MASTER FIC POST: Once Lost, Now Found -Nuke BigBang 2011-

[carolinablu85]

Title: Once Lost, Now Found
Author: carolinablu85
Artist: x_serenade
Rating: eventual NC-17
Disclaimer: I own less than nothing.
Characters: Luke/Noah
Word Count: 40,574
Warnings: AU. Initial Luke/Reid. Angst. Love. Drama. Sex. Emo-ness. Banter. Frustratingly silly boys.
Spoilers: the whole gosh-darn Nuke story through to the end
Summary: Based on the prompt: What if Luke

Comments

[gentleice]

See, the (sort of) good thing about being sick and spending hours in waiting rooms is that I have time to read stuff that I've downloaded onto my ancient handheld device. (And I'm better now, thanks, if a little bleary-eyed.)

And the reason I'm bleary eyed is that I FINISHED READING THIS!!! And I have bouquets to throw at your feet, so you're getting a very early birthday present :). I have a feeling this might be a trifle long, so strap in.

I would have finished this earlier, but I was working on something which features a Reid/Luke relationship (or memories thereof), and I had to stop reading this and finish that bit of writing first. Otherwise, I think YOUR version of that relationship might have taken over my brain and rendered me incapable of sticking with my original outline. In other words, the way you wrote them rang very true and plausible.

Ideally, two things can happen in "what if?" fics. We might forget about the original canon version and happily embrace the what-if scenario. Or we might see the counterpoints to the original and appreciate the cleverness involved. If we're lucky, we get one of these two things in a piece of writing. But with this "what if", you gave us both, and sometimes AT THE SAME TIME. A remarkable feat. You managed the double treat of clever plot construction and just writing it in a way that swept us along from scene to scene.

I also think that it was a brave decision to write Noah as having been blind for so long. It introduced all these interesting dynamics in his character development (impeccably handled, naturally) and the way he related to Luke (ditto). On a related note, I really admire the way you wrote the passages that were from Noah's POV. So often, we rely on visual cues to convey how a character fits into a scene or an environment. You couldn't do that for blind!Noah, but we still got a complete sense of how he was perceiving his surroundings.

Oh, and the sex wasn't bad :P. And you also gave us the nice added bonus of Maddie/Casey, for which you deserve odes and sonnets written in your praise.

Thank you for taking Tasha's prompt and running with it, and giving us this wonderful alternate-scenario story. With the first anniversary of ATWT's final episodes approaching, I've been half-remembering that whole non-triangle mess and becoming vaguely melancholic. It was really good to read something like this and be reminded that diamonds can be forged from dross.

You know, I sometimes feel like I should stick "The End" at the bottom of my comments, because more often than not, they're novel-length. But there are two better words to end this:

Thank You.

[carolinablu85]

Not just novel-length, but novel-worthy too. How can you be so eloquent in a COMMENT? :P Jeez. Happy early-birthday to me, for realsies. It makes me all tingly.

And let's take a moment to rejoice in you writing something.

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Okay. Good. Got it out of my system. So um, yeah. Thank you. Very very much thank you. Taking this much time to think about my fic and then write those thoughts out? It really means a lot!

And oh man, I wrote this to someone else, it's so true: writing Blind!Noah was so ridiculously fun. I don't know why, it was kinda surprising, but I loved doing it. Especially this Noah, who's had a few years to learn and deal and bring himself up to where he is now. SO. MUCH. FUN.

So often, we rely on visual cues to convey how a character fits into a scene or an environment. ohmygod YES. I didn't realize this when I started, but it did get hard sometimes! Like, you can't write "Noah looked at Casey" because he cna't. You can't write "Luke picked up the book" or "Luke frowned" because Noah wouldn't know that. But again, ohman, it was kinda fun to figure out how to make that all work. :)

Thank you thank you again. I seriously can't find words to say how awesome your comment(s) and being are. But they are. Awesome.