Till death do us part

(c) 2023 by ihatemilk

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May 2015

She never called him after Raffles.

Well, fuck her, he didn't feel like seeing her anyway. Their last encounter left him so riled up that a part of him hoped she would get in the crossfire of one of the shootings that were now getting more frequent from day to day, and just get the fuck out of his life, let him live a normal, sane life, without the damn suspense of worrying if her utter disregard for her own life was going to get her killed today or next week. Another part of him wanted to drop a bomb straight on the damn UN base. Yet another part wanted to grab her and lock her up in his Dubai place.

Then, one night, she called. He chastised himself for it but he couldn't help it, the stupid racing of his heart. Taking a minute to put on a mask of indifference, he materialized himself in her room at the UN camp. He could hear her heartbeat from a distance. Her skin had a dewy glow in the orange light of a little table lamp, and the tiny room smelled like her, and he thought he'd lose his mind when she climbed out of bed, wearing just a white, loose boxer-top, and walked up to him in a way that trapped his breath in his throat.

No, fuck no. She was going to get a taste of her own medicine.

"What do you want, Xena?"

Her furrowed brow made him grin inwardly.

Then, when she closed the distance between them, making him high on her scent, a wave of heat washed over him from head to toes, claiming any reason and sense of agency that was still there, leaving him with nothing but the raw need to grab her and make her his for the rest of the night.

Only by some miracle did he manage to remove her hand from his chest and step back.

"I'm not your booty call. Besides, I already got a fuck friend and I'm quite happy with her, so no thanks."

"Good – I'd rather fuck a real man, not a drama queen, anyway."

With the utmost self-control that surprised him, he turned back slowly. The quiet buzzing of the electric socket the lamp was plugged into was ringing in his ears, pulling him in a trance, as if under a safety net that kept him from turning around and just slaughtering her right here, ending this nightmare once and for all.

"Don't call me again." He snapped his fingers before she had time to answer. Never in his life had he wanted her to die as much as he did now.

But she didn't die that night, nor the day after.

Days later, things in Aden got ugly to a point where he decided to pull strings to get the whole damn UN staff out of the city. If she didn't want to listen to him, she was going to be evacuated by her damn employer, and not just out of Aden, but out of the damn country if he could help it.

It was on the very next day, March 28th, that the whole Aden UN office was officially moved from Yemen to Jeddah on a Saudi private jet. He wasn't there to overlook it personally - he was busy elsewhere - but he was calmer knowing that she was out of the hot zone, even if only for now. Though, knowing her, she might as well be on her way back to Aden at the moment for all he knew.

And damn her, he was fucking right.

He was in a meeting at the US Embassy in Kabul when he felt it, like a punch in the gut. Knocking over a chair on his way out, he kept trying to focus his mind to locate her, in vain, with the brain fog cutting off his powers completely for the next few moments until he calmed down.

Of course, she'd gone back to Aden, stubborn bitch. And here he was, at the exact spot where he left her last week, at the UN base, or rather what was left of it — several heaps of debris between the remnants of what used to be walls. Some female voice, wailing somewhere in the distance, a child crying for his mother, in between several lazy-paced shots of AK-47; all as if behind some invisible wall. His vision clouded when he spotted her.

"Xena..." He dropped to his knees, the complete and utter silence ringing in his ears when he uncovered her body from the layers of debris, running his hands up and down her limbs, to see if she was in one piece, praying she was in one piece.

She seemed in one piece, and she was breathing, she was looking at him, squinting her eyes, parting her mouth to catch a breath. "Ares..."

"I'm here, baby…" he hovered above her, cradling her head, feeling for head wounds. She was fading away with each passing second. "I'm here, I got you..."

"Don't go..." she whispered, her eyelids falling shut.

His stomach twisted painfully.

"I'm not..." he barely articulated, cradling her in his lap. When he closed his eyes, he saw white, and then, he didn't register anything anymore, only that her forehead was hot, dusty against his lips. He traced his fingers around her head. There was no palpable wound, but then, seconds later, she wasn't breathing anymore, taking the rest of his breath with her.

The distant voice of his sister, a hand on his shoulder. "I'm sorry, Ar—"

"Don't speak..."

Quite unexpectedly, she listened, and it was the best support she could have offered right now.

She wasn't her usual self for the next several days either, when she occasionally dropped by to sit with him in the hospital room, and for that he was grateful, for how she would just be there, unintrusively. He couldn't bring himself to tell her how often it saved him from losing his mind completely.

He didn't know how many days passed, how long he was sitting there, with his eyes glued to the monitor with her heart rate on it. They said she might not wake up for months, or years. Head trauma, brain swelling, lesion, the words rattled around his head as though to drive him completely insane; he almost strangled the doctor who said she might even not wake up at all. He refused to listen to that. She was a fighter, she was going to wake up and recover, and he was going to take her home, and never let her go again, and surely not to damn Yemen. He was going to fuck her and knock her up if that was what it was going to take to get her to stop trying to get herself killed in those damn rescue missions.

She'd always had a strong maternal instinct; it would surely keep her away from the war zones. It would bind them together, would give him the legacy he'd wanted for so long.

The old him wouldn't hesitate.

But the current him frowned. He didn't want it to be that way, he didn't want to trick her into this. Aphrodite was right; it wouldn't do it for him if she didn't want it too. He wanted her to trust him, to want a life with him. A bitter part of him knew that would never happen. But the new, enlightened part of him knew that he still had a chance to play his cards right, he just had to be clever about it.

And she had to wake up.

What if she woke up with amnesia? Maybe it would be better, easier, they could get a fresh start. But she wouldn't be quite herself, would she? But then, brushing her knuckles against his nose, looking at her sleeping face, his chest expanding, he knew, and he could feel it very clearly, that she was his no matter what. And he would never leave her now, if he got another chance.

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