Chuckling, Giles tugs at a lock of Oz's hair and says something half-indistinct, drowned in laughter.
"You rock. And I was thinking we were doomed to Four Brothers' Best Pizza or the Shanghai Garden of oily noodles," Oz says, rolling closer so he's half on top of Giles. There's only the clinical light shining from the bathroom, and the bed makes a strange, soggy creak when he moves, but despite all the differences, this feels just like home. Giles' hands roving slowly over his back, his chin pressed against Giles' sternum, hand curved against Giles' cheek, fingers rubbing away the pinched red skin left by the side-piece of his glasses. Everything's different, he thinks, but it's joined by just as sweet and warm a thought: Everything's the same.
Kissing Giles, shallowly because he's pretty sure they're both dry-lipped and sour-mouthed from a day's worth of stale, recycled air, Oz feels the opposite of shivers, warm as syrup, run down his back.
"Good cheese? Stinky and unpasteurized and potentially deadly?" He pushes himself up, balancing on one hand, smiling. Giles blinks up at him, face smooth in the dim light, then nods. Oz kisses him again, dropping his head in a series of rapid pecks until Giles is laughing again. "Awesome. Thank you."
Oz fetches what he can from the soda machine in the hall - the currency exchange in LAX was out of fives, so he's loaded down with ones anyway - and fills his pockets with all the bags of peanut M&M's he can coax from the candy and crisps machine. When he returns, edging sideways into the room, Giles has his bounty arranged on a face-towel on the desk.
"Got some M&M's -" Oz lines up the ginger ale and Cokes first, then empties his pockets and slides onto Giles' lap, reaching for the wedge of cheese. "Don't want to go through your whole Flake stash in one night."
This is temporary and kind of rough-hewn, but for now, Oz couldn't feel better.
Giles cuts a few thick chunks of cheese with the pocket knife that, fortunately, he remembered to pack in the checked bag instead of leaving in his pocket. "It's not really stinky," he says, after a thirsty gulp of sickly-sweet ginger ale, "as I didn't want customs to notice us fifty feet away. But the man at Neal's Yard Dairy swore it was hand-crafted in straw-thatched huts by unwashed old farmwives who'd never so much as heard the word pasteurization, so it should have some flavor and plenty of interesting bacteria."
Oz grins and takes a bite.
Now that there's food in front of him, Giles is sharply hungry, even a little shaky. In just a couple of minutes he and Oz finish the cheese and half the packet of cream crackers. In Thailand, Giles read once, people eat at the beginning and end of every journey, even the shortest. It's meant to ground the body and the spirit, keep them safe from the dangerous unfixity of motion. Certainly he feels solider and less anxious with every bite.
Oz shakes a handful of M&Ms into his palm, offers Giles a red one, and squirms happily when Giles takes it, licking Oz's fingertips along the way. "So how did it go? With the others, I mean, while I was talking to Buffy." That's not quite what Giles means either, and after a moment he makes himself say it. "With Willow."
Maybe once Oz tells him what happened, what they said to each other, he can finally stop worrying about it.
Oz lets the candy coating dissolve and fracture, chocolate welling up in the cracks, before he answers. He needs the time to recreate what happened, to try and let it make some kind of sense. "With the others? Fine, I guess." He crunches into the peanut and takes a swig of Coke. "Xander's got his shields up. Um. With Will?" Giles nods and his eyes are half-closed, like he's waiting for a blow that's just about to happen. "Shitty. She's mad. At me, I guess. More for the old stuff, I think. Maybe everything. Not telling her."
Giles has stopped nodding and Oz runs the side of his hand down the valley of his neck.
"Tara said she'd be okay. Right now? She's not." Oz crumples the empty can in his free hand and tries to toss it into the tiny wastebasket. He misses by a mile, and Giles pulls him back. "Us, though? We're good. Aren't we?"
"Yes," Giles says, and leans in for a sugary kiss, syrup-slow and almost motionless. It's almost like a morning kiss, sleepy and full of discovery as they leave the aloneness of sleep. "If you want us to be-" Oz frowns at that, and Giles corrects himself. "Since you want us to be, then yes. We're very, very good."
Every morning it's still almost a surprise to find Oz there. But every morning makes Giles a little surer that he'll be there the next morning, and the next. Perhaps his fears-irrational fears, he knows-about Willow work the same way. He needs to discover again and again that Willow won't come between them (never was between them, not really, not in the way Giles thought she was), and each time he'll believe it a little more deeply.
The narrow wooden chair is definitely not made for two; Giles' legs ache a bit from Oz's weight, and Oz can't seem to get comfortable either. "Come on, let's get into bed." Oz slides off his lap and starts to tidy the desk, as though it's the kitchen at home, which they never leave messy, but Giles says, "Bed," and pulls him over to it.
The sheets smell sourly of hotel laundering, and they're rough to the touch, but with Oz naked against his own bare skin, it feels almost like home.
Sometimes, Oz still wakes up in the middle of the night, confused by the firm expanse of Giles' bed, by Giles' warm body against his, and he lies for several seconds, drifting back into his body, into certainty. And this bed is different, wider but creakier and softer, but Giles is the most familiar thing, even if his skin's dry and warm against Oz's, rather than sex-damp, the way it is when they usually fall asleep naked.
"Very, very good," Oz mumbles, squirming around, flattening out the squishy pillow. When it's something resembling comfortable, he takes a deep breath and kisses Giles again, working his knee between Giles' own. He like to sleep all locked up like this; it helps him relax, and if he does wake up later, it cuts the time it takes to drift back asleep. "We're good. Other people, maybe not so much. Are you -" He can still see Buffy's hard, chipped little face, the black shadows around her eyes, the scent of graves and dirt all over her. Oz shivers and, misunderstanding (or maybe not), Giles tugs the satin-edged hotel blanket over his shoulder. "How did your, you know. Your talk go?"
The blanket's a bit musky and the springs sink alarmingly under his weight every time he moves. Thousands of people must have used this bed, slept or fucked or wanked to pay-per-view porn on the vast television set. It's only the third bed he's ever shared with Oz, unless the back of the van counts. A hotel bed, a palimpsest of strangers' bodies.
"I'm sorry Willow reacted so badly," Giles says, tracing the unfamiliar shadows over Oz's neck and shoulder. He can remember exactly how the light fell in the sleeping loft of his old flat, the flat someone else lives in now. Hotel rooms are nowhere, anywhere; this could be Singapore as easily as Sunnydale. "Sorry that she's angry at you. I hope it will get better." Willow's slow to anger, usually, but her anger can simmer and glow endlessly, like a well-banked fire. She still says unkind things about Cordelia, years after the poor girl last saw Xander.
"As for Buffy . . . I'm worried about her. She's changed." Oz shifts against him, leans up on one elbow, and Giles quickly adds, "She's . . . brittle, I mean. Whatever she's been through, I don't think she's going to recover very quickly." He pulls Oz's head back down onto his shoulder and tries not to think about Buffy in a hell dimension, or how many years might have gone by for her since May.
Buffy's been in hell, perhaps, and now she's got to worry about the mortgage. "Plus, there are financial problems because of her mother's illness. It seems that she and Dawn may lose their house." He sighs, and Oz kisses his chest very gently. "Tomorrow I'm going over all the bills with Buffy to see if there's a solution. But if there's not, I thought we might give her some money, enough to settle the bills and keep things going until she finds a job. Is that all right with you?"
The Council doesn't pay Slayers. Until now, Giles has never thought about it. Watchers are paid well, especially field Watchers, but Slayers get nothing. Perhaps the Council takes the 'sacred calling' business a bit too literally, or perhaps Slayers just aren't expected to ever become adults.
A wave, full of light and very warm, billows and rushes up Oz's chest as he listens to Giles. We and all right with you, simple phrases and brief words that are shorthand for - this, Giles against him, and love, and a relationship that's not vanishing, not going anywhere. Oz feels a little dizzy and a lot giddy, even if the rushing warm light stops at his dry throat and thoughts of Buffy.
"I think that's -" He swallows and licks the corners of his lips; Giles is consulting him. "I think that's amazing. Last thing anyone needs is that kind of worry. Especially Buffy, especially after -" He stops again and rubs his knuckles softly over Giles' cheekbone. He wants to ask where Buffy was, why Lilin thought she was flying in glory but Sunnydale wanted her back on earth. Giles' lids are heavy, though, and Oz's limbs feel thick and kind of numb, and now is not the time.
"Twelve hours, huh?" he asks a little later, and Giles doesn't answer so much as make a noise that could almost be a snore. Oz rolls his head back into the pillow and pulls himself closer to Giles. "Love you."
Outside, it's Sunnydale - night, Hellmouth, California - but inside, right here, it's just where he belongs.
Giles hasn't slept deeply or comfortably since Willow's phone call to London; his sleep has been effortful, haunted by half-shaped anxieties that don't quite resolve themselves into nightmares, and he's awoken more tired every morning. But tonight, now that he knows, now that he's seen for himself, sleep comes black and obliviating, irresistible.
It's full day when he wakes, the room warm and bright just from the light that gets past the curtains. He'd forgotten the strength of California sunshine, as pervasive (intrusive, he sometimes used to feel) as smog and traffic, flat accents and mumbled teenage slang.
Oz is still sleeping, wrapped and folded over Giles in a way that only Oz could find comfortable. His breathing whirrs a little in the back of his throat, a sound too quiet and soothing to be called a snore, and when Giles cranes his neck he can see Oz's eyes roll and dart under closed lids. He's dreaming. Oz-dreams, brewed in the startling depths of Oz's mind (in the mornings, Oz tells him about strange mazy cities whose streets drop off cliffs' edges; apocalyptic landscapes of speaking trees and carapaced, insectile humans; wings, flying carpets, clockwork birds, a thousand ways to fly and fall and fly again) or wolf dreams, the chiaroscuro of moonlight brightened by smell and the urgencies of blood.
Giles rubs Oz's back under the blanket, gently but not too lightly, and whispers, "Dream about me." Asleep, Oz is completely his, trusting his body absolutely to Giles, and completely lost to him, ravished away in dreams like a stolen child in fairyland.
There's a murmur from Oz, a response to the touch or to something in his dream, and Giles lets his hand rove, stroking carefully from everyday places-shoulders, back, ribs and belly-to secret ones-the shallow dip of Oz's navel, the steep jut of pelvic bone, the curve of his arse that Giles' palm molds itself to by muscle memory, bodily knowledge. Oz, locked in the paralysis of dreams, doesn't move, but his breathing's a little faster and he exhales from the throat in long almost-moans. Finally Giles slips his hand between their bodies to touch Oz's cock, already hard and hot under his searching, moving fingers.
What Giles wants, what he always wants when he does this, is to bring Oz to orgasm before he wakes. To find his way into Oz's sleeping mind, into his dreams, and be welcomed there.
Oz always wakes, though, and he wakes now with a shiver, a smack of his lips, a tiny lift of his eyelids. "Good morning," Giles says, and kisses his forehead as his eyes struggle gradually open.
Sleep's a flannel sheet, wrapped and twisted around Oz's body, his mind, and he swallows his first attempt at saying morning. He rolls his lips together, squeezes his eyes, and tries again. Giles is smiling at him, and the room is very bright, and Oz squints as he says, "Morning."
The air in the room is cold, but Giles' body is warm and firm, and he swipes his thumb gently over the head of Oz's cock as his smile stretches, goes sly and teasing, and Oz shivers a little more awake. Awake already hard, with Giles already holding him, and he's sleepy enough that he finds his hips moving lazily back and forth before he can think about it. The flannel of sleep unwinds, loosens, and Oz searches out Giles' mouth, his eyes half-closed and right hand wandering down to grasp the side of Giles' hip.
Soggy, dream-logged and heavy, Oz kisses Giles slowly, as shallowly as he can while his fingers scritch and tickle at the edge of rough hair between Giles' legs.
"Sleep okay?" he whispers and kisses down the side of Giles' neck. In the mornings, Giles' skin smells like loam, like Oz and perspiration, and Oz suckles sleepily, opening his eyes enough to catch Giles' gaze.
"Oh, yes," Giles says, the words wet and slurred through clumsy lips, through the sticky ache of a kiss that wasn't enough, too fast and too shallow. He tilts Oz's face up and kisses him again, rolling Oz's lower lip between his, sucking it until his mouth opens for a real kiss, deep and messy. Oz's mouth tastes bittersour, unbrushed teeth and sleep and the stale echo of recycled air and travel, and Giles' own mouth is no better, but that's unimportant. Under it all he can taste Oz, some singular essence that must be hormones, chemicals, nameable things, but that Giles can find no words for but Oz.
"I slept very well." Stubble scrapes Giles' lips as he kisses up the line of Oz's jaw, detouring to lick his earlobe and suck up a red mark at the base of his neck. "And then I woke and found a beautiful boy asleep in my arms. Really, what could I do, faced with such temptation?" Oz's hand is still teasing through Giles' pubic hair; Giles takes it and guides it over Oz's own body, all the places he touched while Oz was sleeping. Oz's eyes close and then open again, watching his, while Giles moves their hands over the faintly damp warmth of his inner thigh. Flushed with sleep and sex, eyes bright with it, and he's never more beautiful than in the morning.
Breathing is ragged and irregular, from dreams that leave him gasping and now from Giles' low, hoarse, coaxing voice and the brush of their joined hands over his own skin. Oz rubs his face against Giles' chest, warm skin and springy hair, then shifts slightly off Giles and onto his back. He can feel the goosebumps on his legs and the backs of his arms, hear the strange squeaks of the mattress - Sunnydale, he remembers, the fact snapping into his mind like a title-card in a silent movie, we're in Sunnydale.
Giles rolls onto his side as he pulls Oz's wrist over Oz's own hip, then wraps Oz's fingers around his own cock and kisses Oz's shoulder. His eyes are narrow, intent, and Oz swallows morningbreath and the ache of kissing before he says, "Dreamed about you. The library one, actually."
The one where the stacks are three times as large, and Giles is shelving, balanced on the stepladder, wearing suspenders, with his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, and Oz is handing books up to him and then the library gets very warm and somehow Oz is tugging down Giles' fly and licking the bulge in his briefs.
He hears Giles' own breathing come a little faster and harsher, and leans over, kisses him hard and deep before sleepiness slides back and Oz rubs his palm over his chest while he whispers fragments of the dream and pulls at his cock slow and steady.
Giles has his eyes narrowed into slits and his mouth a little open and the sight heats-speeds-brightens everything as Oz pinches his own nipple and bites the inside of his cheek and doesn't dare break eye contact.
Someday Giles wants to do nothing but this, watch Oz's eyes open and close as he touches himself, watch his pupils widen at the pleasure, watch the tiny muscles around his eyes tense and twitch as the strain builds, squeeze tight with orgasm.
Or watch Oz's hand curled tight around his own cock, sliding and pulling, drawing the side of his thumb over the dark red tip, slicking it with every wet droplet that beads at the slit. Or close his eyes and just listen to the flesh-sounds and Oz's rough breathing, grunts and rattles and broken bits of fantasy. Library, school changing room, dark alley, back room of a dirty pub, and Giles himself gone all to sex and need in Oz's mind, perfected there, made beautiful.
Someday, but he needs to touch Oz. Is touching him, licking the rose flush along his chest, taking his cock for a moment in his own fist, straddling him, lifting and pinning his arms and nosing into the crinkly underarm hair where it smells so good, so dirty, sweat and skin and Oz with no chemical interference. Leaning in, pressing him down into the bed, rasping at a nipple with lips and teeth until it's swollen, then playing the tip of his tongue over it while Oz strains, immobile, under him.
"If the school were still standing, I'd take you there," he says, loosing Oz's arms and stroking his hair. "Hide in the stacks with you and suck your cock, bend you over a library table like I always wanted to. Everything either of us ever imagined."
They fantasized, both of them, about public sex, about letting desire shatter concealment and common sense. And now they're back, hiding nothing, and that's the real heart of the fantasy, himself and Oz and no pretense, no lies. "I love you," he says, and rolls his hips so that Oz gasps.
The weight of Giles' body brings with it its own inverse, a swooshing, effervescent relief, and Oz was waiting without even knowing it for just this, for the edge of tension in Giles' voice and the pressure of his hips and chest. His hands cradle Oz's skull, pull him up to kiss again and Oz wraps his arms around Giles, one hand reaching down to his ass, pinky toying with the top of his crack, the other in Giles' hair, nails in his scalp.
He's not sure if he's even all the way awake yet, if this could be a particularly intense dream, but it's more real, hyper-real, than any dream, the scratch of Giles' stubble and insistence of his tongue, the rocking, crushing pressure of his hips and his cock trapped alongside Oz's own, superheated and hard.
So many daydreams and nightdreams, history and hopes, full of Giles' hands and his voice and pressure of his body, in parks and washrooms and libraries and cars both parked and moving, and they're all swirling just under the surface of Oz's skin, wordless and straining.
"Cage," he gasps and wraps a leg around the back of Giles' knees. "Tie you up in the cage, suck you for hours." Words and scraps of fantasy, but there aren't words for this, twisting in Giles' hold, running his fingertips down his ass, trying to thrust and failing and swallowing little grunts. Giles is gorgeous like this, wildhaired and darkeyed, and he smells like *himself* and like Oz, too, and it's all steaming and dizzying. "Or the Pump. Bathroom, grab the edge of the sink and bend over in front of you." The words are boiling away and Oz twists again, drops his hips, then drives them up. "Love you, too. Love this, fucking you -"
Every twist of Oz's body pulls Giles down, in, closer, and Giles thinks of vines crossing and re-crossing, of curious shoots that tickle and cling and knot. "Love fucking you," he says, echoes. Loves losing himself in Oz's intricate pathways, the branches and tendrils of his body, and he slides a hand along Oz's arm to the hand that's locked in his hair, kisses the tight mound of his bicep. "Love to touch you, kiss you. Make you shout. Love your hands on me." Oz's fingers are curling and spreading over his arse, seeking, and Giles hunches his back so Oz can reach deeper, stroke his hole like that, so delicately.
This is where it all begins, everything, fucking and fantasy and Giles' whole life. Oz is the beginning, the sine qua non, the terminus a quo, the first word of the first chapter. Oz, Sunnydale, a coffeeshop and a boy and a guitar, and that was the year zero. Before that the dates go negative, counting down, waiting.
Giles was born when Oz kissed him, reborn two months ago with another kiss, a sleepy morning kiss from an unshaven, unwashed Oz. He kisses Oz again, ritual and tribute and Oz tastes so good, so green and alive. Kisses bristly chin and underjaw and down to the soft places of this throat, sucking and gnawing and then kissing the redpurple patch that he's raised. "Love the feel of your skin," he says, hands moving, hips rocking and pressing his cock against Oz's smooth belly, against the burn and silk of Oz's cock, and they're both breathing rough and stuttery. "Love the shape of your cock in my mouth. The taste of your come."
Sliding down Oz's body, skin whispering on skin, kissing a shoulder, a nipple, tonguing the furrows of his ribs and the arrow-line of hair below his navel. Tangled in Oz's arms and legs, and he wants to go slower, stay forever, play out every fantasy one by one and never leave this bed again. It was like this the first night, urgent and reluctant, everything too fast and not fast enough, not when Giles needed to know so much, feel so much, now. "Want to taste you," he says. Tongue-tip to the head of Oz's cock as Oz's fingers dig into his shoulders, then slow circling licks, and it's every fantasy and every memory and for a moment Giles hardly knows where or when he is.
Chuckling, Giles tugs at a lock of Oz's hair and says something half-indistinct, drowned in laughter.
"You rock. And I was thinking we were doomed to Four Brothers' Best Pizza or the Shanghai Garden of oily noodles," Oz says, rolling closer so he's half on top of Giles. There's only the clinical light shining from the bathroom, and the bed makes a strange, soggy creak when he moves, but despite all the differences, this feels just like home. Giles' hands roving slowly over his back, his chin pressed against Giles' sternum, hand curved against Giles' cheek, fingers rubbing away the pinched red skin left by the side-piece of his glasses. Everything's different, he thinks, but it's joined by just as sweet and warm a thought: Everything's the same.
Kissing Giles, shallowly because he's pretty sure they're both dry-lipped and sour-mouthed from a day's worth of stale, recycled air, Oz feels the opposite of shivers, warm as syrup, run down his back.
"Good cheese? Stinky and unpasteurized and potentially deadly?" He pushes himself up, balancing on one hand, smiling. Giles blinks up at him, face smooth in the dim light, then nods. Oz kisses him again, dropping his head in a series of rapid pecks until Giles is laughing again. "Awesome. Thank you."
Oz fetches what he can from the soda machine in the hall - the currency exchange in LAX was out of fives, so he's loaded down with ones anyway - and fills his pockets with all the bags of peanut M&M's he can coax from the candy and crisps machine. When he returns, edging sideways into the room, Giles has his bounty arranged on a face-towel on the desk.
"Got some M&M's -" Oz lines up the ginger ale and Cokes first, then empties his pockets and slides onto Giles' lap, reaching for the wedge of cheese. "Don't want to go through your whole Flake stash in one night."
This is temporary and kind of rough-hewn, but for now, Oz couldn't feel better.
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Oz grins and takes a bite.
Now that there's food in front of him, Giles is sharply hungry, even a little shaky. In just a couple of minutes he and Oz finish the cheese and half the packet of cream crackers. In Thailand, Giles read once, people eat at the beginning and end of every journey, even the shortest. It's meant to ground the body and the spirit, keep them safe from the dangerous unfixity of motion. Certainly he feels solider and less anxious with every bite.
Oz shakes a handful of M&Ms into his palm, offers Giles a red one, and squirms happily when Giles takes it, licking Oz's fingertips along the way. "So how did it go? With the others, I mean, while I was talking to Buffy." That's not quite what Giles means either, and after a moment he makes himself say it. "With Willow."
Maybe once Oz tells him what happened, what they said to each other, he can finally stop worrying about it.
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Oz lets the candy coating dissolve and fracture, chocolate welling up in the cracks, before he answers. He needs the time to recreate what happened, to try and let it make some kind of sense.
"With the others? Fine, I guess." He crunches into the peanut and takes a swig of Coke. "Xander's got his shields up. Um. With Will?" Giles nods and his eyes are half-closed, like he's waiting for a blow that's just about to happen. "Shitty. She's mad. At me, I guess. More for the old stuff, I think. Maybe everything. Not telling her."
Giles has stopped nodding and Oz runs the side of his hand down the valley of his neck.
"Tara said she'd be okay. Right now? She's not." Oz crumples the empty can in his free hand and tries to toss it into the tiny wastebasket. He misses by a mile, and Giles pulls him back. "Us, though? We're good. Aren't we?"
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Every morning it's still almost a surprise to find Oz there. But every morning makes Giles a little surer that he'll be there the next morning, and the next. Perhaps his fears-irrational fears, he knows-about Willow work the same way. He needs to discover again and again that Willow won't come between them (never was between them, not really, not in the way Giles thought she was), and each time he'll believe it a little more deeply.
The narrow wooden chair is definitely not made for two; Giles' legs ache a bit from Oz's weight, and Oz can't seem to get comfortable either. "Come on, let's get into bed." Oz slides off his lap and starts to tidy the desk, as though it's the kitchen at home, which they never leave messy, but Giles says, "Bed," and pulls him over to it.
The sheets smell sourly of hotel laundering, and they're rough to the touch, but with Oz naked against his own bare skin, it feels almost like home.
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"Very, very good," Oz mumbles, squirming around, flattening out the squishy pillow. When it's something resembling comfortable, he takes a deep breath and kisses Giles again, working his knee between Giles' own. He like to sleep all locked up like this; it helps him relax, and if he does wake up later, it cuts the time it takes to drift back asleep. "We're good. Other people, maybe not so much. Are you -" He can still see Buffy's hard, chipped little face, the black shadows around her eyes, the scent of graves and dirt all over her. Oz shivers and, misunderstanding (or maybe not), Giles tugs the satin-edged hotel blanket over his shoulder. "How did your, you know. Your talk go?"
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"I'm sorry Willow reacted so badly," Giles says, tracing the unfamiliar shadows over Oz's neck and shoulder. He can remember exactly how the light fell in the sleeping loft of his old flat, the flat someone else lives in now. Hotel rooms are nowhere, anywhere; this could be Singapore as easily as Sunnydale. "Sorry that she's angry at you. I hope it will get better." Willow's slow to anger, usually, but her anger can simmer and glow endlessly, like a well-banked fire. She still says unkind things about Cordelia, years after the poor girl last saw Xander.
"As for Buffy . . . I'm worried about her. She's changed." Oz shifts against him, leans up on one elbow, and Giles quickly adds, "She's . . . brittle, I mean. Whatever she's been through, I don't think she's going to recover very quickly." He pulls Oz's head back down onto his shoulder and tries not to think about Buffy in a hell dimension, or how many years might have gone by for her since May.
Buffy's been in hell, perhaps, and now she's got to worry about the mortgage. "Plus, there are financial problems because of her mother's illness. It seems that she and Dawn may lose their house." He sighs, and Oz kisses his chest very gently. "Tomorrow I'm going over all the bills with Buffy to see if there's a solution. But if there's not, I thought we might give her some money, enough to settle the bills and keep things going until she finds a job. Is that all right with you?"
The Council doesn't pay Slayers. Until now, Giles has never thought about it. Watchers are paid well, especially field Watchers, but Slayers get nothing. Perhaps the Council takes the 'sacred calling' business a bit too literally, or perhaps Slayers just aren't expected to ever become adults.
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"I think that's -" He swallows and licks the corners of his lips; Giles is consulting him. "I think that's amazing. Last thing anyone needs is that kind of worry. Especially Buffy, especially after -" He stops again and rubs his knuckles softly over Giles' cheekbone. He wants to ask where Buffy was, why Lilin thought she was flying in glory but Sunnydale wanted her back on earth. Giles' lids are heavy, though, and Oz's limbs feel thick and kind of numb, and now is not the time.
"Twelve hours, huh?" he asks a little later, and Giles doesn't answer so much as make a noise that could almost be a snore. Oz rolls his head back into the pillow and pulls himself closer to Giles. "Love you."
Outside, it's Sunnydale - night, Hellmouth, California - but inside, right here, it's just where he belongs.
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It's full day when he wakes, the room warm and bright just from the light that gets past the curtains. He'd forgotten the strength of California sunshine, as pervasive (intrusive, he sometimes used to feel) as smog and traffic, flat accents and mumbled teenage slang.
Oz is still sleeping, wrapped and folded over Giles in a way that only Oz could find comfortable. His breathing whirrs a little in the back of his throat, a sound too quiet and soothing to be called a snore, and when Giles cranes his neck he can see Oz's eyes roll and dart under closed lids. He's dreaming. Oz-dreams, brewed in the startling depths of Oz's mind (in the mornings, Oz tells him about strange mazy cities whose streets drop off cliffs' edges; apocalyptic landscapes of speaking trees and carapaced, insectile humans; wings, flying carpets, clockwork birds, a thousand ways to fly and fall and fly again) or wolf dreams, the chiaroscuro of moonlight brightened by smell and the urgencies of blood.
Giles rubs Oz's back under the blanket, gently but not too lightly, and whispers, "Dream about me." Asleep, Oz is completely his, trusting his body absolutely to Giles, and completely lost to him, ravished away in dreams like a stolen child in fairyland.
There's a murmur from Oz, a response to the touch or to something in his dream, and Giles lets his hand rove, stroking carefully from everyday places-shoulders, back, ribs and belly-to secret ones-the shallow dip of Oz's navel, the steep jut of pelvic bone, the curve of his arse that Giles' palm molds itself to by muscle memory, bodily knowledge. Oz, locked in the paralysis of dreams, doesn't move, but his breathing's a little faster and he exhales from the throat in long almost-moans. Finally Giles slips his hand between their bodies to touch Oz's cock, already hard and hot under his searching, moving fingers.
What Giles wants, what he always wants when he does this, is to bring Oz to orgasm before he wakes. To find his way into Oz's sleeping mind, into his dreams, and be welcomed there.
Oz always wakes, though, and he wakes now with a shiver, a smack of his lips, a tiny lift of his eyelids. "Good morning," Giles says, and kisses his forehead as his eyes struggle gradually open.
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The air in the room is cold, but Giles' body is warm and firm, and he swipes his thumb gently over the head of Oz's cock as his smile stretches, goes sly and teasing, and Oz shivers a little more awake. Awake already hard, with Giles already holding him, and he's sleepy enough that he finds his hips moving lazily back and forth before he can think about it. The flannel of sleep unwinds, loosens, and Oz searches out Giles' mouth, his eyes half-closed and right hand wandering down to grasp the side of Giles' hip.
Soggy, dream-logged and heavy, Oz kisses Giles slowly, as shallowly as he can while his fingers scritch and tickle at the edge of rough hair between Giles' legs.
"Sleep okay?" he whispers and kisses down the side of Giles' neck. In the mornings, Giles' skin smells like loam, like Oz and perspiration, and Oz suckles sleepily, opening his eyes enough to catch Giles' gaze.
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"I slept very well." Stubble scrapes Giles' lips as he kisses up the line of Oz's jaw, detouring to lick his earlobe and suck up a red mark at the base of his neck. "And then I woke and found a beautiful boy asleep in my arms. Really, what could I do, faced with such temptation?" Oz's hand is still teasing through Giles' pubic hair; Giles takes it and guides it over Oz's own body, all the places he touched while Oz was sleeping. Oz's eyes close and then open again, watching his, while Giles moves their hands over the faintly damp warmth of his inner thigh. Flushed with sleep and sex, eyes bright with it, and he's never more beautiful than in the morning.
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Giles rolls onto his side as he pulls Oz's wrist over Oz's own hip, then wraps Oz's fingers around his own cock and kisses Oz's shoulder. His eyes are narrow, intent, and Oz swallows morningbreath and the ache of kissing before he says, "Dreamed about you. The library one, actually."
The one where the stacks are three times as large, and Giles is shelving, balanced on the stepladder, wearing suspenders, with his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, and Oz is handing books up to him and then the library gets very warm and somehow Oz is tugging down Giles' fly and licking the bulge in his briefs.
He hears Giles' own breathing come a little faster and harsher, and leans over, kisses him hard and deep before sleepiness slides back and Oz rubs his palm over his chest while he whispers fragments of the dream and pulls at his cock slow and steady.
Giles has his eyes narrowed into slits and his mouth a little open and the sight heats-speeds-brightens everything as Oz pinches his own nipple and bites the inside of his cheek and doesn't dare break eye contact.
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Or watch Oz's hand curled tight around his own cock, sliding and pulling, drawing the side of his thumb over the dark red tip, slicking it with every wet droplet that beads at the slit. Or close his eyes and just listen to the flesh-sounds and Oz's rough breathing, grunts and rattles and broken bits of fantasy. Library, school changing room, dark alley, back room of a dirty pub, and Giles himself gone all to sex and need in Oz's mind, perfected there, made beautiful.
Someday, but he needs to touch Oz. Is touching him, licking the rose flush along his chest, taking his cock for a moment in his own fist, straddling him, lifting and pinning his arms and nosing into the crinkly underarm hair where it smells so good, so dirty, sweat and skin and Oz with no chemical interference. Leaning in, pressing him down into the bed, rasping at a nipple with lips and teeth until it's swollen, then playing the tip of his tongue over it while Oz strains, immobile, under him.
"If the school were still standing, I'd take you there," he says, loosing Oz's arms and stroking his hair. "Hide in the stacks with you and suck your cock, bend you over a library table like I always wanted to. Everything either of us ever imagined."
They fantasized, both of them, about public sex, about letting desire shatter concealment and common sense. And now they're back, hiding nothing, and that's the real heart of the fantasy, himself and Oz and no pretense, no lies. "I love you," he says, and rolls his hips so that Oz gasps.
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He's not sure if he's even all the way awake yet, if this could be a particularly intense dream, but it's more real, hyper-real, than any dream, the scratch of Giles' stubble and insistence of his tongue, the rocking, crushing pressure of his hips and his cock trapped alongside Oz's own, superheated and hard.
So many daydreams and nightdreams, history and hopes, full of Giles' hands and his voice and pressure of his body, in parks and washrooms and libraries and cars both parked and moving, and they're all swirling just under the surface of Oz's skin, wordless and straining.
"Cage," he gasps and wraps a leg around the back of Giles' knees. "Tie you up in the cage, suck you for hours." Words and scraps of fantasy, but there aren't words for this, twisting in Giles' hold, running his fingertips down his ass, trying to thrust and failing and swallowing little grunts. Giles is gorgeous like this, wildhaired and darkeyed, and he smells like *himself* and like Oz, too, and it's all steaming and dizzying. "Or the Pump. Bathroom, grab the edge of the sink and bend over in front of you." The words are boiling away and Oz twists again, drops his hips, then drives them up. "Love you, too. Love this, fucking you -"
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This is where it all begins, everything, fucking and fantasy and Giles' whole life. Oz is the beginning, the sine qua non, the terminus a quo, the first word of the first chapter. Oz, Sunnydale, a coffeeshop and a boy and a guitar, and that was the year zero. Before that the dates go negative, counting down, waiting.
Giles was born when Oz kissed him, reborn two months ago with another kiss, a sleepy morning kiss from an unshaven, unwashed Oz. He kisses Oz again, ritual and tribute and Oz tastes so good, so green and alive. Kisses bristly chin and underjaw and down to the soft places of this throat, sucking and gnawing and then kissing the redpurple patch that he's raised. "Love the feel of your skin," he says, hands moving, hips rocking and pressing his cock against Oz's smooth belly, against the burn and silk of Oz's cock, and they're both breathing rough and stuttery. "Love the shape of your cock in my mouth. The taste of your come."
Sliding down Oz's body, skin whispering on skin, kissing a shoulder, a nipple, tonguing the furrows of his ribs and the arrow-line of hair below his navel. Tangled in Oz's arms and legs, and he wants to go slower, stay forever, play out every fantasy one by one and never leave this bed again. It was like this the first night, urgent and reluctant, everything too fast and not fast enough, not when Giles needed to know so much, feel so much, now. "Want to taste you," he says. Tongue-tip to the head of Oz's cock as Oz's fingers dig into his shoulders, then slow circling licks, and it's every fantasy and every memory and for a moment Giles hardly knows where or when he is.
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