A/N: I know it's angsty - sorry! Sorry! I promise the next one's fluff.

25thDecember 1919

It was cold and he was so cold he couldn't imagine ever being warm again. The chill of the cell (and it probably wasn't damp, it wasn't a Dickens' novel after all, but it felt damp - the clamminess of the air made it so) seemed to pervade everything, including his bones. He was shaking, and the excuse John would have given had anybody been there to tell it to, would have been that it was because of the relentless cold. Maybe it was. And maybe it was a lot of other things besides.

He couldn't imagine ever being warm again, but that didn't mean he couldn't remember the sensation. The memory of warmth – her warmth: cuddled into his chest in the courtyard; delicate, calloused hand in his – cold skin somehow still transmitting a tingle of heat along his nerves; soft, warm body pressed flush against him as the covers tangled around their legs; surprisingly heavy warmth of her hair – finally free of its pins – as he ran his hands through it; the hard panicked press of her hot lips against his even as the icy cold of metal closed around his wrists…Anna – in his thoughts where this place couldn't touch her, in his heart where she couldn't be taken from him – was his warmth, much as she was his light.

Lying in the dark, on a mattress so feebly thin he could feel the press of the cold steel frame of the bunk through it, all John could do was wrap himself in the memory of Anna. It was better than any quilt or candle could have been, but the photograph (which he had tried so hard to preserve pristinely, yet already a combination of prison and desperation had creased it) he was clutching to his chest with trembling hands was cold and dry and paper – no substitute for smooth skin – and more a stabbingly painful reminder of all he was aching and shaking with desperate longing for than a comfort. Staring with stinging eyes at the bleak grey stones of the wall (everything was grey in here – John was beginning to suspect that soon he himself would become a shade of grey), the impending trial loomed large and dark and cold and, without the heat of Anna's anger and flame of her conviction regarding the impossibility of his conviction to dispel it, John could feel it settling over him in the way freezing fog sometimes did over London, gradually but steadily – so that you didn't notice it until suddenly you realised you couldn't see your hand in front of your face and it was a struggle to draw enough breath into your lungs.

The cold weight he had come to associate with Vera was lining his stomach like lead and for all that she couldn't have been further away: her body presumably stiff and frozen now – buried in a grave he had paid for during a funeral he had not attended – in London, her soul (if she had one – he hadn't ever believed in souls really, but clearly Anna had one – not that it necessarily followed that Vera did) who knew where, at that moment, he felt the sting of her bitter, miserable, poisonous presence more keenly and acutely than what little of Anna's fire he could summon in this place…he kept reaching for it, for Anna, only to find that his fingers closed on empty air…The miles between York and Downton may as well have numbered hundreds, given how removed he felt from her, from his life.

She had held it together all day, all week, for months - however it was that she was supposed to be measuring the endless time without John. She had ploughed on with her work like nothing was wrong – taking on extra just to keep herself from having to think about anything, reinforcing seams needlessly necessarily to stop herself coming apart at her own. She had smoothed out all the inevitable creases an understaffed house party produced in the running of things and in Mr Carson's brow. She had worried about Lady Mary and how miserable Sir Richard already made her and had kept her unhelpful opinions on the matter to herself. She had curtsied and faked caring about Christmas and faked being alright and even somehow faked smiles.

She had clutched the photograph of their wedding day until her grip produced a tiny tear in one side of it. And now she had had to put it down for fear that the steady flow of her tears would ruin it; had to bury her face in her pillow in an effort to muffle the sound of her ugly gulping sobs.

She had held it together for so long, but on Christmas night – thinking about the last six Christmases; thinking about the fact that this, her first Christmas as a married woman, her first Christmas as Mrs Bates, she was crying alone in a single bed, more alone than she had been any of the previous years; thinking about John, lying in some prison cell, alone and probably cold and, for all that he'd barely stopped reassuring her (albeit perpetually tempered by a grim 'realism' that she refused to listen to) since he was arrested, definitely frightened – Anna could not hold it together any more. She could barely even hold onto her certainty that he would be acquitted, although any other outcome remained unimaginable, unthinkable.

She stared at the whitewashed wall through a blurry haze of tears and, as the heart brooch Lady Mary had given her dug sharply into the palm of her hand where she was holding it too tightly, wished - on every single faded strand of Christmas magic her sister had woven into her childhood – that this time next year would find her in John's arms, maybe even in a cottage and a bed of their own.