Hi Cat Bountry, I’m leaving this comment here where hopefully you’ll see it, even though it’s a comment on all of your fics and not just this one. Yesterday was the first time I ventured outside of /afanfic/, when I stumbled on a link to your fic ‘Respawn of the Dead’ on TV Tropes and decided to give it a go. Four hours later, at 2 AM on a weekday, eyes stinging and screen blurring, I’d read everything you’ve posted to Dotchan and here, and I can’t believe I’ve been missing out for so long! Your style is very different from my own, centred on and carried by dialogue instead of description – there are almost no adjectives in your fics, no descriptive metaphors or point-of-view commentary, and the omniscient narration prevents you from committing to a character, diving into their head and watching the story unfold from behind their eyes, feeling what they’re feeling. This usually makes for boring reading, and would here too if you weren’t so incredibly adept at constructing the supporting dialogue. And you are. You write the best dialogue I can remember reading, nailing that natural flow of a conversation, the eddies and flurries that make your stories perfectly realistic. In ‘Reunion’ I got the impression that you had simply placed a microphone on the table between the characters and recorded their actual conversation, then transcribed it verbatim with a few action fill-words. I’d expect it to be boring as hell, but it turned out to be the most captivating dramatic story I’ve ever read. Before reading ‘Reunion’ I would have scoffed at the idea of a dramatic TF2 fanfic taking place solely around a dinner table with nothing happening but the characters talking. Hell, even just ‘dramatic TF2 fanfic’ seems like a yawn-inducing concept. But you managed to pull it off in a way that kept me glued to the screen, and I have to take those words back. Dramatic TF2 is possible; for you, not only possible, but simply amazing. And why so amazing? Because you have a perfect sense for characterisation. Your headcannon for these characters is very different from mine, not at all how I picture them in my head, but the way you write them so amazingly three-dimensionally, full of flaws and hurt and pain and ugliness, but still human – sometimes barely human after what they’ve suffered, but broken cringingly realistically – got to me in a way I haven’t experienced with other fanfics and rarely with published books. There are good stories and touching stories and sad stories, and then there are the stories that dig in like splinters under a nail and won’t let you go, the kind that get under your skin and make the hairs stand up on your arms, make you wince in sympathy with the characters and feel faintly sick, make you want to stop reading but you can’t. You write like this. Both ‘Respawn of the Dead’ and ‘Reuion’ stuck in my head after I turned off the computer, haunted me as I tried to sleep, nagged at the back of my mind all morning and now at work. I just can’t let them go. This is not ‘good writing’. This is fucking brilliant. This comment got way more tl;dr than I’d intended, but then your authorship deserves so much more than just another ‘MOAR’. If you made it this far, I have a last question for you, since it’s something that’s been bugging me since reading ‘Reunion’ yesterday this morning: In the very last part, the morning after the actual reunion, I thought Rosie’s introspective paragraph was hinting at her and Sniper having spend the night together – am I reading that right? I think I read that paragraph ten times, wondering if my ESL was making me misinterpret this sentence: â€She wasn’t sure if she could look him in the eye again, after last night.†And if I am not misreading that, will this dramatic twist be touched on in ‘Afterwards’? Dun dun DUN. God, I can’t wait to read the next chapter. I’ll just sit here and casually refresh the page every single fucking minute. Thank you so much for sharing your talent with everyone here at the chan, and please, if I may be so bold, please NEVER STOP WRITING! (I will now, though. Sorry for wordspam.)