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"I'm not sure how I feel about this, Lydia," said William, looking at the array of props Lizzie's younger sister had set out for the day.
"You said you wanted to do something special for her birthday, right?" Lydia was not paying him much attention, too busy fussing with the camera. Bennet sisters and their cameras would surely be the death of him.
"Yes, I did say that, but this wasn't--"
"What you had in mind?" she finished.
"Well, no." Lydia had approached him earlier in the week, with a glint in her eye, asking if he'd come up with an 'adequate' plan for a birthday present, and William's intended evening of a quiet, romantic dinner was apparently not up to snuff. Lydia had told him she had an idea in the works - "Something unique, something she'll really like and remember forever" - and William had, perhaps foolishly, agreed. 'A photo shoot,' to him, sounded like a nice, polite portrait like the one he'd had done when he'd first moved to head Pemberley. But now there was a toy gun and a potentially real flail on the table.
Lydia huffed strawberry bangs out of her face and turned to him with a glare that suggested he was the one being somehow unreasonable. "Darce, this is her thirtieth. It's a big one. It's the day society declares her old. She's going to be tragically depressed, and as her boyfriend, it is your job to take her mind off how decrepit she is."
Several parts of her speech seemed grossly incorrect, but the gist of it was true enough, he supposed. He did suspect that Lizzie would find the sort of things Lydia had in mind to be quite amusing. "And I have your assurance that these will never be seen by anyone other than Lizzie?"
"Well, and me, of course. And the hot guy that works in the dark room at school."
"Lydia!"
Lydia held up her hand in a Boy Scout salute, adopting a serious face. "Darcy. You know I don't know how to develop film. I'll get his silence, don't worry, and it's not like you're the one he wants to see pictures of, if you know what I mean. Besides, I have my reasons for going classic on this. I think you and I both know that going fully digital has a tendency to have disastrous consequences."
William certainly couldn't argue with that point; on the other hand, Lydia Bennet did not have the sort of funds William did for covering the sort of missteps that arose from such situations.
Finally he sighed, and in doing so, conceded defeat. "I put my faith in you, and my fate in your hands, Lydia Bennet."
Lydia clapped him on the shoulder in a friendly gesture. "I knew you would. You know why?"
"I do not."
She regarded him with a smile. "Because you and I would both do anything for Lizzie."
Once upon a time, he would not have believed that of the youngest Bennet, but now he considered it an undeniable fact. It was, truthfully, the main reason he'd agreed to Lydia's plot and had come to this borrowed studio. But still, even with his faith in Lydia and his love for Lizzie firmly established, he could not help but wonder:
"But why is there a fish?"