A pause

[prillalar]

I have been so touched by the things people have said about Not the Triumph. You have left such thoughtful, deeply-felt comments and all I can seem to manage in response is "thank you". It seems very inadequate

Comments

[bookshop]

It's not just you. I have seriously been thinking about this story all night and all day and all night again. It's still inside me, and I feel like I have to beg you for a sequel or write one myself somehow, not because I think I could do it justice (I could NEVER!) but just because there's so much that's still there, churning in my chest and unanswered and just, still a little sore.

I've read it three times over since yesterday and I keep trying to review it more articulately and intelligently and I just can't yet because I just can't think straight about it yet. It's painful and awful and intense and it's been lodged in my throat for hours and horus now.

And this: Every time I think about them, I want to cry. It's been that way since the beginning. But they are so difficult, so hard to get hold of, I can't just write about them whenever I want to.

This is exactly, exactly the effect they have on me. I have been trying to make myself write them, not just all night but really for the last several weeks, and it's always some sort of mental struggle to write anything at all with them, because they're so *hard* and so intense, and I care about them so much and I can't figure them out and I can't find words to turn them into how I feel about them and what they are in my head, and especially not since I read Not the Triumph, it makes me feel like they will be stuck in a kind of desperate stoic limbo because I don't know how to get them out of it, and it's so beautiful but it's so unfinished still, and I want to cry and sob and do something to fix them--but I don't know if I'm up to the challenge. I don't know if I have what it takes to scale that mountain. But I have to because they need each other, see, and I need them to figure it out. And I just go in circles.

The thing is that I would have been going in circles, and have been, no matter what, but you wrote that fic and it's like I can't even articulate how much I love it because it's so perfect, and just sort of, on a meta level, leaves me right back where I started, which is perfect too.

And oh god, this cover is GORGEOUS and heartbreaking and I think I'm going to cry. :(( I have been staring at this unfinished Tezu/Ryo drabble all night that I started weeks ago, that I can't even finish now because my heart is in my mouth and they deserve something rawer and realer from me.

The thing about me and H/D is that they always were so much more than a pairing but rather an embodiment of some sort of ideal that sank deep down inside my soul and stayed there, and through the h/d fandom i had ample opportunity to take it out and examine it and grow from it. And Tezu/Ryo is the same way in a sense, except it's less an ideal and more this looming puzzle of love and yearning and commitment and excellence and fear, and it's so many things. I don't know where it's taking me, or where I want to go. But. I don't know. Thank you for writing that fic. And for writing it for me. It means so much, and it has hit me just exactly where I'm at with them, and it's moving, and powerful, and I wish I could tell you how much more I want to write Tezu/Ryo because of it.

Sniffle.

[prillalar]

It's painful and awful and intense and it's been lodged in my throat for hours and horus now.

Oh, honey.

I don't think they will be stuck in a desperate stoic limbo forever. They're so young -- 19 and 21 -- they have time. And I do want to end their story sometime. But first I have to get back to my analysis of the canon and find their story there. I have to figure out Tezuka. Because he's the one who will have to be torn open for this to work. I just don't yet know what it will take.

It would be easy enough to write some little sequel where Ryoma tracks Tezuka down and they fall into each other's arms. But it wouldn't be satisfying. It wouldn't feel real.

I've been in fandom for eight years now. I don't think I've *ever* had pairings that affected me as strongly as TezuRyo and InuKai. I wish I knew why. (And I wish I knew why I can't bear to hurt Inui and Kaidoh. I feel like I'm cheating them somehow by only writing fluffy bunny stuff about them.)

And Tezu/Ryo is the same way in a sense, except it's less an ideal and more this looming puzzle of love and yearning and commitment and excellence and fear, and it's so many things.

I think it's the puzzle that draws us, at least in part. If we understood it all, would we need to write it?

Thank you for writing that fic. And for writing it for me. It means so much, and it has hit me just exactly where I'm at with them, and it's moving, and powerful, and I wish I could tell you how much more I want to write Tezu/Ryo because of it.

You are very, very welcome. Thank you for giving me the push I needed to get started. I still can't quite believe I wrote this.