What the heck is this? Don't worry, for those of you wonderful readers following Firsts - I have not abandoned it, and a new chapter should be coming up in a day or two. But this thing, oh my. I got the idea and started and just couldn't seem to stop. It's kind of introspective, more about Lizzie's thought process than plot points and dialogue. Yeah. It's largely focused on Lizzie's changing views of Darcy, but since she would have edited a lot of stuff in her videos, other stuff does show up. And I'm not totally confident about the timeline for some of these things. Sometimes I had to just guess or speculate.
42-57
Editing her own videos after Charlotte left for Collins and Collins was a miserable experience – partly because Lizzie wasn't quite as good at it as she claimed to be, but mostly because every time she pulled up the editing program, it reminded her of what had happened. Charlotte's stupid, selfish decision and the ugly fallout. The barbs they had exchanged, all the more cutting because they knew each other so well and therefore knew exactly what hurt the most.
The editing itself wasn't so bad, though, even if she knew her viewers would notice a slightly clumsier quality to her videos. Looking back, she had no real regrets about her editing choices. (Unless she counted the desire to edit a certain silver-tongued, two-faced swimming coach entirely out of existence.)
After she and Charlotte made up, editing wasn't so bad. Even when Charlotte was too busy to lend a hand, her absence didn't have that awful finality it once had. And Lizzie was definitely getting better at it, probably about as good as Charlotte. Okay, maybe not quite.
Things got more complicated once Darcy showed up.
58
It was hard enough getting through the care packages video with Fitz. Just having to hear the story again made her so angry she couldn't even keep the cursor steady. Fitz was so happily clueless. She yelled at his cheerful face, but her anger was quickly redirected to the proper place. She hadn't been paranoid; she had actually underestimated just how interfering and controlling and judgy and heartless Darcy could really be.
She left in pretty much the whole conversation, taking a sort of grim pleasure in being thoroughly vindicated in her opinion of that jerkface.
59
A jerkface with the worst possible timing. Not only did he show up right when her hatred for him had reached its absolute apex, but she was also in the middle of filming one of her own personal videos, videos he had no place in and no business knowing about.
Okay, so maybe it was her fault he knew about them now.
Editing that video was quite a doozy. She was shaken to the core by his declaration, stupefied that they could have such completely different views of each other and of their heated interactions. The last thing she wanted was to replay their conversation and relive her shock, confusion and anger. But she had no choice. Charlotte was too busy to help edit, and Lizzie was in no frame of mind to film a new video at the last minute. In the end, she just used the footage leading up to his appearance, including Ricky and Charlotte's ridiculous costumes – she needed a good laugh right now – and her perusal of Jane's sad messages.
The video was almost ready; she just needed a good way to end it. She let her final rant play out, ready to cut it off right there – and there he was, his stupid torso and his staccato rap on the door and his "Excuse me, Lizzie," full of self-importance and stiffness.
Holy crap, he was nervous. Nervous. She didn't like seeing that emotion in him; it made him almost human. Her stomach twisted up unpleasantly. At that moment currently frozen on her screen, he had no idea what he was about to face. The torrent of wrath about to be unleashed upon him.
No. No way was she going to start pitying Darcy. If he was that ignorant of how she really felt, so arrogant as to assume she would respond happily to his declaration, then he deserved a harsh rejection. And he had probably only done it in the first place to gratify his enormous ego. Whatever he might imagine, he couldn't really be in love with her. Someone as selfish and proud as that wasn't capable of genuine love. Lust, maybe, though she was sure there were much prettier girls who would be happy to throw themselves at a rich man, so why had he come to her?
She was really not enjoying this line of thought. Really, really, not enjoying it.
She didn't want to think about it anymore. She kept in that torso shot, just a few seconds of it. She saved the final cut, closed the program and put it all away before she could change her mind. She'd seen it too many times already.
When the video went up the next day, she tried to go about her usual business and not think about anything to do with Darcy. It should have been fairly easy, since she didn't see a trace of him all day and she had plenty to keep her distracted with her reports on inane "Better Living" tutorials and lousy reality shows – but she underestimated her viewers. That brief torso glimpse had the comments section exploding, not to mention the dozens of tweets they were sending her, begging her to show more Darcy. What was wrong with these people? Had they not been listening all this time about what a thoroughly repulsive, unlikable person he was?
Well, maybe she would show them the rest, and then they'd see.
Thing was, the video might make Darcy look bad, but it didn't exactly paint a flattering picture of her either. She was right about what she said; she didn't regret it – but she was hardly at her best while yelling at the top of her lungs at the man she despised. Not to mention losing her head at the end and mentioning her videos.
There was also the problem of legality. Darcy knew about the videos now – at least, she had mumbled something about it after shutting off the camera, and he would have put the pieces together fairly easily after he left – but he certainly hadn't given her permission to include him in them. Was he the sort of person who would sue? And she had imagined things were complicated when Bing thought they were recording letters to Charlotte!
60
When Wednesday rolled around, she plunked herself down in front of the camera and tried to come up with something to talk about, anything that wasn't Darcy. It was a lost cause. Who was she kidding? Even she couldn't think of anything other than Darcy, even if her thoughts were miles away from her viewers'. She finally taped something in between a preface and a warning, then tacked it in front of the remainder of Sunday's video. Editing was easy after that. She left the whole conversation intact, right up until the deer-in-the-headlights moment when she shut off the camera.
What difference did it make when it came to Darcy? If he was going to sue her, he already had plenty of material to justify it – 59 videos worth of insults and defamation. Did it count as defamation if it was true? Lizzie groaned, shoved her laptop aside and buried her face in her arms.
She posted it. In for a penny, in for a pound.
After that, she swore she would spend the rest of the day off the Internet. She didn't need to see the comments section explode again; she didn't need to see the rampant speculation that strangers were making over her personal life. She ignored her Twitter account, stayed miles away from Youtube, and only gave her email a quick perusal to make sure she wasn't missing any important, non-Darcy related business.
She thought it would be a little safer the next day, when some of the furor had died down, but then she had an entirely unexpected distraction in the form of a new Twitter follower. If she hadn't noticed it herself, her helpful fans were quick to point it out to her. Well, Darcy would definitely know about her videos now.
She found herself watching for any fresh tweets from him – no, she certainly didn't follow him back, but she could keep on eye on him anonymously – and taking a morbid curiosity in the cryptic messages that followed. It could have been about her videos – it probably was – but he was so vague and odd about it. Angry? Annoyed? Disgusted? She couldn't even begin to guess.
61
It put her in a very sober, anxious mood when she started filming her next video. At least Charlotte finally had a little bit of spare time. Lizzie really needed her bestie's sensible point of view to balance out her panic. She just wished Charlotte had stayed there when Darcy showed up, provided a buffer or something. Instead, the rest of the video was one big awkward mess.
Lizzie wanted to scrap all of it, but once again she was too distracted (this time by a certain hand-written letter) to put together a different video, and she supposed her viewers would once again be expecting some sort of follow-up to the last mess she put online. Charlotte offered to edit it, but Lizzie felt somehow that she needed to take this on herself, like paying penance.
While it was actually happening, she had been too distracted by her panic when Darcy showed up to notice any real change in him. Now, watching it second-hand, she was struck by the alteration. She hadn't realized how slowly he entered the office, how he waited a moment before speaking up. He didn't respond to Charlotte's awesome declaration about Jane, but then he didn't seem angry or annoyed with her either. Lizzie looked at her own wary face, tensed as if expecting some explosion. But there was no explosion. Why did he zero in on the two mildest insults in all her videos, when he could have brought up so many worse ones? Why did he say he didn't care about it? Was he really so feeling-less that no amount of insults could bother him? No, the video before this one offered evidence enough that he was capable of anger.
She found herself replaying parts just to try to guess what the heck was going on beneath that impassive face of his. There was a moment, less than a second, when the slightest of dimples actually appeared on his face. Why in the world would he smile? He was utterly incomprehensible.
Well, there was a little more to comprehend now that she had that letter. She had been comprehending it, so to speak, on a fairly obsessive basis. Between replays of the video, she would pick it up and read another passage, sometimes in a fury that he still hadn't apologized about Jane and Bing, other times in a haze of embarrassment that she had defended George Wickham when she clearly didn't know the whole story. Not that she entirely trusted Darcy's account – but somehow, the pieces fit together a lot more neatly than they ever had with George's tale.
The actual editing was minimal, like the last video, but she watched this one a lot more before finally shutting down the program. She just couldn't reconcile the stiff man on her screen with the person who had written pages upon pages of heartfelt – was it really heartfelt? Was she really using that word to refer to Darcy? – personal accounts of a broken friendship and a severely wounded sister.
She watched him walk out the door, pause, then keep going. She watched it about ten times as if she could uncover some hidden meaning in it. Was he going to say something else? He had apologized. He apologized again in the letter, not about Jane but at least about making Lizzie's visit unpleasant. And then he hesitated before leaving. What was going on in his head? She wanted to know, and feared it. Feared the possibility that she had been utterly and completely wrong.
