#whaddya know it's newport AGAIN

[tortoisesshells]

wait ok just saw your post about rewatching Downton so I'm sending two more mashup prompts lol. Sybil x Tom, mutual pining + arranged marriage (just to flip canon on its head). AND Thomas x happiness (could include whoever he ends up with in the movie, which I didn't watch), detective AU + noir AU. (noir was not one of the prompts but it should have been!)

It is a truth universally accepted that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife –

Miss Austen was right about a lot of things, but a still truer statement could have started Pride and Prejudice: a single man without a fortune was even more in need of a wife. That’s why he’s here in Newport, isn’t it? Tom Branson, second son of an impoverished, eccentric Anglo-Irish baronet (and a good Catholic mother, thank you very much) was perfectly happy with piecing together his living as a writer and reporter in Dublin, reporting on Lady Gregory and the theater and, when he was lucky, the Irish Republican Brotherhood – until a series of unfortunate events (his father’s passing, his irritatingly Anglo brother taking the title, and kicking the wrong political hornet’s nest several times (and whacking it with a stick to boot)) got him packed off to America with Grandmother Boyle to find a rich American heiress – or just stay out of Sir John Branson’s thinning hair.

He’s pretty determined to do neither, but the United States provides distractions in spades: on the one hand, it’s a land of social unrest and economic upheaval; on the other hand, there’s Sybil Crawley – third daughter of a shipping-turned-railroad family (presumably– her poor cousin, Matthew, helpfully remarks – they own what the Vanderbilts and the Wideners and the Garretts don’t) who’s got ideas of her own – and whose parents would probably account it a blessing if the only unconventional thing she does is either take a degree at a women’s college or run off and work at a settlement house.

As luck would have it, Grandmother Boyle and Sybil’s grandmother, Mrs. Levinson, get along like the proverbial house fire. As luck would further have it, so do he and Sybil, swapping pamphlets and confidences in the interminable afternoons, between outings to Bailey’s Beach, endless rounds of croquet and tennis, and marveling at the fine-hulled Herreschoff yachts bobbing off Station Number 6 of the New York Yacht Club. But Sybil doesn’t want marriage, not right away – she wants her education, she wants to be of use, she doesn’t just want to help pass her Papa’s money from one generation to the next –

Not that her parents listen. After knowing Sybil for only a month, Tom is surprised to be approached by her mother, who wants her settled and is willing to overlook Tom’s empty pockets and Catholicism for his good pedigree; when he puts the question to Sybil, she defers – until the Crawleys lose everything nearly overnight, in the scandal of the decade. The money’s gone. Of course, she must marry; and, unlike others, Tom never cared about the inheritance in the first place. But the hasty marriage sets Sybil’s teeth on edge, and neither of them ever felt so alone as they did leaving the church as man and wife. Can they move past a marriage that both hoped for, but neither wanted in this particular way?

[Thomas AU under the cut]

Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

Corporal Thomas Barrow wakes up hungover in a handsome stranger’s bed on VE Day, + 1, and takes stock: his hand’s not getting any better, his hair’s not getting any less gray, and – given that he’s not truly interested in staying in the Army any longer than he has to, and given that he’s not too keen on going back up to Yorkshire to play footman to the irritatingly unsinkable Crawleys – he’s definitely in the market for a new life. Why not London? Sure, half of it’s a smoking ruin, and sure, a lot of people in London are like people everywhere else, but London’s going to have to rebuild somehow, and there’ll be money in that, maybe even a life, too, if he’s clever – and Thomas Barrow’s always been clever before he was anything else.

Eventually he gets mustered out. Eventually, he makes his way back to London, and finds a place to rest his head at night. It’s pretty easy to find a way around postwar rationing, when you’re used to finding a way to hide more than half your life; and pretty soon, Thomas feels almost comfortable with his black-market trade and his tidy little flat and the discrete pubs and clubs – it’s much more space, much more safety than he’s ever had before.

So he really should have seen it coming, when a metaphorical doodlebug lands smack in the middle of his new life: Dr. Sybil Branson, black-sheep daughter of his one-time employer, standing red-eyed and silent on the landing outside his little flat: Gwen Dawson, maid turned secretary, now Sybil & Tom’s partner & flatmate, has gone missing after receiving a troubling letter about her cousin, Ethel, who was supposed to have been killed during the Blitz. Sybil promises she’d never have troubled him with this, only – only it’s got something to do with the black market and war-time malfeasance, and she and Tom have gone as far as they can go under their own power. He was always the cleverest soul in Downton - she’ll pay him for his trouble, of course – can he help?

Well, why not? How different is tracking down a person from a sack of sugar?

Pretty goddamn different, that’s for sure. For one: it’s not the black market in goods but an entirely different kind of back alley dealings that Ethel, an unmarried secretary who’d been suspiciously sick before the fateful raid, was involved in. For two: she’d made a complaint of assault in 1940, but the records seem to have vanished. For three: Ethel’s friend and long-ago neighbor, the one-time Sergeant Charlie Metcalf, is only too happy to help – something Thomas doesn’t mind so much, as he’s a Leyendecker illustration come to life, not to mention the sharpest barman at his favorite pub, but he’s quickly beginning to feel like this is all more than he – or Sybil and Tom, or Gwen – ever bargained for. Can Thomas find Gwen? Who sent the letter in the first place? Was it Ethel’s work as a government secretary that put her in danger, or the as-yet unnamed man who assaulted her? When the dust of all this settles, will Charlie still look at Thomas like he’s something fine and wonderful?