Author's Notes: I began writing this the night of the series finale as my way of coping with the avalanche of emotions that came after. Spoilers abound for "The Hardest Thing", but I assume that if you clicked on this, you've already seen the finale and are hurting just as much as I am. I hope this takes away some of the pain.
The truth is, Anne never really left Amphibia.
Physically, yes. She'd returned to Earth with Sasha and Marcy and gone on with her life as best she could. But Anne had left her heart behind in Amphibia. The world she loved. The world she'd been willing to give her life for to save. Her home.
Anne held on to her memories of Amphibia however she could over the years. As she drifted away from Sasha and Marcy, Anne made less of an effort to hide her feelings of longing and heartbreak... and her parents noticed. But there was nothing Mrs. Boonchuy could say or do to assuage her daughter's agony.
Every day, Anne struggled to come to terms with the fact that she would never see her best friends, nay her family, ever again. Getting a job at the aquarium, building the frog exhibit, it was all she could do to hold onto her childhood memories. The adventure she'd had with Sprig, Polly, and Hop-Pop. Being out in the field of the Plantar's farm, carrying their produce to the market. And at the end of each day, sitting down and reading a book by candlelight with Sprig by their favorite spot up on the hill that overlooked the farm...
There was nothing Anne wouldn't do to have it all back.
She remember the Guardian of the Stones. The immortal creature that brought her back to life, gave her a one-way ticket home. Anne wondered if she could speak to it as she before. If there was some way her voice might carry across the void, that it might turn back time, and return her to her friends and family.
The night of her 23rd birthday, Anne returned to her Los Angeles apartment after an emotional day. It was good to see Sasha and Marcy again, but it also opened up old wounds.
Sasha was the first to sense that something wasn't right with her old friend. She was a therapist, after all. After some coaxing, Sasha got the truth out of her... and Anne couldn't keep her composure any longer. She couldn't hold in the feelings she'd kept buried for 10 years anymore.
So she cried. And cried. And told Sasha and Marcy how empty her life had been since leaving Amphibia. Since leaving Sprig. It caused quite a scene at the café where they had Anne's birthday party; thinking quickly, Sasha and Marcy rushed their friend out of the café and drove her back to her apartment. Anne stumbled into her bathroom and grabbed a bottle of anxiety medicine her doctor had prescribed her.
"How long have you been taking those?" Sasha asked as Anne washed down the pills with a glass of water.
"Ten years," Anne confessed. "Mom took me to see the doctor a few weeks after we got back. I was... having nightmares. I couldn't sleep."
"You haven't been abusing those pills, have you?" Sasha inquired further.
"Nothing so dramatic," Anne replied honestly. "I take them every day, twice a day, just like the doctor ordered. One in the morning, and one before bed."
"And have they helped?" Sasha asked.
"No."
Sasha picked up the medicine bottle, turning it over in her hands as to examine the label. Through her work as a child psychiatrist, Sasha had become familiar with the various types of prescriptions used for treating anxiety disorders and other ailments. Anne's prescription was an especially potent and rare brand designed to treat extremely severe cases of depression and anxiety. Most doctors wouldn't prescribe it due to a high mortality rate and numerous unpleasant side-effects... it was the sort of medicine you only took when common brands had no effect.
Sasha's colleagues often told her that it was a compromise, taking these meds... the difference between being a functioning member of society and being confined to psychiatric ward.
And her best friend was one them. She'd been prescribed the highest possible dose, even... and she was taking them twice a day. Sasha felt sick to her stomach, knowing that Anne was relying on such potent medication just to get by. It was heartbreaking, to think she'd been going on like this for the past decade.
It wasn't right.
Sasha showed the bottle to Marcy, who'd just finished making Anne a strong cup of tea, and explained to her what sort of regiment Anne was on.
"And she's been taking these for 10 years?"
"Yup. I could tell that she wasn't all there, back in high school, but... I never knew it was this bad."
"So what do we do?"
"What can we do?" Sasha asked. "Outside of finding her a way back to Amphibia... there's no cure for this. No form of medicine that can help. No therapy that can help her cope with this. If she hasn't gotten better in the last 10 years, then she's never going to get better."
Marcy and Sasha took their seats on either side of Anne at her kitchen table. She looked awful; Anne was paler than Sasha remembered, and there were dark bags under her eyes.
"Anne..." said Sasha, taking her best friend's hand. "Tell me; is there anything we can do to help?"
Anne shook her head. "I've been living with this for 10 years, Sash. I've tried everything, but... nothing makes the hurt go away."
Sasha exchanged a worried glance with Marcy.
"You want to go back to Amphibia?" Sasha suggested. Anne nodded meekly.
"Does it make a difference?" Anne retorted. "It's impossible. You know that."
"What abut Terri? And Doctor Jan?" Sasha inquired. "They helped you build a portal before, surely-"
"I already spoke to them," Anne interrupted. "Right after we got back. But the FBI confiscated all of their research. Terri said that even if they could make another portal, they'd never be able to generate enough power for it to be usable."
"What about the Guardian you mentioned?" Marcy asked. "They made the stones! They brought you back from the dead! The gave you the means to get us all home! Is there some way you could talk to them? Ask them to send you back?"
"How would I even do that?" Anne asked rhetorically.
"It's like Mother Olm said," Sasha recalled "You need only ask. And maybe... just maybe, they'll hear you."
"It's worth a shot," Marcy agreed.
Anne wasn't so sure. Marcy and Sasha decided to stay the night, rather than leave their friend alone when she was in such a vulnerable state. Anne went to sleep her own bed while her friends pulled a fold-out bed from her couch, appropriating some spare pillows and blankets from the closet and spending the rest of the night in front of the TV.
There was a full documentary on the "Frogvasion" as it was now called, with numerous scientists and skeptics weighing in on whether or not Andrias's invasion of Earth was a hoax or not. Of course the government had covered up the whole affair and denied it ever happened. Sasha had no idea how they'd managed to silence so many witnesses, despite the mountain of video evidence. In truth, no one was fooled by the cover-up, but having taken possession of all the evidence, it was easy enough for the government to dismiss it as hoax.
Meanwhile, they ignored the suffering of a young woman who'd carried a hole in heart for 10 years. A hole left from being separated from her family, and being apart from the world that she'd given her life to save.
Sasha checked in on Anne periodically throughout the night to make sure she was okay. Though Anne tossed and turned fitfully in her sleep, there was no cause for alarm. If Anne was trying to speak to the Guardian of the Stones in her dreams, there was nothing to suggest she'd had any luck. No strange lights or inexplicable phenomenon. Anne wasn't talking in her sleep or anything of the sort.
Those high-octane meds she'd been prescribed were barely enough to help Anne sleep. Sasha doubted they could make her loopy enough to commune with some cosmic entity-
Wait.
"Is she okay?" Marcy asked, having gotten up from the sofa bed to join Sasha at Anne's bedroom door.
"The medicine," Sasha blurted out.
"What about it?" Marcy asked; and then, her eyes widened with horror. "Omigosh; you don't think she's overdosing? Should I call nine-one-one!?"
"NO!" Sasha urged. "No, she's not overdosing... well I guess she is in a sense, but..."
"You lost me," said Marcy, dumbstruck.
Sasha walked over to Anne's bedside, and knelt beside her as she continued to toss and turn. Examining her closely, Anne could see an increase in her rabid eye movement. Her lips were also twitching, as if she might talk in her sleep, but something was keeping her from doing so.
"The medicine," Sasha repeated. "She's trying to speak to the Guardian of the Stones, but the medicine's stopping her from reaching out!"
"Oh, it all makes sense now..." Sasha went on.
"What makes sense?" Marcy asked.
"Don't you get it?" Sasha explained. "Anne's been trying to reach the Guardian subconsciously through her dreams ever since we got back. That's what's been causing the nightmares! And when she started taking the medicine..."
"It blocked her mind!" Marcy finished. "So, if we could get her to stop taking her medication..."
"I've got a better idea," Sasha interjected.
She took Anne's hand and closed her eyes.
"Guardian of the Stones," Sasha spoke into the ether. "I don't know if you can here me, but... my friend is hurt. She wants to go back to Amphibia. To her friends. To her family. To the world she loves. Please... help her. Help Anne to find her way home."
Nothing happened. Sasha grasped Anne's hand tighter, repeating her plea in her head over and over. Marcy knelt down beside her, placing a hand on her shoulder and closing their eyes. Together, the willed with all their might that their pleas might be heard throughout the cosmos, to reach the being that once granted them unlimited power.
And then, Sasha felt it. A tingling sensation in her chest, like someone had lit a fire in heart... and then, a voice. Her voice, and Marcy's, and Anne's, repeating the same mantra, pleading with the void to send Anne home. Sasha felt her mind connect with Anne's, and saw that her thoughts were not coherent, her subconscious lost in an impermeable fog.
But as Sasha and Marcy connected with Anne, the fog thinned, and gave way to a vision of the night sky peppered with stars... and among those stars, three burned brighter than any others. One pink, one green, and one blue. A menagerie of voices echoed across the void... voices that Sasha recognized. Grime. Andrias. Olivia...
And Sprig.
"You're a hero! An ugly, ugly, ugly hero!"
"You're my everything, Anne..."
"Spranne against the world."
Anne's eyes shot open, glowing bright blue. In an instant, the medicine was purged from her body, and for the first time in 10 years, she saw with perfect clarity.
Sasha and Marcy saw it too.
It was Wartwood. She could see Grime. Olivia and Yunnan. Mayor Toadstool. Croaker. Wally. Loggle. Bessie. Joe Sparrow. Hop-Pop. Polly... and Sprig. They were gathered in the town square, around a large object hidden beneath a tarp. The tarp was pulled down, revealing a statue of Anne holding her sword in one hand, and the Calamity Box in the other.
In that moment, Anne spoke a single word.
"Home..."
There was a flash of multicolored light, and everything went black.
Author's Notes: I will be uploading all 3 chapters of this fic at the same time, so no need to worry about the cliffhanger.
Though I enjoyed the finale, I have to say I was completely heartbroken by the end... and a little disappointed. I wanted the girls to stay in Amphibia permanently so badly, or at least have the means to travel between worlds before the end credits rolled. Sadly, we got neither.
Anne was willing to give her life to save the world she loved, and I hate that she had to leave it forever. She said it all the way back in Season 2: "I feel at home in a place that shouldn't be real". Amphibia is her home. She found happiness there, and friendship, and family. It's cruel and unfair to Anne and the people she left behind that she should be cut off from going back to Amphibia ever again.