From the mouths of centuries-old babes, he thought. Still, he knew that at heart she was actually quite accurately diagnosing a persistent issue in both of their lives... just with slightly different shapes and executions. Stephen at times felt like the Sanctum and his phone were grand-central station for every hero, demi-hero, and Village grandma that needed something witchy done.
But the silence, the dead, echoing silence when he wasn’t being bothered, was somehow always worse.
“Maybe,” he granted. Folding his book closed, he wandered over to the couches assembled around the hearth, sitting down on his usual armchair. “But whenever I think that, i have to remind myself that I’m rather a stodgy old bat to begin with, and that I shouldn’t look gift company in the mouth. What about you? Who has been speaking over you of late to have you so irritated about this particular issue?”
“It’s too fast,” Anya --well, she was Anyanka again, now wasn’t she?-- sighed. Usually she’d be too scared to voice such a thing aloud. This place, though. It was so still, seemingly warded from the outside world. Each and every one of them. “I think maybe I’m out of practice.”
She paced, chewing the very tip of her thumb anxiously. Anya didn’t remember this being so difficult. It certainly wasn’t brain surgery. Woman wronged, wish made, punishment enacted, wash, rinse, repeat, ad nauseum. In fact she was having trouble remembering how much fun she used to have. These days it just felt as though she were constantly trying to meet her quota.
“I...It’s not like I can’t do it,"Anya insisted, sounding for all the world like she was trying to convince herself of than anyone else. “It’s just...I dunno. Maybe I was human for too long.”
Oh, she could practically hear D’Hoffryn scoffing at such a excuse. She’d been human for only a few years, hardly any time at all. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t lived as a human before, even when she’d been a demon the first time around. All those times had only even been cover for her work as a vengeance demon, however. Living truly as a human, if only for that brief time, had changed something in her. Ugh, it was probably something stupid she’d done, like make friends and fall in love.