Oh! Oh oh oh oh oh! This is just gorgeous, so gorgeous I don't know where to start! Sam is such a beautiful contradiction, and you know how much I adore him as a character. One of the essential things about Sam is that he's like an abused dog: he has so much love to give but he has to shy away from it because he's so scared. He's got an aching sense of insecurity that he carries everywhere with him, and that means that as friendly as he is and as fascinated by people as he is, he just can't open up to them, can't let them too close and pushes them away until he's all alone and doesn't know why. That's why he's at the heart of Bon Temps and yet nobody really knows him.

You've captured that beautifully here. Sam has been thrown onto the outside and you really made me buy him turning to crime the way he did. I've always been uneasy about that because he's such a nice guy and yet he's done such terrible things. You sold me on that. You gave me him trying to belong and not managing it, you gave me him telling the world fuck it and pretending he didn't care. You gave me all the aching complexity of Sam and how his past has made him who he is.

The stuff about Sookie is just beautiful. I adore the slow realization that she's just as much of an outsider as he is. I love his thoughts about her and how illogical and infatuated he is. I love his loyalty, when we see his doggy qualities turned to her protection. He's like her guardian angel, and I love that.

It makes me so sad at the end that he missed it and knows he missed it. One of these days, one of us will write that AU where they get together. ♥