Chapter Text
The truth is Blair doesn’t think about Dan Humphrey any more than she has to.
There’s no use in dwelling upon past follies. He and Serena have been back together for some time now. It isn’t much of a surprise. Dan belonged to Serena first which means that he’s always going to belong to her. And no one ever really gets over Serena Van Der Woodsen.
Blair has certainly never been able to.
Sex tapes with boyfriends, drug overdoses, leaked diaries; it’s all water under the bridge. They're S & B. There has never been anything big enough to make them let go of each other. Not for too long anyway. Blair thinks there’s a charming sort of poetry in that.
And so she barely even blinks at the diamond glittering on Serena’s finger when she shows up ten minutes late to Sarabeth's. It’s nowhere near as large as her own, of course, but it shines all the same.
Blair is appropriately enthused. She smiles at the quaint ring — a little less than a carat she'd wager and Blair has an excellent eye for diamonds — and hugs her.
This is how things were always meant to be.
"Did he hide the ring under some waffles?" she asks after they ordered. "I hear that Humphreys are rather fond of those."
"B," Serena chides before she starts gushing.
“He took me to the Hamptons actually, which totally isn’t Dan’s style so I was kind of,” she quirks those expressive brows of hers. “But then we got to the beach and he set up a romantic dinner in the moonlight. It was freezing so we couldn't stay too long but we came back to watch the sun rise just like we did when we were seventeen.”
"Dan has always been a romantic," Blair allows.
The waiter comes with their food and they barely notice.
Serena is on cloud nine, her smile as dazzling as that sunrise she keeps chattering on about. So much so that she doesn’t even roll her eyes as Blair redirects the conversation from her engagement to Waldorf Designs. Instead listening eagerly as Blair complains about the new assistant and his asinine suggestions for the spring line.
It isn’t until Blair hints at needing to be back at the atelier that Serena looks a bit pinched.
Blair says nothing. She just waits. If Serena wants to broach topics that are best left alone – well, Blair isn’t going to make it any easier on her. Not that she has to. Serena barrels through the tension with her usual ease. She doesn’t straighten up or toy with her fingers the way Blair might have. Blair envies that.
“I know you and Dan had a thing once.”
A thing? It was more than that, surely. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it was nothing at all. She's said those words to Serena, to Chuck, and mostly to Dorota so many times that it must be the truth.
In any case, she’s always been better at lies.
“S, that was barely anything,” Blair idly rips the croissant on her plate into shreds. “Confusion and bad judgement on both our parts.”
Blair stares down at the mess she’s made for a moment before looking up. Serena is smiling at her again, all bright and beaming. It’s all Blair could do to smile back.
“We’ve both made our fair share of those over the years, I guess.”
Blair lifts a brow, her mind already back at work and away from this dreadful conversation.
“Mistakes," Serena clarifies.
“Well we've grown up,” Blair takes Serena's hand in her own, stroking the soft of her skin in small, soothing circles. “Things are different now.”
“Are they?” Serena asks. “It feels like so much of the same.”
Blair drops her hand and reaches for her mimosa, if only for something else to hold on to.
It goes like this:
Blair Waldorf is the first girl to own Chuck’s heart and the first to get him to put a ring on her finger, to give him a child. It’s no small feat. Blair has known him since they were kids and he was just Nate's weird tag-along. No one ever thought he could settle down. That he could commit to one woman. That he could have a family.
They’d all been so convinced that the only thing that his future could possibly hold was strip clubs and prostitutes. He’s Chuck Bass after all. No one ever bets on him. No one ever believes that he can do better. No one but her.
Blair knows how much proving them all wrong means to him. That’s why she hangs on his arm at galas, poses with him in front of magazines, hosts dinners for his business partners. She’s the perfect wife. Always by his side.
Bart Bass is a fleeting memory to most. A great man who died a mysterious death twice over. A touch of scandal that will never be erased but Chuck’s successes and failures supersedes all else. A little intrigue is good for business, she reminds Chuck in the moments when the topic of Bart comes up and he comes to her, so lost and angry; a child craving comfort.
The nightmares make him drink. He drinks all the time now, not that it bothers her. Little does.
Blair has gotten good at ignoring the twinge of terror she feels when she sees that empty look in his eyes. She ignores how wrapped up Chuck is in his own demons that he doesn’t even notice her own. She ignores all of the nightmares where she’s the one falling, falling, falling.
Blair swallows it all down until she's full to bursting.
Chuck missed Henry's first steps because he was busy chasing investors in Berlin. Chuck missed their third wedding anniversary because he was in Australia with Jack. Chuck abandoned her once more at brunch with Serena and Dan, and Nate and whatever tart he's dating that month because there was another emergency at work.
Blair manages. She's been managing her whole life.
She spills the contents of her stomach down a porcelain bowl just so she doesn’t explode with all the things that sit heavy in her gut. It gets easier after a while. At least she pretends it does. A lifetime of faking does her well.
She hobnobs with the socialites who hang on the arms of other businessmen, all richer than God.
She’s nothing like them. Those empty, tin women, painted bright gold for garnish. They sit in their empty mansions only to be trotted out and paraded in a bragging contest between these great men. "My wife graduated magna cum laude from Princeton. My wife modelled for Versace. My wife is on the board at the Met."
And she spends all her days at the spa, at brunch and fucking the help, Blair thinks, smiling at their husbands as they go on and on.
There's a part of Blair that likes it. How accomplished she feels compared to them, how superior. She pretends that she doesn’t turn her nose up at those insipid creatures just like they pretend that they don’t gossip about her when she’s not around.
They look down their noses at her too, which baffles her. They should envy her, young and bright as she is, with a marvellous future ahead of her. She supposes they want her to be like them. An ornament. Chuck would hate that. A wife whose only claim to success is her plastic nose and plastic breasts.
They’re building an empire and to do that she has to be as powerful as he is. He understands that. He gives her idle words of advice as she flits about managing whatever crises arise and trying to make sure that Waldorf Designs stands on its own two feet.
It’s been five years since she said I do and when he smiles, she does too.
Jenny Humphrey, surpassing all expectations (including Blair's), becomes one of her most prized designers. She’s good. She has been since high school. Proper training has only given her designs the sophistication that they previously lacked. Of all the designers Blair spent months auditioning, Jenny is the best and Blair has always liked having the best.
At Constance Blair shaped Jenny in her own image. She fought against the mould, of course, torn between simpering sycophancy and bare faced defiance but she still settled into someone Blair could respect even if it isn’t someone she could like.
Even now she's both familiar and foreign all at once. Ambitious, desperate to please, eager to prove herself; all things Blair has been before, all things Blair knows how to use—
"I don't like the cut on this skirt," says Jenny. Blair crosses arms and stares. She doesn't have a designer's eye but she knows fashion. The model doesn't speak, too used to her role as a coat hanger. "It's too…"
"Symmetrical," says Blair.
"Exactly!" Jenny strides over to the model, scissors in hand. "It doesn't fit with the rest of my line."
—but little J isn't so little anymore. She settled into her skin better than Blair has ever been able to.
She spends more time with Jenny than she has anyone else in the past year. It's all very routine. Jenny still fights back. Blair still hates being contradicted. They don't quite match the effortless synchronicity of Eleanor and Laurel but they make it work. Of course they both have to refrain from mentioning Chuck – still a sore spot between them for more reasons than one.
He can't come to any of her shows this season. Not even to Waldorf Designs' first show at New York Fashion Week that's really hers. There’s something about investors in Germany and Jack needing his presence at meetings.
She tunes out his explanations and focuses instead on sniping at assistants, arguing with organisers and sticking her fingers down her throat.
Dorota keeps giving her looks as she flutters around the townhouse in a manic haze.
"Miss Blair, Mister Henry curious. Maybe you bring him along sometime?"
It's not a request and Dorota is one of the few people over the age of four who can still be so demanding with her.
Henry is so clingy for his age. She can't say that he'll grow out of it when she never has. He clutches onto her dress as she leads him through her meticulously organised workspace and seats him on her desk.
"You'll be good for maman, won't you, my little duckling?"
He smiles at her from behind his juicebox and she tries not to grimace.
His grandparents will occupy his attention when they travel to Paris, Milan and London for the rest of her shows but when they're in New York it's just her and she knows Henry doesn't understand.
If his father's presence is exhilarating yet ephemeral, hers never is. She's always there to tuck him in at night and sing him to sleep. He comes to her with every sniffle, every bruise, or to babble on and on about his day. She may not be the favourite but she's the one that never leaves.
Dan and Serena got him the Eloise novels last Christmas and Serena had insisted that they watch the movies together. Cuddled between her and Chuck, surrounded by his aunt and uncles, Henry had been riveted.
Blair reads it to him before bath time every night. Now Dorota has to take her place.
When she was a child it was Harold who soothed her when she missed her mother during fashion week, taught her how to make a perfect choux, and watched her favourite movies with her before bed. He only ever left to attend the afterparties when he was certain that Blair was asleep.
She’s not angry. Chuck has his own empire to build. It’s just… this is so important. Though it’s technically her fourth fashion week, it’s the first without Eleanor peering over her shoulders. Success or failure depends entirely on her.
And Blair has things to prove too. That she isn’t just some trust fund brat in over her head. The Park Avenue Princess, as the tabloids still call her, who inherited a company she doesn't know how to run. She wants him at her side as she rubs everyone’s nose in it. She didn't crash and burn. She didn't implode. She worked herself to the bone for this.
Blair faces the scrutiny of all her detractors alone, without so much as a phone call, but then Serena slips her hand in hers and Blair can’t tell who’s squeezing tighter.
Nate is there to support her too, or to flirt with models, whichever. He brings her flowers and kisses her cheek, like a perfect gentleman, before she shoos him to his seat. He stands to the side with Humphrey after it's all done.
Blair is almost surprised to see him there.
It makes sense of course. His arm is around Jenny's spindly shoulders as she fidgets with nerves. Jenny is his sister and he would accompany his fiancée to an event as important as this one.
It doesn't cross Blair's mind that maybe he's here to support her too.
She tries not to turn her nose up as he nods at her, a small smile gracing his lips. There’s no need to be haughty with him right now other than that’s just who she is. He stands next to Serena backstage as the models start walking down the catwalk.
Serena turns to Blair, delighted, “I think you’ve really done it, B.”
It strikes Blair later that Serena is more excited than she is, bouncing up and down as the seats begin to clear, beaming as she darts past designer and model alike, laughing as she spins Blair around in a hug until they’re both dizzy and giggling.
Blair feels an almost giddy sense of accomplishment. She’s done what even she thought she couldn’t. She relishes in smug satisfaction as she smiles at journalists and the buyers of the major stores who thought she’d fall flat on her face. The unbridled joy infecting everyone around her seems to escape her entirely.
Blair gives a speech as expected. She toasts to Jenny who soaks up the applause with glee. She thanks her staff for their hard work. It’s a celebration. And she can fake joy with the best of them.
“It was a good show.”
She smiles before she can stop herself. Dan Humphrey at a fashion event, in a well tailored Armani suit. Serena's doing of course. He doesn’t look out of place in it like he would have once upon a time, having grown used to events where he has to be well dressed. A decade ago even the thought of it would have made her scoff. Now all it brings is a touch of amusement.
“Marrying Serena Van Der Woodsen doesn’t make you an expert on couture.” Blair says finally.
“We’re not married yet.”
He glances at her wedding ring as he hands her a glass of champagne from a passing waiter. She tucks her hand at her side without thinking. Dan's lip twitches but he doesn't say anything. Blair chooses to blame it on the pressures of the night. She’s been on edge for weeks.
“Of course,” she smiles brightly. “Why the wait? Serena was practically made for a spring wedding.”
“There’s a – I'm writing a new book. We’re waiting until – we’re waiting.”
A new book? Serena never said.
Whenever Blair asks she just shrugs and says, “There's nothing wrong with a long engagement,” before changing the subject. It's never felt like the truth but Blair lets it rest, not eager to prod at the tight lines that seem to settle on Serena's face in place of a smile at any mention of the subject.
As far as Blair knows, while Dan freelances for magazines and news publications, he hasn’t published anything major since his tragic novella all those summers ago. The book where each one of them made their way to a miserable middle age. The critical response was kinder than she expected for a depressing sequel to Inside. The tabloids scoured for every bit of scandal they could find and underserved Wharton comparisons were tossed about which she found particularly offensive.
His friends were less than impressed.
Blair still remembers the day Serena showed up in her foyer, tears in her eyes and his book in her hand. Blair’s copy had been stuffed under her mattress like a dirty magazine she was embarrassed to own.
Serena had cried on her shoulder convinced that Dan wasn’t in love with her anymore.
Blair’s story had been ... excruciating. Too close to home for her to feel anything better than dismay while reading it. She had tossed the book in the fireplace before even getting to the last page. Of course she then bought another copy soon after just to finish it. It was kinder than she expected. After the way they left things between them. She hadn't expected that at all.
She’s spent a lot of time since, purposefully not thinking about it. It makes no sense to try to make sense of it. Not now and certainly not then with Serena gazing up at her with pleading eyes, trying to grasp at any bit of solace. It was easier then for Blair to focus on that.
Serena’s story wasn’t kind to her at all.
That was four years and forever ago. They’ve all moved on.
These days Serena tells her with shining eyes that she and Dan are okay and that she’s so sure that they’re going to make it. Blair has always envied the ease that Serena carries with her, gliding past all unpleasantness so effortlessly. Blair wouldn’t have been able to let it go.
Though maybe there's a part of Serena that hasn’t let it go. That must be what's stopping Serena from walking down the aisle. Nothing that Dan’s published since high school has made Serena feel the way she used to . “Like he sees the girl I know I can be,” she'd admitted to Blair with a shy smile so many years ago when they still wore Constance uniforms.
Blair has never felt like that. Whenever she reads one of Dan’s stories, for better or worse, she sees the woman that she is. Sometimes braver, crueller, stupider but still her.
Blair doesn’t know if it’s guilt or anger that makes her snap out,
“I thought after that sad attempt at an exposé you might have decided that a career change would better suit your talents.”
Dan chuckles and she can hear a tinge of bitterness in it. She opens her mouth, meaning say something flippant to take away the sting but she doesn’t. That’s not who they are anymore.
“Maybe it would, but I can’t seem to let go of it,” he stares into his glass. “That’s one of my problems, I guess.”
Blair has three different rejoinders on the tip of her tongue, each more cutting than the last. He doesn’t give her the opportunity, drifting over to Nate before she can even open her mouth.
It leaves her feeling overwhelmingly bereft as most things do these days.
Chuck turns away from her after a round of love-making the following night and Blair slides closer to him, trying to burrow her way into his skin with some sort of permanency.
“I love you.” Blair wraps her arms around him, pressing her face into his back. “More than anyone can love another person.”
Chuck takes up so much room in her heart, whatever remained she's already given to their son. There's barely any room left there for her.
He kisses her hand and whispers all the declarations she wants to hear with the intensity that she’s grown used to and she tries to let that fill the space inside her that feels so vast and greedy like some sort of mythical cavern, impossible to fill.
Blair worries that she somehow managed to give her entire heart away and it still isn't enough.
Echo loved a man too consumed with himself to ever love her back. When Chuck looks at Blair he sees his own reflection and he loves it, loves her. After a decade of waiting and running in equal turns she finally gets to belong to him.
She's always wanted to belong.
Lily begs for Henry to spend the weekend with her and Blair complies. William left again and with just her in that big, empty penthouse – well Blair understands loneliness.
Blair invites Dan and Serena to accompany her to a two day showing of Rossellini’s Solitude Trilogy at Film Forum. Her husband is out of town on yet another business trip.
Chuck would never want to watch this with her anyway and she can’t go alone, not when she feels different parts Karin, Irene and Katherine in varying shades of potency.
She would weep and she's tired of tears.
Together, Dan and Serena would force composure from Blair in a way that would have escaped her had she gone with either of them individually.
It’s less awkward than she thought it might be. They haven’t spent much time together, just the three of them since ... well not at all since her marriage. Without acknowledging it between each other, they decided to use Nate as a friendly buffer or Henry as a buffer of a different sort.
He needs so much attention. It's easy for them all to ignore each other to give it to him.
Blair’s not really sure why. S is her best friend and she’s used to Humphrey at this point. She was his friend once upon a time. She even dated him at one point.
There should be no awkwardness between them at all.
Serena wrinkles her nose when Blair warns her that it’s a foreign film but then Dan pokes her in the side and she laughs.
“It’s a good one.” Dan says. “I think you’ll actually like it.”
Serena takes the bucket of popcorn that Dan holds out to her and pouts.
“You two are so lucky that I love you.”
Blair smiles as the movie begins, resting her head on Serena’s shoulder.
Alright it's a little strange at first. She’s too used to debating her way through a movie with Dan, and talking costume design with Serena. With both of them next to her she watches in complete silence.
It isn’t until the screen is black and the lights are on that she blinks, shaken back to reality. Serena links her arms in between both Blair and Dan’s. Her smile is as sad as Blair has ever seen it when she suggests that the fresh air might be good for them.
Blair is quick to agree, hoping that the light spring breeze might help her feel less unsteady on her feet.
As they walk her home, they debate the necessity of the almost dreary pace of the film, Dan in favour and Blair against. It feels almost like they're twenty again, cheeks flushed and bickering about Merchant, Ivory and Anger. It's an easy habit to fall back into, a creaky hinge that's been freshly oiled.
"There are lobotomies less tedious than that pacing," Blair argues.
"Yeah I'm not sure I'm gonna listen to that from someone who's unnaturally obsessed with French cinema."
"There's nothing unnatural about Truffaut!" He laughs at her a little and she bites back a smile. Oh, she could just kick him. "What's your point anyway?"
"My point is you already understand the appeal of ennui and you can tell when it works which it does here," Blair scoffs but Dan keeps going. "He manages to get the audience to feel as adrift as Karin in the most vivid way possible."
Dan’s point doesn't sway her. She understands it intellectually but she still argues against it. Rossellini bowls his audience over the head with his brand of neorealism and it’s too much to take in all at once and not enough at the same time. It lacks ... something that she can’t put her finger on.
“Which is the entire point!” Dan throws his arms up like she's the one being difficult. “So does she.”
“You two can sure go on,” Serena tightens her grip on her arm before she distracts them with a sudden craving for street food that Blair refuses to even look at.
It’s not until Blair is midway through her nightly moisturising routine that she registers that the post movie debate was more of a two way conversation than a three.
Serena begs off on the double feature on Sunday in favour of posing for a new friend of hers, Trisha something or the other, a mediocre artist from Soho who doesn’t bathe. Her voice is cavalier when she says:
"Dan may still show up."
A part of Blair should have expected that.
Serena had been fairly subdued in her only input to the night's discussion,
"Maybe it's just not my thing but she was just so … sad."
A part of Blair expected that too. Serena humours her, but sitting in the dark and watching a movie she’s seen over and over, well that’s Blair’s thing. Dan’s too, she supposes, which is why she isn’t too surprised that he actually turns up the following day at the 5 o’clock showing of Europa ’51.
If the three of them barely spent any time together in the past five years, she can count on one hand the amount of time she and Dan have spent alone.
It seems almost absurd to ask him to sit two seats away from her now.
He’s never actually held up that end of the deal in the past whenever she demanded it. Or perhaps it’s that she never let him despite it being her rule. Either way during their brief foray into non-friendship, whenever the occasion arose and they bumped into each other at the movies she would simply sit next to him and grab the popcorn from out of his hands before he could even question her.
“You know I never took you for a Rossellini fan,” Dan says, idly as the lights start to dim.
She isn’t. He focuses too heavily on what happens after the grand kiss and fade to black in a way that makes her want to crawl out of her own skin.
“Well I do adore Ingrid Bergman in just about everything.”
“So do I.”
She already knows that. They discussed favourite actors, favourite directors, favourite decades and favourite genres in the three months that they dated and the year before that.
They don’t really do small talk. They both spent so much time disliking each other and then so much time learning that they liked each other a little too much that they never had to. It doesn’t dawn on Blair until now that she asked him and Serena to come as a couple to prevent this .
Blair is so good at abandoning herself. It's nothing for her to let her mind drift so that she can float outside her own body: weightless. It's always such a gratifying feeling to not have to exist. Whenever it’s just her and Dan she feels so horribly and fantastically earthbound. She hates that, really.
“I'm not –” she huffs out an impatient sigh. “It’s not what you think it is.”
Dan stares at her in that way that makes her feel like he’s looking through her clothes, past her skin, all the way down to the ugly heart of her. It takes everything for her not to fidget under the intensity of that gaze. It would feel like losing even if she's the only one taking score.
“Isn’t it?”
“It’s not.”
She snatches the popcorn from his hands ending the conversation there. She’s always been a stickler for tradition.
Her fingers start tapping against her armrest before the opening credits.
Neither of them acknowledge the tears streaming down her face that starts halfway through the first movie and only ends when George Sanders fights his way through the crowd, desperate to save his marriage.
Katherine, what’s wrong with us? Why do we torture one another?
She really does hate Rossellini.
Maybe Dan understands her better than she thought because this just feels like another exercise in punishment that leads her to run to the bathroom and expel the contents of her stomach, for once, against her will.
Dan is waiting for her outside the women’s restroom, concern evident in his face.
“You good?” he asks.
She nods briskly. Not a lie. She feels less out of sorts than before. His eyes say that he doesn’t believe her.
“Are you - Blair are you okay?”
Blair tamps down the urge to say something mean enough to make him leave her alone. Something he can go back and tell Serena about. Something he could shake his head while he complains about how dreadful her best friend is and how he should have never even gone to the cinema, Rossellini be damned. Maybe Serena will come over after and they can talk. Maybe they’ll all stop being so cautious around each other in a way that none of them are used to.
Maybe they could just go back to who they used to be.
She opens her mouth to say something – anything at all, but she doesn’t know what. She’s never been able to say something cruel enough to Dan Humphrey to make him walk away from her. Not for good anyway. Even now when he can retreat to a place that’s warmer and blonder.
Blair doesn’t want to think about why that is.
“We should go,” she says mutely.
Dan holds out his elbow and she takes it out of habit. She's just a little unsteady that's all. Wordlessly they decide to walk home like they did the night before.
Dan starts drumming his fingers against his unfortunate, thrift store jeans to a beat she can vaguely recognise. “You know for someone who supposedly loved her, you have to wonder why Rossellini was so obsessed with her unhappiness.”
It isn’t his most awkward attempt at starting a conversation.
“Well she wears her pain so beautifully. Some women are just born for tragedy." Aren’t they ? she thinks. Aren't I? “Where’s your sense of poetry, Humphrey? I thought you were supposed to be a writer?”
What she doesn’t say is: Isn’t that the role you wrote for me, for Serena, for Nate, for yourself.
He smirks at her, the twist of his mouth sardonic, “Not a very good one, some would say.”
She almost asks who. His last book was decently received, as dismal as it was. It’s only then did she remember her barb at him after her show a few weeks ago. He’s poking at her. She doesn’t rise to it, if only so as not to give him the satisfaction. Besides if she doesn’t respond he'll start rambling on with all that nervous energy he keeps stored inside and well – it won’t be fair if she’s the only one out of sorts tonight.
He doesn’t disappoint.
“When I write a tragedy – they’re tragedies because my characters can write themselves out of them anytime, you know. They choose not to, either because they don’t know how, or they’ve grown used to it. Maybe they don’t even realise they’re in one, or they’re just stuck. Or… or a hundred other reasons. That’s the depressing thing. It’s all about choice and they’re all too scared and too lost to make one that’s right for them. See, tragedy yeah, but it doesn’t, like, punish.”
“Is that how you see it?” she asks.
“That’s just life.” They both slow down as they come closer to her townhouse.
Blair twists her wedding ring around her finger. “You think life is a tragedy?”
“Sometimes. Don’t you?” Dan let’s her arm fall from his. Good. She needs the distance too.
Blair's laugh is a lot more bitter than she intends. “Sometimes.”
“But it’s only sometimes though,” Dan looks at her in that way she likes to think of as specially reserved for her, all soft-eyed and warm. “Because if there’s one thing I’m starting to learn it’s that life can’t be neatly confined to any one genre.”
She would know. She’s been trying for years. But stories end when they do for a reason. Blair has known that for a while now. That’s why she has always dreaded her curtain call and the sneaking suspicion that it’s already passed.
“Wouldn’t it be simpler, though? If it was,” she looks at the pavement, dirt and stone. It’s just grey. You can’t spin something magical out of that. “Less messy. Less confusing."
At least everything would happen for some grand reason that all makes sense in the end. At least it would hurt for a reason.
“Yeah, it would be simpler,” he says in that way that she's always secretly adored, like he doesn’t think she’s a fool for saying something decidedly foolish. “But then it wouldn’t be real.”