Cycle of Vengeance by Elsieaustin

"Now, hero," the warden said with a glower stamped all over his pig face, "I want you to unload that wagon and line the supplies against the wall."

The redheaded woman Xena had just helped stepped forward to help carry the barrels, but the warden shoved her back.

"I want the hero to do this by herself." He watched sadistically as Xena lifted a barrel and carried it a few steps, then pointed at the far wall and said, "that wall."

It was the cycle of atonement, maybe, whatever the hell that meant. It didn't matter that the warden was a bastard. It didn't matter that Xena's back and arms hurt worse than they ever had after a battle. Actually, the physical pain helped. Most of the time it seemed as if the cycle of atonement spiraled too slowly to ever end, but there were times when it seemed like every blow she took brought her closer to her goal.

Ares had said once that doing good wasn't who she was. He'd been wrong. Doing good was who she was. Clad in filthy rags, carrying barrels in ever-weakening hands, finding peace from the voices of the dead who tormented, her, that was who she was. Xena's hands slipped, and the woman, whose name was Therien, moved again to help her.

"Get away," Xena whispered.

The warden bellowed, "Three lashes for disobedience," and grasped the smaller woman and pulled her away.

Suddenly the woman wasn't Therien any longer. She was Cyrene, Flora, M'Lila, O'Tere. She was just one more of the army who had stood between Xena and instant death. She was one more who had been killed for defending the Warrior Princess, who should have died long ago in their place. No, she wasn't M'Lila. Therien wasn't dead.

Xena lashed out at the guard with a vicious kick, and let her combat instincts take over. The other prisoners joined in the battle against the other guards and wardens. They didn't have a chance, but Xena was an army all by herself. Fighting felt good. Far better than anything else had those past couple of weeks.

Good against evil, Oppressors against oppressed. Xena had no idea which side she was on. The walls between past and present had crumbled to nothing.

The wind by the river was cold, and it sent the little bits of metal on Xena's headdress tinkling. A young woman, beautiful except for terror, lay tied in the river, and the water ran red with her blood.

No. It was the same woman but there was no river, and no crabs. Thalassa was older. She was scarred, and the light that had shone through her heart was gone.

No. It was a different innocent girl, also full of light, with silken hair and a tender expression.

I never wanted to wound you, Gabrielle.

The cold wind cut through Xena's clothes, and the muffled screams of a woman tied cruelly with a whip, bouncing and bleeding over every rock in Greece rang in her ears.

"You know, Xena?" Thalassa said. "The thought of you has haunted me every moment of my life. Do you understand what that's like?"

Xena did. Invisible sea-crabs ran all around her feet, and she carried an invisible whip in her hands. She was haunted by the light bearer who had once stood in the body of the woman before her, and she was haunted by the bearer of darkness who had worn the metal-ornamented headdress.

"Throw her into the pit," Thalassa said. The wardens took Xena away then. She could have stopped them, but she would have had to kill them. As they pushed her ahead of them away from Thalassa, the younger woman's voice carried over Xena's shoulder: "You finally have the punishment you sought, but it's for a murder you didn't even commit. Don't you love the irony?

Oh, but she had murdered Thalassa, and so many others. The wardens pushed her through a grate into blackness. Xena hit the ground hard. Darkness threatened, and she let herself black out.

When she came to, she was covered in rats. Let tiny invisible teeth eat away every last life she'd taken until her soul finally came away cleansed. It would be okay. At least, she thought that for the first few hours of the night. Then the fire inside Xena woke, and she lashed out at the rats, biting and screaming.

"Xena, Xena," came a voice above the grate.

She was half-conscious and still covered in tiny feet, but she'd know that voice if it pierced the void into Tartarus itself. "Gabrielle!"

"Xena, can you hear me?" There was a clanging sound, as if something had been dropped into the prison room and over the grate where Xena had been thrown.

Then there was the sound of a scuffle from above, and the unmistakable sound of a young woman overpowered.

"Gabrielle!"

Whenever I reach inside myself and do things I can't do, it's because of you. Xena had said that to Gabrielle once. In that moment, the full truth washed over her again and her fragile peace was ripped away. She couldn't let the little teeth carry her to the end of the cycle of atonement. She had to protect yet another young woman who'd risked her life for Xena's.

Xena took a rat between her teeth, aimed for the grate in the ceiling, and launched the rat skyward. It dislodged the chakram that Gabrielle had left on the grate. It came down with the speed of a falling meteor, and Xena angled her wrists so the chakram cut through the chains. The chakram bouncing off the steel hurt worse than anything else in the prison had. Good, the pain would wake her up. Maybe it would cut away one little last bit of guilt since she had to serve the greater good and couldn't stay and atone for more.

Rescuing Gabrielle was fairly easy - granted, Xena's heart still stopped when she saw Gabrielle tied to the podium and almost hanged, but one throw of the chakram corrected that. Fighting washed away the residual fear. It felt good to finally return the blows the guards had been heaping on her. Xena won the fight against the prison guards and rescued Gabrielle and Thalassa from the mob. She always won. That was another part of who she was. Ares understood that part.

As she sat in the aftermath of the battle with a tattered blanket covering the bruises on her shoulders, past and present swirled once again. Xena spoke to the girl in the river: "Thalassa, I can't ask your forgiveness. I wronged you terribly. But there's one thing I know. When I met you, you were a wonderful, loving person. And if you continue to let that love be buried under bitterness and anger, evil wins.

It was the scarred soldier in front of Xena who answered, not that girl broken in that long-ago river. "My ability to do good had been crippled. The evil Xena, she did that to me. Don't let her do it to you." She turned to leave. Then, over her shoulder, Thalassa said, "Thank you, Gabrielle."

Xena shook her head. There was her positive proof that Gabrielle could charm light from the most starless night.

"So how about it?" Gabrielle asked, handing Xena her chakram.

Xena winced at the pain in her shoulder as she lifted her arm to take the chakram. Gabrielle's hair brushed her wrists as Xena said, "How about what?"

"Forgiving yourself."

Again that deep, unnamed pain from the layers of the spiral of the cycle of atonement above her. "Gabrielle, that's not for me," Xena said. "But I won't let that monster that I used to be, the one that's sleeping so close to my heart, destroy all the good I can do now." She hoped Gabrielle would be convinced. Xena didn't want to push her friend away. It just ached that Gabrielle would never understand, and there was also the fresh ache of having the hope of atonement snatched away. She had good to do.

"Not as long as I'm around," Gabrielle said.

Xena felt a mixture of warmth and pain. During her time in the prison, she'd shut herself off enough to forget just how much she missed her best friend. Now there was again that smaller form, warm at her side.

As much as Gabrielle had been through, as much as Gabrielle had done, she still had the innocence of believing that there were no unforgivable sins. It was the light she had to give to the world. But it was a light so bright that it blinded Gabrielle to the darkness. Gabrielle would never be able to see the monster sleeping in Xena's heart.

Gabrielle wrapped the blanket more firmly around Xena's shoulders. Xena leaned on her, then concentrated on getting through the pain of walking.

They emerged into the bright sunlight outside Shark Island. Most of the other prisoners sat on the ground in front of the complex, in chains. The wardens were in worse shape than the prisoners had been. Also chained, they sat in a sullen huddle waiting to board the newly arrived ship. Three of them were dead. They would have better burials than the woman Xena had buried the previous evening.

Thalassa emerged from a room next to the pier, leading the redheaded woman who had tried to help Xena move the barrels. "The monster Therien used to be won't cripple her anymore either," Thalassa said. "Will you watch her?"

"Of course we will," Gabrielle answered, and her light shone through her entire body as she moved from Xena's side to help Therien toward them. Xena looked up and met Thalassa's eyes, answering the unspoken question. Yes, I will watch Therien. She won't murder again while she is with me.

"Thank you," Thalassa said, with a voice still crisp but unladen by the old bitterness. She turned and walked back into the room at the bottom of the complex.

Gabrielle engaged Therien in a conversation about redemption before the group of woman even crossed the gangplank onto the ship. Xena followed the younger women and stood behind them, looking over the waves and letting the conversation wash over her. She caught phrases like "one good deed," and "it's easier to believe in yourself if someone else has believed in you first," and "for the greater good." She smiled. Then she sat by the ship's window, awake, all through the night as Gabrielle slept her usual unconsciousness of the dead and Therien slept with her newly-acquired knife by her pillow. There would be no chances with Gabrielle's life.

By dawn, Xena's fourth sleepless night in a row combined with her battle and rat wounds forced her to curl up in the hammock and get some sleep herself. Awake, Gabrielle would be in no danger from Therien. Xena figured that they'd spend the day on deck staff-fighting or something. But when she awoke at dusk, she found Gabrielle sitting next to her, cross-legged on the ship's floor with her parchment and quill in her lap. Gabrielle turned to her and smiled, then set down her quill and helped Xena out of the hammock without a word.

Xena's heart clenched painfully. Gabrielle had followed her through so much, was leading her away from the cycles of both atonement and redemption and not taking "no" for an answer, and yet still didn't understand what she was leaving behind. She would endure alone. But this state of being partially alone and partially driven forward for the sake of someone else's love was in a way more painful than complete solitude would have been.

Therien walked first from the ship into the little fishing village nearest Shark Island. She looked around as wonder lit her face. Then she said, "There's more fish here than I remembered."

Gabrielle laughed. "It's a fishing town. It's grown since you were last here, I suppose."

Xena grunted.

"Therien, why don't you see if you can find us an inn for the night," Gabrielle said. She laughed and gave the woman a small push. "Go ahead and explore."

Therien darted off into the streets.

"Are we going to take her back to her family?" Gabrielle said.

"We can't," Xena said. "Thalassa asked us to watch her. There would be no reason for us to stay if she was with her family."

"I don't have a family," said a voice from the road behind Xena. Xena whirled, and if Therien had been any closer she'd have been in danger of her life.

Gabrielle put a small hand on Xena's chakram arm and forced it down.

"I had to listen for the wardens," Therien muttered. "And I don't have a family. They were all captured and killed by slavers a long time ago."

"Well, that makes it easier for you since you're staying with us," Xena said.

Gabrielle said, "Let's not stay in the village at all. Let's go camp."

"Fine," Xena said, and led the way out of town with even Argo hard-pressed to keep up.

They traveled at top speed for several hours, through dusk and into the night. Finally Therien, who apparently didn't know any better than to ask, came up behind Xena and said, "Where are we going?"

"Athens," Xena said.

"Why Athens?"

"Because that's where Gabrielle and I were going before. You're going to have to learn that you never go out and find those things that you're supposed to do. You just keep your eyes open."

"Like when I saw you slip when you moved the barrels?"

Xena's heart clenched again, and she turned her face back to the road.

Gabrielle had been behind them both the whole time. Xena never had to worry about not knowing when Gabrielle was behind her, because by now she could just feel her friend's presence. There was a subtle change in temperature, and a kind of presence that was uniquely Gabrielle's own. "What happened in Shark Island?" Gabrielle asked softly.

Xena shrugged. "One of those bastards called me a hero and made me move stuff by myself. Therien helped me."

Gabrielle stayed close, but Xena didn't say any more. A copse that had slightly more trees than the grasslands around them presented itself, and Xena wordlessly stopped and started to make camp. Everything went according to routine, until Xena caught sight of an abandoned baby blanket under a rock. She stepped in front of it, but Therien, who missed nothing, was already looking at it with narrowed eyes.

"Slavers," Therien said.

Gabrielle nodded, then looked at Xena.

"It was probably slavers," Xena said. "But we're not going to chase them. We're still going to Athens." She wasn't risking Therien around a group who'd be no match for them as fighters. She and Gabrielle were more than a match for any average band of Greek thugs, and although she had no idea how good Therien was, the woman moved like a fighter.

"Seems like a good deed just dropped into our laps," Therien said mildly.

Time to change her mind? Was her judgment flawed from losing her great chance? "In the morning, then," Xena surrendered. "We'll bring the slavers with us to Athens for trial."

Therien clutched her knife and said nothing else.

"Will you be able to help us track them, in the morning?" Gabrielle said.

"No. I don't know how to track."

Gabrielle seemed to accept this at face value, and turned to start setting up camp. Xena hung back and just watched Therien.

"They're slavers. They don't deserve a trial," Therien muttered, eyes fixed on the baby blanket and hands still on her knife hilt.

Xena looked Therien in the eyes, and tried to put every bit of intensity into the truth of her words. "It's not about them. You can't ignore the rules. You have to expect more of yourself."

Therien didn't say "uh-huh," but she might as well have. Xena knew that she had to watch the former prisoner that night. But she fell asleep anyway, in a watchful position on her bedroll by the campfire. She was still wounded and exhausted. Just before dawn, she woke from yet another dream where little teeth bit away all of her crimes and left her free. Gabrielle was sleeping soundly by the fire, and Therien's bedroll was empty.

"Gabrielle!"

Gabrielle woke quickly. The bard did have the ability to do that. When there was nothing the matter, or when Xena had everything taken care of, she'd sleep even through a fight, with knocked out thugs crashing all around her. But when it really counted, Gabrielle woke like a warrior.

Xena gestured toward Therien's empty bedroll.

"Damn. Did she go after them?"

"Looks like it. I was a fool to go to sleep." Xena glanced around their own camp. It was neat, the fire was banked, and false dawn was fading away around it. "If I follow her on Argo, can you pack up and follow me?"

"Yes," Gabrielle said. "Go."

Argo had no trouble avoiding the occasional trees and boulders in the sprawling plains, and Xena had no trouble seeing where Therien had been. No one had any trouble seeing or hearing where the slavers were, Xena found as she approached. The slavers had stopped in a copse for a?probably a loud drunken party, Xena thought. Or it had been. Two of the slavers lay dead, and Therien was approaching another from behind with her knife out.

"Stop!" Xena yelled.

Therien froze. Two more of the slavers came up around her and seized her arms. Therien struggled, got free, went for her knife, and drew her knife across the throat of one of her former captors. "That's for my sister," she said, in a ringing voice Xena had no trouble picking up. The first slaver held his knife above Therien's back. Xena knocked the knife out of his hand with her chakram, then leapt into the fray.

Later, Xena would wish that she could have given Gabrielle's speech about breaking the cycle of vengeance in that moment, bloodlessly knocked sense into both the slavers and the woman. But just like the battle at Shark Island prison, there was something more primitive than words or ideals at work in that moment. Therien lashed out wildly with her knife, and the slavers concentrated on her rather than Xena, as much as Xena tried to draw fire. Two more slavers were killed, and Therien fell on top of them, still clutching her knife with the same feral grin on her face.

Xena closed her eyes, murmuring that Therien would never know the emptiness that Callisto had felt. Then she knocked out the two living slavers, freed the people from the slave carts, and set about digging graves.

And then she just waited. Waited for Gabrielle, she guessed. Right? She held on to her chakram and tried to avoid being lost in the mingled internal cycles of vengeance and atonement.

Gabrielle arrived a couple of hours later, just before mid-day. Her eyes swept the empty slave carts, the graves, the two unconscious bound men, and Therien's knife in Xena's left hand alongside the chakram in her right. Gabrielle had grasped the situation instantly, something she would not have done even the year before. "You tried to save her," Gabrielle said, and she held out her hand to Xena.

The few steps between Xena and Gabrielle were a chasm that spanned miles. Light couldn't reach darkness. Darkness had no right to reach light. "What do you know?" Xena snapped. She turned. She had nowhere to run, but she had a pile of boulders she could climb. When Xena was upset, she went up.

So she stood at the top of the tallest boulder. Innocence and experience, redemption and lost chances, Therien's soul, all did battle in her heart more fiercely than any other battle that had raged that day. Death fought death.

A voice called to her from the next boulder, still an eternity away. "Xena? If you want me to leave, I will, but tell me you're okay."

Xena had no right to beckon Gabrielle across that chasm. Gabrielle would have to cross it. "Don't leave," Xena said. It was as much of an invitation as she was capable of giving.

There was a scrambling noise, and then Gabrielle stood beside Xena on the boulder.

Xena stiffened, but Gabrielle came closer, then wrapped an arm around Xena's shoulders and guided her to a seat on the rocks. They were positioned exactly as they had been in Thalassa's quarters, when Gabrielle had wrapped the blanket around Xena's bruised shoulders.

Gabrielle still had to cross the chasm, though.

She waited a few moments, and then spoke. "You told me once that there was nothing you could say to take away the pain that I felt. Do you remember?"

Xena nodded. She did remember, the flames of the funeral pyres etching deeper lines into the guilt in her heart. She hadn't had the answers Gabrielle had needed. But they'd been the same in that moment. The same burden. The same soul.

"Then you said," Gabrielle's voice faltered for a second, "that with the weight of the world on my shoulders, the most I could say was that it was a good day of fighting. I think that this?these past few weeks?what you've done?this was a good day of fighting. You tried."

The words hung heavily between them, but Xena couldn't bring herself to say that she had failed.

"You tried," Gabrielle repeated. She said it again, and again, and each repetition was a step across the invisible chasm.

Xena leaned her own head on Gabrielle's shoulder. She leaned on Gabrielle's light and innocence, her ignorance and understanding, her friendship and warm presence. And when the tears finally came, Gabrielle held her and stroked her hair.

I saw a world carved and confused
Into valleys deep in need of love
And falling down all thick with grace
Heaven's cloud of mystery
Is filling every empty space
Down to the depths of human need
It's love that heals, love that heals
And it's deeper still, deeper still.
--Bebo Norman, "Deeper Still"