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Title: Little Company
Author: Glossolalia
Pairing: Angel/Oz
Rating: NC-17
Setting: Wishverse pre-"Puppy"


*

Oz scavenges.

He comes and goes. He used to wish that he had a more permanent homebase. In addition to the library, that is. Not like his old house, but just a place, a fort, that was his.

Dragging his sleeping bag and knapsack of clothes from squat to squat left him tired. Prickly and irritable, lost in his own hometown.

These days, he's not sure, but he *might* have a homebase with Angel. He's not sure how to ask, first of all. So he brings stuff. Candles, books to read, bags of blood from the butcher's when he can get away from the library. Mostly, he scavenges. He's always been good at it, but it's more important than ever these days.

Today's haul is better than he's seen in months.

And just in time, too.

If his hands are full when he arrives, it counts as a visit rather than an imposition.

*

Angel wakes as soon as a foot hits the steps on the first floor. He lies still, watching the shadows shift over the beams above him, judging that it's only about four, perhaps five, in the afternoon. Early for it to be Oz, so his fingers close around the stake beneath his pillow.

But a heartbeat accompanies the careful steps, small and rapid, and he relaxes his grip. Withdraws his hand completely when he smells Oz - smoky, today, in addition to his characteristic wet-grass and blown-leaves scent.

Angel closes his eyes as Oz creeps into the belfry and sets his bag and another load down. He sleeps again, lulled by sounds that are probably (certainly) more familiar than they ought to be, as Oz moves cautiously, slowly, around the room, stripping off his sweater, toeing off his sneakers.

He wakes to guttering candlelight and looming trees.

Angel blinks.

Oz sits crosslegged at the foot of the bed, reading a small paperback. Trees, sinewy and draped in silvery moss, tower over his blond head, the curve of his pale neck.

Trees everywhere, on all the walls of the room, birches and pines, equally thin, wrapped with trailing vines. Sage, silver, pewter, charcoal. *Trees*.

"Evening," Oz says and closes his book.

Angel scrubs his eyes. "Trees -"

Oz lifts his face - pinkgold in the candelight - and gazes around the small room, eyes dark and gleaming as they move. "Like it?"

As Angel sits up, Oz shifts backward until he leans against the wall. Now that he's blinked, shaken his head, rolled his shoulders, Angel can see that the trees are painted onto fabric. Black fabric, stretched across the windows, tacked to the walls.

"What did you -"

"Flats," Oz says. "They're called flats, like for a stage set? The community theater did _Midsummer Night's Dream_ last year. Got burned down last week, and I found these in the trash. Flats."

Angel reaches to touch Oz's shoulder and Oz reacts before contact is even made - leans toward Angel, scrambles on his knees until they sit side by side. Still gazing around, and if Angel didn't know Oz as well as he's starting to, he would suspect something mystical was afoot.

A forest, in his room, atop a condemned church left for the demons and the vermin.

"Needed blackout curtains," Oz says. He sounds slightly hoarse, as shy as ever, even pressed against Angel's side. "Remember?"

"I remember," Angel says. The windows were boarded up when he found this place, but the wood was rotting, full of knots and holes. He covered them with tarps and whatever fabric he could find, but the rains last week blew away most of his protection, left him dancing around shafts of sunlight and ducking the glare.

"So I found you some."

"You did."

Angel looks around the room again. Fairies peeping through the branches, interfering in one's affairs: That's Dru's domain, never was his.

Oz won't ask him again if he likes the curtains. Once is enough for Oz in everything - one question, a single invitation Angel never should have issued to sleep over, just one kiss.

He doesn't want this, and he certainly shouldn't need this, having a human boy care for him like this. Fetch him blood from the butcher, find him new curtains, simply seek out his presence and press his warm mouth against Angel's shoulder. He can't tell Oz to stop, however; the words sit gritty and metallic in his sinuses, waiting to be spoken, eroding.

Oz leans over Angel's lap and rustles in his bag again. Pausing, he glances over his shoulder and asks, "Is the light good? Need some more candles?"

"It's fine," Angel says. Certainly brighter than alleyways, though he never thought he'd return to the days before electricity before arriving in Sunnydale.

"Okay." Oz returns to searching his bag, finally sitting back, cradling a small plastic tape-player in one hand as he untangles the cord to the headphones with the other. "You need to come closer."

Simple enough, and though he shouldn't, Angel bends at the waist, slipping his arm around Oz's back, vertebrae prickling his palm, as Oz holds up the earphones between them.

"Wanted to have music," Oz says. Whispers. "To play you something, but -"

"This is fine," Angel says just as quietly. Inhales the warmth off Oz's scalp, blond hair tickling his lips, and he kisses the crown of Oz's head before he can stop himself. "Just fine."

This close, he can hear Oz swallow dry, then nod, and feels the narrow shoulders flex and square themselves. Angel knows that Oz, once, would have liked nothing more than to learn to play an instrument, sax or guitar.

Angel knows too much already.

Oz presses the play button and the music begins muted, almost tinny. Softly hesitant piano and cautious percussion, then swipes of golden saxophone, cutting through, lifting up, and it's a version of a song Angel once knew. Not old in his usual terms, but ancient for Oz.

Like the start of an old musical, tinkling, full of promises, but the sax is more sad than anything. They crouch together, Angel's arm tightly around Oz, holding him in place, preserving the music and the sadder-than-sad quiet around them. Hush in the false trees, darkness above, around, each candle flame, and if the saxophone is the most vital thing in the room, Angel is not surprised.

Sad, however. Oz should be the vital one, vivid and quick, not sharing a staticky cassette with *him*, sighing a little in time with the music.

"Coltrane," Oz whispers when the tape clicks off. "On the other side, I've got Hartman singing Strayhorn."

His voice is small, thinner than wire, ragged and his scent is hushed and as tinkly as the anonymous pianist's sound. Angel gathers Oz into his lap and removes the cassette player from his sweaty palm.

"I think spacing it out might be best," he says and Oz nods. "What is all this, anyway?"

Oz squirms, just once, and rubs his knuckles over his eyes. He looks tired, or like a woman at the end of a crying jag, but Angel knows neither is quite accurate. Oz is, in fact, hiding something; the tension through his shoulders, setting his jaw and rasping his breathing, is something other than exhaustion or sorrow.

"What's going on?" Angel asks.

"Just wanted to bring you some stuff."

"Thank you," Angel says.

Oz is smiling at that as he tips back his head against Angel's shoulder. And again Angel can't help thinking *simple enough*. Gratitude, simply and plainly expressed, is more than enough to shift Oz's face from tension to light.

He's more grateful than he can say.

"You're welcome." Oz kisses Angel's neck then, just above the shoulder, with soft tongue and hard teeth. Boy's kisses, murmur of stubble and clutch of fingers against his chest. Angel rubs Oz's back, lets him mimic the kisses that tenderize the flesh, bring up the flush, precede the bite.

Pantomiming death, when you get right down to it. Unforgivable.

What he'd like to know is how much better off Oz would be without ever having known him. He wouldn't kiss like this, but he wouldn't have someone to play Coltrane to.

Maybe he would. Without Angel, maybe he'd find something closer to normal.

"Oz -"

Dissenting whimper, but Angel tugs at his shirthem and Oz moves back. Blinking just as blearily as Angel did earlier. "What?"

Candlelight shimmering over green eyes, pale skin. Spungold hair. Deepening every feature, then washing pink over them, paling everything sparse and small.

"Nothing," Angel finally says.

"Good." Oz sinks back against him but doesn't resume the kiss. Angel pushes his fingers gently through the fine, soft hairs at the base of Oz's skull, feels the capillary blood running just under his palm, then the arterial thundering under his thumb as he rubs it over the side of Oz's throat.

"Here early," Angel remembers to say when he's watched an entire bulb of wax travel down the length of the nearest candle.

"Asked for the night off," Oz says, as if he has a regular job, as if he can just request personal time from Giles and the others.

"Oh. You can do that?"

"Never tried before. Seemed to work, though."

They can sit like this for hours. They usually do. Once Oz has unpacked his latest offerings, before sleep overtakes him, both before and after Angel's fucked both of them nearly senseless, they sit. Angel forgets not to breathe, and gradually his chest's rhythm matches Oz's own. Neither speaks much and when they do, they whisper like they're in the church below. As time passes and candles shrink and spit, Angel starts to believe the warmth around them is shared. Equal. That he is not, in fact, stealing everything from Oz. From this boy who may technically be almost a man but whom Angel has to understand to be a boy.

Oz wraps skinny arms, ropy with more muscle than a child of the twentieth century should possess, around Angel. Holds and is held, breath whispering secrets against Angel's skin. Into it.

Angel doesn't want to think about what sort of knowledge Oz is gathering inside his own skin. He continues to return, day after day, seeking Angel out, drawing near, offering himself. He needs something. Needs Angel.

Is it selfishness to give what someone needs? He's eaten enough priests of enough sects and traditions in his day, he ought to know the answer.

If he knew how to ask, this would be the moment.

But Oz is again digging inside his bag, apparently depthless and almost certainly mystical.

"Found this," Oz says and sets a book between them on the bed. Its spine is nearly completely sprung, the pages swollen, far too much for the binding to hold. Blowsy, dandelions gone to seed, almost obscene. "Got you something."

Angel looks over the other things Oz has pulled from his bag: two bars of chocolate. A bundle of bandages. An extra sweater.

"Oz. What is this?"

Without looking up from paging carefully through the ruined book, Oz says, "Stuff. Here, check this out -"

From between two pages, near the back of the book, Oz withdraws a pressed flower. Tips it into Angel's palm but does not sit back.

It is light as rice paper, hardly there. Weight of breath, of sigh. An iris once, but now the color of bruises, brown and dirty purple. Angel holds it up to the candle, and the veins in the petals are visible, traced through the membranes like scrimshaw.

"Beautiful," Oz says quietly. He sucks a bit of chocolate into his mouth as he gazes at the flower.

It is not. It's ugly and old, like clotted blood, stench of rot. Survived well past its time, a sport, an anachronism.

"Yeah," Angel says. But he is setting aside the flower, looking instead at Oz, hair gone brassy in the candlelight, slight smile on his mouth, steady, intent eyes. Long nose, intelligent boyface.

Oz looks back.

Until he understands what Angel meant, and although his gaze doesn't waver, not even then, it shines. Liquefies.

So quiet.

Angel closes his hand in Oz's hair, pulls him closer. Cloud of chocolatescent around Oz's mouth. Sweet, creamy. Green eyes like shadowed cisterns.

He is worse a man than ever -- cowardly as well as damned, hiding, racked by fear -- so the fact that he's been granted this, him, Oz, now of all times: It must be a joke.

Oz is not what he wants, although he resembles her, eerily and inconstantly, but he is, Angel is coming to understand as slowly as wind grinds away rock, what Angel needs.

"Happy birthday," Oz says against Angel's lips.

Shriek, scalpel, silence.

Angel freezes.

Birthdays are not celebrated. Not here, not for him. 99 years since he became what he is, nothing-everything all at once. Monster more monstrous than pure vampires, torn and quartered, drawn between worlds.

Mind raped, crucified on the blazing invasion of the soul.

"How -?" Fists in Oz's hair, shirt, that he has to force himself to uncurl, loosen, release. "How do you know when -?"

"Looked it up." Oz remains still. He knows, Angel knows, that the moment has shifted, that something is wrong, deeply so. But he does not move; he even blinks slowly.

Of course. Angel exists out there, in chronicles, journals, essays. There are pages and volumes devoted to him, his exploits and sins. Facts about him, analysis, interpretation.

Such things shouldn't touch Oz, however. Shouldn't reach him, be accessible to him. Shouldn't exist. Worse than simple murder or straightforward slaughter, this is slowacting poison, creeping through every cell of Oz's body, released like venom with Angel's bite, caught like pollen in Oz's very skin the first moment they met.

"Oz, I don't want -. You shouldn't -"

"Not who you think I am," Oz says. Rough and hoarse.

Ice is better than kindness. Oz should not need him, can't need him. Angel at once stiffens and tightens his hold. "It's wrong."

"What?" Oz blinks once and in the silent unfaltering gaze, Angel shrinks. Crumbles, melts.

He is left grasping and blind. "What do I think you are?"

Oz finally drops his eyes and his arms wrap around his own waist instinctively. Defensively. "Stupid kid. Innocent. I don't know."

"Yeah. Not stupid. But -" Angel doesn't have the words; he never did. He'd like to remain angry. He knows rage. Needs now how it clarifies and sharpens everything for him. "Look, Oz, I -"

"It's okay," Oz says. Angel doesn't know if it's disbelief, disagreement, that roughens Oz's voice. Something more like resignation. "Really."

"Here." Angel pushes his sketchbook into Oz's hands. "Look."

Once he had filled the pages, he turned the book over and started again from the back. Page after page of DarlaBuffy, fierce blonde woman fighting, killing, lunging for him. Darla exploding under that misaimed bolt, Buffy removing her wedding dress (row of seedpearl buttons down the side, too small for his fingers to manage; Dru had the dress first. In crimson).

"Girls," Oz says. His hands tremble against the pages. "I know you love -"

"No. Here -" Angel grabs the book back, flipping back and forth until he finds the most recent pages. In the margins, pushed between crossouts and erasures: That's where Oz lives.

Afterthought, substitute, just small enough to fit between drafts of the twist of Darla's long neck, the lift of Buffy's smile. Decorating the periphery, the borders between the girls.

Oz small, butchered, painted with and wreathed in blood. Head lolling, legs spread obscenely wide. Milkblue veins rupturing, spurting. Ink glossyblack for the puddles, stippled obsessively for the spray.

Innocent. Victim. Prey.

One hand on Oz's neck. Shoves his face against the page.

"That's what you are."

"Okay." Calm, unflinching, quiet as ever, as always. Always, and Angel's never going to die, but even he will be rotten mush and bonemeal before Oz raises his voice. "What's this?"

Bottom of the page, the corner that abuts the spiral binding: Just one simple line sketch no wider than two of Angel's fingers. Oz, curled in sleep, fist guarding his face, lashes arrayed over his cheeks like jewels on velvet.

Angel looks at Oz and there are no words. Never were, never will be.

With one finger, the nail chewed below the quick, black lacquer nearly as dark as ink/blood, Oz traces the sketch. His heart beats fast, irregular, like something trapped, throwing itself against its cage, and his cheeks are flushed. Angel can only see the upcurve of his cheeks, the shadows his lashes cast, the swell of eyes beneath paperfine lids.

"That's what you think *you* are, what you can do," Oz says and closes the book. He sets the sketchbook atop the waterlogged volume and kisses Angel again. Softly, more softly than anything else. "Not me. None of it."

No, probably not. But Angel cannot help this, cannot help but kiss candysweet mouth and savor the stubble's rasp against his own chin, tug sharp bones and silkfine skin over his own body and wrap his arms around shoulders more narrow than any coathanger, sink and roll, crumpling the dead flower to dust.

Angel cannot help.

But he can take, and Oz is open, squirming and clinging, and there's so much to taste, to take.

*

First sign was the only one Oz needed. Some weekend morning, couple months ago now. Giles's place, of course.

Oz was lying down on the couch, Nancy was asleep, and Larry was stretched out on the floor in front of the fireplace, on his back, chair cushion under his head. Basically parallel to Oz, just on the floor. They were watching cartoons or something; they'd come in late, battered and high on adrenaline, and couldn't sleep.

Giles came in with a blanket and another pillow, muttered some crack about animation rotting their brains even further, and flapped the blanket over Larry. Dropped the pillow and lay down next to him, on his side. Back to Oz, he started talking about some idea Larry had had for holy-water spritzers.

And then they just lay there together.

Face to face, talking so quietly that Oz, four feet away, couldn't make anything out. Giles rested his hand on Larry's shoulder like it belonged there.

Maybe it did.

Nancy woke up, took the armchair, and she and Oz sat in silence while Giles and Larry - lay there. Talking.

Alone in the world. The world shrunken to include just them and only them.

First and last sign; Oz finally got up, took a shower, and headed over to the squat on Levine for some rest. His throat ached raw and red and it felt like his face was burning, half-sliding off like candlewax, like someone in a Mexican snuff film.

Nancy said bye. The other two didn't stir.

He gets it now, though. That's the shittiest thing of all; he actually kind of understands now why you'd want that. Why you'd try to make a world of your own, look only at each other, shut out everyone else until they fade, flicker, disappear.

For a minute or two tonight, he gets it. Lying here next to Angel, arm over his waist, listening to the bats shift and squeak in the rafters above, burrowing under the blue flannel blanket he brought over a week ago, he thinks he gets it.

"World of your own," he says now.

Angel frowns, but his eyes are invisible in the dark and the shadows. That's what it takes, just the sight of his confusion and disagreement, and Oz realizes what an idiot he's being. Has been.

"Never mind," he says.

"No," Angel says. "Tell me." His voice is a little hoarse; he must have been dozing.

"Nah, just got mixed up. Believed for a sec in -" Oz touches the plane of Angel's cheekbone, the soft, slight hollow of his temple. "Don't know. Bullshit, basically."

At the touch on his face, Angel moves slightly, bringing his face into a soft hint of light, and he closes his eyes. *What are you thinking?* Oz wonders. *Where do you go?*

But that's the difference: This isn't their private world, this isn't where they whisper such questions to each other, where they actually pretend, then start to believe, that they're the only important people in existence.

Angel tightens his arm around Oz's waist, tucks his fingers under Oz's ribs, and opens his eyes. Sometimes when he looks at Oz like this, it's like he's staring at a stranger. Not a hostile stranger, but someone he doesn't know, isn't quite sure he *wants* to know. But someone he can't stop staring at.

Oz closes his own eyes and tips his forehead against Angel's.

"Never mind. I'm good here." He's telling the truth. "And I'm sorry about the birthday."

Angel stretches, yawns, and kisses Oz's cheek. "Nothing to be sorry for."

"Plenty, actually," Oz says. "Just wanted -. Don't know. Thought -"

He's relieved when Angel seems to let that pass. Just holds him, fingers tracing his last rib, the first one he ever broke.

"What did you think you were doing?" Angel asks and in the quiet, his voice might as well be a scream.

"Wanted to give you something," Oz says. Which is both stupid and true. Stupid, because he gives Angel something almost every day. True, because he did want - again, stupidly - to have that separate world. Just for a minute or two. Not love, though he's pretty sure he loves Angel. He knows Angel loves the dead girl and the slayer who isn't here; nothing for him - he's not *that* stupid. But maybe he hoped for something else. More, better, different than the usual.

Angel's arm circles his waist and he rolls them over until Oz is on his back and Angel propped up on one elbow, looking down at him.

His eyes are nearly black in the red and gold shadows.

"Beautiful," Angel says and this time Oz can't pretend he's talking about something else. "Thank you."

Everything else that comes after, whether Angel bothers to say it aloud or not - the *I don't deserve it, I'm worse than you can imagine, you should stay far away from me* - Oz already knows and doesn't need to hear. He can't pretend that *this* (talking to a vamp, let alone fucking him, letting him drink from you) is a smart choice, but this isn't the kind of place or time where you get to make many choices.

This is where you scavenge.

Angel kisses Oz's hairline, down to his jaw, his mouth as soft as a child's, as a slow ripple runs down the length of his body, and he's moving against Oz. With Oz. Skin like silvery bark, soft and tight, and the only colors are the wetred of his mouth and deepblack of his eyes, the only sound the shush of skin on skin.

This is where you make something new out of the trash.

"I love you," Oz says. It sounds an awful like *you're welcome*.

A trembling glimmer skitters across the surface of Angel's eyes as he glances up and Oz knows he heard both.

-End
 

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