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glossing January 3 2005, 03:19:15 UTC
It's all too good to keep track of - the soft, curled edge of his pillowcase, the warm weight of Giles against him, the lingering buzz of kissing that melted into sleep - and Oz slides into dreams. Flying, and sailing in a birch-bark canoe down the river of Main Street past the Espresso Pump, paddling slowly through soupy clouds and crystalline, tinkling wind, the canoe becoming Giles' chest, broad and warm, rising and falling with breathing waves.

Cushioned on Giles, his mind travels on, around corners and into swamps, past the Statue of Liberty and through Xander's living room, toward the rising sun and past stony banks paced by wolves and animate skeletons. The wind is a tangle of hair, Buffy's blonde, blushing into Willow's red, tickling his face, and on the other side of the sun, black hair tipped with claws. Cold and sour back there and Oz jerks awake, gasping.

Back in their room, Giles splayed on his side, arm over Oz's neck and face buried in the crook of Oz's arm. Morning, maybe afternoon - Oz knuckles his eyes with his free hand and tries to figure out the time, but all he knows is that the room is full of light and the flat smells like home.

Stale, antique-store home, but still home. He has to piss, but when he slides off the bed, Giles grunts in his sleep and smacks his lips. Oz smoothes back Giles' hair, pulls up the quilt, and then hurries to the bathroom.

Half an hour later, all the windows open, and everything still smells...strange. Just slightly off, milk that expired yesterday, and Oz is down the first flight of stairs, checking his wallet for Giles' debit card, before he's formed a plan.

Date bread, blueberry muffins. Something warm and baked to clear out the smell of abandonment. The flat will appreciate it and so will Giles.

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kindkit January 4 2005, 01:45:27 UTC
Bright. They must have slept very . . . Giles rolls over, arm already bent to curve around Oz, but Oz isn't there.

Oz isn't . . .

Oh.

There's a rich, butter-and-cooked-sugar smell in the air, a smell that adds warmth to the sunlight. Oz has only gone as far as the kitchen. He's baking, which is the opposite of leaving.

In fact, he looks cozily settled in at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and reading the Guardian, with the Independent and a copy of Time Out at his elbow. He looks more completely, comfortably at home than he ever has here before, as though it took traveling and coming back to let the truth of it appear.

"Morning," Giles says, hugging him from behind and kissing the top of his head. Oz folds his arms over Giles', his fingers stroking the velvet sleeve of Giles' dressing gown, and tilts his head back and smiles.

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glossing January 8 2005, 02:59:48 UTC
"Morning," Oz replies. Giles is unshaven, the folds of his pajama top still smelling like sleep, and his glasses have slid all the way down to the tip of his nose. Times like this, mornings and late nights, Oz gets a sense of what Giles must have looked like as a kid. Rumpled, soft-faced, his eyes crinkling up in a smile as he bends over and kisses Oz again. Closed-mouthed, because he's just up, and he chuckles slightly when Oz runs his hands up under the sleeves of the robe and squeezes his elbows to hold him in place.

"Muffins and bread should be coming out soon," Oz says, twisting around as he stands up. He can never stop touching Giles' robe; it's soft, and made of a thousand rich colors, and somehow simultaneously perfectly *Giles* and perfectly *not*. "Want some tea? They need to cool, so if you want a shower -"

Giles nods, kissing him again.

"Had to run back for milk," Oz says, plugging in the kettle and checking the oven, "I would've left a note, but you were *out*. Smells better in here, right?"

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kindkit January 9 2005, 20:03:06 UTC
"It smells wonderful," Giles says. It reminds him of their happier moments in Sunnydale, and, more distantly, of childhood Sundays. His mother baked currant scones and sometimes a cake for after dinner, all in the early hours before the morning service. He'd wake up to the smell, usually late, and eat a scone while running to church in his choir robes. "Thank you." Oz's childhood must have been very different, and yet he seems to imagine home the same way Giles does. Perhaps a happy childhood and an unhappy one create the same longings.

Giles hurries through his shower, wanting tea and a muffin that hasn't cooled as much as Oz says they're supposed to. Wanting, mostly, to see Oz again at the table, chin in his palm as he reads and one foot hooked around the leg of his chair. It's the way he always sits, the way he will always sit for each of however many thousand mornings add up to forever. The future echoes out from today, almost visibly close and yet extending far past sight and knowledge, and Giles wants to get started.

All their shaving things are still packed, so Giles doesn't bother. A little scruffiness seems to match the day's mood and the blueberry-jam smell of the muffins that Oz is turning out onto a rack. Giles leans against the counter and kisses Oz while he's still trying to take off the oven mitts. "You," he says. "Thank you." Another kiss, deeper, Oz's mouth tasting richly of coffee and his arm solid and heavy around Giles' neck. "Next time, though . . . do leave me a note, all right? Just in case." He tightens his arms around Oz's waist and hopes it doesn't sound like a refusal to trust.

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glossing January 9 2005, 20:25:19 UTC
Oz bumps Giles with his hip and tosses the mitts over his shoulder. Giles' hair is sticking up, his cheeks still bristly, and he looks *relaxed*. Even asking for a note.

"You'll totally get a note," Oz says, tapping the tops of the muffins, his mouth watering. "Think I'm still a little out of it, that's all. Like, I thought 'muffins' and just...took off."

Laughing, Giles kisses him again, all toothpaste and hot soapy water/clean skin, before pulling back and filling the teapot. And now that weekend-morning quiet is settling around them, soft and warm as Giles' velvet robe, the kind of quiet that, in the midst of, Oz can never imagine ending. Endless, comfortable quiet, glances and sharing sections of the paper, and should it be this easy to slip back into comfort?

Oz counts backward and realizes it's been scarcely a day since they took off from LA. The drive to the city and all the plane-boarding stuff is smeared like rubber cement in his memory, he was so tired. It shouldn't be quite so *possible* to leave California and wake up to muffins and Giles in London the next day.

It feels like tempting fate, somehow, but superstitiousness like that is best left on the hellmouth.

"You like blueberries, right?" Oz asks when the muffins are almost finished cooling. "I *think* you do, but -- brain. Sieve. Right now."

Giles pushes back from the table, reaching for the platter, and Oz plops down onto his lap, inhaling the scent off Giles' neck the way other people would say grace first.

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kindkit January 9 2005, 21:09:19 UTC
The top of a muffin collapses under Giles' fingers when Oz starts nuzzling and sniffing his neck. He grips Oz's heavy t-shirt with a crumb-covered hand and rubs his face in Oz's hair. It smells more familiar now, bright and herbal from their usual shampoo instead of the cheap, overperfumed one the motel provided. "I missed you," Giles says stupidly. "This, I mean, being . . ." While he's still searching for words Oz kisses him, slowly and somehow analytically, as though he too is trying to understand why it all feels so different here, at home.

The kiss scratches a little, red prickly warmth as their unshaven cheeks scrape and snag. Oz's beard always comes in heavily, rough as a brush against Giles' lips, surprising when his chest is so smooth. Something thrilling in the contrast, and Giles is working his way down Oz's neck, licking at the faint caffeine-bitterness and the stubble that thins out like arctic trees, already imagining the silk-and-bone below his throat, when the oven timer beeps.

He freezes in surprise, mouth open to Oz's skin, and then starts to laugh.

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glossing January 9 2005, 21:29:37 UTC
Oz used to think of Giles' stubble in terms of their days in the mountains, cold pearly mornings and the van smelling like sex and pine needles. Since September, though, the rasp of stubble on his lips and under his fingers makes him think of finding Giles in the green dark. White spots in his beard and Scotch clinging to every pore, but the sense-memory isn't sad, not exactly. It's part sad, part hopeful, and nothing can beat the friction-burns Oz got from their sex the morning after.

"Sorry --" He pulls himself off Giles' lap, palm lingering on the nap of his robe -- like the inverse of his stubble and just as touchable -- as long as physically possible before turning to the oven. The mitts would be good, but he can only find one.

"Date bread," he says over his shoulder. "Added some of the dried cranberries we left, too. Gonna be chockful of chewy --"

Goodness, he was about to say, but now that he's across the room, he can *see* Giles and the air goes out of his lungs. Sprawled in the chair, robe open to the belt, flush building in his cheeks, and Oz yanks out the bread, dumping it unceremoniously on the rack, and hurries back.

"Jesus, you look --" No words, but that's okay. Giles opens his arms and jiggles his knee, and he looks about as horny as Oz feels right now. The sun cuts across his face, carving sharp shadows and bright hollows, and Oz kisses wherever he can reach. Cheekbone, clavicle, hollow of Giles' throat. "Taste better, too."

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kindkit January 9 2005, 22:16:28 UTC
"Do I?" Giles holds Oz's hips, so narrow and sharp under the velvety corduroy of his ancient trousers, and leans back when Oz nudges his shoulder. With a rough noise, approval and something like triumph, Oz pulls open the neck of his pyjamas and sucks hard at the end of his collarbone. "Better than date bread with cranberries? Better than - god, Oz - better than steak with peppercorn sauce? Better than miso soup, hmm?" His hmm turns into something else, something that's not even close to language, when Oz rubs his bristly cheek fiercely against the hollow of Giles' throat until his skin burns, then licks the hot and sensitized patch.

Giles slides his hands across the ridged cloth to cup Oz's arse, digs his fingers in and pulls Oz up tighter against him. Oz is still licking his throat, rolling the skin between his lips, yanking Giles' hair to tilt his head. "That feels so -" Murmuring, Oz sucks harder, and Giles can feel the blood welling under his skin, the slow bruise deepening. "Don't stop, don't . . . Oz, use your teeth, let me feel it." Oz used to leave him black and blue, truly marked. Not since the wolf, but that was too much caution, surely, that was Oz chaining himself, denying himself. A mistake, and they're done with those mistakes.

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glossing January 9 2005, 22:34:51 UTC
Giles is asking for something impossible. Asking with his hoarse, ragged, *shy* voice, with his fingers that grip and clutch, and he tastes like home, flour and spit and soap. Skin that burns and glows under his mouth, and this is all impossible. Making breakfast for Giles, getting thousands of miles away from Sunnydale, sitting here and tasting and making Giles tremble and stammer. All of it.

Oz feels -- oxygenated, carbonated, helium-filled -- something. Light and warm and wiggly in Giles' clenching hold, and hungry, too. And when he scrapes his front teeth down the length of Giles' throat and holds his breath so he can hear Giles' reaction, he has to trust that it's okay. He has to trust that the impossible still happens, sometimes, that biting Giles will make him smile and thrust up his hips like he's doing now.

"Feel that?" Another scrape, horizontal this time, dragging his tongue behind his teeth, tasting and sucking it up. "That?" And he keeps on, teeth that don't break skin, but it must be almost enough, because Giles is *gurgling* and his hands flex and grip on Oz's ass in time with the jerky rocks of his hips. Oz thrusts back, the zipper on his pants going tight over his crotch, heat sucked up from Giles spreading and blooming through his own skin.

Lick, scrape, upward, to the soft spot behind Giles' right ear, and when Oz bites, it's safe, there's not enough skin *to* break, and Giles' head falls back as he gasps.

"Feel it now?" Oz asks and his voice is thick with taste and need. "Want you to feel it, Giles."

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kindkit January 9 2005, 23:16:00 UTC
Red flashes behind Giles' eyelids, red smoky glow rippling and throbbing along his skin, and this is what Giles has needed, what he's missed without knowing it even after Oz came back. This roughness, these invisible aching lines Oz draws on him, they mean Oz isn't holding back. He's trusting himself, trusting Giles, and what they used to have they can have again-- dizzying, melting openness, a giving and taking that fragment, kaleidoscope, make symmetry and newness.

"Yes," Giles says. It comes out a soft and sloppy vowel because his mouth is pressed against Oz's shoulder. He bites, another yes that sinks through the black cotton and into Oz's skin, to his nerves and his cock and Oz gasps, shudders, in answer. Wrapping one arm around Oz's shoulders, the other around his hips, Giles tips them both forward onto a sunlit patch of floor. They land with a thump, Giles' knees bruised and probably Oz's backside as well, and the chair clatters down after them. The startlement on Oz's face brightens into a smile, and he pulls Giles the rest of the way down until he's flattened under Giles' body and Giles can feel his every breath. "Want you," Giles says, and Oz laughs, a low and pleased laugh that breaks off when Giles closes his teeth over a bunch of Oz's earrings and tugs. Oz's moan stretches, pleadingly, when Giles pushes back up to his knees. "Let me see you," Giles says, stripping off Oz's t-shirt. He straddles Oz's thighs and kisses his shoulder, wrestling off his dressing gown, and then tucks it under Oz. "Lie back." He wants to see Oz against the velvet, wants Oz to feel it against his bare skin as Giles touches him.

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glossing January 9 2005, 23:32:45 UTC
Every time he breathes, Oz draws in the air through spit still heavy with the taste of Giles, and it's making his head swim as he lies here, wriggling, the velvet brushing and teasing every hair on his shoulders, back, ass. Everywhere.

Everywhere, so soft underneath, and then on top, the rough-nap of Giles' hands and the intensity of his stare, and Oz can't move. He lies still, gasping like a fish for air, getting drunk on the taste and the sight, lips burning for more kisses, and he can't move.

In Sunnydale, they've been so careful. Except for the amnesia, and Oz didn't even realize it until now, until Giles is looking and touching and he's here, totally here, eyes crinkled up and mouth wet and open, and there's nothing else around them to distract them. Nothing to hide from, and the sun is warm on his chest and lighting up Giles' damp hair like a ragged halo, and now Oz can't not move.

Spreading his arms, lifting his chest off the floor, and looking back at Giles.

"See me?" Oz asks, gulping when Giles pinches one nipple and pushes him back down onto hard floor, soft velvet. "Want to watch me? What do you want to see?"

He moves to open his fly and Giles catches his wrist, holds it there between them so hard the bones grind a little.

Soft and hard, rough and velvet, and they don't have to be afraid any more. They've got everything right here.

"Show you everything," Oz says and watches Giles' eyes squeeze close in response. "Anything."

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kindkit January 11 2005, 00:07:30 UTC
These moments, when Oz's voice rattles like beach pebbles and his hips push and offer, when he'll give everything and they can do anything together, these are the best moments Giles knows. He used to coax them into being, used to heat Oz slowly, carefully, until his shyness melted like the wax core of a statue and Giles could pour pleasure inside, pour himself, make something fine and heavy and true. And sometimes he still coaxes, finding a new way to make Oz shy and knowing this moment will happen. Knowing he can bring Oz to blushing urgency, to a surrender that's really something else, something like possession, like immanence.

This is what they're going to have, forever. Long repeated seduction, the most serious and delicious play. "Show me," Giles says, pressing Oz's fingers around the hill of Oz's own erection, then thrusting in a long slow slide. He watches Oz's face as he moves. So much response there, Oz's eyes clamping shut and his mouth dropping open as he drags in a sucking breath, and it's only the beginning of what Oz can let him see. "Show me, let me see everything." Giles cants his hips up as he talks and works one-handed at Oz's flies. "Let me see you hard for me. Let me see you with your cock red and hard and swollen. Your legs spread open so I can see everything, see your balls and your pink little hole."

Words work on Oz almost like touch; he's red-faced and quivering, flush and a sheen of sweat painting his chest to the nipples. He bucks up once as Giles slips his trousers down a few inches, then stills when Giles grasps his hipbones and holds him down. "So fucking beautiful, Oz." Giles brushes two fingers over Oz's mouth, and Oz, eyes still closed, stretches after them like a baby bird. As Giles draws them down his chest and belly, then slowly pulls his trousers the rest of the way off, Oz holds his breath and starts to shake. "I wish you could see yourself like this. Maybe I'll take pictures for you. Would you like that?" When Giles starts on the underpants, lifting them carefully free of Oz's erection and lowering them just past his hips, Oz takes a sudden, wet-sounding breath and opens his eyes.

Being looked at strengthens looking, gives it richness and savor, and Giles sits back on his heels and stares. It's pornographic, Oz splayed wide and inviting on velvet, his pants bunched around his thighs. But it's more, too, purity and ecstasy, and Giles thinks of painted saints, souls bare and faces turned up to the divine light. "Oz," Giles says, and picks up one of Oz's outflung hands. Still looking into Oz's eyes, he kisses it, then sets it on the valley that curves inside Oz's hip. "Let me see you. Touch yourself for me." Oz licks his lips and blushes redder, eyes widening as Giles guides his hand to his cock. "Like on the plane. I want to see what I missed."

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glossing January 11 2005, 19:13:16 UTC
<-------- zigged over

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