A/N: This has been in the pipeline for a long time. It's a place we'll likely never get to in canon, so... after much research and agonizing I've decided to tell William Crawley's (or canon George) story as I imagine it.


i

We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end.


September, 1939

It became something Mary expected of him, her boy, so shy in his affections except for this one small gesture. At only a few hours old, before she'd known what it really meant, he had wrapped his hand around her thumb and she thought he would learn the name William. By evening he had a different namesake, she an even fiercer love. He became a boy of two years old, sleepy on her shoulder as she carried him upstairs; five, beaming up at Lynch as one of the horses ate a carrot from his palm; ten, pushing Sybbie around the drive on his bicycle; sixteen, realizing the weight a title held. He learned William anyhow, because she couldn't bear to call him by Matthew. It had been a linking thread, their handshake. Now he had not returned to school but instead stood clear across the library from her, that thread fraying and bunching into knots.

"You can't mean it."

"Chamberlain was quite clear," he snapped. He could have a tongue like hers, when he wanted to, his pride and his independent nature getting in the way.

"You just haven't thought, darling," she said desperately.

He turned to look over his shoulder toward her, voice biting. "Well there's not much point idling at Oxford if the country's getting bombed, is there?"

She wondered when he had become so cynical. His fingers drummed loudly against the table he leaned on, louder and louder as she thought of how to respond. It stopped abruptly and he spoke again. "I know you want to say that as the Earl I can't go galavanting into danger, but I just – " His face was no longer angry, but lost, and reverent, and he jammed his hands into his pockets. "It's done now. I have to go," he said quietly.

She could resign to this, she could resign as she had before. In the time it took her to walk over to him he had changed in her eyes, was the eight-year-old she had once found huddled in the wool of a green greatcoat, toy dog in his hands, half-anxious and half in awe, his questions so rapid she could not keep up.

"The RAF..." she whispered.

"A blue-blood in blue," he joked. Then sighed. "Why? Why am I any different than Grandpapa, or my fa – "

"Don't you dare," she hissed, reaching up and tilting his face to look at her. It never failed, how similar the blue of his eyes was, the apology in them, a defiance in the rest of his face that was very much hers. "I won't let you go foolishly," she said, wrapping her fingers around his thumb, and his mouth twitched before he blinked, flitting his gaze past her face. She pursed her lips before continuing. "I treasure you too much."

He tensed again. His shoulders set and he stepped back, into the small library, speaking as he walked away. She registered the words with thick static in her ears, frustration as he pivoted around the pillar and out into the entrance hall. "Maybe I'm sick of being treasured," he said, not wavering, cold, their thread caught in the seam of a slammed door.


July, 1939

The trees behind them exhaled yet again, and in the temple ruins William breathed in, smoke and hot summer air. The pillar balanced his back, shoulder blades digging into the stone. He leaned his head back and watched Sybbie fold her legs beneath her, bare feet, skirt tucked neatly around them.

He laughed when she put a wine bottle between them. "Raiding the cellar?" He turned it in his hands. Bordeaux. "Barrow won't like you."

"Then he'll be a hypocrite," she said, grinning. William smiled too, remembering the story Tom had told them.

He uncorked it. "It's not even breathed," he said with mock disdain.

The sky burned; he tipped his head to watch the blue fading to the crisp edge of trees, black masses on scorched ground. A breeze rippled the cloth away from his lifted arm, and he squinted, putting his palm up to the sun and splicing his fingers over its brightness. Heat prickled in his hair.

"William," Sybbie's voice asked. "Have you ever been with anyone?"

He straightened his back against the pillar. It was bold, but he was used to her straight-on way of speaking, so he challenged her with his own question. "Have you ever been with Leon?"

Sybbie looked at him and blushed. "Once."

"What a terrible Catholic you are," he said, smiling.

"And you say you're C of E but you're a heathen." She took the bottle of claret from him, which he held but had not drank. "Who was she?"

He was suddenly shy, running a hand through his hair and looking back to where the house wavered behind a pane of heat. "Hannah Brayburn," he said eventually.

"From St. Hugh's?" Her eyes widened. "When?"

The bottle clanked on stone as she set it down too heavily.

"Eights Week," he said, flicking ash into the grass. "Eric, her brother, rows for Trinity as well and she was there watching... I'd met her once before, at the start of Michaelmas term. She was clingy with Eric then, but he said she was keen on me." He gave an embarrassed smile. "Nothing happened until she seduced me after we won."

"I'm sure the boathouse is very romantic," Sybbie said wryly.

"Not quite."

They'd cycled back from the Isis, and he remembered sun warming where his shirt clung to him, wet along his neck from his hair. A feeling of summer in the clatter of bicycle tires on slates, the thin hot smell of stone and pollen, the cool shadow at the top of the attic stairs. And his nerves only began when the door to his rooms shut, when they were there alone between eaves in an eddy of dust moats, and through the open window he could hear students in the quad singing taunts across to Balliol. Then she had kissed him and the instincts in touch overtook all sound.

It all felt very far away, here at Downton.

"To Hannah," Sybbie said.

He lifted the bottle, its green-edged glass warping half his periphery. "To Leon."

"To the loves of '39."


"William?" Isobel knocked on the door, light and even, and waited for an answer.

"Come in."

She found him curled up, face to the windows, flipping a small piece of paper in his hand. The movement stilled as the door thumped shut. Isobel was reminded of Mary, who had that same protective gesture, the same way of sometimes holding her self arced in.

"Mama sent you to talk to me, didn't she?" William asked, head tilted over his shoulder, defeat clear in his voice. Isobel came around the bed and sat on its edge.

"Do you want to talk?" She looked down at his hand curved under his cheek, face solemn. William blinked, flattening his palm over what she could now see was a photograph concealed against the bedspread. She watched him blink again, more rapidly, then his mouth pull down and his face tilt into the pillow. She put her hand to the back of his head, to the fine ends of dark brown hair there.

"You're scared," she murmured, feeling William nod, breath hitching, the line of his shoulder blade pulling against his shirt's fabric and then away, a clean shadow on the white. He turned his face up but kept his eyes down. "Your father never said it," she started. "But he was terrified. It's a different war, this one, I know, and you'll be in the air, but I think..." She smiled at William meeting her gaze hesitantly, a tear trapped in the sleepless-smudged skin between his eye and nose. Her thumb wiped it away. "I think it's still true that while training may not prepare you for everything, a picture from home and some prayers can get you through."

William stayed still, focussed on his fingers picking at a stray thread in the bed linen, his breath calming. He wrinkled his nose and sniffed, corners of his mouth twitching up with it, and Isobel thought of the boy she'd known for eighteen years, the child that was sometimes so like her own son in the smallest movements, and it was a wonder to her that some things could come through even from a person he had never met. William gave that exact same self-deprecating smile at times, where his bottom lip tensed against his top, hands held behind his back. He was taller. His hair was dark but just as untameable. She remembered combing it when he was young, the slight curl it made, a kink in the brush lines. He was so much Mary too, in the grace of him. Yet he was entirely himself.

She reached down and slid the photograph from under William's palm. The wedding, March 1920. Isobel took a steadying breath. "You keep that close," she said, handing it back. "Breast pocket of your uniform." She ran her hand over William's hair again. "We'll worry, but we're all on your side," she whispered. "All of us."


October, 1938

Eric Brayburn was buoyant, flaxen, never at fault. He seemed to embody Oxford's stone. He smoked on her pathways and cycled her streets and could navigate her river's heart without eyes. A second year medical student who was likely to get a First, it had been rowing that befriended them.

"Concentrate," William said, scanning the drawings of Gray's. He squinted at a colour-coded image of the inner skull. "Eminentia arcuata," he said, tripping over the vowels. The pages fluttered with a breeze and he pressed his fingers to its edge.

Eric flopped back onto the grass. "A hollow within the subarcuate fossa," he said to the sky, stretching his arms above his head. "It houses arteries for cochlear blood supply."

William tilted his head and looked up. "I haven't a clue what you just said, but I'll assume it's right?"

Eric shifted on his elbows to glare at him."Well I couldn't tell you when Agincourt was, so next question," he said, scrubbing a hand through his hair.

"1415," William murmured. He flipped the page, smiling at Eric's exasperated sigh. "Zygomatic," he read, liking the way the word felt on his tongue, the neat print of it over a flare of cheekbone in the skull's grinning profile.

"Have a secret language now, do you?"

Eric tilted his head back toward the path at the voice, and William followed his gaze to a girl pushing a bicycle past the walled gardens, the tyres' tread slowing when she steered onto grass. Eric groaned. "My sister," he muttered. "Hello, Hannah," he said more amiably when she neared. He sat up. "Bonjour, ma soeur," he called in a sing-song.

"You've improved," she said happily. She tipped her bicycle onto the grass behind Eric's back and sat beside him, balancing her hand on his shoulder for a moment as she crossed her trousered legs. "Mon frère," she said, kissing his cheek. "Do introduce me." She glanced across to William.

She had the look of easy confidence, carried in long limbs, and he thought that if they were stood side by side she would just match his height. She smiled across the few feet between them, holding the polished top of one shoe in her hand and extending the other hand out to him."Hannah Brayburn," she said. "Reading French and Classics." It was how people introduced themselves here, he'd learnt; you were not a whole person without your attached credentials.

He took her hand. Cool, slender. "William Crawley. History." She drew her hand away, resting it palm up on her knee, blouse fine about her wrist and bright white against the dark wool of her trousers. She turned her head to passersby and there was red within her hair, delicate curls clipped aside. Auburn to her brother's ashen blond, but they had the same dark eyes, a similar face shape.

Eric leaned to nudge his shoulder against hers. "He's neglected to tell you there's a Lordship attached to that name," he murmured.

William rolled his eyes and Hannah laughed. "Modesty is an attractive quality, Eric," she said.


June 2, 1940

The clock had chimed midnight and there was still light in the library. Cora heard the noise of static before she entered the room, and knew where Mary would be. She was sat in a wing back in the corner of the small library, fire nearly gone as Cora walked across the larger room. She wondered what anxieties had kept her up this late again. She supposed it was obvious.

"Mary, you can't keep sitting vigil like this." She leaned across to flick the wireless off, newsmen having signed off for the night, and Mary's eyes opened at the silence.

"The King's told us to pray," she murmured. She kept her voice to a whisper. "It's worse, when it's so close. I imagine him over France in that flimsy..." She bit her lip. "The evacuation. He needs to come back too."

William was not here, but Cora knew there were days Mary hoped she heard his arrival, Barrow announcing him at the door, and knew that with William's stride into the room it was like Matthew was returned with him, voice an unbidden memory, so alike on certain words that she had to keep her eyes fixed on her son's face to be sure.

Cora smiled wearily and stood. "Try to get some sleep, darling." Mary watched her with a wary look, mingled with sadness, glassy eyes. Her hand hovered as though to catch her mother's, then dropped away.

"Do you wish Papa was still here?" she asked.

Cora turned back with shoulders bowed. "Not for this," she said.


June 4, 1940

London was not the same as it had been, eerily still and dark. As William walked through St. Johns Wood toward Edith's house the blacked out streets allowed his exhaustion to settle in. Everything had become grey, the blue-tint smudges of a late dusk still lingering, and without streetlamps he could see a thin ravine of stars between the buildings. Car windows caught his reflection. His boots clicked. He saw no-one. It made him feel clandestine until the oblong of yellow light that spilled from Edith's open door jolted him into alertness, her shocked face silhouetted against the jamb. He ducked in and shut the door as quickly as he could. "No trains home this late," he said by way of apology.

Edith took his still-gloved hands. "Does your mother know you're back?"

"No."

"Telephone her," she urged, tears shimmering in her eyes. He wondered just what they knew, thought, had been told. Her voice caught. "Telephone her now."

He did, and on hearing the line click and Barrow's voice, he forced himself into jollity, stretched thin by the long pause waiting for his mother's voice. It came, smooth and cool and with a tremor beneath its composure; he had the feeling of being a boy again, in nursery, her hand on his forehead. He shut his eyes to better remember it. "He's fine," he heard her relay, Cora's voice indistinct below it. Their relief caused the past week, wound tight in him, to loosen, knowing he wasn't fine at all, but that there was enough for them to cling to in that single word. He felt dizzy when he hung up, had a vague thought that he should eat, and stood propped up against the wall for a moment before he went to find Edith.


May, 1939

"Four, you're off time," Eric shouted down the boat. "Regan, pace up!"

"They're doing damn well," William shot back at him. Sun was straining through the clouds, and he squinted forward, watching the bright silver of the river, the boats skating towards them with their thin spindles of oar flashing as they moved. His shoulders ached, palms beginning to feel blisters. He counted another lungful of air and exhaled on the backstroke.

"Oriel on port side," Regan said from the cox. The other college's navy and white stripes came into view, blades inching past each other but not touching. "Thank God," he heard Eric say. The week's earlier bumps meant this race couldn't have any.

"Power 20," Regan yelled to get clear of Oriel's sweep.

The water offered little resistance, and William wasn't aware of the crowds or the noise but only the shunt of the sweep, each stroke of the six people in front of him, knowing Eric was being watchful behind him, picking up on every twitch and wrong catch.

"Four!" Eric said again tersely. "Over-reaching, Paine."

William let out a breathy laugh. Far up the river the crowd was thickening, the purple and white of Merton edging on their stern. But somehow they kept ahead, the flag was waved, line crossed, and William's focus shifted. He stopped counting breaths and measuring the steer of the boat, and became aware of Eric cheering behind him, the other oars dragging in the water as each eight let his arms relax. Whistles and applause skipped over the river. The boat slowed, drifted, hitting a patch of shade where the sudden coolness was a shock. Eric was flicking water at him from the bow. "Wake up," he said. William twisted to look at him, his infectious grin. "We've only bloody won it." His eyes were squinting, cheerful, an announcer's voice sounding above his. "Did you see we missed Merton bumping us out by a hair?"

William felt exhausted and delirious all at once, a happy adrenaline passing from his limbs. "Makes the whole week worth it," he said breathlessly. They moved slowly to the dock and the boat knocked against it, starboard oars gathered up against the slats. Before he left William felt Eric's hands on his shoulders, and he fell back. "Bow pair," Eric said, palm up to shake. They had that small piece of power, the technical rowers guiding the rest, opposites on water than to how they acted on land; Eric worrying and William the optimist.

He gripped Eric's hand and raised it above their heads. "Bow and two."


Philip surprised him by being in the drawing room, looking nearly as exhausted as he felt.

"Crawley," he said, in the clipped way of adults, of soldiers from the last war, a way that sounded false in his still-young voice. William began to feel unwelcome. Something about his cousin had always put him on edge, some sense of entitlement Philip leeched from sharing blue blood, though he was a Gregson with his mother's looks, her narrow nose, her eyes. A precocious only child, still youthfully vain despite the Army training. Edith gave William a sympathetic look.

"When did you get back?" William asked.

"First of June."

The last day of bad bombing, the weather clearing as it wouldn't again. William swallowed down a thought of Ian Raynesford, alongside him on the board, waiting in full gear for the scramble, another of the squadron gone. There was no time to dwell on it. They'd kept steady formation until a 109 had cut their tail, and as he'd been forced to curve away from fire the last William saw was his friend's Hurricane tumbling through a siphon of cloud, without radio contact.

"Lucky," he managed to say.

Philip eyed him testily. "I'd say so. Considering the help your lot were."

"Sorry?" William said. He squared his shoulders and didn't blink when Philip stepped close, but instead raised his chin in a mark of authority they had learned as children. William saw determination in him that did not suit the face of a fifteen year old boy, even if he looked his age now in soft cotton, bathed and bandaged.

William could feel Philip's fingers bruising his arm, the skin of his cheeks flush. His cousin's face tipped into a bitter smile, the gold of his eyes darkening. "You don't deserve to wear those wings," he said, pushing his hair back in agitation as he stepped away.

"Philip!" Edith cried.

He wheeled on her. "There was no cover! Luftwaffe strafed us, the only chance we had was a god-damned bit of fog."

William scoffed, crossed him arms, felt the exhaustion spark out in favour of indignation. "We couldn't very well shoot them down over the beaches," he said, studying his cousin and keeping his voice at level calm. "There was a reason we fought inland – so whatever Jerry you saw must have escaped the cordon."

Phillip paced up the room and back down it, his hand clenching then shaking out a fist. "They'll spin it as a victory," he muttered. "Bloody papers."

"Says the son of journalists," William drawled.

"Don't get smart, Downton."

Anger surged. Child, William thought. "Shall we talk about the circumstances of your enlistment, then?" he spat.

Philip glared at him from over the fireplace. "God, it's too late for this," William said. "I'm sorry, Aunt Edith."

He left the room before Edith could speak, Philip glowering. Edith shut the door silently behind her to find William in the foyer, re-buttoning his greatcoat. "Surely you're not thinking you'll take the motor," she whispered. "I won't let you drive, not when you haven't slept."

Her coddling re-sparked the anger that had only just been tamped down, the fatigue of having been airborne for five days out of nine, landings and protocol and commands shuddering through his brain every time he blinked. The debrief that had dragged on while all he could think of was the mess of the beach, civilian boats guiding out military ones, men in lines that became submerged in the sea. Swim out. Shoot down. Clear props. Keep cordon. And if he could fly a Hurricane...

"I'm able to operate a bloody car!" he snapped. The look on her face made him realize what he'd said, and the memory that was only imagined to him slunk back to curl in his throat. His hands tightened on his cap. "I'm sorry."

She enfolded him in a hug. The delicacy of it reminded him of his mother, so much that he felt an ache of homesickness under the grime and petrol that clung to his uniform. "You'll stay here, and get a train in the morning," Edith said. "Don't worry about Philip."

"He's been in this war six months. He's too young," William said.

"They already have him," Edith said, lifting her hand to his cheek, and he saw for the briefest flicker the pain that was wearing through them all. He wilted a little as he nodded and began trudging up the stairs. "And a bath might be in order, you smell horrid," she called softly after him, smiling when he looked back.

For the first time in days, he laughed.


June, 1939

The party ended, the revels of too much champagne spilling through everyone's limbs, and William watched people filter through vacated tables until only Eric and Tamsin were tucked in a corner of the room, blond heads bright against the wood panelling. When he took up with Tamsin, a graduate from Lady Margaret Hall, he damned the consequences. But she loved him in that fierce way everyone did, like his optimism was something in need of shelter. Like the fact that he laughed easily was the mark of a child. In some ways, it was. Things slipped from him and he was blameless, brilliant, thinking a step ahead with his hands animated, that lined smile awaiting approval.

Hannah tugged on William's arm. They left. Behind a trail of guests they weaved through cool corridors until a set of steps took them to the open edge of Trinity's park, beaten off the library's quadrangle. The air had a warm burnt perfume. While Hannah sat he leaned on his heels, the bench edge pressing the backs of his knees, and looked into the dusk.

Hannah shifted closer. "Do you think we'll come back?" She settled her shoe off then on her heel, and he watched her pale hand, fingers curving over the dip of insole. He couldn't imagine them building munitions, knuckles blackened, nor cracked and dry from the carbolic soap of nursing. "People are so on edge."

Some had seen it for years. Spain was receding as Germany roared to the forefront, wireless news accompanying lengthened days as the sun heated the world with a pure light. Hannah sighed. "I hate to say the word, though politicians throw it about."

William grimaced. "War."

She looked up at him. "Sit down," she said quietly. He didn't. Her warmth neared again. "Would you go?"

"My father did." It wasn't an answer, but it was somehow comforting to know there was a family line in it, something shared. He expected it was a line many young men would follow; footsteps to tread in that were already set, making the transition easier. "I would," he said.

"Honourable," she murmured, turning her cheek to his ribcage. She nuzzled there, profile to the silk lapel of his dinner jacket. Her hair was loose of its clip, clinging to the edge of her mouth, pin curls into waves at her jaw. She swiped clumsily at it. "Why are you, William?" she asked, breath warm on his shirt, sweet with alcohol. Her arm fell about his back, fingers pressed to his hip. And he was confronted with it: You're too lovely not to help, he thought. Even now, you are set alight.

She straightened to standing, but her weight was not her own, balanced on his. She kissed him with no restraint, his calmer response causing a high sound to rise in her throat. There was something acrid in the taste of her lipstick, her hands drawing across his collar and down his chest to wind around him beneath his jacket, and the only control in her seemed to be in the shift of her fingers along the depression of his spine. She clasped his hand, putting it to the line of her waist, and it would be so easy to let his palm fall along her side, the dip of her back extended by her curve against him. It had happened before. No.

William pulled away at the sound of footsteps, Hannah wilting. He looked past her into the unlit corridor across the square. Its shadow extended as Eric came into view, his tie gone and his suit rumpled by his hands in his pockets. He stopped at the edge of the grass and raised his eyebrows. "I am drunk," he said. "But not so drunk to be seeing things."

His eyes met William's and there was a sweep of regret, guilt at the tone of his voice, its thin line between sarcasm and annoyance. William gently pushed at Hannah's shoulder and she turned, limbs loose against him. She folded into herself when she saw her brother.

"Eric," she said, pressing a hand to her cheek and sweeping her hair from her face in one motion. "Oh God."

"You shouldn't assume I'm angry." Eric looked between them. "I'm not." His good nature always won out, giving him a higher ground, a moral intelligence."I could have predicted it, really," he said. He smoothed at the back of his hair. "Anyhow, I was coming to find you because Tamsin's leaving soon."

Hannah had her hand across her face, cheeks flush above her fingers. William looked over at her, felt her discomfort in the air. "We'll be there in a minute," he said quietly. He kept his eyes on her as Eric retreated, the white skin around her red mouth where pressure had pushed the blood away, the straightened arc of her eyebrows with the angle of her head, the blue of her gown gathering black against the ground. He reached blindly for where her hand hung between them. "I wish he would be angry," she said suddenly. "He was so protective when we were children."

William dared a laugh. It was something he could not understand, to have a sibling. "What, you thought he'd hit me?"

She wasn't listening, eyes set on a middle distance. "He's a year older, but..." She smiled in a sad, wistful way. "He used to be frightened of August thunderstorms," she said softly. "It was the only time I could be the better one. Be stronger. And what's happened now is proof that neither of us fight at all."

Beneath her embarrassment he realised she was afraid. She had talked of war and her worry reached to her brother first, how she feared it would change him. How the prospect already had. William imagined the way Eric would leave Oxford in a few weeks, driving from the city shouting something behind him, all fair hair and slatted eyes and cheshire grin gone down Parks Road.

To him, these days felt constant, unbroken. Full of static air.


June 5, 1940

"I'd never have put you down as a flyboy."

It was a voice William couldn't forget, high over the sounds and echoes of King's Cross. He turned from the board marking his passage to York and found Hannah, red-brown hair tucked under a green beret that marked her as MTC. "Blue suits you," she said as he walked towards her. She looked on him with shining eyes, a slight deference from beneath her eyelashes, gloves twisted in her hands.

"Ambulances?" he asked, taking in the circled cross on her lapels.

She nodded. "Would you believe Eric's a motorcycle courier for the Army in Eritrea, of all places?" she asked, eyes scanning the boards. "He's flung himself as far as he can."

The tightness in her voice made William pause but ask no question of it. As he looked at her he wondered if this was what adults felt like, seeing the mannerisms they'd loved in a person repeat in unlikely circumstances and become changed by them. In watching her cross her arms and prop one elbow up, hand stray at her shoulder with fingers poised, he saw what Hannah had been. Curled in his rooms with sheets tangling her legs, a cigarette from that same hand; hazel eyes up close, a freckle on the point where collarbone met shoulder, the taste on her lips. How could a mannerism that looked shy and elegant then be so uncomfortable now under grey, glassed-in sky?

He watched her wrist flex, tendons and veins under translucent skin, and he thought of Eric's anatomy books, the cluster of bones that formed rotation beneath a web of ligaments. Scaphoid, lunate, capitate. Eric had recited them, eight taps on his fingertips until the words had become a part of the metre of his breath and his vocabulary. So fierce in his want of precision. But Hannah's gaze was fiercer, directed now at platform numbers.

William smiled. "God, Africa?"

"He's a fool," she said dismissively. She schooled her face and looked at him with a brighter expression. "Where are you off to?"

"Home," he sighed.

She raised her eyebrows. "And here I am with a dreary flat in Clapham," she said, though it wasn't with any contempt. He laughed, a feeling of fondness coming back to him after what seemed like a long dormancy.

They called his train; Hannah stepped close to him, looped her arms around his neck, and he felt relief that her smell hadn't changed, his cheek tucked to her hair as her hand lay flat between his shoulders. Her nose nudged his temple as she spoke. "It's wonderful you can still smile, William Crawley."

tbc.