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Oz has learned to hate silence.
At one point, it was his best friend. He was alone with just the music in his head, the heavy chords and Devon's voice, growling away in his cranium. And his thoughts. Poetry, philosophy, music, and Oz's own somewhat transcendent musings somehow managed to interact and blend, become a part of each other, and that was the noise he lived with. Everything else around him was quiet.
And then he met Willow, whose goal in life was to fill all those little silences that exist within conversations. Her tongue was constantly moving, rippling over her teeth and emitting these beautiful little sounds, lilts and breaths and words that began to overtake his ears, forcing him away from his internalized world. And he began to love it, began to feel the need for her and her voice and those hastily chosen words like an addict needing a fix. He kept messages from his answering machine and listened to them when he had to be away from her, memorizing the stops and starts and fluctuations within the music of her voice.
He knew, of course, that what she said was not always what she was thinking. He had assumed before, because the rambling streams of conciousness that she oralized were so strange, so...Willowy, so straight from her own head that she must have been speaking her every thought, every dream. But there were things that she kept in her head, things that Buffy heard while afflicted with telepathy that he had never heard before. And he was jealous, something he had never been before.
So this was how she felt around him. It made him want to speak more, just to see if she would too. He wanted to hear and touch every emotion that she felt, he wanted to taste each word as it rolled off her tongue. When she was speaking he used to nuzzle her neck, feel her vocal cords rumble underneath his mouth as she finished her thought, laughing by the time she was finished. He used to lick her mouth as she spoke, letting the vibrations from her tongue travel onto his own, making them both smile.
When he went away, it was to complete silence. He didn't talk to himself, he didn't bring his tapes and tapes of 60's rock and roll; he left the Doors at home with Willow and just lived on the road. By the time he finally spoke to someone again, his voice was harsh from disuse, cracking on every other word. He babbled, he must have sounded manic to the guy at the garage who had finally interrupted him and said yes, he would work on the van if he could have the bass. He hadn't played it in weeks, but it had still felt like he was letting go of the only thing that still made noise. That still spoke to him, like Willow.
But he got used to it, and he even began to like it again in India. When the monks told him to sit still and just listen to his thoughts for hours, it was remarkably easy. He began to interact with the silence again, began to love it.
And then he had braced himself for warmth, for sound, for Willow. He had prepared himself for her voice and her smile and for every sound that she emitted, remembering the moans, the growls; the sweet noises that she made in their most intimate moments together.
He returned to silence. He felt it in the air, when he walked into Giles' living room, but being so accustomed to it, he didn't see it as something wrong. No one was silent when he spoke to them; the words fell so easily from Xander's lips: "There's no new guy in her life."
No new guy. Yeah, no new guy, but a new girl, who seemed as friendly with silence as Oz himself was. But he could see it in her eyes, she was growing as addicted to Willow and her silence-crushing speech as Oz had been. As Oz still was. So crazy for Willow and her beautiful, beautiful voice that he nearly ripped out the other girl's vocal cords.
And then he was in that white place. And he couldn't speak, even if he'd wanted to. He was almost grateful. They had taken that choice away from him; he couldn't scream or cry or even move. He was just alone in his head, alone again with his thoughts.
But then he spoke. They had rescued him and he had spoken to her, told her only a few of the thoughts within his head. There were things he didn't say. Like, How could you. Like, I hate her. Like, I wanted to kill her...or myself. Instead he just made sure that he was happy. He wouldn't let her do what he had wanted her to do for so long; he wouldn't let her tell him everything that she was thinking, feeling. He cut her off, unable to bear hearing those words from her, and then he left.
Now he is alone on the road again, and it is silent. He had brought tapes with him this time, but he threw them out the car window before he even made it out of Sunnydale. He is in the desert, and everything here is flat and hot and silent.
He plans to embrace it again. He plans to immerse himself in silence, become so much a part of it that no sound can touch him. That way, if he ever again hears a sound like Willow's beautiful voice, it won't be able to pull him out and hurt him again. It won't be able to wrap itself around his soul and pull so tightly that it drains the life out of him.
He will become a part of the silence, or it will kill him. Either/or.
