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“…but, well, regardless of the past, they’re obviously really happy together.” She smiles at the camera. Jane and Bing. Maybe some things do work out in the end.
For some people.
She tries not to let the flicker of regret show on camera, but she’s pretty sure it’s there. She’ll make a note to Charlotte to do a cut of the pause between now and what she says next.
“Honestly, I don’t know what to tell you guys. I already covered the whole Jane and Bing thing, really. And anything more… well, perhaps I’ve been over sharing the details of my life. Well, not just mine. My sister’s lives, too.” She took a deep breath. “So this is gonna be a pretty short video, huh? Maybe I should’ve come bearing pictures of puppies in flower-beds or… something.” She smiles half-heartedly. Why is it that she completely loses all edge in her videos when her life isn’t all over the place?
You’re a natural storyteller.
Definitely time to turn off the camera now. Before she does something stupid, like cry. She leans forward.
And hears footsteps.
Her heart thuds.
“Lizzie.”
When she’d seen him with Bing a few days ago, he’d been so… stiff. And formal. Like nothing… like Pemberley never happened. Like they were never… Like they were never friends. Or whatever they were.
“Darcy.”
“May I come in?”
May I sit down?
Sure.
“Sure,” she says, then hates herself for it. “I mean… yeah.” Apparently she can’t come up with something between ‘barely concealed hatred’ and ‘teenage drug addict’, because both versions sound forced and stupid.
He sits down next to her, and the easy informality, the rapport, the smiles – they’re all gone, and Lizzie can’t bear it, and she can’t read the expression on his face. It’s like they’re not the same person – the Darcy she knows here, and the Darcy she knew at Pemberley. But she knows what he did now. For Lydia.
Darcy glances at the camera with no reaction that Lizzie can discern, and Lizzie half considers shutting it off. But for some reason she doesn’t – she just keeps her eyes on him, trying to understand.
“Lizzie-”
“Darcy-”
They speak together, and then falter, each too polite to cut across. Lizzie takes the reigns of silence and turns them in her favour. “I… I know I wasn’t supposed to know, but… I want to thank you. For what you did for Lydia. You didn’t have to do that, and it means the world to me. To both of us. To our entire family.”
He’s looking away, embarassed now, and Lizzie muses that it’s a cute look for him. “How did you know?” he asks.
“Lydia told me. She wasn’t going to, but it sort of slipped out. But I probably would have found out anyway. I mean, Gigi kind of put the whole thing on the internet…”
Darcy nods, and it’s a little less stiff: the surface has been scratched, and the man she knew at Pemberley is starting to come back again. Lizzie smiles to herself at the tiny change in mannerisms that marks something so important. “Yes. I’m sorry about that. Turns out that it has had some… interesting repercussions.”
His aunt’s visit. Now that had been interesting.
“Don’t worry about it.”
They stare at each other, unlocking the past, for a few quiet moments – before Darcy speaks.
“Lizzie,” he says, unwilling to break the perfect silence, but fearing that if he basks in it too long it will be ripped from him- “I… If you still feel the way you did at Halloween, then I won’t ever mention it again. But I just have to ask. I still… Do you… feel differently than – I mean, have your feelings changed?” He had a whole speech planned out. He was going to be smooth, and suave, but it just came out awkward, and fumbling, and he hates himself for it.
…the last man on earth I could ever fall in love with…
There’s silence, and it’s not the same silence full of promise there was before. The expression in Lizzie’s eyes is unreadable, and Darcy fears that he is staring too fiercely, too aggressively – like in the video he watched a hundred times to understand where he went wrong, how he was so repulsive to her – and he breaks away, and there’s silence still, and it suffocates him.
“I understand,” he says. “I… thank you.” Thank you? He curses himself. Why did you say thank you? At least it somewhat communicated that there were no harsh feelings on his side.
At least, that was what he hoped it communicated. He gets up, glancing one last time at the camera. Would Lizzie upload this? Would this be a crushing rejection deemed worthy of her video blog? A bumbling fool making one last pass at a girl who had shown no interest in him, whose affections he had fabricated entirely –
“Darcy.”
- and deluded himself into thinking that she might feel a fraction of what he felt? He could just about handle it the first time. He wasn’t sure if he could anymore. The first time, he was an event. And then, he thought, after that, a friend. Now what would he be? A punchline?
“Darcy.”
He could handle that from the internet, but not from Lizzie Bennet.
“Darcy, wait.”
He pauses at the edge of the frame. “It’s alright, Lizzie. You don’t have to explain. I… I hope we can forge a friendship out of this. You’re…” He cuts himself off. You are something quite unlike anything else. Not now. Now is not the time to highlight how completely hopelessly in love with her he was. Even now. He’d have to get over it on his own time. Somehow, though it seemed an impossible task.
“Will!”
That’s almost enough to stop him – that unexpected mention of his name. She’s never called him that before. But he smiles sadly at her, and then turns to go.
Then he feels a hand on his and freezes, for half a second, before he tries to gently slip it away, because it hurts a little too much, and is a little too raw. In time he will cope with it, call himself lucky to be friends, but right now space is necessary.
But she’s practically grabbing him by the shoulder and pulling him down to sit by her, and because it’s Lizzie he’s putty in her hands, and then her lips are on his and her arms around his neck before he can even comprehend what’s happening.
Somehow, he was entirely unprepared for this. Unprepared for the kiss, soft and unsure, and the arms around his neck, and the smell of citrus wrapped to him.
A voice in his head appears, and it sounds remarkably like his sister.
You should probably kiss her back now, idiot.
So he does, and they’re wrapped together for a long, long time before they break apart, neither of them wanting to. But when they do, she says, to the small space between them:
“That clear enough for you?”
He nods, still a little stunned, but letting a rare smile creep up on his lips. It’s not all clear. But it’s getting there. And the euphoria sneaks in, slow and sure, and he's actually trying to stop himself grinning like an idiot. There’s a brief silence, before he says, gesturing to the camera:
“Lizzie… who is, uh, editing these vlogs at the moment?”
He can hear Gigi again: Mood-killer!
Lizzie laughs. “Charlotte. Uh, yeah, Charlotte, edit that out. Cut from before Darcy comes in, or… something. I don’t know.”
A brief pause.
“What do you estimate are the chances that she will, in fact edit this out?”
Lizzie laughs again, and it’s beautiful, musical: “Absolutely none.”
And one hand turns off the camera while she leans across to kiss him again.