I haven't written in the Downton fandom for simply ever, so I must say its nice to be back. While I am a major Chelsie shipper, I am obsessed with Isobel and Dr Clarkson at the moment so I thought I would give them a go. Chelsie, will of course feature as well.

I own nothing. I'm just having fun. Don't sue.

Enjoy!

Love is a funny thing. It's been said before, so many times that it's become such a cliché. But how else can it be described? It's baffling, confusing, exciting and exhilarating all at once. Perhaps someday someone will think of a better sentence to describe love, but somehow I doubt it. The human race has spent thousands of years trying to put it into words. Millions of songs, poems, sonnets, and love letters have been written and yet here we all still are trying to make sense of the peculiar feeling we call love. So for now, let's just say that love is a funny thing.

It can be found in exciting places, like a holiday fling that turned into so much more, the stranger that picked up your keys when you were juggling too many files and a cup of coffee, your best friends brother who you've only met once but haven't been able to get out of your head since. It's a feeling that takes your breath away, whacks you behind the knees, and changes everything in a split second. It's the thing that you never saw coming, the sensation we never expect to experience. We spend most of our lives waiting for it, without even realizing we are indeed waiting. Some people will wait forever without even knowing. Love can happen so suddenly, and so slowly all at once.

It can always be found in places we never thought to look until you do. The man who's worked in the office next to you for the last ten years, who you chat to during lunch, and laugh together over drink on a Friday night. The person who's been your best friend since high school, who's held you as you cried over all the other failed romances, and who you held when they cried over theirs. Even the person you've hated forever can turn into so much more over time. It can sneak up on you, so slowly you don't even realize it's there, until something one day shocks you out of you're the bubble you've been living in. The best friend announces they're getting married, the man next door moving to another floor or another job entirely, the person you hated showing a side to them you never imagined they could possess.

Isobel Crawley, however, had made up her mind that love, no matter which kind, was now a distant memory. Please don't mistake me, she certainly wasn't lacking love in her life, both past and present. She had loved deeply, and still did. She had a loving family, plenty of friends, and a cat who she believed loved her for more than just food. She had always been a pretty girl, and had had boyfriends all throughout her younger years. Boys who liked her feistiness and long blonde hair, boys who had seen her as something to tame, and men who had liked her maturity and frankness about life. She had loved them all, in her own little way, even the ones she wished never to see again, and they had loved her in their own ways as well.

She had always been chatty, willing to talk to anyone about everything from the weather to huge life decisions, and therefore she had many friends. Some were the kind that you invited around for tea every so often, and wished them for their life's achievements, and others whom she would, and had, trusted with her deepest darkest thoughts and fears. No, Isobel knew she was loved, in many different ways. She just didn't think she would ever find romantic love again.

Her husband had died almost ten years ago. Reginald had been her other half, the water to her fire, her ying to her yang, and in many ways her better half. A part of him would always haunt her, stay with her, and keep her company. He was always in the back of her mind, making snide comments, and backing her up ferociously when she got into yet another scrap with Violet Crawley. She had gone on one or two dates after he had died. The shy mail clerk, the accountant who did the firm's books, the psychiatrist who lived in her building. She had never found that connection with someone again, and consequently things had usually died out by the second or third date. Isobel found she didn't mind so much when they did. The whole dating thing seemed to take up an extraordinary amount of time and effort, all for a nice dinner and a bit of awkward chatter.

But she craved it at times, the feeling she had with Reg, a man who would be there to rub her shoulder after a long day at work, a man who would take her mind off her problems, a man who knew her inside and out. It wasn't just his company she missed, Isobel had plenty of people surrounding her to keep her company, but rather the connection the two of them had shared. The fact that he knew her so well that she never had to pretend to be something she wasn't. Someone who knew all the bad things about her and loved her for them anyway. Someone she could tell her silly petty problems to and not be judged for them.

It was, of course, possible that her memories chose to gloss over the less than happy moments of their marriage. All the times they had argued over money, because paying for two degrees at once, with no family support, hadn't been easy. When Mathew was born, and Isobel loathed Reg because he got to leave, travel, while she was stuck home with the baby. The horrible few months when Mathew had fallen from a tree, and damaged his back to the extent the doctors weren't sure he would ever walk again. All the times they had bickered over things that didn't matter, but they'd both just been pushed too far, and it was easier to take it out on one another than to face what was really bothering them.

She supposed all marriages had their ups and downs. Isobel chose to focus on the good memories, rather than the bad. Watching together as their son was awarded top marks in school, year after year. When they had celebrated her fiftieth birthday on the lawn with all their friends. The time when they had both come home from work in horrible moods, and had somehow ended up in bed with a bottle of wine, and several dvds and hadn't gotten up again for the rest of the weekend, and the time he had whisked her off on a surprise holiday to Greece, purely because he felt they deserved it.

It was the little things that had made their marriage as special as it was. Things that no one ever really wrote about, or even really noticed. It was all the shared smiles, the chase kisses as they went about their day, the times they had caught each others eye from across the room. There would never be another Reg, but still, she was starting to hate returning home after a long day at work to a cold empty flat. She hated leaving it in the mornings as well, knowing that he wasn't right behind her, grumbling about how his coat was still damp from the night before.

"Isobel?"

She jumped, pulling herself from the plethora of memories that had invaded her mind and turned away from the window of her office to find her secretary, Ethel, standing in the doorway, a sheaf of papers under her arm and a cup of tea in her hand. The sunlight that was streaming in from the window caught her hair, making it look like a flame, and highlighting the dust notes that surrounded them. Ethel stepped forward, her heels clacking on the wooden floor and handed Isobel the cup which she accepted gratefully. Isobel thanked her and gestured for her to sit in the chair across the desk from her. Taking a sip of the tea, and letting it burn her tongue before swallowing she waited for Ethel to shuffle through her paperwork.

"The court date for the Kruger case has been set for the twenty third of March," Ethel began, extracting a sheaf of paper and sliding it across the desk " and Crawley and Associates have sent over a settlement offer."

Isobel pulled her reading glasses from their case, allowing it to snap closed and she slid the glasses onto her nose. She was silent for a moment as she read the offer, the neatness of the black of the print against the white of the paper. This was how Isobel saw the world, in black and white, with no grey, despite the amount of times her job had forced her to work in the more shaded areas of life. She scanned the document to get the gist of the offer, before starting again and reading it properly. With a snort she dropped the paper on her desk and slid it back towards Ethel.

"He'll agree to a hundred and sixty hours of community service, and the surrendering of his gun licences." She said incredulously, her voice barely held in check. "Has Violet finally lost it? This is a murder charge, not some silly assault."

"They're still claiming it was a suicide." Ethel said with a shrug, her thin shoulders that of a young girl and not those of someone who received top marks at law school. Ethel was working and studying at the same time, and while Isobel had once done the same she had no idea how Ethel did it now. "You know what Violet is like."

Violet Crawley was one of the best lawyers in the city. She was ruthless, scheming and could be exceptionally charming when she put her mind it. She towered over Isobel, and had a way of looking down her nose at anyone who wasn't on her side. She had started at the bottom, much the same way as Isobel had, and now she was a named partner in her firm. They had been in law school together, but a few years apart. Violet was distantly related to Isobel's late husband, and when Isobel graduated from Law School she had offered her a job at her firm. Isobel had declined though, choosing to work in the public defenders offices, something that she always got the impression Violet hadn't forgiven her for. They had bumped heads many times over the years, over many different cases. It became almost personal when they two of them got going. What was amazing about both of them though, was that they could argue in court like two cats in an alley way, and bump into each other half an hour later in their personal capacities, and chat like old friends. They both had gone through a lot, and they both understood each other that when they were in court, all gloves came off.

"I do, but I always thought she was on the side of a victim. They must have something." She mused, sliding her glasses off her nose again and placing the arm against her lips "The last offer at least involved jail time. A pitiful amount, I'll grant you, but jail time never the less."

"So I take it that we're not taking the deal then?" Ethel asked. Isobel was silent for moment before heaving a sigh

"We've got twenty four hours before we have to respond. Let's hold off on declining until we can find out what Violet has, that we don't. I'd rather have an admission of guilt and some community service that nothing at all. At least he would then have a record. In the mean time, let's try and move along with the case."

"So, I'm spending my morning hounding Violet again?" Ethel asked, raising an eyebrow.

"No. You're doing your job, and waiting for Violet to get impatient. She can never resist a good old fashioned brag." Isobel replied, sitting up and waking up her computer. Ethel nodded and stood up, collecting her papers and straightening her jacket as she did.

"So I can tell Sybil to keep researching the case?"

"Please do. And tell her she's taking second chair on this."

"Are you sure she's ready to go up against her grandmother?" Ethel asked, stopping before she opened the door to Isobel's office.

"No." Isobel admitted with a sigh, her fingers drumming on the worn wood of her desk "but I can't keep her in the file room forever, and I'd be interested to see if Violet has a heart under all those layers after all."

Ethel nodded, and left the room, closing the door behind her. Isobel slid her glasses back on and turned to her laptop to go through the case notes again.

It was certainly an odd case. A woman had been found under a tree in a dog park, a rope around her neck and a plastic bag over her head. She had been there for a number of days, and the police had ruled it out as a suicide, especially when a note had been found, stating that she couldn't live with the pain of her cancer any longer. Yet for some unknown reason, the family had requested a further autopsy, and it was then that they had found a brain bleed. A little more digging had revealed a DNA under her finger nails. DNA that had belonged to her long term boyfriend, who also happened to be a recluse, with a bit of a shady past. It had landed on Isobel's desk, a few days after that, when further investigation had revealed that there had been several charges of assault laid by her against him, all of which had been dropped a few days after they were laid.

There was no doubt in Isobel's mind that this was not a suicide, and in her mind the DNA was enough to confirm it. Without that Violet had a much easier task of convincing the judge that it was a suicide, a tragic loss. Still, it wasn't enough. One could wave as many scientific facts in court as you could find, but juries needed a living breathing human to change their mind.

Sighing, she closed the folder and stared at her screensaver of her and Mathew. It was for him that she worked so hard on these cases. It made her feel better that she had taken a murderer out of the everyday life of her little boy, even though Mathew was a grown man who lived in his own apartment and hardly needed her at all any longer. Sometimes it felt that she needed him more than he would ever need her again.

Her door burst open, and Sybil Crawley stuck her head around the frame. Her dark hair was a bit of a mess, like she had run her fingers through it several times in frustration, and her cheeks were flushed excitement, despite the dark circles under her eyes. Whether the darkness was from tiredness, or yesterday's eyeliner or a mixture of the two Isobel wasn't sure.

"Did you mean it?" she asked breathlessly "I get to be second chair?"

Isobel looked her up and down once, noticing that while her suit had changed, the shirt beneath had not, and frowned

"Sybil, did you spend the night here?" she asked sternly.

"I was working on the case" Sybil answered, moving into the room, and closing the door behind her, as though it didn't really matter "I really get to be second chair?"

"Yes" Isobel said with a nod. "I'm sorry that your first case will be against your grandmother, but if I wait until I get a case she's not connected with, I'll wait rather a long time. However, if you find that it's all a bit much, I will find you another case. I will do the same if I feel you're not coping. Are we clear?"

"I understand that" Sybil said, her face suddenly turning serious, reminding Isobel forcibly of her mother when she was younger. Cora had done a few years in this office as well, before being swept off her feet by the handsome Robert Crawley. It often felt that the whole Crawley family was somehow engrained into the cracks of this office. "I always knew that I would come up against granny at some point. I don't know what shocked her more, Edith becoming a journalist or me coming to work here."

"Well we're lucky to have you." Isobel said with a small smile. She wasn't one to over praise her staff but she always wanted them to feel appreciated. It wasn't always easy to work in the DA's office, when there were firms like Violet's who offered almost three times the salary, and an office instead of a cubicle. But the experience was something that couldn't be rivaled. You could almost jump a year as an associate if you worked a year here first. At first Isobel had thought that's what Sybil was doing, and she was reluctant to let Sybil near a client that was only there to be a ladder to a better place. But as time went on she realized that Sybil was there because she wanted to help people. She wanted things to be black and white as well, and not grey. She wanted to be responsible for putting the bad guys away, and not helping them get off. So, like she would with any newly qualified lawyer, Isobel took Sybil under her wing, and slowly but surely let her grow her own.

It hadn't been easy on Sybil. There had been a lot of family pressure to join the family firm, as her older sister Mary had, but Sybil had always been head strong and she knew her own mind, which was one of the many reasons Isobel liked her so much. In a way she reminded Isobel of herself when she was younger.

Still, some days she couldn't help but wonder if watching Mary fast track her way to being junior partner sometimes bothered Sybil and that's why she was so eager to prove herself.

"You really don't need to stay here all night however" Isobel said, waving Sybil towards the chair "the trail only starts in a few weeks and we've got a good case so far. You'll burn out before you can really get going."

"I didn't mean to" Sybil said a little sheepishly, sinking into the chair opposite her boss "but I found something, and when I've got an idea I have to keep going before it becomes stale."

"Well let's hear it then." Isobel said, fighting a smile. Sybil shot her a nervous smile before glancing down at the folder on her lap.

"Well I finally managed to get the medical records of our victim. It turns out that apart from the cancer that her parents told us about, she also had numerous allergies. She was allergic to bees, peanuts, and dogs."

"If she was allergic to dogs, why would she commit suicide in a dog park? Why make those last few moments of your life even worse than they already are?"

"Exactly." Sybil nodded "also, her parents said she wasn't very outdoors minded, so why choose a park? Anyway. I did a little more digging. I can't prove that she had never been to the park before, but I can tell you that her boyfriend had. He bought a golden retriever a few months ago, and joined the training club there. Apparently he only ever attended two or three lessons, but it at least shows that he knew of it's existence, which he denied in his original statement. I was planning to head over there today, and see if they had a membership form or something that he would have filled in."

"Proving that he knew where the place was doesn't prove that he killed her though, and how would he have got the body into the place?"

"I'm still working on that" Sybil admitted "but it's the defenses job to prove reasonable doubt that he didn't do it. The more little things we give them to discredit the harder it becomes for them."

"That's true" Isobel agreed "but we also don't want to give the impression that we're throwing mud hoping something will stick. They can still argue that it was a suicide. Maybe he was meeting another woman there, so she decided that would be the place she ended it? Who knows?"

"Well that brings me to my next point" Sybil said, flipping over a few pages in the folder to get to one of the bottom pages.

"Now that we've got her medical records, I can say that her doctor never mentioned anything about depression, in fact he wrote that he was surprised she hadn't come down with it at all, given the severity of her illness. She never went to a therapist either. She went to him, and the dentist and that was about it. She had quite an extensive medical aid as well, so she wasn't in debt or anything, so it wasn't a ploy to get insurance or anything like that, and apparently her cancer had started going into remission so it wasn't as if she had lost hope. From where I'm looking, she didn't have a reason to kill herself at all."

"If only we had someone who would tell the jury that." Isobel sighed "we have her parents, but what parent wants to believe that their child is unhappy, no matter how old they are? She didn't have many friends, and the ones we've got were overseas at the time of her death so who knows what she was thinking? People are always hiding their true feelings."

Sybil lent back in her chair and thoughtfully bit her nail. It was a habit that she had been trying to kick ever since she was a teenage girl, but it helped her think.

"What about the doctor?" She said suddenly. "It says in his notes that she didn't seem to be depressed, and he saw her a few days before she died. "

"Violet will argue that he's not a psychiatrist, merely a GP" Isobel said thoughtfully "but it's worth a try. Will he talk though?"

"I can go and talk to him after I visit the park?" Sybil said eagerly. Isobel turned to look out the window. It was beautiful day outside, hardly a cloud in the sky. It was too good a day to spend indoors poring over paperwork.

"No" she decided "after you go to the park I want you to go home and get some sleep. You look like hell. I'll go and see the doctor; maybe I can persuade him to have coffee with me or something."

"Okay" Sybil said, getting to her feet, and handing the folder over to Isobel. "I'll let you know what I find at the park. Hopefully I can find a way to get the body in after closing time, or even better, an eye witness."

Isobel chuckled; she missed the days when she thought it could be that easy.

"Take Carson with you." She said, opening the folder on her lap. She glanced up in time to see Sybil's face fall slightly.

"But-"

"I'm sorry Sybil, but this is your first big case, and I cannot let you run completely free yet. Besides, Carson is an excellent lawyer, and has a nose like a bloodhound. He might notice something we have missed."

Sybil nodded, and left the room, leaving Isobel feeling slightly guilty for insisting she take the older man with her. Sybil was like a race horse, chomping at the bit waiting for the gates to open. But if you shot the gate too early the race was as good as lost, and Isobel had seen far too many lawyers lose their license because someone had let them run amok on a case that they weren't ready to tackle on their own. Part of her job, was to keep the lawyers themselves under control, which was often the hardest part of her job.

Returning her attention to the file in front of her she read the doctors notes and medical history. Like all doctors, he had terrible handwriting, but as Isobel's father had been a doctor she had long ago learned to decipher it. Sybil was right about one thing, depression was hardly ever mentioned and when it was it was highlighting the lack of it. Why would a woman kill herself when she had fought this hard to live? Unless of course she hadn't.

Isobel flipped forward to find the Doctors details. His name was Dr. Richard Clarkson, and he had been practicing medicine for almost thirty years. She opened up the search bar on her computer and typed in his name. She waited a few seconds for the results to load and clicked on the first link it came up with.

She read through the page with interest. The man was smart, having published several papers on many different medical subjects, including, she noticed with interest, one on depression. She wondered why he had chosen to remain practicing as a simple GP instead of moving on to higher levels.

He had done charity work in Africa, and had spent a lot of his youth working for doctors without borders, hopefully something she could highlight to endear him to the jury when the case ended up in court.

She scrolled down, reading about his practice and staff until she got to a photo at the bottom. In the photo there were two nurses, and a receptionist, and an older man she presumed was Richard Clarkson.

She glanced at her office door, making sure it was closed, and then berating herself for doing so, before zooming in on his face. He wasn't a very muscular man, but was rather skinny, and he had graying hair. There were lines on his face, smiling lines, she noted with a twinge of satisfaction, and he had bright blue eyes. He wasn't looking at the camera, but rather something in the distance, a look of slight amusement on his face.

'The jury will respond well to him' she thought to herself. She had once lost a case because the witness she put on the stand was arrogant to the extent that even she wanted to smack him at the end, and the jury had ended up letting the accused go, despite the fact that Isobel had built a very strong case against him. To this day, Isobel swore that the only reason she lost the case was because of that witness, and it had been a mistake she's taken pains never to have happen again. It seemed virtually impossible to get twelve complete strangers convinced of your innocence, but it was easy to turn hundreds against you, simply by opening your mouth.

Glancing at the time, Isobel stood and grabbed her coat and her bag. She only had paperwork to do today, a few motions to file and case notes to write up. Everything that could easily wait a few hours, and it really was too beautiful of a day to spend in a stuffy office. The doctor's address hadn't been too far away, she might as well grab a cup of coffee and walk over to see him, even though she had neglected to make an appointment.

She headed towards the elevator, pausing only to let Ethel know where she was going. As the doors closed slid closed Isobel got a snap shot of her little office. It wasn't a fancy office, some of the chairs were a bit wobbly, and the printer had to be abused before it would work, but what made it special was the people that worked inside the small little cubicles. While they all had the common goal in mind they were all different in their special ways. Sybil, who was so eager to prove herself, Ethel, who was struggling to keep her head above water and yet managing to keep smiling. Charles, who after leaving them for a corporate firm for five years, had come back to where his heart truly lie, and married his best friend a year after that. He was methodical, diligent and could come off as a little bit snobbish. His wife, Elsie was the heart of this place. She was the secret keeper, the peacemaker, and the only one who wasn't scared of Charles. She would descend from a high to inform him that not all of us were born with a silver spoon in their mouths, and he would bluster for awhile, yet every night they left the office together, hand in hand. Thomas, who was excellent in his work, and unlucky in everything else, who always seemed to be stirring trouble, which occasionally came to a head. Tom, who seemed to carry a lot of anger around, softened at a grin from John, and melted when Sybil walked into the room.

There were many more of them, some she rarely saw as they were in different departments, and others she worked closely with on a daily basis. But each of them was different, and she couldn't imagine her life without any of them.

Her home life was sometimes lonely, and sometimes she craved someone to come home to, but her work life was not lonely in the least. It was filled with dedication, passion, humor and love. Everything a solid relationship needed.

And for now, that's all she needed.

Please review and let me know your thoughts thus far!