disclaimer: disclaimed.
dedication: Chloe. what are you doing to me.
notes: I refuse to watch the new season. SMD.

title: silicon valley
summary: "This isn't about you, Chuck." — Chuck/Blair.

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Blair was not Serena.

Blair was not summer, not that daze of heat and love. Blair was cold and precise. Blair was winter and frost and icy destruction, the slice of a scalpel against post-mortem flesh.

She was not Serena.

"This isn't about you, Chuck."

She was on the rooftop of some building somewhere in her kingdom—somehow, somewhere along the line, it'd become a tasteless waste in a tasteless city. New York had lost its sparkle in the din and the smoke.

New York was just like everywhere else.

She tossed dark curls over her shoulder, exhaling smoke into the night sky. He stood behind her with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the back of her neck, hungry and burning and Chuck.

It was very Hepburn-esque.

She should have been proud of herself, but mostly she was just too busy being disgusted.

Blair twisted. It was slow and exact; perfectly controlled. Not a muscle twitched out of turn, and she looked at him, heartbeat somewhere in the vicinity of her toes.

"Isn't it, Waldorf?"

"No," Blair said. "It's not about anyone."

"I'm hurt," he said.

He was almost pouting. It didn't suit him at all—where had her dangerous smirking man gone? Who was this stranger in her lover's skin?

"Don't be," Blair scoffed. "I told you, it's not about you."

"Then why? Blair Waldorf doesn't do fear, if I remember correctly."

"Not scared," Blair corrected. "Bored. There's a difference, Bass."

The re-emergence of his last name was duly noted. She could see it in his eyes. Could see it in the slightly twisted quirk to his mouth. And she itched to wipe it away, to put him in his place—something, anything.

She didn't miss him at all.

"When?"

"The next flight out."

There was a silence, then, and they both chewed on their words. Unsaid things that lingered from a past too convoluted to truly appreciate, though Blair was sure Serena saw the irony in it.

She was sure the world saw the irony in it, actually.

And that made her sicker than it ought.

"But here," she said. "Something to remember me by."

And she reached down to the skirt, and tugged it up high enough that if it had been anyone else—had it been anyone who hadn't seen her at her most vulnerable, who hadn't had her screaming on a piano not three hours earlier—she wouldn't have been able to look at herself in the mirror.

But this was Chuck, and if anyone deserved it, he did.

She tugged her garter down her leg—black lace and barely there, she stepped out of it and bent to pick it up. She didn't bother to fix her skirt. She'd already come undone. Just being here had done it.

Blair was not Serena.

And Chuck was just a cracked mirror that showed a slightly better wasteland.

She pressed it into his palm as she walked past him without another word.

She didn't feel anything at all.

It was time to go.

fin.