London, September 2001
When he left Sunnydale, Oz wanted mountains. Needed them.
Wyoming, Tibet: They were the only places he had been happy alone, where the air is drained of moisture, the sky carved jagged by bony peaks. People in the mountains are different; quieter, they take their time thinking and speaking, and they mind their own business. Logic is different up here, too. Cleaner, more direct. Like everything else - sky, skin, voice - it is scrubbed bright and simplified. Reduced down to what can survive, hardy as the trees twisted by centuries of shifting winds.
Darwin noted ecological variation here. Butch and Sundance came here for five years of peace.
Oz has been here for little over a year. El Soñador, they call him, the dreamer. Or Señor Slacker; they know the weirdest tidbits of English. Both names are perfectly accurate. He doesn't do very much. He hangs out with the priest because Jorge has the most books in the region. He takes tourists on hikes, tells them mangled Mapuche myths around the campfire. He reads and walks. He had a dog named Bill for most of the time he's lived here. The town stray, three-legged, his coarse, shaggy hair no color at all other than mountain-gray and -brown, and mismatched eyes, one brown, one blue.
Bill died last month when he got tangled in the electrified fence Benetton erected around its corporate sheep pasturelands.
Oz brought his body to the top of the nearest mountain. He had to leave it there, tucked between two slabs of rock. Too cold to dig in the earth.
He still wears Bill's collar. Lilin made it for Bill when the dog adopted Oz, a thin braided length of leather that buckles in the back.
It is Lilin who comes to tell him.
Oz is meditating, or daydreaming, on the floor of his hut.
She lets herself in; Lilin goes exactly where she pleases. She opens his last bottle of water and sits heavily on the edge of his bed.
"There is a new ghost," she says. "One of the warriors fell."
Lilin is young for a *machi*; she still has all her teeth and there is no silver in her hair. If anyone disputes her authority, however, Oz has never heard of it. She heals quickly and efficiently, she dispatched a *wecufe* from the nursery school in less than half an hour, and she is easy to talk to.
Oz does not know what to say. "I'm sorry?"
"A strong fighter," she says. "One of the best."
He has never told her anything about his past - not the Hellmouth, definitely not the wolf lest he be deemed *wecufe*, nothing about slayers and witches and vampires. He half-expects that she knows anyway. Lilin can lower her lids, look at you sideways, and it's not just the icy prickle over your scalp and down your back that tells you she is seeing realm after realm around you.
"A girl like you -" She touches her cheek, ruddygold. "Bonewhite skin. Yellow hair, eyes just like yours, like lakes. Green. She is gone."
Oz's departure begins right there. Still sitting on the floor, he is already leaving. "Buffy."
Lilin smoothes the blanket next to her and shrugs. She does not answer.
*Giles*.
He must have said that out loud; Lilin's brows lift just before she smoothes out her expression into the one she wears for the tourists. The simplistic, joyful shaman-woman, eager to sell you kultrun and silver.
How is it that death let him start living again?
Lilin does not tell him.
"I'll say goodbye to Quillen for you," she says as she stands. Her brother is in Buenos Aires, working, sending money home. Oz has deliberately half-forgotten him, the spiky spray of his black bangs and the corded strength of his arms. "And I will miss you."
When they hug, their foreheads touch. Lilin smells like cinnamon-tree bark and sweat; under Oz's hands, Quillen used to smell just like this, turned earth, shredded bark, cold rain.
There is nothing to pack; some clothes, Giles's memory book, his passport. Silver and a few replicas of drums and divining sticks. Lilin and Jorge take care of the rest, distribute his crockery and blankets and find tenants for his hut.
Out of the mountains, into the air.
Oz flees, departs, leaves. It takes weeks. He rides with the postal clerk all the way to Bariloche, bargains two silver necklaces and a wristcuff for a seat on the bus to Rio, then scores a courier flight to Amsterdam by way of Tunis (the First Worlder's Sin Tour, really). Ferry, bus, train and another train. Already early September when he crosses the channel.
To London.
Pimlico.
SW1.
He will not be alone any more. No mountains, no solitude. He went to the bottom of the earth, but Giles's book was right: One world can be possessed. He just has to climb these broad whitestone steps up to the small apartment building's door, steps worn shallow and slippery in the light rain.
Logic is so much more complex down here. Down in the moist air, in the swamp of noise, amongst the slam and press of bodies, it is messier, tangled, shooting off in every direction. Nothing necessarily follows.
If Giles is even here, if he doesn't slam the door in Oz's face, if and if and if.
So many contingencies, vectors, potential replies that Oz has not let himself think about until it's too late.
Late is now, so he rings the buzzer and takes a breath.
Note: Cut-tag a quotation from Darwin's Beagle journal.