Fanfic: Checking In.

Title: Checking In.
Fandom: Buffy.
Rating: R, for suggested sex and language.
Description: My Anya ficathon entry for vanilla_tiger; a thousand apologies for the hardware-based delay.

***

Later, Xander would look back on the flight from Sunnydale the way that he’d look back on a particularly disturbing dream. The battle to save the world was crystal-clear and crisp; he’d told Dawn once, only half-joking, that he remembered every Apocalypse he’d ever been invited to. She’d laughed and hit him in the shoulder, and that was that...only he hadn’t been kidding, not really, not entirely. He remembered every time the world had tried to end around him, the times when he’d been powerless and the times when he he’d saved everything. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

Those who survive history are doomed to relive it, every night, every time they close their eyes -- or eye, in his case; the other had been closed forever by a man who thought that destroying creation would be good for a giggle when there was nothing on TV. He closed his eye and tried to sleep, and he watched the last battle spin itself out in a thousand configurations, a million new directions. He refused to let Buffy send him off with Dawn, leaving Andrew to guard Anya’s back. He watched her back himself, and they both ran out of the high school wounded but alive, climbing onto the bus hand in hand, and he never let her go again. He came up with some cunning new plan that meant dividing their forces was unnecessary, and Anya stayed safe in the sunlight while demons filled the dark, and when the battle was finished, she danced back into his arms, and he held her, and they were crazy together. What ifs were eating him alive, but he couldn’t stop going back to them. Couldn’t stop wondering whether she’d expected him to save her, like he always had before.

He remembered getting ready for the battle, walking into the high school, and letting Anya walk away without saying goodbye. Buffy had him fighting with Dawn, and he did his job; he kept her alive to leave Sunnydale behind. He did his job, just like he always had, dependable old Xander, who’d grown to fill Willow’s role as the unshakeable foundation when it became clear that the earthquake faults that riddled California ran all through her as well. Willow couldn’t be stable, and so he had to be. He learned to pour concrete and slay vampires and be stalwart, and no matter how much he tried, he really couldn’t remember anything after the Potentials -- who had become Slayers, down there in the darkness of the catacombs, like bright-winged butterflies breaking out of their cocoons -- grabbed his arms and pulled him away. It was all just a blur of Anya’s-not-here.

We’re on the bus riding out of Sunnydale, and Anya’s-not-here. Buffy’s alive, she’s wounded but alive, like a character from a superhero comic, and Anya’s-not-here. Andrew can’t meet my eyes, I know what happened, I know, but he has to say it, because Anya’s-not-here. They stood at the lip of the chasm, looking down into the empty socket where a city had been (looking down into Anya’s grave), and he cracked lousy jokes with the rest of them, thinking all the while, Anya’s-not-here, Anya’s-not-here, and no one but Andrew even cares.

They got back into the bus. They drove on. And Xander sat alone, his hands folded in his lap, thinking over and over again, Anya’s-not-here, we’re on our way into the future, and Anya’s-not-here...

They drove away and left the past behind them.

*

They pulled into Buttonwillow just before noon, when the fuel gauge on the bus finally swung around to read ‘zero’ and Faith declared Wood unfit to drive any further even if they refueled. They needed a rest, she said; they needed to stop somewhere before they all dropped dead on their feet. Buffy didn’t argue. No one argued, not even Giles, who said something about the town being ‘well situated’ and finally let them all climb out of their seats and back out into the light.

Xander automatically assessed the cheap motel with a carpenter’s eye as they walked across the parking lot and into the dingy lobby, with its peeling wallpaper and ancient remaindered-carpet flooring. It was built on a standard open-air blueprint, with two floors of rooms connected by narrow metal stairways that would be slippery as hell when the rare Southern California rains fell. The courtyard and badly misnamed ‘decorative walkway’ were paved in broken stucco tiles with edges like knives. In the distance he could make out the shape of a swimming pool staring up into the sky like (like a dead city, like a grave that was too big to ever be filled, like a landfill waiting for the trucks to come, like his heart, because Anya’s-not-here...) some blind and vacant eye. It would be empty, he knew; business at this motel was clearly too slow to justify paying the cost to fill it.

He fumbled in his pocket for money and froze as his fingers hit smooth nylon instead of his customary leather wallet...

“Hold this for me,” Anya instructed. “If you get hurt, try not to bleed on it.”

“Ahn, are you sure you don’t want to carry it yourself?”

She smiled at him, eyes guileless. “Don’t be silly. If I lost it in battle, I would have no one to blame.”

And that, as they say, had been that. Only it wasn’t, because Anya-wasn’t-there; he’d made it through the fight and she hadn’t, and so her wallet had survived without her. In the end, she’d managed to get the things she cared about out of Sunnydale before it fell. Her money...and him.

He supposed that thought would be comforting, later. For the moment, he just produced a credit card with her name on it for the uncaring manager, who didn’t bother to ask for ID. He signed her name with an unsteady hand, helped Giles pass the keys around, and walked to his own dingy little second-floor room with its oh-so-undesired poolside view, and pulled the curtains, and fell onto the bed, and slept the slept of the wounded and the bitter.

*

Andrew forced himself to stare into the empty socket of the pool, doing his best to ignore the constant clip-clip-clip of Faith’s endless patrol around the motel’s perimeter. Her place in the world forever changed, the formerly fallen Slayer walks in silence, as graceful as a jungle cat, hunting her prey that never comes, he thought, automatically. Then he winced, glancing up and around to reassure himself that no strange demon or communication spell gone awry had shared his inner monologue with the world. Telling stories was a hard habit to break, especially when you’d managed to bury all three of your best friends inside of little more than a year.

The time for stories was over. That time died with Anya, who fell because he was too helpless -- too riddled with stories -- to keep himself alive. He kept going back to the moment when she fell, again and again, prodding it like a small child picking at a scab. Every time he traced the edges of his pain they began to bleed again, and he thought to himself with something trapped between fear and elation, It still hurts.

Anya understood his stories. She never quite understood why he felt the need to tell them to himself; lying was foreign to her, and storytelling was a form of lying, putting filters on the truth to make it seem more bearable. She didn’t understand why, but she understood what they did for him, and so out of everyone in the ‘inner circle’, she was the one who never tried to take his stories away.

When he went to bed, sometimes, falling through the dazed hinterland between sleep and waking, he’d let himself dictate another future, another past to brace it up. He didn’t realize how similar his thoughts were to Xander’s, sleeping in the room across the hall, on the other side of the empty swimming pool; he just knew that he was hurting, and Anya was gone, and he wanted her back, because he wanted his friend. He wanted someone who wouldn’t lie to him. So he dozed and told himself that she’d survived, that she was crawling out of the rubble all red and golden and glorious, like Jean Grey (only more literal and with better taste in clothes), rising like the Phoenix (only without the part where the power drove her insane and made her destroy a planet full of broccoli people). He told himself the best lies, before he fell asleep...

And every morning he woke up, and Anya wasn’t there, and Xander looked right through him and Buffy was lost in some private pain she wouldn’t even let the rest of them see, and Faith patrolled the motel, clip-clip-clip, and nothing changed.

Eventually, he knew, they’d have to leave the motel and go looking for all the other Potentials who were Slayers in their own right now. Eventually the credit card companies would realize that Sunnydale was gone and Anya was gone with it, and the money would stop. Eventually.

But for right now, Andrew looked into the empty pool, and tried not to tell himself stories, and dreamed of Jean Grey, of Anya and the X-Men.

*

On the second day, Giles came to Xander’s room, knocking lightly, and asked if he wanted to go into town. “There’s a bar,” he said. “It’s likely not much, but I do hate to drink alone.”

Xander looked at him for a long time, searching his face for signs of pity, then rose from the room’s single threadbare easy chair where he’d been pretending to watch television while really considering how simple it would be to replace the cracked and warping window frame. He grabbed his coat off the air conditioner, shrugging it on.

“A beer would be good,” he agreed, and followed Giles out into the early evening.

Andrew was standing on the balcony looking down into the empty pool as they turned towards the exit to the parking lot. Xander looked at him, then looked away, focusing on the walk. Giles observed this little not-an-exchange, but held his silence; if there was one thing he understood, it was the process of grieving.

The summer air was cool and dry; desert climates always show themselves to the best advantage when the night is young. Xander shoved his hands into his pockets, following a half-step behind Giles until they were nearly a quarter of a mile from the motel, walking down a dimly lit street that would have seemed perfectly at home on the outskirts of Sunnydale, if it weren’t for the thousands of stars in the sky. Low light pollution, he thought. It’s beautiful. But Anya-wasn’t-there; Anya couldn’t see that sky with him. So he looked towards Giles, asking aloud, “How did you hear about this place?”

“The manager. He’s an awfully helpful man at times,” Giles said, dryly.

“Helpful...right. Who was in the bikini?”

“Kennedy. And Dawn was wearing a pair of Rona’s shorts.”

“Right.” The crew of teenage girls they’d managed to save from Sunnydale had shown the usual female superpowers where the acquisition of clothing was concerned. Faith and Rona had left the motel earlier the night before and come back after a raid on Buttonwillow’s single Goodwill carrying enough women’s wear to outfit three times as many Potentials as had survived. Rona and Kennedy both knew how to sew, although Kennedy was nowhere near as happy about it as Rona seemed to be; assuming you didn’t mind ‘tight’, ‘trashy’ and ‘Polyester’ as appropriate adjectives, they were starting to build an excellent replacement wardrobe for the group.

He really wished that he could make himself care more.

Giles glanced at him, then indicated a glint of neon not too far ahead. “Come on, then. We’re very nearly there.”

Three pitchers of cheap draft beer later, Xander was finally drunk enough to say the words that Giles had been waiting for. “I miss her.”

“I know,” Giles said, looking down into his glass. It was mostly foam, the bubbles surfacing through the pale amber liquid and bursting in oracular patterns when they reached the surface. You get what you pay for, he thought, with grim amusement. They paid more lives than he cared to consider, and got cheap beer and a motel with an air conditioner that whined more than a teenage Slayer trying to escape her Calling. “I miss her too, actually. I looked at Kennedy this morning -- the bikini was ghastly, bright orange, did nothing for her that two stick-on memos and a pair of old knickers wouldn’t have done -- and wished that Anya were there to say exactly that.”

“I always had a thing for the girls without internal censors,” Xander said, and took another long gulp of his beer.

“Oh, God, yes. Cordelia. What were you thinking?”

“That she had really big breasts,” Xander said.

Giles blinked at him for a moment, and then burst out laughing, shaking his head. “Of course. What was I thinking?”

“You were a teenager once. What else mattered?”

“Contrary to popular belief, Xander, not all teenage boys are completely obsessed with superficialities and -- you’re not buying a word of this, are you?”

“Nope,” Xander said, with more cheer than he’d shown since they reached the motel. “You were a teenage guy. Ergo, there was a time in your life when it was all about the real estate. Back porch and balcony.”

“Indeed,” said Giles, grinning. It still amazed him sometimes, hearing the casual way that Xander’s accidental profession slid into his vocabulary, fitting perfectly into the laidback boy he’d tried so hard to keep out of Buffy’s life. She wasn’t supposed to have friends; no Slayer was. But Buffy did it anyway.

She tried, at least. They’d reached the end of the war she’d been Called for, and were starting on a new one; sometimes, he felt that she was more alone than ever.

But that didn’t matter now. What mattered now was the beer.

“Anya was...Anya was special,” Xander said, cheer fading. “‘Was’. You realize, that’s the first time I’ve talked about her like she wasn’t just going to be catching up with us tomorrow? Pissed off because she had to walk from Sunnydale, but proud of all the money she saved by not hiring a taxi...”

“That would be just like her,” Giles solemnly agreed. “Anya was a very special girl. A trifle insane, perhaps, but very special indeed.” Snapshot moments flickered through his mind; a kiss in the Magic Box when the world was wiped away. A petulant voice asking ‘where’s my hug?’ when he came back to keep Willow from destroying the world. All the smiles, all the sulks, the strange little dance she did each night as she closed out the day’s accounts...everything. “One of a kind, even,” he added.

“When they made her, they broke the mold,” Xander agreed, slamming back the last of his beer before he said, “And then she charged them for it.”

Giles began to laugh again, deeply, and after a moment, Xander started laughing with him. Neither one of them really noticed when the laughter turned to tears; it was too natural of a transition, like summer sliding into fall.

“Is there some sort of law that says none of us get to be happy?” Xander asked, through his tears. “Anya...Tara...”

“Jenny,” said Giles, softly.

“Yeah,” Xander said, looking down into his empty glass. “I hate to say it, but I almost...”

“You almost forgot her,” said Giles, reaching for the pitcher and refilling both their glasses without comment. “It’s all right. I think sometimes that Buffy has forgotten her, you know. That if I said ‘Jenny Calendar’, she wouldn’t know who I was talking about. Because that was never Buffy’s pain, if it makes any sense. It was never her cross to bear.”

Xander nodded, sipping his beer before he said, “It’s like if she doesn’t have to angst over it, it doesn’t count. Jenny didn’t count. Tara stopped counting pretty fast.” And near as he could tell, Anya hadn’t even counted for a moment. Anya-wasn’t-there, and Buffy hadn’t even said that she was sorry. He’d gotten more sympathy from Faith. Sympathy in the form of an offer of sex, but...sympathy.

“You’re not alone in this, Xander. We all left someone behind in Sunnydale.” Some a little sooner than others, but still, there were so many graves, so many women foolish enough to love them...

“I don’t even get to bury her,” Xander said, softly. “I wish I’d married her, Giles. I wish I’d said ‘I do’ and taken her to Hawaii for our honeymoon and let her redecorate the apartment seven times because she was never happy with anything. I had the chance to have so much more time with her than I did, and I threw it away.”

“We all make mistakes, Xander,” Giles said. “What matters is what we do afterwards.”

Xander looked at him gravely, and nodded. “I just hope you’re right.”

*

Andrew was still standing on the balcony when Faith came back from the bar, leading the utterly plastered Giles and Xander by the hand. The Slayer didn’t even spare him a glance. She just got them to their respective rooms, digging the keys out of their pockets and nudging them gently inside, then turned and walked away, heels going clip-clip-clip in the thin desert air. Andrew watched her go, and when she was safely inside her own room, he looked back to the empty pool.

“Xander wouldn’t be this drunk if you were here,” he said softly, aware of how his voice would carry if he wasn’t careful. “Well, actually, he might be. But you’d be drunk too, so that would be okay. He wouldn’t be drunk by himself.”

Talking to Anya wasn’t telling stories, he’d decided. Not yet. Things were still too up in the air for it to be anything but seeking comfort in the familiar. Besides, she’d always done the bulk of the talking in their conversations. This was just...catching up, evening out the scales. When he’d said all the words she wouldn’t let him say before, he’d be done, and he could stop. It wasn’t telling stories. After all, he wasn’t pretending that she was alive; just that she was listening. And everybody said that angels listened.

Was Anya an angel? Could she be an angel? She died saving the world, which probably looked pretty good on the celestial resume, but he wasn’t entirely sure that it balanced out several thousand years of wreaking hell on an unsuspecting world. He’d heard more of the stories than he really wanted to -- in her day, Anya had done a lot worse than killing a few innocent broccoli people. At the same time, though, she didn’t have to stay and die. She didn’t have to save him. So they’d probably let her into Heaven, even if it was on sort of a trial basis. Maybe she’d get brown wings instead of white ones, and complain all the time about the lack of celestial bleach.

Only probably not, because she’d never been much for wearing white. She’d like having brown wings. Maybe she’d even stop dying her hair, and let it grow in sparrow-wing brown, just like her wings, and then she’d match, and she’d be an angel that knew what it meant to get down in the mud and do what had to be done, and so she’d be the best angel of them all, she’d...

“Stop telling stories,” he told himself flatly, and tightened his hands on the balcony rail, and forced himself to look back down into the empty pool. The pool that looked so much like Sunnydale. You did that, he thought. It was you. You killed Jonathan. You let the First Evil control you. You. Maybe if you’d been stronger -- if you hadn’t told yourself so many stories -- it wouldn’t have happened. But you weren’t strong, and you did tell stories, and so it did. You always wanted to be important. Well, you got your wish.

You killed your hometown, and your best friend. You.

He stayed there until dawn, waiting for...he didn’t know what he was waiting for. Waiting for the world to argue, maybe.

When the sun came up he turned and went back into his room, and slept fitfully until noon.

*

Xander woke at a little bit after eleven with a headache that clearly remembered every beer he’d had the night before. He groaned as he rolled out of bed and staggered to the bathroom, where he drank four glasses of lukewarm water and swallowed four aspirin from the bottle someone -- Faith, probably, he dimly remembered her coming and helping them get ‘home’ -- had left on the back of the toilet. When he was tending bar he’d been told that mint was good for getting rid of a hangover, and so he brushed his teeth, then swallowed a mouthful of toothpaste. Every little bit helps, he thought, and moved to go back into the main room.

Anya’s wallet was still lying on the television set where he’d tossed it after checking in. He looked at it for a long moment, trying to decide whether he was ready for the kind of pain that he was contemplating. Then he sighed -- may as well do all the hurting at once, with his hangover beating against his skull like a pile driver -- and grabbed the wallet, moving to settle on the unmade bed.

The first few pockets were painful, but not crushingly so. A handful of cash; Anya’s credit cards, all seven of them; bank cards for two different banks. She’d always insisted on keeping separate accounts, just in case one of the establishments went under. Look to the future, Xander, her voice echoed in his head.

“I’m trying, Ahn. I really am,” he said, and kept going.

Next came the business cards -- beauty salons, herbalists and bookstores. Clothing shops. Several pristine cards advertising the Magic Shop, with her listed as the proprietor. One of Buffy’s Sunnydale High councilor cards. Under those he found a library card, and a phone card good for calls to anywhere in the world.

And then came the pictures.

They’d broken up after the failed wedding, although he’d felt them fumbling their way back into each other’s lives even before their clumsy pre-Apocalypse sex in Buffy’s old house, which was finally -- like Anya -- too broken for him to save. They broke up.

He’d never realized that she still carried pictures of him in her wallet.

How much else didn’t he know?

*

Andrew woke disoriented, unable to shake the feeling that he wasn’t alone in the room. He slid out of the bed, scrubbing at the back of his eyes with one hand, and moved to get a stale doughnut from the box on the bedside table. Bread products soothed his stomach. Maybe he could get some more sleep.

“I hope you’re intending to brush your teeth after eating that. Cavities are nothing to sneeze at, especially given that unemployed former supervillains rarely have dental insurance. Besides which, if you did have insurance, it would probably only cover Sunnydale dentists, and most of them aren’t currently taking appointments.”

Andrew froze with the doughnut halfway to his mouth, then turned slowly to face Anya, who was sitting in the easy chair, dubiously eyeing the box of Safeway-brand triple chocolate cookies on the windowsill.

“You can’t be here,” he said. “You’re dead.”

“The second is accurate; the first is not, obviously, since I’m here,” Anya replied. “If I couldn’t be here, I wouldn’t be here, and you wouldn’t be telling me that I couldn’t be here. Try thinking things through before you speak. It’ll make this much more pleasant.”

“I’m dreaming,” he said, sitting down on the bed and taking a bite of the doughnut. It tasted like sawdust and old sugar. “This is just a really realistic dream.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full, it’s disgusting,” said Anya, wrinkling her nose.

“Sorry,” said Andrew, swallowing. “It’s just that I don’t normally dream of you being in my motel room. Hi, Anya. Can we have this dream somewhere better? Like -- oooh! Can we have it in the X-Mansion? That would be cool.”

“No, because you’re not dreaming. Believe me, Andrew, this isn’t my first choice for venue either. I would much prefer a location with actual charm and character. Not to mention hygiene. Unfortunately, one works with what one has. And what I have is you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you saw me die, and hence -- thanks to the annoying and illogical rules that seem to govern the interaction of the spirit world and the world of the living -- you’re the only one that can currently see me.” Anya shrugged. “So here we are.”

“But...why are you here? If this isn’t a dream, I mean.”

“Well, I needed to ask whether you would consider having sexual relations with Xander.”

*

Pictures. So many pictures. Him in his swim trunks on the beach. The two of them together at the Prom. Him, sleeping -- and he remembered that day, remembered her waking him to announce proudly that she’d loaded the camera all by herself, remembered the sex that came after, hot and bright as a shooting star in the midnight sky. Pictures of a life that wasn’t his anymore, and wasn’t ever going to be his again.

“Oh, Ahn,” he whispered, and opened the last flap, the coin purse. He shook it over his open hand, but the expected coins didn’t fall out. All that came was a golden ring with a small diamond set in the top, and a folded piece of paper.

Xander stared at Anya’s engagement ring, so small and bright in his palm, for a long time before he unfolded the note, and read.

Xander:

In this one pointless gesture I feel I have reclaimed yet another useless portion of my humanity. But I’m scared, and this is the only thing I can think of to do.

When we split up, I kept the engagement ring, claiming it represented a financial pledge on your part and that its retention was a part of your punishment for breaking our contract. That was only halfway true. I kept it also because every time I lose my jewelry, it’s bad. I lost my necklace and became human; that led me to you, but it also ended my life. If I lost the ring, there was no telling what might happen.

But I gave up my humanity without losing it. So I suppose it was a pointless gesture all along.

Xander, the odds are very good that one or both of us will die today. If it’s you, I would rather you have my ring to remember me by in whatever afterlife your actions have earned. If it’s me...I finally understand selfishness. I’m selfish. When this is done, I want you to remember me.

I love you.

Anya.

He stared at the note for a very long time before he realized that it was so hard to see because he was crying. Then he folded the paper carefully, to keep his tears from smudging the ink, and slipped it back into the wallet along with Anya’s pictures and credit cards and ancient receipts.

The nylon still smelled like her.

Clutching the engagement ring in one hand and the wallet in the other, Xander curled up on the bed, and wept.

*

Andrew choked on his doughnut.

“You want me to what?!” he demanded.

“Have sexual relations with Xander. Really, it should prove enjoyable for all parties concerned, if done properly.”

“But he’s -- he’s -- Xander’s a guy!”

“And?”

“And I’m a guy!

“I fail to see the problem.”

“Guys don’t have sex with guys!”

“Andrew...it seems utterly ludicrous that I should be the one informing you of this, but you’re gay,” Anya said, folding her arms across her chest. “By definition, this means that you have sex with other males. At least potentially. I’m fairly sure you haven’t, as yet.”

“I am not gay!” Andrew protested.

Anya sighed petulantly. Then she sighed again, irritated by the way that her lack of actual breath sapped the force from her expression of annoyance. “Andrew, entertaining though it has always been to watch you denying your sexual drives, this is not the time. I am dead, and you are gay. Neither one was exactly voluntary, and neither one is exactly curable. Can we move on?”

“No, because you’re wrong. I’m not gay. Really.”

“All right, fine. We’re going to run a sexual simulation, then. Picture Buffy--”

“Do I have to?”

Anya raised an eyebrow. “Not attracted to blondes? Fine. Picture me, naked in your bed, a sheet draped languidly over my hip--”

“I thought you said you were naked.”

“Naked and a sheet. May I continue?”

“All right.”

“Thank you. Ahem: picture me, naked in your bed except for the sheet draped languidly over my hip, one hand playing across my thighs, teasing myself for your pleasure, nipples erect and rigid with anticipation of erotic satisfaction.”

Andrew’s brow scrunched with the effort of picturing that accurately. Finally, he said, “All right: I’ve got it.”

“Good. Now. Picture Xander naked in your bed, save for that same sheet draped languidly over his hip. One hand is massaging his highly attractive and erect penis, pulling the skin up towards the glans, then--”

“Stop!” Andrew put his hands up. “All right. I give in. All right. I’m gay. Why do you need me to admit that? Are you...are you gay too, and you’ve come to reveal your shameful secret from beyond the grave?”

“Oh, please. That’s Willow’s job. I am -- or was, anyway -- on a strictly heterosexual timetable, one which would lead to agreement to sex with other women only if something large, such as a new car or a trip to the Bahamas, was involved.”

“So why are you here? Are you my guardian angel or something? Like Apparition was for Ultra Boy when she was discorporate and couldn’t appear to anyone else?”

Anya didn’t understand a word of that, and so she cheerfully ignored it, saying, “Oh, I have very directed reasons for forcing you to confront your sexual identity.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she said, smiling brilliantly, “I need you to help me seduce Xander.”

*

Anya’s plan was simple, even logical, if you happened to be insane. She was still present on the corporeal plane because -- in part -- Xander wasn’t willing to let her go. So they would have one last explosively grand sexual encounter, and then he would be willing to forsake her memory and permit her to move on to the great beyond. Whatever that might be.

“I’m hoping for Heaven,” she’d said, “but I’ll settle for Purgatory; I understand it has a decent mall, and tolerable cable television.”

“He’s not going to have sex with me, Anya.”

“Why not? You want to, I want to, he’ll agree.”

“But--”

“It’s very simple. We’ll go to his room, you’ll explain that I’m present and participating as much as possible, and sexual escapades will follow.”

“Anya...”

“Are you in the mood for a haunting? Because one could easily be arranged right now. I have access to at least one hugely irritated ghost.”

“Really? Who?”

Anya glared at him. “Me.”

Andrew grabbed his pants and pulled them on as he headed for the door.

*

It took five minutes of knocking before Xander answered his door. He looked like hell; hung-over and bleary eyed, with tearstains on his cheeks. He was wearing boxer shorts and nothing else.

The boxer shorts had little hearts with bat-wings on them.

This struck Andrew as terribly important.

“What do you want, Andrew?” Xander snarled.

“Tell him you wish to have sex,” Anya commanded.

“I...we need to talk,” Andrew said.

“I don’t want to talk right now, Andrew. Can it wait?”

“Not really.” Andrew cast an anxious glance towards the empty air that was Anya, then looked back to Xander. “Can I please come in?”

“You can’t stay,” Xander said, and turned to stride inside.

Andrew heaved a heavy sigh of relief and followed him.

The motel room looked just like Andrew’s own, save for a few different choices in the snack department.

“What is it?” Xander asked, turning to face him again.

“I...” Your dead girlfriend says I’m gay and I think she’s right and I’m sorry I got her killed will you have sex with me? “This is a nice room.”

“Don’t compliment the room. It’s a horrible room. Xander knows that,” Anya said crossly.

“It’s a horrible room,” said Xander.

Anya nodded. “See?”

“It’s just like, uh, mine. It’s like in X-Factor when the headquarters was destroyed by Apocalypse’s ship and...”

“Andrew. Point. Do you have one?”

Andrew stared. “I, uh...Anya.”

Xander’s eyes narrowed. “Anya what?”

“Now you’re just making him angry!” Anya said, shoving Andrew’s shoulder from behind. Her arm slid smoothly into his, which rose slightly. Her eyes widened. “Oh. This is new.”

“Anya -- Anya, don’t even think it,” Andrew said hurriedly, half-turning. “It’s not a good ide--” He stopped mid-word as Anya stepped fully into his skin, vanishing into him. He was still there, but distanced, unable to move or speak, or even protest as Anya turned his head back towards Xander.

“Andrew, have you gone nuts?” Xander asked. “Because I really don’t have the patience right now. I--”

“Hello, Xander,” said Anya. Andrew’s voice was still male, but her intonations were completely different, twisting the words into new shapes.

Xander had been there when Faith and Buffy switched bodies. He froze, eyes going wide. “Anya?”

Andrew’s mouth smiled. “Absolutely.”

“Prove it.”

“Following my discovery of sushi, I purchased a container of sushi rice and packed it around your--”

“Anya,” Xander breathed, and a bare moment later he was gathering Andrew into his arms, ignoring the shape of the person he was holding in favor of the spirit within. Anya returned the kiss with equal passion -- at least until she slid back out of Andrew’s body, leaving him in Xander’s arms.

“There,” she said. “That seems like an excellent start.”

The kiss lasted another thirty seconds before Xander pulled away, and frowned. “You’re Andrew again,” he said, sharply.

“She was possessing me, but it makes her tired,” Andrew said quickly, fully aware of the pressure of Xander’s hips against his own. “She wants me to seduce you so you’ll let her go. She says to tell you she can give me directions and step in and it’s okay because I’m gay and I don’t think I was supposed to say that part but anyway you always wanted a threesome and...”

“And this is what Anya wants,” Xander finished, looking past Andrew to the air. He was looking at the wrong spot, but Andrew felt somehow that it might not be a good idea to correct him. “I miss you, Ahn.”

“I miss you too,” she said. “Death is very boring.”

“She misses you,” Andrew said.

“I found your ring.”

“Oh, good. Please do not give it to whatever trollop you replace me with.”

“She’s glad,” said Andrew.

“I love you.”

“This is very sweet, but someone should be performing acts of oral sex by now.”

“I can’t say that!”

“She wants oral, doesn’t she?” asked Xander. Andrew stared at him, and he shrugged. “I know Anya. Even dead, I know Anya.”

“I...see,” said Andrew, weakly.

Xander quirked a small smile, and moved to sit on the edge of the bed. “Come on, Andrew. Let’s give my girl a floorshow.”

Anya clapped her hands.

Andrew sat.