"Is there a word for restaurants where the staff is better dressed than you are?"

Her companion does not look up from his menu (written entirely in Japanese and Cantonese…two languages he can speak, "passably," of course.) This Pan-Asian Fusion Eatery—his description, not hers—has a staff of men wearing actual tuxedos, which is something she has always only abstractly understood to be a thing.

"If there is," he replies. "It's probably French."

Quelle ironie.

"Does that word also cover places where the steak costs the same as my parents' second mortgage?"

"It's Kobe beef," he answers, not missing a beat. "From the Hyogo prefecture. The cows are fed beer for the duration of their lives, and they're massaged daily to tenderize the meat. I've been to a farm where it's done." He turns his attention back to the wine list. "Of course, they would have Barolo Monfortino. Half of the wine industry these days is pretentious, over-hyped branding."

"Wait, they massage the cows?"

He finally looks up at the menu he has been muttering criticisms at and gives a small smile at her incredulity.

"For eight hours a day, yes—"

"Wait, wait—wait. There are professional cow massagers? That's an actual job?"

He does not mind being interrupted. In fact, he rather seems to enjoy it.

"Yes, there is a niche market to be filled, and a small group of specialized, competitive people—"

"Are you defending the cow masseurs of the world?"

It is very difficult for her to take this conversation seriously—but he would not be him if he didn't at least try. For her enjoyment, if nothing else.

"It's a job, a very prestigious, traditional one. I'm defending the free market's right to provide employment for people and not be mocked for it."

"I think you had a favorite nanny growing up who was a Japanese cow massager," she teases.

"It's a worthwhile career. It seems like something your sister would enjoy, is she tired of being a 'bikini barista?'"

"Oh ha, ha."

They both know Lydia makes bank at that job in tips, nothing could tear her away from it.

The waiter comes back to take their order. Almost immediately he starts rattling off something in Japanese (which is pretentious in and of itself), but it's the little perfunctory nod in her direction that sets her off.

"Excuse me—" She jerks her head at her companion. "Did he just order for me?" She represses her embarrassment at having to ask—there is nothing to be embarrassed about—it's not a crime to not speak six languages.

"Yes, miss."

"Well, you can scratch whatever he said—I'll have the—" Her eyes skim the page, all of the foreign script with the scant artistic English (like some sort of Etsy-fueled nightmare) blurring together.

"This one," she points to an item at the bottom of the list, at random.

The waiter looks impressed.

"The uni? Very good, miss. It's our specialty."

When he hurries away, she looks back at her date, who is wearing a slightly bemused expression on his stupidly well-proportioned face.

"What, dare I ask, is so funny?"

"Nothing, only…I didn't realize you were such a big sea urchin fan."

"That is not what I just ordered." He nods. "Well, if you hadn't tried to order for me I…probably wouldn't have done that." She might've asked for his advice, honestly, if he wasn't so high-handed all the time, offering it where it wasn't wanted.

"I'm sorry," he says, obviously sincere. "You were talking so much about how you were craving a steak—I thought I was being a 'gentleman.'" He felt sure she wouldn't have ordered the steak because of the price, either, not even tonight, when there was every reason to splurge. "Why didn't you take the English menu when he offered it?"

Because you refused to take it, you doofus. I thought playing menu Russian Roulette would be fun.

"I figured, 'When in Rome,' right? I'm sure the sea urchin will be…great…too…I know Spanish," she adds, pointlessly.

"Next time we're in Spain, you can order for me. Which reminds me…" He looks up, suddenly intent. "Have you thought anymore about Barcelona?"

She bites her lower lip. They have clearly had this conversation before.

"Will…I just don't think I should take the time off. It's not that I don't want to go."

With no menu to distract either of them, he is fixing her without one of those looks—intense, smoldering, with just a hint of pleading chocolate lab.

"And before you say anything, no, I don't want you to pull any strings."

"It's a business trip. Just think of it like that, think of all the industry professionals I can introduce you to."

"Will you be thinking of it as a business trip?" she asks him, pointedly.

He sees them wandering through Gaudi's buildings, doing the Shadow of the Wind tour (not that he'll ever openly admit to liking that book, but even he needs escapism every once in a while), eating with her on the terrace of Roig Robí…

"You're always saying I work too hard."

"You know I'm just getting settled in at work. It would be unprofessional."

He can hear her unspoken thoughts: that she wants to succeed on her own merits, that she doesn't want to be just his plus one, to feel alone in a sea of his sort of people.

"You're right—I understand. It's selfish of me." A pause. "Being gone for that long just makes me think of that winter I didn't see you for months."

He doesn't even realize how much he's tugging at her heartstrings. Before she can completely capitulate, though, their waiter (who she still maintains looks like he's dressed in Georgio Armani) arrives with their wine. Apparently it's not the one he wanted but is 'serviceable'; she spends the next ten minutes verbally expressing her dismay that the promised 'unctuous hint of pearwood' is not more obvious. She only stops when he dryly threatens to send her to the kid's table.

The meal is mostly quiet and warm and content. When their bizarre surf-and-turf combo arrives he trades food with her without question and rather stoically cracks open the unappetizing shell.

"I take back everything I ever said about the cow masseurs."

"That good?" His knife and fork are in a wrestling match with the food, and it is unclear who is winning.

"It's melting in my mouth like that ridiculous endangered tropical fish sushi you love…I hope these guys have a union." She cannot help but notice what is going onn the other side of their (admittedly intimate) table. "Is your food still moving?"

"This…is considered a rare….delicacy in some parts of Asia."

"I'm so sorry, Will—do you want some of mine?"

Before he can answer she's holding up the fork to his mouth and he (adorably awkward man that he is) is glancing around, as if embarrassed at the thought of anyone witnessing this display of intimacy. His ears are actually turning red.

He isn't the type of guy she'd ever seen herself with. The money aside—if only her mother could forget it for even five seconds—he just…wasn't her type. He isn't a ball of energy and outspoken opinions (though he has plenty of them, she's always had that right, anyway.) Bing says they have 'complimentary snarking styles' which she pretends to be annoyed by but secretly finds weirdly romantic. He's never not going to be shy, compared to her especially, but Gigi says that he has improved leaps and bounds on the whole, "not appearing like an ass to strangers" front.

Her words, not mine.

It's the little things about him—that he'll always eat her mother's cooking (even though lard is the secret ingredient in sixty percent of it and she knows the very idea makes him gag), that he acts older than he is to protect his little sister, that his favorite tie is the same color as his mother's eyes. He's pushy and gentle at the same time, a control freak of almost comical proportions. He rarely smiles in public and he almost never laughs.

She is almost always the one who makes him.

"You're very quiet." For once, he is pulling her out of her head.

"I'm sorry—I was just thinking."

"What about?"

"I was thinking that this was the last place I expected to be at almost twenty-seven."

"Life deals us unexpected cards." He says it philosophically, before his hand finds hers across the table. A flushed cheek—his game really has improved. "Where did you always expect to be at age almost twenty-seven?"

"I don't know…working some unpaid internship at the local PBS affiliate, trying to make documentaries about the drudgery of suburban life with Charlotte on the weekends…" she shakes her head. "That sort of thing, you know."

"Is that what you wanted to happen or you imagined would?"

An enigmatic smile.

"Guess."

"So where you are, right now…" He traces his thumb over her knuckle. "Is it closer to what you imagined or what you wished for?"

"It wasn't even in the realm of possibility."

"Why not?"

Because I never thought what my mother wanted and what I wanted could ever be the same thing.

"I just…never thought about it."

"Is that the only reason?"

I didn't think it was possible to be this happy and still want more from life—to have so much more to look forward to.

"Pretty much."

"Do you know what I think?"

"No, but I have a funny feeling I'm about to find out."

"I think that two and a half years ago this scenario would have been a nightmare to you."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

She's lucky coyness becomes her, he thinks.

"Didn't you once say that you 'felt sorry for the poor woman who gets stuck with that douchebag for life?' Forgive me if I'm paraphrasing."

He isn't and he knows it, but she also gets the feeling this is one of his lamer attempts to be playful.

"Are you going to hold that against me?" Despite finding it annoying, she finds the challenging look in his eyes very…provoking. "That was Vlog Lizzie."

"Vlog…Lizzie?"

"You see, William…there's Vlog Lizzie," She pauses and mimes peering over a pair of invisible spectacles, like some sort of prim school marm. "And there's Real Life Lizzie. These are not the same Lizzies. You cannot hold every Lizzie to the same standard of acceptable behavior."

"Forgive me," he replies, evenly. "But it's a little hard for me to extricate one from the other when my first heartfelt confession of my feelings and your crushing rejection was the featured video of the day on YouTube."

Over two million views, she thinks, vacillating between horrified and amused. And so many people had ripped it and reposted that there was absolutely no point in not basking in that view count.

She smiles, a little too widely.

"Well, if it makes you feel better, about eighty percent of the comments were about how hot you were and what an moron I was for rejecting you."

And for believing George Wickham's BS. It's unspoken but understood between them. He doesn't need to be mentioned by name tonight.

"Those people are idiotic," Darcy says, and matter-of-factly takes another improbably large bite out of his sea urchin. She thinks about the continual stream of incoherent, gleeful comments when he first showed up (briefly) in her vlog as an awkward, headless torso and almost smiles at the memory. "Eighty percent of people on the internet are idiotic, as far as I can tell."

Lizzie smiles, and he can tell it's at one of her many little private jokes.

"You shouldn't be so hard on the good people of the internet. They love you, you know."

He suddenly turns serious again, serious and intense—that smoldering stare is boring into her, and not for the first time, she can't believe she ever mistook his feelings for mere scrutiny.

"I didn't want their love, I wanted yours."

He is being so earnest (and yet somehow petulant at the same time?) that she cannot resist goading him.

"Wow, drama queen, much?"

"Yes, because of the two of us, I'm the one infamous for her dramatizations. You probably have a hat and a tie shoved in that clutch."

Touché.

"How else would I entertain the waiters when you go to the bathroom?"

When the waiter comes back to clear away the remains of the Battle of Sea Urchin Plate, she is so distracted by the way her companion's dark hair curls around one ear that she doesn't even notice that nobody offers them a dessert menu.

She does wonder if this is all part of the experience or something extra when the pâtissier comes out to personally present her with a cake on a literal silver platter. It's immense—it's obvious he's had it commissioned—the size having less to do with her appetite and more to with the words on it, drizzled in seventy two percent cacao reduction.

To My Wife Elizabeth

On the Occasion of Our First Anniversary

"Oh…" She looks up from the cake to see him, anxiously awaiting her reaction. "Oh, Will—this looks ridiculous."

"Ridiculous bad…or ridiculous good?"

"Both." Lizzie is almost afraid to touch it. Is it possible to frame cake? Would it be insensitive of her to tweet a picture of this thing? "This isn't…" She is incapable of actually speaking the words.

"You did say it was your fantasy dessert."

Two weeks ago. They're lying on the couch, the back of her head resting lightly on his chest. They've grown bored of making fun of the telenovela playing on the sixty-five inch flat screen (she'd suggested they watch it to 'brush up on Spanish', knowing he won't be able to resist arguing with the characters onscreen.) Idly, she suggests a game—who can dream the biggest, and teases him that she's pretty certain he's never needed to dream for anything in his life. He starts out with a slam poetry session between Keats, Shelley and Coleridge, she counters with a night of dive karaoke with Paul McCartney.

It ends with him telling her 'this moment,' a line so cheesy it's worthy of Bing, but she kisses him so he doesn't care…

"I'm looking at an actual Funfetti cheese cake with an Oreo cookie crust."

It sounds almost more ridiculous than it looks.

"I had to…they custom made it."

Stifling a laugh, she pictures him requesting a dessert that combines box cake mix with mass-produced Nabisco cookies from a man that studied at the Sorbonne.

"You mean this isn't on the regular menu?"

"…You're laughing at me, aren't you?"

"On the inside. Here, help me eat this, it looks richer than you are." He looks so crestfallen. "Oh, I love it—you know I do."

They both agree that it is possible to have too much of a good thing when combining popular American desserts (though the Funfetti cheese cake by itself is spectacular.) She wants to tell him how much it means, really, along with the seashell pendant—it's Moroccan and simple and so her…but there's almost no point.

He just…gets it.

The tranquility is shattered, just as the check comes. A phone goes off.

Two phones go off, actually—a text alert. Identical time.

"Don't check it."

His hand freezes on the iPhone.

She knows who it's from. Only one person gets the cowbell noise.

Cautiously, Elizabeth Bennet unlocks her phone. For a full thirty seconds she stares down, her face inscrutable. Then bracing for impact turns into indignant disbelief before his eyes, and a second later she has practically leapt across the table in an attempt to grab his.

"Lizzie!"

"Give it to me." Her husband's arms are longer than hers, and he is able to hold it out of reach easily.

"No." A part of him is amused in spite of how ridiculous they must look to everyone else in the restaurant.

Then the waiter comes back, and she has no choice to sit back down and behave like an adult, brushing the edges of her dress as she lowers in the chair. No one is really staring, though she imagines them to be, which is worse.

The check is whisked away again, and they are left with just their phones.

"Please delete it, Will. For the sake of everything good in this world, just—delete it."

William Darcy unlocks his own phone, equally cautious.

"I'm sure it isn't that bad—"

Like her, he freezes, eyes glued to the slick, framed-in-chrome screen.

He is staring until the waiter collects the bill.

"…Thank you," Will murmurs, absently. His wife tries to gauge his mood from across the table. Her face is a mixture of apologetic and deeply annoyed.

"Can you believe her? I thought when I got married she would stop pulling crap like this."

"To be fair, it isn't an…unusual request, though it could have been…worded more delicately."

She resists the urge to point out how ironic it is that he has become the one who defends her mother, and instead picks up her cell.

"Could have been phrased better?" An eyebrow raise, before glancing down again, to read from the screen. "'Happy anniversary! I expected a grandbaby three months ago. What's the hold up, ya'll? It's not like the two of you can't afford a nanny. Hugs and kisses, and good luck parentheses smiley face end parentheses!' Do you call that—what are you doing?"

He is typing with the speed and determination of someone who works too much, and it's obvious that on the embarrassment-to-amusement ratio, he is tipping toward the latter. Lizzie manages to snatch the phone out of his hand this time. There is a message open on the screen.

Duly noted. Will redouble my efforts re: Elizabeth. Have a good feeling about the next four hours.

Before she can go into full panic-rage-panic mode, he reaches over and points to the icon at the top of the screen.

Drafts.

"I liked you better when you didn't try to be funny."

"It's your influence, you know. Do you honestly think I would be so idiotic as to actually send that to my mother-in-law?"

"Sending this message to your mother-in-law," the phone says, followed by a cheerful little SPROING trill.

Silence.

"Your phone has a voice command program, doesn't it?"

A beat.

"Yes. Yes it does."

"Still feeling optimistic about the next four hours?"

"…No."

She should be more annoyed at him. She should not be holding his hand as they walk back to the car—only it's cold out, she reasons, and it is better to crawl into the dead Tauntaun's stomach than freeze, no matter how much your mother is going to love said Tauntaun for the rest of time because he (jokingly, accidentally) said he was working at giving said mother more grandkids which she really doesn't need since her second daughter isn't even twenty-seven yet.

"My mom is the worst."

"Not as bad as Cathy."

"Really." She grips his hand tighter. "What's her damage this time?"

"She sent me a E-card that asked in no uncertain terms what the statute of limitations was on annulments in the State of California." He laughs, thinking of Gigi's face when she opens the forwarded message with his commentary. "Better or worse than your mother?"

"Different bad." She leans into him without thinking. "The steak was great, though."

"I'm glad you liked it."

"The company was okay, too."

"Incomparable, from where I was sitting."

She's glad there was no parking around, that they have to walk three blocks, because the silence of the street strengthens her resolve to tell him.

"I want to go to Barcelona."

In the dim light of the moon, it is difficult for her to see if Will has even heard her. He is as outwardly impassive as ever. On the inside, he is awkward sway-dancing his heart out.

"What are your conditions?"

"What?" It was not the first reaction she'd calculated on.

"You obviously have some reservations about this—you have from the start. Tell me," he adds, more gently.

Always the businessman, but always her husband.

"I only really have one—well, maybe two. I don't want to just be on your arm the whole time. I mean, I'll be with you—I just don't want to be with you. If that makes sense"

"I have no objection to you going by your maiden name, Elizabeth, if that would make you feel more comfortable about the whole thing. And I would never expect you to play second fiddle to me—I wouldn't want you to, even if I thought in a million years you would."

"You won't mind me working the room? And the two of us being strictly business associates? I know how much you value…professional behavior in the workplace."

He can tell from the lilt in her voice he's being teased again.

"If someone asks me who that charming woman they saw leaving my hotel room was, I'm not going to say it was, strictly speaking, my business associate."

"So, you're fully confident will be sleeping in the same hotel room?"

"If that's really an issue on the table for discussion, Ms. Bennet, I suggest we wait until you have less wine in your system to negotiate."

"Why is that, good sir?"

"Because I'm going to steamroll you over bedroom negotiations."

Coming out of his mouth the whole thing sounds a lot dirtier than he intended it to, and he is glad for the cloud cover possibly preventing her from seeing the full extent of his ear redness. She can practically feel him burning, and in her slightly tipsy state wonders if its just the wine.

"Well, what do you have planned for the rest of our evening? Opera tickets? Avant-garde jazz concert? Some performance art—"

"Actually, I thought we'd just go home and watch The King's Speech." He suddenly looks worried. "I figured you'd enjoy that more. You didn't want to go to Manon Lescaut, did you? When I suggested it last week you seemed unenthused."

This is one of the many reasons she loves him.

"No, a movie sounds great—I just thought you'd be sick of Collin Firth by now."

"Well, that movie's alright."

"Even with Helena Bonham-Carter…?"

He launches into his infamous Helena Bonham-Carter rant, about how schlocky and passé both she and Johnny Depp have become (he since the 'insufferable cash cow Disney ride franchise,' she since getting together with Tim Burton) but that the King's Speech was a step up because it was an understated part for her, a callback to her early Merchant-Ivory roles.

She humors him, lets him ramble on as they get into the car, until a little hum from her phone (now on vibrate) distracts her from his meandering cinéma vérité digression.

Hey nerd! Word on the street is ur getting LAID tonite. Say hi to the mancake hubby ;) XOXO –L

She will not give Lydia the satisfaction of an indignant reply, no matter how much capslock annoyance she could unleash at this moment. "Engaging" with Lydia is fruitless (she will call mom tomorrow and tell her to stop spreading her hopes and dreams about a media empire inheriting grandchild to the world at large) and her younger sister means well, in her own annoying way.

Besides which…she has a movie to watch.

And she has to see how the next three hours and forty-five minutes will go.

A bit of fun and shameless speculation for how Will and Lizzie might be together, a few years after the series ends. In before canon contradicts the circumstances of us seeing him! Feedback is always appreciated. That's right Lor, I actually finished the damn thing. Thanks for your encouragement.