Introduction
Normal.
Buffy Summers had been envious of people with normal lives. It had taken some time for her to accept her destiny, to really be honest with embracing her fate. She was never going to have a 9-to-5 or a suburban address… or a wedding anniversary. Sixteen year old Buffy would never have accepted that twenty-six year old Buffy was going have a life that would never resemble normal, ever. But, maturity yielded perspective. Now Buffy knew that if sixteen year old Buffy had gotten her way that she would have ended up very miserable.
She was the record holder—the longest living Slayer to date. And, she had no intention of retiring any time soon. There was a certain comfort now with abnormality. The idea of "settling down" seemed pretty pedestrian. Her normal was slaying, and no normal, average Joe was going to fit into that equation. But, Dean… Dean was different. He had grown up in the life, trained from childhood to hunt evil. The parallels between their lives were not lost on Buffy—replacement father figures, supernaturally touched siblings, crawling out of your own grave… the similarities were eerie and familiar.
If there was any kind of life to be built and shared in their world, they might have that possibility with each other.