I don't ship Dair, and I never will. I do, however, ship Blair being happy without having to sacrifice something for once, and Chuck deserves to be alone right now, at least for a little while. The best thing Raina ever did was put up her hair and dump his sorry arse - but at the same time, he always has and always will be the most effed up GG character. That's why I ship endgame: because in the entire world and island of Manhattan, there's only one person who accepts him for the Basstard he can be and loves him through it all.
If the very mention of Dair makes you vomit, you probably shouldn't read this (although it is endgame Chair).
Written, with love, to Imogen Heap's 'Hide And Seek'.
Enjoy.
Still Life
There's a horrible ease to falling in love after you've done it once. After the pleasure of first love has faded, any other game of hide and seek will do. She finds hide and seek with Dan Humphrey oddly soothing. It's balm for the bullet wound in her chest.
It's not a solution.
It's not a cure.
But it helps. It helps to know that there is another person who will follow her star in the sky, will care if she shoots or falls. She loves him in the gentle, soft, half timorous way she loved Nate, and she hangs onto him with her fingertips; it's no use wasting tears because his jaw is the wrong shape beneath her hands as they kiss. She needs to grow up, find an answer, find the question she's asking.
To be honest, she needs to stop hiding behind curtains if she doesn't want what lies beyond to scare her.
She doesn't dream in film noir with Dan Humphrey, but at least she can watch old movies with her feet beneath his and her head on his sweater in a place which is comfortable and doesn't make her eyes sting. He runs his fingers through her hair and makes some comment about the scene, and she retorts and lets him be happy. She's halfway to being there, as much as she doesn't see sparks with Dan Humphrey, because she knows his hand isn't tight enough around her heart to squeeze it and make her ribs crack.
He doesn't think they're fated, so he doesn't need to take a running jump and hope he crashes into her. He doesn't need to lie (though he does sometimes, and they have silly fights over her job at W and his writing which end with her face pressed into his chest and somebody laughing).
But she's not Blair Waldorf.
She's not the Blair Waldorf who knows herself, who knows where the lines are and where she can't cross.
And she sees him – the real him, the boy from the black room with lights flickering across his face – on the street sometimes, and wants to be sixteen again. She wants to show him her bare skin and remind him that they don't need Venice or Paris or anything else at all, really; do his lips move, or does she imagine words whispered across the lanes of traffic - across the poles of distance between Manhattan and Brooklyn and everything she has and he's failed to become.
Someone put a bullet in him, once.
She cried.
His eyes are sad, but he shot her first.
Fin.