Title: Rapture of the Deep
Author: Aresbitch
Pairing: G/A - ish, some X/A subtext because I can't help myself
Rating: R, to be safe
Summary: Ares extends an invitation. Gabrielle foolishly accepts.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not for profit.
Notes: As usual, unbeta'd, so any mistakes are mine. It started off as a playful response to an old thread about Ares and Gabrielle's first date, and then it veered off into a direction of its own, because menacing Ares and overwhelmed!Gabrielle are irresistible fun. Set sometime early to mid s3.
~~~
Gabrielle blinked.
"What did you just say?"
Ares shifted, snorted a breath in, and grasped the hilt of his sword tighter, twisting the grip with - gods - a sweaty palm.
"You heard me," he growled. "Don't make me repeat it."
Gabrielle closed her mouth and shook her head briefly before staring at him again.
"You want to go on a date…with me?"
He glowered at her, a look that had caused cities to fall under the dust of rampaging armies.
"Well, when you put it like that…no," he snarled. When she turned to walk away, he put a hand on her arm. "Wait," he said in a calmer voice. "I mean…yes. A date."
She paused and looked down at the hand on her arm before meeting his eyes.
Except his eyes shifted away from hers slightly, as though he were nervous.
It made her curious.
"Okay."
~~
Mount Olympus spread gloriously out beyond the terrace, a sight few mortals would ever see and live to describe.
Gabrielle wasn't staring at it.
Instead she was staring in disgust at the overturned crockery and splattered food.
And Ares.
Who was shouting in joyous exaltation at the news of another war began in his name.
When he noticed her look he paused, smile faltering.
"What?" He asked, teeth white and lined up so neatly beneath his full lips. At her silence he turned to face her completely. "What?"
"You," she answered. "War."
She said it as though it was something she found at the bottom of her boot.
"And?" he invited with a sneer, but she wouldn't play.
"War is life, girl!" He shouted suddenly, voice booming out over Olympus. "It's fire and conflict and the blood that it spills is the wine on which I feast nightly. It makes empires and destroys kings!" He flung his head back and almost howled.
Gabrielle wondered if he wouldn't start pawing the ground like his three headed beast in another minute.
"It maims and cripples people; it takes fathers away from families and turns women into slaves. It's needless and hate-filled." She countered calmly, even though her insides were roiling like the sea beyond Rhodes at what she was doing.
Arguing with a god.
She was so far from Potadeia.
"Ah, the voice of the righteous, safe in their beds." He moved closer. "It was war that kept you safe in your little village, girl. It kept the armies of Persia from burning the wheat in your fields and it kept you from becoming a slave girl to a slobbering warlord with bad teeth and no manners."
"No. That was Xena."
He smiled, as though she proved his point.
"Xena was the most bloodthirsty, power-hungry warlord you prayed never to meet, Gabrielle. She lined the mountain roads and passes between Chin and Mongolia with her dead, listened in delight at the wailing of the widows and orphans. She was everything you hate." He knelt next to her chair, causing her to move suddenly so her knees weren't so close to his chest. "She was my greatest creation."
The burning excitement in his eyes was almost a living thing, flames dancing at the center like the camp fires in a battlefield.
"She's everything I hope to be." Gabrielle feels the anger burning like water over a low fire. "She's heroic and self-sacrificing. She's strong and - "
"And -?" he prompted when she faltered. He smirked.
"Everything you love about her comes from me, Gabrielle. Her strength, her resilience. She used it once to lay waste to everything and everyone in her path." He paused and swallowed, looking both grieved and
pensive. "Until you."
He stared at her.
She stared back.
"What is it about you?" He asked quietly, a question she sensed was not really for her.
In the distance she heard the soft sound of doves fluttering. Vaguely she wondered if they were close to Aphrodite's quarters.
Goddess of Love.
And Desire.
"Why am I here?" She finally croaked, throat dryer than the desert beyond Alexandria.
For a moment he kept staring at her, his doublet pressed close to her knees, the leather creaking. She could almost feel the heat in the space between her leg and his chest.
Then he blinked.
"Why?" He raised his arm and made a gesture and suddenly a picture formed above their ruined meal.
She saw men fighting, dying. Burning villages and crying children.
She didn't comprehend at first, but when it dawned on her, she felt the twist of revulsion inside of her belly.
Two kingdoms Xena had recently brought peace to, warring again.
"What did you do, Ares?" Gabrielle asked, horrified.
She saw Xena searching for her, ignoring the destruction.
"I needed Xena distracted. Bringing you here seemed the best way."
She swallowed past the lump in her throat, eyes closing momentarily.
"You…used me….to start a war?" She ground out through gritted teeth.
What was that sense of betrayal and disappointment clawing at her? Was it just a meal that didn't settle well?
"I have to be creative with Xena these days." He shrugged and got to his feet, taking a step back from her. "She's getting too good at seeing through my plans." He reached over her shoulder and picked up the goblet of wine that had survived the pounding of his fists against the table top.
She watched him as he took a long draught of the mead, swallowing it in installments. It left his lips shiny, a drop falling down his chin.
She wanted to punch him in the face.
"I don't know what Xena sees in you," she whispered. "Why she didn't let you die when you were a mortal."
He froze in the act of taking a second drink, narrowing his eyes in her direction.
"Don't you?" He drawled quietly, his tone a promise and a threat.
The whole of Olympus seemed to have gone quiet, no more doves fluttering through the air or even the wind through the olive trees.
She got up but didn't know what to do, taking a step back from the table and smoothing her hands down her skirt. He watched the motion, his face unreadable.
"I think I need to get back now, Ares," she pronounced in a voice as firm as she could steady it. For all the good it did her. He simply ignored her and kept staring.
Finally, when she was about to scream at him, he moved. Threw his goblet aside and she watched while the mead splashed out across the marble floor, listened as his heavy footfalls brought him closer to her.
She tried backing up but his stride was so much more than hers, eating up the tiny distance until he backed her up against the marble railing. She tried to say something to get him to back off, instinctively calling for Xena and realizing there was no Xena to call.
Then he clamped a large hand on either side of her head, skin burning hers, and pressed his fingers into her temples.
"Don't you?" he repeated. "Let me demonstrate, then."
She wanted to tell him to stop playing games, that he'd succeeded in rattling her.
Instead her body caught fire.
Beginning in that space between her legs and slowly spreading out, the kind of fire that licked and stroked and left her feeling even emptier than she had after Perdicus' death.
The kind that begged to be touched, filled.
Loved.
It spread upwards, licking at her breasts.
She wanted to run, to hide from him.
It flushed her neck pink and made the tears fall from her eyes.
She wanted to kill him, to watch as the light of life left his eyes.
"Can you see it now, Gabrielle?" he whispered in a ragged voice, his face so close to her she tasted the mead on his breath. "Can you feel it?"
He lifted her into a kiss, and it was like the rapture of the deep that the sailors on Cecrop's ship used to whisper about.
Then, she'd merely turned from the ship's railing and their assorted whispers, like fishwives on market day.
Now, she gazed into the water's edge, and felt herself falling over, floating deep down where the air was gone and the space behind her eyes popped with bright lights like exploding stars in the sky.
The rapture was him, the taste of his mouth, the feel of his rough skin against the smoothness of hers.
And underneath all that, the dark, glowing power of him.
She pulled on his hair, bringing his mouth down so she could taste him, wanting to dive deeper.
He broke the kiss, and stared at her with dilated pupils.
"Now you know," he whispered with a slight grimace, mouth slightly open.
She stared at him, licked her lips as she tried to bring her raging heartbeat back under control.
Cecrop's man said that if left in the depths too long, a body yearned for the rapture more than it did air, and surrendered everything, even life, to remain in it.
She let go of the fistfuls of his hair, and stepped down off the top off his booted feet, going back several inches while trying to smooth a hand through her hair.
"Take me back to Greece," she demanded in an even a tone as she could manage. "The air's too thin up here."
He brooded at her - that patented God of War stare that kept Xena up nights even when she fought against his tricks and illusions - and then lifted his hand and waved it.
"As you wish," he said as she disappeared.
~~
On the road that led to Corinth, Gabrielle crashed to her knees, gravity being heavier all of a sudden, the air she dragged into her lungs harsher, dryer somehow.
She lifted her head and blinked against the heat and dust of the road, and climbed to her feet, using her staff to support her weight, and set off down the path she knew would take her to Xena.
~~
On Olympus, Ares picked up Gabrielle's cup. He held it up to the sunlight, watched it sparkle.
A lot like the girl herself, shining and bright.
He smiled, rather grimly considering his recent victory, and drank from it, savoring the taste of the mead on his tongue before swallowing.
He felt as though he had fallen off the edge of the world, and into an abyss from which there would be no ascent.
He shivered at the image and dropped the cup, walking back into the cool halls of Olympus.
~~
end
That was just .... gorgeous. 
