Through The Eyes Of

Introduction and Author's Note

After much thought and with lots of self doubt I've decided to upload the rest of this story. For those of you who don't know it is I believe the longest story ever on Rockfic and was very well liked there. Lots of you followed this story on that site from the beginning and have migrated over to Wattpad. While Wattpad is not my preferred writing site (I hate the interface) since many of the story's original readers migrated to this site I started publishing TTEO here last year but only a few chapters; there are 324 and that's a lot of copying and pasting.

This story was co-written with sgSixx for almost three years. She was one of my closest friends in addition to being my co-writer and writing TTEO as well as her friendship got me through a divorce, custody battle, and many other sad and lonely times. Last fall I lost my job and was forced to spend about three months in survival mode which didn't leave much spare time to write. It wasn't that I didn't want to write, it wasn't that I abandoned my story or my writing partner, and I certainly didn't lose interest- I just had to take care of some things in my real life.

I moved to a different state, had no money, and started a new relationship that is sometimes difficult to be in to say the least. The city where I currently live is unforgiving and hard. Everyone is out for themselves and almost everyone is just waiting to stab you in the back. There are so many drugs that the town is called Little Detroit because that's where all the major dealers come from. There were weeks that if I didn't steal it my girlfriend and I didn't eat it. It was hard.

Somewhere around late November/early December my co-writer disappeared, started ghosting me on Facebook which is where we always talked. She disappeared at a time when I really needed a friend, especially one who could relate to and understand what I was going through in my relationship and she honestly was the only one who could but she was nowhere to be found.

I sent several messages over the next few months and received no reply and I stopped writing TTEO because I didn't want to do it without her. We worked very hard to create our characters and plot and the story was very much a part of both of us. I can't speak for her but my two characters (Slash and Izzy) were very much a part of me and were very intentionally made to be the way they were. In some ways they are parts of me as I poured all of my pain and anger and fear into them for three years. The relationship between Duff and Slash in this story is the one I would love to have in real life and it was meant to stand in stark contrast to the relationship between Axl and Izzy.

Like I said Wattpad is not my preferred place to publish my work as I have a hard time navigating my way through it. But a couple of months ago I decided to give it a whirl, look for some new fanfic to read and possibly be able to finally talk to my missing friend sgSixx . Imagine my surprise to find TTEO published on her page with her listed as the only author. I scanned through it and found some reference to a page called Uzi Records. I went there and found that it was a joint account that sgSixx shared with @lalilicious. I read their first story Just Say Please or whatever it's called and then moved on to something called TTEO. The story was all over the place changing from a first person to third person perspective in the same chapter, full of grammatical mistakes, words were misspelled and left out of sentences and the plot was all over the place and I thought "What is this? Why is it such a wreck with two good writers? What the heck is TTEO?" Then it dawned on me- TTEO-Through The Eyes Of- omg they were writing my story- without me-and it was terrible! I wish I could explain to you the myriad of emotions I felt right then. I was shocked, horrified, broken hearted, terrified, totally having a panic attack. I was shaking and I felt like my blood turned to ice in my veins. Then I started bawling and then I got angry. Soooo very angry. And could I stop shaking and crying already?!