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Cold Room to Warm My Heart by AineRose Rating: PG-15/R for swearing and mentions of suicide. Summary: Oz is cold. Feedback: Please! Distribution: Take it if you want it but please ask! Disclaimer: I don’t own Oz, or any character in this story; I do own the plot though. Cold Room to Warm My Heart by AineRose The room was always cold. He’d expected it to be cold when he came here, because he was on the outskirts of some no-name town in one of the states that everyone forgot about, in the middle of winter. He had expected it to be cold, but he didn’t expect it to be this cold. As Devon used to say, “So cold it’d freeze the balls off a brass monkey!” which Oz knew really had something to cannons but didn’t particularly care. He realised after about a week that there was nothing he could do to make himself warmer, so he covered himself up in as many layers as he could and lit fires twenty four-seven. Sometimes curling up in a ball helped. Most times it didn’t. It was stupid, he knew, to have air conditioning but no heaters. But it didn’t matter, he could never afford heating anyway. Sometimes, to try to ignore the cold, he thought about music. He wrote songs, good songs, that he sent to Devon when he could afford stamps. Sometimes Angel wrote, but not often. Only when someone died. Oz sometimes wondered if it was wrong to crave the death of an old friend, just for the sake of a letter? Most of the time he didn’t care. He didn’t care about much anymore. Before, when he was young and stupid, he cared about his Mom, and how many girls Devon had slept with. He cared about Willow, and his friends, and the fate of the world. Well, the world can go fuck itself for all he cares now. Now he cares about eating tomorrow, and finding an area for use during the full moon. He cares about living tomorrow, because he knows there’s a chance he won’t. He knows that someday, soon enough probably, he’ll go to sleep and never wake up. He doesn’t know when, but he waits for it, lives for it. He lives for dying. How fucked up is that? So sometimes, he tries to forget about that, and thinks about stupid stuff. Who won the World Cup? Did Ross and Rachael ever get together in the end? Where was his father now? Stupid stuff that didn’t matter, and he didn’t care about, kept him going. Once he wondered if Willow even remembered him, if Dawn ever looked at her cross necklace and thought about who gave it to her, if Xander ever remembered to forget to write? He didn’t think about it ever again. He found it hard to not care about that stuff. All he wanted, all he asked for, was a reason to live. Une raison d’être. Well, God must have missed him. Not that Oz blamed Him; he had always had a tendency to melt into the background. Nevertheless, he still wished that God would at least put him out of his misery. It wasn’t that he had never tried. He had, plenty of times. Enough times to put him on suicide watch twenty four-seven if he had someone that gave a damn. The trouble was that he could never do it. He had overdosed at least three times, the third time using a cocktail of the first two substances. He had even slit his wrists last year. He remembered staring at the blood until he blacked out, but when he came-to the slashes were gone. Damn lycanthropy. At the end of the day, the point was that one day he was going to die, and every day was just a lead up to it. Which sucked. So maybe, just maybe, it was the world that was fucked up, and not him? So he just sat there, in a freezing cold log cabin, because there was nowhere else for him to go; wanting desperately to go home, but knowing he didn’t have one; wishing he was someone else, but feeling sorry for any dumbass who thought he wanted to be like him. Freezing his ass off in a box room that reminded him of a freezer, slowly dying. After all, isn’t that what he had been doing all his life?
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