A/N: Short little one-shot. Completely smut free. Reviews terribly appreciated.
Always on the crux between pleasure and pain. His kindness and his gentle smile - his bellowing and inflexibility. She moves and he drags along. He reminds her of things gone by, things she has forgotten, but finds a use for anyhow. She worries about him daily.
It's as close to a marriage she'll ever get. He is the traditionalist, she sees it in Lord Grantham. She is the foreigner with her different ways and thoughts and customs. Like her Ladyship and they mirror downstairs what their employers represent upstairs.
Night and day and dawn and dusk and she sees it all and walks next to him, sits next to him, reads the words from his prayer book and she is as close to God as she can possibly be because he is there next to her. His deep voice carries her through the hymns, his solemn prayer guides her through hers.
She wonders if she'll stay when he decides to go and if she does: how will she get on with the new butler. If there'll be a new butler. She knows there is a new wind upstairs and that the old ways are clung to with tooth and claw by the old generation, but Tom understands they need to modernize.
While she prides herself in her ability to adjust, to move with the times, she won't know how to deal with things without him there. He is her beacon, her strength. She imagines that is what she is to him too. If she were to leave before him, he'd have to deal with a different housekeeper, with all the staff without her being there to guide them all.
It's impossible to think of Downton without him in it. He is so much part of it, as much as the gravel on the driveway, as much as the carpets in the hall. Years of hard work, of early rise and late to bed, of serving drinks and overseeing tea-parties. Perhaps she is too, with her endless overseeing of cleaning grates and checking the laundry and organising garden parties.
Years of drinking leftover wine in her sitting room.
She wants him to leave before there is too much change. He doesn't like change, he doesn't handle it well, she knows - maids serving at table nearly killed him. So far she has managed to steer him so it didn't interrupt anything upstairs, she has manipulated him so the younger staff wouldn't be intimidated by him. But she can't do it much longer, she hasn't the strength, the resilience, the cunning.
She watches him as he scowls at the wireless in the Servants' Hall, looks longingly at the piano that is hardly being touched these days and she is reminded of William and she sits down next to him, puts her hand over his as it lays on the table. He looks at her and smiles.
Perhaps there is a change they both can make, she suddenly thinks and knows it would be the answer to the problem of not knowing how to deal with the loss of one of them. She asks herself if he would feel the same way. She smiles back and he squeezes her fingers ever so slightly.
Maybe he does.
Maybe he does.