Disclaimer: The characters and setting used in this work do not belong to me, nor have I been given permission to use them.
They’d all left him there at the end. No one remembered Giles’s old friend except perhaps Rupert himself but he wasn’t going to bring him up. Buffy had flown off to Rome and the rest of the gang had gone their separate ways. No one tried to count their losses; it wasn’t worth the heartache. And so Ethan had been forgotten, by everyone.
But Oz had seen the news, seen Sunnydale’s collapse and had wondered what had happened to the Initiative. He knew what they did to people in there, knew what they were capable of.
He’d remembered Ethan.
So now Oz drove his same battered blue van and glanced occasionally at the crumpled, sleeping figure of Ethan in the back. The man hadn’t moved, hadn’t resisted in the least when Oz had broken into his Plexiglas hell and scooped him up like a small child.
It wouldn’t have been much of a fight anyway. Ethan was a perfect example of the human skeleton. If you didn’t look too hard, you couldn’t even tell where he’d been broken and reset.
A loaded revolver lay on the passenger seat. Oz had picked it up on his travels and had taken it with him in case he came up against any guards. But no one had tried to stop him; there was no one there.
Except in the cells of course, but the sunken demon corpses could hardly be considered worth counting.
Either the government had wanted to see what happened if a vampire didn’t get that next meal or they’d simply pulled the plug without a moment’s thought for the Hostiles.
Oz had felt the wolf stirring along those concrete corridors but he’d learnt a lot about controlling the beast within. It needed regular exercise like any other animal but it could be kept on a short lead at the same time.
It was the wolf that’d found Ethan, naked and unconscious.
And now it was the wolf who noticed Ethan beginning to stir. Oz didn’t need to look back this time and simply pulled off the road onto the verge.
Ethan hadn’t realised how loud the engine had been until it was turned off. He tried to open his eyes and found them sealed shut with mucus. He felt a bottle pressed into his hands and he tipped the contents on his face, savouring the little that slipped into his mouth and using the rest to clear his eyes.
‘Hey, easy, that’s all we got for a little while.’
Ethan didn’t understand the words, he had to concentrate too hard for that and right now concentration was beyond him. He drained the last few drops from the bottle, discovered that the light was too much for his head to take, and lay back down into the blankets that swathed him.
*
Haunted wasn’t the word to describe his dreams. Haunted suggested visitations of an otherworldly kind. It suggested pasts confronting presents all in that ghostly sense of unreality. Ethan’s dreams were as real as life itself. Intangible, incomprehensible, but undoubtedly real.
Ripper featured heavily, as he always did. He stood on the other side of the Plexiglas, staring at his own reflection and completely failing to see Ethan.
Then their places were changed; Ethan looked in at his old friend and saw how things might have been if Ripper hadn’t turned Rupert and left the dark magic far behind.
He was wasted, like Ethan had been. His nails were yellow from years of smoking and his fingertips tinged a multitude of hues from all the magic. Sometimes, his eyes looked like pools of black and other times they glowed in violet.
And then Ripper wasn’t alone, Oz was standing over him, loaded revolver in hand. Two realities mixed and Oz saw only his Giles, Buffy’s Giles, good Watcher Rupert never-been-Ripper-oh-goodness-no Giles.
And Oz fired.
*
It was dark the next time he awoke and this time he managed to open his eyes straight away. The engine was quiet again.
‘Oz.’ The boy replied to the unspoken question and Ethan felt a vague sense of recollection. A Sunnydale kid. One of Rupert’s.
Oz had been sitting at the opposite end of the van but he crawled over to Ethan now, making it rock a little, and handed him the water bottle, refilled. Ethan took it and drank, not pausing for breath. Oz opened the van door due to his familiarity with dehydrated persons, or so Ethan presumed, as the older man dived for the exit and threw up all that he had drunk. He crawled back into the van, exhausted by the sudden movement, and took the last few swallows from the bottle before going back to sleep.
*
Their travelling fell into something of a pattern, with Ethan awaking roughly every twelve hours and with Oz being ready for him. By the time Ethan began to speak, it was almost full moon.
‘So, Rupert sent you?’ Oz looked over at the skinny man, looked at his eyes, and nodded. It wasn’t strictly true, Oz knew it, Ethan knew it, but that was what he needed to hear right now. That someone might care about his current state.
*
Ethan began to spend the days dozing in the passenger seat whilst Oz drove. At night, they’d both sit in the back of the van and carefully say nothing of importance or interest. Oz didn’t ask about Ethan’s time in the cells and Ethan didn’t comment on the times when Oz went out into the night to return with rabbits and birds and on one occasion, a fox.
It became a silent and safe companionship. Not friends, they were worlds apart, but they’d shared the horror of the American military and that tentative line between the two of them was enough to keep the silences from becoming uneasy.
Eventually, of course, they arrived in civilisation and it was no longer possible for them to continue in their very animal existence that had passed for living over the weeks of Ethan’s recovery. And recover he had. The weight had settled steadily on his slight frame as he worked his way from water onto solids. His appetite would probably never match Oz’s, despite the werewolf aspect, Ethan was too old to be as good as new.
The magic was coming back too. He could feel it beneath his skin, not quite humming yet, but it was there nonetheless and making itself known.
*
They parted ways at the airport. Oz gave Ethan the cash for his flight back to good old Blighty and Ethan didn’t pretend that he might one-day return it.
Ethan didn’t eat the food on the flight. Seats had been limited and he was in a corner next to a bored-looking businessman. His nails dug into the arms of the chair as he pressed himself back hard into it. His breathing was shallow and his eyes roamed the plane in panic. It was all so confined. So restricted.
*
When they’d landed, Ethan had been prised from his seat and was now sitting in the airport lounge, a cup of water in his trembling hand, being ignored by everyone. No airport staff stayed with him once they’d got him off the plane, no one advised him to get medical attention, no helpful passers by checked if he was all right. He was home in uncaring England and it felt good.
Suddenly he was glad Oz had saved his bullet. Perhaps life was worth living after all so long as life didn’t include confined spaces or disinfectant. He transformed his cup into a rather bewildered dove and flounced out of the airport to the confused shouts of airport staff and travellers.
Beneath his skin, the chaos crackled.
