Archive of Our Own

Poteidaia in mid-autumn meant pretty much the same thing as it always had, Gabrielle found. This close to the sea, the weather was mild enough that seasons had always seemed to blend into each other unnoticed, but there were still certain rhythms of nature that were inescapable even here. The fields had been stripped bare from the last summer harvest; the sheep were growing woolly enough to keep them warm in the cooler months ahead; families were preserving the abundance of summer for themselves and selling the surplus in the town market where children ran free, unencumbered by the burden of summer chores.

Gabrielle had loved this time of year in Poteidaia as a child, and she’d occasionally found herself in the town square in the two weeks she’d been back. Not much had changed here, either, save for trees grown taller and market stalls built new and different faces manning them. There were still the same skeptical looks that had followed her every time she’d been home since she’d first left, following hard on Xena’s heels, and the same whispers, just flying faster and more furiously.

“Did you see the weapons she carries?”

“Not a day aged…”

“I heard she’s done her own share of slaughter now... “

“... but the warrior woman is dead now, they say, and good riddance.” 

“...so changed… not ever really one of us…” 

“Not that anything good ever came from that family. Just look at Lila’s child, poor unnatural thing...” 

Not, Gabrielle admitted to herself ruefully, that she had honestly expected anything less. Her hair was longer again and functionally braided, but everything else - the tattoos, the weapons, her own agelessness - branded her more of an outsider than she’d already been at eighteen. 

“Good old Poteidaia,” she murmured to herself. 

“All right?” Lila’s voice came from behind her even as her hands rubbed Gabrielle’s arms to give them some warmth. “Gab, you’re freezing. I know you must have gotten used to being cold with all that bare skin, but put on a coat.”

“I’m covered,” Gabrielle protested, looking down at her trousers and sleeveless blouse. She wasn’t wrong: it was as covered as she’d consistently been since she’d first shed the last clothes of her former life as a teenager in favor of mobility. Well - mobility and a few other things. “What are you doing at market?”

“We need more flour,” Lila said with a sly look at Gabrielle. “It’s been strange - a good strange - getting used to cooking for more than myself and Sarah again, and somehow I’d managed to forget how much you eat.”

Gabrielle suffered the accusatory poke. “Yeah, don’t know how that’s possible. Can I help?” 

Lila laughed and took her arm as they started ambling through the square. “I don’t know. How long are you planning on staying?” 

“Trying to kick me out already?” Gabrielle teased her, but she was curious to hear the answer. The farm was in bad enough condition as it was. The strain of another mouth to feed couldn’t exactly be welcome. Maybe she could find some work to do as long as she was here, help Lila out, maybe even a way to increase Lila’s income more permanently or securely...

Lila bumped her shoulder with her own, drawing her out of her thoughts. “Mostly I’m just wondering how much to buy," she said. "It’s just rare you ever came home for more than a week, even before. I keep expecting to wake up one day and find out you’ve taken off in the middle of the night.”

“I wouldn’t do that anymore.”

“Yeah, because who would try to stop you?” Lila said with an eyebrow raised. When Gabrielle didn’t answer, she gentled her approach, which was itself enough to rankle Gabrielle’s mood. “Gabrielle, you’re welcome to stay as long as you like. I’d be happy to have you home forever. I think Sarah would too. But I know you.” 

“Yeah,” Gabrielle said vaguely, starting off into the distance. “Well.”

The truth was that she didn’t know where else to go. It had taken her a long time, but she’d made it to Greece, and at length, Amphipolis, about a month ago. Leaving behind the urn and they ashes they contained had left her feeling lighter, but in a way that made her feel that she’d become briefly insubstantial enough for a wind to blow her away if she stood still. And so, with her duties done - with Xena laid to rest in her family’s crypt, with Eve made aware of her mother’s death, with the Amazons squabbling amongst themselves in the sudden face of their own inevitable extinction - Gabrielle had turned her feet southeast on the familiar road from Amphipolis to Poteidaia. 

“Is there something you’re looking for here?” Lila guessed quietly. “I know - it’s been a while for you, now, but I’m here if you need me.”

And there it was: the thing they’d been avoiding since Gabrielle had first shown up on Lila’s doorstep two weeks ago. 

At the time, Gabrielle had recounted the facts, calmly, detached. It was odd, she’d thought even as she was doing it. She hadn’t told the story of her own life from an outsider’s perspective in longer than she could honestly remember. It was hard sometimes to remember the exuberant girl who had once inhabited her body and thrown herself into the reweaving of her life in one crowded tavern after another. She could remember how she’d learned to keep them spellbound with the rise and fall of her voice, the gestures of her hands and body, and how magical that kind of power had been. 

“Did you see the way they were listening to me?” she’d once asked Xena after one of her first performances. “To me!” 

Xena had looked at her in the way she often had in those early days, a growing fondness mixed with a genuine amusement she’d always seemed surprised to find pulling at her lips. “I saw,” she’d said. “You just about had them eating out of your hand. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised.” 

“Why?” Gabrielle had said, a little of her high wearing off at Xena’s words. “What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“You have a gift, that’s all.” At Gabrielle’s questioning look, she elaborated. “You’re discovering that you have a charisma that comes to you naturally. Why wouldn’t you enjoy it?” 

It was enough to sap most of said enjoyment out of Gabrielle’s mood. “Charisma,” she repeated, looking up at the strong profile of possibly the most charismatic person in the known world. Gabrielle had seen a few times already how quickly that charisma could turn dangerous in her, and had already learned how to live in the constant awareness of it for her own safety as well as Xena's. “You mean power,” she translated as she realized. 

“I didn’t say it was a bad thing,” Xena had replied mildly. “It’s a human thing, to crave power. Some kinds of power are just more harmless than others.” 

“Is that really what you believe?” Gabrielle had asked, irked by her own sudden worry at Xena’s tacit comparison of her own latent lust for power to Gabrielle’s own newly discovered talents.

But Xena had laughed, not entirely unkindly. “Yes, I do. Stop making that face, will ya? Look, I’ll be the first to admit I know the dangers of liking power too much. But there’s a huge difference between you and me. I’ve got my sword and my weapons and, well, everything else. But Gabrielle,” and here she’d laughed again, “by the gods, do you talk. And people listen.”

Of course, it was easy to talk when her subject was something she loved, when talking brought her infinitesimally closer to it word by word. It was harder when it was something that hurt to even think about. She counted herself lucky enough as it was that she hadn’t dreamt since Japa - there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that Xena’s body would be waiting there to meet her again if she ever did. 

The same thing had happened after Perdicus had been murdered a lifetime ago; and while the naive girl she’d been then had mourned the disappearance of her dreams and the dried up well of her inspiration along with her husband - well, it wasn’t like she was much for writing these days, anyway. Not since well before Xena had died. 

“I know you are,” Gabrielle said at length, putting a hand over her sister’s where she’d laid it on Gabrielle’s shoulder in her silence. “I just don’t really want to talk about it.”

Lila nodded, her expression far away. “I understand,” she said. “I felt the same way after Lector died. After I heard, anyway. It was - it was some time before I did.” 

“Maybe it was better that way,” Gabrielle replied without thinking.

But next to her, Lila went suddenly still; and Gabrielle’s eyes closed in sudden regret and shame.

“I won’t respond to that, because I think you didn’t mean it,” Lila said stiffly. “You wouldn’t have wanted - two years, Gabrielle - “

“I know, I know,” Gabrielle said apologetically, because it was true, she couldn’t imagine the agony of waiting two years alone, imagining the worst and discovering that the worst was beyond her imagination. “Of course I didn’t mean it. I only meant - you didn’t see it. And maybe that was its own blessing.” 

It was a fumbling explanation at best, and Gabrielle knew it even before Lila reacted.

“Better that I didn’t deliver my husband - our parents - into the hands of the gods?” Lila asked with mounting incredulity. “Better that I was dependent on some foreign barbarian murderers and rapists to do it for me? The gods know you weren’t here.”

Gabrielle didn’t bother to defend herself, or mention that the gods were dead, choosing instead to try to address Lila’s other concern. “Sarah said - "

“I know what my daughter has said,” Lila cut her off. Gabrielle would have gently defended Sarah’s assertion that she’d made sure that her father and grandparents were properly laid to rest when she’d amassed enough authority to do so as Gurkhan’s first wife, but it was clear that Lila was either of a mood not to listen or not to believe. 

“You know, my husband was beheaded too,” Lila said. Her voice was calm, but a dangerous fury underlaid it that made Gabrielle feel every inch of the distance and time that separated them now where they stood. “And I understand more than you think.”

Gabrielle didn’t go after her when she swept away. She was still fuming at herself - and the world, and Xena - and kicking at the nearby fence of a sheep corral with her hands white-knuckled around the top rung when Sarah came to stand next to her almost half an hour later, carefully keeping her distance and looking straight ahead. When she finally spoke, it wasn’t the opening salvo Gabrielle expected.

“I’ve thought about running away from here so many times.”

Gabrielle drew in a deep breath and let it go shakily. “Yeah?” she said when she was calmer. “What’s stopped you?” 

Sarah shrugged. “I promised Mom. It would break her heart if I left so soon. And honestly, I don’t know where else I would go right now. But still, this place - I hated it growing up here. When Gurkhan came through and took me away, I thought it was… I don’t know. A punishment of some kind.”

“Sarah, no,” Gabrielle said, her heart breaking for her despite the rest of her emotional turmoil. 

“I know that it wasn’t,” Sarah continued, finally looking over at Gabrielle. “And I didn’t tell you that to make you pity me, just because I thought you might understand. It’s not something I can tell mom.”

No, it certainly wasn’t, Gabrielle thought. Poor Lila. 

“You think that I think that Xena’s - “ But her voice broke, still unable to form the words so casually. “ - is because I left Poteidaia thirty five years ago?” she finished, not quite understanding what Sarah was getting at. Gabrielle’s wounds were so very different from Sarah’s, and she’d never linked them to her desperation to leave her Poteidaia.

“No,” said Sarah. “But I think you hated it here, too; and I think we’re both stuck here now because we don’t know where else to go. The things that made us who we are - the people who defined us - they’re both gone. And now this is all we’ve got left.”

“That’s depressing,” muttered Gabrielle, but it wasn’t untrue. Part of her wanted to protest putting the love she shared with Xena into the same bucket as the abuse Sarah suffered at the hands of Gurkhan; but she held her tongue, because Xena had defined her in so many ways, and Gurkhan had defined Sarah in so many ways. And now both of them were gone, leaving Gabrielle and Sarah to spin against the world in their first home.

 “I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to run away, either,” was all Sarah said. 

The idea gave Gabrielle pause. “Maybe we should,” she said slowly. Sarah’s gaze shifted to her, the beginnings of a reluctant rebuttal on her lips, and Gabrielle, who was quickly warming to the idea, cut her off. “No, I don’t mean just you and me. Think about it. What’s really keeping us in this place? My parents are dead. The rest of this town doesn’t want anything to do with us, any of us. Your mother is just as unhappy as we are. So why are we staying?”

Sarah stared at her, but Gabrielle could see the seeds of hope starting to take root behind her eyes. “Where would we go?” she asked, and the question wasn’t rhetorical. 

Gabrielle closed her eyes and turned her face up to the sun. “By the gods, Sarah,” she said. “Anywhere we want.”

Xena dropped down next to her, grinning broadly, which was Gabrielle’s first indication that something was up. 

“What?” she asked suspiciously. 

Xena knocked her shoulder with her own. “It’s just good to see you on the road again. I think getting out of Poteidaia was the right move for all of you.”

“Glad you think so, since you were the one who thought I should go home in the first place.”

“Didn’t mean you should stay there forever,” Xena said. “You’re bringing what really matters with you, anyway.”

Behind her, Lila and Sarah lay sleeping in the wagon containing most of the possessions they hadn’t sold in Poteidaia before they’d left. If Gabrielle were to leave behind her awareness of them, focus only on the visage of Xena at her side and the fire before them, she could almost believe that nothing had changed. 

Almost. Everything had changed, including herself, too much for her to ever let that fantasy run too far.

“Yeah,” Gabrielle said on a sigh. “Lila was an easier sell than I thought she’d be, considering she’s never gone further than Amphipolis on a visit.”

“Sarah said once that Lila wanted to be more like you. Maybe she figures now is her chance, when she doesn’t have much to lose,” Xena pointed out. 

“Maybe so,” Gabrielle said softly.

Gabrielle had always been afraid to think too much about just what Xena was in these moments - a ghost or a product of her own grieving mind seemed like the most likely options - but it didn’t stop her from taking comfort in her steady presence at her side. Whatever she was, she felt like Xena. 

She also tried not to think too hard about what kept her coming back. Gabrielle had already changed since Xena’s death. How much more would she change before Xena no longer recognized her? It hurt, soul deep, to think of how changed she’d be in another year’s time, or five or ten or twenty, and Xena appearing at her side, unchanged and frozen in time. Would she be able to recognize Gabrielle at all when she finally joined her?

But as painful as that was, it was more painful still to think that the part of her that was Xena would change and bend and yield enough that Xena would no longer come to her at all. 

“You’re awfully quiet,” Xena said, a small smile on her face. 

“Just thinking,” Gabrielle replied quietly. “Right before we left for Japa, you said you wanted to go to Egypt, but I got the sense you were just restless.”

Xena shrugged. “I was. Gods, Gabrielle, I was nearly forty years old. At that age, my mother had a daughter who was out conquering Greece. And me - I had a daughter in India I barely knew and a family that was dead. And you.” She looked fondly at Gabrielle. “Always you. But I guess it was hitting me just how much of our lives we’d spent wandering around.”

It wasn’t anything she hadn’t already suspected. Gabrielle breathed in deeply, and finally asked the question she’d wanted to ask hundreds of times while Xena had been alive. 

“Would you ever have settled down with me?”

Xena was silent. After a moment, very quietly, she asked, “Was that something you wanted?”

“With you, I wanted everything,” Gabrielle said honestly. 

In that last year, Xena had just been starting to show the first signs of aging: fine lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth, a silver hair or three amidst all that glorious mass of black. It was nothing that Xena herself had noticed with their imperfect mirrors of weapons and water, but Gabrielle had treasured them when she was sure Xena was asleep and her eyes could roam everywhere she loved. It was the first time that she’d really allowed herself to consider that for all Xena’s bluster about warriors dying young, they might get to grow old together after all.

When she’d been younger, it had been enough to wake up every new day in a new place, the wide, unpredictable world before them both; but in those last months she’d started letting herself daydream. She’d imagined the ways she’d soon have to start soothing Xena’s anxieties when she finally started to notice the lines and the grey hairs; because, as the most beautiful woman in the world, Xena naturally had a vain streak she didn’t like to admit to. 

She should have known better, of course - she should have known Xena better. On some level, Gabrielle thought she had, and had simply been willfully blind to the truth: that Xena had always vibrated with a force too difficult for her to contain, and that her bluster about warriors dying young had only partially encompassed what she actually meant and felt when it came to death and deservedness. She’d loved Gabrielle with everything she was, Gabrielle knew that - but for all that love had tethered and transformed her, it hadn’t comprised the entirety of her being. It wasn’t fair, Gabrielle knew, but she was still coming to terms with that one.

The silence descended between them again, but less uncomfortably than Gabrielle had anticipated. “I knew what I was signing up for, being with you,” she said after a time. “I don’t regret it. I could never have regretted it. But there were times I did wonder…”

Xena sighed - her first reaction since she’d last spoken. “Me too,” she admitted. 

“When we had Eve?” Gabrielle guessed, because it was the only time she’d ever really asked Xena to consider a domestic life. 

“That was one of the times,” Xena said, smiling at the look of surprise Gabrielle must have been wearing. “Like I said, I was getting old, and you deserved more. You’d already gone for the whole getting married and settling down thing once before, and you pushed hard for staying with the Amazons when Evie was a baby, so I knew there was at least a part of you that wanted it. I guess I was feeling like we were going to have to make some decisions in the near future. I just wanted to be ready to make the right ones.”

Gabrielle’s mouth was dry. “You know I never would have left you. You didn’t have to make any decisions for my sake.”

“But I did,” Xena corrected her gently. “Even if not for your sake, then for my own. Wandering around aimlessly, trying to atone for sins I’d never be able to account for - it wasn’t any way for us to live. Not forever. Even if you can pretend it was fair to you, you can’t tell me you weren’t starting to feel restless for something more, too.”

Gabrielle was silent. She would have spent a lifetime feeling restless if it had meant having Xena, whole and alive, at her side.  

“I guess, right before Japa, I’d started really wondering what that would look like for us,” Xena said. “Trying to picture it.”

“And?” Gabrielle was almost afraid to ask, too fearful of a picture she’d never be allowed to live out, but yet would never be able to stop wanting. 

“I never really could,” Xena admitted. “You and me, we’re too much adventurers. There was a reason you ran away from Poteidaia. And there was a reason you never stayed with the Amazons.”

Yeah, they were both you, Gabrielle didn’t say. It was just as well, because Xena was right. There were other things making her restless, Gabrielle knew, and other reasons why Xena would never let her soul rest. Xena had never been destined for a small life. Gabrielle couldn’t imagine even a sixteen-year-old Xena, before Cortese, settling down in Amphipolis for a quiet life of marriage, motherhood, and innkeeping. Gabrielle had come too close to that fate herself, and she still broke into a guilty sweat when she considered how she’d embraced it, and what the price of her freedom had been. 

“The closest I ever got was picturing us with a home base somewhere. A little house. Maybe a dog or two. Stray kids hanging around when we were home.” Xena’s voice sounded dreamy. Gabrielle wondered just how much of it was a projection of her own desires. “Somewhere not too far off the roads so we could go travelling whenever we wanted. Maybe close to Athens and the Academy. Or maybe close to the Amazons or Poteidaia, depending how you felt about it.”

“What about you?” Gabrielle asked, throat tight with emotion.

Amiably, Xena grinned lopsidedly. “I wanted to be close to you. There wasn’t anywhere else left that was really home for me.”

Gabrielle laughed wetly. “We’re a matched set, aren’t we.”

“Yeah, I guess we are,” Xena said, and eased an arm around her, pulling her close, and Gabrielle let her head fall comfortably into the familiar crook of her neck and shoulder. “You know there’s no reason you can’t still have all that now.”

Gabrielle craned her neck to stare at her in disbelief. 

“I mean with the home, and the travelling,” Xena clarified, brushing off the absurdity of her original words. “Just because I’m not there doesn’t mean all your dreams are gone.”

Gabrielle suppressed a bitter laugh, but then tried to consider just what her dreams had ever been. A lifetime ago, she’d wanted to go to the Academy if Xena died. She’d ended up doing that while Xena had been alive, and concluded that it was better to live a story than to tell it. She’d also thought once about making a home with the Amazons when actually confronted by a world without Xena. 

But there had come a point that Gabrielle had started to take it for granted that their deaths would come at the same time. She’d simply refused to consider any contingencies, to plan for something that Xena had always accepted as an almost certainty from the very beginning of their journey together. 

“I don’t know, Xena. None of my homes really exist anymore, either.”

Xena made a noise of disagreement. “Eh, I wouldn’t say that. Look behind you.”

Obediently, Gabrielle did, taking in the sleeping forms of her sister and niece. “It’s not the same.”

“Maybe not,” Xena agreed - dream, projection, vision, ghost. “But it is a start.”

Gabrielle had last left Eve in Persia. Fortunately, the followers of Eli didn’t make themselves difficult to track, and Gabrielle hadn’t been required to go as far south as India to find Eve and bring her news of her mother’s death. 

As much as Eve had never really known what to do with her, she’d been more hesitant than ever when confronted with how changed Gabrielle was even in appearance. She’d happened across Gabrielle mid-bath and startled at the dragon on her back and twining down her calf, but it was her hair she’d mentioned. 

“I’ve never seen it so long,” she said, maybe because it was the easiest thing to address. 

Reflexively, Gabrielle’s fingers had come up to where the ends were brushing beneath her shoulders, loosened from her now-customary braid. “I used to wear it long,” she said. “I guess I haven’t had time to cut it.”

“I can,” Eve offered. “That is, if you’d like me to.” 

But inexplicably, Gabrielle had balked at the idea; and Eve, reading it in her face, hadn't mentioned it again. Some women cut their hair in grief; Gabrielle had let hers grow. 

She’d turned down Eve’s offer to come to Amphipolis with her, sensing that it came less from a real desire or even need to do so and more from a sense of obligation - and worse, obligation toward Xena only. They’d spent four days together to grieve, and that had been more than enough for Gabrielle’s blood to start itching with the need to leave, to move. 

“Are you sure?” Eve had asked, embracing her a final time. 

“I’m sure. They need you here.”

“I think maybe you need me more.”

Gabrielle had started at that. Maybe she’d been wrong after all about who Eve felt obligation toward. Surprising herself, she’d kissed Eve’s cheek. “I’ll be fine,” she repeated, and almost meant it. “Go on. Just… maybe send me a letter every once in a while?” she finished in a moment of inspired spontaneity.

Eve had smiled tentatively at her. “Alright.”

To Gabrielle’s mild surprise, Eve had actually done just that. Gabrielle had had two letters from her, one in Poteidaia and another in Epanomi, where she had helped Lila and Sarah settle. The second letter came in the first days of spring, and Gabrielle had taken a blanket for warmth and curled up on the porch to read it. It contained the kind of news she expected from Eve: that they were having success in spreading Eli’s word, that her group was travelling further east, that they were establishing more and more groups of Elijans to do the same but in all directions. Nothing negative, though Gabrielle knew there must be plenty of bad news to go with the good. 

“Why don’t you go visit her?” 

Gabrielle looked up to see Lila easing down next to her. “Who - Eve?” 

Lila laughed. “Who else? I’m sure you must miss her. I’m surprised you’re here with us.” 

Gabrielle opted not to address either of those sentiments. “I saw her not that long ago,” she said instead, unsettled by the idea in a way she couldn’t quite describe as much something in her lifted its head at the idea of movement. 

Lila tsked. “That’s all fine for you to say, Gabrielle, but have you considered your family wants to see you more often than you think?” Gabrielle couldn’t help recoiling a little, chastened by the resentment Lila wasn’t voicing; but Lila, seeing this, gentled her tone and expression. “You’ve got that wanderlust in your eyes again. Don’t think I don’t know what it looks like by now.”

And, well, Gabrielle had to admit that she was right about that much. It was surprisingly easy for her to push Gabrielle into packing a saddlebag and leading Argo out of the stable, and more surprising still when she found Sarah waiting outside for her, a bag of her own in hand. 

“What’s this?”

“I’m coming with you,” Sarah said, obligingly stating the obvious. “Eve was really kind to me on the trip back from Mogador, and made sure I got back to Greece safe and in one piece,” she said defensively before Gabrielle could argue. “I’d like to see her again, say hi.”

For some reason Gabrielle hadn’t considered that the whole experience she would have preferred to forget had led to an actual friendship between her niece and Xena’s daughter. Her heart twisted pleasantly at the idea of something binding their families together besides the friendship between herself and Xena, a feeling she hadn’t had since the birthday she’d spent in Amphipolis with their mutual family and friends just after they’d come back from India.

Gabrielle considered her thoughtfully. It wouldn’t be terrible to have company along for the journey. She extended a hand toward Sarah expectantly, and after a moment, Sarah caught on, grinning slightly as she tossed her the bag.

And so with a long goodbye to Lila, they’d set off eastward and into the non-Greek world that lay beyond it.

Gabrielle had travelled this way multiple times in the last several years on her way to India and Chin and back again, not to mention her long sojourn back from Japa; and as the hills of minor Greece on the other side of the Aegean steepled into mountains and then tapered slowly into grasslands, she felt something settle in her soul as it expanded into the broad reaches of the sky. Something about being here, without the burden she’d been carrying last time, let her breathe more freely than she had since they’d set out for Japa. 

Sarah noticed. ”You seem freer,” she observed. “You’ve been through here before, haven’t you?”

“Uh, yeah,” Gabrielle said. “A few times.” It was always a toss up whose control the land would be under - a little further east, and it would be definitively Persian, but the areas between the last of the Greek colonies and the Persian empire had always been constantly at war every time Gabrielle had travelled through. 

They closed in on the encampment of Elijans by a succession of locals who had seen them, and in some cases had been converted by them. 

“The miracle lady healed me,” one dark-haired boy told her as seriously as only an eight-year-old could, and Gabrielle smiled at him. 

“What did the miracle lady look like?” she asked him. 

“She had curly hair and really pretty eyes. And she was tall.” 

“Dark hair, blue eyes, a little taller than you,” his mother stepped in helpfully. “Incredible, those eyes. Like the fires of the spirits themselves were inside of her.”

Gabrielle didn’t really need much more evidence, but asked anyway, “Did she tell you her name?” 

“She said her name didn’t matter,” the woman said. “I wish I knew it. I would bless it every day.”

They found the encampment two days after that on the flowering banks of a river. In another life, Gabrielle would have begged to spend the day lazing among the flowers with her quill in hand, the sun warming her skin and her blonde hair, and Xena puttering restlessly but comfortingly in the general vicinity. With a pang, she almost longed for the empty scrolls she’d once carried habitually with her, waiting to be filled with her words and everything behind them. 

Gabrielle squinted as they got closer and the scene started to reveal itself as something decidedly less pastoral. 

“Looks like trouble,” Sarah confirmed at her side and cast her a worried glance. 

“Yeah,” Gabrielle agreed. “You stay here.”

“Not a chance. Let’s see what it’s about.”

They kept to the brush and treeline, creeping closer until Gabrielle could make out the details: a group of men in unmistakably Roman armor who didn’t look too friendly speaking with a group of the Elijans, Eve at the forefront. 

“Careful,” Gabrielle breathed as she watched, already dropping to a crouch and reaching for her weapons. 

Eve kept her hands up in a pacifying gesture, but the big one in front who seemed to be in charge looked like he’d had enough. He reached for his sword, but the blade never touched Eve: the chakram had left Gabrielle’s hand independently of her thought and neatly bisected it inches from Eve’s unflinching face. 

The surprise of it, however, was enough to draw her attention to where Gabrielle still crouched with the unerring accuracy one would expect from either Xena’s daughter or the Bitch of Rome, and certainly both. Unfortunately, it also had the effect of giving away Gabrielle’s position to the soldiers, and they pointed to her as several began charging toward her. 

“Sarah, hide,” Gabrielle said, catching the chakram on its return and putting it away to draw her sais. “Now!” 

She could feel Sarah doing as instructed, thank the gods, taking Argo with her as she kept as low to the ground as possible. With any luck, they’d only seen Gabrielle from that distance, and Gabrielle vaulted her body forward after a running leap to make herself a more tempting and distracting target still. 

“Swords,” she muttered before the first one was on her, sparing that last moment to wishing that she had learned the art of them from Xena after all. 

They were fortunate in that the contingent of soldiers present were obviously scouts, and numbered no more than fifteen. Xena would have dispatched roughly seven of them by now, but Gabrielle was doing her best, and she braced her body against the hits they got in against her, the ringing in her head and the taste of blood in her mouth. She was relieved to see that Eve was fighting, at least in self-defense, and wondered how she’d reconciled that with Eli’s teachings. Then again, maybe Eli had made some exceptions since he’d been killed and become a god. 

As it was, it took Gabrielle about five times longer to get through seven of them than it would have taken Xena, trying to stun and incapacitate rather than kill when she could. Eve had been doing her best to do the same, but Gabrielle watched in slow motion two of the remaining soldiers get her in a position where she could not break free without violence - violence that, Gabrielle realized with quick-dawning horror, Eve refused to use. She went limp against their hold as one spat at her. 

There was no time to shout. Gabrielle quickly found an opening to stab the man she was fighting in the neck, and dodged the spray of blood as he fell and she took the opportunity to run toward Eve.

“You fucking traitor,” she could hear one of the soldiers say to Eve as he drew his sword back for a wide arc aimed at her neck. 

Later, Gabrielle couldn’t say what had overcome her when she was faced with the damage she’d inflicted on his body. She could only remember the rage that had narrowed her focus until every last one of her senses were screaming along with her own voice in her own head - or maybe that wasn’t as confined to her mind as she’d thought, either. All she knew was that she was red up to her arms and across her chest with blood that wasn’t hers, and the final soldier who hadn’t faced her was running away. Her muscles twitched with the intention of running after him, hunting him down, making him pay - 

“Gabrielle,” Eve’s desperate voice cut through the consuming haze of fury, and Gabrielle focused: Xena’s daughter. The last living piece of her in the world. The baby she’d cradled in her arms. The child they hadn’t raised, a long year’s worth of exhausted terror still running quick in her veins to the insistent drum of her own heart, protect, protect, protect. 

At Eve’s feet was the soldier who had held her down while his friend had tried to cut off her head like it was nothing. He groaned, looking dazed, and Gabrielle appraised him coolly. Eve must have stunned him while Gabrielle was otherwise occupied, and she was grateful for it as she approached him and unceremoniously jabbed two fingers each into either side of his neck. Immediately he collapsed forward, and Gabrielle was only distantly aware of her surprise that it had worked. 

“Gabrielle! ” Eve cried again. Gabrielle ignored her.

“You have thirty seconds to live. Tell us why you’re here.”

He gasped, gaping up at her with that same dazed expression; and Eve’s hands curled around her arm, heedless of the blood they encountered.

“Gabrielle, please, take it off,” she said. “This isn’t the way.”

“Rumors,” gasped the soldier. “Livia - they said she was here. A fucking Elijan, after everything.”

“Who wants her dead?” Gabrielle demanded. 

“The commander,” he answered as blood started to trickle out of his nose. “You killed him. You fucking bitch.”

“Just the commander?” 

He laughed as best as he could, and the sound gurgled deep in his throat. “Anybody would kill her. She’s a traitor to Rome.”

Gabrielle grabbed him by the neck. “Just the commander?” she asked again, this time more forcefully.

“For now,” he said, and his eyes started to roll back in his head. 

“Gabrielle,” Eve said again, more frantically. “She wouldn’t want this!”

Finally, Gabrielle conceded, taking off the pinch and kicking him in the chest before he could recover so that he tumbled backward, wheezing. 

“Bind his hands, and hold him somewhere,” she commanded the nearest Elijan, a horrified looking man. She softened. “I won’t hurt him again,” she promised at large to the group. They watched her warily, glancing toward Eve; and at her nod and refusal to move away from Gabrielle, they complied. 

“You’re gonna have to move soon, cover your tracks as best you can if you won’t leave them,” Gabrielle said to her. “You know that, right? The sooner the better.”

“I know. Trust me when I say there’ll be time for that later,” Eve said, and tugged at her arm. “Come with me now.”

Gabrielle allowed herself to be tugged toward the river, where Eve methodically washed her hands and arms as best as she could. 

It was still odd to be with Eve, especially without Xena, and for a brief moment Gabrielle second guessed the entire journey here. It wasn’t like Eve really considered Gabrielle as anything other than the woman her mother had loved. It wasn’t even like Eve was her daughter - they were too far past a point where that could have been true. When they’d first come face to face with Livia, Gabrielle had done her best to suppress her memories of mothering a baby that she and Xena had thought they would raise together. It had seemed like less of a cruel joke when she pretended it hadn’t been a life she’d wanted, and even more so now, when there was nothing binding them together other than their mutual, separate ties to a dead woman. 

“Did I see someone with you?” Eve asked, mercifully not starting in where Gabrielle knew she wanted to. 

“Uh,” Gabrielle said, and cringed as she realized she’d forgotten her niece, who was presumably still hiding in the trees. Hopefully. With any luck she hadn’t watched what just happened. They’d had the usual troubles with highwaymen on the road so far, and Sarah had seen her fight; but nothing like that. “Yeah. Sarah. She wanted to say hi.”

“It’ll be good to see her,” Eve said with a small smile, infuriatingly calm as she gently washed Gabrielle’s body. 

It was enough to raise Gabrielle’s hackles, her senses still on a hair trigger even as her mind was starting to enter into a kind of ashamed numbness, and she snapped, “Just say it.”

“Say what?” Eve said, a patent refusal. Gabrielle gave her a look, and Eve relented. “It’s not what she would have wanted,” she said again.

She gave up the right to want things when she left me, Gabrielle didn’t say. “You have no idea what she would have wanted,” she snapped again, and since that was hardly any better, immediately regretted it. Eve was looking at her, only slightly cowed, but also like she understood. Gabrielle sighed, rested her head in her hands. “She never would have forgiven me if I hadn’t,” she said more quietly. “I know that much for sure.”

Patiently, Eve continued her silent work, washing the webs between Gabrielle’s fingers and the beds of her nails until they were clean once again and Gabrielle stared at them bleakly.

“I’m not the only one she loved,” was all Eve offered at long last. “Please, Gabrielle - take care of yourself.”

Gabrielle again wanted to protest that Eve hadn’t known how fiercely her mother had loved her, and yes, sometimes at the expense of her devotion to Gabrielle. Eve also didn’t know what her mother had sometimes expected of Gabrielle, sometimes at the expense of parts of Gabrielle’s soul. Their life together had always been a long compromise. It hadn’t always been a success. 

But those details certainly weren’t things that Eve needed to know; and so Gabrielle kept quiet. 

“You know, sometimes you’re a lot like him,” she said instead. “Eli,” she clarified when Eve looked at her blankly. “You know he was once a man, right?” 

She’d once told a group of Elijans who Eli had really been in Eve’s presence; but she hadn’t ever been sure how much of it Eve had really been capable of hearing or even how much Gabrielle had wanted her to hear of it, dressed as she still was in the rags of Livia and drowning under the weight of her own crimes.

“Of course,” Eve said, clearly unsure where Gabrielle was going with this. “Everyone knows this. Do you mean to say - did you know him?”

“You could say that. We were friends,” said Gabrielle, and then, before she could think better of it, added, “I was his first disciple.”

This was clearly brand new information to Eve, who was goggling at Gabrielle like she’d never seen her before. Maybe she hadn’t. 

“You walked the way of love?” she asked, expression caught somewhere between awe and disbelief before her eyes strayed to the blood spatter Gabrielle presumed was still on her face and chest and the chakram and sais that were omnipresent on her body. Gabrielle felt a stab of irritation, unfairly - Eve didn’t know her, not really, and Gabrielle hadn’t ever really tried to rectify that. 

“I’m sorry,” Eve apologized, reading something of Gabrielle’s feelings in her face, “but - what happened?”

That much was a fair question. Gabrielle laughed a little, because what hadn’t happened? The truer answer lay in a singular moment: her heart stopped, the chakram broken, the world slowing enough to afford Gabrielle a moment of sudden, startling clarity. How obvious her way had been in that moment - obvious enough that she’d never questioned it since.

“A different way of love presented itself,” Gabrielle said. “For all the good it did me.”

Eve didn’t question what that meant - Gabrielle was pretty sure she already had a good idea - but she did take a moment to study Gabrielle appraisingly. 

“What?” Gabrielle asked, uncomfortable under her scrutiny. 

“Do you still talk to him?” At Gabrielle’s confusion, she clarified, “Eli.”

“What, you mean - like prayer?” 

“If you like,” Eve said. “He was your friend. It’s probably different for you than it is for me.”

Honestly, Gabrielle hadn’t considered talking to Eli since he’d died, at least not in the way that Eve meant. Gabrielle was a bard, however out of practice: she talked, especially when death claimed the people she loved. She’d talked to Perdicus often after he’d been killed, and she still talked to her parents and to Ephiny and the sisters she’d lost. She talked to Xena multiple times a day. Of course she’d talked to Eli after he’d been struck down, especially through those last tumultuous weeks of Xena’s pregnancy. How exhausted she’d been, and how terrified. They’d never had a home, her and Xena, but they’d also never been hunted in a way that made every resting place unsafe. 

She had come as close to prayer in the frantic weeks after Eve’s birth as she had since before she’d first run away after Xena. If your father actually has any pull in the heavens, she’d silently said to Eli, can you do us a favor? 

The toll had been starting to show then even in Xena. Her breasts had been constantly leaking and her body ached in ways Gabrielle could read even though Xena was still too stoic and stubborn to mention it. Dark circles had appeared under her eyes between midnight feedings and diaper changes and the stress of the need for constant, unwavering vigilance, and too often she’d cradled Eve to her chest looking lost and afraid, just a mother who loved her child. 

The sight of it had always made every protective instinct in Gabrielle rise up like a lion. She’d wanted to cradle them both close and soothe them to sleep with her voice and her touch. She’d wanted to prowl the edges of their silent, dark campsite with sais in hand and burning in her brain. She’d done the latter a lot more than she’d done the former - Xena was still Xena, after all, and there were limits to the tenderness and protection she’d accept.

Eli had eventually come through in his way, though Gabrielle was skeptical that it had anything to do with her tired ramblings to a dead friend. She had her own feelings about the way he had, jumbled and contrary as they were. 

Eve read her answer in her face, and laid a hand on her shoulder. 

“Maybe you should try,” she suggested. “He might talk back.”

“And if he doesn’t have answers?” 

“It’s not always about answers,” Eve said astutely. “Sometimes it’s just about talking.”

And so Gabrielle found herself wandering deeper into the more secluded, untouched parts of the forest the following day. It was a beautiful day, almost preternaturally so, although it was possible that part of that stemmed from Gabrielle’s own intentions in coming here.

Even five years ago, her younger self would have been in awe of everything around her while Xena, ever practical, would have been making dismissive responses for every wondering comment Gabrielle got out. 

“Why don’t you ever just try to see it the way I see it?” Gabrielle had asked once, frustrated. “What could it really hurt?” 

But Xena had paused and turned to face her with unexpected sincerity. “Does it really matter that much to you?” 

“I mean - it’s not about me,” Gabrielle had replied, flustered by Xena’s sudden earnestness. She didn’t have much of a need to adjust to it, however, since it disappeared almost as suddenly as it had appeared as Xena scoffed. 

“Oh, I guess it’s about me, then?” 

“Well, why not?” Gabrielle had refuted. “For someone who’s so sensitive and attuned to the world around you, I just don’t understand why you never give yourself a chance to appreciate it.” 

But Xena had fixed her with a look, and after a moment said, “Have you ever thought that maybe I just appreciate it differently than you do?” 

Gabrielle hadn’t really had the means to fully understand that question, let alone answer it, until years later, high in the mists above a plain where three armies were assembling below the fortress ramparts. Listen, Xena had said, listen to what’s behind the sounds. 

Here in this forest, late summer light was streaming through the branches and leaves in fits and starts. Gabrielle closed her eyes against it and felt the whisper of movement on her skin, vibrations in the air. 

Listen, Xena had said. 

And finally, in the warm stillness of the forest clearing, the light became blinding even through Gabrielle’s closed eyelids. The air shifted minutely. The pines whispered. Footsteps drawing nearer. A rustle of cloth and beard and long hair. Slowly, Gabrielle opened her eyes, and gasped.

“Eli?”

For there he was, just as she’d known him, as if she’d never watched him die, and never known he’d become a god. 

“Gabrielle,” he greeted her. “It’s been some time, old friend.”

Stunned, she reciprocated the hug he engulfed her in - solid underneath her hands - and said, “I wasn’t expecting…”

“I thought it would be better if I appeared to you like this,” he explained in his warm voice. 

“But - when Xena - and Eve - “ she said, stumbling over what she meant. Eli had never appeared to her as a god, and in a way she’d been glad of it, only witnessing from afar how it had been for Xena and Eve. As painful as Eli’s death had been, she’d always been glad that her last memories of him were what they were.

“You and I have always had a different relationship,” he said, concern flickering over his face. “Was I wrong?”

Gabrielle laughed a little wildly. “I don’t really know how I feel. I guess it’s a little hard for me to reconcile my friend with the god who used Xena and her daughter to kill his competition.”

“You’re the one who came to me, Gabrielle,” he said calmly, making no apologies. “I think we’re both different than the last time we saw each other face to face.” 

And that much was true. “The way of love wasn’t for me,” she said, also refusing to make any apologies. “I think I knew that at the time, too, but just didn’t want to admit it.”

“I know. It was a mistake on my part to ask you to walk it. I was still finding my own way at that time. I’m sorry.” He regarded her carefully when she simply nodded her acceptance of his apology. “I sense that you’re in a similar predicament as when we first met, when it comes to knowing your way.”

“I found the way I was meant to follow,” she said, not agreeing or disagreeing with his assessment. “Everything - everything fell into place when I realized.”

His eyes were kind, even as her own words came back to her and rang in her ears for what they were: a desperate attempt to cling to something that no longer existed. She looked away.

“Gabrielle,” Eli said after a moment had elapsed, “have you considered that a way that is dependent on someone else can’t ever fully be your own way? I’m not saying that it wasn’t right, or that it wasn’t good, or that it wasn’t where you were meant to be. Walking at Xena’s side was a path you needed to share with her, for your sake and hers - but it wasn’t your way in and of itself.” 

“I think Xena knew that.” Even when she’d finally overcome her fear of transforming Gabrielle into something darker and harder than the girl from Poteidaia ever would have been without her influence, even when she’d stopped letting her guilt overwhelm her and spill out of her mouth in the form of suggestions that Gabrielle leave her, Xena had known it. Roughly, Gabrielle wiped a hand over her stubbornly leaking eyes. “I think she was trying to get me to know it too, sometimes.”

Eli smiled gently. “She loves you very much.”

“‘Loves’,” Gabrielle said, laughing through the tightness in her throat. 

Eli didn’t laugh. “Love will never be defeated by death,” he said. “So yes: ‘loves’.”

It only brought to the forefront of Gabrielle’s mind a question she’d been trying not to think about. She knew, because she had finally pried it out of Xena months and months and months after the fact, that when Xena had believed that Gabrielle was dead she’d made the journey to the Amazon land of the dead to find her. One thing Gabrielle had never asked was whether Xena would have stayed there if she had, because she was terrified she knew the answer. 

This was different. Gabrielle had had her body, had arranged it on the pyre with her own hands, had carried her ashes across continents and seas until she’d done with them what Xena wanted. Xena was dead, and wanted to be that way, and Gabrielle couldn’t even try to take it away from her. But that didn’t change the fact that Hades himself was dead, and that Xena had died so far from home even if Hades were still around to have a claim on her.

“Eli,” she began hesitantly. “Is that just a hypothetical?”

“Ask your actual question, Gabrielle,” Eli encouraged her. 

Easy for him to say. Gabrielle steeled herself for disappointment, just a woman before a god, and asked, “Where did Xena go when she died?”

Eli, of course, had already known the question; and now he stepped close to Gabrielle with one hand extended palm-first, until it laid over her heart. 

Despite her preparation, the inevitable disappointment welled up in her and threatened to drop her to her knees with all the longing for a true answer she’d suppressed since Japa. That isn’t an answer, she wanted to wail. Don’t give me more platitudes, I’ve had enough of them from her. 

“Gabrielle,” his voice said, kind but commanding. “Look.”

With an effort, she dragged her eyes up. There was Eli, glowing with his goodness and godliness, smiling at her as if there were anything to smile about. He tilted his head, and Gabrielle’s eyes shifted in the direction he’d indicated to find - 

“Xena,” she said, tiredly. 

Would she ever stop feeling this keen desperation for whatever scraps she could get at the sight of her or the sound of her voice? She looked the same as she ever had when she’d appeared to Gabrielle like this; the same, almost, as Gabrielle had first seen her: clad in her white shift, stripped of the armor that was still buried somewhere in Japa, the same inexplicable tether that had kept them at each other’s sides for nearly a decade pulling at Gabrielle from the intense blue of her eyes. 

“Well, that’s a fine welcome,” Xena chided her teasingly.

“You aren’t real,” Gabrielle told her, biting back another hysterical laugh. “I keep seeing you, and you aren’t real, and I don’t know how to deal with wanting you to be real almost more than I want you to never leave me.”

“Gabrielle. After everything we’ve been through together, why would you think I would leave you?” Xena asked, reaching out to caress Gabrielle’s cheek with her fingers: solid flesh against solid flesh, an illusion, all of it. 

Gabrielle wrenched herself away. “Because I’m changing!” she burst out, unable to contain this particular fear for a moment longer, not when Xena was touching her in her familiar way and Gabrielle’s skin was wondering again if it would be for the last time. “You’re so much a part of me, and someday I’m going to turn around and discover that I’ve changed too much for that to still be true.”

“You are changing,” Xena acknowledged with a smile. In the past, it had always been a smile she’d reserved for Gabrielle when she was proud of her, and Gabrielle had always held it close to her heart. “But you could never change that much. I made you a promise once, remember?” 

Gabrielle had managed to wrangle several promises out of Xena in the time they’d had together, but the one she thought Xena meant now is one she’d made Gabrielle without prompting, bubbling out of her soul well before either of them could have had any idea what it meant.

“I remember,” Gabrielle said. “It doesn’t make you real. Especially since the condition of that promise was that we were both going to be dead.”

At that, Xena laughed - actually threw her head back and laughed, full and light and free. Gabrielle had a split second memory of Callisto, angelic and calm but still weighted with something like the memory of her sadness, of her madness, of how much she had wanted to die and how she could never escape the pain of existence. That weight wasn’t on Xena now, and she was struck suddenly that this was different. That maybe every other time she’d seen her had been different too, but that she’d been too caught up in the all-consuming grief of missing her to notice.

It was impossible to be angry with her like this. Gabrielle was too mesmerized by the way her full smile lit her face and the way it illuminated her already overwhelming beauty. Xena touched her arm; and caught, Gabrielle looked around, only to realize that Eli had disappeared at some point, if he’d actually been here at all. The sun was setting somewhere beyond the trees, and the darkening glade felt more and more set apart from the world the longer Gabrielle looked at Xena’s impossible form. 

“Sorry,” Xena apologized, still smiling. “It’s hard to explain to you - what’s real and what’s not real, I mean. I don’t mean to laugh at you.” 

“You, apologizing? You’re falling dangerously into ‘not real’ territory.” 

“Some things deserve apologies,” Xena acknowledged quietly. “I think we found that out together a long time ago.” 

Gabrielle softened immediately. Those days might seem like a thousand years ago, but the pain of them was seared into her heart forever. “We did,” she agreed. “Will you try to explain to me anyway?”

Xena was studiously quiet for a long moment, before she began in a way Gabrielle wasn’t expecting. 

“You know, I had visions of you a few times.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Gabrielle said, snorting, remembering the year-long ordeal of dealing with a Xena whose best plan for dealing with a vision of their deaths was consistently to keep trying to leave Gabrielle. “Like I could ever forget.”

“I don’t mean just those.”

That got Gabrielle’s attention. Xena was looking at her, waiting for Gabrielle to say whatever she was going to say so they could get to the heart of what Xena wanted to. Gabrielle immediately thought better of one or two remarks, and picked up Xena’s hand instead, encasing it in her own. 

“When?” she asked simply. 

“A few times in Gurkhan’s dungeon. Twice in Hrothgar’s palace.” 

It took Gabrielle a minute to place the second name, but she did. “In Denmark? When you’d lost your memories?”

“When I needed you the most,” Xena answered. “When I was beyond endurance, when I had no sense of myself anymore. When I was a step away from giving up.”

“Was it like - before?”

Xena shook her head. “No. You saw that, you know what it was like. This was like… I can’t really explain it. You were just with me when I needed you. Like you came to me out of my own soul.”

“Wow.” Gabrielle took a minute to process Xena’s words. Xena had never been one to hyperbolize, and she’d never been prone to poetic license. It was rare for her to use language like that, and it always left Gabrielle breathless because of how it revealed the depth and strength of the beliefs she usually held so close and secret, consciously cracking herself in two and letting Gabrielle peer inside, just for a moment. 

“Did we talk? Like this?”

“Hmm?” Xena asked, and refocused on her. “No, not quite like this. In Mogador… well, I wasn’t really in a condition to speak to anybody, and in Denmark I was afraid of you.”

“Of me?”

Xena smiled softly, and corrected herself. “Of myself. You told me that our souls were united. That you were the truth of who I was.”

“But, Xena - that wasn’t me. I don’t remember any of that.”

Xena seemed unconcerned, and only shrugged the words off lightly. “I knew that, even at the time. Why do you think I never brought it up?”

Gabrielle could think of a lot of reasons why Xena never would have brought up additional instances of visions of her, ranging from Xena’s own stubborn recalcitrance to Gabrielle’s refusal to believe in a very particular vision Xena had lived with for over a year. Given how accurately that vision had played out in real life, and how the trauma of it had been something they’d never been able to talk about between them, it really wasn’t much of a wonder at all to Gabrielle that Xena would have kept those experiences quiet - especially when Gabrielle remembered just how broken both Mogador and Denmark had left Xena. 

“Then…” Gabrielle started, fishing for Xena’s train of thought. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither did I,” Xena confessed, which only confused Gabrielle further. “It took me a long time to understand that there are just some things that go beyond our understanding - and this, the thing between us, has always been one of them.” She looked at Gabrielle then, smiled at whatever she found in her expression, and said, “You wrote once that our friendship was ‘a mystery as immortal as the gods’.”

Inexplicably, Gabrielle blushed. “I can’t believe you remember that.”

“I remember everything,” Xena said seriously. “It meant more to me than I think you can possibly realize, and it’s one of my biggest regrets that I never gave you a reason to understand that.” She fell silent, and Gabrielle didn’t interrupt her. “Gabrielle, you were always the spiritual one. You didn’t use the word ‘mystery’ lightly.” 

“No, I didn’t,” Gabrielle agreed quietly. She’d never been an initiate in mysteries of Eleusis, or even in the mysteries of Orpheus in Xena’s native Thrace, but she knew enough: the wonder at the tension between the things one was permitted to know and the things one would never be able to understand, the cosmic fulcrum on which the world turned, the twinned inevitabilities of death and rebirth cycling endlessly around each other. 

With Xena’s calm blue eyes resting on her, Gabrielle wondered if she’d ever been an initiate, and if this had been one of the things she’d simply never seen a reason to tell Gabrielle. Xena, as ever, didn’t give up her secrets easily. 

“Would you still use the same word to describe us?” she asked.

“In a heartbeat,” Gabrielle answered.

“Even though I’m dead?” 

Gabrielle smiled tremulously, because she thought she might finally be starting to understand. “What is death?” she asked in response, a question that had been pondered by philosophers and mystics for millennia, made rhetorical and utterly moot by the mystery residing in her own soul, sitting directly in front of her.

Even in death, Xena’s words echoed in her mind, years and years old and still seared into Gabrielle’s heart as the oath they always had been. Even in death, I will never leave you. 

Xena smiled, tucked a long strand of hair behind Gabrielle’s ear. 

“You’re starting to get it.”

Gabrielle lasted a full month before she started going stir crazy. It was enough time to help the Elijans resettle and come up with ways to avoid the Romans, especially if they ventured west and into more dangerous territory again. They’d never stopped looking guardedly at Gabrielle after that first day, not even when she had made sure that they knew that she’d left the last Roman she’d interrogated under the pinch alive, and not even when she solemnly buried the mutilated body of the one who had tried to take off Eve’s head with all honor due to the dead.

“They won’t stop coming after you,” Gabrielle had told them, feeling like she was talking to a brick wall. “You need to have some strategy.”

Eve’s hand on her arm had stopped her. “They know the risks.” At Gabrielle’s look, she had amended, “I know the risks. This is our mission. This is our purpose.”

“They won’t accept my help,” Gabrielle said. “They don’t trust me. Will they accept anyone else’s help in defending themselves?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” 

Gabrielle could have pointed out that Eve had, as Livia, not been anywhere near this obtuse. But there was a serenity to Eve’s expression now that, while it wasn’t entirely easy and natural, she didn’t have the heart to try to fight anymore. Eve would figure things out, or she wouldn’t. Nobody could say she hadn’t tried.

“They don’t want me to stay,” she commented as offhandedly as she could. The rest of the camp, as it always did, gave both of them a wide berth, though it looked like Sarah at least had made a few friends. 

Eve turned to her, not entirely casually. Gabrielle raised a suspicious eyebrow just as Eve asked, “What if I wanted you to stay?”

“Do you?” Gabrielle asked, eyebrows raised. “Honestly? I know I’m impeding your mission.”  

“I think that’s a convenient excuse to cover the fact that you’re the one who wants to leave,” Eve interpreted, and smiling at Gabrielle’s scoff at having been so easily read by her. “I’m not offended. You’ve been moving for as long as I’ve known you. How much of it has been in a direction you decided on?” 

“What? All of it. I haven’t always chosen the right things, but I was the one choosing to do them." 

Eve nodded. “I know. But who were you doing it for?” 

Gabrielle knew what she was getting at, and on some level - the level that wasn’t rankled - she agreed. Her own need to travel, to go, to do, had complemented Xena’s, but it had almost always been Xena’s inexhaustible drive towards atonement that had driven them across the world with their home carried between them.

It was a truth Gabrielle had been avoiding, and Eve had no doubt read that in her, too. In any case, Eve was right. She didn’t want to stay. 

She brought up her plans to leave with Sarah the next morning. 

“About that,” Sarah began, visibly gathering herself and drawing her proud shoulders back. “I’m not returning with you.”

The words were enough of a shock that for a moment, Gabrielle could only stare. “What - what do you mean?” she eventually said. “You’re staying here?” 

Sarah nodded slowly, and then confessed, “That was always my plan.”

Stunned, Gabrielle looked away and laughed reflexively. In retrospect, it was obvious. She would have done the same thing. She and Sarah had even talked about it. 

“Sarah, your mother will never forgive me,” was all she could say, helpless; but it wasn’t a refusal. Gabrielle understood too well to deny her this. 

“I think you’ll find that she will,” Sarah said with a smile. “She knew too. She was the one who packed my bag and sent me out after you. She told me to come back and visit, and to let her know where I was.”

Gabrielle’s eyes closed and she rubbed her head with shaking fingers. Oh, Lila, was all she could think, forever left behind while her family set off one by one in search of something only the wider, crueler world could provide. 

“Eve knows?” she asked, looking over to where Eve stood silently, watching the exchange. 

“Eve suggested it. Months ago,” Sarah said. It was enough to make many things clear to Gabrielle, and she sent a reproving glance to Eve, who shrugged unapologetically.  “I don’t know if I’ll ever be a devotee to her god, but - there’s healing here,” Sarah said. “I think she understands some things that I don’t. I’d like to try.”

“I think we’ll help each other,” Eve said, having come up behind Gabrielle. “In a lot of ways, I think that’s all we can ever do.”

It was a decidedly saccharine sentiment that nevertheless made Gabrielle’s eyes close again, this time against sudden tears. There was understanding in the press of Eve’s palm on her shoulder, and Gabrielle turned to meet her eyes intently. 

“You’ll take care of her?” she asked, in that moment meaning far more than emotionally. In her eyes, she could see that Eve understood. 

“I will,” she replied solemnly. She’d lost so much of her early fanaticism when she’d reclaimed herself that it was a mild surprise to see how she’d settled into something that Gabrielle suspected was inherently truer to herself. One day soon, Gabrielle might meet her and be able to point to her and say, Eve, and know exactly who she was . One day soon, Eve might be able to do the same thing. 

“Come with me for a minute?” Eve asked her, and with a quick glance to Sarah, Gabrielle nodded and followed her. 

Inside her tent, Eve led her to a trunk. Even before she opened it, Gabrielle had a premonition of what it must contain, and she wasn’t disappointed to find a wealth of scrolls, some covered in her own handwriting, but all covered in her own words.

“Sarah mentioned that your sister had been collecting them, too,” Eve said as Gabrielle knelt to take them in her hands and unroll them like relics. “I was wondering if you wanted any to take back with you.” 

The words they contained seemed to come to her from another person across all the years that separated her from the person she’d once been, not entirely naive, but still freshly enough in love to be unable to fathom a life without it. It was so transparent to her that she blushed, even as she wondered exactly how transparent it would be to a stranger encountering her here for the first time, removed from the deeply personal feelings that Gabrielle could still stir in her like an echo. 

“Eve,” Gabrielle said. “I - wow. How long have you been collecting these?” 

Eve smiled and shrugged self-consciously. “Since I left you and Mother with the Amazons. I came across the first few by chance. You’re not too popular in Rome, but eastward you still have a dedicated audience. I’ve been reading them ever since.”

“Did you have questions?” Gabrielle asked, casting about for the reason Eve had shown them to her and bracing for any potential awkwardness. 

Unnecessarily, as it turned out. “It it all true?” Eve only asked. 

Surprised at the simple curiosity driving the question, Gabrielle reflexively looked down at the scroll she was holding. A single phrase placed it for her immediately: teach me, a teenage widow consumed with rage and begging her horrified friend to teach her murder, vengeance, hatred. Teach me. Teach me. 

Briefly, she wondered what she would look like in her words now, high on Mount Fuji, chakram in hand, desperation and delayed grief pouring through her in the brilliance of the day’s death. I deserve the dignity of a warrior, Xena’s killer had pled for the third time, begging her to sever his head from his body; and honor, she’d spent days bottling her rage, honor, she’d refused to kill him because it wasn’t right even after everything, honor and she was holding tight to Xena’s ashes, honor the sacredness of her body as Gabrielle had laid it on the pyre and honor the funeral she’d refused to give her because she would be fine, she had been promised, honor the way she was shaking and sure as the chakram left her furious hand for the first time - 

Gabrielle shook her head and took a minute to calm down.

“I might have embellished in a few places,” she finally admitted, “but the events are all real. Why?”

“It’s so beautiful,” Eve said in response. “That’s why everyone loves Mother so much. Because you love her. It’s so clear in your stories. You know that, right?” 

“Yes, I know,” Gabrielle said quietly. Xena herself had known it, once she’d finally brought herself to read them. Wistfully, Gabrielle remembered when she’d finally asked to read them. How she’d settled in and started to read them aloud to baby Eve in her lap, how she’d gone quiet after a time and reached out for Gabrielle, too overcome by emotion to try to express it in words. In those moments, Gabrielle had always been secretly thankful that it had taken Xena so long, that she hadn’t read the scrolls until she was able to accept the gift of Gabrielle’s soul infused in them. 

“That’s why everyone loves you,” Eve continued. “Because you love, so much. Because you’re so honest about it, and you’ve changed so much for it.”

“People love Xena,” Gabrielle said dismissively. 

“People love you,” Eve corrected. “People love both of you, because it’s so clear that she loved you too, and that’s what people want for themselves. You know that the stories the bards tell now are of both of you, right?.”

This was news to Gabrielle, who startled slightly. “What? The bards are telling my stories?”

“Oh yes. They’re extremely popular. How haven’t you heard them?”

Gabrielle hadn’t. “Just how much travelling have you been doing, Eve?”

“In Greece? More than you have in the last twenty seven years, I think,” Eve said pointedly. “Look, Gabrielle - when you first let me read your scrolls, I think I thanked you for immortalizing my mother, but I didn’t know what it was that I really meant.”

“And what was it that you meant?” 

“Thank you for giving me a way to know my mother through the eyes of someone who loves her,” Eve said. “And thank you for giving me a way to know you.”

“Me?” Gabrielle asked, startled.

“You’re a part of where I came from,” Eve told her. “I didn’t understand for a long time. You were my mother’s home, and that means that you were my first home, too. I’ve never honored you for that, and I’m sorry.”

“Eve, I…” Gabrielle trailed off. Of all the conversations she’d thought she’d have with Eve now that Xena was dead, this hadn’t been one of them. 

What did it matter if Eve never knew whose hands had delivered her into the world? If she never realized that she still held Gabrielle’s right of caste? If she never remembered the safety of Gabrielle’s arms and body as she’d snuffled trustingly against her chest in her sleep? 

Eventually Gabrielle shrugged, helpless. “How could you have known?” she said. 

“The way every child knows its home is with both of its parents,” Eve replied, and dared to reach out for Gabrielle’s arm. “I know that’s lost to us now, but I hope - I’d like it very much if we could still be in each other’s lives.”

For a moment, Gabrielle was silent while Eve watched her intently - maybe a little fearfully. 

“A few days ago, with the Romans,” she said, and waited for Eve to understand. “I would never have forgiven myself if I hadn’t done what I did. I don’t regret it. I won’t.”

“Because I’m her daughter?” Eve asked, still searching Gabrielle’s face. 

Gabrielle raised a hand to her face, finding there an echo of familiar strong cheekbones. She smiled briefly. 

“Because you’re her daughter,” she finally agreed. “And because you’re my family.” 

It was enough for Eve, who smiled tremulously. Gabrielle took her hand and pressed it between hers. 

“Send for me if you need me,” she said, and saw that once again Eve understood her meaning. “And take care of yourself.” 

“And Sarah,” Eve added. “I will. Do you want any of these to take back with you?” 

Gabrielle considered the scrolls and everything she remembered that they contained - and probably several things she’d forgotten - and shook her head. “Not right now.”

“Then I’ll keep them safe, too,” Eve promised, and was the one to kiss Gabrielle’s cheek this time. “Don’t be a stranger, huh?”   

The first time Gabrielle had seen a body severed from its head had been a few months after she’d started travelling with Xena. She’d still been wearing long skirts and was a few weeks away from meeting the Amazons; and the sight of it had been shocking enough that she’d immediately turned around and vomited. 

She’d been shaking when Xena’s hand came to rest tentatively on her back. “Why? Who would do that?” she’d gotten out, still gagging at the way the close memory of it was burned onto the back of her eyelids where tears were leaking out, more in shock than in empathetic pain just yet. 

Xena hadn’t answered for a time. “The world is a cruel place,” she’d said. “Cruel people don’t need a reason.” 

“Xena, I don’t understand,” Gabrielle haid said, pleading with her to explain, seeing something behind her eyes that said that she understood where Gabrielle didn’t. Later, Gabrielle would remember the whispers she’d heard and dismissed about Xena long before she’d ever met her, and the halting warning that had come from Xena’s own lips a few days after they’d met -- You can’t imagine the things I’ve done, the monster I used to be -- and she would grow cold and look at Xena sharpening her sword by the fire and never ask. 

Xena only handed her a waterskin and urged her to rinse out her mouth and drink. Gabrielle did, methodically. 

“I hope you never do,” Xena had said as she took it back. “Come on, now. Don’t look.”

On the way back west after leaving Eve and Sarah and the Elijans, Gabrielle ran into abandoned village after abandoned village. “Romans, Parthians, who knows,” was the answer she got from a refugee train heading north to less disputed territory. “They don’t care who it is they’re forcing from their homes.”  

She was fortunate that it was high summer and good hunting, so she at least didn’t go hungry and was able to help travellers who were hungry when she could. Still, she couldn’t help her unease when the cover of forest and brushland tapered off into a wide plain; and she hovered at just before the crest of the basin with the inexplicable sense that she didn’t want to see whatever was below her. 

When she finally guided Argo to the edge and looked over, she discovered that she was right. She just as quickly turned her around, eyes stinging. Argo tossed her head and whinnied after a moment. 

“Yeah,” Gabrielle muttered, patting her neck unconsciously. “Guess we should, huh.” 

They carefully descended into the remains of a massacre. It was obvious what had happened: with no cover on the plain, a caravan had been set upon and plundered for the goods they’d taken with them when they’d fled their homes. A cynical voice in her head told her that the survivors were more than likely slaves too far away now for Gabrielle to track or help, and she tried not to think about it as she set herself to doing what she could now for the dead. 

It wasn’t the first time she’d seen something like this - it wasn’t even the first time she’d buried or burned dead she didn’t know - and she doubted it would be the last. There were eight dead in all. Their four wagons wouldn’t yield enough wood to construct a pyre for all of them, but the ground was soft from recent rain, and with there was enough light left in the afternoon for Gabrielle to dig deep enough that their bodies wouldn’t be scavenged by animals. 

The light was nearly gone when she finished, and she set herself to breaking apart the ruined wagons enough so that the spot would be less visible to anyone looking for an easy target. 

It was at the third wagon that she found it: a woman’s head, rolled under the wagon as though her body had simply misplaced it. 

Gabrielle could no more help her body’s reaction than she could draw down the forest to cover them all; and she curled in on herself as her stomach heaved with convulsion after convulsion, and she was soon empty and cramping on the absence of anything she had left to give. 

“Gabrielle.” 

Gabrielle jumped nearly out of her skin at the sound of that voice, and she whirled around to see Xena standing nearby, hands hovering as if once again she didn’t know what to do with them when came to everything Gabrielle held in her body. 

“What are you doing here,” Gabrielle croaked out and turned away. 

“You were calling,” was the response. Her eyebrows had furrowed in consternation the same way they always did when Gabrielle was hurting and she herself was the cause of it, visibly weighing the ways she might try to help against all the reasons she shouldn’t. Caught in indecision, she hesitated with hands half-outstretched. “I didn’t want - "

“Shut up,” Gabrielle snapped as she wiped her mouth and staggered to her feet. “Just… let me do this.”

Xena didn’t say a word as Gabrielle constructed a pyre after all, or when Gabrielle discovered the body, or when she struggled to lay the woman on the pyre, taking care to fold her hands together in a facsimile of a hug she wouldn’t receive. She didn’t move when out of habit Gabrielle laid one of her coins on the woman’s blue, waxen lips, or when Gabrielle silently set the whole thing ablaze and watched the flames slowly lick over her feet, hair, hands. 

There were hands at her shoulders: gentle, commanding. “Come on,” coaxed Xena’s voice. “Let’s move away from here.” 

The plain had been blanketed in darkness, the pyre a beacon in the night. Practically, she knew Xena was right. If it were to attract the same kind of people that had killed that woman, Gabrielle needed to be far enough away that she wasn’t in immediate striking range. She let herself be led back to the place where she’d unsaddled Argo and half-prepared camp, numb to the chill of the night air or the chirping of cricketsong. 

“There, now. Let’s get you warm.”

Unaccountably, it was then that Gabrielle felt some band on her heart suddenly snap violently. She couldn’t help the way weeping overcome her and bowed her body; and Xena seemed to take it as a cue to finally move into her sight, corporeal and shining. Gabrielle couldn’t trust herself to touch the gruesome incongruousness of her. 

“She deserved more,” Gabrielle got out between her gasps for breath. “She deserved better.”

“You don’t know what she did or didn’t deserve.”

“I know,” Gabrielle insisted wildly. “No one - no one deserves that.” 

She was talking about the burning, headless woman. She was talking about her parents and her sister’s husband. She was talking about the first decapitated body she’d ever seen when she was as green as a new shot branch in spring before the hardness of summer, and she was talking about herself, ten years hardened and standing in the rain on a summer’s night on the other side of the world, staring up at the space where a head should have been on a body she’d spent almost as many years loving. 

They all melded into one in that moment, all of them; but the shape and the face of them were all Xena’s, turning slowly to ash while Gabrielle watched in something between calm disbelief and unwavering trust that this was not - could not be - the end. 

“Gabrielle.” 

Gabrielle turned and caught her around the torso in one violent motion, forcibly drawing down her head and crushing their lips together. She was real enough, solid enough, in this moment even now; and the instinctual alarmed resistance Gabrielle had known would be there gave way quickly to submission. 

Gabrielle wasn’t often so demanding -- or at least, not in this way -- and it had taken Xena a while to learn to accept it on the occasions that she had been. It had had less to do with any desire to take charge or control on Xena’s part, Gabrielle knew, and more to do with the way she saw Gabrielle and considered the things that she thought Gabrielle wanted. And that was precisely why whenever Xena had tried to gentle Gabrielle’s kisses and draw out the usual tenderness of her touches by doubling the tenderness of her own, Gabrielle had refused, doubling down harder until Xena had been forced to allow it or risk hurting Gabrielle in an attempt to stop it. Gabrielle had unashamedly used her awareness of this, knowing too that this at least had never been an option for Xena -- not like this, not even in their worst times. 

Somehow Xena knew not to ask questions, and she permitted it when Gabrielle roughly stripped them both bare with a shaking ferocity in her hands. Xena went just as easily when Gabrielle pushed her down and straddled her with a groan tearing something between grief and relief out of her and into the open. Xena’s body was exactly as she remembered it, broad and powerful and smooth; and it arched unconsciously into Gabrielle’s ravenous hands as they roamed over the majestic planes of her shoulders and chest and stomach, the beautiful fullness of her breasts, the miraculous stiffness of her puckered nipples. 

Xena’s breathy moans were music to hear ears, too; Gabrielle remembered the first time they’d ever done this, how astonished she’d been at the abundance of evidence laid out before her regarding the way she affected Xena. She’d been barely twenty, stunned less at the way her own body could feel under Xena’s touch than by the way her own inexperienced hands had been able to command a body so powerful, how it made the familiar blue eyes of her friend darken and unfocus into the eyes of this new person, her lover. 

Gabrielle was too desperate to focus on the renewal of that astonishment, pressing wet kisses along Xena’s unpierced calves, taking a moment to spread her legs and breathe her in on her way up, finally tilting her head backward with the suggestion of a touch so that Gabrielle could kiss there too along all that sea of unmarked skin. Gabrielle left her own marks in place of the invisible rend of separation that would always be there now, even if only in her mind, sucking until Xena whined and pulled at Gabrielle’s hair with her long, beautiful fingers. 

Finally, Gabrielle relented under Xena’s touch, and pushed up on her hands to give her some space. Xena’s legs still bracketed her hips, and her fingers had left her hair to caress Gabrielle’s cheek with the same infinite tenderness she’d always reserved for her. 

“Hey,” she said softly. 

Gabrielle couldn’t speak. There was a twisting deep in her guts, a leaden mass in her stomach, and her heart thrummed quick and panicked like a hummingbird’s. Spread out beneath her, Xena was so beautiful that it hurt to breathe. Gabrielle could almost convince herself from the warmth of her skin, the rush of her blood underneath it, the rise and fall of her chest under Gabrielle’s breasts, that she was alive. 

“I - " she tried to start, but her chest was too tight to continue. 

Xena seemed to understand, and she shushed her soothingly, drawing her down to her chest and wrapping her arms around Gabrielle as she kissed the top of her head. 

“How do I let you go?” 

Xena’s fingers slowed in her hair at the words, stopping for just a moment. “I hope you don’t,” she answered. “Not entirely, anyway.”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” Gabrielle confessed. Xena was too much a part of every part of her, the foundation on which she had built the person she was now. Extracting her was unthinkable if Gabrielle wanted to stay whole: a bitter irony, since Gabrielle hadn’t been whole since Xena had died. 

“It’s possible for you to keep living,” Xena said. “Keep loving. You have too much of it in you still to be done.”

“Life or love?” 

“Both. The thing I always marveled at in you was that every time I turned around you were someone new. Not entirely different, not forsaking everything you’d been before - just new. Unafraid to stride into the world and take it on yourself, your soul, no matter how it hurt you. That takes a kind of strength I never had.”

Gabrielle looked at her seriously. “You were the strongest person I knew.” 

“Maybe,” Xena said, smiling lightly. “Maybe that’s because you didn’t know yourself. Even this - “

Her fingers skimmed over the dragon on her back, and as much as the touch made her shiver, it also made her recoil. 

“Don’t,” Gabrielle said, closing her eyes. “I hate it.”

She could sense Xena looking at her calculatedly, trying to discern what was behind Gabrielle’s words; and Gabrielle dropped her eyes almost as soon as she’d reopened them, not completely sure what was there for Xena to find. Xena moved slowly, urging her with small motions to lay down on her front. Reluctantly, Gabrielle complied, and Xena’s palms ran up and down the length of her back in a familiar enough way that Gabrielle began to relax into the sensation and put the fact of what was under Xena’s hands out of her mind.

“I love it,” Xena said, unseen, her fingers tracing outlines and marked patterns Gabrielle usually tried to forget. “I love anything that saves your life. Anything that’s a part of you.”

“It doesn’t feel like a part of me.”

“Well,” Xena said. Gabrielle could hear her smile. “Why don’t we try to change that.”

Gabrielle remembered the way the world had seemed suspended as if in a dream when Akemi had carefully worked ink and magic, pin by pin, under her skin. Xena had lain next to her then, holding one of Gabrielle’s hands while the other twisted the silk sheets under her, and it had been almost easy to let every individual prick of pain on her back grow into something larger that was capable of subsuming them. It had been easier still to forget that that pain was coming at Akemi’s hands. Xena’s eyes were so blue and held her so easily. Gabrielle had always loved her in red. All these years, and the heady nearness of her could still swallow her whole. 

But now Xena was adding her lips to the touch of her tracing fingers, and the tenderness was so much that the pressure in her chest again grew to be too great to contain in her own body. 

“Breathe,” Xena’s voice said soothingly, and dropped to a whisper across Gabrielle’s skin. “Breathe."  

Gabrielle did, but in a gasp that expelled itself in a choked sob. 

“That’s okay. Keep breathing. Come on, in - and out. In - ”

And so Gabrielle did, again and again until Xena didn’t need to keep reminding her and Gabrielle was weeping all over again. The press of Xena’s lips melded with the rush of Xena’s breath and the touch of Xena’s fingers against her skin, all of them conspiring together to infuse the thing on her back with a reality and life Gabrielle had refused to give it until now, and once again it burned its way into existence on her body in a searing wound. Gabrielle felt it as the fusion it was, rather than a rending; but she still couldn’t help the way she felt the ending woven into it right along with the beginning. 

“This is a part of you,” Xena’s voice reached her ears through the pounding force of her grief threatening to subsume her again, new and fresh all over again with the ephemeral heat and suspended weight of Xena at her back. “Can you feel it?” 

Gabrielle groaned, in pain or something else near enough it. Her back lay exposed to the world, the dragon burning as it rose in an inferno of noise and emotion. Constellations hovered at Gabrielle’s eyelids, and the stars themselves seemed to whisper through the sounds of the universe. 

“That’s it,” Xena said, and Gabrielle struggled to latch onto her voice. “Focus.” 

Somewhere in time, Gabrielle’s mind detached from her body, her hands taking the head of another woman out of a sack of cloth; somewhere the heat of that fire was colder than flame against her skin; somewhere Gabrielle screamed, maenad-mad, ready to rend her own flesh to get at the source of it and let it loose and wild and free.

“Look beyond that,” Xena’s voice encouraged, and helplessly, Gabrielle did.

In Epanomi, Lila was drinking tea under the moon; in Persia, Sarah and Eve were sleeping nearer the Red Sea than even Gabrielle had been; in Japa, Harukata was waking and taking hold of the katana Gabrielle had refused to claim; the world over lovers were coming together, leaves shook and fell, the wind blew, the gods hid, and ghosts walked. Somewhere the spirit of a nameless woman crossed over into a peace this world hadn’t allowed her, her body crumbling into ashes less than a mile from where Gabrielle’s body was still tied to life and the earth, and Gabrielle cried. 

“It’s too much,” she protested, her eyes burning now too, and she was sure she’d be consumed whole within only a few moments more. “It’s too - too much - “

“No it’s not,” Xena’s voice soothed. “You can do this.”

“It - hurts.”

“It’s never stopped you before,” Xena said firmly. “Listen, Gabrielle. Focus. I’m here with you. Always.” 

Somewhere in time, a single crack in a woman’s fractured soul gave way to Gabrielle and started to recrystallize. The oceans swept in and out under the waxing and waning moon; bards composed epics under the auspices of patrons and institutions; armies marched from Rome and spread outward across the face of the earth; a mile away a deer ran through the brush; thirty feet away a butterfly came to rest on a branch.

And there, underneath and through and permeating it all, a steady, eternal heartbeat, was Xena’s love for her. 

“There,” Xena’s voice breathed, close to Gabrielle’s ear, vibrating and ambient in the air all around them. “Can you feel it?”

Gabrielle felt herself suspended, weightless, burning endlessly. She thought of Eli in celestial flames. She thought of Xena’s eyes. She thought of a thousand campfires on thousand nights just like this and how she could use them to chart her life from where she hovered here far above it. 

“Yes,” she choked out, even as the pain of it finally swallowed her whole. 

When she opened her eyes again, it was morning, and she was alone on the plain. A quarter mile away, the pyre smoked in the final stages of consuming itself. When she stumbled over to it at last in the full light of day, the last few embers were burning low and nearly to grey. 

“I’m sorry,” she told the crumbling remains of the anonymous figure. “I wish I knew your name.”

Slowly, steadily, she dug an opening in the earth near the graves of her kinsmen large and deep enough that her bones wouldn’t be scavenged. Had she wanted to be laid to rest somewhere, with someone? Gabrielle sighed, knowing that this was the best she could do to honor her. 

The wind blew suddenly fierce and wild, taking the remains of her body with it, ash by ash, to scatter across the face of the world. Gabrielle closed her eyes and let herself feel the tingling awareness of the dragon on her back, smoldering with a fire she doubted would ever entirely burn out. Beneath her braid, she knew that its head peeked out over the seam of her top; and for the first time she let the thought comfort her. 

She poured some of her wine ceremonially over the freshly turned earth more out of habit than necessity - who knew underworld gods would receive the dead now, or what things they required?

“I hope there’s somebody,” she whispered. “Safe passage.”

Gabrielle arrived back in Epanomi early in the morning six months after she’d left. The town was waking up, and she received a few nods of recognition and greeting as she passed her neighbors starting their day. 

Lila was sitting on the porch of the house as if she’d been expecting Gabrielle; and the total lack of surprise in her face seemed to confirm it. Gabrielle, who had never felt more empty handed and more of a failure of a sister, dismounted and approached her hesitantly. 

“Lila,” she began, but Lila cut her off with a shake of her head. 

“I know,” was all she said. “Come sit with me. It’s a beautiful morning.”

Lila didn’t require explanations. She simply asked after Eve and if Sarah were settled, and if Gabrielle were alright after everything. 

“You look a little better.”

“Thanks,” Gabrielle said with an eyeroll. “Good to know I looked so bad before.” 

Lila thwaped her in the stomach. “You know what I mean. I didn’t like letting you go alone, but after all these years… I had a feeling it was what you needed. Closer to it than what I could give you here, anyway.” 

“I think - it helped,” Gabrielle admitted, casting a quick look to Lila to gauge her reaction. She didn’t need to have worried. There was only a resigned sort of care and love worn into the faint lines of her sister’s face, and she smiled at Gabrielle’s hesitation. 

“Gab, have you thought about meeting somebody new?” she asked. “I’m not trying to get you to settle down, I promise, just… Hektor is a nice man, and he does travel often.”

“Lila,” Gabrielle admonished. Her sister was entirely predictable, but it was hard for Gabrielle to take offense when she knew how much of it came from a place of love and honesty. . 

“Or you know, his sister is a nice woman.”

“Lila!” 

Lila laughed heartily at Gabrielle’s expression, which was hovering somewhere between disbelief and exasperation. “I’m just saying,” she said, raising her hands. “I’ve never seen her respond to a man’s advances, and those haven’t exactly been few and far between.” 

And, well, Gabrielle had already noticed that much. She’d also noticed the glances Isara had stolen at her before she’d left. She’d gotten an appreciative once over from her just this morning as she’d ridden back into town. And it was nice to be noticed in that way - it was. 

Maybe it was Gabrielle’s sigh that made Lila sober and reach for her hand. “I just want you to be happy. I don’t care what that happiness looks like.” 

“I’m not ready,” Gabrielle told her, squeezing back on her hand in assurance. “I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.”

Sometimes Gabrielle wondered what it meant, the things that they had been shown, the way their souls and karma were twined together throughout time and future lives, like stitching binding together the universe between the stars, beyond the gods. Soulmate was a heavy word, and for all the comfort it had always brought her, she wondered where it left her now that she was shuffling through the world alone. There was no one else for her in the way that Xena was for her - that much was a given - but she wondered sometimes, in the moments that the loneliness pooled in the marrow of her bones and made her ache, if it meant there was no one else for her in any way at all.

“I felt that way for a long time, too,” Lila said, but mercifully didn’t press. “Just know that no matter what else, I love you.”

In silent gratitude, Gabrielle leaned her head against Lila’s shoulder, and Lila wrapped her arm around her and drew her close. 

“You know, it took me a while to figure out how important she was to you,” Lila said eventually. “You’d think I would have figured it out faster with how lovesick you were right from the start, but I was younger, so I’ll give myself a pass.”

“I was not lovesick,” Gabrielle grumbled, unconvincing to her own ears. 

Lila laughed in response. “Oh, sister mine,” she said teasingly. “You forget, I was there when you met - and then when you immediately ran away from home to be with her. You’d think being captured by slavers would have put a damper on your day, but no, not you. All the way back into town you were up there at the front of the group, chattering Xena’s ear off.” Lila laughed at Gabrielle’s blush and quirked lips, and nudged her shoulder fondly. “I thought mom was gonna die, she was so scared. I tried to go up ahead and bring you back a few times, but she just clamped her hand down on my arm and said she wasn’t going to lose two daughters that day. Her face was so white! It didn’t look like you even gave Xena half a second to respond.”

“I probably didn’t,” Gabrielle admitted begrudgingly, unable to help a smile at the memory of that, the earliest of days. “She wouldn’t have hurt me. She wouldn’t have hurt anybody. Not then.”

“She’d just taken out a bunch of slavers,” Lila pointed out. 

Gabrielle made a face. “You know what I mean,” she said, and was gratified when Lila huffed a laugh, because she did in fact know what Gabrielle meant. 

It was only much later that Gabrielle had learned the darker truth of that moment - that, stripped of armor and weapons, Xena had been preparing herself to meet death. Xena had been careful to never use such explicit words; and given how Xena finally had met death, in her worst moments Gabrielle couldn’t help but wonder if there had been a reason for that. 

At eighteen, however, Gabrielle had been blissfully unaware of anything but the magnetic pull of Xena’s eyes and the way the graceful power of her movements were enhanced by her sheer physical beauty - which, objectively of course, woman to woman, Gabrielle would have been blind not to acknowledge.

Thankfully, it hadn’t taken her too long to figure things out, and Gabrielle had spent years laughing at herself for thinking she had been doing anything other than doggedly chasing after the most beautiful woman in the world. 

Xena, just a woman. Gods, how long it had taken her to fully understand that. 

“You know,” Lila said hesitantly, “we’ve never really talked about her. And I know how hard it is to talk about someone you love when they’re gone - I know , Gab - but I also know that once you do it, it feels so good to remember them. It’s like… keeping them alive, in some way.”

It was such a guileless thing, but Gabrielle couldn’t help the way it made her wary in a way she couldn’t explain. “Is there something in particular you want to know?” she asked.

“If there’s something in particular you want to tell me,” said Lila, squeezing Gabrielle’s shoulder. “I just don’t want you to feel like you can’t. Maybe me and Xena never really got along, but I know how much she loved you.”

Without thinking, Gabrielle looked back toward the house where she knew the same scrolls that Sarah had grown up reading lay concealed in a trunk. Gabrielle and Xena, she’d said when Gabrielle had finally given her their names in that prison cell, like they were fairy tales come to life, or something equally unbelievable and insubstantial. 

Lila caught the direction of her thoughts and laughed. “No, Gab. I mean I could see it on her face, plain as day. The way she looked at you - I wasn’t surprised at all when I caught you sneaking out again that night. How could we compete?” 

“It wasn’t about competing,” Gabrielle protested. She remembered that night, how urgent the need to be with Xena had been after months and months of separation, how restrained Xena’s touch and how lost her voice had been after all that time believing that she was dead. Still, she’d been glad that Lila had been there this time to witness Gabrielle not running away, but returning to her own life: both of them on Argo, Gabrielle’s arms around Xena’s waist, their shared belongings affixed to the saddle, and Xena confidently leading them down the road and into the dark. 

“I know,” Lila said, her voice gentle. “I was happy for you. I was also scared for you, but I was happy.” 

Gabrielle briefly leaned her head against Lila’s shoulder in silent thanks, and could tell in the squeeze of Lila’s arm around hers that she understood. 

“I was wondering,” she began. “Would you cut my hair if I asked you to?” 

She’d been thinking about it for a while, and in Lila’s appraising look she could see that Lila had been too.

“I was wondering if you’d want to keep it long again,” Lila said. She loosened the tie keeping Gabrielle’s braid together and gently combed it out with her fingers. “You always did have such beautiful hair.” 

“Is that a no?” Gabrielle asked dryly. 

“Is this you asking?” Lila replied, amused. “I will, but you can’t blame me for the results if you don’t like them.”

Duly warned, Gabrielle submitted to Lila’s hands and shears after breakfast. (“No, shorter,” Gabrielle kept saying; to which Lila replied exasperatedly, “I can’t put it back on if I cut too short, Gab, I’m just trying to do an okay job of it.”) Afterward, piles of her hair lay in blonde coils around her seat, a much calmer scene than when she’d first had her long hair forcibly cut away from her, fistfuls of her innocence tossed carelessly away from Alti’s hands. Xena had been upset by it, and for so many reasons, but after Gabrielle had gotten over the shock of it, all it felt was right. 

Gabrielle studied herself in the bronze mirror, and was relieved to feel that same rightness settling over her again in the face of the woman staring back at her, almost recognizable if Gabrielle only got to know her.

“Is it okay?” Lila asked, hovering. “Your tattoo is going to show now unless you wear higher-necked clothes, you know.”

Gabrielle knew. “It’s perfect,” she assured her. “Thank you.” 

With some coaxing, Lila was able to persuade Gabrielle to the local tavern one night to hear a travelling bard who had come from Thessaloniki. 

“He’s not Athens-trained like you, but it should be fun,” Lila said. 

“I’m not Athens-trained, either,” Gabrielle pointed out, but even so she cast a spare thought to Homer, to Euripides and Stallonus and her friends there. It might be nice to visit. She’d heard that Virgil had found his way into imperial circles in Rome and was writing pretty acclaimed stuff there too, but visiting Rome was a thing she’d avoid if she could at all help it. 

“All the better. You’ll come with me, then? I certainly can’t get you to tell me stories anymore.” 

It was said in jest with the familiar undercurrents of concern, and Gabrielle rolled her eyes to dispel them. “Well, we can’t have you unentertained. Let’s go.”  

At the tavern, they were greeted by the now-faces of the townsfolk. Gabrielle raised her eyebrows when a man who she knew to be a widower with three children rose to his feet and kissed Lila on the cheek. 

“He’s being friendly,” Lila said to Gabrielle’s expectant look. 

“Uh huh. Looks like there are some things you’ve been leaving out of what you’ve been catching me up on."

“Hush,” Lila said, managing to blush only slightly. “Let’s just go find some seats, huh? Looks like a good crowd.” 

It was a good crowd, as it turned out, because the bard was well known for his renditions of stories about Xena. 

Lila nearly jumped out of her seat in alarm and mortification when she realized, and only stopped her apologies when Gabrielle laid a hand on her forearm. 

“It’s okay. Really,” she said, listening with one ear. “Call me curious, but I kinda wanna know how this turns out.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“I mean this isn’t mine. I didn’t write this.”

Gabrielle wasn’t really sure how she felt about it just yet. On one hand, it was impossible not to feel protective of the story of her own life and everything it represented. One the other hand, the implications left her a little dizzy. She had architectured this. Set had set all of this into motion. Her eighteen year old self couldn’t even have begun to dream that her childish love letters to a woman who didn’t want to hear them would have become this myth that had outrun her, still spreading across Greece twenty five years later. 

It was a kind of immortality Gabrielle hadn’t ever quite intended for her, and one that Xena had objected to even while she’d been alive. She wondered what Xena would think of this now, to hear her name being invoked after her death in a humble tavern, one of hundreds that had heard her name spoken between their walls. 

How many more years would her name be spoken when Gabrielle was no longer around to speak it? How long would Gabrielle’s love for her, the seed of inspiration for all of this, reverberate in the sound of it?

“I thought it was pretty good,” Lila whispered to her when the bard finished and the tavern was applauding. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I thought it was pretty good, too,” Gabrielle said slowly, keeping an eye on the bard as he accepted the dinars patrons were pressing into his hands as she noticed that his gaze kept coming back to their table. “Looks like you might get a chance to tell him so.”

Lila’s forehead furrowed. “Do you know him? Or do you think he recognizes you?” 

“I guess we’ll find out.”

It only took a few more minutes before the bard finally did approach them as Gabrielle had suspected he might. 

“I’m sorry, I can’t shake the sense that I know you,” he said. “I’m Matthias.” 

Gabrielle shook his hand gamely. “I don’t think I’ve met you, for what it’s worth. I used to run in in the bard circles myself, but it’s been a long time.” 

“Ah - I thought I saw you reacting to Xena’s name,” Matthias said. “I hope I didn’t accidentally steal any of your material.”

Gabrielle laughed. “No, you didn’t actually.”

“You’re a fan, then,” he guessed, and at her questioning look, he clarified. “Of Xena. The Warrior Princess.”

“Oh, yes. In a sense,” Gabrielle agreed, smiling more to herself than in response to the question. “I knew her.” 

“You knew her?” he repeated, looking a little incredulously at her. “She’s just a myth. She’s too fantastic to have ever existed, surely.” 

Gabrielle simply shrugged. That allegation wasn’t anything new. Somewhere, Xena was getting a big kick out of all this. “You can believe what you want. Isn’t that the power of storytelling, after all - the power of words and what they inspire?” 

“Sure,” he agreed easily. “Xena’s an incredibly inspirational figure -- but that doesn’t mean I think she was ever real.” 

Years ago, Gabrielle would have waited for Xena herself to arrive and prove her point or, in lieu of Xena’s presence, argued passionately for her reality. It was important that real people could achieve the things she had; and it was equally important that real people saw that she was just as real as them. Xena had never quite understood the way she had inspired so many people she’d never met, touched only by her name in the words spoken and written by Gabrielle spreading across time and space. She’d been more comfortable owning her infamy because it was a familiar beast, something she was used to holding and, for so many reasons, could never put it down. 

Today, Gabrielle let it go. “I guess the question really is - is it myth or reality that’s ultimately more powerful?” she mused. And what happens when reality fades into imagination? 

Matthias laughed a little awkwardly. “You sure are a bard type, aren’t you. Say, why’d you stop?” 

“Hmm? Oh, lots of reasons,” Gabrielle deflected. “You know how life is.”

They were interrupted by a man arriving in the tavern, which had cleared out enough that they could all feel the gust of wind that he brought with him and the open door. 

“I’m looking for a Gabrielle,” he announced. 

“That’s me,” Gabrielle said as she stood, aware of the sudden suspicion in Matthias’ eyes. “Can I help you?” 

“Got a message for you,” he said, extending a scroll to her. “All the way from Egypt. You must be somebody.” 

“Gabrielle?” Matthias broke in, incredulous. “And you say you knew Xena? You’re too young to be Gabrielle. Even if she ever existed, she - or whoever it was who wrote the original Xena scrolls - stopped writing them nearly thirty years ago, maybe more.” 

Again, Gabrielle resisted the urge to argue. “Believe what you want,” she said. “It doesn’t really change anything either way.” She turned and addressed the messenger. “Do I owe you anything? Or can I get you a room for the night?” 

But he waved her off and set off again into the night. Gabrielle followed him outside away from Matthias’ questions, taking the opportunity to scan the missive once briefly and then again more in depth, feeling the way her heart wanted to sink but started racing in anticipation instead.

“Who’s it from?” Lila asked, looking over her shoulder. 

“An advisor to the prefect of Egypt. It seems there’s a warrior queen on the way to Alexandria, and they want help staging a coup,” Gabrielle said. 

“You’ve been to Egypt. Would that a good thing?” 

“Anything that weakens Rome is probably a good thing overall,” Gabrielle said, sighing. “Whether it’s a good thing for the Egyptians… I don’t know if there’ll ever be a way to know that.”

“And they want your help? For what?” Lila asked, turning the letter over again and scanning the words there. 

“I don’t know. My guess is that somebody in Egypt remembers us and is sending for the next best thing. I wouldn’t be shocked if Xena had some ties with this Zenobia I won’t find out about until I get there.”

There was only a hint of bitterness in her tone. Gabrielle knew that Xena had never come close to giving up all her secrets, even in the end. She had some idea that she’d be well into her fifties and still stumbling over traces of Xena and her secrets in unsuspecting corners of the world.

Lila only studied her with a hint of a smile playing on her lips. “You’re going,” she said. 

Gabrielle scoffed and snatched back the papyrus. “I am not. I haven’t decided yet, anyway.”

“I know you,” Lila reminded her, “and you’re going, oh sister of mine, even if you don’t know it yourself yet.”

“Yeah, we’ll just see about that,” she said petulantly to Lila’s retreating back, and ignoring the look she got thrown over her shoulder. “Maybe I won’t go just to prove you wrong! ” she called more loudly the further away Lila got.

“You’re going!” was all Lila shouted in return before she reentered the tavern and removed herself from the range of Gabrielle’s voice. 

Gabrielle’s heart was still beating at that rapid pace that had never failed to signal a decision it had already made for her before she’d had a chance to acknowledge it. It had beat in just this way before she’d stepped out amongst the women she’d been kidnapped with the day she’d met Xena, before she’d flung her body over Terreis’ and become an Amazon, before she’d hurled a spear into a man’s chest and definitively chosen the path she’d walked until Xena had left Gabrielle stranded on it. 

Unavoidably, her mind drifted to the last time she’d been in Alexandria, her memory settling so clearly on a single image that her body could almost feel it: the heat of the sun on her skin, the weight of baby Eve in her arms, the press of Xena’s body wrapped around them both. They’d left behind the terror of escaping the Greek gods, just briefly, and this moment of peace was the most precious thing that even that younger Gabrielle could have imagined. No dragon on her back, no chakram at her hip, just Xena and Eve in their place, right where they should be. 

It was one of the moments where the losses of the last few years were suddenly unendurable, and she sank to a crouch and simply breathed. 

What do I do? she asked the wind.  

Well, echoed Xena’s voice in response. I hear they have a need of a girl with a chakram . 

Gabrielle very nearly laughed to herself. After everything, is that what she’d become? 

The chakram was on her hip as it always was, in the same way its prior custodian had always carried it; and she unhooked it to flip it idly, curiously, in her hands. All the times she’d watched Xena throw it and catch it, seemingly an extension of her own thought, as magical as Xena herself had ever seemed to Gabrielle. Xena’s magic may have waned over time as Gabrielle understood her more; but the chakram was a something she thought she'd never been able to explain.

She’d used it herself now, of course, and several times. It had lost some of its magic to functionality, but none of its mystery. She turned it over in her hands again before decisively throwing it into the night. 

As she’d known it would even before she threw it, it ricocheted off of three trees, the side of a building, and the top beam of the horses’ fence before returning to her expectant hand with unerring precision. 

Gabrielle huffed a laugh through her nose, shook her head. A girl with a chakram, huh?

“Well, Xena,” she murmured. “I guess I’m going to Egypt after all.”

There were regular boats to Alexandria that left from Athens, and so Gabrielle rounded the bay and set out south along the coast. Naturally, it didn’t take long for her to run into trouble, and the form it took was disconcertingly familiar: smoke, warlords, a village on fire.

“At least it’s not Romans,”  she muttered before sending Argo away to safety and darting into the fray herself. 

None of the villagers argued with the sudden appearance of a stranger fighting on their side, though she did get a few looks when they could be spared. Some wanted to argue with her shouted suggestions to reorganize and throw off the attackers. Most didn’t when they saw that it was working. 

By the end of the battle, most of the remaining thugs had turned tail, presumably to regroup, leaving an exhausted and smoldering village behind. 

“What is this place called?” Gabrielle asked when she realized she didn’t even know. Her voice was thick and slightly scratchy with smoke, and she coughed as lightly as she could in an attempt to not irritate it further. 

The man whose arm she was bandaging looked at her slightly incredulously. “You mean to tell me you don’t even know the name of our village, and you still rode in to help?”

Gabrielle shrugged, unable to defend herself against the accusation. “It’s kind of what I do. Among other things.”

Most of the others were careful to give her space as they walked past, some whispering as they did. Slowly Gabrielle became aware of the fact that a lucky blade had caught the back of her blouse and let the head of the dragon peek out more than it usually did. The rest of her body was splattered with the usual muck of battle, but she didn’t think she looked any worse than the rest of them. 

“They’re saying they think you’re Gabrielle, the warrior bard,” the man said, and Gabrielle refocused on him.

“That’s me,” Gabrielle affirmed. ”Although I haven’t done much barding lately.” 

His old eyes turned wondering. “Forgive us,” he said. “We thought you were just a story.”

She did what she could from there, helped the de facto leaders understand what their options were and offered her help in carrying out whatever their decision was. It turned out to be to abandon the place and move on with the few survivors, most of whom planned to go to neighboring towns where family members lived. They thanked her wearily, and Gabrielle, recognizing their need to mourn and regroup by themselves, prepared to leave.

Argo was only a whistle away - something Gabrielle would never get over after all these years - and permitted Gabrielle to mount easily and urge her into a walk.

“Wait!” cried a voice behind her. “Wait!” 

Against her better judgment, she brought Argo to a halt. “Yes?” she said, turning. 

A young girl stood there, dirty, out of breath, and carrying a bag. Gabrielle vaguely recognized her - she thought she’d seen her fighting valiantly with bloody daggers before she’d been overpowered. Gabrielle had had enough time to send the chakram flying and drop her attackers before returning to the close-quartered fight she’d never stopped.

“You’re Gabrielle, aren’t you?” the girl asked, but Gabrielle could tell she already knew full well who she’d been running after. We thought you were just a story, the man had said

“What’s your name?” Gabrielle asked even as her heartbeat picked up inexplicably.

“Ianthe,” was the response. “I’ve heard that you - you’re like me. You left home when you were about my age, didn’t you?”

Gabrielle’s mouth was dry. The world was spinning. “I was older than you,” was all she could think so say. 

“I’m eighteen,” the girl answered defiantly, and Gabrielle started in surprise. Had she seemed like such a child to Xena all those years ago, too? She’d been very young and very naive, she knew, but by the gods. “And anyway, I don’t have a home anymore,” Ianthe finished quietly, crossing her arms and shifting uncomfortably as she refused to meet Gabrielle’s eyes. 

“Do you have family?” Gabrielle asked. “I can take you - “

“I don’t want to go to them,” Ianthe said abruptly. “I want to - by the gods, I just want to go.” She looked up at Gabrielle then, almost pleadingly. “Do you understand?”

It didn’t matter. Gabrielle couldn’t - she couldn’t. Ianthe seemed to read it in her face, because she regrouped with more purpose, advancing on Gabrielle until Gabrielle guided a whinnying Argo away. It didn’t do anything to dissuade her, and she implored Gabrielle, “Please, let me come with you.” 

“I travel alone,” Gabrielle said. “I’m sorry.”

“I can be useful to you!” Ianthe called after her. “Please! Gabrielle!” 

But Gabrielle had already spurred Argo away, shaking in the saddle. 

It’s not hard for Ianthe to track Gabrielle’s trail. She reaches Gabrielle’s camp just after sunset, and she shivers in the sudden cool of the air. 

There’s a fire burning, but it’s unattended. Cautiously, Ianthe puts down her bag and goes to investigate, ready to reach for her dagger if needed. Perhaps Gabrielle is hurt or needs help? Venturing toward a clearing, she begins to make out low voices, and then, two silhouettes pressed side-to-side against each other. She freezes in place.

“Why not, Gabrielle?” comes one voice, foreign, but low and melodic. “It might end up being just what you need, and you just don’t know it yet.”

“What? Dragging some poor girl around after me when I haven’t got a clue where I’m going or what I’m doing?” comes Gabrielle’s voice. “Pass.”

“You’d think as the poor girl who got dragged around, you’d have a little more sympathy.”

“Stop. That was different.”

“Different in that you didn’t know how I felt. It’s all different on the other side.” A beat. “You did ask me to teach you everything I knew.”

“Stop,” says Gabrielle’s voice again, but this time the brokenness of it makes the other voice capitulate. 

“I’m just saying, how bad could it be? Worst case scenario, you hate each other, you drop her off at the next village or city, you move on.”

“What, was that your plan with me?” Silence, and then a huff. “Figures.”

“Hey, we didn’t know each other,” is the defensive response. “And you were all earnest and eager, and I had no idea how long that was gonna last.”

“She said she’s like me,” Gabrielle says wistfully. “She wants to be taught.”

“Well, see then?”

“I’m no you, Xena,” says Gabrielle, and the hairs on the back of Ianthe’s neck stand up. 

“No,” agrees the other woman - Xena. “You’re something much better.”

“Xena,” Gabrielle murmurs. 

“All I could offer you was how to fight, and I know it was something you needed, but it also hurt you in ways I know you still haven’t forgiven yourself for. But you - you taught me how to love. How to live. You taught me to appreciate beauty, and see meaning in the world. You helped me discover my purpose. You always talked about me like I was the hero, but somehow you never saw that it’s you who’s the hero of this story. And you’re just getting started.”

“Xena,” Gabrielle murmurs again, but she’s crying. 

“It’s so clear to me, after everything - that I was there to help you become what you could be,” Xena continues as if she hasn’t heard her, and it might be heartless except for the way she puts an arm around Gabrielle and pulls her against her body. “We needed each other, but I could only try to atone for the damage I’d done to the world. But you, Gabrielle - you can heal it.”

“You’re forgetting I’m a warrior, now.”

“You are that,” Xena agrees, and there’s a smile in her voice. “But you’re a lot of other things, too, and healing can happen in a lot of different ways. Usually from places you don’t expect. Don’t you forget that.”

But Gabrielle is shaking her head. “Please, please don’t leave me,” she says. “All I’ve ever wanted is to be with you.”

“And you are, always,” Xena assures her. “Shh, don’t cry. You know I’ll never leave you. That isn’t what this is.” Her silhouette kisses the temple of Gabrielle’s. “Remember me and be happy. Live your life. There is so much ahead of you, Gabrielle, I swear it.” 

“Xena,” Gabrielle says a final time. 

“Be happy,” Xena whispers, a final exhortation, and kisses Gabrielle’s mouth, and disappears as if she’d never existed at all. 

Gabrielle sags, obviously bereft of something beyond what even Ianthe can identify based on what she’s just witnessed. Ianthe suddenly feels even more of an intruder than she already had, ashamed at the curiosity that had kept her rooted in place; and she tries to creep away and leave Gabrielle to her sorrow and her solitude. 

Of course, it’s in that moment that she steps on a branch which cracks loudly beneath her feet, and as if that weren’t enough, she curses reflexively under her breath before she can catch herself. 

“Who’s there?” 

Gabrielle’s head has snapped up, and Ianthe can see her reaching for the weapons she keeps in her boots. Hastily she makes the decision to step out of hiding - better to be alive and hated, as Gabrielle surely would, than simply dead - and watched recognition wash over Gabrielle’s face. 

“You,” is all she says. Ianthe’s relieved when she doesn’t advance, doesn’t even appear to be particularly angry. Instead, her hands drop to her sides, her sais still loosely in her grip, and she looks up and chuckles mirthlessly. “Is this a joke?” she demands of seemingly no one. 

Ianthe knows better, of course, and ventures forth bravely anyway. “I’m sorry,” she apologises. “I didn’t realize I was intruding until it was too late. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”

Something about her words is a surprise to Gabrielle, who looks at her in part interest, part suspicion. “Eavesdrop? What do you mean? You could - Ianthe, could you hear her?” 

“Yeah,” Ianthe replies in confusion. “I could see her, too.” 

It seems to stun Gabrielle into silence, and she gapes at Ianthe. 

“I’m sorry,” Ianthe apologizes again, but this time she isn’t sure if she’s apologizing for her intrusion or Gabrielle’s loss. “I’ve heard the stories. You loved her a lot.” 

Gabrielle laughs again, but this time the sound is more rueful and wet. “Yeah,” she agrees. But she doesn’t say anything else, and Ianthe begins to shift uneasily from foot to foot. 

“Look,” she says, “maybe this was a bad idea. I just wanted to find you. I didn’t mean - “

She’s cut off by something hitting her in the face. She sputters and takes stock of the heavy, soft thing she’s caught in her hands: a bedroll made of soft fur. 

“Get some sleep,” Gabrielle says brusquely, but Ianthe can see the hint of a smile - a real one - in the corners of her mouth. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

They don’t talk in the morning. Gabrielle simply breaks camp; and bemused, Ianthe follows her for a day, then two, then a week. By the end of the fifteenth day they’re at the edge of the ocean, a sight Ianthe has never seen, and there’s a ship whose captain Gabrielle is talking to about passage to Egypt. 

“Just one?” he asks, and as Ianthe stares entranced at the vast expanse of water in gentle, unceasing motion, she hears Gabrielle say, “Two.”

It’s a matter of a few days to get to Alexandria. Ianthe takes to sailing like she’d been born to it, staying on deck as much as possible and winning over the sailors, admittedly with some trouble, while Gabrielle conversely keeps below deck as much as possible and intermittently presses at a spot on her forearm. 

“It helps with seasickness,” she explains when Ianthe asks. 

The idea of Gabrielle experiencing anything as ordinary as seasickness still boggles Ianthe’s mind a little bit, but she’s just starting to understand that the full picture of Gabrielle is much more layered than she’d first believed. A full three weeks of travelling with someone will really ground you in the everyday minutiae of their existence, she’s found; but yet for all that, sometimes Gabrielle still seems so extraordinary that Ianthe can’t quite believe she’s real. 

“Of course the gods were real,” she’d replied once to Ianthe’s questions with an odd look on her face. “They’re just dead now - well, mostly.”

“You’ve met them?” 

Gabrielle had appeared further nonplussed. “Well… yeah. But trust me, they weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Mostly. One - “ she seemed to reconsider, and grudgingly conceded some internal point - “ - and a half of them weren’t so bad.”

Ianthe had had more questions, but had been wary of looking stupider than she already did. But what do you say to a woman who has walked with the gods? Who strides through the world with ancient magic embedded in her skin, can sense a leaf falling a league away, has travelled the face of the known world and far beyond, carries an understanding that Ianthe aches for behind the compassionate wisdom of her eyes? 

And Ianthe does ache. She hopes for it to touch her, as much as she hopes to possess it one day herself. She knows very little, and trusts even less, but she is certain of one thing: that Gabrielle is the key. 

They land safely in Alexandria, a whole new country before them, and Gabrielle easily leads them to a good campsite on the outskirts of the city. Tomorrow they’ll enter the city gates and search out the person who had sent for Gabrielle in the first place; but tonight, Gabrielle had wanted peace. The air is warm and the sky is starry overhead, and Ianthe has a hard time wanting to argue with the idea.

But in the still quiet of the night, Ianthe wakes up enough to hear Gabrielle get up from her bedroll. There’s a rustling as she banks the fire, a hiss of sparks, and then a soft shifting of cloth and leather and various objects Ianthe can’t quite identify as Gabrielle carefully searches for something in her saddlebag. 

She must find it, because Ianthe is only aware of her presence some distance away, and the renewed quiet between them. Gabrielle must know she’s awake - Gabrielle knows everything - but she doesn’t say anything, and Ianthe is content to drift off again with the knowledge that Gabrielle is keeping watch. 

She’s nearly asleep again, the world hazy and heavy about her, when she hears Gabrielle’s voice, hardly more than a whisper disturbing the night air.

“I dreamt the most wonderful story,” her words come to Ianthe, almost a dream themselves. “Do you want to hear it?” 

The words aren’t meant for her, but Ianthe smiles unconsciously anyway. How wonderful, she thinks without fully understanding why, only knowing that it is; and finally, she falls asleep to the sound of a quill scratching over papyrus.