Authoress' Note: This story begins in late June of 2001, approximately two weeks after 'Soul Possession' and 'Being Ares: The Pilot', which took place on the same day.
P.S. While you have to be familiar with Hercules; The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess to read this story, you don't need as much background on 'Being Erica' to follow along. In that series, Erica Strange, a 31-year-old woman living in Toronto in 2009, undergoes the same time travel therapy featured in this story, in order to learn from her regrets over her past choices. While Erica's doctor is Dr. Tom, the therapist featured in 'Being Ares', Dr. Naadiah, appeared in a handful of 'Being Erica' episodes and was once Dr. Tom's therapist and his mentor during the series. In short, 'Being Erica' lends its premise and a few of its characters, but this is first and foremost a Hercules: The Legendary Journeys / Xena: Warrior Princess fanfic.
Being Ares: The Vague-Ares of Fate
Part 1
A Xena: Warrior Princess / Being Erica Crossover
By Arianwen P. F. Everett
Ares teleported into his apartment in Washington DC with a smile on his lips. He'd just spent the afternoon in Juarez, overseeing a meeting with a corrupt police chief and his contact in MS-13. Usually the police were biddable to the wishes of the gang, but elections were close and things were tense. A carefully timed reign of unguided gunfire set both men on edge, and Ares shielded the cop long enough for him to take down the gang's representative. If it had gone the other way, the cop's body would have been quickly cleaned up by his own men and the gang's protection bribe made a bit stiffer next month, but with the gang-banger dead, war was inevitable. It was a matter of ego and MS-13 had rivals to overawe. The streets of Juarez would run red within a few days, leaving Ares free to work from his place in DC.
Unfortunately that meant paperwork and lots of it. Tossing his leather jacket on the couch, Ares materialized the documents he needed to examine and revise before handing them over to the lobbyists he was meeting tomorrow morning for breakfast. With any luck, the US government would be well stocked with bunker-busters by September 11th, when his biggest move in decades was set to go down. This one was gonna be messy, so Ares consigned himself to staying in and pull an all-nighter.
Over an hour after arriving home, Ares was checking some numbers on his calculator when his front door was kicked in and Xena, that is Annie Day, stalked over to him, her hands on her hips. "Where is Evander?! Hercules knows you know, so just tell me where he is so Gabrielle and I can get back to Los Angeles! I.. Annie, has work tomorrow!"
Ares jumped to his feet, refusing to be cow-towed by the woman he loved, no matter how desperately he wanted her to stay. "As I told Morgan several days ago, I have no idea where my idiot son is! I haven't seen him in decades and I'd be the last person he'd run to in an emergency! Now, I never thought I'd say this, Xena, but get the hell out of my apartment, and tell Jercules to stop sending his ex-girlfriends to harass me about this! I don't know where Evander is!"
"But you remember him, Ares! Hercules has talked with every other god he could think of and none of them remember anything about him even existing, except you! Why?!" Xena continued her inquisition, not budging for an instant at Ares demand for her to leave.
"I don't know what to tell you, Xena. Evander and I never got along. We never 'bonded'; Jercules and Nemesis made sure of that. Where he is is anyone's guess and none of my business!" Ares rebutted, refusing to flat out lie to Xena, but unable to tell her what she wanted to know. How could he explain 'My new therapist sent me back in time so that I could choose not to sleep with Nemesis and prevent Evander ever being born, which I did, so there's no Evander to find.'
No. Ares wasn't justifying what he'd done and he wasn't betraying Dr. Naadiah either. Hercules could chase his tail all he liked and Xena could join him! The goal right now had to be getting Xena off his back on this. Having her angry with him over this would drive her further away, and he couldn't bare that again, not after just getting her back in his life after so many centuries of missing her.
"None of your business? He's your son!" Gabrielle scoffed, not believing what she was hearing.
Suddenly noticing the blonde.. now light brunette, who'd followed Xena past his broken door, Ares burst out laughing. "Son? Son? Funny, when he was a baby, he was Nemesis' child! When he was four, he was Zeus and Hera's grandson! When he was a teenager, he was Hercules' nephew! And when he grew up and left home, he was Eli's stooge until the God of Light abandoned Eli's followers and left them to be slaughtered by another pack of his own faithful! Until Evander falls off the face of the Earth, I'm nobody, a sperm donor at best! Now, suddenly, I'm his father and he's my son, right?! You know what; go to hell, Blondie! According to your scrolls, you've been there before; I'm sure you remember the way!"
Xena sighed, running her hands through her own brown tresses, a habit that had obviously come from Annie. She understood Ares' frustration, but a good man was missing and Hercules was worried sick. That had to come first. Changing tone, Xena shrugged. "Ares…"
Knowing he couldn't explain and that his protests would just widen the rift between them, Ares marched over to his pulverized door and fixed it with a wave of his hand before holding it open for the two women. "I'm sorry I can't help you further, but I don't have any more information about Evander's whereabouts. Now, I too have work to do before tomorrow, so if you please…"
"Ares, we need to figure this out," Xena tried again, fighting for patience. She knew he had a point, but she needed answers.
Before Ares could respond, Gabrielle's movement towards his coffee table caught his eye and he swiftly crossed the room and forcefully snatched the report he'd been reading out of her hands before she saw too much.
"Alright, I've had enough of this! Get out!" Ares bellowed, storming out through his front door and pointing towards the elevator, only to realize a moment later that he was standing in Dr. Naadiah's office, the report still in one hand, while the other hung in midair, gesturing to an elevator that did not exist here.
"Lifetime after lifetime, blonde, brunette, Gabrielle, Mattie.. by the Gods I forgot how insanely annoying she could be!" Ares growled, earning a small chuckle from his therapist. After sending his report back to his desk drawer on Mount Olympus, Ares plopped down into the modern, leather swivel chair across from Dr. Naadiah and took a deep breath to calm himself before they began.
"You could always just tell them what they want to know. With most of my patients, I advise secrecy, but that's because their friends and relatives would think them crazy. You don't have that problem, at least not with Xena or 'Blondie', so why don't you explain it to them?" Dr. Naadiah queried, as she patted the cover of Ares' notebook of regrets with her right index finger.
"Admit to Gabrielle that I'm in therapy?! I'd rather play a few rounds of Russian roulette with a bullet dipped in hind's blood! No offense, Doc, but she'd use it against me; they both would. Besides, there are just some things a god doesn't explain, and speaking of explanations, I was hoping you had one about why my mongrel half brother even remembers Evander when nobody else outside of this office does?" Ares asked, needing an answer to that more than ever. If the demigod were still mortal, he'd kill him for dragging Xena into this. He was already tripping over his own feet with Xena, now Jercules had him tripping over his tongue too.
"Initially I was as surprised as you were, so I did some digging. It seems that a few centuries back Hercules studied under the Druid spirit of wisdom, a boy named Mabon, who taught him the power of illumination," Dr. Naadiah began her explanation, still a bit uneasy about having missed that fact when she'd sent Ares back on his previous regret.
While she'd assured herself that helping a god wouldn't be that different from helping a human being, she'd obviously been wrong. Ares' knowledge about time travel and different states of reality might help move things along in certain ways, but it was now clear to Dr. Naadiah that they were going to make his therapy more challenging in others. Yes, she could shield the gods from discovering that the Ares they were seeing in the past was from the future, but the repercussions of his choices while working on his regrets was far more likely to cause issues once he returned to 2001 than it would be if he were mortal.
"Yeah, yeah, that's where he first met Morgan. Wait, so you're saying that this 'power of illumination' is what's allowing him to remember Evander, despite the shift in timelines? Well, that's just great! Evander wasn't even born and he's still making my life difficult!" Ares grumbled, letting his head fall back to stare at the near-seamless white ceiling of Dr. Naadiah's office.
While Dr. Naadiah couldn't agree more, she knew she had a lesson to teach and admitting her own frustration would be counterproductive. "He doesn't have to be. When you went back in time on your last regret, you still had a right to choose not to have sex with Nemesis; your body was still your body, and as you said before, there are just some things a god doesn't explain. You have a right to your privacy like anyone else, Ares."
"Too bad Xena doesn't see it that way, but Jercules can do no wrong in her eyes and if he says I did something terrible in not manipulating Nemesis into giving me a son, then I must have. Anyway, what's on the agenda today? Where.. when am I going this time?" Ares asked, wanting to leave the chaos of his current life behind. He was extremely familiar with each of his regrets and he knew exactly what he'd change when he got the chance. His half brother could sit and spin. As Dr. Naadiah told him two weeks earlier, this therapy was about him and his choices. Hercules could get his own therapist.
"Actually you were right both times; it's a where and a when, number eight, 'Britannia'," Dr. Naadiah informed Ares, nodding for her patient to fill in the blanks.
"The beginning of the Dahok fiasco. Yikes, how do I explain all that?" Ares asked off the top of his head, not really expecting an answer.
"You begin at the beginning, continue through the middle, and stop at the end," Dr. Naadiah quipped with a smile, hoping the levity would help him sort through his thoughts. Sometimes the details of an event could overwhelm a patient into introspective silence and a good joke was useful in getting them talking again.
Ares considered that before replying with a jest of his own. "Well in this case, the beginning is literally the beginning of everything. Dahok, and his twin brother, Mithra, the God of Light, were.. are the essences of destruction and creation. They were here long before anything else, and are part of everything that lives, gods and humans included. Almost a billion years ago, Gaea, while far less powerful than either of them, got the jump on both while they were busy kicking the crap out of each other, and caged them in alternate dimensions."
"I'm guessing they weren't too happy about that," Dr. Naadiah commented, trying to wrack her brain on what her friends had told her about the character of Dahok in relation to the television series Xena: Warrior Princess. She knew Dahok was an adversary in the series, an uber-god of sorts, but otherwise she had little to go on beyond commentary about how seriously unsatisfying the conclusion to his storyline was in the show's accompanying series, Hercules: the Legendary Journey's.
"That's putting it mildly. Dahok never stopped trying to re-enter our world and take revenge on his little sister's creations, aka us. He nearly succeeded during Chronos' reign, but the Titans banned together and kicked him back to his own realm, which left them too weak to fight my family once Mom and Dad had gotten it in their heads to take over. A little over three thousand years ago, I felt his initial attempts to return, and as the centuries past I tried over and over to unify the gods to oppose him, not just my own kin but gods from other pantheons as well. Unfortunately, they all thought that I was either paranoid or spoiling for a fight and ignored my concerns until Dahok was able to manipulate mortals into believing he offered them peace and used their worship to break through into our world; then, like today, I was suddenly useful again," Ares spat out bitterly, his earlier feeling of insult.
"And why do you think that was? Why do you think the other gods ignored you until it was too late?" Dr. Naadiah questioned impassively. She was loving the history lesson, but also heard her patient's bitter resentment at being used when times got tough, and couldn't let herself get carried along.
"Well, admittedly I'm a trickster by nature, think of it like 'the god who cried ancient demon of destruction'. Nobody believed me when it was true, and even the gods that did see were too terrified to act, so that by the time Xena traveled to Britannia to join Boudicea in fighting Caesar, Dahok already had a temple and a stable band of followers there. Their high priest invited Gabrielle to attend one of their ceremonies, where they tricked her into killing a priestesses. Then using Gabrielle's shock and self-contempt at taking human life for the first time, Dahok briefly managed to break into our world and raped Gabrielle on his alter. A little over a week later, Gabrielle gave birth to a baby girl she named Hope. Physically, Hope was pretty much a carbon copy of Blondie, but underneath the shell she was just a flesh and blood puppet for her father, and eventually, Gabrielle was forced to poison Hope, after her daughter had killed several dozen people, including Xena's son. But that didn't stop Dahok. He resurrected his daughter, and then found a vessel for himself, killing thousands more all over the world, gods and mortals alike. Hercules and his friends eventually sent Dahok back to his realm, but the dead were still dead," Ares finished his lesson with a sigh, catching Dr. Naadiah's attention as she watched the War God struggle with long buried memories and emotions.
"You lost someone important to you in those killing sprees, didn't you?" Dr. Naadiah guessed, and Ares expression in the next moment confirmed her hypothesis.
Ares bid back the dark memories that were flooding him before he spoke again. In his passing Strife had finally managed to do what he'd sought to achieve for most of his life; he left his mark on his favorite uncle, and Ares still missed him two thousand years later. "My nephew, Strife. Hope teamed up with a mortal-turned-psycho-goddess, Callisto, who stabbed him with a dagger coated in hind's blood just so the two of them could test if the stuff could actually kill a god. Strife gave them their answer."
"I'm sorry for your loss," Dr. Naadiah consoled, genuinely touched by the grief written in her patient's eyes.
Ares sniffed in bemusement at how that sounded. Someone other than himself mourning the dead godling seemed almost fantastical to Ares' ears. "It's funny; you're probably the first person, god or mortal, to say that and mean it. Nobody else cared about Strife, alive or dead. I didn't even realize I cared until I was holding his corpse in my arms."
"Well, sometimes we fail to value the people around us, and it takes loosing them to see our mistakes.. but those mistakes are for another session. So, Ares, when you look back at what happened in Britannia, what mistakes do you see there?" Dr. Naadiah continued, wanting to pull her patient back to their current session. 'Strife's Death' was number six on the list, so Ares would have to deal with his regret over that event at some point, but that day had not yet arrived and Dr. Naadiah needed to get them back onto this regret, the one that would hopefully give him insight as to how he should approach his current dilemma with his brother and Xena's interrogations.
"I was too distant in my handling of the situation. I admit, I was afraid of challenging Dahok without the support of the other gods, so I gave Caesar and Xena too much freedom, trusting that they'd eventually get to dealing with the situation once they'd settled their longstanding feud. Xena did eventually destroy the temple, but not before Dahok had gotten hold of Gabrielle," Ares analyzed, letting Dr. Naadiah see his own failing in taking such a hands off approach to such a dangerous situation. Discord had been right; he had treated Dahok's rise too casually, not as casually as most of the gods, but still, he'd been too slow to respond and Strife had paid the price.
"So this time you plan to be more direct?" Dr. Naadiah asked, knowing Ares was genuinely working through his past failures. He was very close, but still missing the point. A few days in the past would teach him what he needed to learn.
"Yes, starting with getting Blondie back to Greece so she'll never set foot inside Dahok's temple. See, Xena and Gabrielle split up when their ship first landed in Britannia, and Gabrielle and Dahok's high priest were captured by Caesar's men as they tried to make their way to Boudicea's camp. Once I get Gabrielle out of Caesar's.. custody, I can send her home and focus my attention on Dahok's cultists. Heck, I might even get Boudicea to blow their temple sky high herself, but regardless of which mortal does the deed, I'm not leaving anything to chance this time," Ares finished, his self assurance returning. Yes, he could prevent Dahok escaping his realm and wage a proxy war on the dark god and his followers wherever they might hide. If Ares had learned anything from the second half of the 20th century, it was how to successfully wage a globalized offensive by using local populations as cannon fodder.
"Well then, let's not waste any time, shall we," Dr. Naadiah concluded before staring at Ares for a second and sending him back into his past.
Settling back into her chair, Dr. Naadiah considered the issue of Hercules' remaining memories and what they could mean for the future of Ares' therapy. What she knew of the relationship between the two half brothers was disquieting, but her goal had to be allowing Ares to make progress towards a healthier viewpoint, day by day, regret by regret. A war with the demigod could derail any progress her patient made in these early journeys into his past, and that was a distinct possibility with so much pain and distrust existing between the two. Realizing she was in over her head, Dr. Naadiah picked up her desk phone and left a message for her mentor, the man who'd brought her into therapy and gave her the opportunity she was now able to offer Ares and the rest of her patients. "Dr. Arthur, this is Naadiah. I'd like to speak with you at your earliest convenience."
As Ares arrived in ancient Britannia, he took a deep breath before opening his eyes, enjoying the lack of chemical fumes in the air. As a god he was sensitive to smells mortals couldn't perceive and a day hadn't gone by in over a century where industrial byproducts, clinging to the Earth's atmosphere, hadn't touched his nostrils. Even in remote areas, far from 21st century technology, there were faint, wind-swept traces. They weren't always unpleasant, but they were a constant reminder of the passage of time and how the world he'd been been born to, the world he and his family had dominated for ions, was no more. Now, for the moment, he was back in that world, and yet not completely. He knew too much to ever be the god he'd been the first time around, even if he wore that god's skin. Whether that change was a good thing or a bad thing, he still wasn't sure, but it was real.
Examining the coastline, Ares could tell by the piled up boats where the mercenary's ship had disgorged its human cargo and watched as the small band of Roman sentries approached. Then he saw a war chariot of Celtic design making a run straight at the Romans, only to have the driver, Boudicea leap off, armed and ready for a fight. The Roman leader made some comment about laurels being lain on his head, and in the next moment, she stepped out from behind a cropping of rocks. His heart melted as he watched her enjoyment at finally getting the opportunity to kicking some Roman butt, and he was transfixed by every single movement, even though he'd watched this skirmish hundreds of times over the centuries. Gods he could watch her fight all day every day for the rest of eternity and never get bored!
Not for the first time Ares contemplated the indisputable fact that she loved war, but could never bring herself to love him. War couldn't make you smile with a joke after a rough day. War couldn't tuck a blanket around you on a cold night. The triumphs of war were brief, while the losses could last a lifetime. Ares understood all of this in the finest of detail; it was part of every cell in his body, and yet somehow Xena had parsed the two and chosen to toss aside the portion of his being that was capable of loving her back. He doubted he would ever understand that.
Another twenty minutes saw the Britons leave the beach with their guests, and Gabrielle and Dahok's high priest find themselves in Roman hands. Now he only needed to wait till Caesar acknowledged that capture and the negotiations could begin.
Admittedly Ares felt a little guilty about leaving out a big chunk of his plans to Dr. Naadiah, but knowing humans, he'd had no other choice if he wanted her to send him back. Caesar was one of the smartest mortals he'd ever met. Xena was smarter, but Caesar could at least hold his own with her, compared to nearly every other player in human history. This meant that he wasn't going to give up Gabrielle, whom he already knew was Xena's closest friend, without getting an equally valuable hostage in return. The agreements Ares had already entered into with the Roman still bound him, so just grabbing Blondie was out of the question. The God of War had not choice but to horse trade and the only other hostage that might tempt Caesar enough was Xena's mother, Cyrene. He'd told his therapist that he was sending Gabrielle back to Greece, and that was true, what he'd held back was where in Greece she'd end up, specifically Amphipolis. After all, somebody had to manage Xena's family inn while Cyrene was being crucified, and Blondie had always been versatile and competent, or she wouldn't have survived so long in Xena's world.
However, the necessity of this move didn't mean he couldn't head to Amphipolis right now and speak with Cyrene about what was about to happen to her. Hopefully she'd be so grateful for the heads up that when her daughter pulled her down from the cross and brought her back to Boudicea's camp, she could explain what was going on and why he'd taken such a drastic move. Sure Xena would still be livid, but maybe a little less so when the truth came out of her mother's own lips.