Author's note: If you've waited it out this long, thank you. If you've been reading from chapter one, thank you. If you just found this story, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

"I do believe it's true that there are roads left in both of our shoes"

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Soul Meets Body

If maman was the cat, Manhattan was her crème.

I had heard her talk about New York City all my life, had wished her farewell when she left to visit saba et grandmamma or my godmother or any other number of her friends in the city, had seen images of it on television and in movies, knew stories from her childhood in Central Park, had heard tales of the shopping and the nightlife, the fast pace and the indescribable energy that seemed to flow around its many buildings to catch you off-guard at the most random moments. It was constant and ever-changing, sleepless and solid, fickle but steadfast. My own experience there had led me to believe that it was the place I was meant to call home, the place I had always been meant to live and thrive and grow, but it had never occurred to me that it had been her city first. I was so used to seeing her against the backdrop of Paris, chic and unsmiling, that it was difficult to imagine her actually living in any other place.

But as soon as her foot met the pavement on the corner of 5th and East 61st, I realized immediately how wrong I had been to think of her as the consummate Parisian. My life was a black-and-white film in that moment, when she emerged from the back of daddy's limo, her left hand in his right, the glittering platinum band on her ring finger reflecting the cold light of the January sun.

It was a moment, much like the moment the four of us had shared in the house back at 36 Rue George Sand, that seemed like a home video from someone else's life.

"Oh, Teddy. Ellie. You kept us waiting."

All I could really register was her heels clicking on the floor. Was that sound real? Had I only imagined it? Had she really said anything? Was it all one very realistic dream?

"The jet landed hours ago."

She was as lithely and succinctly admonishing as ever, as though I had only just slammed the door in her face and was returning later that day to apologize. But there was a certain...je ne sais quoi about the way her lips parted across her teeth as she brushed past Chuck and through the archway into the sitting room; their eyes locked for a only a fraction of a second, their sleeves whispered across each other by a hair's breadth, but it was enough to send my heart leaping into my throat.

My father, my mother, my brother, and me: together, in one room.

Together.

Once upon a time, there was a girl who had a mother and a father. The king and queen lived on either side of a vast ocean, but their love was divided by more than just sea, sky, or boat.

First, their love was divided in two: the king raised le petit prince while the queen was gifted with la petite princesse. The children were raised apart, brought up in different homes by different people, taught nothing of their real past, and expected to live out the rest of their lives in blissful ignorance. All did not go according to plan, of course, but if you have journeyed this far, that is a fact you already know.

Second, their love was divided in half: by the echoes of the past that sliced through their memories like a knife. These echoes were far-reaching and many-fingered, and above all, they were greedy. They hung over the present like a giant's dead body, history pressing down on fact and choking those who remembered it. And what made it worse was that it was not the king or queen's history, but the histories of their own families – storied and winding enough to fill several tapestries.

Third, their love was divided between them: never fulfilled in the absence of affection. A whisper of faded touches, the whiff of a favorite scent on a foreign breeze, a glimpse of someone on a crowded street corner – but when they turn to seek out a familiar gaze, the dream is shattered. Phone calls never made, letters never sent, words never said, words said and forgotten and regretted. Words said and remembered. Promises made at the foot of a gilded throne; fears nourished in years of exile.

A queen under a spell: a sleeping beauty. A shell of her former self, playing dress up far away from home, slumbering through life and cold to passion or her heartbeat.

A king rode to her rescue and when she saw him in her doorway, the sleep was ended. The veil was lifted, slowly, and with the same care one might take with a bridal sheath.

Their love was whole only when they were together, to sit at its hearthstone and nurse its flame with helpful prods from an iron poker.

And when their love was whole, it was said the king and queen seemed to be on fire.

To say it was overwhelming to be in their presence is a horrendous understatement and not a worthy description of what it actually felt like. What it actually felt like, I'm not sure there is a single word to sum it up, soit en anglais ou en français. Even if such an adjective existed, I would not have been able to summon it from my mind at that moment of knowing that if we wanted to, we could reach out touch each other, all at once if the need for a group hug so arose (though that was a highly unlikely scenario, I could always dream).

I felt complete, most of all, like the fragmented puzzle was finally a colorful picture. But my brow knitted, and my mouth continued to gape unattractively, my eyes darted back and forth between the two of them – Chuck and Blair, Blair and Chuck – trying to reconcile their faces and their breathing and their moving and their coexistence. Ma mère went to the bar behind Teddy and I, and again I saw only daddy. I blinked, and he grinned.

"We expected the car service to pick you up and bring you straight here. Dorota was going to make lunch."

There was a sudden thunk from the other side of the wall, then I heard loud noises coming from the kitchen as Dorota over-exaggerated her retrieval of the pots and pans to assure all of us that she had most certainly not been eavesdropping. I silently wagered that as soon as whatever succulent treat she had deemed worthy of this reunion was simmering away on the stove top, she would resume her post with a crystal glass etching a circle around her ear.

I wanted to say 'We decided to walk around a little' to explain our tardiness. But then, I thought, we weren't really tardy. How were we to know that they would be waiting for us? That daddy would be there waiting for us. Our getaway had been swift, private, incognito, brilliantly orchestrated – we had even left word with the Lifton maid to cover for us should daddy try to call the estate and inquire as to our whereabouts! We had covered our tracks. The unquestioning staff at home had even been fed our lie and asked to pack appropriate casual wear!

Teddy's thoughts seemed to be whistling along the same track as mine. Our eyes locked too, for a little more than a fraction of a second, and then we both looked to daddy with identically wide eyes and asked, "What are you doing here?"

Mère laughed, in tune with the clinking of glass on Baccarat. "Remember when they used to yawn at the same time? You thought it was adorable."

"I thought it was an impressive display of synchronization," daddy argued reminiscently. "You thought it was adorable."

"C'est le ton qui fait la musique." Maman waved a hand and poured daddy a highball of Scotch from one of the more aged, expensive (and more than a little dusty) decanters. At least that finally answered a personal, less life-altering mystery as to why she stocked so much whisky beneath the bar. "You were the one who always tried to record it."

Daddy crossed his arms over his chest, his dress shirt wrinkling around his elbows. "So you could watch the footage as many times as you could stand."

"So you could convert the video file on your computer and upload it to your PDA." Maman produced a bottle of sparkling San Pé and poured its contents into three small tumblers. "He always liked to bring it up as a topic of conversation with members of the board by marketing it as an actual skill, but he hated it when any of them would pull out pictures and talk about their children."

"Their children are boring." Daddy's meager defense was somehow made more formidable by his nonchalant drawl. "Mine aren't."

"Chuck filled Dorota in on your favorites for dinner, Teddy."

It had all been some albeit strange, almost staged play version of a normal conversation. But, when mère brought Teddy his fizzy water and their fingertips brushed beneath the handcrafted hexagonal cut, the scene came to a grinding halt. Maman went, at that mere touch, from an alabaster angel to a pale statue, her face frozen in that tell-tale expression that could only mean she had forgotten her next line; it was a dreadful moment of less-than-blissful ignorance, a kind of grappling emptiness that rang true in her wide brown eyes. I knew that look well, having seen it many times over the years at society functions when her escort expected the evening to end in a place she wasn't willing to go, when I had asked her who Chuck Bass was, when I had begged to know the identify of my father. The look was reflected in Teddy's own expression, doe eyes and all, and for a moment the resemblance was so painfully obvious that it sent a tremble through my heart.

Daddy was suddenly at my shoulder, his right hand on my shoulder and his left resting comfortably on maman's lower back. I realized with a sudden jolt that some time between daddy's appearance and the long stretch of uninterrupted shock I had reached for Teddy's hand to take it in mine, that we were touching, he and I, daddy and I, daddy et maman, ma mère et mon frère.

I'll never tell anyone and I will have Teddy killed if he so much as mentions it, but I couldn't help it. I couldn't stop crying.

No matter how adept we were at pretending to be normal, the four of us could never really be normal. Not just because of the complicated history, the tangled web of heartbreak, deceit, fear, every bad thing that had split us up and kept us apart for sixteen long years, not because we were Basses and therefore expected to live up to everything the name entailed, and not because we lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Because daddy was stubborn and possessive, self-destructive if left to his own devices, prone to drink too much and smoke too much and lose himself too much in the excess that came with wealth and privilege; because maman was a romantic underneath all the hardness, past the frigid mask of dispassion she had been hiding behind for years, because she loved too much and too fiercely and scared herself into believing things that were not true; because Teddy and I were only sixteen, only trying to figure out exactly who we were supposed to be, and up until a few short months before, we had been roughing it out with no father for me and no mother for him.

A small and private wedding ceremony at the chateau in Lyon was not enough to heal over all those years of separation, the ring on maman's finger did not mean that all was forgiven and we could fall into a storybook life where everything went smoothly and nothing could ever tear us apart again, the fact that I was legally Eleanor Misty Bass for the first time since I was an infant did not mean that I was an entirely different person. Though, the months in New York had definitely changed things for me, to put it lightly.

If I hadn't fled Paris on that private jet with my godfather, hadn't gone to live in the Archibald townhouse, hadn't enrolled in Constance with the trust fund money maman had never withdrawn from my account, hadn't met Teddy and gone to the debutante ball and been saved and swept away by my long lost father, maman would never have stopped living in her fantasy world and let daddy wake her up with true love's kiss. (Oui, I knew they had done much more than kiss, but they were my maman et daddy and the very thought of it was enough to make me feel a little queasy, and sex didn't exactly fit in with my fairytale analogy.) We never would have been reunited. If I had let her, ma mère would have kept silent forever, might have lived the rest of her life in solitude and withered away without daring to look at what was actually in her heart, face the mistakes she and daddy had made in their youth and realize that nothing was too broken to repair.

I had thought hearing the entire story would bring me some kind of completion, might string together every event of my life and bring meaning to my existence. All my months, years, of sleuthing and hypothesizing and daydreaming would add up to some epic revelation I had not considered. But, in the end, it was just the story of a scared twenty-year-old girl who had been so afraid of failure she had been ready to abandon everything and literally push everyone so far away, that any chance of letting them down would be eliminated in her absolute absence. Daddy had never given up on her, had sent me to her as a reminder that he was always with her, that he had the same faith in her that she had in him, that she didn't have to be alone, that she could be a better mother than hers had been.

And, when I took a step back and reflected on all those years, I had to admit that he had been right. She had always loved me unconditionally, despite her secrecy, given me everything I wanted and more than I needed. Beyond that, I was through analyzing, done looking at my life with a clinical eye and examining everything through a microscope. I didn't hate Dorota for avoiding my eye any time I wondered aloud about the state of my family, didn't despise my godfather for keeping his lips sealed or Aunt Jenny for being so adamant that I keep my nose out of my parents' business, or my godmother for being an unreliable jet setter with five thousand boyfriends and an unreachable cell phone. I knew they had only been trying to protect maman, had been trying to shield me from the truth of her past so that I wouldn't judge her too harshly.

They had underestimated me, though perhaps with good reason.

But I had done things I'd never before dreamed of doing, had shed my old skin and become something different, something stronger, something better. Maybe it was the fact that I had suffered crushing heartache and devastating humiliation, had dethroned an overconfident challenger and become the Queen of Constance Billard School for Girls, was looking forward to a bright future in luxury accommodations with my twin brother and my father, Chuck Bass, and my mother, the newly rechristened Blair Waldorf Bass, but I understood her better than I ever had. We had sat beside each other on the Bass jet, hands clenched together, my head resting on her shoulder as we both stared out the window at the passing clouds, and I had looked up into her eyes and known with perfect clarity exactly what she was thinking.

Because I had been thinking it too.

This was right.

Those were the words she had said to daddy at the altar. Maman had been radiant in a beautiful cream dress, and daddy had been, as ever, dashing and handsome in a classic tuxedo. Papère and grand-père had decorated the arch under the trees on the back lawn of the chateau with yellow roses, and Teddy and I had donned Yves Saint Laurent and Givenchy respectively to assume the roles of best man and maid of honor. Grandmamma had expressed some concern that things were moving much too quickly, that daddy and maman ought to bring Teddy and I back to the States and take some time to get reacquainted. Maman had laughed at that, a real laugh that pulled effortlessly at her ruby red lips and filled her face with such joy as I had never seen it bear, and daddy had looked silently amused next to her. It was as if they had never been apart.

Seriously, it was as if they had never been apart. I stayed in the guest room with Teddy our first night at the house because I was scared I might hear something I wasn't supposed to.

They were in love, and love didn't need to wait or be rational. Besides, as maman also said at the altar, they were Chuck and Blair, Blair and Chuck.

Their honeymoon was going to wait until Summer, after maman could settle back into life in Manhattan and they could ship Teddy and I to the Hamptons with grandmother Lily. We were going to spend the months in between redecorating our (our!) home according to everyone's tastes, or so went the tentative plan, making appearances at all the right functions as the Bass family, and finally being a family. Together.

And maybe we should have been together for sixteen years, maybe it always should have been right. Maybe we should have had sixteen years worth of weekend brunches at The Palace, 192 months' worth of lunches at The Empire, 5840 days worth of dinners at The Pierre, Christmases with all four of us under the tree, all four of us tying on our skates at Wollman Rink, countless mornings of Teddy and I bickering over the breakfast when we were late for school, ignoring our dad's bored demands for us to shut up and let him enjoy his paper, endless groans at maman picking out outfits for us and then dragging us to stuffy society events. But the part of me that is still six years old, tugging on white ribbons and staring wide eyed at the incomprehensible script in an Italian leather bound journal, is actually rather glad that we didn't have that.

I never thought I would think that. I thought as soon as everything came together, I would spend months mourning and pining for the days we had lost. But all I felt when I looked over at daddy and Teddy was happiness, happiness that we could be together from then on. Happiness that none of us would ever take our family for granted the way we might have otherwise. Sure, it isn't conventional to run away to another country and hunt for clues about the identity of your father, or two travel abroad with your long lost twin brother to try and reunite your parents after almost two decades of self-imposed separation.

And no, it's not conventional to eat family dinner at the five-star restaurant in your father's opulent hotel with your Jewish step-grandfather, overbearing fashion designer grandmamma, infamous socialite Lily van der Woodsen Bass "Humphrey" and their entire extended family, including your heroic godfather Nate Archibald and sunny godmother Serena van der Woodsen, while reporters and paparazzi wait outside with cameras and microphones to find out the scoop on Blair Bass's return to New York City and your twin brother sends under-the-table text messages to his supermodel girlfriend...

But I'm Elle Bass (formerly Waldorf, formerly Bass). I've never been conventional. We have never been conventional. Why start now and ruin all the fun?

XOXO

Good morning, Upper East Side. Gossip Girl here. Your one and only source into the scandalous lives of Manhattan's elite.

Don't know who I am? Good. You're not supposed to.

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. And if that's true, Gossip Girl has raked up enough nostalgia points to earn top billing in her own international comeback tour. So, boys and girls, get your tickets ready, because the gates are about to be unlocked and the opening act is a doozy:

SPOTTED! Gossip Girl's favorite grown-up foursome dining at Bella Blu, a certain white knight minus one shiny golden bauble. Unless you count the globe-trotting blonde who never left his side, that is. And is B here to stay and is she staying here with C, or is the Queen Mum only passing through on a diplomatic mission? Rumor has it that monogrammed luggage sporting the initials BW was seen being loaded into the triplex suite of the Pierre Hotel. Do I even need to pose the hypothetical 'coincidence?' or can you just draw the obvious conclusion for yourselves?

But enough about the past. It's a new me, a new decade, and a new regime. Time for a changing of the guard, don't you think?

The French have invaded and they've done it in style. Constance Billard has a new queen: the long lost heiress to the Bass name, no less. While it's certainly nice to have a Waldorf holding court on the Met steps again, how long will E be able to keep her throne? Or, barring a civilized coup (and let's face it, since when has courtesy been a factor in the dethroning of any monarch?) her head?

Speaking of which, I'm fairly sure Cherry Valence has lost hers. What Gossip Girl thought would be a forgettable holiday fling has bloomed unexpectedly into a full-fledged semester romance with her very own Ponyboy Curtis. An internationally beloved supermodel and a skinny little UES WASP? I suppose stranger things have happened, but I'm thinking pretty hard right now and nothing is coming to mind. The question here is, how long will T be able to keep his heart...from being broken, that is.

Miss me?

Whether you did or not...

You know you love me.

XOXO Gossip Girl