#mysteriesfic*

[mysteriesofloves]

rated E | chapter 5/7

“I care about Henry. I care about how he does in my class. But more than that, I want him to like it. I want him to find a poem that makes him feel like each line is being etched into the inside of his ribs. Have you felt that, Mrs. Waldorf? Do you know what I mean?”

“No,” she says tightly. “You sound ridiculous.”

Humphrey laughs. The sound echoes. It makes her shiver.

“Yeah, I know,” he says. “But have I at least convinced you to let me try?”

or, blair finds an unlikely friend in her son’s english teacher, mr. humphrey

[terrainofheartfelt]

How lucky are you to have the best Dair author of all time write fics for you in their spare time

I KNOW RIGHT????? I truly do not deserve ❣️❣️❣️❣️❣️❣️

@mysteriesofloves love youuuuuuuu ❣️❣️❣️❣️

[nyxetoile]

A couple people asked for Lani’s Chicken and Waffle recipe from Mysteries.

I stole the recipe from Bobby Flay :) It's on the Food Network website:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/fried-chicken-and-wild-rice-waffles-with-pink-peppercorn-butter-and-maple-horseradish-syrup-recipe.html

[mysteriesofloves]

just a little something i wrote for @terrainofheartfelt. a small sequel to this fic from forever ago. happy birthday liz 🤍

The thing he can’t quite wrap his head around is what Blair is doing with him.

Something about Milo, and the wobbly way he walks, makes Dan want to take risks; but he’s still riding the high of getting one date, let alone five.

He’d looked her up, that first night, after he put Milo down. Mostly to see what other exhibits she’d curated, but maybe also to see a photo or two, because she had these little freckles, these beauty marks, dusted over her face, and these pretty round cheeks and these big, curious eyes and he didn’t think he could wait a whole week to see it all again.

There was more than a photo or two. Her name had headlined every website from Buzzfeed to TMZ. She was a wife, once upon a time, and he’s astounded by how many people chose to believe that’s where her story ends.

Because he’s had a front row seat for five dates now to the rest of that story, and he’s gotta say: it’s one of his favourites.

But the point is: he has a small life. A quiet life. Every once in awhile he publishes something that makes someone important and immature mad enough that they make a series of tweets about him and he gets some entertainment for the night, but mostly, he doesn’t have a lot going on. He’d taken her to see the new Agnès Varda doc on Vanessa’s recommendation and he stared at the bowl of popcorn and the sparkling water (because she doesn’t drink soda) between them, and thought, what the fuck are you doing?

And then she’d sniffled next to him, and he’d caught the way she discreetly tried to swipe at her eyes, and he thought, I could love you.

They had their own luncheon in the park, last week. The three of them, Milo bouncing on Blair’s knee, smiling a small, gummy smile up at her, and Dan fisted a hand in the picnic blanket and thought that adding could made it better. Something oncoming was easier to swallow.

He’d kissed her, when they’d dropped her home. With Milo slumped asleep on his shoulder, it was bumpy and chaste and awkward but it still made his face heat; his heart snag in his throat. He’d thought for sure he was done, after that.

He’d thought for sure he was pushing his luck when he texted her, Dinner at my place?

But she came and she ate and now they’re on the couch with a glass of wine each and she’s telling him about the group of scientists that used x-rays to uncover how Rembrandt mixed his paint, her fingers running through her hair and her lips stained just a little on the inside and he’s thinking could could could.

“Anyway,” she says. Her lips roll together. She seems to realize all at once that she’s been talking nonstop about paint recipes. She laughs, shy, so different from that first day, and he says, “Why me?”

She blinks at him. “What?”

“Why’re you going out with me?” he asks. “I’m not…I mean, I’m not what you’re used to.”

Her posture goes rigid, and there she is: the girl he first saw at the gallery before he’d found a way under her skin. She shrugs, rickety like a shutting latch.

“You asked.”

“I’m sure I’m not the first guy to ask you out at work.”

“No,” she presses on. “But you’re the only one who seemed interested in what I actually had to say.” Her spine straight, she smoothes down her skirt, takes a careful, practiced sip of her wine. “You’re the only one who seemed to not care who I really was.”

“I didn’t know,” he says. He sets his wineglass down. “And that’s not—that’s not who you really are.”

“No?” she says, smile starting to return. “Who am I?”

“You’re the girl who rambles about synchrotrons for fifteen minutes.”

Blair laughs, blushing. He takes her cheek in his hand and marvels at how she leans into the touch.

“You’re intelligent,” he says softly, “and intuitive…you weep while watching feminist filmmaker documentaries. Whoever you were before, that’s not really you. You’re—“

Maybe it’s the wine, but he hardly notices when she starts kissing him. It seems so familiar, so right, like the road was always going to lead here. She’s kissing him like she feels it, too, and it clicks into place all of a sudden: Dan’s heart is a house with the door left open, no wallpaper—or peeled wallpaper never replaced. He’s a renovator, caretaker, but a neglectful owner.

She doesn’t see what he sees.

Her knees dig under his ribs, her wineglass trapped between them, her fingers clawing at the back of his neck, and she sighs, and fuck could. Fuck easy to swallow. He’ll choke on this if he has to.

“This isn’t—“ he pulls away to set down her glass, “this isn’t what I had in mind when I invited you over, you know.”

“It isn’t?” she says.

“Oh, no, not—not at all,” he slides a hand in her hair, lips grazing her forehead, her browbone, dropping kisses to the side of her nose, her cheeks, just above her mouth, every mark on her face he’s spent the last few weeks memorizing, “I just wanted to share a meal. A—a friendly game of Scrabble, maybe. I’m always trying to get Milo to play with me but he keeps trying to eat the pieces.”

Her head tips back on a laugh, and he uses it as an opportunity to kiss the exposed line of her throat.

“I thought for sure I was being seduced,” she says, toying with his collar. “Cooking me dinner, pouring me a drink…”

“Nah, that’s not how I’d seduce you.”

She sits back on his lap, meaning at some point she made it into his lap. His lips tingle. He runs his hands down her sides and nearly groans.

“And how would you seduce me?”

“Uh, well, it’d go something like…” he leans closer, picks her hair off her shoulder and brushes his lips over the shell of her ear and whispers, “The first known writer in the world was a woman, Enheduanna, Sumerian High Priestess.”

She laughs, a whipcrack of a noise that startles through him. She shakes her head, fingers tangling in his hair. “That’s good,” she whispers. “But the food was better.“

“I am excellent in the kitchen,” he says. They can’t really kiss, because they’re both grinning too wide. “Not too shabby in the bedroom either.”

“Oh, really?”

“Oh, yeah…pretty decent in the laundry room, too. Always just the right amount of detergent.”

“Okay, that’s enough out of you.” She stands, straightening her skirt, then holds out her hand.

Jane Austen said we’re all fools in love. He’s counting on that.

[mysteriesofloves]

𝖐𝖎𝖓𝖐𝖙𝖔𝖇𝖊𝖗 2022 𝖜𝖊𝖊𝖐 𝖔𝖓𝖊

blair gives dan a surprise at work

[mysteriesofloves]

rated E | chapter 1/?

Once they’re out of New York, Dan stops worrying about where they’re going. The sun hangs low over them, burning red, leftover Christmas holly, one lethal bite away, and he realizes that he’s wanted to leave this whole time, wanted to get as far as possible from home as he could. He just couldn’t bring himself to leave her behind.

or, a 5x14 au

[mysteriesofloves]

rated E | 3.4k

They have a routine, and a guest bedroom, and plans for a forever home. They have each other, and she has them, and that’s just the way things are, now.

or, back in the city, serena stays with dan and blair.

[mysteriesofloves]

rated M | 3.5k

It’s just something I want to try, she had started. We won’t be weird about it. I just want to pretend tonight.

[mysteriesofloves]

rated E | 4.7k

The air in the room feels tight and hot and alive. Pulsing with a heartbeat big and gross enough to rival Blair’s own.

She doesn’t think she’s ever hated someone as much as she hates Dan Humphrey right now.

He flinches like he thinks she’s going to hit him when her hands curl in his collar and tug him in. Teeth first, his breath hot and coming out hard. She can’t take a risk and get everything, but she can take one and maybe, maybe get the one thing she still needs.

or, a 2x08 AU

[mysteriesofloves]

thank you!!! love your blog and your writing !! you’re so talented !

SMOOCHES 💋

[mysteriesofloves]

since i don’t know when i’ll have anything new to share, here’s a tumblr-exclusive tiny cut scene from the milk and honey route, either during chapter 4 or 5 (it’s been so long i don’t really remember). friendship fluff ahead ♡

She hears him awkwardly stumble over pleasantries through the door before it’s even open, but she still snarks, “Don’t you knock?” when it does.

“Who are they?” he says, shutting the door behind him. He gives her a once-over, surrounded by a throne of pillows on the bed, but doesn’t comment.

“Friends,” she says, with poorly masked contempt. She clicks the keyboard of her laptop as he takes a careful seat on the edge of her bed. “They think you’re my boyfriend, and showing up here unannounced isn’t helping.”

“How embarrassing for you,” he says. She raises a brow, and he raises a hand in return. “Just saving you the trouble.”

“What are you doing here?”

“There’s a party at Durfee. I came to see if you wanted to go.”

“Oh, of course,” she says. “I would love to spend my night getting hit on by drunk, horny freshmen.”

“Right. You’d much rather stay in and watch–“ he leans over to look at the screen of her laptop. “Project Runway. This is Jenny’s choice of reality show, too.”

“Well, there goes any enjoyment I derived from that.”

Dan just stares at her. “Have you talked to anyone about getting that Don’t stick your hands into the enclosure sign for your door?”

She sinks further into her pillow fortress, looking away from him. He nudges her foot. “What’s up with you?”

“I’m…” she waves vaguely over herself, then lifts her duvet to reveal the heating pack on her abdomen.

“Ah,” Dan says, an easy little nod. “Does that mean you want me to leave?”

“Do whatever you want,” she huffs.

His brows draw, tapping a finger to his chin. “Spend my Friday night in getting bullied by you or out getting drunk with my Anderson Cooper wannabe roommate. Tough choice.”

She turns away, curling up into herself. “Hey,” he says, softening. “Obviously you. Do I look like I actually enjoy college parties?”

“You look like you got pushed into lockers in high school.”

His hand smoothes over the covers, finding her knee and squeezing. “And now I’m spending the night in with the girl who did the pushing.”

She kicks at him until he gets up with a laugh. He moves towards the door, and she says, smaller than she means to, “Where are you going?”

“Be right back,” he says, slipping back out the door. When he comes back, it’s with a steaming mug. “Here,” he says. “This’ll help.”

She sniffs it; chamomile, the box his own left in her cupboards, with honey mixed into it. “I know that,” she says. “Why do you know that?”

He shrugs without looking at her, gesturing for her to move over. She does, careful not to spill, and he rearranges the pillows to fit himself among them. “My mom,” he says after a moment, voice quiet. He smiles down at his hands, shaking his head listlessly. “She’d tell me all this stuff that a preteen boy definitely doesn’t want to hear. She said if I was uncomfortable I’d be a bad brother and boyfriend, and she didn’t want that.”

Blair holds her breath until she feels it ache, then swallows down a gulp of tea. “I miss home, too,” she offers.

He nods absently, stilled pulled into his thought. She can see it there, held taut between his brows. “Yeah,” he mumbles finally. “But the home I miss isn’t the one that’s there right now. I guess…I don’t know, I guess being here has made it hard to adjust to what home means now.”

She thinks she knows what he means. Before all this, there was a clear picture of home in her head. Now, here, with the droll of foreign voices outside the wall, the pillows moulded to fit the shape of him, his warmth—like the warmth of the tea, soothing and sweet—makes the definition take on new meaning.

“I didn’t mean to bring you down with me,” she says.

He shrugs again, pulling up one of the pillows into his lap. “Misery loves company.”

Blair raises a brow at him. “What’s the pillow hiding?”

He rolls his eyes. “C’mere,” he says, patting the pillow. Hesitantly, she lowers her head, tucking her knees up and hugging them tight to her chest, maneuvering her cup so she doesn’t spill. His fingers come over her temple, massaging firmly.

“This okay?”

Blair bites her lip, shuts her eyes, lest she do something completely pathetic, like cry.

“Yeah,” she says. “That’s nice.”

[mysteriesofloves]

rated E ☆ 35k

“I am so going to regret asking, but—what exactly are you getting at, Blair?”

Blair takes a deep breath, sitting up straight, and lets it all come out in a rush: “Come with me to Paris and pretend to be my boyfriend.”

[mysteriesofloves]

rated M | 2.5k

“Keep talking,” she says. “I like your voice.”

“Oh,” he says, then, brighter: “oh. Okay. Well. Ha. That’s funny—not that, that’s not funny, that’s…nice, it’s just funny that I can’t stop talking until you ask me to not stop talking, then I can’t think of anything to say.”

“Would you like a prompt?”

“Sure. Yeah. Give me a prompt, Waldorf.”

“What would you do if you were here?”

His breath over the line is like static. “Um. What?”

[mysteriesofloves]

rated E ☆ 9.9k

He’s spent the past year wanting to make things better for her. Good, in any little way he can. Maybe, underneath everything, that’s why he really agreed to come here. He would do anything to make things even just a little bit better for her.

Dan POV companion piece to write this down

[mysteriesofloves]

rated M ⭑ 5.5k

The spotlight unsheathes through the dark, kissing her pale skin like a cupped palm. Her hip bops, a small, seductive move, her gloved fingers trailing temptingly across her shoulder. She flows like filling a flute with expensive champagne, pulling off one glove slowly, rolling it down from the elbow, the bare back of her arm as entrancing as if she’d taken everything off altogether, the string of pearls draped around her neck glistening under the spotlight. Every man around him is leering, the whole lot of them, and it takes a sick, stunted second for Dan to realize—he is, too.

He wants to sink back into his seat and will himself to relax. He wants to get up and leave, get rid of whatever it is swirling low in his stomach. Instead, he leans forward.

[mysteriesofloves]

rated T ☆ 5.6k

It’s Friday and the sun is out. Dinner is in the oven, and his wife is on her way home. Dan didn’t think life would ever let him be this happy. If he could do it all again, he’s not sure what he would do. But this does seem like a good place to start.

part 3 of the moon’s never seen me before (i’m reflecting light)