"What are you doing at my father's funeral? You think he'd want you here?" Yes. The awful truth is yes. "Chuck, if this is about the article, you know I didn't write it..." This isn't about the article, it's about what he wrote instead of the article. The thing Chuck can't talk about, the spell that brought his father back to life; the story of Charlie Trout and all the pain and life and death it brought into their house. "Do you think I care about your failed attempt at investigative journalism?" He grabs at Dan, twists knuckles in his lapels, and whispers to him, intimately. "My father is dead because of your father." My family is dead because of your father. And I watched it happen, and I made another mistake to save us all. And now we are broken.

So toughen up Biko toughen up Biko toughen up
This world isn't kind to little things
So toughen up Biko toughen up Biko toughen up
I need you be strong for us

"What? Chuck, look, I'm sorry about this..." Even in the grip of something scary, Dan tries to comfort, reason, calm him down. To be there for Chuck, who needs it, in a way that he's only pretending to be there for Serena, who doesn't. Serena inserts herself between them -- and if it were any other girl, this would mean Dan is a douche, but Serena could piledrive them both with one bangled arm tied behind her back and you know it -- and tries to remind Chuck, in a particularly brutal and ill-advised way, of exactly who's on his side: "Chuck, Dan has been helping us. Unlike you." The "us" includes Chuck, it's a reminder of what he has, and if you doubt it at least Chuck doesn't: "Helping us? Do you have any idea what his family has done?" Only help us to become a family of our own; only forge us just strong enough to break. Only give love and the possibility of love, and then take it away again.

CeCe regretfully asks Dan to leave, and Serena puts one massive foot down: "No, Grandma. That doesn't make sense. It's not fair." CeCe reminds her that, of all of them, Chuck is Bart's son. Bart's remaining blood tie, just as Bart is the last of Chuck's old family. "He doesn't have to make sense today," she says, which is the truest statement of the episode and the least significant: he doesn't have to make sense, but he does. The things we say in grief, fear, pain, are the things we'd all do well to forget but it doesn't make them less true: it makes them more so. Dan backs away, promising he understands, and Chuck is nearly slavering now: "You have no idea."