Title: Hold Me

Spoilers: Takes place after Season 5's episode "Intervention"

Disclaimer: I don't claim any rights of ownership to characters, names, etc. Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy and Fox own everything. I've written this purely for personal entertainment purposes and receive no compensation.

Notes: My thanks to Vatwoman and Head Rush for beta work, excellent suggestions, and many kind words of encouragement.

The story begins….

They walked in silence. The only sound was the dry crunch their boots made on the graveled trail. There'd been a brief dispute upon arrival at this place, even before getting out of the car. What was the matter with him? She didn't want to walk up a mountain, she'd insisted. Well, what had she thought he meant when he'd suggested a day in the mountains? She had no response to that. So they walked.

It was late morning. Buffy was squinting up at the typically over-brilliant sun parched sky when, without warning, the air spoke to her in a whisper of the first Slayer's voice. 'You love with all of your soul. It's brighter than the fire...blinding. That's why you pull away from it.'

The voice was soft but the words clawed at her brain, demanding acknowledgment. She ignored them and stumbled.

Giles scrambled forward, catching her by the shoulders as she skidded backwards to him. She yelped and quickly righted herself, dusting off her backside and tugging at her shirt as if she had actually hit the ground. "Thanks," she muttered, embarrassed.

"You were looking up at the sky." Wisps of her hair fluttering in the warm breeze distracted him as he spoke. Her face was flushed. "You should really keep your eyes on the trail when climbing such a steep incline. If you want to look around, stop where you are. You'll be able to maintain your balance better."

She steadied herself against one of the yellow-leafed trees lining the trail up the mountain and dug a stick into the tread on her boot. A stone fell out and she dropped her foot onto the ground with a thud and screwed up her face. "Ok, so tell me again why we're doing this…again. I mean didn't the first vision quest weird me out enough? You want more?"

"I thought this could be less quest and more…vision." His voice was gentle as was his gaze.

"Huh?"

"This isn't quite the same as before." Her frown forced him to elaborate. He gestured up toward the trail. "Mountain instead of desert." He patted his backpack and pointed at her water bottle. "Food and water."

"How about a magic gourd. You got one of those in there? "

A small, embarrassed smile took hold of him for a moment. "No gourd, I promise."

"Then what's the point?" she sputtered.

"I thought you could use a break. Time away from…everything." He removed his glasses and began cleaning them with a cloth from his pocket avoiding the too familiar, of late, look on her face; the look covering up the emotion within, which he suspected she feared even more than the hell God she had to face. A cold stare had become her armor.

"Giles, I don't have time for time away from anything, let alone everything. Dawn needs…"

"Dawn is being well looked after. It's only for the day; we'll be back by nightfall. And, in all fairness, you were the one who brought up the problem."

She sighed and he heard the irritation etching her breath. "What problem?"

"Wasn't it you who, just a few days ago, told me something was wrong, that you felt emotionally shut down and you didn't like it?"

"Yeah, but we did that quest thing."

"I'm not certain it helped…" he began.

"Great." Words rushed out of her, trampling over his. "Another visit from my muddy mystical predecessor offering words of wisdom that won't tell me what I need to know." Her caustic tone silenced Giles for a moment. He sank his hands into his pockets. "Do you want to tell me what she said?" he asked, not expecting an answer.

"I told you on the drive home from the desert."

"Actually, you said very little."

"I did to...I said it was stupid and nothing we didn't already know." Buffy ripped a leaf from a tree. "She just put it in a way I'd never thought of. It was…doesn't matter. I just hope if I see her again she has something useful to say."

Giles sat down on a large rock near her, his elbows resting on his knees and looked at her. "Buffy, I've been thinking about this quite a bit since you first brought it up. The emotional shut down, that is." He removed his glasses and held them gently in his fingertips waiting for any indication that she was listening. None was forthcoming but he continued. "Your experience is perfectly understandable and normal in many ways." She turned toward him, the leaf now shredded in her fingers. "You're holding everything in…not allowing yourself to feel." He watched her face shrink in confusion and realized stating it delicately wasn't going to get through to her right now. He changed tact; hoping bluntness would penetrate her emotional denial. "You're repressing your emotions."

Her confusion crumbled away, replaced by a gasped exclamation. "Me! You think that I'm repressing my emotions? Ha. That's pretty funny coming from Mr. 'I invented repressed emotions' guy."

He replaced his glasses firmly, stared at the ground for a moment and then back at her. "Yes, I see how you might think that, and it might even be true, but it doesn't change what you're dealing with. You've had a great many major changes in your life lately. The most recent being the hardest." He stood and moved toward her gingerly, treating her as the skittish thing she'd become. "In losing your mother you've lost your anchor, and I'm concerned that you're finding it easier to ignore the pain than to allow yourself to experience it."

She stared at him, unblinking for a moment and then spoke, her voice as strained and tight as her mouth. "You think I don't feel…her…her…" He watched her struggle wordlessly until she ran her tongue over dry lips and was able to continue. "You think I don't feel the pain of it?"

"I think you feel it profoundly, so much so that you've buried it in order to find some relief. You can't even speak of it. And what you really need to do is express your feelings in order to release the pain, not hold it all in."

She opened her clenched fist and threw the shards of shredded leaf onto the ground, staring at them as if waiting for some sign of life. "Giles, I vent, if that's what you're driving at. I'm the chosen one with the venting."

"Pummeling vampires isn't the type of venting you need. It might be helpful in exercising your anger but not the hurt, the loss, anguish…and emptiness." His voice trailed off.

Something vulnerable flicker across her face, but it was gone as quickly as it appeared. She looked away. "It's all the same. You'd be amazed at the satisfaction I can get from dusting."

"It's not the same, Buffy. You and I both know that from experience."

She shot a look at him that carried a mixture of anger and regret.

"I know that losing Angel was a very different experience from losing your mother…"

"Yeah, particularly since I was the one who killed him."

"That…" He swallowed and heard his voice softened more than he would have chosen. "…and the fact that he came back."

Upon hearing just those few words her eyes exuded something childlike, reflecting a naïve and unrealistic glimmer of hope. He caught his breath as he swore he saw the word 'Mom' form on her lips. Empty seconds passed as he searched for the right words; words to comfort, words to ease her pain. It seemed endless. A groan rose up from the impatient earth as it turned and in the end he could only speak the truth. "Buffy, you know that she won't be coming back. It's not possible."

Her face fell imperceptibly as her eyes iced over. "I know," she whispered, turning away as if looking at him and speaking to him at the same time was overwhelming. "Dead people don't come back, at least not as humans. They come back as things I have to kill."

He was speaking to her in that low soft voice he used when feeling her pain. There was a time she liked that voice. It meant he understood what she was going through, but now she hated it. She didn't want to be understood; how could anyone know what this pain was like? All she wanted was to bury it, to hide from it. 'Go away, go away!' the voice in her head screamed at him.

He continued. "Holding things in and not allowing the people who care about you to help didn't turn out well in the situation with Angel."

Buffy grunted and began circling the tree, making it easier to avoid his eyes. "Like there's a good way to deal with it. And I'm not going to run away again, if that's what you're worried about. I've got Dawn to take care of and Glory to deal with."

"I'm not worried about you running away, at least not physically. But I am concerned we might lose you in other ways." A scowl followed by a sidelong look from her urged him on. "You said it yourself. You can't feel anymore…except, I think that you do feel anger and frustration."

"And you think climbing around in the mountains when I should be fighting Glory is going to help?"

"I believe a few hours escape from the constant strain of slaying and protecting your sister might help, might start you on the path to healing. You need to allow yourself time to grieve, if even just a little." He reached out to touch her shoulder but pulled back when she stepped out of reach. "You'll be stronger for it." She kicked a rock onto the trail on her next circuit of the tree. "You may not believe this, but I do know what you're afraid of." She stole a glance but when their eyes meet, she jerked hers away again. "You fear that if you allow yourself to feel the pain you'll fall apart completely, that you won't be good to anyone, that you won't be able to protect Dawn or defeat Glory."

She stopped circling. "And you don't think that's what'll happen?" Her voice had a practiced hardness about it as she stepped back against the tree for support.

"I know it won't. I've seen you through a lot; I know what you're capable of. And…you have people who love you standing at the ready, if you'll just allow us to help."

She closed her eyes, shutting out the world. Her jaw throbbed from endless clenching. The ever present, ever-denied ache inside pitched and frothed until it began to seep out the chinks his words were making in her armor. It poured over her, quickly crystallizing into a hard resin trapping her emotions inside while keeping him and everything else out. She took a breath. Strengthened by the protective barrier, she pushed herself off the tree and marched up the trail.

Giles sighed, grabbed his backpack and followed after her.

She shot ahead of him but he caught up on the flat portion of the trail that circled the small mountain. They were midway to the peak. Barely 10 feet behind her now, he watched as she put the earpieces to her Walkman on and sighed knowing that, once connected to her music, there'd be no talking anytime soon. She rounded a bend and crossed into the shaded side of the mountain. He followed.