#and if you're wondering if I have thought about the Dair Post-Meeting

[terrainofheartfelt]

Just remembered your mysterious HIMYM/GG au 👀

ohhhhhh, you. bless you for holding me accountable for my au nonsense, S, I love you.

Alright then, by popular demand, and by popular I mean at least one (1) person asked for it:

The Gossip Girl HIMYM AU that I will never write

this is....this is SO long, but you know who I am, and I am not brief. and since the tags are still goofy I'm just warning you now. and putting the meat of the post under the cut.

For starters, there’s the building of the core 5, the friends who’ve known each other forever. Now, you may think the obvious choice for the lead, Ted, a professional grade-a sap who gets his heart put through the ringer before he meets the titular Mother would be Daniel Humphrey Professional Yearner, BUT the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do this:

Blair Waldorf as Ted. And Dan as Tracy, The One Blair finally meets on a Hamptons train platform.

And nobody dies or gets divorced, because...

Oh, and obviously everybody’s gay.

Here me out under the cut:

Blair and Vanessa Abrams were roommates at…I’ve thought NYU, but I also thought it would be interesting just to have them meet at Yale (plus like, Dan is at NYU, so). They clash at first, for obvious reasons, but after a battle at the Parents Weekend event, they bond over their fraught relationship with their parents, and then become best friends after getting caught in a snowstorm trying to drive back to the city on Thanksgiving Break. (Yale would obvi make the road trip make more sense). Nate meets the both of them in their freshman hall, and he and Vanessa fall hard for each other during orientation week and have been together ever since. Making the central Marshall/Lily relationship Natessa, which I think works the best, they would carry that same goofy energy, while also being Blair’s self-assigned emotional guardians. Vanessa has that mom-friend “I am the sole possessor of the brain cell” energy Lily has, plus the artistic passions and struggling to realize them, even at the cost of her relationship. And Nate has the shucksy-doodles bi-coded lovable goofball himboness of Marshall Eriksen, who’s internal conflict is often about balancing the practical and idealistic – but Nate’s has more to do with grappling with his family’s expectations, and Marshall’s is more about his own.

A Natessa plot of them getting engaged, then calling the first wedding off because Vanessa gets a fellowship far away sounds like a conflict that would be very in line with their characters, as would the fallout of not only Nate taking time to forgive Vanessa, but Blair would as well. That bit in the s2 xmas episode of “But you never apologized to me! You left me too.” – I could see that. Blairnessa bffs rights.

After graduation, V scrapes together a living as a contractual production assistant, her filmmaker dreams inching to the side for the service of the cash. Okay, I toyed with the idea of lawyer!Nate, but you know what I like better? Taking a page from both Lily Aldrin’s book AND our discourse about different career paths for Natie and making him: a schoolteacher. A softhearted himbo of a kindergarten teacher. He’s very good at it. When he and Vanessa get engaged he is also going for his masters in education (bc he loves teaching, but he wants to affect change at a higher level by being an administrator someday). (Nate would also “rescue” a goat after a farmer brought one to show-and-tell to his class.)

Blair trades her art history degrees for paying her dues at her mom’s atelier. Somewhere along the way, they pick up their group’s lovable ne’er-do-well, Carter Baizen. He, like Blair, is another disaster bisexual, but he, unlike Blair, is more of a scapegrace about it (but definitely not to Barney Stinson levels, because this is my au and I do what I want). (Have Blair and Carter ever hooked up? I think never knowing/always being vague about it would be a funny gag). Nate & Carter would also absolutely have that chaotic goober vaguely homoerotic best friendship that Marshall & Ted & Barney have.

And HERE. Here is why I wanted to have Ted!Blair, for the potential offered by our Robin character: Serena. A significant will-they-won’t-they romance arc for Blairena. They lock eyes across a crowded room, Carter urges his best friend Blair to introduce herself, cue the year of flirtation and back and forth.

(And honestly, Blair being so very Extra™ and telling Serena “I think I’m falling in love with you” on the first date seems on-brand for our girl)

Lots of Robin & Serena line up: privileged yet screwed up family background, effortlessly gorgeous, ambitious, it’s absolutely plausible that Serena could have been a teen pop sensation in Canada, on the record for not wanting to settle down too soon or be a mom, the last which ultimately leads to Blairena breaking up, because what they want out of life is too different. But it’s impossible for them to imagine life without each other, so after the dust of the breakup settles, they stay friends. They would also be dumb enough to make a “if we’re still single when we’re 40” marriage pact. They break up after their anniversary dinner, when a waiter brings a diamond ring-garnished glass of champagne to the wrong table and Serena says, “No, no, no, B, you cannot do this to me, no! No, no, no!” prompting a discussion about their conflicting goals for the future. It’s also a week before Vanessa and Nate’s wedding, so they keep it quiet until the couple is on their honeymoon to tell Carter.

[Robin also has a remarkably similar plot to Serena with her baby sibling and her issues with saying “I love you,” which is another surprising parallel.]

I would also like to present as evidence, your honor:

they're the same picture

If by this point, you’re wondering if I’ve given any thought to the Furniture Question, yes, it’s this: chip wiskers was Blair’s first bf that she was on-and-off with in college, and Nate and Vanessa thought he was The Worst, and made Blair into a worse person. Because aside from being a total douche, he also cheated every time Blair’s back was turned. They reconnect for a sec in their late 20s, and Vanessa schemes to break them up because chip absolutely fails her Front Porch Test. Chuck = Karen

While Blair is reeling from The Breakup, Carter convinces her to come out with him on St. Patrick’s Day, and they end up at some ridiculous nightclub. Also there? Dan Humphrey, having been dragged out of the house by his little sister Jenny. They don’t meet, but Blair swipes the umbrella he left at coat check when she leaves and it starts raining. She keeps it for a couple years.

The burn between Serena and Carter is low and slow, because Serena was Blair’s for so long, but they are oddly compatible, and eventually they fall into bed together, and Blair is furious when she finds out, nearly causing the friend group to fall apart, but it doesn’t. Serena and Carter both, of course, catch feelings, but they stay in denial for a long time.

Meanwhile, Blair meets Louis, and they start pretty serious, but rocky, and one day, in an effort to end a fight, Louis proposes, and Blair says yes. Then gang thinks they’re moving too fast, but Blair, being Blair, digs her heels in, even when Louis bitchy little sister’s (Beatrice’s) wedding falls through and Louis and Blair decide to take over her wedding, which is, to put it lightly, the antithesis of what Blair Waldorf’s wedding should be. Louis (ever jealous) and Blair clash over Serena being invited to the wedding, and in an effort to even the score, Blair invites Louis’ ex, Estee, to the wedding too. Estee shoots her shot, and she and Louis run off together before the wedding, leaving Blair at the altar.

And I can so see Serena giving Blair a speech similar to the one Robin gives Ted, “You’re just disappearing into someone else’s house, someone else’s life, and that isn’t the happy ending that you deserve.”

Blair moves on, and throws herself into her design work, but it keeps leading nowhere, leading to another Vanessa life lecture: “Fashion is killing you, Blair. And it’s killing us to watch it killing you.” Louis, wrought with self-flagellating guilt, orchestrates an adjunct professorship in art history for Blair at Columbia, and after Vanessa’s prompting and the rest of the gang’s encouragement, she takes it.

She’s so nervous and tense her first day of teaching that she refuses to take questions from the class during her first lecture, and accidentally teaches the first 20 mins of ENG-405. In that class? Dan Humphrey.

Speaking of, a few brief “How Your Father Met Me” things before we continue:

The night Nate and Vanessa get engaged is Dan’s birthday, he and Jenny and a few friends are meeting at a bar in Brooklyn. Dan’s partner is running late, but when Dan gets a phone call from them, it’s the news that they’ve been in an accident.

He holes himself up after that loss, until Jenny has enough of it, and pesters him into going to a club with her on St. Patrick’s Day. While there, they run into an old acquaintance of his from Steinhardt, Paul, who’s teaching orchestra. Dan insists that he donate his old cello to Paul’s school, and invites him over. Paul mistakes it as an invitation to hookup (The Naked Man!) but he and Dan end up having a good conversation.

“Even if it sounds crazy, what is it you want to do with your life?” / “I want to be a novelist.” / “Okay. Then everything you do from here on out is in service of that.”

Dan applies to grad school at Columbia for creative writing, and also plays guitar part-time in his sister’s band, playing weddings, bar-mitzvahs, etc. etc.

When Jenny gets a fashion design opportunity in London, she bequeaths the band unto Dan, and leaves an empty room in the loft, meaning that Dan goes to Columbia also in need of a roommate.

He sits next to a guy named Elliot in his class ENG-405, who just moved to the city and is looking for a place.

OMG in this scene Tracy makes a joke about serial killers…and…Joe Goldberg lololololol

“Just promise me there won’t be any naked people in the living room.” / “Don’t worry. I am on permanent hiatus in the love department. I know it sounds a little old fashioned, but I think you only get just one. And, I got mine already.”

Aaaaand we’re back!

So Blair is hitting her stride as an art history prof, and one day she runs into this cute guy in the hall, Elliot, who’s a PhD candidate with a focus on Contemporary Literature. He was in the English class she accidentally taught on her first day of work. She really likes him, he’s cute, intellectually stimulating, but he calls it off because of school’s policy for protecting students, even though they're the same age, are in different departments, and have the same amount of degrees. Blair even goes over to his place to talk to him about it “Blair Waldorf in Brooklyn? Are you lost?” / “It isn’t Brooklyn I’m here for.”

She tries to plead her case, but keeps getting sidelined by stuff of Elliot’s that she swears is proof of their compatibility—a poster of Godard, a vinyl of In Rainbows, a copy of Rosemary’s Baby (“don’t tell anyone, but it’s my Valentine’s movie”), a sweatshirt that says “What Would Dorothy Parker Do?” (“it was a christmas gift from my friend Vanessa, I had no idea more than one existed!”)—only for him to say “That’s my roommate’s actually.”

Blair leaves The Loft without laying eyes on Dan, but she thinks she might have glimpsed his foot, and out of sheer awkwardness, she leaves so quickly that she forgets her umbrella, unwittingly giving it back to Dan.

Elliot said that he had “a bit of a roommate complex” on their first date, which really means that he was ass backwards crushing on Dan Humphrey, his roommate that he met on his first day of classes at Columbia. (though he doesn’t really realize it until after he breaks things off with Blair, and kisses Dan when Dan tries to comfort him – “how could she not love you?...the way you fall asleep doing the crossword…” conking out while trying to solve the nyt crossword sounds like Pure Dan tbh).

Elliot’s romantic turmoil doesn’t last too long, because as he’s figuring out life as a bi guy, he meets, *drumroll* Serena’s little brother, Eric!

While Blair is doing this, Serena and Carter try dating, and implode after a few months. They’re just…not ready for each other, no matter how much love there actually is. They try to move on, see other people, and for a while make a pretty good show that they are actually over each other.

In the meantime, Vanessa and Nate start trying for kids (though arguably one could say they already have three) she accomplishes a few doc projects, he gets a job at a big-time prep school, and Blair throws herself into academia, gets herself published, and gets tapped to put together her first exhibition. It’s a major project, so it takes a fair amount of time to put together. And while it’s happening…so many backslides!

Serena and Carter hookup, cheating on their partners. Carter shoots his shot, saying that he wants to be with her, and breaks up with his girlfriend, Beth, to be with Serena. But Serena can’t bring herself to do the same, staying with…uh…let’s say Colin.

Vanessa gets pregnant, and Serena thinks she does too after her hookup with Carter, but she finds out that she’ll actually never have kids. She acts like she doesn’t care, but however she planned her life, she still needs to grieve, and Blair is there for her even though she doesn’t know the whole story. When Serena finally tells her, it’s after she and Colin break up, over the fact that Serena doesn’t want kids. Blair has a backslide of her own, telling Serena “I love you,” which will be the last time she says it to anyone (in that context) until Dan.

Blairena breakup (without ever really getting back together), Vanessa and Nate have a baby (named…maybe Arlo? If we’re following the name after the grandfather pattern of Lily & Marshall), and Carter is…Carter.

He’s being his usual scapegrace self, and spends a night playing a game with Vanessa and Blair about how he can collect people’s numbers with increasingly ridiculous parameters. The girls eventually get bored, and con him into running an errand for them by hitting the drugstore and picking up take-out. His chosen “target” at the drugstore turns out to be *drumroll* Dan. and I can totally see Dan looking this guy over and thinking “oh, he’s so sad :/” and the “I think you were in love and then you messed it up,” and them having a deep conversation out on a bus bench and Dan telling him to stop screwing around and go get the girl. That night, and that conversation is when Carter starts to plan how he’ll propose to Serena. He wasn’t ready for her then, but he is now, and he knows that Serena is ready for him, too.

(Dan, at this point, is seeing somebody--let's make it Olivia, bc why not?-- but when Carter asks, “Are you two gonna go the distance?” Dan answers, “I don’t know. I still think I haven’t met the right person yet.”)

(Carter delivering that “this woman has a hold on my heart” speech…yeah…)

Blair’s career is on the rise, but on the night her exhibition opens, when Serena offers to go as her date, Blair delivers her to Carter instead, deciding to let Serena go. She had a feeling she knew what was going to happen next, but during cocktails in the gallery, Carter sends a text to the group: “Serena and I are engaged!”

She’ll only let herself say that she’s happy for them, but inside, Blair is—conflicted, and (okay this scene was the beginning upon which this entire cursed idea came from so) Vanessa finally gets Blair to admit to it. It’s the “Admitting it would make you the most awful person in this room, so I’m going to give you an out. Sometimes, I wish I wasn’t a mom. Sometimes I want to pack a bag in the middle of the night, leave, and never come back.” The confession is enough to get Blair to say, “Serena shouldn’t be with Carter, she should be with me.”

Blair and Vanessa talk. And V loves her life, it’s just that she doesn’t feel like she ever got a chance to do the work that she set out to do. She wanted to be a filmmaker, remember? But all she does is gig after gig, only surviving, and a baby on top of that? It never lets up.

Vanessa convinces Blair to let Serena and Carter book a wedding band, and then she talks to Nate. Nothing’s solved really, but both women feel better having the truth out there.

While Serena and Carter plan their wedding, deal with Serena’s difficult mother Lily, and try to out-cute each other, Vanessa starts putting herself out there with her work, and she writes a grant proposal for a documentary that gets accepted. The only thing is, it requires her to live a year in Barcelona. She freaks, thinking that she shouldn’t take it, but Nate, who’s been feeling cornered by his own job, stuck in the same politics of NYC prep schools, which is like the van der bilt pipeline 2.0, encourages her to take it. (He’ll just be the malewife, taking care of the baby, learning to make paella, and watching Spanish The Price Is Right, and he LOVES that idea).

At the same time, Blair’s work and publications get her a job offer at the Getty in LA (or MOMA in San Fran? Or maybe just straight up Paris? idk), and she decides to take it, because she’s not sure she can hang around once Serena is married to Carter.

Speaking of job offers, Nate gets one, to be a principal at his dream school (to bring in another sitcom, think Jess Day’s job in New Girl), but it’s time sensitive, and he accepts, even though he and V already planned on moving their little family to Spain. There’s a biblical level fight, but Vanessa caves, only for Nate to insist that No, we’re moving to Spain.

Serena and Carter decide to get married in the Hamptons, in the "backyard" of Serena's grandmother's summer home (it's more like a fancy rich person garden, we all know this). It’s a big whole damn weekend, after which Vanessa & Nate & Arlo and Blair will be leaving New York – or will she?

The band Carter and Serena originally booked falls through, bails a week before the wedding, but luckily, the BOTB’s husband used to live with the guitarist of one of the best wedding bands in the tristate area. They just had brunch with him, and his gig for the coming weekend just fell through! Wedding saved!

Before the move to Spain, Nate and the baby go visit his mom down in Newport, leaving Vanessa on her own. She hangs around Blair, which is how she discovers Blair is moving.

Blair takes a car service up to Amagansett, but Vanessa refuses on principle, and takes the train instead, and ends up sitting across the aisle from a nice guy, who—when she gets riled up from yet another passive act of aggression by Anne, her mother-in-law—asks if she’s okay and listens to her rant. And that’s how Vanessa meets Dan.

Dan shares the cookies that his sister sent him in a care package, and after dissing Anne Archibald they pivot to discussing French cinema and Jean-Luc Godard and the genius of Sergei Eisenstein.

Despite having made a new friend, Dan has some interpersonal drama of his own. When Elliot fell in love with a man over the bridge and moved out, Dan looked for a new roommate, and who should find him but Georgina Sparks. She’d not needed a place, but was interested in his band, and Dan being the guileless lil duckling that he is, invited her in, and she promptly took over. Now, she was trying to shove Dan out, likely in retaliation for not hooking up with her. Righteously incensed, he tells Vanessa all about it when he finds out, and she offers up her own brand of personal justice: steal the bitch’s van. So Dan does.

Georgina Sparks is a total firestarter, and spends the evening of the rehearsal dinner trying to stir up shit between all the friends. She is ultimately unsuccessful.

While carrying out his own variation on Abrams Justice, Dan comes across some knucklehead walking on the side of the road hauling luggage and a baby. Nate & Arlo took the Jitney up, which then broke down, and Nate foolhardily decided “I can walk that far.” He couldn’t. But Dan offers him a lift, freaks him out because Vanessa told Dan all about her husband, but they become fast friends. “Your wife is cool.” / “The coolest.” Dan vents about total fire starter Georgina, and Nate offers up advice about standing up for himself and fighting for what he thinks is right: a lesson he recently learned in standing up to his mother about his life choices.

At the inn, Nate and Vanessa are reunited, but Dan’s head of steam wears off. “There’s no defeating the devil,” he says. And then there’s a commotion on the patio outside, and Georgina storms in, shrieking about how “the maid of honor just punched me in the face” (Georgie had broken the bottle of 95 Dom Blair had brought for a rehearsal toast with the gang, and Blair responded accordingly). Dan laughs, unable to help himself, and Georgie throws a fit and quits the band “I’m going back to the new Guns n’ Roses!” Dan asks the bartender to send a glass of champagne to the maid of honor, and that’s the first drink he ever buys his future wife.

Riding the high of finally having the toxic Georgina out of his life, he leaves the inn to go to his girlfriend’s family’s Hamptons house. While there, Olivia springs a marriage proposal on him, and Dan realizes: he’s been holding himself back, being with someone safe, which means he doesn’t have to face moving on from what he’s lost, or risk being hurt so deeply again. But he realizes he’s ready to move on, he’s ready for it to be real again. So he says no.

He goes back to the inn, and the night clerk says “You’re in luck, father of the bride never checked in.” (because WVDW is and always will be a piece of shit!!!). Dan doesn’t feel that lucky, but he takes the key (he just needs one) and heads to his room alone. Even though he knows he did the right thing, ending it, he still feels—well, shitty. So he grabs his acoustic and heads out to the balcony, and plays his go-to song for when he wants to make himself feel better: “Moon River,” not knowing that the biggest Breakfast at Tiffany’s fan in the whole world is on the other side of the balcony wall, listening.

The day of the wedding Carter and Serena each have their own crises of confidence. Lily Rhodes (who’s been married four times) really rocks her daughter’s boat, but Eric & Vanessa calm her down. The big crisis though, is when she freaks, and decides the Blair is the person she should be marrying, but here’s the thing, Blair doesn’t feel that way anymore. Blair has really let Serena go, and she is trying to see her best friend’s married and happy together, damnit, even if she has to hold the shotgun herself, this wedding is happening.

And Serena says. “Fine, you’re right, we can’t run away together. So I guess I’ll just have to run away alone!” She makes a mad dash down the halls of her grandma’s old Hamptons mansion, out into the garden where they’re setting up the reception, and runs smack into the band’s guitarist. And that’s how Serena meets Dan (oddly not that different from their first meeting in canon).

“To be honest I’m not sure if I can go through with getting married.” / “Oh. Wow.” / “That’s it? You’re not gonna try to talk me out of it?” / “Okay, during that fall, you did kind of get to second base with me and we’ll always share that, but – I don’t really know you.”

He doesn’t try to talk her out of it, but gives her some solid advice to take three deep breaths. She does, and when she opens her eyes, there’s Carter. And everything is fine again.

After a long crazy road, Serena and Carter finally get married (Eric walks her down the aisle), and then, there’s the reception.

A few dances and a few glasses of champagne in, Carter finally recognizes the frontman of his wedding band. “Guitar-guy! Hey, remember when you told me to stop messing around and get the girl? Check it: I got her! What about you: you still dating that girl?” Dan shakes his head, and then Carter is hit with a piphony. Thee-piphony.

He tries to convince Blair to let him set her up with the guitarist, but she’s moving tomorrow, remember? And she has a train to catch.

Said train, of course, is delayed. So she waits on a bench, sheltered from the rain, reading Colette for the hundredth time, patience thinning by the minute. And then, a flash of color catches her eye, it’s an umbrella, and underneath it, the guitarist.

It’s a stupid idea. She’s moving away in the morning. But she can’t shake it, this feeling that she’s only ever let things pass through her fingers, that she used to want to live like a film heroine. But heroines ultimately don’t just let the story happen to them, they act.

So she walks up, taps the guitarist on his (really nice) shoulder, and speaks. They talk, they banter, they flirt, and it feels…right.

“You’re Elliot’s ex-roommate, right?” / “Yeah. And you’re the professor. I took one of your classes.” / “Really? Which one?” / “ENG-405.” / “English? I never taught – oh no.” / “Oh, yeah.”

“Wait. This is my umbrella. You totally stole my umbrella, Humphrey.”

“What are you talking about? I bought this.”

“Mmm-mm. This is mine. That’s my monogram on the handle. See?”

“So you stole and defaced my umbrella?”

“It’s mine.”

“Nuh-uh. I have proof. Sure it was ten years ago that I bought this, but I hoard all my receipts. Though…I did lose it for a little while there. I went to this club –”

“On St. Patrick’s Day.”

“On St. Patrick’s Day.”

“And you left it there.”

“And I left it there.”

“And you never thought you'd see it again.”

“And I never thought I’d see it again. Funny how sometimes you just…find things.”

It’s both the most cinematic and most real Blair’s life has ever felt, and there’s only one thing to say. “Hi.”

“Hi.”