Title: ...And Back Again

Authors: the OzMIA RR gang: Lily, Vashti, Karen, MD, quantumLiz, Tabitha, and Little Faith.

Spoilers: Through "Same Time, Same Place"

Rating: PG

Disclaimer: The only thing we own is the weirdness.

Summary: Round Robin Fic from Oz: Missing In Action.

Oz fans: Check out OzMIA at ozmia.com or on egroups.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Willow sat in the Summers' backyard. Her things were not yet unpacked,
but she didn't feel in a rush. Her friends' acceptance of her had been a
major relief, but she was still uncomfortable being back home.

It was almost dark, and she was alone. All ten of her fingers were pressed into the lawn in front of her. It would be nice to be back in Westbury, she thought. A simple English wildflower bloomed between her hands. Everything was connected at the roots. Everything.

Curious, she turned her gaze to the patio furniture sitting across the yard. She could feel the wood it had been made of, growing from a tiny seed. It came from Washington State and she could feel the stump grieving. She blinked and the chair was sitting in front of her. She blinked again and it moved to a random spot on the lawn. Trying out the
ability to move things, she thought harder about the chair and about the world, all connected everywhere. The chair disappeared. She willed it back.

She could feel the ants in the ground, crawling under her. They were connected too. It was hot for October, and her mind wandered. This had been her first summer out of Sunnydale since she had gone to sleepaway camp when she was twelve. She had missed home. Despite the bad things that had happened in her Sunnydale summers. And here she was, feeling all of Sunnydale, all of world, moving in the earth beneath her fingertips. Good things had happened in Sunnydale summers too; summers in Sunnydale,
California, Planet Earth, where everything was connected and it was all moving. Summers where Xander kissed ice cream off her nose, where she finally got up the nerve to cut her hair, where she woke up to Oz's green eyes every morning...

But ther had been last time he had checked.

"Huh?"

**end part one**

There was something about existing in the same room for most of one's life to make one familiar with it. Even when one should be in a cheap hotel in New York with several other under-funded twenty-somethings -- waking up with them in fact instead of the aforementioned room. Which must have been turned into a guest-room. Oz didn't remember it being this flowery.

"This isn't usual," Oz muttered to himself. Not that he minded waking up in a soft, clean, albeit floral, bed for once. Not that he wasn't enjoying the Lycanthrope Convention, but sleeping with two women hadn't been turning out quite the way Devon said it would.
Of course they were cheetahs....

***

"I'm so glad your home. I know I've asked you a thousand times already, but how does it feel?" Dawn asked, sitting at the kitchen island.

Willow thought about it for a moment, trying not to feel Dawn's connection to Buffy, carefully reigning in the magic she had just been testing.

"It feels..."

~!~

"Unnatural." Oz climbed out of the flowery bed and looked around. Nice room, small, furnished, didn't smell like cheetahs. The walls were a muted green. The window was open and a slight breeze was pouring in. Oz approached the window and leaned out. The tree lined street stretched out for miles. It was suburbia alright. But suberbia where?

"Your guess is as good as mine." Xander called out from the open bedroom door. "I woke up in a flowery bed. I've been here for hours, but hey, my room has playstation. I got to level ten and decided to pause it and explore."

Oz smiled. "Hey Xander."

"Hey Oz. Wanna find out what's going on around this big flowery house? Or... we could try and beat level ten..." Oz gave Xander a side long glance. "Right. Explore."

Oz followed Xander out into the hallway. A long red carpet spilled out around corners and down a huge staircase with cherry wood bannisters. Xander talked the whole time, nervously. "So near as I can figure, right in the middle of work I was transported here. I'm hoping this is just a displaced Xander effect and I'd wake up at my house from a sugar induced dream. No such luck. What's your take?"

"Bad pizza?" Oz faced Xander and something occured to him. "Have you always had blue eyes, Xand?"

Xander blinked, "Ah, yeah? You okay Oz? Wait, where's your scar...?"

"What scar?"

"The one you usually sport across your throat? The one from Willow when she
went nuts and you had to..." Xander's voice lowered, "Kill her..?"

"Huh, definitely a dimensional thing then..." Oz concluded. Xander shrugged.

They walked in silence down the stairs. Creeping up to the front door, they peered outside. The world glittered, leafty and green. A glitch blinked and demons roamed the streets. The glitch flared again and the tree lined streets returned.

"Can I help you?" A voice asked. They spun around to see...

end part two
----

"Angel?"

Oz stared. Sure, the big skulky lug *looked* enough like Angel, but, something didn't seem quite right. And it wasn't just the fact that he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

"Hey, man," Xander greeted casually. "Nice tan."

Ah, yes. That was it.

"Thanks," answered Angel from behind his pink-tinted sunglasses. "So, can I help you guys?"

"With what?" Xander asked cheerfully. Angel handed each of them a small white card. Oz read his. It said "Angel Investigations" and it gave daytime hours.

"You look a little confused," Angel told them.

A glitch blinked again and the street was dark, crawling with demons. Angel was pale, and dressed in black, and he was smirking rather unpleasantly. Suddenly, everything blinked again and the Vampire-With-A-Tan stood in front of them again in broad daylight, Hawaiian shirt and all.

"Angel," Oz started slowly, grasping for some kind of familiarity in the situation. "Aren't
you a vampire?"

"Could a vampire do *this*?" Angel challenged, closing his eyes, bracing himself, and promptly morphing into a werewolf.

"Well I don't know, maybe some crazy vampire/werewolf, hybrid," Xander offered helpfully. He seemed unfazed. Oz just stared at the furry, clawed creature now in
front of him, wondering if that was what he looked like when he changed.

"You look shorter," Xander muttered.

A moment later, Angel morphed back into the tourist look.

"So you're a werewolf," Oz said.

"Aren't you?" Angel asked sounding mildly offended.

Xander sighed rather pathetically.
"I feel so out of the loop, you guys," he said. "I mean, this whole werewolf thing - how does it feel?"

***

"-floopy," Willow answered.

"Floopy?" Dawn laughed. "It feels floopy?"

"It's just, there's not really a word for it," Willow admitted. "Coming home's made me feel a lot of different things. Scared, happy, nostalgic, lonely. All of those, and yet not quite any of them." She sighed. "When you spend your summer connected to all of nature - understanding the pure essences of things, you get a little rusty with verbal communication."

"You're connected to everything," Dawn repeated.

"Yep," Willow said, a little uncomfortably.

"And I would be included in everything," Dawn said.

"Yes," Willow assented slowly.

"So you can see what I really am?" Dawn guessed, sounding a little unsure.

"You, everyone," Willow said quietly.

"Could - could you maybe show me?" Dawn asked with a kind of timid desperation.

Willow was a little floored by the request.

"Dawnie," she started. "I don't know if that's"

"Because I'd like to know," Dawn rushed on. "What I am. If I'm human, or if I'm
still some ball of energy in there somewhere."

"Dawn-"

"I have to know," she told Willow rather intensely. Able to fully sense Dawn's urgency, Willow sighed, and nervously resigned herself.

She placed her hands on top of Dawn's head and instructed the girl to close her eyes. Dawn did so, and Willow began the process.

Things were going pretty well. The magic was shimmering around Dawn's head just as it
should have and the telepathic link was running rather smoothly.

A moment later, however, Willow's concentration was broken rather briskly.

"What the HELL do you think you're doing?" screamed someone from behind them. Willow turned to see...

-----

... a thin, older woman whose glasses perched on the end of her nose. Her eyes flashed fire from behind the spectacles. She looked rather like an angry cat.

"Professor McGonagall?" Willow and Dawn gasped simultaneously. Just as quickly as she had appeared, the professor winked out of the room, and possibly existence.

"Oh no," Willow moaned. "Something is terribly wrong."

Footsteps were heard bounding up the stairs. The door crashed open, and Xander yelled, "What's wrong?!"

He went pale and skidded to a stop. Oz and Angel crashed into him as they, too, pelted through the door. But Xander paid them no attention.

"Willow! You're alive!"

Dawn and Willow exchanged nervous glances.

"And... you're not all demony?"

Dawn squeaked, and Willow covered her face with her hands. The others could just barely hear her moaning, "No, no, this can't be happening."

Oz sighed very quietly to himself. It was strange, he thought. Not the interdimensional teleportation business, but seeing Willow again. It hurt less than he thought. He stepped forward and gently lowered her hands from her face.

"Hey," he said.

She looked up, nervous and lost.

"Dude!" exclaimed a tall, lanky figure with wavy brown hair. "It's just like the T.A.R.D.I.S.!" Devon polished off the brownie he was eating and sidled into the room.

Angel gave him a suspicious glance but moved over slightly. The room was becoming crowded.

"Oz! You bitch! Is this where you've been?" Before Oz could reply, Devon stopped dead in his tracks, transfixed.

"Who," he breathed, "are you?"

Dawn had the strangest tingling feeling all over. Like the hair on her neck was standing up. Or like she was floating away on a cloud of blue cotton candy.

"You'll touch my little sister over my dead body," warned a steely voice.

Her mind reeling, Willow watched over Oz's shoulder as the tan, Hawaiian-shirt-
clad Angel raised a hand as if to touch Buffy. His hand stopped in mid-air.

"Who," Angel breathed, "are you?"

Oz blinked. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw an organ-grinder's monkey scuttle past. There was a glitch, and the monkey was gone.

Maybe it was a sign, Oz thought.

Willow started shaking her head back and forth. "This isn't happening, this isn't happening," she muttered. Her eyes were wide and frantic.

"It's ok," Oz murmured in a low voice that only Willow could hear. "I can fix this." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a....
____

lightsaber. Momentarily confused, he began closely inspecting it. "Huh. I must have grabbed Luke's by mistake."

Willow looked at him questioningly. "You have a lightsaber?"

"Ran into Luke Skywalker two years ago." Oz shrugged. "Didn't have anything better to do. Plus, Jedi robes go with everything."

"Hey guys, look, Oz is a Jedi," Xander happily called out to the others.

"I think," Willow began to say, very softly, "something's gone wrong with the world as I know it."

"You know, I think I read something about this in the Watcher's Diaries," said the suddenly appearing Rupert Giles. The leather jacket and earring, while very attractive on the man, weren't really in keeping with the Giles they knew, but Oz was willing to take any
possibility of this making sense. He nodded to the Englishman and . . .

___

"STOP!" Willow interrupted with a scream.

Everyone turned to look at her.

"Geez, dude. What's her problem?" Devon asked Oz.

"My problem," Willow responded with a glare, "is that you are not supposed to
be here! And there's no such thing as a Jedi! And Harry Potter is fiction! This has *got* to be a dream. You're all inside my head! You aren't real!"

"Um, Willow?" Xander raised his hand as if he were in class.

"What is it Xander?"

"Then why are we here?"

"Because...because we're all connected."

"In a circle, in a hoop that never ends?" Giles asked.

Willow gave him an odd look.

"How high can the sycamore grow?" He continued. "If you cut it down, then you'll never know! And you'll never hear the wolf cry to the blue corn moon, or ask the grinning bobcat why he grins, can you sing..."

"Go home! Everyone!" Willow shut her eyes. Opening them one at a time, she noticed the extreme absence of people. She could hear Dawn watching TV in the other room, but, other than that, everything was quiet. She sighed and turned to go upstairs, but stopped when she noticed that there was one other person in the room.

"Everyone who?"

"What . . . Why are you still here?" Willow asked, dumbfounded.

Oz narrowed his eyes. "I live here?"

"No you don't!"

"Willow, baby, are you okay? I know it's hard and you just got back from Englan--"

"How do you know that?!"

Approaching Willow carefully, Oz directed her to a chair. "I helped you pack, remember? I made sure you got on the plane okay. We hugged. It was . . . difficult."

"But you weren't even there!" Willow insisted. "You were in, like, Bucharest or, or Istanbul or something. You don't even know what's going on!"

"You mean that you nearly destroyed the world with your black magicks because you thought Warren had killed Xander? I was there for that."

Karen's part! 9!!