Written for the Lizzie Bennet Diaries Fandom University course midterm . . . though I may have gone over the required word limit just *cough2300words* a bit . . .

I expect this to be thoroughly cannonballed tomorrow, but I so desperately want this to be how Lydia "accidentally" tells Lizzie about Darcy taking the site down.

It wasn't that she couldn't sleep.

It was that every time she closed her eyes, she saw his face, and every time she drifted off, she landed in the best dreams of her life, dreams where things had gone differently, where she was happy and content and fulfilled in every possible way. Dreams where she'd never gotten the call from Charlotte and she'd said yes to a date and the whole word had followed after. Dreams that were wonderful and perfect and full of the happily ever after she'd thought only existed in fairy tales. Dreams, in other words, that tore her slowly apart inside every time she woke because the path she had taken made them an impossibility.

So it wasn't that she couldn't sleep. It was that she didn't. It was that she forced herself to stay awake until she was entirely exhausted, in the hopes that when sleep came, it would be dreamless and therefore less painful. She lay each night on the air mattress in her once-room and stared at the ceiling and went over every moment of her time in San Francisco in excruciating detail, basking in exquisite, masochistic agony like the glutton for punishment she apparently was.

She remembered the way he said her name, the deepness of his voice and his strangely clear articulation making her childhood nickname sound somehow more adult and incredibly intimate, sending thrills of pleasure through her that she had no business feeling.

She remembered the way he entered a room, his presence more than just physical. She always knew he was there, long before he spoke; she always had. Even back when she'd hated him, she'd felt a shift in the air every time he walked through the door, known instinctively if he was already present. She remembered the way he radiated, filling the space around him with his unmistakable essence.

And she remembered the way he looked at her, the intensity of his gaze, an intensity that remained exactly the same whether he was declaring his love, discussing theories of transitive media, or listening to her talk about her grocery shopping. There had been a time when she'd thought he just looked at everyone that way, but since Pemberley, she'd become cognizant that it was only her. Everyone else got a normal gaze. She alone got the one that stole her breath and tied her tongue in knots.

His hand on her shoulder, warm and burning, his first true smile when he'd successfully made her laugh, his rumpled hair after removing that hat at the end of the first real genuine conversation they'd had, she remembered all this, every particular of every encounter, played them over and over in her head, and when she came to something she couldn't remember, some phrasing she couldn't quite bring to mind, some gesture she couldn't recall, then she was up and out of bed, down to the den, and in front of her computer to watch those videos yet again, skewing her data and not even caring.

She watched in the den because she needed the plausible excuse. She needed deniability. If the computer was in her room and she was caught, she was rewatching videos of Darcy. But if she was in the den, with all her thesis notes and research spread out around her, then she was referencing some detail, checking some viewer statistic, and the fact that Darcy was paused on her screen was pure coincidence. Really.

"Lizzie Bennet, you're pathetic," she whispered one night to the paused screen where her past self sat, alone, moments before William Darcy was shoved into a room with her. "Do you know what you're doing with your life?" She hurled abuse in whispers at her image on the screen because she had to. If she didn't, there might be room for hope to grow, and if there was one thing she couldn't afford, it was an impossible hope.

"You are sitting in the den at 3:23 am, obsessively watching these videos, and why? Because — I don't even know! Because you're hoping something will change? Because you're hoping you'll find some new, hidden meaning?" She shook her head, tears pricking her eyes. "He wants nothing to do with you, and watching again isn't going to change that. If he wanted anything to do with you, wouldn't he have called?"

Her mind flashed briefly to Bing and to Jane and to the possibility that she didn't have the whole picture, but she pushed that forcefully away. "He acted so concerned for you, begged for you to tell him what was going on, so he could help, but all he did was put you on a plane. He couldn't wait to get you away from him, and what has he done since? Has he checked in? Has he tried to see how things turned out? Has he contacted you at all? No."

One tear slipped down her cheek, and she wiped it angrily away. "What a blissful little fool," she whispered in pain and self-loathing. "He loved you once, and what did you do? You pushed him away. You wanted nothing to do with him. And now? When things are different? When you might—" She stopped, hand at her throat, because she hadn't once said the words aloud and she wasn't going to tonight, either. "He's not interested. Not anymore. And so your life is a perfect little irony, isn't it?"

And she vowed that that was the end, vowed that she was done rewatching, done reliving, done reviewing all those moments, but that vow lasted as long as the rest of them had, because she was a creature of habit and this was her routine. She watched, she paused, she berated, she finished. And with the finesse that came from repetition, she stopped that final video right before her phone went off, in the moment when he waited with bated breath to hear her answer to his maybe-date, in the moment where she looked at him and flushed under the intensity of his gaze and opened her mouth to speak the future-defining yes or no. Held captive in that moment was all the potential in the world, and she had to close her eyes against the painful swarm of might-have-beens that engulfed her that night as they had every night.

But something changed that night, some string inside her snapped, some spark pushed too close to the brink in her exhaustion. Tears escaped her that night; they didn't, usually. Tears escaped her, and to push them back, she snapped into frantic action, digging paper out of the desk and putting pen to it before she knew what would come scrawling out.

To keep the tears at bay, she wrote him a letter that night, a frantic, erratic, emotional letter that was only barely legible, reading,

Darcy,

You're never going to read this, so I can say things I'd never say to you in real life. Verisimilitude. Whatever.

I wish we'd never danced at the Gibson wedding. I wish we'd never met at the Gibson wedding. I wish I'd never seen you in that bow tie and newsie cap, never been slighted by you, never thought you pretentious, never fought back the urge to smack you, to hold back my fury.

I wish you'd never come to Netherfield with Bing because if you hadn't, we would have met at Pemberley Digitial, and I would have thought He's cute, and I would have been unabashedly impressed with you and all you've done with your life, and I would have sought out conversations with you and reveled in the intelligence of them, laughed at your wit, flirted, been interested, all of it, and never once held back. And maybe you would have been captivated. And maybe you would have asked me out. And maybe I would have said yes in an instant.

And there would have been no phone calls from home to send me away, no harsh memories making things awkward and embarrassing, no ill-spoken word hanging in the air between us at every turn. You would have asked, and I would have said yes, and that's the might-have-been I can't stop thinking about.

But Jane said it – there's too much history. You can't erase the past. And God, if that's true of Bing and Jane, what hope is there for us? All he did was love her and leave town and not call. But I ridiculed you on the internet for thousands of people to see and you confessed your love in a public arena and I cut you to pieces with my words while the whole world watched, and there's no coming back from that, to say nothing of the rest of it that maybe doesn't even matter because we screwed ourselves up and over long before Lydia and George Wickham arrived on the scene.

God damn you, William Darcy. I hate you more now than I ever have before because you loved me once, and you opened that door, and it never fully shut and maybe I was ready to walk through it, but it's gone now and I'm stuck with the memory of you and your voice and your touch and your love, and it's not enough and it never will be and it's all I'll ever have, and I hate you. I hate you because you have made loving you impossible and inevitable and utterly inescapable and I can't

The words were meant to be written to hold back the tears, but it didn't work, and by the time she was at the end of it she was crying too fast and too hard to see or hold the pencil, and because she was alone and because she was exhausted and because she couldn't stop it once it had started, she swept the letter to the floor in a burst of anguished emotion, and then collapsed on the sofa and sobbed.

She cried for what had slipped through her fingers, for the man she had come to love so desperately the moment he could never love her in return. She cried because there was an ache in her chest and her gut that she couldn't make go away, and if this is what love was like, then she'd rather cut out her heart and be a spinster for the rest of it. She cried because she'd lost him, because she loved him, because that saying "better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all" was complete and utter bullshit.

At 3:47 in the morning, Lizzie Bennet sobbed, heartbroken, in the den into a corduroy pillow, and at 3:47 in the morning, Lydia Bennet stood unmoving in the doorway to that den, scared to cross the threshold, scared to interrupt, scared to make things worse by announcing her presence. Lydia Bennet recognized the sound her older sister was making because she'd made it herself, and recently, but she didn't know what to do, because she'd never imagined Lizzie so vulnerable and hurt. So lost. She didn't know what to do because she knew there was nothing she could do, not at 3:47 in the morning, not when she didn't have all the answers, not when there was no chance in hell she was going to go try and get them tonight. Some people needed a shoulder there when they broke down. But some people, Lydia knew, the people who always felt they had to be the strong ones, needed to be alone.

But Lydia had always seen more than people realized, and she saw the frozen YouTube screen and she was close enough to read the end of the letter, and she'd watched the videos. In her gut, she knew why Lizzie was crying, and in her gut she knew Lizzie would never, never admit to it. You have made loving you impossible and inevitable and utterly inescapable. Lydia shook her head as she reread that line. Trust her sister to be so eloquent even when on the verge of emotional collapse.

She thought about that line and about what Darcy had said to her the last time they'd talked on the phone – "She can never know I was involved, Lydia. Promise me this. I will not have your sister tied to me when such an attachment must be unwelcome." – and she just kept shaking her head because this wasn't right, and for two such smart people, how they could be this utterly oblivious to each other was really quite mind-boggling.

At 3:47 that night, Lydia discovered her sister sobbing in the den. At 3:51, she resolved to do something about it. And so, at 10:14 the next morning, Lydia walked into the den with more energy and purpose than she'd felt lately, purposefully and unapologetically interrupting Lizzie's filming.

"Let's talk about Darcy," she said without preamble, and Lizzie stiffened beside her.

"Why?" she asked in a would-be disinterested way.

"Because you haven't talked about him in ages," Lydia said.

"Because there's nothing to talk about," Lizzie said stiffly.

"Lizzie, I saw the videos," Lydia responded, straightforward and serious. "He asked you out on a date."

Lizzie colored. "He didn't," she muttered. "He had an extra ticket and Gigi couldn't go."

Lydia rolled her eyes. "Okay, that's not what happened. He asked you on a date, Lizzie. That's what it was." Lizzie looked away, her jaw tight. "Would you have said yes?"

"Lydia," she said softly, "there's no place I want to be right now except right h—"

"Stop it," Lydia interrupted, impatient and starting to get fed up. "Jane quit her job for me. You cut short your independent study and God knows what else for me. You did those things to prove that you're here for me, and truly, Lizzie, I appreciate the gesture." She spoke as sincerely as she could because those feelings were sincere, but she hated the idea that she had called a halt to her sisters' lives. "But you can be here for me without giving up everything. I don't want to be all-consuming to the two of you. I don't want to be a black hole you get sucked into and never escape."

"Lydia, that's not what I —"

"I know," Lydia said, cutting her off. "I know that's not what you meant. I know that's not what you were saying; that's what I'm saying, Lizzie. I'm not speaking for you, I'm speaking for me. Stop putting your life on hold for me. That's not what I want. Stop pretending that what you were doing before all this wasn't important and didn't matter. It's allowed to matter. Would you have said yes?"

Lizzie looked away again, her jaw tight once more. "You hate Darcy," she said then, avoiding the question.

"I hated Darcy," Lydia corrected. "I hated him because my sister thought he was a douchebag and because he insulted my family. I hated Darcy because you hated Darcy, Lizzie, and that's what sisters do. But if you tell me that has changed, then my opinion can change, too. Already has, as a matter of fact."

That brought a frown to Lizzie's face, and she turned in confusion back to Lydia. "What do you mean, already has?" Lydia rolled her eyes.

"I told you; I saw the videos. Yours and Gigi's. It's pretty obvious that he's one of the good guys left in the world, despite the first impression he might give."

Lizzie started to smile, and then she stopped as Lydia's words registered. The furrow in her brow deepened as her confusion grew. "Wait a minute," she said as Lydia suppressed a smile of her own. "Gigi has videos?"

Lydia gave a theatrical gasp and clapped a hand over her mouth as if horrified. "Oh, no," she said, not sounding very horrified at all. "Did I just accidentally let something slip about Gigi making videos for Pemberley Digital that her brother appeared in and did something pretty much guaranteed to change my opinion of him? Oh, drat," she said, throwing in a small foot stomp and an 'aw, shucks" hand gesture for good measure. "And I promised so faithfully I wouldn't tell you anything because he really really doesn't want you to know because you two are infuriatingly two of a kind."

"Lydia . . ." Lizzie said, a hint of her old older sister scolding voice creeping in.

"Sorry, sis," Lydia interrupted with a shrug. "But I really can't tell you anything more about the six videos on Pemberley Digital's YouTube channel that you can easily find by searching 'Pemberley Digital' on YouTube, and that I think you would find quite illuminating. I did, after all, promise."

And with a squeeze to her sister's hand, Lydia flashed a grin more like her old self than she had been in ages and slipped out of the room.

Lizzie watched her go, feeling something like confusion and something like pride and something more like hope than anything she'd let herself feel in a long time. Heart pounding for reasons she didn't want to identify, she hesitated only a few moments longer, then pulled her computer to her, opened YouTube, and started to type.

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