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Part 3
“Let me say again that I am not one hundred percent behind this plan,” Willow said as Dean completed drawing the symbols around the pentagram.
“Just so long as you stay behind the lines,” Dean said. Willow’s mouth pursed, unamused.
But she was efficient with the ritual, the Latin spilling off her lips the way Dean could list the tracks on a Metallica album. A whirling black cloud appeared inside the spell circle, making the candleflames lie down almost horizontally; the air filled with the smell of rubber and rotten eggs.
The black coalesced into a skeleton, red light streaming from inside the skull through the eye sockets, the hole for the nose, the gaping teeth. Then flesh materialized around the still-blackened bones, fading into the image of a blonde girl a few years younger than Buffy.
“Ruby,” Dean said, and stepped into the circle.
“I was in the middle of something important, dickwad,” she snapped, and punched him in the mouth.
Dean rocked on his heels, but didn’t stumble backwards or scuff the lines on the floor. “Fuckin’ bitch,” he said, muffled by the back of his hand.
“Excuse me?” Buffy asked, her hands on her hips, as Willow glared.
“She’s a demon!” he protested, muddy through his bleeding lips.
“And you still don’t get to call her that,” Willow said.
Dean didn’t think much of that, but he couldn’t bother with an argument and turned back to Ruby. “So, what’s going on with Sam?”
She gave him a look equally rich in contempt. “You think I don’t have better things to do than follow you and your weakling brother around?”
“Uh, yeah.” Dean pushed closer to her, backing her up to the edge of the circle. “Talk or bleed, Ruby.”
She tried to shove him back, then blinked when he didn’t move the way a normal human pushed by a demon would have. Her eyes flashed completely black, irises and pupils and whites all gone. “What’s with the strongman act?”
Dean gave her his best poker face. “That’s what I want to know. I’m in this circle so we can fast forward through the part where I show you I’ve been eatin’ my Wheaties to get to where you tell me what the fuck is happening.”
She folded her arms and pouted. “Typical. Now you’re Superman with a lobotomy.”
He bared his bloody teeth at her. “I’m good with beating the answers out of you if you are.”
“Fine,” Ruby said, just before Dean was about to punch her again. “Azazel had a backup plan,” she said, like a bored kid doing a class report. “In case the door-to-Hell thing didn’t work out and he bought it somehow, he set up a fail-deadly to use Sam to destroy the world. Kind of a surprise at the bottom of the box thing.”
“Like Cracker Jacks?” Dean asked.
Ruby shook her head slowly. “No, brainstem, like Pandora.”
Dean glanced at Willow and Buffy, to make sure they knew what he had to put up with. Buffy narrowed her eyes at him, so he guessed the B word was still a problem.
“But what’s the point of making Sam invincible?” Willow asked.
“It’s amazing, Dean, you’ve found allies as thick as you are,” Ruby said.
Now that was just uncalled-for, Dean thought, but if he said something they’d probably all gang up on him. “Hey,” Buffy said. “Wanna find out how hard we punch, too?”
Ruby shrugged. “Azazel did something so that Sam can’t be killed and the Hart can’t move its incarnation from him. The Huntsman has to chase the Hart and the Hart has to run. If they aren’t equals, if one of them can’t be killed, it’s like sticking a spoke in the Great Wheel. The Wheel stops turning, and so does the world.”
By the look on Willow’s face, that was end-of-the-world bad. “What keeps the Wheel turning?” Dean asked.
Ruby’s duh-face was getting very, very old. “Changing the incarnations of Huntsman and Hart will restart it.” From her expression, changing the incarnations would require exactly as much dying as it sounded like.
“Does it have to be both of us?” Dean asked, his voice as raw as if he’d been screaming for hours.
“No,” Willow said, gently. “If the demon did something to fix the Hart into Sam, then it has to be him.” Dean stood like a mannequin.
“Except that he’s invulnerable,” Ruby said, as if she were reminding a forgetful child.
“Nothing’s invulnerable,” Buffy pointed out, and she sounded like she knew that from experience.
“No one,” Dean grated out.
“What?”
“No one’s invulnerable. You said ‘nothing.’”
She had no answer to that.
“He can’t be invulnerable,” Willow said quickly. “I know this demon was powerful, but there’s always a loophole.”
Ruby looked thoughtful. “Weave carefully and the loopholes can be pretty small. Way I heard it, he can’t be killed until his life’s blood’s been spilled. Azazel was no dummy, even if he did let Dean-O here blow him away.”
“Where did you hear that?” Willow asked.
Ruby examined her, up and down, somewhere in between a girl at a club and a shopper at the meat counter. “I read the spell—he had it give Sam protection as long as his life’s blood hasn’t been spilled. I mean, it’s not English, but that’s as close to an exact translation as you’re going to get.”
“Someday you’re gonna tell me how you know all this shit about Azazel and his plans,” Dean said.
“No, I’m not.”
Dean stepped backwards out of the circle, not bothering to look down.
“You could say thanks!” Ruby yelled as Willow started to banish her.
****
Dean woke on his back in the middle of an empty conference room. The last thing he remembered was barreling after Sam, so close he could taste Sam’s blood, his own blood, in his mouth. Demon trickery be damned, he was going to tear Sam to pieces with his fingernails—
Then the rest of it, so much worse that it was no wonder his mind had given him the easiest part first. Ruby had gone and he’d just walked out, found this room where no one was trying to talk to him, and laid down until sleep punched him out.
He was so fucking tired of this crap. And the trick of it was that his own weariness made it tempting to give in to the Huntsman, to think that loving Sam and hunting him could be the same thing. It wasn’t that different, after all, from what Dad had demanded of him, what Sam had made him promise: if it became necessary, take Sam down. Dean’s promise had been a lie, but with the alien presence in his blood, twined through his soul it felt like, Dean was having a hard time remembering that.
“Hey,” Willow said as she pushed the door open. “I, uh, thought you might like to get something to eat. So I grabbed you a burger.”
He turned to her and smiled, almost real, because that was the nicest thing that had happened to him in a while, and it didn’t look like the rest of his list of nice things had much chance of happening.
“Dean,” Willow said carefully, and he jerked his head back up, meeting her eyes. “I’m, um. Getting reports that major ocean currents are slowing to a halt. From what I can tell, the cause is mystical. But the effects won’t be.”
The world stops turning, Dean remembered. “How’d the Huntsman get to be responsible for the ocean?” he asked, not really curious, just needing something to say to prove that he was still functioning.
Willow perked up a little—like another geek he knew, she did enjoy her explanations. “It’s a metaphor, the cycle of life. And the ocean is the biggest cycle of them all.” She opened her mouth to say more, but stopped, brushing her hair back behind her ear. “I’ll just … let you rest a while. Some of the witches I know are working on speeding up the currents, and I think we can do it for a couple of days, but we’re going to need to get at the root cause before too long.”
Dean nodded as she closed the door behind her and thought about root causes. He never put down roots, himself, but he still had that family tree, twisted and black as a nightmare.
What would Sam do, he wondered, ignoring the burger. The first time they’d met Willow and Buffy, Sam had been unable to sacrifice innocents to save Dean’s life and his own, and Dean had never been prouder of him. The stakes were a lot higher now.
Trouble was, that logic fit in too damn well with what the Huntsman wanted. Mostly Dean didn’t care about other people except as counters in the long game he was playing against bad things. When he was daydreaming about how sweet Sam’s fear would taste, how soft his skin would be when Dean slit it open, it was hard to pretend that there was anything noble about trying to bring Sam down.
He was so fucking sick of people—things—the world telling him that Sam needed killing and that Dean was just the one to do it.
****
In the end, he went where he always thought best: his car. He didn’t go anywhere, just sat in the parking lot with his hands on the wheel, keys not even in the ignition. They’d let the car get messier than usual what with the recent events, bags from ten different takeout joints cluttering up the footwell, plus enough cans and bottles rolling around to make it worth their while to find a recycling center. What with his recently upgraded senses, he could smell the sweat, blood, and french fry grease that normally was just background to him.
Buffy opened the passenger side door and got in.
Dean didn’t say anything while she looked around and settled in. She was so tiny compared to Sam that she made the car seem bigger.
He knew it was time for the uplifting speech, the promise that it was important to save the world no matter how hurt you and yours got in the process. He wasn’t going to make it any easier on her by inviting her to start.
Buffy took a breath and began. “We don’t get fair, you and me. If we’re careful and we’re lucky, other people get fair because of us.”
Dean didn’t look at her. “And Sam? What does Sam get?”
“Sam’s not here. He doesn’t get to choose.”
Slowly, he lowered his forehead so that it was resting on the top of the steering wheel, between his hands. “I wish I’d gone to Hell,” he said, clean and distinct.
“I know,” she told him, and for some reason he believed her. “After you guys explained, I wondered what I would’ve done if it had been Dawnie. We give so much, doing what we do. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference between sacrificing yourself for someone and sacrificing something you have no right to give away.”
Dean didn’t answer, didn’t let her see the tears sliding down his face.
“You know what we have to do.”
He raised his head at last, all pride gone. “Save the pep talk for someone who needs it,” he said, but there was no fight in it.
“Want to go for a run?” she asked.
It was like having his deal ticking down all over again, his body going wild with all the things his mind couldn’t handle, and the alternatives were fighting and sex. Neither of those were a good idea, but action might be a survivable substitute. “Yeah,” he said, and reached for the door handle, not bothering to try to smile.
****
Running with Buffy would have been awesome any other time: she was as fast as a vampire, and he could keep up with her because he was the Huntsman, the two of them side by side and tireless. Most of him yearned to be chasing after Sam, even though he knew that Willow had done her witchy thing to shield them from each other. The rest only wanted to be with Sam, letting Sam set the pace from pride even though Sam could run him so hard that his legs didn’t even remember how to stop working.
After he’d been freed from his deal, before this latest curse had settled on them, they’d been good. He remembered a month back, the two of them laughing in the car as they headed towards Altoona. Sam had let Dean get away with playing Metallica three times through before he cracked and threatened to break the tape open and let it unspool out the window like streamers on a just-married car. Dean had sworn that Sam would wake up bald if he did, and they’d gone back and forth with insults and threats, like kids, like guys who couldn’t ever do the kind of harm they’d been bantering about.
Without Sam, without the steady certainty of the little-h hunt, he was spinning out, and knowing that Sam was doing the same somewhere nearby was no help at all.
There were worse things than dying. He remembered that well, from when he thought he had to choose between killing Willow and letting Sam die. But the world was asking him to make the same choice again, like maybe it hadn’t hurt enough the first time.
He knew what Dad had meant, now, when he’d talked about how much he wanted their work to be over. It wasn’t about vengeance. It was just about getting some rest.
Sam wasn’t going to get his happy ending, that was pretty clear. The only thing Dean had to offer him was peace.
****
Buffy told Willow that Dean had found a spell in a book in the trunk of his car that they thought would allow Dean to wound Sam. Willow’s job would be to create binding circles to channel Sam and Dean’s fight to the right places.
“Isn’t she going to ask why I didn’t give her the spell?” Dean had asked. “Seeing as how she’s the witch and you’re not?”
“I’ll tell her it’s all about the Slayer-Huntsman connection,” Buffy had said, managing a tiny grin.
From what Dean overheard, Willow accepted the explanation—Buffy clearly didn’t lie to her on a regular basis—and went straight to planning her part in corralling Sam.
They drove back to the same area in Loudon where Sam had been earlier, where Buffy found them found a big, undeveloped chunk of land and Willow made it repel outsiders, keeping any civilians out.
“So, uh, I called my friend Bobby, good guy. He can—he might be some help,” Dean told Buffy as he pocketed his key, needing to talk about something other than what was about to happen. He could feel himself trembling, almost invisibly, desperate to get into the fight.
Buffy nodded, as if she understood.
“I—you’re good,” he said, not really a question, looking straight into Buffy’s eyes.
“Sure,” she said, because there wasn’t anything else. Dean moved off, towards the center of the open field, leaving Buffy and Willow to get behind a concealment spell and wait for Buffy’s part.
Dean could feel Willow’s wards lifting, like having a bandage unwrapped, coming back to life. He had to stay where he was, as much as he wanted to find Sam, because Willow had also set up a smaller magical circle, supposedly to protect Dean and make sure Buffy could easily reach Sam with her spell.
Sam showed up after fifteen minutes, there between one blink and another. Dean felt a twinge of resentment—Sam seemed to have mastered this whole avatar-or-whatever business much more easily than Dean had. Except that wasn’t Sam any more, not really, just another evil bastard using him as a puppet. Demons and gods weren’t that different when it came to the fine print on the contract. That was why Dean had to keep going: Sam deserved so much better than to have his body taken over again. Motherfuckers who did that couldn’t be allowed to win.
Sam reached the edge of the whitish haze that had sprung up around Dean. He tested it with a kick, like a nervous horse, then drew his foot back sharply at the crack of power, the sound like a hundred lightbulbs blowing at once. He walked around Dean like he was starving and Dean was an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Ruby had said Sam’s life’s blood had to be spilled before he’d be vulnerable. There was only one way to make that happen. Buffy had figured it out too, told him about her sister and this weirdo Glory, pretty much the same deal. Blood calls to blood. Most days it felt like Sam’s heartbeat kept Dean alive even without the mystical nonsense, so he wasn’t much surprised. Hell, he was grateful that he didn’t have to live without Sam.
Sam was trying harder to get to Dean now, punching at the barrier even though it made him wince every time.
“Not like I didn’t know you have a plan, Dean,” he called. “I showed up anyway. You know what has to happen.”
Dean clenched his jaw and refused to respond. Waiting for Sam to get through to him was a physical pain. Dean felt it in his bones every time Sam hit the barrier. He wanted to reach through and pull Sam in, share the shock of it, sinking his nails into Sam’s skin and tearing down.
He shook his head and made himself wait. Buffy needed time to prep.
Sam raised his hands and, holy fuck, a ball of lightning appeared between them, blue-white and blazing so that Dean had to drop his eyes or go blind. There was a crash and Dean felt the rush of air and power as Willow’s protective inner circle collapsed. Now all Dean had to do was make sure they stayed in place, or close enough.
He moved without needing to look, dodging Sam’s grasp, going to one knee just long enough to pull out his knife. He knew it wouldn’t be able to get where it needed to go, but he still needed its weight in his hand. He rolled away, on his feet again like he was spring-launched, and turned so that he was facing Sam.
Sam was unarmed, which of course he would be. Even Dean had picked up enough of the lore to know that the Hart’s magics were defensive. But he was holding something, two somethings, bulky and metallic in his hands. They were like weird clamshells, hinged to close around something, but open on both ends.
“Are those gauntlets?” he asked, startled back into himself, because the Huntsman had nothing on Dean in a mood to mock his little brother.
Sam looked at him with typical disappointment. “Actually, they’re vambraces.”
As if it made a pig’s fart of difference.
“Okay,” Dean conceded, getting ready to fight again. “What the hell are you doing with Comicon castoffs?”
“It’s in us both,” Sam said, fervent and trembling. Dean could see how he was flushed with tension and felt an answering heat: they should be running already, but Sam was too brave and stubborn for that. “I know you feel it too—you want to bring me down. The Huntsman needs his hunt. This is the only way for me to keep us both alive and together.” He held out the braces, as if he thought Dean would really take them. Looking closer, Dean could see that what had looked like tarnish on the silver was actually some kind of writing, one of those dead languages he’d never been able to learn. They yawned open in Sam’s hands like hungry mouths. There was a row of needles on the inside of each, ready to pin him through to the bone.
“So, what, those will make me your slave or something?” He said it with all the defiance he could muster, even though Sam knew him a lot better than that.
Sam shook his head, not a denial. His hair was curled up at the edges, as poufy and ridiculous as ever, and it made the steel gleaming in his eyes even harder for Dean to accept. “Come on, Dean. What good did free will ever do you, anyway? Not like you used it. You followed Dad around like a goddamned dog, and you were so lost without me you traded your soul for my life.” Sam took a deep breath, and when he spoke again Dean heard only his brother. “You and me, Dean. As long as we’re together, what difference does it make? All you have to do is put down that weight you’re carrying and let me do the leading. And let’s face it, the only choices you’ve ever made for yourself were shitty ones.”
Dean rocked on his heels, swiped his thumb over his mouth as he swallowed that. “Yeah,” he said roughly when he’d got his balance back. “You might be right about that.”
Sam’s face lit up, like a second sun in the sky. God, he wasn’t even old enough to have the little lines around his eyes Dean saw every morning in the mirror—he was still just a baby. Sam needed his big brother, and they both knew it.
“Sammy,” he said, and folded Sam into his arms, holding on as tightly as if a poltergeist were trying to rip them apart. Sam hugged back, hard and joyful, his muscles wild-animal tight under Dean’s grip. Dean brought one hand up to clasp Sam’s neck, run his fingers through that messy hair, the other hand hard on the center of Sam’s back. He had to lift up on his toes a little to put his mouth next to Sam’s ear, which was a crappy thing to notice in the middle of a fairly crappy experience overall. “I don’t want to be the Huntsman,” he got out, feeling Sam fumbling with the first binding bracelet, reaching for his right wrist. “And I want you to get your fucking antlers out of my brother.”
That was when the arrow slammed through them both.
****
Dean wasn’t dead.
That was kind of annoying.
Also, the light was so bright that having his eyes closed was doing him no damn good whatsoever.
He opened his eyes, and then he realized that he was still hugging Sam. Awkward, since they were no longer stuck together with an arrow. He let go and stepped back far enough that you could at least have inserted a piece of paper between them. Well, tissue paper.
He couldn’t feel the Huntsman.
“Where the fuck are we?” he asked, since Sam was just staring at him, mouth open.
When he bothered to look around, they were on a featureless white plain, white all around them in every direction as far as he could see, so he was probably going to have to revise that whole ‘not dead’ thing. But he was here with Sam, so he wasn’t in Hell, and honestly that was so far beyond what he’d been prepared to consider a win that he was okay with waiting around for more information.
There was a noise from behind him, and so he turned, keeping his shoulder brushing Sam’s. Buffy and Willow were tiny but recognizable figures in the distance.
Dean looked back at Sam. Sam boggled at Dean.
“I guess … we should go to them?” Sam offered.
Dean shrugged and they went.
One of the benefits of being in someplace not-real was that you didn’t actually have to haul ass across enormous distances. Beginning to walk towards the girls was enough to bring them together in a few steps. Maybe they were already ghosts, doing that ghost-jump-cut thing—except Dean really didn’t want Buffy and Willow to be dead, so scratch that hope.
“So,” Willow said, hands on her hips, “when you said ‘spell,’ you meant ‘arrow.’ I thought there was a plan!”
“There was a plan,” Buffy told her, pretty clearly not for the first time.
“A crappy plan doesn’t count!” Willow protested.
“Did it work?” Dean asked, since that seemed like a fairly significant question.
“It was his decision,” Buffy said, setting her shoulders.
“This isn’t you and Dawn!” Willow snapped.
Buffy glared at Willow. “That’s right, and you don’t get to decide for them!”
“Uh, guys?” Sam said, waving a hand hesitantly. Dean wasn’t as willing to get into the middle of what looked like more history than he really needed to know about.
Willow’s face was white, her hair whipping against her cheeks even though Dean himself didn’t feel any breeze. “You know what, maybe I was wrong to bring you back. I’m sorry I took you out of Heaven. But there’s one big difference: neither of them is dead yet!”
“We aren’t?” Dean asked. “’Cause either you’re ignoring us, or we’re also ghosts on the astral plane, and I don’t even know how that would work.”
Willow turned, eyes flashing, angry enough to have forgotten that she was apparently doing the Marathon of Shame instead of the standard Walk. “Despite your best efforts, no, you’re not dead. Not quite.”
“Okay,” Sam said, using his patented calm the witness tone. “So where are we, and what happened with the Hart?”
Willow sighed. “When Buffy shot you two, I used the mystical energy that the process of your dying threw off to transport us to the realms of the Powers That Be. If anyone can fix this, it’s them.”
“I see the realms,” Buffy said. “If by realms you mean whiter than rice-covered marshmallows. But I don’t see any Powers.”
“Who are those guys?” Sam asked, and they all swung around. Dean edged himself a hair in front of Sam, out of habit.
The beings were not what Dean had imagined as The Powers That Be. They were short and kind of pudgy, and they were wearing what looked like costumes kids might wear for a Thanksgiving play at school.
“So I bet you’re wondering what’s going on here,” Buffy said brightly. Dean glanced at Sam, who seemed willing to let Buffy do the negotiating. Dean didn’t have any better ideas, and while ordinarily he’d have no problems mouthing off to any asshole who thought he, she or it could push Winchesters around, Willow seemed to think there was some chance that Sam could walk away from this and Dean didn’t want to get in the way.
The, uh, person nearest them turned shallow blue eyes towards Buffy. “The Huntsman and the Hart are dying, killed by the Slayer.”
Buffy only paused for a second. “Yeah, so that’s the thing. I want you to release them—let them not be the Huntsman and the Hart any more.”
Blink, blink. “We do not intervene.”
“Uh, what?” Buffy said, and Dean started to reconsider whether she was the right negotiator for the job. “The Powers That Suck do nothing but intervene. If you don’t intervene, you don’t exist.”
Now they were both looking at her, sort of like a person would look at an ant crawling across his path, trying to decide whether to change his stride to avoid stepping on it. That one didn’t ordinarily go well for the ant.
Dean cleared his throat. “This demon, Azazel, he did something to stitch the Hart into Sam so he could destroy the world by disrupting the cycle.”
The Powers turned their heads towards one another. “Mere facts,” one said. Dean couldn’t even tell if it was the first one who’d spoken.
“Yeah, okay,” Dean said. “But what happens if the Hart dies with Sam here and now, instead of moving on to the next incarnation?” Dean didn’t have any idea himself, but since Azazel had done his best to fuck up everyone else’s lives, maybe he’d kicked the Powers in the pants too.
The blue eyes flashed a sudden sun-gold. One Power turned away from them and grabbed his/her/its companion’s arm, fingers sinking deep into flesh. They had an urgent and unintelligible conversation.
Then the Power swiveled to fix Dean in a stare that suggested that he was lower than an earthworm. Given how his schoolteachers used to look at him, though, the look didn’t faze him. “We will remove the instantiation,” the Power announced. “This will preserve the cycle.”
“Does that mean that Sam gets to live?” Dean demanded. “Hey, I’m talking to--!”
Then it was like he hit the ground at ninety miles an hour without even a fall to start it off. Ears popped, world black, slammed into nothingness like driving straight into a wall. Shi--
****
The sound of Sam groaning shouldn’t’ve been the most relaxing wakeup call Dean had gotten in weeks. Dean opened his eyes and discovered that he’d been sleeping on his side, facing Sam, who was in a bed that was too small for him. As, Dean quickly determined, was he. Every muscle hurt, with an extra swell of pain below his shoulder where the arrow had gone through. (Also, Buffy was a fucking amazing shot.)
“Hey,” he said, soft enough that Sam could’ve ignored him if he’d wanted to pretend to be asleep still.
Sam’s eyes opened and they were clear and human. “Hey,” he said.
“What do you remember?” Dean asked, rolling until he was sitting upright.
Sam’s face got stiff, but he didn’t look away. “Everything.”
“Well, that’s convenient,” Dean said, mostly meaning it.
“I’m sorry,” Sam said, curling in on himself.
This, Dean knew. “Being picked by a demon to destroy the world is not the kind of thing you oughta blame yourself for. Now, leaving your wet boots on the backseat with nothing between them and the leather –”
“Dean—” Sam sat up, pulling the thin blanket covering him so that it stayed above his waist. Still trying to protect himself from Dean, as if he expected the Huntsman to have left echoes.
“No, shut up,” Dean said, his voice coming out rougher than he wanted. “I am so sick of you taking the weight for Azazel. That fucker did everything he could to hurt us, you and me, Mom and Dad, and you’re not gonna carry that. Besides, if you want to blame someone for this round, you can blame me. It was breaking my deal that got us in this, triggered the avatar thing, so don’t you dare take it on yourself.”
Sam took a couple of deep breaths. When he looked up, he was smiling, just a little. “Yeah? What’re you gonna do to me if I do?”
“Don’t need to be the Huntsman to kick your ass,” Dean warned him, meaning: I was really afraid for you this time. I’m glad you’ve got your mind back. Let’s never do that again.
“You wish,” Sam shot back, meaning, Dean thought, pretty much the same thing.
****
Dean planned his next step as carefully as he ever planned anything, which was not very. He did go to the kitchen to grab a bottle of that pomegranate soda all the Slayers seemed to like to go with his own beer when he saw Buffy watching the sunset from the sidewalk in front of the Slayers’ offices. It was all cleaned up, no sign that skeletal horses had tried to break every piece of glass in the place not forty-eight hours before.
“Mind if I join you?” he asked. She shook her head, allowing it, and returned to her contemplation of the view.
The bottles clinked as he sat down, squinting into the sky. She accepted the soda and he saw her look him over out of his peripheral vision. She knew he hadn’t brought an offering because he thought he could get in her pants. He took a pull from his beer, watching the fading sunlight glint off his ring.
They sat like that for a few minutes, taking occasional drinks in no particular rhythm. The crazed weather had disappeared with the Huntsman, and the sky was pink and orange, the clouds lit up and looking so solid that he could almost believe that he’d be able to bounce from one to the other without magic if he could get up that high (not that he would, because hello: if people had been meant to fly, cars would do it).
Dean tipped his beer up, finishing it off, and put it down to his side. “I’ve decided,” he said carefully, “that my life pretty much blows.”
Buffy’s gaze went to his shoulder, which was actually feeling fine thanks to Willow’s super-healing potions. “I get that,” she said. “So, now that you’re not the Huntsman any more, you want out?” She sounded wistful, like she knew she couldn’t go herself but liked the idea that somebody else could.
He shook his head, tilted it and smiled up at her, doing his best to stay as far away from sleazy as possible, even though he knew he was probably at least several inches within the sleazeball boundary. “I want in.”
That took her a second. “In? Like, a guy’s auxiliary?”
Dean shrugged but kept his eyes locked to hers. “I’ve got the experience. I can work on non-vampire stuff—I got no problem leaving that to Slayers—and, no disrespect, but you guys are kind of short on people who’ve been doing this for more than a couple of years. I’d do a good job—and I’d keep my hands off the girls,” he added belatedly. “The Slayers, I mean. Not all girls.”
Buffy smirked at him but didn’t comment. “What about your brother?”
His shoulders hunched for half a second, and then he straightened and stared blindly at the blazing spot in the sky where the clouds covered the sun. “Sam told me a long time ago that he wanted a normal life.” He picked up his beer bottle and rolled it between his palms, then put it down again. “I figure, I work with you guys, he gets his chance at that. I mean, once we deal with the arrest warrants and all.”
“This isn’t a job, you know,” she said, but she wasn’t saying ‘no,’ not yet. “It’s a family.” She scraped at the bottle label with her thumbnail, and her mouth quirked like she was keeping a joke to herself. “And when you meet Cousin Andrew, you might regret asking.”
“He’s not all covered with hair, is he?” Dean asked. “I could deal with that, don’t get me wrong. A guy just likes some warning, is all.”
“I think that’s Cousin It,” Buffy said, smiling outright. “Andrew is—you know, actually, Andrew is the kind of person who really has to be discovered, not described.”
Dean had known more than a few hunters like that. “I’d like the chance,” he admitted.
There was a short pause while Buffy looked him over from top to bottom, nothing sexy about it (except that a hot girl evaluating a weapon was inherently sexy, but Dean could put that off for now, given what he was asking from her). “You get that I’m the boss, right?” she asked.
He wiped his hand across his mouth to hide his hope. “You say frog, I say which toe,” he agreed.
“Okay then,” she said, and he recognized it as a dismissal and stood up, not wanting her to think that he was anything other than obedient. “Dean,” she added, before he could turn away. He froze, standing next to her. “The invitation includes Sam too. You need to tell him that.”
Dean started to snort, then cut himself off. “Thanks,” he said instead, his voice rough.
****
He started the conversation about ten times in his head. Sam, he said, I want to stay with them. Hey, Sam, guess what? I found a place where they want me. Sam, Sam, Sam—
Finally, Sam did it for him, which was kind of what he’d been going for all along. They’d taken a quick salt-and-burn a couple of hours away, nothing anybody needed a Slayer for, and Dean had figured it would be a chance to say things that needed saying. “Dean,” Sam said, with that special intonation that meant I Am Serious.
Dean closed the trunk and looked over at him. “Yeah?”
Sam stepped closer. “We haven’t talked about what I said to you while the Hart had me.”
Dean’s shoulders tensed up. They needed a talk, but he was pretty sure he didn’t want this talk. “Wasn’t you.”
“But it was,” Sam insisted. “It used what it got from me, just like a demon. Dean, I know you haven’t liked some of my choices, but at least I’ve made them.”
That still stung. “You think staying with Dad, staying with hunting, wasn’t a choice?”
Sam’s eyes were practically melting with sincerity, all big and hazel and slanted, just like he was when he worked a source. “I think nobody ever gave you a real chance to make a different one, because you were too busy taking care of me and Dad.”
See, if Dean were Sam, this would be the moment to point out just how insulting Sam was being: nobody had ever given Sam any more chance, but somehow Sam had enough inner strength, or whatever bullshit you wanted to call it, to strike out on his own. And yeah, Dean’d admit that it had been brave of Sam to start over, fake normal, all that. But it hadn’t been exactly relaxing to stay, either.
He sucked in a breath. “Whatever. If that’s what you think, I’ve got great news for you: I asked Buffy if I could work with her and the Slayers, and she said yes.”
It took a few seconds, but then Sam’s eyes widened and his lips parted, his whole face open with surprise.
“And she’ll take you too. Or not, it’s up to you,” Dean said, getting it out there. He’d thought up all kinds of pitches: Willow would match Sam geekout for geekout; Sam could keep saving people without living out of crappy motel rooms any more; all the obvious things. But if Sam didn’t bring them up himself, Dean saying them wouldn’t help.
If Sam was going to stay, he was going to stay for his own reasons, not because Dean begged him to and not even because they were fated to be together. Fate was a trick and a lie, and family had to be more than a trap. If Dean didn’t believe those two things then he might as well have died back with the Huntsman.
Dean opened the car door and started getting in, not least so that he wouldn’t have to watch Sam think it out. “Come on,” he called out. “You can brood about it while we’re driving back there.”
Sam spent the next few hours staring at Dean like he’d suddenly turned into Tyra Banks, or maybe a cute little kitten. Occasionally he’d say something like, “And you’re okay taking orders from a girl,” and Dean would have to push his sunglasses further up his nose and just ignore him.
“What if I say I want to keep hunting on my own?” Sam asked at last. Dean knew the question was only offered to get a rise out of him, but that didn’t make it any less effective.
He eased up on the gas. “Don’t say it unless you mean it,” he warned. He wasn’t sure what he had to back up the threat with, but he’d have no hesitation using decades of experience to make Sam miserable if Sam defied him on this.
He could feel Sam chewing at his lip, hunched over in the passenger seat, trying to figure out what was going on in Dean’s head. Actually, having Sam’s attention felt kind of good, despite the empty certainty in his chest about how this would end. “Why? Why would you ask her to take you in?”
Being asked was like getting off of gravel and onto new-poured pavement, a surge forward, a roar of freedom. “Because I don’t want to live like this if I don’t have to! It would be really sweet if the rest of the world knew what we were, called us the good guys, stood up and cheered when we rolled into town. But that ain’t gonna happen any time soon, and at least these girls understand.”
He let Sam gape at him for a bit before continuing. “I know you think I get off on being James Friggin’ Dean or whoever. And if I gotta be an outlaw, then you can bet I’ll be the coolest goddamn outlaw there is. But at the end of the day, it’s saving people that matters. If I can do that –” He stopped, because if Sam didn’t get it after that, there was really nothing left to say.
When Sam spoke, his voice was thick, almost syrupy. “Dean, I—”
He shifted in his seat and stamped down on the accelerator. “You in or out, Sam?”
Sam laughed, sounding congested. “Fuck you, you’re going to listen to this before I say yes.”
And then it wasn’t so bad to have to hear Sam go on about love and all that shit, because the road unspooled in front of the Impala and the wind was loud around him and he knew he was getting everything.
END
End notes: I didn’t really mean to revisit this crossover, but there were a couple of requests, and this is what came out.
Sadly, you will just have to imagine the cut scene where Buffy comes to the door of the room Dean’s staying in and watches Jane and June exit together, giggling, and two minutes later Ksenia leaves as well. This is, however, before Dean promises to keep his hands off Slayers, so he’s not breaking his word. Or maybe Buffy tells him she doesn’t expect him to keep hands off, and the girls make a roster so that nobody gets left out.
“Let me say again that I am not one hundred percent behind this plan,” Willow said as Dean completed drawing the symbols around the pentagram.
“Just so long as you stay behind the lines,” Dean said. Willow’s mouth pursed, unamused.
But she was efficient with the ritual, the Latin spilling off her lips the way Dean could list the tracks on a Metallica album. A whirling black cloud appeared inside the spell circle, making the candleflames lie down almost horizontally; the air filled with the smell of rubber and rotten eggs.
The black coalesced into a skeleton, red light streaming from inside the skull through the eye sockets, the hole for the nose, the gaping teeth. Then flesh materialized around the still-blackened bones, fading into the image of a blonde girl a few years younger than Buffy.
“Ruby,” Dean said, and stepped into the circle.
“I was in the middle of something important, dickwad,” she snapped, and punched him in the mouth.
Dean rocked on his heels, but didn’t stumble backwards or scuff the lines on the floor. “Fuckin’ bitch,” he said, muffled by the back of his hand.
“Excuse me?” Buffy asked, her hands on her hips, as Willow glared.
“She’s a demon!” he protested, muddy through his bleeding lips.
“And you still don’t get to call her that,” Willow said.
Dean didn’t think much of that, but he couldn’t bother with an argument and turned back to Ruby. “So, what’s going on with Sam?”
She gave him a look equally rich in contempt. “You think I don’t have better things to do than follow you and your weakling brother around?”
“Uh, yeah.” Dean pushed closer to her, backing her up to the edge of the circle. “Talk or bleed, Ruby.”
She tried to shove him back, then blinked when he didn’t move the way a normal human pushed by a demon would have. Her eyes flashed completely black, irises and pupils and whites all gone. “What’s with the strongman act?”
Dean gave her his best poker face. “That’s what I want to know. I’m in this circle so we can fast forward through the part where I show you I’ve been eatin’ my Wheaties to get to where you tell me what the fuck is happening.”
She folded her arms and pouted. “Typical. Now you’re Superman with a lobotomy.”
He bared his bloody teeth at her. “I’m good with beating the answers out of you if you are.”
“Fine,” Ruby said, just before Dean was about to punch her again. “Azazel had a backup plan,” she said, like a bored kid doing a class report. “In case the door-to-Hell thing didn’t work out and he bought it somehow, he set up a fail-deadly to use Sam to destroy the world. Kind of a surprise at the bottom of the box thing.”
“Like Cracker Jacks?” Dean asked.
Ruby shook her head slowly. “No, brainstem, like Pandora.”
Dean glanced at Willow and Buffy, to make sure they knew what he had to put up with. Buffy narrowed her eyes at him, so he guessed the B word was still a problem.
“But what’s the point of making Sam invincible?” Willow asked.
“It’s amazing, Dean, you’ve found allies as thick as you are,” Ruby said.
Now that was just uncalled-for, Dean thought, but if he said something they’d probably all gang up on him. “Hey,” Buffy said. “Wanna find out how hard we punch, too?”
Ruby shrugged. “Azazel did something so that Sam can’t be killed and the Hart can’t move its incarnation from him. The Huntsman has to chase the Hart and the Hart has to run. If they aren’t equals, if one of them can’t be killed, it’s like sticking a spoke in the Great Wheel. The Wheel stops turning, and so does the world.”
By the look on Willow’s face, that was end-of-the-world bad. “What keeps the Wheel turning?” Dean asked.
Ruby’s duh-face was getting very, very old. “Changing the incarnations of Huntsman and Hart will restart it.” From her expression, changing the incarnations would require exactly as much dying as it sounded like.
“Does it have to be both of us?” Dean asked, his voice as raw as if he’d been screaming for hours.
“No,” Willow said, gently. “If the demon did something to fix the Hart into Sam, then it has to be him.” Dean stood like a mannequin.
“Except that he’s invulnerable,” Ruby said, as if she were reminding a forgetful child.
“Nothing’s invulnerable,” Buffy pointed out, and she sounded like she knew that from experience.
“No one,” Dean grated out.
“What?”
“No one’s invulnerable. You said ‘nothing.’”
She had no answer to that.
“He can’t be invulnerable,” Willow said quickly. “I know this demon was powerful, but there’s always a loophole.”
Ruby looked thoughtful. “Weave carefully and the loopholes can be pretty small. Way I heard it, he can’t be killed until his life’s blood’s been spilled. Azazel was no dummy, even if he did let Dean-O here blow him away.”
“Where did you hear that?” Willow asked.
Ruby examined her, up and down, somewhere in between a girl at a club and a shopper at the meat counter. “I read the spell—he had it give Sam protection as long as his life’s blood hasn’t been spilled. I mean, it’s not English, but that’s as close to an exact translation as you’re going to get.”
“Someday you’re gonna tell me how you know all this shit about Azazel and his plans,” Dean said.
“No, I’m not.”
Dean stepped backwards out of the circle, not bothering to look down.
“You could say thanks!” Ruby yelled as Willow started to banish her.
****
Dean woke on his back in the middle of an empty conference room. The last thing he remembered was barreling after Sam, so close he could taste Sam’s blood, his own blood, in his mouth. Demon trickery be damned, he was going to tear Sam to pieces with his fingernails—
Then the rest of it, so much worse that it was no wonder his mind had given him the easiest part first. Ruby had gone and he’d just walked out, found this room where no one was trying to talk to him, and laid down until sleep punched him out.
He was so fucking tired of this crap. And the trick of it was that his own weariness made it tempting to give in to the Huntsman, to think that loving Sam and hunting him could be the same thing. It wasn’t that different, after all, from what Dad had demanded of him, what Sam had made him promise: if it became necessary, take Sam down. Dean’s promise had been a lie, but with the alien presence in his blood, twined through his soul it felt like, Dean was having a hard time remembering that.
“Hey,” Willow said as she pushed the door open. “I, uh, thought you might like to get something to eat. So I grabbed you a burger.”
He turned to her and smiled, almost real, because that was the nicest thing that had happened to him in a while, and it didn’t look like the rest of his list of nice things had much chance of happening.
“Dean,” Willow said carefully, and he jerked his head back up, meeting her eyes. “I’m, um. Getting reports that major ocean currents are slowing to a halt. From what I can tell, the cause is mystical. But the effects won’t be.”
The world stops turning, Dean remembered. “How’d the Huntsman get to be responsible for the ocean?” he asked, not really curious, just needing something to say to prove that he was still functioning.
Willow perked up a little—like another geek he knew, she did enjoy her explanations. “It’s a metaphor, the cycle of life. And the ocean is the biggest cycle of them all.” She opened her mouth to say more, but stopped, brushing her hair back behind her ear. “I’ll just … let you rest a while. Some of the witches I know are working on speeding up the currents, and I think we can do it for a couple of days, but we’re going to need to get at the root cause before too long.”
Dean nodded as she closed the door behind her and thought about root causes. He never put down roots, himself, but he still had that family tree, twisted and black as a nightmare.
What would Sam do, he wondered, ignoring the burger. The first time they’d met Willow and Buffy, Sam had been unable to sacrifice innocents to save Dean’s life and his own, and Dean had never been prouder of him. The stakes were a lot higher now.
Trouble was, that logic fit in too damn well with what the Huntsman wanted. Mostly Dean didn’t care about other people except as counters in the long game he was playing against bad things. When he was daydreaming about how sweet Sam’s fear would taste, how soft his skin would be when Dean slit it open, it was hard to pretend that there was anything noble about trying to bring Sam down.
He was so fucking sick of people—things—the world telling him that Sam needed killing and that Dean was just the one to do it.
****
In the end, he went where he always thought best: his car. He didn’t go anywhere, just sat in the parking lot with his hands on the wheel, keys not even in the ignition. They’d let the car get messier than usual what with the recent events, bags from ten different takeout joints cluttering up the footwell, plus enough cans and bottles rolling around to make it worth their while to find a recycling center. What with his recently upgraded senses, he could smell the sweat, blood, and french fry grease that normally was just background to him.
Buffy opened the passenger side door and got in.
Dean didn’t say anything while she looked around and settled in. She was so tiny compared to Sam that she made the car seem bigger.
He knew it was time for the uplifting speech, the promise that it was important to save the world no matter how hurt you and yours got in the process. He wasn’t going to make it any easier on her by inviting her to start.
Buffy took a breath and began. “We don’t get fair, you and me. If we’re careful and we’re lucky, other people get fair because of us.”
Dean didn’t look at her. “And Sam? What does Sam get?”
“Sam’s not here. He doesn’t get to choose.”
Slowly, he lowered his forehead so that it was resting on the top of the steering wheel, between his hands. “I wish I’d gone to Hell,” he said, clean and distinct.
“I know,” she told him, and for some reason he believed her. “After you guys explained, I wondered what I would’ve done if it had been Dawnie. We give so much, doing what we do. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference between sacrificing yourself for someone and sacrificing something you have no right to give away.”
Dean didn’t answer, didn’t let her see the tears sliding down his face.
“You know what we have to do.”
He raised his head at last, all pride gone. “Save the pep talk for someone who needs it,” he said, but there was no fight in it.
“Want to go for a run?” she asked.
It was like having his deal ticking down all over again, his body going wild with all the things his mind couldn’t handle, and the alternatives were fighting and sex. Neither of those were a good idea, but action might be a survivable substitute. “Yeah,” he said, and reached for the door handle, not bothering to try to smile.
****
Running with Buffy would have been awesome any other time: she was as fast as a vampire, and he could keep up with her because he was the Huntsman, the two of them side by side and tireless. Most of him yearned to be chasing after Sam, even though he knew that Willow had done her witchy thing to shield them from each other. The rest only wanted to be with Sam, letting Sam set the pace from pride even though Sam could run him so hard that his legs didn’t even remember how to stop working.
After he’d been freed from his deal, before this latest curse had settled on them, they’d been good. He remembered a month back, the two of them laughing in the car as they headed towards Altoona. Sam had let Dean get away with playing Metallica three times through before he cracked and threatened to break the tape open and let it unspool out the window like streamers on a just-married car. Dean had sworn that Sam would wake up bald if he did, and they’d gone back and forth with insults and threats, like kids, like guys who couldn’t ever do the kind of harm they’d been bantering about.
Without Sam, without the steady certainty of the little-h hunt, he was spinning out, and knowing that Sam was doing the same somewhere nearby was no help at all.
There were worse things than dying. He remembered that well, from when he thought he had to choose between killing Willow and letting Sam die. But the world was asking him to make the same choice again, like maybe it hadn’t hurt enough the first time.
He knew what Dad had meant, now, when he’d talked about how much he wanted their work to be over. It wasn’t about vengeance. It was just about getting some rest.
Sam wasn’t going to get his happy ending, that was pretty clear. The only thing Dean had to offer him was peace.
****
Buffy told Willow that Dean had found a spell in a book in the trunk of his car that they thought would allow Dean to wound Sam. Willow’s job would be to create binding circles to channel Sam and Dean’s fight to the right places.
“Isn’t she going to ask why I didn’t give her the spell?” Dean had asked. “Seeing as how she’s the witch and you’re not?”
“I’ll tell her it’s all about the Slayer-Huntsman connection,” Buffy had said, managing a tiny grin.
From what Dean overheard, Willow accepted the explanation—Buffy clearly didn’t lie to her on a regular basis—and went straight to planning her part in corralling Sam.
They drove back to the same area in Loudon where Sam had been earlier, where Buffy found them found a big, undeveloped chunk of land and Willow made it repel outsiders, keeping any civilians out.
“So, uh, I called my friend Bobby, good guy. He can—he might be some help,” Dean told Buffy as he pocketed his key, needing to talk about something other than what was about to happen. He could feel himself trembling, almost invisibly, desperate to get into the fight.
Buffy nodded, as if she understood.
“I—you’re good,” he said, not really a question, looking straight into Buffy’s eyes.
“Sure,” she said, because there wasn’t anything else. Dean moved off, towards the center of the open field, leaving Buffy and Willow to get behind a concealment spell and wait for Buffy’s part.
Dean could feel Willow’s wards lifting, like having a bandage unwrapped, coming back to life. He had to stay where he was, as much as he wanted to find Sam, because Willow had also set up a smaller magical circle, supposedly to protect Dean and make sure Buffy could easily reach Sam with her spell.
Sam showed up after fifteen minutes, there between one blink and another. Dean felt a twinge of resentment—Sam seemed to have mastered this whole avatar-or-whatever business much more easily than Dean had. Except that wasn’t Sam any more, not really, just another evil bastard using him as a puppet. Demons and gods weren’t that different when it came to the fine print on the contract. That was why Dean had to keep going: Sam deserved so much better than to have his body taken over again. Motherfuckers who did that couldn’t be allowed to win.
Sam reached the edge of the whitish haze that had sprung up around Dean. He tested it with a kick, like a nervous horse, then drew his foot back sharply at the crack of power, the sound like a hundred lightbulbs blowing at once. He walked around Dean like he was starving and Dean was an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Ruby had said Sam’s life’s blood had to be spilled before he’d be vulnerable. There was only one way to make that happen. Buffy had figured it out too, told him about her sister and this weirdo Glory, pretty much the same deal. Blood calls to blood. Most days it felt like Sam’s heartbeat kept Dean alive even without the mystical nonsense, so he wasn’t much surprised. Hell, he was grateful that he didn’t have to live without Sam.
Sam was trying harder to get to Dean now, punching at the barrier even though it made him wince every time.
“Not like I didn’t know you have a plan, Dean,” he called. “I showed up anyway. You know what has to happen.”
Dean clenched his jaw and refused to respond. Waiting for Sam to get through to him was a physical pain. Dean felt it in his bones every time Sam hit the barrier. He wanted to reach through and pull Sam in, share the shock of it, sinking his nails into Sam’s skin and tearing down.
He shook his head and made himself wait. Buffy needed time to prep.
Sam raised his hands and, holy fuck, a ball of lightning appeared between them, blue-white and blazing so that Dean had to drop his eyes or go blind. There was a crash and Dean felt the rush of air and power as Willow’s protective inner circle collapsed. Now all Dean had to do was make sure they stayed in place, or close enough.
He moved without needing to look, dodging Sam’s grasp, going to one knee just long enough to pull out his knife. He knew it wouldn’t be able to get where it needed to go, but he still needed its weight in his hand. He rolled away, on his feet again like he was spring-launched, and turned so that he was facing Sam.
Sam was unarmed, which of course he would be. Even Dean had picked up enough of the lore to know that the Hart’s magics were defensive. But he was holding something, two somethings, bulky and metallic in his hands. They were like weird clamshells, hinged to close around something, but open on both ends.
“Are those gauntlets?” he asked, startled back into himself, because the Huntsman had nothing on Dean in a mood to mock his little brother.
Sam looked at him with typical disappointment. “Actually, they’re vambraces.”
As if it made a pig’s fart of difference.
“Okay,” Dean conceded, getting ready to fight again. “What the hell are you doing with Comicon castoffs?”
“It’s in us both,” Sam said, fervent and trembling. Dean could see how he was flushed with tension and felt an answering heat: they should be running already, but Sam was too brave and stubborn for that. “I know you feel it too—you want to bring me down. The Huntsman needs his hunt. This is the only way for me to keep us both alive and together.” He held out the braces, as if he thought Dean would really take them. Looking closer, Dean could see that what had looked like tarnish on the silver was actually some kind of writing, one of those dead languages he’d never been able to learn. They yawned open in Sam’s hands like hungry mouths. There was a row of needles on the inside of each, ready to pin him through to the bone.
“So, what, those will make me your slave or something?” He said it with all the defiance he could muster, even though Sam knew him a lot better than that.
Sam shook his head, not a denial. His hair was curled up at the edges, as poufy and ridiculous as ever, and it made the steel gleaming in his eyes even harder for Dean to accept. “Come on, Dean. What good did free will ever do you, anyway? Not like you used it. You followed Dad around like a goddamned dog, and you were so lost without me you traded your soul for my life.” Sam took a deep breath, and when he spoke again Dean heard only his brother. “You and me, Dean. As long as we’re together, what difference does it make? All you have to do is put down that weight you’re carrying and let me do the leading. And let’s face it, the only choices you’ve ever made for yourself were shitty ones.”
Dean rocked on his heels, swiped his thumb over his mouth as he swallowed that. “Yeah,” he said roughly when he’d got his balance back. “You might be right about that.”
Sam’s face lit up, like a second sun in the sky. God, he wasn’t even old enough to have the little lines around his eyes Dean saw every morning in the mirror—he was still just a baby. Sam needed his big brother, and they both knew it.
“Sammy,” he said, and folded Sam into his arms, holding on as tightly as if a poltergeist were trying to rip them apart. Sam hugged back, hard and joyful, his muscles wild-animal tight under Dean’s grip. Dean brought one hand up to clasp Sam’s neck, run his fingers through that messy hair, the other hand hard on the center of Sam’s back. He had to lift up on his toes a little to put his mouth next to Sam’s ear, which was a crappy thing to notice in the middle of a fairly crappy experience overall. “I don’t want to be the Huntsman,” he got out, feeling Sam fumbling with the first binding bracelet, reaching for his right wrist. “And I want you to get your fucking antlers out of my brother.”
That was when the arrow slammed through them both.
****
Dean wasn’t dead.
That was kind of annoying.
Also, the light was so bright that having his eyes closed was doing him no damn good whatsoever.
He opened his eyes, and then he realized that he was still hugging Sam. Awkward, since they were no longer stuck together with an arrow. He let go and stepped back far enough that you could at least have inserted a piece of paper between them. Well, tissue paper.
He couldn’t feel the Huntsman.
“Where the fuck are we?” he asked, since Sam was just staring at him, mouth open.
When he bothered to look around, they were on a featureless white plain, white all around them in every direction as far as he could see, so he was probably going to have to revise that whole ‘not dead’ thing. But he was here with Sam, so he wasn’t in Hell, and honestly that was so far beyond what he’d been prepared to consider a win that he was okay with waiting around for more information.
There was a noise from behind him, and so he turned, keeping his shoulder brushing Sam’s. Buffy and Willow were tiny but recognizable figures in the distance.
Dean looked back at Sam. Sam boggled at Dean.
“I guess … we should go to them?” Sam offered.
Dean shrugged and they went.
One of the benefits of being in someplace not-real was that you didn’t actually have to haul ass across enormous distances. Beginning to walk towards the girls was enough to bring them together in a few steps. Maybe they were already ghosts, doing that ghost-jump-cut thing—except Dean really didn’t want Buffy and Willow to be dead, so scratch that hope.
“So,” Willow said, hands on her hips, “when you said ‘spell,’ you meant ‘arrow.’ I thought there was a plan!”
“There was a plan,” Buffy told her, pretty clearly not for the first time.
“A crappy plan doesn’t count!” Willow protested.
“Did it work?” Dean asked, since that seemed like a fairly significant question.
“It was his decision,” Buffy said, setting her shoulders.
“This isn’t you and Dawn!” Willow snapped.
Buffy glared at Willow. “That’s right, and you don’t get to decide for them!”
“Uh, guys?” Sam said, waving a hand hesitantly. Dean wasn’t as willing to get into the middle of what looked like more history than he really needed to know about.
Willow’s face was white, her hair whipping against her cheeks even though Dean himself didn’t feel any breeze. “You know what, maybe I was wrong to bring you back. I’m sorry I took you out of Heaven. But there’s one big difference: neither of them is dead yet!”
“We aren’t?” Dean asked. “’Cause either you’re ignoring us, or we’re also ghosts on the astral plane, and I don’t even know how that would work.”
Willow turned, eyes flashing, angry enough to have forgotten that she was apparently doing the Marathon of Shame instead of the standard Walk. “Despite your best efforts, no, you’re not dead. Not quite.”
“Okay,” Sam said, using his patented calm the witness tone. “So where are we, and what happened with the Hart?”
Willow sighed. “When Buffy shot you two, I used the mystical energy that the process of your dying threw off to transport us to the realms of the Powers That Be. If anyone can fix this, it’s them.”
“I see the realms,” Buffy said. “If by realms you mean whiter than rice-covered marshmallows. But I don’t see any Powers.”
“Who are those guys?” Sam asked, and they all swung around. Dean edged himself a hair in front of Sam, out of habit.
The beings were not what Dean had imagined as The Powers That Be. They were short and kind of pudgy, and they were wearing what looked like costumes kids might wear for a Thanksgiving play at school.
“So I bet you’re wondering what’s going on here,” Buffy said brightly. Dean glanced at Sam, who seemed willing to let Buffy do the negotiating. Dean didn’t have any better ideas, and while ordinarily he’d have no problems mouthing off to any asshole who thought he, she or it could push Winchesters around, Willow seemed to think there was some chance that Sam could walk away from this and Dean didn’t want to get in the way.
The, uh, person nearest them turned shallow blue eyes towards Buffy. “The Huntsman and the Hart are dying, killed by the Slayer.”
Buffy only paused for a second. “Yeah, so that’s the thing. I want you to release them—let them not be the Huntsman and the Hart any more.”
Blink, blink. “We do not intervene.”
“Uh, what?” Buffy said, and Dean started to reconsider whether she was the right negotiator for the job. “The Powers That Suck do nothing but intervene. If you don’t intervene, you don’t exist.”
Now they were both looking at her, sort of like a person would look at an ant crawling across his path, trying to decide whether to change his stride to avoid stepping on it. That one didn’t ordinarily go well for the ant.
Dean cleared his throat. “This demon, Azazel, he did something to stitch the Hart into Sam so he could destroy the world by disrupting the cycle.”
The Powers turned their heads towards one another. “Mere facts,” one said. Dean couldn’t even tell if it was the first one who’d spoken.
“Yeah, okay,” Dean said. “But what happens if the Hart dies with Sam here and now, instead of moving on to the next incarnation?” Dean didn’t have any idea himself, but since Azazel had done his best to fuck up everyone else’s lives, maybe he’d kicked the Powers in the pants too.
The blue eyes flashed a sudden sun-gold. One Power turned away from them and grabbed his/her/its companion’s arm, fingers sinking deep into flesh. They had an urgent and unintelligible conversation.
Then the Power swiveled to fix Dean in a stare that suggested that he was lower than an earthworm. Given how his schoolteachers used to look at him, though, the look didn’t faze him. “We will remove the instantiation,” the Power announced. “This will preserve the cycle.”
“Does that mean that Sam gets to live?” Dean demanded. “Hey, I’m talking to--!”
Then it was like he hit the ground at ninety miles an hour without even a fall to start it off. Ears popped, world black, slammed into nothingness like driving straight into a wall. Shi--
****
The sound of Sam groaning shouldn’t’ve been the most relaxing wakeup call Dean had gotten in weeks. Dean opened his eyes and discovered that he’d been sleeping on his side, facing Sam, who was in a bed that was too small for him. As, Dean quickly determined, was he. Every muscle hurt, with an extra swell of pain below his shoulder where the arrow had gone through. (Also, Buffy was a fucking amazing shot.)
“Hey,” he said, soft enough that Sam could’ve ignored him if he’d wanted to pretend to be asleep still.
Sam’s eyes opened and they were clear and human. “Hey,” he said.
“What do you remember?” Dean asked, rolling until he was sitting upright.
Sam’s face got stiff, but he didn’t look away. “Everything.”
“Well, that’s convenient,” Dean said, mostly meaning it.
“I’m sorry,” Sam said, curling in on himself.
This, Dean knew. “Being picked by a demon to destroy the world is not the kind of thing you oughta blame yourself for. Now, leaving your wet boots on the backseat with nothing between them and the leather –”
“Dean—” Sam sat up, pulling the thin blanket covering him so that it stayed above his waist. Still trying to protect himself from Dean, as if he expected the Huntsman to have left echoes.
“No, shut up,” Dean said, his voice coming out rougher than he wanted. “I am so sick of you taking the weight for Azazel. That fucker did everything he could to hurt us, you and me, Mom and Dad, and you’re not gonna carry that. Besides, if you want to blame someone for this round, you can blame me. It was breaking my deal that got us in this, triggered the avatar thing, so don’t you dare take it on yourself.”
Sam took a couple of deep breaths. When he looked up, he was smiling, just a little. “Yeah? What’re you gonna do to me if I do?”
“Don’t need to be the Huntsman to kick your ass,” Dean warned him, meaning: I was really afraid for you this time. I’m glad you’ve got your mind back. Let’s never do that again.
“You wish,” Sam shot back, meaning, Dean thought, pretty much the same thing.
****
Dean planned his next step as carefully as he ever planned anything, which was not very. He did go to the kitchen to grab a bottle of that pomegranate soda all the Slayers seemed to like to go with his own beer when he saw Buffy watching the sunset from the sidewalk in front of the Slayers’ offices. It was all cleaned up, no sign that skeletal horses had tried to break every piece of glass in the place not forty-eight hours before.
“Mind if I join you?” he asked. She shook her head, allowing it, and returned to her contemplation of the view.
The bottles clinked as he sat down, squinting into the sky. She accepted the soda and he saw her look him over out of his peripheral vision. She knew he hadn’t brought an offering because he thought he could get in her pants. He took a pull from his beer, watching the fading sunlight glint off his ring.
They sat like that for a few minutes, taking occasional drinks in no particular rhythm. The crazed weather had disappeared with the Huntsman, and the sky was pink and orange, the clouds lit up and looking so solid that he could almost believe that he’d be able to bounce from one to the other without magic if he could get up that high (not that he would, because hello: if people had been meant to fly, cars would do it).
Dean tipped his beer up, finishing it off, and put it down to his side. “I’ve decided,” he said carefully, “that my life pretty much blows.”
Buffy’s gaze went to his shoulder, which was actually feeling fine thanks to Willow’s super-healing potions. “I get that,” she said. “So, now that you’re not the Huntsman any more, you want out?” She sounded wistful, like she knew she couldn’t go herself but liked the idea that somebody else could.
He shook his head, tilted it and smiled up at her, doing his best to stay as far away from sleazy as possible, even though he knew he was probably at least several inches within the sleazeball boundary. “I want in.”
That took her a second. “In? Like, a guy’s auxiliary?”
Dean shrugged but kept his eyes locked to hers. “I’ve got the experience. I can work on non-vampire stuff—I got no problem leaving that to Slayers—and, no disrespect, but you guys are kind of short on people who’ve been doing this for more than a couple of years. I’d do a good job—and I’d keep my hands off the girls,” he added belatedly. “The Slayers, I mean. Not all girls.”
Buffy smirked at him but didn’t comment. “What about your brother?”
His shoulders hunched for half a second, and then he straightened and stared blindly at the blazing spot in the sky where the clouds covered the sun. “Sam told me a long time ago that he wanted a normal life.” He picked up his beer bottle and rolled it between his palms, then put it down again. “I figure, I work with you guys, he gets his chance at that. I mean, once we deal with the arrest warrants and all.”
“This isn’t a job, you know,” she said, but she wasn’t saying ‘no,’ not yet. “It’s a family.” She scraped at the bottle label with her thumbnail, and her mouth quirked like she was keeping a joke to herself. “And when you meet Cousin Andrew, you might regret asking.”
“He’s not all covered with hair, is he?” Dean asked. “I could deal with that, don’t get me wrong. A guy just likes some warning, is all.”
“I think that’s Cousin It,” Buffy said, smiling outright. “Andrew is—you know, actually, Andrew is the kind of person who really has to be discovered, not described.”
Dean had known more than a few hunters like that. “I’d like the chance,” he admitted.
There was a short pause while Buffy looked him over from top to bottom, nothing sexy about it (except that a hot girl evaluating a weapon was inherently sexy, but Dean could put that off for now, given what he was asking from her). “You get that I’m the boss, right?” she asked.
He wiped his hand across his mouth to hide his hope. “You say frog, I say which toe,” he agreed.
“Okay then,” she said, and he recognized it as a dismissal and stood up, not wanting her to think that he was anything other than obedient. “Dean,” she added, before he could turn away. He froze, standing next to her. “The invitation includes Sam too. You need to tell him that.”
Dean started to snort, then cut himself off. “Thanks,” he said instead, his voice rough.
****
He started the conversation about ten times in his head. Sam, he said, I want to stay with them. Hey, Sam, guess what? I found a place where they want me. Sam, Sam, Sam—
Finally, Sam did it for him, which was kind of what he’d been going for all along. They’d taken a quick salt-and-burn a couple of hours away, nothing anybody needed a Slayer for, and Dean had figured it would be a chance to say things that needed saying. “Dean,” Sam said, with that special intonation that meant I Am Serious.
Dean closed the trunk and looked over at him. “Yeah?”
Sam stepped closer. “We haven’t talked about what I said to you while the Hart had me.”
Dean’s shoulders tensed up. They needed a talk, but he was pretty sure he didn’t want this talk. “Wasn’t you.”
“But it was,” Sam insisted. “It used what it got from me, just like a demon. Dean, I know you haven’t liked some of my choices, but at least I’ve made them.”
That still stung. “You think staying with Dad, staying with hunting, wasn’t a choice?”
Sam’s eyes were practically melting with sincerity, all big and hazel and slanted, just like he was when he worked a source. “I think nobody ever gave you a real chance to make a different one, because you were too busy taking care of me and Dad.”
See, if Dean were Sam, this would be the moment to point out just how insulting Sam was being: nobody had ever given Sam any more chance, but somehow Sam had enough inner strength, or whatever bullshit you wanted to call it, to strike out on his own. And yeah, Dean’d admit that it had been brave of Sam to start over, fake normal, all that. But it hadn’t been exactly relaxing to stay, either.
He sucked in a breath. “Whatever. If that’s what you think, I’ve got great news for you: I asked Buffy if I could work with her and the Slayers, and she said yes.”
It took a few seconds, but then Sam’s eyes widened and his lips parted, his whole face open with surprise.
“And she’ll take you too. Or not, it’s up to you,” Dean said, getting it out there. He’d thought up all kinds of pitches: Willow would match Sam geekout for geekout; Sam could keep saving people without living out of crappy motel rooms any more; all the obvious things. But if Sam didn’t bring them up himself, Dean saying them wouldn’t help.
If Sam was going to stay, he was going to stay for his own reasons, not because Dean begged him to and not even because they were fated to be together. Fate was a trick and a lie, and family had to be more than a trap. If Dean didn’t believe those two things then he might as well have died back with the Huntsman.
Dean opened the car door and started getting in, not least so that he wouldn’t have to watch Sam think it out. “Come on,” he called out. “You can brood about it while we’re driving back there.”
Sam spent the next few hours staring at Dean like he’d suddenly turned into Tyra Banks, or maybe a cute little kitten. Occasionally he’d say something like, “And you’re okay taking orders from a girl,” and Dean would have to push his sunglasses further up his nose and just ignore him.
“What if I say I want to keep hunting on my own?” Sam asked at last. Dean knew the question was only offered to get a rise out of him, but that didn’t make it any less effective.
He eased up on the gas. “Don’t say it unless you mean it,” he warned. He wasn’t sure what he had to back up the threat with, but he’d have no hesitation using decades of experience to make Sam miserable if Sam defied him on this.
He could feel Sam chewing at his lip, hunched over in the passenger seat, trying to figure out what was going on in Dean’s head. Actually, having Sam’s attention felt kind of good, despite the empty certainty in his chest about how this would end. “Why? Why would you ask her to take you in?”
Being asked was like getting off of gravel and onto new-poured pavement, a surge forward, a roar of freedom. “Because I don’t want to live like this if I don’t have to! It would be really sweet if the rest of the world knew what we were, called us the good guys, stood up and cheered when we rolled into town. But that ain’t gonna happen any time soon, and at least these girls understand.”
He let Sam gape at him for a bit before continuing. “I know you think I get off on being James Friggin’ Dean or whoever. And if I gotta be an outlaw, then you can bet I’ll be the coolest goddamn outlaw there is. But at the end of the day, it’s saving people that matters. If I can do that –” He stopped, because if Sam didn’t get it after that, there was really nothing left to say.
When Sam spoke, his voice was thick, almost syrupy. “Dean, I—”
He shifted in his seat and stamped down on the accelerator. “You in or out, Sam?”
Sam laughed, sounding congested. “Fuck you, you’re going to listen to this before I say yes.”
And then it wasn’t so bad to have to hear Sam go on about love and all that shit, because the road unspooled in front of the Impala and the wind was loud around him and he knew he was getting everything.
END
End notes: I didn’t really mean to revisit this crossover, but there were a couple of requests, and this is what came out.
Sadly, you will just have to imagine the cut scene where Buffy comes to the door of the room Dean’s staying in and watches Jane and June exit together, giggling, and two minutes later Ksenia leaves as well. This is, however, before Dean promises to keep his hands off Slayers, so he’s not breaking his word. Or maybe Buffy tells him she doesn’t expect him to keep hands off, and the girls make a roster so that nobody gets left out.
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I thought that the pull of the hunt and also Ruby's rematerialisation was very vividly described - the flesh reappearing on her still-blackened bones - urgh! Willow and Buffy ticking Dean off for his sexist vocabulary was hilarious, though. I had to grit my teeth sometimes to get through the mental horrors that poor Dean went through in this story.
What a terrific emotional payoff for the deep emotional bloody trauma of this sequel and the first story too. Best use of italics ever in the last line!
Another great read. Thank you,
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