I'm riding with my arms wrapped around her waist as I have so many times before. It's as familiar to me as anything, but a few moments ago, I was another person in another place. She was dying on a cross that should have been mine and the world was ending. In more ways than one.

I don't want to think about it. I just want to feel the wind rushing past as she urges Argo into a gallop, her hair blowing into mine, tickling the side of my face, which I have pressed against her back. I just want to feel the leather under my hands and the heat of her body through it.

I don't want to think about it, but I can't stop seeing her in that dungeon before they dragged her away from me.

"I'll love you forever," she said.

"My destiny was linked to Caesar and that cross," she said, "and I hated them both."

Yes, that cross. I can see it. Not the one they nailed her to so her blood mixed with the rain pounding down on her bare skin, pounding on my head and back as I rode away from her. The one she spoke of. The one Caesar hung her on when he broke her legs and shattered her last measure of trust for other people. Not only can I see it, I can feel it.

I felt the blow that day, felt the bones splinter, felt the anguish in her heart that was so much worse than the torment of her body. I felt it. I saw it. I was there. I lived it with her.

I knew it as I rode away from her, as I stormed into the temple of the Fates, as I set their loom aflame, as the world fell apart.

It was a part of that other life, the one Alti had shown us, the one to which we have now returned.

But I couldn't have been there. I was a child living in my father's house the first time Caesar crucified Xena.

Suddenly I remember a strange conversation we had in the wee hours one morning a few years ago. A conversation about a woman Xena knew but didn't know. A memory I had but couldn't have had.

Maybe it's because I destroyed the loom, I don't know, but suddenly I understand. Suddenly I remember. Not only the other life we were just living in Rome. Not only that years-old conversation or the moments it was about or even how I could have experienced Xena's first crucifixion, but everything, all of it.

She must have felt my body tense because one of her hands moves to mine where they are clasped over her stomach. Her thumb strokes me and I feel the question.

"I'm okay," I assure her.

"Now I know that everything happens precisely as it should," she said. "Precisely."

"Xena!" I blurt.

She quickly shifts in the saddle enough to face me. Her eyes are full of concern. "What is it?"

"Do you remember . . .?" That conversation in the dungeon, that other life; two lives, two separate mortal lives; two choices, yours and mine. It's too big a question.

Her hand tightens on mine. "I remember everything," she says, eyes peering into me, and I understand that she really does remember everything. "Some side effect of what Alti did to us, I figure."

I'm not interested in the why or how right now. I can barely accept what I suddenly know. I quip weakly, "Everything happens precisely as it should?"

Her lips quirk. A tiny smile. She straightens out of her awkward position, faces front again, but leans back into me. "Precisely," she says firmly, with an immense satisfaction that makes me smile.

But suddenly there's a question I'm dying to ask, as if it's been burning in my mind for days or weeks. Since the dungeon, I guess—or rather it would have been since then if I'd been me then. I bite my lip for a moment, hesitating, but then I go ahead and say it.

"Does that mean you've forgiven Caesar for betraying you, having you crucified?" I ask it as gently as I can, knowing the depth of the old wounds whose bandages I'm peeling back with the mention of that name—they deserve delicacy even if this recent experience has already ripped those wounds wide open and thrown in some salt.

For once, however, she doesn't stiffen at his name. Instead she answers with slow thoughtfulness. "No. No, I wouldn't say I've forgiven him. But I accept what happened—then and later. If it's what it took to bring me to you, then I can be the destroyer of nations. I can live with that."

I tighten my arms around her middle and rest my chin on her shoulder. "You're not the destroyer of nations."

I can feel her shrug inside the cocoon I've made for her of my body. "I can live with having been her," she corrects, and I know she thinks it's an irrelevant distinction, know that it's one she's making just to satisfy me.

"Of course. Of course you can," I say, something in me tight and afraid at the implication that once maybe she felt she couldn't, at the thought of losing her, even if the possibility was quashed in the moment it was raised. "It hurts you, I know, but you carry it."

"Relax," she says as she half-turns to me and curls her hand around the back of my head. She knows exactly what I'm not saying, like usual. "It's okay." She urges me into a comforting kiss.

I kiss her like I'm afraid it's going to be the last one, but gradually, the fear drains away. She's here and she's not going anywhere.

"I only meant," she says when her mouth is free again, shifting to face front, "that I hate myself a little less for it now, for all the things I did."

"Oh Xena." I'm too overcome with compassion for her to say any more.

"No, it's all right, Gabrielle," she says, knowing my heart as well as she knows my thoughts. "Really. It's better now. The things I did, they were terrible, but if that's the path that brought me to you, I'd walk it again. Then, I did what I did without considering how wrong it was, without knowing or caring how much I'd one day regret what I was doing. Now, I know. I carry it, like you said, and still, knowing what it is to carry, I'd choose the same path to eventually end up here with you."

My chest swells; I think my heart might burst. It's terrible and it's beautiful, what she's just said. Terrible and beautiful, just like love. I can't say anything at all now. My throat is swollen shut.

Then I feel her tense in the second before she speaks again, and I know why. "Maybe it sounds pretty damn awful to you, knowing all the suffering I caused, to hear I'd do it all again, just the same, to be with you," she says. "But you do know and you also know how much I hate what I did, how much it weighs on me, and well, I just wanted you to also know that you—loving you, being loved by you, being with you . . . I'd rather live with all the horrors in the world on my soul than not have that . . ."

She turns to look at me, to gauge my reaction. "Gabrielle?"

I answer by putting my mouth to hers again.

As we kiss, she shifts forward in the saddle so she can lean back against me and turn her face up to mine, turn her mouth up for my kisses. Appreciating this new position, I lay one hand against her cheek, fingertips just brushing the hair at her temple, to hold her precious face. As the kiss goes on, my other hand begins to stroke her belly through her leathers.

Finally, I can whisper, "It moves me beyond words to know you'd take on all that pain you carry just to be with me, that you love me that much." I nuzzle my face against hers. My tears fall on her cheeks.

"Beyond words, huh?" she says when I finally straighten up, sniffing. "That's something."

I sniff again as I laugh. Her laugh mingles with mine. There's a giddy relief in both, but it's riding on the crest of fiercer emotions.

I put my mouth to her ear. I trace the delicate curves with my tongue, slowly exhaling hot, moist air into her ear on every breath. "I destroyed the world for you, remember?" I murmur between licks.

"I remember," she whispers. Her breathing has gone ragged.

"It doesn't shock me that you'd crush it under your heel for me."

"I wouldn't say I ever had the world under my heel," she manages. "Not the whole world."

"Almost," I tease, my mouth still close to her ear. Who knew six years ago that one day I could tease her about this, that the wounds would ever heal that much?

"And for me, you would. Wouldn't you?" I demand, punctuating the words by squeezing the body under my hands. She draws in her breath sharply through her teeth. "To get to me, you'd crush the world under the heels of your boots and hold your sword to its throat. The whole world."

"I'd slit its throat," she grates. "All their throats, every single one. To get to you. The whole world." Her hands plunge into my hair and pull my head down, pull me into a fierce kiss.

"For you. Every single one. The whole world," I promise between kisses, our lips never really losing contact. She hums in the back of her throat and kisses me with even more ardor.

Long moments later, she tears her mouth away and rests her head on my chest. Her rapid breaths lift the hair around my face as I look down at her. "I know," she says. "I knew that already. Long before the loom."

I flash on her crumpled face, her broken body, hear her scream ring in my ears. "Noooo!" There's a blade in my hand, blood on my hands, the hands with which I had sworn to do no violence, bodies scattered around me. Because she is hurt. Because she is down. Because they dared.

I swallow and tighten my arms around her. "It used to hurt you, knowing that."

She kisses my throat, lightly, without the fervor of a moment ago, and her hand strokes my arm. Comfort. Reassurance. "It doesn't now."

I already know that to be true; if I didn't, I wouldn't be so easy in this conversation. "No?" I say anyway, wanting to hear it all.

She shakes her head; it rolls along my collar bone. "I used to think it was because of me. That I had brought you to that, that I had taken you from your true path and delivered you to a life of violence and death. Now. . ."

"Now?" I wonder if she won't say it, after all, if she doesn't dare, even now, and feel a little sad.

"Now I think that you have walked the path you were always meant to walk, just as I have. We were meant to walk the same path. I just got an earlier start and lost my way for a while. 'Til I met you."

She said it. How far we have come. I knew she had come to see that, in her heart of hearts, but I wasn't sure she was comfortable with it.

"I go where Xena goes," I whisper, quoting a much younger me who didn't know her path as I know it but still knew that much, and Xena takes my hands into hers. "But hey, you had already found your way when we met."

Her head shakes again. "You are my way. You know that." She too is quoting a younger self. "Now," she begins, then pauses. "Now, knowing that. . . . For me . . . the whole world . . ." She waves a hand as if gesturing to the vow I've just made.

"Knowing that, what?"

In reply, she places my hands just beneath her breasts and draws them up and down her belly, and I understand from the way she touches me, the way she makes my hands touch her, what she means. After all, it's not as if I missed her reaction when I said I'd wreak equal havoc on the world to get to her. It's not as if I didn't say it, in part, to cause that very reaction.

She must know she's already told me without words but she answers anyway. "Knowing that . . . Hearing you say it . . ." she amends, "I was completely ready for you, just like that. I wanted you to claim me, make me yours."

"You are mine," I manage, lowering my mouth to her ear again, though her words have made me light-headed. "You're already mine." I take her earlobe between my teeth as if to prove it and am rewarded with the sound of her breath rushing out all at once over parted lips.

"Yes," she agrees. "Touch me." Her hands slide mine down her stomach to her thighs and back up, languorously, without the urgency of a few moments ago. "I just want to feel you close. What I said before, well, I just wanted you to know that, know what it does to me to know you love me so fiercely. I wanted you to know how far we are from the days when it hurt to see you fight for me because I know it hurt you that it bothered me. " Our hands bump into her armor and she stops their motion. "But the . . . the way I responded, that's not why I want you to touch me now."

I move our hands now, back down the same path she just took, her hands now only resting on mine, no longer guiding. That was a lot of explanation for a request I had found uncomplicated to begin with, so I give it some thought as my hands roam down and up again. I don't stop when I reach the armor as she did but continue up until I find the bare skin of her chest, the swells of her breasts. She lets her hands fall away. "You're not ready for me anymore?" I finally ask, not bothered by the idea, just curious.

"I didn't say that," she murmurs.

I brush her hair aside and stroke the expanse of her chest, eventually dipping the fingers of one hand into her cleavage, beneath the leather. I can move my fingers just enough to make tiny strokes of soft skin. I move my other hand back down to her stomach, cuddling her.

"I just want you to know," she says, "that even if you hadn't just gotten me ridiculously hot, I'd still want you to touch me. I wanted you to before that. Since I saw you there on the road. Since I found myself back here in the first place. I just wanted to find you and—"

Of course she did; I know that. And of course I did, too. That's why I'm up here behind her on Argo now as we ride away from Rome, whatever the direction we may actually be heading.

"I love you, too, Xena." I have the goofiest smile on my face. I take my fingers out of her bodice and lay my hand over chest and armor—where I know her heart to be. "And that was quite possibly the silliest conversation we've ever had. Did you really think you needed to explain to me at this point that you want me to touch you because you're in love with me, not just because you want to scratch an itch?"

She's silent for a long moment and I start to wonder if I've hurt her feelings, calling her silly when she was so earnest. I'm marshaling an apology when she says, "Sillier than the one about whether that one group of stars looks like a dipper or a bear?"

Surprised, I burst out laughing.

"How about the one about how fish are just people waiting for the right motivation to grow legs?"

"No, you're right. Not sillier than either of those." I lean down and kiss her smiling mouth.

Her hands slide into my hair. I can tell by the way she kisses that she's way past ready for me, and I'm more than ready to take what she's offering. We're home but I need us to be together like this before I'll really feel we're back where we belong: together.

My hand rubs the bare skin of her chest needfully and then moves down to cover her breast. Of course, what it really covers is the beaten brass of her armor, but I have my ways.

I slide my hand back to the top of her leathers and begin to work my fingers beneath them. She shifts in the saddle, eager for my touch, and I'm glad this Argo is as patient with us as the first Argo. It's a tight squeeze and the armor digs into the back of my hand, but I work my fingers down to where I want them.

Our mouths part and she rises up into my touch, wrapping her left arm around my back, and the sight of her sprawled in my lap, back arched, wanting and wanton, the feel of other her hand tightening in my hair as it does now, pierces me like a flaming arrow ripping through me.

She brings the hand in my hair down to mine where it rests on her stomach and then presses my hand into her body, her fingers rubbing at my skin. I slip my hand from beneath hers and slide it a little lower down her belly while I work my left hand out of her bodice and then into its other side. Watching her face, I see her bite her lip as she waits for my hand to reach its goal, and when it does, her eyes flutter closed and her head falls farther back against my shoulder, neck arching.

She licks her lips before she speaks, her eyes still closed. "Was this worth it, Gabrielle? Was it worth giving up heaven to touch me like this?"

My heart leaps into my throat at the shock of remembering everything we now know, of hearing it spoken of. "So you do remember." She'd told me as much; I just don't have anything better to say in that moment of shock.

"I told you—everything."

I put my mouth to her ear again. "It wasn't heaven I gave up. It was much better than heaven." And it was. Complete union with her. "But you weren't really aware of it. You couldn't feel me like I felt you. "You sensed my presence sometimes, in some dim way, beneath conscious thought, but you couldn't hear my voice. You couldn't see me. You couldn't feel me." As I speak, my right hand encounters hardened leather strips and then the softness of muslin. "We were one, but what good was being one if you still felt alone?"

"But was it worth it, just for this?" She presses into my hand.

"Just for this? Just to touch you like this?" My fingers inside muslin, now; my touch clarifying my words. And what I feel here . . . She is a never-ending delight to my senses. "Just for you to know I'm there and that you're complete? To have met you at last and found that I'm complete? To walk beside you every day and share your burdens, to have you share mine, to hold you, to be held, to look into your eyes and have you see me, to see the love in your eyes when you look at me, to feel it in your touch, to know each other's thoughts without speaking—to have your back and occasionally save your ass? Oh yeah, it was worth it. Just for this, it was worth giving up more than heaven."

"Gabri," she whispers as her hand clenches on my forearm—just that, the way she does when she's too overcome with love or passion to manage the last syllable and my name breaks in her mouth, the way that always undoes me.

"It was worth it just to hear you say my name like that," I tell her.

With a groan, she turns her head, seeking me, reaching up to push her free hand into my hair again and urge me back down, and I lower my mouth to hers. We kiss even as she moves her arm from around me and puts her hand on my hand, under her skirt, even as she redirects my fingers and then strokes tiny, frantic patterns on the back of my hand . . . even as . . . even as . . . . Even then, our mouths don't part, though neither of us has the focus to actually continue kissing. Tongues touch, run over lips, lips press. We breathe together, into each other. Then her mouth slips away from mine as she arches her neck, pushing her head back, hard against my shoulder. I press the side of my mouth against her temple as . . . as . . .

I love that long low sound, the one that seems torn out of her throat.

Her hand drops away from mine and I withdraw my fingers and . . .

I let my hand rest lightly on warm muslin, protectively, holding her, loving her, just because I can. Because she is mine. Because I'm hers.

My other arm is around her stomach again, has been for some time, but now my hold loosens to a light embrace.

And she turns her face into my neck and kisses me messily there, making small contented sounds as she does so, and I lean down to kiss her dark hair.

"Love you," she murmurs.

"Love you too."

After a few more minutes of mutual nuzzling, she straightens in the saddle, saying, "I need you off this horse."

Argo snorts.

"No offense," Xena tells her and pats her neck. "Thanks for getting us here, girl." It's deserved praise because Argo has been the only one of the three of us who was actually aware of our surroundings.

Now, for the first time, Xena actually pays attention to where Argo is heading, and soon, with that unerring knack she has, she has guided us to a small clearing in the trees a short distance off Argo's path.

She helps me dismount, and when my feet touch the ground, I move my hands from her shoulders to her hips and put my arms around her waist. She hugs me in turn and we lean into each other.

"It's been a lifetime since I held you like this," she murmurs into my hair.

"More like two," I quip.

She acknowledges my joke with a hint of a smile, her mood too intense to allow much room for such a fleeting emotion as amusement.

We have been together for . . . forever, after all. For a thousand thousand mortal lifetimes. Maybe more. How long is eternity?

However long it is, I see all the length and breadth and depth of it in Xena's eyes. I see an eternity of love.

"This is all I wanted in that dungeon when I was waiting for the guards to come for me," she says, pressing us together more fiercely. "And then you were there."

Oh Xena. It pierces my heart now to think that I didn't hug her then. How could I not have hugged her one last time?

Oh yeah. I didn't dare, even knowing what I knew of our real life together in an independent Greece, because she was the empress, the most powerful woman in the world, and I was a provincial playwright. Still, I should have hugged her. And anyway, she's pretty much always been the most powerful woman in the world, one way or another, right?

I tighten my arms around her now, as if I can make up for not having held her before she died for me in another life. "I'm sorry I didn't do this then."

"No!" she protests. She pulls away enough to see my face but not enough to loosen our embrace. "You came. It doesn't matter how you touched me or what you said. You came back for me. You loved me. Even then, when we'd barely met." She lifts her hands to my face and brushes away the hair on my brow, then holds my face as I'd held hers, reminding me.

I smile up at her as she had smiled up at me then, and just as tearfully, though for different reasons. "I'll love you forever," I tell her.

"I know you will," she says intently, staring into my eyes. "I count on it.

"And you have, haven't you?" she adds slowly, after a moment, wonderingly. "We have. Forever."

I give her a little nod.

We make camp. Because that is what we do; we travel and then we stop, and when we stop, we make camp.

Tonight's camp is only a fire and our furs beside it; by silent mutual consent, we don't bother with the things for cooking or for our other routine chores.

As I work, I am thinking about the dungeon again and about that desperate ride in the rain to the temple while Xena was dying. I didn't have a plan. I knew where I was going—not Greece, not my vineyard, as she'd wanted, but to the nearest temple of the Fates—but it was rage that drove me, not purpose. A seething fury that the choice I had made had been twisted, that Xena and I had had to wait those extra years to find each other, that she had been so long without me, and all because of Caesar, he whose betrayal had been the last betrayal she could bear, a betrayal the pain of which had once driven me to choose again—and he had taken that choice from me. He had taken her from me. He had bound her to him, and even once we had finally found each other—because of me, for me—she would have stayed with him, to keep me safe. Only even that wasn't enough for him. He had kept her from me for years, and now he had effectively kept us apart for our whole lives—because now she was dying.

He had tampered with the loom of the Fates, their absurd avatar of the lives of man, and his tampering had destroyed what was meant to be, what we had chosen, our destiny.

As the loom burned, as I felt myself dying, felt Xena dying, I had known only that my choice, her choice, our destiny, had been stolen from us because the foolish Fates, mere manifestations of belief themselves, had carelessly made the lives of men into shiny little golden threads that a clever bastard like Caesar could manipulate.

And then the world ended and I was in the world; I was the Gabrielle I had always been, the one I had remembered in a meadow outside Rome when I was the playwright, but now I had always been me.

I didn't know where I was but I knew that Xena was already coming for me. That she had been here first, as she was always first in the world, as if the world had been put back together in order, just as it had been destroyed piece by piece as the threads on the loom burned.

And then I heard the thunder of galloping hooves and Xena rode into sight, her urgency clear in Argo's pace, and the world was complete.

Now Xena rises from crouching near the fire she has lit and takes off her armor as I finishing spreading the blankets, and then there is nothing else to do.

We settle onto the furs, facing each other.

Eventually Xena says, "Hey, you remember that time—it was kinda like we'd had the same dream, only I was sure that it was real, and I remembered you being there with me when I was hurt—

"But I couldn't have been there because I wasn't—yeah. I was thinking about that earlier."

She nods. "Only, turns out, you were there," she says.

We are quiet for a long moment, thinking about the implications.

For my part, I sense that I now have memories stretching back farther than I can comprehend, memories that go back to a time even before time, that they are mostly memories of one long unbroken, timeless existence. I can feel them there, at the edge of my thoughts, and I sense that the right trigger could evoke any one of them as easily as the smell of nutbread evokes childhood and my mother's kitchen, that if my mortal mind had the capacity, I could even remember them all—know them all, live them all—all at once, simultaneously.

"We were . . . we were the same . . . the same soul," Xena says now. "Gods, it's like that story you tell about when people had four arms and four legs and two heads but got split in half 'cause Zeus was jealous!"

I laugh at the realization. "I guess there was a reason I always liked that idea so much. It really was like that, except—"

"Except we didn't bother with bodies 'til we chose mortality," she finishes, making me chuckle at the synchronicity of our thoughts.

We happily snuggle our mortal bodies together, delighting in the feel of each other.

"That day on Mount Nestos, you chose again," she says momentarily.

I nod and explain. "I realized the bond we had was . . . too one-sided. I felt everything you felt, but your . . . your side of it had closed down as you had grown up and you couldn't feel the connection any more. You . . ." needed to feel it . . . "I wanted you to feel it."

"You knew I needed it," she says and I smile, caught, and give a little nod. Both are true. And more yet.

"But so did I. I needed to connect with you in all the ways you could connect with other people, all the ways I had never known. I . . . I needed to hold you and . . ." I kiss her, slowly, wanting to fully experience every single sensation of it.

Long minutes later, we lay we our cheeks together, gently shifting to brush skin against skin. "This," I murmur. "I needed all this."

"Yes," she agrees. "This. Being back with you, having you in my arms, it's all I wanted when I found myself in these woods earlier and not dead like I'd expected. The need for it . . . it drove me to you. I didn't know where I was going, but I had to get to you, so I just rode as hard as I could . . . I couldn't stop thinking about the last time I saw you. Before, I mean. In Rome. The dungeon."

"Me either."

"It broke my heart when they took me away from you, then. Just when we'd found each other again."

"Broke mine too," I mumble. Abruptly, I push myself up on one arm. "If I'd been me and not the playwright—"

Her fingers brush across my lips. "I know."

I am soothed enough to sink back into her embrace but not entirely soothed. "I'd never have let them just take you from me," I fume.

"Sweetheart," she says, gathering me closer so we are pressed chest to chest, our faces in each other's necks. All her love in that one word—and the reassurance that she knows I'd fight for her. That endearment she never uses deliberately—nor casually—but only when her feelings overflow and her heart floods out over her lips.

Her hands tighten. "But in the end, it would have only meant another cross for you. I'm glad you didn't fight them."

She's right and it only makes me more agitated. I should have been with her. I should have died beside her. I pull back to look at her. "Xena—"

"No," she interrupts, pointing a finger at me for emphasis. "No. In this life, you're my warrior, and I love that. I love fighting beside you. I love knowing you've got my back. I love that you'd give your life to protect me." Her hand finds my shoulder, clenches. "But I hate it too. We went to the cross together, once. I heard your screams as they drove the nails into you. I couldn't stand the thought of that happening again. I can't stand it. I know if it comes down to it, you'll die for me, but just let me be glad that in that life, it didn't happen. It didn't happen, and you saved us, and here we are. Together."

"Everything happens precisely as it should?" I repeat again, bitterly this time. I can't seem to get those words off my mind.

She strokes my cheek, gently, the other hand, the one on my shoulder, gentle now too. "Everything."

I don't know how she can say that, with everything that's happened to us, to her. With all the regret she lives with. How she could say it even before we remembered the rest of it. She knows what I'm thinking.

"We're together, aren't we?"

I consider that for a moment. Is that enough for her? How can it be?

As if she has heard my very thought, she edges her face closer to mine until we are nose to nose and reminds me, "The whole world, Gabrielle. To get to you, the whole world."

"The whole world," I repeat, speaking my own heart against her lips.

Yes. It is enough.

-x-
Fini
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