Fic: Meetings
Title: Meetings
Author: saucydiva
Word count: 2K
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Clearly I don’t own it or I would get some amazing topiary going on the roof.
Timeline: Pemberley arc (written after episode 77)
Summary: “Darcy, I just realized something,” she announced, right as her brain caught up with her feet and warned her to stop.
“Lizzie,” he said, blinking at her like he’d dreamed her up. “I have a meeting."
Author’s Note: Thanks to throwingpens for the beta; I had to get this out before I got canon-balled!
(cross-posted at Ao3)
It nagged at her conscience, that first month she was at Pemberley. She’d had four blissful days avoiding only his sister when she spotted him in the halls, looking more relaxed than he’d ever had, talking to Sheila from Accounting. Lizzie was surprised to see him; twitter lied. She’d lingered a bit too long, taking in Darcy in his element, and he’d seen her. He looked spooked, and walked away from his accountant mid-sentence.
A few hours later, she’d received a knock on her door, and somehow she was only surprised he hadn’t stopped by sooner. He greeted her stiffly, but checked in with her as she imagined he did with all his new employees, asking if she’d received her parking pass and her gym locker and her cup of Pemberley koolaid (one of those might be an exaggeration). She smiled in turn, but didn’t meet his eyes as she heaped praise on the atrium and the laundry services.
“Wonderful,” he’d said. “And Lizzie?”
She met his eyes then, and was relieved to see his walls were up.
“Welcome to Pemberley. I hope you enjoy it here.”
After that, she dodged him whenever they weren’t in meetings together, which was always; his company philosophy involved lots of meetings. She sat in on most of them, when she wasn’t working on projects for the Digital Video team. They were never alone, and when there were other people in the room, they could interact almost normally, as though she hadn’t slammed him on the internet, and he hadn’t confessed his crush on her also on the internet.
But it bothered her, to see him every day, and she couldn’t put her finger on why until one day, she was sitting in front of her video camera, debating doing a little costume theater. She sat in her seat, twisting the red bow tie, thinking of the twenty-six work days she’d been shadowing, and the twenty-two of those that involved actually seeing Darcy, when it hit her.
She darted down the hall and threw open his office door.
“Darcy, I just realized something,” she announced, right as her brain caught up with her feet and warned her to stop.
“Lizzie,” he said, blinking at her like he’d dreamed her up. “I have a meeting.”
“Why don’t you ever wear your bowties anymore?”
He held up one finger. “I could cancel my meeting.” He turned back to his computer, typed something while Lizzie stood glued to his doorway, worried someone would come down the hallway and wonder why she was hanging around there, worried his sister would come by and ask her to play tennis again, worried the internet would somehow find out.
She saw a flash of skirt, and she jumped in, slamming the door behind her.
Darcy grimaced, then stood up, like he took lessons on manners from the Queen Mother. She resisted the urge to curtsy as she took a chair opposite his desk. Then, to her horror, he walked around his desk and took the other chair, repositioning it so they were face-to-face.
She waited.
He waited.
“I just miss the stupid things-” she said, at the same time he blurted out “I don’t like feeling foolish.”
“You miss them?” he asked, and she started just a beat later with, “You feel?”
He winced at her question, and Lizzie shook her head. “That’s not fair. I mean. Of course you feel.”
“Darcy-bot can’t wipe the memory from his solid state drive,” Darcy practically snapped at her. “This is outside the realm of my experience. I’m trying, Lizzie.”
“I don’t want to make work awkward for you,” she said, her hands in her lap.
“You aren’t,” he said.
“Really?” she asked. “Because it’s awkward for me.”
He pressed his hands together and touched them to his forehead. “Look. Yes. It’s awkward. I’m trying to take the high-road, but you’re here and I want you to succeed but I also wish you were somewhere else, anywhere else. Is that fair?”
She admitted to herself that hearing that stung. But maybe it was good to hear too, because somehow, thinking he just got over it would’ve stung too, maybe more.
She shrugged.
“I have my college roommate sending me fan fic, Lizzie. People write stories about- the two of us, and he sends them to me, with notes. He leaves comments on them about things like how the author is mistaken about where my mole actually is.”
“Wait, wasn’t Fitz your college roommate?”
“I get these tweets...” His jaw twitched, and she wondered if he was mad. “There’s a gif going around lately of me in your video with the words oh shit in glitter underneath. I saw it in a forum for rowing. I’m just someone’s exclamation point.”
He sighed. “And if it were solely the province of the internet, that would be manageable. But recently I was out and I met a woman who recognized me from your videos.”
In spite of herself, Lizzie was pleased to hear that. She’d yet to meet a fan in the wild, outside of VidCon. “Oh?”
“She offered to, and this is a direct quote, ’help me forget’ you,” he said, the words surprisingly casual on his tongue.
She snapped her head up at that, but even as she searched his face, she realized she had no right to know what happened there.
Which didn’t mean her gut didn’t curl with curiosity.
“I’m sure you’ve never been rejected romantically-” he said, and she laughed. She couldn’t help it; he looked so serious, as though he genuinely thought she’d been some heartbreaker in her life.
“I once asked Tommy Sheilding to Turnabout,” she said. “And he told me- and yes, this is a direct quote, he ‘had to go to the dentist,’ that night. I once got stood up when I tried internet dating. Oh! And I had a crush on Pete Hunter, and he smashed a cupcake in my hair.”
“I trust this was before puberty,” he said.
“This was 2010,” she said, grinning for the first time since she saw Darcy in the damn hallway weeks ago, wearing a green skinny tie that was all wrong for him.
His face remained twisted into a frown. “Think of bowties as the cupcake in my hair.”
It was painful to contemplate, so instead she thought of him as an eight year old, in her class. She shrunk him down in her mind, but his face was twenty years older than it should be. She was age-appropriate, though, and she skipped over to him in shiny red Mary Janes. He smiled, teeth missing. Darcy offered her a cupcake, the way she had to Pete (since, as her mother taught her young, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, dear). She took it, watched his face light up, and then she smirked and smashed the thing in his hair, once, then again, while a classroom of eight year olds tittered. She could feel the moist Hostess goodness on her fingers, under her nails, and for a moment she panicked and wiped her hands on her thighs.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Not because- but I should’ve. Handled it differently.”
“It’s fine,” he said automatically, eyes not meeting hers.
“Are we okay?” she asked.
“I’m okay,” he said, drawing that word out to two definite syllables. “And I presume you know better than I your own emotional state.”
She stood up, stuck out her hand. “Friends?”
He stood too, and seemed to tower over her, even in her heels. “Lizzie Bennet.” He stuck out his hand, and as they shook, he cupped his left hand around the back of hers. Her neck felt warm all of the sudden, and she touched her cheek with her spare hand, trying to cool down. “I am glad to be your colleague and I hope Pemberley is the first step to a lifetime of success. But you and I were never friends, and how can we be now?” He dropped her hand, and placed a hand lightly behind her back, propelling her towards the door. She could feel the heat still, keeping her flushed even now.
“I said I was sorry,” she said, clutching the doorway again.
He leaned over her, and whispered, the air tickling the shell of her ear. “We can’t be friends because despite it all, I’m still in love with you.”
What else was there to do? She retired the bowtie, and stuck to safer topics on her diaries. Charlotte. Her ongoing fight with Lydia. The phone calls she got from her mother. Her viewership numbers dipped, but she couldn’t talk about Darcy again, not when it had cost her so much the first time.
She made friends with Gigi. That was difficult, opening up to her, because she looked so much like her brother that from some angles, it was hard to concentrate around her. Gigi reminded her in some ways of Jane; soft, kind, and all heart, but she had some Lydia in there too. While she might not be as outgoing as Lizzie’s youngest sister, Gigi was fun, ready to drop everything if someone invited her out. They started going out regularly after work, shopping and getting drinks and playing tennis. Darcy came up in conversation, but it was always Darcy from before Lizzie knew him, rowing in high school or playing the trumpet in junior high or finger painting as kids.
They went out sometimes with Fitz, especially when someone found a new restaurant. Fitz fancied himself a foodie, though whenever Gigi found the new food culture just discovered by the hipsters, he’d usually order the blandest thing on the menu. It was fascinating to watch how he’d turn down an entire menu of exciting options and get pasta.
Sometimes, Fitz would bring his boyfriend and Gigi would bring her girlfriend and her brother, too, and while he’d keep his eyes anywhere but by her, it was comfortable, to see him up close, as unguarded as one can be around friends and family and whatever the hell Lizzie represented to him. At work, they kept everything strictly professional, and he was noticeably stiffer around her than everyone else.
At dinner, though, he’d bloom, and he’d tell the occasional story about shenanigans with Fitz or family adventures with Gigi, and sometimes he’d even do an impression of someone. He was terrible at it; his Fitz and his Gigi sounded exactly like everyone else he’d ever try to impersonate, but Lizzie would laugh, and he would too, and for a moment, she’d think maybe the two of them could be friends one day.
When Lizzie found out about Lydia’s troubles, she wept into a pillow. How had Lydia- unfortunately, Lizzie was trapped in San Francisco without a way home till morning at the earliest.
She called Darcy without even thinking it through, and he answered his cell phone despite the late hour. His voice was heavy with sleep, but when he recognized her voice he woke up. Twenty minutes later, he was at her place, ready to take her home to help her sister.
He was still wearing his sweatpants.
Lizzie wasn’t even aware he knew what sweatpants were, but she was touched, on some level, to see he left his house without even changing into adult pants.
He let Lizzie drive his car-his obscenely expensive car- while he was on the phone with his lawyer, talking about anonymity and statutes would Mr. and Mrs. Bennet find out? which had, of course, been Lydia’s chief worry.
He took her to Netherfield, which was chilly since its owners hadn’t been by in months. There, they skyped the lawyer and drank hot chocolate and called Gigi, who heard what happened to Lydia and cried because she felt a sense of responsibility.
It was an emotional night, made worse by the fact she wasn’t allowed to alert her parents that she was in town. She was tired and stiff from the drive, and even though there was still so much to sort out before she could sleep, she could feel herself start to drift off.
When she woke up, she was tucked under a blanket, and there was Darcy, still on the laptop, still talking to his lawyer.
It ended up being three days before she made it back to San Francisco, and almost all of that time was spent in the company of Darcy. So much so that when he dropped her off, and walked her to her door because of course he was that guy, she had the strangest urge to pull him through her door and keep him with her.
That night, she made a video. She didn’t use the jingle, or fancy editing. It was just her and the camera, and the bowtie, which she clutched tightly as she explained she’d been wrong, wrong, wrong about William Darcy.
The next day, she snuck into his office while he was in a meeting.
She left him a cupcake.
Author: saucydiva
Word count: 2K
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Clearly I don’t own it or I would get some amazing topiary going on the roof.
Timeline: Pemberley arc (written after episode 77)
Summary: “Darcy, I just realized something,” she announced, right as her brain caught up with her feet and warned her to stop.
“Lizzie,” he said, blinking at her like he’d dreamed her up. “I have a meeting."
Author’s Note: Thanks to throwingpens for the beta; I had to get this out before I got canon-balled!
(cross-posted at Ao3)
It nagged at her conscience, that first month she was at Pemberley. She’d had four blissful days avoiding only his sister when she spotted him in the halls, looking more relaxed than he’d ever had, talking to Sheila from Accounting. Lizzie was surprised to see him; twitter lied. She’d lingered a bit too long, taking in Darcy in his element, and he’d seen her. He looked spooked, and walked away from his accountant mid-sentence.
A few hours later, she’d received a knock on her door, and somehow she was only surprised he hadn’t stopped by sooner. He greeted her stiffly, but checked in with her as she imagined he did with all his new employees, asking if she’d received her parking pass and her gym locker and her cup of Pemberley koolaid (one of those might be an exaggeration). She smiled in turn, but didn’t meet his eyes as she heaped praise on the atrium and the laundry services.
“Wonderful,” he’d said. “And Lizzie?”
She met his eyes then, and was relieved to see his walls were up.
“Welcome to Pemberley. I hope you enjoy it here.”
After that, she dodged him whenever they weren’t in meetings together, which was always; his company philosophy involved lots of meetings. She sat in on most of them, when she wasn’t working on projects for the Digital Video team. They were never alone, and when there were other people in the room, they could interact almost normally, as though she hadn’t slammed him on the internet, and he hadn’t confessed his crush on her also on the internet.
But it bothered her, to see him every day, and she couldn’t put her finger on why until one day, she was sitting in front of her video camera, debating doing a little costume theater. She sat in her seat, twisting the red bow tie, thinking of the twenty-six work days she’d been shadowing, and the twenty-two of those that involved actually seeing Darcy, when it hit her.
She darted down the hall and threw open his office door.
“Darcy, I just realized something,” she announced, right as her brain caught up with her feet and warned her to stop.
“Lizzie,” he said, blinking at her like he’d dreamed her up. “I have a meeting.”
“Why don’t you ever wear your bowties anymore?”
He held up one finger. “I could cancel my meeting.” He turned back to his computer, typed something while Lizzie stood glued to his doorway, worried someone would come down the hallway and wonder why she was hanging around there, worried his sister would come by and ask her to play tennis again, worried the internet would somehow find out.
She saw a flash of skirt, and she jumped in, slamming the door behind her.
Darcy grimaced, then stood up, like he took lessons on manners from the Queen Mother. She resisted the urge to curtsy as she took a chair opposite his desk. Then, to her horror, he walked around his desk and took the other chair, repositioning it so they were face-to-face.
She waited.
He waited.
“I just miss the stupid things-” she said, at the same time he blurted out “I don’t like feeling foolish.”
“You miss them?” he asked, and she started just a beat later with, “You feel?”
He winced at her question, and Lizzie shook her head. “That’s not fair. I mean. Of course you feel.”
“Darcy-bot can’t wipe the memory from his solid state drive,” Darcy practically snapped at her. “This is outside the realm of my experience. I’m trying, Lizzie.”
“I don’t want to make work awkward for you,” she said, her hands in her lap.
“You aren’t,” he said.
“Really?” she asked. “Because it’s awkward for me.”
He pressed his hands together and touched them to his forehead. “Look. Yes. It’s awkward. I’m trying to take the high-road, but you’re here and I want you to succeed but I also wish you were somewhere else, anywhere else. Is that fair?”
She admitted to herself that hearing that stung. But maybe it was good to hear too, because somehow, thinking he just got over it would’ve stung too, maybe more.
She shrugged.
“I have my college roommate sending me fan fic, Lizzie. People write stories about- the two of us, and he sends them to me, with notes. He leaves comments on them about things like how the author is mistaken about where my mole actually is.”
“Wait, wasn’t Fitz your college roommate?”
“I get these tweets...” His jaw twitched, and she wondered if he was mad. “There’s a gif going around lately of me in your video with the words oh shit in glitter underneath. I saw it in a forum for rowing. I’m just someone’s exclamation point.”
He sighed. “And if it were solely the province of the internet, that would be manageable. But recently I was out and I met a woman who recognized me from your videos.”
In spite of herself, Lizzie was pleased to hear that. She’d yet to meet a fan in the wild, outside of VidCon. “Oh?”
“She offered to, and this is a direct quote, ’help me forget’ you,” he said, the words surprisingly casual on his tongue.
She snapped her head up at that, but even as she searched his face, she realized she had no right to know what happened there.
Which didn’t mean her gut didn’t curl with curiosity.
“I’m sure you’ve never been rejected romantically-” he said, and she laughed. She couldn’t help it; he looked so serious, as though he genuinely thought she’d been some heartbreaker in her life.
“I once asked Tommy Sheilding to Turnabout,” she said. “And he told me- and yes, this is a direct quote, he ‘had to go to the dentist,’ that night. I once got stood up when I tried internet dating. Oh! And I had a crush on Pete Hunter, and he smashed a cupcake in my hair.”
“I trust this was before puberty,” he said.
“This was 2010,” she said, grinning for the first time since she saw Darcy in the damn hallway weeks ago, wearing a green skinny tie that was all wrong for him.
His face remained twisted into a frown. “Think of bowties as the cupcake in my hair.”
It was painful to contemplate, so instead she thought of him as an eight year old, in her class. She shrunk him down in her mind, but his face was twenty years older than it should be. She was age-appropriate, though, and she skipped over to him in shiny red Mary Janes. He smiled, teeth missing. Darcy offered her a cupcake, the way she had to Pete (since, as her mother taught her young, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, dear). She took it, watched his face light up, and then she smirked and smashed the thing in his hair, once, then again, while a classroom of eight year olds tittered. She could feel the moist Hostess goodness on her fingers, under her nails, and for a moment she panicked and wiped her hands on her thighs.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Not because- but I should’ve. Handled it differently.”
“It’s fine,” he said automatically, eyes not meeting hers.
“Are we okay?” she asked.
“I’m okay,” he said, drawing that word out to two definite syllables. “And I presume you know better than I your own emotional state.”
She stood up, stuck out her hand. “Friends?”
He stood too, and seemed to tower over her, even in her heels. “Lizzie Bennet.” He stuck out his hand, and as they shook, he cupped his left hand around the back of hers. Her neck felt warm all of the sudden, and she touched her cheek with her spare hand, trying to cool down. “I am glad to be your colleague and I hope Pemberley is the first step to a lifetime of success. But you and I were never friends, and how can we be now?” He dropped her hand, and placed a hand lightly behind her back, propelling her towards the door. She could feel the heat still, keeping her flushed even now.
“I said I was sorry,” she said, clutching the doorway again.
He leaned over her, and whispered, the air tickling the shell of her ear. “We can’t be friends because despite it all, I’m still in love with you.”
What else was there to do? She retired the bowtie, and stuck to safer topics on her diaries. Charlotte. Her ongoing fight with Lydia. The phone calls she got from her mother. Her viewership numbers dipped, but she couldn’t talk about Darcy again, not when it had cost her so much the first time.
She made friends with Gigi. That was difficult, opening up to her, because she looked so much like her brother that from some angles, it was hard to concentrate around her. Gigi reminded her in some ways of Jane; soft, kind, and all heart, but she had some Lydia in there too. While she might not be as outgoing as Lizzie’s youngest sister, Gigi was fun, ready to drop everything if someone invited her out. They started going out regularly after work, shopping and getting drinks and playing tennis. Darcy came up in conversation, but it was always Darcy from before Lizzie knew him, rowing in high school or playing the trumpet in junior high or finger painting as kids.
They went out sometimes with Fitz, especially when someone found a new restaurant. Fitz fancied himself a foodie, though whenever Gigi found the new food culture just discovered by the hipsters, he’d usually order the blandest thing on the menu. It was fascinating to watch how he’d turn down an entire menu of exciting options and get pasta.
Sometimes, Fitz would bring his boyfriend and Gigi would bring her girlfriend and her brother, too, and while he’d keep his eyes anywhere but by her, it was comfortable, to see him up close, as unguarded as one can be around friends and family and whatever the hell Lizzie represented to him. At work, they kept everything strictly professional, and he was noticeably stiffer around her than everyone else.
At dinner, though, he’d bloom, and he’d tell the occasional story about shenanigans with Fitz or family adventures with Gigi, and sometimes he’d even do an impression of someone. He was terrible at it; his Fitz and his Gigi sounded exactly like everyone else he’d ever try to impersonate, but Lizzie would laugh, and he would too, and for a moment, she’d think maybe the two of them could be friends one day.
When Lizzie found out about Lydia’s troubles, she wept into a pillow. How had Lydia- unfortunately, Lizzie was trapped in San Francisco without a way home till morning at the earliest.
She called Darcy without even thinking it through, and he answered his cell phone despite the late hour. His voice was heavy with sleep, but when he recognized her voice he woke up. Twenty minutes later, he was at her place, ready to take her home to help her sister.
He was still wearing his sweatpants.
Lizzie wasn’t even aware he knew what sweatpants were, but she was touched, on some level, to see he left his house without even changing into adult pants.
He let Lizzie drive his car-his obscenely expensive car- while he was on the phone with his lawyer, talking about anonymity and statutes would Mr. and Mrs. Bennet find out? which had, of course, been Lydia’s chief worry.
He took her to Netherfield, which was chilly since its owners hadn’t been by in months. There, they skyped the lawyer and drank hot chocolate and called Gigi, who heard what happened to Lydia and cried because she felt a sense of responsibility.
It was an emotional night, made worse by the fact she wasn’t allowed to alert her parents that she was in town. She was tired and stiff from the drive, and even though there was still so much to sort out before she could sleep, she could feel herself start to drift off.
When she woke up, she was tucked under a blanket, and there was Darcy, still on the laptop, still talking to his lawyer.
It ended up being three days before she made it back to San Francisco, and almost all of that time was spent in the company of Darcy. So much so that when he dropped her off, and walked her to her door because of course he was that guy, she had the strangest urge to pull him through her door and keep him with her.
That night, she made a video. She didn’t use the jingle, or fancy editing. It was just her and the camera, and the bowtie, which she clutched tightly as she explained she’d been wrong, wrong, wrong about William Darcy.
The next day, she snuck into his office while he was in a meeting.
She left him a cupcake.