Argh, thank you. That gave me the excuse to also go back in and fix the one place where I used almost the right word ("the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning"...thank you , Mr. Twain.)

Train-wreck...just about covers it. I'm not sure I'm capable of not looking fairly closely at any character I'm trying to do justice to (as opposed to this piece, which is about how Aral feels about Ges, and how Simon feels about watching, and Ges is just the motor that makes the story go)...and I'm back around to the fact that I do not want to give him that much of my brain. Broken can be interesting, but Ges doesn't break in ways that I want to investigate.

Huh. I almost wonder if the Aral/Simon thing (which has acquired the working title Recoil, as it's the only thing I've come up with that's not an awful pun, a melodramatic quotation, or, in one wretched case, both) is me trying to give Simon back some agency. For a piece ostensibly about Simon and Aral, I'm spending a lot of time looking at Simon dealing with other people, and...huh [thinky thoughts about plot shape here] I hope that now I'm figuring this out I won't break it. Sometimes I'm a better writer (at least of first drafts) when I don't know what I"m doing.