I absolutely, completely adore this fic, on levels I didn’t know fan fiction (as much as I love it!) could reach. Holy. Crap. This is amazingly deep. The longer I think about it, the more things in the SPN canon feed into it, until it feels like it explains/redeems/makes more tragic/cures the pain of/beautifully deepens the pain of/fixes/delightfully breaks/encompasses the whole thing. Thank you, so much, for writing this.
Funny, the comments that say this is a horror fic. I mean, I know it’s because the idea of no Dean or Sam the way we know them is horrific, because we love them so much. :-) But to me, this is the exact, polar opposite of horror! It’s anti-horror, waking up from the nightmare you are SO relieved to find isn’t real. I mean, haven’t we all desperately wanted to rescue Sam and Dean? As much as I adore SPN, how much of a relief is it, on a real world level, to imagine that none of those horrors ever happened? That angels aren’t just as evil/selfish/amoral as demons or anything else, that monsters aren’t trying to kill us at every juncture, that these poor, beloved, heroic men haven’t suffered so terribly, that love and belonging and a fulfilling life are actually possible for them. Which, in canon, we are constantly reminded just can never be.
The symbolism, the way Sam split his mind into two archetypes, trying to deal with the (common, every day, but no less tragic than the supernatural) horror of his situation, is just stunning. Of course all Sam and Dean ever had was each other, as young Sam was trapped inside himself. I adore how he created characters of the people around him who tried, but failed to help him, and in his mind became the shepherds of death (the inclusion of both the shtriga as the doctor, the monster that tried to kill his “other” self at a tender age, and of Tessa in this way was BRILLIANT). I love, so much, how what people read to him obviously affected the creation of his coma-‘verse: horror comics, adventure stores, and the Bible. That IS what Supernatural is! His mother, in a tragically realistic detail, isn’t around much; he feels abandoned by her, so he burns her on the ceiling; easier to deal with a dead mother than to try, in his teenaged mind, to understand why she had abandoned him.
This part just absolutely KILLED me: Dean didn’t seem to have his usual mental toughness any more than the physical strength he was accustomed to. That was the only explanation he had for why his eyes suddenly filled with tears and his heart felt too heavy to bear, for why the best retort he was able to come up with was, “No, I’m Dean.”
In that moment, we have to let the Dean we know and love die. He’s gone forever, and we feel the grief, and how much like real life is that? Aren’t joy and grief separated by a razor thin line, and how easy is it for them to bleed into each other? What could be a greater joy than a young man waking from a coma, returning to the arms of his loving family in a miraculous way? It’s a joy too great for the spirit to bear, and on the other side of it is grief for the death that had to precede this rebirth.
And all the details—few words packing an incredible punch!—that illustrate the real world in contrast to Sam’s (so funny; it’s the real Sam, but I can’t think of the POV character as anyone but Dean!) journey into the universe his unconscious created. The simple line about how the doctor looks “human in a way no one had looked human in years.” It says it all. And somehow he’s completely helpless to pick a lock, though he’s “done it” hundreds of times; he’s weak, he’s tired out by a tiny struggle when he’s used to being this larger-than-life, strongest-of-the-strong hero... which he truly is, having fought nearly impossible odds to come out of a coma after 8 years.
As John said, he did it. He finally saved Sam. <3 <3 <3
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Funny, the comments that say this is a horror fic. I mean, I know it’s because the idea of no Dean or Sam the way we know them is horrific, because we love them so much. :-) But to me, this is the exact, polar opposite of horror! It’s anti-horror, waking up from the nightmare you are SO relieved to find isn’t real. I mean, haven’t we all desperately wanted to rescue Sam and Dean? As much as I adore SPN, how much of a relief is it, on a real world level, to imagine that none of those horrors ever happened? That angels aren’t just as evil/selfish/amoral as demons or anything else, that monsters aren’t trying to kill us at every juncture, that these poor, beloved, heroic men haven’t suffered so terribly, that love and belonging and a fulfilling life are actually possible for them. Which, in canon, we are constantly reminded just can never be.
The symbolism, the way Sam split his mind into two archetypes, trying to deal with the (common, every day, but no less tragic than the supernatural) horror of his situation, is just stunning. Of course all Sam and Dean ever had was each other, as young Sam was trapped inside himself. I adore how he created characters of the people around him who tried, but failed to help him, and in his mind became the shepherds of death (the inclusion of both the shtriga as the doctor, the monster that tried to kill his “other” self at a tender age, and of Tessa in this way was BRILLIANT). I love, so much, how what people read to him obviously affected the creation of his coma-‘verse: horror comics, adventure stores, and the Bible. That IS what Supernatural is! His mother, in a tragically realistic detail, isn’t around much; he feels abandoned by her, so he burns her on the ceiling; easier to deal with a dead mother than to try, in his teenaged mind, to understand why she had abandoned him.
This part just absolutely KILLED me:
Dean didn’t seem to have his usual mental toughness any more than the physical strength he was accustomed to. That was the only explanation he had for why his eyes suddenly filled with tears and his heart felt too heavy to bear, for why the best retort he was able to come up with was, “No, I’m Dean.”
In that moment, we have to let the Dean we know and love die. He’s gone forever, and we feel the grief, and how much like real life is that? Aren’t joy and grief separated by a razor thin line, and how easy is it for them to bleed into each other? What could be a greater joy than a young man waking from a coma, returning to the arms of his loving family in a miraculous way? It’s a joy too great for the spirit to bear, and on the other side of it is grief for the death that had to precede this rebirth.
And all the details—few words packing an incredible punch!—that illustrate the real world in contrast to Sam’s (so funny; it’s the real Sam, but I can’t think of the POV character as anyone but Dean!) journey into the universe his unconscious created. The simple line about how the doctor looks “human in a way no one had looked human in years.” It says it all. And somehow he’s completely helpless to pick a lock, though he’s “done it” hundreds of times; he’s weak, he’s tired out by a tiny struggle when he’s used to being this larger-than-life, strongest-of-the-strong hero... which he truly is, having fought nearly impossible odds to come out of a coma after 8 years.
As John said, he did it. He finally saved Sam. <3 <3 <3