Chapter Text
Chapter I: This Might As Well Happen
If one had to pick just one thing that was the same about Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy — well… For starters, it would be very difficult. Between the rather contradictory tendencies to say exactly what they thought and to beat around the bush, the fascination with birds, the willingness to do just about anything in pursuit of a sister's wellbeing, the preference for no sugar in their tea (and no sugar coating, on their medicine), the idolization of fathers who did not quite deserve it, the quiet yet vehement distaste for cold hardboiled eggs, the rather unfortunate habit of assuming they knew best about their friends' love lives, and any number of other details big and small, there was quite a spread to choose from.
Secondly, it would be the way they responded to having nothing to do.
That is, poorly.
When there were actions to be taken, or choices to be made, the native quickness of their minds served them quite well. They could think of problems and solutions and the problems with the solutions with a breathtaking speed that almost let them get things done in decent time, and their ideas were brilliant at around the same rate as they were utterly foolish.
When the actions had been taken, and did not particularly prompt new ones, the same style of thought could become troublesome. They thought of problems still easily enough, but solutions became desperate, or implausible, or impossible.
So it was throughout much of the November of 1812. Nearly everything that needed doing had been done. The metaphorical ball was rolling down the archetypal hill. It is important to know that everything would have been quite happily (for anyone whose name was not Catherine de Bourgh or Caroline Bingley) resolved within the span of perhaps a week.
Neither of our relevant parties did.
Here is where the particulars of their thought processes diverge a little, because they were two seperate people, and at the minute they had rather different information. They wouldn't have for long — tomorrow, one would have had a rather revelatory conversation with his aunt, and been spurred on to a rather more revelatory conversation with the love of his life. But it would be quite a while before anyone would see tomorrow, and none of that would matter much by then.
As for right now… It is often said that the world is always darkest right before the dawn, but dawn was ongoing, circumstances were worlds better than they had been a month prior, and Fitzwilliam Darcy was desolate. Perhaps as much so as he ever had been.
There had been, of course, worse days. He had seen one parent die slowly and another with great and terrifying speed. Read letters where all the not-inconsiderable old hurts and insecurities two decades of close companionship could reveal were turned against him without a scruple. Had to tell his sister why a man of seven and twenty would want to marry a sixteen year old girl without telling her brother. Tried very hard to explain the same to Lydia Bennet, to give her any way out he possibly could, and been told no, that "Lizzy hates you. We all hate you.", and Miss Lydia would not trust him about the sum of two and two.
Even as he regarded that issue (and he did not think that Miss Elizabeth hated him, anymore. More like 'vaguely disliked'. Probably. Maybe. Please) there had been worse times. Watching her step into her carriage after the Netherfield Ball, intending never to see her again and still thinking, then, that she would be hurt by that. The look on her face, the restraint she put into not actively yelling at him, as she told him just how wrong he was. Watching her cry, and being wholly unable to offer comfort.
But always there had been something to do. Convincing Bingley of Miss Bennet's indifference — not that he was proudof that, now, but he'd done it. Besides which, they were engaged, so the harm to their love lives (if not to his own) had been temporary. A letter to write, reflections to begin. Rescuing young Mrs Wickham, however that had gone. He had had a task, or been able to find one, and if he had been miserable he had at least been miserable in motion.
Now, the things he had had the power to change were largely resolved. His mother's funeral had been planned and carried out eight years ago, his father's five. Every letter he had ever received from George Wickham had been torn up and burnt, many of their precise contents something near forgotten. Georgiana was alright, or as close to it as a year and the support he, Colonel Fitzwilliam, and Mrs Annesley could provide could make her. Bingley was back at Netherfield, and Darcy would soon return himself. It seemed absurdly arrogant to think he was done fixing himself — he was sure that he was not — but the main issues that Miss Elizabeth had raised, and that he had identified himself, had moved from initial analysis and decision making into long-term goals and habit-forming, which was not much of a way to occupy himself. Mrs Wickham was as safe and as happy as he had the power to make her, little as that may be.
He had, in short, nothing much to do with himself, beyond staring out the window, periodically attempting to reread a novel that had made him smile last year, and ruminating on such happy subjects as 'why he was unlovable' and 'how he had ruined all his own chances at happiness'.
Darcy was not typically quite this miserable, but one should never believe what they think of their lives at three in the morning.
Unfortunately, three in the morning is precisely when it is hardest to remember that.
As it was, he was naturally perfectly hopeless: nothing either of them could possibly do, no amount of time in her presence or outside it, would ever make him stop loving Elizabeth Bennet. If explaining himself and updating his manners could have made her love him, it would have been a fair way towards doing it by now. Therefore, he was to persist in a state of hopeless, unrequited love until he eventually died, alone and unmissed.
Again, it must be stated that he was very tired, and by staying up all night had refused his body leave to ignore its growing hunger. These kinds of thoughts were much easier to argue away, or to feel some kind of peace with, when he was rested, dressed, and fed.
For the umpteenth time he ran over every foolish word of his proposal, every confrontation he had treated as a game, every moment that had held no significance at the time and seemed like the ending of a world now. Bickering by the piano at Rosings, about what constituted accomplishment at Netherfield… Had he insulted her appearance at the Meryton Assembly? Good God, why?
He could suddenly very clearly remember meeting her eyes, when he had seen nothing of them but that they were brown, and a little bit close together. When she had rejected him, Elizabeth had said her opinion of him had been bad almost from the first moment of their acquaintance. She must have heard him — he had destroyed the best chance at joy he had ever had, and before he had even known what it was.
Let us not spend overlong thinking over the particulars of how what is to come came to be. Perhaps what is wished for so desperately by both interested parties must come true occasionally; perhaps one or both had to them some subtle magic; perhaps the stars were aligned and the barrier between the present and the past grew thin enough to fall through.
Perhaps it simply happened because someone two centuries, a hemisphere, and a plane of reality away thought it would be interesting if it did.
Regardless, Darcy wished, with all the desperation of one too tired to find his own behaviour silly, that the Meryton Assembly was yet to come. That he could start over from the very beginning, make a good first impression, get to see what she might think of him, if he hadn't bungled it all so badly.
He was — to put it mildly — rather confused to find the silver of dawn replaced by the bronze-gold of sunset, himself wearing pants, what was physical of his exhaustion and hunger swept away. Darcy was no longer in his rooms in London, this was Netherfield, had he finally fallen asleep?
By pure, rote, muscle memory he welcomed his valet in and allowed himself to be dressed. For a ball, apparently. Alright. This might as well happen.
His book was on the nightstand, the ribbon at a later page.
As for Elizabeth, her ruminations were simultaneously newer to her and, to an audience, more familiar. Offence at Lady Catherine calling purely to berate her over such ridiculous things; puzzling out where such a rumour had even begun; concern, and premature hurt, that Lady Catherine's absurd, elitist arguments would decide Mr Darcy's apparent uncertainty against her.
'If he were satisfied with only regretting her, when he might have obtained her affections and hand, then she would soon cease to regret him at all' and suchlike.
However, that kind of determination could only do so much. Especially when the object of such had, in fact, proposed to her, however poorly. If he was uncertain now, he had not been so then.
Memories are prone to changing with opinions, and however much you or I (or Darcy) might protest that she behaved perfectly justly with the information and feelings that she both had and lacked, Elizabeth could not be so easily resolved. She now knew he was a good man who had acted for actual reasons in the cases of both her sister and (a pause, to cringe and shudder) her brother-in-law.
She now loved him; wished to know him better; wished to know, whenever they parted, that they would meet again. That she had done neither then was remembered, of course, but seemed less consequential. Rather few people would choose to spare their past feelings over their present ones, and as Elizabeth knew that she could love him, and that an explanation existed and would presumably at some point have been given to her, she had little compassion for how badly the circumstance she was imagining would (at least initially) have sucked.
If they had been engaged when Lady Catherine came in with her objections, then even if they had convinced Mr Darcy he would have had to talk to her in order to break it off. She would be certain of a chance to argue her case.
What she really wished was that, somehow or another, she had seen him as he was to begin with. That when he came to propose she had been expecting it, the way he had apparently thought she would be. That she had been able to properly enjoy the time they had spent together before everything got so awkward, because she had properly understood what was going on.
Elizabeth did, in fact, manage to get some sleep that night. It was harder to do otherwise without arousing concern when one shared a room with a light-sleeping sister.
It was simultaneously more alarming and less to open her eyes on it suddenly being visibly late afternoon than it had been for Darcy to watch the change with his eyes wide open. More because she believed she had slept the whole day away, less because it was not until she realised that she was sitting up and clothed in her nice yellow dancing dress (the one Mr Collins had spilled wine on at the Netherfield Ball, now miraculously clean of the obvious stain) that she realised the world had changed.
It was mercifully easy to work things out from context. Everyone — barring Mr Bennet — was very excited to finally meet Mr Bingley, and dressed in ballgowns. It remained cold out, so the time of year had not greatly changed. It was the 18th of October, 1811, and that evening would be the assembly in Meryton where, last year (this year. Today) they had met the Netherfield party.
Lydia asked to borrow the coral necklace Elizabeth was already wearing, and she was so pleased to see her sans Mr Wickham that she agreed without fuss.
Elizabeth had been to any number of dances at Meryton before, and before the arrival of the Netherfield party there was nothing in particular to differentiate this from any of them, but there was something rather unnerving about how much the same everything was. Little moments she wasn't even aware of remembering played out the same as they had before, Charlotte's hair frizzled out of its updo in precisely the same strands, the pianoforte needed a tuning she knew it had soon received.
She was not sure how she passed the time until the Netherfield set arrived, too early for Miss Bingley to consider it fashionable, yet still late enough it could be thought rude, and just kind of bad timing for everyone — althought hadn't they been later, before? — every conversation had been had before, every dance done, and there was an extent to which she could leave the steering to the wind and boggle at the situation.
They walked in. Mr Bingley (not her sister's fiancé, not even her sister's… whatever he had been, a stranger she would have to be introduced to to know) smiling at everything, his sisters (who had done her no harm, and it would be noted if she was cold to them before they did) doing rather the opposite, Mr Hurst (nothing needed saying, she didn't really know him anyway) somehow already at the refreshments table, Mr Darcy (…) looking at her.
Had he really looked at her like that before they'd even met? Was she really so unobservant that she hadn't noticed?
Quite unable to help herself, Elizabeth raised an eyebrow. Darcy pursed his lips, and turned away.
The dance began.
A/N: The book Darcy is mentioned to be rereading was once supposed to be Self Control by Mary Brunton, then I started reading the thing for research purposes and felt that
1) I really didn't want to be reading it anymore, and
2) I think Darcy would feel similarly
There are a lot of very classist undertones to it, it's just kinda mean spirited and moralistic in a lot of ways, and it takes itself awfully seriously for a book as ridiculous as it is. Not necessarily a warning off it, it was popular and bits are certainly entertaining, but it didn't work for me and I wasn't interested in reading the rest to see if there were any cool references to make.
Next up the book was Sense and Sensibility, because I thought that would be fun and meta, and that's the only one of Austen's novels the timeline let's Darcy have. It may still be, I've just made it less explicit because I haven't actually read Sense and Sensibility (of Austen's works, I've so far read P&P (as evidenced) and about half of Mansfield Park) and figured making references to a story I don't fully know wasn't the best idea. I may make it more explicit again if I read it in time for such references to be useful.
My standard warning that I will not be updating regularly, due to a number of other commitments, a tendency to procrastinate, and the fact that I write better for all my stories when I can work on any of them I want, which means that there are a great number of ideas that get more attention than others at different times. If I tried to write this to a schedule, it would kill the fun for me, which would rather defeat the purpose of writing it at all, so I would stop.
Future Author's Notes will be in the section for it, I've just had a number of bad experiences of the Author's Note on a first chapter becoming the note on every chapter, and I don't really know how to avoid it.