Author: Meltha
Rating: PG-13
Feedback: Yes, thank you. Meltha
Spoilers: Through BtVS season 4's finale
Distribution: Fanfiction.net and the Bunny Warren. If you're interested, please let me know.
Summary: After Oz leaves Sunnydale for the second time, his path crosses with an unlikely traveler.
Disclaimer: All characters are owned by Mutant Enemy (Joss Whedon), a wonderfully creative company whose characters I have borrowed for a completely profit-free flight of fancy. Kindly do not sue me, please, as I am terrified of you. Thank you.
Author's Note: Written for the second maleslashminis Oz round for mireille719 who requested Oz/Ethan, a location other than California or England, thunder, and a crime (open to interpretation), but no non-con or character bashing.
Dedication: Thank you to Katy (aka secondalto ) for the beta and Jules for answering my question about a certain fairy, which didn’t become legal in Switzerland until 2005.

No Place Like It

Oz wandered a lot after Willow, after what he saw as his failing. He’d nearly killed that other girl, the one shy, stammering one, the one who had been covered in the scent he had dreamed of so many times on long nights and days in Tibet, Australia, Fiji, a thousand places as exotic as the pictures he had seen on his grandfather’s faded cigar boxes. Surrounded by Xanadu, he had dreamed only of her. Perhaps that wasn’t quite true. He dreamed of safety, the indescribably wonderful feeling of knowing his place in the world, acceptance, the death of demons that could never live when confronted with the depths of her green eyes.

Those dream worlds had shattered now, and he was left without a compass. He had no home, not really. His family wasn’t dead, but somehow they weren’t alive to him either. Had he shown up on his mother’s doorstep, she would have casually asked him how he was, as though he’d spent the day at a supermarket rather than months in a mystic quest for self-control, and he knew that his response would be a similarly vague “okay” before they went their separate ways, he to his room to tune a guitar he no longer owned, she to do whatever it was that she did when she wasn’t there. He was never sure what that really was. He saw no reason to return to a home that felt as though he had never left in the first place. It wasn’t meant as a slap in the face or an insult, just a simple choice, like choosing one burger joint over another.

And so, Oz wandered. He never stayed in any one place long enough to call it home, and he did that on purpose. He stayed in touch with Giles and Angel through email in a variety of little cybercafés in out of the way, tiny, often photocopy-duplicate towns with cracked sidewalks, public schools that seemed all built off the same plan, factories that made things no one could name, teenagers with tastefully bored expressions, adults too tired to know they were alive, and children who stared at the others, knowing they would become them in time and fearing that change from rainbows to grays. He left the print of his shoes there, sometimes shook the dust off, sometimes found something small he loved: a multi-colored burst of graffiti blooming on a dirty brick wall or a song being played on a street corner by a guy with an open guitar case or a sunset that lit the sky on fire. Or a willow tree dancing in the breeze like something out of a forgotten dream. Then he would move on, because this wasn’t home, either.

He left North America after a few months in Canada during the summer. The wind had blown fiercely across the Atlantic on the beaches of New Brunswick, whipping his hair around his head like the arms of a drowning mermaid. His hair was indigo now, like the waves of the sea at its deepest and most secret. When the moon was full, he would restrain himself with chains and ropes wound into Gordian knots, and when he awoke in the morning, naked and white as the flesh of an apple, he didn’t think he had changed, but he never took the chance. The soft rhythms of the ocean had called to him, a siren song of long ago sailors who wanted freedom from the small towns and suffocating safety of civilization. It wasn’t that to him. Instead, it was the affirmation that he was not where he was supposed to be.

The ship he took crossing on was old, not so old that it felt antique, but old enough to have weathered decades of nor’easters and salt spray. It was named after a goddess, Calliope or Ishtar or Freya, he could never remember which. All he knew is that he was rocked to sleep in her arms each night, the whispers of the wind and slap of the waves on the hull beating into his mind like a pagan lullaby, connecting him to something that didn’t ask questions about how he came to be the lone wolf wandering in the night. When they docked in Ireland, the respite was over, and he took up the pack that held his belongings and continued on foot, by boat, on bicycle, from place to place, searching for something he couldn’t form a picture of in his mind.

Odysseus had nothing on him by the time he reached Switzerland. He had been through the Lake District in England, the Scottish Highlands, seen the fields of nodding tulips in Holland, and stood at the water’s edge in Jutland where the sea and the sky seemed to be one in the almost perpetual night of winter. He had gone south into France and decided to follow the Alps as there seemed no better route to take to where he was going, not that he knew where that was yet. It was quiet in Berne when he arrived, but not the soft quiet of stars and nightbirds trilling in time with the slow buzz of insects. It was the ominous quiet that precedes a storm, one where the air’s tension is so great that it rests on the skin with a palpable weight. The side of him that was the wolf panted rapidly as the edge of his tongue rested on his parted lips, tasting the air and the night with deliberate caution. The full moon had passed, and he was as safe as he could ever be, but he couldn’t rest with the storm coming.

He could never rest.

The storm came up quickly, as it was wont to do in the mountains. The stars were blotted out by the roiling shapes of clouds that were definable not by what he could see but what he ceased to be able to see. They were an absence filling the night sky like an oil slick on the road. A lightning bolt streaked across the heavens with dizzying speed, and the sharp retort it sent resounding through the valley below was like a tree cracking in half. Thunder broke through the air, the voice of the darkness, deeply primeval as its voice echoed through the mountain passes, answering its own dark question with itself. It seemed to come not so much from the sky as from all around him, and when the rain began in enormous drops, it was as if the sound of the thunder were touching him, drenching him, coming under his clothes to lie against his skin and stain him. In moments, he was as wet as if he had been thrown in the ocean.

Light flickered up ahead, the sort of light that was steady and suggested it came from inside a building. Oz ran towards it, the strength that his lycanthropy gave him coming to the fore as if he were being hounded down the path. It was perhaps two or so miles away, and he ran the distance with an animalistic need to be free not just of the rain, but of the power of the storm that raged around him. Once, a tree only twenty feet from his path exploded into light and flame, the object of a lightning strike, and the air smelled of ozone and embers. The hair on the back of his neck stood up, and he redoubled his efforts, finding himself panting and feeling his eyes turning to their inhuman form.

Abruptly, almost as though he were in a dream, the shack stood in front of him. It wasn’t fancy, not one of the pretty little Tyrolean confections painted with flowers and shutters and gingerbread. It was a simple shelter built to give some protection to benighted travelers, goatherds, and shepherds, but it looked warm and dry. It was also occupied.

Reining his instincts back under control, Oz forced his face to resume its normal shape by meditating as the monks had shown him. In a few moments, he was confident enough in his own control that he could risk knocking on the door and not having whoever was on the other side think he was a demon out of a children’s fairytale come to eat them up. He knocked.

The door opened a crack, and an eye appeared, staring out into the darkness and tempest. The owner of the eye, though, did not speak. Oz stood, dripping on the doorstep, trying to think of the German words to ask to come in, or for that matter French or Italian or Romansch or whatever the person might speak, but the words fled from him. Finally, he simply opened his mouth.

“Please, can I come in?” he asked, his breath ragged.

The man, for it was a man, opened the door wider but did not move from blocking the doorframe. He was much taller than Oz, but then it seemed like almost everyone was. Maybe that was one of the reasons he had never really found Buffy all that intimidating, which was probably why she had always spoke to him as an equal, at least until he screwed up. The man continued to regard him silently, taking in the spectacle of his wet Sunnydale High t-shirt (emblazoned with the words “Where the weak are killed and eaten. Really.”), sopping sweatpants, scarred dufflebag, and the deep blue hair that was plastered to his head.

“I have no intention of inviting you in,” the man eventually said in a cultivated English accent, a very definite double meaning to his words that told Oz at once he knew a lot more than most people. “However, if you are capable of entering on your own, I will not stand in your way.”

When Oz crossed the threshold without incident, the man put away the stake he had been holding behind the door.

“Thanks,” Oz said, looking warily around the room. “It’s really bad out there.”

“Not a fit night out for man nor beast,” the stranger said, his inflection on “beast” just a touch unusual, then indicated a seat next to the hearth. “I suppose you’re hungry?”

“I don’t want to be a bother. I’ve got stuff in my pack,” Oz said, unzipping the duffle and producing a water bottle and a bag of trail mix. “I just need to get out of the storm until it lets up.”

“Of course,” the man said, and Oz caught the man’s gaze flickering to his t-shirt. “I do have some cheese and bread handy, though, if you should like to have a bite. It will simply go to waste if it isn’t eaten, and I’m quite full already.”

“That’s cool. Thanks,” Oz said, taking a bit of cheese off a plate that the man had put on a small table. “The cheese is good here.”

“Yes. Swiss, you know,” Ethan said. “They have a veritable plethora of first rate dairy products. Now, why don’t you tell me why Ripper sent you here, hmm?”

Oz looked up sharply from the food, which had felt almost heavenly on his tongue, and stared at the man.

“Who are you?” he asked, thinking he already knew the answer to the question after he had let slip the nickname Willow had told him about.

“Ethan Rayne, as I presume you already know,” he said smoothly, not appearing upset and yet with a voice that felt like a baited trap, oiled to perfection and just waiting to be set off.

“No, I didn’t, though I do know who you are now,” Oz said.

“Really? Here I was trying to figure out whether you were sent by the Council or by the bloody Initiative,” he began but stopped abruptly as Oz reacted almost as though he’d been struck. “Well, I see I’m not the only one with a dislike for that particular organization.”

“No,” Oz said. “You’re not.”

Ethan still seemed to be sizing him up, finding him somehow lacking as a threat and yet still on his guard. Oz, for his part, tore off another chunk of bread and topped it with a slice of cheese. If there was going to be a confrontation, it would be better not to have it on an empty stomach. Besides, having a rumbling tummy in the middle of a fight would be downright embarrassing.

“Well,” Ethan said, “as you know my name, I suppose it is only fair that I know yours, then?”

Oz considered this for a moment, then decided to take a chance. It had been so long since he’d heard anyone call him by his name that it would almost be worth it to hear it on another human’s lips even if he did wind up cursed with any of the hundreds of spells that depended upon knowing an opponent’s name.

“Oz,” he said, still being careful enough not to give his full name, or really even his true one.

“And where were you off to tonight, Oz? This isn’t the yellow brick road, you know, and the Emerald City isn’t anywhere around,” Ethan said, his eyes just a bit crafty in the firelight.

“Trust me, there isn’t a Baum-based joke I haven’t heard,” he said, though part of him couldn’t help thinking that it was rather funny that he’d turned out to be Toto, in a way, or that he’d really realized there was no place like home. It’s just that in his case he’d returned to Kansas to find the house had blown away, leaving nothing but debris and bittersweet memories behind. “They got old around fourth grade.”

“I suppose so,” Ethan said with a disappointed sigh. “It seems a waste, though, to have such a ripe field for taunting in front of me and find it's been played out before I even got there.”

Oz finally realized what it was about the other man that was so unnerving. Something about him was feline, from the way he curved his fingers gracefully to the watchful gaze. Even the way he sat was catlike, a thin veneer of indolence spread over constant, sharp attention that could spring to action at any moment. To say the least, Oz was a dog person, not a cat person. The air crackled outside, and inside, the air crackled as well.

“Let’s see, then, what shall we talk about?” Ethan asked. “Giles hasn’t asked you to track me down, or at least you don’t appear to be lying about not knowing I was here. It really is quite a coincidence, though, is it not? Are you sure you wouldn’t like to hear about my daring escape from the Initiative?”

“They had you?” Oz asked, looking up, and his eyes lit up with the wolf again briefly.

“Ah, another guest of the fine men and women in lab coats,” Ethan said, purring the words out. “So I wasn’t the first escapee from their attentions.”

“Not even the second,” Oz said. “You know, for big funding, they’re really kind of inept.”

“Mmm,” Ethan agreed. “They were, however, quite adept at various forms of torture, as I recall. I was a mage, of course, and if that wasn’t a trick of the firelight earlier, I should think I’m right in believing you are a werewolf.”

Oz didn’t deny or confirm the guess, but his silence hung in the air.

“And the other one to escape?” Ethan asked.

“A vampire,” Oz said. “Actually, the Sunnydale facility was blown up about a year ago. Everything in there either died or escaped.”

“Both preferable to continued captivity there,” Ethan said, looking into the flames.

“Agreed,” Oz said.

Ethan looked at him as he finished the rest of the cheese and bread with the relish that only a person who has lived off cheap, stale food can find in a simple, decent meal. Oz was aware of being watched, but, even though he didn’t trust Ethan, there wasn’t the prickling sense of impending danger in the air, and he had learned to trust his instincts. The storm was still raging outside, the sort of thunderstorm that can only come in the mountains, but inside there was at least a respite from the turmoil.

“So,” Oz said, after the last bite was finished off, “I’ll bite, if you’ll excuse the pun. How did you escape?”

He figured if his host was going to provide him with a meal, it was only polite to provide him with the ear he so obviously craved.

“I seduced one of the soldier boys, a charming lad by the name of Graham something-or-other. At least, I believe it was Graham. It might have been some other sort of cracker or snack... anyway, I threatened to break the old ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ rule, and lo and behold if there wasn’t a key slipped into my next plate of badly scrambled eggs,” Ethan said with an air of refined bravado. “From there, I was able to hide in a Jeep that was headed back across the desert and into a small town in Arizona, which suddenly found itself shy of a payload delivery. I was able to acquire the services of a coyote, who was very surprised to be taking someone into Mexico rather than out, and voila. I’ve been traveling Europe for the last few months, seeing all the better slums. And you, boy?”

“I had friends. They helped me out,” Oz explained concisely.

“Had?” Ethan said perceptively. “I take it you do not anymore, then?”

“I do,” he said, turning the thought over in his mind. “They’re just there, and I’m here, and ‘there’ and ‘here’ don’t really intersect much anymore.”

“An American philosopher,” Ethan said with a laugh. “A genuine rarity. Well, at any rate, I do believe this calls for a toast. I’ve been saving something for just such an occasion, though it’s a trifle illegal.”

“I’m not really into that stuff,” Oz said. “Always gives me a headache.”

“Ah, this is an entirely different sort of green,” Ethan said, pulling out a battered suitcase from a corner of the room. “This is la fee verte.”

“Absinthe?” Oz asked as Ethan produced a bottle of greenish liquor, along with two glasses and a pair of curiously slotted spoons.

“Even so,” Ethan said. “It was outlawed here, oh, nearly a century ago, though it’s legal most everywhere else. Still, there’s nothing like a kick from the green fairy to say good riddance to bad rubbish. Ever done?”

“Not really,” Oz said, and he couldn’t quite suppress his curiosity.

“I’ve always rather enjoyed it, but then I suppose I’m a bit of a Bohemian at heart,” Ethan said as he poured a quantity of the green absinthe into each glass. Oz had to swallow back a sharp longing when the emerald color of her eyes was shining in front of him for just a moment. “Ripper, now, he was a right little Boho type in the old days. Back then, this was quite illegal, of course, but that was par for the course for our old ramblings. Really, after conjuring Eyghon, everything else seems a bit tame by comparison.”

Oz watched as he procured a pitcher of cold water from near the fire and placed the slotted spoons over the glasses. From inside his pocked he produced a packet of sugar cubes, the kind that every café had wrapped in paper and waiting on tables for coffee and tea. Carefully, he placed one sugar cube on each spoon, then slowly poured the water over the cube, through the spoon, and let it drip almost lethargically into the glass, diluting the liquor. The clear emerald was lost bit by bit, and in its place the drink became an almost ghostly, opaque white with the faintest trace of soft green in it.

“There,” he said, looking pleased with the result. “That’s called the louche, and a fine one it is at that. I’ve been saving this bottle for a special occasional, or at any rate a decent excuse.”

A scent filled the air, an odor that was very hard to place. Not exactly bitter, but not sweet either, it hung close to the glasses like an invisible fog. Still cautious, Oz took the spoon off his glass and lifted it experimentally, peering closely at the pale liquid within.

“It won’t bite, well, not literally,” Ethan said, laughing. “It’s not exactly for the featherweight division, though. Come now, a toast! To the demise of the Initiative, to the sweetness of freedom, and most especially, to home, whatever the bloody hell that is.”

Oz shrugged, then clinked his glass with the other man’s and waited for him to sip first, which he did. Figuring there wasn’t anything in Ethan’s glass that wasn’t in his as well, he decided it was relatively safe and took a quick sip. The taste was odd, unlike anything he’d ever drunk before, though it did remind him in a very weird way of ouzo. There was a vaguely bitter, nearly but not quite licorice-like flavor to it. He wasn’t entirely sure he liked it, but it wasn’t terribly unpleasant either. With another shrug, he sipped again. It was growing on him a bit.

Even after bread and cheese, the drink still was hitting him rather hard. The edges of things were starting to be the slightest bit blurry after only a few sips. Ethan hadn’t been lying; it was fairly strong stuff. After he finished the glass, as Ethan continued chattering on as though he hadn’t seen another human being in a long while, Oz began to nod off. Quicker than Ethan expected, he was sound asleep.

Ethan noticed at once and immediately ransacked Oz’s dufflebag. It produced, as he had thought, not much of value that he could hock: a small amount of food, a few changes of clothes, some cheap jewelry, guitar picks, creased paperback phrase books, a bunch of photos held together with a rubberband, and less than $100 in cash. He pocketed a twenty, then, looking at the measly provisions, sighed and switched it for a ten.

“Ethan, mate, you’re getting soft in your old age,” he said, throwing a considering gaze at Oz. “Not a bad looker, really, for all he appears to be related to a Blue Meanie. There was a time, was a time,” he finished wistfully.

“I’m not actually asleep, you know,” Oz mumbled.

“Really? It was a passable imitation,” Ethan said, raising an eyebrow. “I would have thought when I went into your bag…”

“Not much there to steal, and I suppose I owe you for the lodgings and food, so keep the ten,” Oz said before rolling over and settling in on the floor and really going to sleep.

Morning came. Oz stirred and opened his eyes to see Ethan curled up in an uncomfortable-looking chair, firmly asleep. The absinthe glasses and spoons still rested on the table, and Oz picked them up and smelled them inquisitively. It was something he had caught himself doing more and more since he had become a werewolf. Sometimes he found it disturbing, but the scent of the traces of absinthe was somehow soothing to him. When he put a glass back on the table, it clinked somewhat louder than he expected, and the result was a groan from Ethan.

“Good heavens, boy, do you have to play the drums this early?” he complained, rubbing his head.

“Actually, I play bass,” Oz said, smiling quietly at his joke as Ethan stretched, his bones creaking. “You look a little trashed.”

“You try staying up past two in the morning drinking absinthe when you’re my age and see if you twitter like a robin at dawn’s first light,” he said, working a kink out of his back.

“Yeah, well, you did alright,” Oz said, checking his bag to be sure nothing else was missing. “Storm’s over.”

“I suppose it is at that,” Ethan said, and there was a twinge of regret in his voice. “You’ll be leaving, then?”

“Soon enough,” Oz replied, zipping his bag shut.

He was finding himself oddly reticent to leave. Of course he knew the story of Ethan’s attempt to overthrow Sunnydale using Halloween costumes of all things, as well as his more recent exploit of turning Giles into a Fyarl demon, something Giles himself had reluctantly mentioned in one of his emails, so he wasn’t fool enough to trust the man. Still, though, it had been nice knowing someone who had some of the same experiences, someone who had survived being a government lab rat, someone who was searching for something and didn’t know what it was yet. It was hard to explain those things to anyone who hadn’t experienced them, and that was a really small group of people on the planet. It had been nice, not having to explain.

He stood, his legs just a little rubbery underneath him first thing in the morning, and slung his duffle on his shoulder. He looked over at Ethan, perverse, decadent, smarmy thing that he was, and that same little smile came back. Before he could talk himself out of it with good common sense, he walked the few steps to the other side of the room and kissed him.

Plainly, Ethan had not been expecting this turn of events, but he also didn’t seem to be complaining. Responding quite enthusiastically, yes, but not complaining. Whatever Giles and he had done in their youth must have provided excellent training because the man was a very good kisser. Even though Oz had meant to lead, Ethan quickly took over, using just the right amount of pressure, varying between little sipping kisses on his lower lip and deeper ones where Oz found his mouth filled by the other man’s tongue, lapping at his palate and sliding against his teeth. His lips were softer than he expected, almost like a woman’s, but not quite. Before things got entirely too heated, Oz stepped back, breaking contact. Ethan looked down at him, eyes a bit glazed.

“Thanks,” Oz said, and walked out the door, closing it softly behind him without looking back.

Perhaps he had found a small, shattered remnant of something he had once known on the other side of the globe, dim and distorted, but he knew that was all it had been: a reflection. This wasn’t home. He still didn’t know what home was or if it even existed, but he remembered now that things had once been much worse, and much better, too. Like the cycles of the wolf, ebbing and waxing with the moon, his fortunes would change as well. It was the way things were.

Until then, Oz would remain a wanderer, but not the only one.