Oh, look, I'm making barkley's comment right above this look like insta-feedback! *g*
I first read this, I think, back in May, still way after it posted, and I must have been on a fly-through since I didn't comment (I failed to comment on a few other fics I had bookmarked from that time), but I'm very glad I saved the link. I enjoyed a slow re-read as much as the initial read, and got a bunch more of the subtleties.
I do buy cold Daniel, completely. He was pretty coldly pragmatic when he was first confronted by the alts, and out of all the ways I can imagine things going after the episode returned to 'our' present, only a few of them don't have a very-shut-down or marginally insane Daniel in them, and fewer have a Daniel who finds any kind of contentment.
I love that you showed this through Katep's point of view. I love the clash of cultures -- Katep trying to placate alt.Jack with generous and respectful offerings, and alt.Jack not just rejecting it but not even processing it, not getting it at all. I think the Katep-Daniel friendship is a rich one for fic mining, and this capitalizes on it in a very satisfying way. Right up to the brief moment where Katep sees a Daniel very different from the man who's become his friend. That's chilling, and the comparison with Ra works well -- Daniel going dark-eyed instead of glowy-eyed. And at the same time, in that moment I can also read Daniel's anger at what happened -- because, in whatever way, he's grieving too, and raging too, under that cold control. So it works for me as either scaryass chilling inhuman coldness, or rage and pain too strong to give vent to.
The comparison of this alt.Jack with Jack is painful, and the way alt.Sam died even more so. (For a while, I thought the 'she' that alt.Jack meant was a daughter -- that he was talking about the death of a child while everybody was responding to him as if he were talking about the death of his wife.) It amazes me how many truly wrenching stories 'Moebius' has inspired -- such a difference between the way some of us view it, and the lighthearted fun the ptb thought they were having.
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I first read this, I think, back in May, still way after it posted, and I must have been on a fly-through since I didn't comment (I failed to comment on a few other fics I had bookmarked from that time), but I'm very glad I saved the link. I enjoyed a slow re-read as much as the initial read, and got a bunch more of the subtleties.
I do buy cold Daniel, completely. He was pretty coldly pragmatic when he was first confronted by the alts, and out of all the ways I can imagine things going after the episode returned to 'our' present, only a few of them don't have a very-shut-down or marginally insane Daniel in them, and fewer have a Daniel who finds any kind of contentment.
I love that you showed this through Katep's point of view. I love the clash of cultures -- Katep trying to placate alt.Jack with generous and respectful offerings, and alt.Jack not just rejecting it but not even processing it, not getting it at all. I think the Katep-Daniel friendship is a rich one for fic mining, and this capitalizes on it in a very satisfying way. Right up to the brief moment where Katep sees a Daniel very different from the man who's become his friend. That's chilling, and the comparison with Ra works well -- Daniel going dark-eyed instead of glowy-eyed. And at the same time, in that moment I can also read Daniel's anger at what happened -- because, in whatever way, he's grieving too, and raging too, under that cold control. So it works for me as either scaryass chilling inhuman coldness, or rage and pain too strong to give vent to.
The comparison of this alt.Jack with Jack is painful, and the way alt.Sam died even more so. (For a while, I thought the 'she' that alt.Jack meant was a daughter -- that he was talking about the death of a child while everybody was responding to him as if he were talking about the death of his wife.) It amazes me how many truly wrenching stories 'Moebius' has inspired -- such a difference between the way some of us view it, and the lighthearted fun the ptb thought they were having.
Glad you wrote and posted.