by L. Inman
1.
"Mmm, donuts," Buffy said, snagging a jelly. "This was a good idea of Xander's."
"You don't have to help with the research, you know," Giles said, gaze buried in his dusty tome.
"I don't mind. Plus, donuts."
"Mm."
A silence. Then Buffy slapped shut her book and hauled over another one. "I didn't know there were so many demon cultures," she said. "I have enough trouble keeping up with the human ones. Speaking of, did you know what I found out today?"
Giles glanced up despite himself. "What?"
"An interesting fact. Did you know that the Eskimos have twenty different words for snow? I guess they have a lot of it, so they felt the need to make up more words for all the different kinds. I think it makes sense. I mean, I have all different kinds of words for my work—a stake alone—"
"It's an urban legend, Buffy," Giles said, with gentle exasperation.
"A whoziwhatsit?"
"An urban legend. The Eskimos actually have fewer than four root words for snow, and that's generous depending on the tribe. Probably, there are more words in English for snow: blizzard, flurry, sleet—"
"Thanks for snowing on my parade, Giles."
2.
Buffy hunched down in her chair and set her eyes meditatively on the cold cup of vending-machine coffee that Giles had left next to his scattered notes on the Ascension, both equally abandoned. Giles himself was pacing with staccato steps around the library lobby.
Her life was such a fugue state. Not that she knew exactly what that meant, but she suspected it hit the nail on the head. Girls her age started looking for jobs to take up where school left off, or got ready to go to college, off to the next stage of their lives. Buffy had a job, and this might be the last stage of her life. And yet one made plans, as Giles would say.
"Giles?"
"Mm." Giles did not vary his pacing.
"D'you ever think how crazy life is? I mean, things going on on so many levels, and you have to talk about it differently every time. It's like that old thing about the Eskimos having—"
"—nine words for snow, or twenty, or two hundred. Buffy, please."
He had stopped. She looked up to see him glaring at her, flushed, taut-faced.
"Are you okay?" she asked quietly.
His gaze dropped.
3.
Giles wandered around the Magic Box, touching things at random, the way he hated to watch customers doing. He ought to be packing. Half the lights were off, and so when a trinket caught a gleam of sun from the window, he paused to pick it up: a heavy crystal globe with a figure of a wizard inside, mounted on a dragon, with glitter for snow. Kitsch, and not even good kitsch; why was he selling such rubbish?
The doorbell tinkled, and sunlight fell across him briefly as Xander and Willow walked in with—his heart stopped for a moment—the Buffybot. "Got it working again," Willow said. They avoided calling the bot by name.
Xander came over to where he stood (he had nearly matched Giles's height now), and gently relieved him of the globe to look at it. He cocked his head and shook it, and gave a little laugh. "It's snowing glitter. Hey, did you know," he said, "that the Eskimos—"
"Have many words for snow," Giles said dully. "Yes."
Xander laid an unobtrusive hand on Giles's shoulder as he returned the trinket to the shelf.
"I've never heard of such a thing," the Buffybot said.
4.
They were all dead, and he didn't know why he wasn't.
Though, he thought with mordant humor, dead was a multivalent term. It couldn't exactly be living to spend most of his waking hours and a good part of his sleeping ones on planes, more often than not accompanied by girls with whom he had nothing in common, shivering with fear and excitement: young lives both endangered and coming to fullness. Planes touched down in all weathers, weathers that meant nothing to him: snow was the same everywhere, and hard rain; only the endless sun of Southern California was distinctive, evoking shadows of love and loathing.
Occasionally Buffy's words haunted him as he looked out the umpteenth plane window into darkness. Why am I back?...It was my time. Buffy had learned to ask the hard questions about her purpose, something these girls might never get the chance to do. All they knew was that an alien malignancy had targeted them for a brutal death.
He mounted the steps to the house on Revello, the girl following. He'd forgotten her name again.
Buffy opened the door, her eyes as empty as he felt his own must be.
"I'm back," he said.
5.
"Some vacation this is turning out to be," Buffy said, knocking snow off her Docs.
"We're closest to the girl," Giles reminded her, securing a tennis-racket to his foot with twine. "Here, we'll have one makeshift snowshoe each. Buck up. All we have to do is crest that hill to the house. And stop kicking my car: it's stranded, not doomed." Buffy desisted and donned the other tennis-racket, grumbling as a vicious wind-blast threw snow in her face.
Floundering over drifts with one makeshift snowshoe, Buffy found her super-strength was actually a liability. It only made it worse watching Giles competently plodding next to her, grim cheer on his wind-stung face. She stumbled over her feet into deep cold powder.
"We're gonna die." The wind caught at her words as she struggled upright.
Giles gave her a sly look. "I say...did you know the Eskimos have more than twenty words for snow?" He plodded on, grinning.
Buffy snatched off her mittens. The snow was too dry for packing, but she managed nevertheless to paste him in the back of the head with a good-sized snowball. He turned swiftly, scooping up snow to retaliate.
Their laughter rang cold over the hill.