FiN Revised: Redemption is Overrated, or The Way of Friendship

by TrekInTandem

Gab doesn't listen. "That is the way of things to which we have come after these years of fighting and loving. It is the sharp cutting edge of our love, the point of the blade which the greater good sometimes runs up against and is impaled on, sacrificed." The series in microcosm; beloved eps enriched w/ intimacies; in-jokes; X/G tough but soft, communicating silently, bantering...

FiN Revised: Redemption Is Overrated

or The Way of Friendship: Why Gabrielle Never Listens (and Neither Does Xena)

"But if I bring you back to life—"

"Those souls will be lost forever."

"That is not right," I protested, fierce even through my tears.

I had finally managed to absorb the shocking caveat to what had been a simple, if brutal (and for a time, infuriatingly secret), plan: Xena dies; Xena stops Yodoshi; Gabrielle brings Xena back by sunset of the second day. Only now Xena had told me that Akemi said she had to stay dead to save the trapped souls, who were already free of Yodoshi—so she was supposed to what? Resave them?

"I don't care," I declared, more plaintively but still firm. "You're all that matters to me."

"Don't you know how much I wanna let you do this? But if there's a reason for our travels together, it's because I had to learn from you—enough to know the final, the good, the right thing to do. I can't come back. I can't," Xena said, voice breaking, face crumpled with the grief of our impending separation. She was crying now, too.

Gods, I hate it when she cries. When she cries, my chest aches as if it will burst, and I wish that it would so that I could tear out my beating heart and give it to her, as if by so doing I could ease her pain.

Her hands, which had wrapped themselves around mine and the urn I held when she first appeared beside me and stopped me from completing the ritual, still cradled both. I wanted to raise those hands to my mouth and kiss them and then brush away her tears, but there was no time. The sun was setting, and while I might be willing to rip my heart from my chest, it would do no good. Only one thing would.

"I love you, Xena," I said, fighting my own tears to get the words out.

And then I dumped the ashes.

Well, what did you expect?

I had told her that she was my whole life—which is true. I had told her I wasn't going to lose her—and that was also true. I certainly wasn't going to stand there with the power to bring her back literally in my hands and at my fingertips and do nothing.

I have hesitated before—hesitated to kill to save the innocent—but I have never hesitated to do whatever it took to protect Xena. Never. And today would not be the first time. Especially not when the hard part was over and all that was left to do was so very easy. The 40,000 souls of Haguchi? Fuck them.

I would cut out my actual heart for her, if I could endure long enough to do it, but to let her die would be to rip out my heart in an entirely different way—and hers too. She is my heart, the other half of my soul.

If it were only me . . . then for the 40,000, maybe. If it would save her soul or her karma or in any way at last give her peace, then yes, yes, I'd take on the devastation of losing her. But not if it meant ripping her up too, and letting her go would rip her up, was already ripping her up even as she asked me to do it. I couldn't do what she asked, not if meant making her hurt. Not if it meant sending her to face whatever's next alone. Never that.

I wanted to end the grief that brought those tears, not cause it, not make it last.

Never mind the good thing or the right thing, I did the only thing.

Whatever gods, ghosts, or mortals thought the greater good would have been better served by Xena's death than by her life could take it up with me, including Xena herself.

She had very nearly pleaded with me to let her go, to let her do this thing, but I heard her words. "I can't," she'd said. Well, I could. If she couldn't, I would do it for her.

And I did.

The ashes whooshed out of their bowl and I winced, hoping no stray particle that might be caught by a current of air and thus fail to land in the pool would be a vital one. A hand, an eye . . . those beautiful eyes . . .

Xena's hands on mine—yes, they were still on mine, had been even as I tipped the ashes into the pool, but they had not acted to stop me since that first moment when she was suddenly there beside me, lifting the urn away from the water. From then on, she had cradled my hands in hers, but she hadn't held them in place. She had wanted to show me her acknowledgement that it was my decision, I knew, to show me that she trusted me to make the right choice. My choice; my decision. And when I made it, right or wrong, she didn't try to stop me.

Now, though, Xena's hands on mine faded away. Was that brush of warmth I felt one last caress?

The very last?

The subsequent moments were some of the tensest of my life—and that's saying something, believe me.

Then the pool frothed and almost immediately, I could see a murky form in its depths, rising. She came up belly first, but it was her flailing arms and legs that first broke the surface. By then, my hands were already in the water, seeking her, the urn dropped unnoticed to the ground at the first ripple of the water. My hands skittered over slippery bare skin, and then finally I had a grip on her arms, pulling her up, pulling her back to me, as if it wasn't happening on its own. It couldn't happen soon enough to suit me.

Her face broke the surface, eyes open, spluttering, water flowing from her mouth. She twisted upright as she coughed it out of her lungs, and then she gasped in a great breath.

Her skin was silky, softer than ever, new-made and wet under my hands, and my hands were all over her as she coughed and retched and finally breathed. I couldn't control my need to feel her solid and whole and with me again. And I was babbling, too, though not saying anything of note. Mostly her name. I don't really remember. But I remember every one of Xena's spare words. I always do.

"Gabrielle." Her eyes found mine; her hands came to my arms. She was back.

"Oh, Xena, I was so scared."

Now my hands were at her neck, the vision of her headless body hung in that samurai's camp like a slab of meat waiting to be butchered fresh in my mind. And he had dared to expect from me a noble death!

I ran my fingers everywhere, but especially over the line at the base of her throat that had been the edge of a bloody stump when last I'd laid my hands on her body—when I was bathing her for her pyre.

"Gabrielle . . . Gabrielle," she said softly, as her hands moved over my arms, up and then down, each repetition of my name both a call to me and an assurance to herself that I was indeed there.

One of her hands came to rest on one of mine—and I almost sobbed with relief to have back that touch that had faded as her ashes went into the pool—but she didn't stop my frantic exploration of her throat. She just touched me while she let me reassure myself that she was whole. As she had cradled my hands around their burden of the urn, so she touched me now, softly, lightly, her hand moving with mine but neither guiding nor impeding, allowing anything, everything.

"I thought I'd never see you again," she said brokenly.

I stilled at that and lifted my eyes to hers. "You'd have seen me again. You're stuck with me forever, remember?"

"In this life . . . in this life . . ." The words sobbed out of her. As she spoke, she took action for the first time in this new life, this continuation of our life, this first day of the rest of our lives. She pulled me to her in a crushing hug.

Her words loosened something tight and hard inside me. Now, I hadn't thought she'd be angry—I hadn't really considered that one way or the other, actually—but that hard little knot inside of me had been braced for her anger anyway. I'd have been more than glad to endure it, if I had considered that I was risking it. But if I had thought about it, I've have known she wouldn't be mad.

How could she be? The woman who brought down on the desert nomads, our allies, the might of Rome—who gave them up to not just any mutual enemy but to the one empire under the sun she despises as she despises no god and no mortal who still walks the earth, as she despises only the man who once thought to rule that empire, Caesar, whom she could not forgive herself for trusting, Caesar, who was fool enough to make an enemy of her instead of an ally, who could have ruled Rome and more with her at his side as she'd offered to be—the woman who upon our allies brought down the hated empire, the empire of Caesar, the empire who had turned her daughter into a worse scourge than Xena herself had ever been, all to save my life from a punishment I had earned?

No, that woman would understand that, given the choice between—what was it? grace?—for 40,000 long-dead souls and her life, for me there was no choice at all. No matter what rested in the other scale, with her life in the balance, I would never need to weigh my choice. The only real question was what had made her think even for a moment that she might talk me into choosing to sacrifice her.

I couldn't fault her for trying, though. She wouldn't be Xena if she hadn't tried.

I hugged her back, fiercely, and we stayed like that for a long time, the water from her body soaking my already splattered clothes, most of her still in the pool, our hands busy clasping and stroking and reassuring ourselves that we were both real and still together. My hand found its way to the back of her neck, beneath the tangle of her wet hair, and my fingers traced that same line they had traced on her throat, the line that should have been a trail of torn flesh.

This time, after a few moments, she took my hand in hers and brought it around between us. "It's not as if you sewed it on yourself. It's not gonna fall off."

I smiled—though I'm sure it looked more like a grimace through my tears—at the glint of humor in her eyes as much as at her joke. Then I did my best to narrow my eyes and look stern, not very successfully. "Was that a crack about my stitching?"

This is the game we sometimes play and have played for years. I think of it as Stoic Warrior. We pretend that we are unfazed by the most traumatizing of events. I started it, long ago—though not as long ago as it seems—and not in moments as fraught as this one, not in the moments when we feared for our lives or had just narrowly escaped death. Not back then.

Xena was so reserved when I first began traveling with her, so seemingly immune to fear and distress, and I was so eager to prove myself worthy of her that as we grew closer that first year on the road, it was often I, not Xena, who shied from sentiment. I had unconsciously assumed that the warrior princess would deem sentiment a weakness, as I knew she deemed love, that while it might be okay to care about your comrades and even forgivable to let it show on occasion, it was uncouth to deliberately say it aloud, a violation of the unwritten Warriors' Code of Conduct.

It wasn't that my assumption was entirely wrong either; it is verboten among most warriors to directly express affection, though many are adept at expressing it indirectly, as Ephiny once did when she gave me her mother's staff. What was wrong in my assumption was the belief that Xena would prefer that she and I maintain that pretense between us. Thus, when Xena would let the pretense falter in those early days, I did what any warrior would do to let a friend save face (though I was hardly a warrior then): I ignored it or laughed it off, once teasingly warning her that she was going to cause me to go soft on her.

Eventually I realized the irony—realized that Xena didn't need me to help her save face on such occasions, that it wasn't an accidental slip when she told me how much I meant to her; realized that it was the stoic, aloof warrior princess who was opening her heart and the romantic, demonstrative village girl who was maintaining the walls between us. I stopped that, then, of course, and when I did, Xena really let me see her heart. If I had shared the tenderness she showed me then with others, most in those days would not have believed that the warrior princess could feel such a depth of emotion, let alone that she would pour it out so willingly, so unreservedly, and so poetically. Most would still not believe, especially now that so many of those who were truly close to us, who'd sometimes had a glimpse of the softness that her fierce heart had for me, who sometimes were themselves the recipients of her tenderness, are gone.

Xena always regarded my earlier behavior with wry amusement, and she loved to tease me about it once I'd abandoned it, and so the game developed over time. What had once been an unconscious move on my part to maintain a needless restraint became a shared joke between us. It was also, admittedly, sometimes a way of coping, a way to react when the emotions were truly too much to handle until we could find the time and space to feel them—as when we first found each other again after experiencing the different lives Caesar had wrought for us with his manipulation of the Fate's loom, after having not known each other only to meet at last and be separated by death, after unexpectedly being reunited once again. But most of the time, the game was a signal to each other that we were okay, that we were holding up. So in times of distress, when we could get past the initial falling apart, the tears or screaming or frenzied clutching of one another, or the initial reassurances that we were together with our love intact, we would play the old game.

She had begun it now, I knew, out of a desire to see if I was okay, and so I played my part as best I could—my performance was admittedly somewhat shaky.

"Was that a crack about my stitching?"

She was still smiling back at the smile I'd given her, but now, gauging what effort the attempt at insouciance cost me and my limited success, the emotions in her were suddenly once again too deep for smiling. Her eyes were searing and her unsmiling lips were parted in a face slack with an intensity of feeling as she brought my hand to her mouth and then bent her head over it, those piercing eyes never leaving mine.

"Hands like a sailor," she murmured, the words like a caress, and pressed her lips into my palm, a lingering, open-mouthed kiss, the kind that is especially warm and rousing. I watched the eyes that saw inside me sink shut under the impact of the mere feel of my skin against her lips.

She looked back up at me, finally. "Get me out of this damn water."

She didn't need my help, not really, but she'd asked for it—I think we were both glad to be touching.

She was naked and wet and the air was cool, and I saw goose flesh rising on her skin when it was done and she stood before me. She was beautiful. She was alive.

"I'll make a fire," I said, starting to move away from her, yet my hands still lingering, still touching till the very last second, but she stopped me, claimed the hand still on her just before we lost contact, drew me back to her.

"No. C'mere. I don't need a fire." She stepped into me, wrapped me up in a hug. "Just you."

She combed her fingers through my grimy, unkempt hair and pushed it back so she could lay her hands on my face and kiss me.

I had a blanket in my pack. Just the one—I was traveling light and had only brought a blanket at all because I wanted to be prepared to take care of her when I got her back—but it was enough to keep her new baby-fine skin from the rough ground.

It was up to me to keep her warm, and I think I did.

We made love on our blanket spread over the flat ground at the base of the fountain, within the sight of our slain enemies if any of them had still had the power to look and to see.

It was a primal, barbaric act to thus reaffirm that we yet lived, to celebrate our victory over death in this way on the very battlefield where we'd slain our foes, but while our loving was fierce, characterized by occasionally desperate hands that could not hold tightly enough and insatiable mouths eager to drink each other down, to eat the other up and be one with her, it was also the kind of infinitely sweet joining that stripped our souls bare, the kind of union during which we never tore our eyes from each other's gaze and seemed to fall into each other through those portals so that we were one being with two bodies and every pleasure felt in one body resonated in both until we were mindless with passion and need and the completion we each found in the other—until, at last, we swept each other beyond our bodies' capacities for pleasure, swept each other over the edge into ecstasy at the same moment, and then, each body's further surrender calling the other's, plunged over and over again together into a seemingly infinite pool of pleasure and release until we drowned in sensation and washed ashore.

I fell bonelessly back to the blanket, and above me Xena too collapsed, her body melting against mine, so that we lay in a sated tangle, too overcome to sort out where one of us left off and the other began and disinclined to even try, instead enjoying the all-too fleeting confusion over whose limbs were whose, relishing the sensation that we had melded bodily into one creature as we had always been melded into one soul.

In our joy at reunion, at once again defying death, with our hearts so raw and open, what else could we have done?

-x-

Along with the blanket, I had soft, warm, comfortable clothes for her in my pack, too, the sort she rarely indulges in wearing, a robe I'd seen and impulsively grabbed at the teahouse, probably something the geishas wore after bathing while they arranged their intricate hairstyles. I had expected that she would be weak, at the very least, that she would need to recuperate. In fact, she was as strong and energetic as ever—more than battle ready. But the robe was it, since when I'd found her, found her body anyway, I had not found the new armor she'd worn into her last battle. That damn thieving samurai. I hadn't taken the time to look for or even demand her possessions once he was down and nothing stood between me and Xena's body. I had a deadline, after all. And talk about deadlines!

But she was content with what she found in my pack, turning that warm smile on me when she found that simple undyed robe. I remembered another smile in the middle of another bloody day on which my heart had trembled. I remembered the way she looked at me as if I were a miracle when I showed up in that bleak northern forest and it turned out that I had her lost gauntlet with me—she looked at me that same way earlier tonight when she turned from her pack with the robe in her hands, looked at me with that same helpless, melting love lighting her face. That helpless love that is the strongest force either of us knows, that is the iron in our wills and the ferocity with which we fight those who threaten it, the only force we accept—and in fact delight in—being powerless against.

She was happy to put on the robe, but she did want to retrieve her new clothes and armor. I wasn't averse to doing so; she had been stunning in them, and I hadn't had time to fully appreciate the sight before the battle. I'd have known she would want them if I'd had time to think about such things, but I still wouldn't have wasted time getting her kit back for her with the deadline I faced.

We had time then, though, so when we came down from the mountain, we went first to the samurai's camp. The camp of the army that Xena had taken on alone in her final battle. The army through which she had single-handedly cut a swath before they took her down. The army whose leader I had fought and defeated in front of them and later killed—with deliberate ignominy, though they couldn't know that yet.

It wasn't for any of those reasons, but I didn't want to go back into that camp. Not to the place where I had seen her naked body hung up as a trophy, the place where I had been led to her severed head and had lifted it in my hands. Not to the place of the most horror I had ever known.

When I was there the first time, if I hadn't already met Xena in the forest, if I hadn't been convinced that I had a way to bring her back, I think I would have gone mad.

We approached the camp in the dark as I had done the night before, and it was all too familiar, but at least it wasn't raining this time.

"It might help, you know," Xena said, very gently, when I had stopped and said I'd wait for her here. I knew what she thought, that seeing again that place where I had seen her dead—and seeing it with her alive and at my side—would replace, or at least dull the power of, my memories. And I knew that she might be right. But I shook my head, and so Xena went into the camp of those who had slain her alone.

I wasn't worried for her safety. She had no intention of dying now.

I can only imagine how those soldiers reacted when she appeared among them, the warrior who had killed so many of them, the warrior they had last seen displayed in her defeat. Displayed in pieces. I didn't ask.

I heard a ripple of cries and then nothing—no war cry, no thud of fist into flesh or of bodies onto ground—and I knew they had not attacked her. Soon she was back with a small stack in her arms—the alleged samurai armor worn at shoulders and waist on the bottom, the gold breastplate, gauntlets, and greaves on top, and in between a flash of red and black that I knew to be the tiny top, the equally tiny panty the monks had blushed to call "short pants," and the long gloves worn under the gauntlets.

Whatever had happened in the camp, she was amused about it, and that was enough for me. Her amusement encouraged my smile, but it was the outfit she held that actually brought it forth and made me shake my head sardonically as my lips curved.

It was a perfectly ridiculous outfit to wear to war. The armor covered her breasts but offered no protection against a strike to the heart from dead on or below, not to mention the fact that what armor there was, was made of solid gold, the softest and most malleable of metals, one that would never deflect steel.

Only three kinds of people would wear such a thing into battle—a general who led from behind, a fool who thought he was invincible, or a warrior who knew she was all but untouchable.

Everything about this battledress was a taunt to her enemies, and that was why Xena liked it. It was one of the reasons that I liked it too. The other reason was that she was sexy as hell in it.

As it turned out, we then had another stop to make before returning to Haguchi. The next item of business was to retrieve Xena's favorite outfit—silly me, I had thought it was at the temple-fortress where I'd last watched her take it off—because as much of a kick as she got out of her new kit, there was no way she was permanently giving up her usual leathers and armor.

Thus, I found myself standing in a clearing in the forest near the battlefield, standing over Xena as she knelt on the ground and pawed through the loose dirt covering the hole she'd dug earlier. I put my hands on my hips.

"Really, Xena? Am I seriously standing here and watching you dig your armor out of a hole in the ground that you buried it in? Again?"

She paused in her efforts just enough to shrug one shoulder and turn one blue eye up to me (the other was covered by a hank of hair), and no, it wasn't a sheepish shrug either.

"Really—what is this about, anyway?" I pressed as she unearthed her breastplate and shook it off.

"Seemed like the thing to do at the time," she muttered, setting aside the armor and returning her attention to fishing in the dirt without looking at me again.

After a few moments' thought, I proposed my theories. "What—you were going off to get yourself killed, and you thought that after you were dead, somebody would steal the iconic breastplate of the warrior princess and—what—pretend to be you? Sell it as a trophy in lieu of your head?" The phrasing gave me pause, and I shuddered, but then my anger rose, and so did my voice. "Did you really think I'd let that happen? Did you think I'd sell it myself?"

Xena carelessly dumped the last armband she'd been hunting for on the ground with the dress and the rest of the armor and rose fluidly to her feet, stepping over to me in the same seamless motion.

"Did you really think that I wouldn't bring you back, Xena?" I demanded before she could say anything—but it sounded more like begging. My words and tone were piteous now, anger gone, my voice suddenly small.

"I never doubted that you would try," she offered instantly, taking my shoulders in her dirty hands.

"Then you were afraid I'd fail you," I concluded miserably.

"No, Gabrielle." She gave me a little shake to get me to look up at her and I did. "I would never fear that you'd fail me." As she spoke, I had a flash of memory: me, standing upon the peaks of Heaven, my hand on my sword, waiting for her, ready to fight her rather than join her. Never again, I reassured myself. "I just had a bad feeling about the whole thing, that's all," Xena was saying. "There was more to it than what Kenji and Harakuta had told me, though I don't think they knew that. Akemi had left something out of her explanation when she sent Kenji to bring me here. Akemi was always leaving something out," Xena added wryly to herself.

"This time what she left out was that she wanted you to stay dead," I said flatly.

Xena nodded. "I didn't know until we were just about to take on Yodoshi. You'd left long before to get my body back." She pulled me into a hug. "Gabrielle, I'd never have kept that from you and let you go off on Harakuta's little quest if I'd known."

I stroked my hand down the rather wild mane of her hair (no comb in my hurriedly stuffed pack) and on down her back. "I know." I leaned my head back so I could look at her without leaving her arms. "I guess it's a good thing you didn't know earlier or you wouldn't have let Kenji tell me there was a way to bring you back, huh? You wouldn't have let it be my choice."

She looked momentarily stricken by my words. "Probably not," she finally said, on a sigh. "There wouldn't have been much point in telling you I could come back once I'd decided I couldn't come back. It would have just made it harder, more painful for you."

"And now you'd be dead—and I'd be alone."

"And so would I," she whispered, and I saw the tear spill over before she pulled me close again.

I buried my face in the hair spilling over her shoulders and cried as I held on to her, feeling her body shudder against me with its own sobs, the one part of my mind that was still functioning amid the sea of relief at having narrowly avoided losing her wondering if I should feel grateful to the manipulative, godsbedamned Akemi for leaving out the crux of her plan until it was too late for things to happen differently than they had.

How ironic that Akemi, in an effort to make sure Xena would do what she wanted, had kept secret the very thing that, had Xena known it earlier, would have ensured the outcome Akemi desired.

-x-

Now, long past what could have been our last sunset, we are settled in our camp.

We made a midnight trip into Haguchi and retrieved the rest of our gear from the temple-fortress, ignoring the stunned faces of the sleepy monks and the cries of astonishment (and, sometimes, of fear) that greeted us and followed, but did not slow, our swift passage through the compound—and eventually turning down the invitation to stay when Kenji finally mustered the presence of mind to offer it. (Guess he wasn't so sure about his and Harakuta's mystic knowledge, after all. Glad he kept that to himself earlier.)

Neither of us wanted to sleep there in the monastery, despite the promise of a soft bed—or whatever the ascetic Japanese equivalent is; we didn't have to discuss it to know that. We had both had more than enough of Haguchi.

We found a place to camp outside of town, in the opposite direction of the battlefield, and Xena let me see to making camp and starting the fire and getting dinner. She didn't even make any crazed-rabbit jokes or cracks about the local wildlife having a safe evening.

It was the middle of the night—far too late for the game I preferred, which is best spotted at dusk, but then who knew if those animals were to be found in Japa at all—and I was tired, even if Xena wasn't, but neither of us was eager to seek sleep. I suppose we weren't yet ready to give up conscious awareness of each other. Then, too, I hadn't eaten since Xena practically force fed me a few bites at the teahouse while Akemi got her needles ready, and I hadn't had the convenience of being dead to stave off hunger.

We didn't even have any trail rations since we'd traveled light to Japa, so if we were going to eat, it'd be whatever nocturnal creature I could find. We did have the bow, retrieved with the rest of our gear from the monks, and it was easier than I had anticipated to locate prey in the dark. My first arrow flew true, guided only by the sound of minute rustlings in the darker shadows of the undergrowth, sounds that I would not have heard three days ago. Many skills, I thought, amused, many uses, as I collected something that looked like a fox but had thick fur like a bear's instead of the fox's sleek coat. I didn't look too closely; hunting is not my favorite chore. Yet Xena had let me do it.

While I hunted and cleaned my catch, Xena cleaned her leathers and armor, first the old and then the new. She removed a lot of blood from the gold armor, and a lot of it was hers this time.

When I went down to the creek to refill our waterskins while the meat cooked, she came along to scrub the dried blood out of the red top and matching kobakama, the short pants.

"'Short trousers,' indeed," I had said with a smirk when the monks had presented Xena with the specially-made yori as a gift and were formally teaching her how to don the armor, carefully providing the names of each item as they went, in both Japanese and Greek, so that I got an inadvertent language lesson; everything's a ritual with these guys.

Admittedly this was probably the only example of kobakama in all of Japa that was this short. The monks had seemed sort of embarrassed when they presented those and told us what they were called.

I hadn't asked, but I suspected the yori was Akemi's idea—and entirely of her design. Sure, the monks might have harbored a secret, collective half-naked warrior woman fantasy, but even if they did, they couldn't have known Xena's exact dimensions so as to complete the yori before we ever arrived. When I saw her in it, though, I had decided I didn't care if it was Akemi's doing. And I had to give the kid credit for being observant, too. I couldn't even blame her for the hours she must have spent filling her eyes with Xena to know her shape that well—almost everyone looks at Xena as long as they can; she's so gorgeous and such an impossible juxtaposition of womanly beauty with a strength and litheness that far exceeds that of even the most exceptional men that one can't help but stare—and it was easier not to begrudge Akemi her eyeful since I knew from Xena's story that's all she'd had.

Back in camp, Xena laid out the wet clothes to dry and went back to the armor. She couldn't do anything about the arrow hole in the abbreviated manju no wa, the collared shoulder pads that in normal armor, armor that was actually useful, would have been lined with metal plates or covered in chain or plate armor (not to mention that they in turn would have covered a lot more of her). When she looked up at me with a wry face as she stuck her finger through the arrow hole and wiggled it, I thought I would throw up.

Then I felt bad about the reaction because, seeing the look on my face, she was instantly contrite—more than contrite—and rushed to me with countless apologies falling from her lips like . . . like snow on fucking cedars. Ha.

I could handle a joke about sewing her head back on but not a finger wiggling in an arrow hole? If it were anyone but Xena, I'd have felt like a fool, but with Xena, it was just how I was and however I am is okay.

Anyway, Xena is still wearing the robe I brought to Mt. Fuji for her, not her freshly oiled leathers and certainly not the wet, arrow-punctured top. I don't think she'll be wearing the new outfit any time in the near future either.

I'll have to show her later that I'm okay with it—when I am, that is. Maybe she can just replace the top; after all, patches show.

As for my own Japanese outfit, the much sturdier armor gifted to me by the monks and the loose pants and tunic Akemi found in the teahouse for me to wear over my new tattoo, the latter ripped open by Yodoshi, I left them in the monastery. They were what I wore as I prepared Xena's body for the pyre, and I never wanted to see them again.

After Xena was reassured that I was maintaining, she finished cleaning the armor and then she did the katana—and my sais and her sword, though our usual weapons hadn't been used this day. It is what she does after a hard day: tend her weapons and the rest of her kit, though not usually my weapons, which I tend myself. It centers her, especially the act of sharpening her sword.

As I watched her tonight, I remembered another day when I had gotten her back from death, when I sat beside her on a log, bedecked as befitted an Amazon queen, holding her while she sharpened her sword, probably more soothed by the action than she was. Tonight, too, her ritual soothed me.

By the time she finished all the blades in the camp (too bad we left the cooking knives at home; they could have used it), the meat was done. After we ate, she let me clear away dinner too—she can tell when I need to take care of her and she tends to let me, most of the time.

Now, I've just put the last of the supplies back in their packs, and Xena catches my hand as I pass her and draws me over to where she's sitting. The chakram still hangs at my waist—she wouldn't take it back when we dressed atop Mt. Fuji—and now she flicks a nail against its edge, making a small but definite ping. It seems to me that the chakram also hums, resonating from her touch itself, her nearness, rather than from the strike.

"C'mere, warrior," she says as she guides me closer, opening her legs for me to stand between them.

"You want to clean it again?" I ask of the chakram (which I of course cleaned of the samurai's blood myself before we ever came down from the mountain), somewhat wryly because she had unnecessarily tended the unused sais and sword. But I'm already registering what she said and forgetting my teasing question even as I ask it.

She calls me warrior only rarely. In fact, I can recall every time she's used that word to address me. She's never used it just to acknowledge or praise my skill in battle, not even when I've managed to surprise or delight her with some new trick, but only ever when I've been using those skills to fight for her.

The first time was while she was pregnant with Eve, not long after Eli's death. In the town where he would later die, she'd taken me to task for my quickness to resort to violence. I could hardly argue since I had drawn blades against a man reaching for a handkerchief and thus started the brawl we'd been trying to avert. And all because I was feeling a little over-protective of my pregnant warrior princess.

That day she reminded me that we weren't at war—but it wasn't long before we were at war, the war of our lives, fighting the Olympians for Eve's right to be born, for her life and for Xena's. It was after one of the battles of that war that she first called me her warrior and pulled me to her the way she did just now.

I rest my hands on her shoulders.

"Nope," she says, low and warm. Weapons maintenance is finished for the night.

She might refer to me as a warrior now and then—although she prefers to introduce me as a bard, because, I know, she wants me to remember that I'm that as well because she remembers the time when I lost that part of myself—but when she calls me warrior, it's only ever in that most intimate of tones. And she always wants me.

She wants me again now, but that's all right because I want her too, all the time. I feel like, if I could, I would crawl inside her skin and stay there, a part of her. Then she could never leave me behind again, not even for a moment. Let Gabrielle dissolve and be Xena.

I tip her head back, lose my hands in her hair, and bring my mouth to hers.

She called me warrior many times in those few short days of Eve's infancy, before we slept away twenty-five years and awoke to find Eve had grown up without us, had grown older than I. The next time after that was after I'd killed Korah. Not the day she brought the Romans down on the desert tribes to rescue me from just execution or in any of the days immediately following but only after I had nearly died from the cannibals' attack, when I had begun coming to terms with what I had done, with living with Korah's innocent blood on my hands. Only when she was sure I could once again accept the name.

On her lips, then, it was a benediction. In it was all her joy in the fact that I loved her so much. Loved her so much I'd kill for her, yes—but I had shown her that long ago. It was more by that point when I had come to accept: joy that I loved her so much that I could live with what I'd done and still be the warrior I'd become, that knowing what it was to have the blood of the innocent on my hands, I was still willing to risk possibly killing another innocent in the future to keep her safe. Knowing my guilt and self-doubt, she'd kept that joy to herself all those days and weeks since the desert, but she let me see it that night, starting in the very moment she called me warrior.

She let me see it as she undressed for me and lay down on our furs. As she held out her hand to me. As I indulged in all my favorite places on her body and she went to pieces under my mouth and hands, giving up even that last shred of caution, of awareness of her surroundings, which she very rarely relinquishes, leaving it to me to be alert to danger, trusting me to keep us safe. Of course, I know it's always been my safety that is her priority. My safety that kept that tiny bit of her focused even on most occasions when I made love to her. That night she trusted me to keep me safe for her.

I move behind her, lay her hair aside, and reach around to loosen the robe she's wearing so I can slip my hands inside. Eventually I reach her breasts and she leans against me so that I am supporting her weight, the crown of her head against my belly so she can look up at me.

Our eyes lock immediately and our gaze only falters when my eyes are drawn to her parted lips, to the redoubled rise and fall of her chest now that her breaths are short and quick.

The next time was in the Norseland, where I'd followed her after she left me behind. Such joy in her when she saw me that day. Such love. She used to get annoyed, even angry, when she told me to stay put and I came after her, which she used to do all the time when she needed more focus than she could bear to spare an enemy while I remained at risk, back when I was only her greatest vulnerability and not also her other two hands, the two extra blades that have her back in battle. She used to get annoyed, even angry, when she told me to stay put and I didn't listen. But not then, not in the northern forest. Not anymore.

When I came for her in that forest, to join her in battle to either fight or die at her side, the fact that I loved her so made her nearly giddy, even in the midst of facing another of those old wrongs come back from out of her past to plague innocent bystanders.

My loving her makes her so happy.

It amazes me that I can have such an effect on anyone, especially the once so stoic warrior princess, amazes me that she should react so strongly to my love when loving her is for me as natural and necessary as breathing.

Of course, after I had come for her and after I had jumped in to help when Grinhilda got the upper hand and then Grinhilda was dead but not, it turned out, Grinhilda at all, it still turned out that she had to fight the next battle on her own, face alone the vengeful god and the monster of her past, and when she was pinned down by the forces arrayed against her, it was love of me that made her put on the ring that exacts a terrible price from one who has not forsaken love, tearing from her whatever she loves most.

We lost another year.

Again, I slept through it, but Xena gained a whole new identity—even a husband. Thank the gods Beowulf happened upon her and brought her to me. But then, he was right when he said we both knew she'd have come for me eventually.

I don't think it would have been much longer either. Already she had begun to remember flashes of her past—she thinks the wedding jarred the memories loose because marrying someone else was so antithetical to everything she was, to everything we shared. She had begun to see me, she told me—to see me calling her back to me—and we both figure she'd have experienced the same thing, Beowulf or no Beowulf. But I'm grateful to him for even one extra day at Xena's side.

When she did come for me, she got herself back in the bargain, and while she remembered her year as Wealthea, for her as much as for me, it was as if we'd been parted only the day before.

"You looked like a princess when I found you," she said that next evening, sitting on our bed once we'd tied up the loose ends of Valkyries and gods, rings and Rhinemaidens, and participated in the requisite celebration with our friends (aka, night of much quaffing, drunken revelry, bawdy tales, and random fisticuffs—I told Beowulf his people really knew how to party; he told me they learned it from Xena), and our time was our own.

"So did you," I teased, crossing the room to stand before her. "A queen, rather." I adopted the pompous, ringing tone of a court herald. "Queen of Denmark, royal consort of Hrothgar."

In truth, I hadn't actually seen her in her royal wedding dress—when I'd opened my eyes she was already Xena again, back in her own mind and in her own clothes, somehow—but Wiglaf had told me about it. At the celebration, he couldn't stop telling the story of what he'd witnessed when Xena crossed the eternal flame, the story of finding her and traveling with her, too, but especially those moments in the forest. Who would have expected a Viking warrior to have an eye for fashion? Yet he spared no detail in describing Xena as she was when she entered Hrothgar's hall for the wedding and thus entered Wiglaf's on-going story—or the way she looked as "a streak of white and gold and ebony soaring through the undying flames that dared not even singe her raiment, let alone a single hair of her mane of midnight." He's a regular warrior-poet that one; I know 'em when I see 'em.

So I hadn't seen her wedding dress, but not seeing it was no reason not to use it as fodder to tease her.

Why is it that whenever I'm not around, Xena manages to have a wedding?

She chucked me in the ribs and grinned but otherwise ignored my teasing and pursued her own thought. "You were beautiful, your skin bronzed by the firelight, your hair all spread out around you." She ran her fingers through my hair, which was almost as long as it had been when we first met. "As soon as I saw you, I knew you were mine and I was yours. That it had always been so and always would. Monsters be damned, all I could do was kiss you."

She was starting to go a little Wealthea there for a bit—not that I had ever had a conversation with Wealthea, but I'd observed the uncharacteristic speech patterns slipping out now and then all day, and throughout the evening, Beowulf had hounded her about it mercilessly (you haven't lived until you've seen a two-hundred-pound Viking, well into his cups, do his Wealthea-Queen-of-Denmark impersonation; how the long house shook with the warriors' roars of laughter)—but that last bit, that was all Xena.

I stepped closer until my knees pressed into the bed, put my arms around her shoulders, and hugged her close. After a moment, she leaned back and reached up to tilt my chin down so she could look into my face. "You looked like a Celtic princess, but you were still my warrior . . ." Her voice softened as she spoke until it was but a murmur. "My warrior who came for me, came to save me from the monsters."

While it was she who had come to save me—to save us both—in the moment when she found me garbed like a princess, she thought too of an earlier moment, of my coming to the Norseland to either add my strength to her own and thus see us both win through or to fight and die at her side, favoring the former of course but preferring the latter to living without her.

"Always," I whispered, growing a little misty-eyed. "I'll always come for you. I'll always save you." Romantic mush—the warrior princess doesn't need saving. Well, except when she does. Usually from herself.

She must have been thinking along similar lines. "You always have. From the very first day we met." She put her arms around my waist and leaned her head against me.

I knew exactly how she thought I'd saved her then, but I love to tease her. "Actually, it was the second time we met when I started saving your butt."

"Oh yeah." Her answer came quickly enough, if a bit muffled, since she had pressed her face between my breasts. She gave a small sigh and turned her head to the side, resting her cheek against my chest, letting the hands that had moved to my hips slide around my back. Her breath was warm on my breast, and when she spoke next, her lips brushed my skin.

"But I was yours that first day, anyway. Just too stubborn to see it. Show me I'm still yours, warrior."

So I pushed her back onto the bed where she'd been sitting and went with her, winding up on all fours over her, and then I showed the former queen of Denmark why it was so much better to be the warrior princess of the bard of Potidaea.

My hands have left her breasts, loosening her robe as they went. Her sleeves caught at her elbows when I pushed the robe from her shoulders, and billows of the soft fabric are pooled at her lap. I slip my hands into the folds of cloth at her waist, and she lets her legs fall open for me, not just enough to give me room but all the way, a silent declaration of a complete surrender that is no defeat but is entirely mutual.

She's not wearing anything under the robe because I didn't pack anything—no comb, no smallclothes—well, you can't think of everything, I tell myself as my hand finds her.

Leaning back on me, her legs now splayed, the entirety of her long luscious body is stretched out before me, a feast for my eyes. There's only that one bit I can't see, but that's all right. There's something sexy about that illusion of modesty, and I like to see my arm disappearing under the cloth. And after all, my hand is there, and if I can't see, I can touch.

She's hot and wet under my fingers, more than ready for me, and though I have been stroking her only lightly until now—yet already she is gasping, her hips lifting up to me—I can't resist the lure of all that wetness. I can practically feel the openness of her body, and it's as if it pulls my hand in to fill it.

-x-

Later, in the night, the tension in her body awakens me to the awareness of her nightmare. I immediately wake her. She bolts upright, clutching me to her, her breath sobbing into my hair as she presses her face against mine. It's been a long time since she woke from a nightmare to reach for her weapons instead of for me, but there's something so particularly desperate in her hold this night that I know what she was dreaming about. I hug her tightly and stroke her hair and back. I murmur her name, a request to know if she is okay, a reassurance that she is, and an invitation to share the horror of it, all in one.

"You did what I said," she manages. "We were lost to each other." She squeezes me more fiercely.

"Never," I assure her. "I never listen, remember?" An overwrought chuckle bubbles from her throat. "I'd never let us be lost. Never."

Never again. I almost made that mistake twice—once on the cliffs of Heaven and again in a desert only slightly less barren—and both times, she saved me from it.

I keep murmuring reassurances and petting her, and slowly the tension drains away and her grip eases. We lie back down, holding each other more gently now. I find tears on her cheeks and dry them away. After a few more moments, she says, "Not even if it was my choice?"

I feel my mouth quirk in an unexpected smile. I know my cue when I hear it. "Especially if it was your choice."

We have an understanding: this kind of choice, we make for each other. That is the way of things to which we have come after these years of fighting and loving. It is the sharp cutting edge of our love, the point of the blade which the greater good sometimes runs up against and is impaled on, sacrificed.

She might have tried to keep the choice to herself this time, given the chance—she almost certainly would have—but that too is only part of our understanding. I tried to do the same once, in the desert.

"All right then," she murmurs, drifting toward sleep again. Still smiling, I go with her, because that, too, is the way of things.

-x-

In the morning as we are breaking camp, Xena mentions Akemi. Perhaps she senses the roiling anger in me that I have not yet dared to acknowledge even to myself; she's annoying like that, but then, so am I to her.

She mentions that Akemi told her that by stopping Yodoshi and freeing the souls of Haguchi, Xena had redeemed herself as well as the souls.

"Hmph," I grunt.

Apparently protesting my reaction, she says nostalgically, "You've have liked Akemi when I first knew her."

"I would NOT have liked Akemi!" I blurt, piqued by her almost wistful tone—only to see a glint of satisfaction in her eyes. I realize she's goaded me, ever so gently but goaded me still, into tapping into that anger I've been tamping down, but the realization doesn't stop me from having my say. "She used you and tricked you. She made you love her and then she made you kill her! She never once thought how that would hurt you—" I stop abruptly and only because I have to take a breath.

"Hey," Xena says gently, deftly inserting her voice into the space of my inhalation, having had much practice at that skill, "I wasn't the woman you love back then, remember? I was the bad ole me. Akemi had been abducted by one warlord and another one—me—came along and killed her captor and took her, not to rescue her, but so I could get her ransom for myself. Why shouldn't she use me to meet her own ends if she could?"

Xena is never bothered when people wrong her if she thinks she's only gotten what she deserves. And she always thinks she deserves it. Everything I am cringes as I see her in this mindset and remember the times I failed her and took such talk at face value. Not anymore. Never again.

"You may have taken her for the ransom, but once you had it, you planned to return her safely to her family, now didn't you? And you never mistreated her. Why, I bet part of the reason you took her from that other guy was to make sure he didn't forget how much he loved money and rape her before he turned her over."

Xena shrugs, a miniscule movement of one shoulder, a slight turning of her chin toward it. "The thought that he might may have crossed my mind," she allows.

I release my breath slowly and relax my own hunched shoulders. "Xena, you were never as bad as you try to make me believe you were." I try to let go of the thought that reminds me that there was a time when I could be convinced as I take her hand. "I know the kinds of things you did—yes, I do," I insist before she can protest. "Tell me I don't know the worst of it by now." I wait, but she's silent, so I go on. "But you always had a heart, and it was always good." I feel the anger surge up again. "And it was the goodness in your heart that Akemi saw—and rather than encouraging it, she took advantage of it for her own selfish reasons. For vengeance." I wave a hand, dismissing my own recent surrender to the allure of that same mistress when we'd gone after Gurkhan. Not to mention that samurai. "I know, I know. I know how seductive revenge can be, but she had no right to involve you. To cause you to carry such a burden of guilt, one that led to you getting yourself killed a few days ago—so no, I wouldn't have liked her."

Xena shrugs that shoulder again, a much looser and more fluid gesture now she's not admitting to having had a good impulse in the bad ole days, and gives me a little smile. "Okay, then." She sounds so light-hearted that she reminds me of Meg. She's the epitome of nonchalance. Doesn't matter to her if I hold onto my grudge against Akemi. She never had any intention of convincing me that I'd have liked her. No, she had another purpose in mind.

I give her a look and go back to folding up one of the furs. I sense her moving up behind me a few minutes later. Her voice is soft when she says, "Are you angry with me for not putting you first? Do you . . . do you feel like Akemi was more important to me?"

As she speaks, I realize it was not only a general concern for my well-being that caused her to make me acknowledge my anger; I know that was part of it, but now I realize that she suspects part of my anger is for her and she wants me to admit it so she can make things right between us.

I turn and keep my face stern as I look up at her. She stands there with her hands loose at her sides—open, unprotected, defenseless. Oh, if I suddenly vanished and was replaced by a snake-haired gorgon monster standing here an inch away from her, she'd take it down before any of those lightning-fast snakes could strike at her. But against me—against the prospect of having inadvertently hurt my feelings—she has no defense.

I arch a brow—my tone is arch, too. "Are you asking me if I'm jealous of your little ghost friend?"

She glances down and all but shuffles her feet, but then she shrugs and looks at me expectantly. She's not going to back down from this topic, no matter how I bristle. She's truly worried, and I can't maintain my bitchy goading in the face of her exposed softness.

I sigh—at myself. "No. No, Xena. I know how much you love me. I know I'm the most important thing in the world to you." My body shifts closer to her of its own volition—or maybe drawn along with my heart. I can't stand apart from her, and I don't want to either.

"You are," she whispers, taking the points of my shoulders in her hands, equally drawn and by the same force. "I'm sorry for what I made you suffer. I broke the promise I made to never leave you. I—just—Gabrielle, I was responsible. I—"

"Had to put things right." I twine my own arms around hers so I can hold onto her, an embrace the breadth of my two hands, an echo of a thousand thousand fullerhugs, promise of a thousand thousand more to come. "You don't have to explain, Xena. I understand that part of you. I should after all these years. It's part of you and I love you. All of you. Even the parts that occasionally make me crazy."

She smiles tentatively. I smile back before I let her go to step around her to get back to work (I'm eager to see the last of Japa), but I smack her ass as I pass. Just to let her know that while I consider this subject exhausted, that's only because I do understand and am not the least bit upset with her. Just to let her know I'm ready to break camp and get out of here, not ready to get away from her. I don't reason all this out, of course; I just sense that she needs the reassurance and act on that intuition without even thinking.

"Let's finish up and get the hell out of here."

"'Kay." Her tone tells me she's content, that she knows things are fine between us. Good.

We are almost done breaking camp when I say, "Xena, did you keep me around back then because I reminded you of her?"

Okay, maybe I am a little . . . not jealous. Not of a little manipulative ghost bitch who was dead before I ever met Xena. I'm just a little curious. That's all. Curious.

She stops what she's doing—literally drops our gear on the ground—and comes to me. "No. Gabrielle, no. I kept you for you—and how lucky I was you wanted me, too. You've got it all wrong." She smiles suddenly, a brief flash of radiance that it still takes my breath away to know is for me, because of me. "When I met her, Akemi reminded me of you."

I just give her a look because pointing out that she met Akemi before she met me is too obvious a point to make aloud. Her smile widens, amused by my barb, silent as it was.

"I may not have met you yet, but my soul knew you, Gabrielle. I was always looking for you. Akemi wasn't you—not by a long shot, but she was a bit like you in a few ways. Her poetic soul, her gift with words, her gentleness. She had a sweetness, too . . . a light. Not as strong as yours, but she had them. And beneath them, she had a touch of your strength—of that steel core of resolve you showed me the first time we met and have never stopped showing me. All those things reminded me of the one I was waiting for . . . the one I was longing for without knowing it." She grins. "Even brackish water tastes good to a man dying of thirst. And, Gabrielle, without you—I was dying of thirst."

She's melted me. She says I have a gift with words, but Xena has one of her own when she decides to use it. This is the eloquence that drew men to follow her and wooed them into battle to fight and die for her cause, even when the cause was mostly power for herself. Now it's a skill she mostly uses only to tell me how she loves me; now every word is heartfelt. The only thing to do now is kiss her, so I do.

When I let her go, Xena says, "Ahhh!" and smacks her lips like she's just had a long cold drink on a hot day. I laugh.

"I love you," I tell her.

"Love you too. Always only you."

-x-

To my surprise and appreciation, we reach the harbor to find a ship preparing to set sail on the afternoon tide. It's not going near Egypt or Greece but it's leaving Haguchi and that's more than good enough for us. In fact, it's going to Chin, which a few days ago would have been last on my list of destinations, right after Britannia (in fact, on the way here, we set sail from India, me preferring to suffer the sea for a longer sailing, just to avoid Chin), but today it has gained in desirability by dint of not being Japa.

When we get to Chin, we will find another ship, buy a horse—just start walking west for all I care. The land route is more direct and less nauseating anyway. The added rigors and dangers of traveling by the land route that discourage many are nothing to us; they're our way of life.

We book passage, reluctantly go into town to find the market and pick up a few necessary supplies, splitting up to make the chore go more quickly, and then just hang around the docks, waiting. The wind off the water is sharp, but if I keep my face turned toward the sea, it's almost as if Haguchi is already just another place we've been and left. Almost.

Around midday, Xena says she'll get us some lunch and heads into town. She doesn't ask if I want to come; she knows I don't. A while later she comes back with a flat lidded basket and announces, "Bento."

I don't ask; I don't particularly want to learn any more about this land than I already have. Inside are clumps of rice wrapped in strips of what Xena informs me is seaweed. I grimace and give her a look that sharply demands to know why she'd bring me seaweed but gamely dig in, and it's not as bad as I imagined based on my previous experience of seaweed: slimy, smelly stuff sticking to my skin after a swim (or a shipwreck). It's not bad at all actually. There are also strips of fish, which I discover is like a completely different food when served raw (normally I'd have protested not only aloud but loudly if Xena tried to feed me raw fish or seaweed but today I just don't care), and some kind of pickled vegetable.

When we're done, Xena asks if I want to keep the basket. The warrior princess has long since come to terms with my need to collect souvenirs and cart them around the world with us, though really I haven't bothered much since the ice cave.

Mementos are for people who stop moving after a while and go home; mementos are for people who think that time's inevitable rush onward can be stopped, that they can put a pin in a moment and hold onto it. I know how fleeting everything one holds onto in this life is.

That is, everything except for Xena.

Maybe I will collect the odd interesting item from our travels from now on—the idea of doing that again suddenly has appeal. We may not stop moving, but after all, I'm always home. Home is where it's always been: wherever Xena and I are together—Xena herself. I think I would like to dig a few treasures from the coming days out of my pack some night by our fire, years from now, and show them to her, let our minds drift back to the people and places we've known. But I won't be starting here.

The only souvenir I'm taking from Japa is the small urn that held her ashes—her face was quite a picture when she watched me tuck it into my pack atop Mt. Fuji but she didn't say anything. I'd noticed there's still a light dusting of ash lining the bowl, and I'm not leaving any piece of her behind. This place that tried to take all of her from me will keep no part of her.

Oh, yeah, and the katana.

I'm not sure I want to keep it, but for now, it's fastened at my side. I attempted to return it to Kenji last night, and he accepted it across his palms with a bow but then turned to Xena. With another bow, offering up the blade to her, he said it was hers by right. I knew she had won it long ago from the master samurai who forged it and had later used it to sever Akemi's head and then placed it in the shrine with Akemi's ashes, and of course, just yesterday, she used it to slay Yodoshi, so I agreed with Kenji—it's hers by right. But Xena glanced at me and I understood both that, hers or not, she didn't want it and that she thought it was now mine by right. Because with it, I had fought for her, and because by doing so, in her eyes, I had redeemed it.

So I knew what was coming when she turned back to Kenji and lifted the sword from his hands. "Once, perhaps. But I already have a sword. This one is Gabrielle's now, if she wants it."

Kenji didn't protest as she took the sword across her own palms as he had done and, with no more ceremony than that, offered it to me, not with a bow but with a heart so transparent that not even the most elaborate ceremony could have further enriched the gesture. The simple act of presenting it on her palms instead of offering me the hilt was more than enough to tell me that she acknowledged the crucial role this blade had once played in her life—one of pain and loss, despair and guilt—and that for her the weapon had been transformed by my use of it. Xena isn't one for symbols, but of this, out of a full heart, she was making one.

So, because I wielded the katana to fight the samurai for Xena's body so that I could bring her back to me, because it served me in my greatest need and served me well, because Xena saw in it a symbol of my love for her and of what our love means to her, what she believes is its transformative power, it now hangs at my side. I couldn't reject what it represents to Xena, and besides, I figured I owed it that much simply for its aid in recovering Xena's life.

Perhaps I will keep it, but then again, it would be a constant reminder of the horror of her death (and for Xena, perhaps a reminder of taking the head of one for whom she cared, however undeserving that one was—and of all that followed as a result), so I'm not sure. Maybe I'll chuck it into the sea on the crossing to Chin.

The day passes. We don't talk much, but we stay close and touch often. At one point, Xena opens the pack containing the yori and shows me that the arrow-pierced red top has been replaced with a brand new one. Both brows rise in gentle query. I grin and nod; when I've put some distance between me and the sight and feel of her dead and mutilated body, I want to see her in that armor again. She explains that she went back to the monastery once she had finished her half of the shopping list and, as she had hoped, the monks had made a few spares of the top and the kobakama—usually the least durable parts of the yori, when the actual armor isn't made absurdly of gold.

"Those monks—always thorough in their work," she says admiringly, mischief sparking in her eyes.

"Yeah," I retort, "whether it's making armor or crossing half the world to somehow track you down and drag you back with them to do a favor for a dead woman." I eye her as she grins, maintaining my pretense of resentment even in the next moment when I realize that this is the first time either of us have ever dared to speak lightly about Lao Ma, the first to posthumously summon her, and thus bring to the other's mind the awful things I did to Xena out of my jealousy of a dead woman. It is okay; it is okay because Xena is smiling—and also because I am not drowning in guilt at the reminder. "I could do with a little less thoroughness when it comes to that last," I add.

She puts an arm around my shoulders and briefly hugs me against her side. "Thank you for coming with me this time," she says seriously.

"You'll never have to go alone again," I say, and I'm making her a promise.

"I already knew that," she says, smiling.

I smile back, pleased with us, with her. "Just in the interest of being forewarned, how many more beautiful, decorous, modest little Eastern girls with a prior claim on you are likely to set the monks on us?"

She laughs boisterously, drawing looks from the men busy at their work on the docks. "None," she manages after a moment. "I'm all out of little Eastern girls. We're safe." She settles back against the piling she's leaning on, still grinning. I watch the mischief flare in her eyes and stifle the grin I feel threatening so that I can respond appropriately to whatever is about to come out of that wicked mouth. "Do you think that's how I like my women, Gabrielle? Modest and decorous?" she teases.

"No." I lean back against her side and rest my head on her shoulder. "I know how you like your women: pushy, presumptuous, and always talking."

"Got that right," she says with immense satisfaction, curling her arm around my waist and cuddling me close. She rests her head on the piling, closing her eyes as she turns her face to the sun, the smile still gracing her lips.

A huge grin spreads over my face, and I just watch her for a few minutes, drinking in the sight of her and the feel of her body at my back, her arm around me. Then I smack the back of my hand into her stomach.

"Hey!" She scrambles upright even as her eyes fly open. "You said it—not me!"

-x-

Finally, the ship's crew prepares to raise the gangplank—the last moment of possible calm for my stomach has arrived—so we board and stow our gear in the small cabin we've rented.

Then, because I want to watch Haguchi recede into the past as the ship pulls away and then fade to nothing as night falls, we go on deck and find a spot at the rail. Also, the fresh air helps with my seasickness, which not even Xena's skill with pressure points can entirely relieve.

She applied the one for seasickness in the cabin, so as always when we begin a voyage of any length, I now remind Xena of her obligation to not let me eat anything nasty while my sense of taste is stunted. I poke her playfully in the ribs to drive home the point—the fact of my teasing more than the reminder.

"Over thirty years of journeying together to the farthest lands, to the very edges of the earth, since I forgot to mention that one little detail, Gabrielle, and you still won't let me live it down," she says, pretending to grumble.

"Nope. And I never will. If there are sea journeys in the next world, then not even in death, Xena."

She grins, amused with our banter. So am I. I wrap my arm around her waist and she puts hers around my shoulder, and that means I can lean my head on her chest, so I do. After a moment's thought, I add, "And you don't get to include in your record of no slip-ups the twenty-five years we spent in the ice cave or the one you spent becoming the queen of Denmark, either."

She laughs. "Fine, fine. Six years then." I feel the change come over her as she grows thoughtful and the perception has nothing to do with the touch of our bodies, though that too would be enough. "You know, it seems like I've loved you much longer than that—but also like it was only yesterday when you talked me into pulling you up onto Argo behind me rather than watch me ride out of Amphipolis without you." She turned her head down to me, her face soft and loving. "Guess that's because it's true what I said before: I've loved you forever."

"I know. It feels the same to me. And me too." I give her a squeeze. After a moment of just enjoying the contact, I pick up our banter. "You know, that was a pretty weak argument that convinced you to take me with you that day." I paraphrase it in a dubious tone. "'I saved your life. You owe me'?"

"Yep. It's no wonder I always cave when you actually make a good one."

"No wonder."

Xena hums under her breath, that sound she makes sometimes when she's amused or pleased that's almost like purring. "That was the last time I got you on a horse without having to beg or cite mortal danger for years, too."

I pinch her waist lightly. "It wasn't that long."

We watch Haguchi grow more distant, the light of the sunset into which we are sailing gilding its buildings and glinting off the water.

Now that this place is truly behind us, I can ask. "How much does it hurt you that I took away your chance for redemption?" I say it softly, watching the shore grow a little farther away with every breath.

I feel Xena shift, turning her head to look at me, feel her eyes, but I can't bring myself to meet them. Guilt anchors me in place.

She squeezes me. "Not a bit. I promise, Gabrielle." Her tone grows lighter, becomes playful. "Redemption is overrated."

I look up then, meet sparkling blue eyes, and know she's telling me the truth and not just protecting me from, absolving me of, my guilt.

She furrows her brow. "How much sense did that make anyway? The souls were free of Yodoshi. What more could my death have given them?"

"You thought differently at the time."

"Well, being dead muddled my thinking, I guess. It was bound to happen one of these times." She punctuates the thought with an amused snort.

I smile to acknowledge her joke. See? I can still joke about your death. I'm fine.

"And what's this state of grace thing? Sounds like something Michael and his ilk would come up with, and while I know the Messenger gets around, surely she's not preachin' to ghosts now."

I laugh and then turn wistful. "Where do you think Eve is now?"

It's hard to take that girl seriously some times, even for me, who might claim the distinction of being Eli's first follower if I had any interest in such an association at this point, but I love her and any time Celeste's hand brushes too near us, I can't help but think how easily it could snatch Evie away from us.

"Wha'd'ya say we go find her?" Xena proposes, the same wistfulness threading through her otherwise hearty tone.

"Sounds good, but what about Egypt's need for a chakram?"

"Let's send it to 'em by monk when we get to Chin."

"Those monks do get around," I crack, laughing. "Or maybe you could just give it a good throw in that general direction."

"Or you could," she says slyly, bumping me with her hip.

"I caught it one time. One time! What's the big deal? Are you gonna make me lug it around forever? I wish I'd just ducked!"

She laughs. Then she gestures grandly at the robe she's still wearing. "Still don't have a place to keep it," she points out.

"Like that's ever stopped you before," I mutter. Indeed, I know she could cunningly craft a way to hang the chakram on her hip in a few moments. She's done it before.

She laughs again at my grumbling. "Fine—the truth is I like how it looks on you."

I look up to check her expression to see if she's joking. She is, but she isn't. I purse my lips. "Oh really? You do, huh? You like having a little piece of you on me at all times, huh? Is that it? Marking me as yours."

"Pretty much," she says cheekily, but she still means it. I grin.

"Why don't you just give me a hickey?"

"Been there, done that," she says haughtily, making me laugh again.

"You and your need for innovation."

"Actually, sometimes tried and true is best . . . No reason I can't have it both ways." She arches her brows in that way that is a proposition.

"Let's go." We turn from the railing without even a last glance back at Haguchi. As we cross the deck, she brings her arm down to my waist and cuddles me to her side. I squeeze her back. "You better be good, warrior princess, if you want to distract me enough from being seasick to have your way with me."

Her laughter carries across the deck and out over the water as we duck inside. I like the idea that this sparkling sound is the last piece of her Haguchi will ever have.

-x-

Xena distracts me so well that afterwards I'm even up for dinner, which is served communally. More rice and fish. Xena's mark is, I know, vivid and unmistakable at the side of my throat, just above the collar bone, the straps of my red top like a frame for it. I catch people take note of it, glance up at the tall warrior at my side, and glance quickly away from us. I want to giggle. Yeah, boys, she's pretty scary, huh?

What they better not have occasion to learn is that so am I.

After dinner, we take a turn around the deck before heading below for the night. Our tiny cabin offers two hammocks that can be hung across it, but we have spread our sleeping furs on the deck instead. When we returned to the cabin earlier, Xena held up one of the hammocks and gave me the eyebrow of inquiry but after a moment's thought I'd said maybe later.

Now, as I'm undressing for sleep, I hold out the chakram to Xena, waggling it enticingly. "Ehh?"

She comes over and takes hold of it, but before I can even let go, she tugs and twists and we each have half of it in our hands. "What's mine is yours," she says.

Both of us still holding the halves in front of us, she raises both brows questioningly. "Satisfied?"

I give her a nod. She's right; the chakram is an incredibly devastating long-range weapon, and it makes sense for both of us to be armed with such a thing if indeed I can use it successfully. "When we have the space, teach me how to use it. If I can . . ." I shrug, a silent concession to carrying it.

Xena grins. "Teach me this, teach me that," she sing-songs teasingly, then sobers. "Everything, Gabrielle. I told you."

I smile back at her. It's so sweet that she's decided she wants to grant the very first request of that over-eager, excessively effusive, nigh delusional girl who latched onto her one day outside Potidaea and wouldn't let go. The ridiculously impossible request of a girl who was so very young she thought she could be like Xena, as if wishing could make a thing so. And yet—my smile widens in surprised amusement—funnily enough, as ridiculous as it was for that girl to think she could learn everything Xena knew, here we are, and that girl is me, and I have learned most everything Xena knows, if on a smaller scale—and have tasted a hint of the pain she suffered to learn it and more than a hint of pain over my own mistakes and regrets, my own losses. Her path was always my path, and while we have walked it side by side for a long time now, I had some catching up to do. It wasn't what she wanted for me, but I know she now feels the rightness of it.

So sweet that she means to fulfill that request—my request—because she loved that girl, because she still loves her, changed as she is. She never wanted me to be a warrior, but a warrior is what I had to be, what I was meant to be, and neither of us regrets who I've become. I know she likes me this way—likes that I can take care of myself and thus that she can believe I will most likely be safe, likes that I've got her back, likes the way we fight as one, likes that I fight for her as fiercely as she fights for me. I know it stirs her. And I also know that no matter how much she appreciates this warrior that her soulmate has turned into, she loved the little naïve, bumbling village girl just as much. Loved her just the same. All of me, always.

My voice is raspy when I reply but it doesn't matter; she knows why. She knows it's only for good reasons. "You did."

We finish undressing and get into our furs, the various weapons we keep about our persons habitually placed within easy reach to either side of us: on one side, her sword, the daggers, and her half of the chakram; on the other, my half, my sais, and the katana. The sight makes me chuckle and Xena looks over. I gesture at the small arsenal spread out on either side of our furs, the two of us naked in the middle of all that weaponry. She smiles, seeing the humor of the obvious incongruity but also understanding my thoughts, the other source of my amusement, immediately.

"You're carrying as many sharp objects as me at the moment, bard. You gonna want the breast dagger back now, too?"

"Nah. I've always considered it mine; I just like keeping it here." I lay my palm between her breasts.

"Marking me, eh?"

"Got a problem with that?" I tease.

"Nope." She grins. "But you were right: hickeys are much more universally understood."

I smirk. "Got it covered."

"Oh yeah?" Mockly suspicious.

"Yup."

Consideringly, she rubs at the base of her throat. She can't see it without a mirror and there's no mirror in here.

"Nope, not there."

Her hand moves up. "Nu-uh. Nowhere on your chest or neck."

She quirks a brow. "I think you've missed something in this particular lesson. Namely, the importance of visibility when staking a claim."

"Yeah? Think I need a review?"

She grins. Then, willing teacher that she has become, she gives me that review.

Later, we're snuggled up ready for sleep, and I'm considering the logistics of making love in a hammock. Certainly doable, I've concluded. Just depends on how you do it. And we're very good at improvisation. I'm thinking that I'll send Xena out to get us breakfast in the morning and surprise her with the hammock when she comes back.

"Gabrielle."

"Hmm?"

"What we were talking about before. About my finding redemption . . ."

"Yeah?" The stab of guilt is milder this time. I know Xena really would rather be with me than at last feel redeemed. It's a powerful, exhilarating kind of thought. It lodges my heart in my throat. I am so loved. I love her so much. Emotions overflowing into my hands, I rub her arm.

"I'm not looking for it any more. I'm . . . I'm just happy. I'm happy with you, Gabrielle. You make my life a happy one. Your love, our life together—that's all the redemption I need. It's more than I could have ever imagined or earned. More than I ever dreamed was possible, even before Cortese and Caesar and all the things I did in my turn. One more day at your side is worth so much more than some abstract concept—redemption? Huh."

"Oh Xena." Tears have sprung to my eyes. I bring my hands up to hold her face. She's the most precious thing in the world. The most precious, my Xena, my world.

I'm not at all surprised that she's echoed my own thoughts of last night. One more day.

"I love you." I kiss her.

When our lips part, she whispers fervently, "I'm so glad you never listen." Someone else so impassioned with gratitude would have said, Thank the gods, but then no one else has our history with them. "Thank you for bringing me back."

"Any time," I promise seriously. "Any time." We kiss again, but after a moment, I draw back a bit. "But I'd rather you not take me up on that."

"Do my best," she says solemnly.

This is a better promise than the one I asked for and received sitting on that log that other day I got her back from death, a wiser promise. This is a request made by someone who now understands so much more about the woman in her arms and a promise made by someone who knows she is known and doesn't have to pretend to be other than she is, someone who knows her best will always be good enough for me, and that if it comes down to it, in the end, I will be there to make the final choice for her, to choose her over the greater good, to keep us together in this life for as long as possible. For even one more day.

As she will be there to do for me.

We spend some time just looking at each other and petting whatever part of the other is handy, reveling in being together. Eventually, my eyes start to get heavy. I've noticed each of her blinks lasting longer than the last as well. "Ready to go to sleep?" I mutter to her.

She brushes her fingertips lightly over my eyelids. "Where you go, I go."

I smile sleepily. "Oh, it's like that is it?" Even as I speak, I turn over, and let my eyes close as I snuggle my back against Xena, one of her arms sliding under my head, the other settling again on my waist. My arm settles over hers.

"Uh huh."

There's a long pause because I'm almost asleep. "G'night," I say, briefly stroking her hand with a thumb, as much movement as I can muster.

"Night," she mumbles. "Love you."

For a moment, I think contentedly of how the ship is carrying us away from Haguchi and into the future. I don't know what we'll do next, but all that matters is we'll do it together. That thought is the one on which I drift off with Xena to Morpheus' realm, with every reason to expect our dreams tonight may be as sweet as they are at times horrifying. Either way, together.

As in life, with its sweetness and horrors.

Together. That's all that matters.

-x-
Fini
-x-

An epilogue exists and may be posted; if you wish to read it when it is, please follow this space. If you enjoyed the story, please leave feedback; it is what encourages me to write and post.