I'd hoped for a much more triumphant return to this site than this. Truth: I wanted to come bearing the gift of a Chapter 31 - a Chapter 31 that has sat on my hard drive and travelled with me from computer to computer for the past fifteen years or so while I worked on it piecemeal between other projects. In my possession, I have a collection of notes pertaining to the plot gathered over the course of a rewrite that I've been posting here and to my account at Archive of Our Own, but I don't have a chapter update for you and for that I'm so sorry.

There are rumours circulating on Tumblr that Fanfiction dot net isn't long for this world. Pieces of the site's functionality are failing, the responses from the team managing it have slowed to nothing, and the "Fandom Olds" like myself look to our archives of work (and I looked at the thirty chapters worth of comments that fed this story over the years) and I had a good old fashioned fit. I'm not ready to say goodbye. I'm not done this story. But it sounds like the site may not be here to support the aforementioned "triumphant return" that I wanted to make. (Let's face it, that'd be mostly for myself at this point, because I'm not sure who all is still around or interested, but damnit, I'm doing the thing even though it's slow-going.)

Let me tell you why: this fandom and this story kept me afloat at what was once simultaneously the best and worst time of my life. Best because my experience in X-Men fandom remains unparalleled, and that was largely due to this site and the people on it and the people reading this work. (Worst because everything else was going to hell, and in a lot of ways fandom saved my ass.)

I've had great experiences in Star Wars and Harry Potter, but folx: there's nothing like X-Men. And there's nothing like Romy. Call it nostalgia, but this is the one that I still talk about almost two decades later.

It's under the pain of possible demolishment that I write this note with the understanding that this story and this site might not be here tomorrow, and that next update might not be next week, but it's coming even if it takes another five years.

It'll just be at Ao3.

You might remember me as "Lucia de'Medici", but times change and so does the name: you can find me over there and on Tumblr - I write as octobertown now.

I hope you're all well, and holy sh*t do I miss you all something fierce.

Please come visit me over there, or shoot me a DM, or poke me on Tumblr just to say what's up, and if you want to see where this thing goes... you know what you've gotta do.

xxx

- Kira