Christmas in Cleveland. Snow and ice and he’d swear the visible puffs of breath had crystals in them. Xander felt the cold as a burn against his exposed face and around the edges of his collar. Everything else was just cold. The faint twinkling stars in the orange-black city sky mocked him.

“Hey,” Willow said, coming up on his right.

“Hey, yourself.” Xander lifted an arm and she slid under it to cuddle. “Who knew,” he mused, “that cold could hurt? I mean, be cold, sure, be uncomfortable, definitely, but downright hurt?”

“Yeah. Faith says we’re all wimps.”

“pffft.” Xander waved a dismissive, mittened hand. “We will let her have her east coast superiority if it will make her happy. I want my Pacific Ocean back.”

“I guess that’s not in the immediate future, though I hear Africa is hot.” Willow squinted down the street. “What are you looking at?”

What was he looking at? Was he even looking? “I’m not sure. It’s cold, but I can’t decide if it’s the past or the future.”

“Oh,” she breathed unhappily. “I’m sorr…”

“Yeah,” he interrupted. “Listen…” Willow was still his best friend. But would she get it? Would she understand how fucking complicated it was? There in the dark, in the cold, he could almost work it out. If she could listen, just listen, maybe he would get it right.

“Tell me,” she invited.

“I wish Anya had made it out. Not just because I didn’t want her to die, but… there was business that needed completion and now it never will be. I probably would have married her in the end, you know? And that would have been wrong. I still didn’t understand the vision. I almost do now, but in Sunnydale, not so much.”

“The wedding vision? But that was a fake.”

“Yeah, but at the same time it felt too true.”

“You would never become your dad.” Willow was firm.

“Maybe, maybe not. But it wasn’t the violence so much as the hatred and unhappiness. It was telling me I wouldn’t be happy or even content. Is it so wrong to want to be happy? Those last few days I was more and more sure that I couldn’t be happy with Anya. If I could have figured out a way to just be friends… but that chance was taken away too.”

With everything.

“Spike loved Buffy,” he said, beginning again.

“Yes,” Willow agreed. “He died for her.”

“Not just her.” Xander thought about it. “He loved you too. He’d always been soft on you.”

“Poor Spike. He never was a really evil vampire.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that. I mean, he’d done some really bad things and really enjoyed doing them. But he felt, even before the soul, in ways that I don’t think vamps are supposed to. Probably because Drusilla was his sire, or something, but he sure wasn’t normal.”

“No.” She shivered.

“Why don’t you go in,” Xander suggested. “You’re cold.”

“I’ll be cold until summer,” Willow said. “Keep talking. I’m listening.”

“You know that even when you hate someone, or you hate what that someone represents, if you have to live with them, the edges get smoothed off. Spike kept getting parked with me and we… started to get along. We’d snark at TV, and drink beer and eat pizza. We’d argue about football-his kind and mine- and do guy stuff. When he got the soul, it was even easier.”

“You were friends?” she asked.

“Sounds like it, doesn’t it?” Xander stared into the past and saw it start to focus, sharpen. “Huh. Maybe…” You’re lying to yourself again. That isn’t it—or not all of it and you know it. Don’t get sidetracked. “No.”

“Maybe? Maybe what?”

He’d better try again. Start again. Maybe all the way through this time, before they froze to death. “While I was in the hospital, after the fight. Spike came to see me. He was so sorry. He thought he’d failed me. He thought I’d blame him and he was totally willing to take the blame. He wanted to take the blame. I wouldn’t let him. Hell, I have enough memories of the soldier to know that you get wounded in battle. I know I’ve been lucky all these years that that’s the worst that’s happened. So I told him I was glad he was able to save the other eye, that I was grateful I wasn’t completely blind. That the bastard that took the one was ready to take the other too, and Spike saved that.”

Xander took a deep breath, coughed on the cold, then a smaller breath before he continued. “He was holding my hand, then, and his eyes were full—he was ready to cry. And let me tell you, bloody tears are not something you want to see fall.”

“Don’t,” he said. “You’ll make me and I think that would hurt like a bitch.” He shook Spike’s hand for emphasis and squeezed it.

“Ah, Xander,” Spike stared at the ceiling a second to drain the moisture away.

“I’m not dead, Spike.”

“And I’m glad for that, mate. Truly.”

“He stroked the back of his hand down my cheek, leaned over and kissed my forehead. Then he left.”

“Maybe he loved you too,” Willow said with some satisfaction. “Not hard to do, you know.”

“Says you,” he said with a bit of sourness.

She poked him in the side. “I do say. Stop that and keep talking.”

“Yeah, well, it did make me think there was more feeling there than just two people who work together. And I was confused. It’s not like I’d ever been all that nice to him.”

Willow didn’t reply to that. She squeezed her arms and pushed closer.

God he was going to have to try again.

“When,” one more time. “When I got out of the hospital, I was sitting in the living room—not watching TV—and 40 eleven dozen slayer wannabees wandering around—well, more squabbling around—and I thought Dawn and Buffy were bad!—and Spike came up and asked if I was up for a beer. ‘Hellya!’ I said and we went out to the backyard and, what do you know, he had a cooler out there, all frosty goodness.” Xander took a deep breath. “We talked. About Anya and Buffy, Dawnie and you. Drusilla. How our lives were run by women. Not,” he hastened to add when Willow stiffened, “that it was bad. Only that we were abnormally beset with estrogen. More than most guys. We sat next to each other, the way guys do, not looking at each other. It’s easier to spill, then, y’know? And we laid it all out. He wasn’t sorry about Anya, ‘cause both of them needed solace. I got that. I wasn’t mad anymore or anything. I told him so, too. At least I don’t have to carry that.”

Xander paused, wondering how to put the next bit. How to explain so Willow understood that it wasn’t just… anything but dead honesty. “There was a moment. There was a moment when I thought, ‘We could be friends. We could be more than friends even.’”

“More than friends?” Willow leaned back to look at him.

He nodded, still looking at the past, because the future seemed so cold.

“Brothers, lovers—all of it. Not that we could, he was straighter than I am—was—am.” Xander took a cautious breath. “Probably would have laughed in my face if I’d ever brought it up. But for that moment, it was possible. And it stayed possible until he blew out. Now that possibility is over. More over even than the Anya possibility. ‘Cause I knew what Anya would lead to and I couldn’t be sure where it would go with Spike.”

Willow was silent for a moment. Then she stiffened and said breathlessly, “I didn’t make you gay!”

Xander laughed, a short bark of amusement. “I know that. You haven’t changed me. My life has changed me. I feel like it’s over.”

“But…”

“I mean, there are no possibilities left—not of my old life. That the possibility that was Spike was the last one, and that got taken from me too. There is still a future, I guess, but no possibilities. It’s kind of cold.” An icy, freezing future was settling deep in his bones, yawning dark and empty before him.

Willow hugged him hard, furiously. “There will be possibilities. Anya and Spike, aren’t the only people you will ever want again. I promise you, there will be someone.”

“Will,” he looked away from the future to tip up her chin and look into green eyes swimming in tears. “I don’t want it. I have lost everything but you. I don’t want to have and lose again. I’ll take the cold; I’ll take no possibilities. I’ve had enough to last anyone.”

She shook her head vigorously. “I won’t let you think like that. I won’t. You are going to come in now and have a good Christmas. I’ve planned forever that you’re finally going to have a good one, and I’m not going to be thwarted. Spike would want you to have a good one; I know he would. Have it for him. And me. And yourself.”

Xander sighed. Figuring it all out had been hard, but worth it. He felt a little lighter now, as though a problem had been worked through. The weight—guilt maybe?—that had been dragging him down wasn’t so heavy any more. Maybe it was just being honest. Maybe it was just offering the memory of Spike the truth of what he had felt? Maybe it was telling a ghost that there might have been something like love.

He let Willow drag him into a house full of women and the idea of a holiday that was supposed to warm them.