Chapter 11: Plans

Their relationship progressed rapidly from there. They saw each other daily and grew ever more comfortable in each other's company. Lizzie found that she hadn't required much time at all for her feelings to catch up with his and a week after their explosive dinner at Catherine DeBurgh's she moved her suitcase from Charlotte's place to his hotel. They had another three weeks together before Darcy and Fitz had to return to Pemberley and Lizzie reluctantly returned to Charlotte's couch. She finished out her planned shadowing experience at Collins and Collins and returned home with Charlotte for Thanksgiving — after employing some creative strategies to persuade Mr. Collins that Charlotte did indeed deserve the holiday off.

Darcy's standing plans for Thanksgiving were to have dinner with Gigi, Bing, and Caroline. However, after a couple of volatile meetings between Caroline and Lizzie before the former finally returned to LA, Darcy did not find that prospect particularly appealing. Lizzie invited him and Gigi to Thanksgiving at the Bennets. Knowing her mother's tendency to cook for three times the people scheduled to attend the meal and wishing to avoid the drama of pre-holiday hysterics that would arise from her daughter bringing home a rich, handsome boyfriend, Lizzie did not tell her mother about their guests until about an hour before their arrival.

Jane, who had taken a train up the day before, was happily surprised when Bing arrived with the Darcys. Apparently without Darcy to impress, Caroline didn't see the need to pay for a caterer or prepare a meal themselves, so Bing found himself released from family obligations and free to join his girlfriend and her family. Thanksgiving at the Bennets was as loud, energetic, and vulgar as Darcy would have expected, but he found he didn't mind so much as long as Lizzie's hand was in his.

Since the next shadowing experience that Dr. Gardner had set up for her was remote with a company in London, Lizzie and Darcy decided that she should come visit him in San Francisco after Thanksgiving. Knowing that her baby sister's birthday fell in the sweet spot between the end of the semester and Christmas, Lizzie suggested she come to San Francisco to celebrate her birth week in style.

Gigi, who instantly adored all of the Bennet sisters, managed to preemptively put out several fires over the course of that trip. Having never had sisters of her own, she was enjoying the novelty of adopting herself into the Bennet sisters. She insisted on joining Lizzie to shop for Lydia's gifts and managed to talk her out of purchasing a self-help book. She joined their nightly trips to bars — which were much more varied in San Francisco than the single bar back home — and had the energy to keep dancing with Lydia when Lizzie and Darcy had collapsed in exhaustion for the evening.

One evening, when their siblings had gone home early to be boring adults, Lydia and Gigi got massively drunk and Gigi spilled out the whole of the story between her and Wickham in detail. "You see, the thing is ... guys like that, they wait until just the right moment. William and I had had an argument right before he had to go away for a month." She paused to sip her martini, sloshing a bit onto her shoes. "I hadn't even seen George in weeks, then he showed up right when I was feeling angry and abandoned and frustrated. He found all of those sore spots and he poked at them. Not, like, obviously ... he'd compliment me on something, then comment that my brother wouldn't think it was good enough."

"OMG, what an ass," Lydia said fiercely.

"Yeah, it's so obvious looking back. After all of the crying and therapy and shouting matches with my brother are over, it's obvious to look back and see how stupid I was, but at the time I really thought that he was the only person who cared about me!"

"Uugh! Men are the worst! I mean, even your brother was sooo bad when we first met him. And Bing! He's like the nicest freaking guy ever, right? But he just ghosted out without even explaining himself to my sister!" The evening continued on in much the same vein of cascading waves of sisterhood and shots. The following month, when Lydia was in Vegas and separated from her friends and came across a familiar face, she was sure to knee him in the balls for hurting her friend. She called Gigi later that night from her hotel room and assured her that "it was totes worth getting tossed out of that bar for the look on his face."

Jane and Bing thrived in LA. When Bing suddenly realized one day that he couldn't remember why he wanted to be a doctor, he went to Jane's place and they stayed up all night talking about it. They broke down the pros and cons of medicine for him and realized that the only thing he really wanted to do was help people and for that he didn't need a medical degree. He finished out the semester since it was so close to the end of term, but did withdraw from the program for the spring semester. He began volunteering for several charities and by the end of March had found a job organizing events for a local youth organization that focused on high-school completion and college prep for under-represented populations.

One of Jane's designs gained critical acclaim in the LA fashion week, leading to her getting her own fall line. While she had stagnated in menial work with the same company back home, in LA she found growth potential in her field. With higher acclaim, she also got a raise, and thankfully was not required to defer her student loan payments again.

Dr. Gardiner had surreptitiously planned for Lizzie's third shadowing experience to be at Pemberley Digital, but decided that would be inappropriate if she had a romantic relationship with the CEO. However, between her contacts and Darcy's they managed to find Lizzie a place at a not-for-profit that made charity videos for web content. For her fourth independent study, Lizzie created a business plan for her own company. Between her web community based around the diaries, and the networking she'd accomplished at the few social events she'd gone to with Darcy in San Francisco, Lizzie had enough investors lined up by June to begin enacting that business plan as soon as she graduated.

She hadn't consciously realized when she left that she was actually moving to San Francisco. It was initially just a visit because they wanted to spend time together during the holidays. But then she kept extending her stay. She had to come back after going home for Christmas because there was a big New Year's Eve gala at Pemberley Digital and Darcy really wanted her support. Then her third independent study began two weeks later in San Francisco, so it didn't make sense to go back home and make another trip. She'd slowly begun moving more of her possessions to Darcy's place every time she was back at her parent's house.

When she came back briefly for her thesis defense a couple of weeks before graduation and discovered that her mother had turned her room into a meditation room, she wasn't even upset by it. It wasn't until she was waiting in the TSA line wishing nothing more than to be teleported home to Darcy that it hit her that Darcy's house was home.

She took stock of the situation when she walked into the house that evening and Darcy was lugging another three bags of her stuff up to the bedroom. There were new picture frames on the mantle mixed in with the Darcy family photos: a candid shot of her and Darcy dressed to the nines at a charity event but staring at each other with dreamy expressions, another of Lizzie, Gigi, Jane, Lydia, and Charlotte all wearing matching sweaters that Gigi had gotten them for Christmas, and another of Lizzie and Darcy casual and windswept against the backdrop of a San Francisco sunset on the first time they'd gone sightseeing. She had re-arranged the kitchen to her liking because Darcy and Gigi never cooked and the personal chef that came in several nights a week worked in so many kitchens that she didn't care about the layout. She'd taken over a desk space in one of the spare bedrooms early on since she was working remotely on her independent study and her thesis. The embroidered 'L' that Jane had made her was hung on the wall, and a memory board full of notes for her thesis hung above the desk. The rest of the wall was nearly covered in various post-it notes.

Darcy was the kind of guy who unpacked his suitcase at hotels, so he'd begun putting her clothes in drawers and in the closet from the first. It had started as a drawer and a couple of dresses hanging in the closet, but now the ratio was nearly even. Once those three new bags were unpacked, she was pretty sure she'd have more clothes and shoes here than him.

She collapsed on the couch in their bedroom next to Darcy and blurted out, "I think I live here."

He turned to her and replied, "well, yes."

"We never actually had this talk. You never asked me to move in and I never made a decision to do so. When did this happen?"

His brow furrowed in thought, "It's been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began."

"Me neither, but I think it's done. All of my investors are in San Francisco. I graduate in two weeks and I'll be starting my business. Here. Are we ready for this?"

Darcy laughed, "Lizzie, I've been living in this house my whole life but I don't think I'll ever be able to think of it as anything other than our home ever again."

"Good," she smiled and kissed him. Raising her eyebrow, she added "The only thing left to do is mix our books. That's the true point of no return."