This first drabble is a Colonel Fitzwilliam/Georgiana drabble – because they are my favourite fanon couple. Each of these drabbles/vignettes will be set after the events of Pride and Prejudice – and offer little glimpses of Darcy and Elizabeth's life together, as well as the extended Darcy family. They will be canon compliant as far as we know of canon, anyway.

BTW, I'm using Richard as Colonel Fitzwilliam's given name.

Doubt

Sometimes she worried that she had been tainted by association or by her own stupidity, because she had not been wise enough or strong enough to withstand Wickham's machinations. She should have known better. Tales of fortune-hunters had been drilled into her head since the schoolroom by various nurses, governesses, and most especially her aunt Lady Catherine. She barely remembered her mother beyond fleeting caresses when her mother came to bid her goodnight, glittering in jewels and smelling of lavender and rose water. Her legacy was another thing. She would never be Mistress of Pemberley, but Georgiana understood well enough what was expected of her as the only daughter of Lady Anne Darcy.

Georgiana should have known better. That's what she'd said to herself afterwards. Fitzwilliam had never utter a word of recrimination to her after her confession. Somehow that was worse. She was a child to him. She wanted a lecture. She needed a lecture, some sort of recognition that she wasn't the baby that he dangled on his knee.

And now she felt tainted.

Especially now under Richard's incessant gaze.

She'd been lessened in their eyes – Richard's and Fitzwilliam's – the silence made the sin all the louder. They would protest her guilt and take it upon themselves as her guardians. She heard it in their silence. The things that were never said in this family –

And there'd been that afternoon by the pier – Wickham had bent and brushed his lips across her bare knuckles, flesh against flesh. Was not that a mortal sin? The prickling, tingling through the tips of her fingers, like a strange sickness that made her ache. Was not that a sin as well? She thought about this often – at odd shameful times which caused a flush of brilliant dark blood to stain her cheeks and neck.

Richard would turn to her then in her moments of recollection, an inquisitive brow, his mouth curving slightly upward. Were those brilliant flushes for him and him alone? She, too, wondered, for somehow in the last three years the sensory memories of her first shameful break had become entwined with . . . what she now felt. Because this wasn't a sin, was it? Now with Richard. When he held her hand or led her to the dance or to dinner and his hand a little too tight to be proper, holding her own hand a little longer than necessary. When he called her Georgie for her ears alone and wrote her all those months he'd been away in the Continent, fighting Napoleon. And he'd come back to her just as he said he would.

He had embraced her tightly and kissed her lips and called her his dearest darling, just as he had in his letters "my dearest darling in all the world."

She'd been thrilled, perhaps more than was proper. Because Richard thrilled her more than Wickham ever had. It frightened her.

Though he never would, if Richard had requested an elopement to Gretna Green she wouldn't hesitate. She wouldn't tell Fitzwilliam or Elizabeth. She'd just go. She knew this without a doubt.

Was that not a sin? To love someone too much? That he became her whole world.

Had she learned nothing in three years?

Tonight, after dinner, Richard would ask her brother for her hand and then she would know. When Richard had first asked to be allowed to court her, Fitzwilliam had been anxious for the difference in their ages, though he had given his consent because he loved them both.

Let that still hold true, she thought, because it just may be me seducing Richard to Gretna Green. It was bold and absurd, but she'd almost lost him in a small village called Waterloo.

She clasped tightly the slim Wordsworth volume so that she would not clasp the blue-clad arm resting so close to her own. She did not used to be so visceral and she blamed Wickham for that too. Even if she could not wish to erase those memories. They made her grateful for what she had now, even if she were not so innocent as other girls her age.

"Georgie?" his low, concerned tone gave her just enough courage to meet his gaze – so blue they were, like robin's eggs.

Wickham may have been the first to kiss her, but Richard was her world and the only future she wanted. She was again shamed that the two men were so connected in her thoughts.

"Richard," she hated her trembling voice, "shall we take a stroll? I am a little warm." He took her hand and the ache returned so much stronger and surged right to her chest. Yes, much stronger, and she steeled herself against the unbearable urge to murmur, "Richard, make them yours," – for that is what she truly desired – to be those things with him, the hands clasped and brushing lips, the flesh against flesh.