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He wipes the dust from the books with a frown. What the old shopkeeper had been thinking, letting things reach a state like this, he could not comprehend. Still, he was here now, and he would take care of them.
It was a way to pass the time, until the wheel of years turned the full century.
This life is a lonely one, and that suits him well, no-one to bother him, no one to intrude in his loneliness, only customers, and the smell of ink and leather covers, sunlight slanting through dusty windows, and a storeroom that he never fully emptied, keeping back one copy of everything for himself.
Yes, this life suits him.
Or, he thought it did, until the day a stray sunbeam waltzes through the door, grinning madly, to announce with galling cheer, "I thought it was you!"
With a sigh he shuts the book, but the sigh changes halfway through to a sound of surprise. "Oz?"
Oz Vessalius grins wider; still no more than a day older than fifteen; still wearing his contractor's empty body.
Still alive.
It wasn't really a surprise, he would realize later, that Oz was still around. Chains did not die easily, and the B-Rabbit, greatest of the great Chains, would go hardest of all.
Yet he had not been in a state that day; so long ago, to really tell if Oz had survived the death of Jabberwock, or the intervening years without Gilbert.
He regretted that. Lottie had truly been out of hand.
He apologizes, and invites Oz for tea in the backroom he lives in, and they speak of this and that, of lost and lonely lives spent searching, spent waiting. They share stories of exotic flowers, of flavorful fruits and of towns long destroyed. They are older than they should be and it shows when they talk with ancient words, heavy stresses and sibilant hisses. They speak of vanished friends and times long gone, they speak of desperate contracts and ancient searches, of finding the sought after one as a woman; a hardship they both know, —though he is beyond mortified to know that Oz saw what he had done to stay near— and of the days when Baskervilles walked the earth, of Jury and betrayal, of possession and of death. They remind one another of the reality of these things, these things which were never widely known.
Together, they remember.
"Aren't you lonely?" Oz asks, and for the first time, Leo knows he is, as old hurt comes yawning up again, and he looks away, stricken.
Oz apologizes, and doesn't mention it again, but the next day he finds himself dragged out of The Lion's Books, treated to a reminder of the fact that his shop is in a city, a reminder of the stale progression of time, and how many things have changed and how little, since their time.
Fewer Chains, for one. Fewer Callings, and fewer children born with the ‘curséd crimson eyes’— fortunate, for there are no Baskervilles left to shield them, and the Jury has withdrawn from range. It knows his face, and the threat he poses, still.
"It is still our time," Oz says, and he can't bring himself to argue, not with the certainty in the Chain's voice, the steel in his eyes.
Golden light covers all the city in the afternoon, and he finds himself buying lunch for the pair of them— quite against his will, of course—, since, as Oz cheerfully points out, he actually has money. (And he cannot help but smile at the knowledge that while he has alternated wandering with working, throughout the long years, Oz has set himself up as guardian deity of a tiny town in a bend in a river in the midst of a tricky forest. No one would have expected that of the Bloodstained Black Rabbit. )
Oz was right. He is lonely. But there is no way to change this, and the two of them cannot long linger together, for they remind one another too much of the past, of those they have lost.
And so they part.
But Oz returns the next year, speaking his name, so long unheard, and the next, until eighteen have gone by, and the wheel of years has completed the round.
He asks Oz once if the other thinks there is really a chance, if they can ever find what they seek, with all of the world to comb, but Oz simply says, with faith in his voice, "Some ties are too deep to be broken."
And now an accord hangs unspoken in the air between them, too precious and fragile to give voice to. They will watch for the other's companions.
Softly, they circle through the years. There's patience enough in their hearts most of the time, but now they quicken with anticipation.
Oz comes to him in grief, once; the grief of having found his friend and lost him again too quickly, and he provides soothing words and sympathy; holding back the bitter feelings of at least you found him until a careless word is less likely to shatter Oz completely. And then the bitterness rises and they scream themselves hoarse at one another in words almost forgotten by the world, in language that has fallen out of use.
Later he apologizes to the books he sent flying at that aggravating blond head, and admits, as he buys replacement cups, that half his ire had been that it was the wrong blond youth, replying with the wrong insults. He lingers as he cleans the splinters of clay, hoping he has not overstepped, and shattered their uneasy camaraderie— bitter though it may be, without it there is nothing.
Oz comes again the next winter, and nothing has changed at all.
Once more they have tea on the first day, speaking of the history they lived in words that betray their origin whenever they speak, were anyone else old enough to know it.
Again Oz drags him out on the second day, and he hangs the closed sign on the door of The Lion's Books while they wander through the streets, marveling at this and that, at how little has changed, how much has changed, and find a place to eat.
As ever, Oz departs on the third day, and the bitter regret goes with him, the memory of grief subsiding, with the reminder gone.
In this way, the years pass silently, ever circling in their ceasless pattern, and one winter he knows he has lost his chance. Oz stays a longer time that year, before departing as he always does, the two of them still unable to bear the other's company for long, yet still brightening the between times with the knowledge that there will be a next time, and a next.
And then, as the wheel circles back to the beginning and time has almost come for Oz to come again, a troupe of performers come to town. Performing the rise and Fall of the Hourglass City. Again.
He ignores them, as is his habit; for it is far from the first time such has happened. He is far too heartsick for hearing the wrong notes, the inaccurate pantomimes of history-made-fable —a history he had lived through, a history everyone else had died in—, even as his customers speak of it to one another, praise it endlessly; and one girl, who has been infatuated with him and his mysteries since she was small, stammers out an invitation that he come with her for a day.
He refuses.
But then Oz comes, and though there is sorrow in his eyes, he holds a secret close as they follow their routine. Tea the first day, and on the second, their wanderings take them to a field, the one taken up by the troupe, and as he is complaining about the inaccuracy, a ripple of notes stills him in mid-breath.
Oz; smiling like the sunbeam he resembles, pulls him, un-resisting, unrelenting, to the musician— the musician who, by the time they are close enough to see— has left off with Statice to begin a melody as familiar as it is foreign, a song precious and lost, a gift that was never his to give, but cherished, unknowing all the same.
As he gapes in disbelief, for though the pattern of gold is familiar he can no longer recall clearly enough to say it is the same, the notes of Lacie are his answer, played clear and sure, every note on key and true.
Some ties are too deep to be broken, says the Oz of memory, and the Oz beside him echoes the words.
And as Elliot sets his flute— well, he supposes, it travels better than most things with strings— down and looks up at him, familiar scowl on an alien face, he knows those words for truth.