“YOU WERE AMAZINH UP THERE”
Blair "You really don’t think i’ll go up there."
Chuck "I know you won’t do it."
“Who’s that girl?”
Chuck "I have no idea.”
I don’t want this moment to ever end
Where everythings nothing without you
I want you to know
With everything I won’t let this go, these words are my heart and soul
I’ll hold on to this moment you know, ‘cause I’d bleed my heart out to show
And I won’t let go
What happens at Victrola, stays at Victrola. 
The composition of this cap is flawless and poignant- with Chuck’s hands splayed on Blair’s back holding her like a precious object, the reverent way he is bringing down the slip’s shoulder strap, Blair’s doll-like hand (with her ring) delicately placed on his collarbone over his bowtie and finally the fact that even though you cannot see their eyes (‘the window to the soul’) this doesn’t at all detract from the adoration depicted in this moment as their mouths are meeting in earnest. The blurred streets of New York City above the limo’s backseat, in the background, with the old-film style colouring completes the PERFECTION!
This scene will forever be in my mind, the song fits the scene just perfectly, the darkness, the naughtiness of Blair, for the first time we saw Blair like she really was, she set herself free. The scene for me didn’t need words, her facial expressions and movements were just enough for me, they said everything.
“In the face of true love, you don’t just give up” 
“My father is someone who goes after what he wants. And Lily Van der Woodsen was no exception. In typical Bass-man fashion his pursuit was direct and at times not exactly subtle. One thing I learned from my father’s courtship of Lily is the importance of perseverance. That in the face of true love you don’t just give up, even if the object of your affection is begging you to. One thing I learned from Lily is the importance of forgiveness. She gave my father the gift of a second chance and, in kind, I watched him become someone actually worthy of that gift. And one day I hope I’ll be lucky enough to find someone who will do the same for me.”
“I love you too”
“It wouldn’t be my world without you in it”
blair: just because you’re dressed poorly doesn’t mean you’re not chuck bass.
chuck: why would i want to be him?
blair: you should have told me you got shot.
chuck: i’m surprised you didn’t shoot me yourself.
blair: oh, i have. many times, in my dreams… the good ones. but if you were really hurt i would wanna know.
chuck: when i woke up my id was gone. nobody knew who i was, nobody was… coming to look for me. i realised i may be alive but chuck bass doesn’t have to be.
blair: changing your name doesn’t change who you are.
chuck: it’s a good start. a chance to live simply, earn people’s respect, maybe become a person someone could love.
blair: someone did love you. and… you owe it to her and everyone else you’re leaving behind not to run away, which is what you’re doing. and i don’t think that great man you’re talking about wanting to be is a coward. i think he would face up to what he did.
chuck: i destroyed the only thing i’ve ever loved.
blair: i don’t love you anymore. but it takes more than even you to destroy blair waldorf.
chuck: your world would be easier if i didn’t come back.
blair: that’s true. but it wouldn’t be my world without you in it.
He looked upon the garish day
With such a wistful eye;
The man had killed the thing he loved
And so he had to die.
He is thunderstruck. Looking up from the piece of paper that would take him far, far away from the street where he lay bleeding, from the diamond that should have been his panacea, from his guilt and regret and his home and himself and her. Now she stands before him and everything changes. Everywhere I went, you caught up with me. He is staggered. She walks to him as though in a dream (I’m in here. I’m trying to tell you something) in which she cannot speak. They approach slowly, tentatively, so as not to awaken from what cannot be real. If you have to leave, let me come with you. (Only do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you). They cross the chasm that lies between them, tearing themselves out of time and space.
They are lit in their separate spheres – she is fire, and he, ice. She emerges resplendent from her hues of red, a flame in the dark (the fire below) that burns him in his moonlit coolness (the icy exterior). She examines him, surveys with exactitude the reality that is Chuck Bass, speaking as though rehearsing a scene that she has watched flickering across a screen, extending her words like a favour bestowed. It is unbearable, his sadness, his regret, his love for her that weighs heavily on his face.
Why would I want to be him? He speaks with a bitter smile. They share the joke like a secret. Their relief is palpable now. It lights them up. Nothing matters but this; being with each other for these few snatched minutes that should not exist, but must. How could it be otherwise? What is one without the other, even in the darkness, even in the depths of Hell? The worst thing you’ve ever done. She will lie to him over and over again. How can I love you after what you’ve done? It wasn’t a reproof. It was an appeal. How it is possible that I love you after what you’ve done? This was not a lie. She stands by him now, she wades into the River Styx (Was my love not strong enough to bring you back from the dead?) to pull him out. She thought their love was limitless. She still cannot recognise that it is.
His face is bathed with her beauty; the flint of his features softened by the sheer force of her. Nobody was coming to look for me. This is so sad, this is heartache to her – hearing of him left with no one, the fate she longed to save him from (And the waves have taken you away). Not enough.
Someone who was worthy of being loved. I will be someone else. Not him. I didn’t care if I lived or died. I will cut this person out of me. This dead thing that rots, that I carry around like the murdered albatross. I killed it. What happens when everything that constitutes your identity is threatened? You create yourself anew, you make that name mean something else. He has done it over and over again, his name a pair of golden handcuffs that shackles him to these permutations of self. How to make the man fit the name?
Someone did love you, she chides. Foolish boy, always running. I don’t want you going anywhere, I couldn’t bear it. He should have come back to her, tie perfectly knotted or not. Someone loved that boy, that impetuous, selfish, vicious, disdainful boy. It’s stupid of you to want her to be anything other than she is. Someone loved all his sharp edges, even if he didn’t. Because he didn’t. To admit defeat is something that is anathema to her. Not enough. This was not part of her story. Now who wants to hear how I got the great Chuck Bass to tell me he loved me?
You owe it to her and to everyone else you’re leaving behind not to run away. It’s something she knows too well. People don’t tell you who you are, you tell them. She reminds him, brings him kicking and screaming back to himself. I don’t think that great man you’re talking about wanting to be is a coward. He hangs on her words, following her thoughts with his eyes, lugubrious and resigned. Chuck Bass: Coward. It’s what his love for her has made him. It stripped him of his armour, of everything he had built. I didn’t care whether I lived or died. What is Chuck Bass without Blair Waldorf? You don’t belong with anyone.He couldn’t face that reflection of himself that followed him everywhere. (Because no matter where you run you just end up running into yourself.) Only they know what it is to look into a reflective surface and fail to recognise the face that looks back. They cannot escape the people they have made themselves into.
I destroyed the only thing I ever loved. He means them. He always knew he would do it. It’s only a matter of time before one of us messes it all up. They are as silent as death as she hands him back the last remnant of their past. They are both in its thrall; they both ran from this inevitability, and they enact these moments as though they are not quite real. Everything is slow and languorous. Her face is full of incredulity and reverence as he closes his eyes at the grim comprehension of this finality. She knows. She refuses. They look at each other now, with this knowledge of what could have been. Their sadness is unspeakable.
But, after all, she is Blair Waldorf. Who are you? You have to be punished for your transgressions. She cannot be weak. I won’t let her be right about me. She takes a breath, steels herself. She knows what she has to say to break the spell. He has been waiting for it; it’s what he has been running from, that knowledge. He knows what she will say with the same certainty he had that black day when his father took away definitely, decisively, the possibility of forgiveness, of approval; when she took his hand in hers with the gentle tremulousness with which you approach a wild thing. He knows with the same certainty she had, finally, looking at his face on that bright Spring day at the Plaza. He braces himself for it, waiting.
I don’t love you anymore.
He flinches as if from a slap. The wretched agony of his face is hard to endure. He buries her words in the same place he buried the excruciating pleasure of each I love you. To a boy like him, I love you is the promise of pain; it is the threat of future grief. It means I will leave you. It means not enough. Every I love you has been like a dull ache that gnaws at him constantly. How to understand something you were bestowed in good faith, a faith that is based on nothing, a faith that you did not earn and do not deserve? How can you love me after what I did? How could you ever love me? He listens to the words like a piece of music so beautiful it is painful to hear. He stows them away and stitches them closed.
Because I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you so much it consumes me. I love you Chuck, and I’ll always be your family. All I ever did was love you. I don’t love you anymore.
It breaks her in two to say it. For a split second you see the mask slipping, slipping away. All the love she has inside her for that boy burns it from her face. She makes it a joke. It takes more than even you to destroy Blair Waldorf. Who do you think you are in the face of the awesome power that is Blair Waldorf? That is her joke. They wear their names like a monolith, like an albatross around their necks. He tries to smile. She is so strong, so proud. Her head held high, her dignity unassailable, clawed back from the brink.
Your world would be easier if I didn’t come back. It took everything inside her to say those words to him. To lie. This is her story now. She has put Blair Waldorf back together piece by piece. She needed this to do it. Her body has ached with the effort of it, as though something inside her had died. She closes her eyes before she replies, summoning up every inch of herself, every scrap of the fortitude that makes her who she is.
The air is heavy with what they cannot say. They pause, they swallow, their throats are dry, their eyes speak a language which they mouths cannot agree with, cannot give voice to. That’s true. But it wouldn’t be my world without you in it. What is Blair Waldorf without Chuck Bass? (If all else perished and he remained, I should continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.) She swallows, her eyes begging. He listens to what she doesn’t say. This is what they have always done. Come home. Come home and we’ll start again. We’ll circle each other like predators, we will dissemble and cheat and feign disinterest and burn the world down. This will never end. Just come home.
“If two people are meant to be together, eventually they’ll find their way back”
This was hard. There are a lot of amazing Chuck/Blair episodes, and I know that their Golden Era was back in S1-S2, but 4x09 is the first episode that came to my mind, along with the sweet awesome thing that’s 4x08. So… why 4x09? Because they’re sexy (and CB have lacked sexy for quite a lot of time back in S3), because they’re cute (Chuck saying he loves her, Blair pretending she didn’t hear anything), because this is the first time they actually act as mature people. One thing they absolutely need to learn is how to love each other without hurting each other, and this is the first time they agreed on keeping distance acting like mature people who only want the best for the other person. They even end up breaking-up but there’s no scheme, there’s no evil plan to take the other down, just an agreement, hoping that they’re gonna find each other again one day, if they’re really meant to be together (which they are, btw XD). Blair makes a choice for herself, and Chuck accepts that. My shipper heart bleeds, but FINALLY they’ve managed to not act selfishly. I also think that this episode pretty much settles how the series it’s gonna end, so… I’m just waiting.
СЕЙЧАС У НАС ЕСТЬ ВОСПОМИНАНИЯ И ЭТО....
НО ВПЕРЕДИ НАС ЖДЕТ ЛУЧШАЯ ИЗ СЦЕН!!! СВАДЬБА CB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!СТОИТ ПЕРЕЖИТЬ ВСЕ ТО ГОВ..О КОТОРОЕ НАС ЖДЕТ, НО ДОЖДАТЬСЯ ЕЕ И ЗАПОМНИТЬ НА ВСЮ ЖИЗНЬ. ОНА СТОИТ ЭТОГО. ОНИ СТОЯТ ЭТОГО!
Inevitably…Chuck and Blair
There are a myriad reasons why I think Chuck and Blair belong together. There is something Old Hollywood about them. They have the raw passion of Burton and Taylor; the sly recognition of Bogart and Bacall; Tracy and Hepburn’s comradeship and solidarity. There is a touch of classic literature to their coupling – Cathy and Heathcliff, Elizabeth and Darcy, Beatrice and Benedict, Scarlett and Rhett. Like great art they are transcendent of time; their story resounds like those of their canonical predecessors. I love them because of Ed Westwick and Leighton Meester. They are completely in sync with one another; completely entranced by the others’ presence when they embody those characters. There is a sense of the intuitive to their acting partnership. They are magnificent apart but they are magic together. That kind of chemistry is a rare bird indeed. It cannot be taught and it cannot be contrived.
But even this alone is not why. It’s not even because I believe in soulmates, or that they complete one another, or that fate is somehow involved, however sadistically, in their union. Their being together or not together is not even the point. They are different people because they fell in love. Something alchemic happened and turned base metal into gold and it keeps happening to them. Mutual torment keeps them together, affording them a certain cloaked intimacy. Anything more would cost them too much. They burnt once briefly and urgently; their incandescence bore a transient heat. Now it is all beautifully controlled, as though they spend their evenings choreographing every move they will make the next day. Two people so determined to control and exert authority would never submit to any other, but the prospect of relinquishing that control is always a delicious impossibility. Love shouldn’t require that you be less than yourself, it should demand that you be more. You shouldn’t have to retract your claws in order to be loved, or soften your edges. The only thing you should do is relinquish the masquerade that you perform for everyone else.
There is nothing static about their relationship; their relation to each other is constantly in flux but one thing remains the same – the point to which they will both return over and over again. That moment when they both stopped pretending and allowed the burlesque to stop just for one exquisite moment. They can never pretend again with each other and that is what they love and hate the most. There is no one else who does that for them in either of their lives; no one else who refuses to look at them until they take off their respective masks. For me, that is real love. It is mercurial and painful and it does not go away even when you beg it to. They belong to each other and that will be true regardless of the years or the distance or the people between them.
SORRY DAN
