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If you had told Buffy six months ago that she would be spending her first Hellmouth-free Christmas in a little old Oxford church on Christmas Eve, she would have—well, not laughed at you, because she had forgotten how—but certainly given you a quizzical look. Six months ago, the hot desert wind, the endless sky, and the survivors were her whole horizon: nothing comfortable except the familiarity of absolute discomfort, nothing old except the very oldest things, nothing beautiful except the very wildest things, nothing happy except that fierce exultation of fighting and winning which people thought had died out with the Iliad and the Odyssey.
But tonight was cold, cold enough, the locals said, to snow—though the old fellow settled by the fire in Giles’s and Elisabeth’s favorite pub felt confident that Oxford would get only the icy arse-end of the brewing storm. It was cold and the air was heavy and still but for the eddies of wind that kicked up the hood of Buffy’s jacket as they walked—cold enough that light and sound carried sharply and seemed to have almost their own stone scent. Buffy shut her teeth against complaint: lots of people lived in cold climates without comment, so she would too. Of course, those other people bought proper coats for the weather. Elisabeth’s nose was pink, but the rest of her was buttoned into a heavy wool frock-coat with both collar-buttons fastened and the hood up, the fringe of her red scarf tickling the icy air with each bounding step she took, her gloved hands shoved deep into her pockets. Giles, meanwhile, had bundled up in a heavy leather jacket and tucked a tweed scarf around everything that wasn’t covered by his flat corduroy cap. The cold touch of the wind was drying to the eyes, so he had traded contacts for glasses before they left. Buffy had blithely disregarded her companions’ elaborate preparations for the weather, ignored their circumspect looks, and shrugged into her fleece jacket without zipping up.
She was deeply regretting it.
By the time they reached the door of the church, Buffy felt the relief of a becalmed sailor spotting land: the light spilling out into the street as the people ahead of them hurried inside was a miracle to beat Dickens hollow. She scuttled in after them, holding the door long enough for Giles to catch its edge, and breathed warmth into her cupped hands. “Eh, ‘tis cold, isn’t it?” the old man in the vestibule grinned at her. Buffy grunted, then smiled, deciding the man wasn’t so much patronizing her as passing a pleasantry; after all, he didn’t know she was a California girl.
Elisabeth, having slipped quickly out of her coat and hung it up, led them up the aisle to a pew near the front. Buffy couldn’t see her face, but she could see that Elisabeth’s head was tilted back, the better to take in the decorated church. Buffy had been in both bigger and smaller churches, but not often for anything but business: slaying, or research that ended in slaying. Now she observed the age-old stone and plaster, the stained-glass windows (dark now in the deep evening but hinting at colorful glories), draped in bunting and greenery by obviously loving hands, the beribboned torchieres at the ends of pews with candles flickering in them—in fact, every possible candle in the entire place burning, a myriad little flames precisely arranged—the flowers and holly spilling over the chancel panels—
They reached their destination; Elisabeth turned, her face already glowing, and ushered Buffy and Giles into the pew before her. They sat down; Elisabeth handed Giles her order of service so she could let down the kneeler briefly and make a silent prayer. Buffy looked at him; this was Elisabeth’s church, and Elisabeth’s chosen method of celebrating Christmas Eve, and she wondered how he felt about it. But Giles’s face was curiously trouble-free, his eyes upraised to trace the dark wood roofing the nave, his gold glass-rims glinting in the candlelight. He lowered his eyes, caught her looking at him, and smiled before dropping his gaze to his lap, just as Elisabeth finished her prayer and sat back, retrieving her order of service. As Buffy watched, Giles shifted his cap on his lap and settled back with a little sigh. His hands, she noticed particularly, were quiet in his lap: without tremors, the dark stone in his ring did not wink in the candlelight. The lines of his face were both soft and austere, the gray at his temples magisterial. Buffy realized with a pang that he really had been anything but old when she first met him.
The service began, with a peal of organ pipes and a glittering, weighty processional: “O Come All Ye Faithful.” Buffy had never heard Christmas carols used as hymns, and in the pleasant shock of knowing some of the words, she nearly forgot to sing. All around her the ordinary voices of the parishioners were raised to a veritable shout: and as the processional reached the head of the aisle Buffy felt an unexpected plunge of—joy? understanding? recognition? none, or all of them—not at what she supposed would be religious truth but at something that lay deep and uncalled-to in her own mind. She fought for this: all her sacrifices and privations were for this, for other people’s festival; and for once she got to enjoy it too, though even this articulated it too strongly. All she knew was that she was full glad she had come.
It didn’t, therefore, matter much that she understood very little of the service as it proceeded. Giles offered her the use of the order of service but she waved it away and drank in the texture and scent of the air and the light, sang when she recognized the words, let the others sing when she did not. Readings, carol-hymns, and sermon gathered to a richness in her consciousness, and she did not even try to grip any of it with her mind. When the choir stood during the offertory to sing something fugal and Latinate, Buffy leaned her head back and let her gaze wander the dark rafters of the nave. The music seemed to whirl up in almost palpable streams into the height and space of the church overhead. If Willow were here, she thought, she would be able to see it; she was a genius and the most powerful Wicca in the Northern Hemisphere—well, Southern now, she supposed. Giles next to her, with his eyelids at half-mast and his eyes dark and taking fire from the candlelight, was probably unraveling all the music’s secrets with his brain and packing the meaning neatly back before even a second had passed. Next to him, Elisabeth sat bright-eyed and unbreathing, as still as he; Buffy couldn’t imagine what being religious would add to the meaning, but it would add something. If Xander were religious he would look like that, Buffy thought.
Spirit, mind, heart, soul…hand. Buffy looked down at hers: warm gold skin, small tapered fingers, knuckles faintly knobbed with work and scarred with battle. Buffy flexed her hand thoughtfully, and noticed its most salient characteristic for the first time, as the music swelled to its peak.
It was empty.
The little pain hit the way she had always supposed her (eventual and permanent) death would, silently and without drama. She stared down at her bare palm; the music fell to silence around her. She became aware of Giles nudging her gently: all around was the respectful racket of people getting to their feet. The priest, Elisabeth’s friend Anne, was now standing behind the altar at the back. The service had progressed into the eating and drinking part, Buffy realized. There was a lot of talk about eating and drinking flesh and blood and remembering who their main course was, which she and Giles received with equanimity as the obverse of the world they came from. When the time came, she did not go forward, and neither did he, but Elisabeth did, her face secret and focused. Her hands, Buffy noted as she watched the faithful go up to the rail and receive the Host one by one, would not be empty. And in fact, they had not been; Buffy had not missed the moment Elisabeth’s hand had stolen into Giles’s a scant ten minutes before, for a mutual squeeze. She had her hands full with him, in every possible sense of the phrase.
She looked up at Giles once more. All the fluttering in him had stilled, and though there was still grief in his face, it was a calm grief: whatever they had said to one another the night before, it had bought them both peace if not complete resolution. This was how people healed, Buffy thought: a mixture of struggle and seeming slips back into despair, and the courage of honesty.
After communion the music rose again, into strides of hymns that once again Buffy knew—proclamations, recessional, the organ once again, and a burst of voices laughing, talking, greeting; there was much shaking of hands and grinning and sidling into the aisle around people genuflecting and offering last prayers. People tossed scarves over their shoulders and tucked creased orders of service into pockets, and over everything a single phrase repeated itself over and over again: Happy Christmas—
“You English are weird,” Buffy heard herself say through the din.
“Eh?” Giles said.
“‘Happy’ Christmas—what the hell’s up with that? —Oops.” Buffy covered her mouth too late to stop the curse, and glanced at Elisabeth, who started to laugh.
“I’ve said worse in church before,” Elisabeth said.
“If it comes to that,” Giles said, keeping to the point, “what’s with ‘Merry’ Christmas? You Americans always have to be different, don’t you?”
“Damn straight,” Buffy said, and gave up before she got her hand halfway to her mouth to laugh even harder with Elisabeth.
Giles rolled his eyes, not quite able to hold in his smile, and turned to push a slow path for them through the crush of noisy revelers, stopping at the back to shake hands and bawl a greeting at the priest, who to Buffy’s relief did not ask her questions but merely gripped her hand and let her go with a warm ‘Happy Christmas.’ They half fell out the door into the cold, pulling on coats and tucking in scarves. At Elisabeth’s insistence Buffy took her gloves and pulled them on, shivering and grateful.
The walk back to Elisabeth’s flat was fortified with the warmth of the church, though the wind had picked up and the lights of Oxford cast an orange glow into the cold, close clouds overhead. Christmas Eve night, and there was a silence over the city as they got into Giles’s car where it was parked in front, all three shivering and spluttering as the engine turned over.
They were mostly silent as the car picked its way over the dark roads toward the house. Between Giles and Elisabeth in the front of the car the silence was shared; Buffy did not begrudge them this, considering what they had been through. Besides, she had plenty to think about on her own.
“I don’t believe it,” Elisabeth breathed suddenly.
“What?” Buffy snapped out of her reverie and sat up to look over the front seat. She saw immediately what Elisabeth was looking at: bits of snow were flying into the headlights like white-gold fireflies speeding out of the darkness. She let out a small, disbelieving laugh.
“It’ll turn to rain,” Elisabeth said, with the conviction of one hoping against hope.
By the time they reached home the air was brilliant with falling snow. “It’ll never stick,” Elisabeth said.
They picked their way among the solar-powered lights Giles had planted along the path to the front door. “Good thing I put these in,” he said, with a lilt of self-congratulation that made Elisabeth and Buffy roll their eyes as they agreed.
Inside, they stoked the fire in the kitchen (“Did you also get the chimney sweep out here?” Elisabeth inquired; “As a matter of fact, I did,” Giles said), and consumed the eggnog Elisabeth had put to chill, followed by tea with orange peel and hot mulled wine. Buffy stretched her sock feet out to the fire and felt the heat charging through her bloodstream; it was hard to believe she had ever been cold.
At Elisabeth’s cajoling Giles got out his guitar and played Christmas carols, which they sang with less inhibition the more wine they consumed. Elisabeth kept going out to look out the windows at the snow, until they laughed at her and she blushed and desisted.
All in all it was quite late by the time the three of them stumbled up to bed. Elisabeth and Giles said goodnight to Buffy at her bedroom door; as she dressed for bed (warmly), she heard them in their room murmuring and rattling what was probably wrapping paper, but she caught neither tension nor passion in the pitch of their voices, and was relieved. Soon they, too, were quiet, and Buffy was alone in the darkness of the house.
She tried to sleep, but it was no good; after less than an hour she rose and bundled up over her pajamas, found her shoes, and carried them downstairs with her. She had not yet made her peace with the compulsion that still drove her up and out in the night hours even on nights free of threat; and tonight held an added urge that she was growing less and less able to ignore.
As she opened the front door (she had caught the trick of minimizing its characteristic squeak and groan), the cat snaked past her ankles and shot out into the accumulated snow, where it began to skulk toward the hedges like a small panther, daintily shaking snow off its feet at each step.
Buffy went out into the cold and silence, breathing in the fullness of the snow-laden air. The lone streetlight at the head of the lane cast a thin light over the front yard—“garden,” they said here—broken by the naked shadows of the shade trees and the hedgerow. Snowflakes lit thickly on her knit cap and her fleece jacket and her ungloved hands (even on a merely nominal patrol she didn’t like to have her hands glutted with fabric). It was already surprisingly deep: it clung like almost weightless frosting to her sneakers as she walked through it.
She was not taking any trouble to be hidden from the view of a potential enemy; but she was coming to know the scent and silence of this place, and she knew unerringly that there was no danger tonight. The darkness was empty of threat, empty of urgency…empty. Except for the snow, which whirled down, stirred by the occasional wind, with a driving, beating violence all the more startling for its complete silence, in a monochrome light, like an old movie with the sound off.
She spread her hands wide to catch the stinging flakes as they fell, unable to repress a shiver. It was still quite cold, and the snowflakes hit her hands, melted, and were gone almost before their sisters and brothers could follow.
Her hands, and the darkness, were empty.
She bent and gathered up some of the snow, packing it into a small ball; she sent it winging into one of the trees, and a dusty fall of powder marred the glittering breast of unbroken snow below.
There was nothing here: no threat, no danger, no urgency. No Angel here tonight; no Dawn; not even Spike with his uncouth, Cassandra-like inerrancy. She was alone.
Had she wanted a moment like this? A moment with not a single voice—human, animal, or demon—to break the silence, a moment with only herself and the impersonal vagaries of weather. A moment to ponder the thing that had come to her (but his mother pondered and treasured all these things in her heart), to let whatever nameless grief this was have its full recognition….
She gathered up more snow, for a real, don’t-fuck-with-me snowball; packed it till it was wet and slippery in her cold bare hands, and took aim. It sailed through the silent snow-filled air and broke against the wooden streetlight pole with a soft crunch, its remnants littering the ground below. Almost before the impact had ended, Buffy was bending down again for more snow. Her next missile hit the trunk of the tree she’d disturbed earlier, and she bent to make another. Soon the air was almost as full of Buffy’s snowballs as it was of snow, each one thrown with the methodical grunts with which she had punctuated years of training sessions with Giles. The cat poked its black face out of the hedge to observe for a moment Buffy’s quiet crackup, then just as silently withdrew. At last, her hands raw and wet, Buffy flung a last deadly snowball with a sharp groan of effort and stopped still. Her head fell back and she gave in to the hot tears that were already sliding down her cold-stung face. They mixed with the snowflakes beating down, and she stood still and let them, her only movement her distressed breath, which came out as volleys of vapor in the air.
It was a long time before she was finished. But she did at last finish, and opened her eyes to the driving snow, which attacked her eyelashes—Buffy was reminded of that dumb song from The Sound of Music, and snorted; then sniffed, because her nose was running freely. She wiped it messily on the sleeve of her snow-crusted fleece jacket, and looked down to see that the cat had returned from wherever it had gone, and was now waiting at her feet.
“All clear?” Buffy asked him, still sniffing.
For answer the cat hopped delicately through the snow to the slightly shallower coating on the front walk. Buffy followed him to the door, brushing snow off her arms and front and stamping it off her shoes. Inside, she hung up her wet jacket and left her shoes to dry on the stone tiles of the entry, then stole upstairs to the bathroom to wash her hands and face free of snow and tears. In the mirror she saw that her hair was streaked wet with melting snow, and her nose and cheeks were fire-red. Her hands, too, were stinging hot: she looked down at them, empty as before, but now acknowledged. Peace was hard to buy, but—probably—worth the cost.
In her own room, the room she and Giles had painted together so unpeacefully, Buffy shed as many clothes as still carried the damp and crawled under the covers, shivering. Soon the bed took on her warmth, and sleep came for her at last, now that she had fought her battle for the night.
When she woke, she thought dimly, as a wind-gust rattled snow against her window, it would be Christmas.
Finis