#Working out Redacted designs is so fun especially when I had also done them once before and it turned out... not as good. XD

[vegaly-art]

Gay people beloveds Also tried out a new way to paint foliage and I hope it turned out alright.

[autisticempathydaemon]

Ship Song Tag Game!

(do we have a name for this I dunno that sounded so awkward)

I’ve had a week, but I’ve been looking forward to sharing my favorite Redacted songs! Thank you, @bratty-telepath , for the tag 💜

I didn't care much how long I lived/ But I swear I thought I dreamed her/ She never asked me once about the wrong I did

Erik tried to kill my Alexis/Christian dreams, but too bad, I’m a Pisces. Y’all know not the escapist denial I am capable of. I love all Hozier songs, but I especially love listening to this from Alexis’s point of view, her being at her deepest and lowest and being loved no matter what.

I ask if you play D&D/ And your face lights up like you've woken up/ From this endless fucking nightmare of pretending this is you/ This is us, this is me and this how we're meant to be

This is the Freelancer/Lasko song, and it’s also just so beautiful. It’s literally about two awkward, lonely people breaking through societal convention and small talk and getting to the real parts of each other; I love it.

Hi/ I'm your friendly neighborhood poltergeist/ Nobody ever looks at me twice/ I'm used to being see-through/ But it feels so bad when it happens with you/ Wish you'd see me the way I see you

This is just Regulus pining before he reveals himself to Doll, and it’s so good.

You were red and you liked me 'cause I was blue/ But you touched me and suddenly I was a lilac sky/ And you decided purple just wasn't for you

My favorite Marcus/Love song. I actually based some of my Love design off this song where their eyes are a glowing, bright, cybernetic blue before the code activation and pink during it. After the osmium undone, their eyes stay purple and can’t be changed back.

But here's a map, here's a shovel/ Here's my Achilles' heel/ I'm all in, palms out/ I'm at your mercy now and I'm ready to begin/ I am strong, I am strong, I am strong enough to let you in

This is a song specifically about Type 8 Enneagram, which I do think Sam and Darlin both are, about having had to be strong and tough and solid your whole life and having the courage to be soft and vulnerable with the people who love you. It’s also gorgeous, it really builds.

They don't know you/ Not like I do/ Only you and I were meant to be

I love a good, heckin yandere song more than the next person, and this one is my favorite. It fuckin bops and is a great Ivan/Baby song.

Take me back to the night we met/ And then I can tell myself/ What the hell I'm supposed to do/ And then I can tell myself/ Not to ride along with you

Now hear me out- Listen to this song. Imagine it from Sam’s perspective. Imagine it from Alexis’s. Think about how they’re both different but both so sad, and get back to me. It’s haunting and melancholy, and I love it.

Get hitched in a chapel in Vegas/ Maybe get rich, life is a craps game/ And I take my cue, from you/ On what you wanna do 'bout a last name/ It's not so bad to be a Watsky

A fun song I really like that I think also works for Vincent/Lovely. It just kind of gives the vibe of him knowing that they’ve been through a lot, that this isn’t how he wanted their love story to go, but he’s in, he’s behind them and so is his whole family.

You could kill me and you should/ I'm an idiot for thinking/ This was anything but blood/ On the wall, on the couch/ On the corner of my mouth/ You must like being the victim/ You've done nothing to get out

Quinn and Darlin’s “dalliance” was almost definitely really toxic and bloody and sexy, and this is the soundtrack to it, and I want to see it.

Then I see you, you're walking 'cross the campus/ Cruel professor, studying romances/ How am I supposed to pretend/ I never want to see you again?

I am going to put a Bee/Lasko song on here, because I am the controller of my destiny and my blog. Lasko is the cutest dude on the DAMN campus, and I just like making my little empathy daemon pine for him it’s sweet~

Tagging: @k9rage @angelnoodlesoup @just-call-me-angel and anyone who hasn’t been tagged yet!

[carewyncromwell]

Happy FFWF Tory! 💛

I’d like to ask you which of your many fics is your favourite and why? Also, what projects have you got in the works, and which are you most excited to write/share with the world?

Why are you asking me to pick favorites amongst my children? XDD Hahaha...really, though, I'm my own worst critic, so I always end up disliking something about my works when they're done, especially after some time has gone by. I still have lingering fondness for most of them, mind you...but I always inevitably see their flaws more and more and have trouble loving them the way I did before. But I guess one nice thing on that account is that it prompts me to try to improve on those things I didn't like in the last project, if possible. I guess of my fics, I'm really partial to my unfinished Good!Rakepick AU. I actually am looking forward to FINALLY finishing its finale, because it just integrates everything I wish Hogwarts Mystery had had -- special focus on and development for each of the cast's members; better characterization for Rakepick, MC, Jacob, Ben and Merula's arcs having had a real impact on their characters at the end of year 6; the Circle of Khanna coming together as a real army to face off against R; a cooler design and storyline inside the Sunken Vault; more Hogwarts lore that better develops the Wizarding World; Dumbledore actually DOING SOMETHING to help MC with the Vaults for once; and so on. I'm also looking forward to finishing the Tangled AU -- GOD, do I wish the world would chill the hell out so I could finish the next part already, there is so much fun stuff I want to get to. >>

Some stuff I do look forward to writing in the future is some more canon material for Carewyn, such as a ficlet centering around her and Felix's relationship; a rewriting of the scene in year 6 where Charlie learns MC's been hiding information about the Wizard in White and Ben and Charlie get into a big fight; a post-Redacted fic centering on the immediate aftermath and formation of the Circle of Khanna; and a rewriting of the scene post-Redacted where Jacob and MC meet again, which would be when Carewyn and Jacob finally have a heated emotional exchange about everything they've gone through. AU-wise, the AU ideas that have tickled my fancy most even if they're likely not going to be worked on for a while are the Peter Pan and Little Mermaid AUs. 💚

Fanfic Writer Friday!

[one-true-houselight]

It’s me, doing stand up!

I cut out the spelling of my name for privacy reasons. Also, the bit that’s cut off the the end is just me saying that I never went skiing again, and that now I just do safe things, like trying to enter the adult job market. 

Transcript under the cut, and if you are so inclined, my Ko-Fi is in my bio. Thanks!

Hello everyone, I am Erika, and tonight I will be performing All Star by Smash Mouth.

I’m kidding, no one would want to hear that. I cannot sing.

(from the crowd: I would!)

(laughter) You don’t want to hear me sing, I promise you.

Alright! Hi! In actuality, I am Erika (last name, pronounced ko-kek), and you’re like ‘ooh, we get a last name now, a mystery, and you’re like it’s an interesting last name too!’ That’s probably because you’ve never seen it spelled out. Let me walk you through my last name (ko-kek), alright, are you ready for this, are you ready: [redacted spelling]. Yeah! Four Ks! That’s a lot of Ks, and they’re in a real strange order. If you- if you noticed, uh, it’s the same set of four letters twice, it’s [redacted spelling] but you may have also noticed that’s not how it’s pronounced! Cuz you know, that would make sense. This is apparently from, like, changes in immigration, that you know happen, which, this is according to my uncle. But my grandfather, who lived in the Netherlands in the 40s (yeah, those 40s), pronounces it like Ko-Kek, so I’m inclined to believe him.

Now, having a weird last name in school is always kind of a crazy existence, though I will say, most of the time when people are like ‘oh, that’s a weird last name’, it’s because people are racist, or at the very least are being like  ‘oh, I’m gonna put Western Expectations on things that shouldn’t have them’, but as you see, my last name, is Dutch, as I mentioned, and Dutch white people, which I am one of, have done some incredibly awful things, so I don’t feel bad mocking it. So we continue on. So, this, so with my last name in roll call, we could change my last name to [silence] and it would sound the same. Let me, let me walk you through…Let me walk you through a roll call, so like the teacher’s up here, and they’re like ‘Alright, let’s see…we have Ferris Beuller? Oh you showed up, very good, alright. Harry Potter? Oh, you didn’t die, that’s fantastic. And then, Erika…[long silence]. And I’m just over here like ‘oh yeah that’s me, hi.’ Now sometimes, I like to speed it up, and rather than say here or present or anything, I’ll just say my last name (Ko-kek) to like, speed up the conversation so it’s not like, uh, Erika, long pause, here, oh, how do you pronounce that?, Ko-kek, it just speeds up the process. So, I’ll go, they’ll go Erika… and I’ll say (Ko-kek). The problem is they’ll get confused sometimes. They’ll look at me and they’ll go ‘Oh, is that here in Dutch?’ No. But you did your best.

And not only does my last name have enough Ks to stop a substitute teacher dead in their tracks, my first name? Erika? Also with a K. My sibling is Kat with a K, my mother is Karolyn with a K, though that’s not her fault, she kind of like, came into it and was like ‘oh, I guess this works out’. And my father…is Doug. But, but, he has a middle name that’s very strange and has a K in it so it all works out, it’s fine. So, if you’re ever like reading something, and you’re looking at it and you’re like ‘huh, there should be a K in this word’, it probably wasn’t a typo, my family just needed to name another child and just like, stole it.

So, I do have to say I’m Erika with a K a lot, because most people will assume it’s with a C. Or, more recently, two Ks. Which is kind of fun, but it’s also at the same time like ‘I’m drowning in Ks, please don’t give me more!’ But no, so I say Erika with a K a lot, which means I realized something really really cool. That rhymes with Erika with a They! These are the puns the queer community was built upon.

I do use they/them pronouns, and I even wear a little tag for it, it’s right here, it’s very nice. Um, and, it’s just kind of weird sometimes, because people will sometimes not use my pronouns, which kinda makes me sad. But I’ve realized something. I was just assuming they were reading the tag and just being rude about it. But recently, I’ve realized that they’re just not reading the tag. The way I’ve realized this is I’ll be like, walking through Target, and someone will be, like, looking around, and they’ll see me and they’ll see the tag and go ‘A ha! A worker!’ And they’ll be like ‘Do you know where the towels are?’ And this is very strange for me, mostly because I know where the towels are. So I’ll go ‘Ok, they’re over there in that corner, but I don’t work here, please.’ And, and they’re like ‘Oh, I just assumed you did because of your name tag.’ Now there’s a couple of problems with that. My ‘name tag’, as they put it, doesn’t have a name on it, which means they clearly didn’t read it. The other big problem with it is that most stores or places of business have a sense of decorum, or at least consistency in their design. My tag, on the other hand, while I love it very much, how do I put this, it doesn’t look good. It looks like if an eight year old magpie with attention issues made it at summer camp. This is basically how the making of my tag went: I’m was just sitting there and I’m like ‘Alright, I’m gonna put five shiny things on it. Wonderful, wonderful, this random piece of gaff tape? That has to go on, that’s, like, that’s key to the whole pronoun tag process. Now, for the words. And I start writing, I’m like ‘they/them and-’ oh my god. What if I could fit more shiny things on it? I’m still writing, I don’t know what I’m writing at this point, it doesn’t look good. Oh, I could put more shiny things on it, maybe I could like, steal a rock and somehow affix that to it…And then I look down and I’m like ‘oh, I finished the words, guess I’m gonna just put it on my shirt!’ And it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine. So, a lot of people don’t read the tag, but a lot of people do, and I have a lot of wonderful friends and family who support me very much.

Though, being openly trans can be, can get a little confusing sometimes. Sometimes I’ll tell stories about being in the Girl Scouts, and be like ‘Ha, that’s funny for obvious reasons!’ and people will be like, ‘oh, it’s the girl thing!’, and I’ll be like ‘no!’. Because the Girl Scouts are actually super cool about trans girls and non binary kids, which we appreciate very much, especially because it gives us a very good reason to buy Girl Scout cookies, beyond just buying something to fill the hole in your heart.

Crowd: support the gays!

Exactly! But no, the weird part about it for me is the scout part. Let me tell you a story. So one time when I was sixteen years old, I was a camp counselor for a bunch of small children, and we went to a playground one time. So I’m wandering around, like you do, like making sure the children don’t like, die, and I see two girls sitting under a tree, and they’re doing the whole, like,  ‘rub two sticks together to start a fire’ thing. So I go ‘I’m gonna wander over and see how they’re doing’, and I’m like ‘How’re you doing, kids?’ And they look at me and they’re like ‘Erika? Why do you rub two sticks together to start a fire?’ and I’m like ‘Well, that’s a very interesting question, so you see, there’s a fire triangle, and the fire triangle has heat, fuel, and oxygen, and you have to have all three because fire is just adding oxygen-‘ And I just go on this like, five minute tangent about, like, talking about the science of fire, and you’re probably sitting there thinking like. Erika, explaining how fire works is like, the most scout thing you can do, and normally I would agree with you. Except. I talked for five minutes about the ins and outs of fire science, and neglected to mention fire safety. So I realize this, and I’m like ‘oh no, I’m going to start a wildfire by proxy’, so I just start yelling fire safety tips with absolutely no context. So I’m like, ‘You need a bucket of sand!’, I didn’t tell them why they needed the sand, I just said you needed one, and I’m like ‘build a circle of rocks on the ground!’, and they’re just gonna do that and go ‘I can build fires for the rest of my life, perfect!’ And then I’m sitting there, so like, another counselor is walking behind me like ‘two minutes left’, I’m like ‘Oh no, I have two minutes to like, save my entire town’, and I’m like ‘You should probably have an adult present’, and then I realize I probably should have mentioned that first, and I was like, ‘alright, just imagine I said adult present first, and just, and then put everything else, remember everything else, but remember adult first, it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine.’ So, luckily, my town has not had any reports of wildfires. But suffice it to say, I am not exactly scout material.

I am going to finish out the night by telling you a story from my scouting days. I was about eight years old, and we went on a ski trip. Now, let me tell you a little thing about eight year old Erika. You may have noticed that up here as a 20 year old, I’m a little bit lanky, my limbs do weird things as I run about the stage like an excited golden retriever. But see, I’m like, at a controllable lanky now. When I was eight, I was just gangly. My limbs just changed like, lengths every day, sometimes by multiple feet. So I’d be like, walking along, and I’d like just, kick a doorway, or like I’d be sitting and raising my hand, you know how like, you sometimes hit your hand on your desk, and you did it like, once a month? I did it twice a day. And people would be like, ‘Erika why do you keep hitting your hand on the desk?’ and I’m like ‘Cause my hand wasn’t there before! It was over here, I don’t know what’s happening!’ It was like I was living in a world of cartoon physics that I didn’t have control over. So I’m just like, ‘I guess I’m walking and my arms over here now, great!’ So my scouting troop looked at this, and was like ‘you know I think would be a great idea to do to this tiny, eight year old, whatever this is? We’re gonna stick a piece of wood, long, skinny, really slippery piece of wood on each of their feet, and then we’re gonna push them down a mountain.’ So, uh, you can probably tell where this story is going.

So, we get to the mountain, and I have my skis, we had to like, wait in a really long line, and I’m like, ‘oh, I’m so excited to go skiing’. So I’m walking around and I’m like, ‘alright, this is very exciting’, I see there’s a ski lesson about to start, and I’m like ‘I should probably do that because I want to make sure I know what’s going on’, so if you’ve never been skiing before, here’s what a skiing lesson is. You have a large group of people that want to learn how to ski, and you have a very excited person ready to tell you about skiing. So, you all go with them, you walk sideways up the mountain because you know, whatever. And the person, the very enthusiastic person, tells you a lot of really good skiing tips, and I, an eight year old with undiagnosed ADHD, sat there, and uh, kind of cycled between looking at the person, watching their mouth move, and having my audio processing like, on the ski lift, OR, I would be watching them, and a skier would go by, and I would watch the skier and be like, ‘oh, maybe I can pick up some tips from the skier’, absolutely ignoring the person that’s just giving me the tips for free. So I did not pick up a lot of good ski tips, but I did pick up one, and this is, this is, I will always remember this. He was like ‘alright, if you’re going down the mountain, and you want to slow down or stop, you make a triangle with your skis.’ And so I was like ‘alright, I’ve got it. I make a triangle with my skis to go slow, great, fantastic.’ So then, I’m like, ‘alright. I know everything there is to know about skiing. It is time to get started.’

So the first time I fell a lot, which, you know, of course you fall a lot, it’s you first time, and like, who knows what skiing is. The second time I also fell a lot and you know, I’m still getting the hang of it. Third time, also fell a lot, but you know, it’s fine. I’m just going to like, skip to the end, because I fell most of the times. It was less of me skiing down the mountain, and more of me just falling over and over again until I reached the bottom. But then, the last run of the day, I’m like ‘alright, I’m gonna do this’, I get about three quarters of the way down the mountain and I haven’t fallen once. And I’m just sitting there like ‘oh my god, I’m the skiing master. Oh my god, I’m gonna go to the Olympics. It’s gonna be great.’ So I am, I’m going down the mountain and, if don’t know if you know this about physics, because I wasn’t stopping and starting by just falling down constantly, I actually picked up a little bit of speed, which was really nice. But at this point, I was going a little bit faster than I intended to go, and I was like, ‘Huh. I kind of want to slow down now’, so I go into the little card catalogue that is my mind and I’m like ‘a ha! Triangle equals slow! Perfect!’ So I, I look down at my skis because I want to make sure I’m doing it right,  and I’m like ‘alright, ready, here we go. Triangle.’ And nothing happened. Now the problem with this is, is that I was eight, and didn’t have critical thinking skills. So I looked at this situation, and I said, ‘huh. This triangle is not working. But it’s the only thing I know about skiing, and since I am a skiing master and know everything, this can be the only solution.’ So I double down on the triangle.

Now here’s the thing. I tell this story a lot, and one time I was telling it and I got to this part, and my friend looked at me and said the following: ‘You were doing the wrong kind of triangle!’ Which is a baffling thing to have yelled at you. So I was sitting there like ‘what are you ta- Was I doing an isosceles? Should I have been doing a scalene? Like, did you want me to yell the pythagorean theorem at it? I don’t know what you’re telling me!’ So she could not explain it, so we moved on. So then I told this story again, and another set of friends was like ‘Erika. She meant you had to do a triangle like this.’ And I was like, ‘oh, because that would actually stop the, oooooh.’ So now, twelve years after this story happened, I now know how to ski. So that’s cool, but back to me being eight years old.

At this point, I am going even faster than before, somehow, going much faster than any eight year old pile of limbs should ever be going, and I go ‘this is bad, I can no longer, uh, control which direction I’m going’, which is bad because I’m heading right for a circle of snowboarders. And so I’m I’m, I’m like, trying to turn and I can’t and I’m like ‘oh no’, so I just kind of look up at them, because I am approaching them at quite a speed, and I just start screaming, ‘HEY! YOU GOTTA MOVE! I CAN’T STEER!’ So they look up at just this banshee shriek from up the mountain, and they go, ‘huh. we should move,’ and they do, as well as they can, because they only have one piece of wood instead of the two that I was privileged to have. But they manage to make it out of the way, and I don’t hit anyone, and I continue down the mountain.

At this point, I literally, like, sit down on my skis and dig my hands into the snow in an attempt to stop myself, which works slightly better than the triangle, which isn’t saying much. So at this point, I have basically reached the bottom of the mountain, and I have reached, and at the bottom of the mountain there was a straight-away, and at the end of the straight-away there was a barrier of snow. Now the barrier of snow was about one, one and a half feet. The straight-away…I’m not really good with distances, but it was at least two feet, we’ll go with that. So I reach the straight-away, and I look up for this at least two foot distance. And I see this barrier of snow and I’m like ‘Ah. Here’s where my journey will come to an end.’

So I’m heading down this straight-away, I’m slowly slowing down, but I’m still going at quite a speed, and I’m like, ‘oh, it’ll be a little bit of an impact, but it’ll be fine.’ So here’s what happens. Here’s the barrier of snow, here’s me, here I go. Wheeeeee. And I hit the barrier of snow. And I go up and I go over it into the super secret special hill that they don’t show anyone, because it’s covered in bushes, and rocks, and leads to the parking lot.

So, at this point, I am now somersaulting down the hill, you know, fun times, and I’m grabbing bushes, I am desperately trying to like, not die, and at this point, I decide, I’m like ‘you know what would be a good, you know what would be good at this time? A flashback of my life.’ So my life flashes before my eyes, and it finishes I’m like ‘huh. That didn’t last as long as I thought it would.’ So I’m tumbling, and I’m just like ‘I’m gonna die! It’s fine!’ So I reach the bottom, and I kind of sit there and I take stock of everything, and I look around and I’m like, ‘Hey. I’m alive. I just wasted a life flashback, do you know how expensive that it?’ So I’m sitting there, and then I realize something. I realize that in my current state I cannot move because all of my limbs that change size all the time are tangled together. And I can’t get out of my limbs because my arm is so that like, I would have to hook it around my foot, but my foot is currently eight feet long because there’s a ski attached to it. So I’m-You know those like, Cracker Barrel things, the like, little metal puzzles that you play with for five minutes then give up because you want to play the peg game? I looked like one of those.

So I go into my mental autopsy, which you know, all eight year olds with anxiety have, and I go ‘we’re gonna just change the cause of death to…starvation.’ Which was very very silly, of course, because I would of died of thirst before I died of starvation. So I’m laying there, waiting for my eventual fate, and I look up into the parking lot I landed next to, and I see two guys walking towards me. And I go ‘huh. Interesting,’ and I go back to my mental autopsy, and I recross out starvation, and write ‘murdered in the snow, while tangled in my own limbs.’ So I’m just like, ‘there’s nothing I can do’, so I just kind of look at them, and they’re looking at me.

Luckily for me though, they were just coming over to help, because from their perspective, they had just seen a screaming ball of just, extremities, shoot over the barrier, tumble down a mountain, and then just lie there motionless for a while. So they walk over, and they’re very nice, they help me out of my skis, and they’re like ‘Do you, do you need to go into the lodge?’ and I’m like ‘Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.’ So I, so they walk me into the lodge and we find my mother who’s there, hello, hi mom, and, and she’s like ‘what happened?’ And I’m like ‘I don’t know.’

[carnalsociety-rpg]

HEY UPPER EAST SIDER, WELCOME TO CARNAL SOCIETY

Ali, you’ve been accepted as Blair Waldorf with Poppy Drayton as your faceclaim. Congrats! Please read through our checklist and turn in your account within 24 hours.

                    THIS I KNOW, THE BEST IS YET TO COME.

OOC Information.

Name/Alias: Ali Preferred pronouns: She/her Age: 27 Timezone: EST Triggers: Student/teacher romances, pedophilia

IC Information.

Name: Blair Waldorf Age: 27 Gender: Cis-female Pronouns: She/her Sexuality: Pansexual Faceclaim: Poppy Drayton Occupation: CEO of Waldorf Designs

Headcanons:

i.

Since she was a child, Blair Waldorf had planned her life out very carefully. Of course, her life took a few (okay, more than just a few) twists and turns that forced her to edit her plan. After testifying in Chuck’s defense after the incident on the roof, Blair fully believed that she had finally gotten everything back on track. And for a while, it truly seemed that way. She was truly happy (a rare occurrence for her) as she continued to work under her mother’s tutelage at Waldorf Designs and grew even closer, if possible, to Chuck. But of course, life just had to ruin her timeline once again. It hadn’t even been a year since the incident, as it was now known, that she discovered her pregnancy, and despite the fact that it was certainly not on her plan quite yet, she decided to embrace what life continued to throw at her. Blair Waldorf was done questioning fate (at least, for now).

Henry James Bass was born on June 13th in the city that had held so many infamous adventures for his parents. When he came into the world, Chuck joking swore that there was a storm raging outside that signaled bad things to come. Blair, on the other hand, insisted the sun was shining which proved that there were good things in store for their family. This is the story they always told about Henry’s birth, and no one ever quite knew who was telling the truth. No one ever really stopped to consider that maybe they were both right.

Although Blair detested the idea of the whole ‘barefoot and pregnant’ marriage ideas (ridiculously tacky in her opinion), she wasn’t overly fond of having their son prior to marriage either. The two eloped in Paris on a spur-of-the-moment vacation to visit her father when she was barely two months along. Although everyone knows that she was pregnant before their marriage, it’s one of those things that people simply don’t talk about; at least, they don’t to her face.

ii.

But all good things come to an end. Whether it was her postpartum depression or Chuck’s dedication to work or her own insecurities, she’ll likely never know. In the months after Henry’s birth, their rushed marriage seemed to fall apart. Though they kept it civil in the public’s eye and for the sake of their son, they soon realized that they had rushed into something they were not ready for, but had no way out of. They were married barely a year before they separated, followed by a divorce about six months later. Henry was barely two before their divorce was finalized.

Although she still feels it was what was best for her and Henry, she does regret how everything worked out between her and Chuck. She fully believed that they were it for each other, but things just didn’t work out the way she wanted it to, and their relationship further deteriorated after the divorce. They were just barely civil to each other in public for the sake of their son, and things were worse behind closed doors, especially after Blair was given primary custody of Henry.

iii.

In some ways, Blair has grown up a lot since the time that Gossip Girl reigned over the Upper East Side. She’s much more confident in herself and has worked on controlling her pretentious and somewhat obnoxious side. She’s definitely had to mature, especially after taking on a higher role in Waldorf Designs (now CEO once more) and having a child looking to her to set a good example. Of course, she’s still the same overly ambitious woman with refined (and sometimes ridiculous) tastes and certainly is still just as scheming (or manipulative, depending on your view), but she just attributes that to her upbringing. She doesn’t like to leave things to chance, and instead will make sure things go in her favor. Blair still doesn’t trust easily, especially after the implosion that was her marriage, but she still has her close friends that she would do anything for. She hasn’t dated really in the year since the divorce, despite being urged to by her friends; she can’t really see letting another man into her life when she’s already so busy with the business, her son, her charities, and her booming social life.

She has taken up yoga as a way to stay calm. It started as a joke during the separation period from Chuck. Her therapist suggested it as a way to control her outbursts, and she decided to try it on a whim. And she found that she actually enjoyed it. Blair liked how it seemed to help her focus in the morning and allowed her to start her day off on the right foot. She tries to do it every morning in her apartment before her coffee and finds that her days are usually better when she does it.

Although Audrey movies are still her favorite, her son isn’t the biggest fan. She would love to say that he’s had refined taste from an early age, but Henry clearly prefers the boxed macaroni and cheese and Disney movies that Dorota sometimes plays for her own children. So far, Blair has seen his favorites,Coco and Moana, more times than she can admit, but at least they have a better plot than a princess waiting around for a prince. She even finds herself watching them sometimes after he falls asleep, still clutching his stuffed giraffe (long story), although she’d never admit to it in public. She likes that her son is seeing happy endings in movies, and that he will believe in them; she thinks that it’s really important that, despite the fact that his parents aren’t together, that Henry sees that there are happy endings in the world.

iv.

About six months ago, Blair received a phone call that rocked her to her core. Her step-father called to tell her that her mother had had a heart attack while they were at Masa and had been rushed to the hospital. Although her mother was survived, the doctors told the family that Eleanor needed to take a step back from her active lifestyle and would need to focus on her health and not her business.

And Blair once again became the CEO of Waldorf Designs. It was something she’d eventually planned on becoming once more, but she had assumed she’d have more time before taking on that responsibility again, especially as she was now raising a toddler. But she couldn’t let her mother down and stepped back into the role with gusto. The business is continuing to flourish under her new leadership, and she’s even thinking about moving into other markets as well like home design. While she once would have considered it to be more trashy than classy, she recognizes good business ideas when she sees them. Plus, it’s not like her brand would ever be sold in Walmart or anything like that; it’s still going to be aimed at the upper class though she is also considering launching a more affordable option so that her business will really be a household name.

v.

The night of Chuck’s death, she was supposed to meet with him. It was something simple, just getting him to sign some forms for the exclusive preschool they were putting Henry in. Blair had been meaning to get him to sign them for some time now, but after playing phone tag for days, she had texted him that she would be over that evening to finally get the papers signed so that they could move forward with their son’s early education. Her last communication with him was a text telling him that he better not be drunk when she got there. She ended up getting caught up with work and sent a text saying that she’d meet him the following day, but it was too late.

The police showed up the next morning at her apartment with Dorota shaking her awake, a look of panic on her face. Blair can still remember the confusion and annoyance at being woken up earlier than she had planned on followed by the disbelief at the sight of the officers in her foyer. She couldn’t tell you what exactly they said to her, just the message behind their words. Her ex was dead.

She had always assumed that she and Chuck would eventually patch things up, despite their divorce. The just needed more time to grow into the people they were meant to be. Now, she’ll never get the chance, and her son will grow up without his father.

Fun Fact: I typed Waldork instead of Waldorf way too many times in this.

Associations:

a smile half feral and half charming. dark lipstick stains on white collars. red roses in silver vases. infamy follows in your wake. fiercely loyal. never forgetting an insult. chocolate truffles and rosé for breakfast. vulnerability hidden behind layers of confidence and sass. lace slips and leather jackets. clever as the devil and twice as petty. a face straight out of myths. chin raised in defiance. the hug of a treasured child. born to make history.

Secret:

[REDACTED]

YOU KNOW YOU LOVE ME.

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