Teeth chattering a little, Oz checks the clock next to the fridge after adding the boiling water to the teapot; he used the darkest stuff, so it's going to steep for just a couple minutes.
"Tea is drunk to forget the din of the world," Giles told him a long time ago, and it doesn't matter if it's yak-butter tea or Giles' favorite smoky kind. It's true, and Oz watches his hands, bright white in the light, move like birds, warming the mugs and reaching for the sugar.
Giles is at the table now, his chair pulled out a little, looking down at his own hands, watching them flex, watching the fingers knit together. "Here," Oz says, handing him his mug and pulling up close against his side. Here, he's been saying ever since he got back, here and not going, and it seems unfair somehow, surreal, that Giles should be the one leaving first. Buffy, though, Buffy changes everything, erases every rule and expectation.
Giles looks up at him, and his forehead is crumpled up, his eyes squinting against the light, and a weight drops and turns inside Oz's chest. Too soon, Oz thinks, the sight of Giles' mussed-up spiky hair and sad, tight eyes, too soon for either of them to leave.
"When, um. When should we go?"
Sometimes the din's too much even for tea. Buffy, and Giles, who's still pretending - just not as thoroughly as he was - that he's all right and unmoved by her loss, and Sunnydale. Hellmouth, nightmare, louder than anything.
"We?" Surprise makes it spill from Giles' mouth without thought, without a moment's consideration, and of course he should have known how it would sound. But he didn't, not until it's hanging cold and sharp in the air between them, and Oz turns his face away.
Giles reaches out to catch his hands, splattering tea onto the table and the sleeve of his robe, and holds them tightly. They're colder even than his own chilled fingers, so he folds them around Oz's mug and chafes his palms lightly over them. "Oz," he says, and waits until Oz looks up again, face as pale and pinched as it was when he first came back, when he was starving and lonely. "I do want you to come with me. If you're sure you want to."
He's been so sure that he'll never go back to Sunnydale. It's become one of their certainties, one of their founding assumptions. They're away from the hellmouth, away from their past and their disasters, away from any obligations but the ones to each other. This is their new life, their Rome rising up from Troy's ashes.
Buffy's in Sunnydale, alive, and once again Giles has two lives and only one man's resources. "Please come," he says, as though Oz has refused, as though it's Oz whose loyalties are split. Giles looks down at his own hands covering Oz's, at his thumb stroking Oz's knuckles, and adds, "I need you."
Buffy's in Sunnydale, and so is Willow, and Giles needs Oz there and he wants to leave him in London, safe. Lock him up, keep him away from the hellmouth, away from her, away from everything that could go wrong.
They brought her back, but of course that's kind, a nice way of saying what really happened. Willow did, and Oz knows it and he knows Giles does, too, probably better than anyone.
"I'm glad she's, you know -" He stops and sets his mug next to Giles' and just kind of stands there for a second, their hands linked, neither of them actually looking at each other. Odd angles, careful glances away: How they didn't look at each other in the library when things were good, when things went rotten, when everything was over. "Giles."
It takes too long for Giles to look up, to meet Oz's eyes, but what counts is that he does. That he's looking back at Oz, fear falling like water across his face, worry and fear and everything else. Oz's legs are frozen, the shins stiff like he's been walking for hours without a meal, but his hands are mobile, and he hauls himself closer until he's standing between Giles' legs and has his hands on Giles' neck under the edge of his robe.
"Course I'm coming." The words, though, they're only true when he says them, when the noise is out and Giles is nodding a little. "Can't let you go alone, can't stay here like - I don't know. No, I'm coming. Won't be alone, you'll be okay."
Everyone's going to know about them now, and that's got to worry Giles, or it will, when the rest of it, the bigger shock, sinks in. In the middle of all the noise and fear, though, Oz thinks it's probably the best thing; Giles won't feel all isolated and burdened, all alone, the way he always has.
"Don't, um, wanna see Will -" Oz says, and his knees go shaky and skittery and Giles wraps his arms around Oz's waist. "But it might be nice to see the sun again, right?"
Giles laughs a little at the joke, gratefully, with his face pressed hard to the thin cloth of Oz's t-shirt and the unyielding bone of his chest beneath. "Listen to that," he says, tipping his neck back against Oz's cold hands and looking up at his face. He smiles, and Oz smiles back, and it feels right, correct. This is what they ought to be doing. "You'd think the sun never shone in London, to hear you talk."
They're been happy since Oz came back, fiercely and painfully happy, and this news is happy news, and it will add to their happiness. It will strip away some of the alloying pain, some of Giles' contaminating guilt, and make everything brighter, purer. Sunnydale, Willow, seeing Oz see Willow again-that will be the forge to this refinement, because impurities can only be removed by burning.
This news is happy news, and there's no reason to be afraid. "As for Willow," - and saying her name makes Giles shiver without reason, makes him pull Oz a little closer - "that will be all right, I promise. You won't be alone either." Giles turns his head to hear Oz's heartbeat, to try and drown out the certainty that there are plenty of reasons to be afraid. There's no pure happiness, and no pure protection either, and Giles has a dozen reasons for ensuring that Oz isn't alone. That Oz isn't alone with Willow.
After a while, after Oz's heartbeat has slowed and Giles' bare feet have stopped feeling the chill floor, Giles says, "Dear god. Buffy's alive." She has her future back, or as much future as a Slayer can ever have; Dawn has a family again; Willow and Xander have their friend. Infinite joy in this simple fact of Buffy's life, and for a moment he's ashamed to have thought so much, at all, about Oz and himself.
In this last month Giles has finally let Buffy die, finally loosed his life from hers. And now she's alive, and he's glad, but there's no undoing that separation, that slow farewell. Oz comes before Buffy now, as he should. "I love you," Giles says, and manages a smile. "We should drink this tea, if it's not stone-cold by now."
"Love you," Oz says and pushes Giles' mug to his hand while he slides onto Giles' lap. It still amazes and settles him all at the same time that they can touch each other, share space like this, with Giles' arm going around Oz's waist as he sips his tea. He's been thinking of it as a London thing, as if intimacy and comfort came in the fog or something, and he presses Giles' arm more firmly against him as he shivers, thinking of Sunnydale.
The wool of Giles' robe smells like tea and soap and scratches against Oz's cheek. He doesn't actually want any tea; he wants to sit here and not move. All of a sudden London doesn't feel like home, but like a vacation he didn't know he was on, and all it took was a phone call. Like their week in the mountains and weekends at Giles' old place, when time hovered sharply over his head, constantly dwindling.
"Can they do that?" he asks suddenly and Giles' brows jump as he frowns. "Sorry. If she's alive, why didn't you do it?" Giles drops his head and Oz hugs him hard, spillng more tea. "Forget it. Sorry."
He *knows* weird shit happens in Sunnydale; he grew up there and he left there for lots of reasons. Stupid to think the rest of the world's any more normal. Oz holds on hard to Giles, rubbing his forehead against the seam and lapel of his robe, wondering if he looks like the kid he feels like right now. Behind his lids, he can see Devry Street, and the run-down playground on the corner, and the blank vault of the bright California sky.
"Sunnydale, huh?" Oz pulls back a little. "Are there even flights there?"
While Oz's questions, the simple one and the agonizing one, rattle around in Giles' head, he strokes Oz's hair, trying to smooth out the wild irregular spikes, like a frozen sea, that sleep has put there. Under the strong kitchen lights it's bright as metal, coppergold instead of quotidian ginger; Oz has indulged Giles' fascination by not dyeing it again, yet, although Giles knows he wants to.
The easy question first. "There aren't any direct flights to Sunnydale." Giles twists a strand of hair around his finger; against his roughened knuckle it's almost impossibly silky and fine, despite a coarsening layer of gel. "We could change planes in Los Angeles, but it would be easier just to rent a car. We'll need one anyway." Mind-filling practicalities-passports, tickets, currency, car rental, hotel-offer themselves as buffer to block out that other question, the one Oz surely won't make him answer if he just ignores it. Giles' fingers itch to pack, his mind yearns for listmaking.
Why didn't you do it?
Willow hinted around at it, a couple of weeks before Giles left, with questions about his spellbooks and his magical training. And perhaps in a few days Buffy will ask the same thing with half-concealed disappointment, with all the stored-up pain from every time he's failed her: Why didn't you try to bring me back? There's no way to explain so that his scruples won't sound like lack of nerve, or worse, lack of love.
Giles slides his hand deeper into Oz's hair, cradling Oz's head against his shoulder (conveniently impossible, like this, to look in his eyes, watch his face). "I didn't try to bring her back because it would have been too dangerous."
Yes, it does sound cowardly. "Oz, this chair is bloody hard and it's cold in here," he says, rubbing Oz's neck to hold him still a little longer. "Why don't we go into the sitting room, and wrap up in a duvet, and talk?" Bed would be even warmer and more comfortable, but this isn't a conversation he wants to bring into bed.
Giles is right, of course - the kitchen's freezing and the chair is old and high-backed and hard - but Oz misses it as soon as they move into the living room. Giles settles on the couch and Oz hands him a fresh mug of tea before dashing into the bedroom for the quilt that's still warm from sleep. He pulls on his pants from yesterday as he returns, finding Giles sitting stockstill with the mug in both hands, watching the steam.
Oz clears his throat and Giles' shoulders twitch but he doesn't look up.
"I'm sorry," Oz says, and he's back to 9/11, not knowing what to say, cold burning through him inside and out. The couch sighs more loudly than either him or Giles when he sits, pushing the quilt over Giles' lap. "I didn't mean -. I just meant -. Dangerous, right? Doesn't sound like something that could be a good idea."
Gradually he pulls himself closer to Giles, until Giles' posture loosens a little and Oz can duck under his arm. Curling his legs behind him, Oz takes another deep breath and hears it rattle all the way down his lungs. Lilin saw Buffy, there are forces out there shared by the powerful, and something's not right, not if Buffy's back.
"I meant -" Oz touches Giles' far cheek and rubs his thumb over his chin and eventually, slowly, Giles looks at him. "Meant you wouldn't have. Get that. I'm sorry."
For the first time, maybe, since he arrived, Oz is glad for one of his fuck-ups; it's much better to talk to Giles and apologize than it is to think about Sunnydale in any shape or form.
Giles takes a few scalding sips of tea, feeling the heat of it unblock the ice that's been grinding inside him ever since Oz asked why. Fear feels cold, and so do guilt and sorrow, while love feels warm. At bottom, even the most complex emotion is only chemistry, and all the soul's pain is felt in the body.
He offers Oz the mug, since Oz didn't bring his own, but Oz shakes his head. "You don't need to apologize," Giles says finally, and rubs his thumb over Oz's shoulder for emphasis. "It's a perfectly understandable question."
Giles believes in the soul, because he's seen what happens without one. What vampires are, alive but soulless, nothing but the body's infinite hungers. But he doesn't know what a soul is without a body. Weightless, lifeless, desiring nothing, free of need and pain. Some faiths would call that heaven, or nirvana.
It sounds, Giles thinks, inhuman, monstrous as a golem or a saint, renunciate and dead.
"I was dreaming, tonight, before the phone rang." Giles takes another swallow of tea, sets the mug on the side table, and settles his arm around Oz's waist. "She was clawing her way out of the grave, and I was waiting for her. Waiting to see if she'd be herself, or something else. Something I'd have to kill." He leans his cheek against Oz's, inhales the warmth of Oz's breath. "It's an unnatural magic. Dangerous and selfish. There'll be a price, and god knows who'll pay it. Maybe the whole world, if we're especially unlucky."
Death is final. It's the central, unstated creed of the Watchers. Immortality and resurrection upset the world's precarious balance, and Buffy has already been resurrected once. "I love Buffy," he says, closing his eyes, feeling warmth, and darkness, and Oz. "I'm glad she's alive. And I wish Willow had never done that spell." Contradictory emotions, incompatible chemicals flowing through his body, and he's half-sick with it.
Oz doesn't know magic. He *ought* to, but it's so close, running through his veins and twisting over his brain, that he can't bring himself to know more. He always half-suspected - though it's not the same at all, really - that Buffy kind of felt the same way. The relief lighting up her face when she delegated to Giles and Willow was obvious; she'd grab a weapon and look happy not to have discuss the intricacies and abstractions.
"You dream about her a lot?" he asks now. "Is it like, like her dreams? The magic ones?"
Giles sips his tea and when he's finished, Oz accepts the mug and sucks down a large mouthful. Hot and bitter without milk or sugar, but it's like essence of Giles, boiling in his stomach and radiating outward. He doesn't know how it's possible to come back from the dead if you're not a vampire. It must be like being ripped inside-out, rocketing through worlds in reverse. She fell, and now she's rising, and Oz is dizzy.
Giles takes the mug back and drinks the last of the tea, carefully setting his mouth to the spot where Oz drank. Without comment, with deliberate casualness, they've come to do this more and more often. They share a glass of water or a mug of tea, even a plate at dinner, sometimes, although it's rather awkward. They feed each other bits of toast or biscuit, lick each other's fingers clean, and if they're in a restaurant and can't, they catch each other's eye and grin like children.
Lovers' nonsense, laughable, and Giles knows he'd despise it in anybody else. But he and Oz have almost four years' absence to fill, endless breaches of trust to glue together with talk and sex and shared crockery.
He'd like another cup of tea to share with Oz, to put off, for a little longer, having to think about Buffy again. But Oz is frowning, brows drawn together, and when he opens his mouth Giles is certain he's about to apologize once more. "I didn't dream about her for a long time," he says, resting a palm on Oz's cheek and running his little finger over Oz's earrings. "But since the eleventh . . . " Leaning forward, he presses his forehead to Oz's, kisses the tip of his nose, then settles back again. "Those were just ordinary dreams, though. I dreamt of her falling. Or that I saved her. Nothing like tonight."
He should probably have told Oz. But they've had a little peace in the weeks since then, and he's wanted to preserve it, guard it from his grief. Guard Oz from his grief, as much as he can, after burdening him with so much of it.
But they've gone wrong before, trying to protect each other from difficult truths. "Oz," he asks, "will you be all right, seeing Willow again?" Giles thinks they know each other well enough, now, to trust that Oz will hear everything he's asking.
Oz twists a little and slides his hand up Giles' sleeve; warm under the duvet, but he needs more, the tickle of forearm hair on his palm, the weird soft crinkly skin behind Giles' elbow under his fingertips. He remembers cold nights, in the van, in the mountains down at the bottom of the world, right back in Sunnydale even, his skin tight and smarting in Giles' absence. Someday, he'll get used to proximity, be able to touch without thinking of how he didn't used to be able to, but that day's a long way off. Even longer, now that Sunnydale's looming again.
"Will I? Be all right?" He's echoing Giles, buying time to think. But his thoughts are just frozen in a block, impenetrable and static, and he could wait until the sun rises, then sets again, and he still won't know what to say. "I'm not going to eat anybody." Giles gives him a tight smile at that and Oz shrugs. "I'm not going to, like -" Fall in love and leave you: It's the truth, he's not going to, he knows that like he knows his own name, but there has to be a better way to say it.
"We'll be all right," he finally says, then nods to seal the promise into fact. "Not going anywhere." Giles tips down his head and Oz kisses his neck, lips on warm, taut skin and the faint burr of chest hair. "Can't imagine not having you. Not ever."
Proximity and intimacy: Oz wonders if that's all magic is, just controlling those qualities and manipulating them. If so, he's all for it.
Oz's kiss, Oz's hand touching his arm, Oz's words-it all feels like trust, like certainty, like the daylight that drives away every evil thing. Solid and true, as though Oz never left him, never touched Willow like this, never said the same words to her, as he must have done. "I can imagine it all too well," Giles says. He can imagine, he can remember, he can drag the whole dead, insubstantial past into the present, resurrect it, give it flesh and blood, let it live again as fear.
There's a pause in the raindrop rhythm of Oz's kisses to his throat, then a sigh, and then it starts again, just as slow and gentle as before. "I trust you." Giles cradles Oz's head in both hands, heavy bone under his fingers. "I'm afraid, but I trust you."
Long ago, Ethan told him that he'd never be a decent magician if he couldn't step free of logic, hold two contradictory truths and believe them both. It seemed impossible, then.
Just as well it did, considering where Ethan's magic led him.
"Willow . . . has changed rather a lot, over the last couple of years." Oz looks up at that, with a faint smile and a questioning eyebrow, and Giles finds himself smiling back. "Yes, but that's not what I meant." He feels his own smile fade, watches Oz's disappear along with it. "Her magic . . . she's got an enormous amount of power now. You don't bring back the dead just by reading the right phrases in a book."
Giles pulls the duvet up over his shoulders and stares down at the blue expanse. It's a new duvet cover, replacing the one he'd had for fifteen years or more; Oz picked it out. Evidence that this is his life now, that Sunnydale is another time, another place.
Contradictory things.
"The only other person I've ever known to have so much power, so young, was Ethan." As always, Oz goes still for a moment, breath held, as though the mention of Ethan will call him up, like summoning a demon. "It's tempting, that power. It corrupts. I'm afraid for her." Giles hooks his arm more closely around Oz's waist, and doesn't add that he's afraid of her, as well. So much power, so little judgment.
He told Willow once that she was going to become one bad-ass Wicca; it wasn't a lie - he really did believe it. She loved the phrase and used it every time she could, and he thought it was cute.
"I'm sorry," Oz says now. Giles blinks a little, kindly, the way he does when Oz starts talking far down a stream of previously-silent thought. "I -. Ethan, huh?"
They've talked about the past. They've talked about the present. But they haven't talked about Willow, because neither of them seems to be able to handle it. Another thing she's got in common with Ethan, apparently. But they can talk about magic, even if Oz knows less than anything about it. Magic's pretty safe.
"Don't be afraid. I'm not -" Oz scrubs his knuckles over his forehead, as if that will loosen his thoughts. "I'm not interested in Willow, not any more. Really." Giles' face is slack, unreadable. "You want to tell me about the power? Or, um. Ask me stuff? Get the fear out?"
He will tell Giles anything. It's just that sometimes he doesn't know what to say. Oz tips his head back onto Giles' shoulder and takes a slow, deep breath.
"Thank you." Giles rests his head against Oz's; he's tired, suddenly, here in the warmth, but it's the sort of anxious fatigue that produces fretfulness, not sleep. Already the day's been long, overfull of event, and it won't be dawn for two hours or more. "Really. But . . . ." He massages circles over his eyebrows, where a headache's starting, and tries to think. Another enormous mess he'll have to solve, a nasty hissing tangle of fears and possibilities. "I don't think I'll really stop being afraid until we're there. I'm sorry."
He needs to see for himself. See Buffy and verify that she's all right (that she's herself), see Willow and judge how she's handling her power, see Oz with Willow and know, finally, that Oz has chosen him.
"I'm sorry," he says again, kissing the crown of Oz's head and sliding a palm along his side. It can't be good, this strain on trust that's only beginning to mend. Bad timing has always been their particular curse.
After a while the silence grows comfortable, familiar; they're better at silence than at talking, but this time, Giles hopes, the silence doesn't conceal secrets and traps. "You should go back to sleep," he says when Oz yawns. He wants Oz to sleep, just as he wants to pack and organize. Normality isn't a cure for fear, but it's the only palliative that works.
"Wasn't a sleepy yawn." He's telling the truth; he doesn't feel sleepy so much as slightly wired, strung out in a way he hasn't really felt since his first days here. But Giles is close and warm, and so Oz doesn't feel quite as strung and nervous as, he thinks, he maybe ought to feel, faced with the prospect of Sunnydale and Willow in the next twenty-four hours. "Just an oxygen one."
Giles nods gravely; Oz is never going to be able to convince him that there are a hundred different kinds of yawns. Sleepy, in several varieties, bored, thoughtful, contemplative, oxygenating: The list is very long but, oddly, Giles still hasn't been swayed.
"True," Oz says, and butts his head gently against Giles' arm. They're still crafting and practicing their own gestural language, but this is one of their oldest silent signals, and Giles sighs deeply, loosening his hold so Oz can pull himself onto Giles' lap. He wraps one arm around Giles' neck and pillows his cheek on the quilt and Giles' shoulder. "Not going to sleep. Just want - is it okay if -"
In the dark, Giles' face is reduced to its most essential elements - the short, fine dip of his nose, broad kind mouth, careful eyes - and Oz smiles slowly. He just wants to stay here for a little bit and, judging by how Giles is pulling the quilt back up and resting his head on Oz's arm, he feels the same way.
"Help you do all the packing and stuff," Oz says a little later. "Be easier with two sets of hands. Just, now, just -" Giles murmurs something nonverbal in the back of his throat and Oz nods. "Exactly."
Dark still, and dawn's coming, and all that crazy activity is going to distract him from both the anxiety of the trip and the quietness of home. Oz wants to pull in all that quiet, the trust, Giles' breathing in his ear, and store it up, let it happen for as long as possible.
"Tea is drunk to forget the din of the world," Giles told him a long time ago, and it doesn't matter if it's yak-butter tea or Giles' favorite smoky kind. It's true, and Oz watches his hands, bright white in the light, move like birds, warming the mugs and reaching for the sugar.
Giles is at the table now, his chair pulled out a little, looking down at his own hands, watching them flex, watching the fingers knit together. "Here," Oz says, handing him his mug and pulling up close against his side. Here, he's been saying ever since he got back, here and not going, and it seems unfair somehow, surreal, that Giles should be the one leaving first. Buffy, though, Buffy changes everything, erases every rule and expectation.
Giles looks up at him, and his forehead is crumpled up, his eyes squinting against the light, and a weight drops and turns inside Oz's chest. Too soon, Oz thinks, the sight of Giles' mussed-up spiky hair and sad, tight eyes, too soon for either of them to leave.
"When, um. When should we go?"
Sometimes the din's too much even for tea. Buffy, and Giles, who's still pretending - just not as thoroughly as he was - that he's all right and unmoved by her loss, and Sunnydale. Hellmouth, nightmare, louder than anything.
Reply
Giles reaches out to catch his hands, splattering tea onto the table and the sleeve of his robe, and holds them tightly. They're colder even than his own chilled fingers, so he folds them around Oz's mug and chafes his palms lightly over them. "Oz," he says, and waits until Oz looks up again, face as pale and pinched as it was when he first came back, when he was starving and lonely. "I do want you to come with me. If you're sure you want to."
He's been so sure that he'll never go back to Sunnydale. It's become one of their certainties, one of their founding assumptions. They're away from the hellmouth, away from their past and their disasters, away from any obligations but the ones to each other. This is their new life, their Rome rising up from Troy's ashes.
Buffy's in Sunnydale, alive, and once again Giles has two lives and only one man's resources. "Please come," he says, as though Oz has refused, as though it's Oz whose loyalties are split. Giles looks down at his own hands covering Oz's, at his thumb stroking Oz's knuckles, and adds, "I need you."
Buffy's in Sunnydale, and so is Willow, and Giles needs Oz there and he wants to leave him in London, safe. Lock him up, keep him away from the hellmouth, away from her, away from everything that could go wrong.
Reply
"I'm glad she's, you know -" He stops and sets his mug next to Giles' and just kind of stands there for a second, their hands linked, neither of them actually looking at each other. Odd angles, careful glances away: How they didn't look at each other in the library when things were good, when things went rotten, when everything was over. "Giles."
It takes too long for Giles to look up, to meet Oz's eyes, but what counts is that he does. That he's looking back at Oz, fear falling like water across his face, worry and fear and everything else. Oz's legs are frozen, the shins stiff like he's been walking for hours without a meal, but his hands are mobile, and he hauls himself closer until he's standing between Giles' legs and has his hands on Giles' neck under the edge of his robe.
"Course I'm coming." The words, though, they're only true when he says them, when the noise is out and Giles is nodding a little. "Can't let you go alone, can't stay here like - I don't know. No, I'm coming. Won't be alone, you'll be okay."
Everyone's going to know about them now, and that's got to worry Giles, or it will, when the rest of it, the bigger shock, sinks in. In the middle of all the noise and fear, though, Oz thinks it's probably the best thing; Giles won't feel all isolated and burdened, all alone, the way he always has.
"Don't, um, wanna see Will -" Oz says, and his knees go shaky and skittery and Giles wraps his arms around Oz's waist. "But it might be nice to see the sun again, right?"
Reply
They're been happy since Oz came back, fiercely and painfully happy, and this news is happy news, and it will add to their happiness. It will strip away some of the alloying pain, some of Giles' contaminating guilt, and make everything brighter, purer. Sunnydale, Willow, seeing Oz see Willow again-that will be the forge to this refinement, because impurities can only be removed by burning.
This news is happy news, and there's no reason to be afraid. "As for Willow," - and saying her name makes Giles shiver without reason, makes him pull Oz a little closer - "that will be all right, I promise. You won't be alone either." Giles turns his head to hear Oz's heartbeat, to try and drown out the certainty that there are plenty of reasons to be afraid. There's no pure happiness, and no pure protection either, and Giles has a dozen reasons for ensuring that Oz isn't alone. That Oz isn't alone with Willow.
After a while, after Oz's heartbeat has slowed and Giles' bare feet have stopped feeling the chill floor, Giles says, "Dear god. Buffy's alive." She has her future back, or as much future as a Slayer can ever have; Dawn has a family again; Willow and Xander have their friend. Infinite joy in this simple fact of Buffy's life, and for a moment he's ashamed to have thought so much, at all, about Oz and himself.
In this last month Giles has finally let Buffy die, finally loosed his life from hers. And now she's alive, and he's glad, but there's no undoing that separation, that slow farewell. Oz comes before Buffy now, as he should. "I love you," Giles says, and manages a smile. "We should drink this tea, if it's not stone-cold by now."
Reply
The wool of Giles' robe smells like tea and soap and scratches against Oz's cheek. He doesn't actually want any tea; he wants to sit here and not move. All of a sudden London doesn't feel like home, but like a vacation he didn't know he was on, and all it took was a phone call. Like their week in the mountains and weekends at Giles' old place, when time hovered sharply over his head, constantly dwindling.
"Can they do that?" he asks suddenly and Giles' brows jump as he frowns. "Sorry. If she's alive, why didn't you do it?" Giles drops his head and Oz hugs him hard, spillng more tea. "Forget it. Sorry."
He *knows* weird shit happens in Sunnydale; he grew up there and he left there for lots of reasons. Stupid to think the rest of the world's any more normal. Oz holds on hard to Giles, rubbing his forehead against the seam and lapel of his robe, wondering if he looks like the kid he feels like right now. Behind his lids, he can see Devry Street, and the run-down playground on the corner, and the blank vault of the bright California sky.
"Sunnydale, huh?" Oz pulls back a little. "Are there even flights there?"
Reply
The easy question first. "There aren't any direct flights to Sunnydale." Giles twists a strand of hair around his finger; against his roughened knuckle it's almost impossibly silky and fine, despite a coarsening layer of gel. "We could change planes in Los Angeles, but it would be easier just to rent a car. We'll need one anyway." Mind-filling practicalities-passports, tickets, currency, car rental, hotel-offer themselves as buffer to block out that other question, the one Oz surely won't make him answer if he just ignores it. Giles' fingers itch to pack, his mind yearns for listmaking.
Why didn't you do it?
Willow hinted around at it, a couple of weeks before Giles left, with questions about his spellbooks and his magical training. And perhaps in a few days Buffy will ask the same thing with half-concealed disappointment, with all the stored-up pain from every time he's failed her: Why didn't you try to bring me back? There's no way to explain so that his scruples won't sound like lack of nerve, or worse, lack of love.
Giles slides his hand deeper into Oz's hair, cradling Oz's head against his shoulder (conveniently impossible, like this, to look in his eyes, watch his face). "I didn't try to bring her back because it would have been too dangerous."
Yes, it does sound cowardly. "Oz, this chair is bloody hard and it's cold in here," he says, rubbing Oz's neck to hold him still a little longer. "Why don't we go into the sitting room, and wrap up in a duvet, and talk?" Bed would be even warmer and more comfortable, but this isn't a conversation he wants to bring into bed.
Reply
Oz clears his throat and Giles' shoulders twitch but he doesn't look up.
"I'm sorry," Oz says, and he's back to 9/11, not knowing what to say, cold burning through him inside and out. The couch sighs more loudly than either him or Giles when he sits, pushing the quilt over Giles' lap. "I didn't mean -. I just meant -. Dangerous, right? Doesn't sound like something that could be a good idea."
Gradually he pulls himself closer to Giles, until Giles' posture loosens a little and Oz can duck under his arm. Curling his legs behind him, Oz takes another deep breath and hears it rattle all the way down his lungs. Lilin saw Buffy, there are forces out there shared by the powerful, and something's not right, not if Buffy's back.
"I meant -" Oz touches Giles' far cheek and rubs his thumb over his chin and eventually, slowly, Giles looks at him. "Meant you wouldn't have. Get that. I'm sorry."
For the first time, maybe, since he arrived, Oz is glad for one of his fuck-ups; it's much better to talk to Giles and apologize than it is to think about Sunnydale in any shape or form.
Reply
He offers Oz the mug, since Oz didn't bring his own, but Oz shakes his head. "You don't need to apologize," Giles says finally, and rubs his thumb over Oz's shoulder for emphasis. "It's a perfectly understandable question."
Giles believes in the soul, because he's seen what happens without one. What vampires are, alive but soulless, nothing but the body's infinite hungers. But he doesn't know what a soul is without a body. Weightless, lifeless, desiring nothing, free of need and pain. Some faiths would call that heaven, or nirvana.
It sounds, Giles thinks, inhuman, monstrous as a golem or a saint, renunciate and dead.
"I was dreaming, tonight, before the phone rang." Giles takes another swallow of tea, sets the mug on the side table, and settles his arm around Oz's waist. "She was clawing her way out of the grave, and I was waiting for her. Waiting to see if she'd be herself, or something else. Something I'd have to kill." He leans his cheek against Oz's, inhales the warmth of Oz's breath. "It's an unnatural magic. Dangerous and selfish. There'll be a price, and god knows who'll pay it. Maybe the whole world, if we're especially unlucky."
Death is final. It's the central, unstated creed of the Watchers. Immortality and resurrection upset the world's precarious balance, and Buffy has already been resurrected once. "I love Buffy," he says, closing his eyes, feeling warmth, and darkness, and Oz. "I'm glad she's alive. And I wish Willow had never done that spell." Contradictory emotions, incompatible chemicals flowing through his body, and he's half-sick with it.
Reply
"You dream about her a lot?" he asks now. "Is it like, like her dreams? The magic ones?"
Giles sips his tea and when he's finished, Oz accepts the mug and sucks down a large mouthful. Hot and bitter without milk or sugar, but it's like essence of Giles, boiling in his stomach and radiating outward. He doesn't know how it's possible to come back from the dead if you're not a vampire. It must be like being ripped inside-out, rocketing through worlds in reverse. She fell, and now she's rising, and Oz is dizzy.
"I wish she hadn't, too."
Reply
Lovers' nonsense, laughable, and Giles knows he'd despise it in anybody else. But he and Oz have almost four years' absence to fill, endless breaches of trust to glue together with talk and sex and shared crockery.
He'd like another cup of tea to share with Oz, to put off, for a little longer, having to think about Buffy again. But Oz is frowning, brows drawn together, and when he opens his mouth Giles is certain he's about to apologize once more. "I didn't dream about her for a long time," he says, resting a palm on Oz's cheek and running his little finger over Oz's earrings. "But since the eleventh . . . " Leaning forward, he presses his forehead to Oz's, kisses the tip of his nose, then settles back again. "Those were just ordinary dreams, though. I dreamt of her falling. Or that I saved her. Nothing like tonight."
He should probably have told Oz. But they've had a little peace in the weeks since then, and he's wanted to preserve it, guard it from his grief. Guard Oz from his grief, as much as he can, after burdening him with so much of it.
But they've gone wrong before, trying to protect each other from difficult truths. "Oz," he asks, "will you be all right, seeing Willow again?" Giles thinks they know each other well enough, now, to trust that Oz will hear everything he's asking.
Reply
"Will I? Be all right?" He's echoing Giles, buying time to think. But his thoughts are just frozen in a block, impenetrable and static, and he could wait until the sun rises, then sets again, and he still won't know what to say. "I'm not going to eat anybody." Giles gives him a tight smile at that and Oz shrugs. "I'm not going to, like -" Fall in love and leave you: It's the truth, he's not going to, he knows that like he knows his own name, but there has to be a better way to say it.
"We'll be all right," he finally says, then nods to seal the promise into fact. "Not going anywhere." Giles tips down his head and Oz kisses his neck, lips on warm, taut skin and the faint burr of chest hair. "Can't imagine not having you. Not ever."
Proximity and intimacy: Oz wonders if that's all magic is, just controlling those qualities and manipulating them. If so, he's all for it.
Reply
There's a pause in the raindrop rhythm of Oz's kisses to his throat, then a sigh, and then it starts again, just as slow and gentle as before. "I trust you." Giles cradles Oz's head in both hands, heavy bone under his fingers. "I'm afraid, but I trust you."
Long ago, Ethan told him that he'd never be a decent magician if he couldn't step free of logic, hold two contradictory truths and believe them both. It seemed impossible, then.
Just as well it did, considering where Ethan's magic led him.
"Willow . . . has changed rather a lot, over the last couple of years." Oz looks up at that, with a faint smile and a questioning eyebrow, and Giles finds himself smiling back. "Yes, but that's not what I meant." He feels his own smile fade, watches Oz's disappear along with it. "Her magic . . . she's got an enormous amount of power now. You don't bring back the dead just by reading the right phrases in a book."
Giles pulls the duvet up over his shoulders and stares down at the blue expanse. It's a new duvet cover, replacing the one he'd had for fifteen years or more; Oz picked it out. Evidence that this is his life now, that Sunnydale is another time, another place.
Contradictory things.
"The only other person I've ever known to have so much power, so young, was Ethan." As always, Oz goes still for a moment, breath held, as though the mention of Ethan will call him up, like summoning a demon. "It's tempting, that power. It corrupts. I'm afraid for her." Giles hooks his arm more closely around Oz's waist, and doesn't add that he's afraid of her, as well. So much power, so little judgment.
Reply
"I'm sorry," Oz says now. Giles blinks a little, kindly, the way he does when Oz starts talking far down a stream of previously-silent thought. "I -. Ethan, huh?"
They've talked about the past. They've talked about the present. But they haven't talked about Willow, because neither of them seems to be able to handle it. Another thing she's got in common with Ethan, apparently. But they can talk about magic, even if Oz knows less than anything about it. Magic's pretty safe.
"Don't be afraid. I'm not -" Oz scrubs his knuckles over his forehead, as if that will loosen his thoughts. "I'm not interested in Willow, not any more. Really." Giles' face is slack, unreadable. "You want to tell me about the power? Or, um. Ask me stuff? Get the fear out?"
He will tell Giles anything. It's just that sometimes he doesn't know what to say. Oz tips his head back onto Giles' shoulder and takes a slow, deep breath.
"Anything."
Reply
He needs to see for himself. See Buffy and verify that she's all right (that she's herself), see Willow and judge how she's handling her power, see Oz with Willow and know, finally, that Oz has chosen him.
"I'm sorry," he says again, kissing the crown of Oz's head and sliding a palm along his side. It can't be good, this strain on trust that's only beginning to mend. Bad timing has always been their particular curse.
After a while the silence grows comfortable, familiar; they're better at silence than at talking, but this time, Giles hopes, the silence doesn't conceal secrets and traps. "You should go back to sleep," he says when Oz yawns. He wants Oz to sleep, just as he wants to pack and organize. Normality isn't a cure for fear, but it's the only palliative that works.
Reply
Giles nods gravely; Oz is never going to be able to convince him that there are a hundred different kinds of yawns. Sleepy, in several varieties, bored, thoughtful, contemplative, oxygenating: The list is very long but, oddly, Giles still hasn't been swayed.
"True," Oz says, and butts his head gently against Giles' arm. They're still crafting and practicing their own gestural language, but this is one of their oldest silent signals, and Giles sighs deeply, loosening his hold so Oz can pull himself onto Giles' lap. He wraps one arm around Giles' neck and pillows his cheek on the quilt and Giles' shoulder. "Not going to sleep. Just want - is it okay if -"
In the dark, Giles' face is reduced to its most essential elements - the short, fine dip of his nose, broad kind mouth, careful eyes - and Oz smiles slowly. He just wants to stay here for a little bit and, judging by how Giles is pulling the quilt back up and resting his head on Oz's arm, he feels the same way.
"Help you do all the packing and stuff," Oz says a little later. "Be easier with two sets of hands. Just, now, just -" Giles murmurs something nonverbal in the back of his throat and Oz nods. "Exactly."
Dark still, and dawn's coming, and all that crazy activity is going to distract him from both the anxiety of the trip and the quietness of home. Oz wants to pull in all that quiet, the trust, Giles' breathing in his ear, and store it up, let it happen for as long as possible.
Reply
Leave a comment