(gossip girl) dan humphrey/nelly yuki, AU where they went to yale together (without blair).
He's surprised when, freshman year only months since the ridiculous spectacle of their respective high school graduations, she walks into his Creative Writing 101 class. He supposes somewhere in the midst of Blair's scheming, sleeping with his teacher, and finally walking away from Serena, he'd heard that she had also accepted her bid to Yale. She wore her hair in a braid, a long plait down her back, and he thought for a moment how becoming she was without a headband and subservient stance.
It took him a few weeks to get up the nerve to sit next to her, fearing his reputation from New York may have followed him here, but she smiles brightly at him, says she's glad he got in considering everything, and asks him what he's working on. Eventually they share their stories, editing each others work for class, and that leads to having coffee and studying for finals together, huddled in library corners. Nelly is funny, something Dan never knew, and ambitious, something he could have guessed.
Out from under the UES' hold on them, they're both different people, it seems, and Dan nervously asks her one day if she'll be going home for Thanksgiving. "No," she says with a proud smile, and he nods, returning hers with his own. He won't be traveling either, he decides, and asks if she'd like to have dinner for the holiday, better than burying themselves in homework for the break. When she accepts, and shows up to his dorm early with a bottle of cheap white wine and her hair down, he's glad for the ways in which she keeps surprising him. They don't go out for dinner that evening, instead toasting life outside of Manhattan with cheap wine and reality tv and Nelly snoozing on his shoulder by the end of the night.