snick_backup | FIC: Oz, After the Apocalypse

Title: Oz, After the Apocalypse
Spoilers / Words: post-series / 2200 words
Character: Oz
Rating: PG

A/N: It is my birthday! I don't usually manage to write fic for other people's birthdays, so I'm stealing

penny_lane_42's idea of posting fic on my birthday, instead. It is my gift to the world, on my birthday! Except, were I writing a gift to the world, one might expect a bit more of a crowd-pleaser, say, Seraphverse fluff. Instead we have highly experimental fic about Oz and doom and apocalypse and winter (title subject to finding something better - feel free to suggest), because that was what was feasible to finish while also working the first week of my new job. So, uh, enjoy! :p

Also, thank you so much everyone for all the lovely birthday wishes. And everyone should go read the fic

angearia wrote for me, Solid Through, which is lovely Faith&Giles (or possibly Faith/Giles).

~~~~~

The world ended. Oz didn’t.

~*~*~

The wolf likes the cold. It’s the first thing the wolf has ever liked that Oz is okay with, so he gives way. Nose pointed ever north, he trots through long brisk nights – bright or dark, it doesn’t matter anymore; whatever has loosed demons and ice on the world has loosed the wolf, too. He doesn’t mind like he would have once. There’s no one to be human for, now.

~*~*~

A long time ago – ages ago, he thinks, as the Cretaceous was to the Triassic – Xander joked about Oz the mild-mannered turning into a wolf. Just like Bruce Banner and the Hulk, Xander said. Then he laughed at the idea of Oz and the Hulk. Then he apologized for short jokes, or possibly for the fact that Oz was short, and the moment was lost.

Oz still thinks about it, though. The comparison is truer now than it was then. Then, he and the man in the moon still had an agreement.

~*~*~

The wolf is lonely. He’s a social animal, as Veruca told him once, though he’s had years of practice in not thinking about her. He could join a pack now, he thinks, and it wouldn’t matter. There’s barely any damage left to do.

It isn’t hope that stops him. He’s not sure why he doesn’t; twice he’s found fresh werewolf sign.

Maybe it’s simply that he’s never been a social animal before. It seems pointless to start now.

~*~*~

He was in Tegucigalpa when it happened. In the middle of negotiating a ride to Guatemala City, he saw the clouds roll in over the mountains, quick and dark and certain. He ducked under a pulpería awning as the rain pelted down. In less than an hour, the radio reported mudslides and washed-out roads. Lightning shocked the sky, bolt after bolt, in colors Oz hadn’t seen since the aurora borealis, and then not even close to this bright. The thunderclaps felt like earthquakes.

Oz slept the night on an American ex-pat’s tile floor. It was flat and dry, which was better than some nights. That night, he didn’t sleep at all. The full moon was two weeks away, but the wolf was restless anyway. He remembered the numbing shock of the Initiative’s electric prods. What he felt was a little like that, but all over, a low-level buzz. Beneath, the wolf whined. The sound of the rain against the roof sharpened, a crashing din. He pulled out of his sleeping bag and looked out the window slats. Hailstones the size of his fists bounced off the neighbor’s roof, and as he watched the street lamp went black.

The wolf was clawing at the door, and the door was giving way.

His hands shook so badly he could barely unlock the deadbolt. He scrambled out the doorway onto the front patio, feeling the familiar creeping ache. Between him and the dirt residential street stood the security fence that surrounded the whole house. He didn’t have the key for the gate, and it was too late to wake the American. He hoisted himself up the cast iron spikes and over the razor wire.

Later, he barely remembered hitting the ground before the wolf took over.

~*~*~

It’s blood, spattered scarlet against the snow. He hasn’t fed in days. He noses the scent and follows it.

~*~*~

It took him two months to cross the border into New Mexico. The wolf had receded after that first night, mostly, so he traveled as a human. This was an interesting exercise in survival politics. He was still American and that was still worth something. Funny; you’d think when the enemy had fangs and scales and spit acid, which human was which wouldn’t matter. Now, it seemed to matter more. Trust was parleyed, something earned, sometimes bought. Occasionally feigned, although he was luckier than most in judging who would share a fire versus who would throw him as ransom to the first attacking demon. He wasn’t admitting yet what gave him the edge.

There was a girl. Rachel. They took shelter behind the bars of the same grand ranch house, one night in Juarez, and she shared a cupful of rice with him. Three days later they joined five others – a father, daughter, two brothers younger than Oz, and a matron whose eyes said she’d seen too much – and crossed the border.

She reminded him of Willow, a little. It was something about her smile, the way her eyes glinted above her straight white teeth. Also, she shouldered a rifle like Willow spoke a spell: effortlessly. Competence turned him on, it turned out.

They were a week north of Las Cruces when the second storm hit. He could feel it coming this time; the wolf howled and twitched just beneath his skin. It wouldn’t take much to bring it out: an unexpected cry or the scent of blood on his tongue.

He had to go, he told Rachel. He had to go. Find shelter and don’t come out. Take care of the others. He turned from her and he ran like Loki with the whole Norse pantheon on his tail. He ran until the first huge greasy raindrops fell, and then he fell, too, and howled.

When he came to in the full clean sunshine of morning, he was lying outside a cinderblock building with a bullet hole in his shoulder. It was a half hour or so before Rachel opened the door with antiseptic and bandages. She said nothing as she cleaned the wound and bound it, and that was wrong, because like Willow she was never silent.

The others, he asked, numb with panic.

Two left, she said. The matron and the little girl. But it had been demons, she said, not him.

Neither of them say, But it could have been.

When she finished, she left him there and returned with his clothes and his pack. He couldn’t stay, she said.

He knew. He took his things and he went.

~*~*~

He’s not sure what he’s chasing after. He can’t place the scent, but it’s a scent that means pleasure and food and not much pain. And the blood is falling more often now, calling him on.

~*~*~

The thing about the wolf is, with so much of it bleeding into so much of him, it means a lot of him is bleeding back into the wolf. First it was glints of memory, things he’d smelled and chased. Then he could make nudges – a suggestion, here and there, that humans were more trouble hunting than they were worth.

He thought: maybe he could be useful. A really vicious guard dog with occasional taste for cheeseburger. Like Bruce Banner again, maybe – Xander said for a while there, once, Banner could control the Hulk a little.

It didn’t matter. Within weeks of the second storm, humanity was gone. New-born demons slaughtered them, or the vampires fell on them in swarms, or werewolf packs dined well. All of those things; Oz doesn’t know. He only knows he hasn’t seen a human since. And that he doesn’t count.

~*~*~

He likes these hills. They’re thick with evergreens, pine and fir that mat the ground with needle straw and nip at his nose with their sharpness. There are deer here, too, and rabbits. Now their tracks criss-cross the snow, and there’s something about that that he likes, even as a wolf, even when he can track them better by scent than any human alive could do with their eyes.

Also, he likes that they’re too cold and, maybe, too far north for demons. When it comes to demons, he and the wolf are in full agreement.

The hills were part of Washington State, he thinks. Could be Canada. The wolf measures distance differently than he would walking. The wolf doesn’t remember everything Oz used to remember, either. He knows he’s losing things: concepts and memories too complex for any brain but his own primate one, which he doesn’t spend much time in anymore.

He would have cared about this before.

The wind has been blowing with him, but it shifts now. The fresh scent on the chill northerly air pauses him. He sniffs again. There are two winding around one another, inextricable: one bitter and rancid, enough to drag a snarl from him before he even thinks. The other is warm and rich and distinct, the one that means food.

He was trotting before; he’s loping now. It’s only half a mile or so. It isn’t distance, but air movement that’s kept the scents from him this long.

He howls, and doesn’t think too hard about the joy behind it, or whose joy it is, or why.

~*~*~

He slows just outside a clearing. They’re both out there in the open, food and demon: a girl – a girl, he registers, and knows from the wolf just how fresh her blood is and how much meat on her bones – a girl no bigger than him and a demon the size of a grizzly bear, but spinier and more drippy. It has her backed against a cliff face on the far side of the clearing. She holds a blade of some kind. Heedless of her torn shoulder, she whips the blade at the demon. Slow, thick fluid flows from its side. Then the demon snatches at the blade, and it snaps.

The wolf charges.

It is glory, clawing past spines to gouge eyes. It is joy, snapping jaws on underbelly and tearing flesh loose. The blood splashes on throat, bitter, loathsome, and it means bite harder, end its flowing, stop the existence of this foul thing.

It is pain as spines are driven into paws, through tender skin. It is rage.

It is dead. The demon is dead. It lies fallen in a great rancid heap leaking its foul dark fluid upon the snow. We want nothing of it.

There is food. It is wounded and not moving, whimpering in pitiful cries that lift the hunger ever higher. Its flesh will tear delicious and blood-rich between our teeth.

But we don’t. We whine and pace in front of the thing, but we go no nearer. This is important. We don't know why, but it is. And yet we are hungry, and our wounds pain us more than they ought. They burn. We whine again and lie down because our paw will not let us stand.

Scent. Demon. The food doesn’t know it yet, but we know it: blood-drinker.

Protect the food. Not our food, but... Protect the food. We turn on our belly and rise on trembling legs, and we growl with all the force in our chest.

The blood-drinker pauses just inside the clearing. We snarl again. It is still as only dead things are still, and then in an instant it is in front of us, gnarled demon face near enough to bite, but we can’t anymore.

It’s handling us now, pawing our wounds, and we whimper. It’s barking at us, too, and we know these barks, we know them...

“Got you good, didn’t it, Dog-Boy?”

The vampire rises and walks past. He drops to the girl’s side and speaks softly to her. He doesn’t eat her. She’s safe.

Now he’s back. The wolf can’t smell him anymore. He can barely even see the furrowed outline and the fangs.

“Don’t suppose you can change, can you? Would be a lot easier hauling you that way. Gotta patch you up a mite, and there’s some people I expect’ll want to see you.”

They’re more words than Oz has heard in months. He has to think about them, channel them through the wolf brain until they make sense. And then, because they’re the first words he’s heard in months that he didn’t speak himself, even if they are coming from a vampire – who calmed the girl instead of eating her – he tries to do what they ask.

He isn’t sure he can. It’s been so long since he tried. But he thinks back to Tibet and chanting and the acrid, welcome scent of herbs, and through the poisonous burning he feels the old bone-deep agony.

He’s lying on the snow, he’s hundreds of miles from his last pair of pants, and there’s a vampire leaning over him. Also, he’s pretty sure he’s dying. He closes his eyes. Vaguely he feels himself wrapped in cloth and swung over a shoulder. Then the jolting begins, and he passes out in self-defense.

He doesn’t wake until he hears a sound he hasn’t even missed: a door closing shut. He’s laid flat. There are voices again. One of them is speaking to him, and he pulls his eyes open.

“Oz. Oh my god, Oz.” Her hair is black instead of red and from the look of her eyes she’s beyond high, but her voice is the same, and she’s crying.

Oh, he thinks. This is what he’s been doing all this time. Coming home.

Finis