Fred/Anya: Could Times Infinity Plus One

[doyle]

After a week spent going 'I will do Fred/Anya without making it afterlife fic' I realised I was going to have to either make it pre-series (and I couldn't get a good enough handle on Anyanka) or go AU. In the end I said sod it and went with afterlife and weirdness.

I'm so glad this is done, I desperately need to do yuletide and 3ships. Not to mention femslash_santa and dw_santa.

Title: Could Times Infinity Plus One
Author: Doyle
Fandom: Buffy/AtS
Pairing: Anya/Fred
Rating: R
Notes: For femslash_minis for cybedahl who wanted a monster truck, no men and no angst.
Summary: Anya wants what she can't have. Fred might not exist.

She was standing over a sarcophagus in her lab, and then for a while she just drifted, existing simultaneously as a wave and a particle; when she pulled herself out of quantum uncertainty long enough to think it over she was pretty sure that some time between she'd died. For a second that scared her, like she could feel the earth pressing down on her (would they bury her or burn her? Send her home or keep her in LA? And had it hurt and oh, Wesley, poor Wesley, and Charles, and her parents would be waiting for her to call and she could never call again) and then -

then it was too much and she was floating again / for the first time / she was nowhere / she had never existed anywhere but here

and when she got tired of duality she tried being a sound wave, and then a thought

and for the longest time she only existed in sentences of exactly fourteen words

and she (if she could call herself a she any more) found that oblivion was pretty nice, like being a kid in a thunderstorm again, making a fort out of the blankets, except she'd never been scared of thunder, she'd just wanted to know how it worked and she'd sat under the window counting lightning onetwothreefourfivesix thunder and felt the thrill of the magic, the connection between the seconds and the distance of the storm -

And after that she tried being Fred Burkle again, with bones and blood and air in her lungs, and she lay on the grass and looked up at the perfect, perfect sky and tested how long she could think about nothing. A fluffy cloud in the shape of a bunny rolled by, the ears drifting away in opposite directions.

Then someone leaned over her and said, "Who are you?" and Fred realised she was in somebody else's afterlife.

**

Anya had been some kind of demon, or some kind of saint, maybe both together - she didn't tell Fred this, but she knew it anyway, like she knew how her hair wasn't really that colour and her name was Anya and Anyanka and Aud - and now she was dead, and she was bored.

"I thought it would be fun to have everything I wanted." Anya yanked a perfect blade of grass out of the ground and glared at it. "Who wouldn't want to have things they wanted? That's just crazy. But I mean, you could say 'hey, I'd like a palace made of diamonds' and there you are, twenty-four carat with eighty master bedrooms and a unicorn stable. Except maybe you didn't really want a diamond palace, you just wanted to want one, and what's the point of a world where you can just have things?"

Fred nodded her head real slow, worried her body wasn't all the way stuck together yet. Being human-shaped was a lot of work. People forgot that. But she got what Anya was saying, or she thought she did: "It's too easy?"

"It's too easy," Anya complained. "Don't get me wrong, I love my monkey Icecapades, and my trucks." She pointed across the grass at the rows and rows of pristine classic cars, and the two monster trucks that were crushing them beneath their wheels. The bigger truck belched a sheet of fire, and Anya sighed. "I just miss my store. The thrill of commerce. I could have one here but it wouldn't be the same."

"'Cause you don't need money for anything anyway."

Anya looked up and yelled, "Does no-one see the flaws in this system?"

"I like your trucks." Fred pulled a daisy out of the ground and knew, even before she started pulling off the petals, that it would end of He Loves Me. "When I was fifteen me and Matty - my friend Matty, from home - we'd try and get high from the fumes after the truck shows at the motorcade."

"Xander took me to a show. He said it was an important part of human culture. I liked the giant beverages, and the hands made of foam."

The last petal said he loved her, whoever he was. He might be a she. Fred rolled onto her stomach so she was right by Anya's side, close enough to whisper in her ear like she was telling a secret: "Hey. You know the one thing you can't have, here, even if you want it? Me."

"Could."

"Could not."

"Could."

"Not."

"Could times infinity."

This was where she was supposed to say could not times infinity plus one, only she couldn't make herself because that made no sense, and while she was wrestling with the math Anya pouted and clamped her chin in one hand and kissed her.

**

And she could have changed, made herself into the air and flown away, or turned up her sensitivity so she'd feel it through every cell when Anya kissed down her body, slow enough to remind her they had all the time in all the worlds, slow enough to make her wriggle and tease her fingers in Anya's hair and wish for her to just hurry, lower, hurry, and Anya lifted her head and smiled because now who wanted what they couldn't have? But she stayed herself, stayed Fred Burkle even when Anya crooked her fingers inside her just right and she arched back her head, dug her heels and nails into the earth.

Later, breathless, she said "So if you did want me and you got me… isn't that bad?"

Anya shrugged her shoulders and nipped Fred's lower lip. "Probably. But I still win."

They lay together on the grass, Anya's trucks a tuba-band-jet-engine roar in the distance, Fred's supernovae pinwheeling in the dark sky like the biggest fireworks display in the universe.

"I think I'll be lightning next," Fred whispered. "I think I always wanted to be the lightning."

"Oh." She couldn't see Anya's face but she could feel her frowning in the dark. "I've never wanted to be a manifestation of weather. Most people want to be famous, or President, or win on Who Wants to be a Millionaire."

Fred laced their fingers together. "You could stay here and have everything you do want. Diamond castles and a big tower of money to swim in." She didn’t say 'or you could come with me'. She tried not to cheat and wish it, in case that made it come true.

Anya was quiet for a second, a million years, an eternity. It was all relative, all the same.

"You're puzzling and off-putting," she finally said. "And you enjoy strange things."

It sounded enough like a yes. Fred giggled. "Race you to the end of the world?"

And Anya was already off and running / flying / just-being, all at the speed of light, and Fred had to break all sorts of laws of physics to catch up to her, but she figured she was probably worth it.

Comments

[tinpanalley.livejournal.com]

LOVED this so much! Just...wow...your ideas always amaze me!