Disclaimer — Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, The WB/UPN, and 20th Century Fox. I make no claims of ownership and obtain no monetary profit from this story.
Aud learns the basics from her mother when she is a little girl. Clover will keep her bunnies fat and happy; a brew made from the boiled bark of a willow tree will cure most aches and pains; babies are the result of sexual intercourse, which is quite fun and not at all shameful; and Thornton's hope and eelsbane mixed together will deliver justice. These are the easy lessons, and Aud's mother is always there with a smile that lights up vibrant blue eyes and all the patience in the world for her inquisitive child, her only daughter.
She dies when Aud is ten, vanishes from the surface of the Earth as if she had never existed, were not loved or missed by a single, solitary soul. Aud is on the precipice of womanhood, but sometimes she feels as though she has missed a step along the way and is falling, tumbling towards Earth. She tries to understand what it is she's supposed to do, asks questions of her sisters-in-law, of the townswomen, even of her father, but they all meet her queries with scorn and contempt. By Odin, her father tells her more than once, won't you cease your irksome questions and just accept things as they are?
So she tries. She accepts Olaf's shameless flirting because he tells her that he loves her and that he could never want another woman as long as she is his. She ignores the suspicion churning uneasily in her stomach and buries her doubts deep in her mind. And when the day comes that her trust, her faith, is shattered, her sisters-in-law are there again to remind her how to behave, how to react. Olaf is a man, they explain to her. He is allowed his affairs. Accept it, and be thankful that he has stood by your side all these years.
But Aud has too many questions, too many opinions; she fails at being a human girl. So, when D'Hoffryn offers her another way, she makes a choice.
There are many lessons that she must learn before D'Hoffryn will allow her to grant her first wish. Some rules are easy to remember — guard your power center carefully, make sure to stand a safe distance away before making a human head explode — while other lessons are more complicated and intricate — how to approach a girl, how to coax a wish from her, how to twist and warp it in order to ensure maximum devastation. D'Hoffryn reminds her a little bit of her mother, with his fond smiles and excited answers, but sometimes she catches glimpses of the demon that lies beneath the good sense of humor and her limbs become almost frozen in terror.
On her first job, she is a wreck. Her palms are a sweaty mess, and she's so nervous that she barely sounds intelligible. She wants so badly to do well, to finally succeed at something.
Then the wish comes, and it's almost like a Zen experience. I wish he'd be eaten by a pack of wild dogs, the girl hisses hyperbolically, and Anyanka concedes; the canines arrive in the middle of the night, while everyone is sleeping, and consume the whole village; not a single living creature survives. She doesn't need to wait until she returns to Arashmahaar and receives D'Hoffryn's glowing praise to know that this is her calling; she was made for this, for wreaking destruction and creating mayhem.
Without a doubt from anyone who matters, Anyanka is the greatest demon to ever wield the power of the wish. There is such praise, even adulation. And then, without any warning, it's all ripped away from her.
Becoming human again after spending eleven hundred and eighteen years as a demon is the single most terrifying experience of Anya's very long life. Before, her body had been so strong; she could feel the power from her necklace, warm against her breast, seeping through her skin and flowing freely through her veins. Now, she is so weak and fragile, with scrawny, undefined limbs that cannot even remove the cap from a water bottle, let alone defend herself from assault. She walks through the streets of Sunnydale knowing that nearly every male with whom she crosses paths could easily overpower and violate her if he so wished, and her body trembles uncontrollably. She has never felt so helpless, or so alone.
She cannot understand how human women bear it, being at the constant mercy of the males of their species. She goes to the bookstore in search of answers and returns to her apartment with stacks of fashion magazines and women's periodicals. They tell her how to act the part of a real girl: what clothes to wear; what color to dye her hair; how to cook a nutritious meal that the whole family will enjoy; how to make herself more appealing, inside and out. She reads and she studies and she practices until she understands.
Anya needs a man. She needs protection. She needs help.
Xander can provide all three for her, with his nicely-sized penis, muscular arms, and quick corrections. She's a strange girl in a stranger land, but Xander is a native, and as long as she clings to him, she'll be okay. Being with him is really quite nice — the sex is amazing, and it feels good to have a purpose in life again.
She feels guilty sometimes, though. Xander will snap at her, or get embarrassed because she's said too much, or the wrong thing, and she feels like she's failed him, like he does so much for her and she does nothing. She tries so hard to understand this foreign world that's slowly transformed from her prison into her home, but she has very little context, and so the lessons don't stick. He tells her that he loves her anyway, though, that he loves all of her peculiarities, so she thinks that maybe she's learned enough to be a decent human, if not a perfect one.
But she was wrong. She's not good enough to be a wife. She's not good enough to be loved. Anya will never be a real girl, so she makes a choice.
When she becomes a demon for the second time, D'Hoffryn has no lessons for her; she's expected to already have all of the answers. After all, she was only human for three years, mere seconds to those who have been alive for more than a millennium. She should be able to jump right back in, to pick up where she left off and go back to being the same fearsome, merciless creature she was born to be.
But although she's only been gone for three years, everything feels so different. The most peculiar emotions, once foreign to her, simmer in the pit of her stomach and snake around her lungs, filling her with panic and dread at every wish. What was once simple and cut-and-dry is now unbelievably complex and confusing.
The whispers make it worse. Lost her nerve! D'Hoffryn's so disappointed. Tamed! Humanized! She feels so alone in her feelings, sadness and alienation threatening to overwhelm her. She just wishes that she could talk to—
No. No, she doesn't.
And she's not alone this time. D'Hoffryn is largely absent, but Halfrek is at her side, full of advice and suggestions. You've got to forget the boy, Hallie insists. You've got to forget the whole sorry lot of them. You're Anyanka again, sweetie. You're no longer bound by their simple-minded codes of ethics and morality.
Hallie makes it sound so easy, as if she should be able to just clap her hands and erase the last three years completely, but she can't. No matter how hard she tries, she can't let go of Anya the way she once did with Aud.
Slowly, though, and with a great deal of practice, she begins to learn how to suppress her. Anya's uncertain voice begins to parrot Scooby Gang morality in her head in the middle of a wish, but in the magic of the moment she learns to silence the thought, bury it beneath anger, hatred, and vengeance. It's not an ideal situation, but it's a step forward. Soon, Anyanka is certain, she'll be back to her old self. She just has to bury everything, every last remnant of humanity, and hide it, from the world and from herself, until it's been forgotten and has withered away.
Then there's blood, crimson, flying through the air. Screams, so shrill and afraid until they slowly fade to silence. There's a beautiful display of bloodshed before her and oh god, she's made the wrong choice! Anya is free, screaming in her head, sobbing at the horror of what she's done, and no matter how hard she searches for Anyanka to tidy things up, that ferocious creature is nowhere to be found. All she can find is guilt, pain, and a stream of semi-coherent thoughts that roar in her ears: Murderer! Oh god, what have you done? Stolen their light, not yours to take, won't illuminate the empty darkness inside of you, you filthy demon! Scrub and scald the blood away, but it won't change anything, ohgodohgodohgod!
She can't suppress anymore; everything's unraveling before her. And as the sword pierces her chest, it hits her, becomes so clear. Anyanka is dead, lost in an alternate dimension four years ago, but she's not Anya, either. She's not sure Anya ever existed; she was just a figment, a reaction to a situation. She just... is. She's the shell of a demon infected with humanity; there's no core, no center, just choices shaped by poorly-learned lessons.
She's no one. She fails, at everything. But these boys... they might be horrible people, but they're human. They can change. They at least deserve that chance, the same chance that she threw away. So she takes a deep breath, looks into D'Hoffryn's eyes, and makes a choice.
It's almost unbelievable, Anya thinks, that she's human again. She'd never wanted to be, not the first two times; each time, she'd made the choice to slough off her humanity and become a demon. This time, though, she'd wanted so badly to be human again, to be just Anya, but she'd known — still knows — that that was far more than she'd ever deserved.
And yet soft, smooth skin adorns her slender frame. Her muscles, abused by the night's earlier fight, ache and throb against her bones. Her eyelids yearn to flutter closed, to give in and welcome sweet, blissful sleep. With every breath Anya is almost painfully aware of the beautiful gift she has received.
She still doesn't know what she's doing, or how to do it; all these years, she's been hiding from that fact. Now, though, the more important question is: Who is Anya? Is she Xander's ex-fiancée? An ex-demon? A Scooby? A former shopkeeper? A capitalist, a communist, an American, a medieval Scandinavian housewife, a swell bowler, a math whiz, a leporiphobe? A nobody?
There are no lessons, no answers to be found in glossy magazines or impatient sisters-in-law. Anya must be her own guide, and, strangely enough, she's okay with that. The first big decision she makes is to accept Buffy's invitation back into the Scooby Gang, because maybe for once she can really help instead of hurt. She won't let being a Scooby define her, though; Anya's certain that there's a whole girl in there somewhere, one who defies such simplistic labels.
So she searches. Anya tries out all sorts of new activities — yoga, cooking, running, reading, kickboxing, swimming, painting, gardening, political activism, writing. She finds more things that she dislikes than likes, but every day she's getting a clearer picture of the woman within, and that, Anya's learned, is what really matters.
At night, after the exhaustion of the day, Anya crawls into bed by herself — no Xander or Olaf at her side, no heavy pendant around her neck. She's all alone, but Anya doesn't mind; at the end of the day, she's happy with who she is and what she's become. This is her choice.