FIC: Fimbul (7/?)

["C S Armitage" <soren_nyrond@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

TITLE: Fimbul 7/?)
AUTHOR: Soren Nyrond
DISCLAIMER: Several characters in this belong to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. I'm still poor, I'm still harmless, and (frankly) I continue to write like a lemming in terminal descent.
SUMMARY: Another part, contains Exposition and a small snuggle
SPOILERS: None -- except for anyone's peace of mind
AUTHOR'S NOTES: All nice feedback welcome
ARCHIVING: If I ever finish the thing, whoever wants it can probably have it.

  
FIMBUL  
By Soren Nyrond
Part 7: The Ermine.
 
 
["Eagles may soar the highest - but weasels don't generally get sucked intojet engines"]
 
 
Dubitski's Drug and General lay halfway along Becquerel, just before its intersection with Maynard. The owner had gone by the name of Dubitski, but whether he had been the original, or whether he had inherited the cognomen with the freehold, no-one knew or cared. All Sunnydale had wanted of him was service, courtesy, and discretion over certain special purchases. Thee QwikDrug at the Mall did for most purchases, but Dubitski could hand mix just what you needed, and he could get unusual ingredients sent in. More thanone student boxer swore by Mr.D's special mouthwash before and during fights, and the football players relied on the ointment he gave them to rub into the bruises they got, that simply wiped the pain away. Several of them also used him for little niggling infections they picked up at away games, when the Coach wasn't as able to vet their after-game entertainment as closely.
 
And now the timber-frame building was entombed in ice, ice which was slowlybut definitely spreading, in the sub-zero biting winds, to the surroundingbuildings. It would take a long while to reach the gallery, though, Buffyhad to admit.
 
"Can we go back now ?" a shivering Xander asked.
"In a minute," Buffy replied. "I want to check there's no ice giants roundhere."
"Eighteen foot Norse-type warrior thingies with axes to scale ?" Xander scoffed. "Just how likely is that ?"
 
The scraping sound alerted him, through the whistling and raging of the snow-storm (had this once been a *warm* town ? - he found he could hardly remember) that there was something behind him, even as Buffy turned, and he sawher expression.
The thing was roughly man-sized, maybe a little smaller, and apparently made out of ice, with a pitted, icebergy, surface. Xander ducked away from it, and winced at the intense cold coming from it. Then the thing raised an arm, and suddenly the air was full, not of snowflakes, but of hail spikes -chips of ace, flying straight at him.
"Look out !" he managed to croak, as Buffy barrelled in. The Slayer couldn't see what there was to be concerned about, till, as she aimed a kick, planning to put the thing down and try staking it, her Slayer senses registered the cold. She pulled the kick, and saw how, when the creature punched down at her, the snow around its first instantly turned to milk-white ice, and how the ice itself at once started spreading.
"We need to get away," she called to Xander, as, somehow, she managed to execute a back-flip, without falling on the half-frozen, half-slushy surface of Becquerel.
"Duck !" Xander called. From somewhere he'd found a cigarette lighter - one of the cheap plastic ones given away to encourage teenage smoking - and hastily he'd broken it open, spilled the fluid on his handkerchief, wrapped the kerchief round a clod, and lit and hurled it. He hadn't expected much - but ice should be afraid of fire - right ?
He certainly hadn't expected that the thing would catch the flaming missileand effortlessly quash the flame, apparently absorbing it into itself.
 
Buffy had seen enough: "Xander ! Run ! Now !"
She half-cannoned into him, to get him started, and then quit the scene, Time for Giles to say what they were facing.
 
 
"I think they're called the Spawn of Jotun," Giles said, looking up from a book which looked at least three hundred years old from the dust on and around it. Giles' trousers looked as though they had been rubbed thoroughly in chalk.
"Picture ?" Buffy asked.
"Poor quality engraving," the Watcher replied. "I rather fear the artist was drawing desperately fast before the Spawn got to him."
"Got it !" Willow said. Xander looked over her shoulder at the screen and recoiled.
"That . " He looked again, more closely. "I suppose what we saw might digivolve into that."
"Digivolve ?"
"Okay, so I watch the kids' shows when I'm not working. Which is not too often, but more often than I'd like. They stopped doing the one with the eight cheerleaders who save the world - I liked the costumes on .. sorry, concentrating."
Even Giles had come over to see what Willow had found: it looked like a roughly man-shaped block of ice and, scaled from what they too to be deep-frozen corpses, the best part of thirty feet high.
"Big," Buffy said.
"And lethal," Willow said: "Touch it and you freeze instantly."
"That looks like the thing," Giles commented: "Whoever drew that obviously had more time than Father Gersion."
"Anything on how to stop it ?" Buffy asked.
"No. but flame and fire won't," Willow answered.
 
"That's right," Giles added, from his book: "The energy bound up and released in fire is one of the things the Spawn feed on - or more exactly, what Jotun feeds on."
"And Jotun would be - ?"
"Jotun would be what the frost giants sent - I read a little deeper," Gilesexplained: "It seems that they can't come until the world is already frozen. But the Jotun acts as their agent, organising the freezing. That must be what's got loose."
"And I repeat," Buffy said, with some asperity, "do we have anything on howto stop it ?"
Giles looked up. "Not yet - it appears only to have been released twice before. In one case it was on an island, and there was insufficient energy to allow the Jotun to freeze the sea and get to more lives. Everybody else died, though."
"And the other time ?" Buffy queried.
"There is no detailed report. It was stopped, but no-one knows how." He looked up: "And before you ask, the Watcher's Diaries give no clue. Whatever stopped the Jotun does not appear to have been a Slayer."
 
"So," Buffy said: "We're on our own."
"There is a further complication," Giles said: "Both Gersion, and my other research point to there being another creature: not a Spawn but a Child of Jotun. I need to contact a library in Japan for details - all Gersion saysis that it is far worse than the Spawn - that it slew far more. The Japanese text may say what it looks like."
"All right," Buffy said. She went to the window and looked out at the driving gale-force wind, carrying curtains of snow before it, and at the foot-deep white carpet that covered all of Sunnydale that she could see. "Well, I don't fancy going out there again. Should we hole up here till tomorrow and hope the sun shifts the snow ?"
"Is this sleeping ?" Xander asked. "Only I could do to get home."
"In that ?"
"Buffy - don't ask, just trust me on this one."
Buffy didn't understand. On the other hand, she spotted that Willow was grinning.
"There's an alternative," Giles said. "Mrs. Torvaldsen, next door, took her cousin's four-wheel drive and she's gone up to a Lake somewhere in Michigan. She left me her keys and asked me to look after the place. I suggest that you, Buffy, and Willow, sleep there, just in case any looters try to get to her hand-carved fretwork."
 
"What was that about ?" Buffy asked, as they dumped their share of Giles' blankets on Mrs, Torvaldsen's front room floor.
"Xander apparently had trouble sleeping last night - I think Giles did too.We may have been a bit . vocal."
"We didn't talk much."
"Not talk, no."
"Then . oh."
"Exactly."
"And Giles . "
"Thought we'd all be more comfortable with several inches of brick wall between us and them."
"You don't think . "
"Xander and Giles . don't be ridiculous." Willow scoffed: "Does Giles look like an Inca Princess or a relief bio teacher ?"
"So," Buffy said, adding her coat and sweater to the pile of blankets, "does this mean we're on our own tonight ?"
"I don't see anyone else," Willow replied, slipping out of her sweater and jeans.
"And so long as we don't make too much noise . "
Willow helped Buffy out of some more of her clothes, and then the Slayer realised a bathroom trip was in order.
"And don't be long - there's a queue," Willow said, suddenly smitten likewise.
 
By the time she returned the room was in darkness. She found her way to the blankets by touch, and lifted one edge.
At once surprisingly strong arms pulled her in, and seconds later she had been stripped of the rest of her clothing, and was being hugged up to an utterly-naked but toasty-warm Slayer.
"Are you laying comfortably ?" Buffy asked.
"Mm-hm," Willow replied, softly tasting the skin of Buffy's shoulder
"Then we'll begin," Buffy said. And did.
 
Outside the snow piled higher and higher and the temperature fell.
Inside temperatures rose and the soft and sensual sounds built, again and again, to crescendos of climax.