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It was all for nothing.
She’d begged, stolen, borrowed, charmed, and fought her way up this mountain, and it was all for nothing.
The healer says something.
“What?”
He says something again, asks her a question, but her ears are ringing and she can’t, she can’t, she can’t. She goes outside, shuts the door behind her, and screams.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers to Argo when she whinnies in alarm. She tries to stroke the mare’s face, but Argo turns away and stamps her foot indignantly. “I’m sorry, girl.”
She goes back inside and wraps a blanket around herself. The healer — Niklio, his name is Niklio — busies himself securing the body on the litter. When he looks at her, there’s too much sympathy in his eyes.
“There’s a coffin-maker in the town down the road. If you leave now, you will make it there by nightfall.”
She wants to hurt him, wants to kill him, for giving up on Xena without even trying. She had dragged Xena’s body up a mountain, and he had said Xena can wait. You, I can do something about.
Don’t tend to me, she wanted to say. I’ll be fine. I walked all the way here with this injury; it’s nothing. Look at Xena. Help Xena. Help my friend — but then he had said Something’s happening, and then, gods, she doesn’t want to remember Xena’s body convulsing, the choking sounds her best friend made as she died, and she doesn’t want to remember the pity on the healer’s face when he turned to her and said, She’s gone. She doesn’t want to remember, and it’s playing over and over and over and over in her mind, Xena’s death, Xena dying, encore after encore of a terrible and meaningless tragedy. Everything, everything was all for nothing.
She doesn’t say anything, can’t say anything. She wraps the cords around her numb hands and hauls the body outside. She attaches the litter to the back of Argo’s saddle. Argo — what is she going to do about Argo? The mare never liked her, and without Xena there to keep the peace… But she can’t abandon Argo, either, can’t sell her, can’t give her away, can’t bear to part with another fixture of her life.
She drags Xena’s body down Mount Nestos on the same litter she dragged it up on. It was all for nothing.
A few months ago, the worst thing that had happened to her was… what? She had been mortally wounded and brought back from the dead with Xena’s bruising fist to her chest. Before that… When her uncle Merops died, but she had been very young. She remembers her mother’s grief more than anything else. She had completely forgotten about him until she saw him again when she was briefly on the other side.
And then she came back. Just like Xena came back more than once after a trip to the Underworld. Down to the realm of the dead and back again, safe and strong and whole.
Maybe that’s why she thought Xena would live forever.
And sometimes she forgets about Perdicus. She forgets to carry him with her everywhere, and sometimes she even forgets that he died, that he’s dead. Will she forget Xena? Will she wake up someday and no longer miss her?
She touches the casket. “It’s perfect.” Its bronze details are reminiscent of Xena’s armor. When she gets to Amphipolis, they will want to put her in a grave of stone inside the mausoleum where Lyceus rests. But the wooden coffin is all Gabrielle can afford, and it’s better than carrying the body around in a bag.
The artisan gently lifts Xena’s perfect, shrouded body into it and closes the lid, and Gabrielle wants to stop him, because what if she wakes up? How will she breathe, how can she escape from this ornate wooden box with her arms pinned to her sides by an expensive, useless gauzy cloth?
She hauls it back to camp — rather, Argo hauls it back to camp, but the trip is exhausting for her, too. Her muscles ache and her feet drag and everything around her is fuzzy and sharp all at once, like she can see everything clearly but she’s not part of it.
As soon as she gets a campfire started, she opens the casket and unwraps Xena. Just in case.
She lies on her side, stroking the casket, willing Xena to wake up, to come back from an adventure she had decided to leave Gabrielle out of. She would yell at Xena and make her promise never to leave her again, but she would forgive her just as quickly.
When Perdicus died, she stopped dreaming. Now she can’t close her eyes without seeing it happen again. Xena’s eyes fluttering closed. The pallor on her face. The shock of seeing her capable body lose all its faculties.
So instead of sleeping, she lies on her side and strokes Xena’s casket, or else she lies on her back and tries to burn the outline of the half-moon into her vision so that when she closes her eyes, she sees something other than Xena’s soul slipping out of her body.
Other thoughts come to her while she lies there, too, unbidden and inappropriate and evil, and she hopes Xena can’t hear them, because they’re terrible, these thoughts: she’s thankful that Perdicus died first; his sacrifice prepared her for a greater grief.
She sends an apology out to his memory, for he can surely hear these horrible thoughts, so he must know the truth.
And if Xena can hear these thoughts, if Xena finds out that she’s not actually pure or light or good, will she even want to come back to Gabrielle? If she can’t be good, what use is she to Xena?
If you come back, Gabrielle prays, I’ll forget this whole thing ever happened. I won’t be mad at you for leaving me. I’ll do everything you tell me to do. I’ll always cook, and I’ll sharpen your sword and carry your things, and I’ll let you take me fishing whenever you want, and I’ll agree with everything you say even when you’re wrong, and I’ll hold you at night, and I’ll hold you during the day if you’ll let me, and I’ll never, ever leave you. If you come back, I’ll live for you and only you.
But nobody responds. Xena doesn’t pound on the coffin from the inside or shout, muffled, Let me out, nor does she kick and punch her way out of it in her desperation to return to Gabrielle; and when Gabrielle eventually falls into a fitful sleep, Perdicus doesn’t come to her in a dream to whisper I know the truth, and I forgive you.
The truth is that she recovered from his death after a few months of mourning, and she will never recover from this.
When she wakes up in the morning and finishes crying, a cold wave of clarity washes over her. She stands up straighter, both disturbed and relieved by her sudden understanding. Did Xena know? Does Xena know?
The truth is that when she had married Perdicus, she wasn’t thinking about the future. She was having an experience, one she’d been raised to have. She was going back in time and following a what if to its conclusion.
And if Callisto hadn’t cut her espousal short... If she follows the what if to its natural conclusion, she sees herself running away from home again, this time leaving behind a husband and maybe even children. She sees herself returning to Xena.
How could she not have known that when she married him?
When Perdicus died, it wasn’t their future that she mourned, but their past. Her childhood hand-in-hand with his, severed so suddenly and so brutally that her grief had seemed insurmountable; but even then she had known that she would be okay, someday, eventually. And someday had come sooner than she’d like to admit, and eventually had only taken a couple of months.
The truth is that if Perdicus was her past, then Xena is her future. Was her future.
And if Xena was her future, then Xena is her past. She can’t wrap her head around that one, so she buries it deep in the back of her mind, in the void left behind by all those thoughts she had so foolishly repressed, the thoughts so recently released, the realizations that came too late.
The truth is that she loves Xena. Loved Xena. Will always love Xena.
And all those times she reached for Xena at night, the times she asked Xena to touch her, to teach her… Did Xena know?
She drops to her knees, bent over Xena’s casket, her stomach and cheeks and eyes aching from crying. The truth is that her soul cried out for Xena’s long before they ever met. The sudden realization of something she already knew is no comfort now.
It’s a very long time before she’s able to stand back up, and it takes even longer for her hands to stop shaking enough to affix the litter to Argo’s saddle.
I want to hate you.
I do. I want to grab you by the shoulders and shake you. I want to stand you up and then knock you back down with my staff. Not that I’d be able to. You’d block each blow with that aggravatingly smug look on your beautiful face, and you’d grab my staff and yank it out of my hands and sweep it under my ankles and knock me off my feet and then you’d stand over me and say something condescending like This isn’t a toy, Gabrielle, or You’ll have to do better than that, or Someone hasn’t been practicing.
And I would tell you no, I haven’t been practicing, because I’ve been dragging your stupid body through the mud, across all of Greece, and soon it’ll be your ashes I’m carrying and I won’t even be able to hold your cold, stiff hands at night, and I will spend the rest of my life sleeping alone.
But if I don’t do this, I’ll spend my whole life waiting for you to decide to reinhabit your body and live again. I know it’s not what you wished — I know you wanted to lie next to Lyceus, whole and intact and slowly rotting — but you were the one who taught me that plans change, and things go wrong, and sometimes you have to do what needs to be done, and sometimes you have to make sacrifices to do it.
I’ll take your ashes to Amphipolis as soon as I can.
Right now my sisters need me. They need a queen. I can’t say no — I have nowhere else to go, no other purpose in life without you, and Xena, you should see the woman who’s acting as queen right now. She reminds me of Callisto with her thirst for power and blood — so I’m going to be an Amazon queen.
I guess that beats warrior princess after all, huh.
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.
I wonder what it will be like, lighting the pyre without you there to sing that ancient Macedonian dirge. I always liked to think that your voice helped carry the departed souls to the Underworld. Marcus, Perdicus — you eased their transitions into the afterlife with your strange, beautiful voice. Who will help you carry your soul onward?
I can’t do it. I don’t know the words. I don’t understand that old dialect, and my voice isn’t like yours. It breaks under strain; it cracks with emotion; it becomes hoarse and dry and uncontrolled and weak. Everything about you was strong. I never heard you sing in happy times, yet I wish I could hear you sing again.
And I wish I could feel your arms around me again. I wish I could press my lips to yours and breathe life back into you. I wish I could wrap myself around you and never let go.
I love you. I’m sorry I didn’t know before.
I love you. I’m sorry I asked so much of you and gave so little.
I love you. I’m sorry it wasn’t enough to keep you alive.
I’m holding the torch now, Xena.
Remember when I couldn’t light my own husband’s funeral pyre? You had to do it for me.
I’m holding the torch now. I guess I’m stronger. I guess you made me stronger.
Thank you, Xena.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
I’m going to let go.