I love your writing; it’s so poetic and detailed. Linking the nearly invisible pinstripe to the moonlight and the waterfall, you set such a beautiful scene. The story is simple, flash fiction, the majority of it the act of undressing, but you use these simple actions to tell so much more. You characterize the relationship between Tseng and Rufus perfectly. The way they know each other, Tseng innately understands that Rufus won’t want his help undressing, that he helps him most by letting him do this on his own. The need for ‘normalcy’, contrasted with what becomes natural when the ordeal is over. I tend to think of Rufus’s relationships being predicated on the circumstances, a question of when as much as who.

Lovely writing.

Although I would like your perspective on why Rufus wears so many layers. In Advent Children, it seems like he’s wearing a black shirt, a white shirt, a black vest, and then his coat. Maybe it’s to keep the stigma from bleeding through, maybe there are days it will drench the bandage and just keep going. Maybe that’s why the first layer is black. Or maybe there’s something more to it.

Cherry, I love it so much, you can't even imagine (actually you could because you have a great imagination). It's perfect: quiet and understated. I love this sort of fic - its probably an actual genre with a name and everything - in which the performance of one mundane task evokes a wealth of memories through which a life is revealed. A la recherche du temps perdu: Proust has his madeleine and Rufus has his buttons. The depth and richness of the history between Tseng and Rufus, and the different relationships Rude has with each of the other Turks, are so deftly drawn with just a few words. I adore the rough sketch of a possible backstory for Tseng, and I really love the fact that, despite his curiosity and his imagination, Rufus respects Tseng's privacy and doesn't pry into a past that is dead and buried.

"The reality is that Rufus, with all the traditional, classical education his father's money could buy, is much more likely to know Wutaian haiku than Tseng." This has got to be one of my favourite lines of all time. It's practically a fanfic on its own. It could only be fanfic because it presuppose a knowledge of these characters, and also because I think a lot of fanfic is about defining, pinning down, encapsulating.

I also like it because their backstories and memories are not exactly those of my Tseng and my Rufus, but their actions and their attitudes are. Tseng, in DIPOTP, is still at the point where he would try to button Rufus's coat for him. This Tseng is wiser, and this Rufus is more humble. I'm so happy they get to be happy.

I also loved the line, " "Now that the pain has gone from his face, the president looks very young. "I can start again!" Rufus exclaims." I often feel that he's never had the chance to be really young. I'm sometimes tempted to write a story about old Rufus - I feel that he would be quite a whimsical, charming, stubborn old man, the kind who exasperated his grown children but got on well with small kids.

What a lovely, lovely present. Thank you!