By: Aurora Goddess
Disclaimer: All characters that have appeared in the syndicated series Xena: Warrior Princess belongs to MCA/Universal and Renaissance Pictures. No copyright infringement was intended in the writing for this fan fiction.
Rated: T
Date Written: September 2007
Summery: A very short descriptive vignette. We see a glimpse of how the Kill affects Ares, past and present.
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A kill is all it was. Warm, inviting, intoxicating. Blood trickling through fingers; glistening off a newly polished blade; staining skin and clothing a deep crimson red. Killing—was his specialty. It was his calling, and his pleasure. For thousands of years, that's how it was.
His first—was like any other, no different, no less. He'd been taken to a desolate field by his mother, to a place where the land met the sea. He was only a young man then, eager to know more about his powers and his desires.
A man shimmered into view before him, clad in leather armor and a sword. His mother looked at him and nodded her approval. The sword was drawn and the fight began. The clanging of metal, sparks flying. A glorious, gruesome dance until it ended with his sword sliding through the chest of his opponent. He drew the blade back and grinned as the blood dripped from the blade onto his fingers—an invigorating sent filled his senses and he threw his head back as he drew on the power that he was created for—the Kill.
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Ares drew back his arm as a young man in front of him fell to the ground. Ares' sword covered with blood, his eyes fixated on the sight of the dead man before him. Thoughts moved through Ares' mind—he'd killed. These thoughts had never bothered him before; after all, it's what he had been born for. In the millennia he'd been alive, the kill had been his calling, and every kill was just as intoxicating as the last.
Now, standing before the dead man on the ground, it had a different affect on the once powerful God of War. The man had been a robber, stealing the only valuables that Ares had in that rundown farmhouse and he killed to protect his life, but somehow, it wasn't making it better. Ares looked uncertainly at the blade, the blood dripping from it. It could have been him on the end of that sword. It could have been him with his own blood on his hands, feeling his life draining away.
His first kill had filled him with such excitement—this kill filled him with doubt and conflicting emotions that he couldn't explain.
Mortality had done much more to him than he ever would have thought possible.
Staring into the blade's blood-stained surface, seeing his own dim reflection staring back at him in the once polished metal, he thought about all the thousands of years he'd been a god. Now, living as a mortal for a year on a farm that had been Xena's, he wondered how things would ever be the same, and how he could ever go back to the Kill.