More S/T, from Tom's perspective, as they near the end of Sybil's holiday and he contemplates her offer to move to Dublin. Thank you so much to everyone who has read, reviewed, favorited and followed for coming along with me on this trip!

Tom

Watching Sybil explore his kitchen in search of ingredients for a farewell meal she planned on cooking for them that night—she was leaving the next day—Tom considered what it would be like to see her like this, wake up to her like this, every day. He was wearing a T-shirt and pajama bottoms and sitting on the sofa with his feet on the coffee table. A news magazine that he'd long since stopped reading lay across his lap. Sybil was wearing a barely there camisole and a pair of old boxer shorts of his she'd found at the bottom of his wardrobe. They were barely clinging to her small hips. She looked, if Tom had to describe it in a word, delicious. Every so often, she would look over her shoulder at him, aware of her effect on him, but she was "too busy," she'd said, "to do anything about it right now."

She'd brought up moving to Dublin again last night, on the drive home from Christmas dinner. He figured that she would, given how well the day had gone. Despite her initial concerns, Sybil had received a warm welcome from the Bransons, and both she and Tom had enjoyed themselves thoroughly. His family had loved her so much, in fact, that Tom believed that if he'd announced halfway through dinner that their intention was to get married, his mother would have gotten up from the table right then, pulled them into her car and driven them to her church so Father Flanagan could do the job that very night. The reaction didn't much surprise Tom, though. His had never been the family he was worried about.

The truth was that Christmas was when he'd miss his father the most. And his mother knew it. The first two after his death, Claire and Kieran had had to drag Tom out of his flat to join the family. Both times, he'd volunteered to watch Aisling, a newborn during the first and chubby toddler during the second, in order to avoid questions as to his book, his writing, and why he was letting it all go to waste. (Given the dark hours he had spent watching the little girl, none the wiser as to what she had lost, it felt appropriate to Tom that the now precocious 6 year old would take such a shining to Sybil, barely leaving her side after dinner, even when it was time to exchange gifts.) Christmases had gotten easier since, but he'd hardly been happy. Knowing, then, how his family would receive his newly found happiness, he wasn't exaggerating when he'd told Sybil that they would throw a party for her on sight. The change in him—after only a couple of weeks in her company and at what was usually a tough time of year for him—was readily apparent. He knew his family would see it and be deeply grateful to her. So he laughed at her obvious nerves. No, the Bransons were definitely not going to be the problem.

Not that he could blame Sybil's parents for the third degree he knew would come. On paper, things on her end were far more difficult to accept. It wasn't just that the Crawleys were very rich aristocrats—though it didn't help. Tom could imagine the men of wealth and position that her parents had pushed their daughters toward, and he most certainly was not one of them.

It was her age. At 24, she was barely more than a year out of university and no less than six years his junior. And it was the four-year relationship she had just extricated herself from. Who wouldn't believe that she was just a young, naive girl vulnerable to whatever lothario wanted to charm his way into her knickers? She would insist, of course, that such a description of her situation presumed she wasn't smart enough or strong enough to fight off unwanted advances or to discern the sincerity of his feelings. She had told Tom, when telling him about the Larry character, that she did not feel heartbroken because her heart had never truly been Larry's to break. He believed her, but he knew her parents would not be so easy to convince.

The Bransons were not better people, then, for so easily accepting their relationship. It was just a matter of circumstance. Sybil was a kind of savior for Tom, and his family welcomed her into their lives as such. Tom, to the Crawleys, would be the man who was taking their baby, fresh from heartbreak, away to another country.

Hello, Lord and Lady Grantham. My name is Tom Branson. I've no fortune or title, but I'm in love with your daughter and I'm taking her to Ireland.

Yes, he could see why they might object, which was why her talk of moving, before he had met the Crawley family and had a chance to make a different, truer impression, continued to make him a little nervous.

In bringing it up last night, Sybil cited The Radical Chauffer's heroine and how she had willingly uprooted her life, all she had known, taking a chance on the love she felt for her family's Irish servant. Why would Tom, of all people, be so worried about Sybil doing the same? He conceded the point. In truth, the very many times the book had come up in conversation since she'd shown up at his flat announcing her love for it and for him was rather amusing to Tom. It was a bit like a common language between them, one that he had made up and that she had studied for years. When one of them wanted to make a point, he or she would simply refer to it, and the other would understand immediately. It gave him a bit of understanding as to how she could believe so easily that her heart recognized his words and clung to them, without knowing it was doing so, on their first night together. That connection between them seemed so obvious now that it was a wonder to him that it took a whole day to discover it existed.

Breaking him out of his thoughts was the sight of Sybil walking toward him, tossing the magazine away then sitting astride him on his lap.

Tom smiled widely and said, "So you've changed your mind about what you want to do this morning, thank God." He immediately started running his hands up and down her legs, as if it weren't already clear what it was he wanted to do.

Sybil put her hands on his shoulders, so as to keep him at bay. "No, I still want to cook for us, but it seems that there is nothing edible at present in your kitchen."

"You've been here for two weeks and you're just now noticing?"

"Well, for most of the time we're here, you have me otherwise occupied," she said with a grin, which he returned while determinedly trying to push his hands under her camisole.

"And wouldn't you rather be doing that? It's our last day, after all."

"No, it isn't."

"No?"

"No. I'm coming back, remember, and we'll have plenty of days and nights for that, which is why I want to make a nice dinner this night, and apparently I need to run out and get food in order to do that."

"And I can't come?"

"Not if dinner is going to be a surprise."

Tom dropped his hands to his sides with an overly dramatic sigh, as if giving up his pursuit. "Fine, but may I suggest a compromise?"

Sybil crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes. "And what did you have in mind?"

"Well, you need to wash up before you go out. I could help you do that to save you time." Just like that, his hands were working his way up her torso again.

"All right, but let me register my skepticism now."

"Why skepticism?"

She laughed and stood up, pulling him along, "No shower involving you is going to get me out the door any faster."

XXX

About an hour later, both showered and satisfied, Sybil was finally off, and he was alone in the apartment again, dressed with nowhere to go.

Standing in the living room, he looked around for something to do. He saw his computer bag across the room, went over to it and opened up his laptop on the coffee table. He had two e-mail messages. The first from Matthew confirming what time his plane would land the next day. Tom smiled and thought of Matthew's texts the second night Sybil had been in Dublin. His last message in the exchange had been a cryptic reference to his being with someone, or at least being hopeful about someone. Tom questioned it, but never received a response and didn't want to press his friend, knowing how reticent Matthew could be about talking about such things—particularly if he really liked the person in question. Matthew hadn't been involved with anyone since Lavinia. It didn't seem to Tom that Matthew was still grieving for her, but he hadn't shown interest in anyone yet either. If Matthew had met someone in London, and for Matthew's sake Tom hoped that was the case, Tom was determined to give his friend room to talk about it on his own time.

Tom replied:

I'll be there to pick you up and drive us directly to the pub so you can hear me drunkenly wax poetic about Sybil and so you can tell me about your mystery woman. -TB

The second message was from his sister Maura. The subject line: Everyone approves! It made Tom smile. Maura had arrived just before dinner had been served, and the family having gone directly from that to opening presents, Maura hadn't gotten a chance to interact with Sybil much. Lily and his mother would have filled her in on what she had missed after he and Sybil had gone home, and Maura was apparently eager to put in her two cents about how wonderful it was that he hadn't been his usual dour self this holiday.

Tommy,

Sorry you weren't at dinner last night. But weird thing—there was this guy who looked just like you! I would have thought he was you except he was all smiling and happy and with a girl!

;) Kidding, obvs.

I wish we could have talked more, but the clinic was crazy and I couldn't get away earlier. Sybil is lovely. Mam said that it's a very new thing, but very serious (wishful thinking on her part?). If your smiles last night were a sign of how happy she makes you, I hope she is around for a long time. Aisling was half asleep when Lil, her and Kelly left, but still managed to wake up long enough to tell me that she predicts wedding bells in your future. That child.

Let's have dinner soon, please! I want to hear more about Sybil. By the way, Mam is still asking when we're going to clear out the attic. Jim and I are taking the extra furniture up there, but the trunks with Da's old papers and things are still there for you, if you think you'll still want them. Let me know.

Cheers, Mo

Tom typed out a reply.

Yes on dinner, but before the 29th because I'll be going to England then to meet Sybil's family. (So, yes, serious.) Tell mam I'll be by for the trunks before I leave. -TB

The trunks. He'd forgotten about the trunks.

Colin Branson was a pack rat. To his wife's supreme annoyance, he'd kept most of his notebooks and papers from when he was a schoolboy, his old journals and all his letters. Basically, if it possessed a modicum of sentimental value for Colin, it wasn't going to be thrown away. In his life, she'd allowed him the attic to keep several trunk fulls of what she very unsentimentally referred to as junk. In the weeks after his death, though, as she began to clear his things out of their bedroom, she couldn't bear to go through the attic and asked her children to do so. They were all too broken up, but when Kieran suggested simply throwing them away—"Does anyone actually want to put themselves through the bother of sorting it all out?"—Tom spoke up. His mother, understanding the depth of his grief, told him he could do it on his own time. Apparently, though, after five years, even the devoted widow's patience was wearing thin.

In fact, Tom had forgotten all about them. Thinking of them now and of the exercise of excavating through the artifacts of his father's life, it occurred to him that his forgetting was a good sign. He was no longer just dwelling on the fact Colin Branson was gone, and though he knew it would be painful, Tom actually felt ready to unearth his father's treasures.

After sending his reply to Maura's message, he closed his laptop, put it back in its bag and laid back on the sofa with a sigh. A few minutes later, he stood up and ambled over to what he still grudgingly called his "writing room." It wasn't much of a room, really. It was small and sparse, furnished only with a single chair and a small table, atop which rested his typewriter, a gift from his father at age 15. ("Now work some magic, my boy," Colin had said, rubbing his hands together as if concocting some sort of master plan for his son.)

On each side of the typewriter there were two stacks of papers. On the left, the sheets were blank, and on the right, they were full of the drab product of his people watching.

Descriptions looking for characters. Densely detailed shells of people with no soul.

Whenever he wondered why he still kept at it, he'd hear the voice of Mrs. McMullen, his piano teacher, telling him to "Practice! Practice! Practice!" Typing, writing, wasn't the same as playing the piano, but the lesson, for whatever it was worth, however misguidedly applied, was ingrained.

What else is there to do?

Tom went to the kitchen for a tall glass of water, then came back into the room and sat down. He checked the ribbon, put in a fresh sheet of paper and started to type.

She steps out onto the terminal, looking fresh, beautiful and in search of adventure. Our hero sees her across the room and

And what?

and he doesn't know what hit him?

Ugh.

Laughing at himself, Tom ripped the paper out of the typewriter and crumpled it up into a ball, tossing it into the waste bin at the other end of the room. Even on his best day, Tom doubted he could ever come up with words to describe Sybil or describe her effect on him. He put that idea aside, and after contemplating the typewriter for several minutes, Tom pulled another fresh sheet of paper off the clean stack, rolled it in and started again.

Dear Da,

I apologize for taking this long to write. Figuring out what to do with myself after you were gone turned out to be quite hard. I don't know whether that makes me a weak man, but I'm certain it does not make me the man you would have wanted me to be. I have done nothing that would have made you proud since you left us, mostly because I have done nothing at all. For that, I must also apologize. You gave me a compass, but fool that I am, I never bothered to learn to read it assuming that you, my guide, would always be with me.

I can't consider wasted the years I spent wondering what you would have wanted for me, but I recognize now that I can't let myself be caught up in that limbo forever. If I have disappointed you in the past, my only excuse is that you were too good of a father and too good of a friend, and having grown to depend on you as I did, I was ill prepared to stand your sudden departure or make meaning of it. Your legacy rests in my hands, and I will be a better steward of it in the future, like your other children have been.

I doubt you're wondering what brought this change in me. You knew me so well you must already have guessed it's because of a girl. You told me once that I was a romantic, and I don't suppose there's any sense in me denying it now. I wish so much that you could have met her, but part of me understands that whatever force is in charge of the way things happen must have known that she couldn't come into my life any sooner, for this moment would be when I was most in need of saving. I'm wondering now if you had a hand in it. If so, I must thank you for once again giving me more than I deserve.

I will continue to do my best at living life without your help. I hope with better success now than before.

Always your faithful son,

Tom

Tom stared at what he had written until he realized that there was noise coming from the kitchen. He got up and saw that Sybil was back and by the look of it had been for a while.

Hearing him, she turned from the spot on the counter where she'd been mixing something in a bowl.

"Hi," she said, smiling warmly.

"I didn't hear you come in," he said. He walked over and, hands in pockets, leaned on the counter, near to where she was.

"I didn't want to interrupt."

After a long moment, he said, looking at the floor, "You can ask me about it if you want to."

She looked over at him, "Ask you about what?"

"My writing."

For all the times the book had been a subject of conversation, the subject of what he had done since, what he had failed to do, had not yet been broached. Certainly not in the way he was offering it up for discussion now. Even when he'd shown her the writing room, she hadn't asked questions.

"Do you want to talk about it?" she asked.

He looked over at her, with a smile that did not quite reach his eyes. "Not yet." As the words came out of his mouth, he realized that a month ago, the answer to that same question would have been "no." He straightened up and pulled her into a long hug.

After a few minutes, she pulled away slightly so as to look him in the eyes, which were now smiling along with the rest of him.

"Well, when you're ready, I'll be around because I'm moving here." She punctuated the last three words by poking him in the chest as she spoke.

He laughed. "Good."