[fic] a lucky recollection, it saved (2/3), the lizzie bennet diaries, lizzie/darcy, 5k words
Title: a lucky recollection, it saved
Author:
allthingsholy
Fandom: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries
Words: 5k this chapter, 11k overall
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Pemberley fic! Because of course. Thanks to Meg, Erica, & Steph for the lookings-over, thanks to (Other) Meg, Marie, & Rachel for the cheerleading. This was going to be two parts. It's no longer two parts. I have no self-control.
[Also at AO3.]
Summary: Lizzie tries her best to concentrate, but she only hears about every third word that Abby says. She’s got one half of her brain watching Abby sketch out possible service app tie-ins and the other half on the toes of Darcy’s shoes, which she can just see out of the corner of her right eye. (Not that she’s concentrating on his shoes; it’s the rest of him, the living, breathing, right-behind-her rest of him that’s so distracting. She doesn’t blurt out, “All of the 100,000 people who watch my videos are basically clamoring for your face, sir,” because that would be horrible, but it’s a close thing. The room feels vaguely like it’s 115 degrees.)
Part 1: here.
++++
Lizzie plays tennis with Gigi on Saturday and spends most of Sunday nursing her wounds. (Losing isn’t an adequate verb choice; whomping barely conveys how bad it was, and Lizzie’s more than sure that Gigi pulled half her punches. Girl’s got game.) Jane brings her ice for her shoulder and looks secretly amused at Lizzie’s pain. New Jane is fresh.
“At one point,” Lizzie says, “I wanted to lie down on the sidelines and cry.”
Jane’s stitching a new collar onto one of her dresses, pins sticking out at the corner of her mouth. “Didn’t you know that she was really good?”
“Catherine de Bourgh said that she was really good. Catherine de Bourgh also said that Caroline is a shining example of the perfect woman. Catherine de Bourgh is sometimes wrong.”
If Jane’s bothered by the mention of Caroline, it doesn’t show. She picks at the seam she’s stitching and says, “Well, apparently she wasn’t wrong about this.”
“Apparently not.” Lizzie’s been camped on the couch for the majority of the morning, delaying the thing she really needs to do: record a new video. Rationally, she knows that her failure to even mention Darcy is more conspicuous than it would be if she just stopped censoring herself, especially now that she’s sure he’s not watching. It should be liberating, in a way, but mostly it just makes things worse. Talking about him behind his back again makes her feel weird in a way that she didn’t before. Not that she’d go back to ragging on him all the time anyway, but.
Lizzie watches Jane, the methodical motion of her stitching, the back and forth of her hand. In the end, Lizzie drags Jane into her video and makes her update everyone on what’s going on in her life instead of Lizzie’s. It’s a cop-out, but it’s better than nothing.
++
Lizzie spends Monday morning observing the team putting together the content for the Rowley campaign. Everyone’s upbeat and enthusiastic and sort of ridiculously nice. They don’t exclude her because she’s just some student; one of the guys, Chris, shows her pictures of his super adorable kids, and one of the women, Abby, tells her about a local farmer’s market that she especially loves. By the time they break for lunch, Lizzie’s even made a contribution to the conversation. Out loud. It’s just a small idea, but it goes on the whiteboard up there with everyone else’s; it makes her feel a little more comfortable to have done something besides take notes for her final report.
Lizzie’s phone buzzes halfway through the afternoon, a full six hours after her video was posted. It’s Charlotte. “Hiding behind Jane now? I’m onto you, Bennet.” Lizzie rolls her eyes and pushes her phone under her notebook and goes back to watching Abby list possible ways of tying the new content to the company’s existing services. Abby’s in the middle of sketching out an idea when the door opens up and Darcy walks in, because of course he does. Last week, Lizzie spent an amount of time she’s not comfortable dissecting standing in the break room watching him develop this campaign, so it makes sense that he’d check in on how it’s progressing. He waves at Abby to continue and sits down in a chair at the back.
Lizzie tries her best to concentrate, but she only hears about every third word that Abby says. She’s got one half of her brain watching Abby sketch out possible service app tie-ins and the other half on the toes of Darcy’s shoes, which she can just see out of the corner of her right eye. (Not that she’s concentrating on his shoes; it’s the rest of him, the living, breathing, right-behind-her rest of him that’s so distracting. She doesn’t blurt out, “All of the 100,000 people who watch my videos are basically clamoring for your face, sir,” because that would be horrible, but it’s a close thing. The room feels vaguely like it’s 115 degrees.)
Lizzie takes an inconspicuous deep breath and refocuses on Abby, because she’s an adult and a professional and she’s here to learn.
Abby’s outlining the way the apps could interact with the different content they’ve already sketched out, and when she gets to Lizzie’s earlier contribution, she tips her head to the side and says, “Actually, Lizzie, this is a great idea. Can you see any ways to really tie these together?”
Lizzie sits up in her chair and taps her pen one, two, three times on her notebook, and when she opens her mouth, she’s talking about content tie-in and structuring the narrative of the campaign to reflect the company’s new slogan, and Abby’s nodding along and sketching out a plan on the whiteboard. Chris smiles at her from across the table. Lizzie’s heart is pounding in her chest and she’s pretty sure her face is a little red, but she feels intelligent and proud and useful. She’s not talking about wanting to throw up at all. It’s amazing.
When she’s done writing out the proposal, Abby looks at Darcy, still sitting at the back of the room. Lizzie turns in her chair to look at him too. He’s got his hands clasped between his knees, eyes fixed to the board, and he nods his head and says, “This sounds great.” He stands up and steps toward Abby and takes the marker from her hand. “But what about this, too.”
They spend an hour working with Lizzie’s idea—all of them, Lizzie and Darcy and Abby and Chris and everyone else whose names Lizzie can’t remember—and for the sixty minutes they bounce ideas around, Lizzie can meet Darcy’s eyes and everything. She says, “And if we did this,” and he says, “Then we could do that,” and it’s like it’s not even awkward at all, like they’re just two people at work who’ve never talked about feelings in their lives.
When they’re done, Darcy caps the marker and leans back against the wall and says, “I like it. What do you guys think?” He looks at Lizzie, sat in the middle of the room and feeling like she belongs, and it’s easy, the way she smiles up at him and nods her head. He very nearly smiles back.
++
She spends most of the next two days in the same conference room, storyboarding on one side of the whiteboard and highlighting the campaign tie-ins on the other. Darcy comes in and out between other meetings and sits in the same chair in the back. Sometimes he’s quiet and sometimes he’s not, but Lizzie’s always super aware of his presence. It stops being distracting after a while, but she still sits up straighter when he comes into the room.
She stays focused on the work 99% of the time when he’s around, but sometimes, in some of the randomest moments, she can’t help but get distracted—by the way Darcy tugs on the end of his tie when he’s listening, by the way he smiles at Mrs. Reynolds when she brings him down paperwork to sign. Chris cracks a joke in the middle of one of their discussions and Darcy almost laughs. Lizzie spent a month at Netherfield watching Darcy work, hunched over his laptop and scowling at the screen, and never saw any of this agreeableness. She can’t even remember seeing him crack a smile.
She comes into the break room on Wednesday to make tea for the next round of discussions and Darcy’s there, stirring milk into a coffee mug with the Pemberley logo on the side. She has to reach around him to get to the tea bags and she can see his gears turning, see the effort that goes into making his mouth curve up into the smallest smile. It’s not that it looks forced, exactly, it just looked—intentional.
He hands her the milk without being asked and then clears his throat. Lizzie’s hands flatten against the countertop because now that she’s noticed how often he stops and starts and stalls around her, she can’t not notice it. He taps his stirrer against the rim of his mug and says, “I think it’s going well this week. You’re really—” Tap tap. “You’ve liked it?”
For a guy who frequently gives boardroom presentations, he has an uncanny knack for not finishing his sentences around her. Lizzie makes herself look up and meet his eyes. “It’s been great. I’ve really learned a lot.”
Darcy smiles again—wider, almost natural-looking—and nods his head and almost but doesn’t quite say something else to her before he picks up his mug and heads back to the conference room. Lizzie pokes at her tea bag and stares at the milk carton.
She spent a month with him at Netherfield cataloging all his faults, and she wonders, not for the first time, if maybe he took away different things from the time they spent under the same roof. Maybe he learned how she took her tea and what her favorite authors were. He was rough around the edges, sure, and occasionally more than a little bit rude, but maybe Lizzie was seeing what she wanted to see. Maybe he made it easy, but maybe she made it worse.
Something hot and uncomfortable settles itself in Lizzie’s stomach. She spends the rest of the afternoon waiting for the conference room door to open up and for Darcy to walk in, but he never does.
++
“So you’ve seen him every day this week?”
“Yes.”
“And talked to him every day this week?”
“Yes.”
“And had generally pleasant interactions with him? Every day this week?”
“Yes.”
Lizzie and Charlotte finally talk about Darcy. Lizzie’s managed to worm her way out of this conversation every time Charlotte’s brought it up so far. (Actually, it’s one of the only times that Lizzie’s been truly thankful for how demanding and innocently overbearing Ricky Collins is. Charlotte’s been too busy to pester her beyond the occasional text and email. Lizzie’s partly thankful for it, partly she just misses her best friend.)
Jane’s out with one of her work friends and Lizzie’s halfway through a bottle of wine because of reasons, and Charlotte’s asking a lot of questions and not saying much in response. Lizzie taps her fingers against the arm of the couch and sighs. “Maybe coming here wasn’t a good idea.”
On the other end of the line, Lizzie can hear Charlotte moving things around her desk. “First of all, you didn’t actually have a whole lot of other options. And secondly, I think maybe it was a good thing. Gives you a chance to—reevaluate William Darcy.”
“Reevaluate William Darcy? Charlotte, this isn’t a Colin Firth movie. We’re not going to kiss in the snow while a camera pans around us.”
“No,” Charlotte says, “this is California so that’s pretty impossible.”
“For a multitude of reasons. The guy spent several hours watching me call him an asshole, I’m pretty sure he’s changed his mind about me.” Lizzie pauses. “Hopefully.”
“Lizzie.” Charlotte has this tone of voice she uses, this uniquely dealing-with-Lizzie exasperation, and Lizzie can hear it all the way from San Francisco. “I’m not saying you should be kissing him in the snow or anything, but I thought you were coming around on Darcy.”
Lizzie pours herself another drink because self-reflection is thirsty work. She knows that Charlotte’s right, that her loathing of Darcy hasn’t so much vanished as spun out in front of her to monopolize most of her non-working hours. But there’s only so much personal growth Lizzie can own up to, out loud, at any one time, so she taps her fingers against the arm of the couch and sighs. “Okay, maybe he doesn’t sit around at night listening to Bon Iver and drinking tea steeped from the tears of hungry orphans. That doesn’t mean he’s a saint.”
Charlotte laughs; it’s tinny through the receiver and makes her feel farther away than ever. “I didn’t say he was perfect. The guy’s social skills could admittedly use a little finessing,” she says. “I just think maybe your first through fiftieth impressions of him were a little—” Lizzie can hear Charlotte choosing her words carefully, hear her stepping around the more exposed and tender of Lizzie’s feelings. It’s something Lizzie’s been avoiding lately, examining her own emotions. There was a reason she was sort of dodging Charlotte’s calls.
Charlotte must find too many soft spots in Lizzie’s rigid exterior because she doesn’t finish her thought. The line’s silent for awhile, just the sound of Charlotte’s breathing and the ring of Lizzie’s wineglass on the end table.
When they finally disconnect—with lots of promises to be better about calling, better at staying in touch, and a few hushed impressions of Ricky Collins—Lizzie drains the rest of her wine glass in one. She draws her feet up under herself and listens to Jane’s empty apartment for a long time.
++
On Friday, Lizzie gets a text from Fitz as she’s leaving work. He’d texted when she first got to Los Angeles (In Sacramento for two weeks with heathens. They don’t even like cats, Lizzie. They’re dog people. How.) but besides that, she hasn’t much heard from him at all.
Lizzie’s riding the elevator with Dr. Gardiner, who’s been shuttling her to and from the office for two weeks, and her phone vibrates from within her purse. Lizzie B, pack your bags. We’re going out. Lizzie’s got her thumbs on her touchscreen when the elevator doors open, and when she goes to follow Dr. Gardiner to the parking garage, there’s a hand suddenly at her elbow.
“Lizzie!” She only sees Fitz’s smile for the split second before he crushes her into a hug. Over his shoulder, Gigi waves. “We were just on our way up to kidnap you. Tapas!”
Dr. Gardiner’s looking back and forth from Lizzie to Fitz to Gigi and back, and Lizzie makes what she hopes is an appropriate facial expression and curls up her shoulder. “Umm, Dr. Gardiner, this is Fitz and you remember Gigi. They’re—”
“So please to meet you,” Fitz says, taking her outstretched hand. “Lizzie’s told us great things about you.”
“Great things,” Gigi echoes, next in line for a this-time-we’re-not-surrounded-by-an-ele
Dr. Gardiner smiles and for a second looks like she remembers being 25. She nods once at Lizzie, eyes mischievous, and says, “I’ll see you Monday, Lizzie.”
Lizzie barely has time to wave goodbye before Fitz slings her bag over his shoulder and hustles her off into the car.
The thing about tapas is that they’re very small plates of very small bits of food, and Lizzie doesn’t have the forethought to eat quite enough of them. And Fitz and Gigi have a plan, a very cunning plan, to get Lizzie a little bit drunk. Lizzie doesn’t catch on until after the tapas place, when they sit her down at a karaoke bar and give her her third mai tai, which is a shame because karaoke is the worst and fruit drinks make her feel ridiculous. They make her feel like Lydia.
“I feel like Lydia,” Lizzie says, kicking her heels against the booth. The lights at the bar keep doing this thing, this weird, clubby thing, and Lizzie watches bands of pink and blue and purple swirl up and down the walls and over the face of a guy struggling through “Midnight Train to Georgia.” Fitz is talking about Sacramento—“Dog people, guys, I don’t get it”—and Gigi keeps checking her phone. There’s a persistent piece of pineapple at the bottom of Lizzie’s glass that she’s trying (ineffectually) to skewer with her straw.
Somewhere in the middle of their third round—two different people sang “Achey, Breaky Heart,” everything she thought she knew about LA is a lie—Lizzie finds herself in the midst of a very heated debate on the relative merits of Ryan Gosling’s face, and judging by the way Gigi rolls her eyes at Fitz, it’s a conversation they’ve had before. He throws a friendly arm around Lizzie’s shoulders and says, “Back me up, Bennet. Gosling: yay or nay?”
Lizzie’s seen The Notebook more than enough times. (Lydia got the disc jammed in their DVD player the summer it came out and even Lizzie’s near physical aversion to all things Nicholas Sparks wasn’t enough to prise it loose. In the end, their dad had finagled it out using his model train tools. The player still won’t close quite right, even all these years later.) Lizzie screws up her face and pokes at her pineapple. “Absolutely yay.”
Fitz laughs into his beer. “Mm, blonds.”
“Ugh, blonds,” Gigi says, leaning back against the cushions in the booth. “I saw Zachary Levi in that Starbucks on Wabash last summer. I’d let him on the cover of my People magazine.”
Lizzie snorts into the last bit of her mai tai. She’s hung around Gigi enough now to know that she’s nothing at all like Darcy, nothing like what Lizzie assumed Darcy would be. Gigi’s kind of willowy and loose, blonde hair in ringlets and bangles at her wrists. She talks softly but isn’t quiet, smiles at strangers and leaves great tips. She’s got this ridiculous, barking laugh sometimes and one dimple on her right cheek.
Lizzie watches Gigi’s face, turned blue from the light of her phone, and thinks about Carter’s and George Wickham and the incredible ease of Gigi’s smile. She retroactively hates that scheming, lying swim monster even more than she did before. Ugh blonds, indeed.
After a passable rendition of “Proud Mary” from a middle-aged maybe-soccer mom, Gigi excuses herself to the bathroom and Lizzie bites her lip and doubles down on the thing she’s wanted to ask all night. Darcy’s name has been threatening to trip out of Lizzie’s brain and right into her mouth since the moment they got into Fitz’s car. Lizzie sucks on the ice from her drink and watches Gigi make her way across the room and as soon as she’s out of sight, Lizzie leans over and grabs his wrist. “Fitz. You have to tell me. Does Gigi know about the videos?”
Fitz narrows his eyes, either because he thinks Lizzie’s ridiculous or because the guy manning the bar turned on some kind of very irritating strobe light. “What?”
Lizzie glances toward the bathroom, because it’s been three hours with the both of them and she can’t keep it in anymore and she’s never gotten up the courage to ask Gigi herself. “Does she know about the videos? My videos. Does she know about them?”
Lizzie’s a few shots of rum—rum’s what’s in a mai tai, right?—past being able to accurately decipher what Fitz is doing with his face right now, but he looks like he wants to laugh and then hug her and then maybe cry? Or just laugh more? (How does Lydia manage this, it’s unbearable.)
Fitz sets his beer on the table and glances over her shoulder. “I don’t think she knows about the videos, no. But if you’re asking me if she knows about what happened with you and Darcy? Probably.”
Lizzie drops her head so her hair hangs around her face. She and Fitz haven’t talked about this, like, at all, but she’s drunk enough to make the intuitive but totally unfortunate mental leap: he knew about the videos, he probably saw her confrontation with Darcy, they’re best friends, he probably knows everything. And he thinks that Gigi knows everything too. This is awful.
“This is awful,” Lizzie says. “You think he told her?”
Fitz shrugs his shoulders. His face is still really confusing. “They’re pretty close. And he probably wanted to talk to someone, so.”
Of all the things Lizzie has let herself imagine about Darcy—not that she spends a lot of time thinking about Darcy (oh god, she spends so much time thinking about Darcy)—his level of unhappiness after their feelings confession situation and whether or not he was upset enough to need consoling afterward are absolutely not among them. She hasn’t sat up at night thinking about it and she hasn’t gone back to rewatch the videos he’s in. She definitely hasn’t spent time reading and rereading the letter he gave her and making note of the pen strokes that seemed heaviest, the ones that seemed important.
(The truth: she has not rewatched the video but she has reread the letter an uncomfortable amount of times, and there’s a spot in the middle—when I saw you with Wickham—where the paper looks nearly torn through. His penmanship isn’t the only thing that she’s been obsessing over these past few weeks.)
Fitz pulls his wrist out of her grasp and holds onto the ends of her fingers. “It’s fine, Lizzie.”
“It’s not fine. I called her brother a prick. Should I talk to her about it? Does she hate me? Does she want to duel? That’s what rich people do, right? Duel?” It’s possible that Lizzie’s had more to drink than she thought.
Fitz laughs at her then, because Fitz is the worst and has no empathy. “She doesn’t want to duel you. She wants to be your friend, I think, regardless of the whole deal with her brother.” He lets go of her fingers and picks up his beer, clinking the rim against her empty glass. “How about you take it one Darcy at a time, alright?”
Lizzie opens her mouth to answer but Gigi comes barrelling back to the table, blonde hair trailing behind her. She sets down another mai tai for Lizzy and something equally fruity and ridiculous for herself. “I signed us up for a song!” she says, leaning forward to grab their wrists. “Come on, we’re doing this. Don’t be bitches.”
(Fact: Lizzie and Fitz are either tone-deaf or embarrassed or both and they do little more than hum along in most of the right places, but Gigi’s got this sweet, bright voice and the ability to win over a crowd. She hooks an elbow through Lizzie’s and knocks their hips together and sings oh, oh, oh with a laugh. So no dueling then, Lizzie thinks. Oh, oh, oh.)
By the time they leave the bar, Gigi’s steps are as uneven as Lizzie’s and they’ve got their shoulders leaned up against each other’s in Fitz’s backseat. The three of them sing along to the Spice Girls—“Fitz, you’ve got Spice World on your iPod on purpose”—with all the windows rolled down and after they pour her back into Jane’s apartment building, Lizzie stays at the curb until Fitz’s headlights disappear around the corner.
++
She gets three emails from Lydia over the weekend, all some variation of, “These videos are lame, let’s hear about your man-action, how did I get cursed with such a dumpy sister?” Lizzie ignores all of them.
On Monday night, Lizzie finally calls her little sister because Jane is still at work and if she gets another text with the word “YOLO” in it, she’ll roll her eyes right out of her head.
“Lizzie!” Lydia answers. “Have you decided to stop being the lamest and actually record something interesting?”
Lizzie rolls her eyes, not quite out of her head. “Thanks, Lydia, love you too.”
Lydia puffs out a breath. “How’s the Darce-hole? Your fans want to know.”
Darce-hole. Jesus. “Please don’t call them that. They’re not fans, they’re just … an audience.” The word “fans” makes Lizzie really uncomfortable.
“Are you kidding? You have fans, Lizzie. You have merchandise.”
“Merchandise?” On the other side of the line, it sounds like Lydia’s destroying a small town, or at the very least her closet.
Her voice is muffled when she speaks, like she’s pulling a shirt over her head. “Okay, it was just some randos in a tshirt I think they made themselves, but still. You have an obligation to them!”
Lizzie makes a sound slightly more lady-like than a grunt but doesn’t answer. Lydia still sounds like she’s caught in a flurry of cosmetics and costume jewelry. “Are you getting ready to go out right now? It’s a Monday.”
“Ugh, whatever,” Lydia says, “this is why you’re still single.” She doesn’t even say goodbye before she hangs up. Sisters.
Lizzie spends the next day thinking about her videos, and the audience-slash-fans who want to know everything. It’s hard to begrudge them their interest when it’s exactly the thing she was aiming for in the first place. She never thought to hold anything back before, that her life was her life and it was her business to share as much of it as she wanted, but now every time she sits down in front of the camera, it’s different. And it’s not just being at Pemberley and it’s not just the fear of who might see it, though neither of those things are the least bit helpful. Talking about Darcy means acknowledging what happened between them, which is something Lizzie’s been actively trying to avoid.
She sets up the camera during her lunch break the next day and when she presses record and sits down, her stomach’s tight and her neck’s super tense. Fine. She’ll talk about Darcy.
“Hi guys,” she says. The red light is mocking her. “So, I know that I haven’t talked much about this since I’ve gotten to Pemberley Industries, but since all of you have been wondering: yes, I have seen Darcy.” She chews her lip, and runs her hands through her hair. “He’s been observing a project I’ve been working on for the past week and it’s been—” Lizzie spends the next ten to a hundred seconds trying to find the right word. God, what does this look like on camera? Uncertainty? Fear? Editing this thing to make her look like she’s not a total mess is going to be a nightmare.
For fuck’s sake, Lizzie thinks. Full disclosure, right? She takes a deep breath and squares her shoulders. “My name is Lizzie Bennet and I have no idea what to think. I mean—”
She’s interrupted by a knock on her office door. Not for the first time, she thinks maybe she should be recording these at Jane’s instead of an actual workplace, because this isn’t the first time this has happened. Chris had come in the week before and they’d ended up talking about camera settings and sound quality for half an hour. Lizzie sighs. “Come in.”
Because the universe is unfair and still paying her back for any number of sins, her office door opens and Darcy peeks his head in. He looks from her to the camera and back again and she sees him suck in a quick breath. Shit. She spares a wish for the floor to open up and swallow her whole, but there’s no time for wishing when Darcy’s in her office. With his face. And his person. And his face.
“Darcy,” she says. Her spine is immediately ramrod straight. Darcy steps into her office and closes the door behind him and god, the last time this happened it went really badly. Lizzie glances around the room. Does she stay sitting? Stand? Turn off the camera? Crawl under her desk? She’s not emotionally or physically prepared for this.
Darcy takes a step toward her and shoves his hands in his pockets. “If I’d have known you were filming, I’d have worn my hat,” he says. Lizzie immediately does that thing she’s done since she was small, that “hiding her face in mortification” thing that usually comes out around Lydia, but when she looks up at Darcy, he’s—he’s smiling. Just one corner of his mouth, but it doesn’t even look like he’s trying.
Lizzie’s breath escapes in a huff. “You crack jokes?” she says.
His smile spreads all the way across his face. One dimple on his right cheek. Just like Gigi. “It has been known to happen.” He rocks back on his heels and shoves his hands deeper into his pockets. Lizzie runs her hands over her knees. (God, are her palms sweating? Her palms are sweating. Jesus.) “I can come back,” he says, “if now’s not a good time.”
“No,” Lizzie’s mouth says, completely independent of her brain. Because the world is spinning backwards on its axis and she doesn’t want to get rid of him as quickly as possible? She clears her throat and gestures toward the camera. “I was just filming a video but if you need something, I can—”
“No, I was just.” He takes another step toward her, almost right to the bench where she’s sitting. He’s probably partly in frame. She wonders if he knows that. She wonders if he cares. “I thought I’d come by and tell you that everyone’s had great things to say about your help with the Rowley campaign. I’ve heard nothing but good things.”
“Oh.” Lizzie’s heart picks up speed in her chest. “Thank you.” She’d been contributing and everything seemed like it was going well, but to hear it out loud is something else. She bites back a smile and tucks her hair behind her ear. When she looks back, Darcy’s grin is smaller but—deeper, maybe? More genuine? Lizzie chews on her lip a second, deciding, and then scoots over a little on the bench. “I was just going to give an update on the company and the project and how thing are going.” Her voice sounds weird but she pushes past it. “You want to sit in?”
Darcy’s eyes widen and Lizzie wants to reach up and grab the words she can almost see still hanging in the air. You want to sit in? Like the last time he did this went so well, like it didn’t end up with him embarrassing himself, her embarrassing him, all over Youtube. (In the back of her head, she hears Lydia oh-so-helpfully reminding her: “Over 300,000 views on this video, Lizzie, see what you get when something interesting actually happens to you?”) Of course he doesn’t want to sit down, what a horrible idea.
But just as she’s opening her mouth to take it back, just as she nearly stands to turn the camera off, she sees him suck in a breath and smile against the flinch in his eyes and take a step forward and sit down. Right beside her. Inches away from where she’s gaping at him open-mouthed.
Lizzie closes her mouth and sits back. (There’s an entirely empty space where her heart used to be.)
Darcy looks back at her, his expression still a little bit pained, a little bit hesitant. He smooths down his tie (yellow with a grey plaid pattern running through) and says, “So where were you? Your name is Lizzie Bennet and?”
There’s something easy about him when he says it, something less pained and more—not hopeful, not light, not exactly. But the lines at his eyes crinkle into something that could reasonably be called a smile, and Lizzie shakes her head because this is actually her life.
She takes a deep breath and looks into the camera. “My name is Lizzie Bennet and—say hello to Darcy.”
++
It takes her longer than usual to edit her video. She was never the best at it in the first place—Charlotte set a pretty steep curve—but she knows it’s not her software that slows her down.
She does look uncertain. She does look afraid. And the moment she locks eyes on Darcy, all the color sort of drains from her face. (Which is saying something. For a Californian, she’s always maintained an aggressive sunblock regimen.)
But it’s the last bit of video that makes her hands still on her keyboard and her fingers pause over her mouse. Lizzie’s half out of frame, reaching up to turn off the camera, and Darcy’s just visible behind her. It had gone alright, actually. He’d talked about app technology and told a story about the time one of the new security guards wouldn’t let him in because he forgot his badge. Editing those parts had been weird enough—she’d laughed during filming, actually honest-to-god laughed at a story Darcy told—but it’s the last five seconds of footage that stop her short. She’s got one hand reaching out for the camera and he’s got both eyes on her and the look on his face is—
Well, it’s certainly not a face a robot could make.
++++
Author:
allthingsholyFandom: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries
Words: 5k this chapter, 11k overall
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Pemberley fic! Because of course. Thanks to Meg, Erica, & Steph for the lookings-over, thanks to (Other) Meg, Marie, & Rachel for the cheerleading. This was going to be two parts. It's no longer two parts. I have no self-control.
[Also at AO3.]
Summary: Lizzie tries her best to concentrate, but she only hears about every third word that Abby says. She’s got one half of her brain watching Abby sketch out possible service app tie-ins and the other half on the toes of Darcy’s shoes, which she can just see out of the corner of her right eye. (Not that she’s concentrating on his shoes; it’s the rest of him, the living, breathing, right-behind-her rest of him that’s so distracting. She doesn’t blurt out, “All of the 100,000 people who watch my videos are basically clamoring for your face, sir,” because that would be horrible, but it’s a close thing. The room feels vaguely like it’s 115 degrees.)
Part 1: here.
++++
Lizzie plays tennis with Gigi on Saturday and spends most of Sunday nursing her wounds. (Losing isn’t an adequate verb choice; whomping barely conveys how bad it was, and Lizzie’s more than sure that Gigi pulled half her punches. Girl’s got game.) Jane brings her ice for her shoulder and looks secretly amused at Lizzie’s pain. New Jane is fresh.
“At one point,” Lizzie says, “I wanted to lie down on the sidelines and cry.”
Jane’s stitching a new collar onto one of her dresses, pins sticking out at the corner of her mouth. “Didn’t you know that she was really good?”
“Catherine de Bourgh said that she was really good. Catherine de Bourgh also said that Caroline is a shining example of the perfect woman. Catherine de Bourgh is sometimes wrong.”
If Jane’s bothered by the mention of Caroline, it doesn’t show. She picks at the seam she’s stitching and says, “Well, apparently she wasn’t wrong about this.”
“Apparently not.” Lizzie’s been camped on the couch for the majority of the morning, delaying the thing she really needs to do: record a new video. Rationally, she knows that her failure to even mention Darcy is more conspicuous than it would be if she just stopped censoring herself, especially now that she’s sure he’s not watching. It should be liberating, in a way, but mostly it just makes things worse. Talking about him behind his back again makes her feel weird in a way that she didn’t before. Not that she’d go back to ragging on him all the time anyway, but.
Lizzie watches Jane, the methodical motion of her stitching, the back and forth of her hand. In the end, Lizzie drags Jane into her video and makes her update everyone on what’s going on in her life instead of Lizzie’s. It’s a cop-out, but it’s better than nothing.
++
Lizzie spends Monday morning observing the team putting together the content for the Rowley campaign. Everyone’s upbeat and enthusiastic and sort of ridiculously nice. They don’t exclude her because she’s just some student; one of the guys, Chris, shows her pictures of his super adorable kids, and one of the women, Abby, tells her about a local farmer’s market that she especially loves. By the time they break for lunch, Lizzie’s even made a contribution to the conversation. Out loud. It’s just a small idea, but it goes on the whiteboard up there with everyone else’s; it makes her feel a little more comfortable to have done something besides take notes for her final report.
Lizzie’s phone buzzes halfway through the afternoon, a full six hours after her video was posted. It’s Charlotte. “Hiding behind Jane now? I’m onto you, Bennet.” Lizzie rolls her eyes and pushes her phone under her notebook and goes back to watching Abby list possible ways of tying the new content to the company’s existing services. Abby’s in the middle of sketching out an idea when the door opens up and Darcy walks in, because of course he does. Last week, Lizzie spent an amount of time she’s not comfortable dissecting standing in the break room watching him develop this campaign, so it makes sense that he’d check in on how it’s progressing. He waves at Abby to continue and sits down in a chair at the back.
Lizzie tries her best to concentrate, but she only hears about every third word that Abby says. She’s got one half of her brain watching Abby sketch out possible service app tie-ins and the other half on the toes of Darcy’s shoes, which she can just see out of the corner of her right eye. (Not that she’s concentrating on his shoes; it’s the rest of him, the living, breathing, right-behind-her rest of him that’s so distracting. She doesn’t blurt out, “All of the 100,000 people who watch my videos are basically clamoring for your face, sir,” because that would be horrible, but it’s a close thing. The room feels vaguely like it’s 115 degrees.)
Lizzie takes an inconspicuous deep breath and refocuses on Abby, because she’s an adult and a professional and she’s here to learn.
Abby’s outlining the way the apps could interact with the different content they’ve already sketched out, and when she gets to Lizzie’s earlier contribution, she tips her head to the side and says, “Actually, Lizzie, this is a great idea. Can you see any ways to really tie these together?”
Lizzie sits up in her chair and taps her pen one, two, three times on her notebook, and when she opens her mouth, she’s talking about content tie-in and structuring the narrative of the campaign to reflect the company’s new slogan, and Abby’s nodding along and sketching out a plan on the whiteboard. Chris smiles at her from across the table. Lizzie’s heart is pounding in her chest and she’s pretty sure her face is a little red, but she feels intelligent and proud and useful. She’s not talking about wanting to throw up at all. It’s amazing.
When she’s done writing out the proposal, Abby looks at Darcy, still sitting at the back of the room. Lizzie turns in her chair to look at him too. He’s got his hands clasped between his knees, eyes fixed to the board, and he nods his head and says, “This sounds great.” He stands up and steps toward Abby and takes the marker from her hand. “But what about this, too.”
They spend an hour working with Lizzie’s idea—all of them, Lizzie and Darcy and Abby and Chris and everyone else whose names Lizzie can’t remember—and for the sixty minutes they bounce ideas around, Lizzie can meet Darcy’s eyes and everything. She says, “And if we did this,” and he says, “Then we could do that,” and it’s like it’s not even awkward at all, like they’re just two people at work who’ve never talked about feelings in their lives.
When they’re done, Darcy caps the marker and leans back against the wall and says, “I like it. What do you guys think?” He looks at Lizzie, sat in the middle of the room and feeling like she belongs, and it’s easy, the way she smiles up at him and nods her head. He very nearly smiles back.
++
She spends most of the next two days in the same conference room, storyboarding on one side of the whiteboard and highlighting the campaign tie-ins on the other. Darcy comes in and out between other meetings and sits in the same chair in the back. Sometimes he’s quiet and sometimes he’s not, but Lizzie’s always super aware of his presence. It stops being distracting after a while, but she still sits up straighter when he comes into the room.
She stays focused on the work 99% of the time when he’s around, but sometimes, in some of the randomest moments, she can’t help but get distracted—by the way Darcy tugs on the end of his tie when he’s listening, by the way he smiles at Mrs. Reynolds when she brings him down paperwork to sign. Chris cracks a joke in the middle of one of their discussions and Darcy almost laughs. Lizzie spent a month at Netherfield watching Darcy work, hunched over his laptop and scowling at the screen, and never saw any of this agreeableness. She can’t even remember seeing him crack a smile.
She comes into the break room on Wednesday to make tea for the next round of discussions and Darcy’s there, stirring milk into a coffee mug with the Pemberley logo on the side. She has to reach around him to get to the tea bags and she can see his gears turning, see the effort that goes into making his mouth curve up into the smallest smile. It’s not that it looks forced, exactly, it just looked—intentional.
He hands her the milk without being asked and then clears his throat. Lizzie’s hands flatten against the countertop because now that she’s noticed how often he stops and starts and stalls around her, she can’t not notice it. He taps his stirrer against the rim of his mug and says, “I think it’s going well this week. You’re really—” Tap tap. “You’ve liked it?”
For a guy who frequently gives boardroom presentations, he has an uncanny knack for not finishing his sentences around her. Lizzie makes herself look up and meet his eyes. “It’s been great. I’ve really learned a lot.”
Darcy smiles again—wider, almost natural-looking—and nods his head and almost but doesn’t quite say something else to her before he picks up his mug and heads back to the conference room. Lizzie pokes at her tea bag and stares at the milk carton.
She spent a month with him at Netherfield cataloging all his faults, and she wonders, not for the first time, if maybe he took away different things from the time they spent under the same roof. Maybe he learned how she took her tea and what her favorite authors were. He was rough around the edges, sure, and occasionally more than a little bit rude, but maybe Lizzie was seeing what she wanted to see. Maybe he made it easy, but maybe she made it worse.
Something hot and uncomfortable settles itself in Lizzie’s stomach. She spends the rest of the afternoon waiting for the conference room door to open up and for Darcy to walk in, but he never does.
++
“So you’ve seen him every day this week?”
“Yes.”
“And talked to him every day this week?”
“Yes.”
“And had generally pleasant interactions with him? Every day this week?”
“Yes.”
Lizzie and Charlotte finally talk about Darcy. Lizzie’s managed to worm her way out of this conversation every time Charlotte’s brought it up so far. (Actually, it’s one of the only times that Lizzie’s been truly thankful for how demanding and innocently overbearing Ricky Collins is. Charlotte’s been too busy to pester her beyond the occasional text and email. Lizzie’s partly thankful for it, partly she just misses her best friend.)
Jane’s out with one of her work friends and Lizzie’s halfway through a bottle of wine because of reasons, and Charlotte’s asking a lot of questions and not saying much in response. Lizzie taps her fingers against the arm of the couch and sighs. “Maybe coming here wasn’t a good idea.”
On the other end of the line, Lizzie can hear Charlotte moving things around her desk. “First of all, you didn’t actually have a whole lot of other options. And secondly, I think maybe it was a good thing. Gives you a chance to—reevaluate William Darcy.”
“Reevaluate William Darcy? Charlotte, this isn’t a Colin Firth movie. We’re not going to kiss in the snow while a camera pans around us.”
“No,” Charlotte says, “this is California so that’s pretty impossible.”
“For a multitude of reasons. The guy spent several hours watching me call him an asshole, I’m pretty sure he’s changed his mind about me.” Lizzie pauses. “Hopefully.”
“Lizzie.” Charlotte has this tone of voice she uses, this uniquely dealing-with-Lizzie exasperation, and Lizzie can hear it all the way from San Francisco. “I’m not saying you should be kissing him in the snow or anything, but I thought you were coming around on Darcy.”
Lizzie pours herself another drink because self-reflection is thirsty work. She knows that Charlotte’s right, that her loathing of Darcy hasn’t so much vanished as spun out in front of her to monopolize most of her non-working hours. But there’s only so much personal growth Lizzie can own up to, out loud, at any one time, so she taps her fingers against the arm of the couch and sighs. “Okay, maybe he doesn’t sit around at night listening to Bon Iver and drinking tea steeped from the tears of hungry orphans. That doesn’t mean he’s a saint.”
Charlotte laughs; it’s tinny through the receiver and makes her feel farther away than ever. “I didn’t say he was perfect. The guy’s social skills could admittedly use a little finessing,” she says. “I just think maybe your first through fiftieth impressions of him were a little—” Lizzie can hear Charlotte choosing her words carefully, hear her stepping around the more exposed and tender of Lizzie’s feelings. It’s something Lizzie’s been avoiding lately, examining her own emotions. There was a reason she was sort of dodging Charlotte’s calls.
Charlotte must find too many soft spots in Lizzie’s rigid exterior because she doesn’t finish her thought. The line’s silent for awhile, just the sound of Charlotte’s breathing and the ring of Lizzie’s wineglass on the end table.
When they finally disconnect—with lots of promises to be better about calling, better at staying in touch, and a few hushed impressions of Ricky Collins—Lizzie drains the rest of her wine glass in one. She draws her feet up under herself and listens to Jane’s empty apartment for a long time.
++
On Friday, Lizzie gets a text from Fitz as she’s leaving work. He’d texted when she first got to Los Angeles (In Sacramento for two weeks with heathens. They don’t even like cats, Lizzie. They’re dog people. How.) but besides that, she hasn’t much heard from him at all.
Lizzie’s riding the elevator with Dr. Gardiner, who’s been shuttling her to and from the office for two weeks, and her phone vibrates from within her purse. Lizzie B, pack your bags. We’re going out. Lizzie’s got her thumbs on her touchscreen when the elevator doors open, and when she goes to follow Dr. Gardiner to the parking garage, there’s a hand suddenly at her elbow.
“Lizzie!” She only sees Fitz’s smile for the split second before he crushes her into a hug. Over his shoulder, Gigi waves. “We were just on our way up to kidnap you. Tapas!”
Dr. Gardiner’s looking back and forth from Lizzie to Fitz to Gigi and back, and Lizzie makes what she hopes is an appropriate facial expression and curls up her shoulder. “Umm, Dr. Gardiner, this is Fitz and you remember Gigi. They’re—”
“So please to meet you,” Fitz says, taking her outstretched hand. “Lizzie’s told us great things about you.”
“Great things,” Gigi echoes, next in line for a this-time-we’re-not-surrounded-by-an-ele
Dr. Gardiner smiles and for a second looks like she remembers being 25. She nods once at Lizzie, eyes mischievous, and says, “I’ll see you Monday, Lizzie.”
Lizzie barely has time to wave goodbye before Fitz slings her bag over his shoulder and hustles her off into the car.
The thing about tapas is that they’re very small plates of very small bits of food, and Lizzie doesn’t have the forethought to eat quite enough of them. And Fitz and Gigi have a plan, a very cunning plan, to get Lizzie a little bit drunk. Lizzie doesn’t catch on until after the tapas place, when they sit her down at a karaoke bar and give her her third mai tai, which is a shame because karaoke is the worst and fruit drinks make her feel ridiculous. They make her feel like Lydia.
“I feel like Lydia,” Lizzie says, kicking her heels against the booth. The lights at the bar keep doing this thing, this weird, clubby thing, and Lizzie watches bands of pink and blue and purple swirl up and down the walls and over the face of a guy struggling through “Midnight Train to Georgia.” Fitz is talking about Sacramento—“Dog people, guys, I don’t get it”—and Gigi keeps checking her phone. There’s a persistent piece of pineapple at the bottom of Lizzie’s glass that she’s trying (ineffectually) to skewer with her straw.
Somewhere in the middle of their third round—two different people sang “Achey, Breaky Heart,” everything she thought she knew about LA is a lie—Lizzie finds herself in the midst of a very heated debate on the relative merits of Ryan Gosling’s face, and judging by the way Gigi rolls her eyes at Fitz, it’s a conversation they’ve had before. He throws a friendly arm around Lizzie’s shoulders and says, “Back me up, Bennet. Gosling: yay or nay?”
Lizzie’s seen The Notebook more than enough times. (Lydia got the disc jammed in their DVD player the summer it came out and even Lizzie’s near physical aversion to all things Nicholas Sparks wasn’t enough to prise it loose. In the end, their dad had finagled it out using his model train tools. The player still won’t close quite right, even all these years later.) Lizzie screws up her face and pokes at her pineapple. “Absolutely yay.”
Fitz laughs into his beer. “Mm, blonds.”
“Ugh, blonds,” Gigi says, leaning back against the cushions in the booth. “I saw Zachary Levi in that Starbucks on Wabash last summer. I’d let him on the cover of my People magazine.”
Lizzie snorts into the last bit of her mai tai. She’s hung around Gigi enough now to know that she’s nothing at all like Darcy, nothing like what Lizzie assumed Darcy would be. Gigi’s kind of willowy and loose, blonde hair in ringlets and bangles at her wrists. She talks softly but isn’t quiet, smiles at strangers and leaves great tips. She’s got this ridiculous, barking laugh sometimes and one dimple on her right cheek.
Lizzie watches Gigi’s face, turned blue from the light of her phone, and thinks about Carter’s and George Wickham and the incredible ease of Gigi’s smile. She retroactively hates that scheming, lying swim monster even more than she did before. Ugh blonds, indeed.
After a passable rendition of “Proud Mary” from a middle-aged maybe-soccer mom, Gigi excuses herself to the bathroom and Lizzie bites her lip and doubles down on the thing she’s wanted to ask all night. Darcy’s name has been threatening to trip out of Lizzie’s brain and right into her mouth since the moment they got into Fitz’s car. Lizzie sucks on the ice from her drink and watches Gigi make her way across the room and as soon as she’s out of sight, Lizzie leans over and grabs his wrist. “Fitz. You have to tell me. Does Gigi know about the videos?”
Fitz narrows his eyes, either because he thinks Lizzie’s ridiculous or because the guy manning the bar turned on some kind of very irritating strobe light. “What?”
Lizzie glances toward the bathroom, because it’s been three hours with the both of them and she can’t keep it in anymore and she’s never gotten up the courage to ask Gigi herself. “Does she know about the videos? My videos. Does she know about them?”
Lizzie’s a few shots of rum—rum’s what’s in a mai tai, right?—past being able to accurately decipher what Fitz is doing with his face right now, but he looks like he wants to laugh and then hug her and then maybe cry? Or just laugh more? (How does Lydia manage this, it’s unbearable.)
Fitz sets his beer on the table and glances over her shoulder. “I don’t think she knows about the videos, no. But if you’re asking me if she knows about what happened with you and Darcy? Probably.”
Lizzie drops her head so her hair hangs around her face. She and Fitz haven’t talked about this, like, at all, but she’s drunk enough to make the intuitive but totally unfortunate mental leap: he knew about the videos, he probably saw her confrontation with Darcy, they’re best friends, he probably knows everything. And he thinks that Gigi knows everything too. This is awful.
“This is awful,” Lizzie says. “You think he told her?”
Fitz shrugs his shoulders. His face is still really confusing. “They’re pretty close. And he probably wanted to talk to someone, so.”
Of all the things Lizzie has let herself imagine about Darcy—not that she spends a lot of time thinking about Darcy (oh god, she spends so much time thinking about Darcy)—his level of unhappiness after their feelings confession situation and whether or not he was upset enough to need consoling afterward are absolutely not among them. She hasn’t sat up at night thinking about it and she hasn’t gone back to rewatch the videos he’s in. She definitely hasn’t spent time reading and rereading the letter he gave her and making note of the pen strokes that seemed heaviest, the ones that seemed important.
(The truth: she has not rewatched the video but she has reread the letter an uncomfortable amount of times, and there’s a spot in the middle—when I saw you with Wickham—where the paper looks nearly torn through. His penmanship isn’t the only thing that she’s been obsessing over these past few weeks.)
Fitz pulls his wrist out of her grasp and holds onto the ends of her fingers. “It’s fine, Lizzie.”
“It’s not fine. I called her brother a prick. Should I talk to her about it? Does she hate me? Does she want to duel? That’s what rich people do, right? Duel?” It’s possible that Lizzie’s had more to drink than she thought.
Fitz laughs at her then, because Fitz is the worst and has no empathy. “She doesn’t want to duel you. She wants to be your friend, I think, regardless of the whole deal with her brother.” He lets go of her fingers and picks up his beer, clinking the rim against her empty glass. “How about you take it one Darcy at a time, alright?”
Lizzie opens her mouth to answer but Gigi comes barrelling back to the table, blonde hair trailing behind her. She sets down another mai tai for Lizzy and something equally fruity and ridiculous for herself. “I signed us up for a song!” she says, leaning forward to grab their wrists. “Come on, we’re doing this. Don’t be bitches.”
(Fact: Lizzie and Fitz are either tone-deaf or embarrassed or both and they do little more than hum along in most of the right places, but Gigi’s got this sweet, bright voice and the ability to win over a crowd. She hooks an elbow through Lizzie’s and knocks their hips together and sings oh, oh, oh with a laugh. So no dueling then, Lizzie thinks. Oh, oh, oh.)
By the time they leave the bar, Gigi’s steps are as uneven as Lizzie’s and they’ve got their shoulders leaned up against each other’s in Fitz’s backseat. The three of them sing along to the Spice Girls—“Fitz, you’ve got Spice World on your iPod on purpose”—with all the windows rolled down and after they pour her back into Jane’s apartment building, Lizzie stays at the curb until Fitz’s headlights disappear around the corner.
++
She gets three emails from Lydia over the weekend, all some variation of, “These videos are lame, let’s hear about your man-action, how did I get cursed with such a dumpy sister?” Lizzie ignores all of them.
On Monday night, Lizzie finally calls her little sister because Jane is still at work and if she gets another text with the word “YOLO” in it, she’ll roll her eyes right out of her head.
“Lizzie!” Lydia answers. “Have you decided to stop being the lamest and actually record something interesting?”
Lizzie rolls her eyes, not quite out of her head. “Thanks, Lydia, love you too.”
Lydia puffs out a breath. “How’s the Darce-hole? Your fans want to know.”
Darce-hole. Jesus. “Please don’t call them that. They’re not fans, they’re just … an audience.” The word “fans” makes Lizzie really uncomfortable.
“Are you kidding? You have fans, Lizzie. You have merchandise.”
“Merchandise?” On the other side of the line, it sounds like Lydia’s destroying a small town, or at the very least her closet.
Her voice is muffled when she speaks, like she’s pulling a shirt over her head. “Okay, it was just some randos in a tshirt I think they made themselves, but still. You have an obligation to them!”
Lizzie makes a sound slightly more lady-like than a grunt but doesn’t answer. Lydia still sounds like she’s caught in a flurry of cosmetics and costume jewelry. “Are you getting ready to go out right now? It’s a Monday.”
“Ugh, whatever,” Lydia says, “this is why you’re still single.” She doesn’t even say goodbye before she hangs up. Sisters.
Lizzie spends the next day thinking about her videos, and the audience-slash-fans who want to know everything. It’s hard to begrudge them their interest when it’s exactly the thing she was aiming for in the first place. She never thought to hold anything back before, that her life was her life and it was her business to share as much of it as she wanted, but now every time she sits down in front of the camera, it’s different. And it’s not just being at Pemberley and it’s not just the fear of who might see it, though neither of those things are the least bit helpful. Talking about Darcy means acknowledging what happened between them, which is something Lizzie’s been actively trying to avoid.
She sets up the camera during her lunch break the next day and when she presses record and sits down, her stomach’s tight and her neck’s super tense. Fine. She’ll talk about Darcy.
“Hi guys,” she says. The red light is mocking her. “So, I know that I haven’t talked much about this since I’ve gotten to Pemberley Industries, but since all of you have been wondering: yes, I have seen Darcy.” She chews her lip, and runs her hands through her hair. “He’s been observing a project I’ve been working on for the past week and it’s been—” Lizzie spends the next ten to a hundred seconds trying to find the right word. God, what does this look like on camera? Uncertainty? Fear? Editing this thing to make her look like she’s not a total mess is going to be a nightmare.
For fuck’s sake, Lizzie thinks. Full disclosure, right? She takes a deep breath and squares her shoulders. “My name is Lizzie Bennet and I have no idea what to think. I mean—”
She’s interrupted by a knock on her office door. Not for the first time, she thinks maybe she should be recording these at Jane’s instead of an actual workplace, because this isn’t the first time this has happened. Chris had come in the week before and they’d ended up talking about camera settings and sound quality for half an hour. Lizzie sighs. “Come in.”
Because the universe is unfair and still paying her back for any number of sins, her office door opens and Darcy peeks his head in. He looks from her to the camera and back again and she sees him suck in a quick breath. Shit. She spares a wish for the floor to open up and swallow her whole, but there’s no time for wishing when Darcy’s in her office. With his face. And his person. And his face.
“Darcy,” she says. Her spine is immediately ramrod straight. Darcy steps into her office and closes the door behind him and god, the last time this happened it went really badly. Lizzie glances around the room. Does she stay sitting? Stand? Turn off the camera? Crawl under her desk? She’s not emotionally or physically prepared for this.
Darcy takes a step toward her and shoves his hands in his pockets. “If I’d have known you were filming, I’d have worn my hat,” he says. Lizzie immediately does that thing she’s done since she was small, that “hiding her face in mortification” thing that usually comes out around Lydia, but when she looks up at Darcy, he’s—he’s smiling. Just one corner of his mouth, but it doesn’t even look like he’s trying.
Lizzie’s breath escapes in a huff. “You crack jokes?” she says.
His smile spreads all the way across his face. One dimple on his right cheek. Just like Gigi. “It has been known to happen.” He rocks back on his heels and shoves his hands deeper into his pockets. Lizzie runs her hands over her knees. (God, are her palms sweating? Her palms are sweating. Jesus.) “I can come back,” he says, “if now’s not a good time.”
“No,” Lizzie’s mouth says, completely independent of her brain. Because the world is spinning backwards on its axis and she doesn’t want to get rid of him as quickly as possible? She clears her throat and gestures toward the camera. “I was just filming a video but if you need something, I can—”
“No, I was just.” He takes another step toward her, almost right to the bench where she’s sitting. He’s probably partly in frame. She wonders if he knows that. She wonders if he cares. “I thought I’d come by and tell you that everyone’s had great things to say about your help with the Rowley campaign. I’ve heard nothing but good things.”
“Oh.” Lizzie’s heart picks up speed in her chest. “Thank you.” She’d been contributing and everything seemed like it was going well, but to hear it out loud is something else. She bites back a smile and tucks her hair behind her ear. When she looks back, Darcy’s grin is smaller but—deeper, maybe? More genuine? Lizzie chews on her lip a second, deciding, and then scoots over a little on the bench. “I was just going to give an update on the company and the project and how thing are going.” Her voice sounds weird but she pushes past it. “You want to sit in?”
Darcy’s eyes widen and Lizzie wants to reach up and grab the words she can almost see still hanging in the air. You want to sit in? Like the last time he did this went so well, like it didn’t end up with him embarrassing himself, her embarrassing him, all over Youtube. (In the back of her head, she hears Lydia oh-so-helpfully reminding her: “Over 300,000 views on this video, Lizzie, see what you get when something interesting actually happens to you?”) Of course he doesn’t want to sit down, what a horrible idea.
But just as she’s opening her mouth to take it back, just as she nearly stands to turn the camera off, she sees him suck in a breath and smile against the flinch in his eyes and take a step forward and sit down. Right beside her. Inches away from where she’s gaping at him open-mouthed.
Lizzie closes her mouth and sits back. (There’s an entirely empty space where her heart used to be.)
Darcy looks back at her, his expression still a little bit pained, a little bit hesitant. He smooths down his tie (yellow with a grey plaid pattern running through) and says, “So where were you? Your name is Lizzie Bennet and?”
There’s something easy about him when he says it, something less pained and more—not hopeful, not light, not exactly. But the lines at his eyes crinkle into something that could reasonably be called a smile, and Lizzie shakes her head because this is actually her life.
She takes a deep breath and looks into the camera. “My name is Lizzie Bennet and—say hello to Darcy.”
++
It takes her longer than usual to edit her video. She was never the best at it in the first place—Charlotte set a pretty steep curve—but she knows it’s not her software that slows her down.
She does look uncertain. She does look afraid. And the moment she locks eyes on Darcy, all the color sort of drains from her face. (Which is saying something. For a Californian, she’s always maintained an aggressive sunblock regimen.)
But it’s the last bit of video that makes her hands still on her keyboard and her fingers pause over her mouse. Lizzie’s half out of frame, reaching up to turn off the camera, and Darcy’s just visible behind her. It had gone alright, actually. He’d talked about app technology and told a story about the time one of the new security guards wouldn’t let him in because he forgot his badge. Editing those parts had been weird enough—she’d laughed during filming, actually honest-to-god laughed at a story Darcy told—but it’s the last five seconds of footage that stop her short. She’s got one hand reaching out for the camera and he’s got both eyes on her and the look on his face is—
Well, it’s certainly not a face a robot could make.
++++