A/N: Shout-outs to slytherinxbadxgirl, Ninja Violinist, Souffle Girl in a Blue Box, addy9ring, The-Knight2000, and Sage of Wind Dragons. Thank you all for sticking with this fic - and a hundred thousand thank-you's to Zavier Starwood, the best beta a girl could ask for. I'll be back in a few weeks with some Faith & Dean projects I've been toying around with: a Sync/Criminal Minds crossover; a series of one-shots set in "what might have been" Montana domesticity; and maybe a few other things. And I'll always consider requests.

Almost three and a half years ago, a Slayer and a hunter walked into a bar. Over 600,000 words later, this is how their story ends.

October 23rd, 2004, Lumberton, North Carolina, 10:45 p.m.

"I am not lying down in that," the hunter refused point-blank. He frowned at the woman sprawled out across the dew-laden grass, grinning in a way that suggested she was perpetually incapable of taking anything seriously.

"Geez, Dean," she teased, staring up at him. "Don't be such a wuss."

"It's cold, and it's wet," complained the man. "And unless you can magically make a laundromat appear in this one-horse town, I don't got any jeans for tomorrow but these."

Faith rolled her eyes. "We're in frigging North Carolina, man. It ain't that cold. Get down here."

Realizing that she wouldn't let up until he did what she wanted, Dean grumbled, "Fine." He lowered himself onto the wet earth beside her, close enough that he could feel the warmth emanating from her body but not so close that their shoulders touched. Dean had learned the hard way that when the Slayer started talking with her hands, there was a decent chance that he would get whacked in the face.

They lay there in silence for a few minutes, and then the hunter groused, "Can't we just dig him up, stake him, and get on with it?"

"No," Faith told him. "Because if we finish early, then I have to call Robin about training the little Slayers. If this goes until midnight, I can call him back tomorrow."

"You really dislike him that much?" asked Dean.

"We slept together once."

He glanced over at her curiously. "Any good?"

Shrugging, she said, "First guy after women's prison, so he got extra points for that. I mean, even without grading on a curve, he wasn't too bad, but he got a bit possessive after – like he was gonna fix me." The corners of Faith's mouth turned downwards. "I didn't need that. I can fix my own damn self."

"What's there to fix?" joked the hunter.

"And that's why I like you. Hey, look!" Faith grabbed his wrist and jerked his arm up into the sky, pointing to a slanting line of three faint stars far above them. "Orion!"

The hunter pulled his arm back. "You know any constellations other than that one? 'Cuz that's the third time you've shown it to me."

"Oh, sure, I know lots," drawled Faith. "There's the Dippers – the Big one, the Little. An' the North Star . . . and that's it. Okay, you got me," the woman admitted. "Maybe I'm not astronomer material."

"No time like now to learn." Dean scooted a little closer on the grass and pointed out some of the other constellations that he knew. "That's Ursa Major, the big bear. And Ursa Minor – "

"The little bear?"

"Yep. And there's Canis Major, the big dog himself."

"Hey, Dean?" the Slayer wondered tentatively.

"Yeah?"

"You ever think about do-overs?"

"Like popovers?" he teased, dropping his arm back down to the grass, the astronomy lesson ended for the evening.

Faith clarified, "No, like second chances."

"Maybe," caged Dean. "What's on your mind?"

The Slayer pursed her lips. "If I did things over, I wouldn't sleep with Robin."

"Okay."

"And I – I think I'd try not to screw up in Sunnydale."

"You regret that?" he asked without judgement.

"Yeah. A lot. I was a messed-up kid."

"Was?" teased Dean.

She elbowed him in retaliation. "Shut up. I mean, what would you do over, if you could?"

After a moment, the hunter said quietly, "Sam. The way things went down when he left for Stanford. It was, uh, not good."

Faith kicked her right Doc Marten into his left work boot in a silent gesture of camaraderie.

"Is that your way of saying you wanna knock boots with me?" Dean asked, once again making fun of her. "I could help you forget all about Robin the possessive ex-lover boy."

"Maybe later. Hush." The Slayer sprang to her feet as something creaked in the earth below them. She threw herself forward into a round-off back handspring double backflip as Bill Tompkins clambered out of his grave in an upwards explosion of dust and grass, her gymnastics culminating in a perfectly-placed stake into the newly risen vampire's heart.

"Ha!" Faith danced backwards in celebration, throwing her arms up into the air. "I did it! With my damn eyes closed!" She continued her happy dance. Thinking aloud, she said, "Maybe next time I'll hold the stake in my teeth."

"Do you always talk to yourself?" grumbled the hunter, his voice suddenly several tones deeper.

Faith whirled around, her brown eyes wide in shock, jerked from the memory into recognition of her reality. That line was not part of the nightly script. She stared at the man standing six feet away from her, no longer lying on the grass. Hardly daring to hope, she said, "Dean?"

"Hey." He looked older than he had sixty seconds ago, older even than when she had last seen him in the land of the living. He seemed more tired, with deeper lines at the corner of his eyes.

The Slayer rocked back onto her heels. "Are you . . . are you real?" She wouldn't put it past the winged nut-jobs to try to mess with her head - especially after last week's escapade with Wes and Ash all the way to the Garden. She had memorized Joshua's cursing for later replay. It was absolutely lovely, how pissed off she could still make the upper management.

"What do you think?" countered Dean. He sounded exhausted.

Her heart leapt up into her throat, and the blood was pounding in her ears, but Faith had to be sure before she allowed her hopes to soar too high. "I need you to prove it."

"Okay." Frowning, the man shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "How's this for proof? The night before I died – the first time that I died – I fell asleep on the phone while you sang me Puff the Magic Dragon."

Faith winced. "In hindsight, that's kinda embarrassing."

Dean smiled wearily at her. "I didn't mind."

Finally, the Slayer allowed herself to believe. Faith charged forward, throwing herself into him. Going up onto her tip-toes, she wrapped her arms around his neck as the hunter's arms locked about her waist, squeezing so tightly that she could barely breathe. She returned the embrace with equal force and buried her face in the black cotton poly of his military-style jacket. As she held on for dear life, the woman fancied she could almost feel the lub-dub of his heart beating against her cheek.

After a long moment, Faith extricated herself and stepped backwards. "What . . . what happened?" Her unspoken question, Why are you here? hung in the air between them.

"Give me a minute," said Dean roughly. Without waiting for a reply, he pulled her back in, his chin resting on the top of her head. "I haven't done this in four years."

"It's only been that long?" murmured Faith into his jacket. She gave him the requested minute and another besides before pulling away just enough to tilt her head back and look up at him. "Seriously, Dean, what happened?"

The hunter did not meet her eyes. "Sam and I got ourselves into a spot of trouble," he answered slowly. "Only way out was for one of us to die. So we made a deal with a Reaper, and I made her promise to take me instead of Sammy. I - I couldn't let her kill him. And I think . . . I think it was time." He glanced around the cemetery. "Where is this?"

"You don't remember?" Faith focused on the easy question instead of the potential bomb that he had just dropped. Damn it.

"We've spent a lot of nights in a lot of cemeteries," he reminded her.

That was fair enough. "It's some place in North Carolina. I forget the name. October two thousand and four, I think."

Dean whistled through his teeth. "Oh-four, huh? That's . . . that was a while back."

"Yeah," agreed Faith. She tugged on his jacket sleeve. "We've got about thirty minutes before the vampire rises again. You wanna – you wanna sit down?"

"Okay."

Moving in awkward tandem, they sat, their backs propped against a family gravestone of ruby red granite, and leaned against each other. Dean snuck another sideways look at the Slayer. He could still hardly believe she was there.

With a deep inhale, the hunter started explaining, beginning the exhausting saga of the Mark, Rowena, the Book of the Damned, killing Death, the Darkness, Amara, Sam getting trapped in the Cage, Castiel willfully signing himself over to Lucifer, Lucifer himself, Chuck being God, Metatron – the whole sh-tty train wreck. He told her of his mother, returned from the dead, and of the interfering British Men of Letters (Faith scoffed at their similarity to her own detested Watcher's Council).

He ended with being captured by the Secret Service; of Sam's and his stay in super-secret Appalachian Guantanamo; and his slow slide into catatonia until he had finally thought to contact Billie.

As he spoke, he felt some of his perpetual fatigue fading away. Deep in his bones, Dean had needed this. No one listened like Faith did – not to him, anyway. She stayed silent for the most part, occasionally making soft sounds of sympathy, encouragement, and, rarely, derision. When he finished, Dean allowed his words to trail into silence.

Sensing his diffidence, Faith elbowed him gently in the ribs. "Hey, bozo. Aren't you going to ask what I've been up to?"

The hunter gazed up at the star-strewn sky above them. "Revolutionizing Heaven, no doubt."

Faith snickered. He wasn't far wrong. "I found Ash and the Roadhouse, like you told me. We've got a weekly poker game going on there now. There's a lot of people who will want to see you – Ellen, Jo, Rufus, this peppy redhead called Charlie, and oh, yeah, an old codger who goes by the name of Bobby Singer."

Dean swallowed against the sudden lump in his throat. "And none of your people?"

"Wes drops in from time to time," Faith said slowly. "And I see my first Watcher, Diana, every now and then. I thought about going to check in on Buffy's mom once, but I decided against it. Mostly though, I've been exploring the Axis. Made it all the way to the Garden not too long ago – it's hard to track time here."

"Busy bee."

The Slayer shrugged. "Gotta do something. A girl can only sleep for so long."

"Do you? Sleep, I mean?"

Exhaling, she told him, "There's a place here . . . one of my memories. It's the scrapyard at Bobby's. The afternoon after you came back from the dead. It's warm, and it's quiet. When I first got here, all I did was sleep there and stake vamps here. It's not far – we can take the road outside the cemetery if you want."

"I'd like that." Dean grimaced. "I haven't seen sunshine in, well, way too long." Rising, he pulled her to her feet. "Lead the way."

They climbed over the wrought iron spiked fence and set off down the gravel road. Somewhere back in the woods was the hidden Impala, but Faith preferred the walk. It felt more real. Besides, it was less than a mile to the salvage yard.

But instead of Singer Salvage, when they rounded the bend in the road they found themselves in a halfway-decent hotel room. Dean was sitting in a chair at the lone table, watching the Slayer from her position in the bathroom doorway. Faith reached up and felt her hair. It was carefully twisted into a severe French braid. She examined the pile of gloves, snow boots, and other wintery accoutrements by the door. Wisconsin. 2012. The morning after they had killed the Sliver Cat. The Slayer raised her eyebrows. This was not one of her usual places.

Dean smiled, pleasantly surprised.

"This is your happy memory?" wondered Faith. She took a step forward, half-driven by the essence of the memory that still existed. In new memories, you always found yourself repeating the original events. On a subconscious level, you wanted to follow the past, wherever it sent you, wherever it took you.

The hunter seemed to realize this as much as she did, for his green eyes gleamed with amusement when she dropped herself gracelessly into his lap.

"It was a good morning." Dean brushed an errant lock of wispy hair away from her face and tucked it behind her ear. "Had three of my favorite things in it: you, me, sex . . ."

Faith snorted and rested her hands on his shoulders. He was awfully close, close enough that Faith could easily kiss him if she wanted to. She wasn't sure that she wanted to. "Classy, dude."

"Just telling the truth."

"Don't get me wrong, that sex was good, but not like 'make a film and rewatch it' good."

"You didn't think it was film-worthy?" snickered Dean.

"You did?" Faith was skeptical.

"Maybe not our best," he admitted. Then, in a more serious voice, he said, "I told you that night that you . . . that you were the one thing that made sense. The one thing that stayed the same."

His eyes were locked on hers, and Faith felt mildly uncomfortable. Revisiting that confession was a little too much – too much for him to say and too much for her to hear.

"I was ready to go," murmured Dean, the words hovering fragile in the inches of air between them. "When I asked Death to off me. When I had Rowena power me up as a soul bomb. When Sam and I got locked up by Uncle Sam."

"Dean - "

"And when things were really bad, you know what happened?"

"What?" she whispered, half-afraid of the answer.

"I'd dream about you, Faith. I'd dream about you and this morning, or the night before, or any other g-ddamned day when it was just you and me. When things made sense."

"Dean . . ."

"Let me finish. I'm not – I'm not so good with words. I missed you, Faith. I never stopped missing you."

"Dean." She said his name a third time, imbuing the word with all the things she had never found a way to say. "I missed you, too."

"Good." Relieved at having gotten that off his chest, Dean stood, lifting both of them off the chair and setting her back on the carpet. He glanced thoughtfully at the bed before coming to a decision. "Can you take me to the yard?" he asked her. "I need the sun. Please."

"Of course," Faith promised him. "We just need to find the road, wherever it is in this place."

They looked at each other, then said in unison, "The map!"

Dean crouched over the pile of outerwear near the door and began rifling in his coat pockets for the Wisconsin road map that he had squirreled away somewhere in there.

The Slayer cleared her throat. It was time, maybe, to address the elephant in the room. "So I guess . . . You showing up in my memories, me walking into yours without using the Roadhouse . . . I guess that makes us . . . soulmates?"

"Looks like," agreed Dean. "Aha!" He straightened in triumph, the folded map clutched in his hand. Catching sight of the thoughtful look on her face, he prompted, "You disappointed?"

"No," said Faith slowly. "Wait. Does this mean . . . Am I stuck in a soulmate triangle with you and your brother?"

The hunter looked up from unfolding the map and frowned. He had an uncomfortable idea of where this was headed. "Faith . . ."

"Our would you say it's more like a soulmate threeway?" she finished with a mischievous grin.

Dean winced. "Aand now I'm never gonna be able to clean my brain out. Thanks for that."

"You're welcome, cowboy. No, I'm not disappointed. Are you?" Faith asked with a trace of hesitancy.

"Actually . . ." drawled Dean. He smiled, and for a moment his constant weariness disappeared, and he was the twenty-five-year-old with the gorgeous green eyes who she had decided to work off her post-destruction of Sunnydale tension on, a hundred thousand heartaches ago. "Actually, I was kinda hoping for it."

Fin.