When Giles used to daydream about Oz coming back to Sunnydale, turning up on his doorstep, he never pictured it like this. There were always words, explanations. Oz never just walked in as calmly as if he'd only gone out for a pint of milk. He never stood in the middle of the sitting room, cool as you like, and asked whether Giles happened to have any juice.
"Kitchen," Giles says, gesturing to the doorway. "There's water. Glasses are in . . . one of the cupboards." For a few seconds Oz stands looking at Giles and doesn't move. Oz's face seems stiller and blanker than ever, or maybe Giles has just forgotten how to read it. It's a relief when he turns and goes into the other room.
Although Giles feels shaky and sick, he can't bear sitting down. He starts to draw back the curtains, then changes his mind and pushes one aside so he can see out. The rain is coming down heavily now, darkening the afternoon to twilight. In the high-rise block of flats that has stolen his view of the river, every window is lighted.
The flat is old and well-constructed enough that sound doesn't carry easily; he can only faintly hear Oz running water and shutting cupboard doors. Perhaps there aren't any clean glasses. It's been a while since Giles has done the washing-up.
The skin of his shoulder aches where Oz touched him. It feels like a bruise, although Oz's hand only rested lightly, momentarily, on the dirty wool of the jumper.
The water's still running. Giles pours three fingers of whiskey in the smeary glass, swallows it down, and carefully puts the glass and bottle back exactly where they were. His stomach feels worse for it, but already Giles can sense the headache easing off and the steadiness coming back to his limbs.
For a moment, while he lets his eyes adjust to the dimness in the kitchen, darker even than the rest of the apartment, Oz just stands still. He'd turned to the right, his body expecting the sink to be right where it was in Sunnydale. His hand closed around empty air.
Nothing is the same, not memory and not anticipation. Vertigo clings to the back of his skull, dull and heavy as a pendulum. It smells shut-up in here, an old person's house where bugs breed in an ancient box of Grape-Nuts and tadpoles swim in the drain and it's safest to drink the gin.
No dishsoap, but the glasses are dusty, so Oz rinses as much as he can, his hands burning under the lukewarm water, his senses still adjusting to city noise, to Giles wandering in the other room. He smells like bedsweat and whiskey and tears.
"Here," Oz says as he returns. Giles has his back to him and he turns very slowly. Almost warily, and it's not as if Oz can blame him. Neither of them flinches, but the air's still and jagged between them, icicles and huge gaps.
Giles hasn't sat down, so Oz stays on his feet, rocking a little from side to side, hands fidgeting with heavy English coins in his pockets, until he makes himself stop. Lights from the window fall in a ragged checkerboard over Giles's face.
"And, you know. Sorry to barge in like this." His voice sounds hoarse, raw leather stinking in the sun, and he swallows against the sudden spike of thirst for Scotch. He can do this without it; not like he didn't come here knowing exactly how hard this was going to be.
"How I'm holding up?" Giles lifts the pint glass Oz has put in his hands. When his lip touches the rim, he remembers he's thirsty. The water is lukewarm, and it tastes of algae and chlorine, but in three swallows the glass is empty.
This is all familiar. This is what Oz did when Eyghon returned, when Giles thought he was going to die. Maybe Oz came here for this, to give him a glass of water like he did that day. There was bread, too, last time, but surely Oz won't try to feed him the sliced loaf from Sainsbury's that's growing mold in the refrigerator. Giles isn't hungry anyway.
"You know, then. About Buffy." He's holding the glass so tightly that the edges of his fingers are turning white. Carefully, he sets it down on the table next to the bottle of cheap blended scotch. There's no point spending money on single malt when he scarcely tastes it. It's medicine, not pleasure.
Oz nods and takes a sip of his own water. His eyes are invisible, shadowed by his sharp nose and cheekbones. Empty sockets in a fleshless skull. Giles turns and pulls the curtains open. The light's dull enough not to make his headache worse, and he can see Oz's eyes now.
The raindrops sliding down the glass cast trickling shadows on Oz's face, like the ghosts of tears. Real tears catch the light; these absorb it, and that seems more fitting. Tears should be black as ink. They should stain.
Oz is still looking at him. Narrow-eyed, appraising. "I'm all right," Giles says. "I'm holding up all right." His voice sounds tinny, as though it's travelled through the ancient intercom. "Slayers die. I always knew it would happen."
Oz doesn't move. Giles wants to ask how he dares to come here like this, giving Giles a glass of water and a show of concern. After a year went by with no word, Giles started to think Oz was dead. How does he dare to come back now?
Even pressed out of melted candlewax, stinking and sagging, Giles can still do angry. Hard, immobile anger, shells of beetles and wasps.
"Gonna say this a lot," Oz starts, and backs up until he hits the arm of the loveseat. Giles can also stand; he's tired and dizziness keeps buzzing around in the back of his head, droning and beckoning. "So I might as well start now. Sorry. Sorry about Buffy, because it's not all right. It's *not*. Sorry about you, and - and -"
He finishes the disgusting water and rolls the glass in his hands. First night he met Giles, his apartment was also stacked with packing boxes. But it was bright there, and there was music, and they drew closer and closer. They, or Giles and someone who looks like Oz, who has Oz's sense memory but not so much his personality. Someone else, someone nicer.
He squeezes shut his eyes and breathes out through his mouth. No mantra, no control, just something that pretends to be calm. Pretend and playact and sometimes things come true.
When Oz opens his eyes, Giles is looking at him. Blank, the face he wore when Xander got going, when Snyder sniped at him. Blank but filled with distaste. Oz is filled with black water, sour and thin, swimming with ash, and has to take another breath.
"About me. Sorry about me and, and. Everything. Us."
It's a stupid word, us. He used to hold it against his palate like a piece of seafood, mussel or scallop, and taste it for hours.
Giles wanted words, and now there are words. Too many, jostling for space like people on the tube. So many words that they crowd the air out of the room, that their sounds catch and tangle into meaningless noise. SorryBuffysorrysorryussorry. Just a hiss and rumble, something you'd hear walking past the door of a busy pub.
Making meaning out of it would be as difficult as translating Sumerian. As difficult as everything is, these days, and Giles is so tired. His head aches so badly. But Oz is waiting, perched awkwardly on the arm of the settee, fingering the beads on his wrist. He's stopped looking at Giles.
It seems important to try and answer, so Giles closes his eyes and sifts through the floating noises, lets them filter down into words. Buffy. Sorry. "Thank you," he says. "About Buffy, I mean."
The rest, the word us that hangs in the air like another bad smell, Giles doesn't have an answer for. Oz has tried this before, has wanted to take Giles' forgiveness like he's taken everything else, but Giles has never given it. Oz wanted it for Willow's sake, then; Giles wonders if there's someone else, now, whom Oz needs to be clean for. How young Oz is, that he still thinks forgiveness is possible.
The whiskey slops wetly in Giles' stomach, and seasickness rises up towards his throat. He crosses his arms over his belly and breathes slowly until everything settles. "It's . . . kind of you, to come and tell me." Kind. Giles used to believe that Oz was kind, gentle. That was before all the times Oz sat in the library with Willow on his lap, sat playing with her hair and looking at Giles. Before he went away, and came back, and went away again.
Giles sits in the armchair, the one near the whiskey bottle, although he doesn't reach out for it. "Oz, where have you been? All this time. We . . . everyone was so worried." Fool that he is, Giles wants to know. He'll always want to know where Oz is, and whether he's all right.
Pretend. Play dress-up, cops and robbers, be who you'd like to be even though you know you'll never be that cool or good.
Giles's anger fills Oz's head, arthropods and turds, exoskeletons and stagnant water. He keeps his head down, can't look at Giles, because he deserves this, the flat knives of Giles's voice and disgust on his face, all of it. He deserves much, much worse.
"The mountains," Oz says. Closes his eyes and looks at the map his capillaries make on his eyelids. Old maps had Jerusalem at the center. London is the center of Giles's map. Oz still doesn't have a center to his own. "Argentina. Patagonia, actually."
He's still dizzy. He's sitting down, but he's still dizzy. And Giles is in front of the Scotch, blocking it, and Oz has to do this, take this.
"Sorry," he says again. "About worrying you. Everyone. Just -"
That afternoon, standing on Giles's doorstep, everyone was there. Everyone, like they'd sold tickets, and he needed to see Giles first and needed to tell him about Tibet but everyone -. And Willow. And her girlfriend. And Giles wouldn't look at him. Giles hadn't looked at him for two years anyway.
"Scratch that," Oz says and pushes up and off the chair's arm. Still not looking at Giles - he tried that and everyone else was there in the way - but moving closer because he's already travelled this far *anyway*. "Sorry about worrying you. Just you."
Without a map, he doesn't even know where he is. But he can see Giles's arm, sweater-sleeve pushed up to his elbow, fingers going white and rose-red on the sofa's arm, he's gripping it so hard.
Too much. Too many words, too much light, too many shadows crawling down Oz's half-averted face. Too much of everything except air. Giles' lungs are empty and laboring, and his heart pounds fiercely, struggling to live. The stupidity of the body, which never gives up.
He'd like to go and lie down. It's dark in the bedroom. He could take the bottle with him, lie down and drink himself to sleep. Drink himself out of this confusion. Drink until he can breathe again, or until he stops needing to.
But Oz is waiting, yet again, for an answer. Waiting for something. The words he's thrown at Giles--sorry and just you--are terrible, full of gelignite and shrapnel. Perhaps he's waiting for the explosion and the blood. Perhaps he's come back to kill. It's one of the things Giles used to dream about-fangs at his throat, claws at his belly. Or a simpler, cleaner death, a knife or a gun and Oz's patient explanation. It has to be this way.
Oz is standing almost close enough to touch. If Giles reached out, what would his skin feel like? Would it be the same, or has Oz turned all to ice and iron, to cold, deadly things?
"Argentina," Giles says finally, because this is something safe. A mapped space, a proper noun. "You . . . you came all the way from Argentina? To tell me you're sorry?"
Too many miles to calculate. And Giles thinks of quests, of pilgrimages, of penitents walking barefoot to Santiago de Compostela. Perhaps this isn't just some new fantastic cruelty. Perhaps Oz really is sorry. Perhaps under those worn-out boots, his feet are bleeding.
"Oz." Giles doesn't know what he wants to say. The word that comes out is: "Why?" It could mean anything or nothing. He won't know what it means until Oz answers.
Giles is asking him questions and Oz sways a little. Questions are cracks, trickles of water over granite, tiny, but if the water keeps running, canyons form, spaces open, air comes in.
Because I love you. Oz has enough of a sense of self-preservation to close his teeth around the real answer, the simple and true one, but it takes too much effort and black swings across his eyes, pushes under his feet. He grabs at air and something rushes up, smacks his knees.
When he can see again, he's clutching Giles's wrist and he's on his knees. Giles's mouth is opening, dark and wet, and Oz shakes his head. Hard enough that black flies across his vision in spots, but he has to answer.
"Yeah," he says. "To tell you I'm sorry."
In his grip, Giles's wrist is familiar, as familiar as the plane on the top of Bill's skull, as the roof of his own mouth, the scent of his own skin.
Giles's mouth is still open. Frozen around why.
"Because I am sorry and because you hate me. Because, because -" He slept alone and climbed the bottom of the world but the wolf was still there, always there, right under his skin. The monks were right: Not control but release was what he needed. Release from fear and guilt. "'cause I can't hide anymore."
Because I love you.
Giles's wrist is broad and solid and the only thing holding Oz up. The floor might as well be a cloud, a gust of wind, nothing. Maybe in forty years they'll laugh at how much of a drama queen he was back then. Maybe in five minutes he'll be rolling down the stairs, kicked to the curb. He's no good at looking at consequences. Never was.
"Kitchen," Giles says, gesturing to the doorway. "There's water. Glasses are in . . . one of the cupboards." For a few seconds Oz stands looking at Giles and doesn't move. Oz's face seems stiller and blanker than ever, or maybe Giles has just forgotten how to read it. It's a relief when he turns and goes into the other room.
Although Giles feels shaky and sick, he can't bear sitting down. He starts to draw back the curtains, then changes his mind and pushes one aside so he can see out. The rain is coming down heavily now, darkening the afternoon to twilight. In the high-rise block of flats that has stolen his view of the river, every window is lighted.
The flat is old and well-constructed enough that sound doesn't carry easily; he can only faintly hear Oz running water and shutting cupboard doors. Perhaps there aren't any clean glasses. It's been a while since Giles has done the washing-up.
The skin of his shoulder aches where Oz touched him. It feels like a bruise, although Oz's hand only rested lightly, momentarily, on the dirty wool of the jumper.
The water's still running. Giles pours three fingers of whiskey in the smeary glass, swallows it down, and carefully puts the glass and bottle back exactly where they were. His stomach feels worse for it, but already Giles can sense the headache easing off and the steadiness coming back to his limbs.
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Nothing is the same, not memory and not anticipation. Vertigo clings to the back of his skull, dull and heavy as a pendulum. It smells shut-up in here, an old person's house where bugs breed in an ancient box of Grape-Nuts and tadpoles swim in the drain and it's safest to drink the gin.
No dishsoap, but the glasses are dusty, so Oz rinses as much as he can, his hands burning under the lukewarm water, his senses still adjusting to city noise, to Giles wandering in the other room. He smells like bedsweat and whiskey and tears.
"Here," Oz says as he returns. Giles has his back to him and he turns very slowly. Almost warily, and it's not as if Oz can blame him. Neither of them flinches, but the air's still and jagged between them, icicles and huge gaps.
Giles hasn't sat down, so Oz stays on his feet, rocking a little from side to side, hands fidgeting with heavy English coins in his pockets, until he makes himself stop. Lights from the window fall in a ragged checkerboard over Giles's face.
"And, you know. Sorry to barge in like this." His voice sounds hoarse, raw leather stinking in the sun, and he swallows against the sudden spike of thirst for Scotch. He can do this without it; not like he didn't come here knowing exactly how hard this was going to be.
"Needed to see how you're holding up."
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This is all familiar. This is what Oz did when Eyghon returned, when Giles thought he was going to die. Maybe Oz came here for this, to give him a glass of water like he did that day. There was bread, too, last time, but surely Oz won't try to feed him the sliced loaf from Sainsbury's that's growing mold in the refrigerator. Giles isn't hungry anyway.
"You know, then. About Buffy." He's holding the glass so tightly that the edges of his fingers are turning white. Carefully, he sets it down on the table next to the bottle of cheap blended scotch. There's no point spending money on single malt when he scarcely tastes it. It's medicine, not pleasure.
Oz nods and takes a sip of his own water. His eyes are invisible, shadowed by his sharp nose and cheekbones. Empty sockets in a fleshless skull. Giles turns and pulls the curtains open. The light's dull enough not to make his headache worse, and he can see Oz's eyes now.
The raindrops sliding down the glass cast trickling shadows on Oz's face, like the ghosts of tears. Real tears catch the light; these absorb it, and that seems more fitting. Tears should be black as ink. They should stain.
Oz is still looking at him. Narrow-eyed, appraising. "I'm all right," Giles says. "I'm holding up all right." His voice sounds tinny, as though it's travelled through the ancient intercom. "Slayers die. I always knew it would happen."
Oz doesn't move. Giles wants to ask how he dares to come here like this, giving Giles a glass of water and a show of concern. After a year went by with no word, Giles started to think Oz was dead. How does he dare to come back now?
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"Gonna say this a lot," Oz starts, and backs up until he hits the arm of the loveseat. Giles can also stand; he's tired and dizziness keeps buzzing around in the back of his head, droning and beckoning. "So I might as well start now. Sorry. Sorry about Buffy, because it's not all right. It's *not*. Sorry about you, and - and -"
He finishes the disgusting water and rolls the glass in his hands. First night he met Giles, his apartment was also stacked with packing boxes. But it was bright there, and there was music, and they drew closer and closer. They, or Giles and someone who looks like Oz, who has Oz's sense memory but not so much his personality. Someone else, someone nicer.
He squeezes shut his eyes and breathes out through his mouth. No mantra, no control, just something that pretends to be calm. Pretend and playact and sometimes things come true.
When Oz opens his eyes, Giles is looking at him. Blank, the face he wore when Xander got going, when Snyder sniped at him. Blank but filled with distaste. Oz is filled with black water, sour and thin, swimming with ash, and has to take another breath.
"About me. Sorry about me and, and. Everything. Us."
It's a stupid word, us. He used to hold it against his palate like a piece of seafood, mussel or scallop, and taste it for hours.
"I am."
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Making meaning out of it would be as difficult as translating Sumerian. As difficult as everything is, these days, and Giles is so tired. His head aches so badly. But Oz is waiting, perched awkwardly on the arm of the settee, fingering the beads on his wrist. He's stopped looking at Giles.
It seems important to try and answer, so Giles closes his eyes and sifts through the floating noises, lets them filter down into words. Buffy. Sorry. "Thank you," he says. "About Buffy, I mean."
The rest, the word us that hangs in the air like another bad smell, Giles doesn't have an answer for. Oz has tried this before, has wanted to take Giles' forgiveness like he's taken everything else, but Giles has never given it. Oz wanted it for Willow's sake, then; Giles wonders if there's someone else, now, whom Oz needs to be clean for. How young Oz is, that he still thinks forgiveness is possible.
The whiskey slops wetly in Giles' stomach, and seasickness rises up towards his throat. He crosses his arms over his belly and breathes slowly until everything settles. "It's . . . kind of you, to come and tell me." Kind. Giles used to believe that Oz was kind, gentle. That was before all the times Oz sat in the library with Willow on his lap, sat playing with her hair and looking at Giles. Before he went away, and came back, and went away again.
Giles sits in the armchair, the one near the whiskey bottle, although he doesn't reach out for it. "Oz, where have you been? All this time. We . . . everyone was so worried." Fool that he is, Giles wants to know. He'll always want to know where Oz is, and whether he's all right.
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Giles's anger fills Oz's head, arthropods and turds, exoskeletons and stagnant water. He keeps his head down, can't look at Giles, because he deserves this, the flat knives of Giles's voice and disgust on his face, all of it. He deserves much, much worse.
"The mountains," Oz says. Closes his eyes and looks at the map his capillaries make on his eyelids. Old maps had Jerusalem at the center. London is the center of Giles's map. Oz still doesn't have a center to his own. "Argentina. Patagonia, actually."
He's still dizzy. He's sitting down, but he's still dizzy. And Giles is in front of the Scotch, blocking it, and Oz has to do this, take this.
"Sorry," he says again. "About worrying you. Everyone. Just -"
That afternoon, standing on Giles's doorstep, everyone was there. Everyone, like they'd sold tickets, and he needed to see Giles first and needed to tell him about Tibet but everyone -. And Willow. And her girlfriend. And Giles wouldn't look at him. Giles hadn't looked at him for two years anyway.
"Scratch that," Oz says and pushes up and off the chair's arm. Still not looking at Giles - he tried that and everyone else was there in the way - but moving closer because he's already travelled this far *anyway*. "Sorry about worrying you. Just you."
Without a map, he doesn't even know where he is. But he can see Giles's arm, sweater-sleeve pushed up to his elbow, fingers going white and rose-red on the sofa's arm, he's gripping it so hard.
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He'd like to go and lie down. It's dark in the bedroom. He could take the bottle with him, lie down and drink himself to sleep. Drink himself out of this confusion. Drink until he can breathe again, or until he stops needing to.
But Oz is waiting, yet again, for an answer. Waiting for something. The words he's thrown at Giles--sorry and just you--are terrible, full of gelignite and shrapnel. Perhaps he's waiting for the explosion and the blood. Perhaps he's come back to kill. It's one of the things Giles used to dream about-fangs at his throat, claws at his belly. Or a simpler, cleaner death, a knife or a gun and Oz's patient explanation. It has to be this way.
Oz is standing almost close enough to touch. If Giles reached out, what would his skin feel like? Would it be the same, or has Oz turned all to ice and iron, to cold, deadly things?
"Argentina," Giles says finally, because this is something safe. A mapped space, a proper noun. "You . . . you came all the way from Argentina? To tell me you're sorry?"
Too many miles to calculate. And Giles thinks of quests, of pilgrimages, of penitents walking barefoot to Santiago de Compostela. Perhaps this isn't just some new fantastic cruelty. Perhaps Oz really is sorry. Perhaps under those worn-out boots, his feet are bleeding.
"Oz." Giles doesn't know what he wants to say. The word that comes out is: "Why?" It could mean anything or nothing. He won't know what it means until Oz answers.
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Because I love you. Oz has enough of a sense of self-preservation to close his teeth around the real answer, the simple and true one, but it takes too much effort and black swings across his eyes, pushes under his feet. He grabs at air and something rushes up, smacks his knees.
When he can see again, he's clutching Giles's wrist and he's on his knees. Giles's mouth is opening, dark and wet, and Oz shakes his head. Hard enough that black flies across his vision in spots, but he has to answer.
"Yeah," he says. "To tell you I'm sorry."
In his grip, Giles's wrist is familiar, as familiar as the plane on the top of Bill's skull, as the roof of his own mouth, the scent of his own skin.
Giles's mouth is still open. Frozen around why.
"Because I am sorry and because you hate me. Because, because -" He slept alone and climbed the bottom of the world but the wolf was still there, always there, right under his skin. The monks were right: Not control but release was what he needed. Release from fear and guilt. "'cause I can't hide anymore."
Because I love you.
Giles's wrist is broad and solid and the only thing holding Oz up. The floor might as well be a cloud, a gust of wind, nothing. Maybe in forty years they'll laugh at how much of a drama queen he was back then. Maybe in five minutes he'll be rolling down the stairs, kicked to the curb. He's no good at looking at consequences. Never was.
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