My husband was out of town for a conference and I may have binge watched all of LBD. This little distraction from the longer story I'm working on is the result.

Licensing Note: Based on Characters and story lines from Lizzie Bennet Diaries, written and produced by Bernie Sue and based off of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. All original content and plot for You Could Have Googled Me is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license by Morgan A. Wyndham. Cross published on Archive of Our Own as Morgan AW and as MorganAW.

Chapter 1: It all comes crashing down

William Darcy shifted again in his bed and sighed. Had his bed always been so cavernous and ... empty? He had never felt this way before. That's not to say he'd never wanted ... female companionship, but he had never felt the crushing loneliness of his empty bed before. He'd never found solitude so oppressive before. But that was before Lizzie.

He shifted again and blindly pawed for his phone on his nightstand. Three in the morning. He was pathetic. He had left Netherfield with the full intent of forgetting that maddening, argumentative, intoxicating woman three days ago and yet here he was, laying in bed pining for a woman. William Darcy, pining!

He idly checked his e-mail — perhaps one of the overseas offices had sent him something that could distract his mind — but there was nothing remarkable there. He opened a new tab in his browser and finally gave in to the urge he'd been fighting since returning to his empty LA apartment. He slowly typed "Lizzie Bennet" into the search bar. His thumb hovered over the search button as he berated himself for being such a fool before finally taking the plunge. The list was more extensive than he'd expected. There was her graduate school profile, her social media, a wikipedia article on some literary character of a bygone age with the same name. But the first entry gave him an odd thrill before he clicked it, hoping beyond hope that it was his Lizzie Bennet that had a vlog.

Suddenly he was staring a dozzens of thumbnails of Lizzie's face. The first video was already rolling and Lizzie was complaining about her mother, but Darcy was scrolling down. She'd made a post today! Was she missing him as much as he missed her? He'd tried his best not to show his feelings, not to raise her expectations but now he hoped he'd failed. If she was just as miserable as him it would mean that there was a solution to his problem.

He clicked play and for seven seconds he was convinced that she felt the same as him, her face was full of turmoil as she grasped for words. She looked so elegant in her elaborately embroidered shirt with it's plunging neckline. But then his stomach dropped. "I'm Lizzie Bennet and I've never seen Jane like this." The cheerful music of her intro taunted him as he waited for her to continue. As Lizzie discussed Jane's true grief and rolled her eyes at her mother's pantomime of grief Darcy was beginning to feel like he'd made a huge mistake. But then Jane bustled in as cheery and sweet as ever. Perhaps it wasn't so bad after all. The coil in his stomach began to unwind when Jane insisted that she was not upset about Bing.

"How's George?" Darcy shot straight up in bed as Lizzie relayed Wickham's pathetic excuses. How could Lizzie believe that man? How could she trust him? His hand clenched around his phone as Jane echoed his own criticisms about George's excuse, then broke down into tears as her tirade was re-directed at Bing. I did this. I convinced Bing to make a clean break and walk away. As Lizzie curled around her sister and comforted her he thought about how he would feel if someone had done that to Gigi and his stomach turned. Lizzie's anger was understandable, her sister was heartbroken — no matter what he'd convinced himself of before, that much was evident now — and it was his fault.

"If Caroline still watches these maybe ..." Caroline knew about the videos? She had been the key instigator in spiriting Bing back to LA, she couldn't know that Jane loved her brother, right?

Lizzie was talking again about their abrupt departure from Netherfield. "At least Darcy left with them," she sneered his name with obvious distaste and his heart cracked a bit. She was happy he was gone? She thought she was friends with Caroline, who spent half of the time she was at Netherfield passive aggressively attacking her, but the one upside to the situation she could find was his absence?

As Lizzie mused about goodbyes Darcy was already trying to figure out if he could fix things, stewing in regret and anger. Then Jane walked in and solved half of the problem. If Jane had a career opportunity in LA, that would resolve his two other major objections to the match. Bing's classes would start again soon and he'd need to be in LA, now they wouldn't have to have a long distance relationship; and from LA they wouldn't have much contact with her horrible relatives.

As the camera cut out on Lizzie's unsure face he tried to recall the events of the last week in the context of this video. If Jane was in love with Bing, why was she kissing another man at his own birthday party? That had happened, Darcy had seen it with his own eyes. He replayed the scene in his head. He had been sitting against a wall texting Gigi and trying not to stare at Lizzie when Caroline had looped her arm through his and propelled him out of his corner, going on about his need to socialize. She had led him into another room just in time to see Jane kiss another man, then turned him around and rushed him out again muttering about the scheming Bennets and how Jane was obviously just using Bing for his money.

He focused on the kiss again, as uncomfortable as it made him, and suddenly a piece of the puzzle slid into place. Darcy recognized the man. Fred Tilney had been friends with Bing at Harvard. Darcy had never liked him because of the way he treated women. He was rich and moderately handsome so he felt entitled to any woman he wanted and he played fast and loose with issues of consent. Darcy even recalled an evening during college when the lout had continually rested his hand on Caroline's rear-end while spouting off cheap pickup lines — heedless of the fact that she continually tried to walk away. It was the only time Darcy had willingly stuck by Caroline's side for an evening. Fred was more controlled in his presence so he stayed because no woman should be treated like that — even if Caroline exhibited much of the same behaviors towards Darcy.

He could easily see Tilney kissing Jane without her consent, but why was he even there? Caroline hated him, but she was the one who made the guest list and sent out the invitations. He felt sick at the thought that Caroline had set this up, that she had willingly put Jane in that situation just when Darcy was there to see it. He glanced at the time. Three thirty in the morning, he could do nothing now. He would visit Bing first thing in the morning, he had to at least try to make things right.