guess dean forgot to get his booster for Clostridium tetani... poor dean. great installment, keep it coming!

Author's Response: Yup, I’m afraid so! Cue angsty hospital vigil… >:)

Way to keep us hanging! :)  I really love this story.

Author's Response: Thanks dude! I had actually planned for this to be the last chapter but I got to 5000 words or so and they were still in the pit, so there will be one more… ;-)

Lots of filling in the gaps in this chapter, and gentle moving of the story forward.

Loved that you had Kathleen tie Dean down, shame it was only so she could clean his leg thoroughly. Now he plans to go out and save the day, and I have no idea how he can do that when he's so badly injured.

Looking forward to finding out in the next chapter or two.

Author's Response:

Oh, Dean. Wandering about out there with Lee on his trail. You'll find out he's pretty resourceful even when he's half-dead!

;-)

How could you even think this wasn't golden?  Introspection, action, comedy, horror and especially freedom. OH MY FREAKIN' STARS!!!!!  There were so many fabulous nuggets in here.  Of course, I loved how the shit hit the fan and everyone was involved in their own desperate fight for life.  The Emmy goes to Dean and bendigo for their exchange about the nagging woman on his back.  I choked over that one!  I wanted to laugh and gasp and I practically peed my pants.

"...just get on top of my brother.  Now.  And that didn't come out right."  Hilarious!  And equally funny was: "What's that hard thing in your pants?" Sam hisses, realizes what he said and backpedals furiously.  "I mean.  What is that?  In there?"

Plus, when Sam makes the decision to sacrifice Bobby for Dean if need be, knowing that mentally and actually doing it---going through with it was damned shocking. 

Throughout the chapter you keep plaguing the bendigo with shades of humanity---the teddy bear, his protectiveness of Dean (his kin), and turning to Dean for help getting Kathleen off his back.  We keep getting drawn back into the misguided idea that perhaps the wendigo won't eat them, is more than a monster.  It's the humanity in us to seek out the similarities between ourselves and others.

I could read this over and over again.  I think I will! 

Author's Response:

Hey Shannon: thank you sweetie! I did think these last two chapters would be a tad anticlimactic after the Dean-Lee confrontation but everyone seems to love them.

Tried for the usual mix of pathos, angst and black humor in this but must confess I ended up having the damn thing throw her out because having her swing her leg up while hanging from just a foot of rope seemed even less likely!

Family love and loyalty is a big theme in these stories and I wanted to touch on the possibility the wendigo might be a part of that with the whole kin issue and the fact it recognizes something of what it used to be in the Benders. And the bookend to that is that Sam is prepared to sacrifice Bobby for his brother... :-O

Thanks for reading, hon! I always look forward to your revews! ;-)

As scary as this chapter was, it was so funny reading about how the wendigo didn't know what to do with an insane woman.  On the other hand, I was so glad that it through Kathleen out of the pit.  I thought that you conveyed the fear and urgency of the characters, as well as their concern for each other, very well.

I kinda felt sorry for Dean that they know about him and Kathleen as well as his iron 'chastity' belt.  Was extremely happy to read that Sam got Dean's chain back.  Awesome chapter as usual.

Author's Response:

Thanks so much! I like to think of that as a sort of male bonding moment with them all looking at each other and wondering what they heck will work to shut poor Kathleen up…

I’m real glad the urgency of it all worked for you… I find it quite hard to convey momentum with words so it’s a huge relief to know it worked!

Yup: couldn’t resist having Bendigo give the game away. A good buddy of mine [Cerridwen7777, who posts on FF and LJ] will soon start posting a story that calls out to this ’verse and features Kathleen, and for the purposes of her story Sam needed to know. So bendigo mimicry came in useful again!

Holy crap! 

I do feel kinda sorry for the Bendigo though...poor thing must be lonely.  Oh, well.

Author's Response: I have really tried to stress the theme of family love and loyalty in this: Dean’s loyalty to his family and brother, Sam’s too, the Gabe-Lee relationship, and Kathleen’s love for her brother, which is what first led her to help Dean in the episode. And that definitely follows through to the wendigo’s loyalty to what it perceives to be its family, and Kathleen’s musings on the fact it used to be human… ;-)

Bobby sroking Dean's hair. Wonderful 

Author's Response: Isn’t it?! Perhaps I’m sentimental at heart after all. And of course it leads into the reality that Sam is prepared to sacrifice Bobby – and had the brothers’ positions been reversed I would have had Dean being willing to do it too… :-(

Whoa - what a breath-taking ride!  Kathleen to the rescue- I hope.

Loved the image of Sam's chest as a springboard - laughed a lot at that one, flexing his pecs oh yes please!

And a lovely touch having the Wendigo/Bendigo chuck Kathleen out of the pit thanks to Dean's quick thinking....

Can't wait for the rest...

Author's Response:

Cackles… I sorta cheated with the pecs since JP wasn’t really as bulky back then!

You know, I spent ages trying to work out how the heck Kathleen could possibly swing her leg up over the top of the pit while hanging from a foot of rope and I concluded it was in fact anatomically impossible… hence, it threw her out. I feared I may have jumped the shark with it, but everyone has loved it so far! :-D 

Holy moly! I about laughed my head off when Dean came up with that line about just throwing her out to get the "harpy" of it's back! Too funny!!! I hope Kathleen can find the gun! The Bendigo must be really mad about right now. Looking forward to the next chapter and hopefully some rescue!


Author's Response:

Having it throw her out was totally last minute and contrived – when I got to the point of writing her getting out I just could not figure out a way of having her climb up a foot of rope!

C21 will be the last chapter, sadly… but it’ll be a good one. And do you really think the gun will just be lying up there waiting for Kathleen to find it? You know me better than that! >:)

It occurs to him that he hasn’t really ever talked to Sam about the woods as an entity, and about all those weeks, about what they did, the three Benders. “It’s – familiar. This.” He sweeps his hand around. “Like coming home. But – unreal too. Like a dreamscape. You know, I woke up here and it was like a kind of… birth, I guess. Reborn, as Gabe Bender. There was no Dean. There was nothin’ else for me, Sam, ’cept little flashes, glimpses of before. Like before was the dream.”

This is just like “La vida es sueño”!  We just read this play in Spanish class.  In English it’s called “Life is a Dream”.  Have you ever read/heard of it? 

It’s about this King who has a prophecy that says his son will be evil and kill people and take over the kingdom.  So the King locks his infant son in a tower and he grows up there alone with only a guard who comes and feeds him.  When the Prince is an adult, the King kind of feels bad, but mostly just wants to prove that the prophecy is true, so he decides to let the Prince out and see what happens.  So they give the Prince drugs and he wakes up in the palace, and everyone is treating him like a Prince, so, essentially like he’s a god.  He decides to see how far he can go, test the limits of his power, and throws a servant off a balcony and tries to rape one of the women of court.  Naturally, the King and the guard drug him some more and lock him back up in the tower. 

When the Prince wakes, he thinks it was all a dream.  Then he has this awesome monologue where he realizes that he can’t tell the difference between reality and dream because they both seemed too real to him.  The soliloquy here is to Spanish theatre what Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy is to English theatre.

“Yo sueño que estoy aquí

destas prisiones cargado,

y soñé que en otro estado

más lisonjero me vi.

¿Qué es la vida?  Un frenesí.

¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,

una sombra, una ficción,

y el mayor bien es pequeño;

que toda la vida es sueño,

y los sueños, sueños son.”

 

“I dream that I am here

of these imprisonments charged,

and I dreamed that in another state

happier I saw myself.

What is life? A frenzy.

What is life? An illusion,

A shadow, a fiction,

And the greatest profit is small;

For all of life is a dream,

And dreams, are nothing but dreams.”

 

The Prince is soon freed by rebels, and comes to the conclusion that, although he cannot tell the difference between dream and reality, he knows which one he likes better, and that is life at the palace, so he chooses that and decides that even if it is a dream, he is going to enjoy it while it lasts.

The play is essentially about not taking life for granted – we pass through it as though it were a dream and it passes much too quickly.  Instead, we need to seize the day, take chances.

 

But anyways, excuse my geekiness.  It just really struck me how much it was like Dean’s situation here, where he had lost track of which was reality.

 

And I must say, you are doing an amazing job of taking us through Dean’s trauma and his long healing process.  Beautifully done.  I really have no words. ;-) maybe I just ran out.

 

And I haven’t been not reviewing, I actually just started reading this story today.

I’ll review again when I’ve finished reading another chunk of chapters :-D

Author's Response: Wow, thanks so much – I’m not familiar with that play at all but it does sound very similar to the ‘illusion’ the Benders constructed for Dean in the first story in this ’verse [The Woods are Lonely, Dark and Deep]. And being back in the place where it happened certainly makes Dean susceptible to confused realities, as you will see when you read on. I’d loe to know what you think! :-D

I cannot tell you how much I love your story!!  I second everything that I read in everyone else's reviews.  I honestly wonder if you aren't secretly one of the real Supernatural writers because you have Sam, Dean and Bobby's characters down to a "T." 

I, too, believe that Bobby loves Sam as much as he loves Dean and the conversation between Bobby and Sam was perfect.  Thank you for the time and effort that you put into your stories.  I look forward to more chapters and more stories!

Author's Response:

Thanks so much - I really appreciate that! I love the stories I read to nail characterization and plot, and actually have a story too... but it seems rare to find stories with all three. I guess that's why I go to such great efforts to try to ensure that mine meet those criteria!

I definitely wanted to use this chapter to explore Sam-Bobby, since it isn't something fanfic often looks at. I do subscribe to canon re the Dean-Bobby bond, but I also feel sure he loves Sam just as much - just in a different way because Sam needs a different kind of love from him.

Dean back to being Dean in every sense of the word - yipee! Hip-hooray!  I wonder how long it will last.

And Sam stuck in a different hole to Bobby - another Winchester plan goes sideways. Something else back to normal.

Am certainly enjoying this story now.

Author's Response: Yup, he's back! These dissociative fugues are pretty common in people who are faced with reminders of a trauma they have undergone, but they never last long. Of course, the $64,000 question is just what set it off... >:)

Wow, what a chapter. Such a lot happens, the chase, finding Kathleen, Dean exploding at Bobby and finally the thing taunting them over and over. Thank you for knocking Dean out for that bit of the story, I don't think I could have dealt with him suffering through it all.

The marking/licking of Dean by that thing was down right creepy and the fact that he was prepared to kill Kathleen rather than let it eat her was so in character. He may prefer rescuing the damsel in distress usually, but giving her a quick death as opposed to one that's long drawn out and painful sounds just like Dean to me too.

Author's Response: Yup, remembering that wendigos can mimic the sounds they hear was one of those 2am eureka moments and I consider it EK's personal gift to me for this story! You'll find out the reasons for its behavior as you read on... ;-)