Chapter Text
It can be the hardest thing to realize you can’t hold on to something forever.
Sometimes, you have to let it go.
But of the things you let go, you’d be surprised what makes its way back to you…
It took Sasha several minutes to find an open space in the parking lot of Thai Go, which was a much bigger, more higher-end establishment than it was when she went to middle school with Anne.
“This is your parents’ restaurant now?” said Marcy with wide eyes.
Anne smiled awkwardly and rubbed her arm.
“Yeah,” she said. “We got a lot busier after the invasion, so we moved here and, as you see, business is still booming.”
“That’s great!” said Marcy. “I’m so happy for you!”
“We better get in there now before they run out of tables,” said Sasha.
“They’re never not out of tables,” said Anne. “Are you sure you want to come here? There are other, way cheaper places we can eat at.”
Sasha laughed.
“I’m sure your parents will be glad to foot the bill,” she said. “Just like when we were kids!”
“We aren’t kids anymore,” muttered Anne.
“Come on!” said Marcy. “I haven’t had genuine Thai food in over ten years! There were options in Seattle, but...it wasn’t the same.”
“I’m sure you’re happy to be out of that shitty Seattle weather and back in sunny Los Angeles!” said Sasha.
“Yeah,” said Marcy. “There’s a lot I missed about this city...you two more than anything else.”
The three of them were quiet for a moment before getting out of Sasha’s car and heading towards the entrance of the restaurant. It had just stopped raining, so the pavement they were on was slippery, and there were worms and other small creatures around them. One creature, a gray chorus frog, startled Marcy, and without thinking, she stepped on it.
“What the hell, Marcy?” said a shocked Anne.
“I-I’m sorry,” said Marcy. “I really am. I don’t know what came over me.”
Marcy lifted her foot to reveal the dead frog underneath it. Anne had to keep herself from crying as she stared at it.
“Hey,” said Sasha. “It’s fine. We’re fine. So let’s...just keep moving.”
Anne nodded.
“Right,” she said.
Marcy tried to put a hand on Anne’s shoulder to comfort her, but Anne sped up, not looking in Marcy’s direction once as they approached the entrance. Once they were inside, they found the host for Thai Go sitting at his desk and scrolling on his phone.
“Do you have a reservation?” said the host without looking up.
Anne cleared her throat. When the host finally raised his head, he gasped.
“Oh, my God!” said the host. “I’m so, so sorry! I’ll get you and your friends a table, pronto!”
The host ran into the dining area, grabbed three to-go containers, and threw them on the closest table.
“Get your food and get the fuck out!” said the host. “Anne Boonchuy’s here!”
“We’re getting kicked out for Anne Boonchuy?” said one of the people at the table. “What an honor!”
After the patrons were escorted out, Anne, Sasha, and Marcy were led to their table.
“You server will be here shortly,” said the host, using a napkin to dry his forehead, which was now drenched in sweat.
“Thank you,” said Anne.
The host took a deep breath and returned to his desk.
“So...what have you been up to since we last saw each other?” asked Marcy.
Anne looked away, signaling she wasn’t ready to speak to Marcy yet. Sasha kicked Anne under the table.
“Ow!” shrieked Anne.
“Sorry, my shoe slipped,” said Sasha in a tone that made it clear she was being facetious.
Anne sighed.
“After middle school, I kinda just did my own thing,” she said. “I played tennis for a few more years, but I wasn’t nearly as good at it as Sasha was at softball.”
“Softball? You didn’t tell me you did that!” said Marcy.
“Yeah, I was a pretty good pitcher,” said Sasha. “Good enough to get me a full ride to UCLA, at least.”
A waitress appeared at their table.
“Can I get you three anything to drink?” asked the waitress.
“Wine, please,” said Sasha.
“Water,” said Marcy.
“Sprite,” said Anne.
The waitress recorded what they wanted in a tablet then left the three of them menus.
“I’ll be back,” she said before walking away.
“I can’t believe you were a softball star and I didn’t know!” said Marcy.
“You have us on Instagram, don’t you?” said Sasha. “I posted to there all the time while I was playing.”
“Yeah, but I never really checked it,” said Marcy. “I’m not the most social person, so social media…didn’t have the same appeal for me it has for you two.”
“No, I understand,” said Sasha. “Instagram is pretty lame. Since I hurt my shoulder junior year of college and had to end my softball career early, I’ve barely checked it myself.”
“Anne, are you okay?” asked Marcy, who noticed Anne watching the door the servers were going in and out of.
“Y-yeah,” said Anne.
“So, tell us about that new exhibit at the aquarium!” said Sasha.
Anne shrugged.
“I got my job at the Aquarium of the Pacific after graduating from community college last year,” said Anne. “And since my boss knew I was interested in herpetology…”
“Herpetology?” echoed Sasha.
“The study of reptiles and amphibians,” explained Marcy.
Anne laughed.
“Yeah, that,” she said. “So my boss let me design a new exhibit for them focused on amphibians, and it’s the most fun I’ve had since...well, since…”
The waitress brought Anne, Sasha, and Marcy their drinks.
“Are you ready to order now?” asked the waitress.
“Shit, I haven’t even looked at the menu yet,” said Sasha.
“Same,” said Marcy.
“We’ll need more time,” said Anne.
The waitress left as the trio drank from their cups and read the menu. Anne glanced at the door the waitress went into, and she saw her parents come out from that same door moments later.
“Fuck,” muttered Anne.
Mr. Boonchuy, also known as Bee, approached Anne’s table with Mrs. Boonchuy, known to the Thai community as Oum.
“Anne?” said Oum. “Why didn’t you tell us you were coming? We would have gotten a table reserved for you and...oh, my goodness! Sasha? Marcy?”
Sasha and Marcy waved at Bee and Oum as Anne, aware of the people at other tables who were now watching them, hid her face behind her menu.
“I almost didn’t recognize you two!” said Oum. “Look at how big they’ve gotten, Bee!”
Bee laughed.
“Come on, honey. Don’t you see we’re embarrassing Anne?” he said.
“She should be embarrassed!” said Oum. “Hardly calls us anymore! I had to learn about that new exhibit of hers from a friend at Thai Temple!”
“I’m sorry, mom,” said Anne. “I was going to invite you…”
“No need!” said Oum. “We are very busy! Talking with lawyer about opening a second Thai Go location! A Thai Go 2! Can you believe it?”
“No, I can’t believe it at all,” said Anne without any enthusiasm.
Oum scoffed.
“Your generation knows nothing about building things! Bee and I, we started from nothing, and now we have the most popular Thai restaurant in Los Angeles!” she said.
“And we better be getting back into the kitchen,” said Bee. “Nice seeing you again, girls.”
“Bye, Mrs. Boonchuy! Bye, Mr. Boonchuy!” said Marcy as she waved at them.
The Boonchuys waved back as they returned to the kitchen. Anne breathed a sigh of relief.
“Thank God that’s over,” she said.
“Your parents seem so cool from everything I’ve read about them, especially during the invasion!” said Marcy.
“They’re my parents. To me, they’ll never be cool,” said Anne, taking another sip of her Sprite.
The waitress returned a minute later, and Anne, Sasha, and Marcy gave her their orders.
“I am really sorry about what happened back there,” said Marcy.
“Don’t worry about it!” said Anne. “Water under the bridge.”
“It’s just...I’ve been having these dreams, but the dreams aren’t my own,” said Marcy. “They’re from a different world...that world.”
“You mean Amphibia?” whispered Anne.
“Yeah,” said Marcy. “But it isn’t the Amphibia we remember. It’s a different Amphibia, a more technologically advanced Amphibia. I think they’re memories from before the box got stolen.”
“How is that possible?” asked Sasha.
“I think...part of the Core is still inside me,” said Marcy.
Anne noticed Marcy’s hands shaking as she finished her cup of water. Neither she nor Sasha could find the words to express everything they were feeling, so they waited for Marcy to speak again.
“I wasn’t able to make any new friends while I was in Seattle,” Marcy finally said after a long, long pause. “It’s hard enough making friends already without worrying they’ll be ripped away from me the way you two were.”
“Are things good with you and your parents?” asked Sasha.
“Oh, yeah! They are now, anyway. They weren’t for the longest time. I didn’t talk to either of them for months after we moved, and I still don’t know if I’ve completely forgiven them, but yeah. Yeah, I would say we’re good.”
Sasha’s phone rang. She took the phone out of her purse and rolled her eyes.
“Ugh,” said Sasha. “Speaking of family problems, it’s my brother. What an asshole. You two are lucky to be only children.”
“Was the falling out between you two after the divorce that bad?” wondered Anne.
“You don’t know the half of it,” said Sasha, clicking the red X on her screen to refuse the call.
“You could give me the half of it.”
Sasha’s eyes widened.
“Uh, maybe later,” she said.
“I still have dreams, too,” said Anne after another long pause. “Dreams about Sprig, Polly, Hop Pop...I wonder how they’re doing now.”
The waitress returned with their food, and after they finished eating, Sasha requested the check.
“Oh, you don’t have to pay for us!” said Marcy.
“I make more than both of you do, so it’s only fair,” said Sasha.
“Once I get my Ph.D in Physics next year, that will change fast!”
Sasha laughed.
“Yeah, probably,” she said.
Oum Boonchuy returned to their table.
“Don’t you worry about the food,” she said. “It’s on the house. And Anne...it’s nice to see you again.”
Anne smiled.
“Make sure to leave your waitress a big tip!” Oum said as she returned to the kitchen.
“So, it’s getting pretty late,” said Sasha. “We’ve gotten our photo taken, watched a movie, gotten fed by Anne’s beautiful mother…”
“Jesus Christ, Sasha,” said Anne, blushing.
“I’m just saying! I hope I look that good at 55,” said Sasha.
“Let’s go before Sasha proposes to your mom,” Marcy said to Anne, giggling.
They each left a tip on the table before leaving. Once they were all in Sasha’s car, they headed to the hotel Marcy was staying at, continuing to chat about their experiences during the ten years they were apart.
“Do you ever think about it?” Anne said quietly as they neared the hotel.
“Think about what?” asked Sasha.
“Going back.”
“Going where?” asked Marcy.
“You know...Amphibia,” responded Anne.
“I...uh...I have to get up early for the flight back to Seattle, so it was great seeing you two again! I had a lot of fun,” said Marcy.
“Don’t take ten years to visit us again,” said Sasha.
“I won’t! I promise!” said Marcy, grabbing her suitcase with one hand and opening the door with the other.
Sasha got out of the car and hugged Marcy. Anne hesitated for a moment before doing the same, not acknowledging the fact that Marcy avoided her question. Before going into the hotel, Marcy turned around and waved at Anne and Sasha. Anne remembered that moment ten years ago, her in a car with her parents and Sasha in a car with her mother as Marcy waved at them, just like she was doing now. As their cars sat in the driveway of Marcy’s house, which wouldn’t be Marcy’s house much longer, Anne and Sasha looked at one another, and it was clear they were both thinking the same thing. They both got out of their cars and ran to Marcy, hugging her even more tightly than they did when they were saying goodbye to her moments earlier.
“Hey,” Anne remembered Sasha saying as she wiped the tears from Marcy’s face. “It’s not over for us. Not even close. We’ve been through too much together. We’ll see each other again, just wait.”
“Yeah,” Anne remembered as Marcy’s response. “I’ll visit you every summer. I promise!”
“Come on, Marcy,” Anne remembered Mr. Wu saying from inside the car. “We have to beat traffic.”
Though Marcy’s father spoke as gently as he could, Anne could still feel Marcy’s body tense up right before she and Sasha let go of her. Marcy looked down and went into the car with her parents. Anne and Sasha stood in the middle of the driveway as Marcy watched them with tears in her eyes from the back window. The car turned onto another road, taking Marcy out of view, and Anne and Sasha returned to their parents’ cars, unaware that this would be the last time that they would see Marcy for ten years.
Anne and Sasha called Marcy often during eighth grade, much of which was spent making up for the work they missed during seventh grade, but in the following years, the calls were less frequent, and eventually, they stopped. Marcy had never been able to visit Los Angeles during the summers she was off, either, as both of her parents had jobs that made it difficult for them to take time off, and they preferred she try harder to make new friends in Seattle. Marcy still occasionally texted Anne and Sasha, but the tenth anniversary of Andrias’ invasion of Earth, a day now known as American Resilience Day thanks to a law signed by President X the week before, gave Sasha an opportunity to reach out to Marcy and set up the trio’s reunion.
“Hey,” said Sasha. “You okay?”
Anne was lost in thought, looking out the window as Sasha drove her to her studio apartment.
“Yeah,” replied Anne. “Seeing Marcy again just felt more...weird than I expected it to.”
“Anytime you meet somebody for the first time in a decade, you’ll feel that way,” said Sasha.
“Are you saying that as my friend or my psychologist?” asked Anne.
“Well, you aren’t paying me, so it must be as your friend.”
Anne laughed.
“When she stepped on that frog, though...I don’t know, maybe I overreacted, but she was the one who brought us to Amphibia, and now it’s like she doesn’t even want to think about it anymore,” said Anne.
“Well, yeah,” said Sasha. “She went through some traumatic shit. And in case you forgot, there’s still a bit of Amphibia in her she definitely doesn’t want.”
Anne turned from the window to face Sasha as they stopped at a traffic light.
“Why would she tell us that?” said Anne. “About the Core? She must have known we wouldn’t like it.”
“She’s been holding it in for ten years,” said Sasha. “I think she felt she had to tell someone.”
“Tonight was a hell of a time to do it, though,” said Anne.
“Sometimes...when you don’t know how to say something...sometimes, you just have to say it.”
Anne noticed tears forming in Sasha’s eyes.
“Sasha,” said Anne. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
A car behind them honked its horn, and Sasha noticed the light was now green.
“Shit!” she said before taking her foot off the brake and slamming it on the pedal.
They got to Anne’s apartment minutes later. They hugged each other, and as Anne opened the door, Sasha pointed to the gift-wrapped box she left in the backseat of her car.
“Don’t forget the present I got you for American Resilience Day,” said Sasha with a laugh.
“Oh, right. I’m not even sure why you bothered,” said Anne.
“You had more to do with saving the world that day than the American military, even if that’s not the line they feed us.”
“What about you? If you hadn’t stopped Darcy, nothing I did would have mattered.”
“Trust me, I haven’t forgotten. I still have the scars to prove it.”
Anne looked down. She still had the door open, but she didn’t feel ready to leave the car just yet.
“The scar I left on your cheek…” said Anne.
“You want to know why I don’t hide it with makeup? Why I’ve never even tried to? I was wondering when you would ask me that,” said Sasha.
Sasha turned her rearview mirror to get a better look at her face.
“It reminds me of who I used to be, and who I can never be again,” she said.
Anne nodded. She finally left the car, took the present Sasha left her from the backseat, and went into her apartment. When she opened the present, she found a small cassette player inside with a tape already inside it.
“They still make these?” Anne said to herself.
She pressed the Play button on the cassette player and immediately recognized the music coming out of it.
“Took a leap through a box, super weird, to a swamp where frogs talk...” Anne heard herself sing on the tape.
As Anne listened to this recording of No Big Deal, the memories of her doing the recording with Sasha and Marcy came flooding back to her. It was a couple of days before their emotional goodbye in Marcy’s driveway. Putting it all on a cassette tape was Sasha’s idea, because that made it feel more permanent, more special than a simple phone recording. They did it all in one take, but they didn’t get a single word or note wrong, as if it depended on their lives to get it perfect. After the near-death encounters each of them had in just the previous month, though, getting a song right was, by comparison, no big deal.
After the song ended, Anne rewound the tape, connected a pair of headphones to the cassette player, and listened to the song again in her bed as she fell asleep.
Notes:
This is the first fanfiction I'm writing that exists solely in the Amphibia canon. While I'm also writing a Gravity Falls fanfic that serves as a prequel to Amphibia, watching The Hardest Thing left me with so many ideas that I decided to just start a new fanfic with them. The idea of a story taking place ten years in the future was one I had even before I watched the final scene of Hardest Thing, as I was never comfortable shipping teenagers, and while I won't confirm or deny that shipping will eventually happen in this fanfic, it's way more likely than it would have been with a fanfic starring 13 year old girls.
Whether or not I even write more chapters of this fanfic depends on the response it gets. Right now, the plan is for there to be more chapters covering Earth as well as Amphibia ten years into the future, but I've written this chapter in a way that it can work as a one-off if there's not sufficient interest to keep it going. Definitely make sure to kudo this if you want more. I'm glad I was able to finish this either way, as it helped me cope with the ending of a show I didn't expect to love nearly as much as I ended up loving it, and it gave me a chance to think about the show, and particularly the relationship between Anne, Sasha, and Marcy, in a different light. Though much of this chapter is just them sitting at a table and talking, the revelations about each character at this time in their lives is something that I feel makes it exciting, and I hope my readers agree. Talk to you soon.
Chapter Text
Marcy woke up in her hotel room at around ten in the morning. If she planned to catch a flight back to Seattle, she would have had to have been at the airport hours before that, but she had no intention of returning to Seattle. She checked her phone and found many unanswered calls from her parents. She nearly dropped it as she put it back on the cabinet beside her with a hand that was still shaking.
Once again, Marcy had a dream about that technologically advanced Amphibia from centuries before she was born. She wished she knew what the dreams meant and how she could get rid of them. She hoped that once she got rid of them, she could get rid of something else she didn’t want.
Let me out, a voice told Marcy as she got out of bed. I know what you feel, and they are feelings only I can handle.
“No,” Marcy said to the voice only she could hear. “I’m not letting you out. Not again.”
Anne reached the Aquarium of the Pacific on her bicycle minutes before the start of her shift. Once she was inside, she was greeted by her boyfriend, Matt, who was holding a bouquet of flowers.
“Hey, baby!” said Matt. “Sorry I couldn’t be here for the opening of your exhibit yesterday.”
Anne blushed then looked down.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I was surprised by some other visitors yesterday, so it wasn’t even on my mind.”
Matt raised an eyebrow.
“Other visitors?” he said.
“Sasha and Marcy!” said Anne, laughing. “Who did you think?”
Matt shook his head.
“Nobody,” he said before giving Anne a quick kiss and giving her the flowers.
Anne’s boss, Elizabeth, passed them.
“Give the girl some room, Matt,” she said. “Her shift’s about to start.”
“If you want to see me again,” said Anne. “You’ll have to pay the aquarium’s entrance fee.”
“I already paid $30 for those flowers!” said Matt.
“Rules are rules,” said Elizabeth.
Matt grumbled and gave Elizabeth his credit card.
“I’ll be back with your receipt!” Elizabeth said before going into another room.
Anne gave Matt a kiss on the cheek.
“See you soon,” she said.
Anne hurried to her exhibit, and before she got there, she bumped into a young woman with black hair wearing a yellow hoodie, one of her coworkers, Chloe.
“Watch where you’re going, leaf-hair!” hissed Chloe.
Anne rolled her eyes.
“Hi, Chloe,” said Anne, ignoring the insult.
“Is that Matt?” said Chloe, noticing Anne’s boyfriend standing near the entrance.
Chloe waved at Matt excitedly, and Matt hesitated before waving back.
“You better before careful, Anne. A guy that good-looking must have tons of women in his DM’s,” said Chloe.
“I can think of one,” muttered Anne, trying her best to keep her emotions under control.
Elizabeth gave Matt his credit card and receipt, and Matt joined Anne on the way to her exhibit.
“What’s wrong, Anne? You seem pissed,” said Matt.
“It’s Chloe again,” said Anne. “I don’t know why she hates me so much. I’ve been nothing but nice to her.”
“Some people are like that,” said Matt. “No matter what you do, there’s no pleasing them.”
Anne chuckled.
“Like my mom,” she said. “After I graduated, she wanted me to work for her and my dad at Thai Go again, but I wanted to do something I would like. When I was a kid, I came here every time I was upset, usually when my mom and I got in a fight over grades or something else. There was lady here, the woman who ran the aquarium before Elizabeth, who would always let me in for free. Those were some of the best moments of my life.”
Anne and Matt reached Anne’s exhibit, which had a banner above it with the words “Get Lost in Amphibia!” on it. There were glass cages in different parts of the exhibit with various frogs, toads, and salamanders inside them. A cage containing a pink South American tree frog was the first one Anne brought Matt to.
“That’s Sprig. He’s my favorite little fella here,” she said.
“Wow,” said Matt, slightly uncomfortable. “You named him.”
Chloe brought Anne a jar with a grasshopper in it.
“Brought you lunch,” said Chloe.
“Thanks,” said Anne sarcastically.
Anne cracked open the door to Sprig’s cage then opened the jar before quickly putting the open end of the jar inside the cage. She shook the grasshopper into the cage, closed the cage, then closed the jar. She gave the jar back to Chloe, who left the exhibit with it. Anne turned back to the cage and watched as Sprig watched the grasshopper. Sprig extended his tongue to catch the grasshopper mid-hop and swallow it. Sprig then did a few hops of his own as Anne smiled.
“Man,” said Matt, smiling himself. “I wish you’d look at me the way you look at that frog.”
“It’s nothing,” said Anne. “He just reminds me of someone I knew really well.”
“I hope it wasn’t one of those frogs that tried to kill us all ten years ago.”
“No, he was actually a big reason we were able to stop them.”
Anne noticed families entering the exhibit, and she kissed Matt on the cheek again.
“Talk to you soon,” said Anne as she left to greet the families.
20 minutes later, she returned to the cage and found Sprig missing.
“Sprig?” said Anne, looking around the cage.
Anne saw that the door to the cage was open.
“No, no, no,” she said. “I remember closing it. I had to close it!”
Anne saw Elizabeth in the distance, and her boss waved at her. Anne waved back, and though she tried to look normal while doing it, she could tell Elizabeth knew something was up. She took her phone out of her purse and called Matt.
“What’s up?” asked Matt on the phone.
“Sprig’s gone!” whispered Anne.
“Sprig?”
“That frog I showed you! Fuck! If Elizabeth finds out about this, I’ll lose the exhibit!”
“You did close his cage, didn’t you?”
“Of course I closed it! I know I did!”
“Alright, alright, I believe you. Listen, I’m at the coldwater exhibit, so we can talk more there.”
“Thanks. And Matt?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Anne hung up and put her phone in her purse before shooing the families and school groups away from her exhibit and putting a Closed sign in front of it. She ran to the coldwater exhibit, where Matt was sitting at a table eating ice cream.
“Man, you guys sell the best ice cream in Los Angeles!” said Matt.
Anne glanced inside the glass cage beside them and found a sea sponge and starfish hiding from a large octopus swimming over them.
“Man, these displays are getting wilder,” she said. “Anyway, I have to find Sprig before my boss figures out what’s going on.”
“Do you know if there was a security camera around there you could look at footage from?” asked Matt.
“The security camera! Of course! I know someone who works in security who can show us the tape discreetly, too,” said Anne. “Come on!”
Anne grabbed Matt’s hand and ran to the security room with him. She chatted with one of the guards, and the guard looked through the videos on the large computer he sat in front of.
“This should be the one,” said the guard.
The guard opened the video, and it showed somebody in a yellow hoodie taking Sprig from his cage.
“It doesn’t show the face very well, but whoever was in that hoodie is your culprit,” said the guard.
“I know someone who wears a hoodie just like that,” said Anne. “Chloe!”
Anne stormed out of the security room, and Matt followed her.
“I should have known it was her,” said Anne. “She’s always hated me, ever since the first day I worked here!”
“I’m sure she has her reasons,” said Matt.
“I don’t care what her reasons are!” said Anne. “She went too far this time.”
Anne found Chloe in Elizabeth’s office.
“Anne? What do you want?” said Chloe.
“You know what I’m here for! Where’s Sprig?” said Anne.
“Sprig?”
“The pink South American tree frog! The one who’s missing from his cage!”
“You think I took him?”
“I know you did! It’s on tape! Who else would be caught dead in that ugly hoodie you’re wearing?”
Chloe opened her mouth in shock before closing it again and storming out of the room.
“Wow,” said Anne. “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen her speechless. No snide remark, nothing. Being found with blood on her hands must have been too much.”
“We should probably follow her to see if she’s okay,” said Matt.
“Are you crazy? I’m staying right here until Elizabeth returns! After she finds out what Chloe did, she’ll have to fire her.”
“But don’t you want to get Sprig back?”
“For all I know, Chloe stepped on him or fed him to one of our snakes.”
“No, she didn’t.”
Anne raised an eyebrow.
“How do you know?” she said.
Matt sighed before unlocking a zipper on his jacket and letting a pink frog jump out. Anne caught the frog and studied him carefully before looking up at an embarrassed Matt.
“You...took him?” said Anne, on the verge of tears herself.
Matt nodded.
“I got Chloe to let me borrow her hoodie by telling her I was planning to mess with you. I wasn’t trying to get her in trouble with her boss, though,” said Matt.
“What about me? That was my exhibit! This is my Sprig!”
Sprig shivered, still afraid after the time he spent in Matt’s jacket. Anne scratched his head to keep him calm.
“Chloe flirts with me in front of you all the time, and I’ve never seen you as upset as you were after that frog disappeared,” said Matt.
“So you were performing some kind of experiment? Do you know how much of an asshole this makes you look like?” said Anne.
Matt turned around.
“We’ve been dating for three years now, and until you got this job, everything was perfect. Now, you rarely ever have time to do stuff together. I’m happy you’re following your dreams, but does it have to come at the expense of us?” he said.
“The only threat to this relationship is you,” said Anne. “You could have talked about this at any time without playing these stupid games. I’m going to put Sprig back, and you need to get out of this aquarium right now.”
Matt turned back around to face Anne, who was now heading for the door.
“Wait! Can’t we talk some more?” said Matt.
“There’s nothing else to talk about,” said Anne. “Now, leave before I get Elizabeth to make you leave.”
Matt grabbed Anne’s arm to keep her from walking out. Anne jerked her arm away from him and continued walking.
“Anne, please!” said Matt, whose voice was beginning to crack. “You’re right, I’m an asshole! A big, dumb asshole who’s afraid of losing you!”
Anne stopped, looking down at Sprig, who was no longer shivering and gave her a friendly croak as he looked back up at her.
“You’ve already lost me,” said Anne before she continued walking towards her exhibit.
Chloe sat in a bathroom stall with her feet up, crying.
Somebody knocked on the door of her stall.
“It’s occupied!” said Chloe.
“Chloe?” said a voice Chloe recognized as Anne’s.
“Go away,” said Chloe. “If you’re here to give me the news that I’m fired, I don’t give a fuck.”
“We know it wasn’t you who stole Sprig,” said Anne. “It was Matt, and he’s banned from the aquarium for life because of it.”
“Congratulations, Nancy Drew,” said Chloe. “Are you gonna find some missing bikes next?”
“Why are you always like this?” asked Anne. “What did I do to you to make you dislike me so much?”
Chloe sighed.
“It’s nothing you did,” she said. “It’s just...I’ve been here for five years and never even sniffed a promotion. You come here right out of college and get your own exhibit immediately. I know, I know. You’re Anne Boonchuy, hero of the Frog-Vasion. You’re more of a draw to that exhibit than any of the frogs there, but I can’t help but feel pissed off about it.”
Anne sat down with her back to Chloe’s stall.
“I never wanted any of this,” said Anne. “I never wanted the celebrity, the paparazzi everywhere I go, the stalkers. This aquarium was an escape from that, then for a while, Matt protected me from all of that. When I no longer needed Matt’s protection, I noticed him getting weird and jealous, but I didn’t realize how bad that it had gotten.”
Chloe opened her stall.
“Well,” she said. “We better get back out there before Elizabeth sees both of us are gone.”
Anne and Chloe washed their hands and left the bathroom together.
“Also,” said Chloe. “I’m sorry. I’ve been weird and jealous, too.”
Anne nodded.
“Friends?” she said.
“I won’t go that far,” said Chloe. “But maybe someday, far into the future.”
Anne laughed.
“Better than nothing, I guess,” she said.
After a few more minutes of walking with Chloe, Anne returned to her exhibit, and she found a familiar face standing by Sprig’s cage.
“Terri?” said Anne.
Terri, who still had their short blue hair but also had a nose ring and long, blue fingernails to match their distinctive hair color now, smiled when they saw Anne.
“These pink tree frogs are rare,” said Terri. “I’m surprised you were able to find one for this exhibit.”
“It was hard, but it was worth it,” said Anne.
“So, how have you been?”
“I’ve been good. How long has it been since we’ve last seen other?”
“Since I helped you get back to Amphibia? More than ten years now. That’s...actually what I’m here to talk to you about.”
“Huh?”
Terri spoke in a quieter voice after this.
“Amphibia’s in trouble, and you need to go back and warn them,” said Terri.
“How? We were only able to open the portal with my powers, and I don’t have those powers anymore,” whispered Anne.
“President X has some of the best engineers in the world working on the portal now. He actually hired me shortly after he got elected, promising to let me and other scientists use the portal for research only. I should have known he had an ulterior motive, though.”
“What does he really want the portal for?”
“I got a text from a whistleblower today. President X is planning to invade Amphibia as retaliation for their invasion of us. He spent his eight years as the head of Homeland Security studying the technology found in the robots scattered around LA after the invasion, and he has most of them working again. The portal is expected to be back up and running tomorrow, and robot as well as human soldiers will be going into it shortly after that.”
“Where is the portal?”
“In a secret facility in Nevada. I drove down here as soon as I got the text. This whistleblower plans to make everything public around 20 hours from now, so there isn’t a lot of time before the president gets wind of it, tightens security, and takes away my access.”
A boy who was running through the exhibit bumped into Terri.
“Whoa! Don’t hurt yourself!” said Anne.
“Sorry, frog lady,” said the boy.
The boy walked into another room, and Terri giggled.
“They call you ‘frog lady’?” they said.
“I didn’t come up with it, but I don’t mind it either,” said Anne. “I did win Frog of the Year, after all.”
“Do you ever think about going back?” asked Terri.
“Every day,” said Anne.
“Well, here’s your chance.”
“I have to think about it.”
Anne looked down at Sprig, feeling conflicted about the opportunity to return to the swamp where frogs talk. She knew she would have to talk to Sasha and Marcy about it first, but she didn’t expect either of them to like the idea very much.
“Okay,” said Terri. “I called out sick tomorrow as well as today, so if you do decide that you want to do this anytime before the shit hits the fan, I’ll be able to take you there.”
Terri gave Anne their number and left the aquarium. Anne looked down a Sprig once more and put a hand on his cage.
“Soon,” said Anne. “We’ll be together again soon.”
Notes:
It's not over yet, folks! I love the engagement this fic has gotten so far, and as we get deeper into the story, I hope it gets even more. Once I decided to continue this fic, I knew I wanted the second chapter to focus on Anne, since she's the main character of the show and the character I personally was interested in learning more about post-timeskip. Like the first chapter, this chapter's title comes from the title of one of Amphibia's episodes, and I'm hoping to do that for every chapter, just because I think it's exciting in a time-is-a-flat-circle sort of way. I also didn't realize Anne's boyfriend had the same name as the show's creator, Matt Braly, until I was finished writing the chapter, but since we're transitioning from a universe more in line with Braly's vision, where a return to Amphibia is impossible, to a universe where it's very much possible, I think that it's appropriate. Though I focused mostly on Anne in this chapter, with short appearances by other Amphibia characters at the beginning and the end, this fic will start to feel like a true Amphibia sequel soon, so if that's what you're here for, I can promise you will not be disappointed.
Chapter Text
CW: Abuse
Marcy had spent the entire day in her hotel room, sketching characters from her webcomic The Forgotten Realms of Faerie in a notepad. Her comic, which was based on all of the fantasy stories she loved growing up (and perhaps some personal experiences), had unexpectedly gone viral, amassing tens of thousands of views a day on the website she had made for it and even spawning its own little fandom. The world that she created as a freshman at the University of Washington and continued to return to as a grad student was a world she wanted to live in forever, but she knew better than most people how dangerous wanting to escape to another world truly was.
You can’t hold me in forever, said the voice.
Marcy squeezed her drawing pencil so tightly that it snapped in two. She buried her head in her arms and began to cry. She hoped that seeing Anne and Sasha again would help her lose this awful thing inside of her, but it had only gotten stronger since their reunion. She had turned off her cell phone due to frequent calls from her parents, but she turned it on again to scroll through her photos. The newest one, the photo she took with Anne and Sasha the night before, made her forget about her problems for a brief, beautiful moment. Though they didn’t share most of her interests, and neither one of them read more than a few pages of her webcomic, the happiest moments of her life were still with them.
Her finger hovered over Sasha’s face for a long time. Though she loved Anne as one of the best friends she ever had, she loved Sasha in the same way...and in a different way, as well. She didn’t understand the feelings when she was younger, but Sasha’s strength, confidence, and willingness to protect Anne and Marcy no matter what inspired feelings in her that eventually she did understand were feelings that only boys were supposed to inspire in her.
She had crushes on other girls, but Sasha was her first and the strongest one she had throughout elementary and middle school. She knew she could never tell Anne or Sasha because it would destroy the friendship the three girls had which she valued above everything else, and if Sasha didn’t return her affections, which she knew was more likely than not, then it would destroy Marcy, too. She also couldn’t tell her journal, or Jo, as Marcy affectionately called it, because it wasn’t something she wanted to put into words. It was something she wanted to shuck into one of the fantasy lands she loved. Her mother supported all the crazy things she was into and her father...tolerated them, but both made it clear to Marcy since she was a kid how important it was to them that she find a good job and a good husband for her to have kids of her own with.
Her phone began to ring, and she nearly tapped the X on the call notification without thinking before seeing the call was from Sasha.
“H-hello?” said Marcy after accepting the call.
“Are you in Seattle now?” asked Sasha.
“Y-yes...I mean...no, I’m not. The flight got cancelled,” said Marcy, changing up her lie on the spot.
“That’s good to hear...sorry, I’m not trying to say it’s good your flight got cancelled, it’s just...”
“No, I totally understand!”
“It’s just...Anne stopped by today, and she told me something really interesting.”
“What?”
“Apparently, President X got a portal to Amphibia working, and he’ll be sending an army to invade them. Terri went to Anne’s job to warn her and offer her a chance to get to Amphibia before President X does. She really wants to, but...I don’t...I just don’t know.”
Marcy’s hand began to shake so much that her phone nearly dropped out of it.
“We should let her,” said Marcy. “But we can’t let her go alone.”
“Are you sure?” asked Sasha.
Marcy could hear the surprise in Sasha’s voice over the phone, but just like Anne and Sasha, she had people in Amphibia she wanted to protect. Olivia, Yunan, Javi, Kettle, Femur, and even Andrias. The only thing that made her hesitate a little was what she would have to bring to Amphibia with her.
During Marcy’s freshman year in Washington, when The Forgotten Realms of Faerie was still in its early stages, she met a guy, the first guy she ever talked to who wasn’t freaked out by all her interests and seemed to have a lot of the same interests. His name was Jacob. Marcy and Jacob spent many nights talking to each other on the phone, and while Marcy didn’t like him in the same way she liked the girls on campus who didn’t pay half as much attention to her, she could imagine learning to love him, starting a life with him, having the family that her parents wanted her so desperately to have with him.
One night, Jacob invited her to play the new Vagabondia Chronicles game with him in his dorm room. Though she really wanted to play it and her own copy hadn’t been shipped to her yet, she still felt a strong resistance to the idea. She eventually did accept the invitation since she trusted Jacob, and again, she really, really wanted to play that game. They played it for hours, and she loved it. It had to be a top five game in the series, and it was the first time she got to play one of the games with somebody else in the five years that she had been in Seattle. She thanked him for letting her play with him as they powered down the console, and he simply stared at her. Though he downed a few beers while they were playing, she rejected every one he offered her, and she could smell the beer on his breath as he leaned in to kiss her. She leaned back.
“No, Jacob,” she said. “Sorry, but no.”
Jacob simply smiled and nodded.
“You know,” he said. “Everyone else at school is saying you’re a dyke, and I’ve been defending you, I really have been, but...if you don’t let this happen...I don’t know if I can defend you anymore.”
Marcy’s body went still. She didn’t say anything after that and simply let what he said was happening...happen.
After that night, Jacob and Marcy were officially girlfriend and boyfriend. They still talked on the phone every night and occasionally did other stuff in person, but Marcy knew she could never love him, and it was clear to her after a while that Jacob realized this and it ate away at him. Once she got her own copy of Vagabondia Chronicles, she left it alone, continuing to play it with Jacob because that’s what a girlfriend and boyfriend are supposed to do. She wanted to break up with him, and she believed he wanted to break up with her, too, but he was just as terrified of being alone as she was.
He began yelling at Marcy over small things a few weeks into their relationship, and a few months into it...he began hitting her. Though Marcy’s dreams about the technologically advanced Amphibia had been occurring since she returned to Earth, she didn’t start hearing the voices until the first time she had gone to bed with a black eye. Though the other girls at school had mostly ignored her throughout this, some did ask if she was okay and if she needed help. The answer to the first was always “yes” and the answer to the second was always “no”. She couldn’t lie to the voice, however, no matter how much she tried to.
It was the voice who convinced her to buy a gun. It was the voice who convinced her to head to the shooting range on the weekends while giving Jacob the excuse that she was studying with classmates. One Saturday, as she was preparing to head to the shooting range again, she heard a loud knock on her door.
“Let me in, Marcy!” said a barely-restrained Jacob. “Let me the fuck in!”
Marcy quickly hid her gun under her bed and let Jacob inside.
“This is the eighth time you’ve texted me that you’re studying!” said Jacob. “Just tell me the truth! You aren’t really studying today, are you?”
“Jacob...” said Marcy as calmly as she could.
“Are you cheating on me with a girl?”
“No!”
Marcy looked down, struggling to make eye contact with Jacob, whose own eyes were wet.
“Are you cheating on me with a guy?” asked Jacob with growing disgust on his face.
“Jacob...please,” whispered Marcy.
“That’s it, isn’t it? The reason you’re so cold to me all the time isn’t because you’re into girls, it’s just because you aren’t into me! Well, fuck you, then!”
“Jacob, let’s talk about this some other time.”
“No, we’re talking about it now!”
Jacob shoved Marcy, sending her to the floor and causing her to hit her head hard. As he launched every type of insult he could think of at her, her vision, which had blurred from the fall, improved enough for her to see the gun she had stashed under her bed. She grabbed the gun and pointed it at Jacob, who ended his tirade the moment he saw it.
“Jesus, Marce,” said Jacob, who was now gripped by fear. “I...I went too far. I see it now. If you want to go study, then study. I won’t bother you anymore. Just...put that thing down and let’s pretend this never happened. Okay? I promise...I wasn’t trying to hurt you...I just...I like you a lot, Marcy, and I don’t want to lose you. So please...just put the gun away, Marcy. Please. Can you do that?”
Unfortunately for Jacob, it was no longer Marcy who he was speaking to.
Marcy met Anne and Sasha at a skating rink.
“You remember this place?” asked Sasha.
“I remember the bruises it left me!” said Marcy with a giggle.
The three of them tried on different roller skates until they found the right sizes for feet that were now bigger than they were during their last trip to this building ten years earlier.
“I think I’m good now,” said Sasha.
“Great!” said Anne. “Let’s go!”
The three of them skated to the rink, and Marcy almost immediately tripped, causing Sasha to grab her.
“Same old Mar-Mar,” teased Sasha.
Marcy tried not to blush, but it was an effort that ultimately turned out to be futile. The three of them held hands as they skated to the rink this time, and as they skated around the rink, it felt no different than it did when they were 12.
“It feels nice to have some girl time before...you know, before shit gets real,” said Anne.
Sasha nodded.
“I’ve moved on from Amphibia, but that doesn’t mean I want to see it destroyed,” she said.
“I agree,” said Marcy. “In a way, I’m glad my flight got cancelled.”
“Oh, Mar-Mar...I’m sorry about last night,” said Anne.
“It’s okay!” said Marcy. “I’m sorry about freaking you two out. I’m...good at that, I guess.”
Sasha looked at Marcy with concern.
“You know we’re still your girls, right?” she asked.
“Yeah, of course,” said Marcy.
“I should have given you the news myself,” said Anne. “If I knew you were still in town, I would have given the news to both of you in person.”
“Like I said, it’s okay,” said Marcy. “You don’t need to protect me anymore. I’m a big girl.”
Marcy let go of Sasha’s hand and skated faster.
“See?” said Marcy, looking back at Anne and Sasha. “I’m doing just fi-“
Marcy skated into the rail at the edge of the rink and flipped over it, landing on her back. A teenage boy who was eating ice cream in front of the rail pointed at her and laughed.
“Just like middle school,” groaned Marcy.
Anne and Sasha skated to Marcy and helped her up. The teenage boy stared at them.
“Don’t you have parents around here somewhere?” Sasha asked the boy.
“Somewhere, sure,” said the boy.
Sasha, Anne, and Marcy skated to the arcade machines in the back of the building.
“I can’t believe these are still here!” said Marcy excitedly.
“Yeah, I thought you would like this,” said Anne.
Marcy noticed a new machine with a game based on the Frog-Vasion. She booted it up, and she laughed hysterically as a chibi version of Anne appeared on the screen.
“I do not remember approving my likeness for this,” said Anne.
“Let’s lacerate some lizards!” said the chibi version of Anne in the game.
“Lizards are reptiles,” muttered Anne.
Marcy moved the joystick attached to the arcade machine to make the chibi Anne move left and right, and she pressed joystick’s button to make Anne shoot blasts from her hands at the frogs and toads coming at her from different parts of the screen. Each frog and toad, once hit, exploded into a bloody mess, causing Anne and Sasha to cover their mouths.
“Wow!” said Marcy. “These graphics are so realistic!”
“Hey, Marbles, why don’t we play a different game?” asked Anne.
“Just a minute,” said Marcy.
30 minutes later, Marcy beat the game.
“Boom!” she said. “New high score!”
Marcy turned around and realized Anne and Sasha were back on the skating rink, and they seemed to intentionally avoid looking in Marcy’s direction.
“Hmm,” said Marcy. “Guess none of the other games interested them.”
Marcy skated back to the rink carefully and rejoined her friends. Anne and Sasha smiled at her, but neither seemed as comfortable as they were before.
“Isn’t it awesome?” said Marcy. “We’re going to see Amphibia again after all these years!”
“Yeah,” said Anne after a long pause. “Awesome.”
After ten more minutes at the skating rink, Anne, Sasha, and Marcy left and headed into Sasha’s car.
“Oh!” said Anne. “I forgot to mention it before now, but Matt and I broke up.”
“Oh, my God!” said Sasha. “You two were perfect for each other!”
“You...had a boyfriend?” asked Marcy.
“Did I not tell you?” said Anne.
“No, but that’s fine. We don’t need to talk about boys, anyway. Super stereotypical, you know,” said Marcy, looking out the window.
“You have a boy toy of your own?” asked Sasha, looking at herself in her seat’s mirror and reapplying makeup.
“No,” said Marcy, who turned from the window to glance at Sasha’s eyes in mirror of the driver’s seat then look down at her shoes. “I’m just...you know how guys are.”
“I mean, it’s a big school you go to. You must have met somebody who likes the same knights and dragons stuff you do during your time there.”
Marcy turned back to the window and noticed that her face now had a few extra eyes. She shook her head, and her reflection was normal again.
“I wish, but sadly, no,” she said.
“Aww. Well, maybe all three of us can get lucky tonight!” said Sasha. “There’s a bar not too far from here.”
“You know I don’t drink,” said Marcy.
“And I literally just broke up with my boyfriend not even 12 hours ago,” said Anne.
“Nothing helps you forget a breakup like an exciting rebound!” said Sasha. “And boys are the last thing you’ll want on your mind as we save Amphibia!”
“Sasha, you’re being bossy again,” said Anne.
Sasha laughed.
“Sorry, old habits,” she said. “We don’t have to go out drinking if you don’t want to.”
“I would love a couple of drinks, but I don’t want you introducing any guys to me,” said Anne. “And I don’t want you going off with any guys...”
“Or girls,” said Sasha, pointing to the sticker with the colors of the bisexual flag on her rearview mirror and ignoring Marcy hiding her face in her hoodie in that same mirror.
“...or girls tonight,” continued Anne.
“Now who’s bossy?” said Sasha.
“Come on. It’s about us tonight. The Calamity Trio!” said Anne.
“Right. The Calamity Trio,” said Sasha.
“The Calamity Trio,” said Marcy, revealing her face from her hoodie again.
“And I’m not going to force you to drink, Mar-Mar. Obviously,” said Sasha.
Marcy smiled.
“You might have to end up driving us home, though,” said Sasha. “You cool with crashing at my place tonight if you do?”
“If that’s what you want,” said Marcy, trying her best to make it sound like it isn’t what she wants. “My hotel’s not that expensive, anyway.”
“Whoo! Let’s get out of here, then!” said Sasha.
As Sasha drove them out of the skating rink’s parking lot and onto the road, Marcy looked at her reflection in the window again. There weren’t any extra eyes this time, and she wasn’t sure if it was a hallucination when she saw them, but she hoped with every fiber of her being that it was.
Notes:
So, I put off writing this chapter for a while, in part because it’s a Marcy-focused chapter and I wanted to read Marcy's Journal first to see if there was anything I wanted to include or if I even wanted it to be part of this fic’s canon in the first place. I do have some references to stuff from Marcy’s Journal in this chapter, and I’ve retroactively made Terri non-binary because I loved that change from the book, but anything else in the book that conflicts with the first two chapters I’m pretty much gonna ignore. I also procrastinated on this chapter for a while because I knew it would be a super hard chapter to write. I don’t have a lot of experience with shipping, but I really loved the idea of Marcy being sapphic, since there was nothing in the show or the book to contradict it, and Marcy being in love with Sasha creates an interesting new dynamic for the story.
The passage with Jacob was the part I dreaded writing the most, since Marcy’s my favorite character, and I hated putting her through all that. I did think it was a great way to show how dangerous this thing inside of Marcy is, but I wish I could have come up with a better way to show it. This chapter definitely takes this story into darkfic territory, and while I wish I could say it gets lighter again after this, I probably wouldn’t be telling the truth. As long as it took for me to start writing this, it only took me a day to finish it, so hopefully I can pick up the pace after this so that this story has a chance of being completed during my lifetime. See you all whenever!
Chapter Text
Sasha woke up without any memory of what happened after she left the skating rink with Anne and Marcy. She looked around and recognized her bedroom. She was in her bed in her bra and panties, and her head was throbbing. She heard something that sounded like another person’s breathing, but she didn’t see anything on either side of the bed. She used what little energy she had to sit up, and to her surprise, she found a man wearing only briefs handcuffed to one of her bed’s front legs.
“Oh,” said Sasha. “Now it’s coming back to me.”
Memories of meeting this man, laughing with him, getting into the back seat of her car with him, and the things they did in her bedroom, materialized in Sasha’s mind.
Who drove us here? Sasha wondered.
Then she remembered: it was Marcy. Sasha tiptoed out of her bedroom, expecting to see Marcy on her couch, but she wasn’t there. She returned to her room and got her phone out of her purse, finding that it was three in the morning and that there were three missed calls from her brother, David. Sasha sighed before tapping on David’s name and putting the phone to her ear. She heard several rings and then heard David’s voice.
“Do you know what time it is?” asked David.
“You either tell me what you’ve been pestering me about now or I block your number,” said Sasha.
“It’s dad,” said David. “He...died last week.”
“Good,” said Sasha. “I hope he rots in Hell.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do.”
“Well, mom’s devastated. She loved him even after the divorce, you know.”
“The divorce your bitch sister was responsible for?”
“I...never called you a bitch.”
“Thanks for letting me know about dad. Bye.”
“No! Wait! The funeral’s this Saturday. I know we have a...history, but it would mean a lot to mom if you could make it.”
Sasha’s finger hovered over the X button on her phone.
“I’ll think about it,” she said after a long pause.
“Thanks, Sash,” said David. “I love y-“
Sasha hung up. She turned to the man on her floor and shook him until he woke up.
“Hey, babe,” purred the man. “Gonna cook me breakfast?”
“Hell, no,” said Sasha. “Put on your clothes and get out.”
“Come on,” said the man. “You’ve been telling me what to do all night. I could at least use a glass of water after the workout you gave my tongue.”
Sasha rolled her eyes.
“I’ll get you some water,” she said. “Just put on your clothes while I’m gone. They’re under the bed.”
“It would be easier with two hands,” said the man.
Sasha got her keys out of her purse and thumbed through the keys until she found a pink one, using the pink key to unlock the man’s handcuffs. She then took her purse with her to her kitchen and filled two large glasses with water, sipping one of them as she looked through her phone some more. She saw that Anne was trending on Twitter due to yet another movie getting made about her, and she felt a pang of jealously, as her own role in stopping the Frog-vasion didn’t get nearly as much publicity due to her fight with Darcy happening inside of a floating castle. She was happy for Anne, but she would have loved to grace the covers of magazines, have makeup and hair companies writing her huge checks to promote their products on social media, and watch A-list actresses play her in movies. The only taste of fame she had was as a softball star, and she lost that after she injured her shoulder in college.
Though Sasha loved her job as a child psychologist, she always felt like she was destined to do more. In Amphibia, she had led an army, had gotten close to ruling all of Amphibia as its queen. She wondered many times what would have happened if Anne, Marcy, and the others hadn’t been successful in stopping her and Grimes’ plot. She knew it was wrong to think about such things. She was a better person now than she was then, at least she tried to be. She still made mistakes, like having Marcy drive her and this strange man to her house last night, but it wasn’t quite on the same level as enslaving entire species like she had planned to do with Grimes back in Amphibia.
Sasha heard footsteps behind her, and she saw the man, now clothed, approaching her.
“Is that cup for me?” the man said, looking at the cup Sasha was holding.
Sasha shook her head and gave the man the other cup. Even in the darkness, she could tell that the man was very attractive. She thought about giving him her number and making this a more regular thing, but she quickly suppressed that thought as the man finished his cup of water in just a few gulps.
“Alright, bye,” said Sasha.
“C’mon, you know I didn’t drive here,” said the man.
“Order an Uber.”
“Can’t we fool around a little more before that?”
“I have somewhere I need to be in the morning.”
“Work?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, it’s okay. I have work, too.”
The man leaned in to kiss Sasha, and she turned away.
“Fine,” he said, taking his phone out of his pocket. “Hope you had a good time, at least.”
“I did,” said Sasha. “I’m just...not ready for anything more.”
The man nodded.
“Can’t say you’re the first one,” he said. “And you probably won’t be the last one, either.”
The man ordered an Uber and then headed out the door as Sasha watched him, not looking back once. She heard the sound of a car driving off a little over a minute later. She returned to her room, and with her head no longer throbbing, Sasha was able to easily fall back asleep.
Sasha stopped her car in front of Anne’s studio apartment, and Anne came out of the apartment moments later.
“Where’s Marcy?” asked Anne as she got into the car’s passenger seat.
“I don’t know,” said Sasha. “She hasn’t been responding to my calls.”
“That’s weird,” said Anne. “Let me try.”
Anne called Marcy’s number on her phone, but it went to voicemail.
“We have to meet Terri at the coffee shop at 10,” said Anne.
“We still have another half-hour,” said Sasha. “I’m sure she’ll get back to us.”
“Yeah,” said Anne. “Didn’t you say she would be crashing at your place, though?”
“Marcy already had the hotel room reserved and didn’t want to let it go to waste,” lied Sasha.
“Okay,” said Anne. “Well, hopefully she does call us back by the time we get to Terri.”
They got to the coffee shop 20 minutes later and were surprised to find Marcy inside with Terri already, laughing together at a table.
“Marcy? Why haven’t you been answering our calls?” asked Anne.
“Sorry,” said Marcy, catching her breath after a bout of laughter. “My phone must have died.”
“How long has she been here?” asked Sasha.
“She’s been here longer than I have,” said Terri. “We were just discussing multiverse theory. Smart lass, she is! Wish I got to meet her earlier!”
A waitress brought Terri and Marcy drinks, and Terri motioned for Anne and Sasha to join them.
“Since we’re already confirmed that there are other worlds out there with intelligent life, are alternate dimensions that much of a stretch?” asked Marcy. “There would be a world, or a universe, where everything we read in fairy tales actually happened! There could be a universe where all of us are witches!”
“Witches,” repeated Anne. “Not something I expect to hear a physicist talking about.”
“Magic doesn’t have to break the laws of physics,” said Marcy. “It can simply bend them.”
Marcy demonstrated by bending the wooden stirrer that came with her coffee.
“Magic and science don’t need to be diametrically opposed,” she said. “I’ve taken interest in both.”
Marcy spoke in a quieter voice after this to ensure nobody else in the coffee shop could hear her.
“We know of at least one witch in Amphibia,” she said. “Who’s to say there aren’t more? Who’s to say we don’t have some on Earth?”
Terri laughed again.
“Definitely keep me updated on your witch hunt after you come back,” they said.
Anne and Sasha ordered coffee, and the four of them chatted for the next hour before splitting up, Anne and Sasha going back into Sasha’s car and Terri and Marcy going into Terri’s car. Sasha followed Terri’s car out of Los Angeles and towards the Mojave Desert. After a few more hours of driving, Sasha noticed something strange in the desert, what appeared to be a large glass building with nothing inside of it. Terri stopped their car in front of the building, and Sasha stopped hers next to Terri’s.
“That wasn’t there when I was driving to LA,” said Terri as they got out of their car.
As Sasha and Anne got out of Sasha’s car, Sasha noticed movement in front of the building, but she wasn’t certain whether it was a mirage in the hot desert sun or a real person.
“Is someone there?” asked Sasha.
The moving shape in front of the building stopped, and seconds later, the shape was revealed to be a short, plump woman, likely in her 50s.
“Damn it!” said the woman! “I hoped nobody would see me under my invisi-veil!”
“Invisi-veil?” said Anne. “That’s a dumb name. Why not call it an invisibility cloak or something?”
“And get sued? Yeah, right!” spat the woman.
“What is this place?” asked Marcy, stepping out of Terri’s car.
“It’s my fortress!” said the woman. “A place for me to practice witchcraft away from prying eyes. At least, that’s what it’s supposed to be, but I suppose my senses are failing me in my advanced age. I didn’t spot you all until it was too late.”
“Did you just say witchcraft?” said an excited Marcy.
“Here we go,” muttered Terri.
“Yes,” said the woman. “I’m a Witch of the Desert, one of a long line of such witches stretching back centuries.”
“Why would you build a huge fortress with nothing in it?” asked Sasha.
The witch laughed.
“That’s just how it appears from the outside!” she said.
The witch walked into the fortress, and Marcy eagerly followed her. Terri hesitated before doing the same, and Anne went in after them. Sasha wiped away the beads of sweat on her forehead and overcame the fear that had gripped her enough to make it hard to move her legs, walking into the fortress after the others once she did. As big as the fortress was from the outside, it was even larger on the inside, with tall glass walls, a smooth glass floor, and glass chandeliers hanging above them from the glass ceiling.
“Wow,” whispered Sasha.
“That’s what they usually say,” said the witch.
The witch sat at a large glass table in the middle of the fortress that had many small pieces of paper laid across it. She dipped a pen in ink and wrote a symbol on one of the papers.
“I haven’t had a visitor in a long, long time,” said the witch.
“What’s that symbol?” asked Terri.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” said the witch, who wrote the same symbol on another piece of paper.
“You know, I dabble a bit in witchcraft myself,” said Marcy, who didn’t sense the uneasiness of the other girls. “I even brought a flea back from the dead once!”
“Oh, that’s lovely,” said the witch, who wrote the symbol on another piece of paper.
“We...should really get going,” said Anne.
“And miss the fun? No. You’re going to be staying here for just a little while longer.”
The witch wrote the symbol on another piece of paper then pushed all four papers to the ground, causing the papers to transform into vines that quickly grew and wrapped around Sasha, Anne, Marcy, and Terri, tightening enough that none of them could breathe.
“Please,” Sasha was able to say despite being choked. “We won’t tell anyone about this place.”
“Sorry,” said the witch. “That isn’t a risk I’m willing to take.”
Everything became blurry for Sasha, and just when she lost any hope she still had of getting out of the fortress alive, she saw two people fly into it on what appeared to be brooms. The witch hastily threw pieces of paper at them, and she saw flames, ice, and more vines shoot out of her direction. The people on brooms avoided them all and launched counterattacks. Just when Sasha felt like she would pass out, she felt a strong heat around her, and the vines disintegrated. Sasha fell to her knees and hands, coughing. She looked up and could clearly see the witch fighting a young woman and young man. The woman was throwing small papers like the witch’s, while the man had an open palm pointed at the witch with his eyes glowing blue. The witch was clearly terrified but continued drawing symbols on papers and throwing them at the man and woman, making them dodge whatever hazards they transformed into. The woman grabbed a paper from under her shirt, hesitated, then threw it at the witch. An icicle came out of the paper which went through the witch’s chest, killing her instantly. Terri gasped.
“Sorry I had to do that,” said the woman. “But that witch was, like, totally evil. I’m not the only one who saw that, right?”
Terri’s mouth was still agape. Sasha turned around and saw that Anne and Marcy also had wide open mouths before realizing that her own mouth was open, too.
“So, it seems witches are real,” said Terri after a long moment of silence between the four of them.
“Hate to say I told you so,” said Marcy.
“No, you don’t,” said Terri.
“No, I don’t,” admitted Marcy, laughing.
The woman and man jumped off their brooms and approached the other four carefully.
“Hello,” said the woman. “My name is Luz Noceda.”
“And I’m Gus Porter,” said the man.
“What are you all doing in this part of the desert?” asked Luz.
“That’s top-secret information,” said Terri.
“I’ll tell you our secrets if you tell us yours,” said Luz.
Terri huddled with Sasha, Anne, and Marcy.
“Should we tell them?” whispered Anne.
“They did just save our lives,” whispered Sasha.
“Plus, they’re witches!” whispered Marcy. “Who couldn’t use help from witches?”
They un-huddled, and Terri smiled at Luz, who smiled back awkwardly.
“Okay,” said Terri. “We’re going to a secret government facility so these girls can warn their friends on another planet that the US is planning to invade them.”
Luz nodded.
“We’re from another dimension,” she said. “Well, I’m from this dimension, but Gus and many others like him are from a dimension we call the Demon Realm.”
“Oh, my God!” said Marcy. “So, he’s, like, a natural-born witch?”
Luz laughed. “Yeah!”
Marcy ran to Gus and pulled his ears.
“Fascinating,” she said. “So, my hypothesis about other universes turned out to be correct! There is a witch dimension! Who knows what else we could find out there!”
“I’m not sure how I feel about this,” said Gus.
“The same as how I felt when you poked and prodded me for a week after finding out I was human,” said Luz.
Anne and Sasha grabbed Marcy and pulled her away from Gus.
“Sorry about our friend,” said Anne. “She gets like that sometimes.”
“It’s okay!” said Gus. “I guess we are cool, but you haven’t even seen everything I can do yet!”
Gus drew a circle in the air, and dozens of clones of him appeared behind him in the fortress.
“Hello, humans!” said every Gus at once.
Marcy’s eyes bulged so wide that Sasha was worried they would fall out.
“We’re part of the Council of Witches that was established in the Boiling Isles – our hometown – several years ago to regulate matters in the Demon Realm,” said Luz. “I was made the Ambassador to the Human Realm after graduating from the University of Wild Magic two years ago, and Gus was made my co-ambassador after he graduated from there last month.”
“It’s my dream job!” said Gus. “Studying humans in their natural habitat! It’s what I’ve wanted to do all my life!”
“We’ve recently learned that there are deposits of a substance known as Titan’s Blood in different places on Earth, and human witches like that lovely Witch of the Desert you just met have been hidden near those deposits for centuries. Understandably, they haven’t been very fond of other humans discovering them, due to our history of societies that have burned and drowned people even suspected of being witches. I don’t think that justifies murdering a bunch of innocent people, though, so with Gus’s help, I’ve been tracking down areas that have had an unusually high number of disappearances over the years, and that’s what brought us here,” said Luz.
“Now we can get the Titan’s Blood from here and add it to our collection!” said Gus.
Luz and Gus led Sasha, Anne, Marcy, and Terri out of the fortress.
“Hey, what’s this?” asked Luz, pointing to something under her foot.
“The Witch of the Desert called it an ‘invisi-veil’,” said Terri. “Stupid, I know.”
“Oh, we should add this to our collection, too, Gus!” said Luz. “Now I can make myself invisible without holding my breath!”
Luz draped the cloak over one of her shoulders, grabbed a piece of paper from inside her jacket, and threw it at the fortress, causing the structure to freeze and shatter under its own weight. Gus drew another circle in the air, and a vial of blue liquid appeared from under the remains of the fortress. It flew into Gus’s hand, and he put it into a small bag with the cloak as Luz gave it to him.
“So, I didn’t get your names,” said Luz. “Well, I know one of them: Anne Boonchuy! Everyone knows you!”
“This is my first time meeting an Earth celebrity! This is so exciting!” said Gus.
Sasha resisted the urge to gag.
“I’m Anne, yeah. That’s Terri, who’s leading us to that government facility, and those are my besties Sasha and Marcy,” explained Anne.
“I know we just met, but I’d love to help you guys however I can!” said Luz. “As Ambassadors to the Human Realm, we probably shouldn’t let humans go around invading other planets.”
Terri nodded.
“You can come with us, but not on those brooms,” they said. “You’ll be shot on sight if you do.”
“Let’s split up!” said Gus. “That way, we can maximize what we learn about all this.”
“Good idea,” said Luz.
Gus got into the back seat of Terri’s car, and Luz got into the back seat of Sasha’s car. As Sasha followed Terri through the desert again, Anne beside her and Luz behind her, she seriously thought about what returning to Amphibia would be like for the first time since she agreed to do it. Would she be welcomed as a former ally or hated as a former warlord? Though she had earned the forgiveness of Wartwood, she had hurt many others during her time there, most regrettably Percy and Braddock.
“Nice flag,” said Luz, staring at the pink, purple, and blue flag on Sasha’s mirror.
Sasha smiled. “Thanks.”
Notes:
So, this chapter went from being Fifty Shades of Sasha to being the zillionth Amphibia-Owl House crossover on AO3. After a second chapter told mostly from Anne’s perspective and a third chapter told from Marcy’s perspective, I was excited to get into Sasha’s head and describe a bit more about what she’s been going through at 23. I didn’t delve nearly as much into her trauma as Marcy’s last chapter, but enough of it is suggested during her phone call with her brother that it shouldn’t be hard to fill in the gaps. Just like in the original show, all three girls have deep-seated unresolved personal issues, and while Sasha may have a better idea of how to address hers after years of training to be a psychologist, she isn’t completely out of the woods, either.
I’m sure some readers would like to know why I decided to bring Owl House characters into this, and it’s honestly just because I wanted to. Official Disney crossovers like That's So Suite Life of Hannah Montana and the one that Lilo & Stitch show did with Kim Possible got me so excited as a kid, and I hate that there was never an official crossover between TOH and Amphibia despite both shows airing in the same hour for much of their histories. We did have enough references between the shows that it’s basically canon that they exist in the same universe, and the creators of the shows did write a crossover script together that was read at a Comic-Con panel two years ago, but idk, I wanted more. I started thinking about how I could integrate TOH characters into this story when I started writing chapter 3, and I figured having some conflict on the way to the government facility in Nevada would be a fun way to do it. The last moment in this chapter, an acknowledgement between Sasha and Luz that they’re the first two openly bisexual characters in Disney’s history, was one I wanted to have the moment I decided this would be a crossover fic, and while it did take this chapter longer that I would have liked to reach that moment, I’m glad I was able to fit it in eventually.
You probably know what the trend for these titles is by now, and the title of Chapter 5 will be Escape to Amphibia, so expect more excitement to come!
Chapter Text
Anne sat in the passenger seat of Sasha’s car, which stayed close behind Terri’s car as Terri headed towards the secret government facility in Nevada where they would try to open a new portal to Amphibia.
“So tell us about...what did you call it? The Burning Islands?” said Anne to their newest ally in the backseat of the car, Luz.
Luz laughed. “It’s the Boiling Isles, and it’s awesome! It isn’t like anywhere on Earth. The prejudices people have simply don’t exist. Even I, as a human, was accepted with open arms. When I told the other witches that I wanted to be like them, that I wanted to soar through the skies, have a palisman of my very own, they didn’t laugh at me.”
The staff Luz was holding transformed into a snake. Sasha and Anne jumped at the same time, and Sasha swerved off course before getting back behind Terri.
“Holy shit!” cried Sasha.
“Sorry,” said Luz, scratching the snake beneath its chin. “She does that sometimes.”
“I...it’s fine,” said Sasha, still rattled.
“But as I was saying,” continued Luz. “The Boiling Isles has been an incredible second home. I’ve made so many friends, like Gus, whom you’ve met... Stringbean here...King...Willow...and of course, Amity, my fiancé.”
Sasha perked up.
“Fiancé?” she repeated, now able to ignore the snake slithering in her back seat.
“Yeah, we’re getting married as soon as I return to the Boiling Isles,” said Luz. “I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m excited, but I’m also nervous. I’m committing a piece of myself to someone else...literally. We’ll both have to cut off our pinkie toes and exchange them during the ceremony.”
“What?” gasped Anne.
“Don’t worry! It’ll grow back...I think,” said Luz.
There was nothing but the sound of Sasha’s car sprinting through the desert and Luz’s snake slithering for several minutes.
“I do love her, though,” said Luz. “More than anything. If I didn’t have her or Gus or any of my fellow witches, I don’t know where I would be. Discovering the Boiling Isles was the best thing that happened to me.”
Anne thought again of the friends she made in Amphibia. Spring, Hop Pop, Polly. Just like the friends Luz made in the Boiling Isles, they accepted her despite how different she was from them, and most importantly, they helped her to accept herself. The ten years Anne had spent as Earth’s hero didn’t make her forget what she was before that to most people, some strange little Thai girl. She felt more like she was from a different planet on Earth than she did in Amphibia, and though Sasha and Marcy helped her feel less alone, they did little to make her feel more accepted, and Sasha in particular liked to remind her of how weird everyone else thought she was in those pre-Amphibia days. Sasha only did that to maintain her power over Anne, and Sasha admitted to this and apologized for it many during their last reunion in Amphibia, but still. It left scars on Anne that, unlike the scar she left on Sasha’s face, she couldn’t see but were just as deep, just as painful.
Sasha was constantly showered with attention by the boys at their schools, middle school especially, while Anne and Marcy didn’t get any attention from them. Marcy didn’t seem to mind, but Anne did, and while Sasha was able to bully some of the boys into asking Anne out, Anne rejected them, not wanting to date guys who weren’t actually into her. The lack of success from her friends didn’t stop Sasha from dating, though. She had a new boyfriend every other week while they were at Saint James, and she usually stole him from another girl beforehand. Since the girls at school were afraid of Sasha, they often directed their wrath towards Anne and Marcy instead. It made school a miserable experience for Anne, and it was one of the reasons she warmed up to Amphibia so quickly.
Wartwood, the city whose official motto was “slow to accept, and even slower to respect”, seemed like the last place she would find the acceptance she had always been craving when she originally moved there, but as she got to know the townsfolk, helped them with their problems, and even fought off the toad soldiers that had been shaking them down for taxes, breaking her arm in the process, she earned their acceptance and their respect. She didn’t understand what happiness truly was until the time she spent in Wartwood after that, and all the fame and money she had on Earth now didn’t make her feel nearly as happy as she did then. She missed it. And for ten years, she believed that she would never see Amphibia, or Wartwood, or her friends again. Learning to accept that was as hard as getting all of those cranky frogs to accept her, as hard as learning to accept herself, but she did accept herself now, and while she no longer needed Sprig or anyone else to help her do that, she still felt happier than she did in years knowing that she not only could see Amphibia again but that she was only a drive away from it.
“We’re here,” announced Sasha.
The car had stopped. Luz’s snake was a staff again. Sasha and Luz opened their doors, and Anne did the same as they prepared to reconvene with Marcy, Terri, and Gus.
“We’ll walk the rest of the way to the facility,” said Terri. “I’ll get us all inside, and then I’ll shut down the facility’s power through a backdoor I managed to sneak in a long time ago. That will give us 15 minutes to get to the room they’re keeping the portal in. As soon as the power comes back on, Anne, Sasha, and Marcy will go through the portal.”
“What about you?” asked Sasha. “The government will know you’re responsible for all this.”
“I know what I’m risking,” said Terri. “My job, my life...but if it keeps millions of innocents from getting slaughtered, I’m fine with that.”
Terri opened their purse and pulled out three small guns.
“I hope you won’t have to use these, but you still might need them,” they said.
Anne gulped. She had been in war before and understood the reality now just like then that it was possible she would have to kill some people, but she had never done it before, not even as a soldier of Wartwood’s army. It was something she preferred not to think about, but now this possibility was staring her right in the face, the cold, heartless steel of those weapons shining in the hot sun. Marcy and Sasha grabbed their guns without hesitation, but Anne’s arm was trembling as she reached for the last one. Anne looked in Terri’s eyes and realized it made them just as uncomfortable, as many of the people they were going up against were coworkers Terri had known for years, but they knew, just as Anne did, that every precaution had to be taken. Anne took a deep breath and took the gun.
“I haven’t been told exactly what room the portal is in, so we will need to check each room individually,” said Terri as they began walking.
Anne and the others followed Terri, shielding their eyes just enough to see where Terri was going as sand pounded their faces.
“Don’t you work there? Why would we need to go in each room?” wondered Sasha.
“It’s a big facility. We all don’t have access to the same rooms, and I’m not lucky enough to have access to the one with the portal,” explained Terri. “I’ve texted each of you a map. The rooms I know the portal aren’t in are crossed out, but the rest of them we’ll have to look in.”
Anne checked her phone, and a text from Terri with the map showed nearly 100 rooms in total, with only five of them crossed out.
“That’s a lot of rooms,” said Luz. “How can we check them all in 15 minutes?”
“We’ll have to split up,” said Terri. “Fortunately, we’ll have six pairs of eyes instead of the four I thought we would have. That will let us do this much quicker.”
Gus drew a circle in the air, and two clones appeared behind him.
“I can give you even more eyes if you want,” said the three Guses simultaneously.
“We’ll just stick with the one. Thanks,” said Terri.
“Aww,” said Gus, making the clones disappear.
“We’re also fortunate that today’s a half-day, meaning everyone won’t be here for a few more hours,” said Terri. “The only part of the plan I wasn’t so sure about was how I would get you all into the building without being noticed, but now, thanks to that crazy old witch, we have the invisi-veil. I’ll need all of you to try and squeeze under that.”
Luz, who was still holding the cloak, put it over herself, Anne, Sasha, Marcy, and Gus.
“It works!” exclaimed Terri. “You’re all invisible! The facility’s in sight now, so just keep going straight.”
“I can’t believe I’m under a magic clock. This is so cool!” said Marcy.
“Wish it wasn’t so cramped, though,” said Anne.
Anne and the others continued walking as straight as they could under the cloak for what felt like half an hour. With everybody sweating under the desert heat the smell was awful, and Anne was certain that if the heat didn’t knock her out, the stench would.
“Stop,” she heard Terri whisper.
Anne stopped with the others, and she noticed the shadow of a man, presumably a guard, standing across from Terri’s.
“Terri! You know it’s a half-day, right?” said the man.
“Yeah, but I wanted to get some stuff done early,” said Terri.
The man laughed.
“Always gotta be working, don’t you?” he said.
Anne heard a beep and the sound of a door opening.
“Go now,” whispered Terri.
“What was that?” asked the man.
“I said I’ve gotta go now!” said Terri, clearly nervous.
The man laughed again as Anne carefully stepped into the building with the others, Terri guiding them with a hand before going in after them and shutting the door.
“You can take off the cloak now,” said Terri.
Anne threw the cloak off eagerly, and she found Sasha, Marcy, Luz, and Gus just as relieved to be out from under it. Terri pushed a few buttons on their phone, and the lights around them shut off.
“Well, the 2 seconds I was able to see again were nice,” mumbled Sasha.
“Remember to text the room number of every room you enter into the group chat,” said Terri. “If you’re in trouble and need reinforcements, text ‘SOS’. If you find the portal, text a thumbs up emoji.”
“Oh, shit!” said Gus. “I’ve never used an emoji before! I hope I’m the one who finds the portal.”
Luz giggled. “Well, I’m rooting for ya.”
“Most of the rooms should be empty, but if you come upon one that isn’t, you’ll have to act fast,” said Terri. “We’re trained to stay in our command rooms during power outages, so you won’t have to worry about anyone wandering about, but you need to be prepared to take decisive action, because if you don’t, you will be killed.”
Anne saw the white of Terri’s eyes staring directly at her in the darkness.
“Do you understand this?” they asked.
“Yes,” said Sasha.
“I do,” said Marcy.
Anne couldn’t muster a response. Everyone was staring at her now.
“Come on, Anne,” said Terri. “We’re on the clock. Do you understand or not?”
Anne sighed.
“Yeah,” she was finally able to make herself say. “I understand.”
Anne didn’t know if she would be able to pull the trigger if the time came to take “decisive action”, however. She had been in swordfights. She had been in fistfights. She had destroyed robots, taken down Andrias with her Calamity Powers, taken down the Core, but this felt different. The very thought of taking a human life unsettled her, and as everybody else entered their rooms, and her phone dinged five times as they sent their room numbers, she turned to the nearest room to her, terrified by what she might find.
Anne looked at the number on the silver plate attached to the room’s door. 104. She texted that number to the group chat then grabbed the door’s handle. Her arm trembled again.
“Come on, Anne,” she whispered to herself. “You can’t hold everyone back. Remember you’re doing this for Amphibia.”
Anne pushed down the handle, pushed the door open, and was relieved to find nobody was in the room. She heard everyone else come out of their rooms, and her phone chimed moments later with new room numbers. She spent the next ten minutes following the process of texting the number of the room she would go in, going into the room, and finding the room empty every time. Though she was anxious going into the first few rooms, the anxiety eventually subsided, and the thought that she might have to kill someone didn’t even register by the time she texted the number “186” to the group chat then walked into room 186.
Inside the room, Anne was shocked to find a man sitting at the desk and staring at his phone. The man was just as shocked to see Anne, and he dropped his phone before reaching for something under his suit jacket.
“Wait,” said Anne. “Please, just pretend you never saw me.”
“You...you’re Anne Boonchuy,” said the man, suddenly recognizing Anne’s face in the darkness.
Anne smiled.
“Yeah...Anne Boonchuy, hero of the Frog-Vasion,” she said. “The president invited me here to see a top secret project before he revealed it to the world, but I...must have stepped into the wrong room, you know, with the power going out.”
“Of course,” said the man. “It’s strange the president didn’t inform us that you’d be coming, though.”
“He wanted it to be a surprise. I guess I’ve ruined it, though. Dumb ol’ me.”
“I know you’re lying, Anne.”
Anne took a step back.
“I know everything that happens in the facility, and I also know Terri is the only person who works for us capable of taking down the main power and backup generators at the same time. I didn’t think she would ever do it, but it seems there’s something more valuable to them, and to you, than your heads,” said the man.
Anne heard the chimes in her pocket again.
“It’s the portal, isn’t it?” asked the man. “You’re getting close, then. Shame none of you will live to see it.”
As Anne saw the outline of gun handle appear from the man’s suit jacket, she pulled out her own gun, pointed it at the man’s head, surprising him again, and pulled the trigger. There was a bright flash then a muffled gunshot then the loud thud of the man falling to the ground. Anne felt like she would throw up as the gravity of what had just happened weighed on her. She wanted to leave, but she couldn’t. Her phone chimed again, but instead of taking out her own phone, she picked up the phone that the man dropped onto his desk when she entered. She tried her best to ignore the warm substances on the phone’s surface as its screen turned on, revealing the man’s lock screen photo with himself, a beautiful woman standing beside him, and a beautiful baby in the woman’s arms.
Anne let the phone drop again as Sasha entered the room.
“Anne, didn’t you get those last texts?” asked Sasha. “Gus found the portal. We’re about to head over there and...oh God, what’s that smell?”
Anne turned around with tears in her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Sorry for what? Whatever happened here, I’m sure you didn’t have a choice,” said Sasha.
“I’m sorry for what I said all those years ago in Andrias’ castle,” said Anne. “About you being a bad person. You apologized for everything you did in Amphibia, and everything before that, but I never have, and I’m sorry for that, too.”
“You...you don’t need to be sorry. I was a bad person. I see that now.”
“There are no bad people,” said Anne, looking down at the man who was now missing part of his head thanks to her. “Or good people. All my life, I thought of myself as a good person, but what good person would shoot a man without a second thought? As soon as I saw his gun, I was no longer concerned about becoming a murderer. I was only concerned with myself. I’m a fucking hypocrite.”
The tears were coming out faster now, and Sasha ran to Anne to hug her.
“It’s okay,” said Sasha. “Let’s just...let’s just get out of here.”
Sasha and Anne walked out of the room, where the others were waiting for them.
“What happened?” asked Terri.
“Somebody was in there,” said Sasha.
“Oh, my God,” said Marcy. “Did Anne...”
“She’s standing here, isn’t she? There’s your answer,” said Sasha.
“I was...so excited to return,” said Anne. “So excited to see all my old friends again. Now I’m starting to wonder whether all of this is worth it.”
“It is worth it,” said Terri. “If you don’t do this, all your old friends will die or become slaves. I want you to remember this, because Andrew likely won’t be the only person you have to kill moving forward.”
His name was Andrew, thought Anne.
Anne drew the gun that ended Andrew’s life.
“The lights will come on at any moment. We have to get stepping,” said Terri.
They all went into room 193, the room the portal was in. Luz drew a symbol on a small piece of paper and tapped it to generate a floating light that revealed the huge machine powering the portal.
“After we get the power back, this will need some time to get going, so we’ll need somebody to guard the room,” said Terri. “How about you, Gus?”
“No way! I’m the one who found it! I was to see that thing in action!” said Gus.
“Luz?”
“Nuh-uh!” said Luz.
“Fine,” said Terri. “I guess I’ll do it myself. If I see anything suspicious, I’ll let you all know.”
The lights turned on, and the machine began to rumble.
“Couldn’t have happened at a better time,” said Terri.
Before leaving the room, Terri hugged Anne.
“Please...save your friends. Don’t let what you’ve done or what you’re about to do go to waste,” they whispered in Anne’s ear.
Terri was now gone, and everyone was now staring at a portal growing larger and larger.
“This is incredible,” said Luz.
“It’s really going to happen. I’m really going to see Grimes again,” said Sasha.
“And I’ll see Olivia and Yunan and...maybe someone else,” said Marcy, who seemed much more conflicted than Sasha was.
Anne was the most conflicted out of the three, though, as while she still wanted to meet the people of Wartwood again, she was no longer certain that the Anne they remembered, the Anne they learned to love and respect, was who she was anymore. Would she have to regain their acceptance? Did she even deserve their acceptance?
Suddenly, the door slammed open, and Terri ran back in with bloody hands.
“You need to see this, Luz,” said Terri, giving Luz a blood-soaked card.
“Henry...Wittebane?” read Luz. “Where have I seen that name before?”
“He said he’s part of some huge witch hunting organization and tracked the two of your here. He killed the guard, and he would have killed me if I didn’t act fast,” said Terri.
“Wittebane...Wittebane...oh, my God! Wittebane! That’s Belos! You think somebody related to him is after us?” asked Luz.
“I hope not!” said Gus. “Either way, we need to get back to the Boiling Isles pronto!”
“He said there are more people coming,” said Terri. “A lot more. If they see you on those staffs, you’re done for.”
Luz turned to the growing portal.
“We should hide out in Amphibia until we get more information on these witch hunters,” said Luz. “Think you can learn more about them, Terri?”
“I’ll try to,” said Terri.
The portal had stopped growing, and a field with exotic plants appeared in its distorted circle.
“I know that flora!” said Marcy. “It’s Amphibia!”
“I wish the circumstances were better, but I’m glad we’ll get to see it,” said Gus.
Anne, Sasha, Marcy, Luz, and Gus held hands and walked into the portal together. Anne blacked out as soon as she entered the portal, and when she woke up, she realized she was in the field with the others lying beside her.
“We’re here,” she said, staring at a massive bird flying above them. “We’re in Amphibia.”
Notes:
I did not intend for this chapter to take nearly a year to put out, but life, as it does, happened. I also had good old-fashioned writer’s block as an obstacle, for this chapter more than the others, as coming up with a semi-realistic way to do the break-in at that facility was hard for me. Eventually, I just decided to start writing this, as May and the second anniversary of The Hardest Thing’s premiere were coming up, and life still very much happening and my not having any good ideas for the break-in didn’t matter all that much. Once I started writing this chapter, it didn’t actually take that long to finish. I’ve spent so much time thinking about what I wanted to do that much of it was just putting ideas I’ve had for months into words.
In this chapter, we return to Anne’s perspective for the first time since Chapter 2. We learn more about what Amphibia means to her and what her life was like before she went there. We also get the break-in I struggled so much to plan for, but like Terri, I had the idea at the eleventh hour to use the insivi-veil introduced in the last chapter to help Terri sneak the others into the facility. After that, Anne goes through an extreme emotional crisis, as this woman thought of as a hero by the world does something not-so-heroic in killing a man in his office, a man with a family who was simply doing his job. Though Anne doesn’t have the same inner demons as Sasha or Marcy, especially Marcy who has an inner demon in the most literal way you can use the phrase, she isn’t perfect, and though she believes she’s fully accepted herself during her trip to the facility, it’s obvious once she’s entered the portal that she hasn’t. The Calamity Trio does not have the exact same issues to resolve as the last time they traveled to Amphibia, but they do have their issues, and it will be interesting to see how it affects them this time. They’ll also have Luz, future wife and non-toe-haver, and Gus, who just got to use an emoji for the first time, to accompany them.
Chapter Text
Moss had already begun to grow on the statue of Anne Boonchuy as Sprig approached it. It had now been ten years since he met Anne, the first close friend he had, and the closest friend he likely would ever have. His eccentricities made it hard for him to get along with other frogs his own age. His ex-girlfriend, Ivy, was one of the few exceptions, but the years he spent traveling to other countries with her made him miss his family, and they eventually agreed that it would be best for them to go their separate ways.
Sprig had spent the last three years studying archaeology at Newtopia University, returning home whenever he could. He hadn’t missed an Anne-iversery since the statue in Wartwood was first unveiled. The others in town missed Anne just as much as he did...well, maybe not just as much, but they missed her. He hoped that Anne could find her way back to them, that the humans would figure out how to make it happen. He needed her here, now more than ever.
Though Sprig’s relationship with Ivy didn’t last, Hop Pop’s relationship with Sylvia, Ivy’s grandmother, did last, with them being married for five years now. The usually-grumpy Hop Pop was much more relaxed with Sylvia as a part of the family, and Sprig couldn’t be happier for him. Sprig headed to the Planter Farm after cleaning the moss off of Anne’s statue and glancing at the concrete face of his old friend one more time. He hadn’t been home in half a year, and he knew Hop Pop, Polly, and Sylvia must have been anxious to see him by now.
“Hop Pop! I’m home!” shouted Sprig as he walked into the house at the back of the farm.
Hop Pop was in the living room reading a newspaper, and he waved at Sprig.
“Hey there, Junior!” greeted Hop Pop.
“Junior?” repeated Sprig. “You never call me Junior. That’s what you called my dad. Are you alright?”
Polly came out of her room, her hair even more disheveled than normal.
“Sorry, Sprig, I didn’t know you were coming,” said Polly.
“What?” said Sprig. “But I sent the letter last week!”
“Yeah, but Hop Pop usually handles the mail, and... well, let’s talk about this in my room.”
Spring hopped up the stairs and followed Polly into her room. Polly shut the door behind them and paused a moment, clearly thinking about what she would say next.
“Hop Pop has been...going through something that happens to a lot of frogs as they age,” she finally said.
“What are you talking about?” asked Sprig.
“He’s developing mind warts,” said Polly.
“Mind warts?”
“Did they not teach you about that in that fancy school of yours?”
“Come on, Polly.”
“Fine, fine. Mind warts is a disease that affects your memory and reasoning. He started showing signs of it a month ago, and a doctor just confirmed he had it yesterday.”
“Can it be treated? Is there a cure?”
Polly shook her head sadly.
“We can at least stop it from getting worse,” said Sprig. “Can’t we?”
The look in Polly’s eyes made it obvious that the answer to that was also “no”. Sprig noticed now that for the first time in his life, Polly was as tall as he was, maybe a little taller, though he would never admit it out loud. When Anne lived with them, Polly hadn’t even grown her legs yet. She would have been amazed seeing how much Polly has grown now.
“Where’s Sylvia?” he asked, desperate to change the subject.
“She’s getting groceries,” said Polly. “She’ll be back in an hour, probably.”
Suddenly, there was a knock on the door.
“Is that her now?” asked Sprig.
“It would be her quickest trip to the store ever if it was,” said Polly.
Sprig went to the door and opened it to find Bog, a large toad with sharp teeth and menacing yellow eyes, standing in front of him.
“Oh, is it that time of the month already?” said Sprig.
“Here’s your reparations,” said Bog through clenched teeth.
Bog dropped a small leather bag filled with coins into Spring’s hands then turned and walked away without saying anything else. Sprig then hopped back up the stairs, gave the bag of coins to Polly, and then went to his own room. He found, sitting on the table in front his window, the telescope Anne gave him for his 11th birthday. He sighed as he picked it up.
“I still haven’t forgotten you,” he whispered.
Sprig opened the window and peered outside of it with the telescope. The first thing he noticed was Wally Ribbiton, known to most of the frogs in Wartwood as One-Eyed Wally, eating beetle jerkey in front of his dilapidated cottage. The next thing he noticed was Sadie Croaker milking a cowapillar on her farm. Next, he saw Leopold Loggle, who was as large and muscular as he was as a member of the Wartwood Resistance, doing push-ups in front of his wood shop. Finally, he saw Chef Flour walking out of his bakery, holding hands with none other than Ivy’s mother, Felicia Sundew.
Sprig lowered the telescope, wondering how these frogs, many of them he had seen almost every day during his childhood, felt like strangers to him now. He had spent six years exploring the world with Ivy, and he didn’t have much time to re-familiarize himself with Wartwood before starting at Newtopia University. Hop Pop supported Sprig throughout all of his pursuits, and Sprig was grateful for that, but with Hop Pop sick now, he regretted that they didn’t have more time to spend together.
Polly was less than two years old when the herons killed their parents, so she didn’t remember them very well if at all. Sprig still had vivid memories of his parents, though he often claimed otherwise. He remembered his mother tucking him into bed and telling him stories passed down through generations of Planters, including a few that he suspected came from Leif, an old friend of his former king, Andrias. He remembered his dad playing catch with him outside of the cottage they used to live in.
And he remembered the night the herons came. As Hop Pop was out of town, his son, Spring’s father, was taking care of the farm and staying in Hop Pop’s house with his family until Hop Pop returned. Sprig was helping his dad bury seeds while his mother played with Polly indoors. Suddenly, there was a loud screech, the sound of a bird Sprig didn’t recognize but one his father clearly did recognize judging by the terror that had now consumed his face.
“Get inside,” his father said in a low voice.
“But what-” started Sprig.
“Get inside, now!” his father said more assertively in the same low voice.
Sprig did what his father told him to and ran into the house, feeling the same terror that his father did despite not knowing where it came from yet. His mother was waiting for him inside, and she gave Polly to him.
“Stay in the house, no matter what,” his mother said.
Sprig began to cry.
“What’s happening, mom?” he said.
“We’ll be back,” said his mother. “I promise.”
As his mother headed out the door, Sprig grabbed her hand, her face now blurry with the tears that had welled up in her eyes.
“You promise?” said Sprig.
The blurry face of his mother relaxed with a smile, and she adjusted his hat, which she and her dad had just gotten him for his seventh birthday. Though it was a little big on him, they told him he would grow into it.
“I promise,” she said.
Those were the last words his mother said to him.
In the present day, Sprig took off his hat, which he had grown into, and stared at it, remembering what he heard as he cradled his little sister in his arms. The successive, louder screeches. The sounds of slingshots. The cries of familiar voices. The sounds of bones breaking, flesh ripping, wings flapping. Sprig didn’t dare walk outside to see what was left. He sat there, eventually falling asleep with Polly in his arms and waking up the next morning right before a visibly shaken Hop Pop walked into the house. The devastation on his face changed to relief for a moment as he saw Sprig and Polly were alive, but then his face grew somber as he knew he would have to give his grandchildren the worst news of their short lives.
Sprig learned later that the heron attack was the worst Wartwood had suffered in nearly 100 years, killing 20% of the town’s population. It was something everyone had lost friends and family members to and something nobody wanted to talk about. Instead of sending his condolences, King Andrias sent the same tax collectors as always. Newtopia didn’t care about the frog villages at all outside of what they produced, a relationship that fortunately got better after Andrias stepped down and the frogs, toads, and newts of Amphibia got together for the first time to build a country that worked for all and not just for a few.
Still, there were scars. Not even monthly reparations could get Sprig to forgive the toads for all their bullying. Most of Wartwood felt the same way, and it would likely be a century at a minimum before these scars were healed completely. The newts of Amphibia’s capital were still seen as a bunch of snobs in Wartwood, but there was never as much hostility towards them as the toads, and while some of the frogs teased Sprig for going to school in Newtopia, most of them were as supportive as Hop Pop.
Hop Pop, who had blamed himself for not being there when the herons attacked, who believed Sprig’s parents would still be alive if they weren’t at the farm at all. Hop Pop, who took him and Polly in after their parents died and did everything possible to make them safe, make them feel loved. He even tried to play catch with Sprig once and immediately threw his back out. That was the last time he tried anything like that, but Sprig still appreciated it.
Hop Pop's desire to protect his grandkids made the farm feel like a prison sometimes, though. Until Anne came, Hop Pop never let Sprig venture far from home, but despite Anne being different than any creature they had ever seen before, there was a quality to her that made her trustworthy once you got over how hideous she was. Even Hop Pop, who constantly warned Sprig to stay away from her when she first moved into their basement, let her and Sprig explore Wartwood without any resistance after she spent some time with them. He even left Wartwood for the first time since the heron attack just to escort Anne to Newtopia.
Anne changed Hop Pop for the better. He changed Sprig for the better, too, teaching him what it means to be a friend, and better yet, what it means to be a hero. He put his hat back on and picked the telescope back up. While the memories of Anne made him just as sad as the memories of his parents, they weren’t nearly as painful. Though he wanted to be around Hop Pop and Polly, the memories of his parents, the memories of him sitting on the floor helplessly listening to his parents get torn apart, would always be strongest on the farm, which was likely the main reason he never stuck around for very long.
In a way, he felt like Wally, living a double life as the simple farmer in Wartwood and the seasoned explorer, always ready with a new story to tell, not always entirely true, in Newtopia. Unlike in Wartwood, he had little trouble making friends there, as there were plenty of newts, as well as the occasional frog, who was as quirky as he was. Once he was adjusted to the school environment, it felt like a home away from home for him, and he wished he wouldn’t have to graduate soon. Now that Hop Pop was sick, he knew he would have to be in Wartwood a lot more, and it was a thought that scared him.
Suddenly, there was a flash in the distance, and Sprig lifted the telescope to his eye again. He couldn’t see clearly what the source of the flash was, but he knew he’d seen a flash like it before, a long time ago.
“Polly!” shouted Sprig as he left his room. “I’m going out!”
“What? Why?” asked Polly.
“I saw something out there, something I need to investigate.”
Polly came out of her room. “Can’t it be investigated tomorrow?”
“No. I don’t know why, but I have a feeling that whatever’s out there, I’ve gotta see it, pronto!”
Polly nodded.
“Then I’m coming with you!” she said.
“No way! You’ll slow me down.”
“I’m not going to be responsible for telling Sylvia you wandered off into the wilderness for no reason!”
“It’s not for no reason! Like I told you, there’s something out there!”
“What?”
“I-I don’t know,” Sprig stuttered. “I saw a flash.”
“It could be a firefly.”
“It’s not a firefly.”
Sprig groaned.
“Fine,” he said. “You can come, but don’t be annoying.”
“I can’t promise that,” said Polly.
Sprig rolled his eyes as he hopped down the stairs with Polly behind him. They left the house and went in the direction of where Sprig saw the flash. After an hour, they were in the middle of a forest.
“Are you sure you know where you’re going?” asked Polly.
“Of course I do!” said Sprig. “It’s um...”
Sprig looked around, uncertain of where to go next.
“This way!” said Sprig after deciding on which way to go.
20 minutes later, they stopped.
“We’ve seen this tree already!” said Polly.
“No, we haven’t!” said Sprig.
“Just admit it! We’re lost!”
Sprig heard a shuffling.
“Did you hear that?” whispered Sprig.
“Yeah, it’s one of the million things in the forest that probably want to eat us!” whispered Polly.
The shuffling got louder, and Sprig realized it was coming from behind him. He turned around to find a large yellow eye staring at him in the darkness. Just as he was about to scream, he heard a familiar name escape Polly’s mouth.
“Wally?” she said.
The one-eyed creature got closer to reveal that it actual was Wally.
“Hiya there, kids? What’re you two doin’ in this scary forest?” he said.
“My brother saw a light, and he’s chasing it like a crazy person,” said Polly.
“What a coinkydink! I see’s a light, and I’m chasing it, too!” said Wally.
“Maybe I’m not so crazy after all,” suggested Sprig.
“You’ll need to find better proof than One-Eyed Wally,” said Polly.
“You mean Wally Ribbiton?” corrected Sprig.
“I ain’t never heard that name in me life!” claimed Wally.
“We both know who you really are!” said Polly.
“Aw, shucks! Now the kids are attacking me!” said Wally.
“I’m not a kid anymore! I’m 21!” said an annoyed Sprig.
“My, how time floatses by! I remembers when you two still had tails,” said Wally, taking off his hat and looking up at the black sky.
“Let’s focus on getting out of this forest before we actually do meet something that wants to eat us,” said Polly.
“I knows the way out!” said Wally. “Follow me!”
Sprig and Polly followed Wally for ten minutes before stopping again.
“That’s that same tree!” said Polly.
“Really?” said Wally. “We mights be lost, then.”
Polly growled and started to turn red. Sprig was worried she might punch Wally if they were in the forest for much longer. He wished he brought his telescope, but he was so eager to find where the flash came from, and what it might have left, that he didn’t think about it. Then he noticed something new in the distance.
“Guys! Smoke!” he said, pointing to the faintest of fumes ahead of them.
“Is there a fire?” asked Polly.
“Is we about to be fried?” asked Wally.
“No...I don’t think so,” said Sprig. “Let’s follow it.”
Polly and Wally looked at each other.
“Do you have any better ideas?” challenged Sprig.
Sprig walked towards the smoke, and after some hesitation, the others followed. The three of them walked for over an hour, trying as hard as they could to be quiet as sounds from animals that likely would try to eat them echoed through the forest. Eventually, they did escape the forest, and they saw a steep hill nearby. Smoke continued to billow from something uphill.
“You guys ready?” whispered Sprig.
“Nope,” said Wally.
“Let’s get this over with,” said Polly.
Sprig, Polly, and Wally climbed up the hill, and their jaws dropped as they found Anne, Marcy, Sasha, and two humans they didn’t recognize warming their hands by a campfire.
“It can’t be,” said Polly.
“Anne!” shouted Sprig.
Anne raised her eyebrows and turned to Sprig, who ran to her excitedly and hugged her as tightly as he could.
“You came back for us,” he said.
“Of course,” said Anne. “I...wish it was under better circumstances, though.”
“Huh? What do you mean?” asked Sprig.
Polly and Wally caught up with Sprig, and neither seemed to believe what they were seeing.
“Polly! Oh my God, you’re so much bigger now! And you have hair!” squealed Anne.
“Anne! It is you!” said Polly.
Anne let go of Sprig and hugged Polly next. Seconds later, Wally hugged Anne from behind.
“Ooh, it’s so good seein’ ya again, dear!” said Wally.
Anne giggled.
“I see you haven’t changed at all,” she said.
“But wait,” said Sprig. “Why did you say you wished you were meeting us under better circumstances?”
Anne let go of Polly then gently shook Wally off her.
“You remember that bald guy from Earth with lipstick and glasses?” asked Anne.
“Yeah,” said Sprig.
“Well, he’s president now, and he’s about to invade Amphibia,” said Anne.
“What?” said Polly.
“Oh, before I get into that, this is Luz, and that’s Gus,” said Anne.
“Hi!” said Luz.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance!” said Gus.
“I know it’s late, but you think you can find a place that can fit the four of us?” asked Sasha. “I really don’t want to sleep on this grass.”
Sprig chuckled. “I’m sure we’ll find something.”
Notes:
I started writing this chapter last year, and I started writing it again many, many more times after that. I wasn't sure how to introduce this world's version of Amphibia, and I had versions of this chapter planned where a lot more happened before Sprig and Anne reunited. I'm happy with the direction I eventually settled on, with a chapter told entirely from Sprig's perspective that doesn't have a lot going on but gives us a good idea of how Amphibia has changed in the last ten years. One of my favorite aspects of the show is its lore, which is developed really well for a show that is mostly 11-minute self-contained episodes, and I hope to expand even more upon it in future chapters.
I know better than to make any promises about timetables at this point, but I will say that the next chapter will be titled Reunion, and it will be more action-heavy than this chapter, which was meant to be a breather after how wild the last two chapters were. I also expect this fanfic to be completed after 10-12 chapters, so expect a lot more to come.
ThatGuyWhoReadsFanFiction on Chapter 1 Wed 18 May 2022 02:03AM UTC
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