Harold

He hears her laughter and it sounds like bells ringing on Christmas Day. His sister's laugh was what he missed most when she went to England to marry that stuck up Viscount and future Earl. Of course, that stuck up Viscount turned out to not be that stuck up and more importantly, to be the love of his sister's life. He still remembers the first time he saw Robert and Cora after their wedding. Robert had given Cora a trip to America for their first wedding anniversary. He saw them the first night they arrived, he had been ready to tell Robert off for mistreating his sister, because he did not believe Cora's letters, which told a fairy tale of a happy marriage. He had been sure that his sister was lying, that she tried to gloss over how unhappy she was. But then he saw Cora and Robert in his parent's drawing room. They stood too close to one another and kept smiling and touching hands.

A few days later he got home very late and because there was still light in the drawing room, he supposed that Robert and maybe his father were still up and wanted to join them. So he walked into the room unannounced, but he did not find his father and Robert. He actually found Cora and Robert, sitting on a small sofa in the corner, Cora's head on Robert's shoulder and his arms around her. They seemed to be talking about something rather private and to this day he thinks that he has never seen love like that before or ever again. Except for in his sister and her husband.

According to Cora all her daughters are very happily married and her son at least seems to be interested in a young woman, but he only ever met his nieces and nephew a very few times. Whenever Robert and Cora came to America with their children, he positively fled most of the time and he only ever visited England once after the wedding, in 1923 because his mother made him come with her. Cora's little boy had been eight or nine years old then, just about as old as her eldest grandchild. By that time, she had had six grandchildren, something that made him very uncomfortable but seemed to make both his sister and her husband very happy. He isn't even sure how many grandchildren his sister has now, she keeps mentioning them, of course, and tells him stories about their antics and about how they all have Robert wrapped around their little fingers and how she thinks that she too is too indulgent with them, but that it makes her and Robert very happy that they have all those grandchildren and how she is looking forward to becoming a great-grandmother.

"How can you look forward to that? That makes you old." His sister had laughed her church-bells-on-Christmas-Day laugh at that.

"No. It keeps me young. And I am not that old. And don't you dare say something else. You are two years older than me." It had made him chuckle and although it made his whole body hurt, he had still been very thankful to her for making him chuckle.

Cora is the only person left in his life. Besides the doctors and nurses of course, but she is the only person left who loves him. Their parents of course are both gone, he doesn't know Robert or his nieces or nephew well enough for them to love him or for him to love them. And he never got married, he never managed to make a woman fall for him, he never really fell for anyone. Women were never more than objects of desire for him and he only came to regret it when he got the diagnosis. He was incurably ill with cancer. He still is of course. He told Cora in a letter and three weeks later his sister arrived in New York. He had not asked her to come, but he had hoped she would nevertheless. She has been staying with him for almost five months now. It wasn't supposed to take that long, but somehow he can't let go of life. He knows that Cora misses her husband dreadfully, he told her a million times to get Robert over, but Matthew and Nicholas are so busy with their law firm that taking care of the estate largely falls to Robert and Tom and the task of managing Downton has become such a complicated matter that no one could do it alone. So Robert is still in England, probably missing Cora as much as she misses him. He feels sorry for his sister, he thought about telling her to just go home, but he does not want her to go home, he wants her to stay with him until the end. And he knows that she will.

She laughs again and he turns to look at her. She wears a simple dress and a simple hairstyle, something that is practical rather than fashionable, which is just like her.

"What are you laughing about?" She turns to him and smiles.

"Robert sent a telegram. Nicholas has eloped to Gretna Green. Without telling Robert with whom and I am sure that Robert was mad with worry. But he then found out that it was Victoria Bates Nicholas left with and apparently and not surprisingly, that has made him rather happy." Cora shakes her head at her son's antics and maybe also at her husband's unjust worries.

"Is Victoria that servants' daughter that you are so found of?"

"She is my goddaughter. And yes, I am very fond of her. And I am very glad that Nicholas decided to marry her. She'll be a good Countess and she'll make him very happy. Although I wish he'd have told Robert that he was eloping with Victoria."

"So all your children are married now."

"Yes." Cora smiles a dreamy smile at that and he knows that she is thinking about Robert again.

"You are very lucky."

"I know."

"I sometimes regret not having gotten married, you know? I sometimes wish to have what you have. Someone to share my life with. Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren on the horizon. Instead I had a lot of yachts and a lot of girls that only came with me because they wanted a diamond bracelet."

"Don't begin to regret now. You enjoyed it. It may not have been the path that I chose, but it is what you were happy with, isn't it?" He knows she wants to help but he isn't sure it is working. So he tries to change the topic of their conversation.

"What are you going to do with it all?"

"With what?"

"The inheritance that is coming your way."

"I haven't thought about it yet. I think I should keep the houses here, rent them out. I don't know."

"And the money? Will that go into the estate?"

"I don't know. Parts of it surely. But probably not all of it."

"And you are sure that there isn't anything in that document of legal theft that you had to sign that states that any inheritance you might receive later in life will be part of the entail?"

"Harold. Matthew and Nicholas both say that there isn't, and I am sure that they are right."

It makes him happy. He decided that Cora would be his sole heiress the moment he heard that his death was just around the corner. There isn't anyone else, but it does not matter in this, he loves his sister and she deserves the houses and the millions of dollars. But he does not want it all to just become part of the entail. He knows that that would not be what Robert would want, but it might have been what Robert's father would have wanted.

Cora

She knows her brother is about to die, really die, a day before it actually happens. He keeps losing consciousness and seems to think that they are teenagers again and begs her not to go to England, begs her not to leave him. She knows that her brother regrets the little contact they have had, she regrets it too, but it wasn't her fault. She invited him with every letter she wrote, she wanted him to see her life in England, to at least see her children when Robert and she took them to America, but he wasn't interested. And he is sorry about it now. She keeps telling her brother that she won't leave. It is not a lie, she won't leave before the funeral. She wonders if she will actually be the only guest. She knows that Harold has few friends, she knows where his address book is and she will invite those friends, but there certainly won't be many people. Robert offered to come over for the funeral, but it wouldn't make any sense. He would need five days at least and she does not want to hold it that long. She is glad that Harold and she were able to go to his lawyer together and that everything concerning his will has already been dealt with and so all she will have to do is to hand in a death certificate and sign a few more papers.

She spends the night sitting next to her brother, alternating between holding his hand and wiping his brow. And quite beside the fact that she has known that he would die for more than five months, that she knew that it was today for almost 24 hours, she breaks down in tears when he stops breathing. She'll miss him dreadfully.

The funeral, which is attended by a few friends and neighbors, takes place only three days later and she leaves a week after that, as soon as she has dealt with the last formalities concerning her brother's will. She feels better once she is on the ship, but she is glad that it will still be a few days before she will be in England again. She needs a few more days to mourn her brother. Because once she is home, there won't be much time for that. Her grandchildren, especially the younger ones, will want her constant attention, she has to organize some sort of wedding party for Nicholas and Victoria and she will, after five long months, finally, finally be with Robert again. And that will make her happy more than anything. Her brother was never a part of her life in England and while she is of course very sad that he died, she also knows that once she is home again, has left America and taking care of her brother and the nurses and doctors and the smell of medicine and impending death behind, once all those things have been replaced by taking care of her very lively grandchildren and her children and children-in-law and Robert and the smell of the English countryside or London for that matter, once everything she has been through has been replaced by the feeling of being where she belongs, she will stop to mourn her brother. She won't forget about him, but life will catch up with her, her life will catch up with her again and so she uses the days on the ship to make her peace with it all.

Once she arrives in Liverpool, true to what she expected, she sees Robert waiting for her. She did not ask him to come, he did not say that he would, but to her there had still been no question about her husband waiting for her on the other side of the Atlantic when she boarded the ship in New York. Once she is off the ship, and walks towards him, she can see how he begins to smile and it makes her so very happy, so much happier than she has been in the past five months.

They don't run towards each other like people sometimes do in movies, in fact Robert doesn't move at all, he is waiting for her to come back to him. And once she is close enough to him to hear him speak, he only says one word.

"Finally".

And it makes her knees go weak. She takes the last step and then they begin to kiss. People around them are tutting, but she doesn't care. He pulls her close to him, so close that she can hardly breathe anymore. She has to break the kiss or she would faint for lack of air and she looks into his eyes and says

"Yes. Finally."

"Let's go to the hotel," he says and it surprises her.

"What?"

"I've booked us into a hotel for the night. We'll go home tomorrow." He grins at her rather slyly now and it lets a shiver run down her spine.

"Why?" she asks playfully, although she is sure that she knows the answer.

"Because I want and need you to myself for a while. At the very least for one night. Once we get home, our grandchildren will ask for their presents and once you've handed them out, our children will ask for the same. And Victoria will want to apologize to you. She already apologized to me and it was quite a monologue. I told her she had nothing to say sorry for, but she says she somehow feels responsible for Nicholas not being completely open with us. I told her that was a silly notion but she would not accept that."

She can very well imagine how Victoria apologized and how the girl feels responsible. Nicholas sometimes is a little silly, but that is certainly not Victoria's fault. But in any case, she will try to stop her from apologizing and if that doesn't work, she will hear the girl out and then tell her what Robert has obviously already told her.

"Oh, and we are going to give them a party. We just wanted to wait for you to return."

"You wanted to wait for me to organize it."

"That too, my darling." She looks at Robert now and when she sees him smile a mirthful smile, she realizes how happy she truly is to be back in England and what their marriage means to her and how very, very glad she is that they are still so much in love, that she knows that they will always be there for one another.

Robert takes her to dinner that night and once they've reached the main course, he finally asks what she knows he has probably wanted to ask since the moment she broke their kiss.

"How are you? Truly?" She looks into his eyes for a long moment and she knows that he will understand, will understand that she is done with mourning and thinking about the death of her brother.

"I've made my peace with it. I knew for a long time after all. I miss him, of course" she doesn't know how to go on because she doesn't know how to put her feelings into words.

"But after having had to deal with his illness so long, you are somehow relieved that it is over."

"Yes." Robert only nods. His mother was sick for over a year, hope turned into despair and despair into hope again quite a few times, but eventually the Dowager lost her last fight and the day after the funeral, Robert told the family that he had thought that it was about time, that his mother had not deserved to suffer any longer and that they should rejoice in the fact that that suffering had been put to an end. Rosamund was close to strangling him for that, but Cora had known that Robert was right. Later that night he told her that he was glad that he did not have to be scared of every single ring of the telephone or every single visit by Isobel or Richard anymore. And she understands that more than ever now.

After dinner, they go on a walk and she holds Robert's hand and although people, Mary in particular, sometimes tell them that they are much too old for displays of affection like that, she doesn't care and revels in the feeling of being with her husband again.

"I missed you so much," she says to him.

"I missed you too. And I could have strangled Nicholas for leaving just like that. Leaving me to deal with his runaway marriage all alone." She knows that Robert probably was a little hurt by Nicholas' lack of trust in him, but the boy has not always had it easy. He grew up in a rather liberal home, but still a lot of conservative expectations have been projected onto him all his life. Nicholas once told her that he sometimes felt torn between what he called 'his Crawley upbringing' and 'the Grantham expectations', because those two did not always match. She understands why the boy wasn't sure about his parents' reaction, especially not about his father's.

"But you told him that we were alright with it?" Robert looks at her incredulously now, as if he couldn't believe that she was asking that question.

"I told him that we were very happy for him and Victoria. She is a nice girl and she has great potential when it comes to being a countess." This makes her laugh. Before Robert and she got married, she once heard her then future mother-in-law say "That American has no potential when it comes to being a countess," to Robert. It had hurt her then, but now it makes her laugh.

"I'll teach her what she doesn't know already, although I dare say it is not that much that she still has to learn." Robert chuckles at this and then leads her back to the hotel.

He has booked only one room for them and it makes her heart burst with love for her husband. He stopped pretending that he slept in his own room about a decade ago, the bed is still in there but only ever made up when one of them is seriously sick and that does not happen very often.

He helps her take off her clothes and it makes several shivers run down her spine because there is something so intimate and familiar about Robert helping her, especially if he doesn't have anything else in mind and she knows that now he doesn't. He wants to be there for her, wants to comfort her if necessary, but he won't make any demands, not tonight.

And so they go to bed and talk a bit more, about her time in America, but mostly about their children and grandchildren and the estate and as they have done so often in the last 47 years, they fall asleep holding hands.

She wakes up in the middle of the night because she has the feeling that she is still on the ship and when she sits up in bed abruptly, she wakes Robert as well.

"Are you alright?" he asks her. She nods and he brushes his knuckles across her cheek.

"Good," he says and smiles at her. She leans towards him and captures his lips with her own and when he looks at her questioningly, she nods again and then lets him take the lead. It takes them longer now, they can't have any hurried love making sessions anymore, they always need to take their time, but it does not make it less enjoyable, in a way it makes it even more enjoyable. Their lovemaking has changed over the course of the last 47 years and especially so within the last ten, but not for the worse. It is still passionate, they only express their passion in a different way, in a way that seems to her more intimate than it has ever before.

"I love you," she whispers into his shoulder afterwards when he holds her securely in his arms. She feels him chuckle and then he says

"I love you too, my darling wife" and kisses the top of her head and it almost makes her cry because she hasn't felt this happy, this right, in such a long time.

Nicholas

If it had been up to him, he and Victoria would have gone to Liverpool to pick up his mother. Or at least they would have accompanied his father, but his father said that he wanted to go alone and there was no arguing with him. "You of all people Nicholas, should understand why I want to go alone," his father had said and he had been right. He does understand. But he did talk his sisters into staying at the Abbey with their husbands and all their children and let Victoria and him go to the train station alone. Much to Mary's chagrin he did not ask the chauffeur to drive them but just drove there himself, but it does not matter to him what Mary thinks 'would have been proper'. He does have a slight suspicion however that it was not only about 'what is proper', but also about the fact that their mother's suitcases will have to stay at the station a little longer then, and as long as the suitcases are at the station, no presents can be handed out. No presents usually means wild and impatient children and Mary doesn't like wild and screaming children that much. At least she pretends to not like them. But he doesn't really care because he needs to apologize to his mother as soon as possible. Not for having gotten married without her present, he is sure that she understood why Victoria and he chose to get married without anyone watching, but for not having told his father about the whole thing beforehand. His father said that he understood some parts of it and could forgive him for the other parts, but he is not so sure that his mother can forgive him for worrying his father so much. She did send a wonderful, heartfelt congratulatory letter that went on for over three pages of course, but it is not in his mother's nature to write accusations into such a letter.

He almost runs to her when she gets of the train, but he is 23 years old and his wife is standing next to him so he keeps himself in check.

"Mama," he says and grins at her when she is right in front of him.

"You little rascal," she says and then gives him a brief hug and kiss on the cheek. She then kisses Victoria on the cheek as well and he can hear her whisper "Don't you dare apologize". Victoria chuckles at this and then shakes her head. He manages to move in a way that he is next to his mother and Victoria next to his father and just as they talked about, his wife involves his father in some sort of animated discussion. Maybe it really was better that his father went to pick up his mother by himself.

"Mama, Victoria might not need to apologize, but I do. I should have been open about it all." She looks at him and then stops.

"Yes. You should have. You should have known that neither your father nor I would be in the way of such obvious happiness. At the very least you should have told your father with whom you were eloping."

"I know." Although his mother has not really said an unkind word and spoke quite normally, he stills feels as if he had been scolded. And rightly so. So he hangs his head. His mother then lifts up his chin and smiles at him.

"Nicholas, don't be like that. Be happy."

"I've disappointed Papa." His mother looks over to his father now and throws him a look that he knows is supposed to mean "wait for a few minutes" and he can see his father nod and then turn towards Victoria again. For a second he marvels at the fact that his father gets along with Victoria so well, but he is very glad about it. And Victoria did read up on the latest cricket and football news.

"I don't think so. But Nicholas, you know your father. He is full of self-doubts. He has always been. He has always been afraid of not living up to the expectations projected onto him. And he is very unsure about how we raised you. You are a wonderful man my dear boy, and you are what you are because of the way we raised you. But it was in a very liberal way, especially considering that you have been a Viscount all your life and that you will eventually be an Earl. Your Papa and I are very, very proud of you and we both know that we have very likely done more right than wrong with you and your sisters. But your father has always been afraid that all that liberalism that you influenced your upbringing quite a lot more than that of your sisters, would eventually go to your head. Not because he thinks you are a bad person, quite the contrary, but because he is afraid that he has not raised you for what is to come for you. We always put your happiness first and it was right, we both know that, but that is not how your father was raised. And as soon as something happens that could potentially harm you, he thinks it was his fault. He was relieved beyond words when he found out that it was Victoria you went to Scotland with and he stopped worrying then. But before that, even if only for a short time, he was afraid that you had run off with someone else, someone you weren't sure about, someone you didn't really love. And that is not what your Papa wants for you. He wants you happy. And had you told him that it was Victoria, he would have known that you were making yourself very happy right away. And that would have saved him quite a few grey hairs."

He can't help but laugh at this. His father has nothing but grey hair on his head.

"Should I talk to him about this?" His mother shakes his head.

"No. He probably guesses what we are talking about now and I'll tell him in any case."

"Which does not surprise me. You always tell him everything." A dreamy smile now appears on his mother's face and she looks over to her husband who smiles back at her.

"Well, he is a wonderful man and I love him." He has to chuckle again because nothing could be more obvious.

"Mama, you know that I really love Victoria, don't you? Our marriage was not one entered in a rush of wild emotions."

"Of course I do. I know you've loved her for years," she says and slightly brushes his cheek. He then offers her his arm and leads her to the car, where he passes her off to his father. He watches his father hand her into the car and then gets into the front where Victoria joins him.

"What did you and your mother talk about?"

"Marriage."

"And what did you tell her about ours?"

"That it was a very happy one. And that it wasn't entered in sentimental haste."

"No. Certainly not." He takes his eyes of the road for a moment and smiles at Victoria who smiles back at him. And then he hears her scream.

AN: I leave it up to the imagination of each and every one of you whether Nicholas is able to react in time and drive them home safely, or whether Matthew and Mary become the Earl and Countess of Grantham only a second later.

I want to thank you for every single review that you wrote for this story, each one made me smile. So thank you for taking the time to write something, especially to those of you who wrote a review for every chapter.

This is by far the longest story I have ever written and I am glad (and a little proud) that I made it to the finish line, so to speak.

I don't know when I will post something again, I have ideas for a couple of one shots, I have even started to write a few drabbles for them, but nothing really solid yet. But I certainly will post again.

Thank you for accompanying me on this wonderful journey!

Kat