Author's Note: Thank you so much to 7gifts and Sapphire1719, who reviewed this, my first Gossip Girl fanfic. I had thought it was a one-shot, but it turned out it wasn't. Who knew?
Italy is hell.
He is mostly alone. Georgina, having failed at seduction, is off doing things he probably doesn't want to know about, except when he requires her perfect recall of Gossip Girl's secrets. The only other member of their group born within a decade of him is a lesbian separatist poet who had apparently already met Georgina, which gives her enough reason to avoid both of them the entire summer, for which Dan cannot blame her.
Everyone else is at least twenty years older than him, authors whose work he admires greatly. He knows he could learn so much from them during the occasional dinner conversations and the weekly cocktail hours that are really group writing sessions in disguise. He knows this is the opportunity of a lifetime.
But they won't shut up about Claire and Charlie.
They've read Inside of course, they've all read each others work, but aside from a brief discussion with a man whose spare prose reflects quiet Midwestern lives, no one ever wants to talk about the pressures of a constantly observed life, or the corruptive influence of beauty on Sabrina, or how familial expectations almost destroyed Derek, or even how the Upper East Side changed Dylan Hunter and his family.
Nope, it's all about goddamned Claire and Charlie.
Charlie's not discussed as much in literary terms (although 'tragic hero' is tossed around much too often for Dan's liking) but all of America read about the country's youngest billionaire after Bart's supposed death. With his resurrection, the Basses are back in the papers, so there's some natural curiousity. Mostly Dan accepts this as his own damn fault; he really should have tried to hide the true identity of his most-famous-in-real-life character, even if he hadn't known at the time what hearing the name 'Charlie Trout' so often was going to do to him.
But it's the discussions of Claire that get to him the most, not unexpectedly. She had after all turned out to be the emotional center of his book. Even now, he could remember how it felt when he started exploring her struggles, moving away from Sabrina's light into Claire's depths, his mind's eye adjusting to the twilight. It was her he ended up feeling most connected to, and so it is her character's journey that resonates most with these illustrious readers.
And it kills him to talk about or listen to or think about, because no matter what Serena says about falling in love with Claire, not Blair, he knows they're the same person, from the label-whoring package of girly evil to the desperate daughter to the brilliant historian to the jealous friend to the witty debater to the only-ever-picture-perfect princess to the happy schemer. He knows her.
He loves her.
But he had thought she loved him, so he guesses he didn't know everything.
Author's Note Part II: I don't expect this story to be long, but just to be clear, it's not a Dair-reunion fic, nor a living-well-is-the-best-revenge fic. I'm first and foremost a Blair fan, so there will be no Blair-bashing either. It's just my take on these three characters after the season finale, which I think showed with the screenful of emails that Blair didn't just blithely run off to be with Chuck, and Chuck didn't immediately fall down at her feet (although maybe it just took him a minute). So that's what this is, if anyone needed to be warned.
Also, it would be nice if people reviewed, but I'm a total lurker, so it's pretty hypocritical of me to ask.