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Fifty Shades of Blue

By C. Sordid

Once upon a time, there was a god of war. There were, in fact, lots of gods and lots of gods of war, but the only one we care about was tall, dark, handsome (SO handsome – well-muscled and strong and leather-clad and generally delicious). He started all kinds of wars and did all kinds of horrible things to people, but really, he was just lonely and misunderstood. His parents were always busy arguing over his father's many affairs, and his sisters kept stealing all the limelight, and no one ever had any time for Ares. (The god's name was Ares, if you hadn't guessed.)

As he grew into a man, Ares set up lots of temples with lots of pretty young priestesses in an attempt to fill the void in his life, and he threw himself into starting a lot of pointless wars, which was his job after all, but something was still missing. So Ares decided he needed someone special in his life. But not just anyone… he needed a mortal with whom he shared a mysterious and supernatural bond. He needed a Chosen.

So he chose someone.

The circumstances of their first meeting remain somewhat unclear, but one version goes that it happened when the girl was still in her infancy. Some sources say he was actually her father, but even by Greek mythological standards, that would make the rest of this story pretty sick, so we'll ignore them.

Another theory is that he first noticed her when she was a child, barely out of her teens, and when he saw her, he knew instantly that she was The One. Picture it: he saw her dancing around in an Academy corridor, batting her eyelashes over her gorgeous blue eyes, singing suggestively about "hit me, baby, one more time," and he just knew that with a theme song like that, she'd make a great ambassador for the values and philosophies of War as a solution for today's troubled youth. Plus, she looked really hot in her uniform.

Oh, wait, there goes my imagination running away with me again. That wasn't actually what happened at all. (Does anyone really believe that Xena wouldn't be the one hitting one more time instead of being hit?)

Let's be serious now.

Our sources tell us that Ares and Xena really met in what historians have termed her "Missing Period" (defined as some point in her pre-show life that they never bothered to make flashbacks about, more's the pity). We can only imagine the scene: a traumatised, lonely warrior woman realising that her hitherto wild and crazy behaviour had left her unfulfilled, and she needed to find an anchor in this cruel world. One fine day, in the middle of the night, she went to the temple of Ares. Or maybe the forlorn and bored god happened to spot her somewhere else. He appeared to her, or maybe she called for him, or maybe he was mad at her because she parked her chariot in a spot that was clearly signed "GOD PARKING ONLY."

Well, have you got any better ideas? See, if they'd only made a flashback, there would be no need for all this outlandish speculation.

Anyway, they met. Somehow.

They probably had a few fights in the beginning so Ares could assess the strength of their mysterious and supernatural bond and decide whether Xena was really Chosen material. She passed whatever tests he imposed with flying colours, of course, because she's Xena and she has many skills. His priestesses in his many temples were jealous of Xena, her skills, and her stunning aquamarine orbs. They hazed her a bit by forcing her to participate in ambiguous slumber parties involving activities like prank prayer-answering, endless rounds of truth or dare, and pillow fights in naughty lingerie… oh, they wear those outfits all the time? Never mind.

The priestesses should really have disliked Xena because she was prettier than them and could fight better, and she made them seem pretty ordinary by comparison, but they all came to adore her after a while. All except the head priestess, whose name was Mary Sue.

Mary Sue didn't just dislike Xena, she hated her, because she thought Xena had come backflipping into the temple with the sole intention of stealing Ares away and ruining Mary Sue's life. Mary Sue and Ares weren't actually together, you understand, but Mary Sue thought that one day Ares would finally clue in that she was there, ready (SO ready) and waiting for him, and she knew that if he fell in love with Xena, that would never happen.

So Mary Sue started trying to sabotage Xena. She mopped the floor with sacred oil so that when Xena practised her backflips, she would slip over – but all that happened was that Xena wondered why her hands were suddenly so well moisturised.

Next, Mary Sue tried hiding Xena's sword, but Ares made up for it by giving his Chosen a beautiful new weapon that no one had ever seen before. It was called the chakram. Uncharacteristically, Xena took a while to master the art of deflecting it off objects, and she made so many dents in the shields and other crap hanging around the temple that it took Mary Sue a month to finish restoring them all to their original state.

Naturally, she was pissed. Wouldn't you be?

Mary Sue took her dastardly plans to the next level. She made up this rumour about how Xena had given birth to octuplets (fathered by Ares, of course) that she had hidden away in Jappa because she didn't want Ares to know about them and use them against her. Mary Sue was hoping that the other priestesses would think Xena was a slut unworthy of being Ares' Chosen, and that they would see her true colours. But the only colour they and Ares saw was the vivid sapphire of Xena's irises. Xena had everyone so charmed that when the rumour started to circulate, Ares decreed that anyone who dared to insult his Princess in that way must be exiled from the temple – and to cut a long story short, Mary Sue found herself out on the street, trying to figure out how to spell "Mary Sue" in Greek for a job application at the temple of Athena round the corner.

Now, you may reasonably wonder, how could Ares be so sure that Xena hadn't given birth to octuplets that she'd hidden in Jappa? Well, one reason was that Xena had once told him she hated sushi, didn't much care for tea in teahouses, and couldn't understand why people would want to fight in funny white pajamas that didn't show off their cleavage – in short, Xena never had been, and never would be, interested in a vacation to Jappa. (Any rumours to the contrary – not to mention a certain unmentionable scroll referring to Joxer's steely buttocks – are the result of an unfortunate incident involving Joxer, Gabrielle, a raucous night out at an Athens sake bar, and an ill-advised wager that he could TOO write a scroll just like her.)

But the more important reason Ares knew there were no octuplets… was that he and Xena had never done IT. You know, never made the beast with two backs, fornicated, engaged in coitus… they had never been LIKE THAT. Hence, octuplets were pretty much out of the question.

Mary Sue didn't know this, of course. She and everyone else would never have believed that it was the case, but, in fact, it was. If she had, she never would have made up such a stupid rumour; but she also wasn't nearly as intelligent and witty as she thought she was, so maybe she would have made it up anyway.

There are a lot of theories about why Ares and Xena had never been LIKE THAT. Our sources get a bit unclear again here, but one school of thought is basically that, ahem, not to get overly anatomical, they enjoyed all the appetisers but didn't move on to the main course. Maybe Xena was worried that Ares wasn't quite as enamoured of her cerulean spheres as he claimed to be and didn't want to risk losing his favour. But our Xena was generally quite a self-confident young lady, so insecurity like this would have been a bit out of character. More likely, at least in this scribe's opinion, was that it gradually turned into a bit of a game between them, both of them understanding that the anticipation was half the fun.

So on things went for a while. Ares war-godded, Xena Chosened, and Mary Sue plotted in the background. Xena really was getting good by this point, out leading armies, racking up an impressive tally of conquered lands and slain opponents, and somehow still finding time to continue her professional development by taking courses from the "We'll Give You Many Skills" catalogue that she dutifully subscribed to. Some noteworthy examples included Advanced Arm-Wrestling Strategies, Nine Lives: An Introduction to the Afterlife in World Religion and Fishing: For Food and Fun. She was happy with her life. Mostly.

But she did occasionally have this niggling, nagging little feeling that maybe she was destined for something more (and that perhaps killing the good guys might not be great for her karma). I mean, Ares was a great boss as they go – he gave Xena a lot of autonomy, the work environment was pretty swank, and of course he was rather easy on the eyes (always a plus with colleagues, in Xena's opinion). But still. The structure of the temple, the army, the priestesses, was stifling. What she really wanted to do was strike out on her own, establish herself in her own name. Not to be Xena: Ares' Chosen, but Xena: … okay, she hadn't fully thought it through yet, but, hey, it was a long-term goal.

Now, as we've seen, Mary Sue (who was inexplicably back at the temple by now) wasn't the brightest of people, but she did have the odd moment of devious brilliance. She noticed these unfulfilled ambitions of Xena's (maybe overhearing Xena singing along to "Highway to Hades" in the shower one morning clued her in to the inner dissatisfaction she was feeling) and realised that this could be her chance to get rid of her rival.

It so happened that Mary Sue had gone to school with a chap called Iolaus (who, conveniently, was now the best friend of Ares' goody-two-shoes half-brother, Hercules) and she'd carried a torch for him ever since, but he'd always been too busy playing the field to notice. So she crafted a cunning plan that would kill two birds with one stone: break up Xena and Ares, and cause Iolaus some heartache into the bargain. She suggested ever-so-innocently to Ares one day that maybe Xena would be able to help him finally annihilate Hercules in an untraceable way.

And Ares went, "hmm."

And so it came about that Ares sent Xena off on a Herc-killing mission, which she was a bit annoyed about, frankly, because it really wasn't her job. She was a Chosen, not some lackey to be dispatched to solve Ares' family problems, after all. Why did no one appreciate her and her cobalt globes anymore?

She was feeling a bit vulnerable and open to temptation, so when Hercules started sweet-talking her about how much nicer her life could be if she stopped wantonly killing everyone who annoyed her, she didn't wantonly kill him and actually listened. The fact that they had this conversation in a forest clearing in their underwear, and he was kind of cute if she squinted just right, was immaterial.

After her little tête-à-tête with Herc, Xena found herself certain that now was the time to make the big leap to self-employment and the Side of Good. So she resolutely marched back to Ares' temple to hand in her notice and her chakram (which handily did double-duty as a weapon and an all-access pass to high-security areas of the temple). She found Ares lounging around on his throne watching a replay of the battle of the Battle of Corinth, and her heart leapt when she saw how pleased he was to see her after so long apart.

Still, she'd prepared a little speech, short and sweet, about how she was no longer interested in the Chosen role and would therefore be leaving to go and right the wrongs she had committed. As Ares' eyes widened in shock, she couldn't help but lean in and kiss him goodbye, knowing full well that she would miss him. She held out the chakram for him to take back, but he refused, mumbling something about how he'd never want anyone else to have it.

As she left the temple a moment later, she deliberately didn't look back, so the unexpected tears in her turquoise seeing-organs were hidden from him.

Watching them from a hidden balcony above, Mary Sue silently cheered.

Xena held up the scroll she had been reading to show that she'd reached the end, and she and Ares stared at each other open-mouthed. She was standing behind him, leaning so they could both see the words, and if they hadn't both been so appalled, it might have been rather cosy.

"What in Hades is that all about? None of it's true," Ares finally spluttered.

"Well, there are two people called Xena and Ares… I guess it's something," Xena said back.

"That makes it worse! People might actually think I'm associated with it in some way. Hardly a comfort. Xena, we need to do something about this! Our reputations are at stake. We need to find the author of this crap and make them stop." Ares' eyes grew wilder the longer he spoke, and he punctuated the last three words by slamming his mug down on the table.

"Oh, I quite agree, Ares, but do you have to get so dramatic about it? You're bad enough in the scroll as it is, let alone starting to re-enact it." Gabrielle entered the kitchen holding a couple of other scrolls in her hands, and studied Xena and Ares.

"You've read this too, I take it?" Xena asked.

"Of course she has, she gave it to me in the first place as some kind of joke," Ares interrupted.

Gabrielle paused for a second to glare at Ares, and then looked back at Xena. "Unfortunately yes. Awful stuff, isn't it? Like anyone would believe you two had never… ahem." Gabrielle's indignant speech dissolved into a well-timed coughing fit as Xena and Ares glared at her in a creepily similar way. Horace, from his spot on the floor, barked sharply.

"Ahem. Lots of things wrong with it. What I was going to say, anyway, is that we need to stop this. People are buying these stories like there's no tomorrow, and they're all going to think I wrote them. I can't have people associating my bardic toils with this... this… nonsense. "

"You might want to stop talking about your bardic toils and just say 'scrolls' in that case," Ares interjected.

"For the ones with you in them, 'toil' is the only word that captures the tedium," Gabrielle retorted.

Xena had been looking at Gabrielle shrewdly as she and Ares bickered. As the bard eventually stopped to take a breath, Xena was finally able to get a word in.

"You said 'stories.' Does that mean there's more than one of these out there?"

Gabrielle laughed grimly and held up the other scrolls she'd been carrying. "Funny you should ask. There's a whole series of them."

Ares, starting to turn purple, made to rise from the table, but stopped as he noticed Gabrielle's bemused look.

"What, Blondie?"

"Oh… I just thought you'd want to read the rest so you can really feel justified in killing the author later. What's the rush?"

"But you said you thought they were awful," Xena said.

"Oh, they are, they are. But there's a certain chariot-wreck fun in some of it, what can I say?" Gabrielle tossed a scroll to Xena, who rolled her eyes briefly, but started unfurling it anyway.

"Can't get much worse," she muttered.

"You might live to regret this," Ares said darkly.