"Thanks. Yeah, purple -" He found the nail polish in a little shop off Oxford Street, a few hours before he picked out the waistcoat. Giles suggested he get a black one, too, just as back-up. The purple seemed, then, like a beautiful congruence, dark and eggplant-y and very lush. Earlier tonight, though, he wasn't so sure about painting them, not with all the dressing-up and the tension and the weird, forced jocularity between them.
But it's better now. Much better, with Giles' touches lingering and sliding, a pat on the back when Oz slips on the waistcoat, then leans over the dresser to figure out which earrings to put in.
"Waist-coat, right?" he asks, still hunting for the last silver ring. "Not weskit, even if that's what the cleaner guy called it?" Giles makes a soft, affirmative noise, and Oz grins. Dressing up really is an entirely new language, with codes and details and syntax he's learning as he goes along. The semantics of it is still escaping him; all he knows, really, is that they both look good. Upright, formal, and *good*.
"Whoa." When Giles turns around, tugging on his own black waistcoat, Oz reaches for him. It's more than William Powell and Fred Astaire -- it's that, plus the memory of seeing Giles at prom, glowing at Buffy and avoiding Oz's eyes -- and it's now. Giles is thinner, more relaxed, completely himself and at home in this suit. "Yeah. You're a movie star."
Purple socks pulled on, he steps into his new lace-ups -- Giles drew the line at patent Docs, and now, decked out in purple, Oz is kind of glad he did, even if he could use all the height he can get -- and stands up straight.
"Thanks, by the way. For this --" He smoothes down the suit and cocks his head. "Everything."
Giles shakes his head and brushes a speck of black lint from the front of Oz's waistcoat. "Don't thank me. It wasn't a gift, it was just something you needed." Oz has his own checkbook now, a cashpoint card and a credit card, but he still tends to think of the money as Giles' money. When it's spent on him, he's both grateful and uncomfortable. "Now, if we'd put diamonds in the lapels like you wanted, then you could've thanked me."
They're nearly ready to go, but Giles has to style his hair a bit while Oz stands back and grins. Oz has done nothing to his own hair, so it falls in soft strands that make Giles think again of a schoolboy. "Makes a change, huh?" Oz says, taking a bit of affectionate revenge for Giles' usual teasing as Giles fusses, trying to improve somewhat on his everyday hair, with a tube of Oz's gel.
"Yes, well . . ." That's as good as it's likely to get; this new haircut is a little too short. Giles puts the gel away and washes his hands. "You'll notice I didn't take twenty minutes. And my hair can still be touched without cutting your fingers on it." Turning, he gives Oz a thorough kiss, with a bit of hair-tousling for good measure. "I'm old enough to need artifice, you see."
Oz's raised eyebrow is comment enough on that, and Giles follows him back to the bedroom again. His nerves come back a little when he puts on his jacket, but then he looks at Oz, who's trying to look at himself in the small mirror over the dresser, hands fiddling with his lapels and his sleeves. Giles has only seen Oz in a dinner jacket twice before, at the high school's homecoming and prom, and then Oz was with Willow and it rather hurt to look at him. Of course, even if they'd been together then, they couldn't have actually been together, not at a school dance. Tonight's party is bound to be better than that. "My handsome Oz," he says. "It's going to be a wonderful evening. The start of a wonderful year."
"Ought-two," Oz says, kissing Giles' cheek one more time, "is going to rock. Quote me on that."
After all the fidgety prepping, checking of details and smoothing out of worries, it feels like it takes no time at all to shrug on their coats and clatter down the stairs to mee the cab. Oz's dressing-up ends at the new suit; his outer jacket is a new camel-colored toggle coat, which he really likes for its weight and the depth (and number) of its pockets, but it's nothing as sharp as Giles' dressy overcoat.
"And it looks like this year's gonna be *frigid*, too," he says as he jogs from foot to foot on the sidewalk. Giles is tugging on his gloves, and he looks like someone in a Hitchcock movie now; the streetlights turn the block into Expressionist swathes of white on black and right between one light and the dark stands Giles, straight and tall and broad-shouldered.
But then Giles grins and reaches for Oz's hand, and he's not ambiguously menacing, no Harry Lime or James Mason, just Giles, and he's guiding Oz into the wide back seat of the cab and they're off.
In Sunnydale, New Year's, like the other holidays, was always pretty quiet. People stayed inside and didn't gather in large groups; it was just habit, and Oz can't remember when he learned to act like that. London is different in every way, particularly holiday traffic. They slide downtown, towards the Docklands, but along the way, the sidewalks are crowded with people and even with the windows all the way up, he can hear the revelry.
Olivia's neighborhood, from what Oz has been reading, used to be skeevier than skeevy, deserted and derelict and generally hideous; he's been picturing it as something like the wharves and piers in downtown Sunnydale. Maybe it used to be like that - the buildings are slightly familiar, giant boxy warehouses like the building that houses the Bronze - but everything's clean. Quiet and underlit, but clean.
"You're in for a treat," Olivia had told him when she called yesterday; she'd been under the impression Oz has seen her loft, but when he reminded her he hadn't, she just laughed mysteriously.
It's a treat in a giant box wrapped up with lots and lots of tulle that sparkles: that's all Oz can think about the loft when the elevator groans to a stop and they step out into the space. Sparkling and loud and so many people. He squeezes Giles' hand and grins.
Olivia's flat, vast and modern, with its spare-lined furniture dotting the space with color, its brushed aluminum and glass block, always makes Giles think of a particularly beautiful airport. The people jostling around the buffet table, as people always do at parties, could be an especially well-dressed crowd queuing at a Heathrow ticket counter.
"Amazing, isn't it?" He touches Oz's shoulder and smiles. "It puts our little flat quite to shame. Wait until you have a proper look at the view, you can see most of London from here."
As they thread through the room looking for Olivia, Giles notices that she's redecorated since he was last here. Which was--dear god--exactly five years ago, for her 1996 New Year's Eve party. The furniture is all different, even sleeker and sterner than it used to be, and several of the paintings are new. Things have changed in his absence; London, too, altered while he was in California. But it keeps surprising him, as though he imagined his old friends and haunts frozen in time, waiting for him to come home.
Olivia, standing near something that could be a lamp or a sculpture and talking animatedly to several people Giles doesn't know, sees them and waves. "Rupert! I was starting to think I needed to ring you again." Her hug and kiss are familiar, at least, and she hugs Oz too.
"We wouldn't miss it," Giles says. "You look beautiful, Olivia." She's wearing a strapless dress in some bronze-like shade that nobody but her could possibly pull off.
"Thank you. You're as gorgeous as ever. And Oz! That waistcoat is smashing, it's the perfect color for you." She seizes an arm apiece and draws them into the group. "This is Neely," she says, smiling at a handsome dreadlocked man who must be her new boyfriend. "Cornelius, really, but he made me promise not to tell." There's a flurry of introductions, with Giles missing half the names as he always does. Olivia disappears halfway through and comes back with two glasses of something red and bubbly. "Pomegranate juice and sparkling water," she explains quietly, handing them to Giles and Oz. "My own delicious invention, and I've been waiting ages for you to try it."
"I'm kind of a bum right now," Oz tells the short woman with hair as dark and shiny as his new patent-leather shoes. Amanda? Ursula? He thinks it's Amanda, and she wants to know what he's doing in London and how he finds it and what he plans to do. She stresses weird words, but she's nice enough, and he smiles over his shoulder in goodbye as Olivia pivots him to face Neely.
"And the cocktail?" she demands, but sweetly, lips about an inch from Oz's ear.
"Great, thanks," he says, though she's already floating away. Neely claps him on the shoulder and, laughing, tells him not to humor Olivia. Which is really, Oz thinks, watching how she moves around people, touching them and complimenting them, changing their groupings without them even noticing, pretty much impossible. Neely asked him a question, he realizes too late, and takes another sip. "Huh? Sorry?"
"You're a guitarist, yeah?" Neely asks again. "Or is it drummer?"
"Neither?" Oz says, but Giles, talking to someone else, clears his throat at that. "Right. Play bass sometimes, and acoustic. You?"
Neely's a vibraphonist, which is just about the coolest thing Oz has ever heard of, and he does it weekends and evenings; the rest of the time, he's a derivatives analyst, which Oz has no reply to. He got recruited by that computer company, and they wanted him and Willow to work on algorithms for derivatives, but he's still not sure what they are.
But it doesn't matter, because a very tall guy who could play Icabod Crane is pounding Neely on the back in greeting, then covering his mouth and saying very loudly, "Is that Rupert?"
Parties have their own music. Not the brassy jazz that's playing on - he cocks his head - a *damn* good sound system, but the music of gossip and clothes and dancing steps as people meet and greet and scowl and snicker. Oz sips his drink again and lets it all wash over him.
Oz is good with people. It's something Giles forgets, knowing him so well. Actually Oz's shyness only emerges on knowing him well; he's shy about what he feels deeply. But he likes new people, likes getting to know them (much more than Giles does, in fact) and he asks them questions out of real interest.
"-how they could possibly have elected that man," someone's saying, and Giles turns back to the people who've been asking him about living in America. "You were there, Rupert, what do you think?" the man continues. He's a journalist of some kind, clever and young.
"Well, I was in California, which I'm told is rather different from the rest of the country. And, to be honest, I don't follow politics that closely." One of the women, who works in public relations for the Labour party, looks shocked at that, and Giles adds, "Of course, it only takes a few seconds of hearing him try to speak to see that they'd be better off with a president picked randomly off the street."
That sets off a general lament about the decline of the English language, and Giles puts in an agreeing word here and there. He'd like to work his way into Oz's conversation with Neely and a tall man that Giles vaguely recognizes as an old friend of Paul's, but he doesn't want to be rude. "I fear that struggle is doomed," he says in response to the older woman's--Susan's--comment about misused apostrophes. "The mistake's become so frequent that most people don't know what's correct anymore."
A couple of minutes later, there's one of those low-tide moments in which several conversations ebb away at once, and Giles finds himself standing next to Oz again. "Having a good time?" He takes Oz's hand and leads him towards the window. "Come and see the view." Cool air and a bit of quiet might not be amiss either, so he slides the glass door open to the balcony. "There's the Tower," he says, pointing. "And St. Paul's, and the Eye. Our flat is somewhere off there, to the left a bit."
They're only five stories up, but Oz feels like they're floating right over the bottom of the city. Like they're leaning over the railing of a zeppelin, if zeppelins had ever taken off the way Oz wishes they had, and the river is black, glittery like mica, and the city itself is *bright* but smaller than he'd expected.
Oz leans over the railing, far enough that he's pretty sure he's making Giles nervous, but he wants to see it all. He tightens his hold on Giles' hand, even draws in more closely, and sighs. His breath blossoms in the cold and it's good to be out of the heat and noise.
"Having a great time," Oz says, moving even closer until he's under Giles' arm. "Did you know that Will's doing work with -- damn. Some library that got robbed of all these maps and he has to dust for prints and all this stuff and work with Scotland Yard?"
Giles blinks, the city gone miniature and twinned on the lenses of his glasses.
"Will's the guy out of Headless Horseman," Oz says, just as the door screeches open behind them. Blast of warm air and a hand closing around his elbow, and Oz stumbles, turning.
"Far too early to hide out alone," Olivia says, rubbing her arms against the cold. "Rupert, you need to come and say hello to Meaghan. She's been asking after you. As for you --" She levels her gaze at Oz. "You do technology things. There's a postgraduate student in cultural studies of science and tech I want you to meet."
Before following Olivia inside, Oz cranes up and kisses Giles' cheek. "See you on the next furlough, handsome."
Giles catches Oz around the waist before he can slip away and kisses him. Just a peck on the lips, nothing they couldn't have done inside in the light, but better out here, with darkness and the cool air around their bodies.
Olivia is looking ostentatiously away, drumming her nails on the window glass with an impatience that isn't entirely joking. "We'll mingle, I promise," Giles says, hoping that his grip on Oz's sleeve doesn't make him look a liar. "If you promise not to bully us about it."
"Weeeell . . ." she drawls, not quite hiding a smile. Like all strong-willed people, Giles thinks, she enjoys being stood up to on occasion. "Do you solemnly swear not to hide in a corner all night whispering to each other?"
Holding up his right hand, Giles says, "On my rather tarnished honor." Over his shoulder he takes one last glance at the lights, enticing as distant things always are. Then he whispers, "See you soon," to Oz and watches Olivia lead him off to a group of young people hovering near the buffet table. They're not so far from Oz's age; he's bound to find things to talk about with them.
Giles watches through the window as names are exchanged and hands shaken, as Oz starts talking to a plump young man with architectural glasses and a pretty girl who's wearing the same Doc Martens that Oz wanted to buy. He must have told her so, because she grins and lifts a foot, showing off the shoe's red-leather flame.
It would be nice to stay here for a while, watching Oz be happy, but he promised Olivia. Giles steps back inside, shutting the door behind him, and shivers with the chill he didn't feel before. Meaghan will want to talk manuscripts--perhaps the British Library's digitization project--and Giles finds he's looking forward to it. He sets off in search of her.
Declan has an impenetrable accent, like he's chewing on peat as he talks, but he's pretty interesting -- he's doing something on something that may or may not involve the human factors of online discourse, and even though Oz isn't quite sure what that means, the guy's face lights up when Oz tells him about the BBS he used to run off his Amiga, so that's pretty cool.
His girlfriend Lucia has cool shoes and a killer green dress but beyond that there isn't very much *to* her. She just nods and drinks a lot as Declan gets his arm around Oz's shoulder and breathes peppermint-breath all over his cheek and demands technical details.
Baud rate, number of members, Usenet gateway: It's all coming back to Oz, and he gets time to munch away on some really delicious pistachio and goat cheese crisps while Declan tries to explain his thesis about something-something-gimme a drink, darling-something.
It's been forever and a half since Oz was at a party and this one's pretty cool. After Declan heads off to find the toilet, Oz ends up chatting with a tall spinstery-looking woman who's actually a fashion editor somewhere and delighted to learn that young men still go to tailors.
From the glances he can grab, Giles looks happy, halfway across the room and laughing his head off.
Oz pours Spinster Fashionista another glass of wine and keeps munching.
Meaghan has a lot of rather funny stories about the older librarians' confusion with computers--one old chap pointing the mouse at the screen like a television remote, another asking if he'd lose his e-mail when he turned the computer off--and Giles laughs a little more than he probably should. Oz has been giving him lessons on the computer they bought a few weeks ago, and Giles is beginning to feel rather expert. The sheer quantity of texts he can find online, and the speed of it, more than make up for the lack of paper-smell. He's got over twenty websites bookmarked now, and his very own e-mail account, and he knows what a URL is and what "spam" means.
"I think sometimes they're being stupid to just to obstruct me," Meaghan says. "I think they don't want the manuscripts accessible."
"Probably not," Giles says, raising his glass to his mouth before he remembers there's wine in it. Meaghan gave it to him, and he doesn't know her quite well enough to explain. He sets it down next to a plant. "There's something greed-inspiring about rare things. In the middle ages the Franciscans used to chain books to the shelves in their monastic libraries."
Ten minutes later, they're talking about whether the easier access of digitization compensates for the loss of detail--paper textures are obscured and colors don't always show true on a computer screen. "You ought to come back to the Library, Rupert," Meaghan says. "If you want to, I think I could pull a string here and there."
"God yes," Giles says before he thinks. Even before he resigned from the Watchers, his long stretch of unemployment was making him uneasy. "I'd - I'd have to talk about it with my partner, with Oz, but yes. Tentatively. Yes." Having a routine again, and work to do, work that he loves more than he ever loved being a Watcher. "Thank you." It'll mean spending a lot of time away from Oz. But that's for the best, too. They're bound to quarrel if they're never out of each other's sight.
"Well, one good turn and all that. You hired me first." She smiles, and he remembers her as a student, too scared to unfold a fourteenth-century letter. "So tell me about this Oz. Is he here? Did you meet in America?"
There's nothing quite as nice, Giles thinks, as being asked to talk about one's favorite subject.
But it's better now. Much better, with Giles' touches lingering and sliding, a pat on the back when Oz slips on the waistcoat, then leans over the dresser to figure out which earrings to put in.
"Waist-coat, right?" he asks, still hunting for the last silver ring. "Not weskit, even if that's what the cleaner guy called it?" Giles makes a soft, affirmative noise, and Oz grins. Dressing up really is an entirely new language, with codes and details and syntax he's learning as he goes along. The semantics of it is still escaping him; all he knows, really, is that they both look good. Upright, formal, and *good*.
"Whoa." When Giles turns around, tugging on his own black waistcoat, Oz reaches for him. It's more than William Powell and Fred Astaire -- it's that, plus the memory of seeing Giles at prom, glowing at Buffy and avoiding Oz's eyes -- and it's now. Giles is thinner, more relaxed, completely himself and at home in this suit. "Yeah. You're a movie star."
Purple socks pulled on, he steps into his new lace-ups -- Giles drew the line at patent Docs, and now, decked out in purple, Oz is kind of glad he did, even if he could use all the height he can get -- and stands up straight.
"Thanks, by the way. For this --" He smoothes down the suit and cocks his head. "Everything."
Reply
They're nearly ready to go, but Giles has to style his hair a bit while Oz stands back and grins. Oz has done nothing to his own hair, so it falls in soft strands that make Giles think again of a schoolboy. "Makes a change, huh?" Oz says, taking a bit of affectionate revenge for Giles' usual teasing as Giles fusses, trying to improve somewhat on his everyday hair, with a tube of Oz's gel.
"Yes, well . . ." That's as good as it's likely to get; this new haircut is a little too short. Giles puts the gel away and washes his hands. "You'll notice I didn't take twenty minutes. And my hair can still be touched without cutting your fingers on it." Turning, he gives Oz a thorough kiss, with a bit of hair-tousling for good measure. "I'm old enough to need artifice, you see."
Oz's raised eyebrow is comment enough on that, and Giles follows him back to the bedroom again. His nerves come back a little when he puts on his jacket, but then he looks at Oz, who's trying to look at himself in the small mirror over the dresser, hands fiddling with his lapels and his sleeves. Giles has only seen Oz in a dinner jacket twice before, at the high school's homecoming and prom, and then Oz was with Willow and it rather hurt to look at him. Of course, even if they'd been together then, they couldn't have actually been together, not at a school dance. Tonight's party is bound to be better than that. "My handsome Oz," he says. "It's going to be a wonderful evening. The start of a wonderful year."
Reply
After all the fidgety prepping, checking of details and smoothing out of worries, it feels like it takes no time at all to shrug on their coats and clatter down the stairs to mee the cab. Oz's dressing-up ends at the new suit; his outer jacket is a new camel-colored toggle coat, which he really likes for its weight and the depth (and number) of its pockets, but it's nothing as sharp as Giles' dressy overcoat.
"And it looks like this year's gonna be *frigid*, too," he says as he jogs from foot to foot on the sidewalk. Giles is tugging on his gloves, and he looks like someone in a Hitchcock movie now; the streetlights turn the block into Expressionist swathes of white on black and right between one light and the dark stands Giles, straight and tall and broad-shouldered.
But then Giles grins and reaches for Oz's hand, and he's not ambiguously menacing, no Harry Lime or James Mason, just Giles, and he's guiding Oz into the wide back seat of the cab and they're off.
In Sunnydale, New Year's, like the other holidays, was always pretty quiet. People stayed inside and didn't gather in large groups; it was just habit, and Oz can't remember when he learned to act like that. London is different in every way, particularly holiday traffic. They slide downtown, towards the Docklands, but along the way, the sidewalks are crowded with people and even with the windows all the way up, he can hear the revelry.
Olivia's neighborhood, from what Oz has been reading, used to be skeevier than skeevy, deserted and derelict and generally hideous; he's been picturing it as something like the wharves and piers in downtown Sunnydale. Maybe it used to be like that - the buildings are slightly familiar, giant boxy warehouses like the building that houses the Bronze - but everything's clean. Quiet and underlit, but clean.
"You're in for a treat," Olivia had told him when she called yesterday; she'd been under the impression Oz has seen her loft, but when he reminded her he hadn't, she just laughed mysteriously.
It's a treat in a giant box wrapped up with lots and lots of tulle that sparkles: that's all Oz can think about the loft when the elevator groans to a stop and they step out into the space. Sparkling and loud and so many people. He squeezes Giles' hand and grins.
"Party time."
Reply
"Amazing, isn't it?" He touches Oz's shoulder and smiles. "It puts our little flat quite to shame. Wait until you have a proper look at the view, you can see most of London from here."
As they thread through the room looking for Olivia, Giles notices that she's redecorated since he was last here. Which was--dear god--exactly five years ago, for her 1996 New Year's Eve party. The furniture is all different, even sleeker and sterner than it used to be, and several of the paintings are new. Things have changed in his absence; London, too, altered while he was in California. But it keeps surprising him, as though he imagined his old friends and haunts frozen in time, waiting for him to come home.
Olivia, standing near something that could be a lamp or a sculpture and talking animatedly to several people Giles doesn't know, sees them and waves. "Rupert! I was starting to think I needed to ring you again." Her hug and kiss are familiar, at least, and she hugs Oz too.
"We wouldn't miss it," Giles says. "You look beautiful, Olivia." She's wearing a strapless dress in some bronze-like shade that nobody but her could possibly pull off.
"Thank you. You're as gorgeous as ever. And Oz! That waistcoat is smashing, it's the perfect color for you." She seizes an arm apiece and draws them into the group. "This is Neely," she says, smiling at a handsome dreadlocked man who must be her new boyfriend. "Cornelius, really, but he made me promise not to tell." There's a flurry of introductions, with Giles missing half the names as he always does. Olivia disappears halfway through and comes back with two glasses of something red and bubbly. "Pomegranate juice and sparkling water," she explains quietly, handing them to Giles and Oz. "My own delicious invention, and I've been waiting ages for you to try it."
Reply
"And the cocktail?" she demands, but sweetly, lips about an inch from Oz's ear.
"Great, thanks," he says, though she's already floating away. Neely claps him on the shoulder and, laughing, tells him not to humor Olivia. Which is really, Oz thinks, watching how she moves around people, touching them and complimenting them, changing their groupings without them even noticing, pretty much impossible. Neely asked him a question, he realizes too late, and takes another sip. "Huh? Sorry?"
"You're a guitarist, yeah?" Neely asks again. "Or is it drummer?"
"Neither?" Oz says, but Giles, talking to someone else, clears his throat at that. "Right. Play bass sometimes, and acoustic. You?"
Neely's a vibraphonist, which is just about the coolest thing Oz has ever heard of, and he does it weekends and evenings; the rest of the time, he's a derivatives analyst, which Oz has no reply to. He got recruited by that computer company, and they wanted him and Willow to work on algorithms for derivatives, but he's still not sure what they are.
But it doesn't matter, because a very tall guy who could play Icabod Crane is pounding Neely on the back in greeting, then covering his mouth and saying very loudly, "Is that Rupert?"
Parties have their own music. Not the brassy jazz that's playing on - he cocks his head - a *damn* good sound system, but the music of gossip and clothes and dancing steps as people meet and greet and scowl and snicker. Oz sips his drink again and lets it all wash over him.
Reply
"-how they could possibly have elected that man," someone's saying, and Giles turns back to the people who've been asking him about living in America. "You were there, Rupert, what do you think?" the man continues. He's a journalist of some kind, clever and young.
"Well, I was in California, which I'm told is rather different from the rest of the country. And, to be honest, I don't follow politics that closely." One of the women, who works in public relations for the Labour party, looks shocked at that, and Giles adds, "Of course, it only takes a few seconds of hearing him try to speak to see that they'd be better off with a president picked randomly off the street."
That sets off a general lament about the decline of the English language, and Giles puts in an agreeing word here and there. He'd like to work his way into Oz's conversation with Neely and a tall man that Giles vaguely recognizes as an old friend of Paul's, but he doesn't want to be rude. "I fear that struggle is doomed," he says in response to the older woman's--Susan's--comment about misused apostrophes. "The mistake's become so frequent that most people don't know what's correct anymore."
A couple of minutes later, there's one of those low-tide moments in which several conversations ebb away at once, and Giles finds himself standing next to Oz again. "Having a good time?" He takes Oz's hand and leads him towards the window. "Come and see the view." Cool air and a bit of quiet might not be amiss either, so he slides the glass door open to the balcony. "There's the Tower," he says, pointing. "And St. Paul's, and the Eye. Our flat is somewhere off there, to the left a bit."
Reply
Oz leans over the railing, far enough that he's pretty sure he's making Giles nervous, but he wants to see it all. He tightens his hold on Giles' hand, even draws in more closely, and sighs. His breath blossoms in the cold and it's good to be out of the heat and noise.
"Having a great time," Oz says, moving even closer until he's under Giles' arm. "Did you know that Will's doing work with -- damn. Some library that got robbed of all these maps and he has to dust for prints and all this stuff and work with Scotland Yard?"
Giles blinks, the city gone miniature and twinned on the lenses of his glasses.
"Will's the guy out of Headless Horseman," Oz says, just as the door screeches open behind them. Blast of warm air and a hand closing around his elbow, and Oz stumbles, turning.
"Far too early to hide out alone," Olivia says, rubbing her arms against the cold. "Rupert, you need to come and say hello to Meaghan. She's been asking after you. As for you --" She levels her gaze at Oz. "You do technology things. There's a postgraduate student in cultural studies of science and tech I want you to meet."
Before following Olivia inside, Oz cranes up and kisses Giles' cheek. "See you on the next furlough, handsome."
Reply
Olivia is looking ostentatiously away, drumming her nails on the window glass with an impatience that isn't entirely joking. "We'll mingle, I promise," Giles says, hoping that his grip on Oz's sleeve doesn't make him look a liar. "If you promise not to bully us about it."
"Weeeell . . ." she drawls, not quite hiding a smile. Like all strong-willed people, Giles thinks, she enjoys being stood up to on occasion. "Do you solemnly swear not to hide in a corner all night whispering to each other?"
Holding up his right hand, Giles says, "On my rather tarnished honor." Over his shoulder he takes one last glance at the lights, enticing as distant things always are. Then he whispers, "See you soon," to Oz and watches Olivia lead him off to a group of young people hovering near the buffet table. They're not so far from Oz's age; he's bound to find things to talk about with them.
Giles watches through the window as names are exchanged and hands shaken, as Oz starts talking to a plump young man with architectural glasses and a pretty girl who's wearing the same Doc Martens that Oz wanted to buy. He must have told her so, because she grins and lifts a foot, showing off the shoe's red-leather flame.
It would be nice to stay here for a while, watching Oz be happy, but he promised Olivia. Giles steps back inside, shutting the door behind him, and shivers with the chill he didn't feel before. Meaghan will want to talk manuscripts--perhaps the British Library's digitization project--and Giles finds he's looking forward to it. He sets off in search of her.
Reply
His girlfriend Lucia has cool shoes and a killer green dress but beyond that there isn't very much *to* her. She just nods and drinks a lot as Declan gets his arm around Oz's shoulder and breathes peppermint-breath all over his cheek and demands technical details.
Baud rate, number of members, Usenet gateway: It's all coming back to Oz, and he gets time to munch away on some really delicious pistachio and goat cheese crisps while Declan tries to explain his thesis about something-something-gimme a drink, darling-something.
It's been forever and a half since Oz was at a party and this one's pretty cool. After Declan heads off to find the toilet, Oz ends up chatting with a tall spinstery-looking woman who's actually a fashion editor somewhere and delighted to learn that young men still go to tailors.
From the glances he can grab, Giles looks happy, halfway across the room and laughing his head off.
Oz pours Spinster Fashionista another glass of wine and keeps munching.
Reply
"I think sometimes they're being stupid to just to obstruct me," Meaghan says. "I think they don't want the manuscripts accessible."
"Probably not," Giles says, raising his glass to his mouth before he remembers there's wine in it. Meaghan gave it to him, and he doesn't know her quite well enough to explain. He sets it down next to a plant. "There's something greed-inspiring about rare things. In the middle ages the Franciscans used to chain books to the shelves in their monastic libraries."
Ten minutes later, they're talking about whether the easier access of digitization compensates for the loss of detail--paper textures are obscured and colors don't always show true on a computer screen. "You ought to come back to the Library, Rupert," Meaghan says. "If you want to, I think I could pull a string here and there."
"God yes," Giles says before he thinks. Even before he resigned from the Watchers, his long stretch of unemployment was making him uneasy. "I'd - I'd have to talk about it with my partner, with Oz, but yes. Tentatively. Yes." Having a routine again, and work to do, work that he loves more than he ever loved being a Watcher. "Thank you." It'll mean spending a lot of time away from Oz. But that's for the best, too. They're bound to quarrel if they're never out of each other's sight.
"Well, one good turn and all that. You hired me first." She smiles, and he remembers her as a student, too scared to unfold a fourteenth-century letter. "So tell me about this Oz. Is he here? Did you meet in America?"
There's nothing quite as nice, Giles thinks, as being asked to talk about one's favorite subject.
Reply
Leave a comment