These were mostly written for various Open On Sunday challenges; they're arranged chronologically in order of writing, with the most recent at the bottom.
Pacific Coast Highway
All night Oz drives north. At dawn he parks, settles on a rock to watch the sea, lights up a joint that might let him sleep.
The sharpest pains--Willow with Tara, a steel table and shocks convulsing his body--he locks in a little cupboard below his mind. To let them age.
Old memories taste better, the pain gone melancholy, rich, wine-subtle.
Giles loved to read out loud, doing Mole and Rat and Toad in funny voices while Oz laughed. Bedtime stories and then bed, salty-sweet kisses and the creak of aging springs.
Giles always kissed like saying goodbye.
Untitled ficlet
(for Glossolalia)
Giles always imagined finding him somewhere mystical: Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat, a Nepalese lamasery. A place with portents, a place where they'd feel fate working under the gossamer veil of matter.
Instead, they nearly collide on a foothpath in Hyde Park. Giles is thinking about a translator for a new, Xhosa-speaking Slayer; Oz is eating roasted chestnuts out of a paper cone.
"Terribly sorry," Giles says before the face registers. Then a pool of silence rises from somewhere under his ribs, fills him, drowns his words in clean purity.
"Hey," Oz says.
Giles stares. The sunlight turns Oz's cropped hair a pale orangey-gold, all the more startling because it's natural. His heavy, shabby coat is the same deep brown as the chestnuts. It's not a California coat. Oz used to look like the distilled essence of California boyhood. Now, stripped of his random artificial colors, he's not a boy, and he doesn't exemplify anything but himself.
"Hello, Oz." With three syllables, Giles' muscles ease, his spine loosens, his joints work more smoothly in their sockets. His shoes are more comfortable. The sky is bluer.
"Want one?" Oz asks, proffering the cone. The chestnut warms Giles' fingertips, but he can't look away from Oz long enough to peel it.
"Thank you." The other words he's wanted to say--where have you been?, why didn't you call?, didn't you miss me?, sometimes I thought you must be dead--don't feel too urgent. It's one of Oz's gifts, this leisure, this spreading, communicable peace. Everything can be said in its own good time.
Oz is smiling. Any other observer might miss it, but Giles sees. He puts the chestnut in his pocket and takes Oz's hand.
Oz smiles a little wider.
Dear Boy
There are words Giles doesn't use: sweetheart, dearest, darling, beloved. Victorian words, as fussy as lace, as ridiculous as bustles, petticoats, starched detachable collars. Usually he doesn't even think them, in case they slip out.
Not that Oz would laugh. But the words don't fit him any more than a tailcoat would. And Giles can't say baby, honey, something modern that might fit, any more than he can wear trainers.
He says Oz, and Oz says Giles, and there are no other words for this impossibility, this miracle. No words but the naked ones, bare as bodies, bare as love.
Calluses and Scars
Every time, it hurts. But that's inevitable. Training leaves bruises, blistered skin, bleeding gashes. Eventually it leaves calluses and scars. Giles has training scars: a slash on his forehead from a misaimed fencing thrust, a knee that aches when it rains. His hands haven't been soft since he was ten years old. Now it's his heart's turn.
He practices diligently, learning to watch Oz and Willow without flinching while they touch, hold hands, laugh together. Even while she sits in his lap.
Every time, it's a little easier. Giles hasn't wept since Oz left him. Soon, he'll stop wanting to.
Notes: Part of the universe of It's Like Jazz.
Truck Stop
They've never dared go to a restaurant together. But they're a hundred miles from Sunnydale, heading for the mountains. They're free, mostly. And the restaurant's sign says "Homemade Apple Pie."
BLT, pie, and coffee for Giles; grilled cheese, pie, and milk for Oz. The waitress flirts with Giles and calls Oz "your son."
"Sorry," Giles says when she's gone.
"'S okay." Oz smiles over the rim of his glass, swallows down milk. Giles swallows too, watching him.
Reaching for forks, their fingers brush. Concealed behind the ketchup and mustard, they hold hands.
When they leave, they haven't eaten a bite.
Notes: Part of the Jazzverse.
Not Like the Movies
In porn, it's never this messy. Sure, guys in porn shoot come like their dicks are air rifles, but it never leaves white patches on their clothes. Oz has started doing his own laundry; his mom says he's really grown up lately.
Porn guys hardly sweat, either. Not the way Giles sweats, dripping like warm ice. When Oz is on the bottom he ends up drenched. Hours later he can still smell Giles on him: salt, wool, the bergamot from his tea.
Not much kissing in porn, but Oz and Giles always kiss, tongues and teeth and spit, messy. Perfect.
Words and Flesh
They never used to read in bed. Bed was for simple spoken words, for want you and more and love. Sex and sleep, communion of bodies.
But now Giles and Oz both keep books on the nightstand. They read, and share the best bits out loud, and talk. Their bed is full of words, sentences, stories; it's as full of ideas as of kisses. Words drape them warm as blankets, join them closer than bodies can reach.
Communion in two kinds, bread and wine, flesh and spirit. Words aren't the body's enemy.
And books, Giles knows, are among love's instruments.
The Wrong Ending
This is the wrong ending. It's backwards and warped, a reflection in a crooked mirror; if Giles could just make his eyes work properly, everything would change. He wouldn't be standing by this mound of earth, wouldn't be thinking about the gravestone that isn't here yet. That's being carved with the wrong name, the wrong dates--impossible dates that don't even add up to forty years.
Oz wasn't supposed to die first. Giles is old; this should be his grave. He should be dead, feeling nothing, and Oz, who was young enough to bear it, should be standing here alone.
Wild Nights
On the nights he spends alone, Giles longs for storms. Peaceful sunsets and still nights are a mockery then, when inside he's crackling with ozone, shaken by jagged drafts and spirals of winds, vibrating to the low, grief-loaded pitch of thunder. He wants to stand in the flash-illuminated garden, rain-soaked and shivering.
On the nights (they come almost as seldom as rain) he spends with Oz, Giles also longs for storms. The bed's a shelter then, a harbor from wind and weather, quiet even when they thrash and tumble across it. It's safety, port, home.
There are never storms enough.
Notes: Part of the Jazzverse, written for the Open On Sunday "poetry" challenge. The reference here is to Emily Dickinsons's "Wild Nights":
Wild Nights--Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should
Our luxury!
Futile--the Winds--
To a Heart in port--
Done with the Compass--
Done with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden--
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor--Tonight--
In thee!
Threadbare
Giles thinks that he and Oz have worn out language. It's a rag, a scrap, with too few threads to cover them.
He might salvage some old words, some cast-off silks. To couch, Shakespearean and precise, a verb where a verb is needed. A verb to capture the bed's give, the warm slip of Oz's skin against his, the act of sex and the act of sleep.
He might make new ones, spin and stitch them. Nothing ready-made--stained with law, outlandish with age--will fit them, fit this. Man and boy, Giles and Oz, the unweaving of all definitions.
Notes: For Glossolalia, inspired by a dictionary website's word of the day, "to couch."
Tradition
Oz grinds cloves and cardamom, grates nutmegs, and the whole apartment smells like Christmas. Like a real Christmas, that is--Christmas out of a storybook, out of Dickens. There'll be plum pudding and fruitcake and gingerbread--English things. Nothing California, no avocado salad or buñuelos.
Giles, chopping walnuts, says, "It's like childhood again." For him, it's memory; for Oz, invention.
But really they're both inventing, both making. Making Christmas, making a home, cooking up a new life from scratch.
They could probably buy a better fruitcake, but Oz loves the warm oven and the feel of flour on his hands.
Notes: For Darla, who asked for holiday baking.
Almost
Until now, Oz never knew that you could almost love somebody. He likes Quillen, likes Quillen's stories (mosaic-ed in Mapuche, Spanish, ten words of English, told and retold until Oz understands). Likes his slow laugh, his strong back, his bittersweet skin.
Liking and loving are twin stones in a wall, so close not a drop of water can squeeze between. But they're not the same stone, and no mortar will ever span that gap.
Quillen's body at night is only the shape of Giles' absence. And when Quillen goes to Buenos Aires for work, Oz hardly misses him at all.
Notes: For Julia, who asked for Jazzverse Oz, set between Oz leaving after "New Moon Rising" and his reunion with Giles. In the Jazzverse, Oz really belongs to Glossolalia, who sent him to Patagonia and created Quillen--I'm just riffing here.
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