A Bouquet of Kisses: Xander/Oz - rated PG, set in BtVS season 2
Happy Valentine's Day! I'm having a lovely one, and I hope you are, too.
Other kisses in the bouqet.
Title: "A Bouquet of Kisses - Xander/Oz" 1/1
Author: flaming muse
Pairings: Xander/Oz
Rating: PG
Spoilers: set during BtVS season two
Note: a kissing fic for Valentine's Day 2005.
Warning: slash
Disclaimers: The characters belong to Joss and various corporate Powers That Be. I make absolutely no profit from playing with them.
Distribution: Please ask.
Feedback makes my muse shake her groove thang!
Late nights were guy time. With Giles snug in his book-filled apartment and the girls heeding more watchful parents or at least overly developed needs to finish their homework or get enough beauty sleep, Xander and Oz were left to their own devices.
They were two young heroes together in a town full of monsters, ready to fight evil wherever it lurked, braced to take on anyone or anything thumbing their noses - or whatever they had to thumb, or tentacle, or claw - at what was good and right...
"... prepared to do battle with demons of the vilest and slimiest sort," Xander continued, slouching in the passenger seat of Oz's van as they drove away from Buffy's house. "Ready to slay a host of vampires with a single stake..."
"Better hope we don't drop it," Oz commented, his eyes on the road.
"Ready to slay a host of vampires with as many stakes as necessary," Xander amended. "Ready to fight evil wherever it - "
"Lurks," Oz finished.
"Right. I already said that. But you get the picture. We are men on a mission."
"As far as I know, it's a mission for mint chocolate chip."
"That's true," Xander agreed, "but it's still a mission. One with potentially dire consequences if we fail."
Oz glanced over at him, his eyebrow quirking upwards a telling fraction of an inch. "Consequences, huh?"
"You should be shaking in your sneakers, my friend. The fate of the world might rest on the procurement of that very dairy product."
"Not to mention the chips."
Xander nodded. "Can't forget the chips. Without the chips you've just got green ice cream that tastes like mouthwash."
"But sweeter."
"Right. Sweet green mouthwash ice cream. Not the stuff that can make the earth tremble."
"But the mint chocolate chip can?" Oz asked, tilting his head thoughtfully. "Could come in handy when I've got a history test."
"Well, maybe not tremble exactly," Xander replied. "But there will be consequences if we don't get any. Maybe big ones."
"Have to admit I'm not seeing it."
"Look, we want mint chocolate chip, right?"
Oz nodded.
"And we're going to keep driving around to all of the 24-hour stores in Sunnydale - and I'm still not sure how they can find that many people with no sense of self-preservation to work in the middle of the night around here - until we find it, right?"
Oz nodded again.
"That means we could be driving all night, and we might not get any sleep at all."
"Well, we could always compromise for a nice cookies-n-cream," Oz said.
Xander raised his finger in warning. "What is this heresy? Compromise? There will be no compromise. Compromise is not in our vocabulary."
"And yet you keep using the word."
"Not - in our - vocabulary."
"Sorry," Oz said. "Lost my head."
"Don't let it happen again," Xander said, his hand falling back into his lap. "Where was I?"
"Not sleeping."
"Right. We could be out all night in search of the glorious ambrosia of frozen mint chocolate chippy goodness. That means by tomorrow night, no matter how much soda we drink, we're going to be too tired to patrol."
"Or bouncing around too much to walk in a straight line," Oz added.
Xander nodded. "Either way, we won't be able to fit into the regular Scooby lifestyle. So Buffy will patrol without us, and when she tries to dispatch whatever evil is afoot she'll be alone."
"With Giles. And Willow."
"And Cordelia," Xander said. "But my point is not with us. We will not be in her secret arsenal of dire demon death-dealing."
"And acute alliteration, apparently," Oz commented.
Xander ignored him. "And that could be the difference between life and death. Between apocalypse and normality. Between kill or be killed. Between demons overrunning the world and - "
"Demons only partially overrunning Sunnydale?"
"Well, that's not exactly where I was - " Xander sat forward in his seat as they pulled into the well-lit parking lot of the Sunnydale Qwik-Mart. "Hey, we're here."
"Let's hope they're able to do their part for the side of good," Oz said, pulling the van into a parking spot and shutting it off.
Xander hopped out of the van and met Oz in front of it. "Think if we explain we can get a discount?"
Oz blinked at him in that expressionless way that always made the hair on the back of Xander's neck stand up and then shrugged. "Doesn't hurt to ask."
The inside of the store was almost blindingly bright with its fluorescent lights reflecting off of polished chrome and white linoleum. The white-haired man behind the counter nodded to them in greeting.
"Hey, Mr. Hoffman," Oz called as they made a bee-line for the row of freezers in the back of the store.
"Good evening, Daniel," Mr. Hoffman called back in an accent that reminded Xander of Arnold Schwarzenegger's, only without all of the muscles getting in the way.
"You know him?" Xander asked in a low voice.
"Never underestimate the importance of being friendly with the people who can come between you and your slurpee," Oz replied gravely. "Also, he bowls with my mother."
The freezers were full of sweet treats, their tempting pictures plastered on their boxes, but Xander and Oz zeroed in immediately on the pints of ice cream. Xander could have sworn that there was almost a choir of angels singing as he reached in to pick up the last two containers of mint chocolate chip.
"Evil is getting its ass kicked tomorrow," Xander announced with a triumphant smile.
"If we can find spoons," Oz added, searching the displays behind them.
Xander rolled his eyes. "We're real men. We don't need spoons to eat ice cream. We can use our hands, or whittle utensils from trees, or kill small animals and use their bones to..." He trailed off as Oz held up a small clear bag filled with plastic spoons. "Or we could use spoons."
"I think the side of good has to be the one with table manners, don't you?"
"I don't know. Have you seen Martha Stewart?"
"Hmm," was Oz's reply, which Xander took to be as a sort of agreement. He noticed that he did not pick up the napkins he had been eyeing.
"Don't you boys have school tomorrow?" Mr. Hoffman asked, looking meaningfully at his watch before ringing up their purchases.
"Yeah. We're taking a study break." Oz handed over a ten dollar bill.
"Just make sure you get enough sleep. You can't learn if you're tired, and you're both growing boys." Mr. Hoffman glanced at their relative heights. "Some more than others, it seems."
"We'll be out like a light in about thirty minutes," Xander said as he picked up his ice cream. "Nothing like a sugar low to send you crashing into the pillows."
Mr. Hoffman made a little grunt of disapproval but didn't comment otherwise as he bent his head to make change. The movement exposed two little crescent-shaped slits behind his ears, and Xander lost the thread of the conversation as he clutched his tub of ice cream to his chest and let Oz talk to the nice man who wasn't a man at all. Or maybe he was part man, but not all man, and that led Xander down an unpleasant train of thought complete with rippling muscles and even more rippling gills.
"Uh... how well do you know him?" Xander asked as soon as the doors to the store swung shut behind them.
"Not well enough to know whether he's a Betty or Veronica kind of guy," Oz said, "but my mom's known him for years. I've always wondered whether he's German or Austrian."
"Austrian? He's a demon. Haven't you noticed the gills?"
"Doesn't mean he's not a demon from Salzburg."
Climbing into his side of the van, Xander considered the wisdom of that statement. "You've got a point."
"Could be from Munich, though," Oz said. "He's got one of those Bavarian hats with a brush in it."
"Huh." Xander looked down at the pint of mint chocolate chip. "So you want to eat this here?"
Oz started up the van. "Thought we'd go someplace more private. Or at least someplace without lights to show we're sitting ducks."
Xander's brain had short-circuited temporarily on the thought of being private, since privacy in his mind was connected to romance, and Oz and romance were two topics he took great pains to avoid linking together for fear of experiencing some of those strange dreams he used to have about Giles, so it took him a few heartbeats to say, "Or parking ducks."
"Pretty much the same thing in this town."
They drove for a couple of minutes before Oz pulled over to the side of the road in a sleepy residential neighborhood. They locked the doors and turned toward each other as they pulled the lids off of their ice cream.
"Ah, yes," Xander said, inhaling deeply through his nose. "Milk, sugar, artificial coloring and flavoring, and just a smattering of preservatives."
Oz extracted two spoons from the bag and handed one to him. "The cornerstones of the American diet."
"It should be its own food group." Xander scooped some of the ice cream out of the container and let it melt slowly on his tongue. It was shockingly cold compared with the balmy night and intensely if artificially flavored. "Mmm-hmm. Daat's de schtuff," he mumbled around the ice cream in his mouth.
Oz's response was to smile faintly and to eat another spoonful.
The van was silent apart from their little exhalations of pleasure as they consumed their dessert. Having spent the greater part of the evening working up an appetite dusting vampires - or at least flailing nearby while Buffy did the dusting - it didn't take them long to eat it all.
"That was good. Food of the gods," Xander said when they had scraped the last of the ice cream from their containers.
"Nice of them to share."
Xander leaned back in his seat and licked his lips, since he had no napkin. "The girls don't know what they're missing. That was way better than sleeping."
Watching his mouth with eyes even more intense than usual, Oz took a second to answer. "I've always been fond of napping."
"Who isn't?" Xander asked. "I mean, you've got the fun of wacky dreams and the added bonus of slacking off from doing something important. But this is different. This is them going home while the night's still young."
Oz shrugged, which Xander wasn't sure was him agreeing or disagreeing. Maybe it was both; Oz was complicated like that.
"But that's okay," Xander continued, "because then we get guy time. Guy time is good. Just the two of us, against the world." As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he froze, suddenly fearful that what was a highlight of his day might just be another mellow moment in Oz's life.
"Ready to fight evil wherever it lurks," was Oz's reply, and, yeah, that was definitely a smile on his lips.
Xander breathed a quiet sigh of relief. "Right."
"Hey, Xander?"
"Yeah?"
"C'mere," Oz said, leaning toward him.
Xander did, and without warning suddenly found himself being kissed. Those smiling lips were on his, teasing them open, and then a warm tongue was slipping inside of his mouth for a brief dance along his.
Oz pulled back as suddenly as he had moved in, and Xander was left goggling at him.
"Uh... Er..." Xander's brain was apparently only capable of coming up with nonsensical monosyllables, and he desperately tried to get it back in gear.
Oz looked at him thoughtfully, his head cocked slightly to the side. "I wondered what you tasted like."
"Oh... uh..."
"I didn't think you'd mind."
"No. I mean, right." Xander swallowed. "So... uh... what do I taste like?" he asked in something of a manly squeak. At least he really hoped it was manly.
Oz leaned forward again, and this time Xander moved into the kiss, his hands clutching the cuffs of his jacket so that he wouldn't reach out and touch that spiky, currently orange hair. You didn't just touch another guy's hair, not even when you were licking ice cream from his lips, but it was so tempting, especially when Oz sighed into the kiss and deepened it, the tip of his tongue teasing Xander's soft palate before withdrawing again.
Xander blinked, trying to clear his head, and wished he still had the ice cream container to cover up the part of him that was very sure of what it wanted, despite the fact that his brain was in spasm.
Oz was quiet for a moment, running his tongue between his lips as though he were savoring the taste. "Mint chocolate chip," he said finally. "Have to remember next time to try before you've had something to eat."
"Next time?" Okay, that was definitely a squeak.
Watching him calmly, Oz said, "Yeah. That all right with you?"
Not trusting himself to speak with the concept of there being a next time rattling around in his head, Xander nodded. Oz's tongue darted out to lick the corner of his mouth, and Xander felt even more blood rush southward. A large part of him wanted to lean over and kiss that same spot, but he was still too stunned to move.
Seemingly as unruffled as always, Oz started up the van and eased it back onto the road. "Didn't Buffy say we were patrolling again tomorrow?"
"Yeah," Xander managed to reply in a weak voice. "All Scoobies on board for vampire slayage and demon ass-kicking."
"Good."
Oz's knowing smile made Xander's stomach flip, and he prayed to whatever gods were listening that evil would stay home the next night so that guy time could start early.
~end~
Other kisses in the bouqet.
Title: "A Bouquet of Kisses - Xander/Oz" 1/1
Author: flaming muse
Pairings: Xander/Oz
Rating: PG
Spoilers: set during BtVS season two
Note: a kissing fic for Valentine's Day 2005.
Warning: slash
Disclaimers: The characters belong to Joss and various corporate Powers That Be. I make absolutely no profit from playing with them.
Distribution: Please ask.
Feedback makes my muse shake her groove thang!
Late nights were guy time. With Giles snug in his book-filled apartment and the girls heeding more watchful parents or at least overly developed needs to finish their homework or get enough beauty sleep, Xander and Oz were left to their own devices.
They were two young heroes together in a town full of monsters, ready to fight evil wherever it lurked, braced to take on anyone or anything thumbing their noses - or whatever they had to thumb, or tentacle, or claw - at what was good and right...
"... prepared to do battle with demons of the vilest and slimiest sort," Xander continued, slouching in the passenger seat of Oz's van as they drove away from Buffy's house. "Ready to slay a host of vampires with a single stake..."
"Better hope we don't drop it," Oz commented, his eyes on the road.
"Ready to slay a host of vampires with as many stakes as necessary," Xander amended. "Ready to fight evil wherever it - "
"Lurks," Oz finished.
"Right. I already said that. But you get the picture. We are men on a mission."
"As far as I know, it's a mission for mint chocolate chip."
"That's true," Xander agreed, "but it's still a mission. One with potentially dire consequences if we fail."
Oz glanced over at him, his eyebrow quirking upwards a telling fraction of an inch. "Consequences, huh?"
"You should be shaking in your sneakers, my friend. The fate of the world might rest on the procurement of that very dairy product."
"Not to mention the chips."
Xander nodded. "Can't forget the chips. Without the chips you've just got green ice cream that tastes like mouthwash."
"But sweeter."
"Right. Sweet green mouthwash ice cream. Not the stuff that can make the earth tremble."
"But the mint chocolate chip can?" Oz asked, tilting his head thoughtfully. "Could come in handy when I've got a history test."
"Well, maybe not tremble exactly," Xander replied. "But there will be consequences if we don't get any. Maybe big ones."
"Have to admit I'm not seeing it."
"Look, we want mint chocolate chip, right?"
Oz nodded.
"And we're going to keep driving around to all of the 24-hour stores in Sunnydale - and I'm still not sure how they can find that many people with no sense of self-preservation to work in the middle of the night around here - until we find it, right?"
Oz nodded again.
"That means we could be driving all night, and we might not get any sleep at all."
"Well, we could always compromise for a nice cookies-n-cream," Oz said.
Xander raised his finger in warning. "What is this heresy? Compromise? There will be no compromise. Compromise is not in our vocabulary."
"And yet you keep using the word."
"Not - in our - vocabulary."
"Sorry," Oz said. "Lost my head."
"Don't let it happen again," Xander said, his hand falling back into his lap. "Where was I?"
"Not sleeping."
"Right. We could be out all night in search of the glorious ambrosia of frozen mint chocolate chippy goodness. That means by tomorrow night, no matter how much soda we drink, we're going to be too tired to patrol."
"Or bouncing around too much to walk in a straight line," Oz added.
Xander nodded. "Either way, we won't be able to fit into the regular Scooby lifestyle. So Buffy will patrol without us, and when she tries to dispatch whatever evil is afoot she'll be alone."
"With Giles. And Willow."
"And Cordelia," Xander said. "But my point is not with us. We will not be in her secret arsenal of dire demon death-dealing."
"And acute alliteration, apparently," Oz commented.
Xander ignored him. "And that could be the difference between life and death. Between apocalypse and normality. Between kill or be killed. Between demons overrunning the world and - "
"Demons only partially overrunning Sunnydale?"
"Well, that's not exactly where I was - " Xander sat forward in his seat as they pulled into the well-lit parking lot of the Sunnydale Qwik-Mart. "Hey, we're here."
"Let's hope they're able to do their part for the side of good," Oz said, pulling the van into a parking spot and shutting it off.
Xander hopped out of the van and met Oz in front of it. "Think if we explain we can get a discount?"
Oz blinked at him in that expressionless way that always made the hair on the back of Xander's neck stand up and then shrugged. "Doesn't hurt to ask."
The inside of the store was almost blindingly bright with its fluorescent lights reflecting off of polished chrome and white linoleum. The white-haired man behind the counter nodded to them in greeting.
"Hey, Mr. Hoffman," Oz called as they made a bee-line for the row of freezers in the back of the store.
"Good evening, Daniel," Mr. Hoffman called back in an accent that reminded Xander of Arnold Schwarzenegger's, only without all of the muscles getting in the way.
"You know him?" Xander asked in a low voice.
"Never underestimate the importance of being friendly with the people who can come between you and your slurpee," Oz replied gravely. "Also, he bowls with my mother."
The freezers were full of sweet treats, their tempting pictures plastered on their boxes, but Xander and Oz zeroed in immediately on the pints of ice cream. Xander could have sworn that there was almost a choir of angels singing as he reached in to pick up the last two containers of mint chocolate chip.
"Evil is getting its ass kicked tomorrow," Xander announced with a triumphant smile.
"If we can find spoons," Oz added, searching the displays behind them.
Xander rolled his eyes. "We're real men. We don't need spoons to eat ice cream. We can use our hands, or whittle utensils from trees, or kill small animals and use their bones to..." He trailed off as Oz held up a small clear bag filled with plastic spoons. "Or we could use spoons."
"I think the side of good has to be the one with table manners, don't you?"
"I don't know. Have you seen Martha Stewart?"
"Hmm," was Oz's reply, which Xander took to be as a sort of agreement. He noticed that he did not pick up the napkins he had been eyeing.
"Don't you boys have school tomorrow?" Mr. Hoffman asked, looking meaningfully at his watch before ringing up their purchases.
"Yeah. We're taking a study break." Oz handed over a ten dollar bill.
"Just make sure you get enough sleep. You can't learn if you're tired, and you're both growing boys." Mr. Hoffman glanced at their relative heights. "Some more than others, it seems."
"We'll be out like a light in about thirty minutes," Xander said as he picked up his ice cream. "Nothing like a sugar low to send you crashing into the pillows."
Mr. Hoffman made a little grunt of disapproval but didn't comment otherwise as he bent his head to make change. The movement exposed two little crescent-shaped slits behind his ears, and Xander lost the thread of the conversation as he clutched his tub of ice cream to his chest and let Oz talk to the nice man who wasn't a man at all. Or maybe he was part man, but not all man, and that led Xander down an unpleasant train of thought complete with rippling muscles and even more rippling gills.
"Uh... how well do you know him?" Xander asked as soon as the doors to the store swung shut behind them.
"Not well enough to know whether he's a Betty or Veronica kind of guy," Oz said, "but my mom's known him for years. I've always wondered whether he's German or Austrian."
"Austrian? He's a demon. Haven't you noticed the gills?"
"Doesn't mean he's not a demon from Salzburg."
Climbing into his side of the van, Xander considered the wisdom of that statement. "You've got a point."
"Could be from Munich, though," Oz said. "He's got one of those Bavarian hats with a brush in it."
"Huh." Xander looked down at the pint of mint chocolate chip. "So you want to eat this here?"
Oz started up the van. "Thought we'd go someplace more private. Or at least someplace without lights to show we're sitting ducks."
Xander's brain had short-circuited temporarily on the thought of being private, since privacy in his mind was connected to romance, and Oz and romance were two topics he took great pains to avoid linking together for fear of experiencing some of those strange dreams he used to have about Giles, so it took him a few heartbeats to say, "Or parking ducks."
"Pretty much the same thing in this town."
They drove for a couple of minutes before Oz pulled over to the side of the road in a sleepy residential neighborhood. They locked the doors and turned toward each other as they pulled the lids off of their ice cream.
"Ah, yes," Xander said, inhaling deeply through his nose. "Milk, sugar, artificial coloring and flavoring, and just a smattering of preservatives."
Oz extracted two spoons from the bag and handed one to him. "The cornerstones of the American diet."
"It should be its own food group." Xander scooped some of the ice cream out of the container and let it melt slowly on his tongue. It was shockingly cold compared with the balmy night and intensely if artificially flavored. "Mmm-hmm. Daat's de schtuff," he mumbled around the ice cream in his mouth.
Oz's response was to smile faintly and to eat another spoonful.
The van was silent apart from their little exhalations of pleasure as they consumed their dessert. Having spent the greater part of the evening working up an appetite dusting vampires - or at least flailing nearby while Buffy did the dusting - it didn't take them long to eat it all.
"That was good. Food of the gods," Xander said when they had scraped the last of the ice cream from their containers.
"Nice of them to share."
Xander leaned back in his seat and licked his lips, since he had no napkin. "The girls don't know what they're missing. That was way better than sleeping."
Watching his mouth with eyes even more intense than usual, Oz took a second to answer. "I've always been fond of napping."
"Who isn't?" Xander asked. "I mean, you've got the fun of wacky dreams and the added bonus of slacking off from doing something important. But this is different. This is them going home while the night's still young."
Oz shrugged, which Xander wasn't sure was him agreeing or disagreeing. Maybe it was both; Oz was complicated like that.
"But that's okay," Xander continued, "because then we get guy time. Guy time is good. Just the two of us, against the world." As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he froze, suddenly fearful that what was a highlight of his day might just be another mellow moment in Oz's life.
"Ready to fight evil wherever it lurks," was Oz's reply, and, yeah, that was definitely a smile on his lips.
Xander breathed a quiet sigh of relief. "Right."
"Hey, Xander?"
"Yeah?"
"C'mere," Oz said, leaning toward him.
Xander did, and without warning suddenly found himself being kissed. Those smiling lips were on his, teasing them open, and then a warm tongue was slipping inside of his mouth for a brief dance along his.
Oz pulled back as suddenly as he had moved in, and Xander was left goggling at him.
"Uh... Er..." Xander's brain was apparently only capable of coming up with nonsensical monosyllables, and he desperately tried to get it back in gear.
Oz looked at him thoughtfully, his head cocked slightly to the side. "I wondered what you tasted like."
"Oh... uh..."
"I didn't think you'd mind."
"No. I mean, right." Xander swallowed. "So... uh... what do I taste like?" he asked in something of a manly squeak. At least he really hoped it was manly.
Oz leaned forward again, and this time Xander moved into the kiss, his hands clutching the cuffs of his jacket so that he wouldn't reach out and touch that spiky, currently orange hair. You didn't just touch another guy's hair, not even when you were licking ice cream from his lips, but it was so tempting, especially when Oz sighed into the kiss and deepened it, the tip of his tongue teasing Xander's soft palate before withdrawing again.
Xander blinked, trying to clear his head, and wished he still had the ice cream container to cover up the part of him that was very sure of what it wanted, despite the fact that his brain was in spasm.
Oz was quiet for a moment, running his tongue between his lips as though he were savoring the taste. "Mint chocolate chip," he said finally. "Have to remember next time to try before you've had something to eat."
"Next time?" Okay, that was definitely a squeak.
Watching him calmly, Oz said, "Yeah. That all right with you?"
Not trusting himself to speak with the concept of there being a next time rattling around in his head, Xander nodded. Oz's tongue darted out to lick the corner of his mouth, and Xander felt even more blood rush southward. A large part of him wanted to lean over and kiss that same spot, but he was still too stunned to move.
Seemingly as unruffled as always, Oz started up the van and eased it back onto the road. "Didn't Buffy say we were patrolling again tomorrow?"
"Yeah," Xander managed to reply in a weak voice. "All Scoobies on board for vampire slayage and demon ass-kicking."
"Good."
Oz's knowing smile made Xander's stomach flip, and he prayed to whatever gods were listening that evil would stay home the next night so that guy time could start early.
~end~