Darcy entered his rooms, tugging off his tie and flinging it carelessly in the general direction of his dresser. The article of clothing fell far short and lay in a crumpled heap on the floor. And though he was typically the very soul of tidiness, Darcy cared so little that he gave it barely more than a glance.
With his jacket shrugged off, he didn't bother to disrobe further before falling backwards to lie half on his mattress with a sigh.
The night had been largely a success, he thought, especially in light of what his previous expectations had been. The creature he had imagined Jane's sister to be – a simpering, clingy and graceless girl with no more on her mind than his money – was only his imagining. His future wife, his Elizabeth has been there. And if Jane was her sister…
It had come slowly to him that perhaps it was unreasonable to expect that she would be wholly sanguine about his apparently firing her without notice or reason. But tonight had shown him that she must not hold it against him. She hadn't been surprised to see him. She had come along on this night, knowing she would be much in his company.
That was not something a woman bearing a grudge would do, or he missed his guess.
Smiling a crooked smile up at the ceiling of his room, Darcy kicked his shoes off before closing his eyes to recall his favorite moments from the night.
Seeing Elizabeth in Bingley's library, looking so fetching in that green dress.
Elizabeth lighting up with pleasure at the sight of his automobile.
Elizabeth pressed against him in the back of the automobile, her scent filling his nostrils and sending the most unfamiliar sensations coursing through him.
Elizabeth reacting to the play, laughing with obvious delight at some places and eyes shining with unshed tears in others. He had watched her more than he had watched the players on the stage and rather thought he had enjoyed his show as much as (if not more than) anyone in the audience enjoyed the spectacles on stage.
And, most of all, Elizabeth turning drowsy in the back of the automobile as they returned from the theatre to drop everyone off for the night, each at their respective houses. She had gone from animatedly talking about the play, to yawning enormous yawns that she couldn't quiet manage to hide, to sighing soft little sighs and eventually succumbing to the pull of sleep, her head drooping onto his shoulder.
"Shall I wake her?" Jane had asked, looking both bemused and concerned in the dim light provided by the streetlamps.
Darcy had affected casualness as he glanced down to where Elizabeth's head rested against him, as if he only just noticed and hadn't spent the past few minutes feeling electrified with sensations. "I wouldn't want to deprive her of her sleep," he had replied, trying to sound indifferent. "It doesn't bother me."
Jane had smiled across at him and Darcy was struck by how pretty she really was. But she was nothing to his Elizabeth.
"Is it normal for her to sleep so early?" He couldn't help but pry just a little. It was difficult, wanting to know everything about her, knowing that someday it would be his right to have the most intimate of knowledge about her, but constrained now by social graces and the way his tongue seemed to tie itself in hopeless knots when her eyes were on his.
"The weekends are always a bit difficult for her," Jane had said. "She works a late shift during the week but can't seem to teach herself to sleep in on her days off. I fear she didn't get more than four or five hours of sleep last night."
Darcy had found himself frowning over this and feeling a pang of guilt. If she were still working for him – if he had not dismissed her – she would be working during the daytime hours. But, no. This was a better sacrifice than that of her entire reputation when he married her. It bothered him that she should have to be the one to make it.
"What is it that she does now?" More prying. Another pang of guilt for not knowing.
Unexpectedly, it was Bingley who had fielded this question. "She sorts mail for Blue Line, Darce. Honestly, didn't the two of you talk about anything the whole evening?"
It galled Darcy, both that he hadn't been able to get this information out of her and that Bingley knew more of his future wife than he himself did. So it was with a bite in his voice when he replied, "She didn't wish to speak of anything related to our last meeting."
Bingley had been undeterred by his tone and had even leaned forward slightly as though in eager anticipation. "Oh yes. How do you two know each other anyway?"
He had felt the color rising through his cheeks, anger and shame intermingled. There was simply no easy way to explain any of it. Even Bingley did not know of his strange second Sight. Georgiana didn't know. No one did and no one could.
"She interviewed to be my secretary," Darcy gritted at last. And then, because it felt so dishonest to leave it there with the false implication that he had met her then and declined to hire her, he had unwillingly elaborated. "She was hired, in fact. But I asked Mrs. Reynolds to find her something else to do."
Bingley had expressed surprise but had not pressed for further details. Jane had not expressed any surprise whatsoever, but of course she would have known. That she had known and did not appear to hold it against him in any way was cause for more hope, he had realized. If Elizabeth had been outraged at her dismissal, would not Jane side with her out of sisterly affection?
Both too soon and not soon enough, the night was over and each of their party was home for the night. Like the besotted fool he undoubtedly was, Darcy could not begin to think of sleeping now, instead rummaging through his memories of the night in the same way a miser might rummage through his stacks of coin, happy to just have them.
That last memory tugged at him now, though. His Elizabeth was sorting mail for Blue Line? Working nights like some penniless nobody when she might have every advantage of his fortune? He had noticed her hands, of course, drawn as he was to drink in the smallest details of her appearance. They had seemed rougher than he recalled from their first meeting, the cuticles peeled away and broken in spots.
He might be able to resign himself to the temporary sacrifice of her working nights, but hard physical labor was something else altogether. He must figure out some way to change those circumstances for her.
For a brief, delirious minute, Darcy had a vision of himself on one knee before her, begging her hand in marriage and promising as long an engagement as she should like so they might both come to know each other better before they were wed. They would be happy together, he knew. He had Seen it. Surely, of all people, his future wife might be entrusted with his greatest secret?
But no. She deserved to be courted properly, his Elizabeth. It could not be for long now that he knew where she lived and had such a conveniently direct line towards more social events with her through Bingley's relationship with her sister.
Darcy yawned now, the day's length and the wild emotional upswing at last catching up with him. It was enough, he thought, that he had a plan for easing her life as much as he might in the coming weeks and months until he could wed her.
He undressed for bed, already lost in dreams of how grateful she would be once he had saved her from her labors at Blue Line. She was proud enough to have not accepted his offer of other employment sent via Mrs. Reynolds's good offices, so he would have to be careful in how he presented it. But that was something he would think on more later, when he wasn't tired and fuzzy with the happy visions that were even now presenting themselves to him as though to urge him along his path.
"Next time," he said in a murmur, falling into his soft bed without having bothered to dress in nightclothes, "next time I will have more to say to her."
Then he wrapped his arms around a spare pillow, fancying he could still smell the delicious scent of her, and he slept.
Darcy woke the next morning feeling as though he had been run over several times by his own automobile. His eyelids were like weights, dragging themselves closed on the few occasions he tried to pry them open long enough to look to the clock to see the time. His mouth was dry and felt foul besides, but he couldn't seem to make himself move even for water and cleaning his teeth.
He drifted in and out of consciousness, feeling a terrible urgency that he should be awake and doing… something. Something that would make him happy. Something to do with his wife. He dreamt in fitful bursts, always the same horrible scene of Elizabeth looking at him as from a very great height, her mouth curled in disdain as she told him she hated him and never wished to see him again.
Then he would wake, thrash fitfully, wish for water and succumb to the dream again.
Once, it was the bells that woke him, peeling sonorously in the distance. How many times had they rung before he had awoken? He counted seven peels, but he had been waking and sleeping for so long now, it must surely be later than that.
He dozed again.
Soon, it was his throat that began to wake him up at irregular intervals in that horrible dream. He almost welcomed the burning sensation there since it saved him from facing rejection yet again by his most beautiful and wonderful Elizabeth.
At length, what felt like days later, it was the presence of another person that woke him.
Darcy stared with dull eyes into the face of his housekeeper, who much have finally grown concerned enough about his absence to come and check on him. Her aged face seemed even more lined with wrinkles than normal.
"I'm so sorry, Master," she was babbling. "I thought as you might just be sleeping in, like, with the late night you had and all. I've sent someone for the doctor. Is there anything you need?"
Darcy watched her hands wring themselves in unconscious fear and then saw, in a rather detached manner, as one of his own hands drifted up to stop that circling, twisting motion. "Water," he croaked.
She made some reply but he was already drifting again.
Then there were strong hands helping him up and a glass being held to his lips. Water lapped at his closed mouth and then into it when he realized what was happening and performed the actions of sipping and swallowing reflexively.
Prying his eyes open again, Darcy was mildly startled to see it was Bingley holding him up. When had the other man arrived?
"Bingley," he said in his strangely hoarse voice. "What-?"
He couldn't finish the question, both because talking wearied him and the glass was still at his lips. The water was a blessed relief as it slid down his parched throat, slightly cooling the fires that raged there.
"We were to meet for lunch today," Bingley answered, his voice unnaturally tense. "When I showed up and you weren't already there, I knew something was wrong. Didn't think I would find you trying to die in your own bed."
"Not… dying," Darcy panted.
Bingley's blue eye seemed skeptical as it gazed down on him. "We'll see what the doctor has to say about that. Drink more water now. You're burning with fever."
Fever. The word broke through Darcy's clouded mind and brought with a surge of alarm. "I'm sick?"
"Very," Bingley confirmed grimly.
"'Lizbeth," Darcy croaked. "Jane." Darcy added the last on with as much emphasis as he could muster, knowing that only concern for his beloved angel would send Bingley away from what might be his own death bed to tend for Jane. If Jane was cared for, then so would Elizabeth be.
My wife, he thought. His eyes had closed sometime in the last few seconds and the darkness seemed intent on claiming him. A vast ocean of nothingness surged towards him and pulled him under, drowning him in depths of sightless and soundless existence.
When at last Darcy's head broke the surface of that ocean, all seemed calm around him. He still felt parched, but his eyes no longer felt weighted closed. They fluttered open upon his command, flinching only from the brightness of the light in his room.
As soon as he could keep them open long enough to do so, Darcy scanned his room with some confusion. Bingley had disappeared and the room seemed empty. A grey sort of light filtered in softly from the curtains at the east-facing window. It was not that bright, really, but his head throbbed in time to the pulse that hammered steadily through his veins.
He tried to push himself into a sitting position and groaned aloud when the effort proved to be more than he could handle.
As he subsided, Darcy heard faint stirrings from somewhere off to his left and rolled his head almost drunkenly to see what had made the noise. His eyes fell on a chair that wasn't typically pulled up to his bedside and the form that shifted sleepily within it soon proved to be Georgiana.
"Brother?" she asked, her voice pitched low. "Are you awake?"
"Georgie," he whispered in reply, voice not strong enough for more than that. "I-"
"Shh," she urged him, moving to stand next to his side. "You've been very sick. Let me get you some water."
She passed out of his line of vision then, but he heard her move across the floor and then heard the sound of water pouring into a glass. It was the most melodious sound he had ever heard in his life, he thought, dry tongue touching equally dry lips in anticipation.
It took some doing on both their parts, but she at last got him levered up into a sitting position and held the cup to his lips. Too exhausted from the effort of rising, Darcy couldn't even bring himself to be irritated at being treated like an invalid.
"More?" Georgiana asked him once he had drained the cup.
"Yes," he croaked, voice still raspy despite the liquid. "Please."
She settled him back against his headboard and then went to pour another glass. He could see her now, at a low desk that was serving as a sideboard. He was straining to remember whatever he could and the sudden thought that he had gone to bed naked had his eyes flying downward to ensure he was still decent. He wore nightclothes now, from what he could see of his chest, and had been covered with blankets as well.
"How long?" he asked in that scratchy voice, grimacing at both the sound and the feel of it.
"Two days," Georgiana answered briefly, hurrying back over to his side. "Mrs. Jenkins found you still in bed around ten thirty on Monday when she found that your breakfast hadn't been touched and none of the staff could account for having seen you."
"Bingley?" he asked next, between gulps of cool water.
"He came by around one in the afternoon and insisted on staying through most of the afternoon and evening with you." Georgiana had pulled a damp cloth from somewhere and folded it against his brow. It felt nice, seeming to add some clarity to his thoughts.
"He sent a message," she added. "The ladies are fine. I hope you know what that means."
Darcy started to nod and then thought better of it when his brains seemed inclined to slide out of his skull. "Yes," he acknowledged. "His Jane. Her sister. Was worried."
He couldn't seem to speak a complete sentence. But even through the fatigue and pain that wracked him still, he felt a sort of flying euphoria. Elizabeth was well. That was all that mattered.
AN: A short one but.. yay? I've been sick. Darcy is sick. Life is hectic. Blah. Blah. Blah. I'll try to get more up soon. Do y'all prefer Darcy or Elizabeth for POV?
PS: Please stop asking about time period. There isn't one. It's fictional, like flying pigs and whatnot. Steampunky London is the best I can tell you. 3 - Imposter