Face the Music
A Darcy/Elizabeth One-shot
Note: All characters belong to the illustrious Jane Austen, dead or alive.
Second Note: I wrote this at ten thirty at night with out a beta so I apologize for all spelling and grammar mistakes.
The piano music she played was sweet and muted, with subtle undertones of bitterness, so like the world that the two of them shared that Mr. Darcy stopped his conversation with Fitzwilliam very, very abruptly and walked over to the piano. In her fingers, even when she missed a note or had to back track and start a measure again, the picture she painted with the notes still held the everlasting thoughts of the English countryside, of her sisters and Mr. Bingley, of himself and her, perhaps the mismatched chords were the two of them together, awkward and stubborn, passionate and quiet, all in one moment, all in one breath, standing in the rain and soaked to the skin. Like in every other circumstance that involved the devilish, bewitching, Miss Elizabeth Bennett, he didn't know what to say, but was so absorbed by her presence that he knew saying anything would be futile and against his impeccable judgment.
It was not that he didn't have the words really, but the ones he could have spoken were to thin to breakable to carry up the sentiments that truly ensnared his every waking thought, whispering constantly of her curling brown hair and laughing, teasing eyes. So instead he stood in silence, his best poker face on, one he had perfected that could not be altered except by the likes of his sister, Georgiana. But his mind was swirling with so many things that he decided not to focus on any, for it would be too exhausting, instead he stood in a daze taking in the music and her presence, suddenly struck by the urge to sit down beside her and halt her playing fingers, bringing them to his lips instead.
She looked up at him, and seeing the intensity in his eyes which he had not been able to conceal well enough, accused him of trying to frighten her.
All the things he wanted to say came flooding back, frightening her was the last thing on his mind, however much she frightened him with her way of living life to the fullest and letting her common sense guide her where her heart could not, namely in his direction. Instead he said something else, cold and despicable, the way he always acted, the way he cursed himself for afterwards, cheered only by the fact that he never seemed to dull her mood, depress her vivacity in anyway, instead with his dull flame to guide her she became a roaring bonfire, an beacon of life in the face of indifference, flickering around it and refusing to be cowed into dimming itself.
From that point he remembered naught what she had said or what she was playing but only what she was and who she was and how dull and boring he was in comparison. He wanted her, more than anything he'd ever wanted in his entire life. But not in an appalling carnal way, no, he wanted to see her walking about in his garden, smiling to him as she lay in their marriage bed, hair down and spread about her shoulders, her eyes half closed with sleep. He wanted her happiness in a more acute and bittersweet way than he wanted Bingley's happiness, for he suspected that her idea of eternally happy was not the same as his by the way she goaded and infuriated him until he was boiling on the inside, so much so that on the outside he turned to ice and could not become relaxed and melted again until far from her prescence.
Later, after he'd thawed and was enjoying brandy with Fitzwilliam, though how he'd gotten to that point he did not know, he found himself saying the strangest thing he'd ever heard.
"Ms. Elizabeth plays the pianoforte uncommonly well, does she not?"
A sudden silence from Fitzwilliam as he looked at Darcy quizzically, because he was a man who should have better taste in music considering his sister was a prodigy on the instrument in question.
"Oh, I don't know Darcy. It sounded mediocre at best to me."
"Yes," responded Mr. Darcy with such a sigh, that he knew could only come from someone who was heart-wrenchingly, stubbornly, madly, in love.
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Peace, love,
Glitzy