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Before Sam’s toss into the sea of time that now separated them, when they only had the miseries of their lives to contend with, Sam and Al had each other.
As young men- if your early forties were young- they had met over physics, then bonded over losing their fathers, Sam much more recently than Al. It was Al who talked Sam through the whole process, give him a list of things to do and not to do, and shipped him to Indiana after Sam broke down crying so hard he fell out of his car.
Al drifted in bumblefuck, Indiana, until Sam was more steady after finishing things up and then Al navigated them back towards their home port of Boston. He insisted on driving back. “A day, a day and a half. Not that bad,” he said. Sam took over for the second half of that trip, after forcing Al out of the driver’s seat and making him sleep in the backseat with a blanket over him.
At MIT, sailing together on long all-night thinking sessions, Al gave his input while Sam puzzled out his “time itch.” As Al said, “You’re always thinking about how to time travel, so you sometimes have to sit down and scratch the itch once in a while of working on that problem.” It was Al who would later guide the sails to lead them towards NASA and military funding for Sam’s dream project, getting Sam in touch with this or that person, all the way through their work at Project Star Bright and the beginnings of Project Quantum Leap. Then Sam was tossed into the sea of time, clinging to the driftwood that was his grip on himself and on Time, and their lives changed so much it got difficult for Al to remember when was what.
Sometimes the sea of time pushed up a wave that obliterated a memory with its descent, the next wave pushing up a new memory. There were waves where Sam and Al met while Sam was still a teenager, waves where they didn’t meet until his thirties. There were waves where Sam and Al became a couple, waves where they dedicated themselves to wives, but either way, they both got heartbroken. There were waves where Al was in Vietnam, waves where he was an astronaut, waves where he was married five times, waves where he was married once with four daughters. For how much the waves affected Al’s pre-leaping life, Sam’s pre-leaping life was the sole constant in his. Maybe he got married to a woman, maybe he got married to a man, maybe he got degrees in a different order, but Sam’s life didn’t vary quite as much as Al’s did. And in the end, the waves worked in their favor. Tom returned from the dead, Donna walked back to the altar, Beth became faithful again and gave Al children. But the waves would continue to ascend and descend, altering this and that, even as Sam’s driftwood floated further and further out of sight.
Standing on the coastline of Project Quantum Leap, Al watched through the binoculars of being a hologram as Sam paddled his driftwood through the sea of time. Sometimes Al was able to toss him a life ring. There were very few times, times he dreaded, where Al had to be helpless and watch Sam nearly drown. He longed to be able to sail out there, yank Sam onto their ship, tie him to the mast, and escort him home, but Sam was not at the project’s mercy. He was at the sea’s mercy, and all Al could do was float with him on the same piece of driftwood for a short time, until Sam couldn’t be seen anymore.