The sulfur-yellow streetlights, dimmed as they pass through the already-fogging window, cast shadows over the traces of Oz's expression, but Oz's eyes glint wetly as puddles. Oz sniffs again, coughs experimentally, and it's the hardest thing all night, knowing that Oz really does believe he's feeling allergies and not grief.
Giles leans over until the gearshift digs into his leg and pulls Oz against him, roughly, dragging him by the neck and the arm. "Oz," he says in a long, soft breath, wishing it was enough just to name him. But perhaps it's something, the name that isn't Danny, the name he chose for himself, because Oz inhales slowly, shakily, and molds himself bonelessly closer.
"Oz," he says again, and then doesn't say anything for a while. All the words that Giles can find--and he's rummaging for them, ever more desperate--are useless and banal. Was it always that bad? How did you bear it? You must have been unhappy. Lonely. I'm sorry.
Giles rubs wide, soft circles over Oz's back and watches the window cloud. Gradually little droplets form and snake down the glass. Their breath, the moisture of their bodies.
There are, he decides, no good words to say.
"Tell me. Everything, anything. I'll listen." Love you, Giles adds, barely a whisper in Oz's ear, and cradles the back of Oz's head, bone and memory under his hand.
Giles is big, and kind, and Oz can smell salt on the air, like they're four miles closer to the ocean than they actually are. But it's not the air around them, it's the air going back and forth from their mouths, hovering around them, and Oz tries to concentrate on the feel of Giles' hand through his sweater, the wick-wick of palm on wool, the fact that he's *not* back in time.
"Don't know what to say. Like, she's a nice lady. I *like* her a lot, but I used to think, sometimes, like, maybe I liked her more than she liked me?" Oz closes his eyes, because they burn and itch, and wishes they were in London. It's colder there, and you can walk the streets without thinking about vampires, and the storefronts stay lit all night. He remembers, belatedly, that Giles claims he can't read Oz's mind, and says, "Wish we were home. Like, not about Buffy or anything. Like that part. Just miss the cold."
Cold is Tibet, the van on the road through Colorado, London and Giles' suede jacket. Cold is not here; here, people put on sweaters when the calendar says to, not because they need to.
Almost the only thing Giles has liked about being back in Sunnydale is the weather, the warmth and sunshine he hadn't realized he'd come to enjoy. But he knows what Oz means. Cold, even damp London cold, clarifies. There's certainty in cold, in walking fast, scarf wrapped tight, and coming home to warmth, brightness, tea and a hot bath and clinging together under a heaped-up duvet. Cold makes home more real. "We'll book the tickets," he says, working his fingers vertebra by vertebra down Oz's neck. "Tomorrow. We'll be home in a couple of weeks." He'll have to think of a way to tell Buffy they're leaving, but that, too, can wait until tomorrow.
A muscle in Giles' back clenches at the twisting, and he shifts a little to ease it. A car really isn't the best place for this talk, but now that Oz has started, Giles doesn't want to cut him off. "That can't have been easy. Your mother, I mean." Banalities again, but the words themselves aren't quite the point. "What about your father? Were you close to him, before the divorce?"
Before, Giles never asked before about Oz's family, never let himself wonder, didn't need the reminder that Oz was only seventeen. Family was a ground sown with charges of guilt, like land-mines. One ground of many. Giles didn't ask certain questions, didn't talk about the future, didn't try and stop Oz leaving him. The worst thing he did to Oz, he knows now, was give in to his guilt.
Oz rubs the back of Giles' neck as he thinks. Relief at the thought of going home - *home*, a whole other city, country, culture, but, still, *home* - mixes with old, familiar worry, sour as pickle juice.
"Don't have to book the tickets," he says, and he is thinking of Buffy's drawn face and the ghosts of bruises around her eyes. "Just talking about it's good."
He doesn't know how to talk about his family. He should be able to talk to Giles, of all people, but once he starts thinking about his dad, and Terry, his mind starts to waver and wander. And this should be easy. It's *Giles*; right now, though, that's part of the problem. Oz likes to think that he started becoming himself, who he really wanted to be, when he stepped over the threshold to Giles' apartment that first night. Thresholds keep out vampires, he's always figured, so there might other magic associated with them. That night, and ever since, even when he was alone and didn't think he'd see a familiar face again, he was himself. He was Oz, not Terry's kid or his grandma's Danny. He left them behind when he came inside and Giles kissed him.
"Let's get back to the motel, and -" Oz turns the key and pulls away from the curb, sucking his lower lip between his teeth, glancing in the rearview mirror as Giles' old building starts to shrink. Once the motor's hum is back inside his bones, he starts talking again. "My dad wasn't -. My dad was okay, before he left. Busy a lot, working split shifts and stuff. Kind of - okay, definitely, a womanizer. He's in Maryland now, I think. Building boats or something. He's got some more kids, another wife."
Sooner than he expected, they're at the motel and Oz cuts the engine, his hands still on the wheel, and looks over at Giles. Giles' face, long and handsome, soft in the dim safety lights of the parking garage, rims of his glasses bright around dark, gentle eyes.
"I don't know what I would've done, you know. If I hadn't met you. Which is, yeah, drama-queeny and stupid. But it's true."
Everyone has pet words and favored phrasings; you can use them to tell if Shakespeare or Fletcher wrote some bit of The Two Noble Kinsmen or whether an uncertain text might possibly be by Chaucer. Stupid would turn up often in an analysis of Oz's language; too often, and always about himself.
Giles grips one of Oz's hands, tightly enough to feel the flaring strength of the bone, and says, "Not stupid. Never stupid." Oz accepts it, silently, and turns his hand in Giles' until they're palm to palm, but something in his body language looks doubtful.
On the way to the elevator they don't say anything. Parking garages always make Giles tense; vampires as well as muggers like the emptiness and the concealing shadows. Once the heavy doors thump closed, though, he says, "I'm glad that it helped you, being with me. That it made you happier. Because . . . you know, we both know, that it could easily have done the opposite." A lonely boy, a man more than old enough to be his father-if Giles were reading about it, he knows what kind of ending he'd expect.
The opposite, Oz knows, is the kind of thing his grandma worried about, gay porn in the Valley and Jeffrey Dahmer and white slavery. Or something just as bad, only more banal, exploitation and misery on a personal level. And maybe Giles is right, maybe it's not stupid, exactly, to believe the stuff he believes about meeting Giles; maybe the only stupidity is how he can't express it very well.
They're at the room now, and as soon as the door clicks closed behind them, Oz takes a deep breath and turns until he's against Giles, arms around his waist. He feels more than clingy, cold-skinned and itchy-eyed; he feels like he wants to sink inside Giles and never have to leave.
"Being with you, it was like, it's like -" He looks up and kisses Giles' chin, feeling the burr of early stubble against his lips. "Changed *everything*. Keeps changing it for the better."
Giles tilts his head until they're lip to lip, a still and breathing kiss, and relaxes into the familiar slow rearrangement of his insides. Coming home (even this approximation), being alone with Oz, loosens Giles' skin, untangles tensions that he never feels until this moment. "For me, too," he says, reaching under Oz's jumper and shirt and t-shirt and resting his fingers on the soft hollow of Oz's back. "You know what a mess I was in, before you came back. And then, earlier . . . I wasn't much of a person before I met you."
If there was gift, if there was rescue, it went both ways. Giles leans back against the door and scritches his nails lightly along the short hairs on Oz's neck, making him shiver. "I could almost wish I'd come to Sunnydale sooner. Had more of your life, shortened the time you were lonely. But -" It should be possible to say anything to Oz, now, but still Giles has to turn away, hang the Do Not Disturb sign outside the door and do up the locks. "That would've been disastrous, really." He turns back and kisses Oz on the forehead without quite looking at him.
Oz can close his eyes and find Giles in the dark; he does that now, sliding his hand up Giles' neck and cupping his cheek, nudging his face downward until they're kissing again. Oz opens his eyes when he needs a breath but keeps his hand on Giles' face.
"Disastrous, yeah," he says quietly. "I still had my retainer until a couple months before you came." He knows what Giles meant, since he's thought about it often enough; what it would have been like to meet Giles when he was fourteen, or even six months earlier. If there was something about turning seventeen that meant something, that brought Giles here.
Oz wraps his hand in Giles' and pulls him further into the room, to the foot of the immaculately-made bed. He sits, half on Giles' lap, leg thrown over Giles' knees, and half on the velcro-rough comforter, and traces Giles' knuckles with his thumb. "I wasn't lonely, I don't think. Maybe I was. Just, mostly, kind of absent. That make sense?"
The best thing about going home, Giles thinks as he cups Oz's kneecap in his palm and tries to find a more comfortable balance, will be having a sofa again, and the big armchair by the window--furniture that might have been designed for lap-sitting.
"It does make sense." He lets his hand travel up denim and wool to the skin of Oz's neck, still a little cool from being outside. Absent could describe his own life, too. But unlike Oz, Giles was the one who made other people lonely. He was absent for Julian and then for Paul, so absent that he never understood (until almost a decade later, after Oz left him and he couldn't stop thinking, reliving) why Paul had been unhappy. Absent for people who tried to befriend him, and even, sometimes, for Olivia. "But it's . . . it's sadder than if you had been lonely."
Giles leans back on one elbow and touches Oz's cheek. Oz is thinking, eyes downturned so that his lashes catch the light, and Giles worries that all this talking is only making him feel worse. "What photos did your mother give you?" he asks, fingers sliding down to the rough tip of Oz's chin. "If you're naked in them, I'm afraid they're not going in the sitting room."
Oz unbuttons his sweater and shrugs it off, then plucks the pictures out of his pocket. He remembers, too late, that the carrot cake is still in the backseat of the car, but lies down next to Giles anyway, sorting through the snapshots.
"Some school ones, other stuff. Camp, and canoeing," he says, fanning them out on the bed between them. He reaches into the back pocket of his jeans and extracts another, then adds it to the pile. "I nabbed the naked one in the yard for you. And one from the Dingoes' first gig. Not naked in that. Maybe people would've stayed if I was naked. Probably not."
He's sorting through the pictures, looking at faces he knows as well as his own dreams - Devon, Devon's mom, Eric - and several whose name he's forgotten, but Oz feels far away. Not quite in his skin, not exactly in the room, but nowhere special. Just floating. He glances up, because whatever went on between them, he could usually find a ground in Giles' eyes.
"Don't know what lonely really means," he says, pulling himself closer. "Absent sounds right. Like - it'd be cool if I'd been waiting, but that's not really it." He looks at the picture in his hand - fourteen years old, skinny as someone from Kosovo, in the damn matching t-shirts Devon made them wear that one time. Oz spent three days silk-screening the snarling dingo face onto Hanes Beefy-T's before they met with the rock god's approval. "Just. Half there."
Something about the pose in the band photo is familiar. Giles rummages through the stack until he finds the shot of Oz and Devon at three, or thereabouts, naked and laughing. And the stances are so alike that it must mean something, must express a habit of mind, a whole relationship and history. Devon in front, posing-basking-in an imaginary spotlight; Oz half a step behind, shyer, ceding the attention or, maybe, pushed out of it.
But Devon is there, in photo after photo, keeping Oz company, being his friend; in the later ones, so is the other boy, Eric. "What about your friends?" Giles asks, rolling in as close as he can without crushing the photos. "Devon, especially. Did that . . . you were very close, weren't you?"
Oz inhales, pulls back to look at him, and doesn't answer. "Oz." Giles kisses him, ruffles, as best he can, Oz's stiff hair. "I'm not jealous. Well, only a little." He smiles, pushes the pictures aside, and wriggles until he and Oz are touching down the length of their bodies, which is almost close enough. And he isn't jealous, exactly. The years of Oz's life when Devon was central are years Giles couldn't have had anyway.
"Shouldn't be jealous," Oz whispers, working his knee between Giles' thighs and his hand under Giles' sweater and shirt, over the warm, taut skin of his side. This is entirely different from the first - and last - time they really talked about Devon, even if they're in almost the same position, arms around each other, legs intertwined. Then, Oz was even more stammery and inept with words, and Giles was...not jealous, but careful and brittle. Like there was much, much more he wanted to say but he wouldn't let himself.
"Devon was the best friend I had before you," he says. Closing his eyes for a second, not to shut Giles out but let Devon in. Long tan fingers, laughing face, lashes longer than any girl's. "Did, like, everything with him. Didn't have to talk, or be on, or anything. Just be." He looks at Giles again and feels himself smile tightly. "But, I dunno. He was always *there*, usually, but he was - flaky. Always on the move."
His skin's warming up with every exhale from Giles, every whisper of fingers and palm down his skin, and Oz tries smiling again. It's easier, now, and he waits, hoping, for Giles to smile back.
Giles hooks his leg higher, tighter, over Oz's hip, trapping him close, holding him. Oz has an arm thrust up under his shirt and the other around his neck, and Giles is working his fingers under Oz's waistband, a warm narrow cave of cloth and skin and the pressure of Giles' own calf against Oz's back. Moving, pushing towards immobility, and one of these days they really will manage to tie themselves into a knot.
"More fool Devon," Giles says, feeling his breath pool in the crook of Oz's neck. When he inhales he can smell himself and Oz, as well as beef fat and onions. "I, on the other hand, am not going anywhere." Between every few words he kisses sweet, slick skin, and the broken rhythm seems to make the words clearer, surer. "Never. You won't be able to pry me loose."
Gradually he loops his way up to Oz's mouth for light, long kisses, and runs his tongue slowly over Oz's lips. "You're mine, you see," and the words are half a gasp, shaking, the way Oz's breathing has gone trembly and quick. "You even said so. And I'm yours. And I love you so much. Entirely." He puts his mouth to Oz's ear, closes his eyes, and lets words slip out as they please. "Fervently, devotedly, passionately, adoringly. Unendingly."
The censor, the mocker in Giles' head that would normally stop him, turn him red and silent with shame at just the thought of words like this, does nothing. Lets him speak, and he's too glad, too liberated, even to fear that Oz will find him ridiculous.
Giles leans over until the gearshift digs into his leg and pulls Oz against him, roughly, dragging him by the neck and the arm. "Oz," he says in a long, soft breath, wishing it was enough just to name him. But perhaps it's something, the name that isn't Danny, the name he chose for himself, because Oz inhales slowly, shakily, and molds himself bonelessly closer.
"Oz," he says again, and then doesn't say anything for a while. All the words that Giles can find--and he's rummaging for them, ever more desperate--are useless and banal. Was it always that bad? How did you bear it? You must have been unhappy. Lonely. I'm sorry.
Giles rubs wide, soft circles over Oz's back and watches the window cloud. Gradually little droplets form and snake down the glass. Their breath, the moisture of their bodies.
There are, he decides, no good words to say.
"Tell me. Everything, anything. I'll listen." Love you, Giles adds, barely a whisper in Oz's ear, and cradles the back of Oz's head, bone and memory under his hand.
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"Don't know what to say. Like, she's a nice lady. I *like* her a lot, but I used to think, sometimes, like, maybe I liked her more than she liked me?" Oz closes his eyes, because they burn and itch, and wishes they were in London. It's colder there, and you can walk the streets without thinking about vampires, and the storefronts stay lit all night. He remembers, belatedly, that Giles claims he can't read Oz's mind, and says, "Wish we were home. Like, not about Buffy or anything. Like that part. Just miss the cold."
Cold is Tibet, the van on the road through Colorado, London and Giles' suede jacket. Cold is not here; here, people put on sweaters when the calendar says to, not because they need to.
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A muscle in Giles' back clenches at the twisting, and he shifts a little to ease it. A car really isn't the best place for this talk, but now that Oz has started, Giles doesn't want to cut him off. "That can't have been easy. Your mother, I mean." Banalities again, but the words themselves aren't quite the point. "What about your father? Were you close to him, before the divorce?"
Before, Giles never asked before about Oz's family, never let himself wonder, didn't need the reminder that Oz was only seventeen. Family was a ground sown with charges of guilt, like land-mines. One ground of many. Giles didn't ask certain questions, didn't talk about the future, didn't try and stop Oz leaving him. The worst thing he did to Oz, he knows now, was give in to his guilt.
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"Don't have to book the tickets," he says, and he is thinking of Buffy's drawn face and the ghosts of bruises around her eyes. "Just talking about it's good."
He doesn't know how to talk about his family. He should be able to talk to Giles, of all people, but once he starts thinking about his dad, and Terry, his mind starts to waver and wander. And this should be easy. It's *Giles*; right now, though, that's part of the problem. Oz likes to think that he started becoming himself, who he really wanted to be, when he stepped over the threshold to Giles' apartment that first night. Thresholds keep out vampires, he's always figured, so there might other magic associated with them. That night, and ever since, even when he was alone and didn't think he'd see a familiar face again, he was himself. He was Oz, not Terry's kid or his grandma's Danny. He left them behind when he came inside and Giles kissed him.
"Let's get back to the motel, and -" Oz turns the key and pulls away from the curb, sucking his lower lip between his teeth, glancing in the rearview mirror as Giles' old building starts to shrink. Once the motor's hum is back inside his bones, he starts talking again. "My dad wasn't -. My dad was okay, before he left. Busy a lot, working split shifts and stuff. Kind of - okay, definitely, a womanizer. He's in Maryland now, I think. Building boats or something. He's got some more kids, another wife."
Sooner than he expected, they're at the motel and Oz cuts the engine, his hands still on the wheel, and looks over at Giles. Giles' face, long and handsome, soft in the dim safety lights of the parking garage, rims of his glasses bright around dark, gentle eyes.
"I don't know what I would've done, you know. If I hadn't met you. Which is, yeah, drama-queeny and stupid. But it's true."
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Giles grips one of Oz's hands, tightly enough to feel the flaring strength of the bone, and says, "Not stupid. Never stupid." Oz accepts it, silently, and turns his hand in Giles' until they're palm to palm, but something in his body language looks doubtful.
On the way to the elevator they don't say anything. Parking garages always make Giles tense; vampires as well as muggers like the emptiness and the concealing shadows. Once the heavy doors thump closed, though, he says, "I'm glad that it helped you, being with me. That it made you happier. Because . . . you know, we both know, that it could easily have done the opposite." A lonely boy, a man more than old enough to be his father-if Giles were reading about it, he knows what kind of ending he'd expect.
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They're at the room now, and as soon as the door clicks closed behind them, Oz takes a deep breath and turns until he's against Giles, arms around his waist. He feels more than clingy, cold-skinned and itchy-eyed; he feels like he wants to sink inside Giles and never have to leave.
"Being with you, it was like, it's like -" He looks up and kisses Giles' chin, feeling the burr of early stubble against his lips. "Changed *everything*. Keeps changing it for the better."
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If there was gift, if there was rescue, it went both ways. Giles leans back against the door and scritches his nails lightly along the short hairs on Oz's neck, making him shiver. "I could almost wish I'd come to Sunnydale sooner. Had more of your life, shortened the time you were lonely. But -" It should be possible to say anything to Oz, now, but still Giles has to turn away, hang the Do Not Disturb sign outside the door and do up the locks. "That would've been disastrous, really." He turns back and kisses Oz on the forehead without quite looking at him.
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"Disastrous, yeah," he says quietly. "I still had my retainer until a couple months before you came." He knows what Giles meant, since he's thought about it often enough; what it would have been like to meet Giles when he was fourteen, or even six months earlier. If there was something about turning seventeen that meant something, that brought Giles here.
Oz wraps his hand in Giles' and pulls him further into the room, to the foot of the immaculately-made bed. He sits, half on Giles' lap, leg thrown over Giles' knees, and half on the velcro-rough comforter, and traces Giles' knuckles with his thumb. "I wasn't lonely, I don't think. Maybe I was. Just, mostly, kind of absent. That make sense?"
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"It does make sense." He lets his hand travel up denim and wool to the skin of Oz's neck, still a little cool from being outside. Absent could describe his own life, too. But unlike Oz, Giles was the one who made other people lonely. He was absent for Julian and then for Paul, so absent that he never understood (until almost a decade later, after Oz left him and he couldn't stop thinking, reliving) why Paul had been unhappy. Absent for people who tried to befriend him, and even, sometimes, for Olivia. "But it's . . . it's sadder than if you had been lonely."
Giles leans back on one elbow and touches Oz's cheek. Oz is thinking, eyes downturned so that his lashes catch the light, and Giles worries that all this talking is only making him feel worse. "What photos did your mother give you?" he asks, fingers sliding down to the rough tip of Oz's chin. "If you're naked in them, I'm afraid they're not going in the sitting room."
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"Some school ones, other stuff. Camp, and canoeing," he says, fanning them out on the bed between them. He reaches into the back pocket of his jeans and extracts another, then adds it to the pile. "I nabbed the naked one in the yard for you. And one from the Dingoes' first gig. Not naked in that. Maybe people would've stayed if I was naked. Probably not."
He's sorting through the pictures, looking at faces he knows as well as his own dreams - Devon, Devon's mom, Eric - and several whose name he's forgotten, but Oz feels far away. Not quite in his skin, not exactly in the room, but nowhere special. Just floating. He glances up, because whatever went on between them, he could usually find a ground in Giles' eyes.
"Don't know what lonely really means," he says, pulling himself closer. "Absent sounds right. Like - it'd be cool if I'd been waiting, but that's not really it." He looks at the picture in his hand - fourteen years old, skinny as someone from Kosovo, in the damn matching t-shirts Devon made them wear that one time. Oz spent three days silk-screening the snarling dingo face onto Hanes Beefy-T's before they met with the rock god's approval. "Just. Half there."
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But Devon is there, in photo after photo, keeping Oz company, being his friend; in the later ones, so is the other boy, Eric. "What about your friends?" Giles asks, rolling in as close as he can without crushing the photos. "Devon, especially. Did that . . . you were very close, weren't you?"
Oz inhales, pulls back to look at him, and doesn't answer. "Oz." Giles kisses him, ruffles, as best he can, Oz's stiff hair. "I'm not jealous. Well, only a little." He smiles, pushes the pictures aside, and wriggles until he and Oz are touching down the length of their bodies, which is almost close enough. And he isn't jealous, exactly. The years of Oz's life when Devon was central are years Giles couldn't have had anyway.
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"Devon was the best friend I had before you," he says. Closing his eyes for a second, not to shut Giles out but let Devon in. Long tan fingers, laughing face, lashes longer than any girl's. "Did, like, everything with him. Didn't have to talk, or be on, or anything. Just be." He looks at Giles again and feels himself smile tightly. "But, I dunno. He was always *there*, usually, but he was - flaky. Always on the move."
His skin's warming up with every exhale from Giles, every whisper of fingers and palm down his skin, and Oz tries smiling again. It's easier, now, and he waits, hoping, for Giles to smile back.
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"More fool Devon," Giles says, feeling his breath pool in the crook of Oz's neck. When he inhales he can smell himself and Oz, as well as beef fat and onions. "I, on the other hand, am not going anywhere." Between every few words he kisses sweet, slick skin, and the broken rhythm seems to make the words clearer, surer. "Never. You won't be able to pry me loose."
Gradually he loops his way up to Oz's mouth for light, long kisses, and runs his tongue slowly over Oz's lips. "You're mine, you see," and the words are half a gasp, shaking, the way Oz's breathing has gone trembly and quick. "You even said so. And I'm yours. And I love you so much. Entirely." He puts his mouth to Oz's ear, closes his eyes, and lets words slip out as they please. "Fervently, devotedly, passionately, adoringly. Unendingly."
The censor, the mocker in Giles' head that would normally stop him, turn him red and silent with shame at just the thought of words like this, does nothing. Lets him speak, and he's too glad, too liberated, even to fear that Oz will find him ridiculous.
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