Between the Shadow and the Soul - 33

[courtneybelle]

“Do you know where your love is? Do you think that you lost it?
You felt it so strong, but nothing’s turned out how you wanted.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I’m Chuck Bass

He sat at the desk in his hotel room, which he had turned to face away from the sprawling view of glittering Tokyo beneath him.

If he stared diligently enough at spreadsheets, and diagrams next to graphs and pie charts, and re-read enough half-baked business proposals slapped together by caffeine-deprived and inexperienced interns on the instructions of superiors who prized their golf swing above any heavy lifting, then he could pretend the noise from the streets below was New York and that the loud shouts were yelled in English and that he was in his own office with a glass of his own Scotch and his own music numbing his brain into a task-oriented stupor.

And the neon lights that painted their reflections on his window and cast his work in an ever-changing rainbow glow were the distant ghosts of Times Square at midnight.

Chuck rested his forehead against his fist and tried his time-honored method of beating the oncoming headache away through sheer brute force.

When that failed and he realized he was out of pain relievers, he slammed his palm against the mahogany wood and sighed. I love my job, he told himself forcefully, blinking his exhausted eyes a few times to clear his vision. Then, he returned to the glowing LCD of his laptop and realized he had no idea what he had been reading for the past forty five minutes. I love my job. I just hate the work sometimes.

When he drummed his fingers on the stack of untouched papers still waiting to be perused, he shot them a venomous glare. All the time.

He had been in Japan for several months, separated from the everyday office politics that plagued him in Manhattan. He was free from the incompetent underlings, the inefficient secretaries, the money-grubbing assistants that had a tendency to cook the books if he did not keep a close eye on them. Bass Industries was everything his father had built over a lifetime of ingenuity and elbow grease, and under his care the corporate infrastructure had undergone a fair amount of deterioration. He was currently in the process of systematically laying off and promptly firing all those he considered to be a hindrance to the company’s future, all the while taking a loathed pacifistic approach to avoid stepping all over the board.

What he really wanted was the omnipotent ability to systematically lay off and promptly fire the entire board, but he had Lily’s assurance that they would respond less than enthusiastically to that suggestion. So, he invented excuses to stay abroad, scheduled meetings with conglomerates he had no real interest in, eyed a few skyscraping hotels and feigned a keen curiosity, when in all reality he was really using the trip as an excuse to take a much needed vacation.

The clock flashed the time from his stand-in bedside table.

3:01 AM.

In New York City, the clock had only just struck 2 PM the previous day.

In Paris, it was 8 in the evening.

Chuck scrubbed his hands over his face and let them run through his still mostly styled hair. It was still thick and dark brown, but now that he was getting nearer and nearer to 40, he could feel the gray hairs pushing up through his scalp and staking their claim all over the place; part of him wanted to think it would look distinguished, and the other part wanted to sue for mental damages.

When he looked back up and realized it was 3:07 in the morning, he decided to shut off his computer and roll onto the luxurious king size bed for another night of staring at the ceiling and letting digital numbers be the flickering light that lulled him to sleep. He had become accustomed to the lack of warmth at his side, but the memory of the last person to take that place curled up against him was as fresh as it had been on the day she left him.

Just as he was about to drift into a very nice dream about the backseat of a sleek black limo, his cell phone buzzed in his pocket.

This was unusual, because all business calls were automatically deferred to his business phone, which was lying dormant atop his now quiet laptop and had not rung for several days. The only people who contacted his personal cell were his family and close friends, and all of them knew exactly where he was and that they could be interrupting either a good, hard sleep or a hard, long slog and none of them would ever call unless it was an emergency.

Frowning, Chuck pulled the phone from his front pocket and lifted it to eye level to inspect the number. It was unfamiliar to his quick memory, and it was not accompanied by a name or picture, so he brushed it off as an unfortunate case of mistaken identity. Until, of course, it fell silent only to ring again thirty second later.

The same number danced across the screen.

And, because he figured it could very possibly be someone he knew on a new phone or on a payphone (as unlikely a scenario as that might have seemed to him at one time, several rather unfortunate circumstances had led him to believe that payphones might just be one public service he didn’t have to pretend didn’t exist), and whoever they were might be in trouble and need his expertise bailing them out.

So, he answered.

“Bass here.”

There was no audible reply, just silence from the other end. His thoughts quickly jumped to some kind of personal blackmail or ransom about to be read to him through a voice changer, or perhaps to the steady breathing of some nameless and jilted former employee who was about to vow to seek revenge on Chuck Bass and the evil corporation he headed. After spending more than half his life running Bass Industries, he had developed a habit of jumping to the worst, most outlandish conclusion, which often served to soften the blow for the real problem.

“Hello?” He tried again. When he still received no answer, he sat up on the edge of the bed and wondered if maybe he needed to switch cell phone companies. “Hello?”

When moving around the room like an insomniac who had imagined the phone vibrating against his thigh did not yield any crystal clear results, Chuck rolled his eyes to the heavens and ran his thumb across his bottom lip to wipe away the moisture his irritated darting tongue had left behind.

“Wonderful doing business with you.”

He pressed his thumb to the end button when one breathless whisper stopped him.

“Chuck.”

Chuck Bass had not heard that voice in almost seventeen years, but there was no mistaking it. It was every bit as fragile as it had been the last time she had spoken to him, but there was deepness in its tone, a maturity that no doubt reflected in his own voice in ways even he could not hear. He had heard her breathe that name in all sorts of ways at all sorts of volumes; anger, irritation, desire, lust, love, admiration, hatred, loud, soft, raspy, deep, soft, light, cheerful, depressed, longing... the full gamut of emotions had been expressed to him through just that one syllable from between her full lips, which he imagined were parted in anticipation of his response.

“...Blair?”

“It’s Blair,” she confirmed, but he already knew. Of course it was Blair. No one else could make him feel so insipidly unimportant and desperately needed all at once. “Chuck? Are you still there? Chuck?”

He closed his eyes and breathed deep through his nostrils. He had been waiting for that phone call to happen for what seemed like much longer than less than half his life, and now that it had and she had uttered his name three times and had said hers, and had called him and hadn’t hung up, Chuck found he wasn’t at all ready. What was wrong? She couldn’t have... Well, he knew there was no way she had decided to do what he had told her she someday would, because in that case she would have appeared to him in person, so he could run his fingers through that chocolate brown hair and pull her into the kiss of her life and see the determination of her decision burning in her eyes.

But a phone call was not nothing, so he felt his fingers grasp at his cell as if grasping for her not to disconnect the line.

“I’m here,” he reassured her. Then, because he found he could not stop himself once he started, he muttered “I’m always here.”

Whether she heard him or not, she pressed forward, a new anxiety in her whisper that informed him her eyebrows were puckered together and that a needy pout had formed which extended not just around her lips but from behind her eyes and even to the quivering of her little chin.

“Chuck, I’m calling because I need you to do something for me. If you don’t mi-”

“I’ll do it,” Chuck swore without thinking. If she wanted him to get on a jet and fly to Paris to be with her that night, or whether she was calling to officially put an end to the waiting game they were both playing and leave him to a lifetime of hopeless, meaningless days and nights, or if she just wanted someone to deliver chocolates to a friend of hers in Budapest, he would do it for her in a heartbeat. It was a sad but true fact that after sixteen years of divorce, Chuck Bass was utterly and completely under her spell. “What is it?”

He heard Blair suck in a breath as if to gain strength.

“Your daughter is in New York.”

He understood why she had needed that pause. All his breath seemed to leave his body in an instant.

“I need you to go there,” she continued, after clearing her throat. She spoke much more resolutely. It was like they were seventeen again, and she was calling him up to send him on a seek-and-destroy reconnaissance mission to take down some handmaiden who had displeased her. He reached for the suitcase before she even finished her request and started piling things into it. “I need you to go there and explain things to her.”

Chuck felt dizzy as he shoved his laptop into its carrier with the rest of his business luggage and checked drawers for any forgotten items, though the contents of his closet completely eluded him as he went into the bathroom and grabbed everything within reach, including the complimentary soap and a fluffy golden robe. “She’s where?”

“She’s in New York,” Blair repeated slowly. “With Nate.”

“Right now?” The shock from hearing her called his daughter and hearing that she was in his world with his friends and that Blair wanted him to go see her and explain things to her sent his brain into overdrive even as it shut down all of his common sense functions.

Blair sounded a bit more like her old self when she snapped at him. “Yes, Chuck, right now. I’m sure she’s been snooping around and I-” The petulant pout faded from her voice and it melted into a sad, nostalgic sort of tuneless melody. “I just want someone to tell her the truth, and it can’t be me, so it has to be you.”

His fingers lingered on the clasp of his suitcase and Chuck waited for her to collect herself.

“Can you do that for me?” she finally asked, reverting back to her original frail and winded sigh.

“Of course,” He checked the watch on his wrist and glanced at the business phone clutched in his free hand. “I’ll fly out tonight.”

And then, any trace of her reserve vanished, and Blair sniffled. It was very soft, faint enough to be mistaken for a shuffling of bed sheets or a rustling of expensive finery, but he had seen her cry and held her more than once when she did so, and his ears were trained specifically to pick up her every movement, continents away from him or not.

“She’s going to cotillion,” she managed to choke out. “Would you...would you mind calling me and telling me how she looks?”

Chuck left the room key on the chest of drawers and let the hotel room door slam behind him. “I’m sure she looks like a Waldorf.”

“No,” Blair broke through her melancholy and her throat tweeted out an involuntary laugh. “She looks like a Bass.”

The first time he saw Eleanor Misty Bass, she was small enough to fit comfortably in the palms of his hands. He thought of her often, and when he did, it was always of the newborn infant with wide blue eyes that faded to brown one day when no one was paying attention, the little baby girl with the tuft of dark hair that curled upwards out of the top of her head and which Blair kept pushed back with stylish silk headbands. His daughter was forever in designer onesies and cuddling with Teddy in their shared crib-they had bought two and even had two nurseries set up, but the twins hated to be separated, so they both slept in the same crib at the foot of the bed in the master bedroom.

Teddy had once been Charlie, but Ellie had always been Ellie.

He knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, that as the years passed she grew older. She acquired more curly tufts of hair, her eyes didn’t look quite so large and rounded on her chubby little face, and she probably wore an array of pretty little dresses with flowery headbands and patent leather shoes. She learned to talk and read and walk and say ‘mine’ all without him to supervise her and fill her bedroom with as many dolls, ponies, and pieces of jewelry she wanted. She grew taller and acquired distinctive interests, started going to school and discovered which subjects she liked best, met friends and enemies and probably had a line of boys stretching around the block for just a chance to get a look at her.

She was sixteen. He couldn’t believe it.

The last time he had seen her, she had scarcely been 6 months old. She had cooed and giggled when he idly tickled her stomach, but he had felt oddly detached from her; as if without Blair there to sit next to him and perfect the little bows on her dress, Ellie did not belong to him. But Blair had left him with the twins to live in France with her father and try to pull herself back together. Chuck had understood, had supported her, had even signed the divorce papers when she had sent them to him, but he had never-not for one moment-believed that any of that meant they were over.

He had done something he had never done before, not even when they had stood at the altar and muttered their hurried vows to each other. Chuck Bass had sworn on more than divine powers or on the witness of their friends and family, he had made a vow on his very life that he would be waiting for her when she came back to him.

Which she would. It was only a matter of time.

Some nights, when the sting of loneliness became so unbearable that he had been tempted to pick up the phone and demand she get her shapely, stubborn ass on a plane that instant and let him help her, he had kicked himself for that promise. What had he been thinking? He had made a lifelong commitment to her before, sure, and that had been the hardest thing he had ever done-as much as he loved her and as often as he reminded her of it with those eight letters and pretty trinkets, giving her the rest of his life was a bit daunting.

And, anthropologically speaking, entirely pointless. Or so he had learned from countless 1 AM reruns of Bones.

But something had happened the moment he saw those twins emerge and blink confusedly at the bright and loud world after enduring hours and hours of sheer hell. Something had rendered him deaf to the silence in the world, and he had just seen those little pink bundles of flesh and bone that they had made together, and he realized that they were now forever linked, no matter what happened to them or their hearts. Teddy had not cried, and Ellie had been too small, but all he had known in that moment of stillness was peace and knowledge that they were perfect.

They were theirs.

And the wedding vows had made sense.

The weeks after that had been even worse than the delivery. Charlie, as they had called him all throughout the pregnancy, was rechristened Teddy upon an insipid observation from Serena; in all honesty, it had been a fruitless effort on Chuck’s part to bring a smile to Blair’s ashen face. He had sat at her bedside, stroked her dry hair, ran his fingers over the trenches in her cracked lips, had kissed the platinum band on her left hand and reassured her with a cold indifference that it would all “work out”.

He couldn’t let himself feel anything, because when he did, he would realize that his children were dying.

Teddy had spent his first days in the NICU, separated from his sister, who had stabilized after quick action by the team of specialized doctors Chuck had flown to New York, and been allowed to sleep in Blair’s hospital room after a few preliminary evenings in the nursery. But she had been oddly sullen, crying only for milk and diaper changes. He stared at the other babies writhing around in their prams, slumbering a lot, but letting their bright eyes dart curiously around the yellow room; Ellie’s eyes stared blankly through metal bars at her mother, who was slowly wasting away through no fault of her own.

He remembered quite clearly that they had been attending Sunday brunch at her favorite restaurant with Lily and his step-siblings and their significant others, when Blair had complained of discomfort and returned from the bathroom horror struck after discovering blood on her La Perlas.

A specialist had examined her thirteen minutes later and informed them that she had a condition known as placenta praevia, and gone on to confuse them by calling it an obstetric complication in which the placenta attached to the uterine wall close to or covering the cervix and was the cause of her antepartum hemorrhage.

“Women with large placentae from twins are at higher risk,” he had informed them when Blair had asked under a thin veil of calm whether or not anything she had done in the past could have possibly caused the condition. It wasn’t her fault. It had just happened.

He, of course, had struggled for a long time with the realization that if his wife tried to carry the babies to term, there was every chance in the world-not some chance, or the ghost of a chance, or a remote chance, but every chance-that she would die. The babies might live, if they were lucky, but it was very likely that she would lose too much blood and die in the delivery room.

Just like his mother.

When word got out, the rumors spread like they always did, like wildfire, throughout the Upper East Side. They called it the Bass curse. He fired a few of the whisperers and threatened petty lawsuits against others, before Blair had intervened by finally smiling and telling him that they were just jealous because they had ever only had one baby at a time. Besides, bad things only ever came in threes, and they were having two; she rubbed his shoulders and kissed his neck and told him that she wasn’t going to die because she refused to allow him the honor of blaming himself for it.

And, in the end, no one died. Teddy recovered when they exhausted all other options and allowed his twin sister to cuddle with him in his pram while Chuck and Blair tried to decide whether or not to let their baby boy out of his misery. The twins had held onto each other like survivors of a tragedy clinging to a stray piece of debris, and in one of those medical mysteries that baffle scientists and renew doctors’ hope in the survival of the human spirit, Teddy and Elle had each come alive.

But the aftermath.

That had driven Blair to leave him, to say that she couldn’t do it anymore and she wasn’t being fair to any of them. He could take care of the babies, she told him, wiping away a tear as she clutched her suitcases in her hands and did that thing where her eyes didn’t match her mouth. She knew how much they meant to him and she would never take them away from him because they would take care of him even though she could not. They were his, forever and until after the day the world ended.

After months of waiting for her to come to her senses and slowly realizing that she was in classic Stubborn Blair mode and sense was quite obviously the farthest thing from her thoughts, Chuck had decided that she wasn’t allowed to feel worthless and unworthy all the way on the other side of the Atlantic. So he had kissed Elle’s nose and tickled her stomach as she babbled nonsense sounds, handed her over to Dorota, and sent them both to France in his private jet with his most trusted pilot.

Teddy had screamed and wailed for his sister for countless nights until he couldn’t cry anymore. And then the scars had healed over.

He had always remembered her as an ageless infant, but the intelligent part of his brain knew she was a young woman. The only thing that could not and would not register with him as he sat in his usual seat aboard the Bass Industries plane was that she looked anything like him; Chuck had decided years ago that she was a perfect carbon copy of her beautiful mother and that she would never have to strain under the burden of being related to him the way Teddy did.

Chuck swirled the glass of Scotch in his right hand and stared at the line of debutantes. “I’m sure she looks like a Waldorf.”

“No,” Blair’s voice broke through his melancholy and his throat tensed and worked to hold down his emotions. “She looks like a Bass.”

And she did look like a Bass, standing at the top of the stairs in light blue, but Lily announced her as Eleanor Misty Waldorf, and he wanted to put a stop to the whole masquerade and set the world straight. She was his little girl, beautiful and small and just like her mother, and she was a Bass. Couldn’t they see it? She practically screamed it, from the way she held her chin aloft and squared her shoulders back to balance her easy, elegant posture as she strolled regally to the dance floor on the arm of...

Maverick Sparks?

He would definitely be talking to her about that decision.

She was only sixteen, after all. There was no need for her to entertain members of the opposite sex for another three to thirty years.

He watched her dance and she was flawless, even in the arms of such an unsuitable partner. She may not have been the lead debutante like that detestable peroxide blonde girl in the low-cut white dress Lily had amusingly struggled not to glare disapprovingly at (or kick down the stairs, Chuck suspected), but she was easily the most graceful, enchanting person in the room, aside from himself. Her movements were sure and swift and well-practiced, but when he looked at her sharply defined face and noticed her dark eyes daring around like they had done so proficiently from her playpen, he couldn’t help but sweep the crowd for whatever she was searching for.

All he could see were the memories of times past-a dark-haired girl in a cloudy white ball gown, with shimmering silver details and a large bow, decorated only with the diamond necklace he had given her for her seventeenth birthday, an ill-conceived plot gone devastatingly awry, a reunion that tore his heart out, a dance that ended too soon. Chuck felt like he lived too much of life in the past, but part of him couldn’t help but think that-even with all its heartaches and drama and gossip and back-stabbing-it was a better time.

When his gaze returned to the place Ellie had been twirling, she was gone and Teddy was mysteriously in her place. It jarred him for a second, to remember that they were twins and, of course, she would look somewhat like him. Their noses weren’t exactly the same, and neither was the shape of their foreheads, nor the intricacies of their eyebrows or the exact shape of their jaws, but their eyes were the same shape under the same brow, and their mouths tensed in the same way when things weren’t going the way they had intended.

That’s when he realized his son was looking quite intently at something with a concerned expression that tore his focus from the redheaded girl in his embrace. A sort of thrill rushed through Chuck and he knocked back his Scotch in anticipation of whatever it was for. Had the two of them already met each other? It was impossible for them to have avoided it. Lex was his best friend and she was staying in Nate’s townhouse... and even though he didn’t know the details as to why she was in Manhattan and not back in Paris in the 16th arrondissement where she belonged, he knew it wasn’t because she wanted to broaden her educational horizons.

She must have grown curious. It should have been expected, considering who she came from.

Teddy pulled away from his date and began walking swiftly towards an alcove that led to an adjacent room meant for more intimate socializing on plush leather couches in dim, flickering light, and when Chuck moved to follow him, the whole disturbing scene came into alarmingly clear focus. First, he saw the back of the blonde’s head, then over her shoulder there was a tall, dark boy with his large hands wrapped firmly around the delicate elbows he knew belonged to his little girl.

At first, he thought it was Maverick Sparks, and his footsteps were charged with years-old revenge. Then, he took a closer look, and realized the suit was different, the physicality was different, and not least of all, the expression on Ellie’s face was a dangerous cocktail of fear, shock, and dread.

That’s when he broke into a run.

He would pull the creep away from her and let security handle him, and then he would face the daunting task of explaining everything to his clueless children. She might not recognize him for what he was, at first, but at least she would know intrinsically that he was around to protect her from anyone who meant to do her harm. It’s what nature had fashioned him to do from his first moment with them in the delivery room.

“Get off me, Tristan!” she was struggling to get away, and Chuck could tell from the relentless grip ‘Tristan’ had on her arms that she would gain some nasty bruises for the effort.

The boy spoke low, in French, but he didn’t need to be fluent in the language to guess at what he was whispering to her. He was sure that at some party a long time ago, he had trapped some helpless girl in a dark corner and whispered something equally dangerous and (as Blair would have said at the time) heinous in her impressionable ears. It didn’t matter to Chuck, really, what he had said; all that mattered was the whimper it inspired to rise from Ellie’s throat and when he saw her eyes flutter closed in faithless defeat, he pressed forward.

“Hey!” Teddy spotted him just as he came on the scene, but the shock of seeing his father unexpectedly turn up at an Upper East Side society event when he was supposed to be working himself to the bone in a Japanese hotel room wore thin when they both saw Ellie’s assailant push her into the wall.

That was it. When her head collided with the panels, Chuck saw red and protocol was shoved as violently to the back of his head as the punch he desperately wanted to deliver to the bastard’s face. Security would take too long to get a handle on the situation, and the only thing Chuck knew in the rush of pure fatherly instinct that pumped in his veins along with the adrenaline, rage, and alcohol, was that he had to get ‘Tristan’ away from Ellie before things got any worse.

Yes, he pulled him off by the collar of his shirt as he had planned on his run over, but he also clenched his fingers around the material and thrust him against the opposite wall harder even than he had thrown his superior weight against the tiny body of his only daughter, and pressed his forearm firmly against the boy’s throat.

“Stay the hell away from my daughter.” His warning was a low and vicious growl that resonated in his ribcage.

Tristan’s eyes widened slightly and he struggled to use his youth and larger muscles to break free. “Who the fuck are you?”
Chuck narrowed his eyes and leaned in to spit in the little jackass’s eyes. “I’m Chuck Bass.”