#impertinent eldest child is my favorite kind of eldest child

[lewis-winters]

here's an excerpt from the Harry Welsh/Kitty Grogan Canon Divergent AU where you have Kitty on the front lines with Harry because I felt like it... and also because I don't think I'll be finishing this this year because of work and... Baldur's Gate 3. Heh.

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The thing about Kitty is: she hates beating around the damn bush.

It's a by-product of her mother's mind games, she thinks. Nothing quite like weaponized bluntness to incite the Queen of Pennsylvanian Roman Catholic Passive-Aggressiveness into actually spitting out the god-awful truth for once. It might've earned her a slap or two in her younger years, but the second she learned to dodge and run, then later on sneak back into the house through her little brother’s open window, her mother has been powerless against her.

Of course, she tried other tactics after that. "No good boy's going to want you and that smart mouth of yours."

But Kitty found ways to fight those, too. "Lots of good boys like smart mouths, Mama, on account that they belong to smart girls. Not that you'd know, of course."

Her Mama had scoffed and sputtered at the idea, raising a hand out of habit, faltering badly when all Kitty did was laugh in her face and dance right out of her reach, reveling in her impertinence instead of cowering. A year after that, Wel—Harry, with all his smitten smiles and dopey eyes, had dropped into their lives, and suddenly her Mama didn't have much to say at all. What could she, when Harry was everything she'd told Kitty she'd never have and more? Marisa Grogan never did like being proven wrong.

By the time Kitty enlisted and was on the train to basic, neither mother nor daughter had said a single word of substance to each other for nearly a whole year.

Kitty likes to say that the silence didn't hurt. It'd been used as a weapon enough times for her to get used to it, after all. When she was younger, it came intermingled with hunger, too, on account of being sent to bed with no supper every time she was impertinent. Which was a lot. Kitty had joked at dinner the Christmas she'd gotten lucky enough to score a weekend pass, with the part of the family that still wanted to joke with her, that those childhood punishments had done the bulk of preparing her for the inevitable starvation she'll face out on the front. Her Mother had gone sheet-white upon hearing it. It wasn't a surprise that the joke fell flat with her.

She'd tried to talk to Kitty after dinner that same day, though. And Kitty didn't want to hear a single word out her mouth, and had decided to go back to camp a day early, annoyed as all hell that her mother had given up the game so easily. Not the most rational of responses. Her brother, Andrew, had even gone so far as to point out in a letter that she was acting exactly like their mother. Good, Kitty had written back, infuriated enough by the comparison to lash out at her longest ally in this particular fight. Let her have a taste of her own medicine. She can have her chat if I get back.

If. Needlessly cruel. Just to drive the point home. War and all its brutality had been naught but a distant future, then. She still had it in her to be foolish.

After Normandy, Kitty remembers telling Harry; "I don't think I regret it."

Harry had scoffed at her, something akin to disappointment mixed in with his concern. "We lying to each other, now?"

He doesn't like beating around the bush, either. It's what they most like about each other.

Today, the elderly couple at Harry's billet are out to church and won't be back until supper, so it's Harry who answers her incessant knocking. He's clearly expecting someone else. Nix, perhaps, on account of the sour tells of a hangover hovering over him like a cloud, and the curse that's halfway out of his mouth. But when he sees that it's her, he snaps out of it and immediately goes still in surprise. "Sgt. Grogan."

"Lieutenant," she stands at attention in greeting. "We need to talk."

"At ease," Harry says, blinking up at her before rubbing at the back of his neck. "Yeah. Yeah, alright."

He steps aside, and lets her in.

[anghraine]

@crossedwithblue asked me to ramble about Catherine Darcy from my Elizabeth/f!Darcy femslash fic and the biracial Darcy-Fitzwilliams in that fic. I am always glad to ramble about my fic, so!

In the fic, the main exposition about the Darcy-Fitzwilliam family history (thus far) comes from Wickham, always a dubious source, but he's mostly not lying outright. Catherine's grandfathers, Lord Harcourt and Sir James Darcy, were great friends who saw themselves as also great trailblazers because they were very into "the East Indies" in their way, and personally traveled to India (more specifically, to modern Kerala). The circumstances that led to them shocking their social sphere by bringing back a pair of beautiful and wealthy Indian women as their wives were never much talked about in the family, so Catherine herself only knows so much. Certainly, all concerned would have considered it a great impertinence for anyone (esp those outside the family) to actually ask about their motives.

Catherine does have the impression that her grandfathers both considered themselves quite noble for going through with the marriages, but that Sir James had a more realistic idea of the difficulties Lady Harcourt and Lady Darcy might encounter in their society. It's only an impression because she never knew him; Sir James died young, leaving Lady Darcy as a rich widow with one child, a very young son. Catherine did know Lady Darcy and was on good terms with her until she died, when Catherine was about eleven.

She has enough familiarity to guess that neither Lady Darcy nor Lady Harcourt were as much out of their depth as many others (incl Sir James) expected them to be. But it wasn't nothing, either. Lady Darcy was always isolated from most of those around her, even before the death of Sir James removed a fairly major buffer between her and the world in which she now lived. She came to trust very few people, and trusted no one so much as her cousin, Lady Harcourt, which only deepened the tie between the Darcy and Fitzwilliam families (already friendly + strong political allies).

Lady Darcy, Lady Harcourt, and Lord Harcourt were all active in forwarding a formalization of that tie through the marriage of young Mr Darcy and one of the Fitzwilliam daughters, Lady Anne. Mr Darcy and Lady Anne were on reasonably good terms as a couple (not a love match by any stretch of the imagination, but an okay one). After several years and a couple of miscarriages, they had one child that survived to christening—Catherine.

I think that Catherine's experiences have always been very polarized. She was the precious, overindulged only child of a powerful landowner for her first twelve years—but raised alongside the steward's son, her father's favorite, to the point that he's almost a surrogate brother (in her own perception, if not Wickham's). She's always conscious that a son would have been preferred to be the one who lived, ideally one like her charming, easy-going father rather than like she is herself. She's certainly aware of being visibly biracial in a deeply racist society. She's also very conscious of her position as a great heiress and the special darling only(-turned-eldest) child.

In a lot of ways, these combined experiences have hardened her pride. At heart, she really wants to be thought of, and treated as, superior for her intelligence, strength of character, and scrupulous high principles. But few people outside her family and her household care about whether she possesses any of those things. She's gotten used to deference because of her family's position and power and wealth, and because she personally is a great heiress (if less of one than she was initially raised to be). It's a substitute at best, but she quasi-buys into it.

After all, it's sort of akin to what she wants, enough that at some level, she accepts her stature as part of the proper order of things. But she also doesn't trust that kind of deference; she knows all too well that it often conceals (sometimes not very effectively) real disdain for her, ignorance, hopes of exploiting her, other ill feelings/motives, or some combination of these.

So she is pretty wary of her social world at this point and, although at some level, she would like to see things in a more idealistic way, she can't—she's too clever and she's seen too much of society to think all that well of it. On top of that, she's also repulsed by the idea of marriage, a feeling which she vaguely thought would pass in her adolescence but which just never did. For a long time, it was easier for her to believe it's because most people are just generally contemptible than that there was something different about her.

At the same time as her general disdain for most others was rising, she remained caring and well-intentioned at heart. When Georgiana came along, Catherine wasn't jealous or threatened, and she's never resented Georgiana for halving her own wealth or for their mother's death. She just loved her and she's always wanted to protect Georgiana from a world that has often seemed fundamentally antagonistic towards Catherine's values and sense of individual dignity.

When their father died, 23-y-o Catherine looked at 11-y-o Georgiana, and even with Colonel Fitzwilliam there as the legal guardian and the executor of the will and her own bff, part of her just felt like ... oh, it's up to me now. And that sense of responsibility as well as affection has never wavered. (She's not a wavering sort of person!)

It's also there in her comfortable camaraderie with Fitzwilliam, another one of her father's favorites, but whom she loves dearly (if very platonically!). They'll badger each other about this or that, but they are genuinely very close, in a more companionate way than either is with Georgiana, and there is not much (except marriage, lol) that they wouldn't do for each other. She's not as close to Fitzwilliam's two siblings, but still on quite good terms with them and would do a lot for them or even Anne.

As in canon, her sense of responsibility and decorum owed to "her own" extends beyond her relatives to her servants, tenants, and a good number of others within the reach of her influence. Mrs Reynolds loves her as much as canon Darcy, and Catherine (who has a sharp tongue when she lets herself) is just as careful as canon Darcy not to speak sharply to those under her direct power, or to be ungenerous or unkind.

This affects her attentive care for Georgiana, as well, since Georgiana will have her say once she comes of age, and in the likely case of Georgiana marrying, there'll be someone else in a position to interfere with Catherine's principled management of the Pemberley estates. She doesn't want Georgiana to feel undue pressure, but she is perfectly willing to intervene should someone Unworthy come on the scene.

So, short version: Catherine is genuinely haughty and she has a lot going on.