A/N: I have had the end of this piece floating through my mind for some time. There are instances when I have a devil of a time linking scenes and succumb to terrible writer's block. This is not one of those times. I discovered I was quickly able to marry the ending with a beginning and now it's simply a matter of hashing out what comes between the two. Cue Led Zeppelin as I ramble on. Anyhow ... the rating for this piece is expected to climb sharply, so consider yourselves warned. It will eventually be a Richobel fic.

The character of Fiona Turnbull is my own creation; all others are named in Isobel's backstory (AKA -property of Julian Fellowes, dang it). Credit for lyrical inspiration goes to Carly Simon.

Hope you enjoy ... and that I can keep my eyes open long enough to finish posting. Hard to brain this late at night!

xx,
~ejb~

Manchester, 1956-1966

Isobel Turnbull came into the world fighting. The second child of Dr. John and Fiona Turnbull, she was born to them four years after her older brother. Never one for being the last in line, Isobel arrived six weeks early with underdeveloped lungs and spent her first days clinging to life by a thread. The day her mother was released from hospital (after having required a blood transfusion due to complications during delivery), Isobel's oxygen saturation plummeted and she turned blue. Her physician father commandeered a bed on the neonatal ward and held his little girl in his arms all night as machines kept her alive, knowing that if she made it through till morning she would survive. Survive she did, and never again did she require supplemental oxygen. Her parents took her home ten days later, and the next time she would see the inside of the hospital was as a three-year-old, gone with Mum and older brother Edward to take lunch to Daddy at his office. The scene on the ward captivated both Turnbull children: the bright lights and antiseptic smells, the hustle and bustle of doctors and nurses hurriedly but calmly tending to patients; row upon row of babies in isolettes being fed and soothed by their carers. Isobel, tugging on her brother's sleeve, had exclaimed, "Eddie, this is what Daddy does all day! This is what I'm going to do when I'm tall; aren't you?"

"Well of course I am," her brother had replied, worldly wise as he was at age seven. "What else is there?"

By the time children were finally born to them, John and Fiona Turnbull had had nearly a decade to think about how they would raise them. Born following respective runs of repeat miscarriages, Edward and Isobel are treasured by their mother and father, who never speak to their children as if there is anything at which they are incapable of succeeding. To be sure, they do not demand achievement from their son or daughter. But when Edward, aged four, wants the science behind what gives glow worms their glow, his father helps him to grow sea plankton and shows him how exposing groups of them to varying amounts of light produces a stronger or weaker glow. And when two-year-old Isobel begins picking out bits of Handel's Water Music on the piano simply because she fancies the tune, her mum knows the window of opportunity in which to teach the tiny girl to read music has opened. When the two children are found curled up together in their father's armchair reading to one another, aged nine and five, from Grey's Anatomy, the elder Turnbulls know without a doubt they are raising the next generation of doctors.

Both children attend fine schools; aided, when the financial strains of running a medical practice assert themselves, by the support of their grandparents. Intellectual curiosity is prized in the Turnbull household, and if Isobel were ever told that girls fare worse at science and maths than boys, or if Edward were ever to hear that literature and language are the province of young ladies, it certainly wouldn't come from their parents. Both are eager students for whom learning comes naturally.

But more than academic success and higher reasoning, John and Fiona emphasise the virtues of empathy and kindness to their children, particularly seeing as both of them show aspirations of pursuing careers in medicine. Conversations around the dinner table always begin with a question: How were you kind today? From early ages Edward and Isobel have known that they are part of a greater whole. They regularly visit elderly widows in their neighbourhood and prepare and distribute food parcels at their church's food bank. And when she and her mother volunteer to hold and feed the babies in the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit, Isobel decides that she is going to specialise in caring for new mothers and babies.

When they aren't at school, or playing music or sport, or serving the community, Edward and Isobel are (naturally) children. Half of the time they get on splendidly; the rest they squabble like cats and dogs. But they've only to look next door for a diversion. The neighbour boy, Reginald Crawley, is Edward's age, and Isobel can't remember a time when she didn't know him. Their parents have been friends since the early years of their respective marriages when both couples moved into the terraced houses in Moorfield Grove. Reginald and Edward were born just weeks apart from one another and have always been more like brothers than mates: adventuring, quibbling, always trying to best one another in sport or academics. Isobel likes Reginald, maybe even loves him (in the way that one loves a brother). He has never seen her as the nuisance and bother that Eddie sometimes does. She is "Izzy" to him, whereas to Ed she is "Smalls."

Manchester, 1969

He's even more clever than her brother, which is saying a lot. Both lads are prefects at school, both determined to follow in her father's footsteps: reading medicine with the end in mind of working under him. Ed's already sat the UKCAT and scored 700 in each section, but he can't be arsed to help Reginald revise (Isobel reckons her brother's got a bad case of what is known in America as "senioritis"). Unbeknownst to anyone besides her father, Isobel began taking the practice tests aged twelve. She has done three of them now and outscored her brother by an average of 75 points per section. When John Turnbull offers Reginald his daughter's assistance, Eddie laughs ("What does she know? She's a kid!") until his father produces Isobel's scores, upon which he stands gaping like a trout.

"I reckon your brother would have slugged you if you were a boy," Reginald teases her one afternoon as they're sat revising in her father's study.

It isn't good graces, but she rolls her eyes. "You know how Ed gets. I love my brother, but the truth is that he's never had to apply himself before, and now he's been outshined. I'm content to let it stand as a boon to me for now; we all know this is one of the last times that being born without a Y chromosome will work to my advantage on the path we've chosen."

He, aged seventeen and with looks to rival his intellect, appears impressed. "You're serious then: you're going to read medicine as well, aren't you?"

"It's all I've ever wanted," she responds earnestly. She is thirteen years old.

oOo

Reginald's score of 2531 earns him the top spot in the matriculating class at the University of Manchester. Edward Turnbull's 2100 puts him just behind his mate.