As slowly as floodwaters, Giles' fears sink and disperse. Some evaporate in the warmth of Oz's kiss and the stronger heat of his words--always loved you--that work on Giles like steamy, rainforest languor. Others, inevitably, seep back into him, cold and muddy, trickling along his spine and making him shiver a little even as he kisses Oz back and says, "I love you."
A few more of the worry lines flatten out from Oz's forehead, and Giles kisses the last little valley between his brows, the one that's been there a lot since Oz came back. He doesn't want to be responsible for Oz's first wrinkle, although if they manage to stay together, he supposes he will be. But not for a good few years yet.
"We'll both do better this time." It's something Giles says a lot, aloud and silently, his own version of Oz's Tibetan prayers that bring the mind into harmony and peace. Perhaps it's the only lesson to be learned from their disaster, the diamond amid the rubble. Now it calms his stubborn shivers, lets him stop thinking about Oz and Willow, lets him rub his cheek against Oz's and remember to be glad that he's here.
The book has wedged itself between the sofa cushions; Giles pries it loose and opens it to the handprint again. Grief literalized in blood; he almost envies Oz for having thought of it, although he doubts it made things easier, any more than his own drinking and random fucking and maudlin hours of listening to records did. He lays his own hand over the page for a moment, then twines it awkwardly with Oz's (the one, Giles realizes, he must have cut) and says, "Will you talk me through the book? Tell me your stories?" Rubble or not, he's going to salvage all he can.
"Can try," Oz says, wriggling downward and daring himself to look at the next page. He has never been sure how Giles *does* that, how he manages to set aside whatever obstacles and private griefs there are and push on. Go where he needs to go and do what he needs to do. That he *hadn't* done that when Oz found him in London, had instead sunk farther and farther into the armchair and within himself, that was the scariest thing.
"There's not much for a while -" He turns the page, finds the first graph he made of the moon's cycle, the dates written in blue pen, and a dandelion from Jenny's funeral dried to something kind of oily and brown. "You said it was for my favorite things, but." He glances up at Giles and sees interest in his eyes, kindness around his mouth, and squirms again. Oz knows this feeling, the weird prickles under his face and chest and the rattle of his pulse, but he hasn't felt like this for a long, long time. It's just how he felt when Giles would ask him to play his guitar. It's opening himself out to someone's attention, to the opinion of someone he respects, and he knows he's going to fuck it up.
Then again, this is another version of their old memory game, a hand held out to the other, bringing him to the past. Or slipping the past into the present, into his mind.
"Didn't have a lot of favorites for a while," Oz says and flips back to the "Dear Prudence" tabs. "Still love this song. Haven't listened to it forever. This paper's from your hospital room. Took it from your chart." He flips forward, trying to get past the especially painful memories. "Matchbooks from bars. Gigs, and other stuff. Devon gave me this postcard. It's the Day of the Dead. Happy skeletons. Um. Ticket I got speeding, that's not supposed to be in there. Lots of moon stuff, obviously. Oh. I wrote this -"
He curves his free hand over the top of the book and shows it to Giles.
"After they fired you."
On the facing page, the sad blue saint card from Larry's funeral.
"It's memories, I guess," Oz says and kisses Giles' cheek. "Not great ones, though. And not really stories. Just glad you're here."
The left-hand page is almost blank, with nothing but the date and I'm sorry, in Oz's small, neat printing, which Giles has only ever seen before on the title lists of mix tapes, and once when he made a hasty, shamed foray into a notebook Oz accidentally left in the library. Pages of equations and computer code, sketches of classrooms in slightly incorrect perspective, and an unfinished note to Willow that Giles read trembling but that was only, as it turned out, about going to the Bronze that night.
Together, the tiny words and the cream expanse of paper are something intimate, like a whisper in a quiet room. "Thank you," Giles says, squeezing Oz's hand. "That was a difficult time." If he'd known, then, that Oz was sorry for him, it might have helped. Or it might have made it all unbearable.
Oz flipped so quickly through the pages that Giles barely saw some of them. When Giles turns back to the beginning, Oz starts to speak, goes quiet, and slumps a little against Giles' shoulder. Giles lets go his hand, circles his waist to hold him closer, and says, "It's all right." They've been through such a slough of bad memories already that Giles is fairly sure he can't get any muddier. Even the torn half-page from his hospital chart only makes him stop for a moment to breathe. Those memories, blurred with pain and drugs, are fairly easy to push down, although he wishes he could somehow detach the memory of Oz's visit from the rest, to have some pleasure in it. Another diamond, this one hopelessly fused to melted steel and the stench of death.
Still, it's a relief to come to the more neutral things, matchbooks and bar coasters and, for some reason, an empty sugar packet. "I didn't know the Dingoes played in so many places," Giles says inanely, and then he notices one plain black matchbox, unremarkable among the others, that says Weisse's. His startled glance meets a surprised one from Oz, who immediately looks away. "I was there once." It was a bad night, a few weeks after Oz left him, when even Sunnydale's only gay bar seemed better than staying at home again to fret over Oz and Angelus in turns. "I didn't much care for it." It stank of old cigarette smoke and older despair, and the men all looked so furtive that Giles half thought the news of Stonewall hadn't reached them yet.
Horrible to think of Oz going there. Giles kisses his temple, rubs the back of his neck, and doesn't ask.
Oz tilts his head, back against Giles' hand and against his neck, and nods. "Skanky spot, definitely," he says and turns the page. Too many downcast eyes and restless hands, watered-down beer, no Giles. He can't imagine Giles somewhere like that, soiled and hung with smoke and dusty tinsel, but he looked for Giles there, every night.
The book, even though it's packed with memories, is safer than wandering alone through his own, so Oz turns back to it.
"Jordy made me this -" He turns the page and shows Giles the self-portrait in yellow and orange crayon, carefully signed in big block letters. "Combination to the cage I built in the crypt. Used an old dormroom lock. Directions to Angel's place in LA, more matchbooks from the pubcrawl."
The pages after he left Sunnydale are packed with roadmaps and phone numbers, layers and peeling tape and scratched-out words, an incoherent mass of information that even Oz can't grab much sense from any longer.
"This is - this is me looking," he says, and lets his eyes close for a minute while Giles draws his finger down the page. "Drove to Chicago. Train to New York, lots of wandering. Plane to Paris. Chasing my tail, mostly. Warsaw, Budapest, Ravenna, finally Prague. What's a word that's not a quest, not a journey, but not a vacation, either?"
Telling and showing Giles this is easier, somehow, than it was the last night he talked to Willow. Maybe because Giles knows how research works, from the inside out, following leads and trails, backing up, getting so turned around you just want to fall down. He doesn't have to explain the false starts, or the worry; Giles already knows.
"Besides research, I mean." He smiles, warmth loosening him from face to shins, and glances up. "Love you, by the way."
Giles has to laugh, and then he tries to make himself stop and explain that he's not laughing at Oz, but Oz grins and just looks slightly puzzled. "By the way!" Giles echoes, laughter bubbling up around the edges of the words. Whispering into Oz's ear now, lots of breath in it to make him shiver, Giles says, "By the way indeed." He nips the lobe - "Incidentally" - catches an earring between his lips and tugs it - "in case you were wondering" - swipes his tongue around the edge and then inside, so that Oz gasps and sways - "I just thought I'd mention" - licks his way to Oz's mouth and kisses him slowly - "that I'm tremendously in love with you."
Oz, smiling, holds him tightly by the neck and dots his face with little nibbling kisses. Everything's been so serious, a long hard slog out of grief and estrangement, and they're only starting to remember how to be silly together. But this is love too, this play and nonsense, and Giles realizes he's missed it.
In Sunnydale, laughter was always a defiance of sadness and fear-Buffy's jokes as she fought, or Xander's infinite and sometimes irritating jest, or the way Oz and Giles would get into tickling matches half an hour before Oz had to leave. It's not that different now, kissing and giggling, scrambling to catch the book before it slides off Oz's lap and onto the floor. They're still laughing as they turn back to the page, the collage of Oz's exile.
"For some reason, I thought you went straight to Tibet," Giles says, looking at a receipt from a coffee shop in Prague. "Silly of me." Giles' research has been done in libraries, where the worst that can happen is a few days' wasted effort; Oz had to travel alone to country after country, asking the sort of questions that phrasebooks never offer words for, with no guarantee that he'd ever find what he needed. It must have been frightening, and endlessly lonely.
On the next page, there's the stub of a train ticket, Warsaw to Budapest, and some more of Oz's handwriting: I miss your mushy peas, how you pile them on your fork, how they shine with butter. I miss the sandwich you gave me one morning through the bars of the cage, fried egg and oily American cheese with too much ketchup. I miss your cream crackers and digestive biscuits and Flake bars and blood sausages and bubble and squeak. I'm really hungry, Giles.
It's one of the things that used to keep Giles awake at night, the thought that Oz might be hungry. Might be homeless, cold, starving. "You realize," he says, rubbing a shoulder whose bones are still too close to the surface, "that you've just let yourself in for another week of fried breakfasts, beef stews and chocolate after every meal?"
"Have I?" Oz asks, the laughter still burbling warmly around his chest and in his mouth. "Cool by me."
He remembers being hungry, but it's like remembering a particularly bad fall skateboarding, or being shot: The pain is gone, and he can *tell* himself what it felt like, but mostly he remembers the situation, the circumstances, not the pain.
"Always think of you and food," he says, turning the page. The colors are brighter here, postcards and handbills from Turkey and India and the trek up to Tibet. Elephants both real and god-like, luscious goddesses with twisting lips, a recipe for lemon pickle that makes his mouth pucker with the memory of it, angry monkeys camping on telephone wires and a scrawled, half-literate signature from Tempa, who helped him get across the border. "Cooking with you, eating stuff. Missed it more than anything." He glances over, and Giles is frowning a little, tracing the line of one of Oz's shoulder-blades. "Well, almost anything."
Once he made it to Tibet, Oz was still hungry. He drank po cha all day long, like everyone else, always shivering, always hoping for something a little more solid. Tangy like something teetering on the edge of rancidity, and salty enough to taste directly sexual, he can still taste the tea; he wonders why flavors get remembered, but not pain. He told himself it was a holy hunger, he tried to tell himself, something about burning away his attachments to samsara with every cramp.
"Here's the wrapper from a brick of tea," he says, tapping the gold and brown slip of oily paper. "You mashed up crumbled-off pieces, and boiled them all day, *then* added that to hot water, yak butter, and salt. Good stuff." Giles nods politely and Oz grins. "Hey, it got me drinking tea. You should be grateful. For a couple weeks, it was all I did there. Taught me humility."
A scent of tea rises from the gaudy paper, but darker and ranker than any tea Giles has ever tasted. It reminds him a little of decaying autumn leaves, and a little of the wide ribbons of kelp, speckled with crystallized salt, that Oz used to buy for Japanese soups, and which always made the kitchen smell of low tide. Probably the salt and yak butter made the tea taste rather better than it would have otherwise. "Do you drink tea now?" Giles asks. "I thought you drank sugared milk that had once been allowed to look at a tea leaf." Oz scowls exaggeratedly, pinches the tip of Giles' nose and then kisses it.
Happiness, Giles is learning, has a thousand shapes, and pouring out two mugs of tea is among them. So are seeing Oz's Save an Animal mug every day, remembering to keep milk and sugar on hand for him, drinking tea and eating meals with him. "I missed cooking with you, too," Giles says. "This will sound ridiculous, but when I thought about you, I thought about food and sleep. Sex. Talking." He cups Oz's cheek and smiles. "Necessary things." If the monks and their butter tea helped to bring Oz back, then Giles is grateful.
Although Giles has tried to imagine Oz in Tibet, he's never really been able to. Even though Oz meditates and prays every day, he's far too solidly anchored in the world to seem monastic. Among the orange-robed monks with their minds turned to detachment and eternity, he must have been earthy and dissonant, a sturdy bit of heather among the hothouse roses. "I shouldn't have thought you needed to learn humility, though. Rather the opposite, if anything." Oz is too good at humility, too used to loneliness and neglect, too able to give himself up to other people's good, or what he imagines it to be.
Necessary things: Giles is right about that, maybe more right than Oz can really say in words. He's hungry all the time, reaching for Giles, taking another helping, introducing a new topic. He is still gorging on food, conversation, *and* sex, enough that Giles has adopted a new smile, half-rueful, half-indulgent, when Oz butters another piece of toast or says something long after they've settled in for the night.
"I need to learn pride?" Oz asks. "Or vanity? Don't think I really want either -" Neither strikes him as a good thing, and both make him think of Ethan, sudden unbidden images of a laughing face and knowing eyes. Giles' account of Ethan, anyway, small threads and clouded remarks. Another black gap between them, persisting under its own power, while the rest are fading and closing. "'course, you did accuse me of being vain when I wouldn't cede the mirror this morning."
Giles squeezes his shoulder and Oz tucks his head against Giles' neck. Never been happier, Giles said the night before Oz left and made it a lie, the gap-that-was-Ethan yawning behind the words. Oz bites his lip and turns the page, finds the mandala facing the note he wrote Giles the morning he arrived in Sunnydale.
"Weird. Travel's got tons of stuff, but Tibet? Nothing except tea and circles," he says. It seems appropriate, somehow, that the most important stage of the trip is empty; he can't think of words, so he shouldn't have scraps, either. "Here. Wrote this, um. When I got back."
There's a date that Giles remembers, from May of last year. He remembers everything about that day: sunshine and the cool air that streamed in from the open door; Oz's tentative stance in the doorway, a slight nervous smile twisting his mouth when everyone turned to stare at him; Willow's blank shock and Tara's sudden agitation, inexplicable then; how he couldn't manage to look Oz in the eye, and how Oz turned to Willow, walked over to her, didn't look at him again. He even remembers something he didn't know at the time: the copper bowl in Oz's knapsack, gift there was never a chance for, beginning of a conversation they never had.
Remembering all that stillborn possibility, Giles can't focus on the page. He looks up, past Oz's head to the shelf where the bowl sits now, next to the Mapuche drum. On another shelf there's a photograph of the two of them on Catalina; Giles recalls the young woman who took it, Oz's pitch-perfect imitation of Giles' accent when he asked her to, and his own panicked attempt to invent a story-Giles and Daniel Hitchens, father and son, tourists from Newcastle (distant, obscure, and an American wouldn't know that their accents were wrong)-in case she asked anything, which she didn't. Giles kept the photo between the pages of a dictionary for four years, but now it's in a frame, on an eye-level shelf for anyone to see. Even the collage Oz made for their anniversary, which Giles wrapped in tissue paper the morning Oz left, put away, and never looked at again, now sits on the dresser in their bedroom. Oz, who found it at the top of a box of books and unwrapped it without knowing what it was, seemed amazed that he'd kept it.
There are old memories everywhere, happiness and pain inevitably mingled. In the open; it's safe to have memories now. Giles hugs Oz close, nuzzling his hair and stroking his jutting shoulderblades through heavy wool, and then turns back to the book. After the date there are words: You're not going to want to talk to me. But I did it and I want you to know that. We don't have to talk. I just want to see you. Then a blank space, the space of the talk they didn't have, the space when Oz went off with Willow, became a wolf despite everything he'd learned, was imprisoned and tortured and freed. The space when Giles drank and agonized and waited. The space when Oz left again.
Two words after that: I'm sorry.
None of it's anything but memory, and maybe it needs its place, its embodiment, just as the better memories do. Giles leans his head against Oz's, their foreheads touching. It's part of Oz's vocabulary of gestures, a term of comfort and reconciliation that's awkward, crippled, in words. "I wanted to talk to you," Giles says. "If we'd had time, if they hadn't been there . . . I'm sorry. If I could've found something to say, anything." He tilts Oz's chin up and kisses him lightly, trying not to think of soldiers and scientists, a cold white cell and a naked, brutalized boy, the debt he owes Riley Finn and always will. "Christ, we've had awful luck, haven't we?" Mostly awful, occasionally miraculous, far too variable to trust. Better to be careful, to trust each other and leave no room for luck.
"Pretty crappy luck, yeah," Oz says, rubbing his nose against Giles' cheek, inhaling tea and other Gilesy things, before he kisses Giles again, more firmly. Weird, how kisses, which slide and deepen and ache, also ground him, tug him back to earth and into the present. He slides his hand up the sleeve of Giles' jumper and strokes the inside of his elbow.
Oz looks back down at his crabbed handwriting and slides his hand back out so he can turn the page. "Didn't know you wanted to talk to me," he says. "So crowded there, and then everything happened. And you weren't there, in - in the place. With the others." Giles shivers and Oz does, too, his throat gone tight and sour. He shakes his head, tries to fling off memory like water from the shower, and kisses Giles a third time. Hardest yet, burning lips and a hand in Giles' hair, and he warms up even as he starts to relax.
"Here now," he says and rolls their foreheads together again. As close as they can get, nearly sharing skin, and Oz takes a deep breath. "You shouldn't be sorry, though. That place's full of bad timing. To put it mildly."
The last of the filled pages trace his route from Sunnydale to San Francisco to stay with his aunt and uncle; they paid for his ticket down to Rio, and he made his way toward Argentina from there. "More travel," Oz says when his breath is coming normally again. "Lots of buses. Law down there, they have to break down seven times a trip. Blow out a tire, lose their brakes, anything. Picture of Esquel. That's near where I lived. Lots of Welsh there."
"Yes, of course," Giles says vaguely, eyes sliding over more bus tickets, an Argentine coin taped to the page, a sketch of a mountain and another of the four stars in the Southern Cross constellation, which is invisible from the northern hemisphere. Oz ran from Sunnydale, from him, to the other side of the world.
You weren't there, Oz said, and then kissed him and changed the subject. With everything Giles has regretted and wished different, he's somehow never thought of this, of what Oz must have felt when Giles wasn't among the rescuers. What he must have imagined it meant.
Oz is starting to turn to a new page when Giles takes his hand. "Oz, please don't think that I didn't . . . I wanted to come for you." Listening, Oz is very still, expressionless, and Giles doesn't know if Oz believes him. This must be what Oz feels every time they talk about the past--the inadequacy of the plain, sad, ignoble truth. "Waiting like that . . . it was awful, I felt so sick and so desperately afraid. But Buffy thought a small team was best." He doesn't add, although he wants to, that he'd have been there if Willow hadn't insisted on going herself. "I'm sorry."
Explanations, Giles thinks, are like skin grafts. Never enough to cover the burnt places, to heal instead of patch. But Oz lets the book go and wraps both arms around Giles' neck, lips pressed to his temple in a long, soft kiss, and if explanations aren't enough, surely this forgiveness can provide the rest.
A few more of the worry lines flatten out from Oz's forehead, and Giles kisses the last little valley between his brows, the one that's been there a lot since Oz came back. He doesn't want to be responsible for Oz's first wrinkle, although if they manage to stay together, he supposes he will be. But not for a good few years yet.
"We'll both do better this time." It's something Giles says a lot, aloud and silently, his own version of Oz's Tibetan prayers that bring the mind into harmony and peace. Perhaps it's the only lesson to be learned from their disaster, the diamond amid the rubble. Now it calms his stubborn shivers, lets him stop thinking about Oz and Willow, lets him rub his cheek against Oz's and remember to be glad that he's here.
The book has wedged itself between the sofa cushions; Giles pries it loose and opens it to the handprint again. Grief literalized in blood; he almost envies Oz for having thought of it, although he doubts it made things easier, any more than his own drinking and random fucking and maudlin hours of listening to records did. He lays his own hand over the page for a moment, then twines it awkwardly with Oz's (the one, Giles realizes, he must have cut) and says, "Will you talk me through the book? Tell me your stories?" Rubble or not, he's going to salvage all he can.
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"There's not much for a while -" He turns the page, finds the first graph he made of the moon's cycle, the dates written in blue pen, and a dandelion from Jenny's funeral dried to something kind of oily and brown. "You said it was for my favorite things, but." He glances up at Giles and sees interest in his eyes, kindness around his mouth, and squirms again. Oz knows this feeling, the weird prickles under his face and chest and the rattle of his pulse, but he hasn't felt like this for a long, long time. It's just how he felt when Giles would ask him to play his guitar. It's opening himself out to someone's attention, to the opinion of someone he respects, and he knows he's going to fuck it up.
Then again, this is another version of their old memory game, a hand held out to the other, bringing him to the past. Or slipping the past into the present, into his mind.
"Didn't have a lot of favorites for a while," Oz says and flips back to the "Dear Prudence" tabs. "Still love this song. Haven't listened to it forever. This paper's from your hospital room. Took it from your chart." He flips forward, trying to get past the especially painful memories. "Matchbooks from bars. Gigs, and other stuff. Devon gave me this postcard. It's the Day of the Dead. Happy skeletons. Um. Ticket I got speeding, that's not supposed to be in there. Lots of moon stuff, obviously. Oh. I wrote this -"
He curves his free hand over the top of the book and shows it to Giles.
"After they fired you."
On the facing page, the sad blue saint card from Larry's funeral.
"It's memories, I guess," Oz says and kisses Giles' cheek. "Not great ones, though. And not really stories. Just glad you're here."
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Together, the tiny words and the cream expanse of paper are something intimate, like a whisper in a quiet room. "Thank you," Giles says, squeezing Oz's hand. "That was a difficult time." If he'd known, then, that Oz was sorry for him, it might have helped. Or it might have made it all unbearable.
Oz flipped so quickly through the pages that Giles barely saw some of them. When Giles turns back to the beginning, Oz starts to speak, goes quiet, and slumps a little against Giles' shoulder. Giles lets go his hand, circles his waist to hold him closer, and says, "It's all right." They've been through such a slough of bad memories already that Giles is fairly sure he can't get any muddier. Even the torn half-page from his hospital chart only makes him stop for a moment to breathe. Those memories, blurred with pain and drugs, are fairly easy to push down, although he wishes he could somehow detach the memory of Oz's visit from the rest, to have some pleasure in it. Another diamond, this one hopelessly fused to melted steel and the stench of death.
Still, it's a relief to come to the more neutral things, matchbooks and bar coasters and, for some reason, an empty sugar packet. "I didn't know the Dingoes played in so many places," Giles says inanely, and then he notices one plain black matchbox, unremarkable among the others, that says Weisse's. His startled glance meets a surprised one from Oz, who immediately looks away. "I was there once." It was a bad night, a few weeks after Oz left him, when even Sunnydale's only gay bar seemed better than staying at home again to fret over Oz and Angelus in turns. "I didn't much care for it." It stank of old cigarette smoke and older despair, and the men all looked so furtive that Giles half thought the news of Stonewall hadn't reached them yet.
Horrible to think of Oz going there. Giles kisses his temple, rubs the back of his neck, and doesn't ask.
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The book, even though it's packed with memories, is safer than wandering alone through his own, so Oz turns back to it.
"Jordy made me this -" He turns the page and shows Giles the self-portrait in yellow and orange crayon, carefully signed in big block letters. "Combination to the cage I built in the crypt. Used an old dormroom lock. Directions to Angel's place in LA, more matchbooks from the pubcrawl."
The pages after he left Sunnydale are packed with roadmaps and phone numbers, layers and peeling tape and scratched-out words, an incoherent mass of information that even Oz can't grab much sense from any longer.
"This is - this is me looking," he says, and lets his eyes close for a minute while Giles draws his finger down the page. "Drove to Chicago. Train to New York, lots of wandering. Plane to Paris. Chasing my tail, mostly. Warsaw, Budapest, Ravenna, finally Prague. What's a word that's not a quest, not a journey, but not a vacation, either?"
Telling and showing Giles this is easier, somehow, than it was the last night he talked to Willow. Maybe because Giles knows how research works, from the inside out, following leads and trails, backing up, getting so turned around you just want to fall down. He doesn't have to explain the false starts, or the worry; Giles already knows.
"Besides research, I mean." He smiles, warmth loosening him from face to shins, and glances up. "Love you, by the way."
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Oz, smiling, holds him tightly by the neck and dots his face with little nibbling kisses. Everything's been so serious, a long hard slog out of grief and estrangement, and they're only starting to remember how to be silly together. But this is love too, this play and nonsense, and Giles realizes he's missed it.
In Sunnydale, laughter was always a defiance of sadness and fear-Buffy's jokes as she fought, or Xander's infinite and sometimes irritating jest, or the way Oz and Giles would get into tickling matches half an hour before Oz had to leave. It's not that different now, kissing and giggling, scrambling to catch the book before it slides off Oz's lap and onto the floor. They're still laughing as they turn back to the page, the collage of Oz's exile.
"For some reason, I thought you went straight to Tibet," Giles says, looking at a receipt from a coffee shop in Prague. "Silly of me." Giles' research has been done in libraries, where the worst that can happen is a few days' wasted effort; Oz had to travel alone to country after country, asking the sort of questions that phrasebooks never offer words for, with no guarantee that he'd ever find what he needed. It must have been frightening, and endlessly lonely.
On the next page, there's the stub of a train ticket, Warsaw to Budapest, and some more of Oz's handwriting: I miss your mushy peas, how you pile them on your fork, how they shine with butter. I miss the sandwich you gave me one morning through the bars of the cage, fried egg and oily American cheese with too much ketchup. I miss your cream crackers and digestive biscuits and Flake bars and blood sausages and bubble and squeak. I'm really hungry, Giles.
It's one of the things that used to keep Giles awake at night, the thought that Oz might be hungry. Might be homeless, cold, starving. "You realize," he says, rubbing a shoulder whose bones are still too close to the surface, "that you've just let yourself in for another week of fried breakfasts, beef stews and chocolate after every meal?"
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He remembers being hungry, but it's like remembering a particularly bad fall skateboarding, or being shot: The pain is gone, and he can *tell* himself what it felt like, but mostly he remembers the situation, the circumstances, not the pain.
"Always think of you and food," he says, turning the page. The colors are brighter here, postcards and handbills from Turkey and India and the trek up to Tibet. Elephants both real and god-like, luscious goddesses with twisting lips, a recipe for lemon pickle that makes his mouth pucker with the memory of it, angry monkeys camping on telephone wires and a scrawled, half-literate signature from Tempa, who helped him get across the border. "Cooking with you, eating stuff. Missed it more than anything." He glances over, and Giles is frowning a little, tracing the line of one of Oz's shoulder-blades. "Well, almost anything."
Once he made it to Tibet, Oz was still hungry. He drank po cha all day long, like everyone else, always shivering, always hoping for something a little more solid. Tangy like something teetering on the edge of rancidity, and salty enough to taste directly sexual, he can still taste the tea; he wonders why flavors get remembered, but not pain. He told himself it was a holy hunger, he tried to tell himself, something about burning away his attachments to samsara with every cramp.
"Here's the wrapper from a brick of tea," he says, tapping the gold and brown slip of oily paper. "You mashed up crumbled-off pieces, and boiled them all day, *then* added that to hot water, yak butter, and salt. Good stuff." Giles nods politely and Oz grins. "Hey, it got me drinking tea. You should be grateful. For a couple weeks, it was all I did there. Taught me humility."
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Happiness, Giles is learning, has a thousand shapes, and pouring out two mugs of tea is among them. So are seeing Oz's Save an Animal mug every day, remembering to keep milk and sugar on hand for him, drinking tea and eating meals with him. "I missed cooking with you, too," Giles says. "This will sound ridiculous, but when I thought about you, I thought about food and sleep. Sex. Talking." He cups Oz's cheek and smiles. "Necessary things." If the monks and their butter tea helped to bring Oz back, then Giles is grateful.
Although Giles has tried to imagine Oz in Tibet, he's never really been able to. Even though Oz meditates and prays every day, he's far too solidly anchored in the world to seem monastic. Among the orange-robed monks with their minds turned to detachment and eternity, he must have been earthy and dissonant, a sturdy bit of heather among the hothouse roses. "I shouldn't have thought you needed to learn humility, though. Rather the opposite, if anything." Oz is too good at humility, too used to loneliness and neglect, too able to give himself up to other people's good, or what he imagines it to be.
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"I need to learn pride?" Oz asks. "Or vanity? Don't think I really want either -" Neither strikes him as a good thing, and both make him think of Ethan, sudden unbidden images of a laughing face and knowing eyes. Giles' account of Ethan, anyway, small threads and clouded remarks. Another black gap between them, persisting under its own power, while the rest are fading and closing. "'course, you did accuse me of being vain when I wouldn't cede the mirror this morning."
Giles squeezes his shoulder and Oz tucks his head against Giles' neck. Never been happier, Giles said the night before Oz left and made it a lie, the gap-that-was-Ethan yawning behind the words. Oz bites his lip and turns the page, finds the mandala facing the note he wrote Giles the morning he arrived in Sunnydale.
"Weird. Travel's got tons of stuff, but Tibet? Nothing except tea and circles," he says. It seems appropriate, somehow, that the most important stage of the trip is empty; he can't think of words, so he shouldn't have scraps, either. "Here. Wrote this, um. When I got back."
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Remembering all that stillborn possibility, Giles can't focus on the page. He looks up, past Oz's head to the shelf where the bowl sits now, next to the Mapuche drum. On another shelf there's a photograph of the two of them on Catalina; Giles recalls the young woman who took it, Oz's pitch-perfect imitation of Giles' accent when he asked her to, and his own panicked attempt to invent a story-Giles and Daniel Hitchens, father and son, tourists from Newcastle (distant, obscure, and an American wouldn't know that their accents were wrong)-in case she asked anything, which she didn't. Giles kept the photo between the pages of a dictionary for four years, but now it's in a frame, on an eye-level shelf for anyone to see. Even the collage Oz made for their anniversary, which Giles wrapped in tissue paper the morning Oz left, put away, and never looked at again, now sits on the dresser in their bedroom. Oz, who found it at the top of a box of books and unwrapped it without knowing what it was, seemed amazed that he'd kept it.
There are old memories everywhere, happiness and pain inevitably mingled. In the open; it's safe to have memories now. Giles hugs Oz close, nuzzling his hair and stroking his jutting shoulderblades through heavy wool, and then turns back to the book. After the date there are words: You're not going to want to talk to me. But I did it and I want you to know that. We don't have to talk. I just want to see you. Then a blank space, the space of the talk they didn't have, the space when Oz went off with Willow, became a wolf despite everything he'd learned, was imprisoned and tortured and freed. The space when Giles drank and agonized and waited. The space when Oz left again.
Two words after that: I'm sorry.
None of it's anything but memory, and maybe it needs its place, its embodiment, just as the better memories do. Giles leans his head against Oz's, their foreheads touching. It's part of Oz's vocabulary of gestures, a term of comfort and reconciliation that's awkward, crippled, in words. "I wanted to talk to you," Giles says. "If we'd had time, if they hadn't been there . . . I'm sorry. If I could've found something to say, anything." He tilts Oz's chin up and kisses him lightly, trying not to think of soldiers and scientists, a cold white cell and a naked, brutalized boy, the debt he owes Riley Finn and always will. "Christ, we've had awful luck, haven't we?" Mostly awful, occasionally miraculous, far too variable to trust. Better to be careful, to trust each other and leave no room for luck.
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Oz looks back down at his crabbed handwriting and slides his hand back out so he can turn the page. "Didn't know you wanted to talk to me," he says. "So crowded there, and then everything happened. And you weren't there, in - in the place. With the others." Giles shivers and Oz does, too, his throat gone tight and sour. He shakes his head, tries to fling off memory like water from the shower, and kisses Giles a third time. Hardest yet, burning lips and a hand in Giles' hair, and he warms up even as he starts to relax.
"Here now," he says and rolls their foreheads together again. As close as they can get, nearly sharing skin, and Oz takes a deep breath. "You shouldn't be sorry, though. That place's full of bad timing. To put it mildly."
The last of the filled pages trace his route from Sunnydale to San Francisco to stay with his aunt and uncle; they paid for his ticket down to Rio, and he made his way toward Argentina from there. "More travel," Oz says when his breath is coming normally again. "Lots of buses. Law down there, they have to break down seven times a trip. Blow out a tire, lose their brakes, anything. Picture of Esquel. That's near where I lived. Lots of Welsh there."
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You weren't there, Oz said, and then kissed him and changed the subject. With everything Giles has regretted and wished different, he's somehow never thought of this, of what Oz must have felt when Giles wasn't among the rescuers. What he must have imagined it meant.
Oz is starting to turn to a new page when Giles takes his hand. "Oz, please don't think that I didn't . . . I wanted to come for you." Listening, Oz is very still, expressionless, and Giles doesn't know if Oz believes him. This must be what Oz feels every time they talk about the past--the inadequacy of the plain, sad, ignoble truth. "Waiting like that . . . it was awful, I felt so sick and so desperately afraid. But Buffy thought a small team was best." He doesn't add, although he wants to, that he'd have been there if Willow hadn't insisted on going herself. "I'm sorry."
Explanations, Giles thinks, are like skin grafts. Never enough to cover the burnt places, to heal instead of patch. But Oz lets the book go and wraps both arms around Giles' neck, lips pressed to his temple in a long, soft kiss, and if explanations aren't enough, surely this forgiveness can provide the rest.
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