Missing Moments

He knew he wasn't dreaming. If he was, it wouldn't be something as ridiculous as this. He couldn't believe it. His father was right, not that he would ever admit it to him. There was something in Blair Waldorf that made her act the way she did. There was a reason for her biting sarcasm, superior eyes, and the emotional wall comparable to the Great Wall of China. For all her attempts at class supremacy she was a little girl at her core sitting on a dirty floor at the end of a hallway and he had just had a meaningful conversation with that person inside. After hearing her talk about her mother and meeting her briefly on the roof, he understood. Only a mother that was as calculating as Eleanor Waldorf could create the inferiority complex within her perfectionist of a daughter. He still couldn't believe that he had found common ground with Blair Waldorf of all people. She wasn't very different from him. He spent the entire summer thinking about how his mother had abandoned him for her art and Blair's mother abandoned her for another girl. He wondered for a moment which was worse. Sure he was upset that his mother left but he could at least rationalize that. His mother had spent her entire adult life taking care of him and Jenny on her own so that his father could live out his musical dreams on tour and now she wanted her husband to return the favor. But how do you rationalize choosing another girl over your daughter? His mother left him to do something for herself. Wouldn't it have been worse if she left him to be a mother to someone who wasn't actually her son? He had a sneaking suspicion that hers might be worse than his.

She had calmed down a little and looked less like a porcelain doll that was made to burst into tears and so he decided to take this chance to try to make friends with her. Having Serena van der Woodsen's best friend on his side might help his chances with his blonde dream girl.

"So, you think we can call a truce?"

She focused her eyes on him in that razor-sharp way that was all her own. She narrowed her eyes at him as if sizing him up before replying, "I suppose a cease fire could be negotiated."

He decided to talk in her language and continued with their Art of War like conversation, "Terms?"

"I get Serena for holidays, birthdays, and emergency shopping trips. Your terms?"

"No more sniping?" he asked weakly, feeling out of his depth.

"No deal."

He had to refrain from rolling his eyes at her, "fine, then we cut down on the biting remarks, and when I say we, I mean you, you can't badmouth me to Serena to try and break us up, and Cedric is off limits."

She looked like she may have almost been impressed but that look melted off her face quickly.

"Those are pretty hefty terms, I'll have to think about it."

He chuckled slightly at her. He should have known that a girl like her wouldn't just give in. He got up off the floor and dusted himself off and offered a hand to her. She glanced at it contemplating whether or not she would contract a communicable disease if she touched him. In the end she told him to go ahead without her. He dropped his hand, slightly disappointed, and turned to walk away.

~ I think we can agree to those terms but you can't wear those shoes or that hair. – Blair Waldorf to Dan Humphrey in 1x04

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"You have to decide what's important to you, keeping your pride and getting nothing, or taking a risk and maybe, maybe, having everything."

She was looking up at him from under dark lashes. Uncertainty was in her eyes and it bored into his trying to make a decision. Trying to decide whether it was worth it to take a risk on Chuck Bass. Then suddenly she gave him half a nervous smile before she spoke.

"Isn't there a third option where I could keep my pride and still get everything?" she asked him with a hopeful smile.

He just laughed and shook his head.

"Not that I know of," which causes her to huff in mock annoyance.

While she goes back into her pensive state, he examines her. She's all bright eyed, focused on her decision making, and looks almost sullen. Yet she carries sullen in the possibly the most beautiful way he'd ever seen. It makes him almost want to invent a way for her to have both her pride and everything else. Someone should really tell her that innocent vulnerability looks better on her than her Queen B attitude. Not him of course, someone else…

~ I mean, she's not that bad… - Dan Humphrey to Vanessa about Blair Waldorf.

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As he walked away from the train wreck that was Chuck Bass and Blair Waldorf, he felt a little uneasy. He was tuning out the incessant questions that Serena seemed to be asking him. His dad and Lily would take care Jenny, he knew that. But as he walked away he thought that maybe someone should have stayed behind to make sure Blair walked away unscathed from Chuck Bass. But his hatred for Chuck and her misplaced venom towards Jenny kept him from turning around walking back towards the scene.

He couldn't get the look of both girls' out his head. He had never seen his sister so broken. Add to that the pound of dark eye makeup that was smudged because of her tears and messy blond hair that seemed completely disarrayed despite being tied back, and she looked nothing short of a disaster to him. He was sure this only mirrored the state that her heart was in.

He had seen Blair angry before, she was all confidence, evil, and brimming with schemes. But the venom she had towards Jenny was a new one for him. He had never seen her look so mutinous, not even when she was ratting out her best friend's little tryst with her boyfriend at a Bass hosted brunch three years ago. She meant business, Jenny was not going to be allowed to stay in the Upper East Side, he was sure of it. But then unbidden, the shattered look of hurt on her face when he told her to lay off Jenny came to mind. Suddenly the two girls didn't seem different at all. They both seemed just as broken as the other. Jenny's parents were taking care of her. Who was taking care of Blair?

He almost turned back around, he even stopped mid-step, but did not turn around in the end. What he heard made him confident that he did not need to turn around. He heard Blair scream at Chuck in anger, no doubt giving him what he deserved.

"No, don't say her name! Or anything else to me, ever again!"

There was hurt in her voice, sure, but there was also anger, confidence, and self assurance and he realized she didn't need him to take of her. She can take care of herself. So he kept walking and finally began to fill Serena in on the details.

~ I would barely be exaggerating if I said that Medusa wants her withering glare back. – Dan Humphrey about Blair Waldorf to his father in 1x04.

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He was smirking at her in the most devilish way she had ever seen him look. The deviousness looked good on him, made him look sexy…almost. She thanked whatever higher power existed that Humphrey couldn't tell what she was thinking. At least she was pretty sure that he couldn't tell what she was thinking. There were moments between the two of them when she wasn't really sure of this. While she stood there entranced by his smirk, he spoke.

"Do you want to stay a while to plan?"

"Sure, I'll have a cup of earl grey," Blair ordered like she was at Starbucks.

"Uhh, okay."

She took a seat on one of the stools at the breakfast bar while set the kettle on the stove.

"You know, we could have avoided this if you believed Serena to begin with," he began suddenly.

"Believed Serena about what?"

He tilted his head to the side and gave her a look that said she knew exactly what he was talking about before telling her, "when she said she didn't overdose. We should have believed her to begin with."

She scoffed at him incredulously. The frustration and stress of the day was finally oozing itself from her every pore. Her worry for Serena, the looming media attention on Serena's overdose, Chuck's unwillingness to be there for her when she needed him, Juliet missing nowhere to be found, and now, Humphrey's self righteous indignation at the audacity of anyone who did not immediately take whatever her blond bombshell of a friend said as an irrefutable fact like he did were all too much for her. She was upset and it was about to steamroll right out of her all over Humphrey.

"Where do you get off?"

"Huh?" he seemed to be taken aback by her sudden injection of spite.

"You know, the Serena that you idolize is not the same Serena that me and Nate grew up with."

"Are you trying to say that I don't really know Serena?"

"No, I am saying that the person you know was the rebooted version who crashed today."

"Are you comparing your best friend to a computer software program?"

"I'm not joking with you Humphrey. You've never had to deal with Serena like this before. You didn't know her before she went away to boarding school. You never cleaned her vomit off your bathroom floor. You've never had to call Nate three o'clock in the morning so he can sneak out of his house and pick her up from whatever trashy bar she landed herself in that night. You didn't have to try and sober her up before first period so that she didn't miss school. You didn't have to lie to Lily and say you were having a sleep over when she called because Serena hadn't come home that night. You never had to trail after her in clubs on Saturday nights to make sure some forty year old pervert from Wall Street didn't take advantage of her only to have to watch her walk away with a twenty-five year old version of the same man. You never had to actually take care of her. It's not a joke. So you'll excuse me if I didn't want to take your advice of letting her run rampant and continue to try and kill herself."

She got more breathless with each passing sentence and became more frantic as well. Dan on the other hand became more shocked with each passing sentence and felt himself shrink in his spot in the kitchen. Her words shocked him. He had never thought that his blond dream girl wasn't always as he had known her, sunny, smiling, and free spirited. Everything that was right with the world. She was right, he never did any of that stuff for Serena and couldn't imagine doing it either.

They both stood there staring at each other. Each waiting for the other to make the first move. She made it.

"Look, it's been a long day. Neither of us have the energy to plot a take-down at this time of night. Why don't we just meet tomorrow morning and start fresh?"

"Sure," he managed to croak out.

"Okay, tomorrow morning at nine o'clock at the coffee shop across the street from the Ostroff Center. Don't be late."

And with that she walked out of his loft leaving him stunned. He barely slept that night. He kept tossing and turning just replaying everything she had said to him over and over in his head. Mostly he couldn't stop thinking about her and how violently she had reacted.

The brunette that had unraveled in front of him reminded him of the hurricane of a girl that laid a tirade onto Serena four years ago in that stairwell. At the time he hadn't really felt sorry for Serena as she received the verbal lashing from her best friend. She had stood him up and he wasn't really sorry to hear her best friend ram into her about butting in on her spotlight which was cutting in on his date. But he felt sorry for Serena now. He felt sorry for Serena because he now understood what it felt like to be on the receiving end of Blair Waldorf's sharp tongue, righteous indignation, and childlike vulnerability. He now understood why the free spirited girl who didn't care what people thought of her stood frozen in that stairwell and let this tiny brunette yell at her. There was nothing else for it. There was no winning against those dark eyes.

He spent all night thinking of how those sharp eyes focused on him, piercing through his mind conveying strength but also a great amount of helplessness simultaneously. It was enough to stun anyone. There was some tragic poetry written in the way her eyebrows had scrunched together in frustration. She seemed so affected by those things she listed that even if he had a rebuttal he would never have been able to voice it. There was something that broke in an indeterminable place inside him as he had watched her perfectly painted lips form harsh words and he almost made a move to touch her as he saw her lips quiver but he had managed to control himself. His comfort would not have been appreciated and he knew it. Her eyes, her expression, the words coming out of her mouth all indicated that this girl had had to do things she should not have been made to do. It made her seem older than her years. The only thing that indicated her innocence was her perfectly porcelain skin. It was flushed, radiant, and the only evidence of her youth.

When it was finally seven o'clock in the morning and he could give up the pretense of trying to sleep he rolled out of bed and got ready to meet Blair at the coffee shop. He arrived early and ordered his usual coffee and the earl grey she never got to drink last night and sat to wait for her. When she arrived she raised her eyebrows slightly as if surprised that he arrived before her. He wordlessly held out the cup of tea hoping she would take it. She did, and gave him a small smile for his trouble. They both walked out of the coffee shop and started re-hashing the events that had landed Serena at the Ostroff Center. He took his cue from her and pretended that last night had not happened and both strolled with their beverages in hand trying unusually hard to be civil to each other.

~ Small yet giant, young yet adult, girlish yet macho. – Dan Humphrey about Clair Carlyle.

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A/N: Needed to get this out of my system. No doubt I have pissed off a couple readers by writing this instead of the next chapter to three words, eight letters, but I swear I am working on it.