I just reread your story and I really loved it. I hope that now that more time has gone by, it will be easier to forget about what happened in episode 5 and move on to our AU world. Please keep writing.

Fantastic! Love it; it made me smile and just feel good. Sybil is going to be so missed, but reading fics like this keeps her alive; that's the great thing about fanfics. Anyway, I really really enjoyed this. :)

Beautiful. They may not have the finest luxuries money can buy, but they have sweet moments of love and that is priceless.

Soooooo cute. Thank you.

Oh gosh Piper, you're going to make me cry! As if your sweet beautiful story wasn't enough, your little message at the end...AHHH! I understand what you mean about feeling like a "shell", but knowing that you are out there, with the fandom, even if you're not constantly writing (and your writing is SOOOOO GOOD!) is worth it, because we need wonderful people like yourself!

This was truly a lovely story; I loved all the intimacies of that conversation, the glimpse into their married lives, and I loved that it could be set ANY time like you said-early in the marriage, later in the marriage, pre-baby, post-baby, etc. And it's a great testament to marriage in general, so thank you for this! Because I always saw Sybil & Tom as the "communicative couple"; I never really got a good vibe from Mary and Matthew when it comes/came to communication and talking through things with your spouse, but I do feel that with Sybil & Tom, and I thank you for helping us see more of that :oD

I understand, its hard to keep writing for them, and I'm struggling myself. But, I have always loved your writing and urge you to write more. I loved this story - its how it should have been on the show!

This is lovely and I think you should continue doing fic.

This was lovely. Afterall love isn't all about the happy sweet moments its about the rough times as well.

And they are just too adorable.

This was beautiful. It saddens me that the fans have a better grasp on these two than JF ever did. Please don't doubt your writing and your love for these two based on that man's insolence.

Popping over from Tumblr to leave a review like a said I would!

This story was so beautiful. I love that you make their relationship perfect by making it imperfect (if that makes any sense). They fight, they disagree, it's hard but they realize what they have is only made the stronger for it all. I'd actually like to see that argument over the lampshade! LoL The connection you create between these two is so incredible and you write them so naturally. And the hopeful note you leave the story on is so promising and it makes it even easier to think of this as not 3x05 compliant. x)

All of your S/T stories have been flawless and wonderful. I'll be heartbroken if/when you finally decide to stop writing for them, but I can understand where you'd be coming from. I know it's harder for some to do, I just find it incredibly easy to disregard season 3 altogether, especially because it ended up being so poorly written with so many stupid narrative decisions. All the 'what-if' scenarios that people had been writing leading up to S3 turned out being a million times better than what we actually got.

So while I'd understand you not wanting to write for them anymore, I really hope that won't be the case and we get to see many more stories from you. If you ever feel the need to vent/rant I'm all ears. :)

I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed reading "Intimate." It was perfect. Really, really perfect. I am so thankful you wrote it. This is what we should have seen of their marriage and I think it's better written than anything JF could have produced about them like this.

It was quiet and gentle and sweet and loving and everything, everything, i everything /i Sybil and Tom deserved. I'm blown away.

The way that you acknowledged the difficulties of their marriage was amazing:

"It was difficult to admit, but everyone had been right; they hadn't been prepared for what was in store. Only, they had all been wrong too, utterly and completely wrong."

Right there, in those sentences, you sum it up so succinctly and eloquently, much more clearly than I've seen in almost any other fic, what their struggles are. They are young, they are naïve, but they put more genuine work into their relationship than anyone else on the show.

When Sybil says, "When we first married, I was so afraid to admit to my family that it was hard. I thought for sure it was proof that they were right. I wanted every second to be happy and easy and filled with love," I was cheering. Because not only did you capture the idealism that makes Sybil Sybil and the way that their relationship works, but you also captured the delusions in so many relationships, particularly young relationships: the refusal to accept that being in love isn't about perfection 24/7.

Instead, love is how you had Sybil brilliantly explain her relationship with Tom, "She knew what his love did; his love filled in all the holes and smoothed all the bumps. She knew because that's what her love did for him" and "I really thought that love meant we would work out all of our problems. I expected problems, I wasn't that naive, but I didn't understand then. I didn't understand that loving you meant there might not always be a solution—" Sybil really should be "proud of what [they]'ve done."

JF should have given that to them. They deserved it. The show deserved it. The viewers deserved it. Think of how wonderful and powerful it would have been to have this scene in one of the episodes. It's so much stronger and it pushes the storyline along further than anything JF did with them this season. I wish he wrote and understood them as well as you.

The fact that none of the characters have had moments like this, a scene that would show a healthy, loving relationship, is inexcusable and makes me worry about his own marriage. I mean, honestly, it doesn't take a genius to know what love should be. Written well-the way you do it-you don't need histrionics to make a relationship interesting. People watch Downton to escape from 2012 and their own lives, and seeing a couple that work to create a loving marriage would be escapism at its finest. What Sybil and Tom have is what people dream of having and spend their whole lives searching for.

That aside, "Intimate" was romantic and beautifully-written. You balance dialogue and description perfectly and don't stick in too many adverbs. I think my favorite details were the way that Sybil pulled him close at the beginning, pressing their bodies together, and how you described the distance between them as "just far enough away to keep from having to cross their eyes to see."

My favorite line was, "The honesty and love in those moments; the confessions, the dreams, all vulnerable revelations that were never to be shared with anyone else. It was perfect, comfortable, unequivocal intimacy." You couldn't have described it any better.

My only quibble with the whole fic was when you wrote, "using his considerable strength to fight her hold" to describe how Tom broke their hold. It seemed a little romance-novel-ly to me. I think saying "fighting her hold" would be enough, as we already know he's stronger than her.

I understand struggling to write the show. It's the AU fics, the one where she lives, or pre-birth fics that are keeping me going at this point. I can't watch anything post-episode 3.5-it's just too painful.

Like you, when Sybil died, I was heartbroken. I was watching in my room at school, and had to slam my laptop shut as soon as it happened. I sobbed on my bed for well over an hour and then had to go hide in the bathroom at work the next day to cry because I could hear one of the secretaries' phone conversations with her pregnant daughter who was across the country and was having some signs of preeclampsia. She ended up being fine and had a healthy son via an intervention-free birth, but all I could think of was the potential of her turning into a twenty-first century Sybil. I still cry over Sybil's death if I think about it too much.

Honestly, the flippancy with which JF treated her character was inexcusable. Even if JBF didn't want to appear in future seasons there were other ways to get rid of the character that were respectful to the story. And the excuse that he wanted to show the dangers of childbirth is also bogus in my book. A) He already did to a small degree that with Cora. B) There are other less essential characters who could have died of the same complication. C) You don't have to die from eclampsia. They had ways (methods that Clarkson mentioned and could have performed) that would have saved her and made for an interesting plot. D) The way that the death was explained away and the way that Tom's character have been treated in the aftermath have been awkward at best and downright outrageous and out of place at worse.

Oddly, what ended up helping me a lot was watching a lot of Call the Midwife. While birth can be dangerous and preeclampsia can turn into eclampsia and death, rewatching that show made it easier for me not to freak out whenever a tv character I like gets pregnant. I suppose it was like exposure therapy in a way-just seeing disaster averted over and over again was calming. I think you'd really enjoy the show.

I hope that you find it in you to keep writing about Sybil and Tom. You are so talented and the more AU fics we have, the more we can take back the show and turn it into what it ought to be. I love your fics and so many fellow shippers do too.

Once again, thank you for writing this. It was perfect.

(I'm Emleng on tumblr. We already follow each other, but because my usernames don't match up, I don't know if you knew who I was over there.)

This was beautiful and tender and so true, I think, to life.

Another really lovely bit of writing from you, I think many would agree with me in saying that. We have loved reading your stories, so much.

So lovely.. We'll certainly miss your stories, and YOU, but thanks for sharing all these wonderful gems with us anyway. Good luck xx