For the contrelamontre regret challenge.
"Hey," Oz says, leaning in the doorway, one arm crossed over his waist. Dark in the room, not much brighter outside in the lobby, but there's a dim halo of hair around his head nonetheless. "Bothering you?"
Wes slots a slip of paper into the book he was not reading and sits back in his chair. "Of course not. What can I --?"
"Thought we could --" Oz shrugs and glances over his shoulder. "I mean, maybe we --"
Wes scratches at the light stubble along his jaw. The boy's words are more hushed, the phrases stuttering like skipping stones, only far less graceful, than they were years ago.
"Would you like to sit down?"
Difficult to discern from beneath the shadows, but Oz may have just smiled at that. Quickly, however, and none too enthusiastically.
"Thanks."
He chooses the chair nearest to Wes's desk, yet folds himself into it, tucking his chin behind an updrawn knee, so tight and small that he might as well have remained in the doorway. Wes turns his chair and leans his elbow on the edge of the desk for a better view.
Oz looks nothing like the boy he knew -- was acquainted with, more rightly -- in Sunnydale. The features are the same, his hair again a garish unnatural color, his clothes might well be *literally* the same -- dark undershirt, worn trousers -- but Wes knows differently.
He might lack the powerful sense of smell and vision that both Oz and Angel have -- that they *share* -- but he makes do, and he knows that this is not the same child. He fancies that he knows better than most that costumes, whether constant or ever-changing, mean nothing compared to internal change.
"How are you finding Los Angeles?" Wes asks. Politeness, he often suspects, is even more deeply engrained in him than duty.
"S'okay," Oz says, shifting in his seat, the leather creaking beneath him. "Haven't been out much."
*No, you haven't*, he wants to say. He shouldn't, but Wes has kept track, almost automatically, of Oz and Angel's long absences, sequestered upstairs. The occasional high, inhuman whine and answering grunt that float down from above, from behind closed doors. The constant proximity, warmth of shared gazes, when they do appear amongst the humans.
"I see," Wes says instead. "I imagine it must take some time to adjust. Good to hear that you're taking that time."
Oz nods, just two dips of the head, and leans forward. "Wanted to say --" he starts, and sits back. "Sorry? Something like that."
"I have no idea what you think you need to apologize for."
"Intruding," Oz says. Plain and clear, no physical twitches or catches to his voice. "Should've warned you. Given you a head's up."
He had done the right thing. He had told Angel to take as long as he needed. That they would carry on just fine without him, that his grief needed to be addressed and acknowledged. That losing one's soulmate, so suddenly, so unexpectedly, on the heels of such a tumultuous year, was not a matter to be shrugged off. He knew Angel, knew that he would try to mourn *and* carry on, and, further, that such an attempt was bound to fail. He can't fault himself, or he shouldn't, for having done any of that.
Because when Angel fails, he does so rather spectacularly and bloodily.
Wes considers himself a fool. Cocky, alight with victory in another dimension, he was unable to think clearly. Angel agreed to go, left the next morning, and Wes's foolish, ridiculously-overblown confidence persisted for the entire summer.
Wes is not, however, a superstitious man. If he were, he might suspect a pattern in the making, warnings against zealous confidence and cockeyed optimism that enter the Hyperion's lobby in the form of longlost redheaded children, all pale skin and huge, pleading eyes.
First Willow, then the Osbourne boy.
"Don't know what you could possibly mean," Wes says finally. He realizes he is rolling the stub of a pencil between his palms, warming it the way they tried to start campfires in Pylea. "I'm hardly --"
Oz sits forward again, fingertips coming to rest on the far edge of the desk. His posture passes from tense and small to graceful and unboned faster than Wes himself can take a breath. Supernatural beings, he thinks, move better, more rapidly, than the rest of us.
"Wesley," Oz says. Uses the old name, the one that belonged to the priggish failure who'd stumbled around Sunnydale. The one that still belongs to Wes, far more deeply and closely, whatever his colleagues claim now, than the jauntier 'Wes'. "It's okay. You don't have to pretend --"
"I mean, really. This is Angel's hotel, after all. His operation. He can bring anyone at all into --"
Oz's eyes narrow slightly. Wesley finds his expression utterly illegible.
He should have tried harder when he was in Sunnydale. He would never have failed quite so miserably and so thoroughly if he had just listened to himself. Heeded instincts that managed to survive his Watcher's training, quietly social ones that urged him to speak naturally to people. To ask after their troubles.
But they were children, all of them, save Rupert, and Rupert himself had spent so much time *among* children that at times Wesley doubted the man's capacity for rational thought. Halflings like Angel and Oz were, to Wesley's eyes then as well as now, more childlike than even a pouty Slayer and her adoring, devoted former Watcher. Arrogance, the conviction that no ordinary being could *possibly* hope to understand their (not very) unique situation and circumstances: Wesley considers that posture definitively childish.
Still. He ought to have tried. He ought to try now.
"Oz," he says, finding it difficult to call someone by that name, feeling it sit, oddly-angled and heavy, in his mouth. Wesley sighs and leans back. "Please don't apologize."
"Need to," Oz says. "Just accept it, all right?"
Wesley nods and straightens the frayed cuffs of his shirt before he looks back at the boy.
When Angel returned, it was still dark though technically morning. Wesley was working and still isn't sure what made him rise and go out into the lobby. Certainly not a sound or a greeting. But Angel, for good and bad, and lately it's been more bad than good, is a magnet, the rest of them filings. As Wes stepped out from behind the counter, Cordelia was descending the stairs and Gunn emerging from the garden.
They all keep vampire's hours. Even in the absence of their vampire.
"I'm back," Angel said. Pointlessly, and he ducked his head. "Brought presents, if that helps."
Wesley moved forward; they all did. Angel remained at the top of the stairs, larger than Wesley remembered, more solid. He wished fleetingly that he had done more than clasp Angel's hand when they parted at the beginning of the summer; to embrace him now would be disproportionate. Far too messy.
His arms ached anyway.
"Good thing, too," Cordelia said. "Postcards would've been nice, you know. A little, hey guys, still dead and kicking, not dust, haven't drowned. Wish you were here. You know the kind of thing?"
As she spoke, Wes plunged his hands into his pockets and eased closer, keeping to the left.
"Can't drown if you don't need to breathe," Gunn said. "Good to see you, man."
"Gunn. Good to be back."
Cordy coughed ostentatiously into her hand.
"Yeah, well, the thing about that --" Angel said, setting down his bags. Leather duffel, scuffed and worn, and another valise that Wesley recognized as well. Angel tilted his head at Cordy. "Got something better, though."
He stepped aside and Wesley saw -- Oz. Just a thin, small boy, jaw tightened, wearing a vague and tense smile. Then he disappeared into a blur of Cordelia shrieks and waving arms and -- "Oz! Oh my god!"
"Wesley," Oz says, tapping the desk, reaching for Wesley's arm. Wesley jerks his hand away, sees it scuttle like a crab across the blotter and into his lap. "Look, maybe it's too soon?"
Wesley clears his throat. He understands something, just from the boy's tone, the mysterious, unreferenced 'it' that he used. He looks at Oz and tightens his hands, knotting them together. "Angel sent you."
"Yeah," Oz says.
"Why?" Interrogation he can do. Far more easily than collegial conversation.
Oz scrubs lacquered nails through his hair until it stands straight up. The light from the hall glints off the steel-blue lacquer for a moment before Oz's hand slides down his neck. *Garish, unnatural*, Wesley thinks again. *Ridiculous*.
"Said I should make friends with you." For a changeling, gotten up like a subcultural poster boy, Oz has always been direct when it suited him. He can drop the mysterious lonely-boy pose and communicate far better than most.
"Kind of him," Wesley says. "Keeping an eye on your social life, is he?"
He can't recall ever having seen Angel and Oz together in Sunnydale. In the same room, of course, but they were all there. He had always been under the impression that both...men were devoted to their partners. This hadn't stopped him, however, from sidelong glances and careful shifts in squeaky library chairs. Idle wondering moments that stretched to breathless half-hours spent imagining the boy's leanness beneath his cavernous clothes, how it would feel to have almost-claws in his hair, an eager puppytongue in his mouth, to be a heartbeat away from being bitten. Transformed. His thoughts about Angel came later, born of acquaintance and then something resembling friendship; seeing Oz again, just across from him, changed and even leaner, again out of reach, sets Wesley's temples throbbing.
But Angel with Oz: His imagination never approached that coupling. Of course Buffy's death would change that. He can't pretend he isn't surprised, however.
"C'mon upstairs. I'll make you up a room," Cordelia said, never letting go of Oz's hand, pulling him down the stairs, past Wesley and Gunn. He hadn't seen her so happy in months, excluding Pylea, and he wanted to smile at the reemergence of some of her characteristic joy and burbling delight.
Oz looked over his shoulder at Angel. That's when Wesley *knew*. Before anyone said anything, before Cordelia stopped dragging him, before Angel even cleared his throat.
It was too late. Wesley knew.
Too late. Angel shifted his weight, Oz looked away, Gunn just watched with bemusement, and Wesley started to open his mouth.
"He'll be okay in my room," Angel said. "For tonight, anyway."
Wesley swallowed icicles at the confirmation. Long, sharp sticks of pure ice that pierced his esophagus, caught there, refused to melt.
He tastes them again now, confronted with Oz's intent calm, slow-blinking eyes and tilt of the head. Ozone and lemons, frigid and knifesharp. But he can speak, he's never been one to let trivial, personal emotion interfere with his interactions.
"Not kind," Oz says. "More like you're the only one who could do it. If he loses it."
"Hardly think that's a worry," Wes says. His eyes are dry, his throat raw and cold. He can't look away from Oz. "The curse is --"
Oz leans back in his chair and lifts the hem of his shirt, scratching hard at what appears to be a sudden itch. "It is," he says. His skin glows dully in the room's half-light, tracks of nails on white like muddied rose petals in the snow. Wesley licks his lips. "A worry."
Wesley doesn't know anything.
He wishes he was more intelligent. He should not be here, he should never have stayed, he has no idea what he's doing or what he'll be able to do.
He should have tried harder. In Sunnydale, in LA, in Pylea.
With Angel, with Faith, with himself.
He wishes he didn't have dreams of staking Angelus.
"Oh," Wesley says. "I didn't know."
If he'd tried harder, if he'd made the first move, if he'd known better, if he'd seen more clearly, things would be different. If he hadn't sent Angel away to mourn, if he had made the effort to talk to this boy years ago, if --.