An Everywhere, BtVS, Giles/Oz, PG
Title: An Everywhere
Fandom: BtVS
Rating: PG
Pairing: Giles/Oz
Disclaimer: These characters properly belong to Joss, ME, Kuzui, and Fox; I'm borrowing them.

Notes: Title and imagery from Donne's "The Good-Morrow". Written in an hour for the contrelamontre letters challenge. Part of the Jazzverse. For kindkit.

Kit wrote:
"Open it," Giles says. Oz turns to the first page, the one where Giles copied Donne's "The Good-Morrow," and then looks up again and smiles.

"It's . . . rather like a mix tape, only in words," Giles explains as Oz leafs through the thick rice-paper pages. "Poems, bits of novels. I wanted to give you my favorite things. I even put in Monty Python's parrot sketch."

When Oz comes to the first of the blank pages, halfway through, Giles says, "The other half of the book is for you, for your own favorite things."

*

When he left Giles's that last morning, Oz left behind his guitar, his new/old shirt, an uneaten blueberry pie, and his shampoo. The book, however, was in his pocket. That much he remembered.

Oddly shaped, more square than rectangle, heavy black binding around fine white paper. Giles filled it half of it in his beautiful Gothic scrawl, small and foreign. Lines and pages of his writing, his favorite things, words, text, poems and transcribed vaudeville routines, fragments and entire speeches.

The book is both love letter and art object, library and museum. Sometimes Oz looks at a page like it's a painting, composed of lines and negative space. Sometimes he reads the same page over and over until the phrases sink like kelp into his memory. Sometimes he just touches ink and paper, recreates the sweep and flow of the pen, maps its motion as best he can. He has seen emblems in the old books in the library, like single-panel cartoons, depictions of melancholy, aphorisms, and creatures from bestiaries. Emblems tell stories with pictures and make pictures out of words.

The book is a multipage emblem. Three years on, and Oz has never deciphered its lesson. The topic is Giles, Giles and Oz, but the moral remains obscure.

*

*For you*, Giles said when Oz found the blank pages at the back.

Oz cannot write like Giles. Never trusted words enough, will never have read enough. His favorite things, with a couple of exceptions, can never be translated into words, then transcribed. He feels like a peasant in the Dark Ages and Giles is one of the monks, one of the select.

His memory, his heart, they're different, too. Giles's favorites are longstanding, well-loved and time-tested. Oz's are temporary, sights caught out of the corner of his eye, the press of wind on the back of his neck after a haircut, the twang in his fingerbones after a long rehearsal, the short length of red yarn he found outside the Baptist church.

But he also could not bear to leave his pages empty. Empty pages abandon Giles all over again, preserve the silence, shove yet another glacier between them.

So he's done what he can. Over the years, he's pressed in his favorite things, bits and scraps of what managed to mean something to him for however long a time.

He started with the tablatures to "Dear Prudence". Sliced his palm and slicked his hand with the blood, pressing its print onto the back of the page. Red, then drying to dirty maroon, he gave Giles his poison, his disease, safer than a bite.

Sugar packet from the diner on county Route 4, the place he started going to when he couldn't sleep at night. Condom packet, the foil ripped, from the morning of graduation. A four-leaf clover covered with scotch tape, the receipt from the Mexican mechanic for storing his van. The first mandala the monks made him draw his first week in Tibet and the address of the warlock in Prague.

One page counts the full moons, another is packed with recipes for tisanes and tarts.

He writes, too. Sometimes.

First time was nearly a year after he got the book, the day after the Council fired Giles. He wrote the date, then: *I'm sorry.*

Once on the train out of Warsaw, diesel smoke in his mouth, when he was so hungry he was seeing swarms of black hornets in front of his eyes: *I miss your mushy peas, how you pile them on your fork, how they shine with butter. I miss the sandwich you gave me one morning through the bars of the cage, fried egg and oily American cheese with too much ketchup. I miss your cream crackers and digestive biscuits and Flake bars and blood sausages and bubble and squeak. I'm really hungry, Giles.*

Once the night, or the morning, the sky both dark and light, that he came back to Sunnydale: *You're not going to want to talk to me. But I did it and I want you to know that. We don't have to talk. I just want to see you.*

Again, the next morning, from the same diner on his way out of town: *I'm sorry.*

*

The book softens over time and with transport. He's bent it back and forth, creasing the covers and breaking the binding so it will fit inside his breast pocket. The fake leather rubs off at the corners and the edges of the pages are speckled and stained. It's been rained on and sat on, battered and roughed up. Soldiers saved from bullets to the heart by their Bibles, natural historians cataloging Amazonian butterflies, Oz's treasure trove.

Someday he'll return the book to Giles. Giles won't have any trouble decoding it.

*London, September 20, 2001. This is where I've been, everywhere I am.*

He finishes writing, caps the pen, and knocks on Giles's door.


[end]