Nihil Inherit: Thanks and Author's Notes
This is for all the fantastic people who have participated in this glorious madness! Read on for detailed gushing. Oh, and a couple of notes on my fic, too. :)
Thanks
First off, many many thanks to wendy and thehighwaywoman for the tremendous amount of work, effort, passion and dedication that they poured into this challenge. It's a huge undertaking, and with the amount of participants this year, I don't envy them the task of herding all the cats into one corral. You guys are awesome, thank you so much for making the magic possible!
I owe a debt of gratitude so vast I won't ever be able to express it properly to pkwench, who's been my beta, cheerleader, confidant, and constant source of strength through all this. Not only did she fix my writing so that it made sense, was mistake-free and had as much impact as possible, but she put up with endless amounts of angsting, wibbling, and flailing on my part. For months. Months and months. She dealt with the panic attacks, the self-doubt, the hyperventilating when things weren't going the way I wanted, with patience and good humour and graceful aplomb. She nudged when I needed nudging, scolded when I needed scolding, corrected when I needed correcting, and gave pep-talks when I needed pep-talks. She also made a .pdf of the whole thing for me, art included, because she is just that awesome. I couldn't have done it without you, my darling! Mwah!
I also owe lots of thanks to roque_clasique, bellatemple, maychorian, essenceofmeanin, art_savage and smilla02, all the awesome writers at beta_bang who allowed me to flail and angst at them as well about my first-ever Big Bang. You guys got me started, and that's huge.
Furthermore, a big thank you to my friends' list, who also put up with my more generalized flailing and angsting here. Do we see a pattern? ;) You are all awesome, and your support means the world to me. I hope the fic doesn't disappoint after the big giant fuss I made for half the year!
Last but certainly not least: naisica, my lovely and extraordinarily talented artist. Holy crap, woman, but you blew my mind with the gorgeous, gorgeous artwork you produced for this story. Thank you for putting up with my constant prodding and poking, my suggestions and my caveats. I loved the concept you provided, the way you wove the themes of the story together so beautifully in your piece. I have already gushed about your use of light and colour, the mirror effects in your work, and all the things I love about it, but I really can't repeat it enough. I am in awe of your talent, and I can only hope that everyone who reads this story lavishes your art with all the praise it deserves. Thank you for all the hard work I know you poured into this.
Caveat Emptor: The following notes contain major plot spoilers. Either read them after the fic, or else be prepared to be thoroughly spoiled for the plot. By necessity I will also be discussing Season 5 spoilers.
Author's Notes
Well, what a ride it's been! This was my first Big Bang ever, and while it may have been an anxious process at times, it's been pretty thrilling overall. Everyone got really excited over this project, and with good reason!
You won't be surprised to hear that my Big Bang wasn't originally going to be a Season 2 AU. I had planned to write my “Never Happened” 'verse, and then as I was riding the bus home from work, inspiration struck. It's probably not news that I'm a sucker for redemption stories, and when I was first thinking about this story, it was the middle of Season 5, and I was praying really, really hard for Sam to be given an opportunity for redemption. As you well know, by then the Sam storyline was looking even more grim, and was getting grimmer by the minute. So I decided that if Show wasn't going to redeem him, I would give him a shot at doing that in my fic.
Time-travel fiction is always tricky. It is show canon, however, and that gave me license to play about with it. It's pretty much Show canon that everything went to hell (literally) when Sam died and Dean sold his soul. So my 'what if' became 'what if Sam was able to prevent Dean from making his Deal?' What if there was no need for Dean to sell his soul? Would things unfold the same way? It seemed terribly easy to say that the absence of the infamous Deal would result in everyone living happily ever after. If Show has taught us anything, it's that you can't avoid your fate.
Having thus thought myself into a corner, I figured that if you can't change your fate, maybe there's a possibility of changing the details. Sam might be destined to kill Lilith and free Lucifer, but he's also destined to stop the apocalypse. The story was never about changing that, but about Sam redeeming himself, about doing the one thing he was never able to do before: save Dean. In saving his brother, Sam will find his own salvation.
The advancement of Season 5 also showed me that time travel can have physical consequences, which gave me a lot of room to play. If Castiel's powers were all but gone, how would he be able to move Sam back in time? The answer was to move Sam's mind (or spirit or soul or however else you want to define it) into a vessel that was empty at the time, and able to receive it: his own body, in those few days in 2007 when he was dead. It would be too simple for Sam to return to his old self and simply know what was going on, of course, which is why I inflicted all sorts of nasty side-effects on the poor boy.
Angels don't experience time in a linear fashion, but humans do, and it seemed fairly obvious to me that the human mind wouldn't cope well with being thrown back three years in time and having to re-live a timeline which is changing all the time. Expressing that physically seemed like a good way to do it. Having Sam confused and mostly incapacitated allowed me to use one of my favourite tropes, the unreliable narrator, and to keep both him and (hopefully) the reader guessing as to what was going on, using the flashbacks and visions to feed bits and pieces of information at a time, and to keep the pacing at the rate I wanted. Having Sam's condition degrade as the story progressed was also a useful way to increase the tempo and build up to the climax of the story, the final confrontation with Lilith in the last chapter.
The most fun part of all this was trying to work my all these ideas into show canon, to weave the two together. All of Sam's flashbacks would be to canon scenes, along with the recurring flash to the “final” scene in which he and Castiel come up with their Hail-Mary Pass of a plan to try to save Dean before it all falls apart. That being said, the more the plot advanced, the more events would start to differ from what happened in the show, which meant that I would have to incorporate flashbacks in increasing amounts in order to show just how much things were changing. That meant walking a fine line between using the show but not overusing it: after all, this is meant to be my own work, even if I'm shamelessly borrowing someone else's creations.
Working with canon and the idea that destiny can't be changed -except when it can- gave me a fair bit of freedom to play. I wanted to keep Ruby, because she made a great ambiguous “is she or isn't she” villain in Season 3. I loved Katie Cassidy's portrayal of Ruby (far more than Geneviève Cortese, sorry!), and I knew she should still play a pivotal role in this AU. The problem, of course, was that even if Sam's memory was all scrambled, he would remember enough to be suspicious of Ruby. How, then, would Ruby pull off her “long con” again? The answer, as it turned out, was simpler than I thought: she'd simply prey on the other brother. Dean, with Sam newly restored to him and with his Deal no longer hanging over his head, is far more vulnerable to manipulation if he thinks it will keep Sam safe and alive. So Ruby changes brothers, but not tactics: stick with me and I will help you save your brother.
In short, in Supernatural, all roads lead to Rome.
The Question We're All Asking Ourselves: Or, Major Character Death
Why kill Sam? I know that the Major Character Death warning is highly off-putting for a lot of readers, and that I probably lost a few people right off the bat with that. That being said, the more I thought about the story, the more I realized it wouldn't work unless the sacrifice at the end was genuine. I dragged Sam and Dean down an inexorable path toward fraternal sacrifice and death, and to somehow save Sam at the end would have undermined the whole premise of the story. I don't believe in easy fixes: I believe they cheapen the message. It hurt me to do it, but I think the fic is the stronger for it.
I'm going to leave it there, because, frankly, I could go on for another ten pages and never get bored of listening to myself talk. ;) That being said, I am happy to answer questions, because I know there are a lot of things I left deliberately vague or unexplained (like the way the Impala mysteriously broke down after Sam died), and which people might be curious about.
Thanks
First off, many many thanks to wendy and thehighwaywoman for the tremendous amount of work, effort, passion and dedication that they poured into this challenge. It's a huge undertaking, and with the amount of participants this year, I don't envy them the task of herding all the cats into one corral. You guys are awesome, thank you so much for making the magic possible!
I owe a debt of gratitude so vast I won't ever be able to express it properly to pkwench, who's been my beta, cheerleader, confidant, and constant source of strength through all this. Not only did she fix my writing so that it made sense, was mistake-free and had as much impact as possible, but she put up with endless amounts of angsting, wibbling, and flailing on my part. For months. Months and months. She dealt with the panic attacks, the self-doubt, the hyperventilating when things weren't going the way I wanted, with patience and good humour and graceful aplomb. She nudged when I needed nudging, scolded when I needed scolding, corrected when I needed correcting, and gave pep-talks when I needed pep-talks. She also made a .pdf of the whole thing for me, art included, because she is just that awesome. I couldn't have done it without you, my darling! Mwah!
I also owe lots of thanks to roque_clasique, bellatemple, maychorian, essenceofmeanin, art_savage and smilla02, all the awesome writers at beta_bang who allowed me to flail and angst at them as well about my first-ever Big Bang. You guys got me started, and that's huge.
Furthermore, a big thank you to my friends' list, who also put up with my more generalized flailing and angsting here. Do we see a pattern? ;) You are all awesome, and your support means the world to me. I hope the fic doesn't disappoint after the big giant fuss I made for half the year!
Last but certainly not least: naisica, my lovely and extraordinarily talented artist. Holy crap, woman, but you blew my mind with the gorgeous, gorgeous artwork you produced for this story. Thank you for putting up with my constant prodding and poking, my suggestions and my caveats. I loved the concept you provided, the way you wove the themes of the story together so beautifully in your piece. I have already gushed about your use of light and colour, the mirror effects in your work, and all the things I love about it, but I really can't repeat it enough. I am in awe of your talent, and I can only hope that everyone who reads this story lavishes your art with all the praise it deserves. Thank you for all the hard work I know you poured into this.
Caveat Emptor: The following notes contain major plot spoilers. Either read them after the fic, or else be prepared to be thoroughly spoiled for the plot. By necessity I will also be discussing Season 5 spoilers.
Author's Notes
Well, what a ride it's been! This was my first Big Bang ever, and while it may have been an anxious process at times, it's been pretty thrilling overall. Everyone got really excited over this project, and with good reason!
You won't be surprised to hear that my Big Bang wasn't originally going to be a Season 2 AU. I had planned to write my “Never Happened” 'verse, and then as I was riding the bus home from work, inspiration struck. It's probably not news that I'm a sucker for redemption stories, and when I was first thinking about this story, it was the middle of Season 5, and I was praying really, really hard for Sam to be given an opportunity for redemption. As you well know, by then the Sam storyline was looking even more grim, and was getting grimmer by the minute. So I decided that if Show wasn't going to redeem him, I would give him a shot at doing that in my fic.
Time-travel fiction is always tricky. It is show canon, however, and that gave me license to play about with it. It's pretty much Show canon that everything went to hell (literally) when Sam died and Dean sold his soul. So my 'what if' became 'what if Sam was able to prevent Dean from making his Deal?' What if there was no need for Dean to sell his soul? Would things unfold the same way? It seemed terribly easy to say that the absence of the infamous Deal would result in everyone living happily ever after. If Show has taught us anything, it's that you can't avoid your fate.
Having thus thought myself into a corner, I figured that if you can't change your fate, maybe there's a possibility of changing the details. Sam might be destined to kill Lilith and free Lucifer, but he's also destined to stop the apocalypse. The story was never about changing that, but about Sam redeeming himself, about doing the one thing he was never able to do before: save Dean. In saving his brother, Sam will find his own salvation.
The advancement of Season 5 also showed me that time travel can have physical consequences, which gave me a lot of room to play. If Castiel's powers were all but gone, how would he be able to move Sam back in time? The answer was to move Sam's mind (or spirit or soul or however else you want to define it) into a vessel that was empty at the time, and able to receive it: his own body, in those few days in 2007 when he was dead. It would be too simple for Sam to return to his old self and simply know what was going on, of course, which is why I inflicted all sorts of nasty side-effects on the poor boy.
Angels don't experience time in a linear fashion, but humans do, and it seemed fairly obvious to me that the human mind wouldn't cope well with being thrown back three years in time and having to re-live a timeline which is changing all the time. Expressing that physically seemed like a good way to do it. Having Sam confused and mostly incapacitated allowed me to use one of my favourite tropes, the unreliable narrator, and to keep both him and (hopefully) the reader guessing as to what was going on, using the flashbacks and visions to feed bits and pieces of information at a time, and to keep the pacing at the rate I wanted. Having Sam's condition degrade as the story progressed was also a useful way to increase the tempo and build up to the climax of the story, the final confrontation with Lilith in the last chapter.
The most fun part of all this was trying to work my all these ideas into show canon, to weave the two together. All of Sam's flashbacks would be to canon scenes, along with the recurring flash to the “final” scene in which he and Castiel come up with their Hail-Mary Pass of a plan to try to save Dean before it all falls apart. That being said, the more the plot advanced, the more events would start to differ from what happened in the show, which meant that I would have to incorporate flashbacks in increasing amounts in order to show just how much things were changing. That meant walking a fine line between using the show but not overusing it: after all, this is meant to be my own work, even if I'm shamelessly borrowing someone else's creations.
Working with canon and the idea that destiny can't be changed -except when it can- gave me a fair bit of freedom to play. I wanted to keep Ruby, because she made a great ambiguous “is she or isn't she” villain in Season 3. I loved Katie Cassidy's portrayal of Ruby (far more than Geneviève Cortese, sorry!), and I knew she should still play a pivotal role in this AU. The problem, of course, was that even if Sam's memory was all scrambled, he would remember enough to be suspicious of Ruby. How, then, would Ruby pull off her “long con” again? The answer, as it turned out, was simpler than I thought: she'd simply prey on the other brother. Dean, with Sam newly restored to him and with his Deal no longer hanging over his head, is far more vulnerable to manipulation if he thinks it will keep Sam safe and alive. So Ruby changes brothers, but not tactics: stick with me and I will help you save your brother.
In short, in Supernatural, all roads lead to Rome.
The Question We're All Asking Ourselves: Or, Major Character Death
Why kill Sam? I know that the Major Character Death warning is highly off-putting for a lot of readers, and that I probably lost a few people right off the bat with that. That being said, the more I thought about the story, the more I realized it wouldn't work unless the sacrifice at the end was genuine. I dragged Sam and Dean down an inexorable path toward fraternal sacrifice and death, and to somehow save Sam at the end would have undermined the whole premise of the story. I don't believe in easy fixes: I believe they cheapen the message. It hurt me to do it, but I think the fic is the stronger for it.
I'm going to leave it there, because, frankly, I could go on for another ten pages and never get bored of listening to myself talk. ;) That being said, I am happy to answer questions, because I know there are a lot of things I left deliberately vague or unexplained (like the way the Impala mysteriously broke down after Sam died), and which people might be curious about.