A/N: Whoa. I'm not used to writing anything like I had to in the last chapter, and it kinda drained me. But here I am again, and I hope you like!

Oh it's a long way to Tiparari...

Chapter Twenty-Four: Five Minutes of Shut-Up

Journal Entry # 300, page 357

I had to dodge to avoid Jon when I got back to Rosings. I didn't want to speak to anyone, but most of all anyone in that house.

And the only person I actually did want to speak to would never listen to me again.

How had things gotten so goddamn ugly? How had I allowed it to turn into a battle of insults and jibes? What was wrong with me that I was twisting this into it being her fault instead of my own?

God, I really was daft.

"...You act like I'm some horrible disease you need to get rid of!" She'd said. I had. It's true. I'd treated her no better than I would have treated the plague, or worse, that oily rodent she calls a cousin. I had talked to her and looked at her as if she didn't matter.

Not to mention the first time I'd seen her. That, I was trying to push to the back of my memory.

Just keep diggin', Willy.

"...Ever since I first saw you, you have been an arrogant asshole with no thought of anyone but yourself..."

Christ, would it never stop? Would I never get rid of her face...and her voice...in my head? The idea that I would spend the rest of my life loving her was now no consolation. It was just a promise of agony every time I thought about it, and going by my track record, that was going to be every five seconds or so.

"...You've made sure that my friend Fred Wickham can't get anywhere in life. He's suffered as much as anyone because of you!"

Fred Wickham. That insolent, arrogant, two-faced bastard. Did she really never see him for what he was? How was that possible?

Well, I thought, getting out a pen and some paper, that's one thing we can remedy, now isn't it?

To Elizabeth Bennet:

Do not be afraid to read this letter. I'm not trying to ask you again. Once was quite enough, thank you. However, there seems to be a rather grotesque misconception of yours in relation to my treatment and alleged abuse toward Fred Wickham. This is the real story, and please do not allow your bias to convince that I am lying. Every word of my story is true as I tell it.

My father's best friend, who also happened to be his steward (a kind of servant), was George Henry Wickham. Growing up, I played with Fred often and he was considered one of my best friends.

Yes, Fred Wickham is indeed Scottish as I am. It seems, however, that he has managed to completely lose his accent, which I must mask to prevent people from asking where I come from in Ireland. I am not Irish; I am Scottish.

When George Wickham died, Fred was twelve, and my father adopted him as a surrogate son. No matter how much I liked Fred, I was getting uneasy around him. At the age of thirteen I could see what my father could not: that Fred was out of control, and needed discipline or a firm lecture to straighten him out. Well, I was only thirteen. When I went off to school, Fred went with me as my roommate. In that room I witnessed what he really was.

By the age of fourteen he was a lush; by fifteen he was a "pimp" I think you call it here. By sixteen he had dated and seduced over twenty- three women. Most of these encounters happened in my room, and I was forced to go elsewhere to do my work. Two of these women were teachers; the rest students like us, but all were older.

At seventeen, apparently bored with what he deemed a "colossal waste of time and energy," he left school and went back to Pemberley to ingratiate himself on my father once more. I myself graduated from school, and then went home to find all of the proceedings and things that should have been my father's concern being taken care of by Fred.

When I say 'taken care of' I mean it in the loosest of terms. My father, bedridden with an illness that had not been even mentioned to me in the past two years, had left all the work of running the house and the area around it to Wickham, who abused his foster father's trust by throwing parties, spending money at exorbitant rates, ignoring the upkeep of the house, and abusing the servants, who are like family to me.

My sister at that time was away at school. Perhaps if she had been home at that time, she would have realized what he was at the beginning. Or maybe what happened would have been worse- I have no idea.
However, on my return from school, I took back my father's house and tried yet again to talk sense to Fred. I still believed that I could make him see that what he was doing was wrong by talking to him. I was foolish and naïve, I will admit it.

My father, still bedridden, was angry at my treatment of Fred, and refused to speak to me about it up to the day he died. Fred, who had never spared time to visit his surrogate father more than once a week while I was away, saw him nearly every day towards the end, something I envied him for greatly. Whenever I could I stopped to see him, and yet every time he looked at me, I could tell he was thinking about what Fred had told him about me. Apparently I was now the wild one, instead of Fred. I was the womanizer, the cheat, the fake. I was not the son my father had raised. My own father, with whom I had spent the better half of my childhood, with whom I had once been friends, now believed that I was the kind of person he had always despised: a wealthy man with no interest in bettering the world around him.

Wickham had expressed interest in becoming a minister, and attending Theology School. To do this, of course, he needed money, and my father and I were the only way he could get it. When my father died, he left Fred enough money to live through two years of Theology School without having to work. He left it in cash, something so unforgivably foolish that I still wonder why I didn't just give Wickham a life-time supply of beer and women and nice clothes. Dad had bought him that.

When Fred left, his wallet significantly heavier, he quite obviously intended to never come back. But he wagered wrong on how long his money would last him. What with gambling debts, police fines, the actual fact of needing food and a place to sleep, he ran out of the money in less than a year. He came back to Pemberley expecting some sympathy for his disheveled appearance and plea for help. If I had actually been there, he would have gotten none.

But I was not there, something for which I can never forgive myself.

But my sister, Georgiana, who was then fourteen, was. You know Wickham, and you know how charming he can be. It would be easier, he decided, to make her fall in love with him and marry her for her money than it would be to squeeze it out of me. He was right. Georgiana loves everyone and everything, and it was only too easy for Fred to convince her that he loved her back, despite their age difference.

It was only the last scraps of my dumb luck that let me come back in time. Fred, who had gotten a friend of his as minister to serve the wedding, was about to make his plans final when I arrived. Georgiana, not knowing that she had done anything wrong or self-endangering, told me everything about her plan. She expected me to be happy for her.

I don't need to tell you that I sent Wickham away with no money and no fourteen-year-old wife. Georgie stayed with me, learned how to run Pemberley while I was gone, and learned how to protect herself from Wickham if he turned up again.

I left her only after being begged by Charlie for months on end to come and keep him company. I am painfully aware every day of how long I've left her alone, and the only consolation I have is that I know that Fred is here in America, not back in Scotland.

This is a true and completely unembroidered account, and I hope you will take my word (as useless as that is to you) on that.

As to your other accusations about my splitting Charlie away from your sister, I cannot defend myself because they are true. But I know what I did was right. I never saw her look more than mildly interested in anything he ever had to say. She didn't love him.

Sincerely,

William Darcy

My eyes aching, I put the letter down. Even in my third time reading it, it made absolutely no sense.

Why the hell would he bother to tell me about his sister and Wickham? To 'save' me from him? To convince me that he was actually right about something?

But why would he bother? If he hadn't hated me before, he damn well hated me now, after... everything.

Why not just let me run into Fred's arms or whatever he thought I would do next? It would be too easy for him to do so.

Maybe he just had this weird "protecting people" thing. I mean, he hadn't protected Georgiana that well, and so he made it his business what Jen felt about Charlie. HE just didn't want her marrying him for money.

Asshole, I thought dispiritedly. He just projected his own fears onto the motives of other people. Jen was just serene, that was all. Emotional fuckwit.

But insulting him, even in my head, where everything sounded better than it actually did out in real life, just wasn't satisfying. He wasn't just Darcy anymore. No matter how much I disliked him, I couldn't HATE him.

He was human.

Dammit.

I was supposed to hate him. I had spent the better part of a year hating him. It had been one of my better pastimes.

I mean, chess club, total bust (why in God's name can you only move certain pieces certain places? I know it was the "rules of the game," as Dad tried to tell me, but why shouldn't pawns move the same distance as knights or queens? Why did it have to be ruled by a frigging feudal system? Checkers were better. At least in checkers, any player could become king, gol darnit). I don't even know what the SAC stood for, or why I was in the picture for their club, and frankly, I'm happier not knowing. The extra classes in school were so boring I had to prop my head up on (unsharpened) pencils to keep it from whacking into my desk and giving me a concussion. I had stopped playing the piano after Mom had pedaled me to every "high class" school and/or agent around like I was some piece of meat. It hadn't been something I'd wanted to do for a long time.

But hating Darcy...that was something that came naturally to me, like breathing, or vandalizing school property with doodles, or watching Looney Tunes. It had been so easy to do it when he had been Mr. Plank of Wood, or Mr. Stick Shoved Up Bum, or Mr. Spoiled Rich Snob Who Just So Happens To Have An Unfairly Cool Car. But now he wasn't a title at all, he was person.

Which didn't make my life any easier, or more enjoyable. It made it harder, mostly because I had been all warm and fuzzy in my cozy proverbial cloak of literal hate.

I tried to figure it out during dinner ("Elizabeth, you have not commented on the soup! I always thought that this soup is the very best. Of course I would have NOTHING BUT the best in my house, as Mrs. Sherman-Wood down the road was only so good to tell me. Mrs. De Bourgh, she said, you have NOTHING BUT the best here, and she was right".)

I tried to figure it out during Sit Around And Listen To Old Bat Speak To Herself Hour. ("Elizabeth Bennet, I daresay you are not concentrating on the conversation! Perhaps it is because my dear, dear nephews have left. Things aren't so interesting now, are they?")

Stupid cow. She made it sound like I wanted Darcy's money too. At least the proverbial fuzzy Cloak of Hate I had for Darcy had been layered with the slightly less warm and fuzzy Windbreaker of Hate I had for Catherine.

But the Darcys had left. I hadn't even gone down to say goodbye. I pretended I was asleep each of the six times Charlotte came to tell me they were there.

And now, thank GOD, I was leaving too.

You know how crappy it was at Netherfield with Pie-Face Emma and Sarah the Spaz hanging around. You know how glad I was to leave there.

This relief was ten times better. I had stayed there for longer than anyone should ever stay there. The place had this aura of doom, like the Gates of Hell, or that Department of Mysteries thingy in Harry Potter. If you want to feel like all of the happiness you've ever known is being ripped out of you in chunks, looked at, then thrown away, I urge you to try Rosings Park for a day.

Catherine works better than any friggin' dementor I know.

Not that I know any, really.

Just a figure of...

Never mind.

Catherine looked slightly miffed when I told her I was going. For someone who enjoyed criticizing and patronizing everything I did, she sure as hell was sorry to see me go. But I had fulfilled my promise and seen Charlotte, and that was enough.

We both knew I was never going back there again.

So I climbed into the car Mr. Young had left for my return trip (he'd left days before with Maria), looking back at the Party who had come to say goodbye.

Catherine de Bourgh, of course, had not deigned to come.

I said goodbye as fast as I could, which meant that sometimes I said like "Guh-bye" or "goo-Bye," or even, in my coolest moment ever, "Goob."

Then I climbed into the front seat (Feeling of POWER!!!!!) and drove off, not looking back.

When I left Netherfield, I had shouted with joy. Now, I could barely even manage a giggle. Too much had changed.

And the whole way home, the letter burned (figuratively) inside my pocket.

A/N: Hey guys. Few quick things: first, thanks to all of you who haven't dropped this story in disgust at my bad updating reflexes. I'm trying really hard now to be good, I swear! Second, in a moment of repeated stupidity, I changed Charlotte's father's last name to Lucas, the way it is in P&P. However, for those of you who are familiar with my Prologue (and you all are of course...), her name is actually Charlotte Young, making her dad Mr. Young. I changed it back in this chapter, and will changed it finally when I edit all the chapters at the end (sniff). For now, sorry for all the confusion if there was any. Have fun! (see Natty? I didn't beg them for reviews! Mleh)