Disclaimer: Ares and other Xena characters do not belong to me.
Summary: A last goodbye from Ares to Xena.
Time line: After Gabrielle returns the ashes to Xena's family crypt.
I appear in your family crypt. The dust that floats in the air, shines in the sunlight. I amble toward the coffins and the urn that sits atop them. For once I ache to be a mortal so that I can intoxicate myself and numb the feelings that invade as I see your ashes before me. I reach for the urn and I can't help but compare the container to you. The sharp ornamental designs are prickly to the touch, much like who you were when I first met you.
I remember watching you take your last breath, out of the bounds of my domain. Immediately I knew that you let them kill you. You had always been obsessed with this stupid idea of needing to be redeemed. All you had to do is look around to know that it doesn't matter. Look at me, look at what I accomplish daily, I have no regrets. As you called for Gabrielle in your dying breaths, I flinched. If you had just obeyed me, you'd be alive. What had turned you from me those years ago? I thought about it for a time. Did your heart start feeling all of a sudden? Did you empathize with those you tortured? I taught you better than that. Feeling and loving makes you weak. It gives you vulnerabilities. I experienced it myself.
When I was mortal, I thought having you would be worth losing it all, but all my past schemes had backfired on me. You didn't want me like I wanted you, even though I had sacrificed it all. I wanted to grow old with you. To taste the pain and love of mortality. I wanted to see your face and eyes tearing as I became a worthy human of your love. I would have done it all; just to be with you. It tore me apart to find out that my chance was immeasurably small and our past stood in the way. A bitterness filled me, but the truth is you saved me from a fate worse than death; experiencing that love, and then losing it.
Your life was but a candle mark in my life. To my dislike, you will still always be in the back of my mind. I escaped you just in time, but you've scarred it nonetheless. I admit that there was a fire between us that could melt the snow off of mountain tops. When you fought with intensity and no restraint; you were mine. It was a masterpiece of your deadliness and skill. Mortals were insignificant to me, except you. You were different. You turned me down, and I became obsessed with possessing you again. Unfortunately your soul is not your own. Your fate strings became so entangled in hers, that there is no room for me; God or not.
In the end you picked her. But the jokes on her. She will be the one to suffer, haunted by her dreams. Feeling your phantom touches, and seeing you everywhere you are not. Longing for death to see you again. Finding herself spending her nights waking alone in cold sweats finding you no longer there. She will curse the day she met you, and beg for the morning to come, because the night is unbearable without you. She will smell your scent on the air and wish to bottle it up, if only to have it available when she misses you the most. Her mind will show glimpses of conversations long past. It's all in vain. Vain useless love. She lost in the end. But I will not, because I pushed you away. I was the fortunate one. So take your redemption and shove it Xena! I hope I forget you.
A sneer forms on my face, my face twitching from the action. My jaw clenches. I walk away feeling irritation in me rising to the surface. If you had never grown a conscience, you wouldn't be here. You wouldn't be in this tiny urn; pieces of you indistinguishable from the ash of any campsite littering the countryside. But you are, and even a God can't undo it. So I'll console myself in the recollection that Gabrielle is hurting more than me. I turn one last time to look at you. Your visage not one I would choose for my last memory of you. I can almost hear your taunting me one last time. Till we meet again.
**Author's Note: This is something I wrote a while back; while trying to imagine what Ares felt at Xena's death. Ares is going through some of the stages of grief. He thinks he escaped, but in my mind the only reasons he is able to know Gabrielle's pain and put it to words is because he feels it himself. It's official, I'm obsessed with Xena-why else would I even be thinking about these situations. Oh well :/**