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It was a sunny day, and warm, which meant that if anyone noticed that Oz Vessalius had gone missing, nobody would think anything of it. After all, Oz loved to run off and get into as much trouble as humanly possible, and a warm sunny day with a few pressing responsibilities waiting for him back at home, which meant that Oz was practically guaranteed to vanish at some point, and if that vanishing just happened to include sneaking onto a bus and riding it for two hours before getting off, well, that was life sometimes..
It wasn’t that Oz was typically in the habit of ignoring his responsibilities. He was typically dutiful and studious, and his mischievous streak rarely went unchecked to the point that there were actual casualties or even witnesses outside of close family members and staff who were paid far too much to care about his pranks, but these responsibilities were more of the “be presented to society as the perfect Vessalius heir” type, and that was all well and good, but Oz wasn’t looking forward to having to navigate society, and all its different rules and expectations. He hadn’t even managed to figure out who his father wanted to be, though he’d been able to shape himself pretty well so far for Gilbert and Uncle Oscar and Ada. How much harder would it be to become the right sort of person for everyone in the world he was supposed to interact with?
Oz hadn’t voiced any of these worries, of course. They had only recently formed into words from a nebulous unhappiness, and he was fully aware of how spoiled he would sound if he complained about any of this. Identities were luxuries for children who were wanted, and for those people who didn’t have ridiculous amounts of responsibility waiting for them as they grew up, and Oz knew it.
But he still had time to try and run from that, even if he knew that he’d go right back home right when he was expected anyway, and it was a beautiful day, and nobody would be surprised if they noticed he was missing. Gil would be sad, probably, but he’d get over it, and anyway (Oz thought) it was good to let Gil have some time to himself, too. After all, Gilbert was worth everything to Oz, and it wouldn’t do to let him feel the same crushing weight of other’s expectations that Oz lived under all the time. Gilbert deserved better—deserved happiness and an identity of his own. Time apart was probably how he could get that, and so it was fine that Oz was leaving him alone on this beautiful day. Normal, even.
The town Oz was headed to today was quaint and gorgeous, but large enough that if Oz hid his face and stayed quiet enough he wouldn’t be recognized (mainly because he’d never actually visited the town as himself before, but it still counted), and he was able to make his way through the streets with little trouble. He stopped at the flower shop, which wasn’t open and wouldn’t be until the next morning, and made quick work of the lock on the door before leaving three times the cost of a bouquet on the counter and making off with a single red rose, locking the door behind him. Oz was not a fan of thievery, but he knew that the person he was going to see would have approved more of him stealing her flowers than him buying any, and anyway, he had left money behind for the shop’s troubles.
It did not take Oz very long after that to make his way to the cemetery on the outskirts of town. The gate was closed, and he didn’t bother checking to see whether or not it was locked before hopping the fence, making sure the rose he’d brought stayed entirely safe and undamaged as he did so. This was technically illegal—really, everything Oz had done today was—but here and now, today, he had run away from his other responsibilities, and he was not going to be Oz Vessalius. Today, he had snuck out and broken into a shop and stolen a flower and snuck into a graveyard: today, he was his mother’s son.
Her grave was in the back corner of the cemetery, out of sight, plain and inconspicuous in a way that Oz had been certain for years meant some form of trouble for somebody, if only because, back when he knew his mother, plain and inconspicuous typically meant that she was either getting bored enough to begin to raise up some hell or was camouflaging hell already raised. In the years since Oz had found this grave, though, he hadn’t been able to find any traps or the like in it—but that didn’t mean he couldn’t hope that someday he would.
“Hi, Lacie,” Oz said, crouching down in front of the grave and placing the rose down on top of it, right next to the last rose he’d brought here, now withered and rotted away. “It’s been a while. I hope you’ve been doing okay.” He swallowed. “I’m doing okay too. Uncle Oscar took Gil and I fishing the other day. He fell in the lake. I think you would have thought that was funny. And we both caught fish.” Oz grinned. “I actually caught Gil with my fishhook when he fell in. Like, I got it in the back of his shirt and started reeling him in and everything. He was my prize catch! But Uncle Oscar wouldn’t let me hang him up on my wall when we got home. I know I say this every time,” he added, “but I think you’d really like Gil. And Uncle Oscar. And Ada. I think…I like to think you’d be glad that they have me, now.”
There was no response from the grave, of course. There was no response at all: the cemetery was as empty as it had been every other time Oz had broken in here—broken in, without a word to anyone, because when he went to visit this place, he could be his mother’s son, an identity he had lost when she died and would never ever reclaim, because nobody wanted the hellion Lacie had been trying to raise. Oz was quiet anyway, though, waiting for a response that would never come.
After a little bit he picked up the conversation again, talking a little bit about Gilbert, a little bit about Ada, a little bit about his uncle, and when the sun set he left the cemetery through the gate and returned home as polite and perfectly as he could be, his mother’s son shed like an old skin once more.