Ancient Greece, When is Irrelevant, Saturday Fandom Time
In general Gabrielle didn't assume trips home were going to be uninteresting. Getting out of her portal just in time to get a hug from Xena, the kind of clingy bearhug you never wanted to tell a Warrior Princess (out loud) that she was giving you, was a good hint that this trip wasn't going to be an exception to the rule.
Naturally she had to ask for an explanation, and got a disjointed tale about how Xena had ended up traveling north to a place that later research in Fandom would tell Gabrielle was Siberia, and running into a tribe of Amazons up there. They didn't like her much. Apparently she had some bad history with them. That was not at all a surprise. There'd been some kind of confrontation with a gravel-voiced, raccoon-eyed (who knew there was mascara in ancient Siberia?) shaman, Alti, that ended with Xena getting a vision of her own death by crucifixion.
Why that warranted a massive bear hug for Gabrielle, well . . . she didn't know the answer to that yet. She wouldn't complain about the hug, though. She'd needed it.
The first thing Gabrielle did once they'd started on the road was grill Xena about absolutely everything and everyone they knew until she was satisfied that their world was back the way it should be. The second thing was to ask that they make their way toward her Amazon tribe and check in on things there.
That plan, as their plans so often did, went awry as soon as they spotted massive army encampments near a small village. By the time they got close enough to make out Caesar and Pompey's emblems on the camps' banners, Gabrielle knew the odds of their getting to the Amazon village were slim at best. The civil war that the two would-be emperors continued to wage had spilled over onto Greek soil, which meant that this village was going to see some trouble -- and besides, Xena never walked away from a chance to get one over on Julius Caesar.
As the Fates would have it, this village just happened to be the home of one Phlanagus, commander of a legion of Greek mercenaries in Caesar's employ. Also as the Fates would have it, Phlanagus pulling rank didn't stop the Roman centurions from trying to kill him. Xena's chakram did, though.
Gabrielle had fully expected to end up getting involved. What she hadn't expected was that, rather than try to drive the Roman armies away, Xena's plan was to give Caesar and Pompey exactly the kind of battle they wanted. It was harsh, Gabrielle thought, of Xena to ask the villagers to burn their own homes to the ground; bad enough that the trap they were setting for the Roman forces called for the villagers to impersonate Roman troops and lure Caesar and Pompey's soldiers in to engage each other. Bad enough that the trap involved stealing Pompey's catapults and using them on both sides. Bad enough that Phlanagus had recruited miners and stragglers from the surrounding area to help Xena form a small army of her own.
What hit home the worst for Gabrielle was the young boy Temecula, just old enough to be a freshman at Fandom High, pleading with her to let him use his formidable skill with a bow and arrow in the battle. Gabrielle resisted as much as she could; he was good with that bow, as good as Katniss, but innocent in a way neither she nor Katniss could ever get back. If it was up to her, he wasn't going to lose that innocence here. Not in a battle that they were forcing to happen in order to get both sides to wipe each other out.
But he'd pleaded with her, wanting to do something to fight for his home village, and finally Gabrielle relented, agreeing to let him use his arrows to send signals.
The first part of the plan was a success: the trap worked, and both armies were distracted long enough for Gabrielle to herd the noncombatants to safety and Xena's small group of recruits to pull off the catapult theft.
With the village razed to the ground -- and watching as it burned around them had been heartbreaking -- and the villagers safely hidden in the nearby foothill caves, the work of preparing for battle began: boiling bandages, setting aside space for the wounded, grinding herbs and making poultices.
“You’ve done this before,” noted Phlanagus’s wife Nogalin, who had been watching as Gabrielle organized the villagers into groups and set them to different tasks.
Gabrielle, who couldn't help thinking of being back in District Thirteen with Karla and Warren and Lady Ghanima while Katniss and the others had gone off to war, kept her eyes firmly on the bandages she was preparing. She had enough misgivings of her own without passing that anxiety on to them. Grateful for the darkness of the caves, she answered softly, “A couple of times.”
It really was like being back in Thirteen; the uneasy tension was just as palpable. They just didn't have the entire thing on a television feed.
Gabrielle didn't know if that made it better or worse.
What definitely made things worse was Xena returning with Phlanagus after spying on Caesar's camp, and pulling Gabrielle aside.
“When I was listening to Caesar I heard him mention a reserve detachment,” Xena told her. “When the battle starts they’ll be coming from the woods. I think I know how I can stop them.”
“And still keep Caesar and Pompey from taking control of their armies?” Gabrielle asked dubiously; Xena had set a second trap, one designed to keep the two commanders completely out of the engagement.
“Mmm,” Xena confirmed; she was fully in her element now, eyes ablaze with battle eagerness. She was looking forward to this. “It won’t be easy, but there’s something else. Another part of Caesar’s plan.”
Gabrielle didn’t think she liked where this was going. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.” Oh. Well. “I won’t be here when everything breaks loose,” Xena reminded her. “Whatever Caesar appears to do, it’s always part of a design. I’m afraid Phlanagus won’t see that -- but you know Caesar, and you know how I think.”
Was Xena seriously asking her to . . . ?
Gabrielle swallowed, took a step back, shook her head. “I can’t give the command! I cannot lead these men to their deaths.”
She was standing up for her own convictions, and she should have been proud of that, but the look of disappointment in Xena’s eyes cut deeply nonetheless.
Xena nodded once, tersely. “I’ll tell Phlanagus,” she said instead, and turned away.
***
The attack was to begin at dawn. No one even bothered to make a pretense at sleeping, least of all Gabrielle, who was aware that Xena was out there somewhere, keeping Caesar and Pompey occupied away from the battlefield. She’d been pacing, watching over the villagers, when Temecula came pelting in from outside.
“It’s over!” he yelled, his voice nearly breaking with relief. “The battle, it’s over!”
Gabrielle wheeled on him. “What?”
Temecula -- by the gods, he looked so young -- nodded. “Caesar’s pulling back. They’re retreating!”
Gabrielle’s gut went cold. “Wait. It can’t be.” She did know Caesar, and she did know how Xena thought. “It’s a trap.”
“What do you mean?” Temecula, staring at her in complete perplexity, shook his head. “We don’t have to fight, now! Phlanagus is already bringing our men back!”
And risking them more than if they had stayed -- if they hadn’t fallen for the trap, like they wouldn’t have if Gabrielle had been in command like Xena wanted. Some of those villagers were about to die, and it was going to be her fault.
She hadn’t wanted this, and she didn’t have a choice. “No,” Gabrielle blurted out, grabbing her staff and gesturing for Temecula to follow her. “This is the trap Xena was talking about -- we can’t pull back!”
***
She met Phlanagus and the ragtag militia on their way back and, in no uncertain terms, laid out her argument for why Caesar’s retreat was a ruse.
“Okay, listen up!” Phlanagus raised his voice so the men could hear him. “Before she left, Xena told me to listen to Gabrielle. She wanted us to trust her.”
He turned to Gabrielle with a nod of respect that could only mean the one thing she’d been avoiding all along.
“You’re in command.”
***
It should have scared her how completely Phlanagus and the men trusted her, just a girl playing dress-up in Roman-style leather armor and holding a staff, but when she led the charge onto the battlefield Gabrielle resolutely shut all of that out of her mind the way Xena had taught her.
Somewhere in the midst of the chaos she heard Xena’s distinctive battle cry, and that was a relief -- especially once the catapult fire began raining down onto the field -- but she had her hands full. Trying to protect Phlanagus, determined to keep Temecula from ever training his bow on a human target, her senses assaulted by the screams. the clash of metal, the sharp tang of blood and bile, the smoke and ash --
They had remembered the multiverse back into existence for this?
Some couple dozen paces away she saw Phlanagus -- a man who’d only wanted to save up enough money to buy himself a fishing boat and live a peaceful life -- dispatch a soldier with a vicious slash and turn toward her, the grin on his face completely incongruous with the blood spattering his face and blade. And behind him --
“Look out!” Gabrielle yelled, but a catapult missile exploded nearby and drowned her out.
A spear -- there was a spear within reach, and she wasn’t so far away or so terrible with her aim any more. She could take out Phlanagus’s oncoming attacker easily.
She seized the spear, aimed, hauled back to throw --
And missed badly when the horribly-timed thought that she had just made the conscious decision to take a human life struck her.
She watched Phlanagus fall, and his attacker run him through.
She saw an arrow come streaking past her to take Phlanagus’s killer right in the heart.
Her one moment of self-doubt had undone everything she’d been trying to do.
***
The carnage was complete: Caesar and Pompey’s armies had completely wiped each other out, leaving the two leaders no choice but to retreat to Rome and regroup.
Gabrielle was too numb to be happy about it. How could she, when she was surrounded by the funeral pyres of the village’s dead?
“I could have saved him,” she said hoarsely when Xena found her beside Phlanagus’s pyre. “How do I get over that?”
Xena reached out to pull Gabrielle into her arms, and Gabrielle didn’t resist.
“I can't answer that question,” she replied. “Maybe `cause there's nothing I can say that can take away that feeling you have. You wanna know that what you did was for all the right reasons-- but with that pain in your gut and the weight on your shoulders, the best you can come up with is that it was a good day of fighting. I've seen so many changes in you -- things I could never have expected -- but as hard as the changes have been, you've gotta know that it's for a reason. All this is for a reason. Otherwise, what's the point? I was asking myself that same question when I first met you.”
Gabrielle used the exact same reasoning on other people all the time; it always seemed to work for them. Why did it seem so hollow now?
But she nodded and wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I should talk to Temecula,” she murmured as she pulled away; the boy had been wandering around looking shellshocked and horrified ever since he’d made that first kill. “I should tell him . . . that what he did was for the greater good, and -- and -- there is a reason for it.”
No, hearing the words in her own voice now didn’t make them sound any more convincing.
She offered Xena a shaky smile. “It was a good day of fighting,” she echoed hollowly, and walked away.
[OOC: NFI/NFB/OOC-okay, warnings for carnage and NPC death, blah blah. Some dialogue adapted from X:WP 4x05, "A Good Day." Yeah, I'm skipping a bunch of stuff from S3 and heading right into an accelerated S4, mostly because I really don't want to have to deal with the damn Dahak plotline any more than I already did because it's ew. Also, seriously, writers, "Temecula?" Really? Anyway. HUZZAH CANON CATCHUP FINALLY.]
Naturally she had to ask for an explanation, and got a disjointed tale about how Xena had ended up traveling north to a place that later research in Fandom would tell Gabrielle was Siberia, and running into a tribe of Amazons up there. They didn't like her much. Apparently she had some bad history with them. That was not at all a surprise. There'd been some kind of confrontation with a gravel-voiced, raccoon-eyed (who knew there was mascara in ancient Siberia?) shaman, Alti, that ended with Xena getting a vision of her own death by crucifixion.
Why that warranted a massive bear hug for Gabrielle, well . . . she didn't know the answer to that yet. She wouldn't complain about the hug, though. She'd needed it.
The first thing Gabrielle did once they'd started on the road was grill Xena about absolutely everything and everyone they knew until she was satisfied that their world was back the way it should be. The second thing was to ask that they make their way toward her Amazon tribe and check in on things there.
That plan, as their plans so often did, went awry as soon as they spotted massive army encampments near a small village. By the time they got close enough to make out Caesar and Pompey's emblems on the camps' banners, Gabrielle knew the odds of their getting to the Amazon village were slim at best. The civil war that the two would-be emperors continued to wage had spilled over onto Greek soil, which meant that this village was going to see some trouble -- and besides, Xena never walked away from a chance to get one over on Julius Caesar.
As the Fates would have it, this village just happened to be the home of one Phlanagus, commander of a legion of Greek mercenaries in Caesar's employ. Also as the Fates would have it, Phlanagus pulling rank didn't stop the Roman centurions from trying to kill him. Xena's chakram did, though.
Gabrielle had fully expected to end up getting involved. What she hadn't expected was that, rather than try to drive the Roman armies away, Xena's plan was to give Caesar and Pompey exactly the kind of battle they wanted. It was harsh, Gabrielle thought, of Xena to ask the villagers to burn their own homes to the ground; bad enough that the trap they were setting for the Roman forces called for the villagers to impersonate Roman troops and lure Caesar and Pompey's soldiers in to engage each other. Bad enough that the trap involved stealing Pompey's catapults and using them on both sides. Bad enough that Phlanagus had recruited miners and stragglers from the surrounding area to help Xena form a small army of her own.
What hit home the worst for Gabrielle was the young boy Temecula, just old enough to be a freshman at Fandom High, pleading with her to let him use his formidable skill with a bow and arrow in the battle. Gabrielle resisted as much as she could; he was good with that bow, as good as Katniss, but innocent in a way neither she nor Katniss could ever get back. If it was up to her, he wasn't going to lose that innocence here. Not in a battle that they were forcing to happen in order to get both sides to wipe each other out.
But he'd pleaded with her, wanting to do something to fight for his home village, and finally Gabrielle relented, agreeing to let him use his arrows to send signals.
The first part of the plan was a success: the trap worked, and both armies were distracted long enough for Gabrielle to herd the noncombatants to safety and Xena's small group of recruits to pull off the catapult theft.
With the village razed to the ground -- and watching as it burned around them had been heartbreaking -- and the villagers safely hidden in the nearby foothill caves, the work of preparing for battle began: boiling bandages, setting aside space for the wounded, grinding herbs and making poultices.
“You’ve done this before,” noted Phlanagus’s wife Nogalin, who had been watching as Gabrielle organized the villagers into groups and set them to different tasks.
Gabrielle, who couldn't help thinking of being back in District Thirteen with Karla and Warren and Lady Ghanima while Katniss and the others had gone off to war, kept her eyes firmly on the bandages she was preparing. She had enough misgivings of her own without passing that anxiety on to them. Grateful for the darkness of the caves, she answered softly, “A couple of times.”
It really was like being back in Thirteen; the uneasy tension was just as palpable. They just didn't have the entire thing on a television feed.
Gabrielle didn't know if that made it better or worse.
What definitely made things worse was Xena returning with Phlanagus after spying on Caesar's camp, and pulling Gabrielle aside.
“When I was listening to Caesar I heard him mention a reserve detachment,” Xena told her. “When the battle starts they’ll be coming from the woods. I think I know how I can stop them.”
“And still keep Caesar and Pompey from taking control of their armies?” Gabrielle asked dubiously; Xena had set a second trap, one designed to keep the two commanders completely out of the engagement.
“Mmm,” Xena confirmed; she was fully in her element now, eyes ablaze with battle eagerness. She was looking forward to this. “It won’t be easy, but there’s something else. Another part of Caesar’s plan.”
Gabrielle didn’t think she liked where this was going. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.” Oh. Well. “I won’t be here when everything breaks loose,” Xena reminded her. “Whatever Caesar appears to do, it’s always part of a design. I’m afraid Phlanagus won’t see that -- but you know Caesar, and you know how I think.”
Was Xena seriously asking her to . . . ?
Gabrielle swallowed, took a step back, shook her head. “I can’t give the command! I cannot lead these men to their deaths.”
She was standing up for her own convictions, and she should have been proud of that, but the look of disappointment in Xena’s eyes cut deeply nonetheless.
Xena nodded once, tersely. “I’ll tell Phlanagus,” she said instead, and turned away.
***
The attack was to begin at dawn. No one even bothered to make a pretense at sleeping, least of all Gabrielle, who was aware that Xena was out there somewhere, keeping Caesar and Pompey occupied away from the battlefield. She’d been pacing, watching over the villagers, when Temecula came pelting in from outside.
“It’s over!” he yelled, his voice nearly breaking with relief. “The battle, it’s over!”
Gabrielle wheeled on him. “What?”
Temecula -- by the gods, he looked so young -- nodded. “Caesar’s pulling back. They’re retreating!”
Gabrielle’s gut went cold. “Wait. It can’t be.” She did know Caesar, and she did know how Xena thought. “It’s a trap.”
“What do you mean?” Temecula, staring at her in complete perplexity, shook his head. “We don’t have to fight, now! Phlanagus is already bringing our men back!”
And risking them more than if they had stayed -- if they hadn’t fallen for the trap, like they wouldn’t have if Gabrielle had been in command like Xena wanted. Some of those villagers were about to die, and it was going to be her fault.
She hadn’t wanted this, and she didn’t have a choice. “No,” Gabrielle blurted out, grabbing her staff and gesturing for Temecula to follow her. “This is the trap Xena was talking about -- we can’t pull back!”
***
She met Phlanagus and the ragtag militia on their way back and, in no uncertain terms, laid out her argument for why Caesar’s retreat was a ruse.
“Okay, listen up!” Phlanagus raised his voice so the men could hear him. “Before she left, Xena told me to listen to Gabrielle. She wanted us to trust her.”
He turned to Gabrielle with a nod of respect that could only mean the one thing she’d been avoiding all along.
“You’re in command.”
***
It should have scared her how completely Phlanagus and the men trusted her, just a girl playing dress-up in Roman-style leather armor and holding a staff, but when she led the charge onto the battlefield Gabrielle resolutely shut all of that out of her mind the way Xena had taught her.
Somewhere in the midst of the chaos she heard Xena’s distinctive battle cry, and that was a relief -- especially once the catapult fire began raining down onto the field -- but she had her hands full. Trying to protect Phlanagus, determined to keep Temecula from ever training his bow on a human target, her senses assaulted by the screams. the clash of metal, the sharp tang of blood and bile, the smoke and ash --
They had remembered the multiverse back into existence for this?
Some couple dozen paces away she saw Phlanagus -- a man who’d only wanted to save up enough money to buy himself a fishing boat and live a peaceful life -- dispatch a soldier with a vicious slash and turn toward her, the grin on his face completely incongruous with the blood spattering his face and blade. And behind him --
“Look out!” Gabrielle yelled, but a catapult missile exploded nearby and drowned her out.
A spear -- there was a spear within reach, and she wasn’t so far away or so terrible with her aim any more. She could take out Phlanagus’s oncoming attacker easily.
She seized the spear, aimed, hauled back to throw --
And missed badly when the horribly-timed thought that she had just made the conscious decision to take a human life struck her.
She watched Phlanagus fall, and his attacker run him through.
She saw an arrow come streaking past her to take Phlanagus’s killer right in the heart.
Her one moment of self-doubt had undone everything she’d been trying to do.
***
The carnage was complete: Caesar and Pompey’s armies had completely wiped each other out, leaving the two leaders no choice but to retreat to Rome and regroup.
Gabrielle was too numb to be happy about it. How could she, when she was surrounded by the funeral pyres of the village’s dead?
“I could have saved him,” she said hoarsely when Xena found her beside Phlanagus’s pyre. “How do I get over that?”
Xena reached out to pull Gabrielle into her arms, and Gabrielle didn’t resist.
“I can't answer that question,” she replied. “Maybe `cause there's nothing I can say that can take away that feeling you have. You wanna know that what you did was for all the right reasons-- but with that pain in your gut and the weight on your shoulders, the best you can come up with is that it was a good day of fighting. I've seen so many changes in you -- things I could never have expected -- but as hard as the changes have been, you've gotta know that it's for a reason. All this is for a reason. Otherwise, what's the point? I was asking myself that same question when I first met you.”
Gabrielle used the exact same reasoning on other people all the time; it always seemed to work for them. Why did it seem so hollow now?
But she nodded and wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I should talk to Temecula,” she murmured as she pulled away; the boy had been wandering around looking shellshocked and horrified ever since he’d made that first kill. “I should tell him . . . that what he did was for the greater good, and -- and -- there is a reason for it.”
No, hearing the words in her own voice now didn’t make them sound any more convincing.
She offered Xena a shaky smile. “It was a good day of fighting,” she echoed hollowly, and walked away.
[OOC: NFI/NFB/OOC-okay, warnings for carnage and NPC death, blah blah. Some dialogue adapted from X:WP 4x05, "A Good Day." Yeah, I'm skipping a bunch of stuff from S3 and heading right into an accelerated S4, mostly because I really don't want to have to deal with the damn Dahak plotline any more than I already did because it's ew. Also, seriously, writers, "Temecula?" Really? Anyway. HUZZAH CANON CATCHUP FINALLY.]