SPN/BtVS: Under Darkening Skies

[rivkat]

Under Darkening Skies
Summary: The Winchesters take a job involving a demon-influenced woman and a powerful witch. Explicit heterosexual content (not, amazingly enough, involving Faith).  35,000 words.
Notes: Written for Sweet Charity for giandujakiss. This goes AU early in SPN Season 3 and right after the first “episode” of Buffy Season 8. Thanks to geekturnedvamp for beta and giandujakiss for accepting a shift in her scenario!

Read the whole story here.  

Comments

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Thank you! One of the nice things about SPN for me is that the relationship between Sam & Dean can work so many ways, and I wanted to do exactly what you said, make clear that a lot of the details are just details.

I didn't expect the parallels to work as well as I thought they ultimately did, and I'm glad you found them plausible. I do think that in another world Spike could have been the right guy -- Jennifer Crusie has an essay (http://www.jennycrusie.com/essays/datingdeath.php) I like a lot on the subject -- but it's much better for Dean to have Buffy to help him than Sam, who's just too close.

I do see Sam as the leader, but he can't do it right without Dean.

[auroramama]

*nodding universal agreement* The parallels were spectacular, as it happened, and I loved what they brought out in each character. Willow is seeing Buffy in Dean too (Buffy echoes this by seeing Xander, who is Buffy's heart) and Buffy is charmed by Sam's Willow-like nerdish qualities in a way that could have been 99% platonic in other circumstances -- I'm imagining how she might have reacted to Fred -- but given his looks, isn't.

Thank you for the link to that essay! I'm an appreciative reader of Crusie's books and her blog, and knew she was a fan, but somehow missed the anthology it's from. It's delicious (and makes me recalculate how much she knows about the dark.) I loved the conditional love thing, especially after months of "Delilah" on the radio. "Now let's talk about you. It's what you do to me."

And yeah, the excruciating thing for me about Buffy and Spike in S6 was how close they came to a real relationship. It's not a universal truth that lovers can't be friends; it's the particulars of their histories and their natures that defeat them. In S7 they don't just reconcile; he gets the chance again to give her just what she needs, and this time he manages it.