World Without Shrimp (Portal, Part 7, 4/4)
Title: World Without Shrimp (Portal, Part 7, 4/4)
Author: kanedax
Fandom: BtVS/AtS Wishverse
Spoilers: BtVS season 6; Previous chapters
Major Characters/Pairings: Tara/Anya, Giles, Buffy, D'Hoffryn
Rating: R for language and mild femslash
Summary: Anya looks back as her relationship is put in jeopardy by extradimensional forces
Notes: As Vi was never given a full name in the series, I borrowed it from the first place I could find, the Hellmouth Alliance RPG.
I don't own these characters. They belong to Joss Whedon and 20th Century Fox.
World Without Shrimp (3/4) / Previous Chapters
Two months can feel like an eternity when the love of your life is absorbed into an interdimensional entity.
Tara understood that The White Hats had done everything in their power to save Anya. But in the end, it just wasn't enough. And meanwhile Sunnydale was still sitting firmly atop the Hellmouth, and demons and vampires and all levels of evil continued to flock to its dark alleys and graveyards. Violet the Vampire Slayer (the alliteration was cute at first, but Vi was hoping that they could come up with another name for her soon) was finally starting to take command of the group just as Buffy had in the past, and she, Giles, and Oz were working on a case involving an export ring of Suvolte eggs.
Larry and Doyle, meanwhile, were investigating a rash of disappearances in the area around the Doublemeat Palace. Larry kept yelling, "Guess what's in the burgers!" but Doyle didn't get the reference and, quite frankly, Tara really didn't think it was funny when she heard it on Nickelodeon as a kid, and it was even less funny now.
Tara did her best to help both groups in their pursuits. Without Anya, she and Giles were the only two left in the group with anything beyond a base knowledge of the mystical universe. As such, time not spent on finals was spent poring over ancient text after ancient text, doing her best to help the group out with their monster of the week dilemmas. Most evenings not spent in Giles's living room researching were spent in her own apartment doing the same.
Not that she spent a lot of time there, anyway. It was their apartment, after all. With Anya gone, Tara found the silence overwhelming, and little items and memories seemed to pop out of nowhere, often reducing her to a sobbing heap for hours at a time. As such, she was spending more and more nights sleeping on Giles's couch, more and more nights sleeping in the bed where Buffy Summers had breathed her last breath before ascending to the heavenly dimension.
Giles often suggested finding a new apartment. Possibly moving into the dormitories of UC Sunnydale again. Larry offered his spare bedroom to her on more than one occasion, saying that the rent could be split but he was more than willing to forego that until she was comfortable. Calls from Los Angeles repeated the invitation.
But Tara wouldn't give it up. To move out meant that she didn't need to keep Anya in her life anymore, didn't need to leave that bookmark that Anya could just pull out when she returned, continuing where they left off.
And she hadn't given up on her, not yet. Finals took much of Tara's time, yes. So did White Hat research. But of the entire group, Tara was still the one researching vengeance demons, researching ways to pull them into barred dimensions, researching ways to search them out or attack them from across the fabric of space/time or separate a soul from a body without having to be close to them. Some nights she would stay up until her eyes were dry and red, until the first hints of sunlight peaked over the horizon, reading some previously-unknown text that had been sent to her by a friendly coven, a friendly demon, or a friendly Wesley in the Watcher's Council libraries.
Finally, one night, three months after Anya disappeared, Tara reached the final page of an ancient text sent to her by Giles's friend Miss Harkness. She closed the book, put it back in the box in which it was shipped, and that was the exact moment that the demon Anyanka appeared in Tara's living room.
"Wow," were the first words out of the demon's mouth when she appeared in a puff of smoke. "You're that Tara?"
Very few people ever have the opportunity to come face-to-face with those taken away from them before their time. The reaction in these rare cases is natural, predictable. With that as a given, it would have done the real Anya's heart good to know that, when Tara saw the face of Anyanka, she didn't melt into a puddle or run to the demon, arms stretched wide to embrace her again. Tara was in love, after all. The moment she looked into the eyes of that familiar face and saw nothing but a stranger, her first and only thought was The amulet. Get the amulet!
Without thinking, without blinking, without even breathing, Tara's palm pointed at the demon, and she released a fireball.
"Woah!" Anyanka yelled, raising her hand and catching the flame, where it instantly curled into itself and dissipated. "Calm down!"
Tara couldn't calm down. This was the woman who had taken her Anya. Her other hand reached out and blasted blue lightning at the demon, which she also absorbed just as simply.
"Criminy!" the demon said as the bolts disappeared. "Hallie was right, you do hate me. Wait, wait, wait!"
As she spoke, the green-and-gold amulet lifted from her breast, the chain snapping as it was pulled towards Tara's outstretched hand.
"No no no," said Anyanka, raising her own hand. The amulet hovered in mid-air, as though being pulled on both ends by an invisible string. And, despite the strain showing on Tara's face, it slowly began to move back towards its rightful owner. "You're powerful, Tara," the demon said. "Just like you were on my side." She flicked her wrist, and the amulet traveled the rest of the distance, landing lightly in her palm. "Just not powerful enough. I come in peace, okay?"
"No," Tara growled.
"Yes," Anyanka sighed, tapping the ends of the thin golden chain together, where they magically fused as though they were never broken. "Can I sit down? I don't have a lot of time, D'Hoffryn's putting a hell of a lot of trust in me even allowing me to come to this friggin' dimension, so my flight plan's pretty limited."
"No, you can't sit down," said Tara. "But I give you permission to die, if you want. Or if you don't."
"Oh, sweetie," Anyanka chuckled, giving Tara's crackling fingertips a passive glance before sitting down at the kitchen table, "even if you could kill me, you don't want to."
"Why don't I? You took her from me..."
"Yes, and she took me from my Xander for a few weeks back in 1999," said Anya. "Which in hindsight was probably one of the best things she had ever done for me. Then she had to go and give her power back; my life might have been better off if I had never continued to have sex with the big homewrecker. You don't want to kill me because that would mean no more Anya in your reality. If I lose my power, which I'm not planning on doing until you're dead...again...then the Anyas all go back to their home universes. But if I die as a vengeance demon, they all die with me. So, no, you really don't want to kill me."
For the first time, Tara allowed herself to study the demon that looked so much like her Anya, yet so different. She was a little thinner, with longer hair that she had dyed blond and pulled back in a ponytail. She wore dressier clothes than Tara had ever seen her Anya wear, professional yet somewhat frilly. They hung off her in a way that reminded Tara of a matronly librarian, or a high school girl overdressing for her first job interview. In 1927.
Above and beyond all of that, however, was the demon's aura, her presence, her attitude. Despite her bluster, her talk of multi-dimensional travel, and her obvious magical strength, there was a certain dottiness about Anyanka, a vapidity that Tara found extremely unlike her own Anya.
"Why are you here?" asked Tara. "To make me pay for talking her into breaking her amulet when we first met? To p-p-punish me? Because you're doing a good job sitting here m-mocking me."
"Not at all," said Anyanka, reaching across the table for Tara's hands, which were pulled back to Tara's lap before the demon even got within six inches of them. "No, I'm actually here because she wants me to be here."
"She?" asked Tara, a shred of hope blooming in her heart.
"This reality's Anya," the demon explained. "Your Anya. See, here's the thing, Tara...When I became a vengeance demon, all of the Anyas from every reality I had touched--"
"I know that part already," said Tara. "You explained it, Hallie explained it, D'Hoffryn explained it..."
"They're all in my head. And almost all of them are glad to be there. They had been waiting for this since the moment Giles broke the amulet and broke my power. They all hated being human, or at least preferred the immortality, the super strength, the ability to travel through space righting wrongs, all that stuff. Everyone, that is, except your Anya."
"My...?"
"I can hear her, you know," said Anyanka. "In my head. This little tiny voice telling me that I'm doing a bad thing whenever I grant a wish, that I shouldn't be hurting people who deserve to be hurt. It's really irritating."
"So you're here to feel better about yourself, is that it?" said Tara, leaning back and crossing her arms. "Here to get her to shut up?"
"Tara, you have to understand my position!" said Anyanka, leaning forward pleadingly. "He left me! At the altar! What else was I supposed to do?"
"So you make yourself feel better by ruining others lives," Tara argued. "As long as others are more miserable than you..."
"But that's just it!" said Anyanka, standing up. "They're not more miserable, because your Anya won't shut up! I've gone... I've gone half-ass! There are so many things that I want to do, so many wishes that I want to grant, but I hesitate at the last minute because she makes me feel bad about it!"
"So she's your conscience, then?" Tara said, smirking with triumph despite herself. "Well, at least she's doing something good in her absence."
"It's embarrassing!" Anyanka cried. "I should be doing so much more, and just between you and me, I think they're starting to talk about me around the water cooler."
"The water cooler?" said Tara with an arched eyebrow.
"Phhht, yeah, you're right," said the demon with a wave of her hand. "What was I thinking? No one's talking about me behind my back..."
"B-b-but I didn't say--"
"He left me!" Anyanka repeated, as if that's the only answer that she would ever need to give. "We were getting married and I had the dress and he had the tux and he looked so sexy and you and Willow and Buffy looked so pretty in your dresses and you and Willow were flirting again and he ruined it! What else could I do?"
Tara blinked. The thought of her flirting with another girl in front of Anya threw her for a moment before she regained her composure. "So, what, you became a vengeance demon again to get vengeance on one man?"
"Yes!"
"What did you do?"
"I..." Anyanka hesitated. "I...Well, I didn't exactly do anything to him. It was more what I did to his mortal enemy..."
"What did you do to his...his mortal enemy?"
"Okay, I know you're a lesbian in this reality, too, so you don't know how this works, but when a man and a woman get really drunk and really horny..."
"You slept with his mortal enemy?"
"Oh, thank God," said Anyanka, wiping her brow. "I didn't really want to give that talk."
"You turned into a vengeance demon and slept with is mortal enemy?" asked Tara, more loudly this time.
"Again, yes, I did."
"You took away my Anya," said Tara, practically yelling, "so you could have sex with his mortal enemy, something that you could have done without being a vengeance demon?"
"Well, I wanted to do more!" Anyanka yelled back. "And in my defense, Spike did spank me a few times, and I don't think his chip would have let him do that if I was a human..."
"I don't want to hear it!" Tara yelled. "Anyanka, why the hell are you here? What do you want with me?"
"She loves you," said Anyanka. “She loves you and she misses you and she won’t shut up about it and that’s why I’m here. To tell you that, and to tell you that…that she says that she’s not that important in the great scheme of things.”
“She is!” said Tara. “She is, she’s the most important person I’ve ever had in my life…”
“But she’s not the only person in your life,” Anyanka replied. “She knows you better than anyone and she knows that you’d pretty much put your life on hold to try to get her back.”
“I haven’t-“
“Devandire Codex, right?” said Anyanka, pointing to the open box on the table. “Deals with interdimensional transit? The Watcher’s Council has the only known copy, yet here it is…”
“Okay, so I’m doing a little research on the side,” Tara admitted.
“You’re important here,” said Anyanka. “Trust me, I know what it feels like to not be needed, and your friends need you. Focus on helping others, Tara. That’s what she wants me to tell you. She’ll come back if she can, but we both agree that that isn’t going to happen any time soon. So forget about her…”
“I can’t!” Tara cried. “I can’t forget about her, she’s gone, you took her!”
“Okay, don’t forget about her!” said the demon. “But don’t… Just remember her. That’s all. But move on. That’s what she wants you to do.”
Tara closed her eyes, feeling the tears roll down her cheeks. But she listened, and, for the first time, allowed herself to absorb the possibility of life without Anya.
“It’s hard, I know,” said Anyanka. “Hell, when you died in my world, Willow went crazy-“
Tara’s eyes flew open. “I…I died?”
“You did,” said Anyanka. “Warren shot you and Buffy, and she survived but you didn’t, and Willow went all dark and veiny and angsty and almost destroyed the world and now she’s in England trying to get better and I don’t want that to happen to this universe, it’s my greatest creation and I don’t want it to get blown up because of something that I did…”
“I won’t blow up the world,” Tara said quietly, her mind still absorbing it. “Warren? Warren Mears?”
“You know him?”
Tara nodded. “He…He h-h-h-helped us defeat Glory. Built a robot that looked like Dawn…”
“A Dawnbot?” Anyanka gasped. “That’s…Jesus, why didn’t we think of that? We were so busy dealing with Sexbot Buffy-“
“Sexbot Buffy?”
“A long story that I know you really don’t want to hear since it involves Spike getting all groinal…”
“Yeah, not interested, thanks,” said Tara, deep in thought. “Warren…?”
“Is he still alive here?” Anyanka asked. “He’s fairly evil in our world. I mean, he really sucks at it, but he did kill you and almost killed Buffy, which is more than I can say about Glory and Adam…”
“He’s still alive,” said Tara. “He’s…He has a job in Los Angeles.”
“Does he have his nerd buddies with him? Jonathan and Andrew?”
Tara shook her head. “Never heard of them.”
“Okay, well, that’s something, at least,” said Anyanka, standing up. “I have to go. Just…Just watch out for them, okay? Keep on your guard around Warren. I liked you a lot when you were alive, Tara, and I was sad when you died. I don’t want it to happen again.”
“Thanks,” said Tara, and Anyanka responded with a nervous half-smile. “Can you, um, c-c-can you come back sometime? I know you’re not her, but…”
“I can’t,” Anyanka admitted. “This is a one-time deal. And please don’t try to follow me, okay? I’m sticking to my own universe, and if you came there and Willow saw you it would be…it would be bad.”
Tara nodded in understanding. “She’s not the one I love,” she said sadly. “She’d be devastated.”
“Apocalyptically, yeah…”
“Thank you,” said Tara, still amazed at herself that she wasn’t trying to destroy this girl. “Thank you for…for c-c-coming.”
Anyanka shrugged. “Just one last thing I needed to do, I guess.”
“Anyanka?”
“Yeah?”
“You…” Tara said, and sighed, “you look better as a brunette.”
Anyanka smiled, and played with one of her golden strands. “Xander liked me better as a blonde,” she said. “But what does he know? Thanks.”
Tara nodded and, with a flourish, the vengeance demon Anyanka disappeared from her universe, leaving the witch to move on.
---------
October 16, 2000
“I told you he was evil.”
“I didn’t doubt you.”
“Yes you did.”
“Okay,” Tara said reluctantly, “maybe for a minute I doubted you.”
“See?” said Anya. “Honestly is the best policy.”
“And he wasn’t evil,” said Tara. “Not really.”
“Which way are we going with this conversation again?” asked Anya as the couple spun around the dance floor of the newly-reopened Bronze. Hours after her family had arrived in town to take Tara away for her twentieth birthday, and had been turned away empty-handed.
“My father’s…my father’s misguided, and imposing, and close-minded, and…”
“And an asshole?” Anya suggested. “I’m allowed to say he’s an asshole, right?”
“Oh, I knew he was an asshole from the day Donny taught me the word when I was five,” said Tara. “But we’ve seen evil. We fight it on a daily basis. Vampires, monsters, demons…”
“Evil demons,” Anya corrected.
“Evil demons,” Tara agreed with a smirk. “We’ve seen evil all around us. Compared to that, my father’s just a weak, pathetic excuse for a man. No more, no less.”
“And here I thought you were standing up for him,” said Anya proudly.
“Well, I’ve grown as a person…”
“You have,” said Anya gently. “You really, really have. But as much as you don’t want to admit it, your father and your brother are evil for what they did to you and your mother. Because they’re human, and they have a soul. Which means, unlike the vampires and the monsters and, yes, the evil demons, they had a choice. And they chose to be abusive. They chose to hold you down, to call your powers a curse, to label you as less than human. That makes them evil, and it makes what you did today all the more courageous. The world could use more women like you.”
“I hope not,” said Tara, blushing. “That’d mean I’d have competition.”
“I’m serious!” said Anya. “Tara, I’ve helped thousands of women over the centuries. Some of them definitely needed the help, as they were past the point of helping themselves. But others…others just came to me as an easy answer. They could have…They could have stood up for themselves, faced their problems, faced the mistakes, the ones their men made or the ones that women made by themselves. But if there were more women with your strength, your courage, then the world would be a much better place. I’m proud of you, baby. And I know your mother would be, too.”
Tara smiled, and to Anya it was the sweetest, saddest smile that she would ever see.
“Too much?” she asked warily. “I mean, if that was too sappy, you could always think about the part where Donny tried to hit you and you turned him into an orangutan.”
Tara burst into sloppy laughter at the thought. “Well, he did deserve it,” she admitted.
“Oh, it suited him perfectly,” said Anya. “That neck beard was the opposite of intimidating.”
Tara’s laughter subsided, and she gazed deeply into Anya’s eyes.
“Are you going to be okay?” Anya asked seriously. “All kidding aside, I know what happened had to be hard for you.”
Tara looked around The Bronze, which, despite initial concerns, had moved past its horrific recent history to become one of the hottest places in Sunnydale again. Citizens of all ages and backgrounds flocked here every night to dance, to play, to be together. The Bronze became a symbol for human freedom, and they danced on the grave of The Master and his reign of terror, they remembered those who they had lost, and they lived.
Among the piles of presents that she had received for her birthday, Tara saw Giles, Wesley, and Doyle talking with some of the former members of the Initiative, drinks all around. Saw Faith, Oz, and Joan arguing the finer points of the Southern California punk scene as the music changed and Joan dragged Oz onto the dance floor, joining Larry and his new boyfriend.
Saw the two youngest members of their circle, Violet and Dawn, conversing over bottles of soda. Both had arrived in the past few weeks under different circumstances, and Tara knew that Dawn in particular was still having trouble adjusting to the loss of her mother. This was the first night that she had actually gone out since Buffy brought her to Sunnydale, and Tara felt her heart warm knowing that the youngest Summers seemed to be enjoying herself, finding a lot of common ground with Giles’s new charge.
Even Buffy herself, the most solitary woman that Tara had ever known, had come tonight to be a part of the festivities. She was, of course, occupying a seat at the bar, alone, but Faith quickly joined her with a pat on the back, and Buffy, in an even more unique turn of events, smiled at her company.
“I’ll be fine,” said Tara. “They’re blood. But this is my family.”
“And what does that make me?” Anya asked.
Tara smiled, pushing Anya’s hair back from her face.
“You’re my everything.”
The two kissed, and they danced, and it was a night that Tara would remember forever.
World Without Shrimp (3/4) / Previous Chapters
Author: kanedax
Fandom: BtVS/AtS Wishverse
Spoilers: BtVS season 6; Previous chapters
Major Characters/Pairings: Tara/Anya, Giles, Buffy, D'Hoffryn
Rating: R for language and mild femslash
Summary: Anya looks back as her relationship is put in jeopardy by extradimensional forces
Notes: As Vi was never given a full name in the series, I borrowed it from the first place I could find, the Hellmouth Alliance RPG.
I don't own these characters. They belong to Joss Whedon and 20th Century Fox.
World Without Shrimp (3/4) / Previous Chapters
Two months can feel like an eternity when the love of your life is absorbed into an interdimensional entity.
Tara understood that The White Hats had done everything in their power to save Anya. But in the end, it just wasn't enough. And meanwhile Sunnydale was still sitting firmly atop the Hellmouth, and demons and vampires and all levels of evil continued to flock to its dark alleys and graveyards. Violet the Vampire Slayer (the alliteration was cute at first, but Vi was hoping that they could come up with another name for her soon) was finally starting to take command of the group just as Buffy had in the past, and she, Giles, and Oz were working on a case involving an export ring of Suvolte eggs.
Larry and Doyle, meanwhile, were investigating a rash of disappearances in the area around the Doublemeat Palace. Larry kept yelling, "Guess what's in the burgers!" but Doyle didn't get the reference and, quite frankly, Tara really didn't think it was funny when she heard it on Nickelodeon as a kid, and it was even less funny now.
Tara did her best to help both groups in their pursuits. Without Anya, she and Giles were the only two left in the group with anything beyond a base knowledge of the mystical universe. As such, time not spent on finals was spent poring over ancient text after ancient text, doing her best to help the group out with their monster of the week dilemmas. Most evenings not spent in Giles's living room researching were spent in her own apartment doing the same.
Not that she spent a lot of time there, anyway. It was their apartment, after all. With Anya gone, Tara found the silence overwhelming, and little items and memories seemed to pop out of nowhere, often reducing her to a sobbing heap for hours at a time. As such, she was spending more and more nights sleeping on Giles's couch, more and more nights sleeping in the bed where Buffy Summers had breathed her last breath before ascending to the heavenly dimension.
Giles often suggested finding a new apartment. Possibly moving into the dormitories of UC Sunnydale again. Larry offered his spare bedroom to her on more than one occasion, saying that the rent could be split but he was more than willing to forego that until she was comfortable. Calls from Los Angeles repeated the invitation.
But Tara wouldn't give it up. To move out meant that she didn't need to keep Anya in her life anymore, didn't need to leave that bookmark that Anya could just pull out when she returned, continuing where they left off.
And she hadn't given up on her, not yet. Finals took much of Tara's time, yes. So did White Hat research. But of the entire group, Tara was still the one researching vengeance demons, researching ways to pull them into barred dimensions, researching ways to search them out or attack them from across the fabric of space/time or separate a soul from a body without having to be close to them. Some nights she would stay up until her eyes were dry and red, until the first hints of sunlight peaked over the horizon, reading some previously-unknown text that had been sent to her by a friendly coven, a friendly demon, or a friendly Wesley in the Watcher's Council libraries.
Finally, one night, three months after Anya disappeared, Tara reached the final page of an ancient text sent to her by Giles's friend Miss Harkness. She closed the book, put it back in the box in which it was shipped, and that was the exact moment that the demon Anyanka appeared in Tara's living room.
"Wow," were the first words out of the demon's mouth when she appeared in a puff of smoke. "You're that Tara?"
Very few people ever have the opportunity to come face-to-face with those taken away from them before their time. The reaction in these rare cases is natural, predictable. With that as a given, it would have done the real Anya's heart good to know that, when Tara saw the face of Anyanka, she didn't melt into a puddle or run to the demon, arms stretched wide to embrace her again. Tara was in love, after all. The moment she looked into the eyes of that familiar face and saw nothing but a stranger, her first and only thought was The amulet. Get the amulet!
Without thinking, without blinking, without even breathing, Tara's palm pointed at the demon, and she released a fireball.
"Woah!" Anyanka yelled, raising her hand and catching the flame, where it instantly curled into itself and dissipated. "Calm down!"
Tara couldn't calm down. This was the woman who had taken her Anya. Her other hand reached out and blasted blue lightning at the demon, which she also absorbed just as simply.
"Criminy!" the demon said as the bolts disappeared. "Hallie was right, you do hate me. Wait, wait, wait!"
As she spoke, the green-and-gold amulet lifted from her breast, the chain snapping as it was pulled towards Tara's outstretched hand.
"No no no," said Anyanka, raising her own hand. The amulet hovered in mid-air, as though being pulled on both ends by an invisible string. And, despite the strain showing on Tara's face, it slowly began to move back towards its rightful owner. "You're powerful, Tara," the demon said. "Just like you were on my side." She flicked her wrist, and the amulet traveled the rest of the distance, landing lightly in her palm. "Just not powerful enough. I come in peace, okay?"
"No," Tara growled.
"Yes," Anyanka sighed, tapping the ends of the thin golden chain together, where they magically fused as though they were never broken. "Can I sit down? I don't have a lot of time, D'Hoffryn's putting a hell of a lot of trust in me even allowing me to come to this friggin' dimension, so my flight plan's pretty limited."
"No, you can't sit down," said Tara. "But I give you permission to die, if you want. Or if you don't."
"Oh, sweetie," Anyanka chuckled, giving Tara's crackling fingertips a passive glance before sitting down at the kitchen table, "even if you could kill me, you don't want to."
"Why don't I? You took her from me..."
"Yes, and she took me from my Xander for a few weeks back in 1999," said Anya. "Which in hindsight was probably one of the best things she had ever done for me. Then she had to go and give her power back; my life might have been better off if I had never continued to have sex with the big homewrecker. You don't want to kill me because that would mean no more Anya in your reality. If I lose my power, which I'm not planning on doing until you're dead...again...then the Anyas all go back to their home universes. But if I die as a vengeance demon, they all die with me. So, no, you really don't want to kill me."
For the first time, Tara allowed herself to study the demon that looked so much like her Anya, yet so different. She was a little thinner, with longer hair that she had dyed blond and pulled back in a ponytail. She wore dressier clothes than Tara had ever seen her Anya wear, professional yet somewhat frilly. They hung off her in a way that reminded Tara of a matronly librarian, or a high school girl overdressing for her first job interview. In 1927.
Above and beyond all of that, however, was the demon's aura, her presence, her attitude. Despite her bluster, her talk of multi-dimensional travel, and her obvious magical strength, there was a certain dottiness about Anyanka, a vapidity that Tara found extremely unlike her own Anya.
"Why are you here?" asked Tara. "To make me pay for talking her into breaking her amulet when we first met? To p-p-punish me? Because you're doing a good job sitting here m-mocking me."
"Not at all," said Anyanka, reaching across the table for Tara's hands, which were pulled back to Tara's lap before the demon even got within six inches of them. "No, I'm actually here because she wants me to be here."
"She?" asked Tara, a shred of hope blooming in her heart.
"This reality's Anya," the demon explained. "Your Anya. See, here's the thing, Tara...When I became a vengeance demon, all of the Anyas from every reality I had touched--"
"I know that part already," said Tara. "You explained it, Hallie explained it, D'Hoffryn explained it..."
"They're all in my head. And almost all of them are glad to be there. They had been waiting for this since the moment Giles broke the amulet and broke my power. They all hated being human, or at least preferred the immortality, the super strength, the ability to travel through space righting wrongs, all that stuff. Everyone, that is, except your Anya."
"My...?"
"I can hear her, you know," said Anyanka. "In my head. This little tiny voice telling me that I'm doing a bad thing whenever I grant a wish, that I shouldn't be hurting people who deserve to be hurt. It's really irritating."
"So you're here to feel better about yourself, is that it?" said Tara, leaning back and crossing her arms. "Here to get her to shut up?"
"Tara, you have to understand my position!" said Anyanka, leaning forward pleadingly. "He left me! At the altar! What else was I supposed to do?"
"So you make yourself feel better by ruining others lives," Tara argued. "As long as others are more miserable than you..."
"But that's just it!" said Anyanka, standing up. "They're not more miserable, because your Anya won't shut up! I've gone... I've gone half-ass! There are so many things that I want to do, so many wishes that I want to grant, but I hesitate at the last minute because she makes me feel bad about it!"
"So she's your conscience, then?" Tara said, smirking with triumph despite herself. "Well, at least she's doing something good in her absence."
"It's embarrassing!" Anyanka cried. "I should be doing so much more, and just between you and me, I think they're starting to talk about me around the water cooler."
"The water cooler?" said Tara with an arched eyebrow.
"Phhht, yeah, you're right," said the demon with a wave of her hand. "What was I thinking? No one's talking about me behind my back..."
"B-b-but I didn't say--"
"He left me!" Anyanka repeated, as if that's the only answer that she would ever need to give. "We were getting married and I had the dress and he had the tux and he looked so sexy and you and Willow and Buffy looked so pretty in your dresses and you and Willow were flirting again and he ruined it! What else could I do?"
Tara blinked. The thought of her flirting with another girl in front of Anya threw her for a moment before she regained her composure. "So, what, you became a vengeance demon again to get vengeance on one man?"
"Yes!"
"What did you do?"
"I..." Anyanka hesitated. "I...Well, I didn't exactly do anything to him. It was more what I did to his mortal enemy..."
"What did you do to his...his mortal enemy?"
"Okay, I know you're a lesbian in this reality, too, so you don't know how this works, but when a man and a woman get really drunk and really horny..."
"You slept with his mortal enemy?"
"Oh, thank God," said Anyanka, wiping her brow. "I didn't really want to give that talk."
"You turned into a vengeance demon and slept with is mortal enemy?" asked Tara, more loudly this time.
"Again, yes, I did."
"You took away my Anya," said Tara, practically yelling, "so you could have sex with his mortal enemy, something that you could have done without being a vengeance demon?"
"Well, I wanted to do more!" Anyanka yelled back. "And in my defense, Spike did spank me a few times, and I don't think his chip would have let him do that if I was a human..."
"I don't want to hear it!" Tara yelled. "Anyanka, why the hell are you here? What do you want with me?"
"She loves you," said Anyanka. “She loves you and she misses you and she won’t shut up about it and that’s why I’m here. To tell you that, and to tell you that…that she says that she’s not that important in the great scheme of things.”
“She is!” said Tara. “She is, she’s the most important person I’ve ever had in my life…”
“But she’s not the only person in your life,” Anyanka replied. “She knows you better than anyone and she knows that you’d pretty much put your life on hold to try to get her back.”
“I haven’t-“
“Devandire Codex, right?” said Anyanka, pointing to the open box on the table. “Deals with interdimensional transit? The Watcher’s Council has the only known copy, yet here it is…”
“Okay, so I’m doing a little research on the side,” Tara admitted.
“You’re important here,” said Anyanka. “Trust me, I know what it feels like to not be needed, and your friends need you. Focus on helping others, Tara. That’s what she wants me to tell you. She’ll come back if she can, but we both agree that that isn’t going to happen any time soon. So forget about her…”
“I can’t!” Tara cried. “I can’t forget about her, she’s gone, you took her!”
“Okay, don’t forget about her!” said the demon. “But don’t… Just remember her. That’s all. But move on. That’s what she wants you to do.”
Tara closed her eyes, feeling the tears roll down her cheeks. But she listened, and, for the first time, allowed herself to absorb the possibility of life without Anya.
“It’s hard, I know,” said Anyanka. “Hell, when you died in my world, Willow went crazy-“
Tara’s eyes flew open. “I…I died?”
“You did,” said Anyanka. “Warren shot you and Buffy, and she survived but you didn’t, and Willow went all dark and veiny and angsty and almost destroyed the world and now she’s in England trying to get better and I don’t want that to happen to this universe, it’s my greatest creation and I don’t want it to get blown up because of something that I did…”
“I won’t blow up the world,” Tara said quietly, her mind still absorbing it. “Warren? Warren Mears?”
“You know him?”
Tara nodded. “He…He h-h-h-helped us defeat Glory. Built a robot that looked like Dawn…”
“A Dawnbot?” Anyanka gasped. “That’s…Jesus, why didn’t we think of that? We were so busy dealing with Sexbot Buffy-“
“Sexbot Buffy?”
“A long story that I know you really don’t want to hear since it involves Spike getting all groinal…”
“Yeah, not interested, thanks,” said Tara, deep in thought. “Warren…?”
“Is he still alive here?” Anyanka asked. “He’s fairly evil in our world. I mean, he really sucks at it, but he did kill you and almost killed Buffy, which is more than I can say about Glory and Adam…”
“He’s still alive,” said Tara. “He’s…He has a job in Los Angeles.”
“Does he have his nerd buddies with him? Jonathan and Andrew?”
Tara shook her head. “Never heard of them.”
“Okay, well, that’s something, at least,” said Anyanka, standing up. “I have to go. Just…Just watch out for them, okay? Keep on your guard around Warren. I liked you a lot when you were alive, Tara, and I was sad when you died. I don’t want it to happen again.”
“Thanks,” said Tara, and Anyanka responded with a nervous half-smile. “Can you, um, c-c-can you come back sometime? I know you’re not her, but…”
“I can’t,” Anyanka admitted. “This is a one-time deal. And please don’t try to follow me, okay? I’m sticking to my own universe, and if you came there and Willow saw you it would be…it would be bad.”
Tara nodded in understanding. “She’s not the one I love,” she said sadly. “She’d be devastated.”
“Apocalyptically, yeah…”
“Thank you,” said Tara, still amazed at herself that she wasn’t trying to destroy this girl. “Thank you for…for c-c-coming.”
Anyanka shrugged. “Just one last thing I needed to do, I guess.”
“Anyanka?”
“Yeah?”
“You…” Tara said, and sighed, “you look better as a brunette.”
Anyanka smiled, and played with one of her golden strands. “Xander liked me better as a blonde,” she said. “But what does he know? Thanks.”
Tara nodded and, with a flourish, the vengeance demon Anyanka disappeared from her universe, leaving the witch to move on.
---------
October 16, 2000
“I told you he was evil.”
“I didn’t doubt you.”
“Yes you did.”
“Okay,” Tara said reluctantly, “maybe for a minute I doubted you.”
“See?” said Anya. “Honestly is the best policy.”
“And he wasn’t evil,” said Tara. “Not really.”
“Which way are we going with this conversation again?” asked Anya as the couple spun around the dance floor of the newly-reopened Bronze. Hours after her family had arrived in town to take Tara away for her twentieth birthday, and had been turned away empty-handed.
“My father’s…my father’s misguided, and imposing, and close-minded, and…”
“And an asshole?” Anya suggested. “I’m allowed to say he’s an asshole, right?”
“Oh, I knew he was an asshole from the day Donny taught me the word when I was five,” said Tara. “But we’ve seen evil. We fight it on a daily basis. Vampires, monsters, demons…”
“Evil demons,” Anya corrected.
“Evil demons,” Tara agreed with a smirk. “We’ve seen evil all around us. Compared to that, my father’s just a weak, pathetic excuse for a man. No more, no less.”
“And here I thought you were standing up for him,” said Anya proudly.
“Well, I’ve grown as a person…”
“You have,” said Anya gently. “You really, really have. But as much as you don’t want to admit it, your father and your brother are evil for what they did to you and your mother. Because they’re human, and they have a soul. Which means, unlike the vampires and the monsters and, yes, the evil demons, they had a choice. And they chose to be abusive. They chose to hold you down, to call your powers a curse, to label you as less than human. That makes them evil, and it makes what you did today all the more courageous. The world could use more women like you.”
“I hope not,” said Tara, blushing. “That’d mean I’d have competition.”
“I’m serious!” said Anya. “Tara, I’ve helped thousands of women over the centuries. Some of them definitely needed the help, as they were past the point of helping themselves. But others…others just came to me as an easy answer. They could have…They could have stood up for themselves, faced their problems, faced the mistakes, the ones their men made or the ones that women made by themselves. But if there were more women with your strength, your courage, then the world would be a much better place. I’m proud of you, baby. And I know your mother would be, too.”
Tara smiled, and to Anya it was the sweetest, saddest smile that she would ever see.
“Too much?” she asked warily. “I mean, if that was too sappy, you could always think about the part where Donny tried to hit you and you turned him into an orangutan.”
Tara burst into sloppy laughter at the thought. “Well, he did deserve it,” she admitted.
“Oh, it suited him perfectly,” said Anya. “That neck beard was the opposite of intimidating.”
Tara’s laughter subsided, and she gazed deeply into Anya’s eyes.
“Are you going to be okay?” Anya asked seriously. “All kidding aside, I know what happened had to be hard for you.”
Tara looked around The Bronze, which, despite initial concerns, had moved past its horrific recent history to become one of the hottest places in Sunnydale again. Citizens of all ages and backgrounds flocked here every night to dance, to play, to be together. The Bronze became a symbol for human freedom, and they danced on the grave of The Master and his reign of terror, they remembered those who they had lost, and they lived.
Among the piles of presents that she had received for her birthday, Tara saw Giles, Wesley, and Doyle talking with some of the former members of the Initiative, drinks all around. Saw Faith, Oz, and Joan arguing the finer points of the Southern California punk scene as the music changed and Joan dragged Oz onto the dance floor, joining Larry and his new boyfriend.
Saw the two youngest members of their circle, Violet and Dawn, conversing over bottles of soda. Both had arrived in the past few weeks under different circumstances, and Tara knew that Dawn in particular was still having trouble adjusting to the loss of her mother. This was the first night that she had actually gone out since Buffy brought her to Sunnydale, and Tara felt her heart warm knowing that the youngest Summers seemed to be enjoying herself, finding a lot of common ground with Giles’s new charge.
Even Buffy herself, the most solitary woman that Tara had ever known, had come tonight to be a part of the festivities. She was, of course, occupying a seat at the bar, alone, but Faith quickly joined her with a pat on the back, and Buffy, in an even more unique turn of events, smiled at her company.
“I’ll be fine,” said Tara. “They’re blood. But this is my family.”
“And what does that make me?” Anya asked.
Tara smiled, pushing Anya’s hair back from her face.
“You’re my everything.”
The two kissed, and they danced, and it was a night that Tara would remember forever.
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