But I don't know which cliche to say
Title: But I don't know which cliche to say
Characters: Dan, Blair
Rating/Word Count: PG/1,111
One-Line Excerpt: Serena says once, "Come on Blair. You'd like Dan."
This is not how their story begins:
(i.e. If the New Yorker is ever stupid enough to publish Dan’s stuff again, he is not allowed to write about this because people know who she is and, unlike Serena, she has a sense of shame; it’s already bad enough that she’s dating a Humphrey, she doesn’t need people to know how it came about.)
Blair throws her nineteenth birthday party and Chuck shows up with Hazel attached to his arm and Penelope attached to his lips. She looks around for a familiar face but Serena is too busy scurrying after Nate while shoving her tongue down her Soul Mate of the Week’s throat to pause for another crisis’.
She spots Dan instead.
His eyes are wet and stretched wide so when she slides up to him she calls him Bambi and asks if Serena had just shot his mother.
Hey Cabbage Patch, I’ve got a proposition for you.
And right before their lips meet, she whispers, “I hate you.”
“Trust me, the feeling is mutual.”
Blair makes it all the way to the patio before wiping her lips.
Later he finds her crying in one of the spare bedrooms, a hint of a vindictive smile tugging on the corners of her lips as the tears dripping down her face mars someone’s leather coat.
Awkwardly, he places a hand on one of her shoulders. “You’re enough.”
Her shoulders stop shaking and she glares up at him, even as she is brushing tears off of her face.
“Obviously.”
Serena says once, “Come on Blair. You’d like Dan.”
They go to NYU together for an entire year but beyond the brief catastrophe of the Sushi Incident Blair forgets about Dan’s existence, so Dan considers it kind of ironic that it’s only after she switches schools do they interact again.
He walks in one day to his favorite coffee shop only to find Blair Waldorf occupying his usual seat, reading the book that’s currently grasped in his hand.
She grimaces, says something witty about dashed dreams, before promptly informing him that he’s going to have to burn his book.
Dan rolls his eyes. “I’m pretty sure that not even the Waldorf’s have a patent on Fitzgerald.”
Blair sniffs, plucks his book out of his hands, and tells him that when his eyes finally get stuck that way it will give his face character.
She leaves her cup for him to recycle.
After that Dan sees Blair every day.
When reaching the shop, they both retreat to their respective corners, open their novels, and proceed with ignoring each other for half an hour before Blair gets up to leave and Dan makes a mad dash to reclaim his seat.
Blair seemed to take a shine to Dan’s booth, either because it possessed the only working cushion or because she knew that it irked him-Dan suspects that it’s a little bit of both. Now he to rush out of class and hurry to the coffee shop in hopes of reclaiming his booth.
He’s only been able to do so twice. Each time, Blair had periodically glanced up to glare at him from across the room.
At least they never bring the same book again.
(Dan always brings a back-up novel, just in case.)
He calls her a “95 pound, doe-eyed, bon mots tossing, label-whoring package of girly evil.”
Rufus applauds his attention to detail with a hearty laugh and that’s why you’ll be earning all the big bucks son.
Dan’s reading a slim volume of Robert Frost’s poems when Blair slides into the seat next to him, to-go cup in her hand.
“Is this supposed to be indicative of your personal preference?”
Dan is pretty sure he’s been insulted, but he’s not completely sure how.
“Robert Frost is a homosexual.” She sips her latte like she didn’t just make him spit out his.
Dan sputters some more.
“You were raised by Hippies, not wolves; even I know there’s a difference.” Blair reaches for a napkin, but doesn’t hand it to him. It takes Dan an extra moment before he realizes that she’s holding it in front of her face to shield herself from another outburst.
They spend the next two hours debating an author’s sexual orientation (just look at all the phallic imagery that he uses, and don’t even get me started about ‘Birches’); Blair trades her to-go cup for a mug.
Serena thinks Dan’s the smartest-Blair laughs-Dan glares.
Chaucer is in her hands when he follows her out of the bookstore.
She raises an eyebrow.
“I don’t like you-I just can’t have you thinking that the greatest writer of Middle English is a homosexual too.”
Blair pauses, then turns away from him.
“Maybe not Chaucer,” she hides a smirk behind a gloved hand, “but the Pardoner is another story.”
Somewhere along the way he stops calling her names and just calls her Blair.
When Dan finally realizes that he’s been consistently walking her back to her dorm, he can no longer remember how it started, or who started it.
He asks Blair about it once, suggests that she was the one who first crossed their invisible boundary, but she had looked so repulsed by the idea that despite his scathing words, he’d begun questioning his memory. After that, Dan decides to just let it go, lest he risk castration by Waldorf.
They fall into it too quietly so they don’t notice it at all.
Dan brings in Capote on a Sunday and tries to convince himself that it’s a treat for her, not him.
Whenever he used to show Serena anything she loved she’d rain him with kisses and enthusiasm, but Blair just awards him with a barely perceptible twist of her lips and slips her hand forward to expose an extra inch of her wrist.
Still-
Her eyes light up when she talks about Tiffany’s; they’re brighter than New York’s lights.
It’s less than what they hoped for-less big, less bold, less bright-but her hand fits just right.
Turns out Dan’s never needed a damsel in distress.
The first time he really sees her she’s beautiful and broken like a heroine from a novel he’s not brave enough to write.
“Do you like me?”
“Of course not.”
Dan pretends that he doesn’t look for a hint of disappointment in her face.
One day, he’s reading her Anna Karenina with her legs on his lap, when she puts a hand over the novel.
“I think Tolstoy was a homosexual.”
Dan opens his mouth to protest and Blair kisses it shut.
(And that, Humphrey, is how our story begins.)