Disclaimer: None of it is mine - it all belongs to L. Frank Baum and the SciFi Network
She looked out over the OZ with a smile on her face, then turned to see the sun lighting up the faces of her newfound family, of the friends that had become closer to her than any she'd ever known. Such a feeling of happiness overwhelmed her, threatening to knock her off her feet with the power of it, that she reached out an arm to steady herself.
In the midst of their smiling faces, she saw Cain frown and move toward her, his typical stoic expression marred with worry. Before she could grin and breezily tell him she didn't require looking after anymore, all the faces around her swam together, until darkness replaced the light.
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"DG? Sweetheart?"
DG opened eyes that she didn't remember closing, and found her parents looking down at her with concern. Her head was pounding, and it took a few moments for her to piece together that it was her robo-parents standing over her.
"Mom? Popsicle?" Her voice was strained and scratchy, her throat suddenly dry. Mom was by her side in a flash with a cool glass of ginger ale, pressing a bendy straw to her lips. Pop moved closer to the side of the bed, smoothing strands of wet black hair away from her face.
"You gave us quite a scare, sweetheart. Some kind of bug hit you just when the storm came. Phone lines down, trees all over the place. We couldn't even call Doc Brown, much less get you to the hospital." Pop's eyes were filled with worry, the lines on his face standing out in stark relief.
"Well, she's come out of it now, dear," Mom said briskly, her hands tugging the coverlet tighter over DG's chest, failing to hide her own emotion as tears filled her eyes. "Poor thing, it looked like you were having the most awful dreams."
"Dreams?" asked DG, as she turned her head with some effort, only to find the drawings on her bedroom wall in Kansas looking back at her. "You mean, I've been here the whole time?" Her own eyes started to fill with tears. Everything she'd been through, all the people she'd met, all the good she'd thought she'd accomplished. Her parents exchanged bewildered glances.
"Of course you've been here the whole time, DG," her dad replied. "Where else would you have gone?"
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She'd woken up at home a month ago, returned to work at the diner two weeks later. She went through the motions, but just didn't quite feel like herself. Her parents asked her not to ride her motorcycle to work, and she acquiesced without a fight. Pop drove her to the diner each day, she worked her shift without complaint, and returned home to sit in her bedroom and stare at the pictures she'd drawn until she fell asleep. At first, she hoped that by looking over her sketches until her eyelids drifted closed, she might at least dream of the OZ. She'd never really gotten to know her real parents. To see Az as the young woman she would have become once out from under the witch's spell. She missed Glitch's misfires, Raw's sweet compassion. She missed campfires on the road, falling asleep against gnarled trees, and waking up to find a leather duster draped across her like a blanket, protecting her from the cold.
But each night she slept a dreamless sleep, awakening each morning feeling farther away from the OZ than she had the day before. She tried sketching her friends, but like the remnants of any dream, their faces slipped away from her, until one day she stuffed her sketchbook into the bottom of the chest at the foot of her bed and decided to stop trying. Like Mom and Popsicle said, you can't hold onto dreams.
