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The cold of the cement seeped through the knees of her jeans, a dull, persistent ache that was almost comforting in its familiarity.
Almost.
Buffy Summers stared at the headstone, the letters blurring in and out of focus as the late afternoon sun cast long, skeletal shadows across the graveyard.
IN LOVING MEMORY OF BUFFY ANNE SUMMERS
BELOVED SISTER, DEVOTED FRIEND
SHE SAVED THE WORLD. A LOT.
A dry, hollow sound escaped her throat. It wasn’t a laugh. It was the echo of where a laugh might have once lived.
“I brought the good stuff,” a voice said from behind her: gentle, measured, cutting through the silent movie reel playing in her head.
Giles.
He didn’t ask if she was okay. He didn’t offer a platitude. He moved to stand beside her, his shadow falling across the grass, and placed a thermos on the flat top of the neighboring grave. “Earl Grey. No milk, two sugars. The way you… used to like it.”
Buffy’s eyes flicked from her own name to the thermos. Steam curled from its spout, a tiny, defiant plume of life in a place meant for endings. She’d been here for an hour, maybe more. Time had a funny way of bending around her now, stretching thin in some moments, collapsing in others. The world had a high-definition clarity that was physically painful—the vibrant green of the grass, the sharp scent of damp earth and chrysanthemums from a nearby plot, the granular texture of the stone under her fingertips—but it all seemed to be happening on the other side of a thick, soundproof glass.
“It’s weird,” she said, her voice raspy from disuse. “Looking at it. Like… reading your own obituary. Which I guess I am, in a way.” She finally tilted her head back to look at him.
Giles looked older. The lines around his eyes were deeper, etched not just by worry but by a grief he’d had to live with, carry, and then suddenly set down. It left marks.
“It is weird,” he agreed, unscrewing the thermos cap. He poured the steaming tea into the small cup, the sound loud in the quiet. “It’s perfectly all right to find it so. There’s no handbook for this, Buffy.”
“There’s a handbook for everything else,” she muttered, accepting the cup. The heat warmed her palms: a sharp, present sensation that anchored her for a second. “Vampires, demons, dimensional rifts… Chapter Twelve: Etiquette for When You Return From a Heavenly Dimension and Have to Visit Your Own Grave.”
A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched his lips. “I believe that one was tragically lost in the Watcher’s Council fire of 1952. A terrible oversight.”
She sipped the tea. It was perfect. It scalded her tongue and tasted of bergamot and sweetness and before. And for a dizzying second, she was sixteen again, sitting in the library, complaining about trigonometry while he polished his glasses. The memory was so vivid it stole her breath.
“They wanted to come,” Giles said after a moment, his gaze scanning the peaceful, deceptive lawn. “Willow, Xander, Dawn, Tara. They’re… rather desperately worried. And trying very hard to give you space. It’s causing them a degree of psychic whiplash I fear may be permanent.”
Buffy winced. She could picture them in the living room of Revello Drive: a tense, quiet constellation of concern. Dawn, trying to be grown-up and failing, her eyes huge. Willow, vibrating with a magic she was trying so hard to leash. Xander, making terrible jokes that died in the thick air. Tara, offering quiet, grounding touches that Buffy had been flinching away from. They’d pulled her from the grave. They’d literally clawed the earth away to reclaim her. And now she couldn’t stand to be in the same room with them for more than twenty minutes.
“It’s too loud,” she whispered, not sure if she was talking about their voices or their hearts or the sheer, overwhelming aliveness of them. “Everything is too… much. The fridge is humming. Dawn’s hairbrush scraping. The air.” She looked at her hands, pale against the dark granite. “It was quiet there. Peaceful. I was… I was finished.”
The words hung between them, stark and ugly. She waited for the flinch, the correction, the ‘Don’t say that.’
Giles took a slow breath. He sat down on the grass beside her, ignoring the damp, and looked at the headstone with her. “I can’t pretend to understand. And I won’t insult you by saying I’m glad you’re back.”
That got her attention. She turned her head, staring at his profile.
“I am relieved,” he continued, choosing each word with the care of a bomb disposal expert. “For myself. For Dawn. For the world, which undoubtedly still needs you. But glad implies a benefit to you, and I am acutely aware that we have, once again, asked you to carry a burden we cannot. To trade your peace for our war. So, no. I’m not glad. I am profoundly, eternally grateful. And desperately sorry.”
Tears, hot and sudden, welled in Buffy’s eyes. They were the first tears she’d shed since crawling out of her own coffin. They weren’t tears of sadness, or joy, or even anger. There were tears of sheer, overwhelming recognition. He saw it. He saw her. Not the Slayer, not the miracle, not the resurrected friend. The person who had been taken from a place of rest and thrust back into the cold.
She didn’t let them fall. She swallowed them down with another gulp of tea, the heat a punishment and a comfort. “It’s cold,” she said, changing the subject because the other path felt like a cliff edge.
“It’s November,” Giles replied, accepting the shift.
“No. I mean… it’s cold. All the time. Since I… came back. I have the heater on, blankets, and I wear two sweaters. Dawn walks around in a t-shirt. I can’t get warm.” She hugged herself, her slender shoulders hunched. “My bones feel cold.”
Giles’ brow furrowed, his Watcher instincts clicking into gear alongside his paternal ones. “A physiological side effect of the mystical trauma, perhaps. Or a lingering… resonance. We should have Tara look at your aura, see if there’s a…”
“No,” Buffy cut him off, sharper than she intended. “No more magic. Not on me. Please.”
The silence that followed was heavy. The unspoken ‘It was magic that did this’ hung in the air between them. Willow’s magic. Done with love, with desperate, grieving love, but it had torn a hole in the universe and shoved Buffy back through it, screaming.
“Alright,” Giles said softly. “No magic.” He looked up at the grey sky. The first, fat flakes of snow began to drift down, meandering lazily in the still air. “I heard they were calling for a bit of snow today but I didn’t believe them…”
They sat in silence for a long while, watching the snow dust the grass and the headstones, catching in the wool of Giles’ scarf, melting instantly on the warm thermos. The world grew softer, quieter, muffled.
“What does snow become when it melts?” Buffy asked, her voice barely a whisper. It was a question from a childhood riddle book, one she’d read to Dawn.
Giles didn’t answer with the riddle. He thought for a moment, watching a flake land on the engraved ‘S’ in ‘Summers’ and vanish. “Water,” he said. “It becomes water. Which feeds the earth. Which allows for new growth.” He glanced at her. “Spring, of course, is the traditional answer. But the transition is water. Cold, at first. Necessary.”
Buffy nodded slowly, her eyes tracking the falling snow. “It feels like the cold part. The… melting part. Like I’m this… messy, cold puddle where something solid used to be.”
“A puddle can reflect the sky,” Giles offered. “It’s temporary. It moves. It finds its level, and then it soaks in, or flows on.” He hesitated, then placed a tentative hand on her back, between her shoulder blades. A simple, solid weight. “No matter how cold it is, Buffy… the snow does melt. Spring will come again. It’s not a metaphor for happiness. It’s a fact of cycles. Of change. However unbearable the cold seems now, the mechanism of the world turns. It is, in my experience, relentlessly stubborn about continuing.”
A small, real shiver went through her, and she leaned, almost imperceptibly, into the warmth of his hand. It was the first time she’d willingly accepted touch since her return.
“I don’t know how to be here,” she confessed, the words dragged from a deep, dark place.
“Then we’ll learn,” he said, his voice firm with a conviction that brooked no argument. “Together. One excruciatingly cold day at a time.”
He helped her to her feet. Her legs were stiff, prickling with pins and needles. She brushed the grass and snow from her knees, her movements slow, deliberate. She took one last look at the headstone, now wearing a thin, white cap.
“We should go,” Giles said. “Willow is attempting a shepherd’s pie. The smoke alarms are in a state of high alert.”
A ghost of a smile, the faintest echo of the girl she had been, touched Buffy’s lips. “We’re saving the world from a culinary apocalypse?”
“See?” Giles said, picking up the thermos. “Some things never change.”
They walked out of the cemetery side-by-side, their footprints tracing a single path in the newly fallen snow. The house, when they approached it, was a beacon of golden light in the twilight. Through the front window, Buffy could see the silhouettes of her friends moving in the kitchen, a chaotic, living diorama. She stopped on the walkway, the cold air biting her lungs.
“It’s so bright in there,” she said, her voice small.
Giles stood beside her, not pushing, just present. “We can stand here until you’re ready. All night, if necessary. We’ve weathered worse.”
Buffy wrapped her arms around herself, watching as Xander gestured wildly, apparently recounting a story, and Dawn threw a dish towel at him. Tara was smiling, stirring something on the stove, while Willow waved a spoon like a conductor’s baton. It was loud. It was messy. It was alive.
She took a deep, shuddering breath, the cold air feeling cleaner, sharper than it had before. The warmth of the tea was gone from her hands, but the memory of it, of the gesture, remained.
“Okay,” she whispered, more to herself than to him. Then, louder, with a fraction of the steel that had slain monsters, “Okay.”
She walked up the porch steps, Giles a half-step behind her, a silent sentinel. She turned the knob and pushed the door open.
A wave of heat, noise, and the unmistakable scent of something vaguely pie-like and burning hit her. All movement in the kitchen froze. Four pairs of eyes locked onto her, wide with hope, fear, and unbearable love.
Dawn was the first to break. She took a step forward, then stopped, chewing her lip. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” Buffy replied. She didn’t smile, but she didn’t turn away. She stepped inside, letting the door close behind her, shutting out the cold, dark, silent world.
“How was it?” Willow asked, her voice painfully gentle.
Buffy looked at their faces, this found family that had shattered heaven to get her back. This messy, complicated, heartbreaking puddle she was standing in.
“Cold,” she said honestly. Then she shrugged off her coat, hanging it on the peg by the door—a simple, normal act that felt like a monumental effort. “Something’s burning.”
The spell broke. Xander lunged for the oven with a yelp. Tara calmly took the spoon from Willow’s hand. Dawn let out a breath she seemed to have been holding for months.
Giles moved past Buffy, heading for the kitchen. “I did warn you about the cheese grater, Xander…”
Buffy stood in the entryway, the sounds of her family’s chaotic, loving life swirling around her. The cold was still in her bones. The quiet peace of the grave still called, a siren song from a distant shore. But here, now, there was also the smell of burnt cheese, the sound of her sister’s tentative laugh, the solid presence of a man who had chosen to be her father in every way that mattered.
The snow was falling outside, covering everything, making the world new and clean and silent. But inside, the furnace was on. The oven was a disaster. The kettle was boiling for another pot of tea.
She was so, so cold.
But maybe, just maybe, she could start to thaw.