Life Behind a Shadow - NC17
Title: Life Behind a Shadow
Rating: NC-17
Author: majistrix
Summary: Dean or Buffy? Faith will have to decide.
Disclaimer: You know damn well I don’t own any of this stuff. Title is from Queens of the Stone Age’s “Little Sister”.
Spoilers: Everything for BTVS and Supernatural Season 1.
Author’s Notes: Thanks to those who commented. I appreciate the feedback!
The first thing Sam saw, when he woke up, was a flashing neon sign saying “Joe’s Cabana” complete with a flashing neon girl lifting up her top over and over again. This definitely wasn’t heaven.
And it wasn't hell either because he and a very much alive Dean were on the sidewalk in front of Joe’s Cabana, Sam laid out and struggling to sit up in defiance of an aching side and head, while Dean was sitting on the curb, head and hand bandaged and looking surprisingly well despite the weird stare he had going on.
Sam won his struggle with verticality and called out to Dean. “Hey. You alright?” Sam asked, his voice raspy from the previous throat crushing, waving his fingers in front of Dean.
But Dean continued to stare ahead ignoring his brother. Sam grimaced as he sat up a little more to see what was enthralling Dean.
Straight ahead of them the lights from the club bounced off of a collection of destroyed buildings, debris, military trucks and ambulances. There was the familiar milling around of paramedics and other emergency responders, but oddly not a cop in sight.
What was much odder was the fact that the wounded people being patched up seemed like they had gotten lost on their way to a birthday party at the local Chucky Cheese. That is if the local Chucky Cheese stayed open until 3am in bad part of town and served pizza with steroids as topping option. Okay, that was a bad analogy, but that was the only way Sam’s already confused mind could reconcile the sight of a girl who could not have been any older than 15 holding up a fallen girder so that an EMT could attend to a person who had been trapped underneath.
There were many more kids around all helping to move debris that was much bigger and heavier than they were.
Sam’s jaw hit the asphalt and he wondered if the blow to the head had broken something because this was bizarre.
“Dean, are you seeing this?” Sam asked turning to his brother again.
Dean, no longer catatonic, gave a nod and a smirk as he tried to straighten his rumpled blood stained clothing with his unhurt hand.
“It’s cool man. Anyway, Faith kind of apologized for us getting jacked up. ”, Dean explained.
“Who?” Sam asked.
“The brunette.”, Dean said, wiggling his eyebrows in the direction the two women standing almost toe to toe arguing next to one of the ambulances that was off to the side.
The one woman Sam recognized as the woman who he fought in the parking garage. In the last of the day’s light he could see that she wasn’t pale enough to be a vampire. Judging from her leather pants and tight top she wore he would have thought her to be the wayward little sister-or possibly barely legal girlfriend- of one of the bikers he and Dean sometimes ended up drinking with after a hunt. She was the kind of girl who looked like she could put up a fight, and probably would, if you crossed her. But even with that kind of spunk she shouldn’t have been able to clean their clocks as easily as she did.
As for the other woman, well, if the difference between Faith’s looks and her abilities was merely puzzling for Sam, the same comparison made about the other girl should have made him so confused his head would explode.
The blonde looked like one of the typical Southern California girls he went to school with. Pretty, pasteled and privileged. Certainly not stupid-we are talking about Stanford after all-but not outwardly fierce. And certainly not as openly aggressive in the way that the other woman was now taking Faith on, standing on tip-toe even just so she could get in Faith’s face.
The school girl was making the biker chick back up and the two of them looked like they were a second away from beating the hell out of each other.
“Dude, I’m almost glad I got knocked out.” Sam could hear the lechery in Dean’s voice. “Come on. Get up. Let’s go over there.”
Sam tore away from the fighting to find Dean grinning with a leering smile and now standing next to him, which unfortunately put his head level with Dean’s crotch where he could see the real reason his brother was so chipper. Sam groaned and shook his head, amazed that even when only a few hours removed from possibly dying Dean still managed to be completely filthy.
“That’s sick. She almost freaking killed you.” Sam pointed out which Dean answered with a shrug. “Besides”, Sam said pointing to the arguing women, “she looks kind of busy at the moment.”
“Sam get your mind out of the gutter. I’m just talking about business.” Dean replied. “These women are uh…colleagues, yeah colleagues, and we have a responsibility to work with them. “
Dean looked down at his little brother, unaware of how much his smirk just did not match his bruised and bandaged face. “And if Faith decides she wants to make up for giving me a lickin’ by giving me a lickin’ who am I to stop her?”
“You are unbelievable.” Sam countered, wondering if the reason why Dean was doing so well despite the blow to his head was because the blood in his body permanently circulated near Dean’s crotch not his brain.
“You fucking bitch!”
“I hate you!”
Dean and Sam both turned in the direction of the yelling to see that the cat fight had now turned into a melee with both Faith and Buffy trading blows.
Out of instinct the men tried to rush over to stop the fight but their injuries reduced their running to a quick hobble. A group of other girls however were able to get to the two women and restrain them.
“What the hell is it now?” another girl asked as she stalked over towards the chaos. She was like Buffy and Faith a little older than the other girls who were there and clearly in charge.
“Willow stabilized him and he’s on his way to the coven to get fixed up.” Kennedy said clearly exasperated by the feuding women. Turning to Buffy she continued, “It’s ugly but it’s the best thing for him right now.”
Faith nodded at this while Buffy shrugging off the Slayers holding her turned her death glare towards Kennedy for siding with Faith.
“They’re evil!” Buffy said her patience completely gone now that she saw that she was double-teamed, “An evil coven. What part of evil don’t you understand?”
Kennedy sighed and closed her eyes, using an anger management technique Willow had taught her, as she struggled to keep her cool. The Slayers had been running non-stop since Willow got some feeling of, what Andrew called “a disturbance of the force”. The “disturbance” was actually the Senior Partners of Wolfram & Hart descending onto the streets of Los Angeles to exact revenge on Angel and his crew for averting their apocalypse.
The sudden and intense fluctuation in dimensional space had reached Willow over a thousand miles away in Cleveland causing Willow to cry out, her body going completely rigid as the connections between Willow and the healing forces of the earth were instantly pushed to nearly a breaking point to balance the presence of the new evil. At the time Kennedy thought the cause was a quick flick and swirl from the new tongue barbell she’d just gotten the other day.
Boy was she wrong.
From the initial annoyance at being interrupted to the hours of having to listen to Buffy order everyone around and Buffy and Faith fighting she was close to losing it.
So it didn’t help that when she did finish her breathing technique the first thing she saw were Sam and Dean, both looking confused, intrigued and more than a little scared by the cat fight. That was it!
“Who the hell are you?” Kennedy growled at the two men, the angry sound of her voice caused everyone else in the fracas to focus on the newcomers.
Dean still in happy horny mode grinned despite the hostility in the woman’s voice. “You just got us out of there.” Dean said his good hand pointing in the general direction of the collapsed parking garage.
“And?”
“Uh…yeah well…” Dean struggled to find a response. The drugs that the medics had given him were kicking in. That and the fact that he was close enough to Faith to see the fighting and the hot night had made her sweaty and she wasn’t wearing a bra.
“We’re hunters.” Sam said finishing for his brother. Sam turned asked Faith, “What was that in there?”
“Something you don’t want to mess with.” Faith stated looking at the ring of bruises around Sam’s throat. “Sorry about the beat down but you were going to kill my boy.”
Sam was confused for a second trying to think of who she could have meant but then remembered the sick vampire he and Dean had come across.
“The vampire?” Sam said incredulously.
Suddenly Sam felt vulnerable again. Sam had had little time to assess his and Dean’s situation in the few minutes since he’d regained consciousness. The only facts he had to work with were that he and Dean we in fact alive, the girl he thought was a vampire wasn’t and not only that but she and the other folks that were with her seemed more interested in helping the injured. Yeah there was a lot of weird stuff going on too but in the hunting business if you wanted to survive you had to learn weird wasn’t always bad and to appreciate good the few times it actually bothered to show up.
Standing next to his injured but patched up brother seemed like something good until Faith said that the dull throb around his neck was for trying to kill something that deserved killing.
If she was choosing vampires over humans what did that make her?
More importantly, how exactly did she and these other girls see Dean and him?
Faith could sense Sam’s discomfort. “Look you can think what you want. Don’t care. Don’t have the time.” Faith motioned at a girl standing on the outside of their little circle of conversation to step forward.
The girl came up to Sam and handed him the gear he and his brother had taken into the parking garage.
“There’s your stuff.” Faith stated, “I don’t know how you got in here but this ain’t for amateurs. If I were you I’d go home. The soldier boys will take you out of here if you need it.”
Faith then turned and looked at Buffy, “Angel’s waiting. You comin’ B?”
The blonde was still giving the other woman the stink eye but she nodded reluctantly.
Faith and Buffy walked away taking Kennedy and the other girls with them.
Sam stood silent, more confused than ever, standing in the middle of the battered street rifle in hand as he and Dean were alone again.
Dean broke the silence slurring, “Jesus, she’s got a great ass man.”
Sam could only shake his aching head at that. Grasping his brother’s uninjured arm he pulled Dean along, shuffling in the direction of where they left the Impala.
Chapter 2 Coming soon!