A/N: Okay, folks. Last chapter. Title comes from Carole King's 'So Far Away.' I'll post the first installment of the sequel in a few days. As a brief reminder, these last two chapters have been written in one form or another since May of 2015. The road was always going to end here.

April 7th, 2015, Omaha, Nebraska, 5:45 a.m.

Dean woke to an empty motel room and the noise of the shower going. Rubbing his eyes, he glanced at the alarm clock next to the bed. 5:45 a.m. Why was Sam up so damn early? Whatever. Maybe this meant that they could get back to work faster. The hunter slowly swung his legs over the side of the bed and started hunting for his jeans and a clean pair of boxers. That leftover pizza from last night should still be edible.

Finding the box with its two bedraggled slices of pepperoni, he tried eating one. It tasted much like cardboard – boring, thick, stale. But his stomach was growling fit to beat the band, and frankly, day-old pizza was the least of his concerns at the moment.

He had had the dream again. It kept popping up, every other week or so. Had been for the last month or so, ever since . . . Dean forced himself to swallow the cardboard pizza and bit down on the slice again. Apparently, his subconscious wasn't going to give him any peace until he took a long, leisurely stroll down memory lane. Which sucked, because he really had been hoping to avoid this specific walk.

It was only memory. How much could it hurt? Sitting back on the edge of his lumpy mattress, Dean closed his eyes. Broken springs pressed upwards into his rear and thighs. The irritation provided a welcome distraction. He did not want to do this. Still, the man took another bite of pizza and let himself remember . . .

About a month ago was when it had happened, when the world had lurched beneath his feet. It'd been the tail end of February, a week and a half into her trip to California, without so much as a text, email, whisper, or smoke signal from her direction since she'd landed in LA. Zip. Zilch. Zero.

He'd been hanging out in his bedroom in the bunker, dialing her number reflexively. He had called her five times in the last three days, with no response yet. It was a little weird. Usually, Faith called him back within forty-eight hours or so. Or, if she knew that she was going to be underground for a while, she sent him a line or two explaining her radio silence beforehand.

What with the tablets, Kevin, Cass, Benny, and everything else, Dean hadn't actually seen Faith more than two or three times since he returned from Purgatory. So much for his good intentions. Still, he tended to hear something from her every other week or so. Chances were, she'd finally found a guy she wanted to shack up with for more than a few days and was ignoring him. Dean had decided to give her one last try, that cold winter afternoon. Finally, he hit pay-dirt.

Only, it wasn't Faith who answered the phone. It was Willow – the pale, ginger witch from ages back. His first thought, that maybe Faith had been holding out on him all these years and was shacking up with a girl, was soon displaced by the nervousness in the redhead's voice. She had passed the phone on to Spike, apparently deciding to let him do the honors.

Spike had been surprisingly kind for a vampire. There had been an accident, he explained, calmly maneuvering around Dean's confusion and questions. Faith had been on a training run with new Slayers, just a routine altercation with a Fyarl demon out in Orange County. The girls had closed in and were trying to bring the demon to bay when it started spewing paralyzing mucus all over the place. Faith had ordered the teenagers out of range just as the Fyarl demon rushed her.

She had taken him down easily, a nice cut to the jugular with a silver knife. Even relating the tale, Spike's tone was tinged with admiration. But things had turned downhill from there. In the rush and excitement of their first successful hunt, none of the Slayerettes had noticed the strain in their leader's voice, or the coughing. No one realized anything was wrong until Faith collapsed to the ground, unconscious. By the time the teenagers turned her over onto her back, she was no longer breathing.

At that point, the girls finally pieced together that some of the mucus had worked its way down the Slayer's throat into her windpipe, blocking critical airways and suffocating her. They called 911, and she was rushed to the hospital by ambulance, but with no luck. Despite intubation and compressions, the doctors in the emergency room were unable to bring her back. It was simply too late.

It wasn't the kids' fault, Spike had said, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. Horrible accidents happened – rarely to Slayers, because they tended not to live long enough – but they still happened.

It took a while for what the vampire was saying to trickle through the thick, gray fog clouding Dean's ears. He listened to Spike's soft voice, the words barely registering, as the vampire apologized for the delay in letting him know. The new girls had panicked, and panic clogged the chain of command. Buffy and Spike themselves hadn't heard until the day before. The vampire's words spun to a halt, and he had waited for what must have seemed like an inevitable outburst.

When the hunter didn't respond, Spike pressed, "Dean? You still with us?"

Everything sank in with a terrible finality. Instead of speaking, Dean threw his phone against the wall, where it had exploded into a dozen shards of jagged black plastic. Not enough. He picked up the lamp from his nightstand and hurled it to the ground. The sound of shattering glass had brought Sam at a run, confused and concerned.

Dean had not taken the time to explain things then. He had simply grabbed his keys, shouldered his younger brother aside, and told him not to wait up. And to be honest, he wasn't entirely sure what had happened after that. His memory of the next few days was fuzzy at best.

Opening his eyes in Nebraska, the hunter reached for the trashcan beside the bed and spit the pizza out of his mouth. He made a face. Yeah, it was definitely not worth finishing. He found a water bottle in the mini-fridge and drank half of it down in one go. It wasn't like she had been his girlfriend or anything. He didn't need to crawl into a bottle of Johnny Walker to handle this. He was doing fine. He just needed the dreams to stop.

Dean couldn't make up his mind about which dreams were worse – the ones where she lived, or the ones where he watched her die. Last night's installment had been another of the godawful 'if only' dreams, where they both survived a little longer, long enough to have each other's backs. This one had been set in Montana. They'd even had another dog.

Dumbass Disneyland ending or Slasherfest vamp out, both kinds of dreams were like a barrage of sucker punches to the gut. And yet, as much as he dreaded them before and hated them afterwards, there was something to be said for getting to see her again.

He wouldn't admit it – who was there to admit it to besides Sam? – but he missed it. Her wolfish smile in the thick of a fight, when it looked like they were about to lose. Her body pressed against his, the two of them dancing in some grungy bar. Her voice on the other end of the phone, listening or laughing, somehow having the power to make even the Apocalypse – the real one – feel surmountable.

He missed everything, but perhaps, most of all, he missed that no matter what terrible thing he did, he could never truly shock her. At the end of the really bad hunts, the ones where he had sunk so low that he was worse than the nightmares he was hunting, she had been his something to look forward to. No matter how far he fell, she was never out of his reach. Until now.

Acting of their own accord, his fingers pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and began typing in a series of numbers: 2-1-3-5-5-5-8-0-6-1. Dean waited while the call rang out. One day, that infernal Watcher's Council of hers was going to catch wise and disconnect both the phone and the number. In the meantime . . .

"Hey. This is Faith. You know what to do."

Fin.