#borrower knack

Oh, the second he even thought about trying to find his own Sam, he'd get a ping from every single matching object. Especially the knife, since that comes from before all their worlds diverged, making it the exact same knife in every way.

So. Much. Headache.

I found this buried in my drafts, and I’m so sorry for missing it!

Sweet Barry doesn’t have a knack yet, because I haven’t managed to come up with one. He’s so far managed to survive through sheer force of will. He might look small and fragile, but he’s got a strong spirit, and doesn’t ever give up when others might want to. In fact, his spirit is what helps keep Xander going, at times.

Not quite! That part of the story has to do more with her personal empathy with other people, and she’s always been quite good at reading people, despite her young age. I like the idea, though!

Looking back to where Brothers Apart first started, Sam was originally going to have the same abilities that he had in the Supernatural TV show.

What caused it to change?

A lot of the story was still developing when Home was written, and it never felt as though the precognition truly fit with borrower Sam. The other borrowers were always meant to be a parallel to the special children in the series, but this was where they started to diverge.

Demonic blood wouldn’t fit, because the curse was linked to the shrinking and Celeste. So I threw out the entire concept, redid Sam’s ability, and from Taken on, he no longer has the ability to dream the future. Now, he’s got the perception to know when someone’s looking for him, the perfect ability to help a borrower survive.

The innate strength of the borrowers, which comes from the way they grow up with angelic Grace embedded around their souls, is an important part of the borrowers, helping them survive at the size they were cursed to be.

So many other abilities followed Sam’s knack that we had to give them an official name, and knack fit best!

Nowadays one of the best parts of coming up with a new borrower character is imagining what ability they might have!

Yep, she does! Any character with unannounced listed for their knack has one but we’re currently keeping it secret.

Normally it would get announced either when it appears in a story, or when it gets guessed, but since it’s not featured in any stories yet (only just came up with it, after all!), it has to be guessed for everyone to find it out!

The only characters that we revealed the knacks to without having them guessed were John and Mary Winchester, and that’s because right now I’m not planning on any stories for the entire Winchester family to be borrowers currently.

One fun fact about Kara’s knack– Since she’s a natural born borrower, she doesn’t have to wait for her knack to develop! She might not realize it, but she already has her ability. It just needs to manifest.

John Watson’s knack could have a number of uses, including protection. It can also be used defensively, or to aid his offense, making it quite the versatile knack for him.

They could, but anyone that tries this is going to need a lot of power. Like, archangel level power. Burnouts aren’t easy to heal because of the angel grace the knack draws power from, and if their ability to harness that power snaps, it’s going to need a lot of OOMPH to break back through.

It depends on the person, and how strong the curse is when its put on them (by the time Celeste curses Sam, she’s refined her technique, but some of the first borrowers to be cursed exhibited signs of their new abilities within days or months because of how overpowering the grace was).

Sam and Dean generally start to exhibit real signs of their knack around 2 - 3 years after they’ve been cursed. It starts out as weak twinges, and then grows in strength. Dean’s uncanny ability to always stumble into food becomes an ability that lets him track down anything he needs. Sam thinks he’s just good at predicting when a human’s about to walk into the room, but instead he’s feeling that their attention is coming closer to him.

A borrower that is born instead of cursed will have that ability their entire life. Whether they exhibit will depend on their specific situation. Only 1 or 2 borrowers out of 100 will actually show signs of their ability, the other 98 go on not realizing they have an ability at all, much like Walt Watch did until the moment he needed it most.