holiday teaser: tell me something true

The fic that I am supposed to post today is definitely not going to be posted today – both a good and a bad thing. Bad because I really wanted to finish all my prompts this month and tbh I'm disappointed in myself! But good because it needs a little more time and care than I can spare at the mo, so it'll probably end up a little longer. But since I have about a third of it written so far, I thought I'd post a teaser. That's got to be less disappointing, right? Right.

So, for lookinglassgirl, love you mucho, here is a snippet of a fic that you will be receiving – a la your prompt, a kind of My Fair Lady/Selfie pastiche with a bit of Drive Me Crazy thrown in for good measure. Set in a s1 that only barely resembles our own.



Blair ran into him in the library a few times after that. Not that she spoke to him – hardly. But she would see him, sitting alone a couple tables away. Once their eyes met and he nodded, curt and perfunctory.

She had no idea who he was, that he was even in her grade, until she happened to catch him filing out of a classroom after Nate one day. Not that she was looking for Nate or anything. She couldn't control every single thing her gaze happened to fall on.

Their schools were not large schools, so it was strange for her to not recognize someone in her grade. The library guy could be a transfer, but then it would be even stranger for her to not have heard of him. It was all highly suspicious.

"You know," she said in the library one lunch period, "I wasn't crying. The other day."

He looked up from his book, startled. "Okay?"

"I had something in my eye," she said. "Just to clarify."

He nodded and they returned to their books. Then he said, "You know my sister, I think. Jenny?"

Blair blinked; Jenny had a brother? She looked over at him again, this time searching for similarities, and found very few. Maybe around the mouth. "Ah. Right. Jenny Humphrey."

Jenny, to her credit, had tried to stick around post-fallout but Blair wasn't interested in charity case friendships.

"She feels really – uh, well, she likes you a lot, and I don't think she necessarily agrees with, uh, everything," he said. "She doesn't think that –"

"That I'm a big slut who got what's coming to her?" Blair said bluntly. She liked to say things very bluntly occasionally, if only to get ahead of other people saying them instead. "Well, she's the only one."

"I'm sure that's not true," he said.

Blair raised an eyebrow. "Really? Then why am I sitting all alone in the library with –"

She had no idea what his name was. He supplied, "Dan."

"With Jenny Humphrey's brother," Blair continued. "Everyone thinks I'm awful. And maybe I am. I cheated on Nate. I did it specifically to make him feel bad, as revenge. And it isn't like I'm a stranger to things like that. There was this girl, Lane Macy, who scored higher than me on last year's history final, so I had the girls serve her a Nairtini at Isabel Coates' pool party. That's not a normal thing to do, right? I do things like that all the time. The girls were just putting up with me. And now they don't have to."

He was quiet like he didn't know what to say. "Have you ever tried being nicer?"

Blair rolled her eyes, now stupidly wet. "Gee, never would have thought of that."

With the kind of good humor often reserved for people about to cry, he said, "C'mon, give it a shot. Say something nice to me."

She had no idea what kind of nice thing one said to a stranger. She wrinkled her nose. "Your clothes are rumpled and your blazer is ill-fitting."

He stared at her. "That is actually the opposite of what you were supposed to do."

"Well I'm not very good at this!" she exclaimed.

"Obviously."

"I just don't know how." Blair slumped in her chair a little, arms crossing. "This is stupid."

"Hey, it's not so bad on this side of the fence," Dan tried. "Quiet. No one bothers you. It's like you're invisible. You just have to get used to birds flying into your head and automatic doors never opening."

Blair refused to crack a smile.

"Oh, what do you know," she huffed, and was luckily rescued by the ringing of the bell. For once she was eager to go back to class.





The idea came to her sometime between the end of that day and the beginning of the next one. It was a little crazy, but the best plans always were.

In the library, she sat directly next to Dan.

"Nobody likes me," Blair said. She felt a twinge of hurt at the words, but there was really no use dancing around it at this point.

Dan didn't seem to understand where she was going with that, exactly. He tried commiseration. "Nobody knows me."

She had researched him a little bit in the interim between idea-having and plan-executing. "I do, now," she said, and off his look, "I like to keep an eye out for academic rivals. You're in the top five at St. Jude's."

He contemplated her with very faint suspicion. "Top three."

Blair pressed her lips together to prevent a smile. "Look, I need an image overhaul. Image rehabilitation, if you will. And you need relevancy. Desperately."

Amused, Dan asked, "Oh, do I?"

"Don't tell me you like hiding out here every day. You just do it because you don't have any other options."

"Please, stranger, tell me more about my life and what I need."

Blair ignored him. "You can help me, okay, and I can help you. A mutually beneficial arrangement. Symbiotic."

His brow furrowed. "What are you talking about?"

And Blair told him.