Title: Balance Point
Author: Gillian Silverlight
Distribution: My site: http://www.homestead.com/gilliansspikelair/, those that already have permission to post my fic, all others please ask. (If you post my fic. Please do not rearrange the sentence groupings. It can alter the flow of the story. Thanks.)
Disclaimer: They belong to Joss and the WB, UPN, FX; just about everybody except me. I just play with them.
Summary: Someone has to deal with Anya’s death
Rating: PG-13
Xander ran through the hallway, “Anya? Anya!?”
He couldn’t see her lifeless body a few feet away where it had fallen behind a defeated Bringer.
It was just as well.
Moments later amid an eye-stinging, nose-wrinkling cloud of sulfur and brimstone stench, a tall, many-horned demon with blue toned skin stood among the dead.
Two steps brought him to Anya’s body, sliced almost in half diagonally by a cruelly sharp Bringer’s sword.
D’Hoffryan waved a hand, muttered and her body was whole and unblemished. Yet life would not reside there again. The demon Lord knew the rules and this was one of them. Lifting her now whole body in his arms, he looked down at the slack face of the woman who of all the vengeance demons he’d ever recruited, had been his favorite.
“Anyanka, it pains me deep in my heart to see you this… Yet, when I chose you I knew there was no other end, my love.”
D’Hoffryan thought back to a day over twelve hundred years ago. He’d had very disturbing, upsetting - no; the word he searched for was devastating - devastating news that morning. In trying to find a solution to the implications of that news, he cast his magick in a wide net, seeking a specific set of vibrations. His search was successful… but the vibrations were contained in a human! It was unheard of, something he had never imagined, but it was all he had to work with and so work with it he would!
His only thoughts when he’d approached her were not for her; but only for himself; how she could be forged to his own purposes, to allow him to escape his own prison, to add to his power-base…
She’d been someone out of step, out of place with those around her. She had just recently discovered her own burgeoning well of power within herself. As emotionally wounded as she had been, it had been quite easy to convince her to become one of his vengeance demons … She’d already turned her straying mate into a troll and set him on the small village she’d lived in.
D’Hoffryan had been impressed.
He’d paired her up with Halfrek. The young woman D’Hoffryan had discovered some centuries earlier, was a wonder at bringing a new vengeance demon along, teaching them the trade, so to speak…
That Halfrek and Anyanka had become fast friends hadn’t hurt either.
What the demon Lord had not expected was that he’d fall in love with his newest acquisition. He never said a word to her. It would have been much too cruel, as his species and her’s could never… Well, suffice to say that although both humanoid, they had no matching parts for that kind of thing. Then too, he was tormented by the knowledge of the purpose for which he’d recruited her. That weight pressed harder and harder on him with each passing century. He knew he’d hate it when it came. He knew it would destroy something inside of him, but he also knew that once having been set in motion, the outcome was as inevitable as the flow of the tides.
D’Hoffryan’s foreseeing had been true, for from the very moment his Anyanka set eyes on the group in Sunnydale; she was lost to him, as he’d known she had to be. They defeated his girl, smashed the jewel that amplified her powers, taught her again how to be a human, taught her how to love. They broke her heart, reminding her once more of the frailty of human emotions, of human lives.
Oh, she tried to return to what she had once been, once or twice, but thankfully she’d moved too far past that to ever be an effective vengeance demon again.
But later… asking for the reversal of that unusually beautiful spell had been the final turning point… The beginning of what D’Hoffryan knew was the end…What was that wonderful line he’d told her? Oh yes! That the scene of the carnage looked like ‘someone had murdered an Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue’. He’d thought her work there simply inspired, even if he had been a bit concerned that she’d been able to do such a deed. It cause him to question for the first time whether or not he’d made a mistake… that he’d chosen the wrong one… that he’d endure this punishment forever.
But in the end, she asked that the spell be undone! He’d been truthful with her because it had to be her choice, ‘to change such a large event, to restore so many human lives, would cost the soul of a vengeance demon’. And even though Anyanka didn’t know that he dared not use hers, she still made the same choice. She had no idea that to him, her soul was much too priceless. Priceless for the not so distant future, for all he’d worked for so long, for mankind and strangely and most importantly, because he loved her.
Instead, D’Hoffryan had called upon Halfrek. He’d used her soul to power the reversal of Anyanka’s spell. When the loss of her friend hadn’t turned his favorite from her decision, from the path he knew she had to walk, he’d been elated! Yes, it had made his harsh words to her and the necessity to cast her out all the harder, but he’d managed. He’d drawn a bit of that extra strength from Ms. Rosenberg’s hard words to him. She’d seen right through him, the little chit! Even though she would never be one of his, he took pleasure in seeing what the small redhead had become and agreed to help her simply because of the enormous progress he’d seen in her in such a short time.
Anyanka had needed Ms. Rosenberg’s help over the next few months
D’Hoffryan felt the building tremble around him…and cursed under his breath, he thought he’d have a minute or two more. But he was ready.
He leaned his be-horned head, for the first and final time, to tenderly kiss the lips of the only woman he had ever loved.
Quickly, while he still had time, he held her limp body over his head as he muttered the proper incantation. Anya’s body seemed to simply dissolve into myriad tiny points of light that soared through the ceiling seeking the heavens.
A wave of the hand transported the demon Lord away just seconds before the area of floor he’d so recently occupied, was pulled into the morass of destruction.
~*~
She felt light… free… weightless in fact. Anya couldn’t imagine where she was or even what she was… It wasn’t as if she could think, at least not like she had before. It was more a sense of consciousness only.
She had no eyes or ears, yet she could sense all around her the vastness of the universe, the brightly burning points of light that were millions of other stars. She could tell she’d been flung across several of those stars. She could ‘hear’ the celestial music from the stars around her and realization finally hit. D’Hoffryan! He’d not really abandoned her after all! He’d loved her enough to make her a constellation!
Anyanka’s newfound song soared to join the rest.
~*~
“So I’m finally free, right?” D’Hoffryan asked impatiently. He wanted a firm, final answer on this one.
“Yes, you’re free. But don’t think it doesn’t give me great pleasure to know what it has cost you, ‘cause it does.”
“I know it does. I have a question though…”
“Ask. Who knows, I might even answer.”
“Why are you still wearing her semblance? She did kick your ass, after all. And if you knew what Anyanka was all this time, why didn’t you simply destroy her?”
“That’s two questions, but I’m feeling benevolent, I’ll tell you. I’m still wearing her semblance because the Slayer’s the first really worthy adversary I’ve encountered in millennia… And considering what she is, she’s surprisingly pretty. I can tell that you don’t find it odd to think a human beautiful, but it is… Their short, miserable little lives, but the Slayer… she’s… different… Don’t you think?” The entity known as the First, turned away from D’Hoffryan.
“As for Anyanka… there was a chance she’d never truly grow up. A chance she’d never tap her true abilities. After all, it was her decision to return to being a vengeance demon that allowed the balance of good verses evil to finally shift to me.
The existence of two slayers put the balance of good and evil into question. One dark, one light… That whole wonderful two sides to the coin thing. A souled vampire working for redemption… Okay, the soul came from a curse. Then a second vampire seeking out a soul… I was beginning to thing the whole balance issue was going to turn into a pendulum, but Anyanka going back over to you as a vengeance demon once more, firmly pushed the balance over to my side. Who knew she’d have an attack of conscience and change her mind again? Then she completely destroyed everything I’d worked for.
By giving her life to save one of my cast-off pawns… On top of the fact that she’d gone so far as to corrupt him to the side with good… After all I’d tried to do for him… It will take me centuries to recover from all the blows they managed to strike at me.” The entity shook its head before looking back up to smile malevolently at D’Hoffryan.
“But in the end, you lost her. You loved her and you lost her. You may be free from your prison of A’Rashmahar now, but she’s gone forever.”
With those words the First Evil vanished from D’Hoffryan’s sitting room.
The demon lord smiled to himself for the first time in days, since Anyanka’s death.
‘I knew she’d do those things. That she’d take your pawn, that she’d grow enough to be who and what she was destined to be, that she’d go back to the side of good.’
The smile fell to a somber expression once more.
‘Just
as I knew one of your agents would kill her as she tried to protect a new agent
for good. But lost? Gone forever? No… She’ll exist forever and I can look at
her beauty every night as she gazes down upon all of us.’
With actions that followed
thoughts, D’Hoffryan walked to the window and looked at the glittering canopy
of lights against the
Gillian Silverlight