Writer's notes: There's a Land of Begin Again, by chamekke
nSeveral readers have asked me questions about my Big Bang fic, There's a Land of Begin Again. What's really going on with Sam? What does the ending mean? Has his timeline completely gone off the rails? And so on.
So I thought it couldn't hurt to share this DVD commentary with those who want to know more. If you've read the fic and you're curious, read on.
If you haven't actually read the fic, HERE BE MAJOR SPOILERS! You should *discreet cough* probably go off and read the fic before proceeding.
So, that having been said, here's the deep background on the fic.
Misty, water-coloured memories...
When I was 13 years old, my friend Karen was in a car accident. She awoke in hospital with complete retrograde amnesia: didn't recognise her mother, didn't know her own name. Her past had vanished. And for the year that we continued to attend the same school, Karen's memory never came back. Her personality was the same, but fate had stuck a big red Reset button on her head, and pushed it HARD.
It's unsettling to look into someone's eyes, someone you know very well, with the awareness that they see you as a stranger. There's no guarantee your relationship with them will be the same the second time round; and in this case, it wasn't. Karen was the object of everyone's fascinated attention, was promptly adopted by the most popular girls, and acquired a completely different set of friends. (To my sorrow, I was not one of them.)
Many fans are justifiably critical of episode 2.08 for its sloppy writing, but it does provide one of the weirder, if largely unexplored, premises of the series: the possibility that Sam Tyler is nothing more than an amnesiac, perhaps brain-injured, Sam Williams. If it's true (and, canon being canon, we cannot absolutely rule it out), it means that Sam had an entire lifetime's worth of relationships that were obliterated by his traffic accident in spring 1973. Which, if you think about it, would be tragic.
In "There's a Land of Begin Again" I kissed a plot bunny that had been flirting with me for ages: that in episode 2.08, not only was DCI Morgan telling the truth about Sam being Sam Williams, he might even have been telling the truth - about Sam's voices being from 1950 - more literally than he knew. How so? Well, what if Sam was actually in a coma in 1950 AT THAT VERY MOMENT?
Therefore, in this retelling of 2.08, when Sam jumps off in 2006, he goes 'back' to 1950 instead of 1973. This means that of course he'll wind up in the body of Sam Williams, just as he [arguably] was in 1973; the difference, of course, is that in 1950 Sam Williams is only 12 years old ... exactly as Morgan says he was.
It also means that when this edition of Sam moves forward in time, crashes en route to CID in 1973, and duly forgets who he 'really' is, his amnesia will be exactly what it appears to be: merely the result of a road traffic accident.
And ("Ah-hah!" I thought) - if the hospitalised young Sam Williams of 1950 did happen to meet, say, a certain young Gene Hunt in that year, then as we see from the pilot, neither of them will remember it when they encounter each other in 1973: adult Sam because of his post-accident amnesia, and adult Gene because not only was Sam so young in 1950 as to be unrecognisable 23 years later, but his name wasn't actually Tyler at the time.
So, basic premise in a nutshell.
But what's really going on here?
Several readers have pressed further, asking what Sam's underlying reality is, wondering how to reconcile his conflicting memories. What's actually happening to Sam? Is he being 'possessed' by Sam Williams? Will he fetch up in 1973 again? In 2006? Is he on an endless loop? Are Gene and his team doomed to die outside the tunnel entrance? Does Sam make it back to 2006? Was he ever there in the first place?
The short answer is - I don't absolutely know. And of course it's not essential to have a definitive answer in order to enjoy the fic, because it's really about Sam's emotional state, his perpetual condition of being lost wherever he is. Plus, I wanted this story to have the same tantalising ambiguity as canon itself. Whatever interpretation you give to this story is just as respect-worthy as mine.
But... having said that, I do have my own take on it, of course :-)
You see, the other influence on the fic is this drabble, which I wrote a year ago. It was inspired by something peculiar from episode 2.08, a funny little detail that some anonymous person in the props department added to the graveyard scene, namely: there's a wilted bunch of carnations in the vase on the Williams tombstone. The carnations are weeks or months old; they're shrunken, faded, but their presence proclaims something amazing. Someone in 1973 loved the Williams couple so much, he (or she) went to the trouble of buying and arranging fresh flowers on their grave... twenty-three years after their deaths. Whatever you may think about that mysterious gravestone, that is actually CANONICAL FACT.
Now when someone's dead that long, relatives usually plant bedding flowers (if they leave anything at all); personal grave visits aren't typically frequent after two dozen years have passed. So, in the drabble, I imagined that the 'someone' was their faithful son, Sam Williams, who had visited his parents' grave immediately before going on his ill-fated M.A.R.S. undercover mission at 'A' Division. My Big Bang fic is, in effect, a backstory to that drabble.
So "There's a Land of Begin Again" is largely about the fear of forgetting. And there's a particular sadness in forgetting one's family, I believe. When you're an only child (as I am), and both your parents die (as mine have), it places a uniquely terrible burden on you because you're the only person of your generation who holds a detailed living memory of them. When that goes out, when you go out, your parents are finally extinguished, too.
In "Begin Again", the poignancy is doubled: not just because Sam forgets his loved ones of 1973 and 2006 (however real or not these people may be), but also because he's forgotten his parents of 1950... and although he finally does remember the Williamses at the end, we know he'll forget them again when he's in that road traffic accident in 1973.
And the tragedy of it is, Brenda and David adored their son. They deserved to be remembered by their only child.
And, when 1973 rolls around... they aren't.
In short, then, I think that in this deep-background version of LOM, 1950 is definitely real. But is 1973? At various points of the story, Sam hears the people around them speaking phrases that he 'later' hears in the future from family and colleagues. Ruth Tyler's empty words of comfort over Vic's sudden, yet clearly permanent, departure? They're spoken by the preacher as he tries to console 1950!Sam with the promise of God's mercy. Annie's mild reproof to Sam in 1973 ("You're clever enough to know that what you're saying can't be true") is heard instead from the lips of young Gene, twice. And other elements occur in unexpected contexts, among them: Hyde, St. James's Hospital, the number 2612, the slang term 'divvy' (a forerunner of 'div'), Annie's words of self-reproach in 1.08, even the make of Sam's car in 2006 (and yes, issue 1 of The Eagle really did mention a Jeep!).
Not to mention the St. Christopher medal, which has always struck me as being a portrait of Sam in miniature: an adult man, carrying the disproportionately heavy burden of an unhappy childhood with apparent stoicism, whilst fighting against the waves of his own treacherous emotions.
There's a psychological condition, a form of déjà vu, in which the patient hears something entirely new, but immediately retrofits it into his deluded perception of reality by falsely interpreting it as a memory of something that's already happened. I've tried to suggest that the 'memories' Sam has of 1973 are actually being created on the spur of the moment, triggered by what Sam hears or sees in the present. So in fact, he really IS Sam Williams; one of the first clues, in fact, is that even though the Sam Tyler we know is not religious (and probably has never gone to Sunday school), young 1950!Sam automatically recognises Saul of Tarsus from The Eagle as being St. Paul, even though he doesn't know why. And although Sam sees both a young Gene and a very young Annie in the hospital, there's no trace of the youthful versions of his supposedly 'real' parents, Ruth and Vic.
So, the possibility exists that Sam was in 1950 all along. Is that THE underlying reality? I started out with that notion, because it pleased me, but the story quickly demanded that I leave the question open. For one thing, as readers have commented, Sam-in-1950 clearly has the maturity and vocabulary of an adult. Even the brightest 12-year-old couldn't think or speak the way Sam does here. And for maximum effect, of course, Sam had to do so. For the story to be persuasive, though, Sam also had to doubt his memories, HAD to be presented with 'evidence' that would force him to wonder whether only 1950 was real.
Erm, yeah. So, that was the original premise, but it mutated into something a bit more... ambiguous. And I think the story was stronger as a result.
And you can read the story differently, as (it seems) most people did. You can imagine that it really is Sam Tyler's consciousness transported back in time into Sam Williams's body, and that Sam Williams's personality and memories are not only still present but eventually 'overpower' those of Sam Tyler. (As with the original show, I think the story can be read in a multiplicity of ways, none of which is entirely reconcilable with everything we're shown.)
Now, the reader knows that Sam's memories of the future are real. The world events he describes are true, even if his memories of them erode like sandcastles as the story progresses. But Sam himself doesn't know what's real and what's not, which is the critical thing. In the universe of this story, the future might be real in some fashion, yes, but 1950 is the fundamental reality, and that Sam's 'memories' of the future may well be some weird combination of confabulation and precognition. (Which, for example, is why Sam Williams's repressed memory of his mother's violent death - in her red dress, a pendant round her neck - is echoed/re-imagined in the scene of Vic's assault of Annie in 1.08.) So there's definitely some timey-wimeyness going on that can't be explained only by little Sam of 1950 having been in a coach accident.
And finally, in the story's coda I also suggested that Sam's longing to escape the anguish of his parents' death - to be strong and independent, never to feel the suffering that comes from love and loss - brings about the very condition of emotional armouring that we see in Sam both in 2006 and when he arrives at CID in 1973. I could imagine Sam's future being seeded by the frustrated longings of SW's childhood, which was so different from ST's.
And some miscellaneous thoughts...
In terms of background, one of the biggest difficulties was having to place the fic in 1950 Manchester. Many of the cultural institutions we associate with fifties Britain arrived well after that. The Goons' first broadcast was in 1951, for example. Rock and roll came later, too, along with Elizabeth's coronation in 1953. Top-ten music lists weren't recorded until later in the decade, and mass television hadn't arrived yet. So research was a challenge! Luckily, because the National Health Service was only created in 1948, the world of hospitals in the NHS's glory days is well documented, so the schedule and hierarchy of a hospital of the time wasn't so hard to reproduce.
The fic also gave me a chance to throw in some very tiny plot bunnulets that had been wriggling in my head for ages: that Sam Williams's family was originally from Wales (Williams is a common Welsh surname), that Vic and Ruth are so physically dissimilar from Sam that it's plausible to suppose they're not his real parents, and so on. So that part pleased me hugely ;-)
In terms of story-telling, I had to show everything through Sam's eyes to sustain the sense of uncertainty and unreality; you can't argue that Sam's possibly imagining the whole thing if you then show a scene through Gene's eyes, or Matron's. But, it can be a strain to see 22,000 words' worth of story through a single character's eyes. To break this up, I included flashback scenes, imagined scenes, and of course several scenes in which Sam overhears/eavesdrops on other people's conversations. This gave (I hope) a more kaleidoscopic impression of Sam's experience than an unrelenting Sam-POV might have done.
One striking thing about Sam - in 2006, in 1973, and even in the 1950 of this fic - is that he's always surrounded by people (mostly women) who care about him, care for him, even though he's almost always oblivious to it. Here, Gwen's surprise treat of custard in the CID canteen of 1973 finds its echo in the custard-and-sponge Sam receives as tacit reward for his courage in protecting Gene, or (less obviously) the gift of The Eagle from the ward sister. Oddly, though, the roles of the original Gene and Annie are reversed in young Gene and Matron. Both young Gene and Matron are protective of Sam, in their way, but it's Gene in whom Sam confides his 'mad secret' (perhaps because, like Annie in 1.01, Gene's a comparative junior in Sam's eyes, a safe confidant precisely because he lacks age and status), whereas Sam largely tries to tough it out in front of Matron because she's the authority figure of his new world.
Young Gene, of course, is very lovable <333 I'd always imagined him as being a vulnerable, more expressive version of his older self, but it was a joy to finally get to write him that way. He's thoroughly bemused by Sam's maturity, of course, and is deeply shocked that this little boy rescues him when everything in Gene's experience says it should have been the other way around. (It's possible that the emotional afterimage of this unusually brave and clever lad may have helped 1973!Gene to recognise Sam Tyler's worth when that edition of Sam showed up in his office.) In any case I can't begin to describe how much I enjoyed writing their fluctuating dynamic; Sam's influence on Gene, and vice versa, and its (mostly) sweet timey-wimeyness.
In their last scene together, when Sam is forgetting Gene's name and identity with each passing second, we see Gene take a match from his pocket. This was to suggest that he's about to burn Sam's notes as soon as he leaves the hospital, in what he intends as a final act of protectiveness and loyalty. That, of course, means that he never hears Sam's story in full, never learns about Sam's future (?) involvement with Gene in 1973 CID and, most critically, never finds out about the existence of Operation M.A.R.S.
Lastly, a quick comment on genre. Sam is mentally an adult for most of the story, and Gene is really a youth or young man... so I was deeply shocked, by the story's end, to realise that in effect I'd written a kidfic. And I don't even read kidfic normally! Honestly, the weirdest things happen in this fandom :-P
P.S. It still blows me away that the Williamses' gravestone is marked at the top with the phrase: In Loving Memory. Gotta love Matthew Graham's sense of humour >:-D
So I thought it couldn't hurt to share this DVD commentary with those who want to know more. If you've read the fic and you're curious, read on.
If you haven't actually read the fic, HERE BE MAJOR SPOILERS! You should *discreet cough* probably go off and read the fic before proceeding.
So, that having been said, here's the deep background on the fic.
Misty, water-coloured memories...
When I was 13 years old, my friend Karen was in a car accident. She awoke in hospital with complete retrograde amnesia: didn't recognise her mother, didn't know her own name. Her past had vanished. And for the year that we continued to attend the same school, Karen's memory never came back. Her personality was the same, but fate had stuck a big red Reset button on her head, and pushed it HARD.
It's unsettling to look into someone's eyes, someone you know very well, with the awareness that they see you as a stranger. There's no guarantee your relationship with them will be the same the second time round; and in this case, it wasn't. Karen was the object of everyone's fascinated attention, was promptly adopted by the most popular girls, and acquired a completely different set of friends. (To my sorrow, I was not one of them.)
Many fans are justifiably critical of episode 2.08 for its sloppy writing, but it does provide one of the weirder, if largely unexplored, premises of the series: the possibility that Sam Tyler is nothing more than an amnesiac, perhaps brain-injured, Sam Williams. If it's true (and, canon being canon, we cannot absolutely rule it out), it means that Sam had an entire lifetime's worth of relationships that were obliterated by his traffic accident in spring 1973. Which, if you think about it, would be tragic.
In "There's a Land of Begin Again" I kissed a plot bunny that had been flirting with me for ages: that in episode 2.08, not only was DCI Morgan telling the truth about Sam being Sam Williams, he might even have been telling the truth - about Sam's voices being from 1950 - more literally than he knew. How so? Well, what if Sam was actually in a coma in 1950 AT THAT VERY MOMENT?
Therefore, in this retelling of 2.08, when Sam jumps off in 2006, he goes 'back' to 1950 instead of 1973. This means that of course he'll wind up in the body of Sam Williams, just as he [arguably] was in 1973; the difference, of course, is that in 1950 Sam Williams is only 12 years old ... exactly as Morgan says he was.
It also means that when this edition of Sam moves forward in time, crashes en route to CID in 1973, and duly forgets who he 'really' is, his amnesia will be exactly what it appears to be: merely the result of a road traffic accident.
And ("Ah-hah!" I thought) - if the hospitalised young Sam Williams of 1950 did happen to meet, say, a certain young Gene Hunt in that year, then as we see from the pilot, neither of them will remember it when they encounter each other in 1973: adult Sam because of his post-accident amnesia, and adult Gene because not only was Sam so young in 1950 as to be unrecognisable 23 years later, but his name wasn't actually Tyler at the time.
So, basic premise in a nutshell.
But what's really going on here?
Several readers have pressed further, asking what Sam's underlying reality is, wondering how to reconcile his conflicting memories. What's actually happening to Sam? Is he being 'possessed' by Sam Williams? Will he fetch up in 1973 again? In 2006? Is he on an endless loop? Are Gene and his team doomed to die outside the tunnel entrance? Does Sam make it back to 2006? Was he ever there in the first place?
The short answer is - I don't absolutely know. And of course it's not essential to have a definitive answer in order to enjoy the fic, because it's really about Sam's emotional state, his perpetual condition of being lost wherever he is. Plus, I wanted this story to have the same tantalising ambiguity as canon itself. Whatever interpretation you give to this story is just as respect-worthy as mine.
But... having said that, I do have my own take on it, of course :-)
You see, the other influence on the fic is this drabble, which I wrote a year ago. It was inspired by something peculiar from episode 2.08, a funny little detail that some anonymous person in the props department added to the graveyard scene, namely: there's a wilted bunch of carnations in the vase on the Williams tombstone. The carnations are weeks or months old; they're shrunken, faded, but their presence proclaims something amazing. Someone in 1973 loved the Williams couple so much, he (or she) went to the trouble of buying and arranging fresh flowers on their grave... twenty-three years after their deaths. Whatever you may think about that mysterious gravestone, that is actually CANONICAL FACT.
Now when someone's dead that long, relatives usually plant bedding flowers (if they leave anything at all); personal grave visits aren't typically frequent after two dozen years have passed. So, in the drabble, I imagined that the 'someone' was their faithful son, Sam Williams, who had visited his parents' grave immediately before going on his ill-fated M.A.R.S. undercover mission at 'A' Division. My Big Bang fic is, in effect, a backstory to that drabble.
So "There's a Land of Begin Again" is largely about the fear of forgetting. And there's a particular sadness in forgetting one's family, I believe. When you're an only child (as I am), and both your parents die (as mine have), it places a uniquely terrible burden on you because you're the only person of your generation who holds a detailed living memory of them. When that goes out, when you go out, your parents are finally extinguished, too.
In "Begin Again", the poignancy is doubled: not just because Sam forgets his loved ones of 1973 and 2006 (however real or not these people may be), but also because he's forgotten his parents of 1950... and although he finally does remember the Williamses at the end, we know he'll forget them again when he's in that road traffic accident in 1973.
And the tragedy of it is, Brenda and David adored their son. They deserved to be remembered by their only child.
And, when 1973 rolls around... they aren't.
In short, then, I think that in this deep-background version of LOM, 1950 is definitely real. But is 1973? At various points of the story, Sam hears the people around them speaking phrases that he 'later' hears in the future from family and colleagues. Ruth Tyler's empty words of comfort over Vic's sudden, yet clearly permanent, departure? They're spoken by the preacher as he tries to console 1950!Sam with the promise of God's mercy. Annie's mild reproof to Sam in 1973 ("You're clever enough to know that what you're saying can't be true") is heard instead from the lips of young Gene, twice. And other elements occur in unexpected contexts, among them: Hyde, St. James's Hospital, the number 2612, the slang term 'divvy' (a forerunner of 'div'), Annie's words of self-reproach in 1.08, even the make of Sam's car in 2006 (and yes, issue 1 of The Eagle really did mention a Jeep!).
Not to mention the St. Christopher medal, which has always struck me as being a portrait of Sam in miniature: an adult man, carrying the disproportionately heavy burden of an unhappy childhood with apparent stoicism, whilst fighting against the waves of his own treacherous emotions.
There's a psychological condition, a form of déjà vu, in which the patient hears something entirely new, but immediately retrofits it into his deluded perception of reality by falsely interpreting it as a memory of something that's already happened. I've tried to suggest that the 'memories' Sam has of 1973 are actually being created on the spur of the moment, triggered by what Sam hears or sees in the present. So in fact, he really IS Sam Williams; one of the first clues, in fact, is that even though the Sam Tyler we know is not religious (and probably has never gone to Sunday school), young 1950!Sam automatically recognises Saul of Tarsus from The Eagle as being St. Paul, even though he doesn't know why. And although Sam sees both a young Gene and a very young Annie in the hospital, there's no trace of the youthful versions of his supposedly 'real' parents, Ruth and Vic.
So, the possibility exists that Sam was in 1950 all along. Is that THE underlying reality? I started out with that notion, because it pleased me, but the story quickly demanded that I leave the question open. For one thing, as readers have commented, Sam-in-1950 clearly has the maturity and vocabulary of an adult. Even the brightest 12-year-old couldn't think or speak the way Sam does here. And for maximum effect, of course, Sam had to do so. For the story to be persuasive, though, Sam also had to doubt his memories, HAD to be presented with 'evidence' that would force him to wonder whether only 1950 was real.
Erm, yeah. So, that was the original premise, but it mutated into something a bit more... ambiguous. And I think the story was stronger as a result.
And you can read the story differently, as (it seems) most people did. You can imagine that it really is Sam Tyler's consciousness transported back in time into Sam Williams's body, and that Sam Williams's personality and memories are not only still present but eventually 'overpower' those of Sam Tyler. (As with the original show, I think the story can be read in a multiplicity of ways, none of which is entirely reconcilable with everything we're shown.)
Now, the reader knows that Sam's memories of the future are real. The world events he describes are true, even if his memories of them erode like sandcastles as the story progresses. But Sam himself doesn't know what's real and what's not, which is the critical thing. In the universe of this story, the future might be real in some fashion, yes, but 1950 is the fundamental reality, and that Sam's 'memories' of the future may well be some weird combination of confabulation and precognition. (Which, for example, is why Sam Williams's repressed memory of his mother's violent death - in her red dress, a pendant round her neck - is echoed/re-imagined in the scene of Vic's assault of Annie in 1.08.) So there's definitely some timey-wimeyness going on that can't be explained only by little Sam of 1950 having been in a coach accident.
And finally, in the story's coda I also suggested that Sam's longing to escape the anguish of his parents' death - to be strong and independent, never to feel the suffering that comes from love and loss - brings about the very condition of emotional armouring that we see in Sam both in 2006 and when he arrives at CID in 1973. I could imagine Sam's future being seeded by the frustrated longings of SW's childhood, which was so different from ST's.
And some miscellaneous thoughts...
In terms of background, one of the biggest difficulties was having to place the fic in 1950 Manchester. Many of the cultural institutions we associate with fifties Britain arrived well after that. The Goons' first broadcast was in 1951, for example. Rock and roll came later, too, along with Elizabeth's coronation in 1953. Top-ten music lists weren't recorded until later in the decade, and mass television hadn't arrived yet. So research was a challenge! Luckily, because the National Health Service was only created in 1948, the world of hospitals in the NHS's glory days is well documented, so the schedule and hierarchy of a hospital of the time wasn't so hard to reproduce.
The fic also gave me a chance to throw in some very tiny plot bunnulets that had been wriggling in my head for ages: that Sam Williams's family was originally from Wales (Williams is a common Welsh surname), that Vic and Ruth are so physically dissimilar from Sam that it's plausible to suppose they're not his real parents, and so on. So that part pleased me hugely ;-)
In terms of story-telling, I had to show everything through Sam's eyes to sustain the sense of uncertainty and unreality; you can't argue that Sam's possibly imagining the whole thing if you then show a scene through Gene's eyes, or Matron's. But, it can be a strain to see 22,000 words' worth of story through a single character's eyes. To break this up, I included flashback scenes, imagined scenes, and of course several scenes in which Sam overhears/eavesdrops on other people's conversations. This gave (I hope) a more kaleidoscopic impression of Sam's experience than an unrelenting Sam-POV might have done.
One striking thing about Sam - in 2006, in 1973, and even in the 1950 of this fic - is that he's always surrounded by people (mostly women) who care about him, care for him, even though he's almost always oblivious to it. Here, Gwen's surprise treat of custard in the CID canteen of 1973 finds its echo in the custard-and-sponge Sam receives as tacit reward for his courage in protecting Gene, or (less obviously) the gift of The Eagle from the ward sister. Oddly, though, the roles of the original Gene and Annie are reversed in young Gene and Matron. Both young Gene and Matron are protective of Sam, in their way, but it's Gene in whom Sam confides his 'mad secret' (perhaps because, like Annie in 1.01, Gene's a comparative junior in Sam's eyes, a safe confidant precisely because he lacks age and status), whereas Sam largely tries to tough it out in front of Matron because she's the authority figure of his new world.
Young Gene, of course, is very lovable <333 I'd always imagined him as being a vulnerable, more expressive version of his older self, but it was a joy to finally get to write him that way. He's thoroughly bemused by Sam's maturity, of course, and is deeply shocked that this little boy rescues him when everything in Gene's experience says it should have been the other way around. (It's possible that the emotional afterimage of this unusually brave and clever lad may have helped 1973!Gene to recognise Sam Tyler's worth when that edition of Sam showed up in his office.) In any case I can't begin to describe how much I enjoyed writing their fluctuating dynamic; Sam's influence on Gene, and vice versa, and its (mostly) sweet timey-wimeyness.
In their last scene together, when Sam is forgetting Gene's name and identity with each passing second, we see Gene take a match from his pocket. This was to suggest that he's about to burn Sam's notes as soon as he leaves the hospital, in what he intends as a final act of protectiveness and loyalty. That, of course, means that he never hears Sam's story in full, never learns about Sam's future (?) involvement with Gene in 1973 CID and, most critically, never finds out about the existence of Operation M.A.R.S.
Lastly, a quick comment on genre. Sam is mentally an adult for most of the story, and Gene is really a youth or young man... so I was deeply shocked, by the story's end, to realise that in effect I'd written a kidfic. And I don't even read kidfic normally! Honestly, the weirdest things happen in this fandom :-P
P.S. It still blows me away that the Williamses' gravestone is marked at the top with the phrase: In Loving Memory. Gotta love Matthew Graham's sense of humour >:-D