A State Of Grace (6a/?)
A STATE OF GRACE 6a
SyrenSoul_Red
Pairing: Gabrielle/Xena (Classic)
Fandom: Xena: Warrior Princess
Rating: This part PG-13. Overall, NC-18.
Summary: Set about a year-and-a-half post-finale. It's not a ghost story.
Spoliers: In particular, Many Happy Returns and A Friend in Need I & II, but this is post-FIN so everything is up for grabs.
A/N: I would like to get a little personal here if you'll let me. A lot of you have commented that this fic is the first you've read in a long time, and the first that has really grabbed you, and that you don't know why. I hope - in this chapter in particular - that this will become clear. People (outside of fandom) don't get how intrinsically tied with Xena a lot of us became, (perhaps because the relationship they shared and the openness of it flooded into our loungerooms each week *meant* something to us.) and that it mattered. And a lot of us felt many things when it ended (hurt) - not just becasue had ended, but the way it ended. This show allowed more fan interaction than any other I have been hooked on. We were invited in. It's finale was a bit of a slap. That's why I'm doing what I do. I hope that it... helps, maybe. It helps me. But hey, enough of that - It's all about the characters, right? Lines in italics are thoughts or episode quotes.
Disclaimer: I don't own Xena or Gabrielle, which is why they are neither rumpled nor moist on your TV screen.
Archiving: Yes to P&P. Anywhere else just drop me a line: syrensoul (at) g mail (dot) com.
POV: Perving over Gabby's shoulder.
Always open to concrit and very grateful for feedback.
Dedicated to sr_m_grammatica .
Part I is here.
Part II is here.
Part IIIa is here.
Part IIIb is here.
Part IV is here.
Part V is here.
*****
“If you could only see the beast you've made of me,
I held it in but now it seems you've set it running free;
Screaming in the dark, I howl when we're apart,
Drag my teeth across your chest to taste your beating heart.”
-- “Howl”, Florence and the Machine
*****
And just like that, I am alone again.
Gabrielle laughed bitterly at her own thought. In truth, she was alone even when Xena was with her. How do you keep the company of a ghost? It was like trapping sunshine in a jar: When night fell, you realised it was never really there. It was empty.
Gabrielle tugged at a fistful of hair and breathed deeply. Tears and forced humour had left grit in their wake and it was a sensation she was becoming resigned to. She stared at the ceiling and realised she had done a lot of that recently, and she missed the open sky, and the stars, and the situations and questions they posed that had nothing to do with her, because she was too small and insignificant to have an effect on them.
She missed being insignificant.
But then, Gabrielle knew she hadn’t been insignificant for a very long time. You don’t join up with Xena and just go along for the ride; you had to accept that the decisions you made could change the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. When Gabrielle had first followed Xena from Potidaea, she’d had no idea what she was getting herself into. It wasn’t until much later that she had accepted, and then embraced, the consequences of their life together.
But she had not expected they would end up paying for mistakes Xena had made a lifetime ago. She had not expected they would keep paying, even in death. And she could never have guessed that, after all the good they had done together, Xena’s life - and hers - would be defined in the end by a single, senseless act of vengeance.
It was just too cruel and unusual for her mind to comprehend.
Gabrielle understood that there were consequences to every action, and when it came to Xena, the stakes were high.
Like when forty thousand people had died in a town called Higuchi.
But for her life to end the way it did...
Gabrielle could feel the tide as it rose inside her and she tried to hold it back, but she knew there was little she could do. This week had already taken its toll on her and she couldn’t hold out forever.
Sometimes the darkness came in a flood and sometimes it fell like a desert. When it was dry, sobs and heaves would perforate her heart and lungs. She would fade into nothingness, a dusty vessel with a cracked base.
Today, she would be a ruptured dam; full of dirty water and pulverising waves, monstrous and deadly to everything in her way. Darkness would hammer a path from her chest to the ocean and drown all that lay between with an inexorable tide of anguish.
Once her thoughts turned to Higuchi, all Gabrielle could do was clutch desperately to herself and hope she made it through alive.
Gabrielle felt it first as a trickle, then as a bitter lake of anger. She had managed to live her entire life without rage, but on the day she had realised that Xena had died, everything had changed. Now she harboured a bitterness within.
She was so angry, angrier than she had ever thought a person could be. She was angry at Akemi for using Xena the way she had, and angry at the people of Higuchi for doing what they had done; she was angry at herself for not stopping Xena; she was angry at whatever Gods had put them on this path, bound them together so tightly, only to tear them apart, but not really apart at all; but mostly, she was angry at Xena.
She was so angry at Xena.
Gabrielle writhed in anger, twisted and convulsed and was ripped apart by it. It consumed her. She didn’t know how she could be so angry at a piece of herself, at someone who was as much a part of her as an arm, or a heart; the mate to her soul. How could you love someone so deeply, and hate them at the same time?
But she did - it hurt to admit it - but at times like this, she hated Xena. She tried not to, tried to keep the feeling away, to snuff it out but it burned in her, surfaced with a white-hot rage that she was powerless against.
How could you leave me?
How could you lie to me like that? Say you would come back to me, knowing you couldn’t?
How could you let yourself be killed?
At these times she hated Xena, and there was nothing she could do about it. Except hate herself for feeling it.
That was the legacy of vengeance.
Blood would have blood, anger would have anger, violence would have violence. It was a cycle she and Xena had fought their whole lives against, and she could not bear knowing Xena had died for it. Died, not to prevent vengeance, but as an act of it.
There could be no grace in vengeance.
After a lifetime spent atoning for sins of the past, Gabrielle could not accept that Xena’s death would be wasted like that. It was too paltry, too pithy a concept; the idea that her death could heal more than her fight for the Greater Good ever had.
Nothing good could come from Xena’s death.
Nothing good could come from her wandering the world as a ghost.
Nothing good could come from a life torn apart, a soul torn asunder, an act that left Gabrielle floundering, flailing, drowning in darkness, unsure of how she could go on with this ghost, living a half-life, mired in grief and loss and anger; unable to move on while Xena remained, and yet unwilling to move on without her.
How could she ever go on without her?
Gabrielle felt her head begin to pound with the beat of a fractured heart; a heart that called desperately for its missing half, that tore its way through the cage of her body. She fell to her knees and clawed at the ground, scraped the skin from her fingers, hoped that the letting of blood might cleanse her, might wash away her bitterness and rage.
How could Xena do this to me?
Their life was meant to be lived together. This life. All of the times they had seen their future meant nothing in the face of what Gabrielle felt. It meant nothing. Because Xena was not meant to die. She knew it, she felt it in her bones, in her marrow, in the thread that bound them together.
How could she let herself be killed?
Gabrielle wasn’t even there when it had happened. Xena had sent her away on a fake mission, knowing she was going out there to let herself be killed. And then, she had let Gabrielle think she could rescue her body, her head - Gods, her head - from that camp, and then burn her, and take her ashes to Mount Fujisan, and all the while Xena had known she wouldn’t be revived. No. No, Xena had agreed to stay dead, even though it meant leaving Gabrielle on her own, to finish a journey they had started together. She’d left her to live a life in which they were never meant to be apart.
How could Xena do this to me?
Beneath it all, Gabrielle howled: a sound beyond fury, beyond pain, beyond sorrow; a sound harder than rage, more potent than anger. She cried for the animal within, the person without; lost and alone, left with nothing but the memory of what had been and a feeble embodiment of what was.
Far away from herself, beyond the war of darkness, Gabrielle’s body was lifted, cradled in a warm lap, surrounded by arms that held her tightly, rocked her though she clawed at them, begged to be let go, to be allowed to tear out her wounded heart and place it in someone else’s chest, back where it belonged. Two arms held her, rocked her like a child, rubbed her back and whispered delicate things, nonsensical things into her ear.
Words fell on her skin like rain, like frost, like innocence lost and Gabrielle let herself be rocked, a boat in a storm, a boat far from shore but somehow safe, as the voice told her it was okay, that she was allowed to be angry, she was allowed to feel rage, she was not alone and somehow, it would be okay.
It would be okay.
Wrapped in a cocoon of warmth, where everything seemed so far away, Gabrielle reached out and curled her finger into a tendril of dark hair. It seemed familiar somehow, and as the world became clearer to her, Gabrielle recognised the woman that held her, and the fragile moment shattered.
Suddenly, Gabrielle pulled herself away.
“Sappho? How did you get in here?”
***
Exhausted by her battle with darkness, beaten and bloodied, it was indignant rage that finally gave Gabrielle the strength to rise.
Anger still burned through every fibre of her being, but now it had been given leave to burst from her skin and incinerate the woman before her; this stranger who had dared to enter her private grief, who had had the audacity to touch her wounds without permission.
Gabrielle poured herself into the fire until she radiated fury and then she turned it against the poet.
She shrunk from Gabrielle. The warrior raised her hand and felt the beautiful bite of its slap across her cheek. She bent her knees, bounced on the balls of her feet, prepared herself for battle.
Muddied brown eyes welled with unshed tears though the mouth beneath them hardened, firmed itself into a line of warning.
“Gabrielle...”
Her name; a memory. A person. A reason. As suddenly as it had appeared, Gabrielle’s anger was gone. Her mouth formed an O of regret.
“Gods. Sappho... I...”
The poet held up her hands, shook her head. “No. No, I shouldn’t have done that. I heard you through the door and I thought someone was hurting you.” She knelt for a moment and retrieved a scrap of red fabric from the floor. “I came to return your skirt. I’ll go now.”
“Wait...” Gabrielle was suddenly terrified to be alone and didn’t know what she would do if Sappho left the room. “Please, stay. Have some tea... I don’t have any tea. I’ll get some from downstairs.”
Sappho turned to her and smiled. She shook her head. “I have tea. I also have wine - Frankly, I could use something a little stronger.” The poet scratched her lip, touched her own cheek with the back of her hand and closed her eyes. Gabrielle wondered if she would tell her to go to hell. “Stay put. I’ll only be a second.”
The blonde hesitated, wondered if the poet would come back. She nodded and tried to force a smile. “Wine sounds good. I’ll... Put some clothes on.”
“If you must,” Sappho said quickly, but it seemed automatic, without levity.
Gabrielle tried to smile, rolled her eyes, but again the action felt forced.
She watched Sappho close the door behind her and took a deep breath.
She wasn’t prepared to tell this story.
Perhaps it was time.
***
I really do appreciate your comments...
Onward to part 6b...
SyrenSoul_Red
Pairing: Gabrielle/Xena (Classic)
Fandom: Xena: Warrior Princess
Rating: This part PG-13. Overall, NC-18.
Summary: Set about a year-and-a-half post-finale. It's not a ghost story.
Spoliers: In particular, Many Happy Returns and A Friend in Need I & II, but this is post-FIN so everything is up for grabs.
A/N: I would like to get a little personal here if you'll let me. A lot of you have commented that this fic is the first you've read in a long time, and the first that has really grabbed you, and that you don't know why. I hope - in this chapter in particular - that this will become clear. People (outside of fandom) don't get how intrinsically tied with Xena a lot of us became, (perhaps because the relationship they shared and the openness of it flooded into our loungerooms each week *meant* something to us.) and that it mattered. And a lot of us felt many things when it ended (hurt) - not just becasue had ended, but the way it ended. This show allowed more fan interaction than any other I have been hooked on. We were invited in. It's finale was a bit of a slap. That's why I'm doing what I do. I hope that it... helps, maybe. It helps me. But hey, enough of that - It's all about the characters, right? Lines in italics are thoughts or episode quotes.
Disclaimer: I don't own Xena or Gabrielle, which is why they are neither rumpled nor moist on your TV screen.
Archiving: Yes to P&P. Anywhere else just drop me a line: syrensoul (at) g mail (dot) com.
POV: Perving over Gabby's shoulder.
Always open to concrit and very grateful for feedback.
Dedicated to sr_m_grammatica .
Part I is here.
Part II is here.
Part IIIa is here.
Part IIIb is here.
Part IV is here.
Part V is here.
*****
“If you could only see the beast you've made of me,
I held it in but now it seems you've set it running free;
Screaming in the dark, I howl when we're apart,
Drag my teeth across your chest to taste your beating heart.”
-- “Howl”, Florence and the Machine
*****
And just like that, I am alone again.
Gabrielle laughed bitterly at her own thought. In truth, she was alone even when Xena was with her. How do you keep the company of a ghost? It was like trapping sunshine in a jar: When night fell, you realised it was never really there. It was empty.
Gabrielle tugged at a fistful of hair and breathed deeply. Tears and forced humour had left grit in their wake and it was a sensation she was becoming resigned to. She stared at the ceiling and realised she had done a lot of that recently, and she missed the open sky, and the stars, and the situations and questions they posed that had nothing to do with her, because she was too small and insignificant to have an effect on them.
She missed being insignificant.
But then, Gabrielle knew she hadn’t been insignificant for a very long time. You don’t join up with Xena and just go along for the ride; you had to accept that the decisions you made could change the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. When Gabrielle had first followed Xena from Potidaea, she’d had no idea what she was getting herself into. It wasn’t until much later that she had accepted, and then embraced, the consequences of their life together.
But she had not expected they would end up paying for mistakes Xena had made a lifetime ago. She had not expected they would keep paying, even in death. And she could never have guessed that, after all the good they had done together, Xena’s life - and hers - would be defined in the end by a single, senseless act of vengeance.
It was just too cruel and unusual for her mind to comprehend.
Gabrielle understood that there were consequences to every action, and when it came to Xena, the stakes were high.
Like when forty thousand people had died in a town called Higuchi.
But for her life to end the way it did...
Gabrielle could feel the tide as it rose inside her and she tried to hold it back, but she knew there was little she could do. This week had already taken its toll on her and she couldn’t hold out forever.
Sometimes the darkness came in a flood and sometimes it fell like a desert. When it was dry, sobs and heaves would perforate her heart and lungs. She would fade into nothingness, a dusty vessel with a cracked base.
Today, she would be a ruptured dam; full of dirty water and pulverising waves, monstrous and deadly to everything in her way. Darkness would hammer a path from her chest to the ocean and drown all that lay between with an inexorable tide of anguish.
Once her thoughts turned to Higuchi, all Gabrielle could do was clutch desperately to herself and hope she made it through alive.
Gabrielle felt it first as a trickle, then as a bitter lake of anger. She had managed to live her entire life without rage, but on the day she had realised that Xena had died, everything had changed. Now she harboured a bitterness within.
She was so angry, angrier than she had ever thought a person could be. She was angry at Akemi for using Xena the way she had, and angry at the people of Higuchi for doing what they had done; she was angry at herself for not stopping Xena; she was angry at whatever Gods had put them on this path, bound them together so tightly, only to tear them apart, but not really apart at all; but mostly, she was angry at Xena.
She was so angry at Xena.
Gabrielle writhed in anger, twisted and convulsed and was ripped apart by it. It consumed her. She didn’t know how she could be so angry at a piece of herself, at someone who was as much a part of her as an arm, or a heart; the mate to her soul. How could you love someone so deeply, and hate them at the same time?
But she did - it hurt to admit it - but at times like this, she hated Xena. She tried not to, tried to keep the feeling away, to snuff it out but it burned in her, surfaced with a white-hot rage that she was powerless against.
How could you leave me?
How could you lie to me like that? Say you would come back to me, knowing you couldn’t?
How could you let yourself be killed?
At these times she hated Xena, and there was nothing she could do about it. Except hate herself for feeling it.
That was the legacy of vengeance.
Blood would have blood, anger would have anger, violence would have violence. It was a cycle she and Xena had fought their whole lives against, and she could not bear knowing Xena had died for it. Died, not to prevent vengeance, but as an act of it.
There could be no grace in vengeance.
After a lifetime spent atoning for sins of the past, Gabrielle could not accept that Xena’s death would be wasted like that. It was too paltry, too pithy a concept; the idea that her death could heal more than her fight for the Greater Good ever had.
Nothing good could come from Xena’s death.
Nothing good could come from her wandering the world as a ghost.
Nothing good could come from a life torn apart, a soul torn asunder, an act that left Gabrielle floundering, flailing, drowning in darkness, unsure of how she could go on with this ghost, living a half-life, mired in grief and loss and anger; unable to move on while Xena remained, and yet unwilling to move on without her.
How could she ever go on without her?
Gabrielle felt her head begin to pound with the beat of a fractured heart; a heart that called desperately for its missing half, that tore its way through the cage of her body. She fell to her knees and clawed at the ground, scraped the skin from her fingers, hoped that the letting of blood might cleanse her, might wash away her bitterness and rage.
How could Xena do this to me?
Their life was meant to be lived together. This life. All of the times they had seen their future meant nothing in the face of what Gabrielle felt. It meant nothing. Because Xena was not meant to die. She knew it, she felt it in her bones, in her marrow, in the thread that bound them together.
How could she let herself be killed?
Gabrielle wasn’t even there when it had happened. Xena had sent her away on a fake mission, knowing she was going out there to let herself be killed. And then, she had let Gabrielle think she could rescue her body, her head - Gods, her head - from that camp, and then burn her, and take her ashes to Mount Fujisan, and all the while Xena had known she wouldn’t be revived. No. No, Xena had agreed to stay dead, even though it meant leaving Gabrielle on her own, to finish a journey they had started together. She’d left her to live a life in which they were never meant to be apart.
How could Xena do this to me?
Beneath it all, Gabrielle howled: a sound beyond fury, beyond pain, beyond sorrow; a sound harder than rage, more potent than anger. She cried for the animal within, the person without; lost and alone, left with nothing but the memory of what had been and a feeble embodiment of what was.
Far away from herself, beyond the war of darkness, Gabrielle’s body was lifted, cradled in a warm lap, surrounded by arms that held her tightly, rocked her though she clawed at them, begged to be let go, to be allowed to tear out her wounded heart and place it in someone else’s chest, back where it belonged. Two arms held her, rocked her like a child, rubbed her back and whispered delicate things, nonsensical things into her ear.
Words fell on her skin like rain, like frost, like innocence lost and Gabrielle let herself be rocked, a boat in a storm, a boat far from shore but somehow safe, as the voice told her it was okay, that she was allowed to be angry, she was allowed to feel rage, she was not alone and somehow, it would be okay.
It would be okay.
Wrapped in a cocoon of warmth, where everything seemed so far away, Gabrielle reached out and curled her finger into a tendril of dark hair. It seemed familiar somehow, and as the world became clearer to her, Gabrielle recognised the woman that held her, and the fragile moment shattered.
Suddenly, Gabrielle pulled herself away.
“Sappho? How did you get in here?”
***
Exhausted by her battle with darkness, beaten and bloodied, it was indignant rage that finally gave Gabrielle the strength to rise.
Anger still burned through every fibre of her being, but now it had been given leave to burst from her skin and incinerate the woman before her; this stranger who had dared to enter her private grief, who had had the audacity to touch her wounds without permission.
Gabrielle poured herself into the fire until she radiated fury and then she turned it against the poet.
She shrunk from Gabrielle. The warrior raised her hand and felt the beautiful bite of its slap across her cheek. She bent her knees, bounced on the balls of her feet, prepared herself for battle.
Muddied brown eyes welled with unshed tears though the mouth beneath them hardened, firmed itself into a line of warning.
“Gabrielle...”
Her name; a memory. A person. A reason. As suddenly as it had appeared, Gabrielle’s anger was gone. Her mouth formed an O of regret.
“Gods. Sappho... I...”
The poet held up her hands, shook her head. “No. No, I shouldn’t have done that. I heard you through the door and I thought someone was hurting you.” She knelt for a moment and retrieved a scrap of red fabric from the floor. “I came to return your skirt. I’ll go now.”
“Wait...” Gabrielle was suddenly terrified to be alone and didn’t know what she would do if Sappho left the room. “Please, stay. Have some tea... I don’t have any tea. I’ll get some from downstairs.”
Sappho turned to her and smiled. She shook her head. “I have tea. I also have wine - Frankly, I could use something a little stronger.” The poet scratched her lip, touched her own cheek with the back of her hand and closed her eyes. Gabrielle wondered if she would tell her to go to hell. “Stay put. I’ll only be a second.”
The blonde hesitated, wondered if the poet would come back. She nodded and tried to force a smile. “Wine sounds good. I’ll... Put some clothes on.”
“If you must,” Sappho said quickly, but it seemed automatic, without levity.
Gabrielle tried to smile, rolled her eyes, but again the action felt forced.
She watched Sappho close the door behind her and took a deep breath.
She wasn’t prepared to tell this story.
Perhaps it was time.
***
I really do appreciate your comments...
Onward to part 6b...