Work Text:
It starts one morning when Blair wakes him up by poking him in the stomach, as usual.
"Go make breakfast," she commands. "I'm starving."
Dan keeps his eyes closed and smiles in his pillow. This technique works about one time out of two, but Blair is cottoning up to it.
"Go. make. breakfast," she repeats after a few seconds. Her nail digs into his skin in a way that reminds him of the night before, and blood rushes to his morning wood. Suddenly Blair's voice in his ear, silken and dangerous. "Pity you're asleep. All that morning sex I was planning on."
Dan groans and finally opens his eyes, grinning. Blair's eyes are fonder than she'd probably like. "Hello," she murmurs, dragging her nails along his side. "I'm hungry."
Dan opens his mouth to say that maybe they can bypass the breakfast and quash her hunger with something else, which Blair will no doubt respond to with 'no way in hell', but hey, worth a try. So he opens his mouth, and... nothing comes out.
"Aphonic? What kind of moronic condition is that? Where did you even get it?"
Dan sighs. He grabs the notebook he always keeps on his nightstand, writes, cold, probably.
Blair quirks an eyebrow. "Well that's stupid. >hat am I supposed to do, if I can't even defend our relationship by saying that you're occasionally witty despite your homeless artist look?"
Nurse me?
Blair sits down next to him on the bed and brushes his forehead, suddenly tender. Dan cranes his head; she leans in until their lips are inches apart, and whispers, "In your dreams, Humphrey."
Dan falls back down on the pillows, mouth open in a silent groan. Of course.
Over the course of the half-hour, he has to convince Blair that his condition's not contagious ("I'm not kissing you anyway"), dissuade her from calling the family 200$-per-consultation doctor (he's not going to be able to do anything, Blair), ingest a truly disturbing amount of honey to her orders, and watch her go through at least eight different books and put them down five pages in.
He waves the notebook in front of her where she's sitting staring forlornly at the door, her nails tapping the arm of the couch.
You know we can do things, Blair. I'm not actually handicapped.
She flicks him a disdainful glance. "I'm not going out with you like that. People might notice just how besotted with me you are if you can't even deny it, that would be embarrassing."
I'm the one that's besotted?
"Well obviously, Humphrey. What did you think, that I was the one infatuated with your greasy hair and doubtful literary skills?"
They weren't so doubtful when you called my novel the best thing you'd ever read.
Blair waves his retort away with her hand. "Temporary lapse of judgment. I was momentarily charmed by your eloquence, that's all."
So what's keeping your highness here with me now?
Blair gives him a smirky smile. "You make breakfast," she says, her eyes dancing.
A few people come by when they don't show up at the day's outrageous high-end upper east side occasion (it was - a brunch, maybe? with Blair's mother? Dan honestly cannot remember, they all look the same to him). Blair drives Vanessa away out of sheer cattiness since Dan can't balance it out and he kisses her cheek apologetically before she runs out the door. Jenny has marginally more success, but mostly her and Blair make fun of Dan, so.
"I'm bored," Blair says.
Dan doesn't look up from his computer.
"Say something."
Dan tries again, because by now doing what Blair says is almost a habit (and usually wields more positive results than it does negative), but nope, the only thing that comes out is still an asthmatic murmur.
Blair... Blair is being a bit weird about this, actually. At first it didn't seem like anything out of the usual, it was fun, but now it's almost like she's afraid of talking, like she might say something she doesn't intend to.
He grabs his notebook, scribbles, are you okay?
She gives him a pinched but affectionate smile. "I'm fine, Humphrey. Go back to work."
Dan makes dinner and they eat at the island, brushing against each other as they set the table. With the quiet Dan is all that much more aware of the way they move, how they seem to have the same center of gravity. Even with this silence, their bodies are in sync, making way for each other, sides touching, the tips of Dan's fingers at the small of Blair's back and her palm against the side of his neck.
She tells him a little about work while they eat but gets tired quickly without the usual back-and-forth. Dan doesn't use his notebook to try to get her to talk more, eats quickly, head bent over his plate. They do the dishes side by side like they have since they got together, maybe a remnant from that first time, his first peek into Blair Waldorf's complicated head.
When they get in bed they shuffle closer than they usually do, on instinct, without consulting each other. Blair isn't a big fan of cuddling; Dan knows, because she told him, that as a child she slept curled on herself until the wee hours of the morning where she straightened up and put her palms flat on the covers for her mother to find. Now that she learned to she sleeps sprawled, her arms open as though to make slow angels, her legs slightly curved in his direction, the only sign that she knows he's even here.
But tonight she lets him wind his arm around her stomach and rest his cheek on her sternum. Her breathing is soft, regular. just before sleep drags him in, Dan traces with his fingers, over her silky nightgown, 'sweet dreams', and Blair's heart skips a beat.
The morning after he can feel as soon as he wakes up, his throat sore and aching, that it's not better. Sorry, he writes on the pad he dug up for the occasion, and slips out bed quietly enough not to wake up Blair. Croissants usually drastically diminish the chances of her being mad at him.
Sure enough, when she wakes up to a tray of orange juice and grilled croissant (he even bought a lone flower on the way home, because even though she mocks him he knows she'll appreciate it) she smiles hazily at him.
"You're good, Humphrey," she says, sounding reluctantly impressed.
This time when he leans down to kiss her she doesn't pull away; he hopes it conveys the I know that doesn't make it out of his mouth.
That day is quiet too, and though Blair isn't as weird as she was the day before there's still something obviously wrong with her. Dan ignores it until he doesn't. He takes his pad, scribbles on it and taps it on Blair's knee, which he's leaning against.
Okay, what is going on?
She bites her lower lip. He doesn't get to see her like that often; if it wasn't worrying it would probably be funny. "It's nothing." She sighs. "It's just... I don't like this, you not being able to talk. It's making me want to fill the silence."
You know you can talk to me, right?
She rolls her eyes. "Don't get cheesy. Where's the spice in our relationship if we tell each other everything?"
Blair, I'm not Chuck.
"And I'm thankful for that, even though it really is trading one ill for the other." He grimaces - being compared to Chuck, he doesn't deserve that - and she grins, quick, leans to peck him on the lips. "But I don't - I don't want us to get boring, that's all."
It's obvious that he's not going to convince her, so Dan decides to take the wiser route and let it go. For the first time since this thing started, though, he wishes he could take her face in his hands and tell her - you'll never be boring to me.
Dan realized, over his years of hanging around with the upper east side's cream of the crop, that for all that people seem superficial and shallow, they usually aren't. Blair is the perfect example of that: for years Dan thought she was only what she showed of herself, a scheming, manipulative queen bee reigning mercilessly over her herd of headband-wearing minions, and now... he wouldn't say he knows her, because he'll probably never know her. He probably won't ever understand why she clung to Nate with such childlike desperation or why her mother's approval means so much to her even after all the times she's been disappointed, and he knows they'll need to date for much, much longer before he can ask about the long stretches of time she sometimes spends in the bathroom after dinner.
But love (of course it's love - he doesn't tell her because he knows she'll run away as soon as he gets half a syllable out), at least for him, means this craving to know, to get under a person's skin, discover them. Blair is beautiful, she's talented and sharp and witty and many, many more things and Dan loves her with something worryingly close to certainty--but she's also complicated and sometimes her sharpness means acidic barbs and the kind of self-destructive things she used to do in what she calls her 'Chuck days'.
So Dan doesn't push her. He doesn't tell her that she doesn't have to watch what she says around him because nothing she says is wrong or too much or whatever she thinks it is; doesn't offer to show her the hundreds of pages he wrote about her and never showed to anyone, hidden safely in the recesses of his computer. He enjoys the warmth of her legs against his back and thinks, all in good time.
They're not actually attached at the hip (and oh, how Blair would hate to know that some people do think that), so Blair puts the pot of honey on his keyboard and declares that she's going out, because she knows he "doesn't want her to resent him later if his ailment keeps her from going to the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at MoMa", which is a perfect example of Blair logic. Dan nods, pretending to understand how her brain works, which, for the record, he doesn't.
He gets some writing done (Blair has actually been doing some editing for him, which mostly consists of her relentlessly mocking anything she considers even slightly subpar) and by the time Blair comes back he's feeling good with himself. Blair also looks like she's better; she loops her arms around his neck and kisses him, slow and languid.
"You should've come," she says, grinning. "It was great; Kusama is a genius. The pieces on fashion were breathtaking."
Dan opens a new document on his laptop and types, you're the one who didn't want me to come. I cramp your style, remember?
"Nonsense," Blair says.
Dan rolls his eyes fondly. God, he loves her. When exactly did that happen? How the hell did he manage to fall in love with Blair Waldorf? Sometimes he wonders.
"I thought about it," Blair says, oblivious to his internal crisis. "You should've told me I was being stupid." Dan laughs; if he did that he probably wouldn't survive. "Anyway," Blair continues pointedly, "this," she gestures to him, "makes me nervous. You not talking is... I want to tell you things."
What? Dan mouths, forgetting he can't talk for a minute.
"I'm not used to being happy," Blair says bluntly.
He looks at her; her stance is definitely defensive, and Dan's heart is beating loud, so loud she can probably hear. He takes a step towards her and she raises her chin, defiant. When he kisses her her eyes fall closed immediately, like surrender.
He wakes up in the middle of the night. Blair is curled up against him, her fingers still buried in the hair at the nape of his neck. She usually never sleeps naked but tonight her breasts are mashed against his chest. Dan feels good - thirsty. he reaches for the bottle of water on his nightstand, trying not to wake her up.
The water trickling in his throat feels heavenly. Dan clears his throat - which is when he realizes that it's gone, he can talk again. It's random, but he's happy; he feels like so much words have accumulated on his tongue over the course of the last two days, pointless, mundane things like pass the salt and more important declarations like I'll probably love you forever if I don't watch myself.
He makes a small sound, just to check, but -- yeah. His voice is back. A smile splits his face, and Blair moves against him.
"Whatever you're doing," she mumbles sleepily, "it can definitely wait until the morning."
Dan smiles to himself. he slips back into the warm cocoon of her arms, brushes his cheek against hers. "I love you," he whispers in her ear.
She pretends to be asleep, but he can hear feel her smile stretching against his shoulder, and he thinks with dazed wonder the he might never have been this happy before.