Not AU exactly -- AW through a blurry, malfunctioning telescope

In the following, we now cover 15-16 years, and this goes places I did not intend, and we end up not in AU exactly, but maybe. It's not what I'd intended. The first part is re-hash of the commentfic and I blame lady_songsmith for the prompt that took us to the Amazon and then anastigmatfic for where we’ve ended up, however improbably. The very end is new.

( In which I recap previous posts and send up a trial balloon for Apostolic Way that I never intended )