Winter is Cold, and Bitter

Willow hadn't cried, not one tear, and she'd been proud of that for reasons she couldn't even put into words. Did all that rigid control mean she'd left that her old life behind once and for all? That no last little trace remained of the child-Willow who'd wept so bitterly at the drop of a hat, wept until tears streamed down her face and over her chin and it felt as if she'd dissolved inside?

Vulnerable, soft-hearted, she'd cried that way when Oz left her the first time, and again on the day the six of them--the four people Willow loved best in the world and, well, Anya--finally closed the Hellmouth once and for all, the day she lost Oz for ever and ever and ever. Grieving wouldn't bring him back, or return Anya to Xander, and the ties that bound her to the remaining three changed that night, until they brought her brought her no more comfort, only pain.

She knew what to do with pain: cut it out, burn it out, drug it back into oblivion. Personally, at one time or another, she'd done more than a little of all three. Wasn't she doing that now, standing barefoot on the balcony with the condominium dark behind her, a bottle of indifferent supermarket wine in one hand? After the first long swallow it didn't matter: she never tasted anything.

Professionally, Willow had a reputation for calmness in the face of pressure. She was pleasant and thorough, intuitive in her treatments. People called her Dr. Osborne. No one, except for the voices who left never-returned messages in her communications files, called her Willow anymore. No one knew that her husband had been dead for over fifteen years, and that when she went home, the only creature there to greet her was a little calico cat named Patches. They didn't know that her sudden trip to California the previous summer had been to attend the funeral of a woman who'd once been her best friend, who'd really never stopped being her best friend, except for the distance, and the long, long silence between them, a silence that Buffy, at least, never had wanted.

Friends belonged to her past, gone along with the tears. Tonight even Patches avoided her, perching on top of the bedroom armoire with a perfectly decipherable look of feline distain. Willow knew she probably deserved the look, but the knowledge did nothing to lighten her mood.

The sharp December wind worked its fingers down the neck of her suit jacket, up beneath the hem of her skirt. The short hair whipped around her face as best it could, and Willow felt snow in the air. Below, the city lights shone so brilliantly that she might have been hovering weightlessly over the Milky Way, instead of wallowing in her own misery on a half-frozen balcony.

She'd told no one at work about Buffy. Hadn't lingered at the funeral. Unable to face them, she hadn't even talked to Xander or Giles, or the kids, though she'd said something brief and meaningless to Joyce Summers. Despite their grief and physical differences, the others looked complete, they looked exactly like family--but it was a family from which, after Oz, Willow had chosen to divorce herself. She'd fled California, for the second time in her life, almost the moment the earth closed over Buffy's coffin. For a long time now, Seattle's dark evergreens and gray skies had suited her--this nearly-foreign city was a good place to hide.

Talking to Giles and Xander, reliving old times, would have meant emerging from her safe little burrow. More than that, it would mean, somehow, that her friend really was gone, and Buffy couldn't be gone. Not so pointlessly. Not at all. Too much bitter irony already existed in the fact that Buffy Summers-Giles had faced, in her life, literally thousands of demons, but died because of a mishap behind the wheel of the little red sports car her husband had given her for her forty-fifth birthday. It seemed wasteful, and wrong--all the more so because Buffy had climbed out of the wreckage, helping a man with a broken arm and a woman with facial lacerations before the stormcloud of blood burst into her brain, and she fell by the roadside, already gone in the seconds before the ambulances arrived.

Nothing to be done. Nothing anyone could have done. In her coffin, Buffy looked untouched, her blue eyes closed as if she'd fallen asleep, but would wake any second. Only faint lines marked the skin around those eyes, and every one of the lines appeared to come from smiling. In her thoughts Willow always saw Buffy smiling--bending close to share a secret, cradling one of her babies in her arms, most of all with her hands on Giles's shoulders, smiling up into his face as he smiled down on hers with an expression of warmth and devotion so profound it made all the deep passion and the love she and Oz had shared, the loss of which had broken Willow completely, seem like no more than a shadow.

Willow sighed, murmuring to herself, "There's nothing to be done," although she knew that, really, there was plenty that could be. Done, that was. Fences could be mended, lost things--even lost feelings--could be found again. She forced open the old-fashioned sliding glass door, the one that always stuck when the temperature dropped, and stepped back into the relative warmth of her condo.

Her feet prickled with pins and needles as the circulation began to return--it couldn't have been more than twenty degrees outside. The wine would warm her, as well as blurring the sharp edges of things. Willow poured herself a glass, drinking the red liquid down like water, then poured another and perched on the edge of her sofa with her arms wrapped around herself. She wanted the memories to go away, to leave her in a vast, cleaning sweep of amnesia, as if nothing that was had ever been. It came to Willow that she hated her life, that every thought, every minute of existence, was like a stabbing, physical agony. She was like the Little Mermaid--not the cleaned-up Disney version with its happy ending, but the old, tragic Hans Christian Andersen story in which a being who left her proper place walked every step over needles and knives.

Willow rocked, holding in the pain. Things had to change. Something had to change. She drank again, the wine sour as vinegar in her mouth. Beyond the big windows the sky showed violet, streaked silver and gold with the lights below. The waters of Puget Sound stretched almost as far as she could see, an expanse of crushed indigo velvet. The largeness of it all made her feel very small, terribly weak, as if no possibility existed for making her way to friendlier ground. Willow realized that she knew none of her neighbors, not even the woman with the lovely voice next door who sang the saddest Blues songs Willow ever heard as she washed her dishes.

Outside the security entrance of her expensive building the streets would be decorated for Christmas, and Willow could at least have put up a Menorah of her own--but she hadn't. The apartment remained sleek and functional, like a photo-spread in a magazine, revealing nothing about the woman who lived within its walls.

You're getting ready to leave, Willow told herself, like a revelation, though she knew at least some of her brain must have mulled over the idea for the longest time. That's why there's nothing here.Random lines from a song she'd heard Giles sing once drifted through her mind: "I sit alone, without beliefs..." and "To England, where my heart lies..."

All of a sudden, the tears she would have sworn were gone forever seized Willow's throat, and she choked on them violently. The glass flew from her hand, wine splashing over the carpet and over her toes. She didn't care. She didn't care. But she was down on her knees, unable to breathe, horrible, choked moaning sounds tearing their way through her throat, her fortunately short nails gouging their way into her face.

The storm ended as quickly as it began. Willow found herself lying on the carpet, sodden with spilled wine and sweat and tears, shuddering with misery, the sense of bleakness and loss so great within her she could not so much as raise her head from the rug. She wanted to go home. She needed to go home, but she couldn't say at that moment where home might lie.

"I wish..." Giles began reflectively, then paused.

Xander glanced up. The monsters were about to do something unspeakable, according to his plot outline, and he'd been wishing that he'd scribbled down something more to the point than, "badness happens." Every idea he came up with seemed older than dirt, or stupid, or like something that would make people laugh aloud instead of creeping them out. Maybe he should have made his career writing scripts for romantic comedies instead. He needed to think it through without interruptions...

He needed something...something. And he didn't know what it was.

Sebastian had told him exactly that last Sunday, as he and Xander walked out by the cliffs after dinner, and Celeste remained behind to cheerfully bully her father-in-law, and to hang the Christmas decorations.

"Xander," he'd said, "What will become of you?"

"I'm okay." The December wind, in Cornwall, usually felt rough as sandpaper. Cold sandpaper. Some might even say icy. Xander could have sworn he'd have been just as warm wearing bermuda shorts and an Aloha shirt as he did with his heavy winter coat on. Either another ice age was gearing up, or the weather hit him harder these days. Sometimes Xander thought that he, too, was turning into an old man, even though he was only forty-eight, not all that much older than Giles had been when they first met.

"People don't die in their seventies any more," he'd told Sebastian, but then he'd felt something cold and salty on his face that wasn't spray from the sea, and Seb had put his arms around him in a firm embrace, while Xander cried on his shoulder. He'd felt stupid--it wasn't his right to cry, not like it was Seb's or Henry's, Beth's or Joy's. Giles wasn't his father, not really, and yet...

Yet, here he was, thousands of miles from California, in a little stone house by the sea, sitting alone in a firelit room beside a quiet old man he couldn't admit was going to die--not the way Buffy had died, suddenly, unexpectedly--but slowly, painfully, over time.

When they'd returned, Celeste had been quiet, a book open on her lap that she didn't even pretend to read. She held one of Giles's hands between both of hers, looking into his face with her luminous dark eyes. Celeste never got any older--if anything, she'd grown more beautiful, and her own face was peaceful and loving. She'd gotten up without making any noise, and crossed the room to link her arm with her husband's, even as she reached up to brush the embarrassing wetness from Xander's eyes.

"It's the wind," he muttered. "Stings."

Celeste nodded, even though she knew he'd fibbed. "Rupert's been a bit tired today. I think the rest will do him good. Will you be all right alone with him this evening, Xander? We could stay if you liked."

"Joy says she's on her way back from Cairo, just as soon as she can arrange it." Sebastian told him. "And Beth's coming up from the Compound at the weekend. With luck we'll even manage to pry Henry loose from Appleyard."

"It will be nice...umn...for them to visit." Xander knew that his eyes must look defiant, but he didn't care. "He talks about them all the time." Which was the truth. Xander knew that when the kids visited, it would be to say goodbye--only one person would have the power to heal the friend who'd become his second father, and that person lay a long, long way away, buried in one of the graveyards she'd walked through so many times, about a million years before.

It had seemed appropriate, somehow, for Buffy to be buried there, in Restfield Cemetery.

"Quiet slumbers for that sleeper, in this gentle earth," Giles had murmured, deliberately misquoting something Xander associated with an old black-and-white movie, but couldn't for a second put his finger on.

"What did you wish, Giles?" Xander asked, dragging himself up out of these thoughts. Months had passed since his companion voiced a wish for anything, which made Xander feel as if he ought to pay particular attention. Usually, he could work in this room and not even know there was another person there, except for the slightly painful sound of Giles's breathing--something he'd managed, over time, almost to ignore.

The older man turned his head to give him that slight, familiar Giles-smile, his eyes crinkling at the corners. In some ways he'd scarcely aged, though his hair had gone silver and his skin become more weathered. His color wasn't the best, though, Xander noted--a grayish tinge overall, with a hint of blueness in his lips. With a mental squaring of his shoulders, Xander saved the file he'd been working on and moved to sit on the ottoman. He took Giles's hands in his own, feeling their coldness, studying the dark blue beneath the nails.

"Xander," Giles said softly.

"You didn't take your pills this morning, did you?"

"I did. They no longer work particularly well. It doesn't matter." Giles leaned forward a little, even that slight movement obviously an effort, one that made him swallow convulsively, and breathe a little harder. "Xander, it doesn't matter."

"It bloody well does, and you know it!" Xander jerked his hands away. "What, I'm supposed to go in tomorrow morning and find you dead in your bed?"

"I'm afraid I've influenced your vocabulary for the worse." Giles was smiling again, and Xander turned his head away, so that he wouldn't have to see. Still, he felt a hand on his shoulder, then cool fingers brushing his cheek. Xander's own father had died twenty years before, still young, and he'd felt nothing, but he couldn't face this. He couldn't.

"You have to fight," he said fiercely. "Giles, you have to, the exact same way you fought all those demons. The way you fought the Hellmouth."

Giles gave another slight smile.

"If you don't..." Xander's breath caught. "I'll go."

"That's your choice," Giles answered, without temper. "I do enjoy your presence here, Xander, but you needn't stay if you don't care to."

"Like you can take care of yourself?" Xander's head shot up. Thirty years later, and he still felt, sometimes, like the angry kid who'd traded barbs with the old Giles in the library of Sunnydale High.

"I might get someone in from the village, or the others can take turns. I never want you to feel trapped here, son," Giles spoke softly, and a look of great kindness had come into his green eyes--they were still clear, despite grief and illness. As always, Xander felt that complicated surge of emotion that occurred whenever the older man called him "son."

"I won't leave you," Xander answered roughly. "You know that. The others..." He wanted to say, "the others have lives," meaning Giles's kids and grandkids. "...don't know the routine," he concluded, and watched them both retreat, backing away from what they'd been close to confessing.

"I'm only a little tired from all our visitors yesterday," Giles said, leaning back in his chair--but his expression had gotten distant, even though Xander guessed he could probably read the older man's thoughts. He'd be thinking of Buffy, the way he always did. At night, Xander often heard him call out her name in his dreams, in a tone of love, or loss, or inexpressible anguish, that one word tearing through the thick, plastered walls. During the day, his control never faltered--and that, too, was the essence of Gilesness.

"It was nice to have the whole gang over, wasn't it?"

Giles gave another gentle smile. Even here, in Cornwall, they celebrated Thanksgiving--Buffy's holiday, Buffy's day. The house had been swarming: Sebastian and Celeste with their daughters and son-in-laws and and grandkids. To their surprise, Moira St. Ives had zoomed down from London with her daughter Wendy in tow. It disturbed him how much Wendy looked like her dad, and how she'd exuded LeFaye glamour until he'd felt the need to go take a long, cold walk by the ocean.

A hint of humor glinted in Giles's eyes. "Enjoyed Wendy's company, did you?"

"She's like something from one of my scripts--and I don't mean the innocent heroine."

"I find her great fun. She's zesty."

"She's--" Xander began before noticing that a further glint had come into Giles's eyes, indicating the older man was teasing, and possibly misdirecting him. "You think you're so sly!"

Giles gave one of his soundless laughs, but even that small effort made him cough. Xander waited it out, then asked, "Can I get you something?"

"Willow," Giles answered softly. "I've written to her, Xander...will you try to bring her here?"

Xander glanced away, shaking his head. "We're old news, man. She's got no business with us."

"Please, son," Giles said, in the same low tone. "I do wish that you would try."

"You don't know what you're asking," Xander told him, but his companion's expression told him that Giles knew very well. His heart may have been failing, but there was nothing wrong with his mind.

Willow didn't know why she'd gone to the museum, but in the end she hadn't been able to stop herself. For that matter, she hadn't known what made her pack a bag and board the London-bound TransPort. The truth was, she felt scared, the way she hadn't been since she'd first met one of the people she was putting off going to see.

She tried to tell herself that visiting the British Museum was a way of closing the gap, something to talk about, a little ice-breaker. "Oh, I stopped by the museum when I got into town, Giles. You know, nothing ever changes there." They could talk about artifacts and Greek temples and Egyptian mummies, and she'd be safe.

The truth that had twisted her stomach in knots, though, all the way from the Seattle-Tacoma TransPort Terminal, was that with Giles, and with Xander too, she could never be entirely safe. Giles was smart as a whip, and perceptive--and he could be devious, too. She and Xander just shared too much history for any lies to be simple or believable. They would see what she had become, how cowardly she'd become, and they would despise her.

Willow shivered, pulling her raincoat tighter around her body. London wasn't really cold, no colder than Seattle anyway, but her bones always seemed to ache now, as if she'd been carrying the same impossible load around for days, if not years. Standing in the middle of one of Egyptian galleries, surrounded by mummies and sarcophagi, Willow's eyes began to burn and she knew she was about to cry. Dr. Willow Osborne, specialist in emergency medicine, was going to burst into tears right there in the British Museum. Before the thought finished crossing her mind, she'd already started, not just weeping, but sobbing again, those horrible tearing sobs that make her entire body jerk almost convulsively, and terrible sounds come out of her mouth.

"Oh, God!" she cried out, "Oh, God!" not really knowing if she said the words aloud, only that they were meant as a prayer, a heartfelt cry in the wilderness, asking only for deliverance from her suffering.

She felt as if her heart had been gone before, but now had started to grow back, rapidly and painfully, and no matter how much she wanted it to stop, once begun the process couldn't be reversed. She pressed her hands to her chest and wept harder.

"Are you all right then, love?" a small voice asked her.

Willow looked up, blearily, to see a man no bigger than she was. A pair of bright blue eyes peered at her through half-moon spectacles of the kind no one had worn in thirty years, and the man's face, haloed in cherubic curls, held an expression of powerful shyness and earnest concern. He reminded her of some sort of kindly elf.

"Often," the little man said to her after a long pause, "One sees young people here rendered nearly paralytic by boredom--" The bright eyes caught and held hers. "Rarely, however, does one encounter a person moved to tears." He gestured to the mummies with one small, well-manicured hand. "I know it's sad, love, but it is the human lot. And they've all been dead for quite a long time."

Willow's jaw dropped, and a blind, speechless anger surged through her--but then she realized that he'd meant the words to cheer her up. That he referred to the anciently preserved corpses and not to her own dead, the ones she sometimes felt she was carrying with her on her back wherever she went.

"Yes," she answered, her voice choked and alien. "Yes. The mummies. They have."

Unable to stop herself, Willow began to weep again, silently, as the old man pressed a clean, crisp handkerchief into her hand. He was nothing like her old friend, but the gesture, and the stranger's very Englishness, reminded her of Giles, and of the old days, the library days, some of the best and worst of her life. She smiled a little, thinking of the way that Giles's handkerchiefs, although consistently clean and plentiful, where usually pretty rumpled, much like Giles himself.

Willow wiped her eyes for what seemed like the hundredth time, a million memories coming back to her as the soft cloth brushed her face. Along with that flood came the sense that she'd done wrong. She'd let something precious slip away from her, and she might never be able to catch hold of it again. She glanced down at the now-gray, crumpled ball in her hands, then up again into the old man's sympathetic eyes.

"I'm sorry," Willow said, gesturing with the handkerchief, but not really apologizing for having ruined its pristineness. Not really.

"You don't know me," the stranger said. "No reason why you should." He gave Willow a gentle, slightly wistful smile. "You had the sweetest young face--and that lovely red hair. Shame that it had been cut short, hair like that."

Willow ran a hand self-consciously over the back of her head. She always wore her hair short now, for convenience, and though technically it was still red, the color had darkened, and it seemed as if she found new white threads every day.

"Willow..." her companion said reflectively. "I'm right, yes? You are Willow?"

It came to her suddenly: a summer picnic at a place called Appleyard, the most peaceful place she'd ever known, even thought that particular summer had been, to say the least, a tumultuous time. There had been people, strangers--friends of Giles's from the British Museum where he'd once worked, one of them a tiny man who'd been just about over the moon to meet Giles's daughter-in-law Celeste. She'd had her mind on other things, hadn't really paid attention...

"I met you at a place called Appleyard," the small man told her in a gentle voice, echoing Willow's thoughts. "Many, many years ago now."

"I remember," Willow answered quietly. So much had happened that summer, and since then, so much toxic water under the crumbling bridge. She'd wished, so hard that the wishing was like an ache inside her, that she could roll back time to that moment. That she could be that other Willow again.

"You've come to say goodbye, then?" he asked her.

"Say--?" She heard the words, but they seemed no more than meaningless noise. They couldn't mean anything.

"I don't know why I've come," she answered in a flat, dull voice, after more than a minute's pause.

Because they're all you have left, her secret, inner voice whispered. And if you don't go to them, you'll be lost.

"I'm already lost," she murmured, half to herself, half to her companion.

For a long time, the old man looked at her sadly, before answering, in a voice no louder than her own. "But, love, you needn't be." With that, he slipped a folded scrap of paper into her hand, rose, and walked briskly away.

Willow sat still, only her eyes moving to examine the elaborate coffins, the artifacts, the mummies themselves in their grayed, ancient cerements.

That's me, she realized. Wrapped up in cobwebs for how many years?

Carefully, as if it might crumble into dust, she opened the paper Mr. Firkins had placed in her hand.

Only four words written there, but they nearly made her cry again: The Cliffs, Penwirth, Cornwall.

"Wait for me," she whispered. "Wait for me. I'll be there soon."