AUTHOR'S NOTE: BEHIND THE SCENES

Well, there you have it! A very personal take on various events in the lives of Sam and Dean prior to the pilot. The magic of fanfic allows all of us to write our own versions, and I have read some truly outstanding pre-series stories. Other writers will come along and create/extrapolate their own pre-series events.

In general, I say very little in introductions or post-story author notes. I tend to want a story to stand on its own, so that readers can develop their own take-away. But this "story"—it's actually a series of vignettes presented as chapters—is complex enough, and challenged me so much, covered so much ground in the timeline, and touched on very significant events in the Winchesters' lives, that I did want to address some elements, and the decisions I made as an author. I always enjoy learning about other writers' processes, so I decided to ramble on about the process for this story.

Obviously readers are free to disagree with my choices. That's the beauty of fanfic.

JOHN

I have long held that show canon established John as a very complex, controlling, hard-nosed, hard-assed, obsessed man who was very demanding of his kids, and was neglectful of them at young ages, but that he never physically or sexually abused them. Show canon in several episodes has presented him as clearly loving and proud of his sons. In "Shadow," when he and Sam meet for the first time since Sam left for Stanford (and was told not to return), it was clear John was very moved to see Sam again, and Sam was as moved to see him, and they shared a very emotional moment and hug—before the dang daevas broke up the nice emo reunion!

In "Dead Man's Blood," John explains that he started college funds for both boys; therefore he was never anti-college, in my mind, and I decided that his objection to Sam going off to Stanford was based on several things: his perceived need to control a rebellious younger son; his desire to keep two "soldiers" in his crusade (and he'd spent 18-19 years investing in Sam's training); and, in purely my own extrapolation, a fear that something could happen to Sam that threatened all of them. We know that in "In My Time Of Dying" John tells Dean that he will have to save Sam—or kill him. So at some point, John learned of a threat to Sam via Azazel, and also of the potential for Sam to go darkside. To me, this supports the contention that part of the reason he was so upset about Sam leaving was fear-based. He couldn't watch or potentially control whatever threat might emerge, so he just cut his losses to move on with the mission, knowing that at some point Sam might be so dangerous that he would have to be, shall we say, put down. When might he have told Dean? Would he have done it at all were he not preparing to deal his own life away?

I wanted to note, too, that as a Vietnam vet, John came home from a very ugly war to a world where vets were poorly treated by many anti-war protestors, with little to no government support in physical and emotional issues. Many Vietnam era vets have never readjusted to normal life. While he met, fell in love with, and married Mary after he returned, the post-war apple pie life didn't last very long. It struck me as realistic that a former Marine who fought in a very ugly jungle war who then lost his wife in a horrible supernatural fashion, might indeed harden himself to return to the role of a mission-obsessed soldier, though taken to an extreme because of the circumstances.

I had planned to write the pivotal scene of Sam confronting his father the night he leaves for Stanford as the two of them butting heads and yelling at one another. That's what every reader/viewer assumes happened. But when I got to the scene, I thought again about John knowing the YED had plans for Sam, even if he doesn't know everything yet (we don't know when John began to learn about the Special Children and Sam's role) and fearing what those plans might be, plus also potentially fearing his own son and what he might become. I opted to change it up and have John go very cold and calm, which would have knocked Sam off-stride. This was just a personal decision I made; I find it equally and thoroughly believable that Sam and John would have stood toe-to-toe and bellowed at one another with a great and powerful vigor.

I know that some fic writers have a very different view of John, and that's fine. As noted, we have the freedom to do what we want! 8-)

SAM

There's no question that Sam and John had a very difficult relationship from relatively early days, as we see in show canon that Sam's resentment of hunting established itself in childhood. They shared a profound personality conflict, no question, as Sam fought to be his own person, to be different, and by college age obviously Sam was bound and determined to escape a lifestyle he completely rejected, even if it meant leaving his big brother.

In writing Sam going through these developmental periods, as he comes to understand that his needs are so very different - and as he understandably struggles for those needs to be acknowledged - I often found it uncomfortable because, while I am a Dean-girl (as is stated in my profile), I really, truly like and appreciate the more mature Sam a great deal, and it was tough to create some not-so-pleasant moments and behaviors in a younger Sam's life.

Very smart, isolated kids who experience a dysfunctional environment even as they identify dreams and goals and begin to feel a desperation that they will never be understood, never to be given the opportunity to follow those dreams (particularly as they enter and go through puberty), often come off as extremely selfish and angry, which is how I wrote Sam for parts of this story. But I wanted to be true to my own interpretation of what could have legitimately motivated Sam early on in his drive to be different and to go another way, and to be internally consistent throughout. Sam had every right to feel the way he felt, to want what he wanted, and he was desperate to break with the lifestyle and his father. I did attempt to have Sam explain his reasoning and justifications to Dean so that the reader would feel both empathy and compassion for him, even if he was occasionally a little overly emo and immature. He was a kid, and younger than his years socially when he went to college if older in experience.

We know that by the time John dies in IMTOD, Sam and his father were still at loggerheads over everything; we know, too, that Sam eventually resolved this after his father's death. The process was begun in "Everybody Loves A Clown" with that moving scene in Bobby's yard when Sam admits how upset he is to Dean; and also when a much more mature Sam, in "The Song Remains The Same," explains to a young version of his father that he came to understand that John was doing the best he could in terrible circumstances, and could admit to loving him at last.

Now, as for my approach to Sam's age and schooling: we know in the pilot that he was 22-1/2 the night of the Halloween party, according to show chronology. With exceptions, college seniors are usually a year younger than this, give or take a few months. Since we can backdate Sam's age that night, it's easy to extrapolate that he was older than the average senior. My explanation was that frequent moves during high school resulted in him losing a fair amount of class credits and could easily have put him behind, which is why I decided to make him 19+ when he left for Stanford rather than the more typical 18.

There have always been questions about how long Sam actually attended Stanford. Well, at Stanford you take the LSAT in either your junior year, or in September of your senior year. Since at the Halloween party his LSAT score is divulged and they are celebrating the results, I chose to believe he took the test in September of his senior year. Couple that with his age, and I think he attended for almost the full four years. (He could not have graduated unless he took final exams early, and there's no evidence he did; he left with Dean after Jess's death in early November. But he may well have formally withdrawn, which is likely since he originally planned to return.)

Eric Kripke has said that in the original pilot script, Sam was 20, and they aged him up two years when they filmed. However, Kripke explained, they forgot to change Dean's line to reflect this alteration. Would they have thus meant the brothers didn't speak for four years? At any rate, I decided to merge the age and school year I felt fit the timeline, according to Sam's established age in the pilot, with Dean's comment that he hasn't "called or bothered" Sam for two years. In my head canon I think they did have contact during Sam's freshman and sophomore years, which is how I portrayed it with phone calls and Dean's rather disastrous visit bridging Chapters 17 and 18. Again, this is just my personal extrapolation; your mileage may vary!

DEAN

Show canon has established that Dean truly did worship and idolize his father and, apparently, felt he never could live up to John's expectations. Of course Dean did live up to them and, in fact, surpassed them, as it was Dean who killed Azazel. He became everything his father wanted and needed him to be, Dad's perfect little soldier, thus sacrificing his own personal freedom and whatever dreams he may have once held. While the show makes it clear Dean willingly accepted that role and thrived on it, clearly now and then he questioned the end result. On two occasions he referred to his father as obsessed, both when he faced himself in "Dream A Little Dream," and as Demon Dean while trapped in the bunker dungeon. But clearly Dean truly loved his father very deeply, and was totally at sea when John died. He could not cope. Sam was his touchstone, but John was his anchor. I also think Dean understood his father far more than Sam ever could, and we know that in the show whenever Sam and John started arguing, Dean actually hung back and didn't interfere until he couldn't stand it any more, which seems at odds with his cocksure personality. For some reason, he was different when his father and brother went at it. In my story, he wants badly for Sam to understand where their father is coming from—because John does have legitimate reasons for doing what he does—and Sam simply can't or won't understand, so Dean tries repeatedly to convince him that John does care. It doesn't work, but he tries.

Dean is far more of a straight-shooter than complicated Sam, views the world and the life as very black-and-white, tends not to question things. Part of that would derive from being raised by a confirmed military man who trains his sons to be as hard as he is, to be "warriors," and a significant part of it would come out of being the eldest sibling; yet another would come out of having a terrible burden placed on him by his father at a very young age and also placing a portion of it on himself. We've seen that Dean will literally do anything to protect his brother. He is every bit as obsessed as his father; but his obsession is all about Sammy. Yet even as I wanted to present Sam's slow process of finding independence, I also wanted to occasionally provide readers with the quintessential "bad boy" Dean: cocky, smart-mouthed, tomcatting around, hustling, and partying a little too heartily.

THE RIFT

Since we know that Sam and Dean didn't even talk for at least two years, I wanted to address what might occur that would cause such a rift. What would make brothers who love one another so deeply, and depend on one another so much both in the midst of danger and in an abnormal family dynamic, walk away from one another?

I didn't see it as a result of any one cause, such as an argument, but a slow accretion of normal change, the growing apart that happens even in some marriages. Sam goes to college, is out of the life, swears he's done for good, while Dean remains in his father's hip pocket because that's actually where he wants to be. The brothers' frame of reference changes utterly, but I felt it would be a gradual shift, the slow erosion of what they once knew. Sam's life was full of new opportunities and people, and his first love; Dean's life remained the same, full of challenges and threats, always in the shadows. And Dean would be very aware of it. He not only lost his brother's company, but the friendship, and the bond, changed.

Show canon established in the pilot that John was a heavy drinker, and certainly we know Dean eventually became a very heavy drinker later in the show (hell, and "purgatory rehab" notwithstanding), so I chose to start that process around the time Sam departed. Sam would view this as a true danger, but he did not have the ability to do anything about it, especially as they're not in physical contact. All he could do was continually tell Dean he needed to break that cycle. When he couldn't get through, and fearing for his brother's life in the midst of very deadly danger, I felt it reasonable that Sam would finally hit the wall on what he was able to cope with. Ultimatums and emotional withdrawals happen often in formal substance abuse interventions, and sometimes people walk away to salvage their own emotional health.

To me, Dean, on the other hand, saw Sam's growing apart from him as also growing up, as becoming the man he wished to be, and since Dean at his core wants Sam to be happy, he realizes he can never truly be the man Sam wants him to be, since he refuses to leave the life and remains with John. Dean has always been that locked box; he internalizes everything. I felt it reasonable to have him finally acknowledge that he could never have the old bond, the old Sam back, and he had to let him soar. So it was therefore not a single incident that caused them to part, but a natural shift in the family dynamic and a mutual decision to withdraw. I wanted to convey how both of them, there at the end—Sam alone in a dorm room, Dean alone in a hospital room—would sense the finality as well as the need for it. Sam to save himself, and Dean to sacrifice for his brother.

Again, purely my own take, and others have written, and will write, very different versions. Fanfic gives us this freedom.

SUMMARY

It has been a very challenging, complex, and extremely interesting ride, writing a long series of vignettes about the formative experiences of the young men we all love so well. Some are events we've heard referred to, or seen a little in flashbacks; some are strictly invention. I had sketched out some rough ideas and included many of them in the story, including what turned out to be a 6,000-word set-up for how Dean ended up with The Coat (as well as giving in to my own love of h/c and Dean whumpage), but some scenes simply took root and grew on their own, such as Sam's kneejerk assumptions that Dean was always drunk when sometimes he was injured.

Originally I wrote the chapter featuring Bobby meeting John first (now Ch 2), and then I realized it really needed to start with John, because the show itself did. That chapter, with Bobby, is the only time I actually moved the boys forward into the show's true timeline, so it breaks continuity there. Everything else is purely pre-series. I would have loved to feature more Bobby, but once he and John had their standoff, I couldn't go back because it would have been inconsistent with what we learned in IMTOD. As for Bobby putting the idea in Sam's head to think about going Ivy League—well, I just thought it was cool. 8-)

In general, I prefer series-timeline stories. But once I started playing with this idea, it just took off on me. Of course all of it is AU, but I did try to link to and extrapolate from show canon whenever possible.

I thank everyone who has seen this through start to finish, especially my fellow "SPNsters," three ladies who have supported me throughout this experience, and I am truly, truly grateful to those who have reviewed. We do this because we love it, but it means so very much when readers take the time to comment.

Lastly, if I made you laugh, or smile, or even feel sad, or cry, then I did my job.

Thank you, too, to all the great SPN writers out there who bring great pleasure to my days! It's so nice to have fellow enablers—er, colleagues.

And thanks to everyone responsible for the series, cast and crew, for providing us with an incredibly complex, rich, emotionally all-encompassing tapestry of family dynamics, mytharcs, character growth, a very special brother bond, and the magic that is the Winchesters.

Kick it in the ass!

(NOTE: I have since been reminded that they didn't actually find out a demon killed Mary until S1. Which completely negates all my Sam&John turmoil. [sigh]. But rather than retconning badly, I'm going to leave everything as-is and call it AU . . . because it is all AU anyway. But I take responsibility for screwing up canon.)