This weekend, after literal years, very possibly literal decades, of searching, I re-found my favorite fan fic ever, “Sedimental Journey,” a Methos/Duncan Highlander tv show fic (one of my friends said “Of course it was Methos/Duncan,” which, well, lol/pink, yes, I’m afraid ‘of course’ was the appropriate response). :D
I’m fairly confident I read it in the late 90s originally–like, extremely confident–but I lost it through Internet Drift, although I remembered the title because I thought it was such a great phrase, and I’ve honestly looked every few years, trying to find it again.
I don’t know why it worked this time. Maybe I was just slightly brighter in my search, although I used the same parameters I did last time. Either way, this time I ended up on an ancient angelfire page that had a long list that included the author’s name as well as the story title, but no links. I’d apparently clicked through to that angelfire page before, but I don’t know if I’d just never then tried to search the author name and the title together before or not, but anyway, this time it worked, and found a 2022 wayback machine copy of the story.
I still loved it. It’s probably almost as good as I remembered, although I’d COMPLETELY forgotten the entire first part of it, and of course IDK if anybody else will like it as much as I do, but nobody else has to, or has to read it, but if I didn’t link to it somebody would ask :D
So anywhere there I was all bubbly with joy that I’d found it and THEN I realized I could email the author with the link on the wayback machine page, although who knows if the email address works anymore. But I sent an effusive email, then looked on twitter for their name, thought I’d probably found them, looked some more, found them on AO3, left another note there saying how happy I was to have found this story, and then, having confirmed that it WAS them on Twitter…also told them how happy I was there, too. JUST IN CASE I HADN’T COMMUNICATED IT THROUGH TWO OTHER FORUMS.
I am a huge, huge dork and possibly an embarrassment to my ancestors, but I was REALLY HAPPY to find it again!
(And the author wrote back and was nice about me being a weird internet stalker! It was great! *BEAMS*!!!!)