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buffyfic-digest      Thursday, September 17 1998      Volume 02 : Number 325



In this issue:

       BUFFYFIC: ADMIN:  Free email policy
       BUFFYFIC: Xander's Incredible Journey (5d/?)

See the end of the digest for information on (un)subscribing to the buffyfic
or buffyfic-digest mailing lists and on how to retrieve back issues.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1998 17:21:36 -0400 (EDT)
From: sah <[e-mail]>
Subject: BUFFYFIC: ADMIN:  Free email policy

Please read this.  It's very important.

Effective immediately, anyone who wishes to s*bscribe to any Buffy list on
a "freemail" account (Geocities, Hotmail, etc.) will be required to
provide us with a "permanent" e-mail address as a backup.

We will <not> under any circumstances reveal this permanent e-mail address
to anyone.  This is for our reference <only.>

This new policy has become necessary because of the problems we've
experienced with freemail accounts.  They're too easy to set up and
cancel, and there is so little recourse if the individual with the
freemail account causes problems, that we have no choice but to enact this
policy.

The s*bscription information pages will be changed to reflect this policy.

IF YOU ARE CURRENTLY S*BSCRIBED UNDER A FREEMAIL ADDRESS:  as long as you
stay s*bscribed, you do not need to provide us with this information.
However, if you uns*b and want to res*b at some point, you will have to
give us this information even if you were previously a s*bscriber through
a freemail account.  If we have to uns*b you for bouncing mail, again,
you'll have to provide the information to res*b.

If you have any questions regarding this, please contact us offlist.
Thanks.

sah and Jill
[e-mail] and [e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 17 Sep 1998 12:56:42 PDT
From: "Cutter Kinseeker" <[e-mail]>
Subject: BUFFYFIC: Xander's Incredible Journey (5d/?)

TITLE: "Xander's Incredible Journey"
AUTHOR: Cutter Kinseeker
E-MAIL: [e-mail]
FEEDBACK: Yes! Yes! Yes! Tell me what you think, but constructive
criticism only please. No "it sucks" type messages.
DISTRIBUTION: Ask me first.
RATING: Mostly PG-13 for language and adult themes. A couple of parts
will be R.
DESCRIPTION: In the aftermath of "Becoming," Xander sets out after Buffy
and winds up "becoming" in his own right. This part describes Oz's
personal problems, and how he deals with them.
DISCLAIMER: I don't own jack. Correction--jack's probably the only thing
I do own. The rest belongs to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, and the Frog
Network.
SPOILERS: Everything up to "Becoming".

S   S
P   P
O   A
I   C
L   E
E
R


Chapter Five
First Interlude

*...In which Giles is rebuked by his Superior, Willow faces her Fears,
Buffy runs from hers, Oz overcomes his Weakness, and two mysterious
Strangers appear...*


Part Four: Oz
*...In which Oz overcomes his Weakness...*

    Long before Oz became a werewolf, he had been a lead guitarist, and in
his mind, whenever he thought about himself, he was still a lead
guitarist. The werewolf thing was always secondary; it was something
that was a part of him, not who he was--a piece, not the whole. The
biggest piece of Oz's life, however, was his rig--rig*s*, technically,
since he owned three guitars, two electric and one acoustic. Oz had
loved music as long as he could remember, and that love had been
transmuted into a physical thing when he learned to play the guitar at
age eight. To this day, when he picked up a guitar and began to play, he
still got that little shiver of excitement he had felt when he first
realized that the guitar wasn't making the music--he was.
    His parents (to whom he was, and probably always would be, "Osgood")
seemed much younger than they were, but in truth they were a good deal
older than most of his (few) friends' parents. He had never heard an
exact figure quoted, but they claimed to have met at Woodstock and
gotten married on the day Nixon was impeached. Former "flower children"
and current "new agers," his parents had been extremely liberal for as
long as he could remember. When he acted up as a child, rather than
punish him, they would explain the consequences of his actions and
compliment him on his individuality. After his sister was born, they got
slightly stricter, but only slightly and only to protect them both from
his sister's fiery temper. Contrasted with Oz's mellow, easygoing
nature, she was a devil-child, but their parents never once lost their
cool with her or him.
    Growing up in such a supportive and broad-minded environment, Oz came
to accept and tolerate a vast spectrum of beliefs. His mellow seeming
was actually a result of this open-mindedness; being open to just about
anything made you hard to surprise or upset. His father's light interest
in the guitar--which probably started because everyone could play the
guitar in the Sixties--had gotten him started at a young age, and nobody
was happier than Oz that he turned out to have some amount of talent. A
series of lucky (and not-so-lucky) breaks had led Oz to hooking up with
a little band called The Dingoes Ate My Baby and becoming best friends
with its lead singer, Devon (which is a complete story in and of itself,
and not to be discussed herein).
    As it would turn out, the easy discipline he had lived his life
by--first as a new age child, then as the lead guitarist of an actual
band--would come in extremely handy later in life. Apparently, the gene
for the disease of lycanthropy ran strong in his family, and his cousin
Jordy was one of them. When the cute little tyke chomped Oz's finger, he
passed the disease on, and the rest was history. Oz's considerable
mental endurance was a blessing with a disease such as lycanthropy which
usually altered its victims' mental state, giving them a false sense of
power and the delusion that their condition was a blessing. His calmness
had also helped him in another way; werewolves don't just change at the
full moon, as Giles and the gang had surmised, but also shifted whenever
they lost control of their darker emotions. He hadn't had the heart to
tell them; besides which, it was a moot point--Oz didn't get angry.
    As far as Oz was concerned, he was still just a normal human being with
a serious disability--but a disability that he could live with. His
strength of will and inability to be surprised had even given him some
slight control over the beast in recent transformations, though he was
still unwilling to go unchained during the three nights of the full
moon. And he did have to admit, being a werewolf was handy in certain
instances: he didn't have to carry out the trash one week a month, he
had privacy when he needed it, and he had gotten a bigger room in the
last six months--okay, it was the basement of his house, but a bigger
room is a bigger room. By that same token, however, he had developed a
whole new slew of problems: he had to make excuses for showing up all
over Sunnydale naked, he couldn't practice *or* play gigs three nights
of the month, and his kid sister kept bugging him to bite her; he
figured it was only a matter of time before there were two werewolves
chained up in their house during the full moon. At least his parents had
been okay with it; it seemed they had known something about this whole
"Mouth of Hell"/"mystical convergence" business all along and just never
thought to tell him; rather, they had considered telling him, but didn't
think he would believe them.
    And then there was his biggest problem of all: Willow. He loved her
dearly, and he thought she felt the same about him (though who can tell
with women), but she was the only thing that could frustrate or surprise
him; that made him nervous. Also, there was that "werewolves and sexual
heat" thing. Recently, he had felt their relationship heading in a new
and unprecedented direction, and the last several times they had been
alone together it was all they could do to keep from tearing each
others' clothes off. Less than a week before Willow's injury, they had
been making out leisurely in Oz's van when he had felt the change begin,
his teeth sharpen, his mind start to falter. He had only just managed to
retain control, and missed biting Willow by the slimmest of margins. He
had explained his reaction as "moving too fast" and Willow seemed to
accept that, but he knew that they couldn't keep this sort of thing up
much longer.
    To burn off his frustration and some of his pent-up sexual energy, he
had turned to his first passion: the guitar. His practice sessions had
become more frequent and more intense, not to mention longer and longer;
earlier this week, he had somehow managed to waste an entire night
trying to perfect the new song he had written--a song about Willow, no
less--but found that part of the song was completely beyond even his
not-inconsiderable talents. Since that night, his passion, his driving
force, had taken on a new form: the quest for an E-Flat Diminished
Ninth. He would spend hours on end looking for the elusive chord, trying
new positions for his fingers, building flexibility, doing all he could
to prove that he was worthy of the song. In his mind, the quest for the
chord had become synonymous with his quest for control over his
transformations, over himself.
    Then, two nights ago, a setback had occurred. While he was struggling
for the proper grip, he had for the first time in a long time become
angry. His level of fury surprised and terrified him; though it was
directed more at himself than at his guitar, by the time he regained
control, he had already partially wolfed-out and shredded the poor,
helpless rig. It had so disturbed him that he confined himself to bed
for the entire following day and refused to even touch a guitar the
following night.
    The compulsion he had built into himself, however, had proven far too
strong for even his willpower to bear. The siren song of his guitar
called out to him, daring him to try again, to fling himself at the
rocky atoll that was the E-Flat Diminished Ninth--and to make it ashore
or be destroyed on the rocks. In the end, his first passion had become
his ruling one--a pale substitute for Willow, he realized, but a
slightly safer one for the both of them.
    As he began to play, he enforced the Zen-like calm he had become so
adept at over the years and simply refused to think about what he was
doing. At first, he fumbled over the first few bars of one of the
mellower songs from The Cure, but in no time flat he was randomly
zig-zagging from the blues-style rock of John Fogerty all the way to the
other end of the spectrum with power chords in the manner of "Helter
Skelter" and "Back In Black." His fingers blurred up and down the
strings with an endurance and agility he had never known before. He
almost started to analyze it, but he tripped over a note, making a
terrible cacophony, and forced himself back into the "do or do not,
there is no try" mindset he had been in for--he glanced at the clock,
subconsciously registering the time--almost the entire day.
    While he played, thoughts gradually came back; they were disconnected
and floating, almost like the one time he had tried marijuana, but
without the messy aftermath. His thoughts flowed, merged, crossed, and
headed apart on eternal tangents. For the first time ever, Oz and the
music were truly one. In his lack of concern, he had found a greater
peace and wholeness than he had ever known. Nothing, he thought, could
possibly compare to this freedom. Then Willow entered his mind again,
and he knew he had been mistaken: one thing could compare.
    Shifting from the loud, brassy arrogance of AC/DC to the milder, but
more sorrowful and bittersweet tune he had written in honor of the love
of his life, Oz changed chords so fast that he nearly took off the tip
of his left index finger. There was pain now, and a little blood on the
strings; that was okay, it just made them slicker and easier to play.
The scent of blood--coppery and strong--was almost overpowering, but he
blanked it out of his mind. The pain was strong, too; checking quickly,
he found that he had mild friction burns over most of the skin on his
hands and forearms and that even the calluses he had built up in a
decade of playing hadn't prevented him from various cuts and scrapes.
But none of it mattered. The only thing that mattered now was the song;
he smiled vaguely for a moment as the slightly ludicrous thought that he
had never titled it occurred to him.
    He continued to play, clearing his mind of all concerns. Oz didn't even
realize it, but he was mumbling the lyrics as he played; he had never
been very confident of his skills as a vocalist and avoided singing with
the Dingoes whenever he could. Had Willow been there, she might have
marveled at how much better his singing voice was than how he had
described it to her; but she wasn't, so she didn't see what happened
next. None saw that--not even Oz himself, really.
    As Oz played, his mind a clean slate, the change began. His muscles
bulked, barely noticeable at first, only to become thick and bunched;
his teeth elongated, cutting his lips as he unknowingly mumbled song
lyrics; fur began to sprout on his body; his ears pointed and
lengthened; his hands started to twist into claws. And then an
amazing--almost impossible--thing happened: the transformation stopped
halfway, and reversed itself, healing many of Oz's wounds as it receded.
Oz finally became conscious of what was transpiring, but in his mentally
dulled state it registered as something far away, as though it were
occurring to a total stranger.
    His fingers, caught somewhere between human and animal digits, never
ceased their relentless working of the strings and frets; indeed, they
moved faster and slower, speeding and delaying in time with Oz's
internal beat. Then, as he neared the end of the song, it became time
for his crowning achievement... if he could do it. Oz's half-human hands
crept toward the chord, almost leisurely, and twisted the strings into
the shape of the do-able E-Flat. His other hand, as near-monstrous as
the first, plucked the proper notes that would end the song. With a
flourish that was completely unnecessary, Oz's left hand pulled the
E-Flat out of place, sliding to the ninth fret and reforming. In a move
that was so smooth it astounded even him, it happened.
    E-Flat Diminished Ninth.
    As the final notes faded into silence, Oz collapsed to the basement
floor, his aching hands clutching the guitar like it was his last anchor
to reality. Gradually, the partial transformation faded and his hands
returned to normal--hurting, but human. When Oz's senses returned, he
found that he was weeping. Searching his heart, he realized that he was
not weeping for the chord or the song--they were good, but any musician
could have accomplished them eventually. He was weeping for himself, for
his happiness. After all, the chord he had been so passionate about was
really just a symbol to him, a symbol of his own level of control and
restraint. The E-Flat Diminished Ninth had been a test--a test he had no
choice but to pass if he and Willow could ever truly mean anything to
one another.
    Oz stood slowly, the pain from his frantic playing dull and throbbing
now. But despite the pain, he was glad, for now he knew that he was
truly capable of mastering himself and his emotions, that he had a
discipline that no passion--save only one--could ever break. And when
his last passion broke his control, he knew, even then he would not
release that final mental floodgate that could harm someone he loved
more than life itself. And now, when Willow decided that they were
ready, they would take that final step into the realm of relationships,
taking the step that both had dreamed of for what seemed like forever.
He had beaten passion at its own game, overcome his weakness, even
conquered his terrible disability.
    And he had done it with a song in his heart.


END CHAPTER FIVE, PART FOUR

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