They all look just the same. That's all Giles can notice in that first endless moment, as pens drop and eyes look up from books and voices sputter into silence. They don't look at all older than when he left them, and of course they wouldn't; it only seems like years have gone by, like one world has ended and another begun.
Then time moves a little, budges forward like a stuck car, and Oz's hey flutters down into the canyon of silence, and Giles sees that they're not quite the same. Anya's got a peculiar haircut, Dawn's grown another inch, and Buffy looks . . . tired. As though she's only just washed off the grave-dirt; as though she was awoken too soon from an exhausted sleep.
Tired and wary-eyed and alive, she truly is alive, and the last two times Giles saw her, she was dead. Smashed at the base of the tower, just a sack of broken bones, her lovely face shattered like a dropped dish; and later, in her coffin, transformed by embalmers' tricks into a ghastly parody of life, putty and make-up and no breath at all
( ... )
So many eyes, shifting over them, and Oz just smiles. Giles' hand is warming in his own, and Buffy is alive. Until this moment, it didn't seem like it was necessarily real. She smells different, like cinders and roses, but she looks real, is alive. Her eyes flicker over to him and Oz half-shrugs as Xander coughs loudly
( ... )
Willow and Tara are the only ones still sitting, with the table between them and Oz like a barricade. Oz hasn't looked at Willow, and Willow can't seem to look anywhere but at Oz, until suddenly she whispers something to Tara, slips an arm around her, and says, "Oz . . .? Oz, you're here. With, with Giles?" She sounds like a confused child, like the sweet girl she was at sixteen, and Giles could almost feel sorry for her shock if Oz didn't look so worried
( ... )
Oz finds himself between Giles and Dawn, right across from Tara, and he tries to give her a smile. Her eyes widen and dart over to Willow. Or, actually, the shape that Willow makes in the corner of his eye
( ... )
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
( ... )
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 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
( ... )
Under Giles' mouth and hands, the humming and stroking, Oz hangs suspended for several moments, fern fronds or those weird plants in the Amazon that grow in the air, root in clouds, and never see the earth. Giles' words twine up through the clouds, bringing water and light, and it's remarkable and beautiful how seriously he takes the physical things, how he can translate sensations into words, pass them back over Oz's body. And then things blur brightly when Giles pushes his lips over his cockhead and sucks so hard that everything snaps back into extreme focus and Oz's skin lights up from the inside out and his mouth aches, hollow and dry.
He tugs on Giles' hair, hooks his hand under one of Giles' arms, and slides around, down, until they're curved into each other and he's licking the pelt of hair at the base of Giles' cock, then the base itself, hot silk foreskin and throbbing vein and Giles shudders, hums again, throwing his leg over Oz's shoulder. Yin and yang, completely round and right, as he rolls his lips over the head of
( ... )
Tangle. Arms and legs looped across each other's bodies, guiding cocks and mouths, braced for leverage on the mattress or sliding along arched backs and spread legs, and Giles is losing track of which ones are his. He moves his mouth slowly over Oz's cock, cradling it on his tongue, sucking tight-lipped and giving a quick up-twist at the head, the way Oz likes, and he can feel it all on his own cock because Oz is doing the same thing
( ... )
Trapped and burrowing and thrusting here-there-everywhere, Oz goes dizzy, his mouth full and hot, Giles' hands pulling him closer, stroking in counter-time to his swirling tongue and own rocking hips. He swipes his tongue over his thumb and index finger on the next pull upward, and then he's diving back in, lips stretching and tongue reaching for the crevice between Giles' balls as his finger swirls around Giles' hole and rocks its knuckle against it.
So much, giving-taking-being, and it's all like those creepy fast-motion nature movies, a plant growing from tiny sprout to towering stalk, ramifying, and the heat and ache are making him grin and twist and rock faster as Giles does, too, and his finger slides a little way in, into where it's tighter and darker and slicker than anything, and Giles groans and Oz answers him, sliding his tongue between the rim of his cockhead and the edge of his foreskin, making him shudder and grip Oz's head tighter with his thighs as Oz's finger slides into the first knuckle
( ... )
Every feeling is magnified as well as blurred, looping and borderless and huge, like a reflection in a rippled funhouse mirror. Oz's finger stretches him wide, fills and reshapes him to a thin skin around its bulk, and his own fingers are clumsy and huge, fumbling around Oz's hole. Each push of Giles' hips sends him forward into wet sucking heat or back onto this stinging burning twisting pleasure, and he arches and humps and spasms between them, back and forth and always higher, always better
( ... )
Oz stands up, folding the top of the bag down so the rest of the danishes don't go stale, and he catches Giles' elbow as he turns. "Not ridiculous," he says, and holds Giles' eyes for as long as it takes for Giles' face to relax a little. Smooth and blink, and Oz nods. "It's not ridiculous. It's just so mixed-up and fucked-up and it's not like we're ever going to know one way or the other
( ... )
Oz is right, of course. Giles' life and Oz's life, the hellmouth, the destiny that sent Buffy here and the duty that made Giles follow, even Buffy's death and resurrection: it's all confusion, a knot of intentions and accidents and inevitabilities. There's no sorting it out. And even if they knew what was chance and what was fate, that would only be the beginning of the story. They'd still live the rest bit by bit, in uncertainty, just like everyone
( ... )
Comments 48
Then time moves a little, budges forward like a stuck car, and Oz's hey flutters down into the canyon of silence, and Giles sees that they're not quite the same. Anya's got a peculiar haircut, Dawn's grown another inch, and Buffy looks . . . tired. As though she's only just washed off the grave-dirt; as though she was awoken too soon from an exhausted sleep.
Tired and wary-eyed and alive, she truly is alive, and the last two times Giles saw her, she was dead. Smashed at the base of the tower, just a sack of broken bones, her lovely face shattered like a dropped dish; and later, in her coffin, transformed by embalmers' tricks into a ghastly parody of life, putty and make-up and no breath at all ( ... )
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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 ( ... )
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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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He tugs on Giles' hair, hooks his hand under one of Giles' arms, and slides around, down, until they're curved into each other and he's licking the pelt of hair at the base of Giles' cock, then the base itself, hot silk foreskin and throbbing vein and Giles shudders, hums again, throwing his leg over Oz's shoulder. Yin and yang, completely round and right, as he rolls his lips over the head of ( ... )
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So much, giving-taking-being, and it's all like those creepy fast-motion nature movies, a plant growing from tiny sprout to towering stalk, ramifying, and the heat and ache are making him grin and twist and rock faster as Giles does, too, and his finger slides a little way in, into where it's tighter and darker and slicker than anything, and Giles groans and Oz answers him, sliding his tongue between the rim of his cockhead and the edge of his foreskin, making him shudder and grip Oz's head tighter with his thighs as Oz's finger slides into the first knuckle ( ... )
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