Fic: The Smart Make Something Out of It (Gossip Girl, Blair and Dan)
Okay, now I am spamming you. But I figure everyone's looking for some entertainment in the lull after the Yuletide deadline, and I am so relieved to have finished this.
I wrote it for mardia for the Catchallthon that inlovewithnight generously ran. She wanted Blair/Dan at Yale. I hope this is close enough to that.
If you are looking for more quality entertainment, you should check out the story jule1122 wrote for me, I'll Point You Home, which is total OTP-service Queer As Folk US Emmett/Ted fic with bacon and skating and real estate and awwwwww.
Title: The Smart Make Something Out of It
Fandom: Gossip Girl
Characters: Blair, Dan, a little Blair/Dan
Spoilers/Continuity: Set during Blair and Dan's freshman year at Yale. No specific spoilers.
Rating: PG-13.
Summary: Blair comes out of retirement for one last act of social destruction.
Word Count: about 1,600.
Disclaimer: Gossip Girl is the intellectual property of College Hill, 17th Street, Alloy, and Warner Bros; it is based on the novels by Cecily Von Ziegesar. This original work of fan fiction is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License; attribution should include a link to this Livejournal post. This story is a labor of love, not money, so it's protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976. I know Saint Peter won't call my name.
Notes: Thanks to callmesandy and annavtree for the betas! Written for mardia for the 2008 Catchallthon. The title is part of an endlessly decontextualized line from Baudrillard.
*
At Yale, Blair learned what it was like to become invisible. Overjoyed to be liberated from the fashion constraints of a school uniform, she arrived to her freshman seminar in an outfit she'd been planning all summer, only to be greeted by a silent chorus of disdainful sneers. Her classmates looked like refugees from an L.L. Bean fire sale. She pitied them.
Most of the other students in her dorm were like that, too: suburban valedictorians with no sense of culture. But there were a few others like her, with some money and some taste, and while some would have been too commonplace to share the steps to the Met with her, sticking with them was more comprehensible than buying into Yale's diversity project.
That is, until Blair overheard her roommate and a guy from down the hall referring to Blair and her friends as "stupid little trust-fund ninnies who are only here because Daddy made a donation." The hiking-gear-as-daywear crowd thought she wasn't good enough for Yale. Blair tried not to let it faze her, and it wouldn't have, except that there was a grain of truth in it. She'd had to scheme her way in, and even with all her conniving, she'd had to spend a mortifying thirty-six hours on the wait list while Serena and Nelly Yuki had declined their acceptances. Blair might have been at Yale on a trust fund instead of a scholarship fund, but she'd fought as hard as anyone to get there.
She traded in her dresses and heels for jeans and sweaters, ate dorm food and stayed in New Haven on the weekends. She went to her residential college's Friday-night social activities and exchanged small talk until people were forced to pretend they'd forgotten what she'd looked like when she'd arrived. She did all of her course reading, and not solely so she could show up that one arrogant, loud guy in her freshman seminar.
She made friends. Shilpa was in her freshman seminar and enough of a Southern belle to not only have a handbag collection but refer to it as such. Arielle dressed in 1950s vintage Chanel and Dior and drew epic illustrations of their psychology lecture. Paul, she met when his roommate sexiled him to hook up with her roommate, and they agreed that the best revenge would be for him to spend the night in Blair's roommate's bed. Paul earned Blair's respect and adoration when he dumped glitter all over Blair's roommate's sheets and wrote "Never piss off a fairy" on the white board on their door. Paul never quite moved out after that. Blair thought her father would approve of her lifestyle choice.
Blair was sitting on the quad with her friends on what was sure to be the last beautiful day of autumn, and she looked around her to see half a dozen other small groups of freshmen, each loosely themed by wardrobe and enthusiastic over-intellectual topic of conversation. None of them had noticed her. She had vanished into the hoi polloi. And she had learned that at Yale, with its fragile illusions of meritocracy, she was better off as one of the faceless many.
She should have known she wouldn't be able to keep it up. There was plenty of New York royalty around to sneer at her for slumming it with the unpedigreed. Most of them were acquaintances who knew her vaguely from cocktail parties and intimately from Gossip Girl, which made them easy to ignore. But when she and Arielle arrived for the first day of their seminar on the French novel - a course for which Blair's three weeks in Paris over winter break had made her feverishly excited - she found her downfall, sitting in the far corner of the room, flailing unwholesomely as he explained some concept, surely poetic, to an enthralled blonde. Blair waved icily as she and Arielle took their seats on the other side of the room.
She managed to avoid Dan Humphrey for the first four weeks of the semester. It helped that he was trying to avoid her, too.
Dan Humphrey had a girlfriend. She waited for him outside the door to their seminar room, and as soon as she saw him, she'd grab his elbow and kiss his cheek like she was showing all the other girls who he belonged to. Blair couldn't imagine who would want him. Other than Serena, who had her reasons, and besides, she didn't exactly want him anymore.
It was ruining Blair's life that Dan Humphrey was getting some, and she wasn't. She'd had a rejuvenating fling in Paris, but while school was in session, she was the chaste and virtuous nun of Jonathan Edwards Residential College. The closest she'd gotten to sex with a guy at Yale was catching Paul watching porn on his computer. In theory, Blair and Dan weren't even in the same solar system anymore, but seeing him twice a week, she had come to realize that she would never be able to un-know him. Or be un-jealous of him when his life was clearly so much more exciting than hers.
Blair decided that a little research couldn't hurt. She didn't have to pull out the big guns or really, even the medium guns - some casual Facebook browsing and selective eavesdropping were sufficient to determine that Dan Humphrey's possessive girlfriend was a junior named Genevieve Wysocki, editor of the Yale Literary Magazine.
Blair was sitting on Shilpa's floor, eating chicken tikka, because Shilpa was bizarrely determined to seduce the delivery guy from Sitar. They were supposed to be studying for their multivariable calculus midterm, but the sight of the delivery guy had put Shilpa off her math. "I have no reason to destroy Genevieve Wysocki," Blair said. "Why am I compelled to destroy Genevieve Wysocki?"
"Because you can't stand it when people are having more fun than you?" Shilpa's mouth was full of samosa. "I'd actually kind of like to see you destroy someone."
"I'm out of that business," Blair said. "I'm retired." But when she looked at her calculus equations, she saw hidden formulae for how to bring a person to her knees. Other people would have seen the patterns of flower petals or how to build a bridge, but Blair saw, in everything, the delicate links that held society together. She saw exactly which filament to snap in her hands.
The Thursday night before Spring Break, someone threw a party for Dr. Seuss's birthday. The theme was vague and cursorily observed: there were a pair of girls dressed as Thing One and Thing Two and at least four guys in One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish t-shirts. Somebody had dyed deviled eggs green and topped them with bacon bits. But most of the crowd was dressed normally and behaving in the usual Yale dorm party way: drinking European beer, attempting to impress each other with anecdotes about Baudrillard.
Blair saw Dan just far enough away from Genevieve Wysocki, and she struck like a star-bellied Sneetch. She sauntered up to Dan and asked him how Yale had been treating him. They chatted idly about Serena and Madame Bovary; the two topics exhausted everything they still had in common. Blair positioned herself so that she was inescapably within Genevieve's line of sight. She smiled and giggled; she made a point of touching Dan's arm. He creased his forehead at her, but he knew this was a scheme, knew her. He played along, and at first Blair thought it was out of fear. But despite his earnest protestations, she always suspected that he enjoyed being brought in on her plots. Dan had a talent for getting people right where they lived, and she respected that more than she envied it.
Genevieve's scowl grew deeper every time Blair made eye contact with her. When Genevieve looked to be on the verge of storming over and giving Dan what for, Blair grabbed Dan by the scruff of his neck and shoved her tongue in his mouth. He was probably too surprised not to kiss back. She wondered if the Constance Billard girls had instructed him well in kissing, or if this, too, was a natural talent.
The party fell into a hush as Genevieve stormed out noisily. She looked as if she expected an army of minions to follow her, but there was no one behind her. Dan was laughing. "I was hoping for at least a slap in the face."
Blair batted her eyes at him, perplexed.
"I've been trying to break up with Genevieve since the fall reading period," Dan said. "Every time I tried, she told me I'd never see my name in a Yale publication, so I, I hung on. I assumed you'd done your usual... thing and figured that out in order to, um, humiliate me, I guess, although there wouldn't be a point to that anymore, would there? I mean, here, where nobody knows us and nobody cares."
Blair grinned, regaining her composure. "Consider it an act of altruism. Don't expect more of them."
A skinny, frumpy, writerly guy came up from behind Dan to slap him on the back. "Congratulations on killing the witch."
Dan introduced them: this was James from his early-morning Yeats seminar, and Blair, they went to high school together. "Perfect cover," James said approvingly.
"Here," Dan said. "I can introduce you to the rest of my friends."
Blair bit her lip and smiled wistfully, letting her eyes just barely hint flirtation. "Maybe not," she said. She retreated to her own circle. From across the room, Dan waved and smiled shamefacedly, as if to apologize for talking about her in public. She waved back as if from the deck of a ship pulling away from the shore, her past shrinking away as the sea got wider.
I wrote it for mardia for the Catchallthon that inlovewithnight generously ran. She wanted Blair/Dan at Yale. I hope this is close enough to that.
If you are looking for more quality entertainment, you should check out the story jule1122 wrote for me, I'll Point You Home, which is total OTP-service Queer As Folk US Emmett/Ted fic with bacon and skating and real estate and awwwwww.
Title: The Smart Make Something Out of It
Fandom: Gossip Girl
Characters: Blair, Dan, a little Blair/Dan
Spoilers/Continuity: Set during Blair and Dan's freshman year at Yale. No specific spoilers.
Rating: PG-13.
Summary: Blair comes out of retirement for one last act of social destruction.
Word Count: about 1,600.
Disclaimer: Gossip Girl is the intellectual property of College Hill, 17th Street, Alloy, and Warner Bros; it is based on the novels by Cecily Von Ziegesar. This original work of fan fiction is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License; attribution should include a link to this Livejournal post. This story is a labor of love, not money, so it's protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976. I know Saint Peter won't call my name.
Notes: Thanks to callmesandy and annavtree for the betas! Written for mardia for the 2008 Catchallthon. The title is part of an endlessly decontextualized line from Baudrillard.
*
At Yale, Blair learned what it was like to become invisible. Overjoyed to be liberated from the fashion constraints of a school uniform, she arrived to her freshman seminar in an outfit she'd been planning all summer, only to be greeted by a silent chorus of disdainful sneers. Her classmates looked like refugees from an L.L. Bean fire sale. She pitied them.
Most of the other students in her dorm were like that, too: suburban valedictorians with no sense of culture. But there were a few others like her, with some money and some taste, and while some would have been too commonplace to share the steps to the Met with her, sticking with them was more comprehensible than buying into Yale's diversity project.
That is, until Blair overheard her roommate and a guy from down the hall referring to Blair and her friends as "stupid little trust-fund ninnies who are only here because Daddy made a donation." The hiking-gear-as-daywear crowd thought she wasn't good enough for Yale. Blair tried not to let it faze her, and it wouldn't have, except that there was a grain of truth in it. She'd had to scheme her way in, and even with all her conniving, she'd had to spend a mortifying thirty-six hours on the wait list while Serena and Nelly Yuki had declined their acceptances. Blair might have been at Yale on a trust fund instead of a scholarship fund, but she'd fought as hard as anyone to get there.
She traded in her dresses and heels for jeans and sweaters, ate dorm food and stayed in New Haven on the weekends. She went to her residential college's Friday-night social activities and exchanged small talk until people were forced to pretend they'd forgotten what she'd looked like when she'd arrived. She did all of her course reading, and not solely so she could show up that one arrogant, loud guy in her freshman seminar.
She made friends. Shilpa was in her freshman seminar and enough of a Southern belle to not only have a handbag collection but refer to it as such. Arielle dressed in 1950s vintage Chanel and Dior and drew epic illustrations of their psychology lecture. Paul, she met when his roommate sexiled him to hook up with her roommate, and they agreed that the best revenge would be for him to spend the night in Blair's roommate's bed. Paul earned Blair's respect and adoration when he dumped glitter all over Blair's roommate's sheets and wrote "Never piss off a fairy" on the white board on their door. Paul never quite moved out after that. Blair thought her father would approve of her lifestyle choice.
Blair was sitting on the quad with her friends on what was sure to be the last beautiful day of autumn, and she looked around her to see half a dozen other small groups of freshmen, each loosely themed by wardrobe and enthusiastic over-intellectual topic of conversation. None of them had noticed her. She had vanished into the hoi polloi. And she had learned that at Yale, with its fragile illusions of meritocracy, she was better off as one of the faceless many.
She should have known she wouldn't be able to keep it up. There was plenty of New York royalty around to sneer at her for slumming it with the unpedigreed. Most of them were acquaintances who knew her vaguely from cocktail parties and intimately from Gossip Girl, which made them easy to ignore. But when she and Arielle arrived for the first day of their seminar on the French novel - a course for which Blair's three weeks in Paris over winter break had made her feverishly excited - she found her downfall, sitting in the far corner of the room, flailing unwholesomely as he explained some concept, surely poetic, to an enthralled blonde. Blair waved icily as she and Arielle took their seats on the other side of the room.
She managed to avoid Dan Humphrey for the first four weeks of the semester. It helped that he was trying to avoid her, too.
Dan Humphrey had a girlfriend. She waited for him outside the door to their seminar room, and as soon as she saw him, she'd grab his elbow and kiss his cheek like she was showing all the other girls who he belonged to. Blair couldn't imagine who would want him. Other than Serena, who had her reasons, and besides, she didn't exactly want him anymore.
It was ruining Blair's life that Dan Humphrey was getting some, and she wasn't. She'd had a rejuvenating fling in Paris, but while school was in session, she was the chaste and virtuous nun of Jonathan Edwards Residential College. The closest she'd gotten to sex with a guy at Yale was catching Paul watching porn on his computer. In theory, Blair and Dan weren't even in the same solar system anymore, but seeing him twice a week, she had come to realize that she would never be able to un-know him. Or be un-jealous of him when his life was clearly so much more exciting than hers.
Blair decided that a little research couldn't hurt. She didn't have to pull out the big guns or really, even the medium guns - some casual Facebook browsing and selective eavesdropping were sufficient to determine that Dan Humphrey's possessive girlfriend was a junior named Genevieve Wysocki, editor of the Yale Literary Magazine.
Blair was sitting on Shilpa's floor, eating chicken tikka, because Shilpa was bizarrely determined to seduce the delivery guy from Sitar. They were supposed to be studying for their multivariable calculus midterm, but the sight of the delivery guy had put Shilpa off her math. "I have no reason to destroy Genevieve Wysocki," Blair said. "Why am I compelled to destroy Genevieve Wysocki?"
"Because you can't stand it when people are having more fun than you?" Shilpa's mouth was full of samosa. "I'd actually kind of like to see you destroy someone."
"I'm out of that business," Blair said. "I'm retired." But when she looked at her calculus equations, she saw hidden formulae for how to bring a person to her knees. Other people would have seen the patterns of flower petals or how to build a bridge, but Blair saw, in everything, the delicate links that held society together. She saw exactly which filament to snap in her hands.
The Thursday night before Spring Break, someone threw a party for Dr. Seuss's birthday. The theme was vague and cursorily observed: there were a pair of girls dressed as Thing One and Thing Two and at least four guys in One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish t-shirts. Somebody had dyed deviled eggs green and topped them with bacon bits. But most of the crowd was dressed normally and behaving in the usual Yale dorm party way: drinking European beer, attempting to impress each other with anecdotes about Baudrillard.
Blair saw Dan just far enough away from Genevieve Wysocki, and she struck like a star-bellied Sneetch. She sauntered up to Dan and asked him how Yale had been treating him. They chatted idly about Serena and Madame Bovary; the two topics exhausted everything they still had in common. Blair positioned herself so that she was inescapably within Genevieve's line of sight. She smiled and giggled; she made a point of touching Dan's arm. He creased his forehead at her, but he knew this was a scheme, knew her. He played along, and at first Blair thought it was out of fear. But despite his earnest protestations, she always suspected that he enjoyed being brought in on her plots. Dan had a talent for getting people right where they lived, and she respected that more than she envied it.
Genevieve's scowl grew deeper every time Blair made eye contact with her. When Genevieve looked to be on the verge of storming over and giving Dan what for, Blair grabbed Dan by the scruff of his neck and shoved her tongue in his mouth. He was probably too surprised not to kiss back. She wondered if the Constance Billard girls had instructed him well in kissing, or if this, too, was a natural talent.
The party fell into a hush as Genevieve stormed out noisily. She looked as if she expected an army of minions to follow her, but there was no one behind her. Dan was laughing. "I was hoping for at least a slap in the face."
Blair batted her eyes at him, perplexed.
"I've been trying to break up with Genevieve since the fall reading period," Dan said. "Every time I tried, she told me I'd never see my name in a Yale publication, so I, I hung on. I assumed you'd done your usual... thing and figured that out in order to, um, humiliate me, I guess, although there wouldn't be a point to that anymore, would there? I mean, here, where nobody knows us and nobody cares."
Blair grinned, regaining her composure. "Consider it an act of altruism. Don't expect more of them."
A skinny, frumpy, writerly guy came up from behind Dan to slap him on the back. "Congratulations on killing the witch."
Dan introduced them: this was James from his early-morning Yeats seminar, and Blair, they went to high school together. "Perfect cover," James said approvingly.
"Here," Dan said. "I can introduce you to the rest of my friends."
Blair bit her lip and smiled wistfully, letting her eyes just barely hint flirtation. "Maybe not," she said. She retreated to her own circle. From across the room, Dan waved and smiled shamefacedly, as if to apologize for talking about her in public. She waved back as if from the deck of a ship pulling away from the shore, her past shrinking away as the sea got wider.