fandomhigh | Library, Wednesday [11/30]

Gabrielle hadn't received word from home this week. Ordinarily that was little cause for concern; not even her Greece, strange as it was, could send correspondence with anything like the (more or less) reliable speed of the current era. This week, though, it had her fretting. Were her parents all right? Was Lila? Helen, wherever she was now? Salmoneus, Autolycus, Hower and Minya, Flora, Pandora, Joxer, her Amazons, Homer and the boys at the Academy, Hercules and Iolaus?

And Xena . . .

That was the one that really twisted her stomach with worry, even though she remained mostly convinced that no matter what this thing was, Xena could handle it. The what-ifs were just persistent enough that Gabrielle couldn't help imagining a world without the Warrior Princess in it.

Her life without Xena in it.

That was . . . unthinkable.

On one level, she was aware of how many people she'd met and learned to care about throughout the past several years of her travels. It wasn't until moments like now, though, that she realized just how many people there were, and the thought had her in a pensive but agitated mood.

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Sorry, Ender; that was the sort of ~~sleep-deprived fuzzy-brained~~ dewy-eyed logic you got from ~~Shanie~~ Gabrielle.

Who didn't look like she was upset by being corrected, at least. She pressed her lips together in a tight line, thinking. "I'm used to getting the defenseless bystanders to safety, if it comes to that," she offered. (It wasn't that hard. It usually involved yelling "Run! Run!" a lot.) "Or finding ways for them to help."

Though she was thinking in her accustomed terms of a straightforward fight, wasn't she?

"Do you think something like this will come down to a battle, though?"

"Something of this scale always comes down to some kind of battle," Ender said. He sounded a little like Mazer when he said things like that, he realised, and the realisation only just fell short of amusing him. "I'd like to know what kind, though. It's always awkward, bringing words to a gunfight."

"But challenging," Gabrielle offered in a weak attempt at a joke. She wanted to argue that it didn't always have to come down to a fight, but the more she thought over her own past experience there, the more she realized it was hard to pull out facts to back her point. "Well, I can hope it doesn't -- but we'll just have to be ready if it does."

"And hope it's a battle of words after all," Ender said. "My vocal chords are just getting warmed up."

"Mine, too," Gabrielle agreed with a tiny smile, and no thought of playfully bragging about it. She was growing out of that, maybe just a bit. "That's the battlefield I prefer, anyway."

"Me too," Ender admitted. "I think we'd all be better off if we focused on that a little more, instead of on finding something to hit."

"That's what I always say," Gabrielle blurted out. Luckily for everyone, she was too preoccupied to go into one of her usual flowery speeches, but not too preoccupied to elaborate just a bit. "It's a cycle of violence, and it's never going to end unless we try to break it."

. . . sigh, Gabrielle.

Ender quirked a slight smile. "And we're not going to break it until we learn to understand each other a little better," he said. "Sadly, it seems to be human nature to massacre each other every now and again."

"Thank the gods, someone gets it," Gabrielle declared, and if it was a little melodramatically intoned, well, that was her nature. "It was a little disappointing at first to realize that three thousand years have gone by since my time and we don't seem to be any closer to learning that lesson."

Library, Wednesday [11/30]

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