Note: This is for KindKit. Because she's my friend. Also, last week she wrote the lovely The Purpose of Photographs, about Jazzverse Giles and Oz and their summer vacation to the mountains. She wanted more, so here this is.
OH that I knew how all thy lights combine,
And the configurations of their glorie !
Seeing not only how each verse doth shine,
But all the constellations of the storie.
Time's doing really funny things to Oz on this vacation.
First, he's still processing what a vacation means. It's strange and adult, going on vacation, when his regular life's as slow and mellow as it is. People talk about getting away from it all and having a chance to breathe. He's never exactly figured that out, one way or another, let alone felt that kind of need.
Second, there's Giles. Good God, there's Giles. Somehow early this spring Oz found the chutzpah to try and pick up the handsome English guy and everything spiralled out from there. Past his control, he sometimes thinks - and control's another one of those words that just confuses him into headaches - so that he's lying here now in the back of his van, watching Giles sleep on his side, curved like something washed up on the beach, and this is Giles. If Giles is what you get when you give up on control, Oz is pretty cool with that.
Giles, with his t-shirt twisted around his neck and his mouth smiling, lips a little open as he dreams, eyes moving rapidly under his lids.
Time's so closely related to space that Oz might as well admit Ms. Bauman was right in physics class. Back home, time didn't do much of anything, and space was unremarkable. He moved from home to school to Giles' place, then back home, back and forth along a simple track. One day, one chunk of time, was pretty much like any other.
The weirdest thing about time back in Sunnydale was how it sank over his head only when he was at Giles'. Only in the apartment did time get counted and keep falling down like a guillotine blade. Anywhere else, and it just stretched out, empty and boring as subdivision lawns.
Up here, though, high in the mountains, they're on vacation. Or holiday. Giles calls it holiday and that's probably a better word. If you break it apart, you get holy day, and Oz likes the sound of that. Then, however, he gets all mixed up, because he doesn't know what holy means.
Turns out there's a lot of religious stuff he doesn't know. He doesn't even know how to pronounce George Herbert's last name. He bought a ragged old copy of The Metaphysical Poets a couple weeks ago, stowed it in his guitar case, and didn't look at it again until he was packing for the trip to the mountains. Along with a new box of Benadryl, in case Giles' allergies acted up, and several cobs of corn to roast on a campfire, and the binoculars that he's had since he was nine, it's the best thing Oz decided to bring along. Giles loves the Metaphysicals; Donne, mostly, but the rest of them, too. Oz's copy even matches the one on Giles' shelves, although Giles' copy is better preserved, neatly annotated in Giles' weird calligraphic scrawl by a younger, well-behaved, pre-demonic Giles.
Anyway. Giles likes Donne, but Oz is finding out on this trip that he likes Herbert a lot.
"Harbert," Giles said quietly last night. They'd doused the fire already and were sitting in the back of the van, its doors open, just staring at the sky and Oz said something about Herbert.
"Oh. Looks like Herbert, though."
"Yes. One of those odd Britishisms," Giles said, working his fingers through Oz's hair. "Like clerk, or lieutenant."
"Words are weird," Oz said a little later. He realized Giles was looking at him, frowning a little. Probably concerned he'd offended Oz somehow. Giles smiled then, and Oz tilted his head back to get a better view of the stars. "Marks on paper, sounds in your mouth, and nothing ever really matches up."
"Indeed."
They were silent then, and Oz kept thinking about Herbert. The sky was almost frighteningly dark, almost perfectly dark, the stars shining like the sharp tips of icicles, very far away. So far away the light outlasted its source. Herbert was pretty obsessed with death, with eternity in contrast to human mortality, and Oz figured he probably liked looking at the stars, too. Even if he didn't know that the stars themselves were dead long before the light became visible on Earth, he'd appreciate the fact. Herbert liked how fixed the stars seemed, perfectly if mysteriously ordered and compared them to the Bible, its individual verses and then the whole texture of it as a constellation.
Constellations are made-up, though. It's not like the stars chose to arrange themselves into the shape of a winged horse or the belt of the warrior. People put those shapes on what was already there. Same as people made up seconds out of the time it takes to draw a breath. Lungs and days were here first, but the rest of it's made-up. After a little while, though, people start to agree that certain things have meanings. Seconds, or the length of the year, or the shapes of the star. How to pronounce Herbert and lieutenant.
And then there suddenly appeared before me
The only one my arms will hold
I heard somebody whisper ‘please adore me’
And when I looked, the moon had turned to gold
Oz never wears a watch, so he's had nothing to shed, but Giles very carefully and deliberately removed his and put it in the van's glove compartment before Oz pulled out of the driveway early Saturday morning.
Since then, they've lived on the rhythm of the day and the night. Bright and dark, open and shut, and even though he finds Herbert's obsession with burial and enclosure more than a little freaksome - night's an ebony box in one poem, love is a coffin in another one - Oz also kind of grooves on it. Its simplicity, for one thing, how nicely it fits the cleanness of time's passing out here. There aren't any clocks beyond their heartbeats and breaths, no half-casual glances at Giles' wrist or the clock on the kitchen wall that reminds them there's only an hour, half an hour, fifteen-ten-five minutes until Oz has to go home.
They aren't parting, and there's no being alone, not up here.
Yesterday they hiked down a narrow trail that sank below, then back above, the tree line; they spent the entire day dipping in and out of the rocky stream. Oz didn't have a watch to shed, but he took off his shorts and t-shirt and sat under what had to have been the world's trickliest waterfall until he shivered and Giles said his lips were turning blue.
"What kind of blue?"
"Deathly blue," Giles said from his perch on a flat rock in the middle of the stream. He had his pants rolled up to his calves and he wiggled his wet toes in the sun. "Arctic blue. Cyanide poisoning blue. Like unto the blue of the proverbial wild yonder."
"So bad, then?" Oz asked, wrapping his arms around his chest and letting his teeth chatter while Giles was too busy laughing to notice.
"Vault of heaven blue," Giles said, still laughing, so the words burped out like bebop.
The water spangled out in a big arc when Oz shook his head, rising, splashing his way over to Giles. Stars, diamonds, tiny inconstant things, and then he reached the rock, hot under his freezing feet, and Giles was opening his arms and preemptively shivering as Oz settled in.
"Blue," Oz said. "Okay."
Humming now, a little Sinatra, Giles ran his palms down Oz's arms and then back up. He sang as Oz turned around and he was still singing when Oz kissed him and tasted sunshine, canteen-flat water, and snatches of the lyrics.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.
Oz is getting a little ripe; the air back here in the van smells like rivers, and sweat, and sex. Also pine needles and snatches of Giles' lime aftershave - leave it to Giles to pack that, wrapped three times in heavy ragg socks, though he forgot his razor and Oz has tried to argue the logical impossibility of using aftershave when no shaving has taken place.
He sets aside the book and pushes open one of the rear doors, letting in the sun, brilliant against the misty dark of the van, before sliding down next to Giles.
There's no parting, no going home alone, not for a while. Just Giles' sleep-heavy legs and a long, rumbly sigh as Oz curves around his body and tucks his chin on Giles' outflung arm. There's a spray of sunburn across Giles' nose, already starting to peel, and his hair sticks out like a bundle of hay. Like that goddess he told Oz about, the first time they went hillwalking, the woman made out of flowers.
Asleep, Giles looks both ageless and childlike, smile curving his mouth, sunburn bright in the morning. Oz has to curl his hand into a fist to keep himself from touching the planes of Giles' face, testing its reality in the blinding light. He settles for looking, for appreciating. Memorizing the whorls of dark-and-silver chest hair peeking out from under Giles' twisted shirt, the faint silvery gleam of old scars and skin well-lived in. Warm and solid, made out of long-lasting things - if Giles was Bloduwedd, he'd be crafted from oak and aspen, birch branches and greensilver linden leaves.
Oz dozes a little, because he can. Because there's no rush, not now.
Later, Giles stretches, then gathers Oz against his chest, nose in Oz's hair, lips on his neck. "What're you thinking about so early? Hmmm?"
Yawning, Oz tells him the truth. "You."
Summary and section headings from, respectively:
John Donne, "Lovers' Infiniteness"
George Herbert, "Holy Scriptures II"
Rodgers & Hart, "Blue Moon"
John Donne, "The Sun Rising"