Chapter Text
William Darcy, M.D., meets an unimpressive Lizzie Bennet, at a large community hospital in an otherwise unimpressive town, on an unimpressive summer’s day.
He’s going to rue that day, but he doesn’t know that yet.
He’s assigned to work a short shift in the emergency department that morning. It involves all his usual favorite things about life in the ED: getting yelled at by the patient who’s high on meth and comes in on a monthly basis, another patient bitching about being kept waiting for too long, internal medicine getting upset about having to re-admit a frequent flier. Then one of his attendings reminds him that he’s a second-year now so he needs to take on more patients per shift.
Oh, and the meth user complains that he needs to work on his bedside manner.
Whatever. He can rush more patients through a shift to make the hospital more money and open them up to liability for providing substandard care, or he can listen to each patient tell a rambling story that doesn’t at all answer his questions, but he can’t do both.
The rotten cherry on top of this shit sundae of a morning is when he gets cornered by his program director and arm-twisted into attending an orientation luncheon to welcome the new interns. But how can he refuse when Dr. Gardiner tells him literally none of the other emergency med senior residents are free this afternoon?
It’s not like he has a life outside of work, or plans already made for his free afternoon or anything. Just another day in his government-mandated three years of indentured servitude. And apparently the job description now includes mingling with crowds of newbies fresh out of medical school who think they know everything and are ready to save lives just because they have “Doctor” in front of their name now, only to come back crying because they don’t know the correct dose of Tylenol and the nurse was mean to them.
He would know. He was one of them last year.
At least there’s one new intern he’s looking forward to seeing.
Bing Lee had matched this past spring into Meryton Community Medical Center’s emergency medicine residency, the same program where Darcy happens to have spent the past year of his life. Word from Caroline was that her brother’s med school girlfriend had finally ditched him for a richer guy after he’d graduated, so Darcy anticipates lots of evenings playing video games to console his best friend. Maybe he’ll take him to the local bars (plural because there’s a grand total of two of them in this entire miserable town), or reach out to Dan Hurst from internal medicine and Fitz Williams from orthopedic surgery to see if they want to get the old Cornell gang back together to hang out.
(As the lone male resident in his own emergency med residency class, it’s not that Darcy minds spending time with his classmates. They’re nice people. But they’re all happily married, and their idea of comforting a friend after a nasty breakup involves lots of attempts at matchmaking that are about as subtle as a neon sign. Plus, hang-outs with his classmates usually end up with Darcy silently standing off in the corner with their husbands, who aren’t in medicine and only want to talk about sports, or mortgages, or how hard it is to raise kids as a stay-at-home dad.)
And, selfishly for Darcy, having Bing around would be a nice change of pace from his own intern year, what with its long evenings spent either trying to numb his mind on the treadmill at the gym or poring over USMLE Step 3 study materials alone in his too-big apartment, while his phone remained obstinately silent.
He had been halfway through his final year of medical school when it happened.
Gigi had just finished her first semester at NYU and was spending winter break with Uncle Earl’s family up in Boston…or so he’d thought.
He’d actually been in the middle of a patient presentation when he’d gotten the call. His attending let it slide because fourth-year med students were constantly excusing themselves from their rotations to take calls from residency programs and schedule interviews.
Gigi was not in Boston. In fact, she’d flown out to California a week prior to go on a ski trip with…a friend. Darcy was a little mystified as to why she’d felt the need to conceal any of this from him, considering his baby sister had never been the type of teenager to lie or sneak around before.
She’d had an accident while skiing, she confessed. She was fine, really, except for a broken leg, so she had to be taken to Ramsgate General Hospital to get surgery. She just wanted to let him know because she was on his insurance and he would probably get a bill in the mail.
He’d booked the next available flight to California.
And then he’d arrived at her hospital room—dodging her nurse who’d tried to block him from entering even though he had the proper clearances—and discovered her with none other than George Wickham.
He hadn’t seen his former friend since their falling out in their sophomore year of college, but judging from the hospital scrubs, ID badge, and surgical cap he was wearing, it was obvious that Wickham was a resident at Ramsgate General. He was also lounging in the hospital bed with Gigi, with his arm slung around her in a way that was definitely neither friendly nor professionally appropriate as he’d smirked up at her brother.
His initial reaction had been one of disbelief.
Gigi had waved at him sheepishly. “Oh hey, you made it. Sorry, we wanted to break the news to you less suddenly, but I overslept—”
He’d lost it.
Gigi’s nurse had burst into the room after him and tried to rush him out the door, but she’d only managed to stop him from punching Wickham in the face.
“How fucking dare you touch my sister? What the fuck are you playing at?”
“Will, it’s okay!” Gigi had tried to get between them, but was hampered by the cast on her leg. “We’re in love!”
“And you! I absolutely forbid you from ever seeing him again! How could you fall for something so obvious? What were you thinking? Were you even thinking?”
“George and I have been long-distance dating for the past semester, and I flew out here to meet up with him. He loves me! Truly!”
Then Darcy heard his own voice go deadly calm as he’d turned to Wickham. “Was it not enough that my parents set up your trust fund? How much will it be this time?”
“Her entire inheritance would be a nice start.”
At that, the blood had drained from Gigi’s face. “George…?”
“Sorry, Peach. Student loans aren’t going to pay themselves, and your brother had it coming, if he didn’t think I’d try to get even. You have no idea how easy it was, Darce, to find her on Instagram, feed her a few lines, and talk her into flying out here in person. She was like a puppy dog, eating out of the palm of my hand, ready to do anything I asked. All you really have to do is be the first guy to pay attention to them and make them feel all grown-up and important. And even if it wasn’t about the money, the look on both your faces is worth it, after what you did to me in college.”
“I’ll go to the hospital admin. I’ll raise hell. You seduced a nineteen-year-old who is your patient.”
“Please, do you know how hard it is to replace a resident? They need me. It’s not like nineteen is illegal.”
Whatever Wickham’s face would look like punched in, Darcy never found out because they’d been interrupted by someone clearing their throat from the door. The commotion had drawn a large crowd in the hallway, and the orthopedics team was there to witness every last word.
George Wickham found out that dating a patient under his care was, in fact, very much prohibited, in the days to come as the ethics committee was consulted and the hospital opened an investigation. In the end, he had been fired, along with Carole Younge, the nurse who had apparently been helping him get Gigi alone.
After his sister was discharged, Darcy had taken her back to his apartment in New York City, deciding that it would be better for her recovery, physical and emotional, to be home with him rather than alone in her freshman dorm. Gigi, however, locked herself in his guest bedroom and refused to come out until, after several straight days of hearing her bawling her eyes out through the door, he could take it no more and got out the spare key.
That was when Gigi had shouted, with all her pent-up 19-year-old angst, that she’d wished the accident had taken him instead of their parents.
He could tell she regretted the words the instant they’d left her mouth, from the way she’d burst into tears again and let him wordlessly hold her while she cried and cried.
“You didn’t tell me what he’d become,” she’d sobbed. “How was I not supposed to fall for it, if I didn’t know what kind of person he was?”
She did stick around after winter break, attending lectures remotely while her leg was still in the cast. She gave painfully brief and perfunctory answers when he asked how college was going, attended physical therapy sessions like clockwork, and mostly kept out of his way, all the while unable to meet his eye.
Out of options, he’d called up Fitz Williams, his old friend and former upper-year mentor when Darcy himself had been in his first year of medical school. He had considered going to Bing Lee or Dan Hurst, but Bing was more the type to need advice than give it to others, and neither of them could keep a secret to save his life (Hurst especially, if he had alcohol in him and blabbed to his wife, who happened to be an old sorority sister of Caroline Lee’s). And there was no way Darcy was going to risk the story getting out to Bing’s sister, who would definitely spread it around their entire social circle. Fitz, who was no longer in New York, was a much safer choice.
By complete coincidence, Fitz had matched three years prior into the orthopedic surgery residency program at Meryton Community Medical Center, which happened to be the site of one of Darcy’s top choices among the emergency medicine programs he’d been considering. It was good to hear from him, and he was a not-small part of the reason why Darcy later ended up ranking MCMC as his top choice.
Fitz didn’t have any advice besides to let Gigi heal at her own pace, though. So Darcy had tried to be patient. He left his bedroom/office door open and made sure to remind Gigi as often as possible that what happened wasn’t her fault, that he was here to talk whenever she felt ready.
Once the cast came off, she went back to living in the NYU undergraduate dorms, from where she only answered his calls once a week to dutifully report that she was still alive.
He went on to match into the MCMC emergency medicine residency with no Gigi at his Match Day ceremony, graduate from medical school with no Gigi at his commencement ceremony, and move himself out to Meryton with nothing more than a “have a safe drive” text from his sister who was left behind to fend for herself in New York.
Bing, who was staying in the city for his final year of medical school at Cornell, had promised to look after her, of course. But Bing didn’t know the particulars of what went down in California, and he’d be traveling around the country for residency interviews for part of the year anyway.
And then, if things weren’t bad enough already, fucking George Wickham had turned up in Meryton a few months into Darcy’s intern year of residency, this time as an EMT. Darcy had a suspicion that the snake had sweet-talked some nurse or coordinator into giving him access to the ED doctors’ schedule. There was no other way to explain why so many of his shifts coincided with Wickham and his team bringing in patients that were a major pain in the ass. Some days, he really wondered whether they just patrolled the streets looking for intoxicated vagrants to bring in while he was working.
He’d considered contacting Wickham’s superiors to warn them about his less-than-savory past. But what good could come of it? The guy was just doing his job, and he could do a whole lot less damage now as an EMT than at his former position at Ramsgate. Besides, a George Wickham who is busy driving ambulances around Meryton is a George Wickham who doesn’t have time to go sniffing around and stirring up trouble in New York.
Then one day in the spring of his intern year, Darcy had come home after work to a text from Gigi, asking if he was free to talk and sending him into a doomsday-prophesizing tailspin—because why else would a post-Ramsgate Gigi voluntarily reach out to him, instead of waiting for him to facetime as usual on Friday night?
He’d called her immediately.
Nothing was wrong, she’d assured him, sounding more alive and Gigi-like than she had in months. She just missed him and was wondering how he was doing.
They managed to stay up past midnight just catching up. She was careful to steer clear of The Forbidden Topic, so he followed her lead. She wanted to hear all about residency, what it was like being a real doctor, whether he was making any friends at work, how their parents’ foundation was doing, whether he’d been reading anything non-medical just for fun lately.
And somehow, it was over a biography of Union general George Meade of Gettysburg fame, of all things, on the 9-year anniversary of his parents’ accident, of all days, that William Darcy started to reconnect with his sister nearly a year and a half after Ramsgate.
Back in the present day, as Darcy wraps up his work and closes his patient charts in preparation for going into the lions’ den intern orientation luncheon, he wonders if he should surprise Gigi with tickets to the Pemberley Public Museum’s new exhibit on their hometown’s role in the War of 1812, or just invite her to visit him in Meryton for part of her summer break.
Or maybe he should do both—it’s not that far. He has a guest bedroom in his Meryton apartment. They can spend the week in town while he’s working, and then drive back out to Pemberley for the weekend. He’ll just have to remember to purchase the tickets when he gets home today. Which is going to be a little later than he’d originally planned because apparently Dr. Gardiner absolutely needs him to mingle at the orientation picnic.
And speaking of which…
Bing Lee looks remarkably well for a guy who’d just gotten dumped by his “perfect angel” not two months ago. In fact, he’s practically vibrating with impatience as he waits for Darcy to finish his charting so they can go to the park.
The reason for his friend’s good mood becomes abundantly clear when they arrive at the picnic and Bing immediately makes a beeline for a leggy redhead who had apparently turned his head that very morning.
Her name is Jane Bennet, and she’s one of the new pediatrics interns, Darcy learns.
She seems nice, he supposes, even if she smiles too much. But who goes to mandatory fun time and comes out with a date?
And now Bing is pestering him to double-date with them.
“You can’t hide out in your apartment forever,” he says. “You need to get out and meet new people, and there are plenty of new interns here to get to know. And there’s always Caroline, if you don’t find anyone here who meets your standards,” he adds teasingly, knowing full well what Darcy thinks of Caroline.
Darcy’s scowl deepens. He wouldn’t put it past Bing to threaten setting him up on a date with his insipid, obsequious sister if he refuses to talk to anyone at this godforsaken picnic. How many times are they going to have to do this before Bing gets it through his thick skull that just because he’s found his perfect angel doesn’t mean that Darcy’s Ms. Right is going to fall out of the sky so they can double-date?
“You’ve been here, what? A whole year now?” Bing continues. “And still the only people you know are from EM.”
According to Bing, Hurst and Fitz don’t count because he already knew them from Cornell.
Well, excuse him if he spent the morning working and taking care of patients instead of gallivanting around shaking hands with Bing’s fellow newbies.
Oh great, now Bing is offering up Jane’s sister Lizzie as an alternative to Caroline.
Darcy gives her a once-over. She’s small, he notes. About half a head shorter than her sister, with darker auburn hair instead of Jane’s striking copper-red. Other than the red hair, there’s absolutely nothing noteworthy about her. But she’s standing alone under a tree on the sidelines of a cornhole match, and Bing seems to think that’s reason enough for Darcy to approach her.
They’re not twins, Bing tells him. Darcy could have guessed that by sight alone. Not that he cares. He just thought it was unusual that a pair of siblings managed to match at the same hospital in the same year. What are the odds of that?
Lizzie is a year younger than Jane, according to Bing, who apparently had the time to get everybody’s life story this morning. She’s a D.O., having gone to an osteopathic medical school straight out of college, while Jane took the more traditional gap year and then got into a normal M.D. school.
Oh, and she’s one of the new family medicine interns.
Great. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that family medicine is the least competitive specialty to get into, so their hospital’s FM program must be really desperate if they’re recruiting D.O. graduates now.
He can already picture how this is going to go. She won’t know what’s going on with anyone who comes into her office because she doesn’t know how to do anything beyond prescribing MiraLAX for constipation, so it’ll just be a pipeline of patients straight from the outpatient office to his emergency room. She’ll freak out when a patient has a glucose of over 1000 on their urine testing and send them to the ED for “uncontrolled diabetes” without ever considering that the abnormal labs might just be because the patient is taking an SGLT2 inhibitor. Or she’ll call an ambulance for every hypertensive patient with a systolic blood pressure over 160. Hey, I’m sending in one of my patients from the office. There’s absolutely nothing life-threatening going on with him; I just didn’t feel like doing my job on a Friday afternoon so can you do it for me?
Darcy is not planning to see any more of a D.O. from family medicine than he has to, Caroline or no Caroline. He has absolutely no intention of third-wheeling on Bing’s dates with his newest obsession, much less with her less attractive sister as consolation, and he tells Bing as much.
Unfortunately, Lizzie Bennet must have impeccable hearing. Because when Bing finally convinces him to at least do his duty and say hi, Lizzie looks at his (reluctantly) proffered hand and says, “I don’t think you’d appreciate catching all my family med D.O. cooties.”
He’s still feeling a little sore about that the next time he sees Lizzie, which happens to be a few days later.
The family medicine inpatient team has come downstairs to the ED to do an admission, and he guesses Lizzie was assigned to shadow them for the day, as part of her orientation week.
Her gaze flicks over to him very briefly, without a hint of recognition, and then she turns away completely and continues listening to whatever inconsequential teaching point her upper year resident is dwelling upon.
(He’s not checking out the new family medicine interns like some kind of creep. He just happened to be walking out of a patient room nearby when their team showed up and blocked the hallway. That’s all.)
She’s objectively not pretty. Not unattractive, per se, but there’s not one remarkable feature about her either. This at least he can feel justified about.
After a few weeks of casual dates and exchanging texts, Bing and Jane decide to go exclusive, and she invites him over to have “family dinner” with her and Lizzie at their apartment. Darcy is included in that invitation, because Jane Bennet has manners and isn’t just going to ignore him while he’s standing right there. So he gets dragged along, with Bing reminding him that Lizzie will be there as a third wheel, and he can make up for offending her at orientation by easing some of the awkwardness at dinner.
Lizzie is a surprisingly good conversationalist.
Jane is quieter, so Bing and Lizzie end up carrying most of the dinnertime conversation, and those two seem like they could have been friends for years instead of just a few weeks.
Lizzie has a way of putting people at ease and making them feel included in her conversations, even though only she and Bing are doing the talking. She’s funny and delightfully witty, and even Darcy has to admit (to himself) that dinner with the Bennets was actually pretty entertaining.
That still doesn’t mean he wants to repeat the experience, though.
The fourth time he sees Lizzie, it’s entirely by accident, as the family medicine residents just so happen to choose Carter’s as their after-work hangout while he’s there with his own emergency medicine co-residents.
She’s perched on a barstool, talking to one of the other female FM interns—the one he’d seen bringing her lemonade at the orientation picnic.
Maybe it’s because he’s already a few drinks in, but he’s a little mortified to notice that she’s seated directly beneath one of the few lamps over the bar area and it’s casting a sort of halo around her head, bringing out the reddish highlights in her hair. And then her friend says something, and Lizzie laughs, and Darcy thinks, huh. Her eyes are kind of pretty.
Next to him at their booth, Becca Reynolds seems a little confused that he’s trailed off mid-sentence, until she follows his line of sight and smiles knowingly.
Crap.
“You should go up and introduce yourself,” she says.
He just mumbles that she’s with her work group and he doesn’t want to intrude.
Becca lets it go. For now. But as they’re leaving, he notices her whispering with some of their other classmates, and he knows this isn’t over.
Caroline Lee drops by for a weekend visit to check out the Meryton area now that Bing is settled in. Naturally, not wanting his sister to be left alone for the evening at his apartment, Bing invites Caroline along to dinner with the Bennets. She readily agrees, probably intending to suss out Bing’s new girlfriend.
And that’s the fifth time Darcy sees Lizzie Bennet.
At dinner, Caroline asks a bunch of pointed and probing questions, each of which Lizzie deals with gracefully. The Bennets grew up here and went to Meryton University for undergrad, he learns. Jane took a gap year after college before getting into Meryton Med, while Lizzie went straight on to Mount Oakham College of Osteopathic Medicine. Lizzie has a bachelor’s degree in biology, and their dad is a college professor. Their parents are divorced, and their mother is some kind of bored housewife, minus the wife part. (Their mother also never finished middle school—this Jane reveals guilelessly before Lizzie, clearly aware of Caroline’s intentions, redirects the conversation.)
All this, Darcy files into a mental folder, along with the supposition that this means Lizzie is young for a doctor, probably only 25 or 26. He catches himself calculating their age difference (4-5 years) and trying to figure out if she’s appropriately older than half his age plus seven (she is), and then kicks himself for even going there.
(She’s probably the same age as Caroline, who has also been out of college for the past 4 years but took the first 2 years off to do some traveling and “charity work” and then spent the following 2 years trying and failing to get into medical school. The fact that their age gap is close enough to not be weird doesn’t mean he’s jumping to date her.)
Lizzie is also ridiculously smart, he discovers, when she asks Caroline what she does and the latter replies that she is applying to medical schools. Unable to help herself, Caroline adds, “It’s a very difficult task as I’m sure you would remember,” plainly implying that Lizzie had no choice but to settle for an osteopathic school. And then Lizzie somehow discerns from reading between the lines of Caroline’s jab that this is not her first year applying.
(Caroline is not a little bit bitter that Lizzie was able to see through her so easily, and she has no shortage of nasty things to say about her on the drive back to Bing’s after dinner.)
Darcy is not sure why he didn’t suspect it sooner, because of course Lizzie would have to be smart to get into medical school straight out of college. And of course she would have to be smart to be able to stand out as an applicant among a sea of other biology majors. At this point in the academic year, he’s also seen enough of her patients in the ED to have noticed a pattern: their medication lists are always up to date in the electronic health record, and the most recent office note always meticulously detailed and impeccably written.
While he’s pondering all this, Lizzie suggests diplomatically that it wouldn’t hurt Caroline’s chances to apply to a few safety schools, including D.O. schools, just in case—having correctly surmised within just a few lines of conversation that Caroline hasn’t been casting a wide enough net. But Caroline scoffs, “No, I want to be a real doctor. Like my brother and your sister.”
(Darcy privately thinks that if Caroline wants to limit herself to getting rejected year in and year out by the top-20 M.D. schools in the country, then maybe they should just let her. And everyone’s patients will be all the happier—and healthier—for it. Something about how insanity involves doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, or whatever to that effect.)
Lizzie suddenly turns to him. “Well, Dr. Darcy? Would you agree that I gave sound advice when I suggested that Caroline should apply to lower-tier schools as a safety net? Or is there anything else you want to add to the class?”
Up close her eyes are green, he notices, and even prettier than when viewed from across Carter’s. They positively sparkle, like she’s sharing an inside joke with him, and he thinks about that for way longer than he probably should.
He even inadvertently lets his opinion of her eyes slip later on the drive home, when Caroline is railing on about how Lizzie isn’t even attractive, and he wonders how Caroline would react to finding out he’s actually looking forward to more dinners at the Bennets’, just so he can get to see Lizzie.
And that’s when he realizes he might be in trouble.
He gets Lizzie’s number.
Okay, technically, Bing gets her number and then forwards it to Darcy.
“To help coordinate whose turn it is to pick up dinner after work,” he’d said.
But still. He has Lizzie Bennet’s number.
A few days after the dinner at the Bennets’ place with Caroline, Gigi texts him.
Who is Lizzie Bennet?
A family med resident at our hospital.
Bing is dating her sister.
Why?
Apparently, Caroline had promptly texted Gigi after that dinner. And since Caroline had had nothing nice to say about Lizzie, Gigi could tell she was jealous, which made her wildly curious.
He tries to surprise Gigi with the tickets to the War of 1812 exhibition in Pemberley (they have antique clothing on display from the same time period! Our family would have been living in Regency England back then! The estate would have belonged to the original owners who built it at the time!), but this only serves to fuel her curiosity about the topic he’s trying to distract from, and he discovers that there is something that piques his sister’s interest even more than history.
He doubts they offer a college major for it, though.
As Bing and Jane’s relationship grows more serious over the next few months, Darcy likes to think that Lizzie has really warmed up to him. It’s probably due to the frequency with which they are thrown into each other’s company and then left to entertain themselves while the lovestruck couple make eyes at one another.
He shouldn’t fault Bing and Jane. At least they’re not all over each other, which he and his dinner appreciate. But Jane is just so boring. She smiles all the time and seems to not have any preferences of her own, just going along with whatever Bing says. It’s like the two of them have made an Olympic sport out of trying to one-up their partner in being an agreeable doormat.
At any rate, they do seem happy together. But Darcy would prefer a girlfriend who is more forward than Jane and isn’t afraid to show she likes him or know her own mind.
Her sister, for instance, has no qualms about drawing him into conversation, or openly disagreeing with him. He learns that Lizzie specifically sets aside time every week to go to the hospital library to read an UpToDate or DynaMed article on some disease or condition that she encounters in her day-to-day work, in order to maintain and improve her knowledge base.
More than once, she’s corrected him on some finer point by citing the research, or even questioning the quality of the studies that he cites, and he’s gone home to look it up and realized she was right. He finds himself wondering if Lizzie has some kind of eidetic memory, because sometimes he’ll ask her a question and see her eyes go slightly unfocused as if she is studying the textbook in her memory, scanning the page for the location of the exact line of text that might provide them with the answer.
And their conversations are not just limited to medicine either. Lizzie turns out to be very well-versed in classic literature and debates him over interpretations of the works of Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Christie, and Tolstoy. Darcy’s own experience with literature extends only as far as what was assigned reading in high school English class, where he was endlessly frustrated by the lack of a one straight answer (why were his teachers so fixated on the symbolism behind the scarlet A? why did they insist on asking him why he thought the whale was white?), before he abandoned all attempts at literary analysis in favor of all his STEM classes in college. The only exception was two writing classes to fulfill the pre-med English requirements, and a handful of history classes he took for the sheer enjoyment of it. Lizzie isn’t much into history, but she does know a decent amount of obscure trivia (explained with “I paid attention in high school,” accompanied by a shrug). She actually responded, “Which one, the February or the Bolshevik?” when he tried to trip her by asking for her opinion of the Russian revolution of 1917, and that topic alone was enough to sustain their nerding out for two evenings.
She’s passionate and eloquent and so, so intelligent, without being condescending about it or showing off. He can’t even find it in himself to be offended while being sweetly lambasted by a girl that pretty, especially when she’s voicing opinions that clearly aren’t her own, just to get a rise out of him. And when he’s stupidly tongue-tied around her, she teases him for not going into radiology. Which very much does not help his inarticulateness, to see her smiling up at him, her green eyes flashing in challenge, as if daring him to argue with her.
Some nights, he gets home after dinner and has to lie down on the couch for a while, just to get the image of those eyes—gleaming in triumph as she’s about to best him in yet another spirited discussion—and that playful smile out of his mind.
He wonders what it would feel like to press his mouth to that smile.
He wonders what it would be like to have her there on the couch with him, his much larger body curled protectively around hers and their fingers intertwined.
He imagines the teasing expression in her eyes transforming into something softer for him, imagines the two of them lying tangled together in his bed on lazy Saturday mornings, imagines himself cooking breakfast for them while she presses an absentminded kiss to his lips in passing as she makes herself a second cup of coffee.
He wonders how she’s still single—at least, he doesn’t think she’s seeing anyone. Given how often they have these after-work dinners together, he has yet to attend one where Lizzie is absent and having dinner with someone else. There hasn’t been any mention of exes, either. Maybe she’s always been too busy with school for a boyfriend. Or maybe she didn’t have a whole lot of options, growing up in a small town like Meryton, where nobody could keep up with her intellectually.
He bets he could, though.
He really thinks he would be in danger if it weren’t for her family.
And that’s the sobering point.
Jane is all right, nice and polite, if a little uninteresting. But apparently their mother is someone that Lizzie does not, under any circumstances, want to be associated with. The woman had called Lizzie’s phone once during dinner, and Darcy had glimpsed “LIZZIE DO NOT ANSWER THIS NUMBER” flash up on her screen as the caller ID. Lizzie had scowled and brushed the call off as “nobody important,” and Darcy had briefly wondered if it was some kind of stalker ex, especially when the person called again repeatedly. But then Jane’s phone went off a few minutes later and identified the caller as “Mom.”
He learns that they have a third sister, the baby of the family, who is about Gigi’s age and also in her junior year of college. But this sister still hasn’t figured her life out and has been changing her major every semester, just like she “plays fast and loose with men” (Lizzie wrinkles her nose when she says this, and he suddenly has to suppress the urge to kiss her there).
Their father is apparently some kind of misanthropic professor at Meryton U who only got tenure about 10 years ago and hates socializing or getting involved in his daughters’ lives. Darcy suspects that the fact that all three Bennet daughters attended the same university where the father teaches means that they probably didn’t have to pay tuition to go there, and that means the Bennets must be the type of family that needs to worry about saving money.
The other issue is Lizzie’s degree and specialty. With how smart she is, he wonders if she’d had a bad day when she took the MCAT, for her to end up going to a D.O. school, which then put her on track to waste her talents working in family medicine for lack of better prospects. Or maybe she went into FM because of the potential for student loan forgiveness after residency.
Darcy is an emergency medicine resident, with an M.D. from fricking Weill Cornell. His parents both got their M.D.s from Cornell. And while, yes, his father went into internal medicine, he did go on to do a fellowship in cardiology, while his mother was an anesthesiologist who actually commanded the respect of the surgeons she’d worked with. His parents had never mentioned to him exactly what kind of woman he should look for in a life partner, but Darcy suspects a D.O. from a middle-class divorced family who is training in one of the least competitive and worst-paid specialties, whose mother doesn’t even have a high school diploma, and whose colleagues routinely punt patients to the ED for “rule out appendicitis” when the pain is on the wrong side of the abdomen, doesn’t exactly fit the bill.
Still, when Lizzie is being particularly opinionated at dinner, he can’t entirely stop his mind from wandering as he imagines all the ways her mouth would be better occupied.
Bing decides to host a party at his apartment. He invites all the residents from emergency medicine, family medicine, and pediatrics. And their significant others.
As far as house parties go, it’s actually pretty tame compared to, say, a college rager. (They’re all feeling their age a little when the party concludes at 10 p.m. and guests actually start to leave because they have sleep schedules and commitments waiting for them at home.)
Darcy spends most of the evening against the wall and regretting accepting the invitation because parties are not his scene. But accept it he had, and he’d even volunteered to show up early to set up the speakers, and now he’s forced to listen to early 2010s pop music (seriously? Carly Rae Jepsen in 2020? Who was in charge of the playlist?) while trapped in a crowd where he doesn’t know two-thirds of the attendees present. He wouldn’t mind so much if he had someone to people-watch and make snarky commentary with, but Lizzie spends most of the night hanging around with Charlotte Lu and, occasionally, with Jane when Bing feels the need to at least make the rounds with his guests.
In fact, the only time he gets to talk to Lizzie, he doesn’t think she even hears his offer to dance over the pounding music, because she just gets out her phone and starts texting someone. Oh well.
At least he got to see Lizzie in a low-cut dress—gray with an orange and yellow print—with a diamond-shaped cutout exposing the skin of her lower back, and images of her in the dress (and potentially out of it) supply his fantasies for a good number of months thereafter.
Lizzie is back to working the family medicine inpatient service. She isn’t exactly happy about that, but Darcy only knows this because Lizzie is never happy when she has to go down to the ED to do an admission.
He gets it. The hours on inpatient are long, and the work is tedious. And congestive heart failure patients are kind of their own worst enemy when it comes to prioritizing being able to breathe over eating whatever salty foods they want and not having to constantly go to the bathroom. He tries to seek Lizzie out after she goes in to see the patients, though, if only to make her life easier by having a treatment plan in place before she has to discuss the admission with her attending. Plus, it’s an excuse to talk to her, as long as he keeps things professional by only talking about work-related things while they’re both at work.
Caroline Lee is back in town again, this time to interview at Meryton U, having apparently decided to take Lizzie’s advice to apply to some “lesser” med schools after all—but no osteopathic schools, because she still has standards.
“How magnanimous of you,” Lizzie deadpans, not looking up from her lo mein.
Darcy silently agrees. Sure, Meryton University isn’t as prestigious as Cornell or UPenn, but it’s still a solid, accredited medical school, and there was no need to diss the Bennets like that. He hopes Caroline has more sense than to say that at her interview tomorrow.
Bing manages to take his eyes off his girlfriend long enough to say something idiotic about how Caroline will be irresistible to Ivy League schools, now that she has so many extracurriculars on her résumé. Darcy can’t help but point out that literally every other applicant will be listing the same “accomplishments.” With her absolutely charming personality working against her, the Lees really ought to temper their expectations. Not everyone can make friends instantly and impress a Cornell admissions committee like Bing did.
That doesn’t stop Caroline from taking more shots at Lizzie, though. She blathers on about how a decent medical school applicant needs to be accomplished in music, art, sports, and foreign languages, each time looking toward Darcy as if asking him to back her up.
He doubts any of this is true, and suspects this is just more of Caroline’s humble-bragging. He drily points out that a decent MCAT score, GPA, and letters of recommendation shouldn’t be discounted. Nor should a personal statement that demonstrates one’s passion for learning and willingness to work hard, he adds, thinking of Lizzie’s weekly self-imposed study time and her impeccable patient charts.
Caroline looks ready to go on the attack again, but thankfully, Jane changes the subject then, and the matter is dropped for the moment.
Unfortunately, the next day, after her interview, Caroline is quick to recount all of it as if the roles are reversed, as if Lizzie isn’t a literal doctor and needs Miss Lee’s advice on how to get into medical school.
When Caroline says something about biology being such an overrepresented undergraduate major among pre-meds, Darcy feels compelled to remind her that Lizzie made it into med school as a biology major. But Lizzie corrects him that she was actually a biology and English double-major, so he tucks that information safely into the ever-growing “Lizzie” folder in his mind.
Caroline just scoffs again and says, “Well, I’m sure you would never let Gigi major in something as useless as biology, Will.”
Considering that Gigi is a history major, he can’t argue with that. Except maybe the part where she implied he should forbid Gigi from majoring in biology. Because Gigi can major in whatever she likes. It’s not like she needs his permission.
He recounts this conversation to Gigi later over Facetime.
His sister looks a little troubled when he brings up the topic of humanities-sciences double-majoring. He has a feeling they’re going to be having a larger conversation about her career plans in the not-so-distant future, especially since the fall of her junior year would be the ideal time to be studying for the MCAT if she’s planning to attend med school straight out of college.
But Gigi just asks if he’s worked up the nerve to ask Lizzie out yet.
His answer hasn’t changed since the last time she asked him.
(He’s not nervous. There are just…other considerations besides feelings that need to be taken into account.)
The weekend after Caroline’s interview at Meryton U, they go to a wine tasting.
Jane and Bing are driving there together to get some couple time, and Darcy, Caroline, and Lizzie had been planning to follow in Caroline’s car.
Except they didn’t realize Caroline had brought her coupe, and she’d conveniently forgotten to mention that little detail until after Bing and Jane had driven off.
“Oh no, there’s no room for all three of us. Sorry Lizzie, you’ll just have to drive yourself.”
Darcy tries to argue that they should just take his car, which does have room for all three of them. Really, what was Caroline thinking, making Lizzie have to get there by herself when this whole outing was Caroline’s idea in the first place?
But Lizzie says, “Oh it’s fine, I’ll just stay behind. Caroline’s car is so nice, it would be a wasted opportunity not to take it. Besides, I’m way underdressed compared to the rest of you, and I’d stick out like a sore thumb in pictures—wouldn’t want to ruin the picturesque by getting in the way of you two.”
“Are you sure?” he frowns. “But you should be taking advantage of your one day off on inpatient. Bing and Jane—”
“—will have to be content with just a third and fourth wheel and no fifth. Have fun!”
And then Lizzie laughs and ducks back inside her building, and he has no choice but to get in the passenger seat and endure an hour of being trapped in a coupe with a triumphant Caroline Lee. And a whole day away from Lizzie.
He doesn’t even like vineyards.
A couple weeks later, he accidentally runs into Lizzie at Carter’s again.
This time, it’s because interview season is in full swing now that it’s November, and he got voluntold to host one of his residency program’s pre-interview dinners for some applicants.
Lizzie and her co-resident Charlotte, apparently, are performing the same service for the family med residency. Their party are already seated at one of the upstairs tables, and the staff member leads Darcy and his group right past them on the way to their own table.
It’s been a busy few weeks, and he hasn’t had a chance to see Lizzie at work, which means that she’s probably finally finished her inpatient rotation.
He hasn’t had a chance to see her at dinner after work either, since Jane and Bing are currently on rotations where their schedules clash. In fact, he doesn’t think he’s seen either of the Bennet sisters for about a week and a half. At that last dinner, Lizzie had brought up George Wickham’s name and hinted that he had been spreading his tale of woe around Meryton. Darcy hadn’t wanted to get into details with Bing and Jane in company, and none of it was really Lizzie’s business anyway, so he’d simply replied that George Wickham was better at making friends than keeping them. He wasn’t sure if Lizzie had taken the hint, but at least he hasn’t seen much of Wickham in the ED since then.
His party sits down at their table, and Becca Reynolds immediately proposes an ice breaker to get their applicants talking.
Across the room, Lizzie seems to be doing the same thing with her group. He watches as she coaxes a giggle from one of the shyer candidates seated to her left. She’s cut her hair, he notes. It had grown to halfway down her back when he’d last seen her, and now it’s definitely two or three inches shorter. He watches with fascination as the auburn waterfall cascades over her shoulder as she leans forward to better hear what her conversation partner is saying over the general din of the arcade and bar downstairs.
Oops, one of the women at the family medicine table has just turned around and looked directly at him, and now her companions are also looking on with open curiosity. Lizzie, ever the professional, doesn’t join them. Instead, she seems to be trying to get her table back on track.
Darcy quickly ducks down and studies his menu when Charlotte Lu turns around and catches his gaze, too.
Becca gives him a sidelong glance while their own tablemates are distracted. “Something on your mind? Or someone, perhaps?”
“Just a momentary lapse in attention,” he deflects.
“She’s cute. Lizzie from family med, right?”
He nearly spits out his water. “You know her?”
Becca laughs. “Only from what I’ve heard of her being brought up in conversation. I mean, it’s kind of hard not to notice when you asked to borrow my copy of Anna Karenina two days after you mentioned that Lizzie reads Tolstoy.”
It’s not lost on Darcy that this is the second time Becca has caught him staring at Lizzie Bennet while they’re at Carter’s. It’s almost as alarming as the fact that he’s apparently slipped Lizzie’s name into conversation so often that his co-residents have noticed.
“I tell you what,” Becca continues. “If you contribute your share of the conversation tonight, so that our applicants can actually tell there are two residents hosting this dinner, then I’ll keep what I saw to myself.”
He groans.
If he’s not careful, the entirety of the EM and FM residency programs will suspect something before long.
He’s working a night shift from hell when Bing picks up a patient named Fran Bennet.
So this is the infamous mother.
The third Bennet sister, Lydia, also came with her. She looks like she’s dressed to go to the club, though Darcy can’t really judge her for that since this would be the time of night for that, and people can’t exactly help when a medical emergency pops up. But he can judge her for openly flirting with a group of EMTs while her mother is being worked up for chest pain.
Wickham himself was around earlier in the evening, but Darcy hasn’t spotted him in a good couple of hours. Knowing his luck, that probably means he’s going to bring in another homeless schizophrenic with chest pain in the next few hours.
Speaking of which, he’s starting to doubt Fran Bennet’s complaints of chest pain, considering all she wants to do is gush over Bing.
Darcy is shocked and disgusted when the woman immediately starts interrogating Bing about how much his parents make, and even more appalled when she comments that Jane should just sleep with him and then she’d be “set for life.” There were also some unguarded remarks about how Jane’s and Bing’s children might turn out.
“You’d have such marvelous babies! I hope they get Jane’s eyes, though. No offense to your type of people, but hers are prettier. But your hair—red hair is such a curse and all my daughters have it. Would you happen to have any rich doctah friends who would be willin’ to date my other two?”
At this point, to her credit, Lydia cuts in and sarcastically reminds the patient she’s supposed to be describing her life-threatening chest pain to Dr. Lee, and if she’s quite finished, she would like to go home.
Darcy really should be minding his own business. Apparently tonight is the night that everybody and their grandmother has decided to show up in the waiting room. He has a kid in one room with an alarmingly high lead level that he needs to figure out what to do with, a guy in another room who was too embarrassed to admit to the ED staff what his rectal foreign body was (it was a lightbulb, the idiot got a fucking lightbulb stuck up his ass), and a half dozen other patients still waiting to be seen for “dizziness” and “abdominal pain.” And EMS just called ahead about multiple gunshot wound victims that are en route, and he’s probably going to be needed in the trauma bay when they get here. Which means Lizzie, who’s working nights this week for family med, really needs to hurry up and get this lead poisoning kid moved upstairs so her room can be cleaned and opened up. And then hopefully they can clear most of the waiting room before they all die of old age.
Lizzie, however, calls him and gives him pushback when he texts her to try to get the kid admitted faster. Apparently she’s questioning why a kid with a blood lead level of 45 even needs treatment and questioning the validity of the test results. Which is just typical for a family doctor—why go into medicine at all if you don’t want to do the work?
He doesn’t have time for this. The patient next door is crashing again and needs a central line, and he just got a message from the on-call surgical resident who wasn’t thrilled about having to deal with the rectal lightbulb guy and had some choice words for Darcy for consulting them for something so asinine (pun probably unintended), and now the cardiologist is also upset with him for calling about a patient having an active STEMI because he just got home and doesn’t want to drive back to the hospital when the on-call fellow can deal with it…and Bing just got dragged away again to deal with Fran Bennet.
To top off this shitty night, Lizzie snaps at him to check Lillian Netherfield’s labs and imaging like the pediatrics consult note suggested and only call her if the kid actually has a medical reason to come in. And then she hangs up on him!
When Dr. Gardiner asks what’s taking so long with the lead kid, Darcy tells him the truth.
The repeat lead level comes back lower. The kid ends up going home.
So does Fran Bennet, but not before subjecting the ED staff to another hour of her unique brand of absolutely unhinged absurdity.
The Fran incident leaves Darcy a little rattled, and as he drives home after his shift finally ends, he finds himself comparing Jane to some of Bing’s gold-digging exes from medical school.
She is a kind person, he allows. So she herself probably isn’t after Bing for his family’s money.
But aside from smiling at Bing (and literally everybody else, including the delivery guy) and always greeting him with “Hi, it’s so good to see you” (like she does with literally everybody else, including the delivery guy), she doesn’t really act like his girlfriend. Darcy has never seen the two of them holding hands or even kissing on the cheek, which is about as tame as PDA gets, even when it’s just the four of them sitting down to a private family dinner.
Does Jane even like Bing, or is she just smiling and nodding along and playing a part? It’s not lost on Darcy that Jane never seems to disagree with anything Bing says. It’s almost like Caroline Lee’s habit of bending over backwards to contradict herself the minute Darcy voices his opinion. And it’s not exactly a secret that Caroline is after him for his family’s money and prestige.
It’s frankly rather alarming how quickly Bing fell for Jane—even by Bing’s standards. Darcy remembers how Bing had added Jane’s number to his contacts with a plethora of heart emojis, and how he’d changed his phone lock screen background to a picture of her within just two weeks of being acquainted. And last week, he’d actually caught the guy gazing dreamily through the windows of a jewelry store and then the bridal shop next door to it, despite barely dating Jane for four months. It was all moving so fast. Granted, Bing has never dated anyone so compatible with him as Jane, but Darcy has to wonder if their compatibility is too good to be true.
And that mother… Is she pressuring her daughter to play the perfect girlfriend and sleep with Bing, in the hopes of trapping him into marriage with an unintended pregnancy? Because it sounded like she doesn’t even want Jane to work as a doctor if she can get away with just marrying a rich one, and Bing certainly seemed to meet all her requirements for a son-in-law: wealthy parents, future six-figure salary, hair that isn’t red.
The fact that Jane has an M.D. does not signify—it’s from a vastly inferior medical school to Cornell, and she’s training in a specialty that’s vastly underpaid compared to emergency medicine, and the Bennet family is of a vastly different financial background to begin with.
Caroline texts him a few days later.
Bing says he finally met the middle-school dropout mom. Is she as awful as I expected?
Darcy decides to tell her exactly what he thinks.
A day after that, Bing comes to him for advice.
Jane will be disappointed, Darcy supposes after he and Bing conclude their discussion. And her mother even more so. But at least Bing will be safe.
Maybe it’s better to cut off all contact with the Bennets. Lizzie doesn’t seem at all close with their mother, and she probably isn’t the type to get pressured into seducing men she doesn’t like. But pursuing her now would also make Darcy look like the biggest hypocrite to Bing. And an Ivy-educated doctor who is the son of Ivy-educated doctors does not lower himself to date anyone from a family like hers, especially now that he has firsthand knowledge of what kind of mother and younger sister she’s saddled with.
So what if she’s a pretty enough girl who happens to be smart? Apparently he’s attracted to intelligence. There are plenty of doctors out there from more acceptable families and who don’t work in primary care.
It’s just a crush.
It’s just a physical attraction.
He’ll get over it sooner or later.
Several weeks later, he runs into Jane in the ED.
She’s here to start her EM rotation, she says by way of explanation. And she’s wondering if he’s heard from Bing lately.
She asks this nonchalantly, Darcy thinks. As if asking after a casual mutual acquaintance one hasn’t seen or thought of in years.
He lamely offers that Bing has been too busy with work to even keep in touch with his friends. That much is true, at least. He hasn’t heard much from Bing since the latter decided to break things off with Jane. Caroline had spent a weekend with her brother shortly after the breakup, and she’d reported back to Darcy that Jane had dropped by once with snickerdoodles (how gauche) while they were out, but she’s kept her distance ever since. And even Caroline has been texting Darcy multiple times a week to ask after Bing because he hasn’t responded to any of her messages since she’d left town after that.
And he has been busy with work. Last Darcy heard, the ICU attendings were pushing to have Bing repeat his rotation given his disappointing performance during his week there, and there’s talk among the emergency medicine faculty that he might not graduate on time with his class if he continues to get similar reviews from the other rotations he’s been on. Already, his co-residents are questioning his readiness to be a senior resident next year. Word among the second- and third-year EM residents is that Bing has already been called into Dr. Gardiner’s office several times in the past month for making careless mistakes like vastly overdosing medications and missing really obvious diagnoses. There are even concerns from Darcy’s fellow seniors about the soundness of Bing’s medical decision-making because he tends to get decision paralysis, even resorting to asking the other interns for their opinions on his own patients, instead of just committing to a working diagnosis and a treatment plan. It wouldn’t be such a big deal at the beginning of the academic year, since all new interns experience some degree of uncertainty as newbies, but Bing has no excuse now that he’s been a doctor for nearly half a year.
(No excuse, maybe, except recently breaking up with his girlfriend who turned out not to be who he thought she was.)
Bing is upstairs delivering babies on the Labor & Delivery unit this week, so there’s little risk of him getting distracted from his current priority of not getting fired from residency on the off-chance that he runs into his ex. But just to be safe, Darcy finds the attending that Jane is supposed to be working with and persuades them to move her to the pediatric area, in the farthest corner of the ED.
(Because she’s a pediatrics resident, of course. The EM experience would be more meaningful for her if she sees the pediatric cases.)
L&D is going okay, Bing says shrugging when they finally get together to play video games over the weekend. They’ve let him catch a few babies so far, and the babies are cute, and nothing disastrous has happened, but he’s just going to hope and pray that whenever he gets a real job, the hospital he ends up working at will have an obstetrics team on hand so that he never has to personally deliver a baby in the ED.
When Bing’s character gets killed for the third time, Darcy glances over and finds his friend staring at his phone lock screen.
“She used to text me every day,” Bing confesses. “She kept texting even though I didn’t respond. But I haven’t heard from her all week.”
“You mean…you just ghosted her? You never sat her down and told her you were breaking up with her?” Darcy frantically tries to recall his conversation with Jane when he ran into her in the ED earlier in the week. Did she seem to be under the impression that they were still together, that Bing was just too busy to keep in touch? She certainly didn’t seem sad, or heartbroken, or anywhere near as affected as Bing has been.
Bing blinks. “Caro thought it would be best if I didn’t give her a chance…uh…to draw me back in. We thought she would get the hint when I stopped texting or calling her.”
“Seriously? You didn’t even so much as send a breakup text?”
“Was I supposed to? I thought, since she didn’t actually care for me that way, that we’d just stop talking and go our separate ways. I didn’t think she’d keep trying to get in touch for weeks afterwards. And I didn’t want to embarrass myself by letting myself get pulled back in.” He sighs. “Not that it matters anymore.”
“So she’s finally gotten the message? How is that a problem? I thought that was what you wanted, if you were going to ignore her for a month.”
Bing shrugs miserably.
Darcy happens across Jane again in the ED the next week. She smiles brightly in greeting but is too busy to stop and chitchat. But her overall demeanor suggests that she’s neither sad about the breakup nor angry about losing her ticket to rich trophy-wifehood.
Bing continues to mope on Labor & Delivery.
Darcy decides it’s best not to mention to him that Jane has asked after him. He’s doing them both a favor, he insists to himself. Bing is struggling academically and needs to focus on work. He can’t afford any distractions, and he can’t go scrutinizing every scrap of nothing for nonexistent signs that Jane Bennet might actually love him. Jane is a decent person whose only crime was not being strong enough to stand up to her pushy mother who is determined to have a rich son-in-law, and she doesn’t deserve to be forced back into a relationship she didn’t want.
Fitz Williams suggests going out for drinks, so they take Bing to Chamberlayne’s, the other bar in town, since Darcy figures it’s farther away from work and the Bennet sisters don’t tend to frequent it as much as Carter’s.
Time and distance will dull the pain, Darcy reassures Bing. The feelings will lessen once he transfers his affections to his next “angel,” Fitz agrees, slinging his arm around Bing and preparing to play wingman as he marches their little trio over to a crowd of young women gathered around the pool table.
Bing doesn’t even bother making conversation with any of the women, and he completely turns away when one of them tells him she’s a junior at Meryton U and her group is there to celebrate her 21st birthday.
Darcy isn’t interested in any of them either. If they’re all undergrads at Meryton U, then they’re Gigi’s age and way too young for him.
Not that any of them try to flirt with him. Apparently no one here has Lizzie Bennet’s level of courage and self-confidence. And it’s not like he’s looking for a casual hookup just to scratch his Lizzie itch. He wouldn’t do that to her. It would feel too much like cheating on her.
He briefly considers getting on a dating app, but he doesn’t particularly want the likes of Caroline Lee going after him just because they see that he went to Cornell and is a doctor, or because they google him and discover how much the Darcy family is worth. Plus, that would be a horrible option for Bing, too. Bing is too open and trusting, and Darcy and Caroline would have even more work to do to protect him if he put all his information on a dating profile for all the gold-diggers to see.
Plus, Darcy highly doubts he’s going to find his soulmate on a dating app where people make snap judgments on someone’s physical attractiveness in the split second it takes to look at a curated profile picture. He’s not going to make a quality connection with someone through weeks of drawn-out text conversations where what you say matters less than how quickly (or not) you respond, or via stilted small talk over dinner with a near-stranger who’s on her best behavior. He doesn’t care if the dating app thinks they’re a match just because they both used to swim and play cello and happen to live in the same geographical area. No, his ideal setting for falling in love involves the company of friends in a comfortable apartment, over casual take-out dinners and meaningful conversation and spirited debates with a partner who doesn’t feel pressured to put her best foot forward…
He spends Christmas in Pemberley with Gigi. The Lee siblings were supposed to stay with them at the Darcy estate for the week, too, but their parents decided last-minute to take the family on a Caribbean cruise for their 30th anniversary instead. He doesn’t entirely mind. Bing would enjoy the change of scenery and maybe the distraction of a cruise ship fling. And it’s not exactly a loss to Darcy to be spared from Caroline’s constant hints and spiteful digs about whether he’s seen any girls with “pretty eyes” lately, in exchange for Gigi’s company.
Unfortunately, his sister seems to only want to talk about Lizzie Bennet, too.
“You seem awfully interested in someone you’ve never even met,” he chides her gently.
She sips her hot chocolate and sticks out her tongue at him. “I would get to meet her if you would just get a move on and ask her out,” she retorts. “You could even invite Bing and Jane and Lizzie to the estate for a weekend, and I could fly into Pemberley from New York.”
“Maybe,” he lies. When pigs fly. “But they might be too busy. It’s hard to get a free weekend during your intern year of residency,” he adds.
“What’s going on with Bing anyway? All I hear nowadays from Caroline is how Bing is busy with work, and Bing needs to get over himself, and Bing needs me to ‘show him how a Darcy takes their studies seriously.’ What’s up with that?”
He shrugs. “We haven’t seen the Bennet sisters in a while. Things were getting too serious too fast with Jane, so Bing decided to take a break. Plus, the hospital is busy with the holiday rush, and he had to study for Step 3. How goes the MCAT studying, by the way?”
Gigi scowls.
In January, he’s assigned to supervise Charlotte Lu while she’s on her EM rotation.
As far as family med interns go, Charlotte is pretty good. She’s very skilled in managing longwinded people. Like that one patient who wouldn’t shut up about their trip to the farmer’s market when all he wanted to know was when they last took their Xarelto. Or Ricky Collins the hospital chaplain who was determined to regale Darcy with a cancer patient’s entire life story when all he cared about was the fact that she had tumor lysis syndrome. He suspects it’s a skill that Charlotte has had to pick up from working in the primary care office, where they only have so much time allotted for appointments but can’t afford to offend patients by interrupting their pointless tangents.
The downside is that Charlotte is detail-oriented to a fault. She goes into each patient encounter armed with a notepad and multicolored retractable pen and takes comprehensive, color-coordinated notes. Any history provided by the patient is written down in blue ink. Past medical history is written in black. Home medications are written in orange for meds the patient already took for the day, and purple for meds that they still have yet to take. Review of systems is written in green for positive symptoms and red for negative symptoms. She even copies down all the patients’ laboratory and imaging results and makes sure to write down the abnormal findings in red ink. Apparently, it helps to draw her eye to the important findings and keeps her oral presentations organized. Darcy is sure her system probably serves her well on family medicine inpatient rounds, where they can take their sweet time reading out every single miniscule detail. But it really doesn’t work with the fast pace of the ED, where her methods border on being downright anal meticulous lunacy.
Fortunately for his sanity, their next patient is a construction worker by the name of Parker Hunsford, who doesn’t have any chronic medical conditions and doesn’t take any medications and only came to the ED today because he unluckily fell from a second-story window earlier in the morning. He was fortunate to have not lost his life or incurred any other injuries than the shoulder. However, Darcy, Charlotte, and their attending have now tried and failed multiple times to reduce the shoulder dislocation, so they’re going to have to ask for more help.
And that’s when he sees Lizzie Bennet.
She’s wearing scrubs instead of the business casual dresses or slacks-and-blouse combo that she prefers on inpatient. That, plus the fact that she’s following Fitz around, indicates to Darcy she must be rotating with orthopedic surgery this month.
He says hello as they approach, proud of himself for not letting any of his inner panic show, and earns a nod in acknowledgement from her. There’s an awkward beat as the four of them try to figure out who knows each other and who needs to be introduced to whom.
Then, to his surprise, Lizzie asks if he’s seen Jane in the ED lately.
“No,” he blurts without thinking, because Lizzie Bennet has the unique ability to shut down his brain just by existing. Then he mentally facepalms as he remembers that he had, in fact, happened across Jane on her EM rotation and gone out of his way to have her removed to the peds corner. And considering Lizzie and Jane live together, there’s a good chance he’s just perjured himself most profoundly.
It wasn’t an intentional lie, though. He didn’t do anything wrong.
But before he can backtrack, Fitz is asking after Gigi and then getting down to business about the shoulder dislocation patient.
They accidentally cross paths one morning as they both enter the hospital from the east wing. It’s the way he usually comes in to work since he parks in the southeast garage (having learned the hard way during his intern year not to go through the ED waiting room), but he hadn’t realized that Lizzie also favors this route.
She doesn’t, she explains. But orthopedics starts their day earlier than the family med office, and it’s too cold and dark outside to walk to work in January.
She says this nonchalantly, but he doesn’t miss the significant look she gives him while revealing this information. So he starts coming into work at the same time to meet up with her.
She is still pleasant as she had been in the fall, though a little quieter, preferring contemplative silence over conversation as they walk through the labyrinthine corridors of the hospital before parting ways at the family medicine department. It’s not that he minds talking to her, since Lizzie Bennet has the unique talent of making even aimless small talk bearable, but it’s nice that they’re so in tune with each other that she can tell when he prefers to keep to his own thoughts. Or maybe she’s just not up for socializing in the mornings before she’s had her coffee.
Either way, he’s going to keep meeting her at the door if it means he gets to start his day with a smile from Lizzie in greeting. Since Jane and Bing are no longer together, he has to find whatever time he can get to spend in her company.
They run into each other a few more times in the ED. He figures it’s inevitable that ortho has to come down to do admissions in the ED as long as patients have access to things they can climb onto and fall off of.
This particular day, Anne Debourgh has returned, wheezing even worse than when she’d come in two days prior, to absolutely nobody’s surprise except maybe her mother’s.
It’s hard to believe that Lizzie is Anne’s PCP. That is, until one has met her mother. The kid is, to put it mildly, a certifiable Hot Mess. They’ve already seen her in the ED three times this week, which is beyond excessive, even for Anne. He had tried to have her admitted the last two times, but her mother hadn’t appreciated being told that Anne’s previous history of multiple intubations and ICU stays puts her at higher risk of dying from an asthma attack.
He gets the sense that there’s no love lost between Lizzie and Anne’s mother either, from the way Lizzie rolls her eyes when Charlotte informs her that “Lady Catherine” had thwarted their attempts to have Anne stay in the hospital earlier that week, insisting that she knew her daughter best and could handle her symptoms at home.
When he and Charlotte return from attending to Mrs. Debourgh, they find their friends from ortho in the process of admitting a patient with a tibial fracture, with Fitz putting in orders while Lizzie types out the H&P.
Darcy nearly jumps in surprise when Lizzie turns around and looks at him directly. “Are you trying to distract me so I mess up my note, lurking there and watching me type? Or are you trying to give me a heart attack?”
Her eyes are sparkling, and she’s smiling up at him again with that playful, teasing half-smirk.
He plays along, delighting in the witty banter and low-key workplace flirtation. Lizzie, it seems, is more than aware of the effect she has on him, if she’s making references to robots and radiologists again.
So is Fitz, who joins in and ribs him for his social awkwardness. He even mouths “lobster” at Darcy as he and Lizzie finish their work and head back upstairs.
Then again, it’s kind of difficult not to catch on to Darcy’s interest when her teasing renders him at a loss for words.
They’re walking to work together again on another January morning when they see Jane. She gives them a wave and her usual radiant smile from the Starbucks line as they pass. It seems that even running the pediatric ICU all night can’t dampen Jane Bennet’s sunny personality.
“We can’t sit around weeping and wallowing in heartbreak all day,” Lizzie says, when he comments that her sister looks like she’s doing remarkably well.
He’s heard somewhere that getting over a breakup takes about half as long as the relationship lasted. (And to be fair, it has been about two months, or half the amount of time Jane and Bing had dated.) But he can’t help but wonder if Lizzie is alluding to herself. After all, he had started avoiding her around the same time Bing had dumped Jane. Getting over Bing was unsurprisingly less of a hardship for Jane than vice versa, but Darcy wonders if Lizzie has missed him as much as he’s missed her.
Of course, she wouldn’t show it outwardly the way his best friend has been melodramatically bemoaning the loss of his angel. Darcy just doesn’t see Lizzie being that kind of girl. She’s much more likely to conceal her feelings beneath her outward wit and sarcasm. She’s a lot like him in that way—they’re both so private that strangers would never be able to read their true thoughts, but they know one another well enough that each knows that the other is aware of their mutual attraction.
One time, he almost gives in.
It’s pouring freezing rain outside, and their pants are six inches deep in muddy rainwater after their mad dash from the parking garage to the hospital doors. He’s faring much worse, his damp hair plastered to his forehead and his scrubs completely soaked, since he’d been running late that morning and could only find parking on the roof level of the garage. He’s fairly certain he looks like a drowned cat, whereas she… God, she’s just so pretty, with her cheeks flushed from running and the droplets on her hair shining just as brilliantly as her eyes, and he almost—almost—gives into the temptation to tangle his fingers in those lovely auburn locks and press her against the nearest wall and kiss her until she forgets her own name.
But then he remembers with a jolt: the previous evening, he had met up with Fitz and Hurst at Chamberlayne’s for drinks after work, where he’d recognized the middle-aged redheaded woman on the far end of the bar. She was clearly already several drinks in, and flirting loudly and shamelessly with the bartender despite receiving no encouragement from him. As the night had worn on and she’d gotten drunker and drunker, Fran Bennet had taken to regaling the other bar patrons—both willing and unwilling—including Darcy’s group, with the sordid details of her failed marriage and how her good-for-nothing ex-husband left her thanks to her utter bitch of a middle daughter. After a too-dramatic sweep of her arm sent somebody’s drink crashing to the floor, she’d mistaken the owner of that unfortunate drink, a bewildered grad student, for aforementioned middle daughter and tried to convince her to take her to MCMC so she could fake another heart attack and beg the “hot Asian doctah” there to take her favorite daughter back. When the cajoling and wheedling turned into expletives and threats of physical violence, the bouncer had deposited Fran outside on the doorstep, putting an end to her antics.
At the end of the day, that ridiculous spectacle is Lizzie’s mother. And that college student who had aided and abetted their mother’s first fake heart attack back in November, and who had proceeded to sexually harass the EMTs while they were working, is her younger sister.
Lizzie Bennet may be leagues above the two of them, but with a family like that, how can she be good enough for a Darcy?
So instead of kissing Lizzie, he stands there like a dolt for several seconds, feeling like he’s just had ice water poured over him (which, technically, he has), and casts about for something to say (“This is a charming hallway”? Really, brain?) before a custodian approaches with a mop and offers them spare towels from his linen cart.
He has a dream. Most of it is complete nonsense—something about finding a pair of runaway children hiding in the bushes outside of an amusement park and helping to smuggle them out of the country on the kiddie tram ride, and Lizzie Bennet is there for some reason—but one particular part of the dream stands out.
They’re on a beach somewhere in Italy. He doesn’t know why his dream-brain picked Italy but there they are. Lizzie is standing a little ways ahead of him, wearing a blue and white sundress that flutters gently in the breeze. As he approaches, he notices that she’s heavily pregnant. But for some reason this is not a surprise to his dream-self, and his dream-logic supplies that they’re either engaged or married.
As he’s observing her, Lizzie turns around, smiling softly, and he takes her hand and leans in for a kiss…
And then he wakes up, rolling over to his side as if reaching for someone, only to meet cold, empty sheets. And he remembers there never was anyone.
He reaches for his phone instead.
It’s 3 a.m. He needs to be at the hospital in less than four hours to see Lizzie again.
In another two days, she’s due to finish her ortho rotation, so there will be no more of their morning walks together. He won’t be able to see her until she’s working inpatient or nights again. He wonders when that would be, and if those weeks coincide with weeks that he’s working shifts in the ED. He wonders if Charlotte would be privy to that information and whether there’s a way to ask her without giving away his interest.
Then he wonders why he’s even bothering to hide his feelings. He’s thirty years old, not thirteen, for crying out loud. He’s an adult with a job and bills to pay and a 403(b)-retirement plan, not a middle schooler who doesn’t want his friends to tease him about his first crush.
The dream had to be a sign. He’s dated other women before, of course. But his last relationship ended during his sophomore year of college, before his parents’ accident. And then he’d been too busy trying to keep afloat in his grief, raising Georgiana, running the Darcy Foundation, and going to medical school in the almost ten years since then to let the idea of dating even cross his mind. He’s fairly certain he’d gone the entirety of his twenties without ever feeling this level of attraction towards any woman, and he would have carried on thus through his thirties if Lizzie hadn’t come crashing into his life. And he’s certainly never had actual dreams of marrying or having kids with anyone before her.
He doesn’t believe in fate or prophetic dreams. There are way too many people on the planet to justify the ridiculous notion that he was made for one person and one person only. And dreams are just dreams. The entire human experience is a bunch of chemicals mindlessly interacting with a bunch of other chemicals, until the right combination of hormones happens and makes people think they’re in love and want to make more humans. But he can’t deny just how fiercely he felt the yearning for that future with Lizzie that his subconscious conjured up. He’s tried for months to rationalize and get over this attraction, but here is as much proof as he’ll ever get that this is no ordinary crush, if he’s dreaming about commitment and 2.5 kids and a white picket fence with her and waking up to find that his awake-self still wants all that and more.
He’s not even sure when such a harmless crush turned into something more, but there’s no denying that he might just be in love. If anything, this dream is the push he needs to accept that every day he’s getting in deeper and deeper and now there’s no way out in sight, and this foolishness needs to end today.
Of course, there are still the issues of her family, and her osteopathic degree, and her decision to go into family medicine, and their relative financial situations to think about. But when he considers the possibility of losing that future with her, all of those objections pale in comparison to the bleakness of a life as a workaholic with no Lizzie in it, a series of endless ED shifts and foundation board meetings stretching into oblivion. He’s already lost both his parents and put his life on hold for Gigi, and then sacrificed his twenties to the physically and emotionally taxing process of becoming a doctor. Would it really be so selfish of him to pursue his own happiness for once?
Besides, while he’s on track to make nearly one and a half times Lizzie’s future projected salary once they graduate from residency, Lizzie is still going to make six figures as a primary care doctor. And the Darcy generational wealth is enough that she would never have to work another day in her life if she doesn’t want to, so her D.O. and family med credentials literally won’t matter, nor will her middle class origins. Besides, Lizzie is outgoing and charming even among strangers and new acquaintances, so she’ll be the ideal partner to have by his side when he’s forced to rub shoulders with the Pemberley elite to secure donations for his parents’ foundation. Plus, Pemberley is a good three-hour drive across the state from Meryton, which would be a decent deterrent to frequent unwanted intrusions from indecent family members, while still being a manageable distance for visits from Jane. Not that she’d have to worry about any scandal associated with the more vulgar Bennet family members, if things played out well and she eventually took his surname…
They’re supposed to be having dinner tonight at Carter’s, to celebrate Lizzie and Charlotte successfully completing their ortho and EM rotations, respectively. Maybe he should offer to walk Lizzie home afterwards and—no. Carter’s is way too informal a setting. Making a move at a bar and arcade might give the impression that he’s just looking for a one-night stand.
He fortuitously runs into Fitz at the hospital cafeteria while they’re both looking to grab a quick breakfast before work. The ortho chief grins knowingly at his proposal to relocate dinner to Sir Lewis’s instead, and especially at his insistence on driving and paying for Lizzie, but agrees to inform her about the change of plans when he sees her.
“I’ll be sure to put in a good word for you, too,” he adds as he dons his scrub cap and heads in the direction of the operating suite.
Darcy rolls his eyes. As if he and Lizzie need Fitz’s help in their love life.
He’s distracted at work for the rest of the day, and Charlotte has to say his name three times at one point to get his attention.
When Charlotte joins them at the agreed-upon meet-up time and location with the news that Lizzie isn’t feeling well and won’t be joining them for dinner, Fitz volunteers to drive her and Brandon there so that they don’t lose their reservation.
“Darce can take his own car and catch up with us later,” he adds, with a wink, “after he checks on Lizzie B.”
Darcy seizes his opportunity. He knows exactly what he has to do.