A/N: Shout outs to ForTheLoveOfEmmett, Madre, tryjah, sonya vasquez, Sage of Wind Dragons, The-Knight2000, LixPix, lilquan45, Lord Demiurgo, and Skylar Kitten!
Also, the wonderful batmanx has created an incredible Faith/Dean fanvid on Vimeo entitled "Our Way." Sadly, I can't post the link here, but if you have a spare five minutes, I highly recommend racing away to your google buttons to find it and watch it. It's seriously fantastic.
December 14th, 2015, Lebanon, Kansas, 6:45 p.m.
"We have got to work out a better for system for this." The ghost glanced disapprovingly at the pale yellow flame from the Zippo lighter as it licked hungrily at the base of the silver crucifix held in the hunter's hand. She backed against the wall near the door and said in a mock-serious voice, "I mean, what if you put a hole in the carpet?"
Dean flicked the lighter closed and dropped it onto the mattress beside him. "Very funny."
Looking away from the immaculately made bed with its dark blue comforter and the man sitting on it, Faith surveyed the rest of the room. Since the last time she'd been here, the hunter had dragged a television in from somewhere else in the rest of the bunker. His laptop was perched beside it on the TV stand, the two linked by a black auxiliary cord. The formerly bare walls were now adorned with a variety of edged weapons and firearms, and a giant-sized bowl of popcorn sat on the cheap wood nightstand. If Faith wished hard enough, she could almost smell the buttery aroma.
"You've redecorated. I like it. Not too overcompensate-y at all." She gestured to an assault rifle on the wall to the left of his bed.
Unamused, Dean folded his arms across his chest. Quips seemed to be something of a Slayer specialty, but that didn't mean she was any good at them. He brushed one black-socked foot against his ankle, tugging the hem of his dark jeans back into place. The chain of the cross was still wrapped tightly around the palm of his left hand. "Sit," he said stiffly. "We need to talk."
The ghost raised her eyebrows. "We need to talk?" she echoed, unsure if she had heard him correctly. Faith tossed her head, and it sent tendrils of hair perpetually coated with Fyarl mucus swinging into her face. "Dean, we don't talk. That's not our schtick, remember?"
When the hunter did not immediately reply, she carried on, "I show up, you threaten me, I say something dismissive, and then you banish me again. Or I pop up in the nick of time, decapitate whatever nasty's got your back against the wall, and then you tell me to get the hell out. That's how we work these days. In case you've forgotten," she snapped with extra bite.
Dean swallowed, his gaze focused somewhere around the ghost's black-sweatered midriff. "I know. But I've been thinking . . . Ever since I got back from our little expedition with Crowley, I've had the place to myself – Sam's out with Cass doing somethin' or other. And I've got an idea."
"The thing with Crowley was a month ago, wasn't it?" Some of the anger leached out of her voice.
"Four days," the hunter corrected her. He raised his eyes to meet Faith's. "It was four days ago."
"Oh," the ghost attempted to play it casual. With another toss of her head, she broke the eye contact and stared instead at the television. "Timing, you know, never really been my thing."
"Right," said Dean, clearly not believing a word that she said. "Here's the deal. I keep thinking, and maybe this is my fault."
Faith snorted, and she glanced away from the back of the TV stand long enough to give him a quizzical look. "In what world is my crappy memory your fault?"
The hunter ignored her. He had gone over this half a dozen times in the last two days, and now that he had some semblance of what he wanted to say, he was not going to allow anything to derail him. "I mean," he continued, eyes locked on that almost-transparent face, "I've seen it before – Sam and me, we see it like every couple years at least. You know, ghosts who can't move on because the living won't let them. And, uh, maybe the reason you can't see a light is because I haven't . . . dammit . . . "
Under the crippling weight of the ghost's silent scrutiny, Dean let out a long exhale through pursed lips. This was harder than he'd anticipated – and he'd planned on it being pretty damn hard. Thankfully, Faith said nothing, merely watched him from beneath furrowed eyebrows streaked with slime, her hands tensed into fists by her sides. Slayer girl had always been good about giving him room to breathe.
Finding the threads of his planned speech, he went on, "You and me, well, we were never really much for words. So I guess I never really said . . ."
God, here came the worst part.
"You were my girl, Faith."
Eyebrows climbing skyward toward her hairline, the ghost widened her eyes dramatically. Words were not necessary to make her meaning clear. The Slayer's skeptical expression spoke volumes.
"I mean, not like that," the hunter amended. "Don't go reading any high school romance crap into this. I guess I just don't know how to say it any other way." He glanced down at his hands in his lap and then looked back into her cold eyes. "But I should have said it. Before."
"So you're telling me this is what - an intervention?" The ghost gazed almost miserably at the bowl of popcorn on the nightstand. She had loved popcorn. He knew she loved popcorn. As well-intentioned as this might have been, it came down a little closer on the side of cruel. "Where you set up snacks and a movie and then you . . . you send me on to the Great Hereafter with some big hurrah? That your plan, Dean?"
"Kind of," the hunter mumbled softly.
Giving up on the dream of popcorn, Faith turned back to him. "Well, it's a damn stupid plan. Was I . . . was I the only one paying attention in that car?" The Slayer's voice rose in volume. "You kick me out of here, out of this veil thing, and my soul's getting dragged straight downstairs. Crowley said -"
"Crowley's a liar," Dean interrupted her.
"Yeah, but he only lies when he can get something out of it. What the hell would he have to gain from making up that story?"
She had a point, but the hunter would never admit that. Not when he was being scolded by a shouting ghost.
"If you'd just listen to me – " he started, but then stopped short in his tracks as a siren began sounding from somewhere overhead.
The ghost rocked back onto her insubstantial heels. If she leaned any further into the wall, she would fall through it. "What is that?"
"Intruder." In one smooth movement, Dean dropped the necklace onto the bed covers and pulled his Colt M1911A1 out of the waistband of his jeans. "You stay put."
Screw that, thought Faith, but she kept her mouth shut. Instead, she waited until the hunter had charged out of the room into the hallway, and then she swept up the cross in her own ghostly grip. Following the sound of the siren, she slowly glided her way toward the main part of the bunker. As the Slayer got closer, she began to hear raised voices.
"He gave you a key?" Dean was demanding of someone. A familiar intruder, then?
"Well, more like he told us where the spare was hidden."
The ghost froze on the spot, unable to cover the final ten feet to the doorway to the library. She knew that voice. That was – that was –
"Unfortunately, Sam forgot the part about disabling the alarms before we used the key. Still, I guess it worked out okay. Brought you at a run."
"What are you doing here?" Dean groaned with the extreme exasperation he had typically reserved for Sam, for her, and for . . . Before Faith could complete that thought, the first intruder spoke again.
"It's Faith's birthday. You think Becka and I'd let you spend it moping around by yourself?" asked Lily with exasperation.
"Get in, loser." Even without seeing it, the ghost could hear Beck's trademark 'I'm so clever' grin. "We're going to dinner."
December 14th, 2015, Mankato, Kansas, 7:30 p.m.
"I still don't get why we had to drive all the way out here," Dean grumbled, flipping the laminated pages of his menu.
Lily and Becka exchanged a silent glance. They had kept doing that, all along the twenty mile drive from Lebanon to Mankato. If they didn't quit, Dean was going to have to say something. He hoped they quit. He'd already said enough things tonight.
"Because," Lily said patiently, taking a sip from her ice water, "this is the closest steakhouse that wasn't a franchise."
"Not that there's anything wrong with Longhorn," Becka put in her two cents. "But Sam said you've been there a few times already, so we wanted to take you somewhere else . . . somewhere more special."
Amused in spite of himself, Dean raised an eyebrow. "So you picked a place called Buffalo Roam?"
The blonde shrugged. "Some times you just gotta work with what you have, Dean."
"Oh, and get whatever you want," added Becka. "I was promoted at work last month, and the firm just sent out the Christmas bonuses, so dinner's on me tonight." She frowned at the final page of the menu. "Unfortunately, I didn't realize this place only carried soft drinks and beer."
Rolling her eyes at the last remark, Lily elbowed her best friend in a completely unsubtle manner. "Don't forget to tell him."
The hunter mentally prepared himself for atomic bombs. "Tell me what?"
Becka bit her lip and then admitted, "I'm engaged."
Well. That wasn't at all what he had thought she would say. Dean made a show of staring down at Becka's ring-less fingers where they were curled around the back of her menu.
The engineer flushed dark red. "It had to be re-sized," she admitted.
"You're marrying a guy who doesn't know your ring size?" Feigning shock, Dean turned to Lily. "You sure he's good enough for her?"
Lily smiled, warmth gleaming in her blue eyes. She knew how to play this game as well as he did. "We-ell, here's the thing . . ." she drawled.
"Lil!" Becka repaid her earlier elbow with an impulsive punch to the right shoulder. "Not you, too."
"All right, all right, I guess he's pretty good," the blonde informed Dean begrudgingly. "Spike and Andrew did deep background checks on him, too. Everything was clean."
He turned back to Becka. "And this guy treats you well?"
If it was possible, the brunette blushed ever darker. "Dean, come on. You don't . . . you don't have to do the overprotective brother thing."
"Yeah, I do," replied Dean, and the levity drained from his face. "This is important. He treat you well?"
Becka folded her menu closed and looked directly into the hunter's clear green eyes. "He does."
"Does he know about your Slayer gig?"
"He knows about that, too."
"And?" Dean pressed with an odd mixture of tension and gentleness.
"And he's okay with it. He's not a huge fan, but he's okay with it." The engineer reached for her water glass. "When things started getting serious, I called Buffy, and we've been kind of negotiating my retirement package."
"Retirement package? That's new."
"It's . . ." Lily stepped in for her friend, who was watching the hunter cautiously now. "It's a new thing. Since . . . Since Faith."
Dean did not flinch. Not while they were watching him. "So tell me," he continued as if the sound of her name wasn't still enough to jar him out of pretending that everything was normal for one freaking dinner, "what's the deal with this retirement thing?"
After exchanging another one of those meaningful glances with Lily, the brunette explained, "There are so many new girls that get called these days. So those of us who've been in it for at least fifteen years are starting to be offered the option to take on more of an, uh, advisory role. I've still got a few more years before that's an option, but I wanted to start the talks early. James – James wants to have kids sometime in the near future, and so do I."
"Good for you, Becks," said Dean quietly as their waitress, a skinny redhead with an abundance of freckles, approached the table. "Good for you."
The redhead, whose name was Chelsea, took their orders – three twelve-ounce filet mignons, complete with salads, rolls, and baked potatoes – and then returned to bring Dean a beer. Once she had disappeared a second time, he said to Lily, "Tell me what you're doing these days, Bernadette Peters."
Grinning, the blonde began counting her plans off one at a time on her fingertips. "Finishing my master's degree in May, then I'm planning on moving to New York with one of my classmates – thought I'd try to audition out there for a year or two. And while I'm doing that, if it doesn't work, I'm going to get my teaching certificate. There's a private school in Cleveland that keeps asking me to consider taking a position there teaching high school students how to slob their way through Romeo and Juliet in a couple of years when their current theater person retires."
"You're better than teaching high school students," the hunter commented, uncapping his longneck and taking a long, slow drink.
Lily looked at him almost pityingly. "Have you ever seen me in a show, Dean?"
"Uh . . ." He had meant to. More than once. But somehow, one thing or another had always come up. "Sorry. I guess I've never gotten around to it."
"It's okay. If you want to change that, I'm doing a production of Sondheim's Into the Woods in Cleveland in February. You and Sam should come."
"Thanks. We'll be there," Dean promised her, a sinking feeling growing in his gut. It wasn't just his brother who he'd been letting down lately. The girls had lost someone, too. And he hadn't even tried to be there for them. The hunter cleared his throat. "I mean it," he went on. "Unless it's the goddamn Apocalypse itself, we'll be there."
Still smiling, Lily nodded. "I'll let you know when they set official dates, so you can get good seats."
They continued talking while waiting for their food to arrive. Dean kept things as light as possible and was grateful when the steaks came quickly. The girls – he had to stop thinking of them as girls. They were only a few years shy of thirty, now that he considered it – had sense enough not to ask him the questions that he dreaded. Still, Lily and Becka knew more things about the horrible recent history with Kevin and Crowley and Castiel than he had anticipated. That was probably Sam's fault.
Lingering over small talk, no one suggested leaving until the restaurant closed at nine. On the way home, Dean reclined in the backseat while Lily drove her rental car back to the bunker and Becka briefly called her fiancé to check in. When they arrived, she stared at the old WPA power plant sitting on top of the Men of Letters' hideout and grinned. "This really is the Batcave, isn't it?"
As he slid across the fabric upholstery and prepared to step out of the car, Dean clapped a hand on her shoulder. "Thanks. You – you girls want to stay the night?" he asked, glancing between Lily and Becka.
"You sure you got space?" queried the brunette dryly.
A characteristically charming smile lighting his face, he said, "Honey, all I got's space."
The girls - women - Slayers - gave each other a final communicative look, and then Lily accepted for them, "Sure, Thanks, Dean."
He showed the Slayers to two of the more recently used bedrooms – Cass had stayed in one and Charlie the other – pointed them towards the bathroom and the spare toothbrushes, and then retired to be alone. First things first, Dean swung through the kitchen to root out the last bottle of Johnny Walker hidden beneath the sink. Then and only then did he finally brave the doorway to his own room.
It was surprisingly warm inside. Someone - damn her - had rousted an old oil heater from one of the other rooms in the bunker and had dragged it over to the wall on the left side of his bed. The full bowl of popcorn was still sitting there on the nightstand, but that same someone had accessed his HBO-Go account and was now sprawled across his bed, watching the murder of a pregnant woman at a feast with a mildly interested expression on her transparent features.
"Never took you for a Thrones fan," Dean said quietly. As he passed the television, he turned the volume a little louder. Better for Lily and Becka to hear the screams of the Red Wedding than whatever uncomfortable conversation he and this specter were about to have.
The ghost glanced up from the massacre. "How was dinner?" she asked conversationally, rolling over to the far side of the bed to make space for him to sit.
Acting from habit, he sat. "Dinner was fine," he answered. "Lily wants to move to New York at the beginning of next summer. Becka's guy finally proposed. They're doing really well, you know."
"About time that James got his ass in gear. You get the steak?"
Dean glanced over his shoulder to stare at her suspiciously. "How'd you guess – "
She shrugged. "They're my girls. I know them about as well as I know you. Which is to say, pretty damn well. Of course they'd take you to a steakhouse. And it's not like you to pass up free steak. So . . ." she allowed the word to trail off into a whispery silence. "Where were we? Before you all went off to be carnivores."
"Pretty sure you were yelling at me." Dean pulled the top off the whiskey and tossed it across the room. It collided with a wall somewhere and disappeared from view. If he was going to continue talking to her, he needed to be a lot more than just pleasantly buzzed off of the two beers at dinner.
"Huh," mused the dead woman lightly. "Doesn't sound like something I'd do. Sounds much more like Sam, if you ask me."
Dean laughed, and he coughed on a burning swallow of whiskey as it scorched down his throat. "You're not wrong," he mumbled.
"Anyway, let's skip the yelling part." Faith flickered. One second she was lying on the bed a few feet away from him, the next she was standing in the far corner beside the nightstand. "While you were off eating steak, leaving me to try to smell and touch this stupid bowl of popcorn that I'm never gonna be able to eat – were you planning on torturing me, by the way, or was that just accidental?" She ran a hand through the fluffy white snack, her smile halfway mournful.
"Accidental," the hunter said sheepishly after taking another pull from the whiskey bottle.
Faith dropped the popcorn back into its bowl. "Better." Any traces of sorrow disappeared from her expression, to be replaced with a mulish set to her jaw that reminded the hunter a little too much of his younger brother. "Anyway, I did some thinking of my own, and, Dean, the answer's no."
"Excuse me?" It was not that he hadn't heard her. Dean wasn't even sure what question she was answering at this point.
The ghost took one slow, sauntering step in his direction. "No, I'm not leaving. There's no goddamn point," she continued as the hunter's whiskey-free hand gripped the edge of the navy comforter until his knuckles turned white.
"Why not?" he said in a voice only just above a whisper.
Faith stepped closer, until the edges of her ghostly jeans were brushing up against his worn ones where he sat on the corner of the bed. It forced him to look up at her.
"You heard what your new bestie Crowley said in the car the other day," she spoke in a neutral tone. Strictly the facts. "There's some deal to drag my soul down into the Pit. So until somebody gets ahold of those winged douchebags upstairs and convinces them that I really have been a proper little Girl Scout, what's the point of even tryin' to move on?"
"That's – "
The Slayer kept going, "Every month I spend up here means ten less years on the rack, isn't that right? I'm not like you, Dean. I wouldn't survive thirty years there – trust me, I'd break way before that. And I have zero interest in becoming a demon and possessing some poor schmuck's meatsuit. I liked my old one too well to replace it with anything."
As a ghost, she did not need to pause for breath, but the Slayer did so anyway out of habit. "I mean, seriously, if my options are Hell or sticking it out here, that's a pretty clear cut choice to me. And if I can't be nice and peacefully dead-dead, at least I can have a purpose."
"And what would that purpose be?" Dean asked with a fraction of dread. He scooted off the end of the bed and crossed to the other side of the room, putting some space – and a giant heap of televised corpses – between them.
The ghost smiled wolfishly as she watched him move, a familiar phantom grin that curdled Dean's insides.
"Same thing it's always been," she told him, her voice barely audible over the continued cacophony of the television. "Save the world. Save myself. Save your scrawny ass."
"For the record, my ass is not scrawny," Dean responded automatically.
Cocking her head to the side, the ghost gave the hunter a blatant once-over. "Oh, I know," she chuckled.
Eyes flashing wild, Dean spun on his heel and turned his back to her. "You see?" he said to the wall. "This is . . . This is why I can't have you sticking around."
Faith slowly glided through the queen-sized bed to stand a few feet away from him. This time, she at least made a pretense of giving him space. "Why not?"
The hunter huffed, and an unwelcome truth slid out, "Because I like it. That's why not."
"Dean," it was half a reprimand, half a laugh, "you're allowed to like things."
"Things, Faith." If he didn't look, it was almost as if his friend was actually standing behind him instead of her shade. "Things," he repeated for emphasis. "Not this. Never this."
"O-kay," said the ghost, her sharp voice heavy with sarcasm.
Sighing, Dean forced himself to turn around. "Look, let me explain it for you." He scrunched his eyes shut and then opened them again, wishing that he hadn't abandoned the whiskey on the other side of the room.
"I miss you, Faith," he said her name slowly, the word barely louder than a whisper. "There's not a goddamn day goes by that I don't miss you. I run into a vampire on a hunt; I miss you. I get drunk; I miss you. I see a beagle; I miss you. I hear half of Bob Seger's catalogue; I miss you. I wake up; I miss you."
"God," breathed the ghost so softly that it made Dean's chest ache.
He retreated another few feet along the wall, gesturing to the ghost as he went, "And this – this thing – it's not you. It's ruining you." The hunter ran a hand over his face.
"And I used to hate it," he admitted. In the quiet space between the two of them, between his still-beating heart and her forever silent one, he could admit another unpleasant truth. "Hated being around you more than I thought I could hate anything that wasn't a demon."
Looking deep into those impersonal dark eyes, Dean sighed again. A little of the fight slumped out of his shoulders. "But lately, as much as I'm trying not to, I'm startin' not to care anymore. Because I'm so goddamn tired, and I miss you so goddamn much. And the only - the only thing that's worse than having you around is not having you around." His gaze slid down to the carpet beneath his boots. "So I'll take whatever I can get."
"Big speech," said the ghost after a moment's silence.
He jerked his eyes up from the ground to see her watching him carefully, her expression oddly sympathetic. "Goddammit, Faith," he swore.
Blazing green fire met dark pools of endless water as their gazes locked. "I like it when you say my name," observed the ghost. "Makes me feel more . . . here."
Dean stared at her in a mixture of fury and stark disbelief, and then he lost it. Head in his hands, the hunter crumpled in half, sliding his way down the wall until he had his back against the plaster and his feet against the steel legs of the bed. When he finally looked away from his own palms, he said only, "God, this is frakked up."
"Yeah." Without waiting for an invitation – they were far past that point – the ghost tugged the oil heater closer to the hunter and then settled herself onto the carpet beside him. Her icy fingers reached for his. "But can we at least be frakked up together again? We always did better together," she reminded him.
"I miss you," Dean dodged the question. "You're sittin' right next to me, and I still miss you so bad that it hurts." A single tear escaped from the burning misery welling up behind his right lower eyelid and streaked its way over his cheekbone. He brushed it away angrily with his free hand. "How the hell is that possible?"
"Whiskey makes everything possible," said Faith. Then, in a much firmer voice, "Dean, for what it's worth, I miss you, too."
He continued on as if he had not heard her, because acknowledging what she had said would start the hurting all over again. "You're so fired up about not going to Hell," he recalled an earlier part of their conversation. "Get in line, Boston. I'm probably booked there first class on the next red-eye. After what happened with Kevin, and then this damn Mark and all."
Grateful for a subject change, the ghost glanced down to their linked fingers, the place where flesh gripped phantasm, and then her gaze traced the edges of Dean's plaid sleeves halfway to the elbow, where she knew the Mark had to be. "Have you . . ." she began tentatively. "Have you notice any changes yet?"
"No," the hunter said brusquely, brushing at his eye again. "It just burns. But it used to belong to Cain. By my reckoning, that kinda makes it the opposite of the damn Holy Grail."
"Not much to argue with there," agreed the ghost slowly. "Then I guess . . . I guess we're both Hellbound?"
The back of Dean's skull collided against the wall, and he stared up at the ceiling. "Guess so."
"So . . ." the ghost hesitated and then repeated her question. "Frakked up together?"
"Yeah." Sighing a final time, Dean surrendered completely. He couldn't fight her off. Not anymore. "Together."