Title: "Role Call"
Author: This person right here (me), brokenheartedshipper/janeausten4ever/Dori
Characters, Pairings: Dan, Blair, Dan/Blair, Louis, Chuck, Nate, Serena
Warnings: Swearing.
Rating: T/PG-13 for, well, swearing.
Notes: Set during Season Five. One little factoid that may be confusing—Alan Rickman played both Snape in Harry Potter and Colonel Brandon in Sense & Sensibility. I know you can't possibly see how that is at all relevant right now, but all in due time!
*/*
He can't stop casting them in every role he sees.
Fifth Avenue. Two people. Man with big ears. Woman with big hair. Arms linked. She looks up at him. Laughs. Sun hits hair. She's beautiful.
What if that were us, Dan thinks. What if he was me and she was her. What if we walked down Fifth and I made a joke and she grabbed my arm and looked up at me and laughed so her gums showed. What if that were us.
Home Depot. Two thirty-somethings in the paint aisle. "You're colorblind, Dean, colorblind! We are not painting out bathroom Forest Jasper!" "Well, we're not painting it Summer's Kiss either!" She huffs. His lips purse. They'll paint it Vanilla Crème.
What if that were us, Dan thinks. What if he was me and she was her. What if we argued about paint color in the Home Depot so Hello My Name Is Jimmy had to come over and ask us if there's anything he can do to help, and in the end we're both grumpy but at least we're grumpy together. What if that were us.
Coffee-shop. Two grad students. It's early morning, they've been up all night. They aren't tired. She nudges his hip. He bumps her shoulder. "I think I'll get the Caramel Cream Macchiato," he says. "You sure?" she replies. "Maybe you should go with something sugar-free—I think you're getting a bit of a pooch there." She pokes his stomach. Grins. He acts offended. Orders black, no cream no sugar and certainly no caramel.
What if that were us, Dan thinks. What if I was in med school and she was in law school and I got stressed over my midterms and consoled myself with junk food during an all-nighter and she teased me about my pooch but secretly liked that it was something to hold onto. What if that were us.
Waterfront bench. Pretzel. Old man, old woman. They don't talk. They share the pretzel. They smile. He puts his arm around her frail shoulders. The ocean mumbles in the background.
What if that were us, Dan thinks. What if we were old and our children never called except on Christmas but we were all right in the end, because we still had our soft pretzels and we ate soft pretzels on our first date, sitting here on this very bench, didn't we darling-dear? What if that were us.
He hates that he thinks like this. As if it isn't bad enough already that he's gone and written them into a book; he's assigned them the roles so clear and simple it's not even a stretch, and she still doesn't want them. As if it isn't enough. Now he has to go and search for them in everything he sees, and he can't stop—it's like an infection, once it starts it spreads and soon he's thinking about them all the time, and the stupidest thing is that there isn't a them, there isn't an us, she said so herself.
But that doesn't stop him.
*/*
He goes and he re-watches them all, every single movie she ever made him see. And of course he's doing it again, he's slapping Dan and Blair and Blair and Dan like an inkless stamp on every pair of characters. Fuck, he's even doing it to the ones that don't make any sense (What if she was a sassy small-town girl on vacation with her family and I was a long-haired dance instructor and she had moves and then…no, no, seriously, no).
But when it does make sense (at least to him, in whatever fucked-up, twisted head-reality he has going on right now), that's when he can't stop obsessing over it, re-watching the movie three times a day and thinking about the characters before he goes to sleep at night and rooting through the Special Features trying to find some evidence of Dan and Blair, Blair and Dan, even when the goddamn film came out fifty years before they were born.
Take Casablanca, for example. Woman married to good and noble man with high political aims, but no true depth (Louis Louis Louis Louis Louis). Woman reconnects with old flame. Said flame is complex. Said flame invokes passion, richness of emotion, intricacy of thought. Woman and said flame must part in the end. Woman returns to good and simple husband. (See, that's the only way Dan can possibly allow himself the role that was Humphrey Bogart's, is if in the end even the passion and fire and Humphrey Bogart-ness doesn't matter, doesn't mean anything at all, because she picks the other guy. The safe guy. ((Since when am I dangerous? Dan thinks, but that's a different ballgame entirely)).
Dan wants to believe—he desperately wants to believe—that he is Rick Blaine and she is Ilsa Lund, because that would just make things so simple, wouldn't it? He would just sit down and watch the film whenever he was feeling Blairish (this was a new word he'd come up with to describe whatever fucked-up, twisted head-reality he had going on right now), he'd just sit down and watch the film and think to himself, Yep, that's us. Best move on now, and be done with it. And of course, yes, sure, maybe he'd remember just a little bit the time she'd dragged him to the tiny black-and-white theatre on the Upper West Side (gasp!) and they'd been the only ones there and he could feel her warm, Blairish arm almost-just-barely touching his on the arm rest, and hear her petite red lips smacking the popcorn, and she'd turned to him and said, "See, Humphrey? Maybe after this you'll have at least some remote sense of good cinema." And she'd looked so smug in the dark, and for once (scratch that—as usual) he thought that "smug" suited Blair Waldorf quite well.
But it's not (that simple), and they're not (Rick and Ilsa), because, for one thing, he isn't an old flame. He isn't even a flame at all—he's Humphrey. Maybe not even that anymore.
*/*
He has to accept that he's doing this now, and that's he's going to be doing it for an indefinite period of time, and with that acceptance comes a certain responsibility. He has to make sure that these wandering, unsolicited notions stay introspective, as opposed to…extrospective. He realizes this as he's walking through Central Park with Nate, and he's looking at these two kids playing soccer, a boy and a girl, and he's thinking to himself, What if that were us; what if he was me and she was her; what if we stayed out all afternoon playing soccer in the park and then we stayed out past bedtime, too, even though our helicopter moms were calling us repeatedly leaving sobbing voicemails on our phones, but we stay out anyway, not so much for the soccer but for the being-with-each-other. What if it were really that simple. What if that were us.
Nate says,
"Dude, you're like, really off today. What's up?"
Dan says,
"What? Oh, nothing, it's nothing."
Nate believes him (for the time being), but Dan can't let something like that happen again or he will be in deep shit. Especially if it happens around Serena, because then she'll know in an instant.
And it most certainly definite not under any circumstance EVER can happen around Blair. Not just for the obvious reasons, but also because if she finds out he's casting her as Audrey Hepburn, she'll just about die of happiness.
It was the most obvious choice, really, once all this started. Breakfast at Tiffany's was one of the first (okay, thee first) on his re-watch list.
Independent, lonely woman lives in the Big Apple. Wears expensive clothes. Keeps destructive habits. Sings sad songs about olden times that remind Dan of Tom Sawyer for some reason (What if he was Tom and she was Becky and they got married at eight years old on the banks of the Mississippi River…). Woman meets writer. Woman and writer live. Writer loves. Woman tries not to. Woman marries foreign millionaire (Louis Louis Louis Louis Louis). Woman pretends to love foreign millionaire. Writer gets angry. Woman ceases denial. Woman and writer kiss in the rain.
If Blair ever found out—God, he'd never hear the end of it. "I always knew it would come down to this," she'd say, sticking her nose up in the air with a self-satisfied smile. "Lonely Writer Boy pining after his Holly Golightly. So predictable, Humphrey." And she'd be so pleased with herself, her life complete now that someone saw her as Audrey Hepburn.
But that won't happen, and she'll never hear of it, because it doesn't make sense anyway. And this is why (now we've come to Dan Humphrey's Attempt at Pragmaticism):
1) Blair is not pretending to love her foreign millionaire. She doesn't just want him for his money. She doesn't just want him for his power, or his status. She doesn't just want him for (and here is where Dan's tripped up in the past) his safety, his shelter from the storm that is her life. She wasn't just kidding herself. She loved him.
2) She wasn't trying not to love him (Dan, that is). She wasn't pushing against some greater force, going all Blairish on him and thinking she could hold back the tides. She wasn't fighting the inevitable. He was. She really, honest-to-God just didn't love him, and it was as simple as that.
(Thus ends Dan Humphrey's Attempt at Pragmaticism. It doesn't suit him well. Also, he's not very good at it).
*/*
Of all the movies Blair forced him to watch, the one that required the most force was Sex and the City.
"You honestly expect me to believe that this is a foray into good cinema, Blair? Seriously? This belongs up there with Last Tango in Paris and 3:10 to Yuma?"
Blair huffed defensively, her voice raising an octave. "I'll admit it's not so much a must-watch movie for our plight to correct Dan Humphrey's film taste—"
"—Definitely just your plight—"
"—but it is, however, a solid lesson in fashion sense, which, needless to say, you are lacking."
"So you're saying I should dress like Carrie Bradshaw?" He raised an eyebrow.
"Oh, just shut up and watch," Blair instructed, and she fell back against the futon cushions. ("Futon," she often scoffed. "I can't believe I'm associating with someone who is in possession of a futon.")
Blair liked Mr. Big. She didn't see why, but Dan did.
Dark. Mysterious. Emotionally unavailable. Rich. Absorbed with work. Powerful. Manipulative. Alluring. Desirable. Inconsiderate. Big.
(Chuck Chuck Chuck Chuck Chuck).
"God, when he and Carrie are onscreen together, it's just like…kaboom! Chemistry." Dan found that Blair became less and less articulate with each glass of wine consumed.
Blair explained that is was simply unjust if they only watched the movie and not the show, because the show was like, ten times better.
(They watched it. Every. Last. Episode. It took three weeks of hard-core dedication to their cause. Well, Blair, at least, had enough dedication for the both of them).
And as for Dan? He likes Aidan.
Sweet. Charming. Smart. Caring. Upbeat. Not-conducive-to-destructive-habits.
They get into a heated debate over it once, and in retrospect Dan sincerely hopes that Nate never, ever has to hear him defend a character from Sex and the City with such passion and prose as he did that night.
"Blair, you're being so ignorant, Aidan's good for Carrie. He gets her to stop smoking. He is always thinking of ways to make her happy. She feels content and safe whenever she's around him. Big pulls her down into a dark place, and just because they have chemistry doesn't make up for the fact that he treats her like shit!"
"He doesn't treat her like shit, he's just complicated! There's more to him than there is to Aidan. He's got a lot going on!"
If Blair ever knew what she was defending in Dan's mind (Chuck Chuck Chuck Chuck Chuck), he's sure she'd clamp a hand over her mouth and mutter an obscenity.
At least, he hopes he's sure.
*/*
Sometimes Blair likes to place herself in other roles, too. Everyone does, really, just not as desperately or as thoroughly as Dan Humphrey does.
When she sat him down in the theatre room at the penthouse, turned out the lights and slid the DVD into the player, Dan squirmed uncomfortably on the stiff leather couch and said, "Where are the bean bags? I thought all theatre room s were supposed to have bean bags."
"Ha!" Blair snorted by way of response.
"…So, um, what are we watching and why won't you tell me?" Dan prodded, plunging a large hand into the popcorn bowl and coming up with about half its contents in his palm. Just the way he liked it. (Just the way Blair hated it.)
She slaps his hand so a shower of kernels fall back into the bowl.
"You'll find out in, like, two seconds, just calm down."
"I don't understand why you won't just te—"
Sense & Sensibility.
"Oh, God, Blair, no. No! You already made me sit through Sex and the City, do we really have to—"
" 'Sit through?' You totally loved it."
"That's—that's beside the point. The point is, this is tyranny! You can't keep forcing me to watch incredibly girly movies without my say in it. I mean, it's not fair."
"Oh, quit your whining, Humphrey. You could use some good old-fashioned culture in you, and who better to teach it than the nineteenth-century British? Nobody's more cultured than them."
"That may be true, but that doesn't change the face that I'm not sitting through this with you!"
"You're still here, aren't you? And would you shut up? The beginning's actually really important."
"Blair, you can't—"
"Shh."
"I—"
"Sh."
"I just—"
"Sshh!"
He had no choice but to sshh.
Until fifteen minutes in, that is.
"Why Sense & Sensibility? Why not Pride & Prejudice? I thought Pride & Prejudice was the big one." (He didn't think, he knew. He'd read it. Twice. Good literature was good literature.)
"Because this one's better."
"…You just with you were Kate Winslet."
"I do not! Besides, I'm more like her character."
"Marianne?"
"Yes, Marianne."
"Oh come on, Blair, you are not Marianne."
And remembering this now, of course he can't help but—
Overpassionate woman (yes) has oversensible sister (no). Good, high-up, but tame blonde Snape (Louis Louis Louis Louis Louis, minus the Snape part) falls in love with overpassionate woman (yes). Overpassionate man likes overpassionate man better (who was that supposed to be? Chuck? Dan?). Overpassionate man screws overpassionate woman over (half yes—Blair'd been screwed over plenty of times, sure, but not by an overpassionate man. Unless we're counting Chuck as Willoughby. Which we're not. Are we? Okay, we are now). Overpassionate woman finally sees sense and marries blonde Snape (yes). Meanwhile, oversensible sister gets it on with Hugh Grant.
Blair was most certainly not Marianne, Dan decided, because first off, where did he come in?—and then there was the fact that she really wasn't all that passionate, like, she didn't quite Shakespeare all the time or have her head in the clouds or anything. She was more an astute Elinor than a Marianne, except she didn't have a sister (unless you count Serena, in which case, yeah, Serena kind of was a good Marianne to Blair's Elinor. Just sub in any of her ultimately-backstabbing former beaus for Willoughby and you've got a match).
If anything, Blair was Emma (and yes, she'd made him watch that too. The Gwyneth Paltrow version). Clever, rich, beautiful, spoiled, oft-the-sayer-of-not-very-well-thought-out-sentiments….And Dan could fancy himself a Mr. Knightley, her intellectual equal, long-time friend and subduer.
Except, in the end, she falls in love with the long-time friend. That was always the problem with Jane Austen: she gave Dan hope, and hours later he'd go to bed and remember that he wasn't Mr. Knightley, and Blair wasn't Emma, and the two of them weren't going to kiss in an English country garden and marry the next day in a quaint little chapel located in said country garden.
That's the problem with the ones that make sense—the Casabalancas, the Breakfast at Tiffany's, the SATCs and the Emmas—they all seem so real for a while. At least until they don't anymore.
*/*
The thing about movies set in New York is that nobody ever gets it right. Everybody's trying to capture that elusive something, that New York aura, that inexplicable energy, and they try do it with lingering shots of the Empire State Building and bird's-eye-views of hoards of people surging down Broadway. What filmmakers don't get is that that something they're looking for isn't in the city—it's in the people.
Only Woody Allen ever got it right.
Dan knows this time, with Annie Hall, that it really doesn't fit. Blair isn't much like small-town Annie, and Dan isn't much like neurotic Alvie (though growing closer and closer every passing day, what with this fucked-up, twisted head-reality he has going on right now), but he can't help watching it, over and over and over again.
New York is in the people, he decides, and Annie Hall proves it. He likes the way the story unfolds before his eyes, one piece at a time, and if he were a movie critic he'd call it 'lyrical' (only he's not a movie critic, he's really, really not). He likes the way it ends, or more like the way it doesn't end. Whatever that means.
And this time he knows. He knows he isn't him and she isn't her, and he doesn't fall asleep at night thinking of Ilsa and Holly and Carrie and Emma—he falls asleep thinking of Blair.
*/*
"Well?" she said expectantly, arms akimbo. "Aren't you going to whine and complain and talk the whole way through?"
"No, actually. I…I like this movie."
"Oh, you do, do you?" She's surprised. "Daniel Humphrey likes the one and only Annie Hall. Well that's a surprise—I never thought you had it in you, Humphrey."
He shakes his head and shrugs jokingly. "Well, I do. I mean, everybody likes Annie Hall."
"Are you kidding?" She looks at him like he's crazy. "Nobody does! I've tried to get everyone to watch this with me and no one will—Serena said it was too depressing, Nate said it was too boring, Louis said he couldn't understand the Queens accents, Mom said she was busy and Chuck—" She stopped short, her expression slipping.
"Chuck what?" he braves.
"…He said he didn't get the point of the movie."
"Well, that's the point."
"I'm sorry?"
"The point is that there isn't a…point. No rising action. No climax. No linear plotline at all. It's just a story, of a man or of a woman or maybe of a man and a woman, depending on how you look at it. It just…is. It's Annie Hall."
Blair stared at him, her mouth agape.
"What?" he asked, alarmed. "What is it?"
"Nothing, it's just—that's it. That's exactly it. I didn't think…I didn't think anyone got it but me."
"Well, they do. Or I do, at least."
Blair smiled a little distantly, leaned back against the couch cushions so her shoulder brushed his. This time she didn't pull away.
"Yeah," she said. "You do."