Oz would like to fold in on himself. The whole way over, he kept trying. If his body can go huge and furry, why can't it shrink the other way? Bring him down to the size of a pea, small and inconsequential, let him roll away, out of the way
( ... )
"Everyone's fine." Oz closes his eyes at that, takes a deep breath. Giles can look at him then, look at a face that isn't at all monstrous. Then Oz's eyes open, meet his, and they're too much. Too much the same. Giles looks at the woven geometries of the blanket instead, at Oz's smooth, small hand resting on it. "Y- the wolf didn't hurt anyone. We . . . used a tranquilizer gun. It should wear off soon."
Giles' untouched tea has turned cold; he gulps it down anyway, and the whiskey is a kind of warmth. "Why didn't you tell me?" His voice goes high at the end, insistent and shrill. Angry. It's a surprise; he didn't know he was angry. One more secret, among so many. One more deception, as though there aren't enough. As though deceptions aren't piled to the ceiling, trailing out the door. As though Sunnydale isn't built on deceptions, all its foundations and beams and stucco nothing but lies. Houses, shops, churches, the school, lie upon lie. The only truth in Sunnydale is the hellmouth, down under the deceptions, invisible to the eye.
Giles is mad at him, and it's new. Different. It's not frustration, or weariness, or anxiety. It's real, actual anger and it's colder than anything. Cuts right through the soggy haze that must be the tranquilizer and wraps around his aching bones.
He traces the nested squares on the blanket with the tip of his finger; he knows this blanket well. He thinks Giles got it in Germany, that it's boiled wool and therefore twice as strong and warm. Four shades of gray, charcoal to silver, building around and out of each other like an Escher design.
Giles hates monsters. Hating monsters is what brought him here in the first place, what keeps him here, what makes him himself. The thought of telling him was like the idea of walking to the edge of the flat earth and jumping off. Impossible, suicidal.
"Couldn't tell you," he adds, because Giles still isn't saying anything.
Giles clasps his hands in his lap, squeezes them into tight, joined fists. "You couldn't-?" Tighter, harder, because if he lets his hands go they might grasp Oz's shoulders and shake words out of him. Shake him loose from that quiet that Giles always thought was honesty. "How long have you known? How long have you been lying to me
( ... )
Giles is like the weather right now. Changing and cold and mean.
Oz stopped wishing he could shrink awhile ago. Now he's just frozen, wrapped so tightly in the blanket he might as well be in a straitjacket. He looks at the dirty tape on his finger, the bandage from Jordy's bite. Somehow, after everything, it's survived the transformations, changing back and forth that cracks his skeleton and warps his skin. But the bandaid's all right.
"I'm sorry," he says first. The best he has, all he can say. Giles works his jaw and Oz watches him stare straight ahead. He picks at the bandage and feels his breath click and rattle around his chest. "I got bit. By my baby cousin, and I didn't know he was. One of them. No one thought it was serious. The bite."
Giles closes his eyes, briefly. When they're open again, he's still staring at the fireplace.
The words aren't making any sense to Oz. His throat's ground up and Giles won't look at him and he's very, very cold.
There are tears in Oz's voice, tears and broken glass. His voice scrapes over Giles' skin and then drips salt into the wounds, and Giles can hardly think for the pain. Giles folds his arms, tucks his hands in over his ribs, only just stops himself from rocking. Oz needs him, needs his hands and arms and he can't, he mustn't. If he touches Oz, his hands might remember coarse fur and distorted limbs.
His eyes wander over the brick walls of the fireplace. They keep talking about having a proper fire some evening, but Giles never gets around to buying logs. He's never actually even checked that it's a working fireplace and not just a façade. Some of the bricks are darker, from soot maybe. Perhaps it is real.
Oz's words echo for a while in the empty, dark space inside Giles' head. Then the strange sounds turn, inexorably, into meaning. "Your cousin. Your baby cousin . . . is a werewolf?"
No one thought . . . Oz didn't know. Why . . . "For God's sake, tell me. Oz." There's more to this, more straw to heap on a back already broken.
The brat inside Oz, the one he hasn't heard from since shortly after meeting Giles, the lazy, obnxious, mouthy kid wants to snap back: I just told you.He tightens his hold on one fold in the blanket and stops looking at Giles. No point there; the man's just going to stare at the fireplace until flames spontaneously catch. Better to lose himself in the strict, regimented pattern of the blanket, the fraying edge of the bandage
( ... )
"It's not your fault," Giles says automatically. His mind has split, fractured into layers like sandstone. In one layer he's angry again; somewhere else, further down, he might be crying. At the top he's thinking, because he can never stop for long
( ... )
"I didn't want you to know," Oz says. "Liked you too much."
Those early days, when Giles struggled to explain things, what he did, that vampires were around, who a Slayer was, Oz listened and listened. Giles kept asking if he had any questions, but he didn't. Giles was clearer than clear: There are evil things. Monsters, and they need to be eradicated.
There was nothing to ask. No way to say to a man he just met, who he already liked more than he should, who was trusting him with all of this heavy-duty, life-and-death information, Hey, maybe not all monsters are all evil.
Thing is, Oz doesn't even believe that himself right now. Giles is smarter, older, more experienced; he knows better. All Oz knows is how much he hurts, how fear leaves behind ice tracks in his body, ripping him apart like glaciers and icebergs, how Giles is never going to look at him again. He doesn't deserve it anyway.
Since Oz woke up, Giles hasn't quite looked at him. But he has to, now, when Oz talks in that soft, soft voice about going.
Oz doesn't look the same, not at all. There are blue-black smudges under his eyes, dark as bruises, and Giles remembers it's three nights since Oz slept. He's sickly pale, bloodlessly pale under that black-dyed hair that makes him look so horribly like Ethan. Pale as a drained corpse. And old. Giles can see, on that white skin, hints of lines that will be wrinkles in thirty years.
Oz looks away and pulls the blanket up around his shoulders, although it's not cold in the flat.
"Don't go," Giles says. Oz must be so tired, and so frightened. "Stay here, please. I'll call in sick so I can stay with you."
Giles loves Oz. He won't leave him alone with this unbearable knowledge.
Giles loves Oz, and Oz is the same person he's always been.
"You don't have to -" Oz starts to say, but the ice inside him shifts and groans again and he has to close his eyes against the pain. All he wants right now is the firm warmth of Giles' bed, tucked up under the ceiling like a kid's, and sleep, and food.
He knows he's so hungry because of the wolf, because it never fed, because of the change back and forth, but he can't say that. Giles sounds thin and strained, crepe batter poured over a hot pan, and Oz just wants to keep him where he is.
The weird thing is that Giles looks - younger, or something, when Oz glances at him. His face is smooth, his eyes even bigger, and his expression's just about unreadable. Maybe that's what anger does to him, rejuvenates him, returns him to his former self.
"I'd like that," Oz says finally and lets himself turn all the way around so he can see all of Giles. He still can't look directly at him, but at the fourth button on his shirt. "And I'm really sorry. I am."
It hurts to look at Oz. So hopeless, half gone into despair, eyes shallow and bleak as a dying animal's. Giles wonders if he looked like that while he waited for Eyghon. And if so, how Oz bore it
( ... )
Oz wonders if he'd be half as freaked out as he's felt for the last few days if Giles *wasn't* in his life. He's been wondering about that a lot, and he has to admit that he wouldn't be. If he didn't know Giles, he would have done everything the same, chained himself up, and no one would have cared if he happened to miss another couple days of school a month
( ... )
"I doubt it." Snyder hates him, but this is the first sick day Giles has ever taken. Even after Eyghon he went in to work, although the black eye and still-fresh bruises on his face made everyone stare
( ... )
Oz grips the arm of the couch and pulls himself to his feet. Leaving the blanket down here suddenly feels like an unbearable idea, akin to sliding off his own skin and stepping away. So he wraps it tightly under his arms and shuffles toward the stairs, picking up the trailing blanket between his fingers like a society lady at a ball in an old movie
( ... )
Oz keeps pulling that blanket tighter around himself, like it's the only warmth and safety left in the world. It strips a little warmth from Giles every time, leaves him barer and colder. Oz doesn't trust him. Instead of opening, he hides, buries himself in blankets and silence and lies
( ... )
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Giles' untouched tea has turned cold; he gulps it down anyway, and the whiskey is a kind of warmth. "Why didn't you tell me?" His voice goes high at the end, insistent and shrill. Angry. It's a surprise; he didn't know he was angry. One more secret, among so many. One more deception, as though there aren't enough. As though deceptions aren't piled to the ceiling, trailing out the door. As though Sunnydale isn't built on deceptions, all its foundations and beams and stucco nothing but lies. Houses, shops, churches, the school, lie upon lie. The only truth in Sunnydale is the hellmouth, down under the deceptions, invisible to the eye.
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Giles is mad at him, and it's new. Different. It's not frustration, or weariness, or anxiety. It's real, actual anger and it's colder than anything. Cuts right through the soggy haze that must be the tranquilizer and wraps around his aching bones.
He traces the nested squares on the blanket with the tip of his finger; he knows this blanket well. He thinks Giles got it in Germany, that it's boiled wool and therefore twice as strong and warm. Four shades of gray, charcoal to silver, building around and out of each other like an Escher design.
Giles hates monsters. Hating monsters is what brought him here in the first place, what keeps him here, what makes him himself. The thought of telling him was like the idea of walking to the edge of the flat earth and jumping off. Impossible, suicidal.
"Couldn't tell you," he adds, because Giles still isn't saying anything.
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Oz stopped wishing he could shrink awhile ago. Now he's just frozen, wrapped so tightly in the blanket he might as well be in a straitjacket. He looks at the dirty tape on his finger, the bandage from Jordy's bite. Somehow, after everything, it's survived the transformations, changing back and forth that cracks his skeleton and warps his skin. But the bandaid's all right.
"I'm sorry," he says first. The best he has, all he can say. Giles works his jaw and Oz watches him stare straight ahead. He picks at the bandage and feels his breath click and rattle around his chest. "I got bit. By my baby cousin, and I didn't know he was. One of them. No one thought it was serious. The bite."
Giles closes his eyes, briefly. When they're open again, he's still staring at the fireplace.
The words aren't making any sense to Oz. His throat's ground up and Giles won't look at him and he's very, very cold.
"I'm sorry. That's what happened."
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His eyes wander over the brick walls of the fireplace. They keep talking about having a proper fire some evening, but Giles never gets around to buying logs. He's never actually even checked that it's a working fireplace and not just a façade. Some of the bricks are darker, from soot maybe. Perhaps it is real.
Oz's words echo for a while in the empty, dark space inside Giles' head. Then the strange sounds turn, inexorably, into meaning. "Your cousin. Your baby cousin . . . is a werewolf?"
No one thought . . . Oz didn't know. Why . . . "For God's sake, tell me. Oz." There's more to this, more straw to heap on a back already broken.
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Those early days, when Giles struggled to explain things, what he did, that vampires were around, who a Slayer was, Oz listened and listened. Giles kept asking if he had any questions, but he didn't. Giles was clearer than clear: There are evil things. Monsters, and they need to be eradicated.
There was nothing to ask. No way to say to a man he just met, who he already liked more than he should, who was trusting him with all of this heavy-duty, life-and-death information, Hey, maybe not all monsters are all evil.
Thing is, Oz doesn't even believe that himself right now. Giles is smarter, older, more experienced; he knows better. All Oz knows is how much he hurts, how fear leaves behind ice tracks in his body, ripping him apart like glaciers and icebergs, how Giles is never going to look at him again. He doesn't deserve it anyway.
"I should probably go."
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Oz doesn't look the same, not at all. There are blue-black smudges under his eyes, dark as bruises, and Giles remembers it's three nights since Oz slept. He's sickly pale, bloodlessly pale under that black-dyed hair that makes him look so horribly like Ethan. Pale as a drained corpse. And old. Giles can see, on that white skin, hints of lines that will be wrinkles in thirty years.
Oz looks away and pulls the blanket up around his shoulders, although it's not cold in the flat.
"Don't go," Giles says. Oz must be so tired, and so frightened. "Stay here, please. I'll call in sick so I can stay with you."
Giles loves Oz. He won't leave him alone with this unbearable knowledge.
Giles loves Oz, and Oz is the same person he's always been.
Almost.
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He knows he's so hungry because of the wolf, because it never fed, because of the change back and forth, but he can't say that. Giles sounds thin and strained, crepe batter poured over a hot pan, and Oz just wants to keep him where he is.
The weird thing is that Giles looks - younger, or something, when Oz glances at him. His face is smooth, his eyes even bigger, and his expression's just about unreadable. Maybe that's what anger does to him, rejuvenates him, returns him to his former self.
"I'd like that," Oz says finally and lets himself turn all the way around so he can see all of Giles. He still can't look directly at him, but at the fourth button on his shirt. "And I'm really sorry. I am."
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