Venita seated herself beside her, setting her drink down on the bar. Oh— I spoke to your little ex-boyfriend too. Accidentally, but he figured out the nature of my work. Anya didn't try to hide her frown. Venita had… met Xander? Already? Did that mean that she knew about her connection to the Scoobies? And in that case, was D'Hoffryn already aware?As she listened to Venita go on, she realised one thing: every word mattered. They'd laughed, they'd cried, they'd murdered in hot blood together, but that didn't mean she didn't have to be careful around her old friend. Conversely, her reappearance could mean all manner of things for her reputation with vengeance demons or the Scoobies.
"Yep," Anya replied in a way she thought was non-committal, instead coming across as more than a little shifty. "Ex-boyfriend. That's him. Xander. The boyfriend I used to have." It wasn't really a lie, was it? They had a second date coming up, but that didn't make them dating. That made them people who were going on dates in the present tense. Still, Venita didn't have to know even that.
Guess I'll have to work on my discretion a bit, but… I just never saw you as the human-boy-loving type. You've changed over the years.
To this, Anya simply shrugged. She hadn't seen herself as the human-boy-loving type either — not since the last human boy she'd loved had cheated on her with a load-bearing matron and forced her to turn him into a troll, anyway — but that was life, she guessed. Of course she'd changed. How could she not have? And yet, looking back, she'd changed more over the past decade than she had in the few centuries preceding it. Sunnydale, and its inhabitants, had been different. Some people were doomed to waltz into your life and change it, even if they disappeared afterwards; Anya wasn't sure whether fate had sent her to Sunnydale to be that person or meet those people, but regardless, death had been cheated and little disappearing had happened at all by the end of it, and here she was. How to put that into words without sounding like the biggest traitor?
I hope living with humans for so long didn't make you go all soft. Hallie told me a little bit before she passed about what you'd been up to before your untimely deaths. Deaths. As in, plural of death. That was right — she'd been just as dead as Hallie to the others for a year. It was still an abstract thing to consider. Before her death, she'd been Anyanka the Soft-Serve, and then completely AWOL to the vengeance world. I'd love to hear what I'm sure are some tactful, vengeful, and gruesome wishes you've been dishing out recently. Renewed chance at life, a fresh start — you've got to have something good to share.
"Oh, yes," Anya smiled a little more genuinely this time. "I've been indirectly flaying people in hell and turning them into household objects and benign sporting goods like nobody's business. You're right about this town being completely terrible, but it's a goldmine for business. As you've probably figured out by now." Her eyes flickered around the bar. Wronged men… Venita had a sense for them, and from the looks of things, there were plenty in this very bar. At least they wouldn't be in direct competition. They'd be exploiting Cleveland's demographics to their fullest.
"They're creative, too. This town has some artists. I mean, you can bend a simple wish to make it interesting, but there's nothing like a wish that's ridiculously zany to begin with, like, like— giving someone kidney stones made of salamanders, or urges to frequent shrimp buffets until they pass out." She stopped, reining in her enthusiasm before it got the best of her. A woman beside her was already looking substantially weirded out — had she raised her voice that high? "Art movie," she assured her, nodding in an uneasy smile that was meant to be reassuring. "We're making an art movie. We're going for Sundance this year."
She turned back to Venita, satisfied. "I don't know what Hallie told you, but you probably thought I completely flaked out on the business. It wasn't like that at all. There was this whole… apocalypse thing, and priorities shifted. There were some humans I ended working alongside — D'Hoffryn might've mentioned them — and my hands were tied. Metaphorically. They didn't… tie me up, ever. Which was good."
