Fic: Exiles 1/4 (SPN/BtVS, Mystery Spot!Sam, Post-Chosen Oz, OFC), Rated R
Exiles
nwhepcat
Rated R
BtVS/SPN crossover; Oz, Sam Winchester
Set post-Chosen for BtVS, during Mystery Spot for SPN
Disclaimer: not mine
Summary: Living a loner's life, Oz meets someone even more cut off from other people than he is.
The version of Oz I'm writing here, with his solitary life, is based on two fics I wrote that featured him.
The American Stranger: Oz meets up with an old friend in Africa.
Indelible: Oz returns to Sunnydale and learns things have changed far more than he'd suspected. Xander/Dawn fic from Xander's POV, but a great deal of the story revolves around Oz and his reaction to Dawn.
Oz drowses in the laundromat, lulled by the sound of dryers and the sun pouring in the plate glass window. He's sitting on the deep ledge of the window, amid piles of freebie newspapers, religious tracts and flyers for weight loss systems and computer classes. It's early Sunday morning, his favorite time to do his laundry, since few people are around at this hour, for the most part. The religious ones are getting ready for church, and the heathens are sleeping off Saturday night. Apparently there aren't that many in the middle. A bored man reads yesterday's paper in one of the plastic chairs in the back, while the owner works on her coffee and a magazine.
The door opens, letting in the July heat and a smell that cuts through his drowsiness.
Blood. Lots of it. And it's not all human. And not exactly animal, either.
Oz goes very still, trying to hold his inner wolf in check. He opens one eye a slit and sees a tall, shaggy-haired guy in an army jacket with a duffle bag slung over his shoulder. Depositing the bag on one washer, he begins stuffing his laundry in a couple of machines.
Grabbing the paperback he'd abandoned on the platform next to him, Oz shifts so that he can watch the guy while seeming to stare idly into space. He's got to admire the guy's efficiency. Of course he's presorted -- he places a tight wad of clothes into each machine without Oz catching sight of any blood at all. The guy wipes his hands on a dark tee shirt before flipping the washer doors shut and heading for the change machine, where he feeds in a bill and gets a cascade of quarters.
Oz takes note of the way the guy moves -- carefully, favoring his left leg and his side. Bruised ribs, he'd guess. He's not sure about the near limp. His wolf sits up and takes an interest, and Oz hauls him back sharply.
The blood smell almost disappears behind the washer doors, and once the machines start filling with water, it fades completely. The guy starts to straighten, but pauses, a hand going to his ribs. His face pales. After a second or two he manages to unfold himself, though he's still got one hand at his side, the other on one of the machines for support.
Just as Oz thinks he should offer some kind of assistance, the guy looks back toward the row of scarred orange plastic seats and its lone occupant, then where Oz is stationed. He notes Oz's attention and his eyes narrow with a distinctly fuck you flavor. He pulls a book out of the pocket of his duffel and stalks out into the stifling heat, parking himself in the plastic chair by the door.
Solitary. Likes it that way. "Hard as nails " doesn't begin to cover it -- even Oz's wolf felt that fuck you. Oz makes him for his mid-twenties at most, yet there's something about him that feels ancient.
And what does it say about Oz's life that he feels he's gotten to know more about this guy in three minutes than he's learned about anyone in the past two years?
***
Oz returns to his paperback while he waits for his dryer. Now that his wolf has awakened, there's no more drowsing in the window.
The first full moon night of the month is still 36 hours away, but ever since the Initiative got Oz, the wolf is never completely dormant. It only comes out on the full moon, but he's often aware of it, watching.
Once his dryer stops, Oz dumps his clothes out onto the chipped Formica table and begins to fold them. He's always liked the Zen of this task: the warmth and fresh smell of clean clothes, the repetitive motion of shaking out a garment, folding it once, twice, three times, maybe four. It soothes him and focuses his mind at the same time. But this time the routine doesn't settle him. The smell of blood is too recent; his wolf paces its cage.
Apart from that, Oz is abruptly aware of the parallels between himself and the stranger. Every piece of clothing he owns fits into one washer, one dryer. Gradually he's whittled things down so all his t-shirts and button-downs are in the same color range, which can mingle with his jeans in the wash without one fading on the other. He shoves his gray boxer briefs in the same load. It's efficient and saves the pittance he makes as a dish washer in the diner across the street, but he's aware of the kind of life this efficiency reveals.
As he folds Oz studies the tall stranger through the front window. An early attempt at reading his book has been abandoned, and now the guy observes what little action is going on out on the street: a slow-moving hound looking for shade, a car of churchgoers.
Oz's wolf watches too. He takes in the subtle changes in the stranger's bearing, indications that the heat or his injuries are taking a toll. When the guy rises from his chair, Oz and his wolf are so zeroed in on him that what happens next seems to occur in slow motion. The stranger's movements have none of the tight control Oz had noticed earlier. He staggers a bit, putting a hand out blindly to steady himself against the storefront, then he goes down hard.
***
Oz tosses the t-shirt he's folding aside and hurries to the sidewalk. If anything, it feels like the temperature has risen another fifteen degrees since he first arrived. He crouches by the tall guy, who's sprawled on the concrete, out cold.
The coppery tang of blood reaches Oz again, fainter than before, this time from abrasions on the stranger's face and hand from his fall.
"Oh hell," says a smoky voice from the laundromat doorway. It's Alice, the owner. Oh hell is her initial response to any crisis, whether it's an empty change machine or a dryer that's shooting out flames. "Think I should call the rescue squad?"
"I don't know," Oz says. "He seems like the kind of guy who'd rather fly under the radar."
She gets that. Not only because a lot of her business depends on the same kind of guy, but because she has a healthy distrust of authority herself. Alice had been reluctant to call 911 even when the flames were erupting from the dryer. "Okay, what do we do?"
He wonders if he's about to offer up the stupidest plan of all time. "We could take him to my place. Let him rest while I finish up his laundry and mine, then figure out where to go from there."
Alice gives him a long look. It's not that she doesn't trust him -- he rents the rooms behind the laundromat building and does the occasional repair work or maintenance for her. He's sure she's figured him for an under-the-radar kind of guy himself. "You sure?"
"Not especially. But what's the worst that can happen? He steals all my stuff? Eighty percent of it is on the folding table."
She eyes the unconscious guy and then Oz. "You're going to need help."
"I think you're right."
Alice hoists the guy to his feet, with some small amount of help from Oz. She's almost as tall as the stranger, with a similar build, except not as muscled. Oz doesn't know much of her story, except she used to be a guy. He often wonders, usually at odd moments like this one, why she chose an old fashioned name like Alice when she's fond of black nail polish and blue-black hair dye and miniskirts with leggings and a wardrobe of different colored cowboy boots. Today's shade is teal.
"I've got him," she says. "Go on ahead and get the door."
Oz heads down the narrow alley to his little courtyard with its few carefully tended container plantings and a chair where he sometimes plays guitar at night. He unlocks his door and pushes it open, then heads back to help Alice with his houseguest.
As she shifts her hold on the stranger, she draws in a sharp breath. "Daniel. You should rethink this." He's never heard her sound alarmed before.
"What?"
"He's got a gun tucked in his waistband."
Oh hell.
***
Oz flicks a look at the tall guy, who's still out cold, propped up by Alice. He raises the guy's shirt tail and lifts the gun off him, ejecting the magazine from the grip. He tucks the pistol in his own waistband and slips the magazine into his pocket. "Now he doesn't."
"Which means he'll be pissed off when he wakes up. Seriously, Daniel. I don't like this. You're taking a big chance."
"Someone took a chance on me once."
She shoots him a look. "You didn't have a weapon."
But he did -- claws and teeth and a wolf he couldn't entirely control. He disappears into the desert every full moon, but when he'd first come here the wolf didn't always confine himself to three nights a month. "Trust me on this," he says. "I have pretty good instincts."
Alice scowls but shifts her hold on the stranger. Oz moves to help support him as they take him into Oz's apartment and ease him onto the bed. "I don't know," she says. "If this is heatstroke or something, he needs to go to the emergency room."
Oz shakes his head. "He's injured. I noticed when he came in. I was thinking maybe bruised ribs, but now I wonder if they're broken." He hauls his first aid kit out of his closet and sets it on the bedside stand that holds his alarm clock and whatever he's reading lately.
"That's a pretty damn big first aid kit for a little shaver like you." She gives him a long, appraising look, and Oz suspects she's remembering a time or two when he returned from a full moon walkabout considerably worse for wear. She lets the silence stretch out, but Oz is comfortable with silence. "First rule of fight club," she finally says, but it still doesn't get a rise from him. "You're going to try to fix him?"
"Not while he's out. He comes to, and it's probably a short route to me getting hurt. I'll just leave a note saying where he is and where his stuff is." He scrawls a note to that effect as Alice asks if she can get a glass of water.
She sets the glass next to Oz's note, and scrawls P.S. HYDRATE!! at the bottom, and then accompanies Oz back to the laundromat. The tall guy's washers have stopped running, so Oz transfers everything to the dryers across the room. Alice refuses to let him use his own quarters.
Oz buys them both a soda from the Coke machine in the back, then passes up his half-finished pile of folding to take a look out on the street. There's a big black hulk of a car parked across the street. Oz has seen parade floats smaller than that.
"Think it's his?" Alice asks from beside him.
"I might bet on that." He pushes the door open and crosses the deserted street to have a better look, and Alice comes along.
"I don't know if it's a classic," she says, "but it's old."
Not much sign inside of a life lived on the road, but the driver's seat is pushed back as far as it will go, which just might accommodate the stranger's long legs.
Oz exchanges a look with Alice.
"I've never seen it before," she tells him, "and this is my view all day, every day."
For the first time he wonders why she does spend her days in here, with her limited view, and how she got here.
Catching sight of something on the passenger side floorboard, Oz cranes for a closer look. Could be a book of some kind.
"I'm not going to start snooping now," Alice says, and briefly Oz wonders if it's a pointed comment because she somehow realized he was entertaining questions about her.
Meeting her gaze, he nods and they head back toward the laundromat. Oz bends to pick up the battered paperback the stranger dropped when he fell. Jim Thompson, Savage Night. "Creepy," he says. The main thing he knows about Jim Thompson is The Killer Inside Me.
Alice glances at the book, twitches her shapely mouth. "Are you sure about this?" she asks again.
"Not especially," he says again.
"Give me the gun, at least. I'll put it in the safe." He follows her to the cramped office in back and hands over the pistol.
Alice holds it in her palm but doesn't curl her fingers around it. She looks down at it and sighs. "Oh hell. I hate these things."
***
Oz tucks the stranger's book back in the duffel pocket and resumes his spot at the folding table. When Alice joins him and shakes out a t-shirt to fold, he isn't sure whether it's because she's decided she likes his company or she's rattled and needs it.
"Think he's some some kind of criminal?" she asks.
"Could be. But he could be an undercover cop who ran into trouble." Things are so rarely what they're assumed to be that Oz stopped assuming long ago.
Alice shoots him a sidelong glance. "Oh, thanks for that, Mr. It Could Always Be Worse."
Oz can't suppress a grin. "Not a fan, huh?"
"Long history. And my brother's one, and our father was." Which is the most personal thing she's offered in the two years since he moved here. "There's a certain mindset." She grabs another shapeless wad of knit from Oz's pile, which turns out to be his gray boxer briefs.
"Oh hey --" He reaches for them.
"What," she says, amused, "you think I've never touched a pair?" She folds them and adds them to the stack, then reaches for another pair.
"They're a little ventilated," he admits. He can't remember the last time he bought any new clothes.
"I actually do see a lot of laundry, you know. And I do the drop-offs. You don't come anywhere near Worst in Show."
How'd she get here, he wonders again, but that's not a question he's earned the right to ask. For the first time in years, he misses having people in his life who know his story, who trust him with theirs. He tries to think of something even slightly personal he can tell her, because he remembers that's how it begins. But it's like there's some heavy iron door in his head that's rusted shut.
For the first time in forever he's not so comfortable with silence, but Alice seems not to mind. She helps him fold his things in between dealing with the other customers who've started trickling in, and when the stranger's clothes are dry, she helps fold those, and hauls out a battered laundry basket that someone has brought and left behind.
"I think you're better off putting his stuff in here than in his duffel bag," she says. "He might not be too happy about the thought of someone opening it up."
"Good thought," Oz says. He packs the stranger's clothes and puts the duffel on top, then piles his own laundry in a zipped canvas bag on top. "Wish me luck."
Alice compresses her lips. "I don't like this. Just set the stuff by your door and back the hell away. Don't go back until he's gone."
"Maybe he needs help." He hoists the plastic basket. "Can you get the door?"
She glares at him. "Daniel. Don't be an idiot."
"It'll be all right," Oz says, but he's not thoroughly convinced. He heads for the door, prepared to nudge it open with his hip if he has to.
Alice heaves another sigh and goes to hold the door for him. "Be careful. Do not make me call 911."
She's just brimming with good ideas today.
***
His wolf is on guard as Oz approaches his apartment door, and Oz lets him have a little slack. He doesn't like walking in blind, but isn't crazy about the notion of knocking and giving his houseguest the upper hand. His wolf picks nothing up, and Oz tries to decide whether that's good or bad. He sets down the laundry basket and braces himself to open the door.
Oz's bed is unoccupied, the Indian-print spread smoothed and tucked up into hospital corners. The bathroom door is open, the light on, and the tall stranger is studying himself in the mirror. He's got his t-shirt pulled halfway up his chest, and it looks like even that much movement is several notches past painful. The guy's side is a solid mass of bruises, and Oz sees a few black bristles of sutures.
"Hey," Oz says in greeting.
Even that puts the stranger on alert. He yanks down the shirt and turns toward Oz, reeling at the sudden movement.
"Take it easy, you're safe here," Oz says.
"You have something of mine," the guy says.
"Your laundry's just outside." That's not what the stranger means, and Oz knows it.
"That's not all you've got."
"It's in a safe place." Oz can almost see the thought process that goes through the stranger's head, weighing the intimidating effect of his height against his obvious weakness. Oz's wolf bares its teeth and the stranger seems to decide against attempting to menace him. "Look, I can tend to that if you like." Like, he suspects, is a strong word. Though Oz suspects it will go over better than need. "I have a fair amount of experience patching people up." Mostly himself, though he has acted as assistant to the occasional missionary or aid worker in his travels.
"I'm fine, thanks." His hard tone and pallor don't do much for the believability of that sentence. I'm is the only word that rings remotely true.
"I'll get the laundry," Oz tells him. When he returns he sets the basket down on the bed and unzips his own canvas bag. "You'll need some clean towels." He sets those on the dresser by the bathroom door. Seems safer than trying to hand anything directly to his guest.
There's a part of Oz that isn't interested in safe. The wolf noses forward, and Oz says casually, "Most of the blood came out, I think. Except one shirt that's pretty much a goner. Demon blood's especially stubborn, wouldn't you say?"
That punches a hole through the wall surrounding the stranger. His attention focuses, lasering on Oz. "You're a hunter?"
***
Oz can barely suppress a laugh. Three nights out of the month, that's a yes. But he knows the type this guy means. He remembers the guy who was on the hunt when Oz first met his wolf, the asshole with the necklace of werewolf fangs. Suddenly it gets a lot less funny.
Oz says, "Let's just say I'm friends with someone in a related field. I've helped her out from time to time."
The tough guy mask slips just a bit. "You know Ellen? You know where she is?"
Oz's wolf scents a complex mix of emotions rolling off the guy. Interesting. For a split second he considers leading him on to see what he can find out, but instinct tells him that would be a dangerous game to play. "No. Sorry. Someone else." He studies the guy. "Is she why you're here?"
"No. She dropped off the radar a couple of years back." The guy gives his head a shake. "Wait. I guess it was a few months." Again, Oz 's interest level dials up. It doesn't seem like this guy to be so imprecise. The stranger shoots him a sour look, as if it's Oz's fault he's revealed anything personal. "Look, I'll just pack up my stuff and get out of your way as soon as I get the rest of it back." He heads for the bed and his laundry, but the movement involved in lifting his duffel off the top of the laundry basket is enough to make him fold over, his breath hissing with the pain of shifting ribs.
"Sit," Oz says, as much to his wolf as to the stranger. "Let me take a look and see what I can do."
The stranger looks at him with near hostility, but clearly realizes he's in no shape to tell Oz to screw off. A cold sweat glistens on his pale face. He eases himself onto the edge of the bed.
"There's no way I can get that shirt off without it hurting like hell," Oz says, "but I'll do my best."
"Cut it off, I don't care."
Nodding, Oz retrieves his scissors from the first aid kit. As he pulls the stretched-out neckline away from the guy's skin, Oz spots a black cord under his shirt.
His wolf's hackles rise, and he braces himself for the sight of whatever trophies he might find hanging from that cord.
***
Oz slices through the stranger's shirt and helps him ease it off. "Let me have a look," he says. Relief gusts from his lungs -- no fangs hanging from the cord, just some sort of amulet.
The guy misreads him. "Yeah, I know. Looks bad." A mass of bruises extends down his ribcage on the left side and on down past the waist of his jeans. There are places where the skin is cut or torn, the worst of which have been sewn with black thread. Over his heart is a crude tattoo. It's a cross, with initials and dates worked into it. D. W. 2/13/08. Others: J.W., M. W., J. M., also paired with dates, all of them older. '84, '05, '06. They all look like they've been worked into his skin with a homemade tattoo needle and ballpoint ink. If it means what Oz thinks it does, his guest is not a lucky man.
"My first thought would be to tape your ribs so you get a little relief," Oz says, "but that would mean burying those cuts under the tape. That doesn't seem like the best idea."
Oz retrieves his first aid kit from the bathroom, spreading it open on the bedspread next to the stranger. "You might want to take that amulet off while I'm working."
"That's not gonna happen," the guy says, his voice so hard and final that Oz gets the idea there's a whole helluva lot of emotion walled up behind that facade.
"Sure," Oz says. He pulls up a chair to get to work, and finally gets a look at the charm. "The Shedu," he blurts in surprise.
The stranger eyes him, equally startled. "You know Mesopotamian gods?"
"I've shopped the whole marketplace. He's one of my favorites. It's a shame he's not on the A-list. People could do worse." He feels a little better about this guy, if he's on a first name basis with a deity that helps humans fight against chaos and evil. "My name's Daniel. Sometimes people call me Oz."
"Sam."
Oz nods. "I've got some herbs that'll make the healing go faster. It'll stink like hell five days past its expiration date, but it'll help."
A shadow passes over Sam's face, and Oz doesn't think it's just physical pain. "Yeah," he says at last. "Sure, thanks."
***
As the water boils, Oz finds his tea ball and rummages through his jars of herbs for the combinations he wants. "I've got some tea that'll take the edge off the rib pain for a while, and I can make a paste that'll help heal some of those cuts faster than they would on their own."
"Where'd you come by this stuff?" Sam asks.
"Got it from a curandera in Mexico." He mixes a few different kinds of herbs into his basalt molcajete, crushing them into finer pieces. "So there's something supernatural going on in these parts?"
"Was," Sam says.
Oz raises a brow but Sam doesn't elaborate. "Apocalyptic or just run-of-the-mill supernatural?"
Now it's Sam who looks curious, but Oz says nothing more, opening another jar of herbs and spoons leaves into the tea ball, then sets out a pot.
"Demons. As far as I know, no apocalypse, but it was bloody. What makes you think apocalypse?"
"Happens more than you think. The near-misses, I mean." The kettle starts to rattle and Oz takes it off the fire, pouring near-boiling water over the tea ball. A rank scent of barns too seldom mucked-out fills the apartment. "Sorry. It's only going to get worse when I make the poultice."
"You've had experience with near-misses?"
Oz shrugs. "Just a few." He pounds the herbs in the mortar a bit more.
"Such as?"
"Let's see.... There was the whole bit with Acathla. A vampire we knew raised him and he would have sucked the world into hell, but he got stopped. Oh, and before that there was the Judge. He was supposed to burn away everything human in the world. Rocket launcher took care of him. I don't think the Ascension was strictly apocalyptic, just if you happened to live in the immediate area, but that same year there was the sisterhood of Jhe. They were gonna open the hellmouth." This is the longest speech he can remember making in maybe two years, and he's not sure what's behind it. Is running into someone who fights demons enough to start him babbling after years of keeping everything to himself? Or is he just getting out the measuring tape to prove he's not half this guy's size in every way?
"You're not serious."
"I used to live on a hellmouth. It was kind of like living on a fault-line, there was always the risk of apocalypse."
"Wyoming?"
"Huh. No. California. Sunnydale. You might remember that town that got swallowed by a sinkhole around six years ago."
That silences Sam for a moment. "I remember that. I went away to college the fall after that. It sounded like there was something demonic going on, and we were planning to head out that way. We got sidetracked."
We? Interesting, considering this guy's as much a loner as Oz. He lifts a brow. "Well, you know. Distractions happen."
A flicker of irritation crosses Sam's face. "Massive fights with my old man. Those tend to feel more important than apocalyptic events."
"You used to hunt with your dad?"
"Yeah." A tic pulses at his jaw. "And my brother."
Oz considers those sets of initials on Sam's tattoo. Three of them ending in W. He'd bet Sam's last name starts with one. Pouring the herb tea into a pottery cup, Oz adds a few ice cubes, then hands it to Sam. "You might want to drink it fast, before you can actually taste it."
Sam downs it as quickly as he can, finishing with a sputtered, "Jesus!" His face is screwed up in disgust.
Oz merely says, "Yeah." He pours a little of the heated water into a bowl, then adds the crushed herbs. Another wave of foulness hits Oz's sensitive nose, and he feels the restless shifting of his wolf. The wolf hates this smell, associating it with pain and weakness after a tussle with something out in the desert.
"Were you there when the town caved in?" Sam asks.
"No. I'd been gone for a few years by then. I had friends who were there." Funny how had feels like the truest possible way of stating things. The last time he'd seen Xander he'd learned how much reality had been changed for Buffy and the Scoobies, and he'd somehow been left out. Dawn Summers was a lie he couldn't swallow, no matter how much he liked her or how important she was to his friends.
Sam attention narrows on him. "They didn't make it out?"
"Most did. One of my friends died there." Another sign of how things had changed: Xander would say he'd lost two friends, but the idea of Spike being on the same side was just too much to fathom. "And some others I didn't know. There was a battle, not just the sinkhole." And this is the weird thing: Of all the times he's told people he's from that town that everyone knows about, the one that disappeared, this is the first time he's been able to tell that part of it. Oz isn't sure how he feels about it, whether it's a good idea to open doors that have been bolted shut all these years. He opts for a change of subject, at least for the moment. "Is there anything after you?"
"After me?" The herbs are beginning to work on Sam, but he manages to shake off his confusion after a moment. "Oh. No. I took care of every last demon in that place."
"Then I think you should stay put for a few days. Do you have a place?"
"Not yet. I'm not staying around, though. I'm on the trail of something else."
"You're in no shape to hunt anything right now. Look. I'm leaving town for a few days tomorrow. You can stay here. Give those ribs a chance to heal."
Oz gets the feeling Sam would protest, but the tea is doing its job, and he's fading out. "Sure."
***
By the time Oz gets the poultice ready, Sam is almost completely out of it. His eyes have closed but his face scrunches up as Oz approaches. "Jesus, Dean," he mutters. As Oz starts to smear the foul-smelling paste over his wounds, Sam bats at his hands. "Cut it out, it's not funny."
"Keep still," Oz tells him. "This'll help you heal."
Sam's eyes open a slit. "You're not Dean," he points out, but he's slipped back under before Oz makes a reply.
Oz is still working when there's a knock at the door. "Hang on a second," he calls out, and rinses off the muck the best he can. He wipes his hands on a dishtowel and opens the door partway.
Alice is there, her hands behind her back. "Daniel, I just came by to say I called the plumber about that leak. He's -- oh dear god, what is that stench?"
Oz can't suppress a grin. "Medicinal herbs. They are kind of pungent."
"And they're so Dr. Quinn." She flicks a glance behind him. "How's your patient?" She frowns. "Still unconscious?"
"He's sleeping. I gave him something for the pain. It'll keep him out for a while, I think. I need to finish this." He swings the door open wider and steps back, and Alice takes his unspoken invitation. Funny, he realizes, how he never lost that Sunnydale habit. He settles in next to Sam and resumes his work.
Alice leans something against the wall by the door and says, "How can I help?"
"I'm good. There's just washing out the bowls after this, but they're too gross to palm off on you. What was that about the plumber?"
She shakes her head. Her glossy, stick-straight black hair swings gently. "Nothing. It was my excuse to check on you."
It occurs to him to glance at the doorway, and he sees what she left there. A baseball bat. Oz looks back toward her and raises an eyebrow.
"You think it's easy finding good tenants who pay their rent on time and in cash? And have handyman skills on top of it?"
He smiles at her. "I'm touched," he says, and means it.
Her cheeks redden and she says, "Well, you're a good guy."
Oz wonders if she'd have said so with such conviction before today. Good tenant, sure, but this is the first he's revealed much of himself to anyone since he came here. It's still precious little, he knows. "I found out one thing," he tells Alice. "Our guest here. His name is Sam."
She regards Sam for a moment, sprawled on Oz's bed beneath a blanket, looking so much younger now that he's asleep. He almost looks like he could be the kid who had apocalyptic fights with his old man. Alice gazes at him, a complex mix of emotions on her face. Oz wonders if there's someone she's thinking of -- maybe even herself, before she opened herself up to who she really is. Suddenly Oz is curious about that version of Alice. It was hard enough dealing with his inner wolf back in high school. To be a guy at that age, concealing a true self that is not a guy -- that seems big.
"How seriously is he hurt?" she asks.
"More than just a few bruises," Oz says. "Broken ribs, some bad lacerations. The herbs will help."
"Which you just happened to have lying around."
"I go hiking in some pretty rugged territory. Sometimes I get banged up."
Alice eyes him, no doubt remembering a time or two when he came back from the desert looking fairly rough.
"I told him he could stay here a few days," Oz says. "He needs to avoid moving around much. I'll be out of town for a few days anyway."
"Oh hell no," Alice blurts. "Taking this guy in, that's one thing, and I don't even like that. The hell you're gonna park him here and then take off for three days."
***
Oz blinks. "Shit, you're right." Her reaction is completely justified. He knows little more than this guy's name, yet he's promised him a crash pad, entirely unsupervised, in Alice's own building. "I used to be in a band, and we were always sleeping on the floors of people we barely knew. We did the same for bands passing through. It's kind of an automatic response, to make the offer. I didn't think."
Alice pushes her hand through her blue-black hair. "I get that. It's part of being a good guy."
"I'm sorry. It puts you in a bad spot. Not cool." There are guys out there who prey on women, which is bad enough, but the ones who can't handle ambiguity of any sort, much less gender ambiguity, seem to react with particular brutality. Oz is aware of that when he reads something in a newspaper -- usually the alternative papers, because that stuff often passes unnoticed by the mainstream rags. Alice has to be aware of that much of the time, if not always.
"Look," she says, "he can stay, as long as you stick around. Trail mix keeps. You can go commune with nature once he's gone, right?"
Trail mix won't keep, at least not in Oz's case. But he doesn't see how he can deny her. His wolf has noticed more about Sam than his present physical weakness. Hunters haven't exactly been his best friends, and Oz has glimpsed the bone-deep grief and anger that runs through this one. Oz has seen what that mixture has done in his own case, even when he thought he had his wolf under complete control.
He looks at Sam, looking deceptively peaceful in sleep.
"I'll stay," he says. He'll figure something out. Get Sam to drink the tea each night and slip out while he's sleeping. Oz won't be able to go as deep into the desert as usual, but he'll be far enough away from other people that he won't be a danger. Maybe Sam will leave after tonight. He said he was on the trail of something. If he improves any over the night, maybe he'll insist on taking off.
Oz suddenly remembers Giles scolding him, more than once, for cutting things close when he came to lock himself away on a full moon night. And other, more measured conversations. Giles believed it was his wolf that pushed him to skate so close to the edge of safety. Was it his wolf that offered Sam a place to crash, or made the promise to Alice?
He's not sure, but now he's committed to both.
Oz meets Alice's gaze. "I'll stay," he says again. He hopes this isn't a choice that puts them all in grave danger.
***
Oz sits in his courtyard, playing his six-string, a longneck at his feet. He's a better player by far than he ever was when he was in Dingoes. Irony is a bitch, no mistake. He plays unplugged versions of old songs he played with the band, ones he's written since then, some old blues, flatpicks a little Doc Watson.
His chair is just outside the trapezoid patch of light cast by Alice's window. Oz wonders if her restlessness is caused by his houseguest. He guesses so, but knows she goes through phases where her lights blaze all night or close to it. He hopes tonight it's not fear keeping her awake.
Though he's outside the patch of light, he's hardly in the dark. Silvery light bathes the courtyard. The moon has just a narrow slice out of it. Tomorrow the sliver will hardly be noticeable, and his wolf will escape its bonds. Over the years, Oz has had less and less mastery over his wolf -- the Initiative undid part of the work he'd done, and his pilgrimage to the Sunnydale crater and the heatstroke he suffered there pretty much blasted any remaining control on the full moon. He copes by taking himself as far from people as he can get. He's got a favorite spot he's been claiming the past few months, remote and easy to defend. It's the better part of a day's travel -- he won't make it there if he leaves tomorrow an hour or two before nightfall.
He finishes one last song, polishes off his beer and heads inside. Alice's light is still on when Oz stretches out on his sofa and drifts off to sleep.
Midmorning light filters through the curtains when he wakes. Oz sits up, rubbing his face, then stumbles into the bathroom. When he emerges, he sees that Sam is not only still asleep, but seemingly hasn't shifted once during the night. Good -- not only for his ribs, but if Oz can persuade him to keep drinking the herb tea, sneaking out will be a lot easier. Even as he considers this, Oz knows it will never happen. A guy like Sam, who survives by the sharpness of his wits, won't do anything willingly that will compromise that. Tonight it'll have to be Plan B.
Whatever the hell that is.
***
Despite the late hours Alice kept last night, the laundromat is open, presumably has been since early morning. It's the time of day when there's not much going on; a bored young mother waits for her dryers while her kid drowses in a stroller. Alice is folding laundry for one of the morning's drop-off customers. She looks energized, not sleep-deprived. Oz doubts he looks that alert.
"Hey," he says.
"Daniel," she greets him, and there's pleasure in her voice.
"I hope it wasn't me who kept you awake last night. I got restless and played a little guitar."
"You didn't keep me up. I liked listening. So how's your guest?"
"Still asleep. I thought I'd head over to the diner and pick up some coffee, wondered if you'd like some." It's the least he can offer; he's still not so sure he didn't contribute to her sleeplessness.
"Sure, thanks."
"How do you like it?" He has no idea how Sam takes it, either. Oz can get one black and one with milk, and drink whichever one Sam doesn't want.
"Just say it's for Alice; they'll know." He catches her scent as the big oscillating fan in the room sweeps past her: faint traces of soap and fabric softener, with an overlay of cinnamon. And something else. Sharp, chemical.
"Turpentine," Oz blurts in surprise.
"Oh hell," Alice says. "I thought I scrubbed that off."
"It's barely noticeable," he says hastily. "I just happen to have a freakishly strong sense of smell. Runs in the family." Certainly true of him and his cousin Jordy, anyway.
"I was painting last night."
Oz spots little signs now: A trace of red just at the very ends of a few hairs framing her face. A fleck of sienna at the bed of a fingernail. "Painting painting," he says, then clarifies as he spots her confusion. "Not wall painting."
"Exactly. Oils. Mixed media, to be more exact."
Huh. He'd never have guessed. "Cool."
She shrugs. "I could show you some of them sometime." Diffident, masquerading as casual.
Oz gets that he's too laid-back sometimes, that his statements are sometimes too under and he can come off as disinterested. "Extremely cool," he elaborates. He has possibly put a little too much intensity into it this time, because Alice looks perplexed for a moment before she relaxes and laughs.
"I'll get your coffee," he says.
***
Oz hasn't planned this right. Well, not that he's planned it at all, but walking back across the street with three cardboard cups balanced carefully in his hands, he realizes he'll have to drop Alice's off and leave if he's going to deliver Sam's while it's still hot.
It's just this one thing: Now that he's found a little bit of community, just a sliver of what he'd had in Sunnydale, it's hard to pull himself away. This lone wolf shit -- it's not real, not natural to what wolves are. It's not natural to who Oz is. He's been without a pack for too long.
Well. It's not like Alice is going anywhere. Or Oz, except for three nights a month. There's time to let things flow.
As he steps onto the curb, Alice opens the door for him. "Back there on my desk is good."
Of course. No coffee on the folding counters. He settles his offerings on a clear space on the desk, beside a neat stack of outdated magazines. He hands her the cup marked A in grease pencil by the Eduardo at the diner. "I hate to tell you this, but Britney and K-Fed are splitsville." He takes up the other two coffees again.
"Yet I just can't let go of their perfection as a couple," Alice says. She sips her coffee. "I bought these at the library sale table. I layer bits of collage into my paintings sometimes."
He nods. "Cool."
She twitches a smile. "Extremely? Or just ordinarily?"
"Excessively." He moves to take a sip of his coffee, then realizes he's got a cup in each hand. "Oh. Guess I should get one of these to Sam."
"Thanks for the coffee, Daniel. I'll see you around."
"Around is where I'll be." He heads out into the late-morning heat, marveling at the fact that Xander Harris once thought Oz could offer him any sort of advice on not acting like a dork.
***
When he lets himself into his apartment, Oz finds Sam sitting up in bed, rubbing his face. Now that the herbs are cool and dry, the room doesn't smell quite so pungent.
"How are you feeling?" Oz inquires.
"Groggy," Sam mumbles. "I feel like I was out for days."
Too bad he wasn't, Oz thinks. "Sorry. It doesn't hit me that hard, so I didn't realize."
"How often to you use that shit?"
"Once, maybe twice a year. I save it for the special occasions, like sliding down an embankment on my face."
"And there in a nutshell is why I don't hike," Sam says.
"I got some coffee. You take it black or milky?"
"Black's fine."
Oz hands over one of the cups and Sam slugs it down as if it's some kind of antidote. Which Oz supposes it is, when he thinks about it.
"So did that stuff make me hallucinate," Sam says, "or was there some dude in a skirt?"
Oz feels a surge of protectiveness toward Alice. "That was not 'some dude in a skirt.' That's Alice." True, when he looks at her he can imagine the guy she might have been before she transitioned, boyish more than manly. But he feels that if he saw that guy, Oz could as easily imagine the woman he could be, sardonic yet sweet. As he's stuck around long enough for Alice to become a fixture in his life -- even before this tentative new friendship -- he's come to view her as just one flavor of the infinite variety of women in the world. She's Alice, the way Willow was Willow. "You had a place to stay last night because she allowed it."
"Sorry, man. Brain's still a little foggy." Sam plies himself with more black coffee.
It annoys him that Sam's blaming it on the herbs. "Yeah, well I get the hunter thing. A lot of travel, but it's not that broadening." Oz sees that this comment has hit its mark, but he doesn't feel like letting it go. "Hunter I ran across years ago had a string of werewolf teeth around his neck." Not that he'd seen it himself, but Buffy had told him.
Oz is gratified to see that this rocks Sam back. "That's fucked up. Those are people most days out of the month."
Relief gusts through Oz. "Right there with you."
"I mean, sure, you have to kill them to save other people, but taking trophies, that's barbaric."
***
Oz goes very still, though his inner wolf wants to attack. Now, while Sam is weakened, groggy, without a weapon at hand.
No. That's not what Oz is, no matter what the Initiative did to him and his control over the wolf.
"It's not like they're demons," Oz says. "They're regular people who've been attacked, turned into something against their will."
"I know that," Sam says, but there's something hard and implacable in his expression.
"Then you don't just --" Oz realizes he's making an argument for mercy that, if extended to its natural conclusion, would make vampire slaying murder. No, he tells himself. Vampires have no humanity left. They aren't walking around by daylight minding their own business, possibly unaware of what they become by the light of a full moon.
"Look," Sam says. "By the time a hunter gets on a werewolf's trail, there's already bodies. I've seen them. It's something you never forget, believe me. 'Savage' doesn't even begin to describe what a werewolf attack looks like. You go all bleeding heart on the guy who's human all but a couple of nights a month, and you sentence other humans to death. That's the truth of it, whether you want to see it or not."
"Is there a school for hunters," Oz says, "and do they offer a minor in Condescending Asshole?" Easier to react to this than to the deep threat contained in Sam's words.
"Sorry," Sam lies. "I wasn't expecting this level of naivete from someone who said he's got some experience with hunters and the supernatural." He drains the last of his coffee. "Listen, if you'll let me use your shower, I can wash this shit off and be on my way."
"Sure, yeah, knock yourself out. Let me get some clean towels." He digs out some fresh ones from the back of the linen closet. "These are a little threadbare, sorry." He hands them over, watches Sam head for the bathroom. "So you have killed --"
Sam cuts him off. "Yeah," he says, and again Oz senses a hard wall -- and this time he gets the very clear feeling that it's a dam.
"Trust me," Sam says. "It was a kindness."
***
As the bathroom door shuts behind Sam, a shiver runs through Oz. To hear the word kindness spoken in such a hard tone. To know kindness is defined as a silver bullet as far as this guy's concerned. What the fuck has happened to Sam that he's got scars crisscrossing his body and his eyes are flat and cold as chips of flint? Sam's younger than Oz, he's pretty sure of it. What made him a hunter?
It's never Career Day at school. There's bound to be a story, full of blood and grief.
Doesn't mean Oz has to stick around and become another hunter's story. If he had any sense, he'd get the hell out of Dodge. Do it now, while Sam's trying to scrub off what's left of the poultice. Oz knows from personal experience that a sander would do a lot better job than the shower, which offers more of a dribble than a spray on its best days. He could gain a lot of ground in forty-five minutes to an hour. Grab the bag he always keeps packed and head on out, pausing only to slash the tires of the big black car across from the laundromat.
And what about Alice? He promised her that he'd stick around as long as Sam's here. It doesn't matter whether or not Oz thinks Sam is a threat to her -- he makes her uneasy and he's got to respect that. Instinct -- Oz lives by it and the price of ignoring it can be death. He's not discounting hers.
And Oz could be wrong. Just because Sam has the lean, obsessive look of a demon killer, it doesn't mean humans are safe -- even the ones who are human 24/7, month in and month out. Men who don't develop an appreciation for the subtle degrees of the human and the demonic probably won't have an easy time with the interstitial nature of a girl like Alice. She has plenty to be wary of from your average guy, much less a man whose vocation is killing things.
Oz can't bring himself to disappear on her for three days, and he sure as hell can't bolt into the desert and take her along. Much as he likes her, he knows he's far more of a danger to her on these nights than Sam.
Oz wishes he and Alice had called 911 the second they saw Sam collapse and walked away from the whole thing.
A surge of restlessness moves through him, and he knows it's the wolf pacing his cage, aware that it's only hours until he's free. Oz grabs his bag and the box of supplies he's already gathered and takes them out to his van. He heads to the gas station a few blocks away and fills the tank, then parks along the street. Now he can slip out tonight without alerting half the neighborhood when he starts the van.
Slip out. Abandon Alice, he means.
This is lousy. He feels like a shitheel.
***
When Oz makes it back to his apartment, the shower's still running. His wolf noses against him, ready with a fresh suggestion, since "head for the hills" got voted down. Jump him.
He spots Alice's baseball bat there by the door where she'd forgotten it last night. One good swing and that's the end of his problems. Just barge into the bathroom, catch Sam in the shower --
Really? he asks his wolf. Because it seems like that's where things get infinitely more complicated.
"That's exactly why the guy thinks people like me should be shot," he mutters. He gives his head a hard shake and takes up the bat, heading up the alley to the laundromat.
Any normal month, and Oz would have left by now, up with first light to make his way to his preferred spot. Of course it makes his wolf edgy to cut things so close. Sunset's just after eight tonight; Oz wants to be gone by six.
He wants to be gone now.
Alice is on her own when he walks in, wiping the tracks of a detergent spill from the front of a washer.
"Hey," Oz says. "You left this."
Reaching for it, she offers a sheepish grin. "Thanks. Alice to the rescue."
"Don't do that. It was cool." Stupid. That's become his fallback word, and it's becoming meaningless. "Brave. It's been a long time since anyone had my back."
"Well, that's too bad," she says softly. "Good guys are a dwindling natural resource."
It's hard to know what to say to that. Oz feels his internal struggle so close to the surface, the desire to lash out at Sam for posing a threat to the stunted little life he's made for himself here. Good itself is a dwindling resource, at least within him.
"Are you okay?" she asks.
"Sure, yeah, I'm cool." Oz winces. "No, actually. I'm restless. It was just weird having Sam there. I couldn't really settle in to sleep for a long time."
She glances out toward the black car. "He's still at your place?"
"Yeah. He's working on getting that poultice cleaned off. It's a project."
Alice nods. "Listen, it's dead in here right now. I'm going to lock up for a bit and go upstairs for lunch. You could join me." She hesitates. "Or maybe we should go hit the cafe. My paintings are all over the place up there. I'd like you to see them sometime, but they aren't exactly restful."
"I'd really like to see them," Oz says in a rush.
She smiles, and there's a dimple he's never noticed before, just on the one side of her mouth. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Cool," she says, and it makes him laugh. Alice adjusts the hands of the clock face on the Be back soon! sign and hangs it in the door, then turns the lock. He feels the nervousness and excitement shimmering off her. "I've never showed them to anyone." She gestures behind him. "Stairs are that way."
nwhepcat
Rated R
BtVS/SPN crossover; Oz, Sam Winchester
Set post-Chosen for BtVS, during Mystery Spot for SPN
Disclaimer: not mine
Summary: Living a loner's life, Oz meets someone even more cut off from other people than he is.
The version of Oz I'm writing here, with his solitary life, is based on two fics I wrote that featured him.
The American Stranger: Oz meets up with an old friend in Africa.
Indelible: Oz returns to Sunnydale and learns things have changed far more than he'd suspected. Xander/Dawn fic from Xander's POV, but a great deal of the story revolves around Oz and his reaction to Dawn.
Oz drowses in the laundromat, lulled by the sound of dryers and the sun pouring in the plate glass window. He's sitting on the deep ledge of the window, amid piles of freebie newspapers, religious tracts and flyers for weight loss systems and computer classes. It's early Sunday morning, his favorite time to do his laundry, since few people are around at this hour, for the most part. The religious ones are getting ready for church, and the heathens are sleeping off Saturday night. Apparently there aren't that many in the middle. A bored man reads yesterday's paper in one of the plastic chairs in the back, while the owner works on her coffee and a magazine.
The door opens, letting in the July heat and a smell that cuts through his drowsiness.
Blood. Lots of it. And it's not all human. And not exactly animal, either.
Oz goes very still, trying to hold his inner wolf in check. He opens one eye a slit and sees a tall, shaggy-haired guy in an army jacket with a duffle bag slung over his shoulder. Depositing the bag on one washer, he begins stuffing his laundry in a couple of machines.
Grabbing the paperback he'd abandoned on the platform next to him, Oz shifts so that he can watch the guy while seeming to stare idly into space. He's got to admire the guy's efficiency. Of course he's presorted -- he places a tight wad of clothes into each machine without Oz catching sight of any blood at all. The guy wipes his hands on a dark tee shirt before flipping the washer doors shut and heading for the change machine, where he feeds in a bill and gets a cascade of quarters.
Oz takes note of the way the guy moves -- carefully, favoring his left leg and his side. Bruised ribs, he'd guess. He's not sure about the near limp. His wolf sits up and takes an interest, and Oz hauls him back sharply.
The blood smell almost disappears behind the washer doors, and once the machines start filling with water, it fades completely. The guy starts to straighten, but pauses, a hand going to his ribs. His face pales. After a second or two he manages to unfold himself, though he's still got one hand at his side, the other on one of the machines for support.
Just as Oz thinks he should offer some kind of assistance, the guy looks back toward the row of scarred orange plastic seats and its lone occupant, then where Oz is stationed. He notes Oz's attention and his eyes narrow with a distinctly fuck you flavor. He pulls a book out of the pocket of his duffel and stalks out into the stifling heat, parking himself in the plastic chair by the door.
Solitary. Likes it that way. "Hard as nails " doesn't begin to cover it -- even Oz's wolf felt that fuck you. Oz makes him for his mid-twenties at most, yet there's something about him that feels ancient.
And what does it say about Oz's life that he feels he's gotten to know more about this guy in three minutes than he's learned about anyone in the past two years?
***
Oz returns to his paperback while he waits for his dryer. Now that his wolf has awakened, there's no more drowsing in the window.
The first full moon night of the month is still 36 hours away, but ever since the Initiative got Oz, the wolf is never completely dormant. It only comes out on the full moon, but he's often aware of it, watching.
Once his dryer stops, Oz dumps his clothes out onto the chipped Formica table and begins to fold them. He's always liked the Zen of this task: the warmth and fresh smell of clean clothes, the repetitive motion of shaking out a garment, folding it once, twice, three times, maybe four. It soothes him and focuses his mind at the same time. But this time the routine doesn't settle him. The smell of blood is too recent; his wolf paces its cage.
Apart from that, Oz is abruptly aware of the parallels between himself and the stranger. Every piece of clothing he owns fits into one washer, one dryer. Gradually he's whittled things down so all his t-shirts and button-downs are in the same color range, which can mingle with his jeans in the wash without one fading on the other. He shoves his gray boxer briefs in the same load. It's efficient and saves the pittance he makes as a dish washer in the diner across the street, but he's aware of the kind of life this efficiency reveals.
As he folds Oz studies the tall stranger through the front window. An early attempt at reading his book has been abandoned, and now the guy observes what little action is going on out on the street: a slow-moving hound looking for shade, a car of churchgoers.
Oz's wolf watches too. He takes in the subtle changes in the stranger's bearing, indications that the heat or his injuries are taking a toll. When the guy rises from his chair, Oz and his wolf are so zeroed in on him that what happens next seems to occur in slow motion. The stranger's movements have none of the tight control Oz had noticed earlier. He staggers a bit, putting a hand out blindly to steady himself against the storefront, then he goes down hard.
***
Oz tosses the t-shirt he's folding aside and hurries to the sidewalk. If anything, it feels like the temperature has risen another fifteen degrees since he first arrived. He crouches by the tall guy, who's sprawled on the concrete, out cold.
The coppery tang of blood reaches Oz again, fainter than before, this time from abrasions on the stranger's face and hand from his fall.
"Oh hell," says a smoky voice from the laundromat doorway. It's Alice, the owner. Oh hell is her initial response to any crisis, whether it's an empty change machine or a dryer that's shooting out flames. "Think I should call the rescue squad?"
"I don't know," Oz says. "He seems like the kind of guy who'd rather fly under the radar."
She gets that. Not only because a lot of her business depends on the same kind of guy, but because she has a healthy distrust of authority herself. Alice had been reluctant to call 911 even when the flames were erupting from the dryer. "Okay, what do we do?"
He wonders if he's about to offer up the stupidest plan of all time. "We could take him to my place. Let him rest while I finish up his laundry and mine, then figure out where to go from there."
Alice gives him a long look. It's not that she doesn't trust him -- he rents the rooms behind the laundromat building and does the occasional repair work or maintenance for her. He's sure she's figured him for an under-the-radar kind of guy himself. "You sure?"
"Not especially. But what's the worst that can happen? He steals all my stuff? Eighty percent of it is on the folding table."
She eyes the unconscious guy and then Oz. "You're going to need help."
"I think you're right."
Alice hoists the guy to his feet, with some small amount of help from Oz. She's almost as tall as the stranger, with a similar build, except not as muscled. Oz doesn't know much of her story, except she used to be a guy. He often wonders, usually at odd moments like this one, why she chose an old fashioned name like Alice when she's fond of black nail polish and blue-black hair dye and miniskirts with leggings and a wardrobe of different colored cowboy boots. Today's shade is teal.
"I've got him," she says. "Go on ahead and get the door."
Oz heads down the narrow alley to his little courtyard with its few carefully tended container plantings and a chair where he sometimes plays guitar at night. He unlocks his door and pushes it open, then heads back to help Alice with his houseguest.
As she shifts her hold on the stranger, she draws in a sharp breath. "Daniel. You should rethink this." He's never heard her sound alarmed before.
"What?"
"He's got a gun tucked in his waistband."
Oh hell.
***
Oz flicks a look at the tall guy, who's still out cold, propped up by Alice. He raises the guy's shirt tail and lifts the gun off him, ejecting the magazine from the grip. He tucks the pistol in his own waistband and slips the magazine into his pocket. "Now he doesn't."
"Which means he'll be pissed off when he wakes up. Seriously, Daniel. I don't like this. You're taking a big chance."
"Someone took a chance on me once."
She shoots him a look. "You didn't have a weapon."
But he did -- claws and teeth and a wolf he couldn't entirely control. He disappears into the desert every full moon, but when he'd first come here the wolf didn't always confine himself to three nights a month. "Trust me on this," he says. "I have pretty good instincts."
Alice scowls but shifts her hold on the stranger. Oz moves to help support him as they take him into Oz's apartment and ease him onto the bed. "I don't know," she says. "If this is heatstroke or something, he needs to go to the emergency room."
Oz shakes his head. "He's injured. I noticed when he came in. I was thinking maybe bruised ribs, but now I wonder if they're broken." He hauls his first aid kit out of his closet and sets it on the bedside stand that holds his alarm clock and whatever he's reading lately.
"That's a pretty damn big first aid kit for a little shaver like you." She gives him a long, appraising look, and Oz suspects she's remembering a time or two when he returned from a full moon walkabout considerably worse for wear. She lets the silence stretch out, but Oz is comfortable with silence. "First rule of fight club," she finally says, but it still doesn't get a rise from him. "You're going to try to fix him?"
"Not while he's out. He comes to, and it's probably a short route to me getting hurt. I'll just leave a note saying where he is and where his stuff is." He scrawls a note to that effect as Alice asks if she can get a glass of water.
She sets the glass next to Oz's note, and scrawls P.S. HYDRATE!! at the bottom, and then accompanies Oz back to the laundromat. The tall guy's washers have stopped running, so Oz transfers everything to the dryers across the room. Alice refuses to let him use his own quarters.
Oz buys them both a soda from the Coke machine in the back, then passes up his half-finished pile of folding to take a look out on the street. There's a big black hulk of a car parked across the street. Oz has seen parade floats smaller than that.
"Think it's his?" Alice asks from beside him.
"I might bet on that." He pushes the door open and crosses the deserted street to have a better look, and Alice comes along.
"I don't know if it's a classic," she says, "but it's old."
Not much sign inside of a life lived on the road, but the driver's seat is pushed back as far as it will go, which just might accommodate the stranger's long legs.
Oz exchanges a look with Alice.
"I've never seen it before," she tells him, "and this is my view all day, every day."
For the first time he wonders why she does spend her days in here, with her limited view, and how she got here.
Catching sight of something on the passenger side floorboard, Oz cranes for a closer look. Could be a book of some kind.
"I'm not going to start snooping now," Alice says, and briefly Oz wonders if it's a pointed comment because she somehow realized he was entertaining questions about her.
Meeting her gaze, he nods and they head back toward the laundromat. Oz bends to pick up the battered paperback the stranger dropped when he fell. Jim Thompson, Savage Night. "Creepy," he says. The main thing he knows about Jim Thompson is The Killer Inside Me.
Alice glances at the book, twitches her shapely mouth. "Are you sure about this?" she asks again.
"Not especially," he says again.
"Give me the gun, at least. I'll put it in the safe." He follows her to the cramped office in back and hands over the pistol.
Alice holds it in her palm but doesn't curl her fingers around it. She looks down at it and sighs. "Oh hell. I hate these things."
***
Oz tucks the stranger's book back in the duffel pocket and resumes his spot at the folding table. When Alice joins him and shakes out a t-shirt to fold, he isn't sure whether it's because she's decided she likes his company or she's rattled and needs it.
"Think he's some some kind of criminal?" she asks.
"Could be. But he could be an undercover cop who ran into trouble." Things are so rarely what they're assumed to be that Oz stopped assuming long ago.
Alice shoots him a sidelong glance. "Oh, thanks for that, Mr. It Could Always Be Worse."
Oz can't suppress a grin. "Not a fan, huh?"
"Long history. And my brother's one, and our father was." Which is the most personal thing she's offered in the two years since he moved here. "There's a certain mindset." She grabs another shapeless wad of knit from Oz's pile, which turns out to be his gray boxer briefs.
"Oh hey --" He reaches for them.
"What," she says, amused, "you think I've never touched a pair?" She folds them and adds them to the stack, then reaches for another pair.
"They're a little ventilated," he admits. He can't remember the last time he bought any new clothes.
"I actually do see a lot of laundry, you know. And I do the drop-offs. You don't come anywhere near Worst in Show."
How'd she get here, he wonders again, but that's not a question he's earned the right to ask. For the first time in years, he misses having people in his life who know his story, who trust him with theirs. He tries to think of something even slightly personal he can tell her, because he remembers that's how it begins. But it's like there's some heavy iron door in his head that's rusted shut.
For the first time in forever he's not so comfortable with silence, but Alice seems not to mind. She helps him fold his things in between dealing with the other customers who've started trickling in, and when the stranger's clothes are dry, she helps fold those, and hauls out a battered laundry basket that someone has brought and left behind.
"I think you're better off putting his stuff in here than in his duffel bag," she says. "He might not be too happy about the thought of someone opening it up."
"Good thought," Oz says. He packs the stranger's clothes and puts the duffel on top, then piles his own laundry in a zipped canvas bag on top. "Wish me luck."
Alice compresses her lips. "I don't like this. Just set the stuff by your door and back the hell away. Don't go back until he's gone."
"Maybe he needs help." He hoists the plastic basket. "Can you get the door?"
She glares at him. "Daniel. Don't be an idiot."
"It'll be all right," Oz says, but he's not thoroughly convinced. He heads for the door, prepared to nudge it open with his hip if he has to.
Alice heaves another sigh and goes to hold the door for him. "Be careful. Do not make me call 911."
She's just brimming with good ideas today.
***
His wolf is on guard as Oz approaches his apartment door, and Oz lets him have a little slack. He doesn't like walking in blind, but isn't crazy about the notion of knocking and giving his houseguest the upper hand. His wolf picks nothing up, and Oz tries to decide whether that's good or bad. He sets down the laundry basket and braces himself to open the door.
Oz's bed is unoccupied, the Indian-print spread smoothed and tucked up into hospital corners. The bathroom door is open, the light on, and the tall stranger is studying himself in the mirror. He's got his t-shirt pulled halfway up his chest, and it looks like even that much movement is several notches past painful. The guy's side is a solid mass of bruises, and Oz sees a few black bristles of sutures.
"Hey," Oz says in greeting.
Even that puts the stranger on alert. He yanks down the shirt and turns toward Oz, reeling at the sudden movement.
"Take it easy, you're safe here," Oz says.
"You have something of mine," the guy says.
"Your laundry's just outside." That's not what the stranger means, and Oz knows it.
"That's not all you've got."
"It's in a safe place." Oz can almost see the thought process that goes through the stranger's head, weighing the intimidating effect of his height against his obvious weakness. Oz's wolf bares its teeth and the stranger seems to decide against attempting to menace him. "Look, I can tend to that if you like." Like, he suspects, is a strong word. Though Oz suspects it will go over better than need. "I have a fair amount of experience patching people up." Mostly himself, though he has acted as assistant to the occasional missionary or aid worker in his travels.
"I'm fine, thanks." His hard tone and pallor don't do much for the believability of that sentence. I'm is the only word that rings remotely true.
"I'll get the laundry," Oz tells him. When he returns he sets the basket down on the bed and unzips his own canvas bag. "You'll need some clean towels." He sets those on the dresser by the bathroom door. Seems safer than trying to hand anything directly to his guest.
There's a part of Oz that isn't interested in safe. The wolf noses forward, and Oz says casually, "Most of the blood came out, I think. Except one shirt that's pretty much a goner. Demon blood's especially stubborn, wouldn't you say?"
That punches a hole through the wall surrounding the stranger. His attention focuses, lasering on Oz. "You're a hunter?"
***
Oz can barely suppress a laugh. Three nights out of the month, that's a yes. But he knows the type this guy means. He remembers the guy who was on the hunt when Oz first met his wolf, the asshole with the necklace of werewolf fangs. Suddenly it gets a lot less funny.
Oz says, "Let's just say I'm friends with someone in a related field. I've helped her out from time to time."
The tough guy mask slips just a bit. "You know Ellen? You know where she is?"
Oz's wolf scents a complex mix of emotions rolling off the guy. Interesting. For a split second he considers leading him on to see what he can find out, but instinct tells him that would be a dangerous game to play. "No. Sorry. Someone else." He studies the guy. "Is she why you're here?"
"No. She dropped off the radar a couple of years back." The guy gives his head a shake. "Wait. I guess it was a few months." Again, Oz 's interest level dials up. It doesn't seem like this guy to be so imprecise. The stranger shoots him a sour look, as if it's Oz's fault he's revealed anything personal. "Look, I'll just pack up my stuff and get out of your way as soon as I get the rest of it back." He heads for the bed and his laundry, but the movement involved in lifting his duffel off the top of the laundry basket is enough to make him fold over, his breath hissing with the pain of shifting ribs.
"Sit," Oz says, as much to his wolf as to the stranger. "Let me take a look and see what I can do."
The stranger looks at him with near hostility, but clearly realizes he's in no shape to tell Oz to screw off. A cold sweat glistens on his pale face. He eases himself onto the edge of the bed.
"There's no way I can get that shirt off without it hurting like hell," Oz says, "but I'll do my best."
"Cut it off, I don't care."
Nodding, Oz retrieves his scissors from the first aid kit. As he pulls the stretched-out neckline away from the guy's skin, Oz spots a black cord under his shirt.
His wolf's hackles rise, and he braces himself for the sight of whatever trophies he might find hanging from that cord.
***
Oz slices through the stranger's shirt and helps him ease it off. "Let me have a look," he says. Relief gusts from his lungs -- no fangs hanging from the cord, just some sort of amulet.
The guy misreads him. "Yeah, I know. Looks bad." A mass of bruises extends down his ribcage on the left side and on down past the waist of his jeans. There are places where the skin is cut or torn, the worst of which have been sewn with black thread. Over his heart is a crude tattoo. It's a cross, with initials and dates worked into it. D. W. 2/13/08. Others: J.W., M. W., J. M., also paired with dates, all of them older. '84, '05, '06. They all look like they've been worked into his skin with a homemade tattoo needle and ballpoint ink. If it means what Oz thinks it does, his guest is not a lucky man.
"My first thought would be to tape your ribs so you get a little relief," Oz says, "but that would mean burying those cuts under the tape. That doesn't seem like the best idea."
Oz retrieves his first aid kit from the bathroom, spreading it open on the bedspread next to the stranger. "You might want to take that amulet off while I'm working."
"That's not gonna happen," the guy says, his voice so hard and final that Oz gets the idea there's a whole helluva lot of emotion walled up behind that facade.
"Sure," Oz says. He pulls up a chair to get to work, and finally gets a look at the charm. "The Shedu," he blurts in surprise.
The stranger eyes him, equally startled. "You know Mesopotamian gods?"
"I've shopped the whole marketplace. He's one of my favorites. It's a shame he's not on the A-list. People could do worse." He feels a little better about this guy, if he's on a first name basis with a deity that helps humans fight against chaos and evil. "My name's Daniel. Sometimes people call me Oz."
"Sam."
Oz nods. "I've got some herbs that'll make the healing go faster. It'll stink like hell five days past its expiration date, but it'll help."
A shadow passes over Sam's face, and Oz doesn't think it's just physical pain. "Yeah," he says at last. "Sure, thanks."
***
As the water boils, Oz finds his tea ball and rummages through his jars of herbs for the combinations he wants. "I've got some tea that'll take the edge off the rib pain for a while, and I can make a paste that'll help heal some of those cuts faster than they would on their own."
"Where'd you come by this stuff?" Sam asks.
"Got it from a curandera in Mexico." He mixes a few different kinds of herbs into his basalt molcajete, crushing them into finer pieces. "So there's something supernatural going on in these parts?"
"Was," Sam says.
Oz raises a brow but Sam doesn't elaborate. "Apocalyptic or just run-of-the-mill supernatural?"
Now it's Sam who looks curious, but Oz says nothing more, opening another jar of herbs and spoons leaves into the tea ball, then sets out a pot.
"Demons. As far as I know, no apocalypse, but it was bloody. What makes you think apocalypse?"
"Happens more than you think. The near-misses, I mean." The kettle starts to rattle and Oz takes it off the fire, pouring near-boiling water over the tea ball. A rank scent of barns too seldom mucked-out fills the apartment. "Sorry. It's only going to get worse when I make the poultice."
"You've had experience with near-misses?"
Oz shrugs. "Just a few." He pounds the herbs in the mortar a bit more.
"Such as?"
"Let's see.... There was the whole bit with Acathla. A vampire we knew raised him and he would have sucked the world into hell, but he got stopped. Oh, and before that there was the Judge. He was supposed to burn away everything human in the world. Rocket launcher took care of him. I don't think the Ascension was strictly apocalyptic, just if you happened to live in the immediate area, but that same year there was the sisterhood of Jhe. They were gonna open the hellmouth." This is the longest speech he can remember making in maybe two years, and he's not sure what's behind it. Is running into someone who fights demons enough to start him babbling after years of keeping everything to himself? Or is he just getting out the measuring tape to prove he's not half this guy's size in every way?
"You're not serious."
"I used to live on a hellmouth. It was kind of like living on a fault-line, there was always the risk of apocalypse."
"Wyoming?"
"Huh. No. California. Sunnydale. You might remember that town that got swallowed by a sinkhole around six years ago."
That silences Sam for a moment. "I remember that. I went away to college the fall after that. It sounded like there was something demonic going on, and we were planning to head out that way. We got sidetracked."
We? Interesting, considering this guy's as much a loner as Oz. He lifts a brow. "Well, you know. Distractions happen."
A flicker of irritation crosses Sam's face. "Massive fights with my old man. Those tend to feel more important than apocalyptic events."
"You used to hunt with your dad?"
"Yeah." A tic pulses at his jaw. "And my brother."
Oz considers those sets of initials on Sam's tattoo. Three of them ending in W. He'd bet Sam's last name starts with one. Pouring the herb tea into a pottery cup, Oz adds a few ice cubes, then hands it to Sam. "You might want to drink it fast, before you can actually taste it."
Sam downs it as quickly as he can, finishing with a sputtered, "Jesus!" His face is screwed up in disgust.
Oz merely says, "Yeah." He pours a little of the heated water into a bowl, then adds the crushed herbs. Another wave of foulness hits Oz's sensitive nose, and he feels the restless shifting of his wolf. The wolf hates this smell, associating it with pain and weakness after a tussle with something out in the desert.
"Were you there when the town caved in?" Sam asks.
"No. I'd been gone for a few years by then. I had friends who were there." Funny how had feels like the truest possible way of stating things. The last time he'd seen Xander he'd learned how much reality had been changed for Buffy and the Scoobies, and he'd somehow been left out. Dawn Summers was a lie he couldn't swallow, no matter how much he liked her or how important she was to his friends.
Sam attention narrows on him. "They didn't make it out?"
"Most did. One of my friends died there." Another sign of how things had changed: Xander would say he'd lost two friends, but the idea of Spike being on the same side was just too much to fathom. "And some others I didn't know. There was a battle, not just the sinkhole." And this is the weird thing: Of all the times he's told people he's from that town that everyone knows about, the one that disappeared, this is the first time he's been able to tell that part of it. Oz isn't sure how he feels about it, whether it's a good idea to open doors that have been bolted shut all these years. He opts for a change of subject, at least for the moment. "Is there anything after you?"
"After me?" The herbs are beginning to work on Sam, but he manages to shake off his confusion after a moment. "Oh. No. I took care of every last demon in that place."
"Then I think you should stay put for a few days. Do you have a place?"
"Not yet. I'm not staying around, though. I'm on the trail of something else."
"You're in no shape to hunt anything right now. Look. I'm leaving town for a few days tomorrow. You can stay here. Give those ribs a chance to heal."
Oz gets the feeling Sam would protest, but the tea is doing its job, and he's fading out. "Sure."
***
By the time Oz gets the poultice ready, Sam is almost completely out of it. His eyes have closed but his face scrunches up as Oz approaches. "Jesus, Dean," he mutters. As Oz starts to smear the foul-smelling paste over his wounds, Sam bats at his hands. "Cut it out, it's not funny."
"Keep still," Oz tells him. "This'll help you heal."
Sam's eyes open a slit. "You're not Dean," he points out, but he's slipped back under before Oz makes a reply.
Oz is still working when there's a knock at the door. "Hang on a second," he calls out, and rinses off the muck the best he can. He wipes his hands on a dishtowel and opens the door partway.
Alice is there, her hands behind her back. "Daniel, I just came by to say I called the plumber about that leak. He's -- oh dear god, what is that stench?"
Oz can't suppress a grin. "Medicinal herbs. They are kind of pungent."
"And they're so Dr. Quinn." She flicks a glance behind him. "How's your patient?" She frowns. "Still unconscious?"
"He's sleeping. I gave him something for the pain. It'll keep him out for a while, I think. I need to finish this." He swings the door open wider and steps back, and Alice takes his unspoken invitation. Funny, he realizes, how he never lost that Sunnydale habit. He settles in next to Sam and resumes his work.
Alice leans something against the wall by the door and says, "How can I help?"
"I'm good. There's just washing out the bowls after this, but they're too gross to palm off on you. What was that about the plumber?"
She shakes her head. Her glossy, stick-straight black hair swings gently. "Nothing. It was my excuse to check on you."
It occurs to him to glance at the doorway, and he sees what she left there. A baseball bat. Oz looks back toward her and raises an eyebrow.
"You think it's easy finding good tenants who pay their rent on time and in cash? And have handyman skills on top of it?"
He smiles at her. "I'm touched," he says, and means it.
Her cheeks redden and she says, "Well, you're a good guy."
Oz wonders if she'd have said so with such conviction before today. Good tenant, sure, but this is the first he's revealed much of himself to anyone since he came here. It's still precious little, he knows. "I found out one thing," he tells Alice. "Our guest here. His name is Sam."
She regards Sam for a moment, sprawled on Oz's bed beneath a blanket, looking so much younger now that he's asleep. He almost looks like he could be the kid who had apocalyptic fights with his old man. Alice gazes at him, a complex mix of emotions on her face. Oz wonders if there's someone she's thinking of -- maybe even herself, before she opened herself up to who she really is. Suddenly Oz is curious about that version of Alice. It was hard enough dealing with his inner wolf back in high school. To be a guy at that age, concealing a true self that is not a guy -- that seems big.
"How seriously is he hurt?" she asks.
"More than just a few bruises," Oz says. "Broken ribs, some bad lacerations. The herbs will help."
"Which you just happened to have lying around."
"I go hiking in some pretty rugged territory. Sometimes I get banged up."
Alice eyes him, no doubt remembering a time or two when he came back from the desert looking fairly rough.
"I told him he could stay here a few days," Oz says. "He needs to avoid moving around much. I'll be out of town for a few days anyway."
"Oh hell no," Alice blurts. "Taking this guy in, that's one thing, and I don't even like that. The hell you're gonna park him here and then take off for three days."
***
Oz blinks. "Shit, you're right." Her reaction is completely justified. He knows little more than this guy's name, yet he's promised him a crash pad, entirely unsupervised, in Alice's own building. "I used to be in a band, and we were always sleeping on the floors of people we barely knew. We did the same for bands passing through. It's kind of an automatic response, to make the offer. I didn't think."
Alice pushes her hand through her blue-black hair. "I get that. It's part of being a good guy."
"I'm sorry. It puts you in a bad spot. Not cool." There are guys out there who prey on women, which is bad enough, but the ones who can't handle ambiguity of any sort, much less gender ambiguity, seem to react with particular brutality. Oz is aware of that when he reads something in a newspaper -- usually the alternative papers, because that stuff often passes unnoticed by the mainstream rags. Alice has to be aware of that much of the time, if not always.
"Look," she says, "he can stay, as long as you stick around. Trail mix keeps. You can go commune with nature once he's gone, right?"
Trail mix won't keep, at least not in Oz's case. But he doesn't see how he can deny her. His wolf has noticed more about Sam than his present physical weakness. Hunters haven't exactly been his best friends, and Oz has glimpsed the bone-deep grief and anger that runs through this one. Oz has seen what that mixture has done in his own case, even when he thought he had his wolf under complete control.
He looks at Sam, looking deceptively peaceful in sleep.
"I'll stay," he says. He'll figure something out. Get Sam to drink the tea each night and slip out while he's sleeping. Oz won't be able to go as deep into the desert as usual, but he'll be far enough away from other people that he won't be a danger. Maybe Sam will leave after tonight. He said he was on the trail of something. If he improves any over the night, maybe he'll insist on taking off.
Oz suddenly remembers Giles scolding him, more than once, for cutting things close when he came to lock himself away on a full moon night. And other, more measured conversations. Giles believed it was his wolf that pushed him to skate so close to the edge of safety. Was it his wolf that offered Sam a place to crash, or made the promise to Alice?
He's not sure, but now he's committed to both.
Oz meets Alice's gaze. "I'll stay," he says again. He hopes this isn't a choice that puts them all in grave danger.
***
Oz sits in his courtyard, playing his six-string, a longneck at his feet. He's a better player by far than he ever was when he was in Dingoes. Irony is a bitch, no mistake. He plays unplugged versions of old songs he played with the band, ones he's written since then, some old blues, flatpicks a little Doc Watson.
His chair is just outside the trapezoid patch of light cast by Alice's window. Oz wonders if her restlessness is caused by his houseguest. He guesses so, but knows she goes through phases where her lights blaze all night or close to it. He hopes tonight it's not fear keeping her awake.
Though he's outside the patch of light, he's hardly in the dark. Silvery light bathes the courtyard. The moon has just a narrow slice out of it. Tomorrow the sliver will hardly be noticeable, and his wolf will escape its bonds. Over the years, Oz has had less and less mastery over his wolf -- the Initiative undid part of the work he'd done, and his pilgrimage to the Sunnydale crater and the heatstroke he suffered there pretty much blasted any remaining control on the full moon. He copes by taking himself as far from people as he can get. He's got a favorite spot he's been claiming the past few months, remote and easy to defend. It's the better part of a day's travel -- he won't make it there if he leaves tomorrow an hour or two before nightfall.
He finishes one last song, polishes off his beer and heads inside. Alice's light is still on when Oz stretches out on his sofa and drifts off to sleep.
Midmorning light filters through the curtains when he wakes. Oz sits up, rubbing his face, then stumbles into the bathroom. When he emerges, he sees that Sam is not only still asleep, but seemingly hasn't shifted once during the night. Good -- not only for his ribs, but if Oz can persuade him to keep drinking the herb tea, sneaking out will be a lot easier. Even as he considers this, Oz knows it will never happen. A guy like Sam, who survives by the sharpness of his wits, won't do anything willingly that will compromise that. Tonight it'll have to be Plan B.
Whatever the hell that is.
***
Despite the late hours Alice kept last night, the laundromat is open, presumably has been since early morning. It's the time of day when there's not much going on; a bored young mother waits for her dryers while her kid drowses in a stroller. Alice is folding laundry for one of the morning's drop-off customers. She looks energized, not sleep-deprived. Oz doubts he looks that alert.
"Hey," he says.
"Daniel," she greets him, and there's pleasure in her voice.
"I hope it wasn't me who kept you awake last night. I got restless and played a little guitar."
"You didn't keep me up. I liked listening. So how's your guest?"
"Still asleep. I thought I'd head over to the diner and pick up some coffee, wondered if you'd like some." It's the least he can offer; he's still not so sure he didn't contribute to her sleeplessness.
"Sure, thanks."
"How do you like it?" He has no idea how Sam takes it, either. Oz can get one black and one with milk, and drink whichever one Sam doesn't want.
"Just say it's for Alice; they'll know." He catches her scent as the big oscillating fan in the room sweeps past her: faint traces of soap and fabric softener, with an overlay of cinnamon. And something else. Sharp, chemical.
"Turpentine," Oz blurts in surprise.
"Oh hell," Alice says. "I thought I scrubbed that off."
"It's barely noticeable," he says hastily. "I just happen to have a freakishly strong sense of smell. Runs in the family." Certainly true of him and his cousin Jordy, anyway.
"I was painting last night."
Oz spots little signs now: A trace of red just at the very ends of a few hairs framing her face. A fleck of sienna at the bed of a fingernail. "Painting painting," he says, then clarifies as he spots her confusion. "Not wall painting."
"Exactly. Oils. Mixed media, to be more exact."
Huh. He'd never have guessed. "Cool."
She shrugs. "I could show you some of them sometime." Diffident, masquerading as casual.
Oz gets that he's too laid-back sometimes, that his statements are sometimes too under and he can come off as disinterested. "Extremely cool," he elaborates. He has possibly put a little too much intensity into it this time, because Alice looks perplexed for a moment before she relaxes and laughs.
"I'll get your coffee," he says.
***
Oz hasn't planned this right. Well, not that he's planned it at all, but walking back across the street with three cardboard cups balanced carefully in his hands, he realizes he'll have to drop Alice's off and leave if he's going to deliver Sam's while it's still hot.
It's just this one thing: Now that he's found a little bit of community, just a sliver of what he'd had in Sunnydale, it's hard to pull himself away. This lone wolf shit -- it's not real, not natural to what wolves are. It's not natural to who Oz is. He's been without a pack for too long.
Well. It's not like Alice is going anywhere. Or Oz, except for three nights a month. There's time to let things flow.
As he steps onto the curb, Alice opens the door for him. "Back there on my desk is good."
Of course. No coffee on the folding counters. He settles his offerings on a clear space on the desk, beside a neat stack of outdated magazines. He hands her the cup marked A in grease pencil by the Eduardo at the diner. "I hate to tell you this, but Britney and K-Fed are splitsville." He takes up the other two coffees again.
"Yet I just can't let go of their perfection as a couple," Alice says. She sips her coffee. "I bought these at the library sale table. I layer bits of collage into my paintings sometimes."
He nods. "Cool."
She twitches a smile. "Extremely? Or just ordinarily?"
"Excessively." He moves to take a sip of his coffee, then realizes he's got a cup in each hand. "Oh. Guess I should get one of these to Sam."
"Thanks for the coffee, Daniel. I'll see you around."
"Around is where I'll be." He heads out into the late-morning heat, marveling at the fact that Xander Harris once thought Oz could offer him any sort of advice on not acting like a dork.
***
When he lets himself into his apartment, Oz finds Sam sitting up in bed, rubbing his face. Now that the herbs are cool and dry, the room doesn't smell quite so pungent.
"How are you feeling?" Oz inquires.
"Groggy," Sam mumbles. "I feel like I was out for days."
Too bad he wasn't, Oz thinks. "Sorry. It doesn't hit me that hard, so I didn't realize."
"How often to you use that shit?"
"Once, maybe twice a year. I save it for the special occasions, like sliding down an embankment on my face."
"And there in a nutshell is why I don't hike," Sam says.
"I got some coffee. You take it black or milky?"
"Black's fine."
Oz hands over one of the cups and Sam slugs it down as if it's some kind of antidote. Which Oz supposes it is, when he thinks about it.
"So did that stuff make me hallucinate," Sam says, "or was there some dude in a skirt?"
Oz feels a surge of protectiveness toward Alice. "That was not 'some dude in a skirt.' That's Alice." True, when he looks at her he can imagine the guy she might have been before she transitioned, boyish more than manly. But he feels that if he saw that guy, Oz could as easily imagine the woman he could be, sardonic yet sweet. As he's stuck around long enough for Alice to become a fixture in his life -- even before this tentative new friendship -- he's come to view her as just one flavor of the infinite variety of women in the world. She's Alice, the way Willow was Willow. "You had a place to stay last night because she allowed it."
"Sorry, man. Brain's still a little foggy." Sam plies himself with more black coffee.
It annoys him that Sam's blaming it on the herbs. "Yeah, well I get the hunter thing. A lot of travel, but it's not that broadening." Oz sees that this comment has hit its mark, but he doesn't feel like letting it go. "Hunter I ran across years ago had a string of werewolf teeth around his neck." Not that he'd seen it himself, but Buffy had told him.
Oz is gratified to see that this rocks Sam back. "That's fucked up. Those are people most days out of the month."
Relief gusts through Oz. "Right there with you."
"I mean, sure, you have to kill them to save other people, but taking trophies, that's barbaric."
***
Oz goes very still, though his inner wolf wants to attack. Now, while Sam is weakened, groggy, without a weapon at hand.
No. That's not what Oz is, no matter what the Initiative did to him and his control over the wolf.
"It's not like they're demons," Oz says. "They're regular people who've been attacked, turned into something against their will."
"I know that," Sam says, but there's something hard and implacable in his expression.
"Then you don't just --" Oz realizes he's making an argument for mercy that, if extended to its natural conclusion, would make vampire slaying murder. No, he tells himself. Vampires have no humanity left. They aren't walking around by daylight minding their own business, possibly unaware of what they become by the light of a full moon.
"Look," Sam says. "By the time a hunter gets on a werewolf's trail, there's already bodies. I've seen them. It's something you never forget, believe me. 'Savage' doesn't even begin to describe what a werewolf attack looks like. You go all bleeding heart on the guy who's human all but a couple of nights a month, and you sentence other humans to death. That's the truth of it, whether you want to see it or not."
"Is there a school for hunters," Oz says, "and do they offer a minor in Condescending Asshole?" Easier to react to this than to the deep threat contained in Sam's words.
"Sorry," Sam lies. "I wasn't expecting this level of naivete from someone who said he's got some experience with hunters and the supernatural." He drains the last of his coffee. "Listen, if you'll let me use your shower, I can wash this shit off and be on my way."
"Sure, yeah, knock yourself out. Let me get some clean towels." He digs out some fresh ones from the back of the linen closet. "These are a little threadbare, sorry." He hands them over, watches Sam head for the bathroom. "So you have killed --"
Sam cuts him off. "Yeah," he says, and again Oz senses a hard wall -- and this time he gets the very clear feeling that it's a dam.
"Trust me," Sam says. "It was a kindness."
***
As the bathroom door shuts behind Sam, a shiver runs through Oz. To hear the word kindness spoken in such a hard tone. To know kindness is defined as a silver bullet as far as this guy's concerned. What the fuck has happened to Sam that he's got scars crisscrossing his body and his eyes are flat and cold as chips of flint? Sam's younger than Oz, he's pretty sure of it. What made him a hunter?
It's never Career Day at school. There's bound to be a story, full of blood and grief.
Doesn't mean Oz has to stick around and become another hunter's story. If he had any sense, he'd get the hell out of Dodge. Do it now, while Sam's trying to scrub off what's left of the poultice. Oz knows from personal experience that a sander would do a lot better job than the shower, which offers more of a dribble than a spray on its best days. He could gain a lot of ground in forty-five minutes to an hour. Grab the bag he always keeps packed and head on out, pausing only to slash the tires of the big black car across from the laundromat.
And what about Alice? He promised her that he'd stick around as long as Sam's here. It doesn't matter whether or not Oz thinks Sam is a threat to her -- he makes her uneasy and he's got to respect that. Instinct -- Oz lives by it and the price of ignoring it can be death. He's not discounting hers.
And Oz could be wrong. Just because Sam has the lean, obsessive look of a demon killer, it doesn't mean humans are safe -- even the ones who are human 24/7, month in and month out. Men who don't develop an appreciation for the subtle degrees of the human and the demonic probably won't have an easy time with the interstitial nature of a girl like Alice. She has plenty to be wary of from your average guy, much less a man whose vocation is killing things.
Oz can't bring himself to disappear on her for three days, and he sure as hell can't bolt into the desert and take her along. Much as he likes her, he knows he's far more of a danger to her on these nights than Sam.
Oz wishes he and Alice had called 911 the second they saw Sam collapse and walked away from the whole thing.
A surge of restlessness moves through him, and he knows it's the wolf pacing his cage, aware that it's only hours until he's free. Oz grabs his bag and the box of supplies he's already gathered and takes them out to his van. He heads to the gas station a few blocks away and fills the tank, then parks along the street. Now he can slip out tonight without alerting half the neighborhood when he starts the van.
Slip out. Abandon Alice, he means.
This is lousy. He feels like a shitheel.
***
When Oz makes it back to his apartment, the shower's still running. His wolf noses against him, ready with a fresh suggestion, since "head for the hills" got voted down. Jump him.
He spots Alice's baseball bat there by the door where she'd forgotten it last night. One good swing and that's the end of his problems. Just barge into the bathroom, catch Sam in the shower --
Really? he asks his wolf. Because it seems like that's where things get infinitely more complicated.
"That's exactly why the guy thinks people like me should be shot," he mutters. He gives his head a hard shake and takes up the bat, heading up the alley to the laundromat.
Any normal month, and Oz would have left by now, up with first light to make his way to his preferred spot. Of course it makes his wolf edgy to cut things so close. Sunset's just after eight tonight; Oz wants to be gone by six.
He wants to be gone now.
Alice is on her own when he walks in, wiping the tracks of a detergent spill from the front of a washer.
"Hey," Oz says. "You left this."
Reaching for it, she offers a sheepish grin. "Thanks. Alice to the rescue."
"Don't do that. It was cool." Stupid. That's become his fallback word, and it's becoming meaningless. "Brave. It's been a long time since anyone had my back."
"Well, that's too bad," she says softly. "Good guys are a dwindling natural resource."
It's hard to know what to say to that. Oz feels his internal struggle so close to the surface, the desire to lash out at Sam for posing a threat to the stunted little life he's made for himself here. Good itself is a dwindling resource, at least within him.
"Are you okay?" she asks.
"Sure, yeah, I'm cool." Oz winces. "No, actually. I'm restless. It was just weird having Sam there. I couldn't really settle in to sleep for a long time."
She glances out toward the black car. "He's still at your place?"
"Yeah. He's working on getting that poultice cleaned off. It's a project."
Alice nods. "Listen, it's dead in here right now. I'm going to lock up for a bit and go upstairs for lunch. You could join me." She hesitates. "Or maybe we should go hit the cafe. My paintings are all over the place up there. I'd like you to see them sometime, but they aren't exactly restful."
"I'd really like to see them," Oz says in a rush.
She smiles, and there's a dimple he's never noticed before, just on the one side of her mouth. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Cool," she says, and it makes him laugh. Alice adjusts the hands of the clock face on the Be back soon! sign and hangs it in the door, then turns the lock. He feels the nervousness and excitement shimmering off her. "I've never showed them to anyone." She gestures behind him. "Stairs are that way."