#missourielephant

[laurelwinchester]

Since Nyssa has a puppy in HTLGI, has anyone shown her John Wick yet? She would approve of him.

can confirm that john wick is her favorite film franchise of all time. that feels right to me, feels organic. she's very impressed by the brutality. sometimes she tries to get laurel to watch them with her but laurel always declines because she says they're ''too violent.''

[habibialkaysani]

juliawcker replied to your post “right. today I have a family thing (bunch of aunts, uncles and cousins...”

you’re lovely and amazing and anyone who doesn’t agree doesn’t deserve the pleasure of your company

kjldnhlkahnaklsngakslhnsalhk ana you are. far too kind. thank you. I just. I’ve been made to feel like I’m a monster for saying that to my aunt. but all I did was tell the truth - that I don’t like being around her and basically all my other aunts and uncles. 

I feel bad because I like being around my cousins. they’re all good kids and it’s fun playing with them. generally I’m better with kids than adults family wise. but I can’t stand to be around people who only care about the job I’m in and when I’m going to get married (to a man, ofc, which is over my cold dead gay body).

juliawcker replied to your post “right. today I have a family thing (bunch of aunts, uncles and cousins...”

i hope it ends soon!

it has finally ended and I am so bloody glad because I feel exhausted.

juliawcker replied to your post “right. today I have a family thing (bunch of aunts, uncles and cousins...”

i like how u clarified “and i don’t mean the cute one either”

whenever I talk about a sister being annoying, you can bet your ass it’s not baby speedy because baby speedy is precious and has never done anything wrong in her life. my other sister, meanwhile, is a whole other story.

dawngrangers replied to your post “right. today I have a family thing (bunch of aunts, uncles and cousins...”

you got this. sending you all the good vibes. <3

thanks, mari. it could have been worse, I guess. and it was only really at the end that I hit a proper hitch in fairness.

missourielephant replied to your photoset “arrowverse characters on daredevil (as written in the devil in star...”

I was wondering if you knew about that story.

hahaha I would be worried if I didn’t given I wrote it ;)

[raywritesthings]

Fandom: Arrow

Characters: Laurel Lance, Quentin Lance, Liza Warner, Damien Darhk, Malcolm Merlyn, Thea Queen, Sara Lance, John Diggle, Lyla Michaels, Felicity Smoak, Oliver Queen, Barbara Gordon, Roy Harper, Cisco Ramon, Ray Palmer

Pairing: Laurel Lance/Oliver Queen (Eventual)

Summary: The summer the Arrow leaves - or dies, as the public believes - Quentin Lance decides vigilantism in Starling City must be brought to an end once and for all. When his daughter stands defiant, lines are crossed, and Damien Darhk sees an opportunity to accelerate his plans for Genesis in the midst of a fight for the city's soul. Can the Black Canary save the world, and just which allies will end up joining her?

Notes: This fic now has a TVTropes page courtesy of @missourielephant. Link here.

@the-white-w0lf @greensirencanary @unusual-raccoon

[laurelwinchester]

In “Everything I Have Is Yours”, will someone say to Oliver “Do you realize this is all your fault? If you had killed Malcolm years ago, Quentin Lance would still be alive, Darhk wouldn’t have nuked a city (assuming that happened i your fic), Tommy wouldn’t have been resurrected as a soulless monster, Laurel wouldn’t have been raped. So much misery and death Oliver, all because you were too stupid, weak, and selfish to put him down.” ? Cause he deserves that, it’d be even better if that came from Malcolm himself.

it's not said exactly like that but yes someone does confront oliver about malcolm and everything that has happened since the choice was made to protect him.

i can't believe i'm saying this but i kind of feel bad for oliver here because he's going to get shit on a lot specifically for the things he said and did to laurel during the Miracle Merlyn fakeout era and i'm not sure he deserves all of it because he...wasn't exactly himself during that time. but when it comes to the malcolm issue, yeah he's going to be called out for that one and he's going to deserve it.

[laurelwinchester]

You know when I saw that in “Everything I Have Is Yours” Laurel was one of Iris’ bridesmaids and that Oliver was married, I immediately concluded that Felicity still tried to get married at Barry and Iris’ wedding. However, Laurel wasn’t having any of that (cause she’s an awesome bridesmaid) and told Felicity in no uncertain terms “No”. While Felicity and Oliver got married later, neither they nor Diggle have ever forgiven Laurel for it. Iris meanwhile, loves Laurel more than ever for it.

you know, i can see that being a real possibility! i think there are a few things she's done over the years (things that seemed reasonable to her but they likely viewed as being petulant and/or disloyal) to alienate herself from team arrow. they clearly do not trust her and it's not just because they (mostly oliver) have all been being heavily manipulated by a dead guy over the past several months.

[raywritesthings]

Thank you, both @greensirencanary and @unusual-raccoon! Since I can’t tag either of you, I will proceed with:

@colorofmymindposts @ayotofu @basmathgirl @1-of-those-things @missourielephant @the-white-w0lf and anybody else who I regularly message/interact with on here, you’re all awesome.

send this to the 12 nicest people you know or who seem to have a good heart and if you get 5 back you must be pretty awesome 💜

In no particular order _ you @klaroline-4ever

@elejahforever

@eternityunicorn @miguelsbrat @beautyandwords @darknightfrombeyond @unusual-raccoon @avala-moon @elijahs-wife @missnmikealson @elena-mikaelson @umaficwriter

and all my followers ♥️🎉🍀

[laurelwinchester]

My internet was down yesterday, so: Happy Mother’s Day to Laurel from Mary in HTLGI; Emma and the new baby in EIHIY; Sin in As We Were; Mary, Sin, and Henry in Softly Sweetheart; Sin, Timmy, and Grace in WYAW, and Mary and Annabelle in Love is a River. I think that’s all of them…

And then the day after Mother’s Day, Dinah calls Sara and says “You forgot to call and wish me a happy Mother’s Day!”. And Sara says “I didn’t forget. I chose not to call”.

yessss all for laurel and none for dinah!!!!

[laurelwinchester]

Edie: I love Laurel will always love and protect her and I’ll turn anyone who tries to hurt her into firewood.

Also Edie: I’m going to murder Laurel and then reanimate her and turn her decaying soulless body over to a witch. And all because I don’t like who she married…She should have married me.

yep, that's her lol

edie is nothing if not a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a metric fuckton of rage. never truly knowable, not even to herself.

the thing about her possessiveness and overprotectiveness (and hypocrisy) is that these things are almost certainly just jealousy and loneliness.

her feelings for laurel are complicated. she does genuinely love her cousin and she still feels responsible for her (in some sort of way) but things like love and her sense of duty have been warped by years of trauma. her hunger and and grief have turned to rage and greed and taken over her. she has gorged herself on hate and power and it has completely unmade her.

unfortunately for laurel, she has, through no fault of her own, become the target of that hunger and rage.

in edie's mind, that baby girl with blood just like hers grew up and stole the life she should have had. she will swear on her life that everything she has done has just been about getting back whatever has been erased from her mind because she thinks this lost memory is what will make her whole again, and that laurel is just an unfortunate casualty of this desperate need, but whether she admits it or not, it's also been about jealousy, loneliness, and resentment.

laurel gets to live a real life. she gets the marriage and the house and the career. she gets a family. she gets to be with her sibling. she gets to be healthy and whole. she gets a choice. she gets to be a mom.

edie has none of that.

laurel gets to remember her life and edie has pieces of hers taken away and has to exist with pain and emptiness she doesn't understand. laurel gets her inheritance and turns it into a super power and edie has hers cut out of her.

the winchester in laurel's life is a source of joy and happiness. he takes care of her. he makes her laugh. he would never dream of hurting her. she loves and is loved by him. he offers her rest and peace.

meanwhile, the only winchester edie ever knew butchered her. he was responsible for what had to have been the most violent and horrifying night of her life that left her with part of her literally cut out of her and resulted in chronic nerve pain and disfigurement.

laurel is surrounded by people who love her just because. edie is surrounded by people she had to brainwash into caring about her and the one person she thought might actually love her just said, You have taken enough years from me. I refuse to allow you to take any more. laurel has never truly been alone. edie feels she has only ever been alone.

that shit stings. it makes her violently angry and green with envy. so, yes, she definitely loves laurel - at least as much as she can - but she resents her just as much, which...

doesn't particularly bode well for laurel.

[laurelwinchester]

You’ve said that the upcoming chapter of HTLGI will be from Edie’s POV. The million dollar question is, will she bitch about the bike lanes?

oh my god the bike lanes! i forgot about the bike lanes!

sadly no. edie will not be sharing her opinion on the bike lanes. she will mostly be bitching about her mother. as is life for the cursed ellard daughters lol.

[laurelwinchester]

You: Laurel Lance is a victim of abuse, gaslighting and trauma and deserves love and happiness!

Also you: Proceeds to give Laurel Lance more abuse, gaslighting and trauma.

[laurelwinchester]

So since a big part of HTLGI is how horribly people in Laurels life have treated her, which the show wasn’t willing to acknowledge, I’m trying to figure out how they stand on it. Is it like this?

Dinah: Unwittingly to admit she’s a horrible mother, probably blames Laurel for whatever problems they have, and isn’t willing to try and fix things. Or at least, not seriously try as the incident with the sweaters showed.

Oliver: Knows he was a bad boyfriend and a bad friend, and that Laurel deserved better. But he doesn’t seem to realize how bad he was/is (he thinks he was a 6 out of 10, but he was really an 8), and also doesn’t seem to be aware of what things were really bad. Such as his ableism.

Sara: Knows she was a bad sister, and is genuinely trying to be better and more supportive. I’m pretty’s sure she did finally apologize for everything.

Quentin: He’s the one I’m not sure about. Is he aware that he’s a bad father? That argument with Dean makes me think no. He seems to know that Laurel was murdered because of him, but also seems to expect people to forgive and forget that.

Just curious as to their views on their treatment of her, let me know is you can. Thanks.

okay so this is a meaty question and it requires a meaty answer so stay with me here, i have a lot to say.

dinah: i have no earthly idea what is wrong with dinah in canon. she's just an incredibly badly formed character written by incompetent writers who made it clear for the better part of a decade that they were unaware women were also people and who should probably be jailed for wasting alex kingston's time and ours for years. there is no other explanation. HOWEVER… i do know what's wrong with htlgi!dinah.

now obviously there's more to it - and i'll get into that in a minute - but the crux of the issue is this: when dinah looks at laurel, she doesn't see a daughter. she just sees the curse. a time bomb. not a thing to love, but a thing to be afraid of. she has never been able to escape that line of thinking and that destroyed any chance of her having any kind of normal relationship with her eldest.

the surprising thing about her is that out of everyone here she is actually the most self aware. at least now. she wasn't always, there was definitely a time where she was angry, where she put unnecessary blame on laurel's shoulders for their endless conflict, where she lived in denial, but at this point she is well aware that it's on her.

she is not someone who should have been a mother. she wasn't really interested in having children, but quentin wanted children and she didn't want to lose him. which is never a wise family planning method. she's not a particularly maternal person. she's not warm, although she's tried to be. mostly what she is, what she has always been, is a frightened person and that is, ultimately, what drove a lot of her choices. she wanted a normal life with her normal husband, away from the weird spooky darkness surrounding the ellard family, but for whatever foolish reason, she didn't take into account what would happen if her firstborn child was a girl. unfortunately, the person who ended up paying for that foolishness was laurel. she spent much of her life wondering what she had done to make her mother close herself off from her and it turns out all she did was exist.

reasonably speaking, there was likely some undiagnosed postpartum depression in the mix when laurel was born, along with environmental stresses (dinah and quentin were young, broke newlyweds living in the glades and eventually had to move in with her parents because their financial situation was so untenable) but at the end of the day a lot of dinah's treatment of laurel stems from stubborn ignorance and deep rooted fear.

when she looks at sara, she sees her mirror. they were able to have a good relationship because they were a lot alike. they were mother and daughter but they were also friends. dinah encouraged sara's youthful selfishness because it was something she never truly got to have. she never worked particularly hard to heal any rifts between laurel and sara, largely ignoring the deteriorating relationship between the sisters as they got older because, deep down, although she would never admit it, she probably wanted sara to distance herself from laurel because she believed laurel to be unsafe. she favored sara because sara was hers. laurel was something lost before she was even born.

when she looks at laurel, she sees the curse and all the others before her. dinah ellard was a wonderful person with a wonderful life - but she still drowned herself before she hit thirty five. faye, depressed and paranoid, yeeted her kids and hid away in the woods for the rest of her life, barely venturing out. faye's daughter elizabeth drank herself into an early grave. dinah's own sister, valerie, is unstable more often than not, has sucked all the air out of the room for her entire life, stealing most of bea and richard's attention even into adulthood and still, now, in her early sixties, needs to be looked after like a child. and then there's edie. volatile, explosive edie who brought down a building on hundreds of innocent people and got her throat ripped out by a hunter with a chip on his shoulder. and that's pretty much all dinah knows of the curse. terrible echoes of women who went wrong. so that's what she saw when she looked at laurel. and she's not really someone who will love the monster anyway. she's more of the opinion what's the point of getting attached to something that will either wither and die or kill everyone in the blast radius?

oliver: 100% this man's biggest problem is that he has rocks for brains. no other way to put it. he puts his whole foot in his mouth regularly and does not understand why people get upset with him. doesn't know what ableism is. probably couldn't spell it. thinks he can't possibly be misogynistic because one time he tweeted a picture of himself in a pink shirt that said ''the future is female'' and a bunch of blue check marked white women with ''freelance journalist'' in their bio came out of the woodwork to stroke his ego.

he rarely intends to hurt laurel. or anyone for that matter. most of the time he genuinely means well. in fact, right now, where we're at in htlgi, he is something that is causing major strain on laurel's marriage and he doesn't even know it. i think, just from seeing her in an actually happy and healthy (for the most part) relationship, he does realize in retrospect that their past relationship was unhealthy, that she was deeply unhappy, and that he was more than just a regular ''bad boyfriend'' but i doubt he knows what to do with that information. he definitely doesn't know how to make up for it.

but overall he is not a villain, he's not a bad guy, he is just a rich, entitled, privileged man who grew up lacking vital life lessons and kindergarten logic because he was never expected to need any of these things. he had money. he didn't need emotional intelligence.

(and i know we're supposed to believe the island made him better but we saw the flashbacks. those five years were mostly here's how oliver learned how to shoot an arrow, how to fight, how to speak this language, here's how he learned this skill and that skill, here's how he got this tattoo and met this person and made this enemy. there was very little here's how oliver learned emotional intelligence.)

sara: yeah, dinah was primarily the problem here. most of sara's bad habits were inherited from and encouraged by her mother. dinah taught her how to be selfish and callous and that her every bad decision would be forgiven no matter what. insidiously, without either of them even really realizing it or thinking too hard about it, dinah also taught sara that laurel was beneath them. again, that was never intentional but that was the vibe dinah gave off because of her own issues and kids are sponges so sara definitely picked up on it. she knows better now obviously. she's learning. she's her own person. if she makes it through htlgi and goes back to the legends, we know she'll learn more and carve out even more of her own personality separate from both her mother and sister. i think she will probably always be a little childish when it comes to laurel, but in normal younger sibling way. less i'm going to steal your life because i was taught i deserve it more and more yeah i cheated at mini golf what are you doing to do about it i'm baby.

quentin: he is a tough one because he truly is easily the most frustrating case here. he recognizes he's made mistakes, but does he recognize he is a bad father? not…really. to an extent maybe. he will carry the guilt for laurel's death with him for life, but will it make a difference? doubtful. he apologizes and will continue to apologize, but will it change anything? no, probably not. i don't think he's able to understand the concept of long term trauma.

like, if the lance family were to go to family therapy right now, dinah might have a breakthrough, but quentin would probably be unable to get there. laurel could bring up something blatantly horrendous that he did in the past and be like hey when i was nine months pregnant and scraping your drunken ass off the bar floor, you kind of called me a whore and blamed me for sara's death and it's been stuck in my head ever since and i've spiraled into self hatred and depression like a hundred times and have regular nightmares, is this bad? and he would just be like ……idk that was years ago babygirl sounds like a you problem.

and i have no idea why!!!

with dinah, i can work her out. i can attach her to the lore of htlgi and the mythology of the ellard family and make her make sense. a terrible kind of sense, but still a kind of sense. with quentin, i…really don't know why he is the way he is. he's just kind of a stubborn dick. maybe his own father was an asshole? maybe he's just one of those parents who think they can do whatever they want to their kid because they made them? (for the record, i think that seems like the option that's most in line with his character.) or in htlgi, there is the recurring theme, in regards to dean and laurel, of the hungry recognize hunger. maybe it's the same with dinah and quentin, but instead it's trash attracts trash.

[laurelwinchester]

Happy Father's Day to Dean! May he have a great day with Mary in HTLGI; Mary and Sin in Softly Sweetheart; Sin, Timmy, and Grace in Where You Are Wanted (given that I'm apparently the only one left who remembers them, I have to keep mentioning them. It keeps them alive); Ben Braeden in verse's where he stayed with him and Lisa; and of course, with Emma in all the ones where she got to live. Oh, and may he keep his eye on Claire.

(checks hand) Nope, that's all of the children Dean has. Who the hell is this 'Jack' people are whining about?

living for this shade lol

[laurelwinchester]

In HTLGI, I’m pretty sure you’ve said to picture Florence Pugh as an adult Mary ( so I guess a young Florence Pugh) works for Mary now; and I think for Edie you’ve alternated between saying Kate Siegel and no one can portray her. But I wanted to ask about any other “fantasy casting” ideas you have. Like ones for Hanna or that rat bastard Ricky. Personally I’ve been picturing Ming-Na Wen for Lady Shiva.

yesss, florence pugh as adult mary! i really do love that idea. my favorite thing about it is that i had nothing to do with it. i love when someone else does things for me lol. i'm also just incredibly touched that someone has enjoyed my fic enough to actually fancast someone as mary. that was really heartening to read.

(also, i suppose this is a spoiler but it's mild and won't be coming up for probably a hot minute or two so i'm just going to let this slip, but when we first meet adult mary, she's going to be somewhere around the ages of 27-30 so a pretty good age range for florence pugh.)

you know, i have to admit i've been leaning into the kate siegel as edie thing more and more lately. it's interesting because most of the time it really is hard to picture edie as anyone in particular because she's just so...edie. she's in a league of her own. but then i wrote her ''every man has it in him'' monologue from chapter 16 and i was like...yeah, kate siegel could do that. so she's definitely been on my mind a lot more often lately when writing edie. i kind of want to go back and read the past couple chapters to see if the shift in my thinking has been noticeable in the writing of her character.

as for hanna, i've gone over a few different possibilities for her in my head and i think i eventually landed on olivia holt. the character of hanna moretti was created to be a wolf in sheep's clothing. she's supposed to look young, almost childlike, with sort of a disney channel-esque look about her to conceal how ruthless and brutal she can be, and i think olivia holt with her big disney princess eyes could fit that bill.

on a related note, i think mädchen amick would be perfect for marlene moretti. mostly because of twin peaks. i love twin peaks. i aspire to create twin peaks vibes. but also, i mean, i think she would be pretty convincing as a witch.

ricky is a mystery to me. it's hard to put a face to a brute like him. originally, when he was first created, i was thinking of the guy who played brock rumlow in the captain america movies. frank grillo. just because he played a memorable douchebag antagonist. ricky's features were actually based on him. but, again, now it's hard to put an actual person's face on such a useless lump of evil. especially with how bad he's about to get and especially now that he doesn't really resemble much of anyone anymore. he is... well, he's seen better days.

honestly, i think one of the characters that is the most visible and set in my mind is gemma chan as lady shiva. i've got my heart set on that one. ming-na wen is a great choice and there's no doubt that she could totally nail the role of lady shiva, but the lady shiva in htlgi is a bit younger (mostly because of her relationship and background with edie, which i hope to expand on soon) so when she started taking shape in my head, it was just an immediate - oh, gemma chan. yeah, she's perfect.

[laurelwinchester]

New question for HTLGI, will we see when Nyssa was first invited to live with Dean and Laurel? Like Dean is all “ You invited the assassin, the assassin who poisoned you, to come any live with us and our daughter?” And Laurel just says “Yes. I trust her.”

‘‘i trust her,’‘ she says, and dean’s suddenly glad they’re having this conversation over the phone because his face does this

(joke’s on him though because nyssa quickly becomes one of his closest allies in his wife’s weird comic book world. i bet they share recipes and text each other about terrible reality television.)

[laurelwinchester]

Happy mother's day to Laurel. Here's hoping she's having a good day with Dean and Mary. May the one in the Where You Are Wanted Verse also have a good day with Sin, Timmy, and Grace.

Honorable mention to Beatrice Drake today as well, as she was an awesome grandmother and great-grandmother.

Dinah can piss off, today is only about honoring good mothers. Not horrible ones.

aww, i love that you included bea in this!

i also love that you remember the where you are wanted verse because full disclosure it's been so long that even i sometimes forget about that one.

may all the mom!laurels sprinkled around the universe have a great day full of handmade cards, cinnamon pancakes, bouquets of tulips, and bea’s lemon bars.

and none for dinah.

[laurelwinchester]

On this day, I think about the HTLGI verse, and what it would be like if Laurel wasn't revived. There are 3 things that are important to me: 1 If Oliver did replace Laurel with some random nobody off the street, Dean had Iris release Blackbird. Not only did she win a Pulitzer Prize for it, it almost instantly got all of Star City to agree that Laurel is the one and only Black Canary, the pretender needs to piss off (which she did). 2. Joanna won the lawsuit Dean filed against Oliver.

I should have been able to fit all 3 in one post, I think it used to allow more space. Third thing: Laurel got a proper funeral, like she wanted. Salted and Burned, ashes spread in Big Sur. The only people in attendance: the Winchester Clan, Thea, Joanna, Ted, Nyssa and Sara. If Laurel's parents didn't care about her enough to respect her wishes for a burial, they don't deserve to attend her real funeral. If Laurel isn't coming back, it's important that she get that at least.

.

what's interesting is that i am 100% confident that somewhere within the htlgi universe, there is an earth that exists in the multiverse where laurel did not get to come home.

her resurrection was the consequence of a chain of events that she had little to nothing to do with. it went back to edie, to john winchester, to the car accident in 1995, all the way back to the 1500s when hazel and alice aelard lived and the curse first began. take just one of those things out (maybe john actually killed edie, maybe lady shiva did not save her, maybe there was no car accident and she lived out her life as the normal, perhaps even good person she could have been, maybe there was never any eldest daughter curse) and there's still a good chance darhk would have killed laurel, but then she would have just been...gone.

i think life for dean and mary in the aftermath of that would be...quieter. maybe, without an evil witch stalking their family, even softer. but less. life after laurel would be darker. star city and that cozy house in the quiet neighborhood would no longer be home. 

i think they probably would have ended up back in kansas. maybe not permanently, but for a little while. all of dean's roads seem to lead to kansas in one way or another. he would have remained retired, no getting called up for world saving duty, no more fighting, regardless of how routine the case seems (because you never know, after all, when a random vampire might shove you onto a rusty spike) because he's all mary has now and he has to stay alive for her. he would have chosen her the way john should have chosen his boys.

the lawsuit filed against oliver would have likely been settled very quickly because i don't think he would have put up much of a fight. the tacky statue would have been removed, possibly replaced by a tasteful plaque somewhere in the city, maybe at the courthouse, maybe near where cnri used to be. joanna would have overseen that.

i also don't think oliver would have replaced her. i know that's literally what happened in canon but i'm trying to make htlgi!oliver less of a shit. like, yeah, he's still gonna be a douche 40% of the time but the fool’s trying. more than that, he loves her. he loves her very much. he's allowed to love her here. he wouldn't have even tried to replace her. he knows it can never be done. on this earth, he will have to find a way to love and let go, to live with all those ghosts without a weird statue and without trying to erase her from his life.

iris probably still ended up eventually releasing blackbird (with dean's blessing) on laurel's birthday one year. it was very well received. especially by the citizens of star city who still, even after years, love their girl.

but the funeral.

that's an issue.

laurel clearly deserves a better funeral. she deserves what she asked for. she deserves to have her final wishes honored. she deserves big sur. but big sur means letting go. ashes means there is no way back. i'm not sure dean would ever be able to bring himself to accept that fully. sure, there are periods of acceptance, he learns to live with the grief, there is joy and laughter, maybe even other loves, but there's still that thought in the back of his mind. 

what if? 

what if, someday, she comes back? what if, someday, there's a way? she'll need something to go back to. she'll need her body, her arms and legs, a beating heart, the tattoo on her hand of the three blackbirds. you can't come back if you're salted and burned. that's the whole point. and what if she comes back?

he knows better, of course. he knows how these things work. he knows she belongs in big sur, with the wind and the sea, soaring, but every year, as april 6th approaches, when he thinks about following through on his promise, about giving her away, he can't help but think -

what if, one day, when mary's all grown up, when he's old and gray, there's a knock on that door and it's her, alive and well, in that blue dress they buried her in, smiling, as young and beautiful as she was that last day, telling him, ''i'm sorry i'm late. i got so lost.''

that's the thing. that's the problem. big sur means letting go and when dean winchester loves you, he doesn't let go.