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After the show, he finds her in the costume closet.
She’s out of her Countess Ellen Oleska costume and now in her own clothes, prim and proper and tied together with a literal bow at the top of her head; the picture of girly innocence. In his humble opinion, the Countess Oleska costume suits her better: all dark and dramatic in its black lacy glory, perfectly describing the type of utterly complex girly evil that Blair Waldorf is, rather than the goody-two-shoes perfect girl facade she tries so hard to maintain.
He doubts that good girls scheme and manipulate, or spread fake rumors about a teacher sleeping with a student just because that teacher wouldn’t give them a free A, or try to maim their school play co-stars while on stage. There isn’t a part of him that believes Blair's good little girl facade.
Still, she doesn’t deserve to have her life ruined by this, to lose Yale when even he knows it’s the thing she wanted most in her entire life—especially not over rumors that ended up being true anyway; she wasn’t wrong to call the whole thing ‘eerily prophetic.’
Her back is to him as he walks into the closet. She’s neatly smoothing out her costume and hanging it up on the rack.
“It wasn’t me who was messing with you,” he says with no preamble. She doesn’t startle but her hand falters against the lace of the costume. “It was Rachel.”
She turns around at this. She looks him in the eye, but her face is stone-cold and unreadable.
“We also had sex here—uh, in the costume closet—so you can do whatever you want with that information,” he shrugs at the end, hands in his pockets and as nonchalant as he’ll ever be.
He actually isn’t worried about her spreading that around; he figures she will, sure, but everyone already thinks he slept with Rachel, so it wouldn’t make a difference if they knew it was true.
He looks at her for a beat, eyes locked together while her face remains unmoving, and then turns around to walk away from this dingy costume closet.
But before he walks away, her voice rings out, and breaks the silence.
“Why are you telling me this?”
He turns around, and she’s looking at him, her face is not nearly as stone-cold as it had been, and her wide eyes give way to her confusion.
He shrugs. “What you did was wrong, but it ended up being true anyway, and you don’t deserve to have your life ruined because of it,” he says, looking deep into her eyes. It takes all the bravery he has; it feels like he’s standing in front of a black hole or dangling above the deepest hole carved into the Earth. "I’m sorry, Blair, I really am.”
She looks at him with those big brown eyes of hers. He’s never looked into them for longer than a few seconds but right here, right now, with his eyes locked with hers, it feels like they could suck him in, like he could fall in them and never come back out.
He’s always toeing the line between terror and admiration when it comes to her.
She stares at him silently, and Dan isn’t sure what she’s going to do, but the last thing he expects is for her to slam him against the wall with more force than he’d thought Blair Waldorf, the perfect picture of daintiness and also a handful of inches shorter than him, could have and shoves his shoulders hard.
“Ow, Blair, what the fuck—”
“You’re sorry? Really? Don’t pretend like I don’t know this is what you wanted the entire time!” she’s yelling now, and he’s sure if there were still people sitting in the theater’s audience, they would’ve probably been able to hear her.
He looks at her like it’s the most absurd thing he’s ever heard, because, well, it is. “What in the hell are you talking about? Why would I have wanted this, and literally how could I have schemed to make this happen? I can’t scheme! I’m not like you!”
“Of course you wanted this to happen! Then you could be off at Yale and live off your merry fantasies of camaraderie with people way above your station without me as a reminder that you don’t really belong there,” she sneers, her lips twisting into a cruel little smile and her eyes full of rage.
His gaze hardens, and his jaw clenches, anger thrumming through his veins. He doesn’t think there’s anyone in the entire world who can make him as angry as Blair Waldorf does—not even Chuck Bass in all his slimy glory because at the end of the day, he is just that, a shitty slimy guy who has plenty wrong with him, unlike Blair who he knows is capable of being better.
He shakes his head in disbelief. “You know, instead of blaming everyone else for how your life’s turning out, you should accept that it’s your fault. After all, none of this would’ve happened if you hadn’t pushed and schemed and tried to ruin everyone’s lives. It’s your own fault,” his voice rises and matches Blair’s because he can’t help himself, and he can be just as cruel as Blair when he wants to be.
She looks at him—he’s seen Blair angry plenty before: at her minions, at Chuck, at Nate, at Serena, at Jenny, at him—and he doesn’t think he’s ever seen her this angry.
She’s looking at him like he’s the scum of the Earth, like he’s at the bottom of her shoe and it’s the greatest of displeasures to set even the slightest bit of her sights on him. She’s looking at him like she wants to maim him or something equally as violent.
But violence has always lingered beneath the surface with Blair, simmering below and ready to strike at any given moment. He sees her as the Upper East Side’s very own Queen of Hearts, yelling ‘off with their heads’ the moment a subject steps out of line; violence is always the answer with her.
So he’s expecting her to yell in his face, say something so incredibly cruel that could only come from her, or even throw a punch; he knows she’s capable of it, she did just shove him against a wall.
The last thing he could’ve expected was Blair surging forward and pressing her lips to his.
She kisses him like she’s throwing a punch, like she wants it to feel like a fist to his lips, like it’s supposed to hurt.
He doesn’t kiss her back immediately, too shocked by the fact Blair Fucking Waldorf is currently pressing her lips to his with an unrelentingly hard force.
There are many, many reasons why he shouldn’t kiss her back: she’s his ex-girlfriend’s best friend, she’s borderline evil, she’s made his sister’s life a living hell, they hate each other, they’re actively fighting right now and he’s not completely sure that this isn’t a cruel joke and if he kisses her back she won’t laugh in his face.
Still, none of that stops him from wrapping his arms around her, pulling her closer, and meeting her lips with the same strength.
He kisses her for all the same reasons that he shouldn’t: he hates her and she hates him and she’s fucking crazy and they both keep making the wrong decisions that ruin everyone’s lives and they’re both so fucking angry.
It’s either a punch to his stomach or her lips on his. He needs to put it all somewhere before he implodes, and he’s angry enough with her that it seems like a good idea.
The fight isn’t over, the kissing is only an extension of it. Instead of sharp, biting words, it’s her lips on his, purely violent and aggressive, so hard he thinks that when he pulls away, his lips will be bruised.
He squeezes her hip, hard, and she digs her nails into his arms equally as hard—half-moon marks on his skin and bruised lips, scars of a battle fought; leaving bloody and black and blue is exactly what he’d always thought would happen to him if he got too close to Blair.
Still, even with the anger and hurt, he can’t pretend he’s not enjoying this.
Dan has always felt like he’s operating on some other level of crazy that nobody, especially not Serena, has been able to match. He’s too high-strung, too much of a nervous wreck, and overall just too much. Yet, weirdly enough, Blair’s the only one who he feels can get it.
She’s a high-strung, high-maintenance perfectionist who could probably teach a doctorate-level class on being ‘too much,’ and he doesn’t feel the need to put on some persona or hide the worst parts of himself. If anything, she’s brought them out time and time again, and seeing as neither of them particularly likes each other, anything they do is in spite of themselves, not because of each other.
And it doesn't hurt that she truly is one of the prettiest girls he’s seen in his entire life. She may be borderline evil, and he knows that better than most, but it doesn’t erase the fact that she objectively is very beautiful.
If he hadn’t been met by Serena’s blinding radiance the night he saw her, he could’ve very easily crushed on her instead, as distasteful as it may seem to him now.
Half of him thinks she’s old Hollywood, classically beautiful, timeless in a way many try and fail to emulate. The other half of him sees her beauty as that of a siren, luring him to his destruction with a bat of her lashes—with her lips pressed against his, he can’t think of a better way to die.
When she pulls away, all he can see is her; the world ends and begins with her. Her lips are puffy, and her chest is heaving on a breath. He’s sure he looks much worse.
She’s looking at him through a heated gaze, set alight by both anger and lust. “I hate you,” she says, digging her nails deeper into his forearms.
He thinks she might kill him. He thinks he might let her.
He crashes his lips down on hers as a reply.
She’s quick to react, deepening the kiss and pulling him so close it’s hard to tell where he ends and she begins; everything becomes a blur of dark curls and hungry hands.
He idly thinks that maybe this is some sort of trap or con, luring him in so she can destroy him, and he’d let her because he’s just too far gone. He could get lost in her, he thinks he already might be.
And then he’s brought back to reality by a fist landing against his shoulder.
It doesn’t hurt, he doesn’t think it’s supposed to—the way Blair’s mouth has been meeting his hurt more than this. It’s an aimless punch, but she doesn’t stop, she keeps throwing soft punches at him, even with her mouth on his.
He’s not exactly surprised, she’s always been violent, although she’s always been more subtle and in control of it. He wonders what it is about him that makes her lose her control, that makes her open up and spill over when she’s usually so bottled up.
He pulls away. “Blair—” he says, cut off by a soft blow to the shoulder.
She’s not looking at him, and he can hear the choked sob that leaves her throat, but she doesn’t stop punching him. She’s angry and she wants to hurt him, to make him bleed and bruise him up, yet all he wants to do is comfort her.
He’s always seen Blair as otherworldly—not in a face launching thousands of ships Helen of Troy way, but because of her strength. She’s like an ancient wonder of the world, unmoving and unyielding despite the tests of life and time, unbreakable by any force in the world. To see her like this, shaken and so overcome by what she feels, is jarring.
This is not how Blair Waldorf should ever look, and he’d give anything to have her calling him a dirty Brooklynite right about now.
He hears her choking back her sobs, trying to keep it all in even as it threatens to explode out of her. She tries to land another aimless, harmless punch but he stops her, grabbing her arms.
“Blair, stop, it’s okay,” he tries to soothe, but he knows as soon as the words leave his mouth that they aren’t the right ones.
She finally looks at him, tears brimming in her eyes. “No, it’s not,” she shouts, waving her arms wildly. “Everything I worked my entire life for is gone, it was for nothing. I have nothing—” her voice cracks and it’s as if she’s cracked, finally breaking and bursting into tears, everything she’d been pushing deep inside her capsizing and spilling over.
Here is this girl who he sort of hates, who he’d been fighting with tonight, and who was actively sabotaging him, yet he doesn’t hesitate to wrap his arms around her and let her collapse against him.
He doesn’t say anything to comfort her, he doesn’t think there is anything he can say, just wraps his arms around her and pulls her close. She feels her shaking against him, sobs wracking her body and tears wetting his shirt.
It’s so weird to see Blair as anything other than the sharp, untouchable girl she presents herself to be, it’s weird that she’s letting him.
She’s this strong, almost cold girl who’s secretly so sensitive it must hurt her, and after bottling it up for so long, she’s breaking down in the arms of a boy she hates—it feels like the life of a tragic female love interest in a movie, yet she’s so irrevocably human it couldn’t be anyone but Blair doing this.
When he was with Serena, everything she did felt vaguely like he was looking into a TV screen and seeing a beautiful but tragic female character; his life with her felt like he was in some sort of cliched film reel.
But Blair could never be a character, she’s too human and too complex to ever fit herself into the confines of a screen.
Even with all her girly evilness, looking back now, he’s surprised he fell for Serena with Blair there. Of course he loves Serena and he wouldn’t change it for the world, but his whole life, he’s always been drawn to the complex—to the dark, to the melodramatic, to the sharp edges and melancholia—so he’s surprised he was entranced by bright, bubbly Serena when Blair fits the title of complex too well.
Blair has been shadowed by Serena’s light, yet he’s never been one to venture into the light, he’s always been one to stick by the shadows.
He shakes his thoughts away. This is Blair Waldorf, he’s not about to start waxing poetry about her just because she’s a pretty girl who’s showing him a different side of her.
She clutches his shirt in her fist, face burrowing deeper into his neck. He swallows the lump in his throat, It’s just Blair Waldorf.