ironic that she always comes to the so-called City of Love alone and broken-hearted and without a boy who loves her if it didn’t break her heart even more)
Chuck apologized for his mistake countless times and in countless ways, but Blair is too tired to care. It’s not the first time he has cheated, she knows; she’s found the remnants of his indiscretions before: the lipstick on his collars and the scent of perfume that isn’t hers on his clothes. She knew the truth and she pretended - like she always does - that it didn’t exist. She had brought all of this on herself because she is too afraid of losing the person who knows her best.
Blair doesn’t care that he’s sorry; she doesn’t care that he still loves her. She doesn’t want to care about Chuck Bass or anyone else anymore.
She has spent her whole life trying to please everyone: her mother, her father, Nate, Serena, Chuck. She can’t keep trying to be someone just to make them happy.
She wants to care about herself from now on.
So she packs her bags and books a hotel and takes a flight to Paris. She will channel Audrey for a summer before she returns to take Manhattan by storm once again.
She calls Serena and tells her she needs a few months to be by herself. Blair knows that if anyone understands what she needs, it is her golden-haired best friend.
She tells her parents she will be spending the summer in Paris, and she promises to visit them as much as possible.
She visits Nate before she goes and he tells her he will always be there for her, no matter what. Blair knows he is telling the truth because Nate has never been a good liar. Nate Archibald’s cluelessness and transparency has become the one stable component throughout her life, but Blair doesn’t mind.
She doesn’t call Chuck but she knows she will see him soon.
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She’s in Paris for less than twenty-four hours before he shows up at her hotel room. She knew he would come and she knows she should stop him, but she is still too weak to try. He may be the reason her heart is aching and she fled New York to move on from him, but that doesn’t make her love him any less.
He looks so broken when she answers the door that she almost gives up on her idea of being alone. The largest part of her heart wants to forgive him and love him and take him back and keep pretending.
But she uses her head - not her heart - like the queen she still is.
She doesn’t give in, but she invites him in and lets him sit on the bed next to her. Blair figures he at least deserves that.
“I just need to be alone for a while,” she tells him.
“I love you,” he swears and she knows it’s the truth. She couldn’t always tell when Chuck was lying, but she could always tell when he was being sincere.
“I know,” she promises, “but I can’t do this right now. I can’t be with you until I figure out who I am.”
He stares at her and he starts to tell her who she is, that she is everything to him and that he doesn’t want anyone but her and -
But she stops him with a kiss.
It is soft and slow and deliberate and it feels like the end because it is supposed to.
She moves her hand to his face as he closes his eyes and she wonders if he is trying to stop tears like the ones now flowing freely down her face.
When he opens his eyes she knows that the brokenness there is reflected in her own.
They stay like that for what feels like hours: their eyes locked, her hand on his face, his arm around her waist as they sit closely on the silk sheets of her rented bed.
It is him who moves away from her. He stands up and tells her he won’t try to contact her at all that summer.
“But that doesn’t mean I won’t have you watched,” he promises.
She laughs because this is the boy she fell in love with.
“Maybe in the future?” She whispers it like a promise, mirroring the one he made to her so long ago.
Their hands are clasped together, the tears are falling, and it is just like that moment all those years ago except now that future has gone to waste.
(And in the deep recesses of their hearts they both know that that future is gone)
He nods and she sees the small smirk playing on his lips as he lowers his head. She walks him to the door, where they stand for a few moments, staring at each other as if it is the last time.
And maybe it is. Because maybe the future they once had is really, truly gone. But she doesn't want to admit it.
Twelve: Neither Blair Waldorf nor Chuck Bass will ever admit that they will ever end.
“I really am sorry, Waldorf.”
“I know, Bass.”
She kisses him and he promises eternal love.
“I will always love you.”
(It is not three words, eight letters anymore because this is definitive. This could be the final end of Chuck and Blair, Blair and Chuck)
Maybe that’s the problem, she thinks, but it doesn’t stop her from professing the love she will always have for him.
“I love you, Chuck Bass. Always have, always will.”
It’s a different boy now, but it still means the same thing.
There’s a ghost of a smile on his lips when he walks away. He doesn’t look back, and she is glad. When she shuts the door, she promises herself that she will not cry.
Thirteen: Blair Waldorf was never very good at keeping her own promises.
Blair isn’t even twenty-one, but she feels as if she has lived lifetimes. She doesn’t know when she stopped being young and started feeling so old.
Blair decides that she is in Paris and it is about time she started acting her age. It is time she sees Paris the way the Serena’s of the world see it.
She goes to Parisian clubs at night, stays out as late as she wants and doesn’t worry about the circles under her eyes the next morning. She drinks and dances and flirts with French boys who she has no intention of calling. She wears high heels and short dresses and rides mopeds around the city without worrying about her hair.
She watches Godard films and wears her makeup like Bardot. She goes to quaint cafes and drinks coffee and smokes cigarettes behind black sunglasses. She reads Flaubert, Dumas, and Sand. She listens to Edith Piaf and pretends she is Audrey in Funnyface and Sabrina.
She is not Holly Golighty here. In Paris she is Sabrina Fairchild: a young girl who runs away to Paris to escape her life of heartbreak due to a rich playboy.
(Blair always pretended to loathe the David character in Sabrina because she was supposed to love the honest, hard-working Linus’s of the world. But Blair also pretended Sabrina - a girl torn between two brothers - was nothing like her. But in reality, she is just like Sabrina. Replace the brothers with best friends, the Larabees with Basses, and La Vie En Rose with Moon River and it’s pretty close. Maybe that’s why Blair fought it so hard; it hits too close to home)
She has been to Paris countless times before, but never once has she tried to experience it like this.
For once, it feels like she is actually living.
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Blair is in Paris for almost two months when she spots him. It’s so easy when you had his face and figure memorized by the time you were eleven.
She’s in some crowded bar she’s never been to before. It smells of Scotch and Marlboros and she is trying her hardest not to think about Chuck and instead focus on the man asking for her number, when there he appears - almost out of nowhere, like a shadow on a wall.
He doesn’t notice her at first, and she wonders if she wants him to.
Blair looks at him and realizes that the past few years have been good to him. She hasn’t seen him since he and Serena attempted their doomed relationship after high school. Blair thinks he is even more handsome now than he was then, if that's possible.
She saunters past him and realizes that apparently she does want him to notice her.
(Fourteen: Because the truth is, all Blair Waldorf ever really wanted was to be noticed)
“My, my, my, little Blair Waldorf is all grown up.” She can hear appraisal in his voice and she turns around, gives him a coy smile like this is the most natural thing to happen.
She isn’t that much older than she was during their very brief affair during her senior year at Constance, but she takes it as a compliment either way.
“Carter.”
His name is like a curse and a plea at the same time.
"Hello, beautiful."
Blair doesn't know when his voice started giving her chills.
He motions for her to sit and she does, while mentally trying to calculate how old he is now (twenty-five she assumes, but she’s never really known when his birthday is). She doesn't really know what this means but she orders a martini anyways, like always.
(Some things never change, no matter what city she is placed in)
He smirks and she tries not to flinch. She hasn’t spoken to Chuck since he chased her across the Atlantic and she bid farewell to him in her hotel room, but it doesn’t stop her heart from aching every now and then.
He asks her what she’s doing there, and she actually tells the truth.
“Escaping.”
“From what?” She wonders if his eyes have gotten bluer over the years.
“Everything.”
“I know the feeling,” he whispers softly, and she thinks that maybe he is right.
She swallows a sip of her drink and she lets him put his hand on her thigh because maybe, after all, she doesn’t want to be alone anymore. It’s familiar, but it feels different.
Fifteen: Because, really, what Blair was most afraid of was being completely, utterly alone.
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Thank-you for reading. Comments are ♥. Part three should be up tomorrow.