once I was
Dan/Blair, Vanessa, Jenny. 3208 words.
90s musicians AU.
sequel to half of what I say is meaningless
For![]()
stainofmylove!!!
Summary: He turns away from mirrors as much as he can.
Note: I reeeeally wanted to write you Oz fic, but since I wrote this first fic for you last Christmas, I couldn't resist the symmetry of doing a sequel this go around. It's one year to the day, actually, if you ignore the fact that I posted this so late. Symmetry!!!
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Dan wakes covered in glitter. He lingers in bed, stretching his arm across the empty expanse beside him and watching as the particles ignite one by one, forming constellations.
Last night Blair came to him all in lilac, with shimmery pastel lids and glossy lips and a pearlescent lilac tinge to her cheeks that made her look slightly ill, or alien. Her long false lashes brushed his cheeks when they kissed. Her dress was plastic and squeaked like rain boots when she climbed into his lap, felt sterile beneath his fingers. There was glitter all over her, and she looked like some kind of space princess. By comparison, as always, Dan was rough and rumpled and muted; as always she left him changed, glittering.
She is engaged to her boyband boyfriend but she insists it's just for show.
Dan sits up eventually and rubs a hand through his hair, over his face. His bones crunch exhaustedly when he moves. He sits slumped in bed, waiting, wishing sleepless nights could somehow not result in such tired mornings, that the glitter on his skin could dissipate as easily as the girl who put it there.
Last night they'd had the TV on in the background, old movies playing. Dan watched Blair brush glitter out of her hair and onto his sheets. "Do you like doing all this?" he'd asked. "Honestly. Does this whole thing work for you?"
Blair had given him a lilac half-smile. "Depends which part you mean."
"The music," he said. "Do you at least enjoy the music?"
She raised an eyebrow. "Do you?"
"More than I'd enjoy being without it."
She set the brush aside and crawled into his lap, plastic crinkling. "I enjoy what it gets me," she said, and then kissed him and that was that.
A week later Blair is doing a set for MTV and Dan tunes in, door to his bedroom shut so Vanessa can't burst in and find him at it. It's not just whatever thing he has for Blair that's motivating him; she doesn't ever play small venues, and he's curious too see what she's going to do with it.
He's surprised to see Blair looking relatively subdued – for her, though still conspicuous by anyone else's standards – in a fuzzy sweater, short skirt. Dan has missed the first ten minutes or so, so Blair is already in the middle of a song. It isn't one of her own, he realizes, but a cover of one of Jenny's. Her voice isn't as good as Jenny's but there's something about it, unpolished as it is in the moment, straining a little and breathy sometimes but still good. Real. There's a spark in her dark eyes, too, and the way they flash from the screen feels almost dangerous.
She brings something to it that Jenny doesn't. Jenny isn't going to like that at all.
Blair smiles a little when the song finishes, a satisfied smile. Later on when he calls her, during the quiet middle of the night, he says, "Enjoyed yourself, huh?"
"Oh fuck off, Humphrey," she laughs.
He's not sure he had anything to do with it, the song, but he's not sure he didn't, either.
Jenny seems to stretch out visually, becoming taller and thinner, all limbs encased in black and hair down to her waist. The girls she runs with now all look the same, all models with thin gray skin and cigarettes between their slender fingers. That Calvin Klein girl whose face is everywhere lately, Agnes Andrews, she and Jenny are practically surgically attached at the hip. It's a world removed from Dan, not one he understands.
He worries about the bruised gray under her eyes, covered up with eyeliner, and worries every time one of those dumb entertainment news segments throws around words like heroin and chic. He tries to bring it up once and Jenny just laughs at him, says, "Yeah, and how's that whiskey treating you lately?"
"That's not the same thing," Dan says, hating that look in her eyes, fearing their father's name might pass her lips in a moment of cruelty. But it doesn't, because Jenny's not like that.
"Look in the mirror," she says. "And try to tell me that again." Then she pushes up her ragged sweater sleeves to show her smooth, unmarred arms. "I'm not on heroin, Dan. Jesus."
He doesn't take her advice. In fact, he turns away from mirrors as much as he can.
The tour they're going on will last six months, maybe more. It will be six months where he will not see Blair, six months in Europe, six months of easily ignoring each other in favor of other things. Six months of Blair's fake engagement to the boybander. Six months of buses and planes and trains, of hotels and sleeping on the road. Dan has never left the country before.
On the plane ride over, first stop London, Dan gets drunk off many tiny bottles and ends up on his knees in the coffin-sized bathroom puking his guts out. When he emerges, pale and shaky, the flight attendant smiles at him and says, "I saw you on the VMAs."
He takes his seat next to Vanessa again, slumping down and pressing his clammy forehead against her shoulder like he's done many times before in his life. But she is stiff and unyielding, so eventually Dan shifts away.
He has begun to feel a gap yawning between him and Vanessa, and by extension the other guys in the band, Aaron and Ben. They feel less and less like a band, more like hired musicians serving out contracts. Part of the problem is that they don't have a unifying name or identity; Dan is indisputably the headliner, whether he likes it or not. It's all in that famous last name of his.
Before he left, Dan had asked Blair if she was going to miss him. It had come out teasingly, joking, will you miss me? pressed into her mouth. In a gesture that surprised him with its romanticism, Blair sat up a little in bed and placed her lips against the flat front of his shoulder, leaving a cranberry red kiss behind. He let it fade off naturally, but he became so conscious of it over that day or so that now it's like a scar, retained through sense-memory if nothing else.
A list of cities on an itinerary doesn't capture the restless, all-consuming exhaustion of touring, the misery of it. It's like being stuck in a time loop or something. Dan is never sure what day of the week it is or what hour of the day, or even where they are half the time. He feels as though he's always just emerging from a quickly snatched nap, drowsy and disoriented.
They rest when they rest and then stumble out to play, Dan's throat feeling raw with overuse and nurtured by cigarette smoke. Afterwards they meet people, all kinds of people, people who just want to see him, know him, ask him questions. Dan drinks way too much because there's always so much of it around and he's so stressed, so tired. He swore to himself that he'd never touch anything harder than liquor but backstage one night he lets someone give him something to snort. The show runs with more energy than he's had in forever, but he is aware of Vanessa watching him with suspicious, unhappy eyes.
You're the one who wanted this, Dan wants to say but doesn't. You put me out there in the first place.
In some hotel room in some city, Vanessa sits half on the balcony, her spine resting against the open sliding glass door. A cigarette is held loosely in her fingers and she blows gray smoke into the cool night. "I know you hate talking about it," she says. "But –"
Dan lies on his back on one of the beds, eyes on the ceiling. "Why do I feel like you always say things like that," he murmurs. "'I know you don't want to talk about it, but.' If you know I don't want to, don't bring it up."
There are a lot of things Dan doesn't want to talk about. His father. His mother. Jenny eclipsing him in every possible way, professional and otherwise. The chasm growing between him and Vanessa. Blair. But tonight it's –
"We're supposed to start recording once we get back," Vanessa says, ignoring him. "You know the second album's more important than the first. It's the one. It's the one that proves it, proves us."
"Then write it your goddamn self," Dan says, reaching down to haul one of the blankets up and over his head.
Dan's father had had one very profitable album but had never been able to replicate its success. It was the first one and it signaled a breath of fresh air in a folk scene gone sour. His dad had written half the music and half the lyrics, but the rest was supplied by the other guys in the band, or Dan's own mother. She wrote poetry that was easily stolen. Still, his dad got most of the credit because he was the face of it, the voice.
After that first album, a string of middling efforts followed. Sometimes a critic would review them favorably but the momentum was gone and Rufus Humphrey was remembered by history as a one hit wonder, if he was even remembered at all. The story of the downward spiral is a familiar one, and it isn't particularly interesting.
Dan doesn't want to look in the mirror and see his father looking back at him.
He speaks to Blair once while he's abroad, Amsterdam or Dublin, who can remember. He's about to leave the hotel to go to the venue and he hasn't showered in definitely a few days, and possibly hasn't slept either. It's hard to say. He sees his reflection in the window and turns away, listening hard to a phone that is crackling and unclear along the line.
"You miss me," he tells her.
"I dialed your number by mistake," she says. "I bet you look repulsive right now."
He smiles a little, a rare feeling. "You miss me," he repeats. "I want to hear you say it or I'm hanging up."
"Nate and I are doing a photoshoot together soon," she says. "I just want to make sure you don't miss it when it hits stands."
"I wrote a song for you," he says. "For your album. You should be grateful, because I can't write worth a damn for myself anymore."
"Good," she says. "I don't need the competition." A static-filled pause and then, "I can't wait to sing it," which is as good as her saying she misses him, really.
Once they're back in the States they delve straight into recording again, though Dan feels that the songs they have are unfinished, un-worked. He shows up to the first session drunk off his ass, feeling along the walls as he tries to keep his balance.
"Are you kidding me?" Vanessa says, furious. "Look, I let this shit go while we were touring, but you're seriously acting so –"
But Dan, drunk as he is, has no interest in her ever-present disappointment. He just laughs, weaving on his feet and careening into Ben, which just makes him laugh harder. "You don't have to be sober to sing," Dan says. "Ask Morrison. Ask Cobain. Ask Dylan, Joplin, fuck – ask Rufus. Ask Rufus if you have to be sober to sing."
He sees Vanessa's face soften a little but he remembers once in a moment of anger she told him he'd never be half as great as his dad was.
"Play the fucking song," he says. "I'm ready."
Dan's on the same label as Blair, amusingly enough, and he ends up at her album launch because of it. But no, he knows that's not all it is: the news of all the input he and Jenny had on Blair's music has traveled fast and extensively. And maybe it's more than even that, Dan realizes, as journalists ask him question after question about his relationship with Blair, about the times they've been photographed together, their genre-spanning friendship – ironic emphasis on friend.
When he catches a spare moment with her during the after party, he says, "You know they're selling us. You and me."
Blair raises an eyebrow, like it's so naïve for him to think that's news. Her look is entirely more muted now, deep plums and murky silvers. A playful little girl growing up into a mature artist – artist in a word they've been throwing around all night, using it to replace pop star. "They sell whatever they've got," she says. "Don't tell me you don't know that by now?"
Dan does but he still frowns, brows drawing together. "That's not what you think of us, is it?" he says. "Another thing to sell?"
"There is no us, Humphrey," Blair says, brushing past him. "Thanks for the tune, though."
The next time Dan performs live he goes out alone first, without telling anyone that he plans to do so. He already knows Vanessa won't be pleased, but he needs to do this, alone in front of all those hyper-attuned faces with his heart shivering on every beat. He sits, pulls his guitar up into his lap and tools around for a minute. "Opposite of an encore," he says, smiles and sees a girl in the front return it. "There a word for that?"
The song he sings is Blair's. Not even one of her love-sweet-as-sugar ballads, but one of her genuine pop songs that he makes slow and melancholy.
It's a mistake only because the public is already on watch when it comes to them. Otherwise Dan knows exactly what message he's sending, and exactly what he means by it.
Jenny watches him with expressive, entertained eyes. "You're a mess," she tells him. "Everyone knows you're in love with her."
"Mm, well. What can you do?" Dan affects a careless shrug, pouring himself a plastic cup of whiskey and frowning at the bottle's label. They're at Agnes' place. Her brands aren't exactly to his taste.
"She's using you, you know." Jenny studies the lift of the cup to his mouth and she frowns a little. "You do know that?"
"Don't worry, Vanessa gives me a talk every other day. I get it. I'm a failure." Dan's gaze strays to the loose-limbed models dancing in the center of the large, empty apartment, pausing only for bumps of coke. The music is loud where they are but low here, on the periphery.
Jenny sighs. "Dan. No one thinks you're a failure."
"It's alright," he says. "I am. It's fine." He glances at her. "And if you say 'we're just worried about you,' I'm leaving."
The smile she gives him then is wry. "Remember when I had to show you my arms?" she says. "The marks on you aren't so easy to see." When Dan doesn't say anything, Jenny adds, "Just tell me if you need help, okay?"
"Okay," Dan says, though he knows he never would.
It feels like whiskey has begun to move sluggishly through his veins instead of blood. His feelings on that are neither here nor there.
Sleepless and sorry, he leaves his Lower East Side apartment one night to walk dark, chilly streets with no clear destination in mind. He ducks into a tiny bar but orders seltzer at the last minute, one of those dumb games he plays with himself when he's pretending he doesn't have a problem.
"Hey, are you–" starts the girl next to him, but something in his expression makes her shut up. It makes him feel bad, but not enough to do anything about it.
The bar has an open mike night kind of thing, so after taking a seat through a couple of acts, Dan gets up there himself. He has to borrow a guitar and he's pretty sure the woman he borrows it from recognizes him too, but she doesn't say anything.
"Uh, I don't really…" he starts, looking down. His hands find strings and chords without consulting his brain much and he just starts playing. He sings nothing of his own devising, just songs he likes, and he loses track of the time but no one stops him. It's just him and the guitar on a little half-step up that counts as the stage, the room growing quiet the longer he goes on. When he looks up again, the crowd has at least doubled, people standing against the walls.
"Well damn," Dan says. "People love free shit, huh?" There's a low laugh. He feels kind of powerful here, alone and uncritiqued. It hits him profoundly, suddenly: the intimacy of the room, the independence of performing without telling anyone or asking permission, the freedom of doing something for himself and no one else.
"Alright, I've got this one song…" he starts again. "It's rough, so be gentle ¬–"
Dan drags Blair from her paid-for penthouse in the early hours of Sunday morning. She grumbles the entire time, wrapped up in a white fur coat in the passenger seat of the rented car. She has sunglasses on, and a hat too. He's never seen someone misunderstand the meaning of incognito so beautifully.
"Where are we going?" she demands. "I have a hair appointment at four."
"Maybe cancel it," Dan says, and drives them out of the city.
Dan and Jenny were born in New York City but Rufus was a transplant, and at some point he'd gone back to his hometown, a place they'd rarely visited as a family during the brief stints of Rufus actually parenting. But Dan has gotten directions and childhood visits to grandparents made certain landmarks stick out in his memory. Blair falls silent as they drive.
Rufus spent a long time in rehab, on and off, but now he lives in a small house with his second wife. Dan has not seen his father since he was fifteen, when his parents divorced. Jenny still sees him sometimes.
"Do you want to come in?" he asks Blair.
She pushes her red-tinted sunglasses up. "Do you want me to?"
"I'm not sure," he admits.
"I'll come," she says decisively. But before his fingers find the door latch, "Dan? Why, um… Why did you bring me here?"
Dan settles back in his seat, looking up at the neat-if-shabby little house in front of them. "I don't know," he says. "I thought about it, and you were the only person I wanted to bring."
They're quiet for a few long moments, radio loudly eating up their silence. Then, briskly, Blair says, "We don't have all day, Humphrey," though the look in her eyes is gentle.
They get out of the car, Blair like a beacon of the unusual in her getup. Dan likes that. He reaches for her hand, which she surprisingly gives. He can feel her acrylic nails when she squeezes his fingers.
He takes a deep breath, and then they walk up the front path.
Dan/Blair, Vanessa, Jenny. 3208 words.
90s musicians AU.
sequel to half of what I say is meaningless
For
stainofmylove!!!Summary: He turns away from mirrors as much as he can.
Note: I reeeeally wanted to write you Oz fic, but since I wrote this first fic for you last Christmas, I couldn't resist the symmetry of doing a sequel this go around. It's one year to the day, actually, if you ignore the fact that I posted this so late. Symmetry!!!
Dan wakes covered in glitter. He lingers in bed, stretching his arm across the empty expanse beside him and watching as the particles ignite one by one, forming constellations.
Last night Blair came to him all in lilac, with shimmery pastel lids and glossy lips and a pearlescent lilac tinge to her cheeks that made her look slightly ill, or alien. Her long false lashes brushed his cheeks when they kissed. Her dress was plastic and squeaked like rain boots when she climbed into his lap, felt sterile beneath his fingers. There was glitter all over her, and she looked like some kind of space princess. By comparison, as always, Dan was rough and rumpled and muted; as always she left him changed, glittering.
She is engaged to her boyband boyfriend but she insists it's just for show.
Dan sits up eventually and rubs a hand through his hair, over his face. His bones crunch exhaustedly when he moves. He sits slumped in bed, waiting, wishing sleepless nights could somehow not result in such tired mornings, that the glitter on his skin could dissipate as easily as the girl who put it there.
Last night they'd had the TV on in the background, old movies playing. Dan watched Blair brush glitter out of her hair and onto his sheets. "Do you like doing all this?" he'd asked. "Honestly. Does this whole thing work for you?"
Blair had given him a lilac half-smile. "Depends which part you mean."
"The music," he said. "Do you at least enjoy the music?"
She raised an eyebrow. "Do you?"
"More than I'd enjoy being without it."
She set the brush aside and crawled into his lap, plastic crinkling. "I enjoy what it gets me," she said, and then kissed him and that was that.
A week later Blair is doing a set for MTV and Dan tunes in, door to his bedroom shut so Vanessa can't burst in and find him at it. It's not just whatever thing he has for Blair that's motivating him; she doesn't ever play small venues, and he's curious too see what she's going to do with it.
He's surprised to see Blair looking relatively subdued – for her, though still conspicuous by anyone else's standards – in a fuzzy sweater, short skirt. Dan has missed the first ten minutes or so, so Blair is already in the middle of a song. It isn't one of her own, he realizes, but a cover of one of Jenny's. Her voice isn't as good as Jenny's but there's something about it, unpolished as it is in the moment, straining a little and breathy sometimes but still good. Real. There's a spark in her dark eyes, too, and the way they flash from the screen feels almost dangerous.
She brings something to it that Jenny doesn't. Jenny isn't going to like that at all.
Blair smiles a little when the song finishes, a satisfied smile. Later on when he calls her, during the quiet middle of the night, he says, "Enjoyed yourself, huh?"
"Oh fuck off, Humphrey," she laughs.
He's not sure he had anything to do with it, the song, but he's not sure he didn't, either.
Jenny seems to stretch out visually, becoming taller and thinner, all limbs encased in black and hair down to her waist. The girls she runs with now all look the same, all models with thin gray skin and cigarettes between their slender fingers. That Calvin Klein girl whose face is everywhere lately, Agnes Andrews, she and Jenny are practically surgically attached at the hip. It's a world removed from Dan, not one he understands.
He worries about the bruised gray under her eyes, covered up with eyeliner, and worries every time one of those dumb entertainment news segments throws around words like heroin and chic. He tries to bring it up once and Jenny just laughs at him, says, "Yeah, and how's that whiskey treating you lately?"
"That's not the same thing," Dan says, hating that look in her eyes, fearing their father's name might pass her lips in a moment of cruelty. But it doesn't, because Jenny's not like that.
"Look in the mirror," she says. "And try to tell me that again." Then she pushes up her ragged sweater sleeves to show her smooth, unmarred arms. "I'm not on heroin, Dan. Jesus."
He doesn't take her advice. In fact, he turns away from mirrors as much as he can.
The tour they're going on will last six months, maybe more. It will be six months where he will not see Blair, six months in Europe, six months of easily ignoring each other in favor of other things. Six months of Blair's fake engagement to the boybander. Six months of buses and planes and trains, of hotels and sleeping on the road. Dan has never left the country before.
On the plane ride over, first stop London, Dan gets drunk off many tiny bottles and ends up on his knees in the coffin-sized bathroom puking his guts out. When he emerges, pale and shaky, the flight attendant smiles at him and says, "I saw you on the VMAs."
He takes his seat next to Vanessa again, slumping down and pressing his clammy forehead against her shoulder like he's done many times before in his life. But she is stiff and unyielding, so eventually Dan shifts away.
He has begun to feel a gap yawning between him and Vanessa, and by extension the other guys in the band, Aaron and Ben. They feel less and less like a band, more like hired musicians serving out contracts. Part of the problem is that they don't have a unifying name or identity; Dan is indisputably the headliner, whether he likes it or not. It's all in that famous last name of his.
Before he left, Dan had asked Blair if she was going to miss him. It had come out teasingly, joking, will you miss me? pressed into her mouth. In a gesture that surprised him with its romanticism, Blair sat up a little in bed and placed her lips against the flat front of his shoulder, leaving a cranberry red kiss behind. He let it fade off naturally, but he became so conscious of it over that day or so that now it's like a scar, retained through sense-memory if nothing else.
A list of cities on an itinerary doesn't capture the restless, all-consuming exhaustion of touring, the misery of it. It's like being stuck in a time loop or something. Dan is never sure what day of the week it is or what hour of the day, or even where they are half the time. He feels as though he's always just emerging from a quickly snatched nap, drowsy and disoriented.
They rest when they rest and then stumble out to play, Dan's throat feeling raw with overuse and nurtured by cigarette smoke. Afterwards they meet people, all kinds of people, people who just want to see him, know him, ask him questions. Dan drinks way too much because there's always so much of it around and he's so stressed, so tired. He swore to himself that he'd never touch anything harder than liquor but backstage one night he lets someone give him something to snort. The show runs with more energy than he's had in forever, but he is aware of Vanessa watching him with suspicious, unhappy eyes.
You're the one who wanted this, Dan wants to say but doesn't. You put me out there in the first place.
In some hotel room in some city, Vanessa sits half on the balcony, her spine resting against the open sliding glass door. A cigarette is held loosely in her fingers and she blows gray smoke into the cool night. "I know you hate talking about it," she says. "But –"
Dan lies on his back on one of the beds, eyes on the ceiling. "Why do I feel like you always say things like that," he murmurs. "'I know you don't want to talk about it, but.' If you know I don't want to, don't bring it up."
There are a lot of things Dan doesn't want to talk about. His father. His mother. Jenny eclipsing him in every possible way, professional and otherwise. The chasm growing between him and Vanessa. Blair. But tonight it's –
"We're supposed to start recording once we get back," Vanessa says, ignoring him. "You know the second album's more important than the first. It's the one. It's the one that proves it, proves us."
"Then write it your goddamn self," Dan says, reaching down to haul one of the blankets up and over his head.
Dan's father had had one very profitable album but had never been able to replicate its success. It was the first one and it signaled a breath of fresh air in a folk scene gone sour. His dad had written half the music and half the lyrics, but the rest was supplied by the other guys in the band, or Dan's own mother. She wrote poetry that was easily stolen. Still, his dad got most of the credit because he was the face of it, the voice.
After that first album, a string of middling efforts followed. Sometimes a critic would review them favorably but the momentum was gone and Rufus Humphrey was remembered by history as a one hit wonder, if he was even remembered at all. The story of the downward spiral is a familiar one, and it isn't particularly interesting.
Dan doesn't want to look in the mirror and see his father looking back at him.
He speaks to Blair once while he's abroad, Amsterdam or Dublin, who can remember. He's about to leave the hotel to go to the venue and he hasn't showered in definitely a few days, and possibly hasn't slept either. It's hard to say. He sees his reflection in the window and turns away, listening hard to a phone that is crackling and unclear along the line.
"You miss me," he tells her.
"I dialed your number by mistake," she says. "I bet you look repulsive right now."
He smiles a little, a rare feeling. "You miss me," he repeats. "I want to hear you say it or I'm hanging up."
"Nate and I are doing a photoshoot together soon," she says. "I just want to make sure you don't miss it when it hits stands."
"I wrote a song for you," he says. "For your album. You should be grateful, because I can't write worth a damn for myself anymore."
"Good," she says. "I don't need the competition." A static-filled pause and then, "I can't wait to sing it," which is as good as her saying she misses him, really.
Once they're back in the States they delve straight into recording again, though Dan feels that the songs they have are unfinished, un-worked. He shows up to the first session drunk off his ass, feeling along the walls as he tries to keep his balance.
"Are you kidding me?" Vanessa says, furious. "Look, I let this shit go while we were touring, but you're seriously acting so –"
But Dan, drunk as he is, has no interest in her ever-present disappointment. He just laughs, weaving on his feet and careening into Ben, which just makes him laugh harder. "You don't have to be sober to sing," Dan says. "Ask Morrison. Ask Cobain. Ask Dylan, Joplin, fuck – ask Rufus. Ask Rufus if you have to be sober to sing."
He sees Vanessa's face soften a little but he remembers once in a moment of anger she told him he'd never be half as great as his dad was.
"Play the fucking song," he says. "I'm ready."
Dan's on the same label as Blair, amusingly enough, and he ends up at her album launch because of it. But no, he knows that's not all it is: the news of all the input he and Jenny had on Blair's music has traveled fast and extensively. And maybe it's more than even that, Dan realizes, as journalists ask him question after question about his relationship with Blair, about the times they've been photographed together, their genre-spanning friendship – ironic emphasis on friend.
When he catches a spare moment with her during the after party, he says, "You know they're selling us. You and me."
Blair raises an eyebrow, like it's so naïve for him to think that's news. Her look is entirely more muted now, deep plums and murky silvers. A playful little girl growing up into a mature artist – artist in a word they've been throwing around all night, using it to replace pop star. "They sell whatever they've got," she says. "Don't tell me you don't know that by now?"
Dan does but he still frowns, brows drawing together. "That's not what you think of us, is it?" he says. "Another thing to sell?"
"There is no us, Humphrey," Blair says, brushing past him. "Thanks for the tune, though."
The next time Dan performs live he goes out alone first, without telling anyone that he plans to do so. He already knows Vanessa won't be pleased, but he needs to do this, alone in front of all those hyper-attuned faces with his heart shivering on every beat. He sits, pulls his guitar up into his lap and tools around for a minute. "Opposite of an encore," he says, smiles and sees a girl in the front return it. "There a word for that?"
The song he sings is Blair's. Not even one of her love-sweet-as-sugar ballads, but one of her genuine pop songs that he makes slow and melancholy.
It's a mistake only because the public is already on watch when it comes to them. Otherwise Dan knows exactly what message he's sending, and exactly what he means by it.
Jenny watches him with expressive, entertained eyes. "You're a mess," she tells him. "Everyone knows you're in love with her."
"Mm, well. What can you do?" Dan affects a careless shrug, pouring himself a plastic cup of whiskey and frowning at the bottle's label. They're at Agnes' place. Her brands aren't exactly to his taste.
"She's using you, you know." Jenny studies the lift of the cup to his mouth and she frowns a little. "You do know that?"
"Don't worry, Vanessa gives me a talk every other day. I get it. I'm a failure." Dan's gaze strays to the loose-limbed models dancing in the center of the large, empty apartment, pausing only for bumps of coke. The music is loud where they are but low here, on the periphery.
Jenny sighs. "Dan. No one thinks you're a failure."
"It's alright," he says. "I am. It's fine." He glances at her. "And if you say 'we're just worried about you,' I'm leaving."
The smile she gives him then is wry. "Remember when I had to show you my arms?" she says. "The marks on you aren't so easy to see." When Dan doesn't say anything, Jenny adds, "Just tell me if you need help, okay?"
"Okay," Dan says, though he knows he never would.
It feels like whiskey has begun to move sluggishly through his veins instead of blood. His feelings on that are neither here nor there.
Sleepless and sorry, he leaves his Lower East Side apartment one night to walk dark, chilly streets with no clear destination in mind. He ducks into a tiny bar but orders seltzer at the last minute, one of those dumb games he plays with himself when he's pretending he doesn't have a problem.
"Hey, are you–" starts the girl next to him, but something in his expression makes her shut up. It makes him feel bad, but not enough to do anything about it.
The bar has an open mike night kind of thing, so after taking a seat through a couple of acts, Dan gets up there himself. He has to borrow a guitar and he's pretty sure the woman he borrows it from recognizes him too, but she doesn't say anything.
"Uh, I don't really…" he starts, looking down. His hands find strings and chords without consulting his brain much and he just starts playing. He sings nothing of his own devising, just songs he likes, and he loses track of the time but no one stops him. It's just him and the guitar on a little half-step up that counts as the stage, the room growing quiet the longer he goes on. When he looks up again, the crowd has at least doubled, people standing against the walls.
"Well damn," Dan says. "People love free shit, huh?" There's a low laugh. He feels kind of powerful here, alone and uncritiqued. It hits him profoundly, suddenly: the intimacy of the room, the independence of performing without telling anyone or asking permission, the freedom of doing something for himself and no one else.
"Alright, I've got this one song…" he starts again. "It's rough, so be gentle ¬–"
Dan drags Blair from her paid-for penthouse in the early hours of Sunday morning. She grumbles the entire time, wrapped up in a white fur coat in the passenger seat of the rented car. She has sunglasses on, and a hat too. He's never seen someone misunderstand the meaning of incognito so beautifully.
"Where are we going?" she demands. "I have a hair appointment at four."
"Maybe cancel it," Dan says, and drives them out of the city.
Dan and Jenny were born in New York City but Rufus was a transplant, and at some point he'd gone back to his hometown, a place they'd rarely visited as a family during the brief stints of Rufus actually parenting. But Dan has gotten directions and childhood visits to grandparents made certain landmarks stick out in his memory. Blair falls silent as they drive.
Rufus spent a long time in rehab, on and off, but now he lives in a small house with his second wife. Dan has not seen his father since he was fifteen, when his parents divorced. Jenny still sees him sometimes.
"Do you want to come in?" he asks Blair.
She pushes her red-tinted sunglasses up. "Do you want me to?"
"I'm not sure," he admits.
"I'll come," she says decisively. But before his fingers find the door latch, "Dan? Why, um… Why did you bring me here?"
Dan settles back in his seat, looking up at the neat-if-shabby little house in front of them. "I don't know," he says. "I thought about it, and you were the only person I wanted to bring."
They're quiet for a few long moments, radio loudly eating up their silence. Then, briskly, Blair says, "We don't have all day, Humphrey," though the look in her eyes is gentle.
They get out of the car, Blair like a beacon of the unusual in her getup. Dan likes that. He reaches for her hand, which she surprisingly gives. He can feel her acrylic nails when she squeezes his fingers.
He takes a deep breath, and then they walk up the front path.