Chapter Ten - consequences
Stalking the worn out floor boards, Buffy paced the rough lining of the trampled rug. Every light bulb in the entire house had shattered and powered down for the duration - another power cut due to rain. Every glance was accidentally plunged towards the lifeless; still body, which had finally ended up on the very sofa, which Buffy had sat just this morning.
"She looks kind of ill," Buffy stated. Xander was very quickly ready to offend Anya, even when she was dead; he'd still made sure no one said a word against her: which of course, no one did.
"She's just cold, she's warming up now though and-" There was defiantly something banging his insides to be said, but he had deliberately kept it un noticed. Eyebrow's raised; Buffy knew straight away there was a lot that was needed to be said.
"Was I cold when I was resurrected? Was I unconscious?" She questioned. Xander was mystified, he wasn't sure how to answer her question, or even whether he was supposed to answer. No one had been quite brave enough to talk fully to Buffy about her resurrection. Suddenly, the sound of swift movement was conjured from the front door; Evalder had dissolved in the middle of the doorframe.
"No, I wouldn't think you were, but you are forgetting the one most important fact" She spoke smoothly with a voice too calm to cause disruption. Buffy, Xander and Giles were completely trapped by the voice that the sudden break in hadn't run past them yet. However, Willow was smarter than that.
"You can't just break in here like this! She's using a spell, I should know" Willow was furious with the cheek of the newly acquainted witch.
"Such envy, only the 'blondey' can throw me out"
Buffy was melted; she could have wiped the floor clean with whatever was now cooling over her brain. However, with one shake from Willow, Evalder gave up: she was not welcome.
"That's it, who the hell are you?! How dare you storm in my house and mess with my mind like that!" Buffy's fury was just enough to mask the mistake she'd made, it was no longer her house anymore - it was Giles. Straight away, Evalder was clear to get Buffy's discomfort out in the open.
"You went to heaven, she went to hell. The afterlife was fantastic for you, the only thing you had to get over was the fact your so called friends had brought you back, she has to get used to being sat down for longer than 6 seconds without being dragged to her feet and painfully tortured." Atleast Xander had tried not to make it sound so dreadful.
Xander was welling up, he was sure to slap Evalder off her high horse quite soon, comparing them two like they were actually the same person.
"Anya came back wrong, something isn't right but she's brave and your going to wake her up for us" He was very sure what he wanted.
Evalder's eyebrows may have raised, but the calm swiftness of her walk showed she was not to be feared, but to be thanked. Her hand poised and lurched above the deep blood full cuts scraped into the dusty fragments of the poor women's cheeks, arms and neck.
Anya's eyebrows began to continuously bounce up and down, her fists clenched and tense followed by the innocent groan breaking free from her small ruby red lips. Electric blue flows zapped in and out of her glossy eyes: Anya was awake.
"She's awake, she's actually alive" Buffy commented, utterly surprised by the actual existence of resurrection being a success, except it wasn't. Anya's lip was shivering, her arms trembled as she lifted herself upright on the collapsing sofa, she looked exactually like she had the day they saved except for the scars and dust and sadness.
She rubbed her hand over her shoulder, revealing the deep scar underneath: different from the others. Tracing the cut with her fingers she showed how it ran straight across her whole body, shoulder to waist.
"Honestly, why settle being human, if you'd been in demon form that wouldn't even cause so much as a prick of pain, let alone death." Death, that's the thanks she got for saving the world, but then again apart from them - who would know the world actually needed saving. As soon as Evalder had spoke Anya had raised her head, her eyes pinned to the strangeness of her face like she wasn't used to being spoken too.
"You…" was all the damaged Anya could say, she was still staring around the room in utter surprise, her eyebrows forced into confusion once she glanced upon a photograph on the wall.
Willow's sensitive side shone as she crept to Anya's side, she gently wiped her scars with a damp clothe fetched as soon as they'd arrived. Suddenly, Anya shuddered, and shrank away towards the door, failing to reach the handle, she dropped to the ground. Sitting in a small lump on the floor she was still staring at the photograph.
"Anya, are you ok? Your home now, me and Dawn brought you back from hell remember?" Shaking his lost lovers shoulders, Xander traced her eyes direction ending at the photo, he had to pause for a minute to think, but once he'd stood up he had realised the meaning to this weirdness.
"Photograph on wall, too many people, why are they there…" Anya gave her opinion, words of a mad man of what she'd used, perhaps…
All eyes situated against the wall on that one small photograph, an old one, but still valid. The reason of why it was in Giles house weren't too clear. In the photograph stood eight happy and content friends, if you didn't know the group you'd say they were family. Giles, Willow, Buffy, Dawn, Xander, Tara, Spike and Anya, sat hand in hand on a sunny day at Scarborough inside the now hypnotic photograph.
"Too many dead" Anya retorted.