Would you fall in love with me again - Story Analysis

If you haven't heard it: it's the Odysseus and Penelope reunion duet from EPIC: The Musical. Odysseus comes home after twenty years of war, and before anything else — before relief, before joy — he stands in the doorway and confesses that he's afraid:

Now hold that against the premise of this fic, where Jake is folded back through time into his young avatar body, carrying thirty years of a marriage that — in this timeline — never happened.

Listen to those lines again. Every metaphor Odysseus reaches for, Jake means literally.

"I am not the man you fell in love with." For Odysseus, that's the war talking. For Jake, it's plain fact: he is, physically, not that man. He's a stranger's face on a love she hasn't lived yet.

"The things I cannot change" aren't his choices — they're the timeline itself, the thing that took her memory of him and handed it back empty.
But here's where it stops being a perfect fit and becomes something far more devastating, which is the inversion.

In the Odyssey, Penelope waited. Penelope remembers. That's the whole shape of the original: the tragedy is one-sided, because Odysseus is the only one who's afraid. He comes home to a wife who kept the marriage alive for twenty years, and the song resolves into mutual recognition — is it really you, my love — I love you — how long has it been — twenty years. Two people reaching across the same gap and finding each other's hands.

Jake doesn't get that. Neytiri never waited, because there was nothing to wait for. She doesn't remember the marriage. She never made the vow. The kind and gentle husband she'd be forgiving never existed for her. So Jake is left singing Odysseus's half of the duet into a silent room — all of the shame, none of the homecoming. He gets to be the one who returns changed, and he doesn't get the one who stayed.

That's why this song doesn't belong to the beginning of the story. It belongs to the end — or to the version of the end the whole narrative is straining toward.

"Would you fall in love with me again" is the question Jake is asking with every chapter, except he has to earn Neytiri's twenty years of faith from absolute zero, from inside the body of someone she's only just met.

Play it over Act One and it's almost unbearable, because you can hear the second voice that's supposed to answer him — and it isn't there yet.
That's the fic. A man who came home to find that home didn't remember him, and choosing to build it again anyway.