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