This was brilliant. You're writing had me pulling an all-nighter to read it all.

Idk what fanfic does with comments so I’m just gonna say that is unfiltered 4:30 am.

Great story. 3 sections, all with action! Because time does that. Create plot. Real life too. 4 if you include the epilogue. Time goes on.
Characters are all ‘3-D’ as explained in the story itself. The villains don’t know they’re villains. They aren’t even the main enemy at times. Against self. Francis is to be mentionsed as a good guy. Gilbert too, despite his low screen time.
Yao was an interesting character. Great benefactor guy. To pervy villain. To old man. To good guy. He didn’t actually change that much though.
Family relationships and not shipping. An uncommon type of fanfic, but plays it well. Half-brothers, and step brothers, twins, brothers who didn’t really know they were half-brothers, and parenting brothers. Then single parents.
But there is ROMANCE. A large hunk of it is somewhat based on that, but it isn’t the total focus. Must be mentioned though, the pairings are uncommon. UKRus is main. ScotFran if you squint, and wear glasses. CanUk if you count a crush not be mentioned. And NAcest as the same. AmeRom if you twist your head and focus. AusHun is canon, and so is one-sided PruHun. Others too, probably. Maybe.
Yep. So incest comes up. Not acted upon. So does murder. And neglect. And feeding someone drugs without concent. A bit of Suicide. One of a 9-year old briefly mentioned. Unhealthy relationships. Cancer. Death of mothers. Irresponsible parents. Sexual thing~ with employers and employee. VEry LaRge age gap. Wanting kids or nah. People just can’t accept gays. Alcoholics. Shrinks.
But it isn’t dark. Wow. It’s amazing that.
Some touches I liked: Romano likes his bro for reals. Relationships can be repaired. Resisting drugs and alcohol. USUK bromance. NA twins. UK Bros. Separation of family can be both good and bad. Britain can Cook! Just not savory things. Sweets only that. Prussia is neat and clean. Prussia can also pursue someone married without totally ruining the marriage and being a great second dad. Canada’s internet friend. The fact that he still used internet. Just. Not as much as Junior Scout Leader. Casual cancer mention. Nyo. The aliases of everyone in such a chat. Cough cough ‘Stud’ ‘Author’ ‘Fancy-pants.’ Safe interneting! Without real name mentions. Shipping brothers. Ha! Creepiness scale of 1-10. France being an 8 yet twincest being 7.5. Ease dropping correctly! Angel fairy mention. Arthur is such a mom. Francis is easy going dad. But they’re brothers. Unblood-related, yet there is no FRUK. Just brother-bond. France tried so hard to be a big bro. Even good parents are flawed. Multiple generations. Yay. UK Bros actually trekked to make up. In a twisted fuked way, but they did. Stabbing is OK. 7x. 1. Bend the laws and guilt the bad and dying to let the good ones go. The accused doing so willingly. Vash. U good policeman. So good.
The ending with everything going back to the father (of whom I forgot about. Everyone did actually, which makes it better). A whole subconscious story mix. France realizing that what he read was a sTOry then editing it. Authur is a ‘genius idiot’ as directly quoted. Vash realizing this. Problems sometimes can not be easily fixed.
I now realize this is becoming a bit of a summarized-thing. Fanfic won’t allow more than one comment or it to be edited, which I find unfair. But yeah. Great story. Faved.

Hidden memory or Angel/Fairy Magic. Probably the first, but it’s fun to think about the second.

Misguided love. Like. Really misguided. And somewhat twisted. Very good motive.

So many mysteries arisen after so many years. Ages are still iffy for me, except for Allie and Mattie-17 year olds. Prussia’s neatness is shown! Canon fact he is very clean. Alfred’s Revolution/love! Mattie in isolation. But there are still left-overs plot. The stabbing, fairies, angels, and Yao.

I love this fic. And the part when Patrick cried is actually really sad, but what he did to Arthur was really fucked up. I really like his character. After I finish this I'm gonna read the sequel.

A fair warning: This is not going to be a positive review. It will most likely not make you feel happy as the vast majority of reviews I'm sure do for you. But, I am compelled to write it anyway, because I went and read this entire story despite a lot of things. I was very tempted to abandon it halfway through, and I had to take constant breaks to go off and read/watch other things that would make me feel much better, before coming back to read this.

To begin with, from start to finish, many, many things about this story deeply disturbed me. Extremely so. For being a RusUK fanfic, it has managed to utterly ruin the pairing for me, perhaps forever. I don't know about you, but I've lived emotionally abusive relationships. It's one of the most terrifying things I have ever experienced in my life. Finding out after the fact that my best friend had also been through something similar was even more terrifying. And reading this story brought back a lot of traumatic experiences for me, both in Arthur's familial and romantic relationships. So, no, I didn't enjoy the way this was portrayed at all, and I certainly couldn't believe that these two, as they were written in this story, would've made a healthy couple.

Note that qualifier: as they were written. To be blunt, this story was a mess. I could not, for the life of me, understand the logic behind some characters' actions. As I said to myself, perhaps somewhere around chapter 30, "So Arthur here is thirty years old, and yet he has lived almost his entire life being controlled by other people. How am I supposed to reconcile this with his canon characterisation?"

There was just so much going on in this story, that I couldn't keep track of it all. It felt like a whole bunch of stories mashed into one poorly-paced bundle. You wrote some scenes as they happened, sure, but then you skipped over so much time that would've been better-served by actually describing what went on in the intervening years, so that the characters would be better fleshed-out. For instance, part of the reason why I simply couldn't buy Ivan and Arthur's rekindled relationship was that you didn't write about Ivan's own struggles during the intervening 8 years. You didn't show how he changed or grew as a person, you simply tossed me back into the mix of things and expected me to fully believe that he was a changed person even without writing him any different. All you did was tell, tell, tell, without any show. These characters didn't feel all that human to me, to be honest.

Put it like this: When animating something, especially in 3D, it's quite easy to animate the big movements, the ones that involve, say, a human model's limbs and such. But it's the little movements, the breathing, the blinking, the micro-expresssions, that add humanity to the animation, that makes it less robotic. Those little movements were what you were missing in this story, I think. The in-depth thoughts, that "in-the-moment" feeling. It made it so difficult for me to try to connect to any of your characters at all, sympathise or empathise with them. And that's the most frustrating thing to find when reading a story: When you don't understand or know any of the characters, or what they're thinking, or why they're doing what they're doing.

So much of your story felt completely unnecessary to the plot. So many characters could've been cut out or replaced without affecting anything. What, really, do the twins do here? Roderich? Lizzie? Antonio, Romano, Feliciano? What about Owen? I know arguments could be made about adding characters for the sake of fleshing out the setting, but when you already struggled with making your core characters interesting or likeable, adding more secondary characters did not help.

There were also several points that just baffled me. I'm not sure how Arthur and Ivan even managed to adopt children. They both come from broken homes, have had abusive fathers, one's a recovering, abusive alcoholic and the other is, well, Arthur. Why would Francis go straight to the Kirklands with what he'd realised? How does that make any kind of sense? He knows what they're capable of and what they've already done. He knows they covered up a murder and weren't above drugging Arthur to keep him silent. Why would he go, alone, to confront them, without telling anyone?

When it comes to the Kirklands themselves, I can appreciate that you tried to show how different characters can have very different opinions of themselves and each other, based on the knowledge they have. Which is why it's unfortunate that it simply never went anywhere. Nobody came to an understanding, they just got blackmailed or otherwise coerced. The ending was one of the most pessimistic and depressing things I have ever read, since the basic moral I got was, "Horrible people will do horrific things and we can't possibly bring them to justice, the only thing decent people can and will do is suck it up and deal with it." I think I deal with enough of that in real life, thanks, I don't really need or want to see it in the stories I read too.

In fact, yes, as the story itself pointed out, the ending made me feel cheated. And self-deprecation, or self-aware humour, or whatever that was attempting to be, did not make me feel any less cheated. Slogging through all this mud, only to arrive at an ending like that, as a reader, was just a terrible feeling. It's not very descriptive, but in the end, this entire review was an attempt to describe how this story made me feel, which is summarised with "terrible feeling".

The epilogue made me laugh, but it was not helped by the fact that the laughter was, I am sure, completely unintended. I was reminded of a review I read for a drama, which went:

"We’ve been on this road for a while so it was no surprise, and in that respect the final episode delivered exactly what I expected—loose ends tied at warp speed, and everyone’s terrible parents suddenly being nice for no real reason other than we’re at Episode 20. I sort of wanted to ask about everyone’s lobotomies but then Dad really went and got his brain re-wired literally, so that kind of takes care of that on a meta level. I could’ve stood to see him suffer more, but he was, like most of the roadblocks in this drama, a device more than a person.

It wasn’t like I hated the drama with a fiery vengeance or anything, though I doubt it’s news that I didn’t love it. It’s just deflating when you get to the end and realize it was all empty, and the conflict that we thought was driving the entire series was basically all for nothing. Talk about a letdown."

And on that note, I think that does reiterate a lot of what I felt about this story as a whole, although more disturbed than simply disappointed, and there was plenty of disappointment to go with it. I'll just leave off with this final sentence from that drama review, which I find applies to this story quite well:

"The brothers’ relationship remained the most engaging part, and it’s really a terrible waste that it was sidelined as a bookend story rather than the meat and potatoes, which it should’ve been."

I knew it was twins. I do like Francis mom. I like how Arthur is already attached to Alfred.

Twins again I assume.

Aw. I think I'll like this story. So more new brothers? Mrs. Bonnefoy wouldn't happen to be pregnant with twins? ;) Or at least in future chapters.

I LOVE THIS FIC.

Love!

This is so beautiful! In all honesty, I dislike spending much money, especially e-books despite my love of reading. I prefer to borrow books from the library instead. However, I AM DEFINITELY GETTING YOUR DANG NOVEL! I dun even care if I already read this. This is the one thing I'm willing to read over and over again. That is something I rarely do because I already know what happens. Even so, I will always wish that this will not be taken down. I LUV THIS!

Francis Bertrand, subtle. I like it.

I love the thought of Romano and america being friends. Its like, my number 3 otp.