send you my love on a wire
Blair/Dan. Also Jenny, Serena, Vanessa.
2991 words. 90s musician au.
summary: Blair craves cameras long before she figures out what to do in front of them. To go from unremarkable to poreless, polished, perfect – it's something Blair quickly becomes addicted to.
note: for Maja! A very belated birthday gift. Title inspired by Envy Adams, because she is v. important to my interpretation of Pop Star Blair, and the one lyric quoted in the fic is from Josie and the Pussycats, also of great importance. Last fic in this series, for real this time.
Blair craves cameras long before she figures out what to do in front of them.
It starts when she's little, her mother pinning her up in swathes of luxurious fabric before trotting those same glamorous designs in front of investors, translated from Blair's miniature size to the long, lean form of a model. It hurts. It's embarrassing. Blair is stuck with pins, critiqued, dismissed. But the act of transformation blitzes all of that out in the blink of one glittering eye. To go from unremarkable to poreless, polished, perfect – it's something Blair quickly becomes addicted to.
She does commercials for a while. Tamagotchis, toys, dollhouses. Skincare when she gets older – Clearasil, Neutrogena. Someone sees her and likes the way she looks, figures out she can hold a tune, and that's that. It's all singing along to pre-recorded tracks and trying to make her limbs learn choreography and working, working hard all day and all night, turning her body into the most important cog in a well-functioning machine. Blair is the best of the best. She didn't get that way by accident.
Then Serena happens.
Serena is discovered on a talent show but it's not because of her talent – it's the way she smiles, the way she tosses her hair, the body that blossomed ahead of itself. It's nothing that can be practiced or taught, and Blair tries. She studies herself in the mirror and attempts to recreate that shining, easy coolness but everything about her is too forced, too practiced, too purposeful. She had worked hard to make it that way but now it's no good. She's a relic before she ever really became relevant and everyone she knows is dyeing their hair blonde.
Blair needs new.
She sees the sister first, before she knows Jenny Humphrey is anybody's sister. Tall and gangly with her long ice-white hair and rough, soulful voice, she's like the Anti-Serena, Bizarro Serena, all substance instead of none. Blair looks at her like an equation, a sum made up of parts, and she knows immediately which parts she can use.
Blair goes to one of Jenny's shows with the intention of talking her up backstage after and that's where she first sees him. He's the opening act, standing awkwardly on stage in the middle of a spotlight that makes his cheekbones straight and sharp as a ruler's edge. His hair is too long, thick and curly and flat in the wrong spots, hanging in his eyes; if you didn't look past it you might not even notice his face.
"Uh," he says. "The band doesn't really have a name. I'm Dan."
His body seems to wrap around the mic, his shoulders hunching in and face tilting just so, eyes closing and lips parting. It feels personal. It's hot. Blair thinks with the right image, something really could be done with him.
She doesn't get to meet Jenny that first night, so she has her people set up a meeting with Jenny's people. Jenny flakes on it so Blair swans in on one of her recording sessions dressed in a pink tulle dress with a black spiked headband, to fit in. Jenny eyes her up and down before bringing a cigarette to her smudged oxblood lips. "I'm not giving you songs."
"I'm telling," Blair says, eyebrow arching, white shimmer on her skin catching the low light. "Not asking."
Jenny meets her eyes straight on like a challenge and that's how Blair knows not to back down, because Jenny wouldn't if she was where Blair is right now. Asking for a favor but trying to act like she's far above it.
"More flies with honey," someone says, and when Blair's gaze slides over she sees it's him, Dan. She met him once. It was forgettable.
She thinks of his voice, low and difficult to decipher, a mystery that had more than half the crowd hooked. "You write?"
"I write," he says. "But not for you."
Blair smiles at him, shark-like.
Blair is out with her girls in tow, making an appearance at a club that pays her to get photographed there with her hair just the right side of tousled and her lipstick still in place. Blair is not to get messy drunk, not ever, she is to maintain her image as a sweet, relatable good girl – but one who can have fun too, who can inspire jealousy in eleven year old girls sighing over her pictures in magazines. It's a fine line. Blair has become very good at looking less drunk than she is.
Tonight she's dressed in a beige satin micromini, with Kati and Iz done up in silver and blue variations. They have stars drawn on their cheeks and pinned into their crimped hair. Blair's eyelashes are so long they touch her brow bone when she looks up. The music is loud enough to drown in, but there's another song stuck in Blair's head that she can't stop humming. Kati asks what it is, shouting over the music. Blair tells her the band doesn't have a name.
She goes into the bathroom for five minutes of privacy, the kind of privacy that means being packed in with fifteen other sparkling drunk girls while they choke on perfume and fight over two stalls. Tonight it's more crowded than usual somehow and Blair is irritated, fighting her way to the head of the pack before she realizes that the shouting and crying and panic isn't the usual drunk nonsense.
"Did someone call an ambulance?" shrieks a girl with spiky red hair. "She's not waking up!"
It's Serena sprawled on the dirty tiled floor in a gold metallic minidress, unconscious with blood smeared on her upper lip, but her hair is still shining, her skin still gleaming.
She survives. Not everyone can be so lucky.
Dan sends her a song, a tape of his voice scratching out words for her against an acoustic background. It sounds wrong but right at the same time; halfway through she realizes he doesn't know her at all, but he's not wrong about her either. He's singing in what he thinks is her voice – the voice that someone chose for her after seeing her splash her face in an ad for foaming cleanser. With the right molding, it could work. Can't you just, he sings, an artsy boy's attempt at accessing the depth of her girlish pop pain, pretend to be nice?
She makes him rewrite the bridge, but she records it. It's a hit.
"Are we friends?" he asks once.
"I'm not friends with people who wear flannel," Blair says definitively.
The engagement deal has been in the works for six months already. The label had set Blair up with the band, All 4 U, but she'd been allowed to choose any of the boys in the lineup as her future special someone. She settled on Nate, the sweetest and the prettiest of them, who had once made small talk with her during cocktail hour at an event. She likes him and they look good together, so it was an easy choice; he's also dating his skeezy manager, a guy named Carter Baizen, and Blair likes feeling as though she's doing him a real favor with this whole deal. Like that makes it mean something.
The ring is a pink heart-shaped diamond that looks like someone won it in a claw game at an arcade. Blair and Nate go everywhere arm-in-arm for a while and after they're done with photo ops, Blair lets Dan Humphrey drink her under the table.
The night she gets engaged, she leaves Nate in the arms of his manager and takes off laughing with her bottle of champagne in the back of a towncar. She goes home and changes out of her sexy little dress and into silky pajamas, laughing her way to the bottom of the bottle. She's just wondering what to crack open next when Dan appears at her door like she summoned him, a bottle under one arm and a record under the other. The Smiths. Of fucking course.
"What year do you think this is? I don't have a record player. Let's do shots."
She puts on the Cardigans while they slingshot the tequila he brought with him. It bubbles pleasant-unpleasant in her stomach when it hits the champagne but when Dan kisses her she doesn't think the feeling in her stomach has anything to do with alcohol.
It'll probably be bad for business, but she takes him to bed anyway.
"Do you like doing this?" he wonders. His fingers are stroking up and down her back, watching her with his usual shuttered, solemn expression. "Honestly. Does this whole thing work for you?"
She's sitting in his bed, her back to him, brushing her hair. She came straight from a photoshoot and she's leaving the evidence all over him, glitter like a brand. Blair likes that. "Depends which part you mean."
"The music. Do you at least enjoy the music?"
She thinks of his father, of whom he never speaks. "Do you?"
"More than I'd enjoy being without it." His fingertips seem to pluck out chords on the bumps of her spine.
"I enjoy what it gets me," Blair tells him, which has always been true. She makes the deals, she trades for what she wants; she gives up this and that of herself to get the cameras, the looks, the longing, the fame. It's a deal Blair has never thought twice about making.
Later, after, he has the shine of her iridescent lipgloss on his mouth when he tells her, "Your problem is that you pretend to be nice. You're not. You're dangerous."
Blair has never thought of herself as such. "Haven't you heard?" she teases, nudging her mouth against his again. "I'm a good girl. I'm the best."
But Dan shakes his head even as his lips part to kiss her back. "No." He touches her mouth, her cheek. "Poison in the sugar."
Dan goes on tour for six months. "Will you miss me?" he asks, and Blair doesn't want to lie so she kisses him instead, a tender press of lips to his pale shoulder.
Six months feels like an awfully long time.
This thing, whatever it is – sex, music, the crosshairs where both meet – has been going on for weeks now. Weeks of making eyes at parties and sneaking off and bedding down; weeks of Blair letting him get under her skin even though she tries not to, even though she shouldn't be doing anything of the sort. He knocks and she lets him in; she doesn't know how to stop.
"The papers are starting to pick it up," her manager (formerly her mother, now another distant middle-aged woman whom Blair can freely project her mommy issues onto) tells her. "Either lose it or use it."
Those are words Blair has come to live by, and she doesn't want to do one so she decides to do the other.
The shift in her image is not as difficult as Blair expects, but the smoothness of the transition comes from months of planning and strategizing, firing and hiring stylists, letting the right outlet have the right story. She starts to phase out her little girl dresses for slinkier, more elegant styles; at first she keeps them in her traditional candy colors but then even that starts to fade. Seventeen does a whole feature on the evolution of her style, her new maturity. Tulle and cotton is replaced with vinyl and knit, sugary blues and lavenders give over to deep cranberries and charcoal greys. She drops curls and glitter for a blunt cut and bangs. She ditches the bows and headbands.
She's photographed with the right people; Dan helps with that. She starts building up her next album, performing acoustic sets, letting people hear her voice even when it wavers. Polished no longer works. Carefully cultivated imperfection is the new thing.
Dan, far away on the phone, laughs at her with a voice that sounds strained. She knows it's not about her. She's not the only one in magazines. "Never met something you couldn't sell, could you? Prettiest sell-out I know."
"Oh please, how much did those jeans with the holes in them cost? What's this I hear about you doing a Gap ad?"
"I turned them down!" Dan protests.
"Yes, but do you think you would have gotten the offer if it didn't look good for them? You're in the stratosphere, Humphrey, pretend otherwise if you must."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, pop star," he grumbles. "Sing me another one."
Serena goes to rehab. Everyone waits with bated breath to see if it will last.
Dan is back in time for the album launch and Blair makes sure to get him invited to the party. His name is in her liner notes, D. Humphrey under at least three of the songs. Jenny ultimately got more on the album but Dan's are the songs Blair likes the best, secretly; they're the ones that make her feel something, prickling along her skin and buzzing around her brain. She hums them over her morning coffee. She sings them in the shower.
He's skittish like he's been lately and she sees him lurking at the bar more than she sees him anywhere else. Blair pretends to ignore him and smiles so hard her teeth might crack with it, posing in front of the blown-up cover of her album with a coquettish smirk. Her face looks back at her from a million posters: pale and perfect against a bright pink background, hand smearing her lipstick. It's the middle ground, the transition. The Blair she was and the Blair she's going to be.
She wants Dan to see it, but he's just looking at the bottom of his glass.
Vanessa finds her at the end of the night, demanding answers to questions Blair still refuses to ask.
"You see him," Vanessa says angrily. "You see what he's like now. He's in a bad place."
"I'm not his girlfriend," Blair snaps. "I'm not his sister or his friend or his mother."
Vanessa looks at Blair with a thousand expectations. "Well for whatever reason, he thinks you're important. So maybe you could do something decent with that."
Blair dismisses it. "Everybody drinks. Everyone goes out. It's not a big deal."
Vanessa's jaw is one tensed line and she shakes her head like she's never met someone so heartless in her life.
Jenny's at her too. "He's a mess. Everyone knows he's in love with you."
"He's a big boy, he can take care of himself," Blair says, feeling defensive but not for herself.
"He's not someone you can just use and throw away," Jenny says, angry. She must've been talking to Vanessa.
Blair would freely admit to using him though she's not sure where anyone got the impression that there was an expiration date on it. She uses Dan for his insight and his sensitivity and the thing in him that is ruthlessly real. If he wants to give that to her then she is allowed to have it.
He calls early one morning when Blair's beauty sleep has not been enough to crush the exhaustion from her eyes. "Can you come somewhere with me?"
"Where?" she demands crossly. "Might I remind you, Humphrey, that Sunday is God's day of rest, so you better have a really good reason for –"
He tells her and Blair falls quiet and then she says, "Pick me up in an hour."
They go to his father's house, but his father is long gone from it. Blair hates the look on his face when they wait for excruciating minutes on that unanswered doorstep, the way he seems to collapse on himself, crumbling.
"Never again," Dan says, over and over. "Never again."
Blair has never met Rufus Humphrey but she feels vicious towards him, hauling Dan back to the car with just two words on her furious lips. Fuck him.
She breaks up the engagement with Nate the next day. The papers go wild.
Blair has to tour for the new album and it's important because her new image is far from cemented, plus Serena's post-rehab vegan hippie antics are starting to pull focus. Blair thinks about how the last time she spent months away from Dan she found him a worn-out boozed-up mess and she sets her shoulders, demands he come along.
On tour she tries to fill up his time with tasks. She makes him teach her guitar. She makes him practice their set for hours. She's the very picture of a diva, changing songs last minute, altering rehearsal hours without letting him know ahead of time. She wants to keep him on edge so he's too busy trying to keep up with her to drink, but he does anyway. He finds a way.
Blair's secret is that she's always had stage fright, which is why it was always easier to pretend she was someone else. Cutesy good girl. Hardworking starlet. Bitch with a heart of – well, some precious metal. Having someone up there with her is better and worse; it's like she can't help being herself because if she's not, Dan will call her on it. But because Dan is there she can let herself relax, at least a little. If she stumbles he'll cover for her.
Blair starts writing songs, which she has never done before. Somehow, they're not hers, not exactly; she's writing in what she thinks is his voice, the one she's spent so long listening to that she no longer knows what to do without it. It's obnoxious. The songs are hers, but she's writing them for him.
She gives them to him and Dan gives him back, songs made personal and painful by his voice, honest and true in a way Blair can never be without cringing. But he gives that to her, so she takes it.
Blair/Dan. Also Jenny, Serena, Vanessa.
2991 words. 90s musician au.
summary: Blair craves cameras long before she figures out what to do in front of them. To go from unremarkable to poreless, polished, perfect – it's something Blair quickly becomes addicted to.
note: for Maja! A very belated birthday gift. Title inspired by Envy Adams, because she is v. important to my interpretation of Pop Star Blair, and the one lyric quoted in the fic is from Josie and the Pussycats, also of great importance. Last fic in this series, for real this time.
Blair craves cameras long before she figures out what to do in front of them.
It starts when she's little, her mother pinning her up in swathes of luxurious fabric before trotting those same glamorous designs in front of investors, translated from Blair's miniature size to the long, lean form of a model. It hurts. It's embarrassing. Blair is stuck with pins, critiqued, dismissed. But the act of transformation blitzes all of that out in the blink of one glittering eye. To go from unremarkable to poreless, polished, perfect – it's something Blair quickly becomes addicted to.
She does commercials for a while. Tamagotchis, toys, dollhouses. Skincare when she gets older – Clearasil, Neutrogena. Someone sees her and likes the way she looks, figures out she can hold a tune, and that's that. It's all singing along to pre-recorded tracks and trying to make her limbs learn choreography and working, working hard all day and all night, turning her body into the most important cog in a well-functioning machine. Blair is the best of the best. She didn't get that way by accident.
Then Serena happens.
Serena is discovered on a talent show but it's not because of her talent – it's the way she smiles, the way she tosses her hair, the body that blossomed ahead of itself. It's nothing that can be practiced or taught, and Blair tries. She studies herself in the mirror and attempts to recreate that shining, easy coolness but everything about her is too forced, too practiced, too purposeful. She had worked hard to make it that way but now it's no good. She's a relic before she ever really became relevant and everyone she knows is dyeing their hair blonde.
Blair needs new.
She sees the sister first, before she knows Jenny Humphrey is anybody's sister. Tall and gangly with her long ice-white hair and rough, soulful voice, she's like the Anti-Serena, Bizarro Serena, all substance instead of none. Blair looks at her like an equation, a sum made up of parts, and she knows immediately which parts she can use.
Blair goes to one of Jenny's shows with the intention of talking her up backstage after and that's where she first sees him. He's the opening act, standing awkwardly on stage in the middle of a spotlight that makes his cheekbones straight and sharp as a ruler's edge. His hair is too long, thick and curly and flat in the wrong spots, hanging in his eyes; if you didn't look past it you might not even notice his face.
"Uh," he says. "The band doesn't really have a name. I'm Dan."
His body seems to wrap around the mic, his shoulders hunching in and face tilting just so, eyes closing and lips parting. It feels personal. It's hot. Blair thinks with the right image, something really could be done with him.
She doesn't get to meet Jenny that first night, so she has her people set up a meeting with Jenny's people. Jenny flakes on it so Blair swans in on one of her recording sessions dressed in a pink tulle dress with a black spiked headband, to fit in. Jenny eyes her up and down before bringing a cigarette to her smudged oxblood lips. "I'm not giving you songs."
"I'm telling," Blair says, eyebrow arching, white shimmer on her skin catching the low light. "Not asking."
Jenny meets her eyes straight on like a challenge and that's how Blair knows not to back down, because Jenny wouldn't if she was where Blair is right now. Asking for a favor but trying to act like she's far above it.
"More flies with honey," someone says, and when Blair's gaze slides over she sees it's him, Dan. She met him once. It was forgettable.
She thinks of his voice, low and difficult to decipher, a mystery that had more than half the crowd hooked. "You write?"
"I write," he says. "But not for you."
Blair smiles at him, shark-like.
Blair is out with her girls in tow, making an appearance at a club that pays her to get photographed there with her hair just the right side of tousled and her lipstick still in place. Blair is not to get messy drunk, not ever, she is to maintain her image as a sweet, relatable good girl – but one who can have fun too, who can inspire jealousy in eleven year old girls sighing over her pictures in magazines. It's a fine line. Blair has become very good at looking less drunk than she is.
Tonight she's dressed in a beige satin micromini, with Kati and Iz done up in silver and blue variations. They have stars drawn on their cheeks and pinned into their crimped hair. Blair's eyelashes are so long they touch her brow bone when she looks up. The music is loud enough to drown in, but there's another song stuck in Blair's head that she can't stop humming. Kati asks what it is, shouting over the music. Blair tells her the band doesn't have a name.
She goes into the bathroom for five minutes of privacy, the kind of privacy that means being packed in with fifteen other sparkling drunk girls while they choke on perfume and fight over two stalls. Tonight it's more crowded than usual somehow and Blair is irritated, fighting her way to the head of the pack before she realizes that the shouting and crying and panic isn't the usual drunk nonsense.
"Did someone call an ambulance?" shrieks a girl with spiky red hair. "She's not waking up!"
It's Serena sprawled on the dirty tiled floor in a gold metallic minidress, unconscious with blood smeared on her upper lip, but her hair is still shining, her skin still gleaming.
She survives. Not everyone can be so lucky.
Dan sends her a song, a tape of his voice scratching out words for her against an acoustic background. It sounds wrong but right at the same time; halfway through she realizes he doesn't know her at all, but he's not wrong about her either. He's singing in what he thinks is her voice – the voice that someone chose for her after seeing her splash her face in an ad for foaming cleanser. With the right molding, it could work. Can't you just, he sings, an artsy boy's attempt at accessing the depth of her girlish pop pain, pretend to be nice?
She makes him rewrite the bridge, but she records it. It's a hit.
"Are we friends?" he asks once.
"I'm not friends with people who wear flannel," Blair says definitively.
The engagement deal has been in the works for six months already. The label had set Blair up with the band, All 4 U, but she'd been allowed to choose any of the boys in the lineup as her future special someone. She settled on Nate, the sweetest and the prettiest of them, who had once made small talk with her during cocktail hour at an event. She likes him and they look good together, so it was an easy choice; he's also dating his skeezy manager, a guy named Carter Baizen, and Blair likes feeling as though she's doing him a real favor with this whole deal. Like that makes it mean something.
The ring is a pink heart-shaped diamond that looks like someone won it in a claw game at an arcade. Blair and Nate go everywhere arm-in-arm for a while and after they're done with photo ops, Blair lets Dan Humphrey drink her under the table.
The night she gets engaged, she leaves Nate in the arms of his manager and takes off laughing with her bottle of champagne in the back of a towncar. She goes home and changes out of her sexy little dress and into silky pajamas, laughing her way to the bottom of the bottle. She's just wondering what to crack open next when Dan appears at her door like she summoned him, a bottle under one arm and a record under the other. The Smiths. Of fucking course.
"What year do you think this is? I don't have a record player. Let's do shots."
She puts on the Cardigans while they slingshot the tequila he brought with him. It bubbles pleasant-unpleasant in her stomach when it hits the champagne but when Dan kisses her she doesn't think the feeling in her stomach has anything to do with alcohol.
It'll probably be bad for business, but she takes him to bed anyway.
"Do you like doing this?" he wonders. His fingers are stroking up and down her back, watching her with his usual shuttered, solemn expression. "Honestly. Does this whole thing work for you?"
She's sitting in his bed, her back to him, brushing her hair. She came straight from a photoshoot and she's leaving the evidence all over him, glitter like a brand. Blair likes that. "Depends which part you mean."
"The music. Do you at least enjoy the music?"
She thinks of his father, of whom he never speaks. "Do you?"
"More than I'd enjoy being without it." His fingertips seem to pluck out chords on the bumps of her spine.
"I enjoy what it gets me," Blair tells him, which has always been true. She makes the deals, she trades for what she wants; she gives up this and that of herself to get the cameras, the looks, the longing, the fame. It's a deal Blair has never thought twice about making.
Later, after, he has the shine of her iridescent lipgloss on his mouth when he tells her, "Your problem is that you pretend to be nice. You're not. You're dangerous."
Blair has never thought of herself as such. "Haven't you heard?" she teases, nudging her mouth against his again. "I'm a good girl. I'm the best."
But Dan shakes his head even as his lips part to kiss her back. "No." He touches her mouth, her cheek. "Poison in the sugar."
Dan goes on tour for six months. "Will you miss me?" he asks, and Blair doesn't want to lie so she kisses him instead, a tender press of lips to his pale shoulder.
Six months feels like an awfully long time.
This thing, whatever it is – sex, music, the crosshairs where both meet – has been going on for weeks now. Weeks of making eyes at parties and sneaking off and bedding down; weeks of Blair letting him get under her skin even though she tries not to, even though she shouldn't be doing anything of the sort. He knocks and she lets him in; she doesn't know how to stop.
"The papers are starting to pick it up," her manager (formerly her mother, now another distant middle-aged woman whom Blair can freely project her mommy issues onto) tells her. "Either lose it or use it."
Those are words Blair has come to live by, and she doesn't want to do one so she decides to do the other.
The shift in her image is not as difficult as Blair expects, but the smoothness of the transition comes from months of planning and strategizing, firing and hiring stylists, letting the right outlet have the right story. She starts to phase out her little girl dresses for slinkier, more elegant styles; at first she keeps them in her traditional candy colors but then even that starts to fade. Seventeen does a whole feature on the evolution of her style, her new maturity. Tulle and cotton is replaced with vinyl and knit, sugary blues and lavenders give over to deep cranberries and charcoal greys. She drops curls and glitter for a blunt cut and bangs. She ditches the bows and headbands.
She's photographed with the right people; Dan helps with that. She starts building up her next album, performing acoustic sets, letting people hear her voice even when it wavers. Polished no longer works. Carefully cultivated imperfection is the new thing.
Dan, far away on the phone, laughs at her with a voice that sounds strained. She knows it's not about her. She's not the only one in magazines. "Never met something you couldn't sell, could you? Prettiest sell-out I know."
"Oh please, how much did those jeans with the holes in them cost? What's this I hear about you doing a Gap ad?"
"I turned them down!" Dan protests.
"Yes, but do you think you would have gotten the offer if it didn't look good for them? You're in the stratosphere, Humphrey, pretend otherwise if you must."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, pop star," he grumbles. "Sing me another one."
Serena goes to rehab. Everyone waits with bated breath to see if it will last.
Dan is back in time for the album launch and Blair makes sure to get him invited to the party. His name is in her liner notes, D. Humphrey under at least three of the songs. Jenny ultimately got more on the album but Dan's are the songs Blair likes the best, secretly; they're the ones that make her feel something, prickling along her skin and buzzing around her brain. She hums them over her morning coffee. She sings them in the shower.
He's skittish like he's been lately and she sees him lurking at the bar more than she sees him anywhere else. Blair pretends to ignore him and smiles so hard her teeth might crack with it, posing in front of the blown-up cover of her album with a coquettish smirk. Her face looks back at her from a million posters: pale and perfect against a bright pink background, hand smearing her lipstick. It's the middle ground, the transition. The Blair she was and the Blair she's going to be.
She wants Dan to see it, but he's just looking at the bottom of his glass.
Vanessa finds her at the end of the night, demanding answers to questions Blair still refuses to ask.
"You see him," Vanessa says angrily. "You see what he's like now. He's in a bad place."
"I'm not his girlfriend," Blair snaps. "I'm not his sister or his friend or his mother."
Vanessa looks at Blair with a thousand expectations. "Well for whatever reason, he thinks you're important. So maybe you could do something decent with that."
Blair dismisses it. "Everybody drinks. Everyone goes out. It's not a big deal."
Vanessa's jaw is one tensed line and she shakes her head like she's never met someone so heartless in her life.
Jenny's at her too. "He's a mess. Everyone knows he's in love with you."
"He's a big boy, he can take care of himself," Blair says, feeling defensive but not for herself.
"He's not someone you can just use and throw away," Jenny says, angry. She must've been talking to Vanessa.
Blair would freely admit to using him though she's not sure where anyone got the impression that there was an expiration date on it. She uses Dan for his insight and his sensitivity and the thing in him that is ruthlessly real. If he wants to give that to her then she is allowed to have it.
He calls early one morning when Blair's beauty sleep has not been enough to crush the exhaustion from her eyes. "Can you come somewhere with me?"
"Where?" she demands crossly. "Might I remind you, Humphrey, that Sunday is God's day of rest, so you better have a really good reason for –"
He tells her and Blair falls quiet and then she says, "Pick me up in an hour."
They go to his father's house, but his father is long gone from it. Blair hates the look on his face when they wait for excruciating minutes on that unanswered doorstep, the way he seems to collapse on himself, crumbling.
"Never again," Dan says, over and over. "Never again."
Blair has never met Rufus Humphrey but she feels vicious towards him, hauling Dan back to the car with just two words on her furious lips. Fuck him.
She breaks up the engagement with Nate the next day. The papers go wild.
Blair has to tour for the new album and it's important because her new image is far from cemented, plus Serena's post-rehab vegan hippie antics are starting to pull focus. Blair thinks about how the last time she spent months away from Dan she found him a worn-out boozed-up mess and she sets her shoulders, demands he come along.
On tour she tries to fill up his time with tasks. She makes him teach her guitar. She makes him practice their set for hours. She's the very picture of a diva, changing songs last minute, altering rehearsal hours without letting him know ahead of time. She wants to keep him on edge so he's too busy trying to keep up with her to drink, but he does anyway. He finds a way.
Blair's secret is that she's always had stage fright, which is why it was always easier to pretend she was someone else. Cutesy good girl. Hardworking starlet. Bitch with a heart of – well, some precious metal. Having someone up there with her is better and worse; it's like she can't help being herself because if she's not, Dan will call her on it. But because Dan is there she can let herself relax, at least a little. If she stumbles he'll cover for her.
Blair starts writing songs, which she has never done before. Somehow, they're not hers, not exactly; she's writing in what she thinks is his voice, the one she's spent so long listening to that she no longer knows what to do without it. It's obnoxious. The songs are hers, but she's writing them for him.
She gives them to him and Dan gives him back, songs made personal and painful by his voice, honest and true in a way Blair can never be without cringing. But he gives that to her, so she takes it.