okay wait to be serious for a moment i loved that concept of a consistent nightmare plaguing grace. i remember thinking while reading it, man if he wasnt in the thick of it, right by simon, he wouldnt really bother and then like in the next couple paragraphs grace was like 'if i wasnt experiencing this so vividly, i wouldnt be putting any of my marbles on this' and i was like YES YEAH YUHUH.
this timeloop has so much richness for angst writing, where one person remembers everything while the other is just stuck. theyre both stuck to a certain degree! they thought they were both figments of their imaginations! every scene of interaction i was just eating up. honestly i think im gonna go back to reread simon and grace's first interaction, it really felt like a heart to heart moment of two guys confused and scared. the addition of grace completely shutting down and isolating himself from rocky was such a heartwrenching detail. it was awesome to get to read it, so thank you! I'm really looking forward to the continued fics!
i kind of just realized i coulda just logged in on ao3 to comment but youre getting this here. oops lol
As someone who almost never gets asks, trust, I am so thrilled to have one for this fic!
Yes! The sheer angst of it, meeting this person over and over, and they don't even remember what happened? You can't even take solace in the whole at least we both had to do this, at least we both know how awful it was. That connection is broken the second things reset, and I definitely made a point to gloss over that aspect and more just hint that by the end of it Grace was suffering more from losing and reforming connections than he was from what was actually going on. But it's there. It sits and it festers. Simon is still Simon, but he'll never be the Simon he was in that moment. It's mourning the loss of two desperate people who just don't want to be scared and alone anymore, and then only one of them carries that burden of knowing going forward because the other one has the mercy of forgetting the pain.
I definitely wrote the backstory fic as a way to explore all the nitty gritty as I go, and while it isn't a huge part of where I wound up with the next two fics, I do think a lot of their navigating a relationship is influenced by the fact Grace was shown in real time that forming attachments can be dangerous and retreating back keeps you the safest of all.
(Although, better late than never, my plans for fic 5 do explore Grace's astounding ability to pretend he's not suffering trauma from all the past bullshit and the things only he remembers now. So it's not that I'm avoiding it, either, it just takes a backseat to the rest of everything first because I decided to write snippets over longfic for a change and I try to keep each fic to a theme while also following a linear trajectory through their 3 years 7 months prior to reaching Erid. Did I shoot my own foot? Maybe.)
Anyway, thanks so much for making my day and also seeing the potential for angst stacked up on angst. I'm glad it hit the boxes I wanted it to. The exploration of human connection and how situations shape us is pretty much the entire reason I write, so. Expect more of it!