Home is where the heart is

[adifferentlife]

Another long day has passed by them, and Sybil is finding it harder to play along with her family. Though she and Henri had spoken at the hospital and mended much of what lay between them, things were still strained. They had not been able to say proper farewells, not with the other nurses and Doctors about, and as such she felt lonely and unsure.

Dinner had been difficult, Sybil doing her best to avoid Mary's glances and to have polite conversation. She could not help but look at it through Henri's eyes, and the extravagance of all that they had in Downton ate at her. When dinner finishes she stays only as long as she must, pleading tiredness in order to go to bed early. She can hear her Grandmama say that the hospital is working her too hard, but Sybil cannot stay to disabuse her of the notion, taking solace instead in the silence of her room.

Too much silence, she thinks hours later as she lies awake in bed. The sounds of a modern city have become the thing she is accustomed to. But it is not truly the quiet that keeps her up, but the thoughts she cannot escape. How will she manage here in this place that was once her home and now feels so strange? How will she find a way to make Henri understand as well?

Even the worst worries can only keep her awake so long, succumbing eventually to sleep. It only feels a few brief moments later when she's woken by the buzzing of her alarm, reaching out to find it and knocking glasses off her bedside table.

Henri's glasses. Her alarm clock.

Abruptly awake, she sits, seeing her own bedroom in Darrow and not the one she had fallen asleep in. Better, she thinks, is Henri beside her, rousing at the sound himself. Sybil gives him no time, pulling him into an embrace, kissing him fiercely.

They are home.

Comments

[jaimemieux]

Combeferre had slept poorly the night before, a habit that was becoming terribly common. Though grateful for the bed at the inn, it was small, and cold, and (most damning of all) empty of the woman he loved. Though relieved to have work still offered to him at the hospital, his days there both exhausted him and left him too troubled to easily embrace slumber. Worse yet, with every day, the feeling that this was a world in which he did not belong grew stronger, and more frightening.

But what could he do? He would adapt. He would find his way in the world.

Though he could not remember when, he must have fallen into a deep and dreamless sleep sometime in the wee hours of the morning. And strange, as he slowly drifted into wakefulness, he found himself more comfortable, more content and warm, than he had felt in days.

He opened his eyes, and without warning, Sybil was kissing him.

“Le bon Dieu,” he exhaled against her lips, for the moment so glad to have her there that he did not even ask why. “My darling…"