OK, so a while ago, the lovely repmet sent me a prompt that I loved and was eager to write, but I've had so much other stuff to work on that I hadn't taken the time. And then May began, with a new Rock the AU theme (the Bransons facing emergency situations) that fit this story so perfectly that I couldn't delay any more.

So anyway, this is going to be a two-part story, with the conclusion coming some time this week or next depending on how the rest of the week goes. I won't say exactly what the prompt is because to do so would be to give away some key plot points, but here's some background to set things up. After Sybil gives birth (and lives, obvs), she, Tom and their daughter go to London, after Tom finds work there at a newspaper. Two years after their first daughter (Saoirse) is born, another comes along (Susan). For several years after, Sybil works as a nurse until one too many uppity doctors overrules her better judgment and she decides to put an end to it by becoming a doctor herself, with Tom supporting her every step of the way, of course.

When the story starts, it's 1932, and the girls are 12 and 10 respectively. Sybil has been a doctor for more than a year. As with anything I write, I am not an expert on any topic I cover, only an amateur writer with an Internet connection. Any historical or medical inaccuracies are unintentional. This is all in good fun. Onward . . .

The ringing alarm startled Sybil so thoroughly that she dragged her pen across the page of the notebook she'd been writing on.

"Crickey," she said in frustration.

She put her pen down but left the notebook open so the big blot of ink could dry. Then, leaning across her desk she grabbed the old tin clock and flipped the alarm switch to stop the shrill sound that after almost a month she was still having trouble getting used to. She smiled as she set it back down, thinking of the day several weeks back when her daughters, having bought it used from a from a vendor on Portobello Road with their own money, gave it to her to mark her one-year anniversary as an internist at London's Mile End Hospital.

Leading up to that special day, Sybil had been complaining about always losing track of time while she worked in her office because the tiny space had no windows by which she could mark the movement of the sun. More often than not, on recent weekday afternoons, that had meant Sybil was late to pick up the girls from Miss Billings' flat. Miss Billings was their downstairs neighbor, landlady and dear friend almost from the moment the young couple had moved in. Miss Billings walked the girls home from school and occasionally watched them when both parents were off working. A former stage actress, the now elderly woman lived off the rent of her tenants and was enjoying a comfortable and quiet retirement. Having never married or had children, she loved sharing stories of her past exploits with the Branson girls, whom she found inquisitive, charming and always eager to chat. It was Saoirse who had revealed to Miss Billings that their mother had once been a lady of society and their father the cheeky chauffeur who stole her heart. No stranger to scandal or drama, Miss Billings found the whole thing terribly romantic and helped the girls write a play based on the story for the girls to act out for their parents. Tom and Sybil were grateful for her friendship and had come to love her dearly.

Once the alarm was off, Sybil looked around her office and thought about what was left for her to do. The long and narrow room, formerly a supply closet, was not much to look at, but it accommodated her needs quite well. And it rather tickled Sybil that the room had, after years of meeting its originally intended purpose, been deemed capable of fulfilling a much greater one—Not at all unlike myself, she would say. Her desk sat at the back of the room, facing the door, with the right side of it against the wall, leaving just enough space on the left for Sybil to come around to sit down behind it and in front of the shelving full of books that lined the back wall. Two small plush chairs offered a place for visitors—usually patients or their family members—to sit, and at the corner just inside the door were a coat rack and an elegant standing lamp that had been a gift from Mary and Edith to, in Mary's words, "spruce things up a bit."

The space wasn't much. Her childhood bedroom at Downton was at least five times as big, but this was her very own—a sanctuary of sorts and a marker of how far she had come. The rickety old clock on her desk and the pictures that stood next to it were reminders of the family she loved so dear, Tom, ever her rock, and Saoirse and Susan, who were now nearer to young women than Tom, over-protective to a fault, was comfortable admitting. The clock's alarm was a daily reminder that it was time to do her final rounds of the day so in one hour's time or so she could go home to them at a reasonable time.

Sybil looked over her notes on the cases she had seen that morning, finished out the sentence that the alarm had interrupted and closed the notebook. She walked around the desk and to the coat rack to slip on her white jacket before grabbing a smaller notepad (the same kind that Tom always carried with him for his reporting), a pencil and her stethoscope. Finally ready, she set out to do rounds before she'd leave for the day at 4 o'clock.

"Hello, Dr. Branson!"

Sybil turned as she closed the door to her office behind her to see Kitty Kelly, one of the nurses normally stationed on her floor, a frequent diner at the Bransons' roomy flat and a favorite of the girls because she was unfailingly cheerful and, like their father, a native of in Ireland.

"Off to do rounds?" Kitty asked, as the two fell in step next to one another, walking toward the nursing station at the other end of the hall.

Sybil nodded. "Rather a slow day, but it's nice to have those every once in a while."

"It'll be a long night for me," Kitty said. "I just got here an hour ago, and already, I've been vomited on twice."

"Oh, dear," Sybil replied with a smile. "Was that Mr. Fordham?"

"Indeed."

"Golly, that virus is not giving up without a fight," Sybil said, taking out her pad and pencil and making a note. "I'll be by to see him shortly."

As the two women arrived at the desk, another nurse, Penny Clark, was running up the stairs. She stopped at the top to catch her breath.

"Pardon me, Dr. Branson, Nurse Kelly," she said as she panted. "We've just had a call downstairs from the police. There was a raid at an underground club, not too far from here."

"What kind of club?" Kitty asked.

"I don't know—only that it's illegal, I suppose," Penny said, still breathing heavily.

"I've heard of these," Sybil said. "Tom did an expose on one last week. They front as exclusive dining and dancing establishments, but in reality they are more like brothels, and in some cases, the women there are held more or less against their will, with their families under threat."

"Heavens!" Kitty exclaimed. "So why have they called us?"

"I was getting to that," Penny answered, rolling her eyes and finally breathing normally. "There was a raid this afternoon, and apparently some of the security at the club where it all happened did not want to go quietly as it were, so there was chaos and a gun battle and people were trampled—the long and the short of it is that the police are bringing the injured here, as this is the closest hospital. It's at least twenty to thirty from the sound of it. Can't say how badly injured they all are, but anyway, Nurse James downstairs told me to come fetch anyone available to help—"

"Say no more, Nurse Clark," Sybil said quickly, cutting her off, once it was clear what was happening. "I can certainly lend a hand. You go on to the other floors."

Nurse Clark nodded and headed back to the stairs.

"If you give me a second, doctor, I'll leave a note for the duty nurse," Kitty said, running around the empty desk and reaching for paper and a pen. "I've already cleaned up vomit today, what's a bit of blood going to hurt."

Sybil laughed. "One does wonder why they make the aprons and jackets white."

Kitty laughed too, and once her task was done, the two women made their way down the three flights of stairs and down the hall that led to the hospital's main first-floor wing, where patients in need of acute, immediate care were usually taken. When they arrived, Sybil could see the head nurse and the duty doctors assigned to emergent care that week already making preparations and assignments and setting up a small triage area at the doorway.

Sybil's wartime experience had taught her to quickly diagnose and determine what immediate care patients needed, skills that her coworkers had noticed and had come to depend on in her. She wasn't surprised, then, when she was asked to staff the triage area, with Kitty and two other nurses supporting her. Her role would be to make quick determinations for what potential patients needed as they came in and send them either into the ward for care, into one of three operating theaters on the first floor if the matter was serious or into the waiting area to clean up and be released after questioning from police if the injuries were minor. Sybil, as was her custom when she was serving as a duty doctor, took off her jacket and went over to the nurses' cupboard for an apron, which she found more comfortable to work quickly.

Within ten minutes, the first of the injured had begun to arrive. They were mostly bruised or badly cut, and the nurses and Sybil dispatched them quickly. The first serious wound was a police officer knifed in the right thigh. Sybil saw that part of the blade had broken off and was still lodged in the muscle, but even though the man was bleeding profusely, the knife had missed the femoral artery by an inch.

Lucky bastard, Sybil thought. That inch of flesh had kept him from bleeding out on the spot in seconds.

With Kitty applying pressure on the bleeding around the wound, Sybil cut the fabric of the officer's trousers, applied bandages around the piece of blade sticking out from the leg and tied the leg to the stretcher in which he'd been brought in to immobilize it so he could be transported more safely to the first operating room.

Over the next quarter of an hour, more cuts, a handful of sprains and broken bones came in and Sybil and her team made quick work of diagnosing and directing them to the appropriate care. When the flow seemed to have slowed, Sybil stepped away for a moment to the bathroom at the end of the hall to wash her hands and take off the apron she'd borrowed and slip her jacket back on.

Stepping out, she heard Kitty call out, "Another one just in, Dr. Branson! This one's a gunshot wound!"

She hadn't put her jacket all the way on when she heard Kitty. She dropped the jacket on the floor and slipped the apron back on as she ran. She could see that the patient's head, turned away from her, was caked in blood as she approached.

"Where?" She asked as she came up. All four nurses hovered over the patient removing extraneous clothing to find the entry point.

"Looks like a bullet grazed the temple, and there's another on the shoulder," Kitty said, moving so Sybil could step forward.

"Oh, lord, the abdomen's been hit too!" Another nurse said cutting away the man's waistcoat.

Without bothering to look at his face—the abdominal injury would be the critical one—Sybil leaned over his chest and reached to pull away the other side of the waistcoat that the nurse had not cut away yet and the white shirt beneath.

That was when she saw it.

A thin line of uneven stitches along the fabric, maybe four inches in length.

xxx

"Sybil, where is the waistcoat for this suit?" asked Tom walking into the kitchen with his shirt untucked and his braces hanging at the sides of his trousers, as Sybil made eggs. The girls sat waiting, still in their nightdresses, at the breakfast table.

"Da, what's happened to your shirt?"

Before Tom saw what she was talking about, Susan ran up to her father and stuck her finger into the small hole on the left side.

Tom swatted her hand away but laughed. "How did that get there?"

Susan giggled and ran back to the table, evading her father's tickling attempts.

Sybil set the kitchen spoon down and walked over to inspect the damage. "You manage to ruin you clothing in the oddest ways. The waistcoat is likely under the bed somewhere or at the bottom of your laundry pile."

Leaning over to whisper in her ear, Tom said quietly, "You're the one who likes to rip everything off."

Sybil gave him a look, but couldn't stop the blush that came over her cheeks. "Take it off, and I'll mend it."

"Can I mend it, mum?" Saoirse asked.

"You?" Tom asked playfully. "I don't know if I trust you with my clothing."

"Please! Miss Billings showed us how. She said she used to make and mend all her old costumes."

"Well, it's a good thing," Tom said. Leaning over the table conspiratorially, he whispered to the girls, "I don't know if mam could have taught you how to do it properly."

Sybil laughed, but Saoirse said, "That's not very nice to say, da, since mum does all your mending because you're even more rubbish at it than she is."

"That's very true," Tom replied, contritely.

He removed his shirt and threw it on top of Saoirse's head. "Have at it, my girl."

Then, he came up behind Sybil and without warning lifted her off the ground.

Sybil shrieked, causing the girls to laugh. "Three cheers for a lady who can mend people but not clothes!" Tom yelled out.

Both girls responded at the top of their lungs, "HIP-HIP! HOORAY! HIP-HIP! HOORAY! HIP-HIP! HOORAY!"

xxx

"Oh, God!"

Kitty noticed Sybil's change in demeanor immediately. "What is it?"

But Sybil didn't answer and, instead, scrambled from where she was leaning over and pushed Kitty away to look at the patient's face. Taking it into her hands, she wiped the blood that was oozing from a long gash across the side of his forehead. "Tom? TOM?"

Kitty gasped. "Oh, my god!" Luckily, her training kicked in and she immediately began to assess Tom's condition. "He's still breathing," she said. "The pulse is weak but steady."

Sybil choked out. "Oh, darling, please hang on!"

Sybil tore away what remained of the shirt so that both wounds were accessible. Her hands were shaking but also moving on instinct. A part of her, the wife, was pulling in one direction, trying to lift her above the scene, turning everything at the edges black. But another part of her, the doctor, remained focused on the wounds in front of her, using her narrowing vision to her advantage so she could focus on what she knew how to fix and letting all the chaos around her fall away.

"We need to abate the bleeding in the shoulder and immobilize it until it can be addressed properly," she croaked out, not recognizing the sound of her own voice.

"Sybil," Kitty said quietly, taking her by the shoulders from behind to pull her away, but Sybil shook her off.

"Let me go, and do as I say!" She yelled, moving on the abdomen.

Kitty gestured for one of the two other nurses with them to see to the shoulder. Then, she pointed at the other and said sternly, "You, go tell Nurse James we need a surgeon and the nearest theater cleared out and then come back with the duty doctor—"

Sybil ran around the stretcher and stuck her hand beneath Tom's back to feel around for an exit wound. There was none. "Bloody hell, he needs a surgeon now!"

On cue, two doctors ran up. "The room is ready—what are the details?"

Sybil opened her mouth to talk, but Kitty beat her to it offering first his vitals and then a summary of his wounds, leaving the most serious to last. "Gun shot to the abdomen, maybe six inches from the navel, no exit."

The surgeon looked past Kitty to Sybil for confirmation, but Kitty immediately stepped between them again. "It's Dr. Branson's husband. I've told you what you need to know, now go save him and I'll see to her."

"I'm coming into the theater!" Sybil said pushing Kitty away.

"That's not advisable doctor," the surgeon said, gesturing to those around him to lift the stretcher so they could transport Tom.

"I must!" Sybil cried.

"Dr. Branson, please," Kitty said, holding her back as the team lifted Tom and walked him to the operating theater about thirty feet away.

"NO! I need to be with him," Sybil cried.

But the team had stopped listening, instead focusing on Tom and getting him where he needed to be. Sybil followed a few steps behind with Kitty next to her to ensure that she wouldn't get in the way. They had just made it into the room and placed him on the table when Tom regained consciousness.

"What . . . where . . . Sybil . . . "

It was barely audible, but just loud enough that Sybil heard him.

"TOM!" she called out running toward the door, but Kitty grabbed her again and stopped her just as one of the nurses inside slammed it shut.

"NO! PLEASE! I NEED TO BE THERE FOR HIM! TOM!"

There was nothing Kitty could say, so she held her friend against her as she collapsed in tears.