wanna be your lover, baby (don't wanna be your boss)
dan/blair. theatre au. 2383 words.
summary: Dan met Blair six years ago when she was the understudy for the lead girl in a play he was working on. "Sure, she's got star power," he remembers Blair saying. "But I've got talent." When that line showed up in the next play he wrote, Dan knew he was a goner.
note: for![]()
corleones! I switched the last two prompts for ~creative reasons. hope no one minds! ao3 link.
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"The thing is –" Dan has the phone between his ear and his shoulder as he fishes around in a container of leftover Chinese. His relaxed posture belies how serious this conversation really is, for him. "There's no one else who can do it. It's yours."
He can almost hear the smile in her voice. "Oh, is it?"
"You know it is." He sets the carton down, taking his phone in hand again. "I wrote it for you."
"That's not fair." Her voice has a laugh in it now, so he knows she's going to agree. Flattery always works for her. "You know those are the magic words."
Dan met Blair six years ago when she was the understudy for the lead girl in a play he was working on. "Sure, she's got star power," he remembers Blair saying. "But I've got talent."
When that line showed up in the next play he wrote, Dan knew he was a goner.
The Bedford Avenue Theatre used to be a movie palace back in the forties or fifties. It was purchased by Dan's father at the height of one-hit-wonder glory for a grossly low price and has been, at various times, a semi-functioning art gallery, a venue for bands, and (briefly) a used bookstore-coffee house hybrid. None of the attempts ever made much money, and when Dan took it over he remade it into a proper theatre and sank nearly all his money into it while doing so.
But it's a beautiful building: red velvet seats, a once-opulent ceiling of fading gold, and a proscenium arch like a gaudy frame. It beats the black boxes where Dan did his early stuff. And he likes the look of Blair in this place, all of her put-on glamour amongst the broken-down glitz. It's all very Tennessee Williams.
Blair flounces into the theatre on the first day of rehearsals with her customary melodrama, dressed in a big loungey capelet with her tiny black pug in her arms. An assistant follows.
Dan rolls his eyes. "Your adoring public isn't here today, Waldorf."
She smiles at him meanly as she drops into her folding chair. She sits in it like a throne. "Just be happy that I'm doing you this big favor."
She sets the dog on the floor and it immediately scurries off to investigate and probably pee on something important.
"Remember where you started," Dan reminds her.
Already it's beginning. The stagehands and assistants and other actors are all beginning to look at them like prime reality TV. They haven't worked together in two years – not since the breakup.
Blair arches a well-groomed eyebrow. "Remember where I ended up," she says.
They got together in the whirlwind following that second play, the first in a line of roles he would write specifically for her. It got him criticism as time went on, people saying he wrote the same role over and over: a kind of Zelda Fitzgerald meets Blanche Dubois in different disguises and scenarios. Dan can't help it. It just suits her.
Still, they did well enough together that she got a string of movie deals and a couple of awards. Dan got attention too, but it was always a big fight between them: that his ambition wasn't greater than his need to maintain a certain indie image. He refused to leave his Brooklyn roots for big-budget success. She wanted more. She always wanted more.
Dan found he couldn't give it to her.
Blair had a literary background, in that her life was the stuff of turn of the century novellas. She grew up a spoiled heiress but her family lost half their fortune thanks to the messy end of her first marriage – to a Monégasque prince, no less. That was undeniably a draw to Dan, those shades of Wharton and Isherwood, and he liked the silly things she did, like save up for Chanel eyebrow pencils and blow measly paychecks on French pastries or Italian Vogue.
How exactly she stumbled into acting, Dan was never quite sure, aside from a lifelong dedication to Audrey Hepburn taken to extremes. He thought maybe it was a reaction to being told that she couldn't do it. Once they got together, she told him a story about how she was going to model for her mother's clothing line but got replaced for being too stiff, and she ended up running to the competitor out of spite. Blair could never be told no. She'd always find a way to prove herself and then some.
This worked for the two of them, for a while. Blair could be stiff when she was acting, too prim and mannered, and Dan would push her buttons to try and startle her out of it because when that happened, she could be electric. He would be mean and argumentative. He would make her so angry her cheeks would splotch red enough to be seen through her overpriced foundation. But it worked. She'd be amazing.
They'd go back to their loft apartment afterwards and fight some more, get drunk, have sex. The good, rough kind that left them both with bruises and bites, so mellow afterwards that they could never even remember what they were fighting about.
It was the best time of Dan's life.
Blair takes to antagonizing him about the new play.
"A writer, an actress, a failed romance," she muses – in front of everyone, the whole cast and crew. She flips through her script carelessly. "Wonder where you got that idea."
Irritably, Dan says, "It's set in the twenties."
Blair arches an eyebrow. "Oh, okay. That makes it fiction then." The pug scrambles by (it has become a fixture of rehearsals) and she scoops it into her lap. "I hate to give the critics much weight – we all know how they can be – but it does seem a certain repetitiveness is plaguing your work, Brooklyn."
His jaw tightens. "Let's try to make it through a scene without digressions, how about that?"
"Okay." Blair's eyes are locked with his as she leans forward, red nails on his pages. "Let's try."
"You're such a cliché," she hisses backstage.
"Oh look who's fucking talking," Dan snaps.
Blair gives him a pointed up and down – which, okay, he's wearing a vest and a big knit scarf and a hat, but it's a valid look.
He frowns at her and lists off on his fingers, "Tiny dog, too much makeup, Botox, superiority complex, cringing assistant."
Blair glares at him. "Neckbeard, ostentatious fake glasses, black coffee that you do not even like to drink."
They stare at each other, furious, and this is the moment it would happen, in the past: this is when they would kiss, rip at each other's clothes, and fuck right here backstage without even a hint of courtesy to anyone else. But they can't do that now, so they just turn on their heels and stalk off.
They entire play hinges on Blair's character: she's protagonist, antagonist, anti-heroine, all at once. He wasn't lying when he said it was for her. He wrote it for her, and he wrote it to play to all her strengths and vanities.
So sometimes they end up alone at the theatre, the two of them, very late at night.
"Again," Dan sighs, before she's even finished speaking. Tonight they're working on her long monologue, her show-off moment. "Try to act this time, maybe."
Blair's tongue presses against her teeth as she fights rolling her eyes with everything in her. "Don't you get tired of being such a pain in the ass?"
"Do you?" he asks mildly.
She's in her version of casual tonight: a comfortable little dress, her hair tied back with a silk scarf. She kicked off her flats so she could tuck her bare legs underneath herself. She keeps a fluffy cushion on her folding chair now.
The dog (who is called Regina, which Dan maintains is hardly an appropriate name for a dog) has taken up her customary spot in Dan's lap. He's sort of powerless against dogs. Her happy, labored huffing is the only sound besides Dan's tapping pen, Blair's fidgeting.
"Maybe try getting up, walking around," he says. "You know…doing literally anything besides sitting still and disinterestedly reciting your lines."
"Maybe if the lines were interesting I'd be interested."
"Hey, if you don't want to be here, you don't have to," Dan says. "Your understudy can just take over. She's a lovely girl, that Penelope."
Blair's eyes narrow. "Fine," she snaps. "Let's do it again."
Sometimes Dan would go see her movies. There was the teen movie she was slightly too old for, the thing set in the sixties, the Wharton adaptation (technically a miniseries, which Dan watched from the comfort of his couch, somehow annoyed at her invading his living space in even that small way). And finally the Clara Bow biopic that at least partially inspired his current endeavor, though Fitzgeraldian delusions should not be discounted.
If he was honest, he'd say she's a better screen actress than a stage one.
Her large, luminous eyes, her expressive mouth: they need the camera right up close to be effective. The close-up was her best friend; it was the minute, subtle shifting of her face that was her best asset. Body language was always hard for her. They used to work on it for ages but she just didn't naturally know how to take up the stage, to use that big empty space to her advantage. Sometimes she'd go all Norma Desmond because she just didn't know what to do with herself. He hates to admit it even now but giving her up for the screen was the best thing for her.
He just wanted to keep her close, with him, and he hadn't been willing to compromise. So they'd split, just like that.
Late at night, again.
Blair sits on the edge of the stage with her legs hanging off – tonight it's heels with little ankle straps and a ruffled romper with an oversized sweater. "They get back together at the end," she points out.
"Uh-huh." Dan shuffles his papers and notes, looks busy. "I'm a romantic. Sue me."
Blair smiles a little. He isn't looking at her directly, so he only sees it in his peripheral vision, but he knows it's there. She's smiling. "Last time we saw each other, you weren't very romantic."
"Maybe sentimental's a better word." He finishes pointlessly putting his things in piles and looks up at her. "You ready?"
Blair doesn't answer right away, looking back at him. "Dan," she says.
He knows that tone of voice, soft and cajoling. "No," he says automatically. "Nope. No way."
Her smile stretches a little. "Come here."
"You gonna be nice to me when no one's around to see it?" Still, he finds himself standing, body unfolding from the cramped chair and drifting towards her.
"Yup," she says. "That's the only time I can be nice to you."
"It's fiction," he warns her. He's close enough now to touch her, fingers and palm slowly settling on her legs. Her stockings are just a little scratchy against his dry hands. "It's not about us."
Blair puts her hands on his jaw. "I'm not the one having trouble telling the difference."
The set, at least for the first half, is a bedroom, lived in and feminine. He and Blair have sex in a bedroom that is a copy of a bedroom that used to be hers. Dan takes the sheets home after to wash them and then arrives early the next day to put them back. He feels incredibly stupid.
Dan used to get a major kick out of Blair whenever she would try to do normal people things. He liked pretending to be exasperated when she had no idea how to clean a bathtub or fix a loose button. He liked showing her things like that; he's aware of what that says about him.
But she wasn't stupid and she wasn't helpless, just overly indulged and obstinate. She figured things out. She didn't need him – not that she ever really did. He just liked to be thought of as needed.
There are things it's impossible to forget about another person, and then there are things you don't mean to forget, but you do. Like the exact smell of Blair's shampoo, expensively fragranced and impossible to place until he smelled it again. It had slipped from him entirely. Maybe if he'd come face to face with it out there in the world in the last two years, it'd have stuck with him – but he hadn't and it hadn't, and so it's something of a shock to him to have missed such a detail. He doesn't even know what the brand is anymore.
Blair makes him stupid like that, makes him overly concerned with things that don't matter, makes him count each affection and stack it against the others. If she does this, does it mean she loves him? It must, right?
She won't come back to his and he won't go back to hers, so the affair goes on in the theatre. Sometimes on stage, which appeals to her, and sometimes in Dan's undersized but private office, which appeals to him. He finds a stray diamond earring caught in one of his notebooks once. He doesn't know what it means, in the grand scheme of things.
It's opening night and Dan is fussily micromanaging everyone backstage – until he sees Blair in the wings, watching surreptitiously through the curtains as the audience files in. She has the look of a young girl waiting for Christmas, excited and nervous.
"You'll be great," Dan says, studying her in her glittering flapper dress.
Blair glances over her shoulder, and her response is as genuine as it is flippant. "I know."
He steps up beside her so they can look out together. "You know," he reminds her, "it's fiction. It's not about us."
"Yeah, so I've heard," Blair says. "It's got a nice ending, though."
"You don't think it's sentimental?"
"I always liked happy endings." Her hand slips into his, her own in a long white glove. "So maybe I'm not the one to ask."
Dan squeezes her fingers. "Yeah," he says. "I always liked them too."
dan/blair. theatre au. 2383 words.
summary: Dan met Blair six years ago when she was the understudy for the lead girl in a play he was working on. "Sure, she's got star power," he remembers Blair saying. "But I've got talent." When that line showed up in the next play he wrote, Dan knew he was a goner.
note: for
corleones! I switched the last two prompts for ~creative reasons. hope no one minds! ao3 link.
"The thing is –" Dan has the phone between his ear and his shoulder as he fishes around in a container of leftover Chinese. His relaxed posture belies how serious this conversation really is, for him. "There's no one else who can do it. It's yours."
He can almost hear the smile in her voice. "Oh, is it?"
"You know it is." He sets the carton down, taking his phone in hand again. "I wrote it for you."
"That's not fair." Her voice has a laugh in it now, so he knows she's going to agree. Flattery always works for her. "You know those are the magic words."
Dan met Blair six years ago when she was the understudy for the lead girl in a play he was working on. "Sure, she's got star power," he remembers Blair saying. "But I've got talent."
When that line showed up in the next play he wrote, Dan knew he was a goner.
The Bedford Avenue Theatre used to be a movie palace back in the forties or fifties. It was purchased by Dan's father at the height of one-hit-wonder glory for a grossly low price and has been, at various times, a semi-functioning art gallery, a venue for bands, and (briefly) a used bookstore-coffee house hybrid. None of the attempts ever made much money, and when Dan took it over he remade it into a proper theatre and sank nearly all his money into it while doing so.
But it's a beautiful building: red velvet seats, a once-opulent ceiling of fading gold, and a proscenium arch like a gaudy frame. It beats the black boxes where Dan did his early stuff. And he likes the look of Blair in this place, all of her put-on glamour amongst the broken-down glitz. It's all very Tennessee Williams.
Blair flounces into the theatre on the first day of rehearsals with her customary melodrama, dressed in a big loungey capelet with her tiny black pug in her arms. An assistant follows.
Dan rolls his eyes. "Your adoring public isn't here today, Waldorf."
She smiles at him meanly as she drops into her folding chair. She sits in it like a throne. "Just be happy that I'm doing you this big favor."
She sets the dog on the floor and it immediately scurries off to investigate and probably pee on something important.
"Remember where you started," Dan reminds her.
Already it's beginning. The stagehands and assistants and other actors are all beginning to look at them like prime reality TV. They haven't worked together in two years – not since the breakup.
Blair arches a well-groomed eyebrow. "Remember where I ended up," she says.
They got together in the whirlwind following that second play, the first in a line of roles he would write specifically for her. It got him criticism as time went on, people saying he wrote the same role over and over: a kind of Zelda Fitzgerald meets Blanche Dubois in different disguises and scenarios. Dan can't help it. It just suits her.
Still, they did well enough together that she got a string of movie deals and a couple of awards. Dan got attention too, but it was always a big fight between them: that his ambition wasn't greater than his need to maintain a certain indie image. He refused to leave his Brooklyn roots for big-budget success. She wanted more. She always wanted more.
Dan found he couldn't give it to her.
Blair had a literary background, in that her life was the stuff of turn of the century novellas. She grew up a spoiled heiress but her family lost half their fortune thanks to the messy end of her first marriage – to a Monégasque prince, no less. That was undeniably a draw to Dan, those shades of Wharton and Isherwood, and he liked the silly things she did, like save up for Chanel eyebrow pencils and blow measly paychecks on French pastries or Italian Vogue.
How exactly she stumbled into acting, Dan was never quite sure, aside from a lifelong dedication to Audrey Hepburn taken to extremes. He thought maybe it was a reaction to being told that she couldn't do it. Once they got together, she told him a story about how she was going to model for her mother's clothing line but got replaced for being too stiff, and she ended up running to the competitor out of spite. Blair could never be told no. She'd always find a way to prove herself and then some.
This worked for the two of them, for a while. Blair could be stiff when she was acting, too prim and mannered, and Dan would push her buttons to try and startle her out of it because when that happened, she could be electric. He would be mean and argumentative. He would make her so angry her cheeks would splotch red enough to be seen through her overpriced foundation. But it worked. She'd be amazing.
They'd go back to their loft apartment afterwards and fight some more, get drunk, have sex. The good, rough kind that left them both with bruises and bites, so mellow afterwards that they could never even remember what they were fighting about.
It was the best time of Dan's life.
Blair takes to antagonizing him about the new play.
"A writer, an actress, a failed romance," she muses – in front of everyone, the whole cast and crew. She flips through her script carelessly. "Wonder where you got that idea."
Irritably, Dan says, "It's set in the twenties."
Blair arches an eyebrow. "Oh, okay. That makes it fiction then." The pug scrambles by (it has become a fixture of rehearsals) and she scoops it into her lap. "I hate to give the critics much weight – we all know how they can be – but it does seem a certain repetitiveness is plaguing your work, Brooklyn."
His jaw tightens. "Let's try to make it through a scene without digressions, how about that?"
"Okay." Blair's eyes are locked with his as she leans forward, red nails on his pages. "Let's try."
"You're such a cliché," she hisses backstage.
"Oh look who's fucking talking," Dan snaps.
Blair gives him a pointed up and down – which, okay, he's wearing a vest and a big knit scarf and a hat, but it's a valid look.
He frowns at her and lists off on his fingers, "Tiny dog, too much makeup, Botox, superiority complex, cringing assistant."
Blair glares at him. "Neckbeard, ostentatious fake glasses, black coffee that you do not even like to drink."
They stare at each other, furious, and this is the moment it would happen, in the past: this is when they would kiss, rip at each other's clothes, and fuck right here backstage without even a hint of courtesy to anyone else. But they can't do that now, so they just turn on their heels and stalk off.
They entire play hinges on Blair's character: she's protagonist, antagonist, anti-heroine, all at once. He wasn't lying when he said it was for her. He wrote it for her, and he wrote it to play to all her strengths and vanities.
So sometimes they end up alone at the theatre, the two of them, very late at night.
"Again," Dan sighs, before she's even finished speaking. Tonight they're working on her long monologue, her show-off moment. "Try to act this time, maybe."
Blair's tongue presses against her teeth as she fights rolling her eyes with everything in her. "Don't you get tired of being such a pain in the ass?"
"Do you?" he asks mildly.
She's in her version of casual tonight: a comfortable little dress, her hair tied back with a silk scarf. She kicked off her flats so she could tuck her bare legs underneath herself. She keeps a fluffy cushion on her folding chair now.
The dog (who is called Regina, which Dan maintains is hardly an appropriate name for a dog) has taken up her customary spot in Dan's lap. He's sort of powerless against dogs. Her happy, labored huffing is the only sound besides Dan's tapping pen, Blair's fidgeting.
"Maybe try getting up, walking around," he says. "You know…doing literally anything besides sitting still and disinterestedly reciting your lines."
"Maybe if the lines were interesting I'd be interested."
"Hey, if you don't want to be here, you don't have to," Dan says. "Your understudy can just take over. She's a lovely girl, that Penelope."
Blair's eyes narrow. "Fine," she snaps. "Let's do it again."
Sometimes Dan would go see her movies. There was the teen movie she was slightly too old for, the thing set in the sixties, the Wharton adaptation (technically a miniseries, which Dan watched from the comfort of his couch, somehow annoyed at her invading his living space in even that small way). And finally the Clara Bow biopic that at least partially inspired his current endeavor, though Fitzgeraldian delusions should not be discounted.
If he was honest, he'd say she's a better screen actress than a stage one.
Her large, luminous eyes, her expressive mouth: they need the camera right up close to be effective. The close-up was her best friend; it was the minute, subtle shifting of her face that was her best asset. Body language was always hard for her. They used to work on it for ages but she just didn't naturally know how to take up the stage, to use that big empty space to her advantage. Sometimes she'd go all Norma Desmond because she just didn't know what to do with herself. He hates to admit it even now but giving her up for the screen was the best thing for her.
He just wanted to keep her close, with him, and he hadn't been willing to compromise. So they'd split, just like that.
Late at night, again.
Blair sits on the edge of the stage with her legs hanging off – tonight it's heels with little ankle straps and a ruffled romper with an oversized sweater. "They get back together at the end," she points out.
"Uh-huh." Dan shuffles his papers and notes, looks busy. "I'm a romantic. Sue me."
Blair smiles a little. He isn't looking at her directly, so he only sees it in his peripheral vision, but he knows it's there. She's smiling. "Last time we saw each other, you weren't very romantic."
"Maybe sentimental's a better word." He finishes pointlessly putting his things in piles and looks up at her. "You ready?"
Blair doesn't answer right away, looking back at him. "Dan," she says.
He knows that tone of voice, soft and cajoling. "No," he says automatically. "Nope. No way."
Her smile stretches a little. "Come here."
"You gonna be nice to me when no one's around to see it?" Still, he finds himself standing, body unfolding from the cramped chair and drifting towards her.
"Yup," she says. "That's the only time I can be nice to you."
"It's fiction," he warns her. He's close enough now to touch her, fingers and palm slowly settling on her legs. Her stockings are just a little scratchy against his dry hands. "It's not about us."
Blair puts her hands on his jaw. "I'm not the one having trouble telling the difference."
The set, at least for the first half, is a bedroom, lived in and feminine. He and Blair have sex in a bedroom that is a copy of a bedroom that used to be hers. Dan takes the sheets home after to wash them and then arrives early the next day to put them back. He feels incredibly stupid.
Dan used to get a major kick out of Blair whenever she would try to do normal people things. He liked pretending to be exasperated when she had no idea how to clean a bathtub or fix a loose button. He liked showing her things like that; he's aware of what that says about him.
But she wasn't stupid and she wasn't helpless, just overly indulged and obstinate. She figured things out. She didn't need him – not that she ever really did. He just liked to be thought of as needed.
There are things it's impossible to forget about another person, and then there are things you don't mean to forget, but you do. Like the exact smell of Blair's shampoo, expensively fragranced and impossible to place until he smelled it again. It had slipped from him entirely. Maybe if he'd come face to face with it out there in the world in the last two years, it'd have stuck with him – but he hadn't and it hadn't, and so it's something of a shock to him to have missed such a detail. He doesn't even know what the brand is anymore.
Blair makes him stupid like that, makes him overly concerned with things that don't matter, makes him count each affection and stack it against the others. If she does this, does it mean she loves him? It must, right?
She won't come back to his and he won't go back to hers, so the affair goes on in the theatre. Sometimes on stage, which appeals to her, and sometimes in Dan's undersized but private office, which appeals to him. He finds a stray diamond earring caught in one of his notebooks once. He doesn't know what it means, in the grand scheme of things.
It's opening night and Dan is fussily micromanaging everyone backstage – until he sees Blair in the wings, watching surreptitiously through the curtains as the audience files in. She has the look of a young girl waiting for Christmas, excited and nervous.
"You'll be great," Dan says, studying her in her glittering flapper dress.
Blair glances over her shoulder, and her response is as genuine as it is flippant. "I know."
He steps up beside her so they can look out together. "You know," he reminds her, "it's fiction. It's not about us."
"Yeah, so I've heard," Blair says. "It's got a nice ending, though."
"You don't think it's sentimental?"
"I always liked happy endings." Her hand slips into his, her own in a long white glove. "So maybe I'm not the one to ask."
Dan squeezes her fingers. "Yeah," he says. "I always liked them too."