Oz used to get freckles. Tiny, barely-there ones in the summer, the kind that happened after staying in the sun too much. The kind that looked like a tiny fairy kissed you all over and left the marks to be discovered by somebody who loves you. It should be just the same this summertime, but he doesn't know; he hasn't had the chance to examine Oz's face as intimately as he could did ten years ago, back when he was ten years less guarded and ten years more forgiven for touches towards his master.
Even so Gilbert remembers, better than he does his own name. In fact, it's enough if he just closes his eyes. And then easily, it swells up behind his mind's eye, vision like it was yesterday, and he sees Oz's head cradled in the lap of his younger self while the rest of him lies over a winding bed of green grass going as far as the eye can see. He remembers the air. Still distinctively remembers the clean, humid smell of freshly cut grass, laced with the wafting of roses carrying across the wind.
And he can hear Oz's voice like yesterday, mourning the lack of a pillow, asking for and then just taking his servant's lap as substitute. Can still hear the stammering from a younger Gilbert, a voice pitched like something small and scared, along with the insincere protests falling from his lips.
He's read the freckles over this boy's skin so many times. Lost and found himself in their constellations, found his dreams stretched over the thin skin beneath yellow eyelashes, found heaven in the peace over the everything of this boy's face. Gilbert looks now for Oz and so often thinks, 'who took you from me and grew me into someone who is unable to examine you under the hot breath of the sun?'
Then he thinks, 'who left you the same and yet not the same? Who made me a man utterly changed but left me still staring at you in the same way since forever?'
Gilbert doesn't know. The memories are as splendid as the boy though. Despite not deserving it, he yearns to look for those fairy-dots again, to study them with Oz's blessing, and when he finally will, it'll be with them inside the deep belly of a day that, who knows, might actually feel like tomorrow for once in his gutted life.
That's when he'll work up the nerve to count them, count them with trigger-calloused fingertips which he will be shying over the sun-warmed cheeks, of the boy who is the sun itself. He'll count just how many stars dot that constellation, under the sun and in lieu of the sun; just how many stars had guided Gilbert home.