Work Text:
After graduation she got a job waiting tables and was fired three days later. She considered cursing the manager with boils but that would have required ingredients and spellbooks and she was so out of the game that the thought of all that effort just to curse some guy that wasn’t even worth it filled her with an all-new level of exhaustion.
She went to a bar with her fake id she finagled off that Warren character a week after realizing that being human meant following human laws and went home with a woman with a wide smile and bright red hair.
(Okay, so she seduced the manager’s wife. So that was so much easier than boils.)
The next morning, dressed in the same clothes from the night before but with an additional run in her fishnets, she went to a coffee shop that wanted to be kitschy and yet anonymous like STARBUCKS, but was too small-town to lose its personality and too impersonal and sterile to be charming.
“Finding the charms of humanity yet?”
Anya smiled that smile she reserved for people that she loved and people she truly hated. Too often, the line between those two things was just a little more blurry than maybe they ought.
“Not really,” she said with a sigh, sitting down next to the red-haired witch that trapped her in a teenage human’s body. “It would have been far easier to just give him boils.”
Willow winked, “But not as fun as fucking his wife.”
For a human, she at least had priorities that Anya could understand.
Willow bought her a coffee and they sat in relative silence for a while, Willow reading a thick, musty book and Anya shielding her sensitive eyes with dark sunglasses, whining softly into her black coffee until Willow handed her a couple ADVIL with a soft grimace of sympathy.
Eventually Amy joined them, loud and pleased with herself and full of words words words that spilled all over the table and invited them to join in.
They didn’t talk about high school or prom – with the wolves or whatever – or graduation – big snake, huh? – or what was coming next – omg what college did you get into – because why would they?
They didn’t talk about things that mattered – how’s being human again – or didn’t matter anymore – hey sorry for the whole trying to kill you thing – or reminisce about past mistakes – remember when I broke your foot because you made me break out all over my back and I couldn’t wear my favorite halter – or the cheesy thing – isn’t it great how we can all be friends now? – because there’d be no point.
They talked about celebrities and the weather, about how MTV had sold out, about the ugly sweater that woman down the street had put her dog in, about whether pink or orange was preferable to puke-green.
For a small moment, Anya almost felt like a Real Girl and not an ex-demon struggling to find her way through the heat and sweat and stink and fear of humanity.
“I lost my job,” she said morosely as Amy refilled her cup with fresh coffee – it came up from the bottom like a well overflowing and smelled like cream and caramel and cinnamon.
They always paid for the first cup as a sign of legitimacy. Their sly and yet frighteningly-exposed relationship to their own magic always felt a little intoxicating to be around. It was like being with Hallie in the old days, but without the security and invisibility of immortality.
“We know,” Amy shrugged.
They always knew more than they should.
“You didn’t want to be there anyway,” Willow said over the edge of her mug, eyebrows raised.
It was uncomfortable not knowing what she wanted. For so long, she had followed the whims and needs of others. Pain appeared all around her and she found the brightest thread and let it pull her wherever she was needed. Now she was less than a will o’ the wisp. She had nothing holding her down or pulling her forward.
“I wish—“
Amy cut her off with a glance, Anya’s lips sealing shut before she could finish the thought. She bristled under the limitations of Amy’s power, she yearned to get closer to it.
“You’re young and you’re hot and super fucking powerful,” Willow said. Sometimes she drawled her words like a bored villain in a Western. Like any moment a man with spurs clattering against the floor would burst through the door and challenge her to a shoot-out and she’d kill him with a wave of her fingers, sighing with boredom through it all. “Stop fucking wishing for things and go out and get them.”
The conversation shifted to dental dams and overpriced magickal ingredients and the current vampire population and whether they should do something about all the bees dying and where to buy good heels that wouldn’t pinch your toes.
She didn’t say goodbye to them – the witch that made a wish and the witch that turned her human for her trouble. They were the closest things to mortal friends she had ever had, but they didn’t seem to be the type you say goodbye to.
They were the type you said hello to weeks, months, years later and they acted as though no time had passed. Because they’d probably already know everything you had done and seen anyway. They didn’t miss much.
And somehow, despite a rocky start, Anya was on their list of people we care about what happens to personally, though maybe not yet on the people we’d go to war for. As far as she could tell, each of them only had one person on that particular list. And depending on the day, it could or might not be each other.
She hotwired a car using 20% elbow grease and 70% left-over magickal wherewithal and 10% sheer stubbornness – it was a nice black car, not too nice to be missed too soon, one of a dozen on the road – packed up the clothes she liked, a few books, an old letter from Hallie, and a CD or two and got the fuck out of Sunnydale, California.
She sang off-key at the top of her lungs all the way to the freeway, where traffic slowed to a complete stop.
Three hours and ten miles later – public radio telling her a combination of a basketball game, Jehovah’s Witness conference, a fire, and a five-car pile-up was responsible for the abysmal traffic, but she’d lived in Southern California long enough to know that it was just a typical Thursday afternoon – and she wasn’t at all surprised that the sun had set before she’d been able to put Sunnydale fully behind her.
She ran through her four CDs and had grown bored of public radio and was just about to consider dealing with the obnoxious DJs attached to the Top-40 station Sunnydale pretended was just as good as any LA station, when she saw the hitchhiker.
Anya hesitated for about half a second before the very judgmental image of Amy, Willow, and Hallie shaking their heads at her irrational fears popped into her head. She slammed on the breaks and giggled at the chorus of honking horns behind her.
“Get in!” she shouted out the passenger side window.
Her voice sounded girlish and clear to her own ears and she was glad that she had put on the pale purple dress instead of just a pair of jeans and t-shirt.
Harmony Kendall came tearing into the car, her hair covering her face and a duffel bag looped over one arm. Anya pushed the car into a crawl again as soon as Harmony’s first foot touched down and laughed again because it felt good to laugh.
Harmony rested her feet on top of her duffel bag looking a bit like a child with her knees so high and exposed under her khaki shorts, and pulled a compact out of her purse, opened it and then grimaced slightly before closing it with a SNAP.
“Is this seriously what we’re listening to? God I just want to get out of here already.”
Anya clicked the button to turn off public radio and started with Track01 of her favorite Good Charlotte album. Harmony sneered a little, but Anya just rocked her head like one of those freaks from the 80’s.
She wanted to say something then about how the 80’s were always a good time – 1680 had been a blast and damn they knew how to get down in 1880 – but it would come off more nerdy than like a hilarious anecdote with a Cordette in the car that had no idea that she used to be a demon and had actual, factual memories of those times. Anya tapped her fingers against the wheel and reminisced about that time with Hallie in Rome in the 1480’s.
Good times.
Harmony sighed a couple of times and fidgeted in her seat, but never said anything. And despite being over a thousand years, Anya never really lost the social anxiety of her human adolescence, so she didn’t really say anything. And traffic crawled along.
“I could fucking walk faster,” Anya moaned as the CD shifted back to Track01. There was only so many times she could hum along to the same 12 songs.
(Actually there wasn’t. She had once spent an entire week in a small theatre with Hallie forcing an orchestra to play the same opera on repeat. The fragile humans didn’t quite make it through the process and the last few hours were a bit rocky especially in the percussion section, but it was probably worth it. The details were a little blurry.)
Harmony laughed uncomfortably and stared out the window.
A tear trickled down her cheek and something inside of Anya TUGGED. She could practically feel Harmony’s pain. But couldn’t also. Couldn’t in all the ways that her stubbornly human body could no longer intuit pain and the source of it. All she could do was see it and sense it, couldn’t pull on the thread.
Was it blue – that soft baby blue that pulled on Hallie’s heart and tore her to shreds; the pain of childhood neglect, of families that looked the other way, of pain locked in the home that children carried around with them?
Was it the pale yellow that called out to their old friend Ben; the nearly-white pain of dread and anxiety, of bullies and bad parties and friends that weren’t friends but specific and complete emotional torturers?
(She sometimes even missed the orangey-red that called out to Anya’s nemesis, Eyrl; the red of a cuckold, the pain of a man left by a wife that claimed neglect, the anger and resentment and hurt of a husband no longer a husband, a father no longer a father, a man without the woman he wanted on his arm?)
Was it her red, her pinkish bloom of red like the soft insides just next to the skin of a nectarine, the wound of a woman in pain, a woman who loved and was betrayed, a woman who loved and was sent away or cast aside or hurt because she loved? Was Harmony’s pain calling out to a Vengeance Demon that no longer existed, that sat beside her in this disgustingly weak human shell of a body and could do nothing – could see nothing could fix nothing? Once, the world had been full of color and hurt, it lingered in the air and on the wind, it called to her and her kind with a vibrancy and power that could wake her from a dead sleep and comfort her a thousand miles away. Once, the world had been full of pain that she could soothe.
Once, she was powerful and there was no pain in the universe that she could not fix with her own brand of swift, delightful vengeance.
Now, the world was grey and silent, the buzz and hum of all those voices that once called out to her silent and still. Now, the world didn’t speak to her and she couldn’t call back.
She was the mermaid walking on knives that tore her feet apart but left no blood behind and a throat that stung from the screams she could not give rise to.
Anya sunk into her own funk – turned on the County Radio Station and let the clangs and twangs fuel her grief at her own plight and Harmony cried silently and they crawled towards a freedom that felt like a tomb.
At an over-crowded In and Out near some Outlets about halfway to Los Vegas – an unspoken agreement between the two of them boycotting the idea of going West towards beaches and happy people playing volleyball half-naked felt abysmal – Anya ordered everything she could and a giant chocolate milkshake and Harmony sat opposite her sipping sullenly on a Diet Coke.
Around them, families with loud, boisterous, happy children ate greedily and somehow also lazily. Fathers swung their arms across the booths behind them, spread their legs wide, and pushed their stomachs out. Mothers ran interference between sullen teens and their wide-eyed siblings or the fathers and tsked when anyone took too large of bites. Teens on dates rolled their eyes at the children laughing and sticking fries up their noses. Babies wailed at the inconvenience of their lives – stuck in booster seats and laps instead of crawling or toddling about in freedom, soda ripped out of their hands and food cut up into small pieces that couldn’t satisfy. Groups of tittering grandmothers on their way home from a weekday getaway to the casinos vocally lamented how much they missed their grandchildren, but were secretly glad they weren’t the ones responsible for cleaning up spilled milkshakes and wiping away tears. Teamsters and contractors flocked together in little clumps, necks and ears red from lives out in the sun, hands rough and dirty, knuckles thick, voices loud from shouting into the wind and over long distances.
Running away now felt less like an escape to something better and a desperate scramble to get away from … everything, only to have all of that everything thrown in their faces.
Anya chewed and chewed and chewed and Harmony sipped, sinking further and further into her chair as time went on.
“I’m hungry,” Harmony whispered somewhere between Anya’s first and second Double-Double.
“So eat something, weirdo,” Anya had never had time for women that didn’t eat when they were hungry, or brought up food after intentionally eating too much. Then again, she’d never had to worry about her figure before, she eyed the burger in her hands warily and wondered if her jeans would still fit the next morning. How fast was the human metabolism? Surely not so slow that she’d notice the difference of one meal.
She’d be better tomorrow.
Harmony’s eyes flashed yellow and if Anya hadn’t been looking straight at her in that moment, it would have completely slipped her by.
Stop fucking wishing for things and go out and get them, Willow’s voice pierced through her memory.
Anya grinned, “Oh that I can fix!”
It’s not exactly that they went on a murder spree down the coast, abandoning the anonymity of Las Vegas after only a week because it was so flashy as to be a bit mundane. It’s just that Harmony was hungry and Anya was very determined that she never be hungry again.
She’d been on the set the first time Vivian Leigh cried out those words and they stuck with Anya in a way that many a moment from her demon days just didn’t.
“There’s something eternal about hunger,” Anya said as she filed her nails leaning against the wall of an alley while Harmony disposed quickly of a man three times her size that liked to pick on his wife and three daughters.
(Okay so sometimes she liked Hallie’s job nearly as much as her own. So sometimes Harmony showed just as much humor as her old friend did at making men’s lives end. So sometimes she liked to pretend that nothing had changed, even if everything had changed.)
Harmony let the body fall to her feet and smiled happily. She loved to eat and Anya loved to watch her eat.
And Harmony loved to make Anya happy.
“Like the food chain or whatever, right?”
Anya kissed her then, because she understood, because they understood each other, because they were young and beautiful and she was growing stronger and magick lingered in her fingertips the way it used to pump through her blood and she was fixing things again.
“Right.”