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“I think something’s missing,” Gabrielle says, on a warm spring day like any other.
The pronouncement draws a raised eyebrow from Xena, striding on horseback by her side. She makes a show of patting the chakram at her hip, then, more humorously, Argo’s flank. “Seems like all’s accounted for to me.”
Gabrielle smiles absently, but says, “No, that’s not what I mean. I think something’s missing in me.”
This draws a long, thoughtful silence from Xena. When Gabrielle meets her gaze a moment later, her friend is appraising her with a somewhat troubled, curious look.
“Like what?” she asks at length.
“I don’t know,” Gabrielle says, then shakes her head with a small laugh. “Maybe it’s nothing, after all.”
—
But the thought does not abate as she hopes it will, in the coming weeks. It plants itself in her so stubbornly that a month later, she sets out on her own. Xena is supportive, of course — she’s always supportive of what Gabrielle believes is best for herself, and she speaks nothing but encouragement, even when they use their spare funds to purchase Gabrielle a mount. Xena’s smiling even when Gabrielle embraces her at their departure, her body familiar and sun-warm in the circle of Gabrielle’s arms, and Gabrielle finds herself thinking that Xena is like a rock — no, not like a rock, she can be more evocative than that. Like a mountain. Xena is like a mountain, ever-steady and immutable, a landmark which Gabrielle can return to and find it comfortingly unchanged.
Xena is smiling even when Gabrielle rides off, one hand waving, the other shielded over her eyes against the glaring light. But when Gabrielle turns a final time, to sneak one last glimpse of her friend, Xena’s face is tilted up toward the sun, her eyes closed, the smile vanished. Something about the slope of her jaw, the angle of her neck, suggests sorrow, even supplication. Like she’s praying. Which can’t be possible, because Xena does not pray, certainly not to the gods around these parts.
That single image is enough to give Gabrielle pause, her doubts made loud, a sudden lurch of vertigo like she’s about to step off a tall ledge. But the horse is already in motion, and her life with it, and it suddenly seems quite impossible to stop, or to turn back in her steps at all.
—
Gabrielle takes up farming. It’s grueling work, at first; the skin on her hands splitting, healing, splitting again on sickles and shovels, her muscles even sorer than when she’d trained long days at the staff with Xena. Her fair skin burns, then browns, ever so slightly; new creases around her eyes, a new hardness to her shoulders. Her mother would weep for that lost fairness, and the thought satisfies Gabrielle.
The nearby town where she settles is quaint and quiet and has everything she needs. She pierces two new holes in her ears with a sewing needle. She takes up making her own clothes, a skill at which she had always been abysmal as a child and for which she’d drawn her sister’s constant ridicule. She sells her horse to help pay for a small, ramshackle house, practically a shed, and spends her time not-farming on beating it into something shaped like a home. She tends two chickens in her humble yard. Her staff gathers dust underneath her bed as spring turns to summer, and summer to autumn.
In that time she meets a man, who like the other men she’s met, is handsome and a good listener and has many high-minded ideals and, perhaps most importantly, is interested in Gabrielle. His name is Rhodus. The first time she recites one of her poems aloud to him, Rhodus listens with a beaming, spellbound earnesty, then gushes effusive praise for her skill.
“But the rhyme sequence doesn’t work,” she says, frowning at the compliments, hands on her hips. “Didn’t you hear the mistakes? It’s still just a working draft.”
“It was perfect,” Rhodus tells her, “because you wrote it.”
“Well,” she says, perturbed by this response. “Usually Xena and I would talk through the different rhymes and phrasings to see what works best. She always said my work can’t be perfect until I meet my own standards.”
The faintest shadow of irritation dims Rhodus’ usual brightness. “Xena again. Always Xena.” He leans forward, takes her hand, smiles warmly. “Your friend sounds a very harsh teacher.”
And Gabrielle doesn’t know how to explain to Rhodus, who compared to Xena is an utter stranger, that it isn’t harsh at all, but exactly what she needs.
Still, she continues to see Rhodus through the winter, because he is attentive to her and has grand plans for creating a future together. And when he kisses her for the first time, it’s exactly as she expects it to be: safe, and as numbing as a limb falling asleep.
—
Early in the following spring, another person joins their crew in the fields, a young man. He has a shock of black hair, cropped to the ears, a sharp jaw, a small, lithe build. And then, sometime around midday, the person turns toward Gabrielle to dash the sweat from their brow and Gabrielle realizes, with a small jolt, that it’s not a man at all, but a woman. Gabrielle watches the woman work for the rest of the day, fascinated by the masculine ease of her mannerisms, like she’s been working fields her entire life, like the land bends to her hands. And when the woman finally catches Gabrielle staring, she pauses, as though in surprise, then gives a small smile that seems to suggest some secretive, intimate knowing between them — and Gabrielle looks away, strangely flush.
—
Later that evening, she cuts off her hair. It’s not as cleanly done as the woman’s in the field, but the effect is the same. She appraises the new angles of her face in the glass, engrossed by the image she finds. Somewhat repelled. Somewhat, she finds with a small thrill, afraid. Would someone think her a man, from behind?
“I think it’s cute,” Rhodus enthuses, kissing the nape of her newly bare neck, and Gabrielle is impatient with the sentiment; a small seed of resentment that had not existed prior, watered in the coming weeks whenever Rhodus makes it clear that he does not see her intentions for what they are. She doesn’t want to be cute or petite or anything less than what she is. She wants to intimidate; to make people in the road turn their heads, uneasy, questioning her. Xena would understand, she thinks, unfairly to Rhodus, and then wonders for the hundredth time where Xena is, if she’s keeping safe — if she’s missing Gabrielle at all.
—
Not long after she cuts her hair, on an evening in which Rhodus insists on staying in, Gabrielle wanders down to the local tavern. In a town as small as this, there's only one of them, and there are always errant travelers passing through, as well as a handful of the locals. Most of the farmhands end up here after their long days working in the sun. Feeling listless, Gabrielle drinks one glass of kykeon, then two. She finds herself thinking about Xena again as evening's blue light encroaches on the bar, as the candlelight flickers up and a steadier stream of people presses in. She isn’t often a drinker, especially since she settled down with Rhodus. But tonight, her doubt stalks her like a persistent hound, and liquor quiets the discomfort of it.
On her fourth drink, Gabrielle looks down the bar and finds, with a flash of surprised heat, that she’s already being watched. By a woman, a head taller than Gabrielle at least, her hair dark as a raven's wing and her eyes an uncanny shade of blue. She looks like…
As the woman’s stare lengthens, its aims made undeniable, heat uncoils in Gabrielle like a long wire. She can feel color rising to her face, and blames it firmly on the liquor. Then, to her dread, to her breathless, giddy excitement, the woman sidles down the bar and buys them both another round. Gabrielle downs the rest of her kykeon as nonchalantly as she can, trying to still the trembling of her hand on the glass.
“New to town?” the woman asks, in a low husk. Even her voice sounds like…
“No.” Gabrielle clears her throat, gives a polite smile. “I’ve been here for about a year now. Working nearby.”
For some reason, at the moment she should mention Rhodus, taken abed this evening, tending the house, the words stop in her throat. She takes a sip of her drink in that silence, unnerved by her own latent dishonesty.
The woman had caught the omission — perhaps, even, had been looking for it. She slides in closer, a pulse of heat, and Gabrielle feels the lightest brush of a hand against the bare skin of her waist. A thrill flares through her at the touch; at its forwardness, at its newness, she can’t say. The woman’s fingers are roughed, callused by either manual work or swordplay. Just like —
“Seems a shame that a woman as beautiful as you should be drinking alone,” the woman says, with a smoothness that tongue-ties Gabrielle, who has always credited herself as a quick wit, unflappable.
“Ah,” Gabrielle says, appropriately flapped. “Well.”
She drinks more. The room has started to float at the edges, tilting dizzily, tilting her inexorably toward the woman. The stranger’s hand tightens on her waist, an intention proclaimed. Gabrielle’s head spins. No one is watching them; everyone swept up in their own conversations and flirtations, even the barkeep too busy to mind them with the influx of new drinkers. It would be easy, covert. They could even leave together without drawing idle notice. The woman leans in, so tall that it dizzies Gabrielle, and she finds herself thinking —
If it were Xena, Xena would — pinch the flesh on Gabrielle’s bare hips to tease her, like I’ve forgotten you’re ticklish?, the familiar, smug arch of her brow, the amused curve of her mouth. She’d tilt Gabrielle’s face up with two directive fingers under her chin. That’s exactly how she’d do it. Gabrielle can picture it so clearly that when she blinks the mirage of Xena away, the sight of the other woman’s face is a cold shock to her system. She leans back, ever so slightly, away from the woman’s touch. At Gabrielle’s blank, petrified stare, the stranger’s receding interest and confidence are as readable as script, embarrassing them both.
“Must’ve got the wrong idea,” the stranger mutters, “sorry —”, already retreating into a shell that for a moment had been cracked open, a doorway into whatever clandestine world that woman in the field’s smile had suggested to Gabrielle was hers for the taking.
Once the woman has vanished from the bar, Gabrielle pays her tab and stumbles out into the crisp spring evening. The night sky, its bright scattering of stars, whirl about her eyes, sickening her. Rhodus would scold her for being drunk like this, for being so unpresentable. She leans a hand against the outer stone wall of the tavern, trying to find her balance. Somehow, she ends up sitting in the dirt, her head pressed against her kneecaps, her eyes closed as she bites back nausea.
When she opens her eyes again, there’s a pair of knee-high boots in front of her at eye-level. Leather, laced, familiar.
Xena, she thinks, with such a soaring hope that it clears her dizziness like a powerful gust of wind. She pitches forward, as if to hug the boots to her chest. She starts to say her name joyfully, is about to say, At last you found me, but when she looks up, she finds an older, unfamiliar face peering back with her. The woman is old enough to be Gabrielle’s mother, and she certainly isn’t Xena.
“Are you alright, dear?” the woman who is not Xena asks. “I was passing through and you seemed to be in a bit of a spot.”
The relief and rightness that had poured into Gabrielle, filled her to the brim like an empty cup; it drains away just as fast, leaves her reeling with loss made fresh. She chokes on a dry sob, crumpling with grief as she clutches the laces on the woman’s boots. Where is her friend now? Why had she — foolish, impetuous, flight-footed Gabrielle — ever chosen to go away from her? What had she thought she would find out here without Xena as her witness, her confidant, her muse? What is a life for Gabrielle without Xena in it?
“Oh dear,” the woman says, more sternly than before. “Stand up, now. You don’t want anyone to see you in a state like this.”
Gabrielle lets the older woman help her, swaying, to her feet.
“Thanks,” she says, wiping the tears from her cheeks. She feels ridiculous and ashamed by her outburst.
The stranger gives her arm a light, maternal pat. “It’ll all work out, dear. Heartbreak always mends itself in the end.”
Gabrielle laughs a half-sob. “And if it’s self-inflicted?”
The smile-lines around the woman’s eyes deepen warmly, conspiratorially.
“Far simpler,” she says, “for that you know what you need to do.”
—
Gabrielle packs her things in the middle of the night, and finds that her entire life from the last year can fit inside a single burlap sack. She is not unsympathetic to Rhodus’ confusion, and then, as reality settles in, his despair, as he begs her to stay, as he begs her for an explanation. She tells him she is being kind to them both. She knows, but does not say for fear of sounding cruel, that Rhodus will find the perfect woman, one of a depth he can see comfortably to the bottom of. Still, she is thankful to him, and kisses his cheek one last time before she leaves at first light.
“Gabby,” he pleads, hoarse from crying, eyes red-rimmed and wretched. It’s the last thing he says to her.
And she, to him, not unkindly: “It’s Gabrielle.”
She doesn’t bother trying to purchase a mount again. She relishes the walk, the long and scenic route back home.
—
As though by some miracle, Xena is exactly where Gabrielle left her. The same field, the same green copse of cypresses flowering behind her — even the same season, the sunny yellow puffs of daffodils in bloom across the hills. It's like the time had not passed between them at all, but had instead been blinked away, like dust from an eye. Just like a mountain after all, Gabrielle thinks as she runs to Xena through the tall grass — ungraceful, staff banging against her back, ungainly limbs flying. She’s laughing too hard to care. Xena’s smile is whiter than sunlight on water, watching her approach, her arms already open in welcome.
When Gabrielle crashes into her, it knocks her breathless. She’d forgotten, in their time apart, how very solid Xena is. It's like plunging face-first into a brick wall. Xena doesn’t budge, even with Gabrielle’s momentum; just wraps her up in a tight hug, her cheek pressing easily to the crown of Gabrielle’s head. She's even taller than Gabrielle remembers. Gabrielle pulls back, beaming, to look at her, to drink her in after so long apart, and she sees Xena doing the same, noting her hair length, the new lines in her face from long hours in the sun. Xena strokes one of the short strands out of Gabrielle's face, a tender brush of her hand. She opens her mouth to say something, perhaps to comment on her hair, but Gabrielle kisses her too quickly to hear it, riding the jagged high of her adrenaline and her joy. After a startled beat, Xena’s hands find both of her cheeks, keeping her in place. Holding her steady. This is what a kiss should feel like, Gabrielle realizes with a shock of clarity — like coming alive, coming awake, all of the pieces of her falling precisely into alignment.
When Gabrielle finally pulls back and their eyes meet, she's delighted to see that Xena seems the slightest bit winded, the slightest bit discomposed. But there’s a lurking amusement too, that age-old quirk of her eyebrow that reads a little like, Oh, have you caught on now? Because, well — Xena’s always one step ahead of her, isn’t she?
When Xena speaks again, she’s still out of breath. “Did you find what you were missing?”
Gabrielle smiles, tightens her arms around Xena’s neck.
“Yeah,” she says. “I did.”
—
(“Your hair,” Xena says quite some time later; a comment made belated by long, languid kissing in the cool shade of the cypress trees. “You cut it.”
“Yeah.” Gabrielle rolls her eyes, props herself up on her elbow with a lopsided grin. “Do you think it’s cute?”
Xena smiles, and runs her hand through the short, feathery strands. “I think it’s you.”)
—