Author's Note: AiH is back! This story takes place in the 'what-if' Buffy/Supernatural verse featured in the penultimate chapter of my fic Synchronicity and chapter 2 of Ramble On. This will be canon-consistent with all Marvel movies up through Civil War, Doctor Strange, and Spiderman: Homecoming. Some slight changes in the timeline between Civil War and Infinity War may happen, however, such as Dr. Strange and Tony Stark being already acquainted.

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters and settings belong to Warner Brothers, Eric Kripke, Joss Whedon, and Marvel. Not necessarily in that order.

June 2, 2017, Missoula, Montana, 7:45 a.m.

Alarm clocks were one of the world's most obnoxious inventions. Particularly, thought Faith Lehane sourly, after seven straight hours of insomniatic hell interspersed with recurring nightmares about being gut-shot and watching her intestines fall out into her hands. Or at least that was the justification she gave herself for hitting the snooze button three times in a row, and now having only twenty minutes to get ready for work.

The thirty-six-year-old reluctantly sprinted for the bathroom, grabbing her uniform off the cedar chest at the foot of her bed as she went, avoiding a stubbed toe by a mere half-inch. To save time, she skipped the conditioner, brushed her teeth in the shower, and twisted her wet hair into a loose bun that would not have been out of place on a geriatric librarian.

After ducking back into her room only long enough to grab the brown leather messenger bag that contained her wallet, a nasty little switch blade, and two lethally sharp wooden stakes, the woman charged down the staircase of the old two story clapboard house and followed the scent of coffee into the kitchen.

"Morning," said her housemate as he glanced up from the newspaper spread out across the kitchen table. He was wearing a long gray robe over his t-shirt and boxers, a pair of knock-off shearling slippers on his feet. The robe was one of the few things that they had been able to rescue from the Man of Letters bunker after Metatron and his angels smote it with the wrath of Heaven two years back, and it made an appearance nearly every morning that the man did not have to be at work before seven. "I made coffee."

"Thanks," replied Faith, grabbing a yogurt and an apple out of the fridge. She downed the yogurt in four giant spoonfuls and shoved the fruit down into her messenger bag. She could eat it in the car.

Dean smiled knowingly. "You late for the diner again?" He glanced at the digital clock over the stove. "What time's your shift start? Eight?"

"Eight-thirty," the woman corrected him. "But Melissa wanted me to come in fifteen minutes early."

The hunter raised his eyebrows at the mention of Faith's boss. "This about that manager position that's opening up?"

"Maybe." She shrugged nonchalantly. "Either that, or I'm getting fired."

"They aren't going to fire you," he replied, his low voice even and reassuring. "Every time I go in there, all I hear about is how the cook's half in love with you and how no one else is anywhere near as good at dealing with the students when they decide to be assholes at three in the morning."

"That's because I don't deal with teenager sh-t at three in the morning."

"Except for when it's Slaying-related," he pointed out, revisiting what he knew to be a sore spot.

Faith winced. She had hoped he wouldn't bring this up today. She and Dean had been in Montana for eighteen months, ever since they followed Sam and his new wife out to the university when he completed his bachelor's and started working on a PhD in American folklore. It had taken Dean a good ten minutes to stop laughing after he realized his little brother was taking hunter research and hunting work and using it for his doctorate. When he finally wiped the tears from his eyes, he had told Sam very seriously that their dad would have been proud – and then he started chuckling again.

The first six months in Missoula, Dean and Faith had lived out of a rundown motel on the outskirts of town. After a month, they reluctantly agreed that if Montana was going to be their base from now on, there were worse things in the world than getting an actual steady job and digs with fewer fleas. If they were going to try to pass as civilians, they should probably engage in more civilian things - hence her waitressing gig at a twenty-four-hour diner located two blocks from the main university campus and his position as a mechanic at one of the larger garages in town.

A couple of paychecks later, they had purchased this rambling old house in one of Missoula's rougher neighborhoods at the county sheriff's auction. The place had sold cheap because of all the maintenance work required, but neither Faith nor Dean was one to shy away from hard work. When they weren't taking three-day weekends to investigate whatever hunting or Slaying job arose in the surrounding states, they spent their days off repainting the interior and exterior of the house, laying down new flooring on the sweeping front porch, nailing fresh shingles onto the roof, or replacing the seventies goldenrod toilets and showers with fresh white porcelain and fiberglass models from Home Depot.

Not so long ago, Dean had mentioned in passing that if they stuck around here, one of these days he'd like to have his own garage, to be his own boss. Sticking around was still something that Faith struggled to conceptualize. During her two decades as a nomad, the most stability she had had was while living in a California women's prison – and then when she was splitting her time between her apartment in Cleveland and Giles' flat in London. Settling in one permanent location still felt unsettling and uncomfortable, as if she was forever waiting for that moment when she would feel the itch to be gone and run off.

But somehow, Faith doubted that she would run off this time. Dean – well, he needed her. The man was fully capable of surviving on his own, but after that rough patch when Sam had suffered a stroke while attempting to close the gates of Hell and then gone on to recover and marry his physical therapist, Faith and Dean had finally admitted aloud that they preferred one another's company to being alone. And whether you hunted or Slayed, it was generally safer to do so with a partner, which was why when he asked her to move into the bunker in Kansas, she had said yes.

Since then, they had never revisited the discussion, and by some unspoken agreement, when the Bunker had been destroyed and Dean mentioned that he was thinking about heading West to Montana, it was clear that he wanted Faith to come with him.

The only thing that occasionally interrupted their otherwise functional partnership occurred whenever Buffy or Slayer Central threw their weight around and pressured Faith into taking on one of the many newly-called Slayers with issues. As Faith had been the twenty-first century's poster child of 'Slayers with Issues,' Buffy and her advisors thought that she would be an excellent person to mentor the at-risk teenagers.

Generally speaking, it wasn't the teenagers themselves that Dean objected to. The house had three bedrooms, even if one was primarily unfurnished, and between his job at the garage and Faith's gig at the diner, they weren't lacking for groceries. It wasn't even that the teenagers required close supervision or extensive training. He had no compunction about putting them to work on whatever house renovation project was next on the list, and there was something fun about teaching a stuck-up teenage girl that super powers weren't enough to keep arrogance and stupidity from getting you killed.

If pressed, Dean would have claimed that it was the principle of the thing. He didn't like that Faith still caved to Buffy, and how the Slayer headquarters never gave them more than forty-eight hours' notice. And after Buffy's brusque phone call the week before, asking when and not if Faith would be able to take on another freshly called Slayer, he had been passive-aggressively dropping hints about how pissed off the whole situation made him.

The brunette woman rinsed out her yogurt container in the sink and tossed it into the recycling bin in the cabinet below. "We gotta talk about this now?" she wondered.

"Nope." Dean slid off of his bar stool and joined her at the sink. He set his coffee mug down on the stainless steel surface and twisted to face her. "You get any sleep last night?"

"Is that your not-subtle way of trying to tell me that I look like crap?"

He shook his head. "You look fine, Faith. You always look fine. Want me to fix you a coffee to go?"

Never one to turn down coffee, the Slayer nodded. "Sure."

Dean grabbed a travel mug out of one of the cabinets and began pouring the still-steaming beverage into it. "For what it's worth, I heard you moving around about two-thirty."

Faith's irritation cooled. 'I heard you moving around' was Dean-code for his own insomnia and bad dreams. "Rough night all around, then?"

"Yeah." He pressed the mug into her free hand.

"You could have come into mine." When the dreams were bad – really bad – when everyone died, or just the person you loved most was murdered over and over again, when Angelus turned her into a vampire, or Alastair racked him in Hell, they had a tacit understanding about finding each other. It was a little easier to disbelieve your nightmares with familiar, steady breathing lying next to you.

"So could you," replied Dean without judgment. He looked up towards the clock again. "If you don't leave now, you're gonna be late."

"Crap," grumbled Faith, following his glance. Five past eight. She had better hope that she didn't hit any red lights on the way over to the diner. She ran for the door, calling back over her shoulder as she went, "Thanks for the coffee!"

The man hollered after her, "Good luck with Melissa!"

As she reversed out of the uneven gravel driveway, Faith reflected on this little arrangement of theirs. It was the closest to true independence from the Slayers' council that she had come since being called twenty years before, and she couldn't ask for a better hunting partner than the one she had now. She often wondered just how long civilian life would satisfy either of them and which one would crack and run first. But in the meantime, until this blew up in her face as everything always did, Faith would settle for playing house.

June 2nd, 2017, Queens, New York, 3:27 p.m.

"Have you read the new one yet?"

Peter Parker rolled his eyes. Whenever his best friend found his next big interest – be it book or movie or video game – somehow Peter always got dragged into it. "Ned, if they've been all over the internet for the last four years, I don't know how it counts as new."

This did not diminish Ned's exuberance in the slightest. "No, seriously," his voice continued emanating from the Stark Phone, "I just finished Swan Song – and, dude, it almost makes all that Avengers stuff you were telling me about look less like a soap opera."

"It wasn't a soap opera," retorted Peter, and he took another bite of his sandwich. He stared out across the Hudson river and drummed the heels of his Spiderman suit against the brick wall of the apartment complex roof that he was currently perched on.

"Which bit? The Captain America stuff or Sam using the power of love to defeat the Devil and lock him back in his cage?" asked Ned.

"Either," the teenager shrugged, then swallowed. "Both." He wasn't sure which he preferred dwelling on less. Over the last year, he had spent an uncomfortably large amount of time dodging the subject of the U.N. Accords and whether or not the goody two-shoes whose recorded lectures featured during detention was a war criminal, a traitor, or simply misguided. Not that Ned's new favorite books were any cheerier.

"Aha! So you did read Swan Song!" Sometimes Ned had a particularly impressive talent for only hearing the parts of conversations that he wanted to hear. It was something like the converse of Aunt May's superpower: hearing the parts of conversations that Peter wanted her not to hear.

"Sure," Peter admitted. Honestly, it hadn't been half bad. Not good, but not half bad. "Finished it last weekend."

"Aaaand?" queried his best friendly excitedly. "What did you think?"

Shifting on the wall, Peter took another bite of his sandwich. "Can't we talk about this later?" he wondered through a mouthful of steak and peppers. "I need to get moving."

"Judging from the smacking, you've still got half a hoagie left."

"Ned –"

"Am I wrong?" Ned demanded, obstinate.

"No," Peter exhaled. "You're right. What did you want to say about Swan Song?"

"Well, to be honest, I felt like it was a bit of a cop-out. The whole 'love is magic' thing. I mean, isn't that what My Little Pony's all about? Wait – no, that's 'friendship is magic,' isn't it?"

The teenager choked on his hoagie. When he finished coughing and spluttering, he reminded Ned, "You admit to watching My Little Pony at school, and I think even the decathlon team'd have to kick you out."

"I'm just saying, it would have been nice to actually read about an apocalyptic battle. Those books never managed to be as epic as they kept promising."

"Maybe you've been watching too much Michael Bay along with your Ponies," teased Peter.

"That doesn't count as a counter-argument."

"Sure it doesn't." Peter swallowed the last bites of his sandwich. "Look, I've gotta go. Can we finish the Ned Leeds Book Review Club tomorrow?"

"I guess. Hey, you don't think you could conveniently manage to drop some bad guy onto the top of Flash's new car, do you?"

"If I'm in the neighborhood," promised Peter. "See you later, okay?"

"Sure thing, Spiderman."

Peter wadded up the paper trash from his sandwich, tugged the cowl of his suit back over his face, and held the crumpled ball in his left hand. Whenever he got within fifty feet of a trash can, he'd toss it in. No point in littering. Sending a streak of webbing across to the parking garage on the other side of the road, he began slinging his way through the city.

As he left the apartment building behind, Peter allowed his mind to wander a little over the events of the day. He had woken up, gone to Midtown for his half-day of summer calculus and robotics electives, along with make-up American history – no matter what Happy and Aunt May said, he had not forgotten to turn in the final term paper on purpose - and then he finished half of his homework before spending the rest of the afternoon taking care of Spiderman business. Peter had managed to stop three muggings and one falling grand piano, and then it was hoagie time. Luckily, he still had a few more hours of glorious freedom before Aunt May would be expecting him home to finish his homework and eat dinner. He wondered if she would object to him picking up Thai on the way back.

"Sir, police scanners mention a disturbance in progress at AJ's Jewelry," spoke a cool female voice in his ear.

"Thanks, Karen." Peter changed directions mid-swing, instantly forgetting about the pad thai. He had work to do.

From: The One Who Snores
Time: 11:45 a.m.
Message:

youtube / superswingingspidey

. . . .

From: Firecracker Girl
Time: 12:07 p.m.
Message:

What?

. . . .

From: The One Who Snores
Time: 12:08 .m.
Message:

Watch the link

. . . .

From: Firecracker Girl
Time: 12:12 p.m.
Message:

I'm at work

. . . .

From: The One Who Snores
Time: 12:14 p.m.
Message:

Watch it on break. You get the manager spot?

. . . .

From: Firecracker Girl
Time: 12:41 p.m.
Message:

Yes

. . . .

From: The One Who Snores
Time: 12:54 p.m.
Message:

Drinks tonight?

. . . .

From: Firecracker Girl
Time: 1:17 p.m.
Message:

Sure.

. . . .

From: Firecracker Girl
Time: 2:00 p.m.
Message:

You sent me *another* Spiderman clip?

. . . .

From: The One Who Snores
Time: 2:29 p.m.
Message:

…yes

From: Firecracker Girl
Time: 2:37 p.m.
Message:

I'm starting to think you're in love with him.

. . . .

From: The One Who Snores
Time: 2:40 p.m.
Message:

It's Spiderman, Faith. He's awesome.

. . . .

From: Firecracker Girl
Time: 2:57 p.m.
Message:

Thought Captain America was more your type.

. . . .

From: The One Who Snores
Time: 3:03 p.m.
Message:

That's Sam's kind of hero. Not mine.

. . . .

From: Firecracker Girl
Time: 3:15 p.m.
Message:

Right.

. . . .

From: The One Who Snores
Time: 3:20 p.m.
Message:

Silver Dollar or the Rhino?

. . . .

From: Firecracker Girl
Time: 3:25 p.m.
Message:

Rhino. I get off at six.

. . . .

From: The One Who Snores
Time: 3:32 p.m.
Message:

K. Meet you there.

June 2nd, 2017, Queens, New York, 7:25 p.m.

No sooner had Peter finished handling the jewelry store robbery when the telltale sounds of a carjacking two streets away caught his attention. Once Peter left the carjacker – a skinhead barely two years older than he was – webbed safely to the wall of a parking garage, the teenager finally started to work his way back across the city to the alleyway where his backpack and street clothes were stored. He made it to his things in fifteen minutes, and he even managed to change out of his suit without incident.

But that was where everything went mega weird extremely quickly. Just as he began zipping his bag closed, a couple stumbled into the alley, their arms wrapped around each other as they murmured the sort of romantic nonsense that always made Peter feel horribly uncomfortable. Something was up with the age discrepancy between the two: the man was in his late twenties at least, and the gaudy yellow and green check of his suit screamed nineteen-seventies. The skinny redheaded girl clinging to his arm, on the other hand, couldn't have been too much older than Peter was himself.

The teenager slunk back into the darker shadows in the corner of two brick buildings, preparing the web slingers in his hand for a quick vertical escape up onto the roof. He was almost ready to begin his ascent when the man snarled and gave his companion a great push, shoving her so hard that she flew across the alley to crash into the overflowing dumpster, her head hitting the industrial steel with an uncomfortably loud thud.

Peter jerked forward in an attempt to go to her aid, but the girl had already sprang to her feet. To his horror, she was tossing back her messy red hair and laughing. Something pointy and cylindrical – made of wood, maybe? – was clenched in her hand, and she sprinted at the man, whose face had morphed into a ridged, fanged rictus. The girl moved fast, faster than Peter ever would have expected from someone who had just made the acquaintance of a dumpster like that. She collided with the fanged man and jammed the thing in her hand into the creature's chest, just beside its sternum. Despite his enhanced reflexes, all that Peter could do was stand and watch in horror as the snarling thing exploded into a cloud of dust.

Turning to the girl in shock, he stammered, "What the heck was that?"

"Vampire," she said tersely, shaking her unruly bangs out of her eyes.

He knew that he had super-hearing, but Peter still couldn't quite believe what the girl had just told him. Although he usually evidence of his eyes, he was struggling with how that thing had just gone poof, like an old dandelion after a kid blew on it too hard. "What?" he repeated uncomprehendingly. He was mildly used to Mister Stark's robots and even random bits of alien tech coopted by scavengers, but this had been something else entirely.

"Don't worry about it." The girl shot him a pitying glance. "You're safe now."

Utterly confused, Peter glanced from the pile of ash back and forth to the strange girl. He was still trying to put all of his neurons back in order. "If that was a vampire, what does that make you?" he asked at last, thinking that she must be one of those mutants that Mister Stark had told him about once. " A vampire killer?"

"Actually," the girl smiled at him, grinning with pride and self-satisfaction, "the term's Vampire Slayer."

Before he could ask her another one of the fifteen questions crowding his brain, she dashed out of the alley and vanished.

Peter took the long way home this time, ignoring both the subway and the bus in favor of walking the fifteen blocks between the alley and the apartment he shared with Aunt May. His brain buzzed distractedly with every step. Vampires weren't real. They were fiction, just like in those horror books that Ned had convinced him to read last semester. Not that Peter disagreed with Ned's assessment that the Winchesters and their adventures were badass. They totally were. Sure, they were also occasionally badly written, but for trade paperbacks, they were hard to beat. But vampires, werewolves, all the creatures in those books, they only existed in the stories.

Besides, he considered himself to be a fairly rational person. Peter believed in the laws of nature, he believed in the wonders of science. He believed in alien mind control and autonomous artificial intelligence, and even sometimes in Mister – Doctor, he reminded himself – Doctor Strange's sorcery. But vampires? No way.

Briefly, he wondered if he should mention this to Happy or Mister Stark. No, the teenager decided after a few minutes' mulling the idea over, it was best not to. Neither of them would take him seriously – he couldn't even take himself seriously. This evening had been weird, but he didn't need to tell them. Like as not, there had been something wrong with the mushrooms in his cheesesteak sandwich. In the meantime, he would just keep his eyes open, see if he found anything.

His phone vibrated in his pocket: a text from Aunt May, threatening to eat all of the Moose Tracks ice cream in the freezer if he didn't get his butt home soon. Peter took off for the apartment building at a dead sprint, and all thoughts of the monster in the alley and the girl who had turned it to pixie dust fell out of his mind.

That is to say, they fell out of his mind until two weeks later, when the thing with the werewolf happened.

A/N: I'm anticipating 10 chapters or so. Thoughts?