Overcome (A P&P fanfiction)

Chapter 6 - Overcoming old roles

Chapter 6 - Overcoming old roles

Early next morning, Darcy came down the stairs in good spirits. For the first time since he had returned from Rosings, he had slept well and felt rested. He also found that he was hungry like a wolf. And he felt a little restless, like a race horse shortly before the race. He wanted to... well, just start... start over.

Since the unexpected intimate conversation with his sister the day before he felt a sense of hope and determination he had believed lost for good since leaving Rosings. He could not foresee if anything could be salvaged in regard to Elizabeth, but Georgiana was right - wallowing in self-pity and despair was not a real option, either. He had promised Elizabeth to heed her criticism and change the man he was for the better, even if she would not be at his side to witness it. It was time to approach this task and start with righting the wrong he had done to his best friend in interfering in his blossoming relationship with Miss Bennet.

He reached the door of the small breakfast parlor that they preferred over the grander, official one and stopped at its doors when he saw that his sister was already seated at the table, holding a cup of coffee in mid-air and gazing pensively out the windows. He was oddly struck by the air of serenity and contentment that emanated from her, something he could not remember to have witnessed in her for a long time. Or ever, for that matter.

He couldn't shake the feeling that so much about Georgiana was new. In the course of the last day, he had witnessed so many firsts about her, he was still reeling from trying to grasp it all. The sister that talked to him yesterday had only little resemblance left with the girl she used to be before. Before Ramsgate. Before.. ever.

Georgiana had not noticed his presence yet, and seeing her like that, Darcy could not help but reminisce about their life together.

For as long as he could think back, Georgiana had always been his little sister. As in little... As in child. Darcy so clearly remembered having played hide and seek with her within the vast halls of Pemberley or the gardens, her sitting on his lap when he used to play the piano for her, reading her bedtime stories when she couldn't sleep at night. It seemed like only yesterday that she would rather run to him than Mrs Reynolds or her nurse for him to dry her tears when she had fallen to the ground or off the swing or that he happily endured innumerable tea parties as the only guest of her party of dolls. And although their father had always considered it too childish and girlish for his heir to indulge Georgie with these activities, Darcy had always loved it. He had always cherished his time with her in her little carefree world of play and joy as it had reminded him of the loving family they once used to be... before his mother had died.

For the first ten years of his life he had been on the receiving end of his parents love and care. Loved, cherished and coddled as their first born and proud heir, he had grown up with the mutual attention of his mother and father who had always made time to spend their days with him, including him into their respective responsibilities to prepare him for his future life as Master of Pemberley. And although his days had been filled with lessons, practice, exercise and responsibilities from very early on, his parents always had let their love for him guide their words and actions. When Darcy thought back to those days now, it always seemed like a piece of heaven and bliss.

And then his little piece of heaven had shattered into a million pieces of dark nothingness with the death of this mother. With the addition of Georgiana to their family, it had seemed as if all other members of it had vanished. His mother dead and gone, his father broken beyond recognition by her death, his love and care for his children gone as well, drowned by immeasurable grief that manifested itself by his retreat into a stern but loveless display of honour, duty and responsibilities. Darcy believed to this day that his father's heart had died alongside with his mother, basically leaving him an orphan in matters of the heart. A situation he had shared with his baby sister who had never known her parents' love as he had to begin with, her mother dead and her father uninterested in her.