Rather a Story

Title: The Burning Bridge
Summary: Written for spn_j2_bigbang. Season 6 AU. With no end in sight on their quest to restore Sam's soul or to figure out just what Crowley is up to in his search for Purgatory, Sam and Dean break off in order to investigate a string of mysterious deaths in which the victims exhibited all the signs of radiation poisoning with no apparent cause before their deaths. The case takes a darker turn, however, when soon after they begin investigating Sam begins to exhibit the same symptoms as the victims. Suddenly Dean finds himself facing the disturbing dilemma of whether it might not be easier to let go of this empty-shell version of his brother and simply let the illness take its course...
Artist: The brilliant and awesomely talented tripoli
Link to Art: http://tripoli.livejournal.com/492758.html
Characters: Dean, Sam, Cas, Bobby, OCs
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 21,403
Disclaimer: All recognizable belongs to the CW.
Warnings: Levels of violence commensurate with the show.
Neurotic Author's Note #1: There are several people to thank for this! First off, my fantastically talented artist, tripoli, who illustrated this story in such an imaginative way. I am in awe, because she touched on all the important notes of the story in incredibly creative ways that would never even have occurred to me. There's also rainylemons, who not only beta'd the crap out of this story, but did the usual hand-holding she always does when I wailed unendingly to her about my writing, and once again served as my own personal medical encyclopedia without ever once complaining or balking. I love you, darling! Any mistakes concerning the subject matter found herein should of course be attributed to my lack of understanding, and any remaining grammar/spelling/syntactical mishaps are also all mine. And last but not least, wendy and thehighwaywoman for the herculean task of running the spn_j2_bigbang.
Neurotic Author's Note #2: So this fic has gone through about a million permutations before it ended up here. A long, long time ago, there were conversations with a few people, de_nugis included, about a story about Sam with radiation poisoning. I kept meaning to write it, and even signed up for a prompt by poor shangrilada in order to try to get this done, but it never happened. Instead, I started writing it for the hc_bigbang, but when that challenge didn't work out, I gave myself one last push in order to get it done for the main Big Bang, and here it is!
Neurotic Author's Note #3: Okay, confession time. This story is actually a shameless fix-it attempt on my part. No, seriously, this is the story in which I attempt to fix ALL the things about S6, and a couple of earlier things too. Yeah, I got nothing. On a purely storytelling front, this was a surprisingly difficult story to write, mostly because Soulless!Sam was and continues to be a bit of a mystery to me. That being said, I am quite pleased with how it turned out, in the end. I hope you'll all enjoy it!

( The Burning Bridge )