A/N: So, guess what, I've just gotten Lasik surgery on my eyes and my eyes have found a new bestfriend - Artificial tears! Which meant hyperventilating in and out of the operating room (my first surgery ever!) and a hatred for all bright lights, but I'm glad to have my vision back and here we are with a new chappie (Yay?) which coincidentally is related to the medical field. Dundundundun.

This scene has been brewing in my mind for some time now but I had dinner with a friend of mine who is in her first year of med school and that changed the context and the story completely. There are a number of doctors and nurses in my family but it has always seemed so normal to me that it never really sunk in what they had gone through in medical and nursing school and the kind of surgeries and cases they go through on a daily basis, so the experiences that my friend shared have been something of a rough awakening (good thing we've moved on to the dessert at this point), so in a way, that inspired this. That's not to say she had gone through what Sybbie has in this chapter (I basically just gave away who this will be about, haha) but listening to her experiences in a way told me why aristocratic families in the 30's would be so opposed to their daughters and granddaughters, viewed to be delicate, entering medical fields. I've only put the information most relevant to the plot here but there you go. I might expand this later to include the more bloody and gritty details.

Thank you so much for your continued support and don't forget to review!

Warning: ANGST!

Disclaimer: If DA was mine, Sybil and Matthew would still walk the Yorkshire earth. Also, I'm no medical expert so...

encore

1938

Not one element of that night had been forgotten, forgiven perhaps, but never forgotten – never that. After all, how could one forget? The words of an always loving father cutting through her, insults, not only to the man she loves, now her husband (that had been bad in itself), but to her also – insinuations that she was but a child, that she could not possibly know her own mind, when it was her father who acted every bit the child; the implication that she who never acted on impulse, who never considered anything but until the most minute detail would allow herself to be seduced, never mind the accusation that the man who stood by her, himself a bastion of honor would degrade himself to that. No, nothing was forgotten and tonight, each memory came back to her in clear detail, more so because each word tonight recalled exactly that night.

That night, she and Tom had weathered every insult, every slur, every threat, and had emerged united. They were only stronger today than they had then and their strength empowered them today. Tonight, as he had that night, her father threw insult after insult, accusation after accusation, only now, none of them made the least impact, except one for tonight was much bigger than them. Tonight they themselves were parents as her father had been that night and as indifferent as they could be to slurs made to them, neither would accept the slightest on their daughter.

"And what, pray, Papa, would you define as decent?," she began, an edge to her voice and her husband's hand in her own, "that Sir Philip you have so raved about?"

"Perhaps you have forgotten that your daughter is a debutante, Sybil?," her father stated, casting condescending glances on what he saw as her shameful excuse of a sitting room, the tea Poppy had laid out untouched. What business had he to come bursting into their home, ridiculing the existence they had worked so hard to build and criticizing their daughter's choices?

"And what of it?," her husband retorted, fury equally making itself known.

"I won't expect you to understand," her father sneered, "that every door in London will be shot in your daughter's face, that the court would turn its nose up at the sight of her."

"Only the doors of your kind, Lord Grantham," his voice was rising, "And Sybbie has always been the daughter of a journalist and a nurse, never that of an earl. I don't see how that is to make any difference."

Peace had settled within the family over the years – acceptance and forgiveness with it yet, just as talk of war after one that they believed would end all wars had come to spread like wildfire in the buzz that was the streets of London, conflict had a way of reigniting.

"I don't know whether you have yet to realize it, Tom, but the only chance your girls have is because of their mother's blood and with your daughter determined to act as – "

"Papa!," he had gone too far with that. How dare he?! How dare he the careless blue-blood who had plundered her mother's money in speculation, he who had done nothing but lie in his easy chair and admire his estate while his sons-in-law suffered ridicule after ridicule in order to save it, he who had never lain awake at night fearful of what the crisis would do not to him but to his daughters, he who had never ensured his little girls as he tucked them in at night that they could be whoever they wanted to be, that they would be loved and adored whatever that was; How dare he ridicule his granddaughters' father, his daughter's husband and judge reduce his worth to the presence, or lack thereof, of a title?!

"GET OUT!," she bellowed, "GET OUT, PAPA! "

"Sybil, I only meant –,"

"I know exactly what you mean, Papa. It has always been how you have felt about us. But you cannot come bursting into our home, insulting everything we have worked for and making our daughter feel any less a person for wanting to live a useful life different from the idle one you have wanted us all to live!"

Her father loved them, she knew that – he loved her and her girls and over the years he had come to respect her husband, but he did not understand them, he would never understand them, their choices, the life they have lead. This lack of comprehension, tolerated at times likewise flared at times into a fury, an indignation over what he would view as an affront to the life he continues to live, the life he had given her that she so indifferently thrown away. That was what this was about, she knew that. In the daughter who was so like her, not only in looks, but in every single way, her father saw once more in perfect detail the Sybil who stood in the drawing room that night.

But she was never truly part of that world. She was born to it but that was the end of it. Neither was her daughter part of it. The fact that her father could not see that angered her.

"Medicine is hardly a profession for a woman, and to specialize in that field?! Your mother may no longer see it, but no mother in society will allow her daughter to associate with a girl who tinkers not only with corpses but also those parts, no suitor will – it is entirely inappropriate!"

"Inappropriate for who? Not for Sybbie, not for us," her husband retorted coldly, challengingly.

Her father ignored that.

"This is what comes of spoiling her! The mad clothes! Letting her run wild! That dance!," his voice was rising again and she thought of her sleeping daughters, "The association with that boy – the – the maid's bastard! I had thought this medicine nonsense had died down when she agreed to join the season even if the juvenile infatuation with that boy had not, then I enter the Lords and the room is abuzz with talk of my eldest granddaughter, the most celebrated deb of the season, taking up Gynecology! "

It was an echo of the words he had told her mother the night she and Tom have told the world of their intended union, words relayed to her by Anna. How little had change over the years – accusations, casting "unwise" decisions as the fault of over-indulgent parents and the follies of youth. She drew a deep breath willing herself to calm down, lest her frustration wake her youngest daughters from their slumber. How different it was, she pondered, how similar and yet how different that she and her husband, just like her parents, had three beautiful and strong-willed girls each of who knew their own mind. "I'm sorry for disobeying you, but I'm interested, I'm political, I have opinions!," she was eighteen when she had told him that, the same age as her daughter was now.

Eighteen years ago, in those short moments before exhaustion and delirium had combined to take over her, she had held her tiny daughter and looked into those great blue eyes for the first time. In those brief moments, she had silently made a promise to the infant whose small hand curled around her finger that she would never be silenced from speaking her mind for fear of ridicule, that no rules or opinions would hinder her from chasing her dreams be it in love or in profession. She had not promised her daughter a life free from want, nor would she have, but she had promised her a life where the world with all its struggles and ugliness but likewise its beauty will be hers for the taking. With the return of health and lucidity in the months that followed, her resolve had only fortified.

She squeezed her husband's hand and drew support from its warmth.

"What are you so afraid of, Papa? A woman who understands how her own and how another woman's body works and helping her understand it? Most men clearly don't. I know Sir Philip did not."

"There is no need for indecency, Sybil."

She scoffed at that.

"What indecency is there in it, Papa?"

"Toying with corpses as she had played with her dolls before she becomes exposed to that, a young woman, so full of life and grace, ensconced in a laboratory looking death in the face – I have been to a war, Sybil. I have seen what death looks like and it has no place in the presence of my granddaughter! I will not – cannot allow it!"

Her father meant well, she knew that and so did her husband. She knew it from the way his hand squeezed her own and the way his shoulders dropped the slightest. Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, in his outburst of decency and propriety, as critical as those points were in his world, had also come here to protect his granddaughter's innocence. Her own mother had sought to do that for her when she had told them she had wanted to become a nurse. But ignorance is not the synonym of innocence. How wrong her mother had been then. How wrong her father was now.

"I have seen death too, Papa. I've looked at its face and felt its cold hand. I can even tell you what death looks like – death is seeing my husband weep and hearing my daughter's cries and listening to a voice that repeatedly tells me to let go! Death is the fear that grips me whenever I remember how close I had come to not sleeping next to Tom at night, to not rocking our girls to sleep, to not supervising their lessons before dinner, to not watching them grow, to being buried below the cold ground with nothing but the earth for company! I have met death, Papa! Surely you cannot forget that I have, since it was you who so enthusiastically believed that nothing was wrong!"

Beside her, her husband went completely still as he was wont to do when confronted with memories of the night and what could have happened, his hand trembled in hers. Before her, her father blanched. He was struck dumb. That was cruel, she knew that. Her words had been cruel and perhaps unwarranted especially after the long years he had repented for it, but for her daughter's sake she was prepared to be savage, thankful only that her eldest daughter was not there to witness the savagery. She prayed that dinner at Eaton Square would last the duration of the confrontation.

She knew that her daughter knew her own mind and could very well fight her own battles but she had from the beginning been Grandpapa's little darling and she knew, felt, how painfully her Grandpapa's disapproval had sliced through her. Sybbie was her baby, the very first, and recognizing the strength her daughter possessed could not stop her from wanting to be the one to fight her baby's battles if only to spare her the pain. It was an instinct that her own mother had told her would never go away.

"With all due respect, Lord Grantham," her husband said from beside her, his voice still carrying the strain of memory's onslaught, "it is not your place to decide the matter. Sybbie is our daughter, not yours and she will enter medical school whatever your opinion is about it."

"Must you be so disagreeable, Papa?," she supplemented, "Surely you cannot be so blind to her as you were to me! Sybbie has always had an aptitude for medicine, even Doctor Clarkson is awed by the accuracy of her diagnoses, and that without previous training! Mamma was delighted when she heard the news, Mary and Matthew too, why could you not accept that this makes her happy and be proud of her for it? Can't you see, Papa, how this hurts her?" ("Just as you have hurt me, Papa," she thought)

"But Gynecology?!," he had regained his voice, "Both of you insist that it is not indecent, both of you choose to disregard what will be said, but have either of you even considered how it would affect her? We've almost lost you that day, Sybil. We've almost lost Sybbie too. It is a bloody miracle that you both are here today!" He drew a deep breath. "If a mother were to die in the manner you almost had, Sybil, if a father were widowed in the manner you almost had been, Tom, if a child were to be born dead as your brother had…" She noted there were tears in her father's eyes. "Sybbie has always felt so keenly for others, you know that. You want to protect her but if she played witness to the events that could have taken place during her birth, would you be able to comfort her, do you think, from that?"

Unbeknownst to their first born, they had taken notice of the intensity of her clinging, of the long silences, of the tantrums that have not taken place since early childhood, of the sad, far-off look in her normally alert and sparkling eyes, in the months leading to their twin daughters' birth. They understood that she knew something that she should not (but they never knew it was that), but the fears and anxieties of the present had forced them to put aside concern until the events should warrant it. The happy conclusion that followed then effaced all the terrors of the past months and like magic, the concerns have been forgotten. Little did they know that their daughter had cried herself to sleep in her grandfather's arms, knowledgeable of the events of her birth and trembling with fear lest the toxemia of yesterday should not spare her mother again. In all truth, the lack of this understanding made it easy for them to be blind to that aspect of her father's concern and cast all opposition to his aristocratic nonsense.

"No. Nothing could comfort me from that, Grandpapa. Nothing ever will."

All three had turned to the sound of the voice, to her daughter, standing in the open door, alabaster cheeks pink from the cold. George stood strong behind her, her most loyal ally since the days of hurricanes in the nursery. Clearly, the dinner in Eaton Square has since been over. The children, not really children any longer, closed the door behind them and eased themselves into the seats by the window, their place since childhood. Of all her family, it was her nephew who from the beginning was most comfortable in her home.

"Sybbie –," she and her husband begun.

Realization dawned on them like a dark cloud. Their daughter knew. Their baby who they had sought to protect from the horrors of her birth knew all of it – that was the reason behind it all. That was the reason why her father, already opposed to a career in medicine, had attacked Gynecology in particular.

"Do you remember, Grandpapa, what you told me that night?" their daughter's voice was strained.

The room was bathed in absolute silence save for the sound of her and Tom's heavy breathing. They wanted to put their arms around their baby and kiss away the pain, just as they had done when she had fallen from her bicycle and scraped her knees in Regent's Park so long ago. In some corner of their minds, they registered that George, looking at his shoes, had also known. Tears were flowing down her father's cheeks as he nodded.

"You told me that it was not my fault, that none of it was," their daughter continued, "but it still felt that way and it felt that way even when Uncle Matthew told me that Mamma and the girls were alright. Sometimes I remember, even when we are all happy and together, and I feel that way again."

"Sybbie, darling –," her heart broke into a million pieces. She wanted to reassure her daughter that it was never her fault, even when in the moment when they had feared all was lost, it was never Sybbie's fault, never. But her daughter had already continued on.

"I go with Mamma to the hospital. I volunteer and I see mothers die and I see little girls who are to grow up without mothers and I see fathers who just stare in the distance and act as if they cannot hear their children's cries," tears were now flowing down from her beautiful eyes, "then I remember how close we had come to losing Mamma, how close Aoife, Saoirse, and I have come to becoming those little girls. You told me, Grandpapa, that that was the state Da was in, Granny too, before Mamma woke up. Grandpapa, those families could have easily been us!"

Her nephew wound his arms around her daughter, allowing her to cry into his chest, just as he had always done since they were little children. She did not hear what he whispered to her curls, but she knew they were words of comfort.

"I know my heart would break every time I witness another family that could not be spared, I know that I cannot save them all, but if there was any chance, however small, that I could spare a little girl from feeling how I felt, of giving her back her mother, of giving her the chance to grow up with both her parents, of protecting them all from ignorance…Grandpapa, please. Please. Can't you see?"

Pride mingled with heartbreak in her chest and combined so exponentially that she felt it would explode. Just like a phoenix, her daughter had risen from the ashes of adversity and used that as her weapon. She had always been strong, even as a little girl, and her sense of justice was one that whatever privilege her grandparents handed her could never take away. She so felt for others that her adversity became her own. She fought for her beliefs to the very end. Mrs. Sybil Branson was a proud woman, not by the standards of the world her parents lived in, but she was proud of the life she and her husband had built, she was proud that her daughters had grown to be wonderful young ladies unencumbered by the weight of privilege, and at this moment, her heart burst with pride at the amazing person her firstborn had grown up to be. She turned to her husband and from the way his eyes shone, she knew he felt the same.

The sobs that have now wracked her father's strong frame, had turned into audible cries, but the steps he took towards her daughter were lithe, barely heard. Sybbie had removed herself from her cousin's arms and threw herself to her grandfather's. He smoothed her curls as she, Tom, and George watched the weeping pair, transfixed. After many minutes, her father raised his head, his voice remained wracked with tears, but a determined understanding now painted it.

"I do, Sybbie. I do see and I am so sorry. So, so sorry."

A/N: Was it too much? My roommate said, "That's a lot of low blows from his daughter!"