i need your brilliant mind to cheer me up (if you have time and/or want) and give me your best canon show ending with dan-wasnt-gossip-girl but dair are actually final endgame afterward headcanons
Oh dear friend I would be happy to share. I’m sort of robbing peter to pay paul with these because I do have a fic idea that I want to plug these into eventually but I am absolutely happy to share them now 🤍🤍🤍
Okay so post canon, but Dan isn’t GG are the rules yes? So let’s see what I can do. Cheering up is the endgame I promise but ya can’t reckon with the canon omelet without breaking some angst eggs.
Also this will be pushing my personal agendas of musicians!Humphreys and dilf!Dan — and bi!Dan but that’s like, canon to me, so.
Like most dair writers out there, I think derena implode on their own shortly after the wedding. Dan Humphrey may be a born liar, but just because he’s good at it doesn’t mean he likes it. He hates feeling like he’s living a lie. It was easier somehow, when the wedding was upcoming, to lose himself in the story Serena was trying to tell, and it was a good one. But in the After, when the dust settles, he feels…hollow. Lying makes him hollow, and acting like she’s the settle-down-and-marry kind makes Serena hollow, too.
He ends it, but she leaves first, hopping off to parts unknown with Carter Baizen on her arm.
Dan goes to London, and crashes on his sister’s couch because he’s trying to break his own habits of relapse (asking Serena to take him back, falling into bed with Georgina). Jenny screens his calls and gives him something to do: write songs with her. (They both say that it’s not and never will be their day jobs, but Jenny’s always written the same way their mom has always written, because it’s good for her mental health and good mental health focuses what she calls her “real art.” During one of the mini-breakups between Blair’s 2nd wedding and his own, Rufus got Dan work as a studio session musician to pay the bills (play in the accompanying band, etc.) He’s good and reliable on keys and guitar, and something about playing what other people write helps him get out of his blocks.
He gives what help he can, including throwing her some stuff that was languishing in his old journals that hadn’t seen the light of day, and Jen, in between freelancing lines, puts out a respectable EP, and convinces him (he calls it bullying) to write more with her.
Blair meanwhile, cuts Dan out and off, his annulment makes it easy. She wasn’t sure, in the run up to the wedding, if she could stand him being married to her best friend, she was convinced that the more they were in each other’s presence, the more she was in danger of falling off the precipice of her marriage. So when Serena calls her from Antigua, all Blair feels is relief.
But relief fades, and she misses her friend. Both of them, but it’s more often than not Dan she’s looking for when she needs to make eye contact at yet another ridiculous thing said at whatever event of the week she’s at. It’s Dan she wants to talk to about the last movie she saw that didn’t begin with a lamp jumping on the letter “I.” It’s Dan she wants to ask for advice when she’s drowning at Waldorf Designs because she can’t keep up.
She’s on a ledge, all the time, and when she finally has to say something about work to Chuck he says quit. So they can have another baby. (obviously chip is deep dark and manipulative and there’s way more shit going on but this is supposed to be cheery so we’ll just leave it at that for now)
It’s then that she starts to think about leaving, really leaving.
She’d thought that if she ever did, Dan would be there, but he’s even less of an option now than when he was Serena’s. Because even if he wanted her now, Serena would always blame Blair for her marriage falling apart. But Dan isn’t around, the last she remembers hearing about him is that he was dating some Canadian indie musician. Blair thinks she may have been the only one genuinely unsurprised at the fact that said musician was a guy.
Dan’s not there, but Nate is.
She and Henry become Nate’s roommates, in the small UWS apartment Nate rents, not the red herring of a hotel penthouse that keeps the Spectator bloodhounds off his heels. Nate gives her a safe place to be once the papers are served, and they take inspiration from each other. He from her for cutting Chuck out of her life for good this time, and her from him, for going back to school and finishing. She hands in her resignation to Waldorf Designs and Nate blocks every form of contact he and Chuck have.
Blair does her best on her own, with Nate and Dorota’s help (and Cyrus’ legal help), but it’s still hard, to keep up with classes at NYU and her toddler, and one day she gets home to see Jenny in her apartment.
Jenny and Nate are pals, and Jen’s in the city because when Blair left her position, Eleanor put up the metaphorical bat signal, and since her capsule collection was so well-received—and still coveted by fashionistas—Jen was offered an interim position.
Jenny and Henry get along pretty well, actually, and Jenny is self-actualized enough not to hold his parentage against him, and not to hold too much of Blair’s past against her, though she suspects it’s only out of respect for Nate.
They clear the air one night, while Dorota has Henry, on Nate’s balcony, passing a joint between them.
“I told myself I wouldn’t say anything until you ask about him,” Jenny says. “But you never do.”
“Maybe I’m afraid of the answer,” Blair replies. She knows Dan and Nate are close friends, but she hasn’t asked him anything either, for the same reason, Nate can see right through her, and she wasn’t ready for that.
After that, Blair finds through thorough browsing Jenny’s social media that Dan moved to an apartment in Chelsea, that he evidently seems to share with Jenny now she’s in the city, that he plays music, that he appears in a lot of the covers Jenny shares online, and that they have an album slated for release in a few weeks.
She finds a performance of Jenny on a late night talk show, and she watches, because Dan isn’t in the thumbnail so she thinks it’s safe. It’s pretty good actually.
Life goes on. Blair’s divorce is finalized. At Cyrus’ and Nate’s advice, she holds nothing back in her depositions, and as such gets full custody of her son. The relief is so palpable Blair locks herself in a bathroom in the courthouse and cries.
Jenny continues to hang around at her pal Nate’s apartment, but it’s kind of…okay? She’ll crash in at the end of the day with takeout, interrupting Nate and Blair reading for classes, she’ll joke with Nate and Henry and pick Blair’s brain for advice on Waldorf Designs.
One night after Henry’s asleep and she’s had just enough red wine to make her brave, she tries watching one of Dan’s performances posted to Jenny’s feed. It’s a cover of “Chelsea Morning” and it makes Blair smile because she has memories of him singing Joni Mitchell in the loft, and one day while they were together the weather was dreary and neither of them felt like going anywhere and he pulled an LP off the shelf and declared it a “Blue Day” and they lay on the rug and listened to the whole album. And it’s…that thing of when you hear the voice of someone you cherish for the first time in a long while and it hits you how much you miss it in your everyday? It’s that.
But she can’t keep living in the past, she has to get Henry enroled in preschool and herself enrolled in her last year of college plus figure out just what she wants to do with her life.
One day Jenny calls her. “Okay so you know I hate asking for favors from you but if you were to ask, well, anyone, they would say that you probably own me a billion.”
So, Blair goes. Jenny and her work is being photographed for a feature in Vogue, and her coordinator backed out, and there’s actually not that many people in this world that Jenny trusts with her vision, but Blair is (begrudgingly) one of them.
So, Blair steps in, interfacing with the photographer, and the Vogue team, which is headed up by … *drumroll* Epperly Lawrence!
Epperly casually mentions at the end of the day that she’s glad Blair is back in this line of work, because she was always good at it. And that gets Blair thinking…
Nate cheerfully accuses Dan of never coming around anymore, but Nate knows damn well the reason why.
Not that he resents Nate for being there for Blair, maybe he resents that he couldn’t be.
He’s still writing, but prose is slow going. Songwriting though…He likes cowriting with Jen. She’s never precious with him, will tell him when something doesn’t work so that shen she says something is good, he believes her. They have to hold Rufus at arm’s length to curb his enthusiasm, because neither of them expect it to last, this music thing, but they have to see it through. But, with Rufus’ permission, he takes some of his dad’s half-finished songs and completes them, and the end up on the record. The record is a hodge podge really, of Jenny’s writing and his writing and Rufus’ all it coming together in something that actually resembles a record. It’s helpful, having a place to put words that he wasn’t able to get out in another medium. Jenny reads his lyrics, and he knows just by the sideways glance she gives that she knows who they’re about, but doesn’t say anything.
They’ve worked together. Jenny told him because she isn’t precious with him, but she also seems like she’s waiting for him to ask. He can’t let himself.
The record comes out eventually, and it’s good. It feels good to have something collaborative, it’s much harder to hate it after it comes out, unlike the books with only his name on the cover.
They’ve been gigging in the city, half of their stuff, half covers, and that plus the album plus their name recognition (plus his connections from working for a studio for so many years, Jenny tries to tell him) gets them an offer to play as an opener on a similar sounding acts tour.
Dan’s always thought he wouldn’t be the type. Rufus’ over-romanticized stories have kind of put him off, but he can tell Jen wants to do it. She’s felt too chained to Waldorf Designs as of late and is chomping at the bit for an artistic palate cleanser. And it’s not like there is anything keeping him here in New York.
At Epperly’s encouragement, Blair starts putting herself out there professionally again, applying everywhere, because she’s not that attached to New York, there’s little to keep her here. And, miraculously enough, she gets an offer from Vogue Paris. It’s a demotion anyway you look at it compared to her last job, but it’s earned. And hers. She can move to Paris, Henry can grow up bilingual and in a city where he isn’t Chuck Bass’ son. (Bass Industries goes under after the divorce. Apparently the financial strain and bad press was too much for him to take).
She starts putting the plans in motion, and Nate starts making some of his own. With Dan’s help, he’s been applying to graduate programs for social work, “And while I hate the idea of even more school, I really want to do this.” And before that, he’s taking the post graduation sailing trip of his dreams. Blair worries, the way she always does, that Henry’s gotten too used to having Nate around, that she’s gotten to used to having him around. But it’s time for her to move on. “If you ever need me,” Nate promises, “I’m there.”
During her last week in NYC, Nate persuades her to let Dorota take Henry for the night and come out with him to the show Jenny’s playing before she leaves on tour. She’d given Eleanor her notice with a long list of vetted replacements, but Eleanor still bemoans her misfortune to Blair over the phone. Blair had only nodded along, half listening while coloring with Henry. Waldorf Designs is not her ship to save anymore.
So they go. It’s a retrospective sort of thing, with Lincoln Hawk as one of its main centerpieces. She spots Lily in the crowd, because of course those two couldn’t stay away from each other very long. And, during the set, both Dan and Jenny come onstage.
It’s something to watch. The Dan she knows is never comfortable in the spotlight, he shifts away from it, or tries to reflect it back onto someone else. On stage, behind the mic and a guitar in his hands, it’s like he wraps the music around himself. It’s not about him, it’s about the story.
Nate takes them to the stage door after the show, and he and Jenny disappear into the night shortly after, which means Blair is left to her own devices, and so is Dan.
“Walk me home?” she asks, suddenly shy.
He says yes.
She loses count of how many blocks, but they walk the whole way, from the club on the Lower East Side, to her old penthouse that she’s helping her mom close up and prepare to sell before leaving for France.
They take their time, going slowly, and talking about…everything.
Henry is the first thing he asks about, and they go from there.
She talks about her new job, and he talks about his musical moonlighting. They touch on their respective divorces, but they’re both on the other side of it now.
Eventually though, they get to her door. And because she has nothing to lose and everything to gain, she kisses him, and all those years, all that time between the last just falls away.
“So, Dan, are you coming upstairs, or what?”
“Blair,” he sighs, “I’m going on tour tomorrow.”
“I’m moving to France in three days!”
He laughs, and when she grabs his hand and leads him forward, he follows.
The next few months go by, Dan tours, Blair settles in to her new job and helps Henry settle into his new life in Paris. He loves his new school, and the language he picks up quickly in the way only small kids can.
Dan sends her postcards from every stop, the constraints of the format keep him from saying too much too fast. He sometimes shares stories from the road, like when in Nashville, he breaks a string midsong during an acoustic set and drops out completely from laughing too hard, leaving Jenny on her own and causing her to go “What the fuck, dude?” as soon as she finishes. Sometimes he doesn’t talk about the tour at all, writing about the years they were strangers to each other.
Blair pressures Nate into getting an email address so she can send him replies. They go on like that, his card and her emails, until he wraps the tour back in NYC.
A few weeks after his last postcard, Blair is out on her favorite weekly ritual, her Thursday lunchtime visit to Musee D’Orsay. She’s been systematically showing Henry all of her favorite places, but with him in kindergarten, this midday trip is something she sets aside just for her.
She can trace the path to her favorite gallery on autopilot now, but when she gets there, someone is already standing in front of the painting, blocking most of Manet’s work from her view.
She would know him anywhere, even with his back turned. She knows him from the set of his shoulders and the curl of his hair, and the stillness of his figure, like he was part of the art himself.
He perks up at the sound of her heels clicking on the marble floor, walking into the rest of her life. And when he turns to look over his shoulder, oh, she cannot stop her smile.
Dan gets his own place in Paris at first, a tiny studio walkup in the 6th. “Left bank,” Blair snorts, “figures.” He wanted to give Henry time to actually get to know him, since he was a baby when Dan last knew him, but Dan is still around all the time, cooking meals, accompanying the Waldorfs on Blair’s trips to show Henry her Paris, which becomes showing Henry and Dan her Paris. He sublets the tiny studio after 3 months. They’d waited enough.
They get married at Harold and Roman’s vineyard in the summer. It’s small, quiet. Lily and Rufus fly in and rent a property a few kilometers away for the weekend, Eleanor and Cyrus plan to drive up from Paris on the day, and Nate and Jenny tumble in a few days prior from their respective landing places—Nate from Berkeley, Jenny from Tokyo.
Dan and Nate and Roman lead Henry in kicking a football around on the grounds, and the quiet, ever-present guilt she can’t help but have—that she’s kept her son from having a father—fizzles and fades away. Because Henry has Dan, and hope balloons in Blair’s chest that her son isn’t destined to be broken and break others in return. She’s relieved, so relieved that she’s…nauseous?
Jenny’s the one that finds her slumped on the floor of her father’s tastefully decorated guest bathroom. Maybe it’s some remnant of feminine solidarity, or that they’ll legally be family in less than 24 hours, or maybe after all this time Jenny Humphrey really is her friend, because Jen slips out and to the city and back on a crucial errand.
Blair toys with the idea of waiting until tomorrow, to make it “special,” but it already is, special. So before he goes to stay the night in the carriage house (because Daniel Humphrey had to have some kind of tradition for his wedding), she tells him she’s pregnant. And tells him that she wanted to tell him now, when they’re like this, because she loves him like this and tomorrow isn’t going to make them more of a family than they already are, or change how happy she is about this now.
He so cries.
On the next day, after they sign the marriage license, Dan signs the adoption papers that make Henry his. Though if you were to ask, Dan would say it’s him that belongs to Henry.
They don’t say anything about the pregnancy ntil a few weeks later, but Jenny catches Dan sipping on Blair’s champagne all night with raised eyebrows.
Serena doesn’t come, but she calls while Blair is getting ready, and three months later, she sends the most expensive and designer baby basket money can buy.
Apart from his absolutely terrible French, Dan takes to his life as Parisian house husband very well. He calls it his Julia Child, Alice Toklas phase. Blair still sometimes has to remind herself that she doesn’t need to guard Henry so jealously anymore, that Dan’s here for him as much as he is for her.
Many a time, though, Henry will be telling him a story and get so excited that he goes too fast and forgets what language he’s speaking, and Dan will have to stop him and say “Henry, honey, en Anglais, please.”
“Does it bother you?” Dan asks after Lizzie Waldorf-Humphrey is born, “That she can’t run for president?”
“Nah,” Blair says sleepily, “She’s a Supreme Court justice all the way.”
One day when Blair’s organizing her home office, she stumbles across their high school senior yearbook. She ignores most pages, too many of them with the potential to hurt, but sends a picture to Serena of the page of the two of them, which Serena hearts immediately.
She pads down the hall and into Dan’s office, the door open so he can keep one eye in Henry in the living room, Lizzie asleep on the sofa.
“So this was your plan all along?” she asks as she saunters in. “The American writer in Paris?”
It takes him a minute to come out of his head and back to her, but he always comes back. He blinks at the book in her hands for a moment until his eyes light up in recognition, the rest of his face lighting up with a laugh.
He reaches out a hand, tugging her to him. “This,” he says, in that heart-stirringly sincere way only he gets, “is so beyond what I ever could have planned.”
She slips onto his lap, and he holds her close, the both of them knowing this quiet will only last so long, and then Lizzie will wake up and Henry will barrel in with a question and a follow up and the cat is somewhere in the house about to knock something over. Never completely peaceful nor perfect but wholly, entirely worth it.
