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]

Families. Giles sips his Coca-Cola, rediscovers that he doesn't like it, and tries to puzzle through the word. For once Oz seems surer of language than Giles is.

The Sunnydale group was (is?) a family, of course. A loose one, shifting around the edges like smoke or a flock of birds. A variable one, where he can be Buffy's father or mother or something utterly undefined, where no one's role is ever quite fixed. A family that pushes--he won't say twists--the word family almost out of recognition, to the limits of meaning.

Almost. Last week, Xander wouldn't use the word. Too much sex for them to be a family anymore. Giles supposes it was he and Oz that finally made the metaphor impossible.

"It's odd," he says finally, looking away from the group of teenagers he'd been unconsciously staring at and focusing on Oz's puzzled face. "I've never thought of us--you and I--as a family." Blood won't work as their metaphor. They're not siblings, not, god forbid, parent and child. But there's more to it than blood. Giles remembers Buffy standing before Tara's father, claiming Tara as family. "But of course we are."

He strokes the inside of Oz's wrist and adds, "I'm glad I was there with you, tonight. I didn't like to see you hurt, but . . . I'm supposed to be there. As your family." Although he can feel his face going red--it's one thing to talk this way in bed together, but another, harder thing with clothes and a table between them and the glare of fluorescent lights half-blinding him--he looks into Oz's eyes and smiles.

[glossing]

Giles is blushing, and his words are coming out in a sort of stammery rhythm, so Oz turns his hand and covers Giles' hand with it, tucking his thumb inside as he smiles back.

"It's okay," he says. "I mean, I guess.... Like, I didn't know what to call you, right? Boyfriend or whatever. They're all such stupid words. But family works, because that's you and Buffy and Xander and also Jordy. People I like, you know?"

Oz swallows another gulp of Coke and checks over his shoulder. When he used to come here, people would shift back and forth from table to table, a great shifting crowd of faces, and you were always on the lookout for new arrivals. It kept him on edge, then, whereas now he just feels curious.

"Didn't mean to freak you out. With Terry, or the family thing. Just glad it's over." Hurt, Giles said Oz was hurt. He's still puzzling that out, and he could ask Giles, but that would be weird.

The waitress comes back with their fries and burgers, and Oz slides his hand from Giles. He doesn't look for the flicker on people's faces any more, the little twitch of eyes and thinning of lips that happens when they see him holding Giles' hand.

"Dig in," he tells Giles. Giles is still looking at him, smiling but his eyes are hooded, and Oz knows he's thinking. Oz is thinking, too, but it's an entirely different rhythm. He leans forward, ostensibly to grab the ketchup, and says, "Love you. *So* much."

[kindkit]

"That's another very good word," Giles says. "Love." In so many ways, they're off the map of language. Family is a strange word for them, but Oz is right that it's not the only one. Giles can't imagine calling Oz his boyfriend, although he was pleased, earlier, when Oz said it to Teresa. But it's people Oz's age who have boyfriends and girlfriends. At Giles' age it sounds faintly sordid, as though it involves expensive presents, the promise of a career head start, and perhaps a messy, highly-publicized divorce.

Partner, on the other hand, sounds of golf games and contract negotiations, while lover is a bedroom word, not something to be said to strangers.

Oz, thoughtfully chewing a bite of his cheeseburger, makes one of his few imperative gestures, a wave of the hand and lift of the eybrows. Eat, it means. Giles steals a chip off Oz's plate, although there's an identical, untouched pile of chips on his own, and eats it, then tries his own burger. It really is very good: juicy, salty, and just greasy enough to satisfy that deep evolutionary craving for rich things.

He likes eating with Oz, and watching Oz eat. The table is as almost as important as the bed to love, Giles thinks, and then a word pops into his head. Copain, French for boyfriend, but its root is pain, bread. The English would be companion.

Companion. Oz is the man he shares bread with.

Reaching simultaneously for onion rings from the basket, he and Oz brush hands. "So what do you think?" Giles asks, sliding an oily fingertip across Oz's palm. "The best burger in three counties?"

[glossing]

Oz swipes the napkin over his mouth, and exhales beef and grease; his head is already starting to swim from the massive meat-infusion, and he can only nod for a few seconds. "It's pretty damn good," he says, and grabs another onion ring from right under Giles' fingers. "Haven't been to the other two counties, though. Wanna come with?"

Giles grins, his mouth full, and there's no thought on his face now, just enjoyment. Oz tucks back into the second half of his burger, dripping juice and oily globs of cheese, and even if his stomach's starting to complain, he couldn't stop eating if he wanted to. He's never eaten like this, even before he gave up meat for the second time at ten, and he knows Giles prefers real food, with sauces and simmering. But they're both devouring their plates like they've been out in the desert for six months, and he'd think it was funny if he had the higher brain functions to think.

And there's still a huge glass of milkshake and the spillover in the dented tin container, plus onion rings whose batter just kind of melts and crackles in his mouth. When they finish - or slow down, there's still tons of fries on their plates - Giles has a smear of grease across his chin and Oz touches his own chin, trying to tell him, restraining the instinct to lean over and clean him up.
"Didn't eat meat til I was six," he says, slumping in the seat, drawing patterns in the condensation on the milkshake glass, smiling vaguely at Giles. "How about you? How old were you when you had your first nonboiled vegetable?"

[kindkit]

Two napkins aren't enough to take all the grease off his fingers and face, and then Giles undoes it anyway by eating another chip. "Not until you were six? But I thought-"

Oz licks a finger in a way Giles is fairly sure wasn't meant to be erotic, and explains that Teresa, at the time, was a vegan and a great believer in raw foods. It took the combined force of Oz's father, grandmother, and pediatrician (armed with growth charts and nutritional recommendations) to convince her to let Oz have dairy products and then, a few months later, meat.

Food and love. Teresa was faddish in both, spasms of enthusiasm covering a fundamental uninterest, a lack of trust in anything solid and simple. She starved Oz, and Giles thinks he hates her.

Oz, who's been talking quite cheerfully about it all, sputters to a stop in response to some tension or expression of Giles', and his face twists into worry. "Parents," Giles says, with a shake of his head and a smile that he's sure Oz isn't convinced by. "You're right, my mother practiced the darkest art of English middle-class cookery, the boiled vegetable. And of course boarding school was even worse. It wasn't until I went to France-nothing glamorous, I was harvesting grapes-that I learnt that vegetables had individual flavors. Must have been twenty, then." In his memory, it was glamorous, heat and sweat and laughter, meals of coarse wine and good bread, blisters and low pay and freedom. Ethan was with him, naturally, but even that doesn't spoil it.

Oz visibly relaxes again, sipping at the malted and listening to Giles talk, and Giles is glad he changed the subject. He'd like Oz to be angry on his own behalf, to understand that he deserved more love, better love, better care than he ever got, but he's not sure there's a way to that without hurting Oz in the process. And it's not as though there's a cure for the past. What matters is to give Oz love now.

Giles takes the glass that Oz offers him and sucks up a mouthful of cold chocolate. He's reminded again of films and old, sentimental Norman Rockwell illustrations of lovers in malt shops. "Pity I don't still have the BMW," he says. "We could drive around with the top down. Perhaps go on a burger-comparison road trip. Although by the end of it I'd be so disgustingly fat that you'd be ashamed of me. As it is, it's past time for me to take up running and fencing again." He's put on weight since Oz came back. Food, unlike love, has drawbacks, and Giles wants to be slim and healthy and desirable for as long as he can possibly manage.

[glossing]

"Will you wear that mask that looks like a beekeeper's?" Oz asks, because he needs to ignore the tightness that's still haunting Giles' face as well as the idea that Giles could ever be disgusting. "When you fence?"

Nodding, Giles gives him a smile and Oz rubs his chin. "You could teach me how. Figure if you trained Buffy, I'd be really easy."

He flexes his hand, then grabs his knife and tries a short jab in Giles' direction, making him jump and grin even more widely. Oz's head is throbbing from the meat, and caffeine, and sugar, but he doesn't feel particularly antsy *or* loagy.

"I'd go running with you," Oz says, "but it wasn't ever my thing. Kind of more a moseyer. But fencing looks like chess, only live-action. Cool."

The waitress is clearing away their plates, and Oz has to curl his fingers into a fist to keep himself from grabbing the last tiny onion ring. He can't help but remember Giles, face sweaty and glowing, after training Buffy in the library, nor how he always had to cut his eyes away and keep busy with a random open book.

"I'm stuffed," Oz says, more to keep himself from thinking than anything else. "How're you doing?"

[kindkit]

Continued here