This is a companion story to Words, Words, Words. It's not necessary to read that first, but you'll appreciate the parallels if you do. At least, that's my hope.
Enjoy!
Actions Speak Louder
William Darcy never considered himself to be a man of action. He did act, certainly, if and when the occasion required it, but the action always came after careful consideration and deliberate planning. He believed in rational discourse, methodical decision making, and a life as free from impulsive spontaneity as possible. He prided himself on being ruled by his head in all things rather than his heart, by a logical thought process rather than any emotionally-charged desires.
Even as a child, he refrained from such activities as jumping out of trees to see if he could fly, splashing in mud puddles, or chasing girls on the playground to steal a kiss. Such actions made no sense to him – a bedsheet tied around his neck wouldn't help him defy the laws of physics, jumping in mud puddles had no educational value, and even if stealing hadn't been morally and legally wrong, a kiss hardly seemed worth the effort.
He did once make plans to run away from home. Upon learning at the age of eight that his parents had decided – foolishly, in his opinion – to have another child, he'd spent three weeks putting together his escape plan and itinerary, complete with maps and charts and color-coded time tables. Then he'd taken it to his mother for her approval, because his father always said that every proposal should be subject to at least two pairs of eyes before being put into practice.
His mother had reviewed his proposal as seriously as she reviewed any at Pemberley Digital, and after she'd pointed out some flaws in the plan that his eight-year-old eyes had not seen, he'd made the decision to abandon the project. After solemnly informing his mother of his choice, she had nodded her agreement, then started reading From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler to him because she thought he might enjoy Claudia's character. He did, though he frowned at the impulsive impropriety of her brother, Jamie.
His mother always said he had an old soul, and even before he knew what that meant, William liked the sound of the words. He used to repeat them to himself when he felt put upon or awkward or out of place, an explanation for why he was different, better by far than weirdo or teacher's pet or loser, words he heard from other voices.
He knew he was different, knew and understood that most children his age spent more time with play clothes and mud pies and skinned knees than neckties and spreadsheets and day planners. The older he got, the more words he was able to assign to his differences, words like shy and reserved and introverted. And he knew, had always known with the help of his mother's whispers in his ear, that his differences were nothing to be ashamed of, that in them lay his greatest strengths.
He was talented and intelligent and had an impressive mind for business and strategy. The older he grew, the more easily and naturally he entered a world where neckties and spreadsheets and day planners were the norm, and the very things that had gotten him laughed at as a child were what elevated him within his father's company as an adult. Standing in front of a board room full of executives and talking about quarterly projections or acquisition stratagems, William was in his element.
Unfortunately, that confidence never managed to extend beyond the board room. He watched with guilt as his father moved effortlessly through the crowds of Pemberley's black tie fundraisers, chatting easily with sponsors and patrons and venture capitalists. He looked on with envy as his friend George transitioned naturally from an easygoing child into an easygoing adult, securing friends and admirers with a wink and a smile and a mountain of charm that William could never hope to emulate. Even his little sister seemed to navigate the complex social requirements of the Darcy family with an ease that had always escaped his own understanding.
His mother told him time and again, always gently, always with great empathy, that he couldn't judge himself by their accomplishments, that his strengths lay another way, and that that was nothing to be ashamed of. Do the best that you can, she always told him, and don't worry about what anyone else says or thinks.
His mother's advice became his mantra, but acting on it proved vastly more difficult than merely repeating it over and over. His father swooped in and saved him from awkward attempts at small talk, George flew through girlfriend after girlfriend, Gigi delighted everyone she met with her tennis trophies and swimming records and that damn infectious smile. And William? He watched and wished, with a yearning that frightened him with its intensity, that he could do the same.
And then his parents died.
There was a lot that became easier for him with his parents' deaths. He hated that he noticed it and hated even more that it was true, but he could no sooner deny the facts in front of him than pin a bedsheet around his neck and hope to fly. As CEO, family patriarch, and legal guardian of a ten-year-old girl at the age of 18, the reserved demeanor he'd always had came to be seen as appropriate and expected. His stolidity and introversion were no longer so glaringly out of place. Awkward and unfriendly and elitist were replaced with mature and stoic and coping so well.
He embraced the reprieve with relief and gratitude, and threw himself into the company, hiring an energetic and talented PR Head and working toward becoming a successful and dedicated enough CEO that no one would comment on how little he had to say at the company's social events.
His work became his life, and if, every once in a while, he found himself wishing for more, wishing for one person who knew him as well as his mother had, with whom he could feel comfortable letting down his guard, well, those wishes weren't debilitating, and it was never long before work became so all-encompassing as to bury them again.
Because shortly after his parents' deaths, William had accepted that he would probably never marry. He simply didn't have the time to devote to any sort of relationship not related to business. He knew that there were plenty of young women of his circle who would be more than willing to become Mrs. Darcy, but he wanted more than an arm-candy, trophy-wife socialite. He wanted what his father had been lucky enough to find in his mother – a true partner. William doubted there were more than a handful of women in the world who could or would fit the bill, and frankly, he didn't have time to find them.
And then William met Lizzie Bennet.
She captivated him. Her spark and passion and presence and candor enthralled him in a way no woman had ever done before, and in a way he had long ago stopped expecting any woman to ever do.
But then - Lizzie Bennet.
Lizzie Bennet, who was middle class and not impressively beautiful. Lizzie Bennet, who was loud and opinionated. Lizzie Bennet, who, while certainly intelligent, had a roughness about her that couldn't be overlooked, and a family even rougher and louder than she was. There was no reason, none at all, for Lizzie Bennet to stand out in any way, but there was something about her he found himself incapable of ignoring.
She did things to him, to his carefully ordered world. She got in somehow and left chaos in her wake. She got under his skin like a splinter and took hold of his mind like an illness. She invaded every moment, every aspect of his life. His mind strayed straight to her at every brief lapse in attention. He couldn't get her out of his head, and he was a man who prided himself on his focus, his ability to control his thoughts no matter the distraction. But somehow, Lizzie Bennet proved equal to all his years of mental discipline.
And she drew more than just his thoughts. As time went by, she began to compel his actions, and suddenly this man, ruled by logic and method and rationality, was taking time out of his day, away from his work, to read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, to join the Lees at bars if she'd said she might be there, to ask her to dance in the middle of the Netherfield sitting room.
To confess his love for her in front of a recording camera.
He did not immediately search out her videos after their confrontation. Rather, he sat in his room in the growing dark, trying to identify exactly when and where and how his life had spiraled so completely out of his control. Trying to pinpoint how he had possibly gotten this so wrong, how he had possibly come to mistake enmity for flirtation, loathing for mutual admiration, hatred for love. But his memories and recollections were too tinged with his own emotions to offer any insights, so he switched on the light, powered up his laptop, and searched her name.
When it was over, hours later, he sat without moving, staring at the computer screen, Lizzie's image in pixels burned into his eyes. This, he thought when he could think anything, this was why you didn't allow yourself to become run away with emotion. This was why you held back, assessed and reassessed until you were certain of the parameters under which you operated. This was why spontaneity should be shunned at all costs. Because otherwise, you ended up sitting alone in a pitch-black room at three in the morning listening to the woman you loved devote 59 videos on the Internet to talking about how much she hated you.
Stuck up, pompous prick . . . unpleasant, disagreeable, and full of himself . . . stone freaking statue . . . Stuffy. Rude. Boring. Snob. Humorless. Arrogant. Selfish. He didn't know why those words hurt more than the ones he'd heard as a child, but they did. Each word felt like a personal attack, because it was, and maybe that was it. The weirdos and teacher's pets and losers he heard once upon a time were hurled just because he was different. But Lizzie's words were personal, and he had no idea how he'd missed it.
It took him five hours and eight drafts to get his thoughts down on paper in a way that was satisfactory, her tirades against him playing in his head all the while, echoes of Nice Darcy? It's like every time you say those words an angel loses its wings and He's like a robot with buggy programming for social interaction and The Darcy-bot needs to go to the shop for some repairs, or some series upgrades hurting more somehow even than the memory of her being taken in by smiling, charming George.
He delivered the letter with an I sometimes have trouble expressing myself, resenting bitterly the irony that he was so much more at ease with her after all hope of winning her over was gone. He delivered the letter, and he left, and that, he knew, was the end of it. He would return to his life, and Lizzie Bennet would return to hers, and they would never speak again. But he'd gotten back to methodical, deliberate, rational decision making, and he'd ended it on his terms.
And when his thoughts still strayed toward her, or his heart still raced at the memory of her, or his hand hovered over the button that would take him to YouTube, to her videos, to see if she had changed her mind in any way, he forcefully and rationally pushed those urges down if not away, as he should have done all along. Lizzie Bennet was no longer a part of his life.
But then she came to Pemberley. And once again, everything changed.
The changes were tangible, the air between them thick with all the words that had been said and all the ones that remained unspoken. William forced himself to breathe, to relax, to come closer to "going with the flow" than he ever had before, never to change how she felt toward him, only to show unequivocally that he was no robot, stiff and cold and unfeeling. He wanted to show her that he could be warm, could smile, could make jokes and share moments and give compliments. So he found a newsboy cap and he pretended to be Fitz and he let his actions speak louder than his words could.
And it was working. William knew it was working, knew they were building something between them that had been missing the first time he'd tried to pour his heart out to her. But then George Wickham reappeared, determined to taint Lizzie's life as he had tainted so much of William's.
William would be damned if he'd let that happen.
Taking care of George was simple in the end, if not easy, a matter of determination, persistence, deduction, patience, and knowledge of property acquisition and copyright laws. It was a matter of action, action he should have taken a year ago but hadn't, out of an effort to save his sister pain she was now experiencing anyway.
He would tell Lizzie that he had not done any of it for her family, but that would not, strictly speaking, be true. He had done it for them.
He had done it for Lydia Bennet who was going through pain he could only imagine because she had been emotionally manipulated into loving a man who had seen her only as a means to an end. He had done it for Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, whose pain he didn't have to imagine because he remembered it all too well. He had done it for Gigi, to give her the closure she hadn't gotten the first time around, and for Fitz, who had jumped back into the fray without having to be asked. On some level he knew he had done it all for them. But mostly, he had done it for Lizzie.
He had done it for her and kept it secret because the last thing he wanted her to believe was that he had used her situation to improve his standing in her eyes. Or worse, that he had done it to create a debt between them, when the truth was, he had only wanted to take some of the anguish and agony from her. He had only wanted to lessen the pain, to make right what his inaction had set wrong in her life. He had only wanted to return the smile to her face and the light to her eyes.
When he had made sure that George was taken care of and the website was removed from the internet and all copies of the tape were destroyed, William allowed himself two days to recover, two days in which he caught up on her videos, desperate for the sight and the sound of her, desperate to know how she was doing.
When she posted her February 14th video and Lydia revealed that the site was down, and Lizzie looked straight at the camera and said, Thank you. Whoever you are, whatever you did, you are a wonderful person, and we cannot thank you enough, William smiled, softly, ignoring the weight in his chest. He had done it. Her relief was tangible, and the smile on her face was worth the entire ordeal. He closed his eyes and accepted her thanks and wondered if she would have phrased it differently, had she known who was behind it all. But even as he wondered, he knew it didn't matter. His resolve had not shifted. Gigi and Fitz could protest all they liked, but he would not reveal himself to Lizzie, and he'd made them both promise that they would keep the secret, too.
After she had thanked him and returned her attention to her sister, he stopped the video and turned his computer off. He had seen all he needed to. What she needed now was space and time for her family to heal and recover.
But then she called him. To . . . chat.
He listened to her voicemail three times in succession, trying to make it make sense.
When you have a sec, give me a call. I'd like to . . . chat.
Something was wrong with her voice. It was high pitched and too bright and not Lizzie. More than that, the words didn't make sense. Lizzie Bennet did not call people just to chat. Lizzie Bennet hated small talk almost as much as he did; they had talked about it in San Francisco. The difference between them was that she was good at it and could turn it on when needed, where he could not. But she had made it very clear that she didn't enjoy it. Lizzie Bennet valued the power of words and knew that he did, too. She would not call him, out of the blue, if there was no reason. But why, then, wouldn't she have told him the reason? If it was urgent, she would have said so. She would have not used words like sec and chat.
He thought about returning her call. He almost did, several times. But he wouldn't begin to know what to say. Hello, Lizzie. This is William Darcy. I am returning your phone call invitation to chat. What topic would you like to discuss?
He sounded like a robot even to his own ears.
After three days in Chicago, most of them spent agonizing over her voicemail and cryptic words instead of focusing on the conference he was there to attend, he received a text from Gigi, saying they needed to talk as soon as he was home, about Lizzie and the videos Gigi correctly assumed he hadn't been watching.
Her videos. Her life - and his - laid out on the internet for all the world to see. On the plane ride home from Chicago, he caved, and watched. When he landed in San Francisco, he did not meet his driver in the pickup line. Instead, he went straight to the ticket desk and booked the first flight to Netherfield.
He didn't think. He didn't plan. He didn't let himself. If he thought about what he was doing, he'd never follow through with this irrational impulse. If he planned his next move, he'd end up driving his rental car all the way back to San Francisco. He didn't think. He didn't plan. He just let I've been watching my videos. It's been . . . illuminating and You know who's in charge of Darcy's life? Darcy and What's the worst that could happen? He ignores you? He's not interested? play over and over again in his head. He let hope bubble up in his chest, foreign and unfamiliar but welcome all the same. And he let the momentum of this impossible impulsive action take him right up to the Bennet's front door.
When the door opened, he was as surprised to see Charlotte Lu as she was to see him, but he didn't let the surprise stop him because once he stopped moving, once he let his brain catch up with his feet, he wasn't sure what would happen, so he needed to make it to Lizzie first.
If he'd stopped to think about why he was doing this, why he was going all the way to Netherfield in person, he probably wouldn't have been able to come up with anything close to a satisfactory answer. But when he saw her standing in her family's den, eyes wide in shock and startled surprise, he felt a rush of emotion, of love and need and purpose like he'd never felt before in his life, and that was when he knew. He knew why he was there, and for one shining second, he felt as if everything in his life had been leading him to that place, in that moment, with that wonderful person.
The first time he confessed his love to her, he firmly believed that she brought out the worst in him, but he would find a way to cope. The second time he confessed his love, he knew that she brought out the best in him, and that he was the luckiest man in the world.
William Darcy would never consider himself to be a man of action. He would always believe in rational discourse and methodical decision making and the power of logic to bring clarity to the foggiest of situations. But loving Lizzie Bennet changed William Darcy in many ways. Loving Lizzie Bennet taught him that spontaneity had its place, that emotion was not weakness, and that actions and words together could convey anything and everything under the sun.
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