Title: Instinct

Author: Enness

Sequel/Series: 1?

Summary: A little "What if?" fic, basically created as a reason to put Xander and Oz together. Because that's just fun to do.

Warnings: Slash later on, possibly some minor angst. Depends on how things unfold.

Rating: T for now, will probably go up to M later.

Disclaimer: I own nothing, Joss Whedon is my Master etc.

Dedication: To Karen Nick for the beta!

A/N: The Woody/Cheers thing is actually unintentional. "Woody" is a shout-out to a TWoP poster (Set, IIRC) who gave the name jokingly to the low-rent version of Willy who appeared in "Family", and I only realised the link with the title when it was already written.

Prologue: Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Woody looked around the bar as he wiped up a spill on the counter. Just another quiet Tuesday evening; too quiet for Woody's liking. Business had been steadily declining for the last decade or so, and every night it seemed like less and less of the regulars were still alive. Woody had weathered a lot in his time – he had bought a bar almost identical to this one for a pittance in a little stinkpit of a town in south California from a guy named Willy, who had opted to leave the exciting world of bar management after taking one beating too many. After an earthquake destroyed the bar (and the town with it), Woody had taken his insurance money and run, buying a new property and setting up in this new little stinkpit of a town in Ohio, which seemed to have a plentiful supply of his particular clientele. Since then, Woody had endured robberies, fires and fistfights of the kind most bars had never seen, but he had persevered. After all, his was just about the only establishment of its kind in the tri-county area, and even an army of Slayers hadn't been able to thin out the steady supply of demons simply looking for a place to sit down, relax and enjoy a few pints of blood or viscous fluids, or gnaw on a bowl of entrails.

But thirty years of constant slaughter takes its toll, and Woody was reaching the point of desperation – the only thing stopping him from doing something about it was the fact that he was pushing sixty-five, and the concept of starting in a new line of business seemed too much to cope with. Better to ride out the slump for a few more years, then sell the property and retire on the funds – that is, assuming he didn't get himself killed by either a disgruntled customer or an angry Slayer in the meantime. This was hardly an occupation that lent itself to employee safety.

Woody felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, and look around to see a man at the other end of the bar staring at him. Once the man had his attention, he nodded at the empty bottle in front of him. Woody grabbed a fresh one – only regular beer, nothing unusual for this guy – and plonked it down in front of him while popping off the top in one fluid, practiced movement.

"There you go, Danny. You want anything else?"

Danny shook his head without even looking up and Woody backed off. There was something inherently threatening about Danny, something that everyone in the bar seemed to recognise, that kept an apparently normal human safe in a bar full of monsters. He wasn't tall – in fact, he was a little on the short side, and his hair (unkempt and grey, with flecks of the natural red still showing in patches) and clothes (torn, baggy and generally unclean) gave him the appearance of a bum, yet he always had the money to pay his tab at the end of the night and he didn't cause trouble, so Woody let him be. Still, no one could deny there was something creepy about him – if not in the unidentifiable power he gave off, then in the dead stare of his eyes and the fact that he had never been known to string more than six words together at once. Danny gave off one very clear signal – he just wanted to be left alone.

Tonight, however, it seemed that Danny was going to be disturbed. As Woody watched in silence, a tall, blonde girl in her early 20s walked into the bar. She seemed to hesitate for a moment, looking around uncertainly, then she regained her composure, strode across the room and slid onto the seat next to Danny, calling over to Woody:

"Vodka on the rocks please, when you're ready."

A slight Irish lilt to her accent only served to make her seem exotic, adding to her natural good looks, and Woody was impressed. It wasn't often his establishment got patrons this young or beautiful that weren't simply interested in killing things, and although several of his other, more mystically perceptive regulars were staring at her, they seemed to be appreciating the view rather than fearing for their lives, so he assumed she wasn't a Slayer. As he poured her drink, she turned to Danny and gave him a flirty smile.

"Hi there," she offered, but Danny said nothing in return.

Woody smirked to himself – in the five years Danny had been coming here, he'd barely interacted with a single other customer – the odds of this girl getting him to spring for a drink were somewhere between slim and nonexistent. Indeed, she met with nothing at first but dead silence – Danny didn't even look at her. This didn't deter her, though. As Woody walked over to her with her drink, she tried again.

"C'mon, Oz. Surely you're not rude enough to let a lady buy her own drink?"

Danny's twitch was slight, but noticeable. Looking up at Woody, he nodded – the barkeeper was so shocked he almost dropped the glass he was carrying. He set the glass in front of the girl and wandered away, busying himself by organising the yak urine in order of strength, but carefully eavesdropping on every word they said, a skill honed by years in the profession.

"How'd you know that name?" Danny asked the girl. There was no threat to his words, but no real curiosity either, simply a flat query like someone asking about the weather.

"The same way I know that you stopped using it after she died. It reminded you of being younger, of being with her, and boy is that something you'd rather not be faced with every day."

This time the reaction was far more obvious – Danny's face broke, and there was far more emotion in his voice as he gasped out "How…?"

"All these years of hanging around demons and you've never met a sibylline one before?" she asked him lightly, but her tone became more soothing as she continued. "And I'm sorry to bring up painful memories, but the second I walked in here, I sensed you – your pain, your loss, and most of all your need to talk about it."

Something was seeming…off to Woody. This girl knew everything about Danny, and seemed to want to help him for no reason other than helping him. Woody had learned over time that there were very few demons around who would offer something for nothing, but before he could process this thought any further, he was distracted by another customer ordering a round for himself and three of his friends. As Woody busied himself fetching their drinks, the girl kept on talking.

"I suppose I've gone about this kinda backwards. My name's Neasa, and I don't normally wander up to random bar guys and offer to help them, but you…you're different."

"Different?" There was a hint of curiosity in Danny's voice, tinged though it was with cynicism.

"Well, yeah. I've never met someone who held onto their pain as much as you do - you've been sitting on this hurt and regret for decades, haven't you?"

"So you're gonna help me," Danny suggested, sounding more than a little bitter. This wasn't the first time someone had decided he needed saving, and he was sure it wouldn't be the last.

"I'm going to try. At the very least, I can listen to you, give you someone to talk to."

"And I'm supposed to just open up to you?"

"What's the alternative?" she shot back. "Sitting around this dive all day, thinking about the past, wishing…what exactly are you wishing? That you could save her? That you could give it another shot?"

The "dive" comment caught Woody's attention again, and as he heard this last bit, he realised who and what she was. If he had caught it straight away, she'd have been out the door – he had heard enough stories of unfaithful guys ripped apart from the inside or tight-fisted bosses crushed by a physical manifestation of their own egos to know that her kind were nothing but trouble. Their powers were limited on their own, but when acting as a conduit for someone else, they could cause almost infinite problems But Danny was wounded, stunned into honesty by her calculated, incisive comments. Before Woody could warn him, he had replied to her, filling in the blank.

"I'm wishing I could change it."

Woody stared in horror – this was worse than he had imagined. Temporal folds, and world-altering spells in general, were very bad for business, not to mention the continued existence of the universe. The girl smiled, her ridged, demonic face revealed, and as Woody saw a flash of light and felt the world rip into pieces around him, he heard the faint echo of her last words.

"Works for me."

Danny blinked, momentarily disoriented. As he tried to take in his surroundings, he realised there were no surroundings to take in – he and the girl were still sitting on the bar stools from Woody's place, but they were now in the middle of a huge, black space that seemed to stretch out to infinity. As he played back over the last few seconds in his head, he realised exactly what he had just said, and everything made sense – as Neasa started talking again, she simply confirmed it.

"Five minutes in and I've got an open-ended wish that you get to practically tailor-make for yourself, plus a free vodka in the mix. Hot damn, but I'm good."

"You're a vengeance demon."

"Ah, the vengeance phase. We all go through it, you know," she said with a smile, sounding almost nostalgic. "Officially, we're supposed to be called 'justice demons', but we're very much misunderstood. I mean, yeah, the younger ones tend towards the 'Someone has screwed you over, let's make them pay' type-cases, but after 5,000 odd years, that gets a little old. Me and mine, we tend to find people who have gotten a raw deal of things and balance the scales – it goes a little way towards paying back the damage we've caused, and plus, toying with the universe is pretty fun. And you, my friend, have had one hell of a raw deal. You had so much potential, but when you heard about that witch and her…untimely passing, well, you just stopped. And three decades later, give or take a year, you still haven't started again. You know, for a time, they thought you might be ideal for a little revenge, payback for the one who killed her…"

"Buffy wouldn't have done it if she had a choice," Danny replied, but he sounded as if he was parroting someone else's words. This was something he had had to tell himself to keep from losing it in the days, the months after he heard. It was the only thing that stopped him from going feral. On some level, he hated Buffy, but a tiny part of him knew she wasn't to blame, and that was enough to keep him in check. "She had lost control of it all, just like I was always afraid she would. Buffy had to stop her."

"…and that's why they gave up on the vengeance route and sent me instead. So here I am, ready to 'change it'. Now, I can see exactly what it is your subconscious thinks you need to change, but I'm kinda curious to see if you'll get it yourself."

Danny ignored her implied question and rounded on her – he would have stood up had he not been afraid that he'd fall into the nothingness. "Why should I believe you? I've met vengeance demons, I know how you work. You don't care about justice, you care about a high body count."

"A fair criticism, and I can see why you'd think that, but times have changed since you last met one of us. With a well-trained army of Slayers around the place, we've had to clean up our image a bit – we're aiming less for the 'slaughter' option and more for the 'fulfilment and good times'. Which isn't to say there won't be slaughter involved, but there's an equal chance of you getting a 'happily ever after' out of this. And besides, you've made the wish, I've already started unravelling time, so you might as well indulge me while we wait. So tell me, Oz – what is it you want to change?"

For a moment, Danny was silent. She was right – there was nothing he could do at this stage, and if it was already going to be changed…why not at least tell her what he wanted? It was small, but it was the one thing he could pinpoint as making a difference, the one thing arbitrary enough that he knew would stop him from falling into the same patterns if he did go back.

"If I hadn't gotten out that night…if the door had been stronger, I wouldn't have met Veruca, I wouldn't have had to leave her to figure things out, and I could've been there. I could have saved her…"

"Very good," said Neasa with a smirk, and the world around them flashed again. They were standing in the tomb, where a much younger version of him was pacing up and down the cage, apparently unaware of them.

"Your wish is my command," she continued, waving a hand over the steel door. For a second it glowed blue, and then it was back to normal. She smirked at him again. "It might be corny, but it's a classic for a reason."

"Will I remember?" he asked, the reality of this suddenly facing him. He was still wary, but at the same time, a tiny voice inside him was hopeful – maybe this was the real deal. Maybe this could make it all go right – the way it should be.

"Not a thing, sweetie." With that, she snapped her fingers and Danny disappeared, becoming a swirling column of light that flowed across the room and merged with the younger Oz. For a moment his eyes flashed, and then he snapped out of it – he blinked a few times and was momentarily stunned before he remembered where he was. Hmm. Must have zoned out or something he thought for a split-second, before going back to mentally working out the chord progression for a new Dingoes song, counting down the minutes to sunset, already feeling the change grow inside of him.

Neasa smiled to herself. Five millennia of doing this had left her somewhat difficult to please, but she had a feeling this one was going to be fun to watch unfold. And besides, her mark had left things open-ended enough that, should she feel the need to change a little more here and there, she could do it without repercussions. This should be interesting she thought as she teleported away, leaving the werewolf alone in his cage.