ten thousand miles [spn][author's notes]
Stop. Before you do anything (even grab some more tissues/kill me) go here and tell tripoli8 how awesome she is for the absolutely gorgeous art. I had my own private happy-dance when I saw what she’d made, and it lasted for a couple of hours at least. It's better than anything I could ever have imagined.
Thanks to paxlux for the super beta job and for helping me get out of those tight corners I managed to push the story into. Your awesomeness defies the laws of life. This story is all the better because of you! <3 Thanks to my sister, shescheeky for reading the very first, uncut draft and for all the positive feedback. I would have given up before I’d even started without you. Thanks to lemanya for the prompt and for not bashing me over the head - when you said I could put this on a shelf till June if I had to, I don’t think you meant it literally. Can’t get away without mentioning my flist, who provided ideas when my brain was too fried to think of any.
And finally, thanks to audrarose, thehighwaywoman and wendy for running this challenge.
Okay. So.
I’m guessing some of you are probably wondering what really happened to Sam. Honest answer?
I don’t know.
I’m on the same page as Dean here, same page as you. We all have the evidence, but it’s not even close to being satisfactory. What I can tell you is that Sam did not leave of his own free will - the fact that Dean went to Hell even after Sam’s disappearance is meant to prove this.
After that? It’s up to you.
Is Sam alive?
Well, if you are going to believe what Dean believes, (that the dreams are real) then he probably is. On the other hand those dreams could just be dreams or Dean’s subconscious urging him to move on - if you take this route, then you can assume that Sam is dead. The former means that someday Dean and Sam might be reunited. The latter means that at the very least, Sam hasn’t spent years suffering. Neither option is perfect, but that wasn't the point of the story.
The dreams themselves are supposed to be symbolic. That was my intention while writing them. When Dean first has the dream, Sam tells him that he's waiting on the river bank for Charon. In Greek mythology, Charon is the ferryman of Hades, who carries the souls of the deceased across the river that divides the world of the living from the world of the dead. Dean, we know, is alive. In every dream that he has, Sam is on the same side of the river as Dean. We never see the ferryman appear. (Of course, the myth also says that the dead who were left unburied were forced to wander the shores for a hundred years. Make of that what you will. I tend to ignore it.)
Another thing I should mention here which I forgot until some brilliant users commented about it: the possibility that, when Sam is sighted in Denver, he's a ghost. The girl at the register and all the other people who saw Sam tell Dean, Bobby, Ellen and Jo that Sam didn't speak. This can be interpreted to mean that he was a spirit. If anyone is stubborn enough to remain on the living side of the river, even after death, it's Sam. You can assume that he moved on only after he was absolutely certain that Dean had moved on (or begun the process) too. This also means, then, that Dean's dreams were more visions than anything else.
Of course, it's still possible that Sam didn't say anything because he didn't want to (or, if you're feeling up to it, couldn't) and which allows you to suppose that he's still alive, somewhere.
The choice is yours.
Here's what I think: the dreams were real. Whether as a result of Sam's psychic abilities or the unbreakable bond between these two, I want to believe that in those moments, while they were both sleeping and healing, they were together. After that, I try not to mull over it too much.
Research! How much did I do? Just enough, I think. If there are any glaring errors concerning the police investigation, I'm sorry. Just getting a detective to take Sam's case seriously involved fictionalization. From what I've read, the US seems to be notoriously bad at missing persons investigations, especially in the case of an adult - like the officers tell Dean, it's not a crime to disappear and if there are no signs of foul play, the police don't ever have to look into the disappearance.
Now, let’s talk Shakespeare.
Many, many moons ago (last Christmas) I asked lemanya for a prompt. She provided the verse of King Lear which appears at the beginning of this story:
"The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much nor live so long."
I’d like to say that this verse completely inspired this story, but I’d be lying. Fact is, I have never read King Lear and this verse read without the context confused me enough to make me want to figure out what was going on behind the words. What actually inspired this, then, was the ending of King Lear, and more simply, the full ending verse:
“The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.”
For those of you who are like me, and have never touched a copy of this play, can go here or here to find some information.
King Lear ends in tragedy. Only three of the major characters survive to the end. King Lear and his estranged daughter are reunited and reconciled, only for the daughter to be uselessly executed and for Lear to die of grief. Not exactly reassuring - but then, real life often isn’t either. Yet the final verse carries a semblance of hope. It seems to suggest that the worst has passed, that the future has to be better than what is being left behind. Of course, when you’re leaving behind everything that’s ever mattered, the future tends to look bleak.
So the first step was to think of a tragedy and the second step was to parallel it to the quote - leave something behind, go on to something that isn’t guaranteed to be good but is probably better (or easier) than the events leading up to that point. I’d wanted to write a story about either Sam or Dean going missing for a while before the prompt and this not only provided the opportunity, but the ending as well. In a world where the supernatural can do practically anything, it seemed to me that death (while terrible) wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to the Winchesters. Uncertainty, on the other hand, might be.
Like the ending of King Lear, the ending of this fic is really a matter of interpretation (hopeful or hopeless) but my intention was to give as promising an ending as was possible while sticking to the story I wanted to tell. I hope you all don’t hate me. I promise, this was just as painful to write as it was to read.
And now, I must go hide, in case you're all preparing to tar and feather me.
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