Sunnydale, 10/01: An Oz only a mother (and Giles) could love

[glossing]

When Oz takes a right out of the Magic Box's alley, instead of the usual left, Giles looks surprised. Oz bites his lip and keeps his eye on the road, weaving up Main Street, then cutting across Calendula, and Giles' brows are lifting and he's about to open his mouth and ask where they're going as Oz slows to nab a parking space

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[kindkit]

Giles, already blushing and choking back a laugh, manages not to say that he likes Oz's hair this way. Teresa was joking, as parents do, about the nonsense of children, just as Oz seems much younger when he talks to her. But it's not a game Giles can join in, because he'd inevitably be on the wrong side, an adult to Oz's child.

When Teresa turns back to the box, he whispers in Oz's ear, "We'll talk later about your nudist inclinations," and trails a fingertip, out of sight of Teresa, across his ribs. This is another game, one to make Oz blush, to call him back to adulthood, to Giles.

When Giles finally remembers the photograph, he sees a small shaggy boy, Oliver Twist with messy hair almost to his shoulders and a faded "March for Justice in South Africa" t-shirt. "I'd hardly know it was you," he says. "If it weren't for the shirt." Oz, red to the ears, stares at the picture as though he's looking for proof.

"Oh my! Danny, do you remember this?" Teresa hands him a picture frame made of matchsticks, with a photo inside of a younger Teresa and a slumping, nondescript man who must be Oz's father. "You made it at that summer camp. Though who knows how they found time for crafts, between all the Christian brainwashing sessions."

[glossing]

The frame is light, breakable, in his hands, and Oz concentrates on the messy globs of hardened glue and the smeary fingerprints before looking at the picture. His breath slows down from the spike it gave at Giles' touch and whisper, and he tilts his head. Old things are so delicate, whether they're Giles' books or Oz's crappy crafts projects.

"Camp was fun," he says, squinting at how *pudgy* his dad looks, greasy hair and faint smirk on his lips. "Canoed and stuff." He twists so he can see Giles' face. "Episcopalian camp. Lots of guitars and hymns. This was before I stopped singing, so I was pretty happy."

Terry clucks her tongue against her teeth and takes the picture back. "Ron's mother enrolled Danny in the place. Didn't *pay* for it, of course, but he seemed content."

Oz smiles. "I'm good at that, yeah." He plucks another picture out of the box, because the last thing Giles needs to hear is all about how Nana controlled Ron and interfered in the marriage. "Hey, this one's nice -" In the backyard, he and Devon are sharing Devon's dad's purple sleeping bag, and Devon's grinning, waving at the camera. Oz himself is watching Devon, and he looks...kind of frustrated. "Used to camp out all the time," he says and shows the picture to Giles. "Didn't stop til, what? College, maybe?"

"Daniel is a sweet boy with many abilities," Terry reads from a report card. "His aptitude in math and language is remarkable, but I wish he would be a bit braver among his peers and make his presence known."

"See?" Oz asks Giles. "No social skills, told you."

He feels like he's pretending, walking this tightrope between his mom and Giles, and it's making his stomach hurt. But Giles holds him snugly around the waist and rests his chin on Oz's shoulder to look at the picture, and Oz tries to relax.

[kindkit]

Giles presses a quick kiss to Oz's cheek and says, "You're just not . . . glib, that's all. Not brimming over with chatter that doesn't mean anything." Out of the corner of his eye he sees Teresa smile, approvingly or perhaps indulgently.

What he'd like is to take these boxes back to their motel and go through them together. He could tease Oz about his boyhood nudism, ask about his father, about singing hymns in summer camp, about a whole childhood spent (apparently) frolicking naked with Devon. It was with Devon, Giles knows, that Oz first had sex, but what he's seeing in these pictures-the two of them something like brothers, something like childhood sweethearts-seems much more idyllic than he'd imagined.

Looking back at the picture, Giles says, "We could go camping again if you like." And once again he's saying something he ought not to say in front of Teresa. Gratefully, he takes the new handful of photographs she gives him.

"They're all school pictures," Teresa says. "I think I found most of them. And I'm pretty sure these two are from different years, even though Danny's wearing the same shirt in them both."

Giles shuffles through the photos, watching the shaggy boy get taller, lose the babyish roundness in his face, and then suddenly transform into Oz at about thirteen. After that he varies in hair color, in the brightness of his overshirts and the number of his earrings, but he stays essentially the same. In the early photos, he has an awkward smile like the ones adults put on for the camera; in the later ones, he's stopped forcing himself.

"Remarkable," Giles says. "Here, let me look at you." Oz shifts in his lap, and Giles holds the third-to-last of the pictures (the one that must have been taken when Oz was seventeen) next to Oz's face. And then he can see the changes. Oz looks older now, and . . . no, not sadder, but like someone who's been sad, deeply and for a long time. It's an adult face, more different from these paper boys than any of them is from the others. Carefully, trying not to show too much in front of Teresa, Giles smiles at him.

[glossing]

Giles is reading him, wearing the same expression, all narrowed, shining eyes and soft mouth, that Oz saw for the first time the first night they met. In Giles' bed, Giles asking him about happy memories, and listening with exactly that look on his face. Oz wonders what Giles sees there, what's bringing the wet shine up to his eyes and making him look sad and tender and full of love all at the same time.

Oz has never done the math, but he knows now that there was love, or something like it, in the bed that night, and he smiles back at Giles.

"I love that purple shirt," he tells Terry, picking out the eighth grade picture. "Wore it to a Ramones show and Dee Dee spilled half a bottle of Bud on it."

"Which ones are the Ramones?" she asks, and he can't tell if she's teasing him. She was never any good with music made after Ian Tyson divorced Sylvia.

"Loud," Oz says, and Terry nods.

"Why don't you go upstairs and show Giles your room?" she asks, and it's a normal phrase, but it makes Oz laugh, like it always did, when she tries to play normal mom. "I've got some eggplant and salad I could make us all for dinner."

The box is nearly empty now and Oz starts to slide off Giles' lap.

"You cook now?" he asks, wrapping his hand in Giles'.

"I do," Terry says. "Had to fend for myself, didn't I?" Oz bites his lip and glances at Giles. "Kidding, Danny, God. Senses of humor aren't genetic, are they?"

[kindkit]

Oz's fingers tighten in his, and Giles takes a deep breath. A whole angry speech unfurls in his brain and spills onto the back of his tongue. There are things he'd love to say about neglect and abandonment, about her utter selfishness and her blind ingratitude for whatever miracle let Oz grow up gentle and loving. That let him grow up at all, unprotected in a place like this. He'd love to hurt her back, precisely and deliberately, for the way she's just hurt Oz without even realizing.

Another breath, and he says, "Thank you, Teresa. Dinner would be lovely. We're both getting horribly tired of restaurant food."

"Well, you won't mistake this for restaurant food." There's no sign that she's noticed the stiffness of Giles' tone. In fact, her flirtatiousness is back. "But don't panic if you smell smoke. I haven't burned the house down yet."

He smiles, feeling the strain of it in his cheeks, and reminds himself that she's only silly and not deliberately cruel. And that Oz, in his patient and protective way, loves her.

Following Oz up the stairs, he tries to breathe out his anger, but he's still twitchy and tense when he shuts the bedroom door behind him. "Come here," he says, closing his eyes and wrapping his arms closely around Oz. "I love you. So much." I wish we were home, he doesn't say. I wish we could hide in our flat and never deal with other people ever again.

[glossing]

Oz lets himself pour and lean against Giles' larger, more solid body, hands on his waist and cheek pressed to Giles' shirt. Warm here, and very safe, a word he never would have associated with any square inch of Sunnydale.

Giles breathes slowly, deliberately, and Oz tries to match his rhythm.

"Love you, too," he says through a scratchy throat and thick, useless tongue, then straightens up. He hooks his index fingers in Giles' belt loops and tips back his head. Giles is angry, and Oz doesn't know what to say, how make that better. "Sorry for being so weird." Giles opens his mouth to disagree, but Oz shakes his head. "Not just me, I know. But -"

He turns in Giles' arms and surveys his room. Small, with cartons stacked haphazardly under his old desk and in the open closet; if Oz had to choose two of the *worst* people to help you move, Devon and Terry would be instant winners.

"Glad you're here. Even if it's weird and random, I'm glad you get to see this -" He sweeps his arm out, taking in the room, the single bed under the wall, his work table - and rolls his head against Giles' chest. "Always felt like you half-lived here, you know? Thought about you so much."

[kindkit]

"Did you?" Giles slides one arm up to circle Oz's chest, and leans into the bob of Oz's head when he nods. "I used to try and imagine it. What a place that was yours would be like. What kinds of things you'd choose to have around you. Which is a way of wondering, I suppose, what your mind would look like if I could see it."

Although he can't actually tell, he's sure he can feel Oz smiling. "I don't think I did too badly," he says, looking around at posters of bands whose names he vaguely recognizes because Oz has mentioned them, mangy paperbacks, a jar full of buttons and bottlecaps, a stack of coasters that probably come from every bar the Dingoes ever played in. "Although every time you pulled some strange new object out of that rucksack, I had to revise."

The room might look like a jumble-sale collection of clutter to the casual eye, just as a casual listener might find Oz's conversation fragmented and strange. But the books acquired for pennies at thrift stores are good books, Dickens and Lorca and Tolstoy, poetry, history, politics, science. The bands on the posters, Giles trusts, are good bands, and he knows Oz has a memory attached to every oddity here--the old postcard of a ferris wheel, the necklace of leather cord with three red beads, the broken bits of a robin's eggshell like fragments of sky.

It's all a matter of knowing how to interpret, just as talking with Oz means working through the connections, piecing the whole thought together from its known fragments. Detail, accumulation, collage: that's Oz's mode, and this room really is his, molded to fit him, echoing his mind.

[glossing]

Oz sits on the corner of his bed, one knee drawn up and his arms wrapped around it, watching Giles inspect his stuff. Strange to think of a room as your mind, especially this room; Giles' old apartment wasn't really like his mind, more like a shell for it, one that fitted but wasn't the same. Oz always thought his knapsack was more like him, bouncing and jumbled and portable, but maybe Giles is right.

Whether this is still his mind, though, Oz isn't sure. It feels like one of the cemeteries in the bright sun, blanching out all the ghosts, making them wait.

"Used to keep my phone on the windowsill," he says, and Giles looks up, smiling, setting aside the book he'd been paging through. Oz drops his knee and scoots back farther on the bed, making room for Giles. "For, you know. Calling you, and -" Glancing away, his face is hot, the ghosts of embarrassment and shame sliding over him, and Oz forces himself to look at Giles. "Those conversations we used to have. Loved those."

The harsh, urgent sound of Giles' voice, just his voice, describing everything, touching Oz through the wires, making him twist and buck on this narrow, creaky bed. Oz shivers, face still hot but shame long gone. "Yeah. You definitely lived here." He lifts Giles' hand and puts it on his chest, lets it slide down into his lap. "And there, too."

[kindkit]

Giles looks at Oz's face-slightly flushed, eyes not quite meeting his-and feels his hand move of its own accord, cupping Oz's crotch, thumb sliding along his zipper. Years ago he used to fantasize about this, about fucking Oz in this room he'd never seen, about slipping through his window at 3 am and waking him with a kiss, about how at first Oz would be nervous and shy, reluctant, and how he'd loosen into heat and eagerness with every touch. He told Oz about it in one of their conversations, and Oz's quick stuttery gasps were even better than the ones he'd imagined.

"Oh, Christ," he says, only the words get mangled because he's kissing Oz hard, pushing with his tongue and shivering as Oz opens, takes it, sucks fiercely at it. Under his hand Oz's cock stirs, stiffens, and Giles has to think very determinedly about Teresa, just downstairs, before he can lift his hand and move it to Oz's waist. "I loved them too." The words are nothing, barely even breath against his tongue, but the sensitive skin under Oz's ear would be warm, prickly-soft, salty. The skin he really can't lick right now. "Talking to you. Listening. The things you said."

He remembers words, the cool plastic of the telephone, his breath dampening the mouthpiece and his mind straining to do the impossible. Nothing of Oz but sound, but words and noises without substance, and his own hand transparent and vague on his own skin. "And I hated them. Afterwards I always missed you even more." Giles lies back on Oz's bed the way he always wanted to, and smiles when Oz follows, settling half on top of him in the narrow space. Giles' lips are sticky, sore with the need to kiss, but he speaks instead. "I like living with you much better when it's not metaphorical."

[glossing]

"Metaphor's kind of for the birds, yeah," Oz says, wiggling a little to release his arm. He pulls it free and leans his head on his hand and tries to memorize this sight. Giles, in extreme close-up, short graceful nose and smiling mouth, and beyond, the clutter of his old room, all these old treasures and keepsakes he left behind.

He concentrates, lets memory burn new threads and paths, but his body's feeling thick and hot, lying here so close to Giles but so - *chastely*, too. He's never felt chaste around Giles, for good or bad, and his skin's confused.

"Like living with you, *period," he says, smoothing back the hair standing up over Giles' forehead. "Good and literal and --" Something's curled up in an old ashtray on his sidetable and Oz grabs for it, across Giles, getting a slight oof from him. "My Catalina necklace. *Damn*."

Giles squints - Oz is holding it too close for him to make out clearly - and then smiles. His slow smile, the memory one. The *good* memory one, that is, full of honey and light.

Oz ducks his head. "Can you put it on me? I didn't think I still had this."

[kindkit]

Giles wipes the dusty shell on his trousers and fastens the chain around Oz's neck. Oz was wearing it that last night. Giles remembers putting it on him after they showered, knowing it was the last time he'd do that, the last time he'd see Oz getting dressed, the last time for everything.

Oz is holding the shell in his hand, looking at it, and Giles wonders how long he kept wearing it, afterwards. Did he take it off the moment he got home the next morning, or did he cling to tokens the way Giles did? It was weeks before Giles threw away the shirt Oz left behind. He wrapped it around his pillow and slept with his face pressed into the smell of Oz. It was filthy when he finally managed to put it in the bin, and it smelled only of Giles himself, and the pillowcase under it was stained a faint green that never came out.

Apart from the shirt, Giles kept everything-mix tapes, a few of Oz's books that he really should have returned, all the photographs, even Oz's old mug. But he could never listen to the tapes, open the books, use the mug, and he left the pictures in a bureau drawer until he almost forgot about them. Those things were absence, the negative space where Oz used to be.

"It's strange, all these memories," Giles says, and kisses Oz's neck where the chain lies. Rubbing his cheek against Oz's, Giles can feel the drag of the earring that he took from Oz the day he came back. He's worn it ever since. "The past is . . . no. I was about to say the past is catching up with us. But that's backwards. We're catching up with the past. Revising it." Changing the ending, he's beginning to realize, changes the meaning of all the rest.

He kisses the corner of Oz's mouth and adds, "You really ought to go through all this and see if there are things you'd like to bring home." It's still a kind of surprise, that word home, and it makes them both smile.

[glossing]

Oz looks around - he has a Lounge Lizards poster on his closet door that he'd like to keep, if only because John Lurie's cooler than *anyone* not English, and there are paperbacks from his Herman Melville phase that he's pretty sure Giles doesn't own, and probably a winecrate or two of cassettes he could salvage. The freight charges would be *obscene*, though, but he's not sure how to raise that point. Then again, he can't argue with the word home, goofy as it still makes him feel when he realizes he's grinning about it.

"Revision's a cool word," he says, sitting up a little straighter, moving his still-yearning skin to a safer, chaster distance. He drops the shell against the base of his throat and knits his fingers through Giles'. Catalina, and saltwater-wind, back where it belongs. "Even if it makes me think of junior-year English class and Ms. Petrie's lecture on re-envisioning and 'seeing anew' and all that crap."

Revise, though, is also how Brits describe studying. Olivia told him that in the midst of a tangled anecdote about revising for my O-levels. It's not just changing things, it's studying them and committing them to memory.

"I'll probably bring some books and tapes," he says and squares his shoulders. Money is the weirdest subject of all, even if Giles calls it ours. Money's not like home, it's not so easily shared. "If that's cool. Not too much, just -" Giles shakes his head gently and runs his thumb up and down Oz's knuckles. "Right. It's cool. Okay."

There's the squeaky groan of the third stair from the landing, the one Oz trained himself to hear in seventh grade when he and Devon started coming in through the window, so Terry's on her way up. And for a second, Oz thinks he should freeze, drop Giles' hand, but that's ridiculous.

Habits are like memories; they get changed and studied, too.

"Soup's on," Oz says, and wraps himself around Giles one more time. "Not ashamed to say, I'm a little scared of what she's done to that helpless eggplant."

[kindkit]

Giles laughs, picturing Teresa hacking at the vegetable like a mad murderer in a film. It's more vibration than sound, since his face is buried in the crook of Oz's neck. Oz laughs too, and squirms in a way that makes Giles take a breath and inch his hips back. "Oh dear," Giles says. "And I'm a little scared of eggplant even when you cook it. As you know." Oz used to claim it tasted just like meat if cooked properly, which always set off a long, silly argument that would finally devolve into tickling and kisses.

"Guys?" Teresa calls through the door. Giles jumps and sits up so quickly he almost knocks his head against Oz's nose. "Dinner'll be ready in five minutes. Grilled eggplant with Greek yogurt sauce. I'll have to show you my cookbook, Danny-it's got all these great recipes that are really low-fat and healthy." Oz raises an eyebrow with a faint smile, and Giles finally relaxes. Teresa isn't going to open the door, of course. He and Oz aren't teenagers to be monitored and caught out, and Teresa was never that kind of mother in any case.

On the way downstairs he squeezes Oz's hand (he's stopped caring, he realizes, about what Teresa might think or whether he might offend her) and says, "You should bring anything that you'd like to have. Anything you're fond of. And if you're worried about money, there's really no need." There've been many more important things to talk about than money, but it really is time. He can't let Oz keep fretting over every trivial expense.