"Done," Anya (BTVS), PG
For the Death card challenge at fandom_arcana.
Title: Done Author:kethlenda Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Pairings/Characters: Anya Rating: PG Tarot: Death Word Count: 452 Notes: Spoilers through season 3.
She can feel a wish crying to be granted. It’s an acid green heat like heartburn where the amulet meets her breast. The call is as irresistible as an apple steeped in a witch’s envy.
This is what she is. She is the embodiment of the righteous wrath of the betrayed. And the taste of wrath is sweet.
***
The nave is drafty and silent this time of night beneath the dim blue eye of the rose window. The woman slips unnoticed into the west aisle, threading her way through the labyrinth of side chapels until she reaches the one she seeks.
“She’s our saint,” Margaret had told her. “She never fails.”
The woman meets the eyes of the crude wooden statue and lights her candle. No one has ever taught her the words to thisprayer. She is on her own.
“Anyanka?” she whispers into the twining smoke. “Please…bring my husband home.”
***
Three girls sit cross-legged on the dormitory floor. “We ought to have candles,” one suggests. “You have to have candles to do witchcraft, don’t you?”
The others giggle, tittering about witchcraft like it’s a schoolgirl’s game, no more momentous than Truth or Dare.
There is a scraping sound as the match meets the matchbox, then the hiss of flame. “I curse you, Joseph Kendall,” says the leader of the three as she lowers the hungry flame to the candle wick. “May you wake up tomorrow morning with a nasty case of jock itch.” Anyanka, ear to the door, nods and smiles.
***
Cordelia thinks for a moment, turning the amulet over and over in her perfectly manicured fingers.
Anyanka can taste the moment Cordelia’s emotions coalesce into a single thought, a single searing drop of venom.
“I wish Buffy Summers had never come to Sunnydale,” says Cordelia.
***
“Done,” says Anyanka. She waits to feel the power surge through her veins. She feels nothing.
Cordelia is smiling, tossing more wishes Anyanka’s way, each more elaborately cruel than the last, and still the sweet poisoned taste of vengeance eludes her.
Anyanka looks down, sees cloth and flesh where stone should be. It’s gone. How? Memories flutter at the edge of her mind like a dream washed away by waking, and they’re gone before she can grasp them.
I’m only a woman, she thinks, not quite believing it but knowing she has to. A girl. No more powerful than Cordelia, who is now sauntering across the quad, laughing as she thinks of new curses, new wishes.