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terrainofheartfelt · 1 year

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Gossip Girl Appreciation Week | Day 6: AU

The Grossly Indulgent Pop Music AU I will never write:

Inspired by one of the only Jonerys fics I like.

Not quite a fic, but not not a fic, here’s an unhinged idea that grabbed hold and wouldn’t let me go. The music is a loose jumping off point of inspiration, in that all the characters have one or two artist equivalents. I use their music as the characters’ work in this universe. So it’s like an AU of pop musicians’ lives, but not really, since I don’t know their biographies, just their music. It’s fanfic, you know how it is.

Enclosed beneath the cut you shall find: dairfair, negatively painted jenny/damien & chair, some positive jenate, and a inkling at my newest ot3 vanessa/aaron/serena. And lots of opaque music references.

image sources: (x)(x)(x)(x)(x)(x)(x)(x)(x)

Blair and Serena come up in a lab-grown pop girl group in their teens (sample track here), but break off for their own solo acts after a few years. They have a friend breakup after that. Diss tracks are written. (Inspo: Honey & Bad Blood) the final (supposedly) proverbial nail in the coffin of their friendship is when Blair marries record label exec Chuck Bass.

(Needless to say, Chuck is a piece of shit. Living off family money and power, using his title to back young women artists into a corner. Blair thinks she conquered the beast by putting a ring on it but, well, you know.) (While Jenny Humphrey is coming up she’s one of the artists Chuck harasses. She refuses to sign with his label and tells him to fuck off.)

The rumors as to why their girl group break up run wild, and they mutate with each tabloid run, growing more and more ridiculous, but, like many rumors, they did spring from a small seed of truth.

Blair was ambitious, and always used the act as an opportunity to set herself up for a solo career. Serena was her best friend, but whereas Blair had to work hard at everything that came with this job, it was like Serena didn’t have to try at all. She was the darling of the interviews, of the fans. The favorite on the covers of magazines and music videos. Serena was getting solo offers since their debut, but turned them down, until she didn’t.

Their group toured with a team of dancers, also all carefully selected by the label. Nate Archibald was one of the fan favorites, and the label quickly paired him and Blair together for publicity. Blair was always just a little more invested than Nate was. He wasn’t even sure if this career, this lifestyle was what he wanted, but Blair was more than sure, was constantly working to get ahead. But the label kept them together, until they figured they could pair Nate with Serena instead. (And Nate didn’t fight it, because he’d always carried a torch for Serena anyway).

It wasn’t the first fight between the friends, nor the last, but it was the big frisson that they couldn’t come back from. The group held on for another album, but it was clear that they couldn’t go on. Blair and Serena signed solo contracts, and Blair got close with Chuck Bass, and that was the final straw for Serena.

Nate tried to stay friends with both of them through it, but he was also coming to the conclusion that he didn’t want to keep up this lifestyle. He quit performing to go to school, and he found his niche teaching dance to kids—not at a university level, not with the intention to make future professionals, but just to young people looking for something to love. It suits him, and he becomes a reality check for his two high profile best friends. Or he tries to be, but their lives keep pulling them away from New York, so he sees them less and less.

(The other two members of the group move on to other adjacent things. Kati founds her own fashion label—available in Targets everywhere!—and Iz becomes a judge on one of those America’s Got It Factor Talent Shows).

Post girlgroup, Serena runs a Kesha-like life, pop hits made for club dancing. Her character is much more glittering and reckless than Serena might prefer to be, but she’s in the game so long that it sort of – becomes her from time to time.

Serena works tirelessly, keeps trying to break out of her brand of the out of control party girl, but her label, the one she was brought up on, founded by her maternal grandfather, wants her to keep making what sells. Her brother Eric tries to fight her corner, but he’s only a junior employee. After a handful of solo albums and years of endless touring, she burns out. Eric gives her a place to be and rest, and she tries to figure out what the hell she’s going to do. She wants to make more music, but of what?

Blair is taylor-esque, clinging to her brand of The Good Girl from her teen career into adulthood. The reputation and her general effervescence add sparkle to the Bass brand, clean it up a little. It’s a symbiotic business relationship, until it isn’t.

Chuck progressively tries to exercise more control over the music she puts out, to the point that Blair just…doesn’t. Her last album under the Bass label is the one she released with tracks that allude to their relationship, her victory lap for landing the billionaire bachelor whale, as it were (Style, Wildest Dreams, Wonderland, I Know Places). She’s more clever than some give her credit. For example, the tongue-in-cheek “Blank Space” belies an artistic self-awareness. Which is why, even though they aren’t in the same genres, Jenny Humphrey respects her.

Speaking of Jenny: the Humphreys!

Rufus Humphrey, frontrunner of the early 90s outfit Lincoln Hawk, enjoyed a good run when his kids were little, then a less lucrative run as a solo artist, before he finally settled into producing. He runs a small, proud independent label with his old bandmate, and they pride themselves on supporting talent that the bigger corporate labels pass over. Both his kids, Dan and Jenny, make music with him.

They grew up playing piano, then graduated to guitar, then spiraled on from there. Dan joins his first band when he’s sixteen, playing keys for his best friend’s big sister’s band. Ruby Abrams and her bandmates affectionately call him an honorary lesbian, and after gigging with them for about a year, Dan comes out as bi. (his three sisters: Jenny, Vanessa, and Ruby, are already out)

His best friend Vanessa is also a musician. She tries to go the classical route, wanting to usurp her parents’ and her sister’s expectations, but ultimately finds her happy in the indie folk niche that Rufus curates. (Think Lucy Daucus & Maya Hawke) Vanessa’s favorite instrument is bass, but she can find her way around a keyboard or guitar.

Jenny is the real prodigy, though. She has her guitars and piano and even a mandolin, but she’s restless at sticking to just one sound, so she experiments with them all. Fulfilling, absolutely, but it’s a long time before she puts out a full length record.

Dan and Jenny’s parents break up while the kids are in college. With Rufus touring as much as he was when they were young, Alison did the heavy lifting raising them, and now that they’re grown she kind of – has a Mom Drop. She moves back home to the Bay Area, and Dan ends up following her to California, needing to get out of New York and get some distance from his dad.

Jenny stays in New York, taking classes, making music. She starts dating a much older artist—he’s not on her dad’s label (which is part of the appeal) —but he has a complimentary sound. After the mess that was her model gf Agnes, Jenny is hoping for something steadier, but that’s not what it becomes. Being with Damien Dalgaard, darling of the Guy with Guitar genre, ends up being more of a mindfuck. (John Mayer. Damien’s basically John Mayer.)

Rufus tries to put his foot down (even though Jenny’s an adult) and Vanessa tries to help, but it’s one of those things where the toxic relationship just has to run its course, even if it puts Jenny into major spotlight for the first time. It’s rough on her, but she makes it through and out of the relationship. And, at least she comes out of it with enough material to graduate from EPs and make for her first full length album: Badlands.

Jenny starts out this au Halsey-like, but evolves her sound back to her rock folk indie origins, a sound like Julien Baker.

Meanwhile, Dan tries his luck as a musician on the West Coast, immersing himself in the scene there. He joins the roster of another band, and has enough skill to make income as a session musician to cover the difference, which leads him to another band. He still tries writing, but he’s so busy making other people’s music come alive that he doesn’t get far.

At one concert or another he bumps into Serena van der Woodsen. She’s fun, and smart, and stupid hot, and more miraculously, she is into him. They date for a while, but her life in the spotlight as a partying popstar gets more and more chaotic, and Dan can’t keep up, and he’s not really sure he wants to. The break up amicably, but it still stings enough to generate some songs, ones he doesn’t have time to record.

He keeps dating around. Serena sets him up with one of her friends, an actor, Carter Baizen, but he works so much too that it doesn’t go anywhere at the time. And then, there’s Georgina,

At the beginning, Georgina the heiress from Bel-Air just seems like another in a line of innocuous bad decisions Dan’s made since moving to LA. She’s crazy, but she’s hot, and fun, and it’s a good time until it fizzles out.

Then, months later, when Dan’s offered a spot in a backup band for someone, Georgina shows up at his door, pregnant.

The Milo plot unfolds, Dan steps away from his music, works only on what will pay bills and keep life stable for the baby. Georgina flakes, and flakes, until she doesn’t, until she decides to tell Dan the truth about Milo’s paternity and take him with her, all the way back to her parent’s mansion in Connecticut.

After everything, his parents, Serena, Georgina, everything going on with Jenny, Dan just kind of…breaks. He deflates, struggles, holes up in his crummy apartment on the eastside of Los Angeles until Vanessa bullies him into coming back to New York.

Being around each other again helps the Humphrey siblings reset. Jenny is already promoting Badlands, and Dan becomes her roadie, proudly cheering her on from the sidelines, even while the contents of her lyrics are absolutely gutting.

He keeps trying and failing to write, until both V and Jen tell him that he’s trying too hard to “make it into something.” Jenny just tells him to write and see what comes out, and however it sounds, it sounds.

So he does. It’s not quite the folk his mother raised them on, or the 90s rock of their dad, or the punk that Dan’s been a support player in all these years. It’s softer than that, but more jagged too. But he plays a demo for Jenny and Vanessa and keeps on going.

Jenny is a big believer in using songwriting as some sort of “exorcist.” Spit out all the bad shit, pour it into a song, put it into a vessel that doesn’t hurt you anymore. Dan’s style is a little bit different from his sister’s. She’s braver than he is – is okay to take her emotion and throw it out into her singing, but Dan thinks he might not be that tough.

For example, the stuff about Milo, Dan can’t even say it directly. He writes about it sure, but it comes out a mess, until he’s not sure if he’s talking about himself, or Milo, or even Georgina. He can’t even bring himself to mention either of them by name, just names a song after an approximation. Georgia. He also writes his first of many storytelling songs: You Missed My Heart.

He gets enough positivity from the demo for a record deal, and the leading single, Motion Sickness, does better than Dan thought it would. He says it has to be because there’s more residual interest in one of Serena van der Woodsen’s exes than he thought. Jenny and Vanessa share a look, because he really is that good though.

And after years of work behind the curtain, Dan Humphrey is getting vested interest in his own songs, and what’s more, he’s written something worth singing. Stranger in the Alps launches an entirely new phase of his career, and, as it turns out, his personal life.

Blair doesn’t travel in the circles of the mid-level artist, but at a festival, purely by chance, she ends up in Dan Humphrey’s car.

It’s not Dan’s first festival gig, but this is definitely the biggest, and the best spot he’s ever gotten in a lineup. The true sign that he’s on the up and up, though, is that he’s provided transportation.

After sound check before his gig, he’s herded back to his car, to go back to his hotel before he goes on later tonight.

But then this girl gets in with him.

Blair had had it with her handler (her husband’s goon), and paparazzi were starting to catch the scent—as far as the public knew, she still had the perfect fairytale dream marriage—so she co-opted this nobody indie guy’s ride as her getaway car.

Dan’s bewildered, and irritated, but also kind of charmed. It’s a nice break in the routine, accidentally kidnapping a princess of pop.

He invites her to see his set, which she scoffs at, but she googles him as soon as she’s back in her hotel room. And then, she pulls strings so she can watch his set from backstage. (He covers “I’m on Fire,” and she absolutely does not think that it’s hot).

They have a drink in the green room after, and don��t stop talking until a festival staff person kicks them out because the venue’s shutting down for the night.

AND SO IT BEGINS.

She arranges for him to see her headlining set, and then after, she asks him what he thought, and he tells her. Like, actually tells her. She’s a good artist, with talent, but she keeps dumbing it down, and why?

He essentially says she’s better than this, and she tells him to fuck off, and tells him that just because not every single one of my songs is about angsting alone on the bedroom floor doesn’t make me shallow, Humphrey. (and that’s his Moment.)

She’d been after compliments, some vague idea that he’d be blown away by how good she is, and she’d get a positive review for once. Which is so stupid, why should she even care what a nobody like Dan Humphrey thinks?

But he is not a nobody, not anymore.

She looks him up after the festival. His star is definitely rising. A child of nepotism, his father was in a popular band in the late 80s and early 90s, and so Dan and his little sister grew up close to the business. Humphrey’s been in a couple bands since he was sixteen (started young like her), but after those broke up, and a couple lost years that google can’t account for, he released a solo album and just like that, people are paying attention, beyond just the indie bubble.

Blair recognizes his sister, Jenny Humphrey, and even has one of her albums saved in her library. Not something Blair would make, but it’s decent.

She digs a little more, trying to figure out those lost years, but comes up empty. She does find, however, that Humphrey famously dated Serena a few years back, Google is rife with paparazzi photos of them in LA. And he accused her of making shallow music? Serena’s solo work is nothing but her belting about parties and drugs and sex to heavy beats. Club music. Music to have parties, drugs, and sex, too.

Finding out his history with Serena is enough for Blair to write off Dan Humphrey as a hack, an aberration. A way to pass the time at a festival gig and distract herself from her own life.

But, Blair finds Dan Humphrey is becoming increasingly unavoidable. He’s doing one talk show appearance while she’s at another studio a few floors up. He’s moved back to New York, he tells her, just until he goes on tour again. He invites her to a show, at some dive in Brooklyn she’s never heard of. For that, she nearly doesn’t even go.

But then, she does.

For security reasons, she sneaks in the back, aided by her assistant Epperly, and watches from the closet that counts as a backstage. It’s an acoustic set, and Dan plays arrangements of his solo album (that she absolutely did NOT listen to), plus some covers. In fact, he covers one of her songs. “Blank Space,” mashed up with “Stand by Me.” He introduces it by saying, “I really love the melodies in this song, I think it’s just really good melody writing.” And it feels like…an apology.

They keep meeting up, but now, it’s on purpose, not accidental. They’re both in New York for the time being anyways, Dan is getting some rest before the European leg of his album tour, and Blair is supposed to be working on a new album before her own, but she’s got…nothing. Less than nothing. And Chuck knows that, which means it’s harder and harder to have him around.

Besides, there’s no rule that she can’t have friends. Honestly, with how her career is, she doesn’t really have any. There’s Epperly, and Dorota, maybe Nate. She’s married, but she’s not sure she would call Chuck her friend.

She and Dan though, they have a real connection. And they can be just friends.

Since she has absolutely no new songs to record, she leaves for Europe a couple weeks early, she tells Chuck it’s to visit her parents in Paris and get inspired, but then, at the last minute, she changes her itinerary, and goes to Dublin instead, where Dan’s first gig is.

Blair’s been letting herself and this friendship live in plausible deniability, but as she’s learned more about Dan, about the kind of person and artist that he is, she knows that isn’t really his thing, and when she appears at his show in Dublin, he refuses to let it go, and Blair, worn thin by…literally everything else, can’t keep up the denial anymore, and tells him to bring her back to his hotel.

It’s a mistake, it’s such a mistake. Blair’s life is already precarious enough as it is. Chuck’s label owns her contracts, her catalog, and basically her. She’s been over and over it, and can’t see a way out. She wanted to be on top, and that was the price.

But, Dan.

Being with him feels like waking up after spending her entire adult life asleep. She’s excited about music again, about making something. She writes, then hides it all away, because she can’t record songs about being in love with someone else on her husband’s dime.

She has her tour, and Dan has his, but they meet on every overlapping date. Sometimes she’s so tired after a concert all she has energy to do is sleep in his arms, but even that stolen time feels sacred.

When their tour legs end, Dan tentatively asks if it’s the end, but she really doesn’t want it to be.

He’s back in New York City at first, so that’s easier, and harder, because Chuck is there too. Thankfully, Blair’s sales were high enough that she’s in his good graces, and when she slips away it’s easy enough to say she’s working on something new. She practically sees cartoon dollar signs flash in Chuck’s eyes when she does. How she ever thought that this could be her happily ever after, she’ll never know.

She and Dan talk about that, about living in stories and wanting fairytales but being smacked down by real life. She tells him that she doesn’t feel like she belongs to herself anymore, how she doesn’t want to write anymore if it means that Chuck will profit off it, but if she walks away, all those things she believed, promised, sung, was all of it for nothing?

She wrote love songs about Chuck, for Chuck. Her life’s work is tangled up in him, and she’s not sure she wants to pull away from all of that, much less if she even could.

Dan tells her about Milo, about loss, about the shadow his father cast and how hiding in it was safe so he didn’t try to break out of it, but now he’s out. He talks about loving his parents but resenting them for not staying in love, and resents himself for falling out of love in the past.

“What did you do about it?” she asks him.

He waggles his eyebrows at her, and reaches behind him to grab his guitar.

It’s unfair, she knows it’s unfair. Blair comes to rely on Dan too much, to center her, to hold her, to love her even when it’s not his place. But she keeps going to him, and he’s always there, arms open.

He’s writing about her. She knows before he even tells her. She can sense it sometimes, when he’s looking at her, and she just knows he has lyrics running in his head.

But it’s unfair. He’s bicoastal, going to and from LA for gigs and appearances. When he’s gone, Blair does her own, always beginning and ending with paparazzi shots of her on Chuck’s arm, smiling like she’s still in love with him. Her heart belongs to someone else now, but she’s afraid she’s in too deep to break away.

In the meantime, Dan, Jenny, and Vanessa come back to their roots: each other, and decide to do a project together, write an EP (boygenius. It’s boygenius). They have a fair mix of songs, and all of Dan’s lyrics are fed by his relationship to BLair, that he’s told no one about, but it bleeds out of everything he writes. They’re approaching an impasse, he can feel it, but selfishly, he wants to avoid it as long as possible, to keep her as long as possible.

In addition to his EP with Jenny and Vanessa, Dan has a deal for a next record, and a handful of songs to put on it already. When he’s in LA, he’s working on his own music, and when he’s in New York, he’s either working with Jen and Vanessa, or he’s with Blair.

But it can’t last. Blair is feeling the pressure from Bass Records, and if she were to get caught in an affair, or separate from Chuck, Chuck would hold her catalog hostage. Her entire life’s work wouldn’t be hers anymore. And maybe Dan’s right when he says that she can’t stay with her husband, but she’s right when she says she can’t leave him either.

She can’t even record new music for the label either, because everything new she’s written is covered in Dan. She even wrote a song about that. She is covered in him.

But Dan has his own wounds, and they make him push, and push, and self sabotage, and after one gruesome, draining fight, Blair calls it off.

In the meantime, Jenny and Vanessa are doing work of their own, on their music and on themselves.

Vanessa plays her solos up and down the east coast, through the Midwest, and back in New York. Through Rufus, she meets Aaron Rose, a jack-of-all-trades of sorts. Like Rufus, he was a musician first, but mostly works now as a producer. They hit it off, and after working on a thing or two, they start dating, but only casually. After several years and multiple musical acts, Aaron’s star as a producer is rising, and he’s working with bigger and bigger names.

Jenny is still healing from all her garbage (Agnes, Damien, etc.), and the music helps, and the project with Dan and Vanessa does too—it’s an excuse to reconnect with each other, and she becomes close to two of her favorite people again. It helps. As does the therapy, and all the other things she does.

One such thing, recommended by her therapist and her parents, is to do creative things that are outside of her purview as a musician. She’s always sort of been into fashion, so she gets into sewing, into designing her own looks. And when that’s not active enough, she puts in time at the dance studio in Brooklyn where her mom used to teach, where she took classes once upon a time.

She isn’t interested in lessons, or classes with other people, but the owners still know her, and love Alison, so they’ll give her solo studio time when she asks for it, and one afternoon, one of their new staff walks into the wrong studio.

Jenny kind of bites his head off, but he kind of likes that. He says his name is Nate, he’s the new hire to take over the beginner classes. And — he’s hot, obviously, but Jenny is on permanent hiatus in that department. Not that that stops her from looking.

But after that first meeting, Nate is just always around, and Jenny doesn’t really want to deal with all the shit that having him around kicks up within her, but she likes hanging out with him, so she tells him – firmly – that she only wants to be friends, and he respects that. What a thing, to have a guy respect her boundaries.

She keeps putting it all in her music, Turn Out the Lights doesn’t make the same splash as Badlands, apparently people care less the more distance she puts between herself and Damien, but Jen decides she’s okay with that.

Reeling from another heartbreak that Dan can’t really talk about, he puts it into his music, in the EP with Jen and V and in his new album. His sophomore solo album, Punisher, comes out to a great reception. Well, great within the small circle of people who actually know who he is.

The gigs that began with his debut keep rolling in, late night shows, radio appearances, festivals, and now mixed in with those are engagements for his act with Jen and Vanessa. To his surprise, people are interested in that music because of him. He doesn’t know how to feel about that. If you ask him, Jenny and Vanessa are way better at what they do than he is.

Dan’s public profile grows bigger and bigger, but Blair can’t be happy for him, because it makes him increasingly unavoidable. She refuses to listen to the new music he releases, she’s afraid it’s too cruel towards her, or worse, it’s too kind.

But, just like their accidental first meeting, she stumbles across a single he put out after the new album. Typical Humphrey. A goddamn overachiever, kept on writing even after the album was done. She didn’t mean to see it, but she was scrolling through All Songs Considered, and there he was, talking about Audrey Hepburn, of all things.

There’s this line in the movie Sabrina, where she says “I have learned to be in the world and of the world, and not just stand aside and watch.” And that’s really what this song’s about, about falling in love with a person because they’ve taught you how to live, how to appreciate everything the world has to offer. And there’s – there’s a tremendous amount of joy in that, but there’s also fear, because gaining that now means that it’s possible to lose it too. So – I guess this is sort of trying to reconcile those ideas within a song.

Blair listens to “Sidelines,” and it makes her so angry that she scribbles off a song idea of her own, because he still doesn’t get it. He meant her while she was in the middle of running away, so why won’t he just let her run?

She worries fleetingly about getting caught, because Audrey is her thing, and Dan knows that, but Audrey is a ubiquitous enough icon that no one but she would ever make the connection. He’s good at that, Dan is, of coding a message to her that only she could understand. It’s the same skill that makes him such a good writer.

Blair writes songs because she can’t help it, but she won’t record them. A new album would mean adding to Chuck’s empire, and the thought of Chuck owning these songs too, the only things of Dan she’s allowed herself to keep…she can’t stomach the thought of it.

She’s stayed with him to protect her work, but now her work is dead on arrival because of him, and that’s really what drives her decision to divorce Chuck.

She has to do it carefully, of course. She sets up a place of her own to go to in New York, moves in all the things that mean the most to her. Puts her notebooks in a safety deposit box—just to be sure. And, finally, she reaches out to her mother, to get a recommendation for a divorce attorney familiar with entertainment law.

On a first impression, Cyrus Rose doesn’t look like much beyond a short, ebullient, overly cheery middle-aged man, but Blair quickly learns that when he’s practicing law, he turns into a bulldog. He fights for her and for her work so fiercely that for a little while, Blair lets herself believe that it will all come out her way.

But there’s all the media coverage, and it paints her out as a bitter, gold-digging, ungrateful woman, villainizing a man who doesn’t deserve it. It pisses her off to no end, but Cyrus tells her to hold her silence, and she trusts him, so she does.

In the end, Cyrus is able to get her out of her marriage and most of her contract with Bass Records. She’s not destitute, she still has her family money, and a comfortable settlement, but Cyrus is ultimately unable to save her music. Bass will still own her masters, and the residuals from those masters. It’s that that breaks her heart the most—more than how quickly Chuck turned the media cycle against her, more than how many people followed his lead, more than the evidence Cyrus discovered of his multiple affairs, of his mismanagement of the company—but that her work cannot belong to her, that hurts the most.

But, bulldog that he is, Cyrus digs out a loophole. Since going solo, Blair has been the prime writer of all her songs, which gives her the legal right to rerecord her masters. So while she can’t stop Chuck from doing whatever he wants with her old work, anything she makes now can be entirely within her control.

She just has to find someone willing to work with her. And who she trusts enough to work with.

Worn out, Blair retreats from the public eye, it’s lonely, but thankfully, not too lonely.

The divorce process set Blair to looking back at lots of her life, at things and people she wishes she had handled differently. After she privately filed her petition, she reached out to Serena, and, miraculously, Serena answered.

Before anything else is fixed, Blair and Serena’s friendship is fixed. They reconnect, because everything they’ve been through, together and apart, has made them want to focus on what matters, and what matters is each other.

They talk all the shit through, Blair’s marriage, Serena’s struggles, their respective creative blocks. They start appearing in public together, and the tabloids gobble that shit UP.

Serena is working on a comeback record of her own, her first since burning out with her grandfather’s label. It’s zany, and bright, but doesn’t shy away from the heartache she’s been through. It’s so incredibly her, that Blair can’t help but love it. She loves it, no matter that the liner notes give credit to a Dan Humphrey on a few tracks

Free from Bass Records, Blair wants to work on a new album, but she’s unsure of where to begin. Serena offers to introduce her to this producer she’s been dating (out of the public eye for a change), Aaron Rose.

Blair doesn’t quite know what to make of Aaron, of his music, of his open relationship with her newly restored best friend, but she looks up his previous acts and thinks…maybe working with him could be the change her sound needs.

Dan is moving in—if not the same—adjacent circles to her. Enough so that she can’t get him out of her head, can’t get over wanting him. She spills the whole thing to Serena, who she knew was also Dan’s ex, but didn’t know that they were still friends. Serena tells her to stay optimistic, Blair says Serena just thinks that because she’s okay sharing a boyfriend.

Her engagements have been sparse, she’s not wanted many, and not many have wanted her, but Austin City Limits is still on her calendar. In the promotional materials, they highlight her on one stage, and Dan’s band with Jenny and Vanessa on another.

She doesn’t intend to seek him out, but fate conspires against her, and they end up thrown into the same green room. Again.

Dan doesn’t want to want her anymore. His career has forward movement and even if the music he makes is about her, the people who like it don’t know that, nor do they care. They care that it’s good. His career is good, he’s been dating Netflix Original darling Carter Baizen for months now, happily and uncomplicatedly. (Serena put them in touch, then one dm led to another, and it’s nice). Not that Carter doesn’t have his own damage—no one in LA is without damage, but they can forget about their damage with each other. It’s not love, but it’s not not love.

Dan doesn’t want to want her anymore, But, oh, he does.

They nearly miss their calls—his set, her soundcheck—while talking (well, talking, fighting, kissing, then talking some more). But they fulfill their contracts, and just like it started three years ago, they end up backstage after their shows, drinking, and talking, and talking until a harrowed stage manager is begging them to leave.

Dan sets a limit, makes himself go back to Jen and Vanessa, instead of going home with her, but he says he’s going straight to New York after this, and asks if she’ll be around.

Blair says yes.

After the divorce, Blair sold off the real estate she’d kept from her marriage. It was all too haunted, too high up, too far from reality. While looking for a new place, Epperly showed her a listing for a remodeled carriage house in the West Village; Blair would have bought it sight unseen if anyone but Epperly had been there.

Back in New York, Dan invites her to a secret acoustic show he’s playing near NYU. She goes, of course, and this time, when she asks him to come home with her, he says yes.

It takes time. For them to trust each other, and reconnect. But they do, and Blair feels like her life is finally making sense.

She and Dan take one day, one step at a time, in secret, for both their sakes, and meanwhile, she, Epperly, Cyrus, and Aaron negotiate a new contract with Rose Records.

Her best-friendship, record deal, and love life all fall into place, and then Blair is writing like never before.

Aaron is….unconventional, and doesn’t let her push him around, which she finds infuriating, not for least of which is the direction he wants to take this album. She fights it at first, but if she really does want to make a departure from the pop princess songs she was generating, maybe following down his path is not the worst idea. And if she hates it, then she can just walk.

It’s still pop, but it’s bigger, less bubbly and more….glittering. It’s….darker isn’t exactly the right word, but like she’s not trying to be the Good Girl anymore. It’s just crafting a record that’s hers, one song at a time.

She offers Dan the option to co-write, more than once, but he turns her down. Not because he doesn’t care, but because this is the first time the music she’s making entirely belongs to her, and he doesn’t want to get in the way of that.

“Church and state,” he says one late night in her cozy house on Cornelia Street.

“And which one’s this?”

“Church,” he answers immediately before kissing her. “Obviously.”

Speaking of church and state, and despite their expectations, they’re able to keep them out of the public eye. Blair’s friends know, and Dan’s family knows, but no one else does. By some miracle, they keep out of the tabloids. Blair keeps working on her album, Dan keeps working with his sister and best friend. They go out into the world and make music and go home to each other at the end of the night.

Blair and Aaron Rose make a surprisingly good time. They finish the album fast, and nine months after Blair’s divorce from Chuck and Bass Records, reputation drops.

She has a whole slew of promotions to do for the release, but that midnight, she and Dan open a bottle of wine and listen to the whole thing start to finish. (“Church and State, honey, I’ll listen when it’s done,” he’d said). He’s a fan.

She and Aaron were both intent on it not being a “divorce record,” but it is about her, exploring who she is as a person and an artist after her carefully constructed life fell apart, and about the love and truth she found in the wreckage. It's not a divorce record; she never point blank references Chuck, or their marriage, but the argument could be made that there’s a rebuke against him in every track. Even in the love songs she wrote about Dan, her writing of him is an antithesis of who Chuck was as a partner. The most pointed tracks are even able to claim plausible deniability. There are some people on the internet, though, who criticize the single “Look What You Made Me Do,” as a phrase habitually used by abusers, to which Blair says (in private, of course): “Yeah, that was the whole fucking point.”

The album doesn’t out perform her Bass releases immediately, but no one denies that the Queen B is back, she charms on late night shows, radio spots, and a months-long tour kicks off with high sales. There’s another legal fight about her having to pay for the right to perform her own songs on the tour, and as infuriating as that is, Blair is restored at having herself as an artist back.

Of course, to the public, the addressee in many of the songs is a mystery. Who is “Gorgeous” about? Or “Dress”? Or “Call It What You Want”? Many a pop culture think-piece is written on the topic, but no one guesses right. The most popular theory though, since they appear in public so often nowadays, is that Blair is dating Serena. It turns out to be a pretty good cover for keeping their real relationships private, so they play it up.

(sidebar: in the effort to hold of the Divorce Record allegations, Aaron had her tweak the bridge in Gorgeous, the original lines she demo’ed for him were: you make me so happy it turns back to sad / there’s nothing I hate more than what I can’t have / guess I’ll just stumble on back to my man / unless you want to take me home)

(It’s actually a testament to the loyalty and restraint of the people around them, because Blair and Dan are shit at being subtle while they’re together. )

Speaking of the people around them, it’s a bit hilarious how their lives all intertwine and overlap. There’s Dan’s sister, who’s hated Blair’s ex-husband for years, and who’s now decidedly not dating Blair’s ex-boyfriend. (“Just friends,” she and Nate insist to anyone who even comes close to asking, but Blair thinks they doth protest too much). And there’s Blair's best friend who was her former nemesis and Dan’s ex but is now dating Blair’s colleague and producer. Speaking of her colleague and producer, Aaron—who just so happens to be her lawyer’s son—he’s also in a poly-relationship with Dan’s best friend and bandmate, Vanessa Abrams. Vanessa who, on more than one occasion, Blair has caught giving Serena the eye, and vice versa.

They are all kind of a mess, but Blair finds she loves it that way. Her supposedly pristine life had been fake anyway. She much prefers this.

She and Dan keep their relationship a secret through her stadium tour and into awards season, when they decide to finally come out of the shadows.

“I’ve never really come out before,” Dan jokes, “everybody just already kinda knew.”

They pick the American Music Awards as the event. Blair gives him one last out in the limo ride over, but he doesn’t want to take it. He’s not ignorant of the public attention and pressure she lives with, but he loves her more than he’s afraid of that.

He gets out of the car first on his side, then comes around to open her door and help her out onto the red carpet. She kisses him as soon as she’s on her feet, limo door still open, cameras flashing in front of them.

The internet loses its collective mind. Intrigue suddenly sprouts up around this unassuming sad boi indie artist. Streams of Punisher and Strangers in the Alps hit all time highs. Dan’s been represented by his dad this whole time, but now Rufus jokes, “I think I can’t afford you.”

To ask him if his life has changed is stupid, of course it has, but his focus doesn’t. Dan’s attention is always only on the music. On the music, and on Blair.

Every year, Vanessa orchestrates a benefit show at one of their old favorite clubs in Brooklyn. It’s usually just Vanessa, Jenny, and Dan, but once she’s earned the trust of Dan’s sisters, Blair appears too. People go feral for a bootleg when they hear through the grapevine that she covered “A Case of You,” with Dan on the dulcimer.

For two people who love playing music, and love playing music together, they don’t do it in public very often. It becomes something that they save for just each other, and only occasionally will they perform together in public. Dan plays on Blair’s NPR TIny Desk once, and once for WFUV, they do a cover of “Dust to Dust.” it’s OBSCENE. sex in the studio amirite

The dark corners of the internet (fangirls) start looking a little too closely at their lyrics, and it’s only a matter of time before a fan tweet theorizes that Blair Waldorf had an affair with sad boi indie guy while she was married.

Chuck jumps on the rumor, plays it up in an attempt to smack Blair down after the success of her latest record. He calls her a cheater, a gold-digger, all the accusations he floated during the divorce and more.

In response, Blair releases a single. She wrote it while she and Dan were first together all those years ago, and kept it for her. At the time, she never planned on letting it see the light of day, she wasn’t even sure she would share it with Dan. But where she is now, she feels happy and safe in sharing this piece of her soul.

When she drops “ivy,” it's a confirmation of the rumors, but unapologetic. Comedians applaud her gall on late night shows. She was accused of having an affair, and she said, yeah I fucked him, and I wrote this ballad about it.

It isn’t pristine, or the most graceful thing to admit, but Blair is happy, and she won’t pretend to be sorry for being happy. She releases another album (Loneliest Time), then another (Lover), as does Dan (the more rockabilly Sleepwalkers). And three years after her divorce, they marry in a private ceremony with only their nearest and dearest in attendance. They keep the marriage quiet for six months after the fact. And, in the meantime, Blair sits down with Aaron to strategize re-recording her masters.

She starts with a single from her last record under the Bass umbrella. She’d written “This Love” about her and Chuck’s on-again, off-again relationship before he finally gave in and married her. On touring, she’d grown increasingly tired of it, she’d hated it for a while there. But her life and heart have come full circle, and now she can sing it with a new perspective.

When “This Love (B’s Version)” drops, she posts a set of photos on instagram:

The cover of the new single, which is a close up of her face, eyes closed, lips red, another set of lips kissing her cheek

The original photo used for the cover, zoomed out to see Dan kissing Blair’s cheek.

Another photo of Blair and Dan in their home at the West Village, forehead to forehead, facing each other.

A candid shot of Blair in the studio, wiping her eyes after tearing up while recording vocals.

Another candid of Blair and Aaron hugging once they wrapped.

Blair writes the caption of the post herself, which reads:

It’s funny how the meanings of songs can change as you change. When I first recorded “This Love,” I hadn’t even met the love of my life yet. I thought my big, magical, cyclical love story was done. Then, when I learned it wasn’t that magical at all, I couldn’t bring myself to sing the song anymore, its meaning had become tainted, hurtful. But then, after enough time, and with the right person, something amazing happened. I found a new meaning in it, deeper, happier, and it was like my life had finally caught up to what I had written all those years ago. These hands had to let it go free, but “This Love” has finally come back to me, and now I share it with you. xoxo, B

And CURTAIN

PS: this is how they announce Blair’s pregnancy when it happens

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