Title: "All You Ever Wanted"
Author: Lila
Rating: PG-13
Character/Pairing: Blair, Blair/OMC, Blair/Chuck, various others
Spoiler: "Carnal Knowledge"
Length: one-shot
Summary: Blair can't be the girl her father wants but she can be the person she's always been meant to be.
Disclaimer: Not mine, just borrowing them for a few paragraphs.
Author's Note: Second part of my latest GG fic, focusing on Blair's first month of college. Thanks for the support for Part I. Enjoy.
II. All hands on deck now. The sea is getting rough again…
She spends the summer in France with her father and with each passing day the light that only shines for her returns to his eyes.
She reads by the pool and tutors at a local community center in the afternoons (to improve her French, but her father doesn't have to know otherwise) and her free time alternates between texts from Serena and phone calls from Nate (true to his word, like a good Vanderbilt) and avoiding message alerts from Gossip Girl. Graduation has come and gone but there's no regime to step in until fall and she knows her former classmates are passing their time chronicling Chuck's conquest of Manhattan, Ibiza, and St. Tropez.
She walked away from him but it doesn't hurt any less. It doesn't mean anything more. He loved her last summer but slept with someone else. History has a way of repeating itself even as the circumstances change.
She ignores the ache in her chest and concentrates on the love in her father's eyes.
She's trying to change but she's still Blair Waldorf; she picks battles she knows she can win.
---
Her father is the one to put her on the plane to Yale. Dorota packs her things and Eleanor buys her a new wardrobe, but it's her daddy who kisses her cheek one last time and wipes tears from his eyes as she sets out to start her new life.
"I'm so proud of you," he says into her hair and she thinks he might actually mean it; she hopes he does. "You've come so far and it's only going to be better. You'll see. College is a whole new world, Blair-Bear. You're going to love it."
She knows she will. Yale is the one thing she's wanted her entire life. It can't be anything less than perfect.
---
It's the most disappointing moment of her life when she finally steps foot on Yale's campus without anything to prove to anyone in particular and discovers she doesn't like college. Worse, she kind of hates it.
Freshmen aren't permitted to move off-campus and she lands a double with a girl named Caitlin from Encino. Blair doesn't know much about California, but she does know the valley and grits her teeth even as she pastes on her brightest smile. She shakes her roommate's hand and tells herself it will work. It has to work. She can be friends with a girl who doesn't know Manolo from Mui Mui and clearly dyes her hair in her bathroom sink. She's Blair Waldorf. She can be friends with anyone because they want to be friends with her.
College isn't Constance and her floormates aren't Hazel and Penelope and Iz. They don't see her charm and they don't fall in line. They don't have a single thing in common, even Caitlin, and her bright, shiny new existence feels more like a prison and less like a future.
She and Caitlin share a room but not a life and on the fourth day of the second week she curls into a ball on her bed (hard and long and way too narrow) and calls Serena in a panic. Her best friend picks up on the third ring and laughs a breathy hello. "What's up?"
Blair stifles a sob, tries to get it together. "I hate it here, S," she says because Serena is her best friend and has always loved her for exactly who she is. "I want to come home."
"Oh, Blair," Serena sighs. "It can't be that bad."
"It is that bad. No one here gets me." She pauses, doesn't bother hiding the tears any longer. "No one here cares about me."
"College is an adjustment," Serena insists. "We talked about this over the summer, remember? You're completely on your own for the first time. It's going to take some getting used to."
"I miss home," Blair whispers. "I miss my mom and I miss my apartment and that creepy hotdog vendor on 87th who used to whistle at us on the way to school. I even miss Gossip Girl. I miss mattering. I don't matter here." Serena doesn't answer and Blair closes her eyes because she got it all wrong. She wanted to go to college to move forward; Serena wanted to start over. "You don't miss her at all, do you?"
"I like that no one knows who I am," Serena says carefully. "I tell people my name and it doesn't mean anything more than a new person to meet." She pauses, and her voice is barely more than a whisper when she continues. "I don't miss anything about New York."
Blair misses everything but she's in New Haven not the Upper East Side and there's nothing more to do than more forward. "Help me, S," she cries. "Help me like it here."
"You have to let go. Life isn't a movie, Blair. You have to work for your happy ending."
"I don't understand."
There's a lot of noise in the background, laughter and people talking loudly, and Blair's suddenly so jealous her stomach tightens up and her chest constricts and it's like that weekend last year all over again. She closes her eyes, counts to ten. It's not Serena's fault that nothing comes easy to her. "You've built up Yale in your head for so many years that it can't possibly meet your expectations. So you don't fit in. Try to be more like them and see where it takes you."
"You think I should change who I am."
"I think you should open yourself up to new things. You're always so consumed with everything working out the way you think it should that it rarely happens in a way to make you happy. This is your chance to be anyone you want to be, Blair. Try on a few different people. You might be surprised by what fits." There's more laughter in the background, and then a squeal, and then Serena back on the line. "Look, Blair I have to go. Pancakes just took off and we need to find her – "
"Pancakes?" Blair asks. She knows Brown's kind of a hippy school, but even hippies should know where to draw the line when it comes to naming their children.
"Remember my mentor, Summer? He's her rabbit. I really need to help her." Serena sighs, because she's being a bad friend. "Blair, you're going to be happy but only if you let yourself. No one's going to beg you to be their friend. You might have to do the asking yourself."
They say goodbye and promise to talk soon and as she's hanging up Caitlin comes back from wherever she's been out having fun. She mumbles a hello and brushes by only to stop in her tracks when Blair doesn't say much in return.
"You okay?" she asks and Blair forces a smile and blinks back the tears; after eighteen years, she's a master at wearing the right mask at the right time.
"Of course," Blair says in return and hopes the third degree will end so she can slide under her extra-long sheets and nap away the hell that is college.
Caitlin pauses as she tugs on a cardigan, bites her lip as if the fate of the world rests on the decision she's making. "A friend of mind is playing tomorrow night at the Tune Inn." She pauses, bites her lip again, but pastes on a smile to rival Blair's the morning they met. "Do you want to come?"
Blair wants to say no. She'll ruin her shoes and damage her hearing but she has nothing better to do. Serena isn't there to hold her up. She has to take care of herself. "I don't have anything to wear," she protests feebly and winces inwardly at how pathetic she sounds, but it triggers something within Caitlin because the smile on her face widens into something real.
"You can borrow something of mine," she assures Blair and wraps her hands around her wrists to pull her to her feet. "Come on, I'm on the way to meet Jess and Emily for dinner. You're coming."
She chokes down a salad (not even Serena can convince her that dining hall food is a sacrifice she should be making) but forces a smile all the way through. Jessica is from Nebraska (on scholarship) and Emily is from the Upper West Side and they know people in common (people with the last name Humphrey) but she tries to be the girl her father sees and looks past the poverty and terrible taste in friends to see what's underneath. Jessica is a film encyclopedia (Audrey is one of her favorites) and Emily is one of the funniest people she's ever met and by the end of the meal her side hurts from laughing so hard and she has a date to watch "Sabrina" the following afternoon.
For a moment her chest constricts, because she remembers Thanksgiving three years earlier and doubling over with laughter while Nate and Serena tried to drown her in her own bathroom, but the moment passes and she can breathe again. Her past is locked away safe in her heart but there's room for more memories.
When she slips beneath her extra-long sheets, it's the first night she doesn't cry herself to sleep.
---
She hates the band (too much angst, too much irony, too many useless keyboard players), but she almost has the time of her life.
They go to a party afterwards and Caitlin introduces her as "my friend Blair" to a boy she wouldn't touch with a ten-foot-pole.
She forgets about the boy but keeps Caitlin.
She stops hating college and starts trying to make it work.
---
She has a routine: lunch with Caitlin on Tuesdays and Thursdays, movie nights with Jess on Wednesdays, Sunday brunch with Emily no matter how hungover they feel. She has dinner with the whole group most evenings and they catch up on what they did during the day and what cute boy caught their eye and she stops worrying about how hard it was and concentrates on how easy it's becoming.
She spends her free time bouncing between lame rock shows and reading on the quad and study sessions in the law library because it's quieter and the boys are nicer to look at.
She lets Caitlin make the plans and follows along like a good solider; it's a welcome change to let someone else lead.
She wears jeans every now and then and stops worrying about ruining her shoes.
She attends parties in dorms and apartments and even a field one starry night. The rooms are crowded and the people are sweaty and no one has any idea who she is but they all seem happy to meet her; she even enjoys meeting some of them.
It's not what she's used to but she doesn't complain. After a few weeks, it stops feeling like a person she's trying on and starts feeling like her life.
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