FIC: BtVS, Out of This Stony Rubbish

[annakovsky]

This is a sequel to a story I wrote two years ago, The Weary World Rejoicing, which was set in an apocalyptic AU where the events of "The Gift" didn't turn out so great.

Out of This Stony Rubbish
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. R. 11,200 words. Spike. Willow. Xander. Anya. Giles. Tara.
For moireach and T.S. Eliot, without whom this would not exist. Moireach beta'd. TS did not.

***

When Willow comes back on Christmas Eve, she brings him a pack of cigarettes. He can't think where she could've found them after all this time, and she doesn't say.

"Merry Christmas, Spike," she says instead, and when she presses them into his hand her fingertips brush his palm. She half-smiles at his expression, then gets pulled back into a crowd of excited, laughing people before he can even think of a snide remark to shrug it off.

He goes outside and turns the pack over in his hand, the cellophane crinkling, and when he opens it he takes a moment to just breathe in the scent of stale tobacco.

He's almost glad Giles and Willow are back, which surprises him. But it's not like that means he's doing anything pointless like getting attached, like some kind of idiot, like some kind of Scooby. He can tell Rupert's in a bad way - his heart's going a mile a minute and his skin has a grayish cast, though the others don't seem to notice.

It's not particularly remarkable. That's the way it is around here - someone's always dying. Too bad for the Watcher, 's all.

Spike stands out in the snow and smokes a cigarette all the way down to the filter, until it's burning his fingers. He holds the smoke in his lungs as long as he can - which, as he doesn't need to breathe, is until someone talks to him and he has to respond.

He drops the butt into the snow and toes it out, and two hours later his lungs are still full of smoke.

***

Spike stays on guard duty until the graying dawn starts to prickle at him. He turns the cigarette pack over in his pocket, then walks down to Willow's room. No one's awake yet at this time of morning, the compound empty and quiet, looking especially dingy and small with no one around. The snow in the courtyard is trampled and muddy, and all the buildings could use a paint job.

He goes inside Willow's building and finds her room, leans against the wall of the corridor opposite it, waiting. He's grateful the hallway doesn't have windows.

Willow wakes up early, he knows, and hers is the first door to open. Her hair is still mussed from sleep, growing out into a mousy brown, and she's wearing an enormous hooded sweat-shirt and flannel pants. The rooms are cold, in winter.

"Spike," she says, when she sees him. Her voice is rough, from the morning and the cold. "What are you doing here?" But her question lacks conviction and he smiles at her slowly, predatory. They both know what he's doing there.

She sighs and closes her eyes and he steps forward and pushes her hair behind her ears.

"Just," she says, "give me five minutes to brush my teeth." She shuts the door carefully behind her, but not before Spike sees Tara, asleep in their bed. She's been simple for over two years, but it's still a bit surprising. Like Buffy being dead is surprising, how every morning you wake up and think it's not true, but it is.

He goes to his room and lights a fire in the grate, stands as close as he can to it to try to warm his body up for her. He doesn't undress - it's too cold for nakedness. When she finally comes in, she's still in her sleeping clothes, and when he bends her over the bed, she makes a soft noise and pulls her pants down just far enough. Her sweat-shirt covered back, the hood pulled over her head (she must be cold), and her bony hips - when he pushes into her she could be anyone.

When he touches her she shivers, and for a second he thinks it's from wanting him, but then she says, "You're cold," and the only thing he can do is try to thrust hard enough for the friction to warm him up.

She won't stop shivering.

***

The first time they fucked was the previous April. Willow had found a spell she thought would fix Tara, would heal Glory's mind-wipe, and she made Spike help. Roped him into gathering ingredients, anyway, and into tying a knot at a crucial moment. The whole thing ended with a small explosion and an evil smell, like sulfur, and when it cleared Tara said, "Jug jug jug tereu" and giggled and was just the same. Willow burst into tears.

Sniveling, she took Tara's hand and went to put her to bed, and Spike was left in the library with a smoking bowl of chemicals, and a circle of salt, and bay leaves. The pack of Tarot cards was on the corner of the table, the top card turned over: the hanged man.

Instead of tidying up, he went outside and sat on the steps leading up to the wall and smoked a cigarette - this was earlier in the apocalypse, before he had completely run out. Willow eventually came and joined him, still sniffling a little.

He was halfway done with the cigarette when Willow said bleakly, "I really thought that would work."

"Yeah," Spike said. It had been rainy, and the steps were still a little wet. He could feel it soaking through his trousers.

"I keep thinking, things have to change, you know? But I guess not. I guess this is all we've got left."

Spike let smoke drift out his nose.

"I just miss Tara so much," Willow said, and choked up again, and Spike rolled his eyes.

"Least she's not dead," he said. "That's something."

She looked at him sharply, then sniffed and wrapped her arms around herself, and didn't say anything else. They all miss Buffy.

Spike finished his cigarette. "Want to fuck?" he said.

Willow's eyes went wide. "What?"

"I said," Spike said, enunciating clearly, "do you want to fuck?"

Willow was still staring at him. Her mouth opened and shut again. Then she said, "I'm gay, Spike."

"So?" Spike said.

"So... so do you even have any condoms?"

Spike looked at her. "I'm dead, brain trust. I'm not going to give you anything."

Willow picked at a hole in her sneakers. Her wrists were thin and bony, sticking out from under her ratty sleeves. Everything deteriorating, holes in their clothes, not enough to eat. This was the worst apocalypse he could imagine, how it went on and on and didn't end.

"Yeah, okay," Willow said, and didn't look at him. They went up to his room, and the sex wasn't good, but it was something.

***

Spike might be the only one who isn't surprised when Giles collapses on New Year's Eve. He just goes pale and crumples at the dinner table, so quietly it takes them all a second to notice.

Xander's the first to see. "Giles!" he says, and leaps up, almost tripping in his hurry. He feels for a pulse.

Giles is still alive; Spike can hear his heart beating from down the table, quick and weak. While everyone else is jumping up, Spike slowly drinks down the last of his cow's blood and wipes his mouth on his sleeve.

The doctor's already there, up from his dinner, listening to Giles's chest and looking serious. Spike props his head on his hand and watches them.

"Let's get him into bed," the doctor says. "I need to examine him."

Xander looks around and, rather predictably, calls, "Spike!" Spike's already getting up, leisurely making his way over. Between the two of them, they pick Giles up and carry him back to his room, across the courtyard, through the old crust of snow.

"Oh God," Xander keeps saying.

Once Giles is set on the bed, Spike has to help maneuver Giles's clothing off, and if there's anything he'd fancy less, he hasn't thought of it. Rupert seems so old now, with the illness and the added years. Or maybe it's just because hardly anyone over fifty has survived this long. He might be the oldest person left alive, and that's a strange thought.

(Oldest person besides Spike himself, but Spike's not a person, and he's not alive.)

Spike props Giles up while Xander gets his trousers off, and so isn't positioned to see when Xander draws in a breath and says, "What the hell is that?"

"Eh?" Spike says, and cranes his neck. Xander's staring at a place on Giles's upper thigh. There's a massive welt there, purple and ugly, like a stab wound that had half-healed and then opened up again and then half-healed again over an infection.

Even Dr. Hopkins looks horrified. "Oh, that's nasty looking." He touches the skin around the welt gingerly, begins to probe around the injury as lightly as he can. Giles moans, still unconscious. Hopkins runs his hand over one particular area, feels a shape. "It feels like part of the weapon that did this is still in the wound."

"Well... can you take it out?" Xander asks. He and Spike finish settling Giles against the pillows and step back. Spike leans against the wall.

"I'm not sure," the doctor says. "Even if I were a surgeon, which I'm not, and even if we had surgical equipment, which we don't, it seems like it's been in there a long time...." He trails off, and takes Giles's pulse, uses a dingy stethoscope to listen to his chest.

When the metal touches his skin, Giles's eyes flutter open. "What is that noise?" he says faintly.

Xander looks at Spike. The room is silent. "I didn't hear anything," Xander says.

"Oh," Giles says, and his eyelids drift downward again.

"Giles," Xander says. "What happened to your leg?"

"What?" Giles says. "Oh, it was rather idiotic, really." He smiles, a bit, but then starts coughing, deep hacking coughs. Xander tries to hold him steady, and when the fit of coughing subsides, Giles slumps back against the pillows, his eyes closed. He doesn't say anything else. Spike eventually slips out.

***

Sometime in the middle of the night, Spike ends up wandering up to the wall, smoking. He is allowing himself one cigarette a day. Sometimes just half of one at a time.

It's cold out, the stars icily clear, and he's not on guard duty tonight, so there's no good reason for him to be hanging around. Habit, maybe, if that counts as a good reason, which Spike doesn’t think it does. Except it's too confined, indoors, too confined in general. Out here at least you can stretch out, even if it's just mentally.

Xander is already up there, sitting and leaning against the parapet, his head tipped back so he’s looking up.

Spike exhales his lungful of smoke and carefully puts his half-smoked cigarette out against the stones. It makes a black mark against the gray. “What’re you looking at?”

Xander doesn’t move, his head resting against the wall behind him as if he’s tired. “The North Star,” he says finally. “It's the, uh, pole star. The whole sky rotates around it. If you pay attention, you can see the constellations moving.” He points up. “See Orion? Two hours ago it was over there.” He moves his hand.

“Huh,” Spike says. He takes out his pack and tucks the half-cigarette back in for later. “How’s Giles?”

Xander looks at him sharply. "Giles?" he says, and Spike realizes that may have been the first time he's ever called Rupert that. Xander seems rattled. “Bad,” he says finally, hunching his shoulders against the cold. “He needs antibiotics for that... stab wound, or whatever. And we don't really have any. And the doctor doesn't think he can risk trying to take out whatever's in there, when he doesn't know what it is and with the wound so swollen. And on top of that he has pneumonia."

“The Old Man’s Friend,” Spike says. And at Xander’s look he almost feels apologetic for pointing out the obvious. Stupid Scoobies, getting to him. “That’s what they used to call it.”

“Giles isn’t old,” Xander mutters, and his mouth turns down and for a second Spike is afraid that he's going to cry. But the moment passes, and when it does, Spike sighs and sits down next to Xander. The stones are cold, but it's warmer sitting down, out of the wind.

“Happy bloody New Year,” he says, and pulls a flask out of his duster and takes a swig. They have begun to make their own gin - Spike built a still in the basement of the hall. He passes the flask to Xander, who drinks and passes it back.

It starts to snow.

***

After a couple of inches have accumulated, Xander says something about going to bed and takes himself off. Spike stays up there, sitting on the wall and drinking and letting the snow settle on his shoulders.

It's New Year's Day, but here is the funny thing about it: the sun just doesn't come up.

He doesn't have a watch - there is all of one working clock in the compound. The rest have all run down, batteries dying, slowing to a stop. So when it doesn't start to get gray in the east, at first he just thinks that he's lost track of time. The cloud cover is thick, anyway, that'd make it darker.

It has to be mid-morning before he realizes that something is seriously wrong, that the sun isn't rising. The day isn't just the gray of a thick cloud cover - it's completely pitch black. The realization comes with a feeling of delight, at first - his skin isn't getting that crawly feeling that comes with dawn, he's free, he can stay outside as long as he likes.

He's grinning and heading across the courtyard when Anya comes to meet him. "There you are," she says. "Come on. We're having a meeting."

Spike rolls his eyes. "Of course we bloody are."

"Well, it's not every day that the sun doesn't come up," Anya says irritably. The pregnancy's starting to show - she walks with a bit of a waddle.

They go to the library, where they always have meetings. Xander and Willow are already there waiting for them, and John, and Dr. Hopkins. Spike sits in a deep windowsill and looks out at the darkness.

"Okay," Xander says. "So we're all here." Anya sits down next to him. Xander looks tired. "And it's almost noon, and the sun's not up."

"Bloody wonderful, 's what it is," Spike says.

Xander ignores him. "Which, if there are any vampires around besides the Bleached Wonder here, leaves us really vulnerable. Not to mention anything else evil that doesn't really like the daylight."

"Also, it's expensive," Anya says. "We're having to burn candles all day long, and more firewood since it's colder."

"Right," Xander says. "And we have to consider the possibility that this might be a long term thing."

John shifts in his chair. "You mean, the sun might not be coming up anymore?"

"Yeah," Xander says.

"Excellent," Spike says, and he's grinning again. "Now this is an apocalypse I can really get behind."

"Don't be an idiot," Anya says. "If there's no sunlight, the plants will all die. If the plants all die, the animals all die, and if the animals and plants all die, then so do we humans. And if the humans and animals all die, Spike, what exactly are you going to eat?"

Spike makes a face at her. "Don't be such a wet blanket."

"So," Xander says, ignoring them, "we have to find out what's causing this and stop it. First of all, is it mystical or something else?"

"Something else?" Spike says. "What, like the earth stopped spinning around the sun? What do you think would've caused that, exactly?"

"Fine," Xander says. "Obviously it's mystical. Willow, do you have any ideas?"

Willow is looking pale and small, curled up in a chair, her arms wrapped around herself. "I'm trying to think," she says. "I can't remember... I mean, this is big. It would help if I knew how large of an area was affected. Is this just us, or is this the whole planet, or what? And if it's a spell, who's powerful enough to cast something like this? I've heard of spells to block out the sun, but they're usually just for, like, a half hour, and over a really limited area. This has already lasted way longer, and is way wider, and...." She trails off.

"What?" Anya says.

"I don't know. It just feels... bad. Nasty. I can start researching, I guess."

"Okay," Xander says. "I'll send out a team to find out how widespread this goes. You get together a team to do research. And in the meantime, let's try to keep everyone from panicking."

"I wish we had Giles's old library," Willow says quietly. "Or Giles."

Xander's face twists. "That’s the other item of business, I guess. Doc, how's Giles?"

Hopkins shrugs. "I gave him the last of the antibiotics. There's nothing else to do but wait and see. He might make it."

Xander nods, and the planes of his face shift, tighten, his mouth a thin, miserable line. "Okay."

***

Mark and Jess are the best riders, so Xander sends them out on horseback to find out how far the darkness goes. They head east. Spike watches them from the top of the wall as they fade into the distance, disappearing at a bend in the road. He had volunteered to go himself - anything to get out of the compound - but Xander had turned him down. "What if they hit sunlight all of a sudden? No, you stay here."

So instead he has to teach another weapons session, just like he does every night. They're doing throwing spears, and so he goes to set up straw bales for targets, pulling them awkwardly across the front of the barn.

Nobody's any good at weapon's practice, but it makes them feel better to think they can do something. That they're not just waiting around to die.

***

The sun doesn't rise on January second, or third, or fourth. The whole place is getting edgier and edgier - at a hand-to-hand combat practice, tempers are high and Spike has to break up two actual fights. Father Michael is holding Mass every day. When Spike passes him in a hallway, he crosses himself.

It's not surprising. Spike's not deaf, he hears the rumors, and in a crisis no one trusts the vampire or the witches (crazy or otherwise), and they're skeptical about the dying old man. After all, before Giles showed up, the sun always rose.

Giles is no better and no worse. He wakes up sometimes, but never says much. Willow's stalled out on trying to find out what's going on with the sun, and instead starts to look for a spell to heal Giles. Spike's dubious. He sits on her windowsill after fucking her, smoking half a cigarette, and he tells her so. "Not like you ever found a cure for your girl, and how long've you been looking?"

"This is different," is all Willow says. He was hoping for a fight, but she just sits there in her layers of clothes looking tired. Her sweatshirt says UC Sunnydale. Willow shivers. "Were winters always this cold?"

He finishes the cigarette. "No, but there always used to be sun."

"The river's going to freeze over," Willow says. "Anything could walk across." She shivers again, and then gets up off the bed. "I'm going to go do more research. I must've missed something."

From the window, Spike can see her walking across the courtyard to the main building where the library is. The snow comes up to her knees.

***

On January sixth, Mark and Jess come back, their horses walking down the road with their heads hanging in exhaustion. The blackness extends out at least three days to the east, they say. They didn't go any farther, they got overwhelmed with it. Xander nods and looks grim.

On January seventh, Willow goes marching out the gate into the woods, wearing a knapsack on her back and a determined expression. Spike follows her out, catching her a few yards out into the fields.

"Go away, Spike," she tosses over her shoulder.

"Where do you think you're going?" he says, and his boots are crunching in the snow.

"None of your business," she says, and she walks faster, taking long steps, almost tripping in the depth of her own footprints.

Spike rolls his eyes, and when it becomes clear she really doesn't want him, he finally stops walking. "Fine then," he calls after her, as the distance between them widens. "Get yourself killed, see if I care."

She waves dismissively and keeps walking.

Two hours later, the sky slowly turns from black to gray. There's still no sun, exactly, but it's more the darkness of a thick cloud cover, light enough that Spike has to go inside because his skin begins to burn. Everyone else is rushing outside to see the lightness, and he has to push through the crowd to get in the door. Always going the wrong direction.

He gets a stack of old weapons and takes them to the hall to do some upkeep, sharpening the spears, oiling the strings on the crossbows. He's almost the only one there, except for a few little girls involved in a game of jacks in the far corner, so he notices the movement when someone comes limping through the door. Giles.

He's using a walking stick and leaning heavily on Xander, but his color is better, and he's out of bed. Xander helps him sit in a chair by the fire, wraps a blanket around him, and Giles keeps apologizing for being an inconvenience. But Xander's grinning like the day Willow came back, like Christmas Eve, like things are going to be all right after all, just because Rupert's going to live. Sometimes Spike envies Xander's uncomplicated view of reality.

Willow doesn't come back. It gets progressively lighter and lighter, and two days go by, and for all they know, she's still out in the forest. They send out search parties and can't find her, even when the sun comes all the way out, bright, reflecting off the snow. Finally, just after sunset on the third day, Spike spots her from up on the wall. She's walking so slowly that for a few minutes he's not sure she's moving.

He goes out to get her, and when he reaches her she's pale and she smells like blood. "What have you been doing?" he says sharply, but she closes her eyes and looks like she's about to fall asleep standing up. "Oh, fine," he says, irritated at her for being an ass, and he puts her arm around his shoulders and half carries her back. She smells like blood and sweat and like something burned - sage, maybe.

They put her to bed and she's asleep immediately, her heartbeat slow and weak. The doctor looks worried, makes them wake her up to feed her. She goes right back to sleep after eating the toast (made over the fire, the burned bits scraped off - Spike remembers how from his schooldays) and drinking the tea.

Sleep must've been all she needed, though, because twelve hours later, at midmorning when the sun's up and Spike's sleeping, the door to his room creaks and it's her. She sucks his cock and climbs on top of him, and when he rolls her over he finds a smear of dried blood on the inside of her elbow. There's no cut underneath it. "What's this?" he says, and she rubs at it self-consciously. It comes off in flakes.

"Nothing," she says, and slides his cock inside her, and he gets distracted. He means to ask her later what she did in the forest, exactly, but he doesn't remember until after she's gone.

She avoids him, when they aren't fucking, so he doesn't get another chance. But three nights later, when he's out on a patrol, his group comes across three dead bodies of deer, their throats slashed, their internal organs laid out in complicated patterns. The gore doesn't bother Spike, but the patterns do, somehow - the design gets into his head, the arrangement wrong in some indefinable way. Unsettling. One of the group, the fourteen year old, throws up.

Spike tells them not to touch anything. They leave the bodies there, flies buzzing, and go on with their patrol. When Spike tells Xander about it later, Xander's forehead furrows and he rests his hand against the doorjamb, like he's holding the whole place up with sheer force of will. Like it's heavy.

***

It stays cold, colder than usual. The river freezes. They're running out of food - Anya has people grinding their grain reserves into flour at all hours, and they're down to their last canned vegetables. Xander sends people out ice-fishing, a group on the river at all times, and other groups out hunting for any deer or other animals still alive out there. That's the only protein they're getting, besides the occasional egg - they can't afford to kill any of the domestic animals.

Giles insists he is well enough to fish, even though no one believes him until they catch him limping out the gate, leaning heavily on his walking stick, a small boy beside him carrying a fishing pole, a bucket, and a saw. After that Giles goes out almost every day, sitting for hours on the ice, wrapped in a blankets, his pole propped beside him. And somehow he always brings back more fish than anyone else does. Lucky, he says. Sometimes after sunset Spike takes another lawn chair and gets his own fishing pole, sits on the river with Giles and fishes in silence. But he never catches anything.

***

In February the wolves come, over the frozen river, in late afternoon. It's still too light for Spike to venture outside, so he has to pace in the hall while everyone else goes running for weapons. The wolves catch them with almost half the compound outside, fishing and hunting, and some of the wolves even manage to get through the gates. Spike can hear people screaming.

By the time it's all over, everyone who comes straggling back is covered in blood. Xander's shoulder was bitten deeply enough that Spike can see what he thinks is a tendon through the mess of blood and gore. But everyone's talking about how a wolf had knocked down a grown man and was gnawing on him when Xander went charging up and killed the wolf with one stroke. That was before he fought off two more and got everyone inside and shut the gates. With one hand tied behind his back, no doubt - Spike doesn't believe it for a second, but somehow it's been all of five minutes and it's already legendary. Spike paces and wishes he could kill something.

Xander is pale and quiet while the doctor bandages him up. Five people are dead, one of them a toddler, and a little boy got bitten in the throat, might not make it.

No one notices that Tara's disappeared until an hour later.

***

Willow is verging on hysterical. Spike, as one of the only ones not injured, and as the best tracker, is sent out to find Tara. He takes a few of the others who made it through unscathed with him - Bram and Josh Goldberg, a couple of orphaned teenage brothers, and Ben, and Martha. They're all reasonably good with weapons, and reasonably good at shutting up and doing what they're told. He could do worse. It's the night of the full moon, so at least they can see without having to tramp around with lanterns, and the moonlight reflecting off the snow is so bright it's almost like day.

The snow is also useful for following a trail, though the hundred yards closest to the compound are completely trampled down, splashes of blood pinking the snow. On the side closest to the forest, Spike picks up Tara's trail - he can still smell her, a bit, and there is a group of footprints leading off into the woods. At least three other people were with Tara, which is strange considering she's the only person missing from their settlement. Which means the footprints belong to something else.

They follow the trail all night, all the way through the woods, past a ghost town, down an abandoned highway. The freeways are unsettling, now that they're deserted, especially snowed over. They're like a smooth white pathway, unnaturally straight, and it's strange how quickly they've come to seem foreign and dangerous. You spend any time on the road and you're exposed - anything could jump out at you. Spike makes his group stay out of sight, in the trees at the side of the highway, a little ways away, under cover.

The trail keeps going and going. Whoever grabbed Tara has almost two hour's head start, and Spike suspects they're moving more quickly than his group is. The Goldberg boys are getting tired, dragging their feet, and Ben's yawning. When the horizon starts to get gray, Spike doesn't have a choice - they find an abandoned rest stop and hunker down to sleep for the day.

The linoleum of the rest stop is skuzzy - leaves and dirt have blown in, dust has settled and who knows what else has been there. Animals, for sure, and maybe some demons. There are still tourist leaflets scattered across the floor from when the rack of them got knocked over. Spike toes at one with his boot - it's for the Three Sisters Wilderness. Hiking, apparently, is one of the exciting things you can do there. It's hard to remember hiking being something people did for fun.

They get out their blankets, and hunker down in the corners. The boys fall asleep right away; Spike takes the first watch. It's cold and dirty and the light reflecting off the snow outside is harsh. After two hours, give or take, he wakes up Martha and tries to sleep himself. The sun moves across the sky.

At nightfall, they set out again, walking, following the tracks, which stick to the highway. Whatever kidnapped Tara is taking advantage of the ease of movement made possible by the old road, apparently more concerned with moving quickly than with safety. Which means whatever it is isn't afraid of much. The tracks go right down the empty carpool lane, between speed limits and green signs listing the miles to Portland, a city where no one lives anymore. All those tall buildings, empty and overgrown, broken windows and crumbling office furniture, all those places for things to hide. Falling office towers, the whole city a ruin.

They track them almost all the way to the city, across rivers and overpasses, places where they almost lose the trail. For three long nights they doggedly follow Tara's footprints, their feet freezing, their noses red with cold, heads down against the wind.

But they don't find her. The trail's getting colder, and it keeps going and going, the buildings getting taller and taller, empty windows like eyes, staring down at them, unnerving. Every time they hear a noise, they start. Finally even Spike admits that there's no point in going further. Everyone's too tired to even discuss it - they just stop in their tracks and turn around, start walking the other direction in their own footprints. And the bad thing about spending three nights going out is that it's three nights back, three nights of frozen bread and ice melted to make drinking water. On the second day back, Ben kills a couple of squirrels, and they build a fire and cook them, and things seem better.

They come trudging up to the compound at the darkest part of the night - it must be three or four in the morning - but Willow and Xander are at the gate, waiting for them. They must've been watching, all these nights. Xander's arm is still in a sling, from the wolves.

Willow and Xander can see for themselves that Tara's not with them, that the whole party is exhausted and hungry and cold, and Spike doesn't have to say anything. Willow starts crying quietly, like she's already tired with days of crying, and she looks at Spike like he killed her goldfish.

That was Angel. Spike never had the patience for those kind of dramatics.

Xander closes his eyes and rubs his forehead and says, "Come on, let's get you warmed up and fed and you can tell me what happened." They all start walking to the kitchen, and Willow slips away into the darkness somewhere along the way. Spike doesn't see her go.

In the kitchen, Xander heats up water to drink (no tea leaves to spare, so it's just hot water), and starts cooking some fish, and they all huddle around the fire, warmth seeping out from the hearth, and Spike tells him about the nothing they found.

What's one more person dead or missing? Ninety-nine sheep didn't wander off, and yet.

Spike wants to kill something or fuck something, but the chip stops the first, and Willow's no doubt going to put a stop to the second, and unless Xander's up for it, he doesn't see a lot of options. He goes to bed and tries to sleep.

***

Two weeks later, when Spike starts his shift on top of the wall, late in the night, he sees something strange in the moonlight a couple hundred yards out from the complex, like a stick has been stuck into the ground and an indistinct mass has been put on top of it. Nothing's moving around it, though.

He calls over Xander, who peers into the darkness. "I can't see anything," Xander says.

"Come on, it's right there!" Spike says. Humans are so pathetic.

He's about to start an argument, but before he can Xander says, "Okay," believing him, and Spike stops short. That still manages to surprise him, after all this time.

"So let's go," Xander says, and he heads down to the gate, Spike trailing in his wake.

Spike leads the way out to whatever it is, Xander behind him walking in the indentations Spike's feet make in the snow. It's up past their knees, now, packed down and heavy. Colder than winters in Oregon should be, more snow - when Buffy died, the weather changed, got less hospitable. Spike's concentrating on where he's stepping, so he doesn't realize what the thing he's heading out to is until he's almost right up to it.

It's a head, on a stake. Flies crawling out of the nose, and blood frozen and congealing, thick drops of it coloring the snow. The eyes are open, and the mouth, a bit, and the skin is chalky. It's Ben. They hadn't even known he was missing.

"Well, fuck me," Spike says. Xander gags, then throws up onto the snow. Spike smells bile and blood and fear. They stand there staring at it. Spike looks at the forest nearby, tries to see if there's anyone around, if whoever left the head is there watching, but there isn't anyone

Xander says, "We can't just leave him here." When Spike glances over, Xander's staring at his shoes, not looking at the head. Xander clears his throat. "We have to... I don't know. Bury him."

Spike shrugs. "Yeah, all right." He takes a step closer to the nasty thing, and leans down to grab part of the stick that's not too bloody. There's not as much blood as you might expect, as a matter of fact. This might have been vampires. It has that air.

They walk back to the gate, Spike holding Ben's head in front of him like a torch, like a spear, and the flies buzz around him. They're getting picked off, one by one. It doesn't bode well.

***

No one remembers when they saw Ben last. His family died in the original apocalypse, so no one keeps tabs on him. He could've been missing for hours, or days. No more than a week, though - Xander's sure they would've noticed.

Well, whatever helps him sleep at night. They institute a nightly roll call, after that. If something out there is focused on them, vampires or whatever, grabbing people when they get too near the forest, they at least need to know who's missing right away. They can't keep losing people like this.

***

They're pretty sure it was vampires. The next night, almost everyone goes out hunting for them, in groups of four or five. Spike takes the same group that went looking for Tara with him, with Jess replacing Ben - they work all right together.

His group goes east, and in the end, they're the ones who find the nest of vampires, four vamps total. Spike kills two, and Martha kills one, and when he goes to stake the fourth, he sees that it's Tara and stops, just in time. Her face is twisted grotesquely, snarling and giggling at the same time, and she's still damaged in the head, simple. Just evil on top of that. When he pauses, trying to get his head around the fact that it's her, trying to think what to do, she tries to bite the younger of the Goldberg boys. But she's young, she doesn't know her own strength, and Spike gets her arms twisted behind her before she sinks a tooth in, holds her down.

They don't know what else to do, so they tie her up and take her back to the complex with them. Spike holds her by one arm, and Jess holds her by the other, and Martha marches behind them with stakes in both hands and a grim expression.

Hardly anyone's there when they get back - they're all still out hunting. Spike gets better bonds, chains her up in the hall in front of the fireplace. They get some water to drink and sit in a circle and watch her and don’t say anything because there's nothing to say.

Spike thinks about Willow spoon-feeding Tara, before, and brushing her hair and then looks at Tara with her game face on and thinks, well, that's that, then. At least they know what happened.

***

The other groups drizzle back in throughout the night. Willow's is almost the last. When she sees Tara, her eyes widen and she runs to her, throws her arms around her like she didn't even notice the fangs. She's already crying, big wet soppy tears of joy filling her eyes so she doesn't see Tara going for her neck.

Spike acts purely on instinct. As Tara sinks her teeth in the region of Willow's jugular, he drives a stake through her heart and Willow's arms close on dust. The thick flakes of it stick to the blood bubbling out of Willow's neck, dark red and hot, and Spike automatically presses his hand to the wound to stop the bleeding.

Willow's blood is slick underneath his hands, and he can feel the grit of the dust that used to be Tara, and it's like everything is in slow-motion, the shape of Tara's body poised in the air for a second that seems like forever, then drifting towards the floor, the expression on Willow's face not changing right away, because she doesn't realize what's happened. The noise of the crowd around them that stops abruptly as everyone goes deadly silent, and Tara's dust in the air. She's not a corpse, she's dust, like she never existed, and Spike's got the stake that killed her in his hand, and his hand on Willow's throat, and her blood is thick and seeping through his fingers, and her eyes are widening and her mouth is falling open. Her lips are a little chapped, little ridges of dead skin, and there are freckles light across her nose. She looks around at the room like she expects to see Tara standing a few feet away, like she just lost her, like Tara's just been misplaced, and then she looks at Spike in confusion, like she doesn't understand what just happened. Her eyes flicker to the stake in his hand.

Spike can actually see the moment it hits her, when Willow realizes that he just staked Tara, and it's like she's been punched in the stomach. She jerks away from Spike's hand on her neck and doubles over, and the sound she's making isn't a sound anyone should ever make. She's wailing, and Xander's coming up beside her and holding onto her desperately, like he's done it before, and she's pressing her face into his shoulder and wailing, wailing, and Spike is standing there blankly, his hands at his sides, the left one sticky with Willow's blood, the right one still clutching the stake, and the crowd has moved away from him so he's standing there alone.

Willow pulls away from Xander abruptly and goes to attack Spike, hit him or scratch his eyes out or something, and he's prepared to let her, but Xander stops her before she's gotten more than a few steps, and she starts crying again, and everyone's watching. Spike still stands there. Tara's dust is all over him, he's breathing it in, it's collecting in the creases of his jacket. The doctor bustles up to Willow with what's left of the first aid kit, gauze and tape and Neosporin, and makes her sit down, puts pressure on the puncture wounds in her neck.

Anya takes Spike by the arm. "Come on," she says quietly, and gently moves him out of the room, takes him to the kitchen and sits him down. The sun is starting to come up.

"She was going to kill her," Spike says. "I didn't have a choice."

"Okay," Anya says, and lights a fire.

"I didn't," Spike says.

"Okay," Anya says again, and Spike stares at the countertop and thinks about Tara's teeth in Willow's neck. The countertop is peeling at one edge, the lineoleum-type material curling upwards. Underneath it's black and gritty.

"I couldn't have done anything else," Spike says, mostly to himself.

"It's too bad it was you, though," Anya says, putting a pot full of blood over the fire to heat it up for him. There's a black stain down one side of it, but the metal is still mostly clear and reflective. Well-made, with a copper-bottom. Spike can see it reflecting the kitchen, but where he should be there's just blank space.

He pulls his eyes away and looks at Anya. "What?" he says. "Why's that?"

Anya looks at him like he asked the stupidest possible question. "Because you're having sexual intercourse with her." She turns and stirs the blood, trying to keep it from congealing too much.

Spike blinks at her back.

She turns back around and catches his expression. "Oh, everybody knows." Spike opens his mouth, but can't think of anything to say, so in the end just shrugs. Anya wipes her hands off on a towel. "So you can see," she continues, "how it doesn't look good, killing Tara when you're sleeping with Willow."

Spike's mouth has gone dry. "I couldn't... she was about to kill her."

Anya shrugs. "Still. It's quite a faux-pas. Even if she was a vampire."

She swings the pot off the stove, the blood smelling sweet and warm, and pours it into a mug, pushing it across the counter to Spike. He looks at it. For a second he feels like he shouldn't be hungry after what's just happened, with Tara's dust still all over him, Willow's blood on his hand, but his stomach's growling, and it's not really his problem. So he drinks it, and goes to wash up.

***

They hold a memorial service for Tara the next day, outside in the sunlight. It's a brilliant sunny day, the sky incredibly blue, the snow incredibly white, and it's so bright Spike can't even watch from a window. He wonders if they did that on purpose.

***

No one except Anya is really speaking to him after that. Giles keeps giving him disappointed looks. Willow won't even be in the same room with him. Xander looks at him apologetically, but then goes after Willow. He's loyal, Xander. Spike wouldn't expect any different.

Spike's never really liked any of them, but the silent treatment bothers him more than it should. He takes to following Anya around, helping with chores. She's maybe the busiest person in the compound, overseeing planting and weaving and cooking and the livestock, her pregnant belly getting places about a minute before she does.

Two days after the memorial service, Spike is asleep in his room, the curtains drawn. (Anya had sewn extra thick ones, to keep all the sunlight out, and they're surprisingly effective.) His blanket is old and woolen, ripped and trailing at the bottom, a tan color left over from the '70s, but it keeps him reasonably warm. He must be tired from all the chores, because he doesn't hear the door open, doesn't wake up until Willow's got a stake pressing against his chest.

Enough light's coming in through the open door for him to see her face, which is quiet and calm and deadly. It's worse than her being upset, either crying or angry - she has reached a point of pale fury, completely collected and resolved. The point of the stake is pressing between his ribs - she's experienced with staking, she won't miss. He's frightened.

"Willow," he says.

"Don't move," she says, and her eyes are red-rimmed but dry. She has both hands on the stake.

He doesn't move.

"I should kill you right now," she says. "No one would mind."

"Willow," he says. "Red."

"Shut up," she says.

They look at each other from what seems like a long distance. It's intimate, almost, her hands on the stake, the stake against his skin. His bare chest, her ratty sleeves. More intimate than when they slept together. Then they never really looked at each other at all. He almost wants to kiss her - they never did much of that, either, when they fucked.

Willow's mouth turns downward, and she tries to control her expression. "Sure," she says, "Xander might be a little annoyed, but that's only because you're useful. The only reason we've kept you alive this long is that you're good at killing things." Her voice is low, quiet. Factual.

He swallows. The point of the stake is digging into his chest painfully, and he thinks it might've broken the skin already. The dirty sheets are rough under his hands.

"You know that, right?" Willow says.

He nods carefully, trying to move as little as possible. It's all he can do not to squirm away from the stake.

"Yeah," she says. "You're a killer." Her eyes start to get brighter, and he's listening desperately for any noise in the hallway, anyone coming by to stop this.

If they would stop this. He's not sure that anyone would.

"You're a killer," she says again, but her voice is getting thick and now he can see that tears are welling up, and she isn't moving the stake.

"I'm sorry," he says. He feels pathetic.

She closes her eyes and her breath catches, and then she drops the stake and sits heavily on the edge of the bed, and she's crying, quietly, wretchedly, and he can finally breathe.

He sits up against the headboard, bends his knees up and rests his forearms on them. He doesn't know whether or not to touch her. She just sits there and cries. Her back is small and convex, and her hair hasn't been washed, and he thinks about patting her shoulder, but doesn't.

"I'm sorry," he says again, finally.

She lets out a shaky breath. There are little robots on her pajama pants, in blue and green. "Oh, like it matters," she says, through snot and tears. "Like that matters."

He runs his hand through his hair and wipes the sleep out of his eyes. "Well, I am," he says.

"I hate you," she says, and gets up to leave slowly, like moving her body hurts, like everything hurts.

***

February turns into March, and the snow hasn't melted. In fact, it keeps snowing more and more, feet of it piling up, drifting against the buildings higher than Spike's head, the air colder and colder. This isn't normal Willamette Valley weather, even in post-apocalyptic Oregon. It's all wrong.

No one looks at him when he walks across the compound, hardly anyone says anything to him at meals, and it's like not existing. It wears on him. Between that and the snow, he can hardly stand it.

"Always winter and never Christmas," Spike dreams he says one night, sitting on top of the wall next to Xander, smoking and watching the empty fields and their breath in the cold air.

"Shut up," Xander says, in the dream. "We had Christmas."

Then the dream shifts and Spike's been re-buried, he has to get himself out of his own grave. But instead of graveyard dirt, he's digging himself out of layers of snow, dead and cold and buried, and he can't breathe.

He wakes up gasping for air, which is ridiculous. He's dead, he doesn't need to breathe. Outside, people tramp through the snow, doing chores, fetching water, fishing, hunting, trying to stay alive. The paths they've shoveled are like tunnels, the snow arching up on either side, up to people's chests. Everyone's cold, all the time, and hungry. The children have stopped playing outside. At first they were always out in the drifts, playing Fox and Geese, having snowball fights, but the novelty has worn off. Everyone is quieter. Afraid, like the snow's pressing in at them, like it's malevolent. Willow has mostly stopped leaving her room.

***

On the first day of spring, they would be getting ready to plant the fields if it weren't for the snow. Even so Xander is in the barn, working on the plows, getting them ready to use, as if any day now there will be a thaw. Idiotically optimistic, that's Xander. He's sanding them down, making new handles for one the cold has split, checking the rest of them for wear and tear. He looks natural working with the wood, like he knows what he's doing, more so than with other things.

Spike stands and watches him for a long moment, waiting for him to look up, but Xander ignores him. Finally, Spike gets the millstones that Anya sent him out for, and goes back to the kitchen. On the way, he passes their memorial wall, where the names of the dead and missing are carved. They’ve had to add more lately, and they're running out of room. The names are getting crowded together towards the bottom.

No one has bothered to cross out Giles's name, even though now they know he didn't die, so it's still there among the dead, in the great crowd of the dead. Beside Buffy and Dawn.

In the kitchen, Anya puts Spike to work grinding grain into flour between the two large stones. It's boring, exhausting work, which vampire strength was not designed for, but he can at least do it for longer than humans can. He grinds the grain and listens idly to Anya bossing people around, and it's just another day.

"Oh no," he hears Anya say, and glances over to see her staring at the floor at her feet. She looks pale, and he suddenly realizes that he smells blood.

"You all right?" Spike says, and as Anya begins to sway, he jumps up to catch her before she falls. She's bleeding, there's a puddle of blood between her feet. "Get the doctor," Spike says to a teenage girl who just walked in the door, and she scampers off, eyes wide. He sighs and scoops Anya up, starts to carry her toward the doctor's rooms, trying not to jostle her too much.

"The baby," she says.

"Shhh," Spike says. "You're fine." They pass John in the hallway, who does a double take and looks alarmed. "Get Xander," Spike tells him, and then he's at the doctor's and it's a jumble of people bustling around and the doctor examining Anya, and blood and fear.

Spike leaves, to stay out of the way, and because the whole thing is dull. Illness and death, monsters and death, snow and death. It all gets so tedious.

***

That night, when Spike goes into the library, Xander's already there, his head in his hands. Spike almost turns to leave, but then Xander says, "She almost died," without even looking up.

Spike stops, his hand on the doorjamb. "She didn't, though?"

Xander starts a little at Spike's voice, and looks up. "Oh, it's you," he says, but without rancor. He rubs his forehead. "No. The doctor got the bleeding under control. She's sleeping now."

"And the baby?"

"Okay, at the moment. Anya's on bed rest until it's born." Xander pinches the bridge of his nose, his eyes closed. His lips move a little, silently, and for a second it's almost as though he's praying. Then, out loud, he says, "Shut the door. You're letting in a draft."

Spike looks at the dark wood of the door, then closes it behind him and walks across the room to the window. "So you're speaking to me again, are you?" he says, his back to the room.

Xander's chair creaks and he sighs. "Oh, fuck off, will you, Spike?"

Outside the window, thick icicles are hanging down from the roof. They melt a bit, when it's sunny during the day, and then refreeze, and some of them are as big around as Spike's wrist. Spike doesn't say anything.

"Look," Xander says, behind him. "I mean. Thanks. For grabbing her and getting the doctor."

"Yeah," Spike says, and shrugs. "Don't mention it."

He hears Xander push his chair back. "I better get back to her, I guess," Xander says. The door creaks open. "See you later."

"Yeah," Spike says, and the door clicks shut. It's so cold the windows are partially frosted over, ice making patterns on the inside of the glass. Jack Frost. The Snow Queen. Spike presses his thumb into the frost to make a hole to look through, but he doesn't have enough body heat to melt it, and all he gets is a cold thumb. When he takes it away, the patterns are completely intact. He didn't change them at all.

***

They miss Anya - she's the expert on almost everything they do to survive, and every time they turn around they have to go running into her room to ask her advice on something. She's propped up against the pillows, cheerful, if a bit pale and bored of not being able to get up. Spike goes in the afternoons to read to her.

One day when he walks in, carrying the battered paperback of Grendel that they're halfway through, Willow is already there, sitting on the straight chair by the bed with her knees pulled up to her chest, body folded up small. Huddled against the cold, they're always cold.

"Oh," Spike says, surprised to see her. "Uh, sorry." He starts to leave.

"Oh, for heaven's sake, you two," Anya says. "There's another chair."

Spike stands in the doorway and looks at her, then at Willow. Willow shrugs. "Whatever," she says, looking at her bony knees. "I don't care."

"Well, neither do I," Spike says.

"I do," Anya says. "Sit down and stop being babies. You have to talk to each other some time." Spike opens his mouth to protest, but Anya cuts him off. "Sit."

He sits.

"Read."

He glances at Willow, who is clutching her knees tighter against her, and still not looking at him, then opens the book, folding it backwards against itself. The pages are yellowed. Clearing his throat and looking at Willow one last time, he begins reading where they had left off. "Nothing was changed, everything was changed by my having seen the dragon.... Futility, doom, became a smell in the air, pervasive and acrid as the dead smell after a forest fire - my scent and the world's, the scent of trees, rocks, waterways wherever I went."

They're only on the second paragraph when Willow gets up, all of a sudden. She mutters something and walks out.

Spike is still holding the book open, his finger marking the place. "What did she say?" he asks Anya. He wants a cigarette. He only has one left - he's been saving it. He doesn't know for what.

"She has to do something," Anya says. "I didn't really catch it."

Spike shrugs and goes back to reading and wanting to smoke. He gets through two pages before the latter urge becomes overpowering. "You mind?" he says, getting the last one out of the crumpled pack and tapping it against his thumb.

"It's bad for the baby," Anya says. He raises an eyebrow at her. "No, not really."

He lights it and keeps reading, the rhythm of breaths, the smell of the smoke, the texture of the yellow pages. The ash hangs off the end of the cigarette in a long cylinder.

He finishes the chapter and the cigarette at the same time, smoked down so low that his fingers are hot. He stubs it out and tries not to regret having smoked it, having none left and no way of getting more. As he puts it out, Anya sits up a little straighter and puts her hand on her belly. "The baby's kicking," she says. "You want to feel?"

Spike looks at her, a little alarmed. "Not really."

"Come on," Anya says, and grabs his hand, presses it against her stomach. Spike feels a stirring under his hand, life, the baby moving inside her.

"Strange, isn't it?" Anya says, and she's smiling.

"Very," Spike says, and there's a rumbling, somewhere in the distance. He cocks his head to the side. "What's that?"

Anya listens too, her forehead furrowing. "Thunder?" There's another peal of it, quiet and far away, deep. Spike moves to the window to look out, but all he sees are empty snow-covered fields and in the distance, trees. Clouds mass on the horizon, but if there's lightning, it's too far away to see.

"What was Willow going to do?" Spike says again, but Anya doesn't answer, just curls her hand protectively over her stomach. The thunder rolls one more time, deep and ominous. He stands at the window, listening, the book forgotten in his hand.

***

The thunder keeps up all afternoon, but there's no sign of lightning, or even rain. Just dry sterile thunder, far in the distance. Menacing. At dinner, food is scarce, and even Spike just gets half a cup of cow's blood. Willow doesn't show, and Giles is still out on the ice, fishing. He doesn't eat much, these days, and skips dinner more often than not. It's one more item on the list of things Xander worries about to Spike. That and how if the snow doesn't melt soon, they won't be able to plant the spring's crops, and then.... Xander always trails off, at that point, but Spike knows what he means. Every winter they barely make it. They're always on the edge of death.

"Where's Willow?" Xander says when Spike finishes eating and gets up to leave.

Spike snorts. "You're asking the wrong person."

Xander twists his mouth, and looks down the table. Tara's place, empty; Willow's; Giles's; Anya's. Finally he comes to John, who says, "I saw her walking out the gate earlier."

"Oh," Xander says, and looks worried.

John pulls at the neck of his shirt, fanning it so air goes down his collar. "It seem hot in here to you?"

"A little," Xander says.

It does feel warm, even more so when Spike goes outside and isn't hit by the familiar shock of cold. It's almost mild; the air seems moist, and the wind is picking up. The thunder's still rolling, far away.

He gets a fishing pole and goes down to join Giles, sitting on the ice. The hole they've been fishing at has expanded over time, almost three feet across now. Giles is bundled in blankets, and the bucket next to his chair is full of fish. He's rubbing at the wound in his thigh gently, like it aches.

"Rupert," Spike says in greeting, and Giles nods at him as he sets down a lawn chair and baits his hook. There's another roll of thunder, getting louder. Giles's fishing pole jerks as something bites down on it.

"Another one?" Spike says, as Giles begins to reel it in. The blanket around Giles comes untucked, and the edge of it is flapping in the wind.

"Hey!" Spike hears from behind them, and when he turns, Xander's walking through the snow towards them, down the slope towards the river. Spike puts his pole to the side of his chair - not like he's catching anything anyway - and goes up to meet him.

"Have you seen Willow?" Xander says, when they've met halfway. "I don't want her disappearing again." Thunder sounds again over the end of his sentence, so loud it almost drowns him out. Xander's hair's grown long, shagging over his collar, and the wind is tossing it around and into his eyes. Xander tries to push it back.

"No," Spike says. "Not since this afternoon. She said she had to do something."

"Do what?" Xander says, and Spike sees a flash of lightning. That's the first, that he's seen. He looks in the direction of the flare for a long moment before turning his attention back to Xander and shrugging. "When was this?" Xander says.

"I don't know," Spike says. "Late afternoon. Right before...." He trails off, realizing. Xander raises his eyebrows. "Right before the thunder started," Spike finishes. He and Xander look at each other. Behind them, Giles is standing on the edge of the hole, taking the hook out of the mouth of the fish he's just caught. Xander shifts his weight, and the snow crunches under his feet.

Another roll of thunder starts, first in the distance but then rumbling louder and louder, closer and closer, until Spike can feel it in his gut, the deep vibration of it, shaking him. Xander's eyes go wide, staring over Spike's shoulder, and when Spike turns to look, he sees Giles teetering on the edge of the hole in the ice, sees the surface under his feet shaking, the water rippling. And as he watches, as the thunder reaches its peak, the ice gives out and Giles goes straight down into the water, like Buffy falling off the tower, like Dawn falling through the air after her, the darkness of the water like the portal they had both plunged into too late to save the world.

There is a moment of horrible silence as the thunder stops abruptly and the water has closed over Giles's head, a silence so deep and painful Spike's ears are ringing with it, the empty river, Giles gone like he never stood there. But then Xander's yelling, and he and Spike are scrambling down the river bank to the ice, sliding in the snow on the sides of their feet, and then they are crawling carefully out onto the ice on their stomachs, spreading their bodies out to disperse their weight, making their way out to where the ice has gone rotten. Spike's smaller, so he crawls out the farthest, Xander holding his legs in case the ice goes out under him too. He reaches into the blackness of the water, the icy coldness of it, and feels around for Giles, his hair, his skin, his clothing. For a long moment, there's nothing.

Then Giles comes floating up from the depths, gasping for breath as his head emerges from the water, and Spike is getting a good grip on him and they're pulling him out of the hole, cold and sodden and coughing, choking up water. They get him all the way to the river bank, all three of them off the ice, lying there panting.

Spike's so wet from the water of the river that it takes him a minute to realize that it's begun to rain. Rain - not ice, not snow - rain coming down in big, wet drops, making craters in the layer of snow on the ground, melting everything. Xander helps Spike to his feet, dark hair getting slicked flat to his forehead, water dripping off his nose, and he's looking around wonderingly.

"It's rain," Xander says. "It's the thaw."

Spike blinks warm rain out of his eyes and wipes it off his face, and it's pouring, coming down in buckets. He looks at Xander for a second, then they both turn towards Giles, figuring he must be on the verge of hypothermia, that he needs to get inside and warmed up as soon as possible. But when they turn, somehow Giles has gotten to his feet by himself, is standing there on the edge of the river without even his walking stick. His glasses are bizarrely still perched on his nose, wet and fogging up, the water on them a pearly sheen reflecting in the light. Under Giles's feet, Spike can see wet grass instead of snow, rivulets of water running over Giles's shoes and into the river.

The ice cracks. Spike and Xander both jump, but Giles is steady and doesn't move. For a second he looks kingly, standing straight, not even shivering.

Willow comes running up, her hair slicked down by the water, her arms full of branches of holly berries. "You guys," she says, and she's smiling. It's the first time she's smiled in a long time. "It's raining." Then she looks over at Giles, standing there all on his own, and she blinks. "Wait, what happened?"

"I fell through the ice," Giles says.

"Oh," Willow says. She pushes her wet hair out of her eyes with one hand, shifting the branches she's carrying. "Are you okay?"

Giles starts nodding, slowly. "Yes," he says, and he sounds surprised. "Yes, I think I am."

"Willow," Xander says, raising his voice to be heard over the roaring of all the water, the swelling river, the melting snow. "What did you do?"

Willow looks surprised. "What?" she says. "I didn't do anything." Mud is appearing under her feet too, under all their feet, and the thunder rolls again.

"Are you sure?" Xander says. "It's raining."

"Of course I'm sure," Willow says. "It's just raining. It wasn't me."

The rain keeps pouring down, clumps of snow falling off tree branches, the air getting warmer and warmer so some of the snow is beginning to evaporate straight into steam. When they all turn to walk back up the hill to the buildings, Willow's arm brushes Spike's. Giles doesn't lean on anyone. All they can hear are the sounds of water.

***

END