Oz is nodding and kissing the pad of Giles's thumb but he can't seem to move. Can't even taste Giles there, even after the kisses, even this close. Every time he swallows, there's a hint of blood from where he's been gnawing the inside of his cheek all day, and he wonders if that's safe, if he could infect Giles without even biting him.
"Bed's good, yeah." Things are at their best and their worst up there, where there's nowhere to hide. He used to think of the loft - he still does, really - as Giles's fort, his refuge from all the demands and duties that run like rusting girders through him, slumping his posture and bowing his shoulders. Where they're closer than any other time, naked and unconscious.
Gripping the back of the couch to push himself to his feet, Oz remembers the first time he grabbed it, the first night, when Giles's mouth and hands were all over him, seeking and prying and discovering, when he felt like his life had just started.
Even if he's from Sunnydale, where you're not supposed to hope or have much in the way of expectations for your life, he still thinks it sucks that it's over this soon.
His hand in Giles's bigger one, Oz follows him up the stairs.
Giles wonders how many times, in the last year, they've been here in the bedroom undressing. A hundred, maybe, give or take. He ought to have kept a diary in code or shorthand or something, recorded every moment he spent with Oz, because now he'll never know for certain. His memory's so accurate with official things, with research and training. It's only his life he forgets.
They undress each other, kissing sometimes, just like they usually do. But it all feels flat, abstracted, like a film. It's fading before Giles' eyes, disappearing under his touch, turning into memory even as it happens.
In bed, they settle into the same old comfortable position-Oz's head on Giles' shoulder, his arm across Giles' chest and one leg tucked between Giles' legs. Their bodies know what to do. Habit, memory in the muscles.
"I love you," he says one more time. Maybe the last time; there'll be no call for it tomorrow. It's habit, saying it, but something more too, and the relief of feeling makes him shiver. "My Oz." He kisses Oz's hair the way he always does, pulls the quilt up tighter around his shoulders, tries to let the familiar weight of Oz's body seem solid and real.
The streetlight has usually been on for hours by the time they reach the bed to sleep, but as Oz lies here, eyes open, trying not to dig his fingers into Giles's skin, it only just now starts to flicker on. He gets the weird, hot flutter in the center of his chest, kind of like the time he got pneumonia in Wyoming after trying to run away, at the sound of Giles's words. He can't remember when Giles started calling him my Oz, what the first time sounded like, whether it was deliberate or just slipped out.
He wants to respond. Wants to say, in return, my Giles, but he doesn't know how. Doesn't know if it's the truth, or if it is, for how long. Because loving somebody isn't just feeling one way, it's having the other person take you inside, let you love them, return it somehow. So whatever he feels for Giles, it depends on Giles if it counts as love.
"Always," he says instead. Because he'll always have Giles inside him, always let him love, even if that only lasts until tomorrow morning. He kisses the underside of Giles's jaw. "Always."
They're never made promises, although Giles has thought them sometimes. They've never planned for a future beyond the next month or so, beyond a long Saturday drive or a concert in Los Angeles. Giles hasn't asked Oz to finally make a decision about college; he hasn't asked Oz to get a passport; he's closed his lips on words like always, closed them until they ache.
Oz doesn't mean to be cruel. Giles knows that, repeats it to himself as he smiles and kisses Oz and says nothing. Oz isn't cruel. The cruelty's in something else, in time, in the rotation of the earth that will surely bring tomorrow, bring sunrise, but will never bring always.
The cruelty's in this desperate tiredness that makes Giles want to sleep away their last hours, and in the bone-deep ache that makes him think he'll never sleep again. Oz can't seem to get comfortable either; he shifts, fidgets, stretches, massages his own shoulder with a sigh. "Turn over and I'll rub your back," Giles says at last, rolling onto his side.
At first Giles just touches him, palming light, soothing arcs up and down his back, but Oz's body doesn't loosen at all. So Giles kneels up and puts his weight behind it. "Shh," he says when he hits a tight spot and Oz hisses in pain. "Try and relax."
So much tension. This isn't tiredness or nerves, this is grief held close, misery locked in the body. As Giles pushes down hard, presses the rigidity out, he wishes he could work out Oz's sorrow, too. Let it ooze away, let things be right again.
Oz bites his hand when Giles corkscrews a knuckle into the center of one of the knots beneath his shoulderblade. Gnaws a little before reminding himself to try and breathe deeply. Regularly. Exhale the pain and inhale the comfort.
Every touch, however, seems to make him tighter and tenser. It's not Giles, it's just - it feels as if relaxation is hovering, just in front of him, and it's too scary to contemplate. Relaxing means letting go, cancelling the watch he keeps on himself, unwinding and loosening and hoping. He grinds his teeth and clenches his fists. Digs them into the mattress until he realizes, too late as always, that he doesn't want to spend the entire night resisting Giles, who's just trying to be nice.
"It's okay," he says and rolls onto his back. Tugs Giles's arm over his chest and folds his own arm over it. "Probably need a morphine drip and a big Russian masseuse at this point."
Giles's smile is small in the dark, like he's trying to feel something that just isn't there. Oz runs his fingertips down the side of his face, over his jaw, and waits, nearly holding his breath, until Giles closes his eyes. He doesn't remember closing his own.
But when they open, his mind is empty and the light in the loft is watery and gray. Oz wants to sleep more, endlessly, never rise. And he wants to escape, just as surely and sharply. Giles is still asleep; Oz is too much of a coward to look at him longer than it takes to learn that.
He slips out of bed and creeps downstairs to the shower.
For hours of darkness and quiet, Giles holds Oz and listens to him breathe. Not until he wakes to a dull, cloudy dawn does he realize he was asleep and dreaming. This, he knows, is what his dreams will be from now on. Oz asleep or sitting on his lap or washing salad greens for dinner--lost ordinariness turned into the heart's desire. A fairy tale in reverse.
He rolls over, reaches for Oz, and Oz isn't there. The bed's empty, the sheets are cold, and Giles is shivering, freezing, dying. Knees curled up to his chest, arm stretched over the space where Oz should be. But it's tomorrow, and Oz is gone.
It takes a long time for the faint noises downstairs to register as footsteps. Then the teakettle whistles and the sound pours over Giles like steam, scalding him with relief. Oz is still here. For now.
Once he stops shaking, Giles pulls on yesterday's clothes and goes downstairs. Oz is sitting at the breakfast bar, drinking tea out of his Spare an Animal mug. He doesn't like tea.
There's a second mug set out for him, beside Oz. Giles settles on the stool, pours himself some tea, blows on the surface, takes a burning sip. "Good morning," he says, which is the stupidest thing he could possibly say. Except that it's not, because next he says, "Did you sleep well?"
Maybe he'll say something about the weather, next. Something to fill up the silence, hold back the time.
After his shower, Oz held his new/old green shirt in his hands for a long time. He couldn't seem to put it on, but he couldn't put it down either. He has a couple spare t-shirts in his bag, but instead he slid a shirt of Giles's out of the hamper and put that on. Huge, billowy, slightly stale-smelling.
Oz sips his tea, then spits it back out when it burns his tongue. "Morning." He poured in half of Giles's sugar, but the tea still tastes bitter and too hot and he's never going to understand how Giles can drink it, let alone claim to like it.
"Huh?" he asks when he realizes there was something else. Everything is - slightly rigid. Like he's encased in ice, transparent and gleaming, but he can't move, can't hear. "Oh, sleep. Not really."
When does tomorrow start, anyway? If it was a place, there'd be roadsigns and border guards.
"I'm not really hungry," he says, buying a couple more chips and slivers of time. "But I could make you something."
When he finally lets himself look at Giles, it's worse than Oz expected. Sleepworn, mussed and rumpled, the lenses of his glasses smeared with fingerprints, Giles is beautiful. It hurts to look, so Oz doesn't let himself blink.
Oz is staring up at him, wide-eyed and pale, waiting. Biting his lip and tearing a piece of paper towel into shreds. Giles wants--needs--to pull Oz into his arms, kiss him, whisper nonsense about love and hope and how everything's going to be all right, they're going to find their way to the happy ending after all. And although there's not a word of it he wouldn't mean, it would all be a lie. It's not what Oz wants, not what he needs. Oz's happy ending can't be the same as Giles', because Oz isn't happy with him anymore.
Giles could delay a little longer, set Oz to making pancakes and so give himself another hour or two. But the pain that's throbbing down between Giles' spine and belly is getting worse by the minute. "No," he says. "Thank you. But I'm not hungry either."
He lays his hand over Oz's, stilling the fingers before they can roll another strip of paper into a ball. "Oz, I-" His voice cracks, and he swallows and starts again. "I know something's wrong. I think . . . I think that you're not happy. I think maybe you want to, to go."
He wants to shut his eyes, but that would be selfish. So he blinks once, slowly, and tries not to hope that Oz will tell him he's mistaken.
His hand turns itself over, pressing palm against Giles's palm, curling fingers through Giles's fingers. Oz feels it all happen and thinks of anesthesia, scalpels, medical experiments. How a rabbit's heart can still be kept beating after it's removed from the rabbit.
Giles's voice is jagged, like ice is clinging to him, too, catching in his throat. There are little drops of wet on his lashes after he blinks.
"No. Yes. I -" Oz squeezes Giles's hand because it's warm and home and everything he can't have any more and it burns. "Have to go. Not happy, but that's -"
That's not the point. It hasn't been the point since he and Jordy wrestled that morning.
"Not your fault, not you," he says. "Just have to go."
It was sunny that morning, another Saturday, and they were watching WWF. Oz cheated and started tickling the poor kid and Jordy flailed, shouted, bit.
"I'm sorry, 'cause -" His throat hurts and his chest is caving in, so slowly he feels every rip and crack. "My fault and I'm sorry."
Giles's hand weighs a ton. It doesn't matter; the claws could still sink in and Oz could yank him over and feast on his throat in half a second.
Giles is clutching Oz's hand, squeezing so hard he can almost feel the bones grind, and he remembers every film he's ever seen where the wounded man begs for the coup de grace. Somehow he got it all wrong, thought that when the knife came and opened his throat it would be the end. A flash of agony and silence. But there's no silence, no peace, he's ripped open, guts torn and spine broken, bleeding and weakening and not dying. He's not going to die, because people don't die for love. They bleed and they scream but they don't get to die.
"If that's what-" Broken voice, voice like a battered old fence, pleas behind it straining and pushing to get through. Voice like a broken bone, white shards and scarlet pulp. "What you need, then-"
Makes himself let go of Oz's hand, makes himself stand up, because Oz is looking at him and he can't bear it. So beautiful, so small and so innocent, dark circles under his eyes and damp hair falling in his face, and how is it that he's tearing Giles open and leaving him to suffer? Oz is wiping his eyes on his sleeve, hugging himself the way he did last night, and Giles hates him for looking so sad. And then love comes back like a knife, like electrodes, and Giles wants to beg his forgiveness, beg for mercy.
"Oz-" and Giles stretches out an arm to him, begging for a moment's respite, for a instant's morphine before he has to go on not dying.
Giles's hand is huge and bright, shimmering with heat and motion and life, like a balloon or flock of geese, hovering. Right there in front of Oz's eyes.
When it closes around Oz's own hand, it dwarfs it, pulls him to his feet, stumbling, off the stool, and Oz falls against him and the tears are hot like oil on his cold face.
"Have to go, have to go," and his arm wraps around Giles's waist and he could bite him, then run away, come back later and they could be together and share the cage and it wouldn't be so cold. Blood runs fast and thunderous around Giles's heart, right under Oz's cheek, runs out arteries and in through veins, and everything's so warm and alive.
Words like shards of icicles, after they fall and shatter, mix with pebbles and dirt, scraping past his lips and the litany shifts and grind until he's half-chewing on Giles's shirt button, clutching his hand and his waist and groaning.
"Love you so much, love you, love you -"
Giles's breath rattles, knife over ice, wheezing, and Oz finally looks up at him.
Giles is wrong again. There's no ease in this, no comfort in Oz's tight grip or his shuddering body or the muttered words that sound horribly like love. Red twisted face streaming tears, desperate agonized eyes on his, and he knows that Oz, too, is waiting for the knife. Needing the amputation, the stroke across the jugular, the clean merciful cut. And Giles doesn't want to see him cry, see him hurt. Not now when it's too late, when the words have been said and Oz has to go.
"I know," he says, and kisses Oz's face, wet and ugly with crying. The salt stings his lips. He should let Oz go now, but there's one more thing to say, and he has to say it while they're still touching. While they still can touch. "If you need me, ever. To talk about, about anything. This doesn't . . . I . . . I c-care about you. Always."
It's too tight, this last hug; he can't breathe. He steps back out of it, away from Oz, and he still can't breathe. The air's turned corrosive, his lungs are raw and empty and straining, and he wraps his arms over his chest to hold back the choking coughs.
Giles bent and hacking, shaking, face turned away: Before Oz turns, that's all he sees, huge, large as the screen at a drive-in. He starts to reach for Giles's shoulder, and he's tiny, and maybe Giles wrenches away or maybe the tears are blurring what he can see or maybe both, but he doesn't manage to touch him. He feels even smaller and more transparent than ever. Just a little chip of ice scraped off the windshield.
"Always love you," Oz says, turning, picking up the knapsack that seems to weigh a hundred pounds. Now that he can't see Giles, isn't anywhere near that warmth, all his skin feels rigid and hard, death masks and dioramas, skeletons and natural history.
He's left the apartment a hundred times, and it's felt like a million, bag on his shoulder, trying not to feel. It doesn't matter. Somehow he makes it from the bar to the front door and then outside, but his legs are ice and he doesn't know how he's moving.
As he heads for home, eyes on the sidewalk and icicles on his face, scraping his mouth and throat, Oz knows he doesn't deserve anything, least of all what Giles said.
He might as well have eaten Giles alive. At least then he'd be warm, then there'd be something in his stomach. He's vomiting into someone's hedge, branches poking his eyes and cheeks, and all that's coming up is tea and bile, sour and hot and bitter.
Giles can't breathe, but he can hear. Hears Oz say love and always, and then hears the door shut, and if he could find the breath he might almost laugh at how long always lasts. But the air's black and thick, full of coal dust and acid, coating his lungs with gritty filth. Poison smog like mustard gas, and he's bent double trying to haul in air, empty and gasping and somehow heavy with sediment, with pollution. So heavy his knees weaken and he's on the floor, curled and wheezing.
Crying, he can cry now that Oz isn't here to see it, cry himself raw. He's been wanting to cry for days, weeks, and now he can cry, has to cry, can't stop, and it doesn't help a bit. More acid, more poison, burning him from the inside, scorching his eyes and throat and face.
Some time passes. The light falls a little differently, and Giles gets up. He walks around the flat, wanders it like he's never been here before. Every so often he wipes his wet face. He'll remember, eventually, how to stop crying.
He keeps seeing things that belong to Oz. The mug on the bar. In the kitchen, the pie he baked for yesterday that they never got around to eating. Oz's guitar lies on the coffee table, but Giles can't look at it. Can't see it yet, or think about how he's going to return it.
On the bathroom floor there's Oz's green shirt, with Giles' cuff links still attached. He picks it up, and he knows it's going to smell of Oz, but he doesn't bring it to his face. Not yet. He doesn't want to waste that, it's too precious.
His lungs still hurt, and he's never been so tired. He thinks he might go up and lie down, but he only gets as far as the stairs. Sits on the bottom step, with Oz's shirt in one hand, and wipes his face again.
When he finally hits his bed, Oz can't cry. He can barely move, and he definitely can't sleep. All he can do is think and hear and remember - Giles, love, and kisses and care, tears and leaking, bubbling snot and wheezing breaths and the grip of his strong, beautiful hand and *Giles* - none of which he wants to happen. He's too open, too freshly raw, mud tracks freezing over, and he wants time to go away.
*Oz* wants to go away. Not permanently, nothing like death or travel. Just wants some space, wants a thin black curtain to drop like a guillotine blade between him and the world. Just for a while, just long enough for everything to fade a little. Fade, dim, blur, just fucking stop being so sharp and bright and full of ice.
He takes two Tylenol-3s and washes them down with a juice-glass full of Kahlua before climbing back into bed with a joint and another glass of alcohol.
The sight of Giles is carved on the inside of his eyelids, in capillaries and blood. Red scratches against the dark, glowing and feverish. Giles crying, turning away, and it's something like a premonition.
Oz watches him until the middle of the night. This is what he's done, and it's not even the worst of it. Giles is strong and brave and he'll still go to work Monday morning, still stammer at Buffy, still be obsessed with killing evil things. But inside he'll be sick and empty and Oz did that, and maybe it's even worse than being killed. At least you get to stop hurting when you're dead.
"Bed's good, yeah." Things are at their best and their worst up there, where there's nowhere to hide. He used to think of the loft - he still does, really - as Giles's fort, his refuge from all the demands and duties that run like rusting girders through him, slumping his posture and bowing his shoulders. Where they're closer than any other time, naked and unconscious.
Gripping the back of the couch to push himself to his feet, Oz remembers the first time he grabbed it, the first night, when Giles's mouth and hands were all over him, seeking and prying and discovering, when he felt like his life had just started.
Even if he's from Sunnydale, where you're not supposed to hope or have much in the way of expectations for your life, he still thinks it sucks that it's over this soon.
His hand in Giles's bigger one, Oz follows him up the stairs.
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They undress each other, kissing sometimes, just like they usually do. But it all feels flat, abstracted, like a film. It's fading before Giles' eyes, disappearing under his touch, turning into memory even as it happens.
In bed, they settle into the same old comfortable position-Oz's head on Giles' shoulder, his arm across Giles' chest and one leg tucked between Giles' legs. Their bodies know what to do. Habit, memory in the muscles.
"I love you," he says one more time. Maybe the last time; there'll be no call for it tomorrow. It's habit, saying it, but something more too, and the relief of feeling makes him shiver. "My Oz." He kisses Oz's hair the way he always does, pulls the quilt up tighter around his shoulders, tries to let the familiar weight of Oz's body seem solid and real.
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He wants to respond. Wants to say, in return, my Giles, but he doesn't know how. Doesn't know if it's the truth, or if it is, for how long. Because loving somebody isn't just feeling one way, it's having the other person take you inside, let you love them, return it somehow. So whatever he feels for Giles, it depends on Giles if it counts as love.
"Always," he says instead. Because he'll always have Giles inside him, always let him love, even if that only lasts until tomorrow morning. He kisses the underside of Giles's jaw. "Always."
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Oz doesn't mean to be cruel. Giles knows that, repeats it to himself as he smiles and kisses Oz and says nothing. Oz isn't cruel. The cruelty's in something else, in time, in the rotation of the earth that will surely bring tomorrow, bring sunrise, but will never bring always.
The cruelty's in this desperate tiredness that makes Giles want to sleep away their last hours, and in the bone-deep ache that makes him think he'll never sleep again. Oz can't seem to get comfortable either; he shifts, fidgets, stretches, massages his own shoulder with a sigh. "Turn over and I'll rub your back," Giles says at last, rolling onto his side.
At first Giles just touches him, palming light, soothing arcs up and down his back, but Oz's body doesn't loosen at all. So Giles kneels up and puts his weight behind it. "Shh," he says when he hits a tight spot and Oz hisses in pain. "Try and relax."
So much tension. This isn't tiredness or nerves, this is grief held close, misery locked in the body. As Giles pushes down hard, presses the rigidity out, he wishes he could work out Oz's sorrow, too. Let it ooze away, let things be right again.
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Every touch, however, seems to make him tighter and tenser. It's not Giles, it's just - it feels as if relaxation is hovering, just in front of him, and it's too scary to contemplate. Relaxing means letting go, cancelling the watch he keeps on himself, unwinding and loosening and hoping. He grinds his teeth and clenches his fists. Digs them into the mattress until he realizes, too late as always, that he doesn't want to spend the entire night resisting Giles, who's just trying to be nice.
"It's okay," he says and rolls onto his back. Tugs Giles's arm over his chest and folds his own arm over it. "Probably need a morphine drip and a big Russian masseuse at this point."
Giles's smile is small in the dark, like he's trying to feel something that just isn't there. Oz runs his fingertips down the side of his face, over his jaw, and waits, nearly holding his breath, until Giles closes his eyes. He doesn't remember closing his own.
But when they open, his mind is empty and the light in the loft is watery and gray. Oz wants to sleep more, endlessly, never rise. And he wants to escape, just as surely and sharply. Giles is still asleep; Oz is too much of a coward to look at him longer than it takes to learn that.
He slips out of bed and creeps downstairs to the shower.
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He rolls over, reaches for Oz, and Oz isn't there. The bed's empty, the sheets are cold, and Giles is shivering, freezing, dying. Knees curled up to his chest, arm stretched over the space where Oz should be. But it's tomorrow, and Oz is gone.
It takes a long time for the faint noises downstairs to register as footsteps. Then the teakettle whistles and the sound pours over Giles like steam, scalding him with relief. Oz is still here. For now.
Once he stops shaking, Giles pulls on yesterday's clothes and goes downstairs. Oz is sitting at the breakfast bar, drinking tea out of his Spare an Animal mug. He doesn't like tea.
There's a second mug set out for him, beside Oz. Giles settles on the stool, pours himself some tea, blows on the surface, takes a burning sip. "Good morning," he says, which is the stupidest thing he could possibly say. Except that it's not, because next he says, "Did you sleep well?"
Maybe he'll say something about the weather, next. Something to fill up the silence, hold back the time.
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Oz sips his tea, then spits it back out when it burns his tongue. "Morning." He poured in half of Giles's sugar, but the tea still tastes bitter and too hot and he's never going to understand how Giles can drink it, let alone claim to like it.
"Huh?" he asks when he realizes there was something else. Everything is - slightly rigid. Like he's encased in ice, transparent and gleaming, but he can't move, can't hear. "Oh, sleep. Not really."
When does tomorrow start, anyway? If it was a place, there'd be roadsigns and border guards.
"I'm not really hungry," he says, buying a couple more chips and slivers of time. "But I could make you something."
When he finally lets himself look at Giles, it's worse than Oz expected. Sleepworn, mussed and rumpled, the lenses of his glasses smeared with fingerprints, Giles is beautiful. It hurts to look, so Oz doesn't let himself blink.
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Giles could delay a little longer, set Oz to making pancakes and so give himself another hour or two. But the pain that's throbbing down between Giles' spine and belly is getting worse by the minute. "No," he says. "Thank you. But I'm not hungry either."
He lays his hand over Oz's, stilling the fingers before they can roll another strip of paper into a ball. "Oz, I-" His voice cracks, and he swallows and starts again. "I know something's wrong. I think . . . I think that you're not happy. I think maybe you want to, to go."
He wants to shut his eyes, but that would be selfish. So he blinks once, slowly, and tries not to hope that Oz will tell him he's mistaken.
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Giles's voice is jagged, like ice is clinging to him, too, catching in his throat. There are little drops of wet on his lashes after he blinks.
"No. Yes. I -" Oz squeezes Giles's hand because it's warm and home and everything he can't have any more and it burns. "Have to go. Not happy, but that's -"
That's not the point. It hasn't been the point since he and Jordy wrestled that morning.
"Not your fault, not you," he says. "Just have to go."
It was sunny that morning, another Saturday, and they were watching WWF. Oz cheated and started tickling the poor kid and Jordy flailed, shouted, bit.
"I'm sorry, 'cause -" His throat hurts and his chest is caving in, so slowly he feels every rip and crack. "My fault and I'm sorry."
Giles's hand weighs a ton. It doesn't matter; the claws could still sink in and Oz could yank him over and feast on his throat in half a second.
"Just have to go."
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"If that's what-" Broken voice, voice like a battered old fence, pleas behind it straining and pushing to get through. Voice like a broken bone, white shards and scarlet pulp. "What you need, then-"
Makes himself let go of Oz's hand, makes himself stand up, because Oz is looking at him and he can't bear it. So beautiful, so small and so innocent, dark circles under his eyes and damp hair falling in his face, and how is it that he's tearing Giles open and leaving him to suffer? Oz is wiping his eyes on his sleeve, hugging himself the way he did last night, and Giles hates him for looking so sad. And then love comes back like a knife, like electrodes, and Giles wants to beg his forgiveness, beg for mercy.
"Oz-" and Giles stretches out an arm to him, begging for a moment's respite, for a instant's morphine before he has to go on not dying.
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When it closes around Oz's own hand, it dwarfs it, pulls him to his feet, stumbling, off the stool, and Oz falls against him and the tears are hot like oil on his cold face.
"Have to go, have to go," and his arm wraps around Giles's waist and he could bite him, then run away, come back later and they could be together and share the cage and it wouldn't be so cold. Blood runs fast and thunderous around Giles's heart, right under Oz's cheek, runs out arteries and in through veins, and everything's so warm and alive.
Words like shards of icicles, after they fall and shatter, mix with pebbles and dirt, scraping past his lips and the litany shifts and grind until he's half-chewing on Giles's shirt button, clutching his hand and his waist and groaning.
"Love you so much, love you, love you -"
Giles's breath rattles, knife over ice, wheezing, and Oz finally looks up at him.
"I'm sorry. So sorry. I can't -"
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"I know," he says, and kisses Oz's face, wet and ugly with crying. The salt stings his lips. He should let Oz go now, but there's one more thing to say, and he has to say it while they're still touching. While they still can touch. "If you need me, ever. To talk about, about anything. This doesn't . . . I . . . I c-care about you. Always."
It's too tight, this last hug; he can't breathe. He steps back out of it, away from Oz, and he still can't breathe. The air's turned corrosive, his lungs are raw and empty and straining, and he wraps his arms over his chest to hold back the choking coughs.
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"Always love you," Oz says, turning, picking up the knapsack that seems to weigh a hundred pounds. Now that he can't see Giles, isn't anywhere near that warmth, all his skin feels rigid and hard, death masks and dioramas, skeletons and natural history.
He's left the apartment a hundred times, and it's felt like a million, bag on his shoulder, trying not to feel. It doesn't matter. Somehow he makes it from the bar to the front door and then outside, but his legs are ice and he doesn't know how he's moving.
As he heads for home, eyes on the sidewalk and icicles on his face, scraping his mouth and throat, Oz knows he doesn't deserve anything, least of all what Giles said.
He might as well have eaten Giles alive. At least then he'd be warm, then there'd be something in his stomach. He's vomiting into someone's hedge, branches poking his eyes and cheeks, and all that's coming up is tea and bile, sour and hot and bitter.
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Crying, he can cry now that Oz isn't here to see it, cry himself raw. He's been wanting to cry for days, weeks, and now he can cry, has to cry, can't stop, and it doesn't help a bit. More acid, more poison, burning him from the inside, scorching his eyes and throat and face.
Some time passes. The light falls a little differently, and Giles gets up. He walks around the flat, wanders it like he's never been here before. Every so often he wipes his wet face. He'll remember, eventually, how to stop crying.
He keeps seeing things that belong to Oz. The mug on the bar. In the kitchen, the pie he baked for yesterday that they never got around to eating. Oz's guitar lies on the coffee table, but Giles can't look at it. Can't see it yet, or think about how he's going to return it.
On the bathroom floor there's Oz's green shirt, with Giles' cuff links still attached. He picks it up, and he knows it's going to smell of Oz, but he doesn't bring it to his face. Not yet. He doesn't want to waste that, it's too precious.
His lungs still hurt, and he's never been so tired. He thinks he might go up and lie down, but he only gets as far as the stairs. Sits on the bottom step, with Oz's shirt in one hand, and wipes his face again.
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*Oz* wants to go away. Not permanently, nothing like death or travel. Just wants some space, wants a thin black curtain to drop like a guillotine blade between him and the world. Just for a while, just long enough for everything to fade a little. Fade, dim, blur, just fucking stop being so sharp and bright and full of ice.
He takes two Tylenol-3s and washes them down with a juice-glass full of Kahlua before climbing back into bed with a joint and another glass of alcohol.
The sight of Giles is carved on the inside of his eyelids, in capillaries and blood. Red scratches against the dark, glowing and feverish. Giles crying, turning away, and it's something like a premonition.
Oz watches him until the middle of the night. This is what he's done, and it's not even the worst of it. Giles is strong and brave and he'll still go to work Monday morning, still stammer at Buffy, still be obsessed with killing evil things. But inside he'll be sick and empty and Oz did that, and maybe it's even worse than being killed. At least you get to stop hurting when you're dead.
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