A/N: 100% Darcy angst, certified.
Darcy learns to write her name at four years old, and everyone tells her that she's clever.
.
But cleverness doesn't make much difference when you do all your growing up in the span of two and a half minutes, the time it takes for them to explain.
.
The life of an endless academic is this: number two pencils and a crushing fear of failure.
Darcy takes the LSAT on a snowy Saturday. She eats two granola bars beforehand. It's like choking down ashes.
She gets a 172.
That's great, George says. He's ecstatic.
It's enough, Darcy says, but that's not the same as perfect, and so it really isn't enough at all.
.
You can't be such a perfectionist, Fitz tells her, when she gets her first A-. Darcy, I know grades matter to you—
It's more than that, she says, voice brittle. Is she snapping at Fitz, or just snapping, a thread pulled too tight? This is the only thing I'm good at.
He looks disappointed. It's almost more than she can bear. He says, How can you think that?
And it's true. But if good was enough, it wouldn't even matter. What she means is not that it's her only skill, or her only responsibility, or her only talent.
What she means is that this is the one thing she can control.
.
When George falls, almost out of reach, she realizes that she can't control anything after all, and it was in trying that she lost track of what mattered most.
.
Darcy lines up her pencils at her desk. She rubs her temples and stares out at the city and tells herself that grief is something you can hide.
That it's something she's hidden.
(Two different things.)
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It wasn't your fault, George tells her, but he still doesn't know everything—she couldn't bring herself to tell him everything—so how could he know about this?
.
She writes in pen, most days. Signatures and notes and something that looks dreadfully like chicken-scratch in the corners of depositions and briefs.
Yet, things like mechanical and lead have a way of staying behind.
.
She can't sleep on the night each year that marks that fateful date. She lies awake and thinks about all the things that time has made her forget—her mom's voice, and her dad's smile, because pictures can't capture everything and the dead stay dead, while the living line up seconds like bullets in a cartridge.
.
You would have liked him, she says, to her mother's picture, the day before her wedding. And it's sentimental, and maybe she cries.
Or maybe she only wants to, and stands frozen and hollow, wondering why the tears never come when she knows they're supposed to.
.
I love you, Eli whispers, and his hands and heart and hopes are hers, but that doesn't mean she isn't falling, isn't ticking down days on a calendar nobody else watches, doesn't mean she isn't enough.
Being loved and being lovable, after all, are two different things.