Giles stays in the shower until the water goes tepid and then cold. First he washes his hair twice, scraping fingernails over his itching scalp, rubbing the shampoo in. Then he scrubs himself several times with the expensive scented soap he found in the cupboard when he moved back in. Olivia left the soap for him. When he told her he was coming back, she had the flat cleaned ("lorryloads of dust, Rupert, and we won't talk about the nest of mice in the bedroom cupboard"), got his old furniture out of storage, stocked the place with food and toiletries, and even left a vase of irises on the kitchen table. She came round to see him the day after he arrived, and he supposes he must have thanked her. He took her out for a meal, and they talked quite a lot. Those things were easier, then, before he got so tired.
Before he started drinking quite so much.
Remembering whiskey makes his mouth pucker with dry yearning. But whiskey, or at least the quantity of whiskey he's been swallowing down every night, is part of the wintry, hibernating world he made for himself. With Oz here, he can't stay in that world. Not unless he wants to take Oz with him.
The thought brings back some of Giles' nausea, and he tilts his face up to the cold water, lets it flow over him until he starts to shiver. Then he finally gets out, towels off, brushes his teeth again, and ruins two razor blades shaving off a week's growth of stubble. He cuts himself near the right ear, and it takes a long time for the bleeding to stop. But he looks a bit better for shaving, and even feels better. After he showers or shaves or goes out, he always feels better; it's just that finding the energy is so difficult.
He'd like to change into cleaner clothes than the ones he put on an hour ago. They touched his dirty skin, and Oz might be able to smell it. But if he doesn't put them on, he'll have to go out in a towel. Oz will see him like that, half-naked and weary and forty-seven years old. So Giles puts on a lot of deodorant and gets dressed.
Oz isn't in the kitchen, and for a moment Giles' breath catches in panic, but he's only moved to the sitting room. His hair is wet, his skin is reddened, he's wearing a different shirt, and when Giles sits down he can smell the acrid chemical tang of scouring powder. "Oz, what did you . . ." He stops, because he knows what Oz did, although he doesn't know why.
Even after Buffy died, Giles worried about Oz. So many terrible things could have happened to him, and Giles has imagined every one. Whatever has happened, it can't be one of the most terrible, because Oz is still alive. But it was bad enough that he's scrubbed half his skin off with Ajax.
Two cripples, and Giles wonders if they'll help each other hobble, or pull each other down.
Now that he's clean, he can touch Oz without much fear. He lays a hand on Oz's cheek, rough with stubble and residual grit. Slowly, through shifts so tiny Giles is only half-aware of them, they turn and settle into a nervous embrace. Loose at first, and then it tightens, and Giles trembles when Oz leans against him, tucks his head under Giles' chin. "Oz," he says, and then he's not sure what to say. It's too soon to talk about the past, about why Oz left or why he's back or what happened in between. Finally, Giles says, "I'm glad you're here." Only after he's said it is he sure it's true.
"So'm I," Oz says. Here is one of those weird words, the kind he likes a lot, that makes no sense except in context. It has to point to something, can't mean anything without already being in the world. Right now, here is not necessarily England, London, even Giles's apartment. It is the close hold of Giles's arms, the rise of his chest, the insistent thrum of his pulse in his throat.
Against Giles, Oz always felt like sunlight or wind, something almost invisible and definitely weightless, spread over and touching the land. Giles as earth and terra firma, solid but never impenetrable, strong and always welcoming. He's dreamed of this, waking dreams and sleeping ones, the scent of Giles - cotton, paper, deep secret aquifers - rising up through him, around him, giving him some kind of shape. He's woken up more times than he count in just this position, on his side with his arm curled up, palm curving, head tipped down, recreating Giles and the shape his body made.
He knew, even before everything went to hell and he sped up the process, that it was a dream. That Giles isn't something firm and eternal and strong, that he's just a man with as many petty quirks and random oddities as anyone else, and, further, that he loved *that*, loved the man much more than the metaphor, the consolation of strength and wisdom.
Oz didn't need a Watcher.
"You're bleeding," he says, tilting his head a little. It was hard to tell through the shifting layers of chemical scents - shaving cream, soap, deodorant - but he thought he'd sniffed something deeper. Richer, organic, human. Something like home, if that word had any meaning any more. Giles turns his head, shows him the razor-scrape, stippled pale skin and tiny pricks of still-welling blood. Oz touches the curve of Giles's jawbone, traces a circle, dream-bandage, around the cut, then leans in and kisses it.
Lightly, but Giles stiffens underneath him and Oz murmurs something, nonsense, reassurance, low soothing sounds, and kisses the blood again. These were the other dreams, stark arctic white and flat endless black, taste of Giles's blood stronger and surer than any scotch or K or acid. Shaken inside-out, not hallucinatory or mindaltering but instead clarifying and simplifying. Necessary, the route inside to Giles, to where he really is, who he really can be. Oz kisses a line down the dip of Giles's jaw, over the small divot in his chin, and upward, to tense dry lips.
Just a kiss, he's trying to say but he doesn't want to move his mouth away far enough to speak. Palm rubbing slow circles over Giles's shoulder and slow brush of lips on lips. Giles, kissing, faint reassurance of blood, and streaming through it all the urgent confounding exhilaration of having gotten here at all, at last, overdue and potentially unwelcome.
He's kissing Oz. It feels unlikely, confusing, a defiance of all the laws of history and science. Time's rolling backwards, frogs and flowers rain from the sky, angels with bloodied wings and flaming swords wander the streets, and Giles is kissing Oz. He slips one hand into Oz's wet hair, wraps his other arm as tightly as he can around Oz's waist, and tries not to be afraid.
Close to, the bleach-and-perfume smell of scouring powder is almost chokingly strong. It covers the unnameable scent of Oz's skin, even the sourness of travel and old sweat. The primal, memory-stirring familiarity of him is gone, and Giles has to keep opening his eyes to be sure. We're all animals, at bottom. We're all wolves, thinking with our noses, the simple truth of odors bypassing the rational brain. Giles doesn't want to imagine what drove Oz to do this, to strip away this connection. Then he wonders if Oz can smell him anymore under his armor of cleanliness, if he too has thrown away something they needed.
Oz's lips are rough and a little sticky with Giles' blood. Maybe there should be horror in that, in the appetite for blood and in all the kinds of contamination that blood can carry, but instead Giles is grateful. Oz wants to taste him, drink him, know him, and perhaps there's no desire truer than that. If Oz were bleeding, Giles would lick it up, would take every precious drop on his tongue and keep it.
Blood and skin in the kiss. The deepest thing and the shallowest, and that's right somehow. It's right that Oz is kissing him with a closed mouth and reddened lips, with two kinds of knowledge.
Even these shallow kisses are almost too much, thawing Giles too quickly, making his skin stretch and ache with the liquid pressure of it. He moves his lips away from the sun-heat of Oz's mouth, kissing up Oz's jaw to his ear, cradling Oz's head in his hands. "I've missed you so much," he says, and then kisses the intricate folds of his ear where sound gathers, amplifies, focuses. This is where hearing begins; it's one of the places where Oz begins. It deserves millions of kisses, months of Giles' attention. But Giles isn't sure he has months to spare, so he keeps kissing, following Oz's hairline, mapping one of his borders. I love you, he breathes soundlessly as he kisses Oz's forehead, pressing the words into him. And then terror, cold as icemelt, bursts through him, and he goes still against Oz, clutching him with chilled hands.
"Ssshh," Oz is saying before he exactly knows what's happening. Giles is silent and deadstill and gripping Oz with something like desperation. He cups his palm over the back of Giles's skull, runs it up to the crown of his head, down to the nape of his neck, and they shift around again until he has Giles against his shoulder and one arm wrapped around Giles's back, his other hand still petting Giles's hair. "Ssshhh."
Watery blood on his lips, aching and chapped, determined to kiss more. To kiss all the way into Giles, past blood and muscle and words, into the quiet center where he doesn't have to fumble with a disgusting body or stumble over words he's only half-sure the meanings of.
"Missed you," he whispers, and Giles tilts back his head a little. Oz straightens his glasses and kisses his temple again. "All the time. So much." They're talking about two absences, maybe more, here; not just the last time Oz left, but the first time, too. He can hear it in Giles's voice, admission and pain snagging like fish-hooks in the words, and Oz himself can't separate the absences. It wasn't two separate things, leaving Giles and then, later, leaving Sunnydale (twice); it was an extended leavetaking, a slowmotion absence impossible to chart or put on a calendar, let alone on a map. "All the time, more and more."
His hand slows in Giles's hair and Oz shifts a little, closes his eyes. He left and kept leaving, and finally, with the Initiative's tasers and scalpels still sparking and slicing beneath his skin, he managed to move his body onward. Onward, downward, all the way down the rim of the earth until he came to rest in Escuel. The farther away he got, the more he missed Giles. It seemed impossible, nonsensical, to miss him more than Oz did in the first months after leaving him, because that was the kind of pain you *don't* forget, that lives on in your muscles and nerves and is always about to crackle back to life.
But it was only in the mountains, out in the cold dry air where he tried to bake himself dead like the mummies they still find up in the Andean passes, that he learned just how much more you can miss someone. Missing Giles beyond pain, into the actual content and organization of his thoughts, the sinews connecting the thoughts, the sequences they come in. It probably helped that he wasn't drinking any more, that he could think now and, thinking, see the constant vortical shadow of Giles's absence.
"Giles," Oz says, and tips up Giles's chin. "Can't leave again. Promise you, anything you want me to swear on. Won't leave. *Can't*."
Giles wants to make Oz promise. Wants to make him write it in blood and swear it three times over. Oz would do it; Giles knows that, looking at the anxious lines on Oz's forehead, feeling the cautious tenderness of his hands. Oz would do it, and Giles might be a little less afraid.
But it's not the kind of promise that means anything. People make it every day, standing together before a god some of them even believe in. They promise honestly, reverently, to stay, and in a year or ten, they go. Love dims down to headaches and irritation, and they go.
Trusting that promise is like trusting the paintwork to hold the bridge together.
"Oz, don't," Giles says, tilting his head down to kiss Oz's hand. Whatever has brought Oz here after so many years-guilt, loneliness, compassion-it's nothing to base a promise on anyway. "Don't promise. Just stay." He leans forward and kisses Oz on the lips again, closing Oz's mouth to promises, his own to pleas.
At first the kiss hurts, and then it soothes. Perhaps that's what kisses always do, perhaps that's why there are never enough of them, why the round of pain and comfort never ends. But Giles is tired, and after one kiss he settles down against Oz's shoulder. If he were smaller, he could sit on Oz's lap. That would be true comfort, resting on Oz's body, cradled and supported. That would be what he needs, and the unfairness of it makes his throat tighten and his eyes sting.
Ashamed, he presses his face into Oz's neck, rubs his thumb over the hinge of Oz's jaw, and strokes the hair behind his ear. When he can trust himself to speak, he says, "I'm . . . I'm awfully tired, really. I think I ought to lie down for a bit. Will . . . will you come with me? Not - I don't mean - I'd just like to be near you. If you want." He doesn't lift his head to look at Oz's face. This, surely, isn't what Oz came back for. An old man, a ruined man. But Giles doesn't have the energy to pretend.
Oz draws his fingers slowly from Giles's hair and kisses the corner of his temple. His mouth buzzes and whispers, aches to keep kissing and talking as much as it craves sleep and quiet. Giles won't look at him, and Oz could spend hours (days, years) wondering why, wondering what he's done, how he can possibly repair the damage and soothe the hurt. He could, but he would succeed only in confusing himself and annoying Giles, sending up another round of sputtering and misunderstanding.
So he kisses Giles again, and the soapsmell is finally fading, so he can he taste himself, tendrils and vines mixing, tangling, with Giles's own scent.
"'Course I want," he says softly and stands up, offering Giles a hand. "Want to be with you. Came for you."
He needs to keep things simple, as simple as possible. Giles will, sooner rather than later, shut down to apologies, just like he did the first time. He'll look at Oz with that careful squint, nod shortly to himself, and turn around. Oz might be a slow learner, but he does eventually get it. Apologies and promises are small, shaky, tenuous things. Bodies aren't much better, all tearable and fragile, skin and blood, but they're solid. At least Giles's hand is solid, warm, in his, and Oz follows Giles down the hall, as close as he can without obviously crowding him.
The bedroom is dark, the light suspended in the liquid dim, and Oz thinks again before he can help it of underwater caverns, still currents and stagnant, sickening atmospheres. He pulls off his boots, then the socks he's worn since setting out, slick and stiff at the same time with sweat and wear, and curls his toes against the floor.
"Giles?" Oz asks, hears the words and feels their motion against his mouth, inside and then outside, before he knows what he wants to say. Giles is closer to the bed, and he turns, eyes wide, almost startled. Oz looks at the floor, dark wood under his pale feet, and pushes his hair back with an impatient hand. "I'm sorry."
So much for simplicity and forward motion.
He makes himself look back up again, at Giles. At the face he thought he remembered perfectly, but, compared to the real thing, his memories are smeared fingerpaints, schizoid and muddy. Giles is clear and bright, sharp cheekbones and weary eyes. More handsome (beautiful, the voice in Oz's head insists, and he swallows) than anything.
It means something different, now, when Oz says sorry. When he said it in Sunnydale, he was trying to wash Giles away, to scrub himself free of the last clinging reminders. Now it's an invitation, a hand held out.
"I know," Giles says. In the dimness Oz looks as pale and frail as a paper doll, as fleeting as a ghost. Giles wants to clutch at him, anchor him to the earth; if he tried, would Oz dissipate to vapor and memory? But he's not memory, he's solid and warm. He smells of bleach and a little, now, of unwashed socks. His dirty hair sticks up in odd places, from Giles' hands and his own, and something in the dulled color makes Giles think that Oz has gone hungry for months. There are rough patches on his face and hands, windburn and labor, and all his bones stand out like an anatomy lesson. The slouch of his body and set of his lips show exhaustion held off by will.
If Giles' longing had conjured him up, he'd be perfect. He'd be what he is in Giles' memories: so beautiful, so brimming with life that all the light in the room seems to gather around him. An angel in a painting, whose feet don't quite touch the ground.
Oz's bare feet look cold on the rugless floor, and he's rubbing his arms and waiting, still, for an answer. "You're here now," Giles says, because it's the closest he can come to I forgive you. Perhaps in a month or six, if Oz is still here, Giles can find better words for it.
Oz pauses, thinks, then nods. His eyes are almost invisible, just dark cutouts in his white paper face. Giles would like to see his expression, but it's one more thing he'll have to take on trust.
Cold as it is, the room is stuffy, the air flat and heavy, like breathing too long under a blanket. Giles opens the window a little and tries to straighten the messy bed. "There is one thing I want you to promise me," he says as he smoothes the rumpled, gritty sheets. The words almost catch in his tight throat, and he can't look at Oz, because he's not going to cry like tired child, not now. "Promise me that if you decide to leave, you'll tell me first. That you won't just walk out."
The last time, Giles had to learn from Xander that Oz was gone. The memory makes him want to double over, fold his body around the terrible emptiness at its center. He stands very still, clutching the iron railing of the headboard.
It passes, after a few moments, and Giles sets his glasses on the night table, pulls off his socks, and lies down. He can look at Oz now, one blur among many in the merciful darkness. He can stretch out a hand and wait for Oz to come to him.
Words and a hand, both of them pale in the dark, both reaching for him, and Oz nods again, swallowing, moves forward. Pale, but more than he's had in years, way more than he deserves, but Oz isn't going to question what Giles is willing to offer. Not any more. Already he's received shelter and touch, food and quiet, gentle questions. So much.
He takes Giles's hand as he sits and holds it between his two smaller ones. You left, the mantra and the statement. Not an accusation, unless it's a bloodless one, drained and limp from overuse and exhaustion. When he left Sunnydale the last time, his head was sick, swirling drunkenly with shame, with the need to move, to flee. Escape and make a run for it, like it was the last chance he'd ever had. "Promise," Oz says. He lifts Giles's hand and kisses it all over again. "I promise I'll say something. I'll stay. Promise."
Giles rolls back a little, making room, and Oz slides under the sheet and blanket awkwardly, still holding Giles's hand, up in the air like a glass of water he's afraid of spilling. On his side, facing Giles, he brings it down between them and kisses Giles again. Dry lips, soft skin. Someday he'll explain what was going on, someday Giles will need to know and Oz will need to tell. But right now, doing that seems as absurd as breaking out a trumpet and playing the third movement to A Love Supreme, absurd and jolting and impossible. Right now Oz just wants to move closer and closer until their arms are bent at the elbow and their hands locked together between them and he can rest his forehead on Giles's shoulder.
Tip back his head and kiss his neck, jaw, mouth.
Words are forming, finding their shapes and gathering, then dispersing, in Oz's throat, on the back of his tongue, but he's still kissing Giles, slow and shallow, petting his damp hair and the words aren't important right now. Love you and I promise and here now rise and entwine as Giles tugs the blanket over Oz's shoulder and cups the back of his skull. Holds him like you hold up a baby's head.
Oz closes his eyes and presses closer. Still arriving, always coming back.
Before he started drinking quite so much.
Remembering whiskey makes his mouth pucker with dry yearning. But whiskey, or at least the quantity of whiskey he's been swallowing down every night, is part of the wintry, hibernating world he made for himself. With Oz here, he can't stay in that world. Not unless he wants to take Oz with him.
The thought brings back some of Giles' nausea, and he tilts his face up to the cold water, lets it flow over him until he starts to shiver. Then he finally gets out, towels off, brushes his teeth again, and ruins two razor blades shaving off a week's growth of stubble. He cuts himself near the right ear, and it takes a long time for the bleeding to stop. But he looks a bit better for shaving, and even feels better. After he showers or shaves or goes out, he always feels better; it's just that finding the energy is so difficult.
He'd like to change into cleaner clothes than the ones he put on an hour ago. They touched his dirty skin, and Oz might be able to smell it. But if he doesn't put them on, he'll have to go out in a towel. Oz will see him like that, half-naked and weary and forty-seven years old. So Giles puts on a lot of deodorant and gets dressed.
Oz isn't in the kitchen, and for a moment Giles' breath catches in panic, but he's only moved to the sitting room. His hair is wet, his skin is reddened, he's wearing a different shirt, and when Giles sits down he can smell the acrid chemical tang of scouring powder. "Oz, what did you . . ." He stops, because he knows what Oz did, although he doesn't know why.
Even after Buffy died, Giles worried about Oz. So many terrible things could have happened to him, and Giles has imagined every one. Whatever has happened, it can't be one of the most terrible, because Oz is still alive. But it was bad enough that he's scrubbed half his skin off with Ajax.
Two cripples, and Giles wonders if they'll help each other hobble, or pull each other down.
Now that he's clean, he can touch Oz without much fear. He lays a hand on Oz's cheek, rough with stubble and residual grit. Slowly, through shifts so tiny Giles is only half-aware of them, they turn and settle into a nervous embrace. Loose at first, and then it tightens, and Giles trembles when Oz leans against him, tucks his head under Giles' chin. "Oz," he says, and then he's not sure what to say. It's too soon to talk about the past, about why Oz left or why he's back or what happened in between. Finally, Giles says, "I'm glad you're here." Only after he's said it is he sure it's true.
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Against Giles, Oz always felt like sunlight or wind, something almost invisible and definitely weightless, spread over and touching the land. Giles as earth and terra firma, solid but never impenetrable, strong and always welcoming. He's dreamed of this, waking dreams and sleeping ones, the scent of Giles - cotton, paper, deep secret aquifers - rising up through him, around him, giving him some kind of shape. He's woken up more times than he count in just this position, on his side with his arm curled up, palm curving, head tipped down, recreating Giles and the shape his body made.
He knew, even before everything went to hell and he sped up the process, that it was a dream. That Giles isn't something firm and eternal and strong, that he's just a man with as many petty quirks and random oddities as anyone else, and, further, that he loved *that*, loved the man much more than the metaphor, the consolation of strength and wisdom.
Oz didn't need a Watcher.
"You're bleeding," he says, tilting his head a little. It was hard to tell through the shifting layers of chemical scents - shaving cream, soap, deodorant - but he thought he'd sniffed something deeper. Richer, organic, human. Something like home, if that word had any meaning any more. Giles turns his head, shows him the razor-scrape, stippled pale skin and tiny pricks of still-welling blood. Oz touches the curve of Giles's jawbone, traces a circle, dream-bandage, around the cut, then leans in and kisses it.
Lightly, but Giles stiffens underneath him and Oz murmurs something, nonsense, reassurance, low soothing sounds, and kisses the blood again. These were the other dreams, stark arctic white and flat endless black, taste of Giles's blood stronger and surer than any scotch or K or acid. Shaken inside-out, not hallucinatory or mindaltering but instead clarifying and simplifying. Necessary, the route inside to Giles, to where he really is, who he really can be. Oz kisses a line down the dip of Giles's jaw, over the small divot in his chin, and upward, to tense dry lips.
Just a kiss, he's trying to say but he doesn't want to move his mouth away far enough to speak. Palm rubbing slow circles over Giles's shoulder and slow brush of lips on lips. Giles, kissing, faint reassurance of blood, and streaming through it all the urgent confounding exhilaration of having gotten here at all, at last, overdue and potentially unwelcome.
Here.
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Close to, the bleach-and-perfume smell of scouring powder is almost chokingly strong. It covers the unnameable scent of Oz's skin, even the sourness of travel and old sweat. The primal, memory-stirring familiarity of him is gone, and Giles has to keep opening his eyes to be sure. We're all animals, at bottom. We're all wolves, thinking with our noses, the simple truth of odors bypassing the rational brain. Giles doesn't want to imagine what drove Oz to do this, to strip away this connection. Then he wonders if Oz can smell him anymore under his armor of cleanliness, if he too has thrown away something they needed.
Oz's lips are rough and a little sticky with Giles' blood. Maybe there should be horror in that, in the appetite for blood and in all the kinds of contamination that blood can carry, but instead Giles is grateful. Oz wants to taste him, drink him, know him, and perhaps there's no desire truer than that. If Oz were bleeding, Giles would lick it up, would take every precious drop on his tongue and keep it.
Blood and skin in the kiss. The deepest thing and the shallowest, and that's right somehow. It's right that Oz is kissing him with a closed mouth and reddened lips, with two kinds of knowledge.
Even these shallow kisses are almost too much, thawing Giles too quickly, making his skin stretch and ache with the liquid pressure of it. He moves his lips away from the sun-heat of Oz's mouth, kissing up Oz's jaw to his ear, cradling Oz's head in his hands. "I've missed you so much," he says, and then kisses the intricate folds of his ear where sound gathers, amplifies, focuses. This is where hearing begins; it's one of the places where Oz begins. It deserves millions of kisses, months of Giles' attention. But Giles isn't sure he has months to spare, so he keeps kissing, following Oz's hairline, mapping one of his borders. I love you, he breathes soundlessly as he kisses Oz's forehead, pressing the words into him. And then terror, cold as icemelt, bursts through him, and he goes still against Oz, clutching him with chilled hands.
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Watery blood on his lips, aching and chapped, determined to kiss more. To kiss all the way into Giles, past blood and muscle and words, into the quiet center where he doesn't have to fumble with a disgusting body or stumble over words he's only half-sure the meanings of.
"Missed you," he whispers, and Giles tilts back his head a little. Oz straightens his glasses and kisses his temple again. "All the time. So much." They're talking about two absences, maybe more, here; not just the last time Oz left, but the first time, too. He can hear it in Giles's voice, admission and pain snagging like fish-hooks in the words, and Oz himself can't separate the absences. It wasn't two separate things, leaving Giles and then, later, leaving Sunnydale (twice); it was an extended leavetaking, a slowmotion absence impossible to chart or put on a calendar, let alone on a map. "All the time, more and more."
His hand slows in Giles's hair and Oz shifts a little, closes his eyes. He left and kept leaving, and finally, with the Initiative's tasers and scalpels still sparking and slicing beneath his skin, he managed to move his body onward. Onward, downward, all the way down the rim of the earth until he came to rest in Escuel. The farther away he got, the more he missed Giles. It seemed impossible, nonsensical, to miss him more than Oz did in the first months after leaving him, because that was the kind of pain you *don't* forget, that lives on in your muscles and nerves and is always about to crackle back to life.
But it was only in the mountains, out in the cold dry air where he tried to bake himself dead like the mummies they still find up in the Andean passes, that he learned just how much more you can miss someone. Missing Giles beyond pain, into the actual content and organization of his thoughts, the sinews connecting the thoughts, the sequences they come in. It probably helped that he wasn't drinking any more, that he could think now and, thinking, see the constant vortical shadow of Giles's absence.
"Giles," Oz says, and tips up Giles's chin. "Can't leave again. Promise you, anything you want me to swear on. Won't leave. *Can't*."
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But it's not the kind of promise that means anything. People make it every day, standing together before a god some of them even believe in. They promise honestly, reverently, to stay, and in a year or ten, they go. Love dims down to headaches and irritation, and they go.
Trusting that promise is like trusting the paintwork to hold the bridge together.
"Oz, don't," Giles says, tilting his head down to kiss Oz's hand. Whatever has brought Oz here after so many years-guilt, loneliness, compassion-it's nothing to base a promise on anyway. "Don't promise. Just stay." He leans forward and kisses Oz on the lips again, closing Oz's mouth to promises, his own to pleas.
At first the kiss hurts, and then it soothes. Perhaps that's what kisses always do, perhaps that's why there are never enough of them, why the round of pain and comfort never ends. But Giles is tired, and after one kiss he settles down against Oz's shoulder. If he were smaller, he could sit on Oz's lap. That would be true comfort, resting on Oz's body, cradled and supported. That would be what he needs, and the unfairness of it makes his throat tighten and his eyes sting.
Ashamed, he presses his face into Oz's neck, rubs his thumb over the hinge of Oz's jaw, and strokes the hair behind his ear. When he can trust himself to speak, he says, "I'm . . . I'm awfully tired, really. I think I ought to lie down for a bit. Will . . . will you come with me? Not - I don't mean - I'd just like to be near you. If you want." He doesn't lift his head to look at Oz's face. This, surely, isn't what Oz came back for. An old man, a ruined man. But Giles doesn't have the energy to pretend.
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So he kisses Giles again, and the soapsmell is finally fading, so he can he taste himself, tendrils and vines mixing, tangling, with Giles's own scent.
"'Course I want," he says softly and stands up, offering Giles a hand. "Want to be with you. Came for you."
He needs to keep things simple, as simple as possible. Giles will, sooner rather than later, shut down to apologies, just like he did the first time. He'll look at Oz with that careful squint, nod shortly to himself, and turn around. Oz might be a slow learner, but he does eventually get it. Apologies and promises are small, shaky, tenuous things. Bodies aren't much better, all tearable and fragile, skin and blood, but they're solid. At least Giles's hand is solid, warm, in his, and Oz follows Giles down the hall, as close as he can without obviously crowding him.
The bedroom is dark, the light suspended in the liquid dim, and Oz thinks again before he can help it of underwater caverns, still currents and stagnant, sickening atmospheres. He pulls off his boots, then the socks he's worn since setting out, slick and stiff at the same time with sweat and wear, and curls his toes against the floor.
"Giles?" Oz asks, hears the words and feels their motion against his mouth, inside and then outside, before he knows what he wants to say. Giles is closer to the bed, and he turns, eyes wide, almost startled. Oz looks at the floor, dark wood under his pale feet, and pushes his hair back with an impatient hand. "I'm sorry."
So much for simplicity and forward motion.
He makes himself look back up again, at Giles. At the face he thought he remembered perfectly, but, compared to the real thing, his memories are smeared fingerpaints, schizoid and muddy. Giles is clear and bright, sharp cheekbones and weary eyes. More handsome (beautiful, the voice in Oz's head insists, and he swallows) than anything.
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"I know," Giles says. In the dimness Oz looks as pale and frail as a paper doll, as fleeting as a ghost. Giles wants to clutch at him, anchor him to the earth; if he tried, would Oz dissipate to vapor and memory? But he's not memory, he's solid and warm. He smells of bleach and a little, now, of unwashed socks. His dirty hair sticks up in odd places, from Giles' hands and his own, and something in the dulled color makes Giles think that Oz has gone hungry for months. There are rough patches on his face and hands, windburn and labor, and all his bones stand out like an anatomy lesson. The slouch of his body and set of his lips show exhaustion held off by will.
If Giles' longing had conjured him up, he'd be perfect. He'd be what he is in Giles' memories: so beautiful, so brimming with life that all the light in the room seems to gather around him. An angel in a painting, whose feet don't quite touch the ground.
Oz's bare feet look cold on the rugless floor, and he's rubbing his arms and waiting, still, for an answer. "You're here now," Giles says, because it's the closest he can come to I forgive you. Perhaps in a month or six, if Oz is still here, Giles can find better words for it.
Oz pauses, thinks, then nods. His eyes are almost invisible, just dark cutouts in his white paper face. Giles would like to see his expression, but it's one more thing he'll have to take on trust.
Cold as it is, the room is stuffy, the air flat and heavy, like breathing too long under a blanket. Giles opens the window a little and tries to straighten the messy bed. "There is one thing I want you to promise me," he says as he smoothes the rumpled, gritty sheets. The words almost catch in his tight throat, and he can't look at Oz, because he's not going to cry like tired child, not now. "Promise me that if you decide to leave, you'll tell me first. That you won't just walk out."
The last time, Giles had to learn from Xander that Oz was gone. The memory makes him want to double over, fold his body around the terrible emptiness at its center. He stands very still, clutching the iron railing of the headboard.
It passes, after a few moments, and Giles sets his glasses on the night table, pulls off his socks, and lies down. He can look at Oz now, one blur among many in the merciful darkness. He can stretch out a hand and wait for Oz to come to him.
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He takes Giles's hand as he sits and holds it between his two smaller ones. You left, the mantra and the statement. Not an accusation, unless it's a bloodless one, drained and limp from overuse and exhaustion. When he left Sunnydale the last time, his head was sick, swirling drunkenly with shame, with the need to move, to flee. Escape and make a run for it, like it was the last chance he'd ever had. "Promise," Oz says. He lifts Giles's hand and kisses it all over again. "I promise I'll say something. I'll stay. Promise."
Giles rolls back a little, making room, and Oz slides under the sheet and blanket awkwardly, still holding Giles's hand, up in the air like a glass of water he's afraid of spilling. On his side, facing Giles, he brings it down between them and kisses Giles again. Dry lips, soft skin. Someday he'll explain what was going on, someday Giles will need to know and Oz will need to tell. But right now, doing that seems as absurd as breaking out a trumpet and playing the third movement to A Love Supreme, absurd and jolting and impossible. Right now Oz just wants to move closer and closer until their arms are bent at the elbow and their hands locked together between them and he can rest his forehead on Giles's shoulder.
Tip back his head and kiss his neck, jaw, mouth.
Words are forming, finding their shapes and gathering, then dispersing, in Oz's throat, on the back of his tongue, but he's still kissing Giles, slow and shallow, petting his damp hair and the words aren't important right now. Love you and I promise and here now rise and entwine as Giles tugs the blanket over Oz's shoulder and cups the back of his skull. Holds him like you hold up a baby's head.
Oz closes his eyes and presses closer. Still arriving, always coming back.
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