I may never forgive him. I may never be the shipper I once was. Who cares about her face getting cut when all the worst parts of Chuck Bass were laid bare – call it love, call it what you like. I wrote this to try and understand him, and I hope you understand my need to try.

Othello

When you are given something as precious as a heart, you make certain promises – don't abuse it, don't neglect it, don't break it. Don't tear it with your hands when your own is lost to silence. Guard that heart in your keeping; make it beat for you, or else pass it on and let it beat in a place where the sun shines upon it. When you feel the sting of her palm on your face, don't break her heart. When she turns her face away and you turn into darkness, don't break her heart. Don't enact revenge on a heart – don't starve it, or stab it, or scorn it, no matter what its owner does to you. Hearts are too delicate to become collateral damage.

Hers lies cold and dead in my hands.

And those hands have torn open her world.

And her world is not safe with a monster in its corners.

Whatever I did to that heart would always be okay, because it would lift mine. She would save mine in her own way, as young or old or connected or separated as we were. We were bound together like no other people in the world; perhaps this is why I continue to hurt her, to starve and stab and scorn.

Unforgivable.

Reprehensible.

And yet every other time she's been torn, it's for things that don't really matter.

If not for my father, and my faith in my father, I would have gone to Tuscany. I would have had summer with the girl, fall and winter with the woman, and he would have died and washed his own hands clean. I could have asked because I knew she would said yes, not because I had lost her heart and it wasn't touching mine and how the fuck do you expect mine to beat without a pilot light, without my pilot light? I made her run. I made her run across the empty floor, and I wondered whether she'd be better off if I'd never loved her at all.

Her face.

Her perfect face.

Her perfect, bleeding heart.

Is the truth, then, that one cannot live in the light with the other? Must one of us suffocate or be smothered to be happy? I would take suffocation. I would take strangling. I would take her bullet in my gut gladly, because there is blood on her face and she ran from the place she once called home. I would take her walking on my grave, but all of this is egoistical because I want connectivity, and I want her walking over my grave because it's mine. I love, and I don't want to feel love that makes me rend that delicate little girl's heart with my fingers. I don't want to feel anything if it means she feels the backlash and dies of it.

"Make her happy." The words mean nothing with no one to hear them. "Take her away and make her happy."

Fin.