Title: Snow and Fire
Author: Gail Christison

Rating: FRAO
Pairing: B/G
Feedback: I love it, always.
Timeline: After Into The Woods, right wherever S5's missing Christmas eppy goes.
Disclaimer: All the goodies belong to Joss as we all know, though I get Rhiannon, the cat, the dog, the chickens and the snow...not to mention, Giles's bubble bath and his Christmas boxers. I don't know who has the copyright to Rupert Bear though LOL!
Distribution: Once More With Feeling - those with permission - all others, please ask.

Summary: Buffy finds out about an amulet hidden in the High Sierras which could protect Dawn. Buffy and Giles take a road trip on Christmas eve :-) Snow, Christmas and other adventure abounds :-) And of course, romance.

Author's Notes: This began as a response to a challenge for a fic to make someone feel better about being snowed in and became my Christmas fic for this year. Thanks to Julia for the idea. I know it's taken a while, but I hope it helps...even if it's not exactly Southern California. Big thanks to my betas Karen and Liz for helping get this out for Christmas and to Kazza for her little idea :-)

Dedication: This one is for all the B/Gers who are snowed in... Merry Christmas, everyone!

"I don't know why I let you talk me into this."

"Did you want to spend Christmas in toasty Sunnydale again?"

Giles snorted. "Christmas in my 'toasty' apartment is far preferable to spending Christmas Eve on the road, heading for God knows where, to find God knows what."

"God has nothing to do with it. Sowakathwali, that waitress at Willy's, is terrified of Glory and if she says there's an amulet up here that will help us defend Dawn…well, I want it, besides, we'll be home by tomorrow night, latest."

He sighed. "I understand that. And Sowa has been helpful before, for a Kowali demon. I understand that too. I simply didn't expect my holiday plans, piddling though they were, to be tossed aside for a long road trip of extremely questionable value. Come to that, how did your mother and Dawn take the news of your sudden departure?"

Buffy shifted uncomfortably in her seat. "Dawn has it all under control. I mean, she's got Mom all to herself…and Mom took it the way she took going away for Thanksgiving last year," she said dryly. "They'll be fine. They don't need me. They're perfectly capable of playing board games, watching weepy movies and stuffing themselves with chocolatey Christmas goodness with or without me."

Giles shot her a sudden, sideways look. "No, I suppose not. Is that all you had planned for Christmas?"

She continued to look out the window. "Pretty much. Mom's not strong enough to go anywhere or do anything much, so it was just going to be us…real quiet. Willow and Tara have big plans, and Xander and Anya have gone to San Fran to raise some heck… and probably do some serious sex," she added, just to see him look shocked, and was disappointed to see that he didn't even raise an eyebrow. "So what were you going to do?"

"Mm?" Giles murmured as he guided the BMW up a steep gradient behind a large truck. "Me? Well, I…I had plans. Yes, plans that I don't have any more because we're out here climbing mountains instead…"

Buffy tilted her head to one side. "You were going to spend Christmas alone again, weren't you?"

He cleared his throat. "Of course not…" he began haughtily, but deflated quickly and dropped his head a little, without taking his eyes off the road. "Sitting at home in my chair, with my own eggnog and a good book, pretending it's cold is still much preferable to gallivanting across the Californian countryside in search of some unverified talisman."

"Up it, is more like it," Buffy observed as the scenery continued to change and they continued to climb. Her thoughts, however, were lost in imagining what the last few Christmases might have been like for the big Watcher, painfully aware as she suddenly was, that the three of them had somehow managed to neglect him almost every year for their own plans, their own lives. She looked up at his gentle profile and wondered for the first time if he'd ever been lonely.

The last time she'd even thought about him at Christmas was the year Angel returned. And they still hadn't even managed to invite him for dinner….

She closed her eyes. She'd dragged him into helping Angel instead. And he'd done it…without a word of dissent, as always, in spite of the horror to which the vampire had once subjected him.

Giles turned off the main highway smoothly and Buffy suddenly started to rub her arms. "You don't have the heater on," she observed.

"Should I have?" he drawled. "It is California, after all, and the temperature was seventy two when we left Sunnydale."

"Well, now we're in the Sierras and it's not seventy two anymore, Toto," she complained. "Heater…please?"

Giles put it on and leaned forward over the wheel to look up briefly. "I don't like the look of the weather," he muttered. "And I've yet to see a sign to tell us how far to this turning Sowi was talking about, now that we're off the highway."

Buffy looked up at the darkening sky with its greenish clouds hanging low and frowned. "Not good," she pronounced, as small patches of snow started to be seen on the roadside and in the fields they were passing.

"Not good," he agreed. "Do you want to try to get back to the highway, or continue on, whilst praying that the heavens don't open until we're safely into a warm hotel?"

Buffy bit her lip. They needed that amulet. They needed all the help they could get, but Giles looked worried. "What do you want to do?" she asked carefully.

He looked at his watch. "We can go on. It can't be much further and we've at least three hours of daylight left."

The snowflakes started less than ten minutes later, just as they finally found what Giles confirmed from his mileage indicator, had to be the turnoff, before resetting it.

At first Buffy proclaimed their prettiness, large, fluffy flurries that they were, but in time the wind picked up and the flurries were joined by friends and became something more ominous.

"Giles, I haven't seen a car for the last hour," she observed, breaking a long silence.

"I know," he said darkly. "Nor have I seen a sign. I was certain this was the right turning…"

Buffy looked at him with alarm. "We're lost?"

He shook his head. "I checked the map. But there really should be some sign of civilization by now."

Buffy checked all the windows, barely able to peer through the ever-increasing amounts of falling and swirling snow. "There isn't even a power pole or a light out there, let alone a town," she observed. "Giles it's getting dangerous. We're going to have to stop soon. And I didn't pack for snow."

"Nor I. I packed for the forecast," he growled. "We both did. And snow was supposed to be out of the question until close to New Year's."

"Where exactly are we?" she asked, peering through the windscreen and the overworked wipers. "Do you have any clue, or have we just entered the Twilight Zone?"

He would have snorted again, but he didn't have the heart. The mileage indicator on the dashboard was showing that they were approximately the right distance from the last turnoff to find the next one and the small town that was supposed to be at the junction, but there were no signposts, no indications of any turnings, and no sign of any kind of civilization.

"To be honest, I don't know. Either I misread the map, or this road wasn't marked, and therefore threw my count completely out."

Buffy squinted out of her side window. "I'm going to have to go with 'not marked', at this point," she observed dryly. "Is it me, or is there a light on that hill?"

Giles slowed down even more and stole several looks out of her window. "Looks like a light. Watch for a gate or some such. They might be able to tell us where we are, at the very least, and if we're fortunate, we might even be offered shelter for the night if it's a terribly long way to the next town."

The gates were locked. Giles undid his safety belt, but Buffy stayed his arm. "Let me do it. If there's a way to open it, I'm your girl."

His face was a picture of frustration and stifled gallantry, but he nodded stiffly. "Just don't catch pneumonia…here, hold on," he added as she opened her car door, reached over the back and grabbed the leather jacket he'd thrown there when they last filled the car, hours earlier, in warmer climes.

"It'll get ruined," she said softly.

"Better the bloody jacket than you," he growled. "Wear it, and move quickly. This sudden, drastic change in temperature makes you a prime candidate for catching something nasty."

"I'm the slayer, Giles, remem—?"

"The same Slayer who ended up in hospital last time she contracted a bad virus," he pointed out acerbically. "Move quickly and get back in the car as fast as you can."

She rolled her eyes and opened the door, the blast of frigid air more of a shock than either of them expected, warmed as they were by the car's heating system.

Giles watched as she lifted the chain on the gate and found a padlock of some size on it…and smiled when she easily snapped the solid links and pushed the gates open. They would have to offer compensation…

Buffy clambered back into the car after closing the gates again behind them, still swaddled in Giles' jacket, and peppered with snow, dotted in her hair and still on her shoulders. More freezing air followed her.

"You're shivering," Giles said indignantly. "You were only gone for a couple of minutes."

Buffy looked sideways at him. "Turn the heater up," she growled through chattering teeth.

"It's up as far as it will go," he said apologetically and put the car in gear. "Let's get you to some real shelter."

The light was a security sensor light, being continuously triggered by a tree branch blown across it by the freshening wind.

"Well, it's a homestead. That's gotta be of the good," Buffy proposed, ignoring the complete lack of internal lighting, parked vehicles or life of any kind. "Maybe they're asleep?"

"At four o'clock in the afternoon?"

"Okay. Well, maybe they're old. Nap time?"

"Or perhaps the place is deserted," he shot back very dryly. "Or they had the good sense to go somewhere warm for Christmas."

"Either way we're screwed," she observed, deadpan.

Giles opened his door. "Let's try knocking first, shall we?"

They were halfway to the porch when Buffy realised Giles was still in his shirtsleeves and getting wetter by the second. Once they were undercover and out of the wind, she turned on him.

"You're soaked. Why didn't you put something on to keep dry and warm?"

"Because you're wearing it. I brought an extra sweater for the night, but wearing it would be rather pointless in this, don't you think?" he asked, brushing off snow and looking out at the storm.

Buffy had the good grace to look sheepish, then started to peel the leather jacket off, snow going everywhere.

"No," he commanded. "You must stay warm. Shall we just find out if our hosts are in residence, first?" He stepped up to the door and gave the knocker a good work out.

"Warm is a relative term," she muttered as they waited.

And waited.

Eventually they looked at each other then Giles pulled his map from his breast pocket and unfolded it. The porch sensor light was diffuse, but strong enough to make out the brightly coloured roads and the major centres. He pointed out the road they were supposed to be on, and the last turning before it that he had identified.

"No doubt about it," Buffy said, shivering again. "This should be the right road, lack of junction notwithstanding. If it is, there's another town about forty miles down the road, and the highway just as far in the other direction. If it's not, God knows where we'd end up…if we could see far enough to get there."

"I'm not taking you back out in this. It would be foolish in the extreme to leave shelter when we don't know how much worse the storm will get or where we're going. Stay here. I'm going to check the outbuildings to see if there's somewhere I can put the car. It would be nice if the engine block didn't freeze during the night and my sump and radiator refrained from cracking."

"I'm coming with'," she announced.

"Buffy—"

She shook her head. "I'm coming."

There was a barn, a hayshed, a large double garage and a covered, but open, shelter for some expensive farm implements.

Buffy found horses in the barn, both looking restive and hungry, and a cat curled up on a folded saddle blanket, left on what looked like a feed bin. When it saw her and moved swiftly to the hayloft, she lifted the lid on the bin and scooped up a measure of oats, experimentally offering them to one of the horses, which barely allowed her to pour the grain into its feedbox, it was so ravenous. She did the same for the other one and made a mental note to ask Giles to split a bale of hay for them.

By the time she'd come up empty on the cat food front, she could hear Giles starting the car. He must have found a space in the garage. Judging by the horses' behaviour, he might have found an extremely empty garage. The cat was now also winding its way around her legs, wailing plaintively.

Something was definitely not right about the whole set up. Not only that, but they would have to check the whole place for other livestock before they could even think about resting…or food for themselves. Buffy wrinkled her nose. More interesting smells…

The horses also hadn't been mucked out for more than a little while. It was lucky that they had those thingies on their water troughs that kept filling them when they got low, or they'd have been in a lot more trouble…

Giles met her halfway to the hayshed. "What are you doing?" he demanded, shouting into the wind.

"Horses, hungry, hay," she shouted back.

"Horses?"

"And a cat."

"Bloody hell. Nobody would go away on a holiday and just leave their animals. Hungry, you say?"

"Starving…in the feed me now before I bite your arm off sense, not the bones poking through sense," she added awkwardly.

"Come on, then, I'll help you pull down a bale or two and we'll make sure they're not the only the only hungry things around here."

The horses settled down to munch blissfully after Giles split the bale of lucerne hay, and they headed off into the blizzard to investigate the rest of the buildings.

They found a henhouse behind the hayshed and a kennel around the back of the house, on the back porch. Inside it was a tightly curled up ball of hair, which, when it uncurled and launched itself at them, turned out to be an unchained collie.

Buffy relaxed and shifted out of the defensive stance she'd taken up, when it threw itself at Giles in a licking frenzy.

"Something's really wrong here, Giles. Nobody would leave all these animals alone. Those poor chickens are going to freeze. And they were so hungry."

"Well they're not hungry any more," he pointed out, scratching the dog's scruff and talking to it softly. "I'll go back later and try to rig something to keep them from freezing. Even a couple of those lanterns which were hanging on the stable wall, hung above the perches, would throw off enough warmth to keep the birds from freezing on them."

Something occurred to him and he let go of the dog, walked up to the back door and tried it. It wasn't locked.

They crept inside warily, a small bathroom immediately to their left, laundry to their right, and what looked like the kitchen dead ahead.

A half-frozen, soaking wet Giles slid his hand up the wall until he found a light switch. It was dull, almost like twilight, because of the low, heavy cloud and the snow and it felt good to finally blink and focus in the bright light.

Buffy sighed. Everything was running normally. She could hear the refrigerator cycling and the clock was running on the microwave.

"We have power and light," she observed. "And with any luck, dinner."

"Yes," Giles agreed, "but right now I'm more concerned about where the owners might be. We'll search the entire house before we do anything else."