Writer's Note
Hello, Reader!
If you would like to continue on to the actual story, head on over to the next chapter. Here, I wanted to take a moment and talk about this story and why I made it. If you skip this chapter, there will be no hard feelings as—even though there are no spoilers in this chapter—it is unnecessary in order to enjoy the actual story.
For the ones who stayed, hello again.
I debated on whether or not I should write this little ‘writer’s note’. But I concluded that I wanted to say a few things even if no one actually reads this one chapter. At least, for my own mind.
First of all, I wanted to say that, while it could have been better, I have no animosity to the actual ending of the show. I saw it, I got teary eyed, and went into severe ‘depression’ the following Thursday when no new episode was to be seen.
I saw the first episode of Supernatural on the day that it premiered on September 13th, 2005. I had just turned 16 twelve days earlier. For weeks, I had seen the TV trailers on the, back then, WB channel about two brothers who were going to be going around the country hunting monsters and saving people. From the moment that I saw the trailer for the first time, (totally not because closeted, teenage me had a crush on the young brother that I eventually knew as Sam), I was hooked. I wanted to see this show no matter what. And when the day came, I went to my room, sat on my bed, and had the channel ready. I still remember that for me, back then, it was channel 27.
I have never known (as I’ve only met 2 other fans in my life) if my experience was the norm, but in my channel, right before the show premiered, the screen turned black and a message came up: ‘For a scarier experience, please turn off all the lights.’
As if it had been written as a scene in a movie, I brought my feet up on my bed, and turned off my side table lamp.
What followed was an hour of pure exhilaration. I had always been a fan of the fantastical, and the horror, so this show seemed tailored made for me. And before the episode was over, I had been cemented as a ‘Sam-Girl’—though I hate (read: lightheartedly so) that there is no gender-neutral term for it, especially since I am a gay man.
I came back week after week. I suffered through what, eventually around Season 3, I believe, came to be known as ‘hellatus’. I was there when Misha, then Jared, and lastly Jensen, all joined Twitter. I was there when Misha broke Tumblr—the first time.
I saw all the YouTube clips of the cons that I could never attend—my greatest disappointment to this day when it comes to Supernatural.
I read every article. Every interview.
I remember the first time that I cried in Supernatural. Dean’s death at the claws of the hellhounds that dragged him to Hell. Even just now, as I wrote this, I got chills remembering that scene. I remember the second time that I cried: when Sam confessed in Season 8 that he remembered as a child, reading the stories of King Arthur, and thinking that he would never be a hero like him—because even back then he knew that there was something wrong with him (the demon blood). And I remember the third, and last, time that I cried: in Season 15, episode 18 when Castiel, Angel of the Freaking Lord, professed his love to Dean Winchester.
I will admit, here and now, that I have watched ‘The Confession™’ in YouTube at least over 100 times in the background while I’ve gamed. I can recite the entire scene from memory. (Forgive me).
It is hard to say, exactly, just how much this show means to me. I was a fat, friendless, 16-year-old gay boy in pre-modern ‘gay tolerant’ America when this show premiered. During those days, even in 2005, I believed that I had no future. That is a huge topic that would derail this so I will stop here—but things turned out much better than I ever imagined.
To the ‘me’ from then, this show about two brothers hunting evil, was an escape. Early 2000’s TV, for me, was mostly trash—except Charmed and Buffy. So, my focus was mostly aimed at Supernatural. I would live—as depressive as that sounds—week to week just in anticipation of the newest episode. I came to love these characters as much as real friends. Sam eventually having to share top-dog crown, for me, with Castiel from Season 4 and onward.
From the first moment that I saw Castiel and Dean interact in that abandoned church in the middle of nowhere, I felt… something. It was weird. I didn’t know exactly why, but in some of their interactions I would think to myself—’hmm, this is a bit weird, isn’t it?’
By that time, I had already ventured into the fan-fiction corner of the SPN fandom.
I mostly stayed there between the hellatuses and focused my attention mostly on the made-up adventures shared between the brothers and Bobby, amongst other characters. I knew of the ‘other’ side of the fan-fiction corner, the forbidden side—no shame from me, you do you, boo-boo—and I didn’t care much of it as the pairings were usually between the brothers and female characters or the taboo one, whose name I am sure I cannot even write here without incurring the wrath of the admins and increasing the rating of this story as a whole.
One time I happen to read the synopsis for a story between Dean and Bobby and I didn’t read another fan-fiction for a while after that. Again, you do you, but that wasn’t for me, fam.
Then something happened when Season 4 ended and I went back to the fan-fiction corner between hellatuses. A new pairing had been born. A pairing that came to be known as ‘Destiel’.
And boy, did I read the f#$k out of that!
The ‘huh-moments’ that I had during my first viewing of Season 4 suddenly made sense while reading this new pairing. From the hellatus of Season 5 and onward, I never again read Supernatural fan-fiction. In a way, I had simply outgrown it. I would turn 21 in a few months. I was about to graduate from university and move away from home. Life had just become much more than before and my time in the fan-fiction world had come to a close.
I will confess, here and now (again), that I have written, and published on a nameless website, exactly ONE fan-fiction in my life and it shall never be tied to my public persona—ever. Well, only one story until now. Until this one, my #2.
16 years is a very, very, long time. When 2020 began, before the Pandemic turned our lives inside out and it was simply the beginning of a new decade, I was astonished thinking back at how much I had changed as a person between 2010 and 2020. And the whole of Supernatural is 6 years more than that. I have seen clips of cons where there are kids asking questions who hadn’t even been born before the show’s premiere!
During the run of Supernatural, from start to finish, I went from being a lonely, closeted 16-year-old boy to a 31-year-old man, married to a wonderful husband and surrounded by an incredible group of friends—one of which I have begun to re-watch Supernatural with from Season 1 a few weeks after I saw the last episode. She had only seen up to episode 4 a few years back, too scared to watch episode 5 as she was scared of Bloody Mary. During the viewing of the episode, I scared her so good that she let out a blood-curling, horror movie scream. I was so proud.
I remember the moment that I saw the news that Supernatural would end with Season 15. I was at work, it was late for me, and I saw that Misha had tweeted a video link. I opened it and the moment that I saw their reddened eyes in the clip, I knew what was coming. I had been expecting it as well. 15 years is a very long time. And all things must eventually end. Though I had been with Supernatural through it’s ups and downs, liking and disliking it—though saddened by the news—I was ready to see it end.
Chuck, the God we love to hate, said in ’Swan Song’ that endings were hard. And, as someone whose pastime is to write stories, I knew that all too well. I knew that the ending of the show wouldn’t be perfect. And it wouldn’t give me all that I wanted. That’s why 15x18 broke me the way that it did.
Listen, guys and gals and non-binary pals, I know that it could have been better. Canonically, Castiel was written to be in love with Dean Winchester at least from Season 13 when he made the deal with the Shadow—though we shippers had seen the clues from all the way back in Season 4. I mean, when you think about it, writing a gay angel character is exactly what 'No-F$#ks' Kripke would do.
They buried their gays, and because of the Pandemic, we couldn’t get the ending that was planned—as Jensen described it, it was supposed to see a lot of old characters reunite and having watched the last episode, I believe that instead of just Bobby, everyone that had died and gone to Heaven up to that point was supposed to appear and welcome Dean. That means that a Bobby, Mary, John, Ellen, Jo, Ash, Charlie, and Castiel (among others or less) reunion in Heaven was the supposed true ending to the scene that simply became Bobby’s. And the fact that Bobby mentions that Castiel helped Jack rebuild Heaven leads to the fact that he would have been there—in that reunion that never was.
What would have happened when Dean saw Castiel alive?
What direction would the show have taken their reunion?
I don’t know. A few people with access to the original script know. But it is likely that we will never know.
Going back from the tangent, though not perfect, the ending that we got is the ending that there is. And I, for one, accept it. Because even if it did not give me everything that I wanted, it is what Misha Collins, Jared Padalecki, and Jensen Ackles (among others) worked to give us. And after 16 years, 13 with Misha, I appreciated every moment. Because nothing in life will ever truly please you. It was a lesson that I learned early in life. And it is the lesson that has prevented from feeling too much disappointment when I’ve encountered it—sorry for the real world, grounding lesson.
Now, after all that, (forgive me and bless you if you’re still here), why did I write this first chapter of, seemingly, random crap?
To explain why I wrote this story.
The weeks after Supernatural ended, I kept going back to 15x18. To that moment. I heard ‘The Confession™’ again and again and I began to wonder, what if?
What if 15x20 had happened differently?
For all my love of Supernatural, one of my biggest pet peeves was how jumbled and open-ended a lot of plots were. If Eve, Mother of All, was mentioned by Castiel to be the biblical Eve, why did she create monsters? How? Why didn’t Chuck stop her? Did he help her? Death (from Season 5) was older than God, or perhaps not? They can’t remember. Amara existed first, making her the older sibling… but Amara and Chuck were the first in the universe, and their separation caused the Big Bang and the universe to come to be—but what is the Shadow and how did it come to be? Why does it like to sleep? Why didn’t Sam use Mjölnir during the whole of the latter 10 Seasons? Why is Adam still alive and happy, while Lilith and Eve got the short end of the stick? Why was Adam (Winchester) left in the Cage for 10 years when we literally, directly, saw Lucifer in the Cage when Rowena released him? Where did Sam’s powers go? If it was always meant to come down to Sam and Dean, as Lucifer and Michael, why did they try to break the First Seal with John? Why did Azazel put Sam with all the other candidates if Sam was the True Vessel? Why did Death like food so much? Where did the Anti-Christ end up after the Apocalypse when his powers were lost? And really, any pregnant Demon could make such a god-like being? And what in the name of Jack is the whole deal with the Garden of Eden?
A lot of these are light-hearted, while some are glaring plot holes that can only be answered with Head Cannon. Most are the product of having different head writers with different visions, and also, not having a concrete plan from Season 1 to Season 15—and honestly, what show this long has ever accomplished such a thing?
So, I asked myself on January 15th, 2021, what if 15x20 had happened differently?
Well, this is my brain’s answer. 7 days and 98 hours of writing later (Word tells you how long you’ve been working on projects), I wrote this. Between yesterday and today, I’ve gone through it once over to make sure there were no graphical mistakes but in something this large—roughly 61K words—that is inevitable and, honestly, I just wanted to release this.
The finished product could have easily turned out to be about 3 to 4 episodes of content for the actual TV show.
And to end this, whatever this first chapter is, I would like to say a few words:
1-To this day, though my adoration of Destiel, I am, and always have been, a ‘Sam-Girl’—God, please someone find a gender-neutral term! The reason I repeat this is because my story focuses primarily on Dean and Castiel’s POVs. Mostly Dean’s. The reason for this is simple: for me, Sam Winchester has been completely discovered. It is no one’s surprise that Supernatural is mostly Sam Winchester’s story, because it was by design. We were supposed to be Sam entering this supernatural world, a return for him and a start for us. As such, his character, out of every other in the show, has been the one fleshed out the most. There was nothing that I could have added to Sam Winchester in this story, but fear not, he is still a part of this story. Just not the focus.
2-One of my aims with this story, besides the view into what ‘Destiel’ could have been, was to fix a lot of the plot holes. To my surprise, as I wrote, I found that a lot of them could have been fixed by actually tying them together. Doing so, and adding a bit of head cannon, I happened to fill many of the holes—at least the ones I found important to my story and I hope that you can enjoy them!
a.As a side-point, I would like to add that although this story is technically a ‘Destiel’ story, it is not a ‘spicy’ story. Not in the sense of smut. Which again, more power to the people, but for one thing, I thought it would pull away from the actual story that I was writing. And also, as a reader, a moment like, for example, a first kiss or a declaration, even if it’s 4 sentences long carries more of an emotional punch and gratification than 4 pages of hardcore adult action. Both can be good, but this is my preference.
3-I read once that the creator of Pokémon—weird tangent but please bear with me, you’ve been here this long, thank you by the way—believed that every single Pokémon game casing was its own universe. Although every casing carries the same game code, the decisions you make in it create its own little pocket universe. As an avid Pokémon player in my youth, I loved that. I took that line of thinking here. Although 15x20 is real and the main canon of Supernatural, in my own head, I created my own pocket world and went in another direction. This means one major thing: these are my Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester and Castiel. Tens of millions of people have watched Supernatural during its 16-year run—even if they had only seen a few, or even one, episodes in passing. Those people created a version of these characters and those versions live in those people’s imaginations. You might think that the way that Sam, Dean, Castiel, and others act in my story feels odd—and that’s ok—because it is obviously not written or approved by the creating team of the show. However, as an avid watcher of 16 years, I wanted to write them in such a way that they could be perceived as true to the source material as possible. This means that for one, Dean won’t immediately be okay with everything the moment that Castiel comes back (forgive the slight spoiler but I mean, this is a Destiel fic, is it not?) and is 100% proud and out. That… is not ‘realistic’ in my mind (quotations because they are technically fictional characters and thus by definition not real).
Well, with that, I hope that you can enjoy this little view into my head cannon. This is, in a way, a love letter to the show that I have watched for 16 years and to the actors that I have come to appreciate along the way.
It’s not perfect. It might not be liked by everyone.
But I cried twice while writing this, damn it. I don’t know if I was accurately able to communicate to paper what was happening in my mind, but let me tell you, in my mind those two scenes were tear-jerkers.
I hope you cry. But, like, in a good way?
Endings aren’t easy or perfect, but this one I wrote with love.
-J
