¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} chakram) wrote in ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} valarlogs,@ 2016-03-10 18:00:00 |
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Who: Xena and Callisto
What: They share a dream of fire
when: Recently
Where: Xena's condo
Status: complete
rating: PG-13
There was chaos in the village. People desperately trying to pack their valuables and leave. Xena’s army was coming, and people were trying to flee. But there hadn’t been much time. Xena had come and began to lay waste to the village. Callisto was with her mother, father and sister in their home. Somewhere, a fire had started, and the wind only fanned the flames. The fire spread from house to house, turning the village into more of an inferno than anything else.
The flames reached Callisto’s home, quickly razing it. Part of the roof collapsed and she heard her sister’s screams as she burned. One of the roof beams had fallen on her father, crushing his chest. If he wasn’t dead before the flames got to him, at least he was unconscious. Her mother, who had been holding Callisto, was engulfed by the smoke. Callisto had been crying ever since the roof had begun to collapse.
But even as the smoke became unbearable, Callisto somehow managed to crawl away from her mother, and she spotted a way out. A gap in the wall, just big enough that Callisto could squeeze through. She crawled quickly, coughing as she went, desperate to make it out of there. But as she was trying to squeeze through the opening, the rest of the roof was giving way. She thought she heard her mother crying out briefly.
“Mama!!” Callisto cried. But before she could do anything else, someone had grabbed her arm and helped pull her out. It was a man, one of the other villagers, and he pulled her to freedom, then picked her up and started to carry her away from the burning village. As he ran, Callisto caught a glimpse of a dark haired woman on horseback. And the seeds of vengeance had been planted.
In the real world, Callisto woke up screaming, kicking the covers aside and attempting to leap out of bed. It was actually falling out of bed, and she scooted herself into the nearest corner of her room, pulled her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms over her head. She was hyperventilating and wanting to scream and cry at the same time, but she couldn’t. The fear of fire was far stronger than her need to scream and cry.
Killing women and children was never supposed to happen. Xena forbade it, and to the best of her ability she kept to her word. Put a man to the sword, but innocents should not suffer. Besides, without them there'd be no one to pillage. What she'd only ever admit to herself was that events had changed her. Lao Ma had planted a seed, and with distance from Atli she'd started to see just what kind of monster she could be. The birth of Solan was the clincher. She'd vowed to never again let harm come to a child.
But someone started a fire, and it was whipped up by the wind and a frentic army. Cirra burned and all Xena could do was watch. Fire didn't discriminate, it just took. And like so many things in Xena's life, it reminded her that she was a monster.
She woke, tears at the edges of her eyes, and breathed heavily. Shit. Shit. She sat up, and moments later she heard Callisto scream.
She grabbed a gun and ran across the hall and into Callisto's room. Xena stopped in shock. Callisto looked much younger. Like she must have looked after her parents had died.
And something almost clicked there but she refused to believe it.
"Hey...Cally...you okay?"
It was entirely too much for her to handle. A dream in which her family had died by fire again, and Callisto managing to survive. Images of the dream played through her mind alongside images of her home in this world burning. The echoes of her sister screaming in her head. She’d always had a screw loose since her family had died. That was a mental scar that had never healed. But now, she could feel her sanity slipping further away from her.
“Make it stop...make it stop…” She said, though her voice was muffled by her arms. She needed it all to stop, but it just kept coming. She could almost feel the heat of fire on her skin.
“I can’t,” Xena said, defeat weighing her voice down. She set the pistol on the night stand and approached Callisto as one would a wounded animal. She knelt next to her, concern crossing her face. “Tell me about it. What happened?”
Callisto still remained in a tight ball, sitting in the corner of the room. Her body was shaking a bit. The wounded animal analogy wasn’t that far off. Callisto was wounded, though it was not a physical one. “Fire. Fire and death. My family, my village, all burned.” Callisto was too far wrapped up in the images in her head to be able to connect the Xena in her dream to the Xena beside her.
Why fire? Was Callisto always going to be associated with fire and death? Xena patted her shoulder awkwardly, then reached to put her arms around her. She felt a really tight pain in her chest. Fire and death. Burning villages. But that was impossible. That had to be impossible.
It certainly seemed that Callisto would never be free of fire and death. How many nights had she dreamt about the fire that killed her family? This was adding an entirely new dimension to it. Feeling Xena’s arms around her, Callisto leaned into her, but she wasn’t yet uncurling from her position. Her body was still shaking.
Xena kissed the top of Callisto’s head, then started to rock her. What could she say? What could she do? This felt wrong and strange on some level like this wasn’t something they were supposed to do. She couldn’t explain why she felt that way, only that something in her heart siezed up.
It took a little while, but Callisto finally started to calm down. At least calm down to the point where she wasn’t curled into a ball any longer. She leaned her head on Xena’s shoulder. It felt strange to her, almost wrong, to be in Xena’s arms, but it wasn’t foreign to her. Xena had to deal with her anxiety attacks whenever her pyrophobia was triggered or if she’d had a particularly bad dream. Though the bad dreams were less frequent, more something that happened in the early days when she’d first joined the Godslayers.
“It’s always fire, and always my family. But never me. I’m left behind, saved, but for what?” Her voice soft, and had an odd, slightly sing-song tone to it. Callisto’s mind was cracking, some more sanity having slipped away.
Trauma didn’t just go away with time, or with age. It remained, sometimes dormant for years and it could take something as simple as a match to set Callisto off on a bad day. Smoking was banned among the Godslayers, for that reason alone.
“Maybe there’s some reason you got to keep going. Or maybe you can find one. After all there’s still one god left to slay.”
Callisto always was thankful for the fact that Xena had banned smoking in the Godslayers. Though who knew, perhaps prolonged exposure to fire would eventually get rid of the pyrophobia. But Callisto wasn’t willing to actually do that. She had her good days and her bad days, the worst ones being around the date of the fire, and sometimes her family’s birthdays, though that tended to depend on how focused she was on other things.
“Maybe. I just don’t know how much more of this I can take.” Every time she had one of these episodes, it seemed that another piece of her soul broke off and died. Some days she wondered how long it would be before she didn’t feel anything anymore. She was already part way there as it was.
Plenty of times Xena had assigned Callisto the fun kind of busy work to keep her distracted. Once, she’d set her up on a date. That had ended in disaster, and was not spoken of again.
“You’re a strong girl. Strong woman. No matter how much life takes from you you can always take something back. Don’t let the bastards win.” Whether she was talking about life as a bastard, or whoever had started the fire, Xena didn’t even know.
“So you had a shit beginning. You gonna let that define you?”
It was just best to not put Callisto on a date. She’d long known she wasn’t the dating type. She could definitely fall in love, she was in love, but dating and romance wasn’t for her. Besides, she was kind of broken and kind of crazy, who would be able to love her? Contrary to the commonly accepted human nature, she didn’t really feel the need to have close personal relationships of the romantic sort. Xena was her best friend, the Godslayers her family, and that was all she needed.
She lifted her head from Xena’s shoulder. “I am who I am because of it already. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing.” Callisto well knew she’d be a completely different person had her family not died. She didn’t dislike who she was, not entirely, she just tended to have a very stark view of things with an often negative spin.
Xena was still paying for some of those medical bills for Callisto’s date.
“I like you how you are.” Xena turned her head to look at her. “You’re my friend, you’re family. You’re the good kinda crazy and I don’t know if I’d have held this operation together as well without you. You put the fear of god into people and that’s a good thing.”
Callisto wasn’t going to apologize for said injuries that led to said medical bills.
For as much as her mind was still trapped in the memory of her family here having lost their lives, and the images of her dream still taking prominent position in her mind, Callisto was listening to Xena, and she did manage a brief little smile. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.” Of course, the word friend hurt, but it seemed to hurt less than the chaos the dream had caused her did.
If Xena was aware that Callisto harbored more than friendly feelings for her, she neither let on that she knew, nor intentionally led her on. Xena liked the freedom to choose her partners and she didn’t quite view Callisto the same way Callisto viewed her. Objectively, she was hot. The right kind of drink in the wrong kind of circumstances and she’d probably be tempted, but she’d regret it.
There weren’t too many things that helped calm Callisto down. But Xena knew where they could start. “Want to go get a drink? Do you want to start a bar fight?” They could stay in and drink, too.
Callisto was glad that Xena wasn’t leading her on. And really, she well knew her feelings wouldn’t lead to anything but disappointment and heartbreak, so she didn’t even give them life. She didn’t even really know what to do with love. It wasn’t like she found it easy to express it after the way her family had been taken from her. So it was keeping it to herself and hoping one day the feelings just went away.
“A drink sounds great, though maybe just staying in? I don’t want to go out right now.” Callisto didn’t trust herself to not snap and land herself in prison right now. She needed to calm down without people who didn’t know her being around. Besides, as she looked at Xena, something was telling her that she was the dark haired woman from her dreams. But she was trying to not let herself consciously dwell on it. It couldn’t be possible. Xena would never do that to her.
Besides, if Xena did, then it would mean Callisto’s best friend here was the woman who destroyed her life in her dreams. That would break her more than she would ever wish to admit.
Feelings never went away. Xena had a few she’d buried in her past, but sometimes, those feelings welled up, and it sucked. She nodded, getting to her feet and offering her hand for Callisto to take if she wished. Something in those blue eyes made her uneasy. Something told her this was far from over. “I think there’s a take out place open this time of night. I’ll give ‘em a call.”
No, feelings never went away. But in Callisto’s case, she could at least kill her feelings. Or just hope they’d eventually die like her kind heart had died with her family. She was not a kind person, though she could be kind to those she considered friends or family, but she’d sooner stab someone than give them the chance to get to know her.
“Thanks,” she said, then took Xena’s hand and stood up. There was a profound sense of loss that was evident in her dark eyes, a sense of emptiness that reflected how empty she was starting to feel internally. Good, maybe it would mean eventually she wouldn’t feel anything at all, and that would be better.
What Callisto wanted was numbness, oblivion, but it was something that Xena could never, and would never, give her. She guided Callisto to the living room, dialing the take-out place and putting in an order. She broke out two bottles of whiskey and sat next to her.
Sometimes Callisto wondered why Xena wouldn’t let her be numb. Numb would be better than hurting. Oblivion would be better than unrequited love. But as she couldn’t be numb or have oblivion, she opted for being angry and vengeful. At least she could make others hurt the way she hurt. It was all she was good for when it came down to it.
Sitting down, she stared at nothing in particular, her eyes glazing over slightly. She just wanted everything to stop. She took one of the bottles of whiskey and took a drink straight from the bottle. It was that kind of night.
“I’m sorry for waking you up,” she said after the whiskey had burned its way down her throat.
Xena thought that if Callisto went numb, she’d never come back. And she desperately wanted Callisto to be able to come back. She looked at Callisto, mouth set into a thin line, then opened the second bottle. What the hell, solidarity, right?
Life was easier before the dreams. If Xena was the giving up type she’d pull them out. But they were here. And they were going to conquer the OC even if they had to burn it to the ground to do so. “Don’t sweat it. I’m sure I’ll be screamin’ in no time flat.”
Perhaps Callisto didn’t want to come back. Perhaps she couldn’t come back. It was times like these that made her question why she was still alive. She could easily end her own life. Driving her bike too fast and going around a curve that was too sharp would do the trick. But Xena always brought her back from the brink, and Xena was why she came back at all. If she didn’t have Xena in her life, Callisto knew she’d slip into numbness and eventually die. No one else cared about her enough to sit here with her like this, not even the other Godslayers.
“Fuck these dreams,” she said, looking at the bottle in her hand as though it held all the answers.
There were days Xena wondered if she’d wake up and find her friend gone. She wasn’t a stranger to suicide, she’d lost other friends that way. She knocked back some of her bottle, crossing her legs underneath her on the couch. She eyed Callisto like she knew where her mind was going. “Yeah, I’d like them to fuck off too.”
Xena undoubtedly did know where Callisto’s mind was going. It was a place her mind went a lot, especially in times like this. And it was times like this that she knew she’d never be a balanced person. There was too much damage, too many parts that hadn’t healed together correctly. Callisto would always be at least a little crazy. Though these dreams of hers might leach away the rest of her sanity if they kept going at this rate.
“I wonder what gives people these dreams. I thought it was just some mass hallucination. But perhaps they slipped some very potent LSD into the water here.” It was what Callisto would tell herself because it gave her a tangible thing to direct her anger at. When her anger didn’t have a target, she became a loose canon. And Xena didn’t need Callisto going off the rails like that.
A broken vase could be put back together but the cracks would always remain. It was a very deep thought, deeper than Xena usually went at this point in her life. Maybe Lao Ma really was having an effect on her. She’d never loved Borias. But she had loved Lao Ma. Ugh.
Love. Who needed it?
“Maybe it’s somethin’ in the air.”
Love was a stupid emotion, one Callisto was becoming increasingly more embittered by. Love was something she was starting to convince herself she could never have. People didn’t tend to love broken and crazy, let alone broken and crazy with homicidal tendencies.
“Sounds about right. Wonder if there’s a way to protect against it.” Callisto didn’t want to see what her future dreams would hold if they started out like this.
“It’s probably too late.” Xena took another swig, and wondered how it hadn’t spread outside of Orange County. Why weren’t their legions of people coming in, the conspiracy theorists and the people who hunt bigfoot and on and on.
“Wonder why we aren’t seein’ all kinda men in black…”
“Peachy,” Callisto said, taking another swig herself. She leaned back against the couch, bottle resting on her thigh. At the men in black comment, Callisto snorted slightly.
“Maybe we have, we just don’t remember because they used that memory eraser thing on us.” But it didn’t make sense how this was all confined to one specific area. There should be more attention given to the shit that seemed to happen here. Mutant monkeys? Blood rain? That shit should have every reporter from every news agency in the world camped out here.
“Don’t joke about that, for all we know you’re right.” Xena scoffed, and fiddled with the cap of the bottle. If any of them stepped outside and tried to tell someone about what was happening, they’d get laughed off. How did people stay sane.
And how was she going to tell Callisto the Warrior Princess in their dreams killed her parents?
“Gotta have a laugh somewhere, otherwise it just all gets a bit too serious.” From what Callisto could see, people didn’t exactly stay sane around here. They all had to crack at least a little bit with this sort of shit and alternate lives they dreamt about. Callisto knew she was cracking right now. She ruffled her already disheveled hair a bit, and sighed a bit, leaning her head back until it touched the back of the couch and she stared up at the ceiling.
“Leave it to us to find a place like this.” Would everyone else in the Godslayers have dreams like this if they came here?
Xena looked at her for a moment then sighed heavily and gestured with one hand. She wasn’t drunk enough for this. “Come here.”
Lifting her head, she looked over at Xena. “Why?” She doubted Xena was going to hug her. Yet even as she asked, she moved closer to Xena, knowing that it was important, whatever it was.
"It's just us. You're going through some shit, and honestly I'm going through some shit." She gestured again like 'come here and cuddle me bitch'.
And at that, Callisto did move the rest of the way over and slid an arm around Xena as she snuggled up to her, folding one leg underneath her as she did. “Did you have another dream?”
“...Yeah,” Xena said. She put an arm around Callisto and let her pillow herself against her. “About this fucked up shamaness.” She hadn’t really talked about Lao Ma, except in jest on the network. Atli was not someone she wanted to talk about much at all. Xena might be a gangster and she may have done a lot of bad things, but what had happened to those Amazons was beyond the pale.
The thing that scared her the most was she thought she’d do something as bad here if the circumstances were right.
“What’d she do?” Callisto was more than happy to pillow herself against Xena. It was comforting, and Xena was the only person she even let get this close to her, let alone touch her in such a way. She was the only person she trusted, and the only person who would ever see her this vulnerable. No doubt if the rest of the Godslayers saw her like this, they’d think she was the weakest link in the gang. But she wasn’t the weakest link.
She was arguably the most dangerous link because she could be so unpredictable some days.
“She…we...betrayed some people. She needed their blood. It was supposed to bring great power. The kind of power you could conquer nations with.” Xena’s fingers stroked lazily at Callisto’s shoulder. “Thing of it was...it wasn’t really fair. They weren’t innocents, but they deserved a better death than that. I was so blinded by lust for power I wasn’t seein’ the forest for the trees. I wasn’t bein’ smart.”
Which was better than admitting she felt bad.
“And if you’d been smart, what would you have done instead?” She rested her head on Xena’s shoulder. Had Xena admitted to feeling bad about what she’d done in the dreams, Callisto would’ve started wondering about her. Xena wasn’t without remorse here, especially when it came to innocents, but Callisto didn’t exactly have the empathy aspect any longer. She didn’t feel remorse for anything she did, and never really understood why people felt it. It was just one of the things she’d never really understand.
“There are other ways to gain power. I could have turned the Amazons into a tool instead of a sacrifice. Listened to my allies. You can’t build power if you piss off or kill everyone you encounter.” Xena sneered. “Lure ‘em with honey but hold the stick ready.” Her head fell against the top of Callisto’s. “It was really apparent, when we were in Chin. I wasn’t seein’ the long picture. Sacrifice greater gains for instant gratification.”
Callisto could see how it would be problematic to just constantly kill everyone. Though it also seemed to depend upon what sort of reputation one wanted to have. Killing everyone tended to earn one the power of fear of the masses. And Callisto rather liked being feared, revelled in it even. “Seems your dream self needs to learn the fine art of the long game.”
“Fear is useless if there’s no one to fear you. Make enough people afraid and then someone is gonna get it in their head that you need to go.” Being a leader meant enough assassination attempts as it was. Didn’t need to add fuel to the fire. “And we ain’t immortal.” She grinned
She didn’t exactly see it as a bad thing about getting assassinated. But Callisto did have that whole deathwish thing. She’d be perfectly fine with just running on fear and fear alone and seeing who had the guts, and the skill, to kill her. But she wasn’t in charge of anything, so she had no thoughts to actually do that. “Fortunately. I wouldn’t want to live forever anyway.” She’d get tired of existing at some point. At least with Xena and the Godslayers, she had something that she liked and enjoyed. Once that cooled, then she’d probably simply die.
Xena rubbed Callisto’s shoulder, then picked up her drink to knock back more of the alcohol. “Living forever, ain’t that why we’re called Godslayers?”
“True. Gotta keep up the reputation and all.” Callisto said with a little nod and snuggled against Xena a bit more. She shifted slightly to make herself a bit more comfortable.
If anyone saw them snuggling, then that person would lose their eyes, fingers, and tongue. The better to not tell anyone with. Xena chuckled to herself. “We’re not gonna live to be little old ladies, you know.”
Callisto may have accepted that a little easier than Xena had. Xena wasn’t quite ready to die just yet. She had too much left to do.
There would definitely be swift punishment dealt out to ensure no one heard about how they sometimes spent their nights. Of course, Callisto wouldn’t be surprised if there were whispers among the others if there was something more between her and Xena than there actually was. Let them whisper. If the whispers ever got to Callisto’s ears, she’d probably introduce the person who said it to her boot and fists.
“Live fast, die hard, as they say.” Callisto chimed in with a smile. The alcohol helped in getting her anxiety to let go, and she started actually relaxing a bit, leaning a bit heavier against Xena. Certainly a good sign.
Xena wouldn’t mind. It would expose the homophobes among her crew, and those kind of people didn’t deserve to run with the Godslayers. A lot of the more criminal biker gangs weren’t very inclusive to begin with, and Xena liked to think she attracted the element the others tended to reject. Equal opportunity violence.
She took another swig, splashing some on her arm which she licked up. “One of these days, we’ll make history. Live fast, die young, but we’ll still be immortal.”
Definitely weed out any homophobes. While Callisto was bisexual, she rarely showed attraction to anyone. Most of the gang probably thought she was asexual, which was fine enough with her. It meant they left her alone with sex jokes.
She took another swig herself and chuckled a little. “Go out with a scream, not a whimper. Maybe they’ll make a television show based on us some day. Something that’ll show up Sons of Anarchy.”
They got hit on a lot outside the gang, though. Xena tried to brush most of it away from Callisto. Less police reports that way. Less police reports was a common cause for Xena to do anything for Callisto. The woman was like a bear trap.
She threw her head back, laughing loudly and squeezing Callisto with her arm. “We can call it The Road Warriors!”
Definitely less police reports that way. Some people didn’t know how to take no for an answer, and Callisto was more than willing to punch them when they didn’t. And punch them repeatedly. Sometimes even stab them.
Callisto grinned. “I like it!” She liked being able to make Xena laugh. “It’d also be a better show than Sons of Anarchy by far.”
“Sexier too.” She smirked, rubbing her knuckles through Callisto’s hair. “...you feelin’ better?”
She had to remind herself that Callisto wasn’t supposed to feel this good against her and blamed the alcohol.
“Definitely sexier.” Callisto smiled a bit. She enjoyed the touch to her hair. “Yeah, I am.” She lifted her head and looked at Xena. “Thank you.”
Even now it still amazed her how Xena could calm her down with relative ease. Oh some nights were more difficult than others, especially early on. But no one had ever been able to calm her down until she’d met Xena. Perhaps there was little wonder why she’d fallen for the older brunette.
“Any time.” She kissed Callisto’s forehead, realized that she’d done something soft like that, and immediately followed it by downing the rest of her bottle and making snapping noises with her teeth.
Okay the kiss to the forehead was a little weird. Maybe more than a little weird. However, she didn’t say anything about it, she just took a longer drink of whiskey. And for some reason as Xena made those snapping noises, Callisto found it hilarious and started laughing. Whether it was because of the alcohol or because of that widening fracture in her psyche was anyone’s guess. Though perhaps it was both.
It was a crazy kind of laugh, but Xena found herself laughing along. She hadn’t had a good crazy laugh in a long time, and it was almost like a weight off her chest. Sometimes, revelling in one’s madness? Not so bad.
It definitely wasn’t a bad thing to revel in one’s madness now and then. Though Callisto played with that line far more than was probably necessary, but she’d been a little crazy ever since her family had died. And who could blame her? No one went through trauma like that unscathed. “Ah, it’s good to laugh.”