Episode 24: Redemption (Epilogue)

[redemptionmod]

Title: Episode 24: Redemption (Epilogue)
Masterpost: Supernatural: Redemption Road (for full series info,
warnings, and disclaimer)
Authors: swordofmymouth and zatnikatel
Characters/Pairing: Dean/Castiel, Sam, OC and canon characters
Rating: NC-17
Wordcount: ~9,200
Warnings: language, violence, explicit sexuality, references to torture and Dean/Alastair
Beta: murron
Art:

Comments

[zatnikatel]

Hey there: thank you for such an awesome comment! Hope you will forgive my tardy response - I've been dealing with a couple or three very tight press deadlines here in the RL world of journalism.

It's funny but the idea for this initially came from my sheer butthurtness at what happened in 6.22, and I was a little amazed anyone wanted to participate, period. But together we took that butthurtness and turned it into something really positive that was a celebration of all that we love about all of these characters. I hope we've provided a good story and I hope also that if nothing else, this VS is proof positive that Cas could quite easily be integrated into the onscreen Winchester family without negatively impacting on the central sibling relationship/interaction in any way, shape or form. Because as we know, if the writers want to create a schism between Sam and Dean for plot purposes, they will do it even in the absence of Cas (coughs, season 7).

Sword and I poured ourselves into these final eps (#22-#24), as you can tell! We loved writing them, and I can honestly say I've never completed a fic before and had such a feeling of having gotten it right and done a damn good job in the process. We came to the notion of progressing this into end!verse because we originally had planned to do an ending that basically saw them all recovering at Bobby's and an alternate "dystopian" ending in which Dean and Cas never made it back from Hell but actually stayed there and built a whole new world there as "kings of the wild frontier." We were however writing to what we thought were much tighter deadlines at the time, and didn't think we would be able to write both so we merged them into this realistically bittersweet ending, having given them all the tools they need (ie, each other) to hopefully avert that future Zachariah showed Dean, along with some half-decent plotbunnies for any possible follow-up.

All of this has been alternately satisfying, frustrating and intensely stressful at times, but I hope it's something all the contributors - both writers and artists - can feel proud of taking part in...

;-)