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Summary
She wishes Dan Humphrey had never taken a seat across from her their first week here. She wishes she didn’t have to contemplate the way she feels about him at all.
[or, Yale AU].
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this was unexpected but so pretty
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Dan Blair
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She rolls her eyes again, looking past him, to where Lily and Rufus’ dance has slowed to an almost stop, the two of them clinging to each other, like if they let go they’ll lose another twenty years. Rufus says something, his nose nudged to her cheek, and Lily laughs, head tipped back in a mirror image. Blair blinks away, feeling suddenly like she’s intruding. When she looks back at Dan, he’s looking at her, too.
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Blair wants to belong to someone, she always has. She wants someone to want her, her and only her, forever and ever, like the happy ending of a windswept romance. She falls fast and hard and it consumes her, eats her up from the inside out and she lets it. She wishes, just once, it would be enough. She wishes she would be enough.Blair has heard first hand accounts of Dan’s love; in Christmas trees and stories she never read and the kinds of declarations no one’s ever made to her. Has witnessed it herself; him always coming back, always being there, both the moth and the flame, both the lighthouse and the sailor. Around every corner, every sharp turn of Serena’s life since she came back, Dan had been there, his chest a safety mat. Love consumes Dan too, it must, this twin flame of theirs that has burned long and hard for other people.
She wonders what it’d be like, to be loved by someone like that.
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Blair remembers when her feet couldn’t reach the floor, swinging off the edge of the couch or a chair, watching her mother pace around the living room and the atelier alike. The way Eleanor spoke to her employees, to the men and women with tape measures and dress pins, to the models whose spines stuck up straight and rigid, thin skin pulled taut over ribs. Back when her feet couldn’t reach the floor, dressed in a handmade nightgown, asking for a bedtime story. She realizes, now, after telling him all this, that even in the almost empty penthouse, under just the glow of a nightlight, Eleanor still spoke to her the same way.Eleanor got too busy, too tired at night to read her stories, replacing them instead with old films to make Blair fall asleep. They’d had the opposite effect, of course, Blair staying up all night to watch sweet-speaking, kind-hearted Audrey fall in love with various charming, handsome men. But her mother’s demands always rang louder than the film scores, and once Blair’s feet could reach the floor, she knew: to be in charge was to be cruel, and Blair had to be in charge, so Blair had to be cruel.
But when her fingers catch on the cool vinyl of her headbands in the bottom of her drawer, like a rusted helmet, remnants of shed armour, of shed snakeskin, she wonders if she’d been instilled with unkindness since birth. If, like loneliness, cruelty was embedded in her tissue, passed down like her last name.