Chapter 26—After Life

When she saw the island, Anya knew she was dead. It all came rushing back to her. Now she was back in this Hell and stupid Xander had refused to even let her say good-bye. They knew it was coming this time; it was inexcusable that he had not said any of the things you were supposed to say in such a situation. The last thing he ever said to her was, "You're going to be fine." If she had been given any kind of option, she would have become a ghost and haunted him.

Of course, you weren't given an option when you were a demon. There was probably some kind of complicated equation that the Powers That Be employed, where good deeds were weighed against bad and the scales were tipped by factors you never even thought about during life. And if the scales tip in your favor, maybe then you get some options. But if you were evil, it's all fire and brimstone.

Well, technically, Anya did not see any fire, but there might have been a trace of something brimstone-y in the air. Really, her personal Hell was more like water and bunnies, but that just did not have the same ring to it. She started on an island, or in the water. It did not matter where she started because eternity was a loop, and she was rejoining it in the middle.

And to be accurate, Anya did have options. Three of them, always the same three. One, tread water. Which was fine for the first fifteen minutes or hours or years, but then it really started to hurt. So, two, give into the water. Every time, eventually, it would get to that point where drowning was the best option. Except she didn't "drown." Because she was already dead, so there was nowhere to go from there. She just kept breathing water, which, it turned out, also really hurt. And when her muscles couldn't take anymore, and her lungs were burning too much to even think about going under, there was option three, the island.

There was more than one island actually, but they were all the same, so why waste time on semantics? The island was approximately one hundred square feet, flat and bare, and lousy with bunny rabbits. And they weren't just run-of-the-mill scary bunnies. These bunnies were maneaters. The second she crawled onto the shore, hacking up seawater, they all swarmed her, attacking and biting. Except they couldn't really eat her either. So like Prometheus, her liver, and whatever else, grew back every day, readying her to be eaten all over again.

But the worst thing was that nothing ever changed, and there was no end in sight. After decades, centuries, and millennia, the treading, drowning and bunnies were unnecessary. Just sitting alone on an island for that long would be torture. She would give anything for just a few decades of burning alive or wandering endless hallways. Heck, at this point she would even take toy poodle Hell.

Finally, one day, something different happened. Even though Anya had not made that decision to give in, she started to sink. She did not fight it, but she did instinctively hold her breath as she went farther and father down. She kept expecting to hit the sea floor, but she just continued sinking. Eventually, she could not hold her breath any longer, and she prepared for the onrush of salty water, but when she took her first breath, there was no water. Then she hit bottom.

Anya was lying on her back staring up at... She squinted to see better. Ceiling tiles. Everything around her seemed foggy, but she could hear the sounds of people talking and of machines beeping and hissing and humming. There was a strange smell in the air. Not bad, just strange. Once she realized that she had the ability to breathe glorious air, she tried to take deep breaths, but it still burned, and she was forced to keep her breathing shallow. She wanted to turn her head and see what this place was, but her body did not respond to the command. All she felt were her eyelids growing heavy and closing.

Surfacing back in Hell, Anya pulled herself onto the island to give herself time to think about what had just happened. There was a brief respite that came on the island, after the bunnies finished gnawing at her, while her body was healing itself. As long as she could get past the blinding pain of the irritating sand in her wounds.

Time had little meaning, so she had no idea how many years passed while she sat there considering the ceiling tiles and those moments of something different. It was so long, though, that it began to feel like a tease, as though its only purpose was to remind her that there was more to this existence than her solitary corner of the ocean.

She did not remember closing her eyes, but she opened them now to more ceiling tiles. They looked the same as the last, but she could see enough through her peripheral vision to tell that this was a different room. This time when she tried to turn her head, it obeyed. She saw a wall and machines that meant something to her. In her fog, she was able to come up with the word "hospital."

That one word told her everything. This was real, and those machine were there to keep her out of Hell for a little bit longer. She listened to the soothing sounds they made, the sounds that meant she might not die. Under the beeps of her heart monitor and the plops of her IV drip there was another familiar rasping sound. Although it took some effort, Anya turned her head in the other direction.

There, sleeping in the recliner beside her bed, snoring like he always did, was Xander. Anya tried to say his name to let him know that she was awake, but her voice came out as a barely audible whisper. She considered slapping her hand on the bed to make some noise, but she decided to let him sleep for a while.

Anya had only been awake for a few minutes, but she felt herself growing drowsy again. She was a little afraid that if she closed her eyes then, she would go back, but it quickly got to the point where she could no longer hold them open. Within another minute, she slipped into unconsciousness one more time.

–

As soon as Xander confirmed with his own eye that Anya made it through the surgery, he had sent Buffy and Willow home. Then he spent the night in the waiting room trying to sleep. Every ten minutes or so, the double doors would swing open, and he would sit up to see if it was someone with new information about Anya. It never was though.

Finally, around daybreak, after a solid forty-five minutes of sleep, a nurse had woken Xander to tell him that Anya seemed to be recovering well from her surgery, that she was being moved to a room, and that he could sit in there with her if he liked.

After what the nurse said, Xander had expected to see some kind of improvement, but Anya looked the same as she had when he saw her hours before, weak and vulnerable, practically at death's door. He had forgotten in his hazy, sleep-deprived state that he was still expecting her to die on him. Seeing her hooked up to all those machines made it easier to remember. Xander settled into the chair next to her bed and fell asleep to the hum of the machines.

When he woke a couple hours later, Anya's head was turned toward him, but she was still out. Even though he did not feel well rested, Xander could tell that he would not be falling back to sleep anytime soon. He did not want to leave Anya, but there was nothing for him to do in that room, so he got up to see if he could swipe a magazine from the waiting room.

As he was opening the door, he heard a soft thumping noise. He looked back at Anya. Her eyes were still closed, but her head was facing the other direction, turned toward where he was now. She raised her hand and dropped it down next to her, which accounted for the thumping. Hoping that meant she was awake, Xander closed the door and said her name. "Anya?"

She opened her eyes and licked her lips, but she did not say anything. Still, she was alive and conscious. Xander walked back to her side. "How are you feeling?"

"Hurts," she rasped. "All over. Hurts to breathe."

"You had a tear in your lungs." Xander knew that he was not the best person to inform her of her medical status, and he felt that he had already misstated it just with that one short sentence. "Or something like that. You had some other injuries, but it was mostly your lungs." He figured this was a good time for a small fiction. "But now everything's okay, and you're going to be fine."

"You said that. I didn't believe you." Anya took a couple deeper breaths, and Xander could see how painful they were for her. "I thought I died."

Between the soft volume and the fact that she just woke from surgery, Xander auto-corrected her words to mean that she thought she was going to die. "We were all worried about that, but you're better now."

"No." She shook her head, looking like it took great effort. "I was in Hell."

He heard that clearly, but his mind refused to register the plain meaning of those words. "What?"

Anya closed her eyes. "I was in Hell," she murmured again. "But it's okay."

Xander did not know how that could possibly be okay. Sure, it was something he had considered before, what with Willow insisting on it, but he kept coming back to the same thought. "You died saving the world." He realized the futility of arguing this point now, but he persisted. "People like that don't go to Hell."

Anya was quiet for a long time. Xander thought she had fallen back asleep until she spoke again. "But I'm not really people. I made choices, and there are always..." She trailed off at the end.

Before this, part of Xander thought that if she just woke up, that would be all he needed, but now it was taking an ominous turn. Like maybe she came back just to make sure he knew where she was going to end up. He felt the need to keep her talking. "Always what?"

She opened her eyes again. She seemed a little confused, but then she remembered what she had been saying. "Consequences. Thousands of years of consequences. Do you know what the worst part was?"

Xander was not sure he wanted to know, but he asked anyway. "What?"

"That I couldn't die again. I wanted to. I spent so much time wishing it all would just kill me so that it would finally be over. But I was already at the end, so it couldn't kill me." She paused to think about that. "It's kind of ironic in a way. When I wanted to die, I couldn't, and now that I can, I don't want to."

Xander smiled. "I'm not sure that really counts as irony."

She closed her eyes again. "Maybe not," she said dreamily.

She was drifting out on him again, and Xander did not want to miss this opportunity to tell her certain things. "Wait, Anya, before you go..." He winced at the awkward wording of that. He reached down and put his hand over hers. "I just wanted to let you know that I still love you too."

For a second, he was not even sure if she could hear him, but then Anya turned her hand over and curled her fingers around his. "I know."

–

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Author's Note: Considering that I'm so swamped that I completely missed January, part of me feels like maybe I should just end it here where everyone is in love and happy and alive. But there are a couple more things that need to be said, and the D'Hoffryn storyline isn't really resolved. So this isn't the end, but if you wanted to think of it as the end for a little while, that might be okay. (I just don't know whether my updating is going to get better or worse, but there are 2-3 more chapters planned.)

Oh, and why drowning? There's a whole thought process that went into that, but all that matters for you is that it has nothing to do with Anya's fears specifically.