Chapter Text
It was the looks that got him in the end. Thomas hadn't cared at first -- he hadn't cared about almost anything, really -- but the more time passed the angrier their shallow pity made him. They had nearly killed him -- and now they looked at him as though it was his own terrible fault. As though they were such wonderful people for accepting someone who was practically a convict into their midst -- his attraction to men had already been enough to land him in unlawful waters, and now there was his attempt to end his own life to add to the rap sheet.
They had, admittedly, lied for him, practically all of them. They had lied about him kissing a man a few years before. Now they lied that he had flu, as though he could be in bed for a week and emerge unscathed, unchanged. It kept him safe – but it chained him. It trapped him on a prisoner’s wheel, doomed to make each day a carbon copy of the last, making no progress no matter how diligently he stepped. They surrounded him in such a falsehood that everything they said to him was fake. They were fake. Their sympathy was fake.
It was this, more than anything else, that spurred his efforts to find another job. He wanted to start afresh, without the ankle-chain of his history here. Even if he had to leave Yorkshire, the only place he had ever loved, and Phyllis, the only person who loved him.
Well. There was Jimmy. But a handful of letters did not a love story make, much as Thomas might wish it. So he was striking out on his own, taking control of his life in a way he had not attempted since the war ended. He had only two days left at Downton: on Saturday, he would be travelling to work in Durham, in a shop. It felt like taking massive steps backwards, but the owner was elderly and childless and had hinted that he was looking for someone to run the business in his old age -- and perhaps, one day, to inherit it.
He did not have to stay there, anyway, as Phyllis kept reminding him. Getting out was his priority. This would enable him to do so.
That Thursday afternoon, he sat playing chess with Andy. In his long-sleeved shirt, the evidence of Thomas’s injuries were invisible, but certainly not unfelt. He was absurdly conscious of them with every piece he moved.
“You alright?” Andy asked in a low voice.
If one more person asked him that, Thomas would add murder to his list of criminal tendencies. He ignored the question, stopped rubbing his itchy wrist and took one of Andy’s knights.
Just as Andy was moaning that Mr. Barrow always took his bloody knights, a person walked into the servants’ hall. A very handsome person, whose face was a great comfort to Thomas. A person whom Thomas had not seen in the flesh for a year and a half.
Jimmy Kent walked back into Thomas’s life with a nervous smile and a strange look in his eyes.