5.
Disclaimer: All characters and general concepts are property of Renaissance Pictures and StudiosUSA. No copyright infringement intended. Yeah.
"Are you sulking?"
Ares glowered. "I don't sulk."
Xena smiled and said, "Come on, you heard the healer. I have to change Grinhilda's poultice during the night, so it's most practical for me to share a room with her."
"I didn't complain, did I?"
"Not out loud," Xena said drily, and Grinhilda looked up at him with the same insufferably smug smirk that Gabrielle would give him when she thought she had one-upped him. What was it with blondes, anyway?
"I'm fine, alright? Perfectly fine. Couldn't be better." He suddenly noticed that Xena had stopped listening and was, in fact, staring at a stage holding a large standing harp. "What, are you going to play for our supper?"
She tilted her head toward him. "I could snap the strings in a creative manner, but that's about it."
A man with the fair hair and olive skin of a southerner took a seat at the harp. With a small nod to the audience, he lifted his hands to the harp. "I sing a song of Xena, the mighty Warrior Princess."
"Huh?"
They watched as the bard launched into a story about freeing Prometheus.
"Must be one of Gabrielle's," Ares said presently. "Most of the facts are right."
"This is... true?" Xena asked quietly, still watching the bard intently.
"Come on; let's get a table near the stage."
The bard had actually stopped by their table before the end of the night.
"You know," he said, eying Xena, "You look a bit like her."
"Er," Ares began hurriedly, but the man cut him off.
"Of course, Xena wasn't so... girly, and she had better hair." The bard stalked off, primping his own thinning hair. He sniffed when he heard the laughter start up behind him.
Ares shook his head, still grinning. "All right, what's next? Someone pops up swearing up and down that they've seen Gabrielle?"
Xena gave him a sceptical look and stood, her stool scraping across the rough floor. "Keep an ear open, then. I'm taking Grinhilda off to rest."
Ares watched mournfully as they walked away. Xena placed a hand on the valkyrie's elbow to gently support the woman, and he couldn't help the brief scowl that crossed his face before his eyes dropped unabashedly to what he privately referred to as Xena's assets, not that he'd tell her that to her face, the humour-lacking, unnecessarily-violent bitch. Gods, she was perfect.
Snatches of conversation drifted by, and Ares gloomily swirled his drink when the women disappeared from view. Some couple to his left was having a high decibel row about a neighbour named Trixie who didn't wear underthings because said underthings were definitely located underneath their—the couple's—bed and definitely not on Trixie's person. Some other group to his right was comparing the sizes of each participant's battleaxes, and Ares didn't particularly desire to look over and see if they were referring to their weapons in a metaphorical sense or not due to the bit of disturbing grunting going on. He was just about to drain his mug and call it a night when a name caught his attention.
"—from Grindl. Right. Were there flying pigs in the sky when you looked up?" Raucous laughter from the speaker's posse followed.
"Laugh if you wish," a quiet, steady voice responded, "but I know my wounds ache at night."
"Oh, really? And when did you last fight Grindl? In your sleep last night?"
"No."
Ares flicked an eye over to the growing crowd of Vikings. The harassed party was a tall warrior with dark hair and eyes.
"Grindl is dead," the warrior said. "I saw him killed myself. What I fought…" He shrugged. "I think only the woman who killed Grindl knows. It attacked me when I attempted to approach the Lady of the Ring."
Groans resounded through the mob. "You saw the Lady, too? Charmed life you've got there."
Ares stood. "You've seen the 'Lady of the Ring'? She's real?" he asked, feeling a twinge of excitement race through him.
The warrior turned to look him over with an assessing look in his eye that made Ares' hand twitch.
"She is a beautiful woman," the warrior said finally. "She has golden hair that glows like a halo and such strength of…" he trailed off, blanching as if he'd seen a ghost. Ares turned to the direction he was staring, gave the man the dirtiest glare he could muster, and put a hand on Xena's arm to manoeuvre her into a more defensible position. She brushed him off absently, and he gave her a wounded look.
"Xena…" the warrior said slowly. "You're alive."
Xena paused to consider his words. "Should I not be?" she said.
The warrior came to life suddenly, and Ares wondered snidely if someone had just wound up the man's key in his back. He pushed through the crowd toward Xena. Ares grabbed at his sword, but the man stopped short and dropped the hand he had reached out. "Please," he said. "You must come with me. You're the only one who can save Gabrielle."
Xena's eyes narrowed. "Who are you?"
"So," Ares said, "you found out Gabrielle's location, got rid of this Beowulf dude, foisted Grinhilda off on him, and stole his boat." He paused for dramatic effect and clasped a hand to his chest. "I love you, Xena."
"What a charmer," she said drily. She contemplated the coil of rope in her hands for another moment and dropped it onto the deck with a sigh. "This stuff's entirely too rotten to stand a sea journey. What did Beowulf do, row everywhere?"
Ares snickered. "Vikings, muscles for brains, what else is new?" He helped her refold the sail she'd pulled out of storage. "How do you know how to do all this stuff, anyway? I can't imagine dainty Lady Wealthea tacking the jib or whatever it is sailors do."
"I'd just come back from a diplomatic journey, remember? One of the soldiers was a foreigner. He taught me some things before Hrothgar—" Her jaw shut with an audible click.
When it became apparent that she wasn't going to continue, he prodded. "Hrothgar had him disposed of, didn't he?"
She looked at him then, and the naked fear in her eyes was staggering. He'd almost forgotten. She had been so much like the Xena he remembered that he'd almost forgotten. That ugly bastard was going to pay. He reached out wordlessly, and her fingers curled loosely around his.
He pulled out his store of raunchy Viking jokes on the walk back to the port town to pick up more rope, and she looked just about ready to kill him by the time they'd reached the outskirts. He blamed himself later for focussing so much on Xena that he hadn't noticed the tense atmosphere and increased activity of the town before they'd stepped into a supply store.
It was strange watching her haggle now, using her diplomatic persuasiveness instead of the intimidating veneer of arrogance that he'd remembered from back… before.
Ares let Xena out the shop door first.
He heard her give a choked off cry before there was a slap of flesh on flesh and a flurry of fur and hair whirled past him. With a furious yell, Ares drew his sword and charged. He landed a solid kick on Hrothgar, pushing him back and away from Xena before a couple of soldiers charged him. His sword clanged harshly against one soldier's blade, and he pushed, scraping along the metal until he could block the second sword. Twisting his wrist, he pinned the two weapons down to the ground, and a quick pivot and jab with his elbow yielded a satisfying crunch from one soldier's nose. He staggered back, and the other soldier took to the opportunity to make another swing. It was easy to slap the point away and sink his blade to the hilt up through the soldier's ribs. The one blinded by his broken nose hovered to his right, and a diagonal hack into the man's shoulder dropped him quickly.
Ares swung his sword up quickly, and an arrow shattered upon impact and spun out like shrapnel. He looked up and tensed. There had to be something like thirty soldiers with longbows. He crouched to decrease the target area warily. No shelter nearby. The odds were solidly against him.
Hrothgar spat at him as he approached Xena again, taking a circuitous route to stay out of reach of his blade. Ares shifted, trying to position himself so that he could see Hrothgar and the archers at the same time.
"Did you actually think you could get away from me?" Hrothgar snarled.
Xena looked up at him, frozen but for the thin trickle of blood from her split lip.
The fear was back, Ares saw. He could feel his arms shake with rage. What in Tartarus had that son of a bitch done to Xena before he found her? If he bolted towards Hrothgar, he thought, maybe the archers wouldn't dare shoot for fear of shooting the man. Or maybe they would shoot anyway and hit Xena. Hrothgar seemed like the type of leader who would be followed by soldiers ready to cheerfully shoot him if he got in the way. Fuck. The man had a cleaver of a sword out, but held with a relaxed grip.
"I picked you up from the swamps, gave you a name, shelter, everything you had!" The tirade continued. "You owe me everything, and this is what you give me in return?" He jabbed his sword towards Ares' direction. "You run off and whore yourself out to the first pathetic, disgusting foreigner pig that you see? Again!"
Xena cringed back, her head lowering and shoulders hunching defensively.
Hrothgar leaned forward. "Useless, weak slut!" he yelled in her face.
Ares saw Xena's eyes flick upward, and a grin began to twist his mouth. They blazed.
Quickly as a snake, she tilted her head forward and slammed the hardest part of her crown into Hrothgar's nose, and rolled backwards and onto her feet while he bellowed. In the same movement, she'd thrown the chakram, and it ricocheted off a wall and sliced neatly through the bowstrings of the archers, taking off at least one finger from soldiers who were too slow to move their hands out of the way. Ares crowed and charged them. Serves them right for standing in a row like idiots, he thought, mowing them down quickly. Xena could handle Hrothgar, he knew.
The majority of the archers hadn't had the foresight to pack another weapon, and it wasn't long before they were sprawled on the bloodied snow, either dead or sensible enough to pretend to be dead.
Xena was dodging Hrothgar's erratic swings of his cleaver easily enough. He lunged forward with a thrust, and she spun, lifting a knee and bringing down an elbow like so—
The CRACK resounded through the air, and Hrothgar's sword slipped out of his suddenly nerveless grasp to thud to the ground.
She stepped up into Hrothgar's shocked face, grabbed his loose clothing, whipped her leg out as she spun again and heaved, launching him into the side of a building with a heavy smack. His brain must have caught up at this point because he grabbed his limp arm and screamed. Xena slammed her heel down on his throat, and the scream became a hoarse wheeze.
She turned around and looked at Ares at this point, a fierce grin on her face. The chakram whizzed by his head just before she reached out and snatched it out of the air. Leaning down again, she sliced cleanly and precisely through the tendon on the back of Hrothgar's left leg. She lifted the chakram to his throat, and through the rasping of Hrothgar's breath, he heard her voice, low and steady. "Next time you attack me," he heard, "you won't just get a warning."
The rope she'd dropped had a large splatter of blood on it, and Xena gave it a distasteful look. She tossed it to Ares, nodded to him as if to say she was finished here, and walked away.
Ares snorted. Right. They had a blonde to save.
I'm so sorry... It's been over a year, and it turns out it has to be a transition part. I swear the next part will be up in one week. Quote me on it.