Stillness in the Move, Chapter 2
Title: Stillness in the Move, Chapter 2
Fandom: Gossip Girl
Characters/Pairing: Dan/Blair, POV Dan
Rating: R
Summary: The six women Daniel Humphrey has sex with, and the one time it was perfect, with Blair Waldorf. Charts Dan's relationships and sexual escapades with multiple characters - Serena, Rachel, Georgina, Olivia, Vanessa, and finally, amazingly, with Blair. Slight AU.
This chapter concerns Rachel.
Sorry about the very long pause in between chapters! I have to admit I was feeling a bit uninspired after that finale - it was a rather painful one for Dair fans.
This installment is a little bit AU just because I didn't watch the first couple seasons that closely (I really got hooked around Season 4 with the Dan/Blair storyline) so I don't think the events/timeline match up exactly with how they happened.
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The short stories Daniel Humphrey writes the summer after he breaks up with Serena van der Woodsen are all biting, snarky, bitter. They are slightly tongue-in-cheek, self-aware of their own pathetic nature, but entirely devoted to the subject of his breakup. If he picked up a guitar and turned them into songs, he would most likely become the male Taylor Swift. Still, he thinks of them fondly, believes them to be more complex than the lust-filled, cloudy, clearly teenaged prose of notebooks past. He titles them things like Blondes Have More Fun(ds) and Ex-Girlfriends and Ohs, finding solace in little puns. He writes them first on a laptop, makes a sweeping round of final edits, and types them all out on a typewriter he'd gotten from Serena, an unusually thoughtful gift for her. She usually liked to give him glamorous things he'd never use - watches and jewelry that were always more Archibald than Humphrey. But he'd smile and accept them gratefully, only to incorporate them into his sardonic stories later, listing all the ways in which Serena, flawless as she was thought to be by her adoring public, was generally insensitive. Callous. Fake. Shallow. Just - too fucking blonde. He wrote up a tedious laundry list of negative qualities in the It Girl but he missed her, goddamnit, he missed her. He felt the emotion deeply. He filled himself with it, he tasted it, he swirled it around in his insides and made sure it permeated his core, filled him to the very brim so that he could know it completely. It was an indulgent exercise in self-pity that Dan excused for his writing. It's okay to drown in your emotions if you have to express them and put them on paper, Dan thought, waving away his own misgivings.
The typewriter was one of Serena's only personalized gifts for Dan, something that blue-blooded Nate or Chuck would never appreciate. He looks at it every morning in defiance, thinking, at least you won't betray me. He names it Goldie Locks. It was all very stupid and clichéd, like a first break-up should be. In five years he would laugh at his astounding immaturity. But during slow, tender moments in the city, where time waded by like a painful, luxurious wave, these thoughts kept him sane.
Sometime during the summer, Dan makes the transition from blondes to brunettes. And he likes it.
At first it was just an exercise in getting over Serena van der Woodsen. He'd been enchanted for so long by this sunny, golden, carefree goddess - it was time he turned his attention to other types of beautiful women. And besides, blonde girls only reminded him of his ex-girlfriend. He stops watching old films starring Marilyn Monroe and creates a long Netflix queue of dark-haired beauties: the smouldering Vivien Leigh, the mysterious Ava Gardner, the slightly dangerous, ever so sexy Elizabeth Taylor. When he settles down to watch Breakfast at Tiffany's one night, he feels a strange pull at his chest. Of course, he identifies with Paul: his kind nature, his writing, his poverty. But it's something about Holly Golightly - her flawless smile and her big, sad eyes - he feels like he's seen it before. But Holly is nothing like Serena or Vanessa or Jenny or any of the other women in his life. He chalks it up to a strange case of déjà vu and falls asleep a little bit restless that night.
When he tries to force Old School Movie Night with Nate Archibald, he is met with nothing but wide-eyed skepticism.
"Dude…" Nate says slowly when Dan tries to convince him to watch some Tati or Bergman. "Um, why don't we watch something more, um … recent? I've been dying to watch Kill Bill, it's even got some good reviews, yeah? And hot chicks fighting. You down?"
Dan concedes and is pleased to find that Quentin Tarantino is definitely an entertaining director. He takes note of the familiar leggy, blonde protagonist but is more interested in Lucy Liu and Vivica A. Fox, entranced by their fiery personas. He dates a string of brunettes that summer. He twirls his fingers in their chocolate brown hair lazily; he takes them to charming bistros and buys them coffee and listens politely to accounts of their life. He enjoys kissing them. He finds them to be attractive. And yet. He tries to care. The feeling does not come.
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Claire's eyes speak volumes, intimate and comfortable, yet inexplicably discordant with her tone: stridulous, clanging, and unabashedly bitchy. "Get out of my way, Lonely Boy," echoes in my ears but the words are transient, flushed out by the image coagulating, thick, like liquid resolve, in my brain. Dark, laughing, poisonously lovely eyes. The shiver crawling up my spine has decidedly nothing to do with the crispness of fall, and everything to do with the girl I detest. Abhor. Can't fucking stand. Right?
"Oh my god, Dan, what are you writing?"
"Jenny - no, come on, this is private - " Dan splutters indignantly, closing his laptop with a defiant snap.
"You are literally so pretentious," she laughs, flipping her short blonde hair. "Your writing is like an SAT dictionary."
Dan raises an eyebrow at his little sister. "Which - you should be studying for, Jen," he says, scolding, but Little J doesn't take the bait.
"Stop changing the subject, Lonely Boy," she says derisively. "So you're calling Serena Claire? That doesn't really fit her. You should go for something more dramatic. Maybe like…Ophelia."
"I'm not naming my girlfriend after the suicidal counterpart to Hamlet, Jenny. And it's not about Serena, for the last time, I write fiction." Dan counters, shaking his head.
Jenny looks confused for a second and then relents. "Whatever, Dan, go talk to some books or something. Anyway, I thought everything you wrote was about Serena," she throws over her shoulder as she runs out the door in her precariously high heels, looking more like a runway model than a teenager headed to school.
Dan follows begrudgingly, trying not to let her words affect him.
I thought everything you wrote was about Serena.
He hasn't written a single word about her in weeks. They're back together now, after a tumultuous, yet strangely boring cycle of getting back together, splitting up, only to end up dating again. Chocolate-covered strawberries, a seductive gaze, voyeurism in a moving bathroom. Dan had written extensively on the metaphor of how they had both buried their feelings, trying desperately to make it work, only to have every contained emotion spill out, bubbling and sad, while trapped in the vessel of an elevator. How funny and logical it all was, wrapped in a shiny layer of irony.
Although Dan had missed her, really missed her, and been virulently jealous of Aaron Rose and the stupid, sleazy way he'd smile at Serena, now that he had her back - it was … well, okay, weird. Kind of stagnant, as if he were standing uncomfortably in an elevator, stuck between floors. Seeing Lily and Rufus together was like seeing his future spelled out for him, and that was phenomenally uncomfortable for a teenager, waiting on the cusp of change. Lily with her cold, Upper East Side ways, and his father, his dearest father who made a good, honest living and the best fucking waffles in all of New York, trying so hard to fit in. Was that how he would end up with Serena, twenty years from now, gritting his teeth through insipid conversation and superficial parties? He felt perfectly comfortable as Nick Carraway, writing his way through the champagne-drenched silliness and winking, ostentatious lights, but he would never be a Gatsby or a Buchanan; of that he was quite certain.
Claire: now she was a new character that he had been experimenting with for some time now. She had absolutely nothing - NOTHING - to do with any of the women he knew in real life. She was influenced exclusively by his ample knowledge of literature and film, of his Netflix queue of memorable brunettes, armed with Audrey's arresting eyes and Vivian's scintillating spark. She lived solely in his head. At first Dan had been suspicious of his mental state when a tiny, pixie-like seductress started appearing and sometimes even talking to him, but he'd dismissed it as normal - for a writer. Hemingway was an insane drunk and he still managed to write luminous prose. If he was going to be a real writer, with fleshed-out, three-dimensional characters, well, it would probably help to start having imaginary conversations with them in his head … and … seeing them around everywhere, smirking and flirting with him secretly.
"Humphrey, it's time you check yourself into the Ostroff. Who are you, Sylvia Plath? You made me up inside your head. You certainly should avoid ovens at all costs," Little Claire sat in his pocket on his way to class and laughed airily at him, sticking out her tongue playfully.
Shut up, Claire, he hissed at her in annoyance. Plath was deeply depressed because of the state of womanhood in 1950's America. I am nowhere near oppressed or repressed. Haven't you ever heard of white male privilege?
"Privilege!" Claire shouts out, amused. "I dunno, Hump, you are from Brooklyn, isn't that like being homeless anyway," Claire teased. "I hear you guys are all distantly related to the mole people. That is some fucked up genetic oppression."
He looks at little Claire - dressed today in a schoolgirl outfit with just a bit of her garter peeking out, and he's turned on, and he wants to kiss her, good God, what in the hell is wrong with him, she is an eight-inch fragment of his imagination whereas Serena van der Woodsen stands tall and proud like some sort of amazon queen, blonde hair blowing in the autumn wind.
His girlfriend comes up to him, all five feet and glorious nine inches of her, her school tie silver today to match her glittery eyeshadow. "Morning," she says and gives him a quick peck happily. He smiles, taking her in, and replies, "Good morning, beautiful." He means it, one hundred percent, and looks little Claire square in the eyes as he says so. She frowns, glaring at him a bit, and disappears into thin air - poof! Thank god, Dan thinks, not missing her. At all.
Trying to distract himself from the seemingly unstable state of his sanity, Dan points ahead to the very petite girl struggling in high heels ahead of them, very unlike his little Claire, who could walk more gracefully than a stripper in her platform shoes. "Who's the new kid?" He asks Serena, to which he is answered with a giggle. "She's my new Shakespeare teacher, Miss Carr!"
A/N again: Okay, so I hope it's obvious that little Claire is based off of Blair. However, this lends some weight to Serena's theory that Dan was only ever in love with the fictional Claire Carlisle, not Blair Waldorf, as she said in the finale. I just want to clarify that I absolutely do NOT agree with Serena; I believe that Dan has always had a thing for Blair and is simply in denial in this chapter.