What happened to Thomas Barrow ⎹ Downton Abbey⎹ Explicit 18+⎹ M/M⎹ Gay ♥ FanFic⎹

The End.

"Wait, what's that?"

"The end."

"The end. What end."

"I got rid of him. Like I always said I would."

He smirks. Cunning little liar. You sneaky little piece of s_. I smile and I oblige. "How did you manage it, darling?"

He coughs. Can't help it. He is, and it figures, drunk out of his mind. Still unsure if he's lying to me or to himself. I let him unravel with a distant ear.

"Well first I was hostile, but it did no good. You picked a man of particularly high spirits. He fought back. Valiantly. So I took the opposite approach."

I smile and repress the urge to betray myself by tapping my fingers on the table top a little bit too impatiently. No no no. You don't get to win.

"Really? And what was that?"

He leans forward. Wait for it. He's going to try to sound cruel. He wants me to hate him as much as he hates himself. Fool. Fool. Sweet little fool.

"Fucked his brains out, then told him I didn't love him."

He laughs. No humour in that. Grins at me. Pain obvious in his eyes. I can see it. He can't see it.

"Neat." I empty my cup of tea. "Now I'm out of a butler though."

He groans. He's so drunk he doesn't even notice the tears in his eyes.

"We'll get a new one. Old. Unbent. It's for the best."

"The best." I repeat. The best.

I remain still and quiet for a while. His poorly raised self-defence is already starting to crumble. He's shaking on his chair and sniffing too much for his own good.

"He was mine," I say after a while. "I was very fond of him. You dismissed him without my knowledge or my consent."

"You hired him without my knowledge or my consent," he slurs. "Am I not the master of this house?"

He sounds so bitter.

"You are. The Master of this house. Jolly good show. How does it feel, to be the Master of this house?"

"I feel great. Never felt better, actually. I'm back to who I was before."

He glances at me with red angry eyes. He looks like he's about to implode.

"Before what? Before Thomas?" I attack. He winces. Name is too fresh on his mind. It's only been too days.

Why on earth would he send away the man he was obviously so infatuated with?

"Before Thomas? Or before the war? Because let me tell you something. You weren't like that before the war. You were happy. Foolish and vain, maybe, but happy. And now look at you. Back where you started. Wherever it was."

I sound cold and I mean it. I'm not amused. I'm angry. I'm angry at him. Angry at myself. Angry at Edgar. At this moment I could pack up and move abroad and not look back.

"You just hate being wrong." His voice is tormented by intermittent sobs. "You wanted me to treat him as if he was a birthday present. You wanted me to throw myself at him and forget everything ever happened. You got him as a replacement. How dared you!" He chokes on his spite. "Well, I don't want him. And you can't stand it."

He doesn't mean any of that, of course, but he's desperately trying to convince himself, and who knows, I would have believed his method efficient if he wasn't so inebriated.