Title: Let it Snow
Author: Rainne
Pairing: B/G
Rating: FRAO/NC-17
Disclaimers: Buffy & Co belong to Joss & Co. No profit made here. Don't sue.
Spoilers: vague
Feedback: is my crack.
Distribution: Ask first.
Summary: Christmas in Bath, a few years after the end of season seven.
Warning: Slight angst, death of secondary characters

A knock on her front door brought Buffy Summers out of a deep depressive meditative state. She wrenched her unfocused gaze away from the roaring fire in her fireplace and turned toward the door. The knock repeated and she got up, wondering who on Earth would be on her doorstep in the middle of a raging English-countryside blizzard.

Her question was answered in the form of the Snow-Demon Formerly Known As Rupert Giles, who dashed through the door as soon as it was opened and danced around in the entryway, trying to warm up. "Bloody fucking hell!" he exclaimed, snow falling off him in clumps. "I don't recall temperatures this low since I was a boy!"

She shut the door quickly to keep out the freezing winds, and set about relieving him of his damp overcoat and the jacket beneath. "You're gonna catch pneumonia or something, Giles!" she admonished. "What the hell are you doing out in weather like this?"

He grinned at her. "I'm not out in it any more, am I? I'm in here with you."

She grinned back. "Why, so you are."

There was a plastic bag poking out of one of the deep pockets of his overcoat, and he reached forward to pull it out. He withdrew a large chrome Thermos and held it out to her cheerfully. "Hot cider?"

She squealed with delight. "Giles, you're the best! Come on, you come sit by the fire and I'll get some glasses." She ushered him into the little living room and then disappeared into the kitchen, returning a moment later with two champagne flutes and a tin of biscuits - the little thin buttery ones.

He smiled. "Champagne flutes?"

She put out her tongue at him as she sank gracefully to the floor beside him, setting the tin of biscuits between them and opening the Thermos. "It's all that was clean. The maid seems to be off this week."

He blinked. "You haven't got a maid."

"Hmm. Must be why nothing's clean." She smirked at him as he realized her joke and grinned appreciatively. "So, honestly, what on Earth convinced you to come all the way out here on a night like tonight? And I hope you brought a bag because there's no way I'm letting you drive all the way back to town tonight."

He blinked. "Goodness. I'd forgotten. I should go and get it before the car's covered by the snow."

She sighed, but moved to the entryway with him, helping him on with his overcoat and watching, shivering, in the doorway as he dashed back out to his car, retrieved his overnight bag, and dashed back again. They repeated the earlier process of snow-shedding and coat-hanging, and then returned to their warm places by the fire, sitting in silence until the shivering stopped.

"I couldn't let you be alone tonight," he finally said softly. "It wouldn't be right."

She sighed. "It's just another night these days, Giles."

"Of course it's not," he chided her gently. "Buffy, it's still Christmas."

She sighed, pulling her knees against her chest. "Yeah."

He looked around the cozy room. "You didn't get a tree?"

"Didn't much feel like it, really," she said softly. "Not so much with the Christmas cheer this year."

He reached out and gently touched her shoulder. "They wouldn't have wanted you to grieve your life away."

A tear trickled down her cheek. "Never did give them what they wanted. Any of them."

"That's not true, Buffy!" he exclaimed. "They all loved you very much, no matter what happened. You know that."

She sighed, hugging her knees tighter. "I know." After a long moment of silence, he heard her whisper, "I miss them."

"As do I," he said softly. "We have the comfort of knowing that none of them suffered in any way."

"No, they left that for me." She suddenly looked up at him. "For us. God, how could I be so selfish? Here you are trying to comfort me when you're just as alone on Christmas as I am."

He smiled softly, sadly. "But I'm not alone, Buffy. I'm here with you."

She smiled wanly. "I'm not good Christmas company, Giles."

"You're the only company I could want," he replied softly.

She moved closer to him, resting her head on his shoulder, and he instinctively moved his arm to wrap around her shoulders. They sat there on the rug before the fireplace, watching the flames jump, occasionally sipping at their cider, and feeling each other breathe. Then suddenly he moved. "I almost forgot," he said, standing. "I've brought you something."

She blinked. He'd brought her a Christmas present? She watched him as he moved back into the entryway and returned a moment later with his bag. He rummaged around inside it for a moment before withdrawing a small, wrapped package. "Oh, Giles, you shouldn't have."

"Nonsense. I wanted to." He handed it to her. "Open it, please."

She pulled at the wrapping paper and her eyes filled with tears as she stared at the framed photograph. She, Dawn, Xander, Willow and Giles, all standing together at the edge of the Crater Formerly Known As Sunnydale, grinning and happy. This photograph had been taken a year and a half after the destruction of the town, and about ten hours before the car crash that had taken Dawn, Xander and Willow from them.

She'd lost her mind with grief after the accident. Survivor's guilt, the hospital shrink said. She was supposed to have been in the car with the three of them, but had backed out of a shopping trip at the last moment due to a bad headache. Angel had come, trying to be her rock and her comfort, but she didn't want anything to do with him. The only one who'd been able to soothe her raging grief was Giles, who eventually took her from the L.A. hospital and brought her here, to this tiny cabin on his family's extensive estate outside Bath, miles from town where he kept a flat of his own. The solitude was nice - she liked it. It was quiet here, far away from life and the things of living that she was no longer able to face on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes, she was even able to think about other things for long stretches of time.

She'd discovered a talent for art out here, when he bought her a set of pencils and a sketchpad as a way to pass time. She'd begun slowly, sketching her sister and friends from memory, but before long she was using chalks, crayons, pastels and paints to create beautiful works. He'd convinced her to let him take a few of her better pieces to a shop in town that was run by a friend of his, and they'd sold almost immediately. She became suddenly all the rage, her work sought after by the avant-garde and the nouveau riche. Fleeting fame, perhaps, but lucrative. Just the previous week, in fact, she'd actually appeared in public for the first time since coming to England, at a gallery function in London and on Giles's arm. She hadn't stayed long, unable to bear the press and vulgar curiosity of the crowd, but it was a start. She was healing, however slowly.

He, on the other hand, had been her rock, even through his own grief. Stalwart as always, he held her up when she fell and it was that task which enabled him to carry on. Knowing that someone had to take care of Buffy, and knowing that he would never entrust her to anyone's care but his own, had given him the impetus he needed to keep going. He, too, was healing.

He watched her gently touch the faces in the photograph, the bright smiles too soon taken from them, and then took her in his arms as she began to cry, shushing her gently and holding her close in a way that neither of them would have been comfortable with before the destruction of the Sunnydale Hellmouth. She clung to him like a drowning woman, sobbing out her pain once again. But when she'd cried herself out, she didn't withdraw from him as she usually did. She held onto him, her face buried in the crook of his neck, breathing in the scent of him and slowly coming to a new realization.

After a long moment, she sat back a bit and looked up into his face. Her hand slowly rose to caress his cheek, her thumb brushing at the wetness she found there that matched her own. "Why are we alone together, Giles?" she asked him softly. "There's nobody out there for me - I've started to realize that. And I think you're starting to realize that there's nobody out there for you. But maybe... maybe there's somebody in here for each of us?"

His breath caught in his throat as he processed that unlikely statement. And then he gave her the most honest answer he could give her. "I don't know, Buffy. But it's been this way ever since that bloody ponce Travers went on about his bleeding father's love. Because I think that you know as well as I do that neither of us looked on our relationship as familial."

She nodded, her hand still caressing his cheek. "So... what do we do?"

He sighed. "I don't know that, either."

There was a long silence, and then her voice came, so tiny he almost didn't hear her. "Would you... kiss me?"

He looked down at her face. She was looking up at him, her eyes sparkling in the firelight. "Are you sure, Buffy? Are you sure that you want this?"

She swallowed and nodded slightly. "I'm sure."

He leaned down and gently, experimentally, touched his lips to hers. Their first kiss was bittersweet, the salt of their shared tears mixing with the sweetness of this vast new vista opening before them. She whimpered a bit when it was over, wanting more, but he was touching her face with his gentle fingers, coaxing her to open her eyes and look at him. "I can't be casual about this, Buffy. There are things you need to know before we go any farther, if we go any farther. Do you remember the summer after your sophomore year, before you went to your father's, the ritual we did?"

"The Bonding ritual. Yeah, I remember. How could I forget?" She smiled slightly, laying her hand gently on the center of her chest. "It's always here. Even when I was dead, it was here."

He nods. "If we become... intimate... the Bond... will react. I can't say how - journals of centuries past have recorded effects anywhere from a psychic awakening with their Slayer to a deepening of the Bond to a level akin to a soul-fusing. A few have mentioned reactions tantamount to the Bond's rejection of the intimacy. There's no way of knowing how our Bond will react to this. All I can say is that there will without a doubt be long-term consequences."

"I'm fairly sure there'll be long-term consequences anyway, Giles," she said softly. "And I don't care. I... I need this. I need you."

He leaned forward and kissed her again and she responded eagerly, her body rousing to his almost without effort. Her arms went around his neck, holding him close, and she rose up on her knees to reach him more easily, her mouth hungry on his own. He delighted in her swift response to him, glorying in the joy that was their kiss.

And then he was laying her back on the soft rug, leaning over her as she looked up at him, her hair spread all around her and glowing in the firelight like a nimbus of gold. His hand slipped up from her hip to the hem of her tee shirt and his eyes were questioning, confirming. She nodded once, unable to speak, and he slid his fingertips beneath the material, brushing the skin of her stomach and feeling it pebble into gooseflesh as he did so. She arched her back as he slid the shirt farther up, exposing her belly - and he paused.

She looked at him, confused briefly, and then realized what he was staring at. She grinned. "You like?"

"Didn't that hurt?"

"Giles, Slayer, remember? Extra pain tolerance, super-healing abilities?"

His finger traced the design inked onto her flat stomach gently, examining the contours of the radiant sun around her navel, tracing the three arms which emerged from the design, giving it a faintly triangular cast, and then over each set of initials. D.M.S. Dawn Marie Summers. A.L.H. Alexander Lavelle Harris. W. G. R. Willow Gabrielle Rosenberg. Then he touched the ring that nestled within her navel itself. The top part of the bent barbell was a simple ball; the bottom, which actually sat inside her navel, was a bright yellow sun. He had to know. "Why the sun?"

Her smile faltered a bit. "It... helps me remember that they are where I was... and that it's a good place."

He pulled her up and into his arms, holding her close for a long moment, then laid her back down again. pushing her tee shirt up to its previous level, exposing the tattoo once more, and bending down to place a gentle kiss to her navel.

She giggled as his lips and breath tickled her flesh and he smiled, then slid his tongue into her navel to play with the ring. She gasped at the sensation it created - the bolt of lightning that went straight to her groin. He traced his tongue around the inner circular edge of the tattoo and then moved again, his hand sliding her shirt up and his mouth following it until he'd raised it all the way to her armpits, exposing her unbound breasts.

He leaned forward and placed a gentle kiss in the valley between her breasts, then slowly kissed his way up the right one to the nipple, which he swirled his tongue around and then drew into his mouth. His wet heat on her sensitive nipple made her gasp with pleasure and he increased the pressure on her nipple just a bit, making her squirm beneath him as his right hand moved up to tease her left nipple.

She began to wonder if she could come just from him playing with her breasts. Then he switched sides, sucking and licking at the other breast, and she began to feel fairly certain that she could. When he brought his teeth into play, nibbling gently at her sensitive and swollen peaks, she found out for certain.

He pulled back from her, looking into her eyes curiously as she opened them again. "Did you just...?"

"Come from you playing with my breasts? Uh-huh."

He smiled suddenly, a Ripperish grin that made her thrill as she lay beneath him. "I had no idea you were so sensitive," he commented softly.

"Neither did I," she admitted, and he quirked an eyebrow.

"Oh, really?" he murmured, leaning down to nuzzle and then nip at her neck. "Well, I wonder..."

"Wonder what?" she managed, and then got her answer as he set about seeing how many times he could make her come before he took her pants off.

When he finally did slide her sweatpants down her legs and off, he could smell her arousal without even getting close to her. She was quivering beneath him, sweating and gasping, as she came down from her third orgasm, but she didn't even have time to recover before he was settling between her thighs, leaning forward to gently trace his tongue along her labia. She moaned his name and he smiled as she did it, loving the sound of it as her passion rose again. He wrapped his large hands around her hips to hold her steady and took her into his mouth, his tongue dancing across her sensitive and swollen flesh, tasting her sweet nectar and exploring the soft places of her, feeling every texture with his tongue. He loved the taste and the feel of her, loved how she moaned and gasped and called his name. And he loved the way she bucked up into his mouth when he sucked her hot little clit between his teeth. He teased the nub with his teeth and his tongue, and then slid two fingers into her slick channel, curving them upward as he licked at her. She called his name and convulsed again, her inner muscles quivering around his fingers and her clit throbbing under his tongue.

He withdrew his fingers from her slowly, then reached down to unfasten and then shuck his jeans. He moved up her body to place gentle kisses on her flushed face. She raised her arms languidly to wrap them around him, her eyes still closed in the aftermath. They flew open, though, when he pushed the head of his cock into her opening. Her mouth opened slightly, as though to speak, but he was sliding further in and the only sound that came from her lips was a low keening as he socked himself all the way home in one smooth movement and she came again before he was even all the way in.

He pulled back and began to thrust into her even before her orgasm had finished, drawing the pleasure out as she called his name until she was very nearly incoherent. She was so hot beneath him, so tight and so wet, and she felt so very good around his cock and in his arms. He grunted slightly with effort as he thrust into her, feeling himself spiraling closer and closer to his own completion. She was gasping beneath him, bucking up to him, and he felt it rush forward and hit him, slamming himself more deeply into her than he had before and letting the orgasm come, spurting out of him and into her even as she let out a full-throated scream and came around him again, harder than any of the previous times. Her entire body convulsed beneath him even as her vaginal muscles clamped down on his cock, drawing his seed deep into her.

They fell asleep together, still joined, on the rug in front of the fire.

The cold woke him and he realized where they were and that the fire had gone out. A glance out the window showed him that it was still dark outside. He carefully raised himself off her exhausted form, his withdrawal pulling a groan from her even as she slept. He knelt and lifted her into his arms and she snuggled into him instinctively, not waking, and he carried her to the bedroom, laying her in the bed and climbing in with her after turning on the electric heater. She instinctively snuggled up against him, and he took her in his arms.

And then the Bond hit them both full force, waking her up and causing him to gasp in shock as it opened wide between the two of them, singing with joy and completion. He could feel her inside him, her entire soul laid bare for him as his own was for her, and in that moment they both knew that neither of them would be parted again. When the initial shock of it was over, they exchanged a few whispered declarations of love and settled down to sleep again, holding one another tightly.

----

ONE YEAR LATER

Despite blizzard conditions, the little cabin outside Bath was all aglow on Christmas Eve, bedecked with holly and mistletoe and with a huge tree visible in the tiny living room. On the rug in front of the fireplace, Buffy and Giles lay together as they had the previous year, feeling their Bond sing between them. His hand lay on her swollen belly, gently caressing the affectionately nicknamed "camel hump" and feeling his child within, kicking at his hand.

Their life now was so vastly different from the way it had been the previous year, he thought. Only it wasn't. Buffy still rarely left the seclusion of her cabin, having grown accustomed to her own and Giles's company and preferring it to the company of others. He had managed to convince her to leave it long enough for a honeymoon in Paris after their wedding, which had been a very small and tearful affair due to the absence of the Scooby Gang, and she would occasionally make gallery appearances as her work became more and more popular, but she preferred to stay to herself and as such had developed a reputation as something of a recluse painter. He himself had taken over the Directorship of the newly-reestablished Watcher's Council and was often engrossed in Council business as he made sure that the mistakes the Council had made in the past would not be repeated. A construction crew was hired to build an office onto the back of the small cabin, and then, just before the first snows fell, another had been hired to add on a second bedroom. The bedroom was nearly finished, needing only to be decorated and furnished and, of course, inhabited by the child who was very nearly ready to be born.

His child. A dream he never thought would have come to fruition - and here he was with the woman of his dreams and fantasies, who was about to present him with the child he'd never imagined he'd have.

He snuggled close to her back and wrapped his arm around her, kissing the back of her neck. "Penny for your thoughts, luv?"

She sighed. "Just wishing they could be here. Missing them."

"Of course you are, darling," he whispered. "But they're here with us in spirit."

She nodded. "I know." She sent him a pulse of wordless love along the Bond, and he smiled.

"I love you, too, my Buffy," he murmured into her ear. "Forever."

And outside, the snow continued to fall.

--THE END--