Life's not fair. Gabrielle'd told him that dozens of times: so had Xena: so had his brothers. Life wasn't fair. But, for the love of Heaven, death was supposed to be!

He'd been sitting around Heaven feeling sorry for himself for about nine months when they had an influx of souls pouring in. Forty thousand, Michael had said. Forty thousand souls that had been trapped for more than thirty years, and everyone was put to work.

"That includes you, Joxer," Michael told him.

"But what about the transfer of power?" Joxer demanded. "Don't tell me you're going to delay it again! You said I'd get my wings this week! Gabrielle may be in trouble and I'm stuck up here waiting for you guys to do paperwork . . . "

"She's fine, Joxer."

He spun around, searching for the source of that voice he would know anywhere.

"Xena!"

There she was, dark hair standing out dramatically against the white walls of the hall and the white of her robes. She wasn't smiling, but that was nothing unusual. He ran to her and hugged her, fighting back the urge to cry. Xena was here. Xena was dead. But she was here. He didn't know whether he was exultantly happy or broken-hearted.

She hugged him absently and tousled his hair. "Even in Paradise you can't keep your hair brushed."

"What happened?" he demanded. "I haven't been watching, I've been fighting red tape . . . Where's Gabrielle?"

She met his eyes and pressed her lips, restraining emotion. "She's still alive. Still on Earth. Going home to Greece."

"By herself?" he demanded. With eyes wide, he turned on Michael. "I want that guardianship now. She's gonna get in trouble any minute . . . "

"I want Gabrielle's guardianship," Xena interrupted.

Michael blinked at her. "Xena, you just died. We can't give you a guardianship yet; we have forty thousand people to take care of. Starting with you. Gabrielle is well-guarded. Joxer, will you take care of her?"

Joxer knew when to stop arguing and take orders. He jerked his head toward the doorway and then followed his own gesture, assuming that Xena would follow him.

As soon as they were out of range, Joxer started on his questions, which were many. "How did it happen? Do you have a plan for going back? Why all the new souls all of a sudden? How can I help?"

"Arrows; no; they're people I killed; and you can't," Xena told him tersely.

Joxer took a minute to sort this out. "Okay, maybe you'd better start from the beginning, 'cuz you just lost me."

"I died to save these people and if I don't stay dead they don't stay saved. Any part that you don't understand?"

"Yes!"

She rolled her eyes. "They needed to be avenged. On me. I killed them. Now do you understand?"

Joxer blinked at her. "Maybe. You mean, you can't go back? Ever?"

"Ever."

"But that's not fair!"

"Life's not fair, Joxer." Xena turned away from him and headed down the passage, leaving him to stand alone.

When Joxer dropped his petition to become one of the seven guardian angels assigned to Gabrielle, Michael was concerned but too busy to investigate. When they decided to give her an eighth guardian, they sought out Joxer as their first choice, but he turned them down. As a matter of fact, he stopped doing things altogether. No one ever saw him watching Earth in the glassy lake created for that purpose: he stopped begging to be made a guardian angel or a dream-sender, or even to be reincarnated. Whenever anyone asked, he told them he was busy.

For thirty-five years, he was 'busy'.

Things had finally settled down. Gabrielle, settled in Athens writing plays and using the profits to buy enslaved Amazons and free them, had been reduced to having only Xena and Perdicas guard her, with Iolaus splitting his time between her and Hercules.

She was coming down with influenza. Not surprising: she was a very old woman: she had lived eighty-five years, even if she'd only been conscious for sixty. Considering that life expectancy was still under forty, she was ancient.

It was then Joxer ceased being busy.

He ran up to where Xena was watching her charge in the lake, almost jumping with excitement. He would have been making an absolute cacophony if he'd been wearing his old armor instead of celestial robes. He tugged violently on hers, crying, "Xena, Xena, come see! It's finished!"

"What is?" she asked, reclaiming her sleeve. "And where have you been?"

"Never mind; just come on."

Xena had nothing better to do, so she left Iolaus watching the pool and went with her old friend. He led her, bouncy as a child, to a little back-chamber, hidden in the network of passages and tunnels. Throwing open the door, he ushered her inside.

It was filled with scrolls, piled haphazardly everywhere.

"What's this?" Xena asked.

"Just look at them. Look at them, Xena."

She took a scroll from a nearby pile and unrolled it. In many different scripts, it said the same thing, over and over: 'I forgive you'.

I forgive you. I forgive you. Over and over the phrase marched, some small and graceful, some broad and forceful, some the clumsy, unsteady writing of children. I forgive you.

"What is this?" Her voice had ceased to be demanding, and when she looked up at Joxer her eyes were bright with wonder.

"Forty thousand forgivenesses," he said. His whole body was shaking with happiness. "Everyone who died in Hikuchi. They've all forgiven you. I got them all to forgive you."

Again she scanned the piles and piles of scrolls. "Why?"

"Why? So you can go home, Xena! Vengeance isn't required where forgiveness is given. You don't have to be dead anymore! You can go home to Gabrielle, to Greece, to being alive!"

And Xena stared at him.

Her mind did some quick calculating. Forty thousand people divided by thirty-five years, divided by three hundred sixty-five days per year . . . it should have been impossible. Still, here they were. He'd done it. Crazy idiot, he'd done it.

There was a rush of wind next to them, and Michael appeared. As he turned to survey the room, his wings knocked some of the scrolls over and sent them rolling to the floor. They were darn inconvenient in small spaces.

"She can go home now, right?" Joxer asked. "That's the way it works. She died for vengeance, but forgiveness nullifies vengeance, so she doesn't have to stay dead. Right?"

Michael's face filled with pain. "Joxer, it's not as simple as that . . ."

The soft brown eyes suddenly opened very wide. "Then what else have I got to do? Tell me and I'll do it."

"Joxer. . . " Xena took him by the shoulders and shook him gently. "Give it up. I'm not worth this. A hundred saints wouldn't be worth this."

"You're worth it to me, you and Gabrielle."

It was too much. She pulled him tight against her and let tears escape down her cheeks. "Oh, Joxer, you poor, stupid, stubborn . . ."

Michael unrolled a scroll and looked at it. "Joxer, you got all of these people to forgive their murderer, and the murderer of their families?"

Joxer sniffled and stood up straight. "Yes, sir."

Michael shook his head. "You're insane."

"Yes, sir."

"All right." He ran a hand through his hair, trying to organize his thoughts. "I'll make it work. Somehow, I will make it work. Xena, you're going home."

Xena shook her head. "I can't. Why would I? Everyone I love is here . . . Gabrielle will be, in a few days. That Earth down there isn't my home anymore."

"I know that. You're still going home. Your real home. Joxer just about killed himself for you . . . again . . . and I'm not going to let effort like that be wasted. It's not fair."

"Life isn't fair," Xena intoned automatically.

"Then we will make it fair."

Gabrielle had been dying when she'd gone to sleep. But when she woke up, everything was different.

The noise of Athens no longer assaulted her ears: only a harsh cacophony of bird song. The air smelled like dew and smoke and the mountains.

She sat up, and her back didn't ache. Her left eye, which had been going dark, saw with perfect clarity. Her hands were callused and smooth . . . young hands. Hands of a girl nineteen, maybe twenty, years old, callused like someone accustomed to using a staff. She had ink stains on her right index finger.

"This is camp," she said aloud, and her voice was steady and resonant. "This is a camp."

"This is our camp," came the correction, from a low, harmonic voice that was so impossibly familiar.

"Xena!" she screamed, jumping up and suddenly finding herself in a crushing, well-known hug. "How did it happen? How?"

"A miracle."

Joxer and Michael watched them, from the heavenly lake.

"We've messed with time, space, destiny, incarnations . . . just about everything we could mess with," Michael observed. "But it's done. I hope you're happy, Joxer."

"I am." They sat in silence for a minute, then Joxer said, "No, I'm not. Michael, can I make a request?"

"Request away."

"I'd like to go to the Elysian Fields."

Michael looked sideways at him. "Elysian Fields?"

"Yes. I'd like to forget. That's what the Elysian Fields are for, aren't they? So the blessed departed of Greece can forget the cares of their life."

Michael looked down at the pool, where Gabrielle was trying to get explanations from Xena and Xena was trying to talk fast enough and not communicating anything.

"You want to forget this? Forget your best friends and everything you did for them?"

"No. But I want to forget our deaths, and I want to forget that they're going to live the lives they missed without me. So send me to the afterlife my mom promised me if I was good." He shrugged so that his robe hung smooth again. "Heaven has no place for me anymore."

"And now, my son, it has been made known unto me that all things, when they leave this world, are returned to that Being that gave them life," Michael quoted. "What gave you life, Joxer? Your people, your culture? Or your friends?"

"That's not a fair question . . . "

"Life's not fair, Joxer."

He hung his head. "Don't ask questions you know the answer to, okay?"

"Okay." Michael reached over and squeezed the other's shoulder. "Go home, Joxer."

"Forty thousand? Joxer got forty thousand murdered people to forgive you?"

Xena grinned. "He saved my soul. And my life. And yours. The life that we missed, because of the mistakes that we and so many others made."

Gabrielle looked down at her skirt . . . her own, dear old rusty-colored skirt. "I always knew that stubbornness of his would get him into trouble someday."

"And his love."

"Owwww . . . "

Both heads snapped around. Joxer was lying on Xena's pallet, his eyes squeezed tightly shut.

"Joxer!" Gabrielle, with the youthful enthusiasm she had thought was gone from her, jumped on him and hugged him. He yelled in pain for another moment or two, then returned her embrace.

"Oh, Gabrielle, Gabrielle, I missed you . . . "

"Joxer, you idiot!" She pulled back and shook him. "You stupid excuse for a warrior! What were you thinking? Forty thousand people, thirty-five years, three lives . . . " Then she threw her arms around his neck and just stayed there, her knees wet with dew, holding him and letting him hold her.

Xena hooked her chakram onto her belt and got to her feet. "All right, you two, let's go. I just got back the life I missed and I'm not gonna miss a second this time around."

This was a sensible point of view.

"Joxer, how did you do it?" Gabrielle asked. They were walking side-by-side behind Xena and Argo, on the road towards Corinth, where their friends always seemed to congregate. "It just wasn't possible. Do the math: you couldn't talk that many people into forgiving Xena in that short of a time. How?"

He grinned his goofy, lopsided grin at her. "Magic. You put a spell on me, you know, and your magic is stronger than death or time or anything else."

"You're crazy."

"I'm in love."

"Same thing," Xena commented over her shoulder, and Argo snorted agreement.

Author's Note:
This is for the three people I love most in the world. Don't rest in peace, guys: live in adventure.

Please take a moment to write to Seri at silverhawkwarrior@netzero.com and let her know how you liked the story!

COPYRIGHT NOTICE:
Xena: Warrior Princess, Xena, Gabrielle, Joxer, Michael, and all other characters who have appeared in the series, together with the names, titles and backstory are the sole copyright property of StudiosUSA and Renaissance Pictures. The lyrics to "Female of the Species" are owned by the appropriate copyright holders. No infringement of copyrights or trademarks is intended in the writing of this fan fiction. This story is copyright © 2001 by Seriana Ritani and is her sole property along with the story idea. This story cannot be sold or used for profit in any way. Copies of this story may be made for private use only and must include all disclaimers and copyright notices.