DISCLAIMER: Buffy-The Vampire Slayer and all related characters are the property of Mutant Enemy Productions, Inc., Sandollar Television, Kuzui Enterprises and Twentieth Century-Fox Television. No copyright infringement is intended. This work of fiction is for entertainment purposes only and no money has changed hands. The story and all original characters are the sole property of the author and may not be used or archived without permission.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Just some review responses-

Gina1982: Thank you much, and there's one more chapter to go.

MsTree: Thank you, and High Tea begins now.

Sun-chan1: I thank you. (takes reverent bow)

Jason: Say what you want about the universe being crappy, but you got through seven chapters and you're probably reading this now, so I've done my job. :)

Okay...Finale time!

RAISING ANYA,

FACING WILLOW

By Darrin Colbourne

---

Anya

The first order of business upon our return to the castle is to get Tara, Cordelia and Catherine cleaned up. They’re all covered in Bad Willow’s blood - especially Tara - and the sight of them freaks out my friends. Tara takes care of herself and Catherine the wiccan way, but Cordelia begs our indulgence and goes off to take a nice, normal shower. I don’t blame her at all. I sense that she wants to do more than clean up.

The other thing that freaks the Scoobies out is seeing me and Willow in our Willowcoven clothes. It takes a minute or two to convince them that Willow is Our Willow and that I’m not here to kill anybody. After that they’re all bursting with questions, so it takes a few minutes more to get them to relax and be patient so that I can explain everything properly. I get them all to retire to the parlor - I’ve always wanted to do that: “Retire to the parlor.” - and make themselves comfortable, then I summon several novitiates to the castle and have them prepare High Tea and serve it. The others watch in amazement as the girls lay out scones, cakes and other pastries and provide a ridiculous variety of teas and coffees, serving each person his or her preference without needing to be told what those preferences are.

As the girls work I use my powers to get a surreptitious glimpse of Cordelia. Just as I thought, I find her curled up on the floor of the shower, letting the hot water cascade over her as she cries her eyes out. I quickly give her back her privacy, then use my control over time and space to subtly create a time warp around the bathroom she’s in, giving her all the time she needs to get it out of her system and finish up. Only Tara understands exactly what’s going on, and she lets me know with a nod that I’m doing the right thing. Willow, still not accustomed to her newfound awareness, senses something is going on but isn’t sure what. I just give her a reassuring smile when she looks at me, and by the time she decides to ask me about it telepathically Cordy is drying off, so I just ask her to have patience. A minute later Cordy walks into the parlor wearing white towels around her body and hair. She’s done her best to hide the sadness in her eyes, and even manages to smile to everyone before she heads right over to the couch where Willow is sitting and sits down gracefully on her right. Kennedy, sitting on Willow’s left, bristles at this and starts to say something, but Cordy just smiles at her, holds up her palm and mimes a beating heart. “Thump-thump,” she says, “thump-thump.” Kennedy gets even madder, but gets the message and backs down.

I’ve kept the servant girls here until they could serve Cordy a cup of cappuccino. Once they’ve done that, they bow to Willow and Me in turn and then disappear. Then I look around the room, take a sip from my cup of Earl Grey, then smile. “Okay,” I say, “Questions? Comments? Who goes first?”

Xander raises his hand. “Ooh! Me! Pick me!”

I chuckle at that. “Xander.”

He lowers his hand. “I just have one, little question. What…” - he indicates me, Willow, Tara, the food and everything else - “…the Hell??”

Cordelia smiles at him. “Good, Xander,” she says, “way to be vague.”

“You want specific?” Kennedy says as she puts down her latte. “I’ll give you specific.” She turns to me. “If you were always on our side, why did you let Willow’s evil twin keep us locked up and powerless?”

“Because, quite frankly, I wasn’t always on your side. At first I wanted to punish you just a little bit for not even attempting to dig me out of what was left of Sunnydale.”

“But you were dead!” Andrew says, stating the obvious.

“It would have been nice to at least have had a decent burial!” I say. “Y’know…funeral, consecrated grave, wake…that whole bit?” They all just give me That Look then. I shake my head. “Anyway, that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that genuinely wanting to hold you captive kept Willow from being suspicious about the other things I asked for.”

“Like taking over the world?” Willow says. “You said before that that was some kind of plan?”

I nod. “You have to remember that practically everything about Willowcoven is powered by Willow in some way, and the things that give Willow her power only exist within the boundaries of her empire. If she goes outside of those boundaries she has to rely on her internal reserves, and so does everyone and everything she brings with her. Those reserves are finite until she has absolute control of a reality and can use the mystical energy there to replenish them. She’d already used up a bunch of energy resurrecting me, so all we really had to do was force her to use more and more until she was weak enough to be beaten. Bringing a whole army here to do nothing was a good way to start.”

“How could you have kept any of that a secret?” Robin says. “I thought Willow was a telepath.”

I smile. “The nice thing about her being so starstruck over me is that she didn’t try very hard to read my mind until it was too late.”

“When did it become ‘too late’?” Giles asks.

“When she gave me the first thing I asked for: Amy’s power.”

“Why?” Buffy asks. “What did that do?”

“Let me put it this way: for all the differences between our two universes the things that I always found interesting were all the things that were similar.”

“Like how my twin and I both met our Taras the same way.” Willow says.

“Or how my twin did the same time in stir as I did,” Faith says.

“Right,” I say, “and when I thought of that, another similarity came to me: in both universes Willow was the most powerful Wicca around, but there were other powerful witches practicing magic before she even thought of it. One of them was Tara. Another one was Amy, and her Amy had the same malevolent streak as the one we know, so it didn’t come as a surprise when I found out that she was Willow’s right hand, but I hadn’t thought until after Bad Willow asked me what I wanted that Amy might know things that Willow didn’t know about magic, and I decided I wanted to know them too. Turns out, one thing Amy knew was how to keep Willow from reading her mind at all. When I got Amy’s power, I knew how as well. After that, keeping my plans secret was child’s play.”

“Okay,” Kennedy says, “so how come you didn’t just let us go after you could keep secrets from her?”

“Because that would have blown my cover, telepathy or not, so I engineered one of our Willow’s trademark miracles.”

“I have a question,” Catherine says. “You said our Faith had the same plan we all did, Y’know, to get Willow away from her power and weaken her?” I nod. “Well, what good would it have done her? The Heiress was right. If you hadn’t been there and done everything you did, when Willow died her precious Dawnie would have gotten all her power.”

“She certainly would have,” I say, “and that Dawn was probably easier for Faith to manipulate than Willow was, so her next step would have been to lead the new Sorceress off a figurative cliff and find a way to take the power then.”

“How harsh…” our Dawn mutters before taking a sip of her mint tea.

I look around. “By the way, where is that Faith?”

My gaze falls on Buffy, who manages to stammer out, “Um…we…uh…you see…”

Faith tries to continue. “We got…a little…”

“Overzealous?” Kennedy says.

I sigh. “Okay, fine…did she at least get a decent burial?”

“She will,” Giles mutters. “Earliest opportunity, I assure you.”

“Couldn’t have happened to a nicer girl.” I say.

Xander raises his hand again. When I nod to him, he lowers it and says, “Okay, so all of this stuff where you were getting married and you had us locked up and you had your stalker bring shiploads of witches to our reality was all part of your nefarious - yet beautiful - scheme to bring down Big Bad Willow?” I nod. “And you’re sure she’s really dead?”

“Yes, very, very dead…and if you’re wondering, I can’t bring any of the slayers back that were killed during the invasion, but all the ones that simply lost their powers should have gotten them back when Buffy and the others did.”

“That’s great, and I was worried about that, but what I really want to know about is,” - he looks at Willow, then points at her - “What the Hell??”

I smile at him, then turn to Cordelia. She puts her cappuccino down, looks at Xander and asks very seriously, “Did you ever see the movie Dogma?”

Xander gives her a confused look, then shoots me one. I just nod, so he turns back to Cordelia. “Yes, I did.”

“So you know how the crux of the movie was the two fallen angels trying to get back into heaven, and if they succeed it shows how God can make a mistake, and if that happens the universe unravels ‘cause it’s built around God being perfect?” Xander nods and Cordy shrugs. “Well, that’s kinda the spot our reality is in. It isn’t just Willowcoven. Our universe is the universe Willow designed for herself. She didn’t just take it over. She re-ordered it so that history unfolded in a way that would bring her rule about and the future would always be subject to her rule, whether she lived or died, then she did the exact same thing in twenty-one other realities. That’s an entire suburb of the multiverse restructured and bent to her will. You couldn’t do anything to her that wouldn’t have an effect on it, which means that just killing her would have caused the same problem for us that Loki and Bartleby getting back to heaven would have caused in the movie. Reality goes bye-bye.”

“And not in the quick, clean, ‘poof’ kind of way where nobody feels anything,” Catherine says. “We’re talking about chaos that would make opening the Hellmouth look like opening a Christmas present.”

“Surely it wouldn’t have been that terrible…” Giles says.

“Yep,” Catherine says, “that terrible. Gwen tried to explain it to me a bunch of times, but it never really sunk in until I met Tara and she showed me exactly what was at stake in my mind. It’s kind of hard to explain…”

“It’s easy to explain,” Cordy says. “Willow was a witch and a lesbian, so in the course of conquering our universe she rebooted it so that the practice of both Witchcraft and Lesbianism was the norm and boring old heterosexuality and other run-of-the-mill religions were the deviant practices.”

“Is that even possible?” Xander says. “I mean, guys-with-girls has pretty much been the norm since the Birds and the Bees were invented. What could you do to change that?”

“You figure out what makes the original situation the norm,” Robin says, “then find a way to apply it to the new situation.” He looks off into space for a second, then, “What makes heterosexuality the norm for us is that it’s the only way we can reproduce without outside help…” He looks at Cordy. “…so she would have had to find a way to fix it so that women could have children with each other without the help of artificial means or men. My God…” He looks off into space again. “She used her magic to turn men and women into two separate species.”

“And guaranteed that her New Woman would be the dominant one,” Giles says. “After all, if she doesn’t grace the men with similar reproductive ability they eventually die out, and Nature would have made sure she started out with more women anyway. So men get boxed into the status of apes and Wiccan Lesbians become Masters of the World…and she becomes their Goddess.”

Cordelia touches her nose and points at both of them. “And now that you can imagine that,” she says, “picture this: One fine day Ms. And Mrs. Jane Q. Public are out on a nature walk. Little Suzy Public is skipping merrily along in front of them, bouncing her ball and walking their pet man on a leash, and it’s just a really great day. Now imagine that the engine that keeps this little paradise going, and that keeps any of them from realizing that there might be something wrong with this picture - Willow’s magic - just stops. What do you think will happen when the Publics and their pet man all come to their senses at the same time, yet remember what had been going on up to that point?” Robin and Giles just stare at her. “Exactly. Now imagine it happening all over the world…in twenty-two different realities.”

“That’s why we couldn’t just kill Willow,” Catherine says. “Her power has to continue until we can undo the damage gradually, in a way that won’t start a multiverse-wide civil war between Men and Women, because in that scenario, eventually both sides will lose.”

“But her power can’t continue without someone to wield it,” Cordy says. “That meant that if we were going to kill her, we had to find a replacement for her.”

I’ve never seen someone do a spit-take in real life before. The one Willow does when she hears that is hilarious. She puts her French Vanilla Blend down carefully, then turns to Cordy. “You mean Me??”

“Well, of course,” I say when I’m done giggling. “You saw what happened to me when I tried to wield it. It almost tore me apart from the inside out. The same thing would have happened to Evil Dawn, and it would have vaporized Bad Faith outright. I’m sure even Tara would have been hard-pressed to control it…”

“Not That Hard-pressed.” Tara says defensively.

“The bottom line is that through her own actions Bad Willow made herself so powerful, and in turn made her power so unique, that only Willow could do what she could do, be what she was. So, the only way to get rid of Bad Willow permanently and repair the damage done across her empire was to replace her with a Good Willow.”

“And fortunately for all of us,” Cordy says as she puts an arm around Will’s shoulders, “there was a perfectly good Good Willow just sitting around doing nothing but making Slayers.”

“But…but…” Willow says, “…I can’t! I can’t be her!”

“That’s good!” Catherine says. “We don’t want you to be her. We just need you to use her power.”

“But I thought…” She looks at Cordy. “You said you wanted me to sacrifice myself!”

“Let me rephrase.” Cordy says. “What we really need you to do is dedicate your life to helping us undo what your doppelganger has done. That requires a certain type of sacrifice on your part. Just not the icky kind.”

“Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?!”

“It’s not a secret plan…” Tara says.

“…if you tell anybody about it.” Willow finishes, then she turns to me. “Well, how did you find out about their secret plan?”

“I didn’t have to,” I say. “I had the same plan. And - thanks again to Bad Willow - I was in a better position to implement it. Also, having seen first-hand what the empire was like, I had the same incentive for putting it into action.”

Willow just looks at me, then at Cordy, then at me again. “But I can’t use her power!” She says. “It’s fueled by the darkest of magic! I can feel it coursing through me right now. It will corrupt me, the way it always does!”

“No, it won’t,” I say. “You’re a stronger, smarter person than you were, and now you know more about magic than you ever have. You can make sure you rule it instead of it ruling you.”

“What if you’re wrong? What if it does rule me?”

“Not to worry,” Cordy says. “If that happens you’ll have your four best girlfriends around to knock some sense into you.”

Willow blinks. “Four?”

“Mm-hmm. Anya, Tara, Catherine and Me.”

“Excuse me, Towel Girl,” Kennedy says to Cordy, “but I believe you’ve miscounted.”

Cordy thinks about it. “Nope. I think I covered everybody.”

“I believe the actual number is one, as in me, as in if you think you’re going to push me aside…!”

“Oh, that’s pretty much a given, honey.”

Kennedy throws her latte down and stands to confront Cordy. “That’s it! You and me, Bitch! Right now! And don’t give me that ‘I’ll beam out your heart’, shit, ‘cause even if you do that I’ll use my last breath to beat that smile off your face, and then I’ll haunt you!”

Cordy stands and stares her down. “Been haunted before, by an old hag that, like you , didn’t know when to let go! Believe me…the day comes when I see your scrawny little ectoplasm near me, you’ll be calling the Ghostbusters to get them to save you from me!”

I glance over at Tara. I would expect her to try and reign Cordy in, but it seems like she’s waiting for her girl to kill Kennedy. Willow, meanwhile, is too flabbergasted by the whole scene to do anything. Guess it’s up to me. I send Willow just the right mental image. It makes her look at me, then at Kennedy. That’s when she gets up. “Ken?” She says. “We should talk.”

“But Willow…!” Kennedy says.

“Please, baby,” Willow says. “Let’s just talk.” With that she touches Kennedy’s shoulder and they both disappear. Cordelia sits back down with an annoyed huff. I go back to my tea.

“Oh, my God,” Dawn says, “she’s really going to go with them, isn’t she?”

I’m insulted. “Well, so am I!”

“Well, yeah, but…what I mean is…you’re…”

I hold up a hand to stop her. “Never mind. Like I really expect to get a ‘Sorry to see you go, Anya’ from you people.” I shake my head, then laugh. “Anyway…yes, Dawn, we’re taking her with us.”

“We need her,” Catherine says. “There’s an entire universe of people who need her.”

There’s a long silence then, which Cordy breaks with another huff. “Would you two stop scaring the poor girl?” She turns to Dawn. “She has our Willow’s ability to cross dimensions now. It’s not like she can’t come back and visit.”

Dawn looks confused for a second, then she looks at Catherine and me in turn. We both offer her playful smiles.

“Oh. Right…” she says.

---

We prepare to leave as soon as Willow and Kennedy return. Kennedy walks away from Willow as soon as they appear. I don’t know what they talked about and I don’t try to read either of their minds to find out. As long as Kennedy’s willing to let Willow go, it’s enough for me.

We use the castle courtyard to stage our exit. Just to get her in practice, I have Willow construct the portal that will take us to our new home. Tara is the first to walk through, stopping only long enough to glance at the others. I think they expected her to say a proper goodbye, but this isn’t the Tara they knew. To her, we’re all either strangers or enemies.

Cordelia - now wearing a middie blouse and full-length skirt she teleported in - does say proper goodbyes, however, giving big hugs to Buffy and Giles, a little hug to Faith and a bear hug and sloppy kiss to Xander.

“I bet there’s a great story behind that goodbye,” He says.

“I’ll come back and tell it to you sometime,” she says with a grin, then she turns and goes through the portal.

Catherine looks around. It looks like she wants to say something, but most of us are strangers to her as much as we were to Tara. Finally she locks in on Dawn and waves her over. “Dawnie, come here!”

Dawn approaches cautiously. “What?”

“I won’t bite! Just come here.”

Dawn obeys and Catherine gets close enough to whisper something in her ear. After a few seconds Dawn pulls away and says, “Ewww, that’s…!” Catherine pulls her back and keeps whispering. The more she whispers, the more Dawn’s expression goes from disgusted to curious. Finally Catherine pulls away, smiling. “Really?” Dawn says to her.

“Just once,” Catherine says, “and she’ll be your slave.”

“Slave, huh?” Dawn says, then both girls turn to look at Buffy.

“What?” Buffy says.

Dawn just grins, while Catherine turns and walks through the portal.

“What??” Buffy says. “What did she tell you?”

Dawn keeps smiling as she says, “You know when you have those days when you think you have the weight of the world on your shoulders and you just want to give it all up and run away?” Buffy nods. Dawn smiles wider. “Next time you have one of those days…ask me again.”

And on that weird little note, it’s time for Willow and me to say our goodbyes. We both hug and kiss everybody almost to death. Ironically, we both pay the most attention to Xander. This turns out to be my favorite goodbye. “Sorry to see you go, Anya,” he says when we’re hugging.

I lean my head on his chest and want to stay there forever. “I think you mean that,” I say softly.

“Always have,” he says, “always will.”

Yeah, I like it right there, but I can’t stay. I pull away from him and wave goodbye to everyone as Willow and I head for the portal. When we’re there we just stand there side-by-side staring at it. “Ladies first,” she says off-handedly.

I look at her. “That doesn’t get you off the hook. We both count.”

She sighs. “It was worth a shot. Together then?”

I take her hand. “Together.”

We face forward and jump into the portal. I remember the last time I went through a portal like this there was a dreadful cold feeling. Now it’s nothing, like a long jump from the sidewalk to the street, only instead of a street, we end up in Willowcoven’s Staging Room. Once there, we find Tara, Cordelia and Catherine standing with their hands up in the midst of a hundred warrior witches.

“What’s going on here?” I call out.

One of the witches steps forward, and Willow’s grip on my hand tightens as she sees the face of Willowcoven’s newest Chief of Internal Security, the face I showed her not so long ago back in our old reality.

“Forgive my impertinence, Mistress,” Kennedy says with a smile, “but we detected these insurgents trying to infiltrate the mansion through the Staging Room.”

“They weren’t ‘infiltrating’,” I say. “They are here as our guests. They have seen the error of their ways and wish to join the Coven. The Sorceress and I welcomed them, and we sent them here ahead of us.”

She turns to Willow. “Is this true, Sorceress?” She says.

Willow doesn’t say anything, so I jump in. “How dare you question what I say?”

“Again, Mistress, I beg forgiveness for my impertinence, but I would like to hear Willow tell me this herself.”

Willow squeezes my hand tighter, but this time manages to say softly, “The Mistress speaks for me, Ken…nedy, and as such you will obey her as you would me, do you understand?”

Kennedy takes a moment to look in Willow’s eyes, then she backs away and bows. “Of course, Sorceress.”

I let out a quiet breath and say, “You and your troops may return to your barracks.”

She nods to me and says, “Yes, Mistress,” then she and all the warriors disappear. Willow relaxes her grip when they’re all gone.

A moment later an administrator appears in the room. “You summoned me, Mistress?”

I indicate Tara and the others. “Find places for them in the mansion and make them comfortable. They’ll be working with us from now on.”

This time the girl only gives Willow the slightest glance before obeying. “Yes, Mistress. Right away.” She turns to Tara. “If you and your companions will follow me…” She turns and leads them to the portal disk, and a moment later they all disappear.

And finally Willow finds her voice. “I can’t, Anya! I can’t! Not with Kennedy’s doppelganger running the mansion’s security! Couldn’t we just…?”

“No,” I say. “Our Kennedy could never fill this one’s shoes. She would simply cause suspicion among her subordinates, and if Internal Security ever suspects us, we’ll just end up fighting Willow’s empire for the rest of our lives! No…so far we’ve fooled her. We’ll save our Kennedy for the day that’s no longer the case.”

Willow looks like she wants to protest more, but she just bows her head. “If you think that’s best.”

I lift her head and look her in the eye. “I do, and you have to think that, too. You cannot have doubts. You’re the Sorceress. I’m the Mistress. We rule together, until we find a way to dissolve the empire from within, right?”

She smiles. “Right.” She closes the portal with a mental command. “We rule together.”

I smile back, then we turn and head for the portal disk hand-in-hand…together, the way it should be. We’re allies, friends, the way we might have been long ago if we hadn’t been kept apart by my jealousies and her judgments.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. Most of the time, when I was a Vengeance Demon, I only granted the wishes I wanted to grant. Sure, I had quotas, and D’Hoffryn always had a special case or two for me to handle, but generally, I never granted a wish that didn’t satisfy me personally.

I keep that in mind as Willow and I get to the portal disk, as I lean my head on her shoulder and we step onto it, as we teleport off to our new destiny. I grant the wishes I want to grant.

Including my own.

FINITO