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I.
Xena strolls back into camp with a pair of freshly-skinned hares in one hand, catches Gabrielle’s look, and sighs as she kneels to wash their lunch and her hands in the river. ”All right, that’s enough. I can’t take much more of this.”
“Much more of what?” Gabrielle hastily looks back down at the bread and cheese she’s slicing, but it’s too late. Xena’s seen the wince, the furtive flicker of her eyes.
“You know what. You can’t keep flinching every time you look at me, Gabrielle. You shouldn’t feel guilty for hitting me when I told you to try and hit me!”
“I know, it’s just...“ Gabrielle hesitates, clears the food aside and makes a space on the rocks beside her. Xena obediently settles down, bends forward and lets Gabrielle cautiously probe the edges of the bruise blooming gaudily just above the bridge of her nose.
“It looks terrible,” Gabrielle says. She sounds miserable. “Does it hurt?”
“Yes,” Xena says patiently. “Getting smacked in the face with a staff is supposed to hurt. And poking at it only makes it worse.” She catches Gabrielle’s hand in hers. “It’ll be gone in a few days. And it doesn’t matter how it looks, I’m glad you gave it to me.”
Gabrielle makes a face, tugs her hand free and starts slicing chunks of hare into their brand-new frying pan. “You wouldn’t be so glad if I’d broken your nose.”
“Yes, I would.” Gabrielle snorts in disbelief, and Xena smiles. “If you can get past my guard, then I know you can land a hit on anyone who might try to hurt you. And knowing that is worth a broken nose.”
That seems to be the right thing to say. For the first time all day Gabrielle relaxes, and her smile isn't hurried or forced. “Always looking out for me, aren’t you?”
“Always,” Xena agrees. “So I want you to keep trying to get past me. No, I didn’t let you hit me last night,” she adds before Gabrielle can protest, “but one hit is just luck. I want to see if you can do it again.”
“All right,” Gabrielle says, surveying Xena with a new, speculative gleam in her eye — a look that, if Xena didn’t know better, she might call predatory.
But Xena does know better, and while Gabrielle is shaping up nicely with the staff and can hold her own in a fight now, she’s far from a master strategist or a bloodthirsty assassin. To really get past Xena’s defenses, she’d probably have to be a little bit of both.
2.
All Xena wanted to do was visit the daughter of one of her old cavalry commanders. The little girl’s all grown up now, and they’ve heard she has a thriving caravan-supply business -- the kind of thing that could be helped by a visit from someone who’s traveled most of the known world on foot, and can give advice on how best to get from, say, Cathay to Carthage and back. After her father served Xena’s legions for most of his life, it seems like the least she can do in return.
Only it turns out that the cavalry commander’s daughter is being blackmailed by the father of her child, who’s turned the business into a smuggling ring, and within three days Xena and Gabrielle have gotten themselves embroiled in a sworn feud between bands of brigands around Byzantium.
After a week of slogging through mud and blood and brigand politics, which are only slightly less complex than Amazonian politics, Xena doesn’t think she’s ever needed a bath more in her life.
Gabrielle’s been talking for weeks about visiting the Byzantine baths. As Xena rests submerged up to her neck in the patchouli-scented water, lulled by the heat and steam and Gabrielle’s idle chatter as her fingers deftly tease the tangles out of Xena’s matted hair, she’s got to admit that for once Gabrielle’s stories of lascivious delights and Elysian luxuries might not have been exaggerated.
She’s almost asleep when something shifts. Nothing so obvious as a noise; it’s something in the way Gabrielle moves, some minute difference in the pressure of her touch. Xena tenses at once, relaxation eclipsed by fierce pride, and turns to catch the staff she’s sure is headed for her —
Gabrielle presses a soft, swift kiss to the angle of Xena’s jaw.
A heat that has nothing to do with the baths catches under her skin. It’s very distracting as she wrestles her nerves and muscles to stillness, more than a decade’s worth of battlefield instincts suddenly foiled and useless.
Gabrielle’s still pressed close against her back. Now she slips her arms around Xena’s waist, her chin resting on Xena’s shoulder. “Something wrong, Warrior Princess?” she asks, far more innocently than innocent Gabrielle ever does unless she’s up to something.
Xena touches the spot where Gabrielle’s lips brushed, half-expecting it might be tender, as it would from a blow. “No,” she says slowly. “I just thought —“
“Oh, I know what you thought,” Gabrielle says sweetly. “There’s more than one way to get past your guard, you know.”
“Apparently,” Xena mutters. Gabrielle laughs.
3.
“A Spartan general spat on me once,” Xena says sourly. “I had Dagnine string him up by his entrails as an example.”
Gabrielle grins at her, completely unfazed, and hands her a flagon of mead. “That was the old Xena. If you were going to string me up by my entrails, you would have done it a long time ago.”
Xena accepts the mead, tasting it gingerly. For homebrewed village stuff, it’s surprisingly good; strong as sin, and richly flavored with apples and honey. Gabrielle certainly seems to like it. The two flagons she’s already had, and the chill autumn wind, have brought a flush to her face and a gleam to her eyes that Xena hasn’t seen in far too long.
She musters all her will and strength to hold onto her scowl, but it’s no use. She can’t resist smiling back. “You’re right. Probably around the time you used my chakram to scratch your back fungus.”
“And anyway,” Gabrielle says, “I didn’t spit on you.”
“You licked me. That’s worse. In front of the entire village!”
“I was only giving them an accurate recreation of the experience,” Gabrielle points out, in what would be a very reasonable tone of voice if she wasn’t half-drunk and trying not to laugh. “That actually happened, and you didn’t mind it then.”
“You were a Bacchae then!”
“A true artist has to really inhabit her characters. I was a Bacchae then, and I had to become a Bacchae again, so they could feel it.”
Xena raises an eyebrow and takes another sip to hide her own laughter. “Feel what, exactly!”
Gabrielle throws out an arm in a theatrical wave. Luckily, Xena’s there to catch her before she falls over. Undeterred, she declaims, “The wildness! The unbridled bloodlust! The raw savagery of Bacchus’ enchantment!”
A howl drifts through the night — a distinctly human howl. Xena pegs it as male, adolescent, exultant with mead and a different kind of lust. Probably taking advantage of the harvest festival and Gabrielle’s story to play at fighting off Bacchae and rescuing the pretty girl from their clutches.
It was a masterful telling, Xena has to admit. With the crackling bonfire behind her, Gabrielle was more captivating than usual, and when she fell on Xena to bite her, half the village cried out in fear. And if Xena had to clean Gabrielle’s slobber off her neck afterward — well, she’s had to clean off worse.
“That counts as a point, by the way,” Gabrielle informs her. “That’s six for me, zero for you.”
“A point,” Xena repeats, mystified. She can’t remember which one of Gabrielle’s made-up games they’re supposed to be playing. Probably not the one where you have to name all the things that are the same color as your favorite type of bird. And it’s not the guessing-dead-warlords game. Then what…?
Then she remembers Gabrielle leaping down from the rafters of Minya’s hut, and the Byzantine baths -- and suddenly a handful of incidents over the last few months fall together like a clutch of cast knucklebones into a definite pattern.
She keeps her expression haughty and her voice cool. “No, that definitely does not count. I saw you coming from a mile away, but I chose to let you use me as a prop. For dramatic effect.”
“Xena, the mighty Warrior Princess, letting herself get licked by a ravenous Bacchae? Seems pretty unlikely,” Gabrielle says in a sing-song voice.
“Well, it’s happened before.” Xena eyes Gabrielle with a new and highly amused understanding. “Are you still a Bacchae now?”
Gabrielle snorts and takes a swig of mead. “Of course not.”
“With how fast you’re drinking that, you might want to think about turning back into one, since I’m pretty sure Bacchae don’t get hangovers.”
“Shhhh. Don’t say that word.” Gabrielle presses two fingers to Xena’s lips. In the spirit of retribution, Xena licks them.
Gabrielle pulls back her hand and stares at it, then looks back at Xena. “Oh, so it’s like that, huh?”
Xena leans back against the wall of the rough-hewn barn behind her and takes a nonchalant sip of her mead. “I think that makes it six to one.”
4.
At Pompeii Xena’s wounded by a lucky pirate with a battleaxe. It just misses taking off her leg, but leaves her with a jagged gash down the outside of her thigh, through the muscle, so deep that as she clamps a hand to it to staunch the gush of blood, her fingertips graze white bone peeking through the pink scraps of flesh --
The next thing she knows is the sound of a sweet, beloved voice in her ear, cursing viciously in four languages.
Her entire left leg is a searing, pulsing, grating agony. It’s almost impossible to breathe through the haze of it, let alone think. But she has to. She can’t hear the cacophony of screaming men and horses anymore. The battle must be over. But where...?
The world tips violently and she’s falling, fast at first and then slower. Someone’s arms are clasped around her, hauling her awkwardly sideways and down until she lands in leaf-litter. A forest? But they were fighting in an open field. With a monumental effort Xena opens her eyes to find that she’s laying on her back, staring up at Argo’s flank and the canopy of trees that definitely weren’t there a minute ago.
“Thrice-damned son of a syphilitic centaur,” Gabrielle hisses through her teeth, and Xena manages to lift her head an inch to look down at herself. Gabrielle’s on her knees in the dirt, both hands inside the wound on Xena’s leg. There’s blood streaked up to her elbows, a bowl of ground herbs next to her and a fire burning a few feet away, still hissing and crackling as it evaporates the sap in the green twigs heaped onto it in a haphazard pile.
“G’brlle,” Xena slurs.
Gabrielle spares her a glance, panic and relief and resolve all warring on her face. “It’s all right,” she says, not very convincingly. “It’ll be all right. I think I almost have the bleeding stopped —“
Xena blacks out again.
When she wakes for the second time she’s warm, wrapped in the heavy softness of all their furs. Her leg is still a throbbing torture, but it’s less sharp now, more bearable. She cautiously tries to move her other limbs; thankfully, nothing else seems to be broken or sliced apart too badly.
“Xena!”
Warm, calloused fingertips graze her cheek. Xena blinks up at Gabrielle’s face, lit in shades of gold by the fire she can still hear crackling somewhere off to the left. Night fell while she was unconscious. She tries to speak, coughs, and croaks out “Fire —“
“I know it makes us a target, but you need to stay warm. You’re in shock,” Gabrielle says. Her voice wavers, but her hands are steady as she strips back the furs and pulls on Xena’s shoulders, sitting her up and leaning her against a pile of their packs and gear. She disappears, then comes back with a wooden bowl and sets the lower edge of it to Xena’s lips. The taste of cool, clear water is sweeter than ambrosia.
When Xena’s drained the bowl three times, Gabrielle sets it aside and settles beside her, rearranging their bodies and packs until Xena’s stretched out comfortably with her head in Gabrielle’s lap. “You scared me,” Gabrielle says softly, tangling her fingers in Xena’s hair. “How do you feel?”
“Better,” Xena says. “I’ll live — thanks to you.”
“I don’t know whether we won the battle. All I could think of was getting you out of there.”
“If we lost, we would have been picked off by Tirion’s scouts by now. Lucius can handle mopping things up. You did the right thing.” Xena feels the lead weight of her body, the dark undertow of sleep dragging her down again, and closes her eyes.
“Get some rest,” Gabrielle says, unnecessarily.
Xena feels Gabrielle brush the hair back at her temples, and feels Gabrielle’s lips on her forehead for a long, lingering moment. “Hey,” she mumbles, indignation fighting exhaustion. “Tha’s not fair. Doesn’t count when I can’t d’fend myself.”
Gabrielle’s voice is clogged with unshed tears, and somehow still sounds like she’s trying not to laugh. “All right, it doesn’t count,” she says, and kisses Xena again.
+1 .
Gabrielle kisses Xena on a cliff overlooking the sea, and it might be for the hundredth time or the thousandth. Xena honestly doesn’t know. If she’d ever been keeping count, she stopped years ago.
Gabrielle’s been kissing Xena for hours, slowly, languorously, but with a single-minded absorption that reminds Xena of the way she gets when she’s writing a new scroll; frantic bursts of hunger and inspiration alternating with long pauses while she traces the arch of Xena’s bare hip, contemplating the perfection of her own artistic vision.
It’s been a long, slow, lazy day, sun-soaked and warm. They’re a few weeks out from the summer solstice and a long, hot trek away from civilization, so far out on the edge of the world that they haven’t seen a human habitation in a week. There’s no one to save or condemn, no refugees desperate enough to stumble into their camp and beg for help, no demons of the past or future. The world belongs to the two of them alone, as though new-made from the gods’ hands, and they are taking full advantage of it.
Gabrielle raises herself up on one elbow to devote more attention to the parenthetical space between Xena’s breasts and her collarbone. Her skin is warm, soft where she and Xena are pressed together, her free hand tracing lazy spirals across Xena’s stomach.
“Make a sculpture, it’ll last longer,” Xena murmurs, low and teasing. She settles a hand in Gabrielle’s hair just to be sure she knows not to stop.
“Ugh. Have you ever tasted clay? This is much better.” Gabrielle breaks off her slow, thorough study to filch a brief kiss to the side of Xena’s neck.
Something about the quick, impish movement, the sheer delight, tugs at Xena’s memory. “Why do you do that? You’ve never told me.”
She immediately regrets asking the question, since it means the loss of Gabrielle’s lips as she pauses, confused. “Do what?”
“Kiss me like that. Try to surprise me — like it’s a game.”
“You told me to, ages ago. Back when you were first training me to use a staff.”
For a moment Xena feels the weight of memory, the terrifying abyss that separates the woman at her side, scarred and strong and radiant, from the girl who set off boldly into the world to chase danger with nothing but an unassailable confidence and a vulnerable heart.
Feeling her tense, Gabrielle rests a hand over Xena’s own heart. Anchoring her to here and now. “I hit you in the face, while we were stargazing. Remember?”
“I remember. It was supposed to be a training exercise. I’d been challenging recruits to try to hit me for years, but you — you cheated. Changed the rules on me.”
“I didn’t like hurting you,” Gabrielle protests. “I’d hardly call that cheating. Why would I work so hard to hit you, just to have to watch you walk around with bruises, knowing I gave them to you? Hurting you just felt like hurting myself.”
Xena rests one of her hands over Gabrielle’s and draws her fingers up to the livid marks Gabrielle’s teeth left on her neck the night before. “I see that’s one dislike you’ve overcome over the years.”
“Oh, did those hurt, Xena? I’m sorry, I can just —“ she starts to shift away, then laughs as Xena growls and pulls her back down.
Gabrielle settles herself a little higher, so she can reach Xena’s hair, tangled and matted with salt from their morning swim. “There was another reason,” she says, a little softer, more serious. “You were so startled when I kissed you — that was what made me want to do it again. Like love was such a strange thing, it made more sense to you to be attacked.”
“It did make more sense,” Xena murmurs. “Fighting made sense. Love —“ she laughs, and there’s joy in it, but there’s irony too, and something darker, almost grief. “By the time I met you, I hardly recognized it anymore. You taught me love all over again.”
Gabrielle leans down and presses her lips to Xena’s. A brief kiss, soft, chaste. “We taught each other. You used to tense up whenever I got close. You were always expecting an attack, but never expected love. I wanted to show you that there wasn’t a minute, not a day when I didn’t want to be close to you, when I didn’t love you. Not because we were in danger and you protected me, not because I thought it would keep you from giving in to your dark side, but just — because of you.”
“Gabrielle,” Xena says, and can’t say anything else, so she says it again, because Gabrielle’s name will always be the last word on her lips, the end of her breath. She kisses her way up Gabrielle’s neck and has no poetry for the way it feels, for the way the warmth of her skin fills her mouth like honey, and she doesn’t need it. No word, no poem compares to the real thing.
“So,” Gabrielle says, breathless, laughing, “do I win?"
There are ten thousand things she could say, infinite variations of yes and please and forever; but she doesn’t need them. Gabrielle knows.
“Yeah,” Xena answers. “You win.”