And now I'm very glad that I was a bit swamped and behind on the friends list when you started posting this story and I wound up saving the bits to my thumb drive for later, because it meant that I was able to go through the whole thing at once today when I had nothing going on at work. In my (admittedly limited) exposure to Handy fic, I'm used to seeing his experience portrayed as either unremittingly craptacular or else as sunshine and kittens and joy -- marvelous work in balancing out the undeniable downsides of his having to juggle a massive identity crisis, all the Doctor's accumulated trauma, and a relationship with a woman who quite likely considered himself a shadow of the man he remembered being, with the opportunity inherent in a fresh start in a strange universe for the life the original model Doctor would never have been able to have. Alt!Jack was an unexpected pleasure but a welcome one. And very much liking the deleted scene fragments.