Giles sounds amazed, his voice hoarse and quavery, and his arm keeps tightening around Oz. Inhaling slowly through his nose, Oz turns and kisses Giles' stubbly cheek, right over a sticky swipe of lube. It is pretty amazing, he supposes, to go toward the person you want the most. Spike went with Buffy, and Xander and Willow woke up next to each other, a new-old memory that makes Oz's chest ache for half a second, pointlessly.
"Want you," Oz whispers back, lips moving over stubble and skin. "Always. Keep telling you that." He smiles, but Giles doesn't; Giles squeezes him more tightly and his breath pools warmly against Oz's neck. It's not a joke, not anything to josh about, and Oz kisses Giles' temple in apology. "Always. Senile or at full-power, Giles. Promise."
Memory, he's learning now, grows and thickens like yarn getting spun; he remembers, now, that Spike and Buffy left to deal with vampires, that the others are probably still wandering the sewers, that he left Giles more than once. But all the facts, however strong and sinewy they're becoming, still don't feel entirely real. Not nearly as real as this, feeling Giles' heart beat against his side, smelling the sweaty exhaustion coming off Giles' skin, thinking about home. London, eight thousand miles, and this time tomorrow, they'll be there. Unconscious, probably, but there.
Most of Sunnydale and its events have always felt like that, though: strong, factual, but not nearly as absorbing as the other stuff, as the half-moon scar on the side of Giles' nose that's usually obscured by his glasses, as the whisk-whisk of his cotton against Oz's corduroy, as anything that's this quiet. Hellmouths are drama queens, Oz thinks, massaging the top of Giles' neck and humming the weird cowboy-campfire song he found himself singing to Giles several days ago. They're drama queens and spoiled brats demanding all the attention, now, and Oz tends to turn his back on people (towns) like that.
He can't wait to leave this place.
"I'll be right here," he says as the banging in the cellar gets louder, heralding the rest's return. "When you tell them, I mean. I'll be, like, human flak jacket."
Giles doesn't ordinarily procrastinate, but in the weeks they've been here, he never found the right time to tell everyone that he and Oz weren't staying. Easier, always, to wait for another day when the others weren't so busy or so relaxed, when they were happier or when a rare bit of happiness wouldn't be disrupted. Now it's the last possible moment, and he's tempted to just wait a little longer and ring them from London. To hell with half-measures--he might as well run away for real.
Of course, Oz wouldn't let him run away even if he truly wanted to. Oz has sworn off disappearances without warning.
"Thank you," Giles says as Oz slides off his lap. "But I don't want you to be the flak jacket. The one who takes all the blame." It's not Oz who has duties here. Not Oz whom Buffy is counting on. "I want you here, of course," he adds, because Oz has stopped, frowning a little, halfway through straightening his clothes. "Just not as a human shield."
Oz, absently tugging the hem of his cardigan, looks about to say something, but then the basement door opens and Tara appears, hugging her sweater close around her. "Is everyone all-" Giles says before he sees her expression. "What happened?" Her face is wet, her eyes blank, and she walks out the front door without a pause.
It must be - Willow must be - but Willow's at the top of the stairs looking around, and when she doesn't see Tara in the shop she lets out a hoarse sound and runs for the door.
"What-"
"The spell," Xander says. His face is bleeding and Anya and Dawn are holding on to his arms. "Willow did it. And Tara-"
"Willow's been controlling Tara's memory," Anya says.
"Ahn, we don't-"
"Yes we do, Xander! It's not like we could help hearing about it when they were fighting at our brand-new dining table!" She pushes Xander into a chair and sits down herself, barely flinching when Oz ducks under the table and emerges with the two escaped rabbits in his arms. In remarkable detail, considering she wasn't meant to be listening, Anya tells about Willow and Tara's row and the promise Willow made to avoid magic. "Giles, you've got to do something about Willow. She was bossy enough before she turned into Stalin-with-spells."
"Unfortunately, I can't think of anyone whose advice she's less likely to heed," Giles says. "In any case . . . Dawn, you should hear this too." Dawn, holding a rabbit while Oz tries to open the box without freeing the others, pets its ears and doesn't answer. Poor girl, she must feel as though her world is shattered yet again. Tara's been almost a mother to her.
Anya mutters something that Giles at first takes to be a complaint, but then the rabbits vanish with a cartoonish pop. "Bunny-banishing spell," she explains. "Clears the hoppy little monsters for half a mile. I'm thinking of marketing it to gardeners. Or possibly an agri-business conglomerate. Large-scale thinking means large profits, after all."
Scowling at Anya, Dawn comes back to the table, followed by Oz. "Well," Giles manages before all the planning he's done for this moment goes out of his head. None of his tactful, rehearsed words remain. Oz lays a hand over his, which doesn't bring anything back but lets Giles decide he'd better just get on with it. "We're leaving. Oz and I. We're going back home."
"I get the shop back!" Anya exclaims at the same moment that Xander says, "Leaving? Giles, you can't." After a quick look between the two, Anya shrugs and Xander continues, "We - Buffy needs you. And Oz, man, you can't go. You're the only guy I know. Who'm I gonna eat junk food and talk about manly things with, huh?" He laughs, nervously, and Giles stifles an answering laugh of his own. Buffy's been furious ever since Giles told her, early this afternoon, and Willow's just done a spell that could have got them all killed, and Giles can't decide which is funnier--the fact that Xander doesn't consider him a "guy," or the thought of Oz talking cars and football
Oz rubs his chin as he checks Giles out of the corner of his eye. "It's a good point," he tells Xander, "but, I mean. You've always got Spike, right?"
Xander raises his hand to flip him off, but stops when Oz leans toward Dawn. Her arms are still folded across her chest, around the bunny who's not there, her chin pointing up to the ceiling. She's pretending nothing's happening, or that nothing bothers her, something like that. Oz slides back and squeezes Giles' hand.
"I don't know what you're so upset about," Anya's saying to Xander. "You have me, and that should be enough. I can drink many a man under the table, and that's got to count for something."
"No, but see, what I meant was --" Xander starts.
Willow's doing magic on her *friends*: Oz's brain is stuck there, needle running and rasping through the same groove. Not just her friends, not just, you know, resurrecting the dead, but going into Tara's head and rearranging it like Lawrence on Changing Rooms.
"Why'd Willow do that?" Oz asks suddenly, and Giles' hand tightens into a fist beneath Oz's palm. Oz turns in his seat and shrugs. "It's just -- why would you *do* that?"
"Makes everything easier," Dawn says. Finally, in a tone so flat and cold that Oz's throat dries and swells. Dawn's not a kid, but she shouldn't *that* world-weary. No one should. "Keeps everything, like, under control."
"Oz, I don't think --" Giles starts to say and Oz realizes he's rubbing Giles' arm, the way he does to loosen up writing muscles, and he stops. Looks down at his hand, chipped nail polish and pale bony fingers on Giles' nice blazer, and makes himself stop.
"Right, not the point," Oz says. He's not sure what the point is; the Hellmouth sets whatever internal compass he has whirling drunkenly. He's about to apologize, say something else, when the bell over the door rings and everyone's head turns automatically. Buffy's leaning against the door, rubbing her side and smiling tightly, almost nauseously.
"Joan? What was I thinking? Anyway. Back," she says. "Glad I caught you, Giles."
"Giles is leaving!" Xander says, half-standing up. He sits down when Giles rises, his arm slipping away from Oz's hand. "And he's taking Oz with him!"
"Really, Xander, it's not like that," Anya tells him, and Oz turns back, like Giles needs his privacy with Buffy. He kind of always did.
"Giles is kidnapping me?"
"Might as well be," Xander says, slumping down, shrugging off Anya's anxious hand. "Don't get me wrong, it's cool you came back, even if it was with the big guy, but --"
"You have to admit, you have a habit of showing up and disappearing," Anya says. "It's hard for some people. Like Xander."
Oz can't help himself; he checks over his shoulder, just once, just to make sure that Giles and Buffy are okay, before turning back.
Giles tries to smile reassuringly at Oz, who shouldn't have to defend himself to Anya, of all people. She and Xander mean well, probably. That's the hardest thing. Giles isn't just choosing Oz over his duties; he's choosing Oz over Buffy, over Dawn, over Xander. Over all of them, and all their awkward, tentative affection. He's rejecting them, leaving them behind. And so is Oz.
When Giles turns back to Buffy, he feels, with sudden vividness, all the traces of sex on his body and his clothes. What happened with Oz seems, for a second, grotesque. Fucking in the back room, on Buffy's workout mats.
Perhaps in Sunnydale they're inevitably grotesque. They don't fit here, not together. "Buffy-"
"You're really leaving? Still?" As she speaks, she folds an arm carefully over her ribs. She must have been in a fight, a bad one.
Giles nods. There's a smear of dried blood at the corner of her mouth. He should get her a glass of water, a chair, a first-aid kit.
"How can you? We all just lost our memories. Anything could be happening." Slowly, wincing, Buffy leans against the counter. Very quietly, she says, "Giles, how can you just leave me?"
It's the question she didn't ask this afternoon. It's the awful silence that yawned between his attempts at explanation. Every reason enumerated, the truest ones played down, the strained ones expanded until Giles almost made it sound like this was for Buffy's own good. No wonder she didn't believe it. Doesn't.
"Buffy . . ." When Giles lays a hand on her shoulder, she twists away, then hisses and holds her ribs again. "I have to." Without meaning to, he glances back at Oz. Buffy sees, of course.
"Funny how boyfriends weren't important when I had one." Briskly, she straightens up, pain disappearing from her face and posture. She's used to hiding it, of course. "Come on, Dawn," she calls. "Time to go home."
For once, Dawn doesn't argue. She hugs Oz, whispers something in his ear, and follows her sister to the door. Then, to Giles' surprise, she turns around and hugs him tightly. "I'm still mad at you," she says, half-muffled against his chest.
"I know." To Buffy, hand on the doorknob, staring at the boarded window, Giles says, "Willow did the spell. Xander and Anya can explain. But . . . Buffy, keep an eye on her."
Without looking at him, Buffy nods, and then she and Dawn are out the door, gone.
Oz had wanted to say goodbye to Buffy. He *likes* Buffy, even more this time around than he did in high school; he's tried to tell her about hearing about what she did for Dawn up on the tower. When everyone else reeled and bitched about her being in heaven, Oz sat back and thought about Lilin, about ghostly roads and other dimensions where Buffy had probably floated forever and a day, and he smiled. Xander noticed, asked what was so funny, and Oz said something about Xander becoming queen to an underworld king.
He makes more jokes in Sunnydale. It's something Xander always did, and Oz knows why now; it makes things a little easier, a little softer around the edges, at least temporarily.
But there's no joke to make now, not with the bell ringing and Anya and Xander standing up from the table like Oz and Giles are kids dragged home by the truant officer and there's gonna be trouble from the parental units. Oz moves a little closer to Giles and takes his hand.
This is exactly how they came back, but this is goodbye. No Buffy, no Tara, not even Willow.
"Don't forget to write, man," Xander says, taking Oz's hand. All thoughts of disapproving parents vanish, squeezed out by Xander's construction-strong grip, and then he's pulling Oz into a bearhug. "I mean it. Or call. Charge it to Giles, tell him you need to make contact with the homeland."
On top, Xander smells like the sewers, all damp and drips, but underneath, it's pure Xander, like the bathroom after Xander showered, clean and *warm*. "Can do that," Oz says, looking up and thumping Xander's back.
"It shouldn't be too expensive," Anya says, pushing her hand between Oz and Xander and giving Oz a brief, one-armed hug that smells like, well, currency. Well-thumbed bills and jangling coins. "You don't say very much. Xander could even call you. For the manly things."
Oz kisses her temple as Anya pulls away, and Xander's smiling. Really smiling, like he hasn't since the wedding news, and Oz squeezes his elbow one more time. For half a moment, Oz doesn't want to leave. He wants to rent an apartment in Giles' old building and keep house and head out to play pool with Xander and the guys on Friday nights and go to sleep alone most nights while Giles patrols and remember how to wait. It would be better that way, happier for everyone else, and he's being incredibly, mindblowingly selfish to want it any other way.
Oz steps aside so Giles can say his farewells, and he tries to picture the apartment in London. It's faded and spidery in his mind, like a Xerox of a pen-and-ink sketch, an idea of a place that's not exactly real.
Saying goodbye was easier last time, in the airport. Perhaps because there simply wasn't much time, or perhaps because everyone was grieving. Giles left then out of grief and uselessness, not to start a new, happier, safer life somewhere else.
Xander puts his hands in his pockets, rocks back and forth, takes them out again, and says, "Hey, didn't we just do all this a couple months ago? Weird. You and Oz, with the going and the coming back and the going. Guess you are kind of alike after all."
Just like last time, there's an embarrassed handshake that turns into an embarrassed hug and a good deal of forceful back-pounding from Xander. "We'll come back for the wedding," Giles says, his voice wavering from the thumping he's getting.
"With presents?" Anya adds herself to the hug for a second, then pulls Xander back, her arm looped around his waist.
"Of course. Exotic English presents that cannot be had in California." As soon as Giles reaches for him, Oz is there; Giles squeezes his ribs and smiles at Anya. Standing this way, the four of them must be distorted mirrors of each other. Not four people, but two couples, laying unspoken claims, marking unconscious borders. Love changes everything. Love expands and limits, pluralizes individuality. No more autonomous I mixing freely, but us and them.
Once, long ago, there were just four people: Buffy, Xander, Willow, Giles. Strange to remember that now. And of course it's not really true, because there was always Oz, hidden. So patient, never asking to be the center.
"Well, goodbye then," Anya says. "Enjoy lots and lots of sex, and don't even think about the shop. Ever."
A round of goodbyes follows, like the clink of glasses at a toast. Giles watches them go, Xander still waving as the door shuts behind him, then turns to press tightly against Oz. This is what he's chosen, Oz and the future they can have together, so long as they don't stay here. This is what he wanted that whole awful year of concealment and anxiety. The chance he ached to have missed after Oz left him.
It feels very definite, now. Very real. Only now, Giles realizes, has he finally, publicly put Oz first. Chosen him. Before, it was only plans and intentions. "Love you," he says, closing his fists around the fabric of Oz's jacket.
When Giles bought the shop, not much more than a year ago, he thought he might stay in Sunnydale forever.
He kisses Oz's forehead, breathes in the familiar scent of his hair, and lets him go. "Oz, I . . . I need a minute to myself. Sorry. It's all-"
This is what Giles wants, what Oz needs, and Giles knows he's foolish to wonder if he's doing the right thing.
He's never said goodbye to Giles. Oz is thinking about that, hands driven deeply into his pants pockets, as he waits by the car. He supposes he could have waited in the shop, but there's something about saying goodbye to places that's best done alone. So he's outside, rocking on his heels, wondering what it means that he hasn't said goodbye to a place himself since he left Sunnydale the first time. The second time, he drove out through the blacked-out town, headlights dimmed, and just wished himself elsewhere; leaving Bariloche, he rushed to sell his stuff and catch the bus.
It's like Xander said: Oz doesn't say goodbye. And he promised Giles that he wouldn't leave again without saying goodbye. Hence, he's staying. It makes a strange, chlorine-bright sort of logic in his mind, actually. No goodbyes, no leaving.
Cold out here, and he thinks he gets a whiff of Spike lurking around back in the alley. Whiff, and a glimpse of the cherry at the end of his cigarette.
"Anyone back there?" Oz calls, and his voice is hoarse, and he realizes he wants to say goodbye again. Small and pathetic, maybe, that it'd be to *Spike*, but he takes his chances when they present themselves.
There's no answer, so Oz pulls his jacket more tightly around himself and turns his back on the lights from the shop. He's facing east now, and if he squints, he can see the cloudy sky and think about the plane.
For a while, as a small boy, Giles dreamed of owning a grocer's shop. Mostly he wanted the unlimited supply of sweets, but he also, he knows now, wanted something that was entirely his own. Setting his own hours and picking his own stock (every kind of cake ever made, and absolutely no sprouts or beets) seemed like perfect independence. No one makes shopkeepers memorize Latin declensions or go to bed early on a summer evening.
Instead, of course, he took the Watchers' oath, which uses the word obey three times. And later, before he came to America for Buffy, he swore to train and guide her until her death or his own.
Perhaps he's never been very good at obedience.
Sitting on the table, rubbing at a sore spot on his shoulder, Giles looks around at the books and herbs and crystals, the ritual candles in eight (unnecessary) scents, the tacky unicorn statuettes that sell remarkably well. He chose all of it, even the unicorns, because in the end one has to stock what other people want.
It seems to epitomize something, that he tried to be a Watcher and a shopkeeper at once, and found that neither was exactly what he'd expected. Time to be something else, then.
Time to go home with Oz and see what happens next.
But Giles finds himself wandering around, running his fingers over the shelves and polishing away the smudges on the brass incense burners. He goes back into the exercise room with a handful of wet paper towels and wipes the mat down again, mentally apologizing to Buffy all the while.
Eventually she'll forgive him for leaving. And when she dies, it won't be his fault, any more than it would have been if he'd stayed.
In the office filing cabinet, behind folders full of daily and monthly accounts, he finds a half-empty bottle of Johnny Walker. He'd forgotten that he put it - hid it - there, a week or two after Buffy dived off the tower.
The bottle's uncapped and Giles' mouth is parched, his blood sour with craving, before he remembers that Oz will smell it on him. And Oz will worry, which isn't something Giles should do to him.
He puts the cap back on, opens the drawer again, and stops. Shuts the drawer, goes back into the main room, and puts the bottle in his briefcase.
No sense wasting a bottle of whiskey, even bad whiskey.
Oz never looks in his briefcase.
Giles is too tired to think, or too tired to have to think. He puts out the lights, double-checks the boards over the window, sets the alarm, locks the doors. Wraps his arms around Oz, who's waited so patiently for him, kisses his forehead, and says, "Let's go."
Big things, important things -- things like departures, farewells, even homecomings -- are never as momentous and weighty when they actually happen as Oz expects that they'll be. As he drives them to the motel for the last time, he thinks explicitly that this is the last time, but nothing stirs inside him. Just a slow, seeping need to get on with this, pack up the last of their things, maybe even nap before getting to the airport with enough time to spare.
Exhaustion mutes the urgency of it all, keeps his eyes solidly on the road, and Oz is measuring forward motion by the tempo of Giles' breathing and thunk-thunk rhythm of dashed lines down the center of the road.
Even their conversation is moving like syrup, phrases and murmurs that slide through the dark of the car.
"Everything go all right?" he asks and Giles murmurs in reply, dropping his hand on Oz's thigh. A while later, Oz remembers to say, "Good."
Sooner -- or later, it's hard to tell -- they're back in the room and Giles steers Oz to the bed. Oz knows he should protest, stay up and help pack, but there's the drive ahead of him and just thinking about that makes him woozy. Lying on top of the blankets, knowing that if he gets underneath he'll never wake up in time, Oz hugs the pillow to his face.
"Wake me up at three?" he asks. He doesn't even know what time it is now, but that's better. If he knows what time it is, he'll waste what he does have worrying that it's not enough. When Giles squeezes his shoulder and drops a kiss on his temple, Oz reaches blindly out and grabs Giles' hand.
"Always choose you," he says thickly and his eyes won't open. Amnesia and exhaustion feel almost the same: heavy and sweet, cloying like potheads' incense. Giles still wanted him, not even knowing him, and Oz keeps that fact right under his lids as he sleeps.
Soon enough he'll have to wake and drive again and they'll drag themselves through paranoid security lines and yet it all feels very far away. Like another country, like they've already lifted away from Sunnydale, and it all happened without him noticing.
"Want you," Oz whispers back, lips moving over stubble and skin. "Always. Keep telling you that." He smiles, but Giles doesn't; Giles squeezes him more tightly and his breath pools warmly against Oz's neck. It's not a joke, not anything to josh about, and Oz kisses Giles' temple in apology. "Always. Senile or at full-power, Giles. Promise."
Memory, he's learning now, grows and thickens like yarn getting spun; he remembers, now, that Spike and Buffy left to deal with vampires, that the others are probably still wandering the sewers, that he left Giles more than once. But all the facts, however strong and sinewy they're becoming, still don't feel entirely real. Not nearly as real as this, feeling Giles' heart beat against his side, smelling the sweaty exhaustion coming off Giles' skin, thinking about home. London, eight thousand miles, and this time tomorrow, they'll be there. Unconscious, probably, but there.
Most of Sunnydale and its events have always felt like that, though: strong, factual, but not nearly as absorbing as the other stuff, as the half-moon scar on the side of Giles' nose that's usually obscured by his glasses, as the whisk-whisk of his cotton against Oz's corduroy, as anything that's this quiet. Hellmouths are drama queens, Oz thinks, massaging the top of Giles' neck and humming the weird cowboy-campfire song he found himself singing to Giles several days ago. They're drama queens and spoiled brats demanding all the attention, now, and Oz tends to turn his back on people (towns) like that.
He can't wait to leave this place.
"I'll be right here," he says as the banging in the cellar gets louder, heralding the rest's return. "When you tell them, I mean. I'll be, like, human flak jacket."
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Of course, Oz wouldn't let him run away even if he truly wanted to. Oz has sworn off disappearances without warning.
"Thank you," Giles says as Oz slides off his lap. "But I don't want you to be the flak jacket. The one who takes all the blame." It's not Oz who has duties here. Not Oz whom Buffy is counting on. "I want you here, of course," he adds, because Oz has stopped, frowning a little, halfway through straightening his clothes. "Just not as a human shield."
Oz, absently tugging the hem of his cardigan, looks about to say something, but then the basement door opens and Tara appears, hugging her sweater close around her. "Is everyone all-" Giles says before he sees her expression. "What happened?" Her face is wet, her eyes blank, and she walks out the front door without a pause.
It must be - Willow must be - but Willow's at the top of the stairs looking around, and when she doesn't see Tara in the shop she lets out a hoarse sound and runs for the door.
"What-"
"The spell," Xander says. His face is bleeding and Anya and Dawn are holding on to his arms. "Willow did it. And Tara-"
"Willow's been controlling Tara's memory," Anya says.
"Ahn, we don't-"
"Yes we do, Xander! It's not like we could help hearing about it when they were fighting at our brand-new dining table!" She pushes Xander into a chair and sits down herself, barely flinching when Oz ducks under the table and emerges with the two escaped rabbits in his arms. In remarkable detail, considering she wasn't meant to be listening, Anya tells about Willow and Tara's row and the promise Willow made to avoid magic. "Giles, you've got to do something about Willow. She was bossy enough before she turned into Stalin-with-spells."
"Unfortunately, I can't think of anyone whose advice she's less likely to heed," Giles says. "In any case . . . Dawn, you should hear this too." Dawn, holding a rabbit while Oz tries to open the box without freeing the others, pets its ears and doesn't answer. Poor girl, she must feel as though her world is shattered yet again. Tara's been almost a mother to her.
Anya mutters something that Giles at first takes to be a complaint, but then the rabbits vanish with a cartoonish pop. "Bunny-banishing spell," she explains. "Clears the hoppy little monsters for half a mile. I'm thinking of marketing it to gardeners. Or possibly an agri-business conglomerate. Large-scale thinking means large profits, after all."
Scowling at Anya, Dawn comes back to the table, followed by Oz. "Well," Giles manages before all the planning he's done for this moment goes out of his head. None of his tactful, rehearsed words remain. Oz lays a hand over his, which doesn't bring anything back but lets Giles decide he'd better just get on with it. "We're leaving. Oz and I. We're going back home."
"I get the shop back!" Anya exclaims at the same moment that Xander says, "Leaving? Giles, you can't." After a quick look between the two, Anya shrugs and Xander continues, "We - Buffy needs you. And Oz, man, you can't go. You're the only guy I know. Who'm I gonna eat junk food and talk about manly things with, huh?" He laughs, nervously, and Giles stifles an answering laugh of his own. Buffy's been furious ever since Giles told her, early this afternoon, and Willow's just done a spell that could have got them all killed, and Giles can't decide which is funnier--the fact that Xander doesn't consider him a "guy," or the thought of Oz talking cars and football
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Xander raises his hand to flip him off, but stops when Oz leans toward Dawn. Her arms are still folded across her chest, around the bunny who's not there, her chin pointing up to the ceiling. She's pretending nothing's happening, or that nothing bothers her, something like that. Oz slides back and squeezes Giles' hand.
"I don't know what you're so upset about," Anya's saying to Xander. "You have me, and that should be enough. I can drink many a man under the table, and that's got to count for something."
"No, but see, what I meant was --" Xander starts.
Willow's doing magic on her *friends*: Oz's brain is stuck there, needle running and rasping through the same groove. Not just her friends, not just, you know, resurrecting the dead, but going into Tara's head and rearranging it like Lawrence on Changing Rooms.
"Why'd Willow do that?" Oz asks suddenly, and Giles' hand tightens into a fist beneath Oz's palm. Oz turns in his seat and shrugs. "It's just -- why would you *do* that?"
"Makes everything easier," Dawn says. Finally, in a tone so flat and cold that Oz's throat dries and swells. Dawn's not a kid, but she shouldn't *that* world-weary. No one should. "Keeps everything, like, under control."
"Oz, I don't think --" Giles starts to say and Oz realizes he's rubbing Giles' arm, the way he does to loosen up writing muscles, and he stops. Looks down at his hand, chipped nail polish and pale bony fingers on Giles' nice blazer, and makes himself stop.
"Right, not the point," Oz says. He's not sure what the point is; the Hellmouth sets whatever internal compass he has whirling drunkenly. He's about to apologize, say something else, when the bell over the door rings and everyone's head turns automatically. Buffy's leaning against the door, rubbing her side and smiling tightly, almost nauseously.
"Joan? What was I thinking? Anyway. Back," she says. "Glad I caught you, Giles."
"Giles is leaving!" Xander says, half-standing up. He sits down when Giles rises, his arm slipping away from Oz's hand. "And he's taking Oz with him!"
"Really, Xander, it's not like that," Anya tells him, and Oz turns back, like Giles needs his privacy with Buffy. He kind of always did.
"Giles is kidnapping me?"
"Might as well be," Xander says, slumping down, shrugging off Anya's anxious hand. "Don't get me wrong, it's cool you came back, even if it was with the big guy, but --"
"You have to admit, you have a habit of showing up and disappearing," Anya says. "It's hard for some people. Like Xander."
Oz can't help himself; he checks over his shoulder, just once, just to make sure that Giles and Buffy are okay, before turning back.
"Sorry?"
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When Giles turns back to Buffy, he feels, with sudden vividness, all the traces of sex on his body and his clothes. What happened with Oz seems, for a second, grotesque. Fucking in the back room, on Buffy's workout mats.
Perhaps in Sunnydale they're inevitably grotesque. They don't fit here, not together. "Buffy-"
"You're really leaving? Still?" As she speaks, she folds an arm carefully over her ribs. She must have been in a fight, a bad one.
Giles nods. There's a smear of dried blood at the corner of her mouth. He should get her a glass of water, a chair, a first-aid kit.
"How can you? We all just lost our memories. Anything could be happening." Slowly, wincing, Buffy leans against the counter. Very quietly, she says, "Giles, how can you just leave me?"
It's the question she didn't ask this afternoon. It's the awful silence that yawned between his attempts at explanation. Every reason enumerated, the truest ones played down, the strained ones expanded until Giles almost made it sound like this was for Buffy's own good. No wonder she didn't believe it. Doesn't.
"Buffy . . ." When Giles lays a hand on her shoulder, she twists away, then hisses and holds her ribs again. "I have to." Without meaning to, he glances back at Oz. Buffy sees, of course.
"Funny how boyfriends weren't important when I had one." Briskly, she straightens up, pain disappearing from her face and posture. She's used to hiding it, of course. "Come on, Dawn," she calls. "Time to go home."
For once, Dawn doesn't argue. She hugs Oz, whispers something in his ear, and follows her sister to the door. Then, to Giles' surprise, she turns around and hugs him tightly. "I'm still mad at you," she says, half-muffled against his chest.
"I know." To Buffy, hand on the doorknob, staring at the boarded window, Giles says, "Willow did the spell. Xander and Anya can explain. But . . . Buffy, keep an eye on her."
Without looking at him, Buffy nods, and then she and Dawn are out the door, gone.
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He makes more jokes in Sunnydale. It's something Xander always did, and Oz knows why now; it makes things a little easier, a little softer around the edges, at least temporarily.
But there's no joke to make now, not with the bell ringing and Anya and Xander standing up from the table like Oz and Giles are kids dragged home by the truant officer and there's gonna be trouble from the parental units. Oz moves a little closer to Giles and takes his hand.
This is exactly how they came back, but this is goodbye. No Buffy, no Tara, not even Willow.
"Don't forget to write, man," Xander says, taking Oz's hand. All thoughts of disapproving parents vanish, squeezed out by Xander's construction-strong grip, and then he's pulling Oz into a bearhug. "I mean it. Or call. Charge it to Giles, tell him you need to make contact with the homeland."
On top, Xander smells like the sewers, all damp and drips, but underneath, it's pure Xander, like the bathroom after Xander showered, clean and *warm*. "Can do that," Oz says, looking up and thumping Xander's back.
"It shouldn't be too expensive," Anya says, pushing her hand between Oz and Xander and giving Oz a brief, one-armed hug that smells like, well, currency. Well-thumbed bills and jangling coins. "You don't say very much. Xander could even call you. For the manly things."
Oz kisses her temple as Anya pulls away, and Xander's smiling. Really smiling, like he hasn't since the wedding news, and Oz squeezes his elbow one more time. For half a moment, Oz doesn't want to leave. He wants to rent an apartment in Giles' old building and keep house and head out to play pool with Xander and the guys on Friday nights and go to sleep alone most nights while Giles patrols and remember how to wait. It would be better that way, happier for everyone else, and he's being incredibly, mindblowingly selfish to want it any other way.
Oz steps aside so Giles can say his farewells, and he tries to picture the apartment in London. It's faded and spidery in his mind, like a Xerox of a pen-and-ink sketch, an idea of a place that's not exactly real.
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Xander puts his hands in his pockets, rocks back and forth, takes them out again, and says, "Hey, didn't we just do all this a couple months ago? Weird. You and Oz, with the going and the coming back and the going. Guess you are kind of alike after all."
Just like last time, there's an embarrassed handshake that turns into an embarrassed hug and a good deal of forceful back-pounding from Xander. "We'll come back for the wedding," Giles says, his voice wavering from the thumping he's getting.
"With presents?" Anya adds herself to the hug for a second, then pulls Xander back, her arm looped around his waist.
"Of course. Exotic English presents that cannot be had in California." As soon as Giles reaches for him, Oz is there; Giles squeezes his ribs and smiles at Anya. Standing this way, the four of them must be distorted mirrors of each other. Not four people, but two couples, laying unspoken claims, marking unconscious borders. Love changes everything. Love expands and limits, pluralizes individuality. No more autonomous I mixing freely, but us and them.
Once, long ago, there were just four people: Buffy, Xander, Willow, Giles. Strange to remember that now. And of course it's not really true, because there was always Oz, hidden. So patient, never asking to be the center.
"Well, goodbye then," Anya says. "Enjoy lots and lots of sex, and don't even think about the shop. Ever."
A round of goodbyes follows, like the clink of glasses at a toast. Giles watches them go, Xander still waving as the door shuts behind him, then turns to press tightly against Oz. This is what he's chosen, Oz and the future they can have together, so long as they don't stay here. This is what he wanted that whole awful year of concealment and anxiety. The chance he ached to have missed after Oz left him.
It feels very definite, now. Very real. Only now, Giles realizes, has he finally, publicly put Oz first. Chosen him. Before, it was only plans and intentions. "Love you," he says, closing his fists around the fabric of Oz's jacket.
When Giles bought the shop, not much more than a year ago, he thought he might stay in Sunnydale forever.
He kisses Oz's forehead, breathes in the familiar scent of his hair, and lets him go. "Oz, I . . . I need a minute to myself. Sorry. It's all-"
This is what Giles wants, what Oz needs, and Giles knows he's foolish to wonder if he's doing the right thing.
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It's like Xander said: Oz doesn't say goodbye. And he promised Giles that he wouldn't leave again without saying goodbye. Hence, he's staying. It makes a strange, chlorine-bright sort of logic in his mind, actually. No goodbyes, no leaving.
Cold out here, and he thinks he gets a whiff of Spike lurking around back in the alley. Whiff, and a glimpse of the cherry at the end of his cigarette.
"Anyone back there?" Oz calls, and his voice is hoarse, and he realizes he wants to say goodbye again. Small and pathetic, maybe, that it'd be to *Spike*, but he takes his chances when they present themselves.
There's no answer, so Oz pulls his jacket more tightly around himself and turns his back on the lights from the shop. He's facing east now, and if he squints, he can see the cloudy sky and think about the plane.
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Instead, of course, he took the Watchers' oath, which uses the word obey three times. And later, before he came to America for Buffy, he swore to train and guide her until her death or his own.
Perhaps he's never been very good at obedience.
Sitting on the table, rubbing at a sore spot on his shoulder, Giles looks around at the books and herbs and crystals, the ritual candles in eight (unnecessary) scents, the tacky unicorn statuettes that sell remarkably well. He chose all of it, even the unicorns, because in the end one has to stock what other people want.
It seems to epitomize something, that he tried to be a Watcher and a shopkeeper at once, and found that neither was exactly what he'd expected. Time to be something else, then.
Time to go home with Oz and see what happens next.
But Giles finds himself wandering around, running his fingers over the shelves and polishing away the smudges on the brass incense burners. He goes back into the exercise room with a handful of wet paper towels and wipes the mat down again, mentally apologizing to Buffy all the while.
Eventually she'll forgive him for leaving. And when she dies, it won't be his fault, any more than it would have been if he'd stayed.
In the office filing cabinet, behind folders full of daily and monthly accounts, he finds a half-empty bottle of Johnny Walker. He'd forgotten that he put it - hid it - there, a week or two after Buffy dived off the tower.
The bottle's uncapped and Giles' mouth is parched, his blood sour with craving, before he remembers that Oz will smell it on him. And Oz will worry, which isn't something Giles should do to him.
He puts the cap back on, opens the drawer again, and stops. Shuts the drawer, goes back into the main room, and puts the bottle in his briefcase.
No sense wasting a bottle of whiskey, even bad whiskey.
Oz never looks in his briefcase.
Giles is too tired to think, or too tired to have to think. He puts out the lights, double-checks the boards over the window, sets the alarm, locks the doors. Wraps his arms around Oz, who's waited so patiently for him, kisses his forehead, and says, "Let's go."
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Exhaustion mutes the urgency of it all, keeps his eyes solidly on the road, and Oz is measuring forward motion by the tempo of Giles' breathing and thunk-thunk rhythm of dashed lines down the center of the road.
Even their conversation is moving like syrup, phrases and murmurs that slide through the dark of the car.
"Everything go all right?" he asks and Giles murmurs in reply, dropping his hand on Oz's thigh. A while later, Oz remembers to say, "Good."
Sooner -- or later, it's hard to tell -- they're back in the room and Giles steers Oz to the bed. Oz knows he should protest, stay up and help pack, but there's the drive ahead of him and just thinking about that makes him woozy. Lying on top of the blankets, knowing that if he gets underneath he'll never wake up in time, Oz hugs the pillow to his face.
"Wake me up at three?" he asks. He doesn't even know what time it is now, but that's better. If he knows what time it is, he'll waste what he does have worrying that it's not enough. When Giles squeezes his shoulder and drops a kiss on his temple, Oz reaches blindly out and grabs Giles' hand.
"Always choose you," he says thickly and his eyes won't open. Amnesia and exhaustion feel almost the same: heavy and sweet, cloying like potheads' incense. Giles still wanted him, not even knowing him, and Oz keeps that fact right under his lids as he sleeps.
Soon enough he'll have to wake and drive again and they'll drag themselves through paranoid security lines and yet it all feels very far away. Like another country, like they've already lifted away from Sunnydale, and it all happened without him noticing.
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