88 lines about 44 women - Yuletide Fic
Title: 88 lines about 44 women
Author: Abi
Fandom: Valentine (With a heavy dose of Greek mythology.)
Rating: Adult Content
Written for: fannore in the Yuletide 2008 Challenge
Acknowledgements: Several goddesses blessed this story with their time and attention. ceares sucked it up and watched the show just so she could help me figure this story out, for which she deserves a friggin medal. dancinbutterfly totally held my hand while I wrote this, despite never having seen a minute of the show, because she is just that awesome. spike21 read it and told me I didn't suck just when I needed to hear it - you don't know how much that means to me. And last but not least, my beautiful wife abisgirl told me when to write, take breaks, and go to bed. Thank you all so much.
Summary: When Phoebe dies, she is reborn with no memories of her past lives; but though she can be fickle, Aphrodite always remembers.
88 lines about 44 women
"I've had many names over the years, you'd probably recognize my original one - Aphrodite."
- Grace Valentine.
"Phoebe is a special case, a Titan. When members of her race die, they're reborn again into a new body with no memory of their past lives. So, although her soul is ancient, she's still a child emotionally."
- Grace Valentine.
1Before ever there were Olympians Phoebe played in the Oracle, hidden deep in her mother's navel. Her brother never saw the pretty lady in the water, but eons later, when she's a crone her grandson Apollo introduces her to Aphrodite, so beautiful and young and driving the other gods wild, and Phoebe finally understands.
2Her name is Cassandra until a pair of serpents come upon her while she sleeps and their forked tongues lick inside her ears, flicker and tickle and tease out something vital holding her sanity in. Without the Oracle no one believes her but Aphrodite, but all Aphrodite wants is to torment her with her touch and her tongue teasing the shell of Phoebe's ears where her serpents took Cassandra away.
3For generations she is called Sibyl, no matter where she is found, and spends her lifetimes a pale woman stooped in the dark, fingers trailing across the still waters under Delphi, watching the life of a fickle young goddess. She has only the promise of love in some future life and the certainty of one who knows destiny.
4Phoebe spends a decade with Venus' mouth on hers, drinking kisses like honey wine until she thinks she might drown. Rome burns without her; she dies young and happy and cannot care that the next life will not be so sweet.
5Men come and sack the temples, call Venus the Goddess of Whores and rape her priestesses in the square. Phoebe is burned alive for witchcraft a dozen times, never knowing who she is.
6She goes down to the pool in the cave when her moon blood comes without fail; she had her children lifetimes ago when her father's son took her. She tries to poison her womb with herbs when her father gives her away in this life and prays for beautiful woman in her dreams to save her until the blood and the dead child slip out of her and she slips away into her next life.
7Phoebe's mother found her when she was a small child and raised her as her own, but never aged a day. Phoebe dies an old woman with her head pillowed on her mother's lap; her mother sheds crystal tears down her porcelain cheeks, stroking her daughter's sliver-white hair away from her wrinkled face.
8Her name is Miriam and she can see the future in a pool of water at the base of the hill. She knows that somewhere there is a very beautiful, very sad woman weeping for her lost child, just as sure as she knows their paths won't cross this lifetime.
9They bleed Abigail Tuesdays and Fridays, but still she has visions of a daemon woman who steals the virtue of a dozen men every night that leave her sweating and agitated. They light a candle for Abigail every Sunday and tie her hands to the bedposts every night to guard against her spoiling what soul the succubus has left her further in her sleep.
10Grace finds Hannah on the eve of her marriage to the butcher's son. As she's running for a ship setting sail for Greece at dawn, she thinks her mother will be sorely disappointed she will have to pay for the good cuts of beef again.
11Phoebe is born self aware with wise milk-white eyes, blind to the here and now. The three days she is alive before they drown her in the river she sees more than she has seen in seven lifetimes and knows Grace will find her again in the next.
12Sarah wants a little gray kitten with a pink nose and a white paw more than anything she has ever wanted and she knows the pretty faerie lady with the wavy black hair will bring her one for her birthday. Her mother laughs and says, "If wishes were fishes," but for that year and every year of her life the faerie lady comes and gives her her birthday wish.
13Helen and Cassie became sisters when Cassie's husband Andre introduced Helen to his brother Lem. Everyone in the village says heaven was looking down on Lem that day, but privately, as she braids daisies into Helen's hair in the afternoon sun, Cassie thinks it was her the angels were smiling at that day.
14The poet whimpers, delirious as her lover suckles her breast. She rocks her hips against her Aphrodite's thigh until it's slick with her juices and cries out her completion.
15Huldah is 25 when she meets a woman so beautiful she thinks she must be imagining it, until the next time she sees her, years later, and realizes that the picture she has of Grace in her mind doesn't do justice to her actual beauty. She spends years between sweet stolen kisses behind the barn and is grateful when she gets them.
16She says, "Your face is so familiar; I just can't quite recall where I've seen you before." The woman sighs wistfully and says, "You never do," before paying for the cloth and walking out of the shop.
17Mariam's mother tells her it's nothing but sinful vanity the way she covets pretty things like buttons and ribbons and the like, but she can't help herself when the new girl (so pretty she doesn't need any silly adornments) tucks a purple petaled flower behind Mariam's ear, just peaking out of her bonnet. Mariam presses the flower in the middle of her prayer book and keeps it hidden there until she can no longer hold the book in her withered old hands.
18Phoebe falls in a pond when she's eight and sees her father die. She is twelve and has been living in the muck for a week after her father's widow cast her out when Grace finds her and tells her that nasty woman wasn't really her mother after all.
19Abbey finds her magic on her own, makes the flowers in her garden dance and tells Hester Mayfield her true love's name. She's burned at the stake before she even knows that someone is looking for her.
20Grace found Phoebe when she was a little girl and swept her away to a life of magic. By the time Phoebe is 17 Grace has lost interest in waiting and taken up with a painter who finds her smile enigmatic.
21Aphrodite's lips are red, puckered around Phoebe's pink nipple as she sucks. Phoebe moans and wishes it could always be like this.
22Ares slices her in half when she's six months old and leaves her tiny bleeding body in the bed of his slut wife. Aphrodite takes herbs that night and takes away any hope he might have had that she will ever give him a child.
23Deborah never finds true love. She dies alone.
24Rachael waits for true love until she's afraid she'll be barren. She has 36 great grandchildren when she dies, still wondering what might have happened had she waited just a little bit longer.
25Daphne sees a woman who could be the spitting image of Venus on the Half Shell out of the corner of her eye one day. She thinks it very odd that Venus should be so very sad.
26Ulga's husband is killed in the war. Her sons follow in their father's footsteps and her daughters stolen away by the barbarian hords.
27Ares raises Phoebe as his daughter. Though her mother's wanton infidelities disgust her, she can't stop herself from watching them every night with one hand dipped in the pool of Oracle and one hand dipped in the pools of her skirt.
28Sister Mary Esther and Sister Mary Grace live one cell down from each other for forty years and never touch. Though Mary Esther never says so out loud for the sheer folly of it, she secretly thinks Mary Grace must be an angel sent from God just for her.
29Nothing remarkable happens the whole of Beatrice's life, so she follows the glamorous lives of the Ladies of the Ton in the papers. One Lady in particular captures her imagination, bright and beautiful as she is.
30Sarah can't stand the monotony of her life, so she runs away to the city. She falls to a life of prostitution, and quite happily into the arms of the madam who takes her in.
31A wild-eyed, crazy woman comes through her window and kidnaps her in the night, tells her she is a goddess, and locks them up together in cave. Phoebe has never been happier.
32While Katrina knows that Bella has the attention span of a gnat, sleeps with any man who looks her way, and never remembers important dates like birthdays and holidays and anniversaries, she just shakes her head and smiles, because despite all that, Katrina knows true love when she sees it. Bella, she thinks, knows it, too.
33An angry man bursts into her bedroom, purple with rage, and drags her lover away by her hair. Her lover screams, "I'll find you, I promise, I'll always find you!" as the door slams shut.
34Everyone deserves a shot at true love, even her, she believes this, no matter what anyone says. She turns to her friend, runs her fingers across Grace's cheek to brush a lock of raven's black hair out of her eyes, smiles shyly and stands up on her tip toes to kiss her.
35In her whole life she sees her cousin Grace (twice removed, on her mother's side, the spitting image of their great-great grandmother, or so everyone says) three times. Once when she is a little girl Grace gives her a doll with stovepipe curls almost as pretty as her cousin's, once at her coming out party when Grace introduces her to a handsome young man named Richard, and once at her wedding, where Grace looks ethereally pretty with three perfect tears streaming down her face as Richard says, "I do."
36They move around a lot. Phoebe sees all the ways they could be found out, watches Ari or her father or some random mob of disapproving neighbors steal into their house and drag one or both of them every time she touches the surface of a pool of water, but she does it every morning when she wakes up, because while it hurts her heart, it makes it that much easier to hide.
37Elayne shivers deliciously hot in her belly every time Grace's fingers brush against hers. For years she wishes that Grace would touch her somewhere, anywhere, everywhere else, but she never says and then Grace is gone.
38She laughs and kisses Grace on the nose. She can feel Grace's fond smile on the back of her neck as she pays for the puppy.
39"I can't fall in love, it's practically pathological with me," she tells her new friend in a sort of over-serious, woeful fashion and falls back onto her bed dramatically. Her friend laughs and says, "I think I can help you with that."
40Rachael sighs happily as Grace brushes her hair. Grace sweeps her hair back from her neck after the hundredth stroke and presses her lips to Rachael's throat, just below her right ear.
41Phoebe is blind jealous when the Oracle shows her Grace is sleeping with Ari again. When she storms in to confront them, Grace slaps her and tells her she can't be bothered to waste all her time protecting Phoebe if she's just going to run around waving a flag in front of the bull.
42A frighteningly beautiful woman finds Phoebe when she's very young, drags her to Apollo's door and leaves her there, throwing, "She's your problem this time," over her shoulder as she goes. Phoebe is so annoyed by this treatment she doesn't even bother to ask the Oracle who the woman was, or what her problem is, doesn't even think about her again ... much.
43Phoebe Valentine knows who she is (what she is) and that Grace Valentine isn't her mother (or her lover, or really anything to her at all beyond her friend, despite the niggling little voice in the back of her mind screaming otherwise). She breathes deep and quashes it every time she feels her jealousy of anyone in Grace's life start to rear it's head - they're both happier that way - and Ari leaves them be.
44In the end they both give up; Aphrodite gives up her need to be relevant and fades, and the Oracle gives Phoebe one last gift - it gives her up. They die side by side, mortal and truly beautiful in that way that only old women who have been both loved and lived full, happy lives can be.
Author: Abi
Fandom: Valentine (With a heavy dose of Greek mythology.)
Rating: Adult Content
Written for: fannore in the Yuletide 2008 Challenge
Acknowledgements: Several goddesses blessed this story with their time and attention. ceares sucked it up and watched the show just so she could help me figure this story out, for which she deserves a friggin medal. dancinbutterfly totally held my hand while I wrote this, despite never having seen a minute of the show, because she is just that awesome. spike21 read it and told me I didn't suck just when I needed to hear it - you don't know how much that means to me. And last but not least, my beautiful wife abisgirl told me when to write, take breaks, and go to bed. Thank you all so much.
Summary: When Phoebe dies, she is reborn with no memories of her past lives; but though she can be fickle, Aphrodite always remembers.
88 lines about 44 women
"I've had many names over the years, you'd probably recognize my original one - Aphrodite."
- Grace Valentine.
"Phoebe is a special case, a Titan. When members of her race die, they're reborn again into a new body with no memory of their past lives. So, although her soul is ancient, she's still a child emotionally."
- Grace Valentine.
1Before ever there were Olympians Phoebe played in the Oracle, hidden deep in her mother's navel. Her brother never saw the pretty lady in the water, but eons later, when she's a crone her grandson Apollo introduces her to Aphrodite, so beautiful and young and driving the other gods wild, and Phoebe finally understands.
2Her name is Cassandra until a pair of serpents come upon her while she sleeps and their forked tongues lick inside her ears, flicker and tickle and tease out something vital holding her sanity in. Without the Oracle no one believes her but Aphrodite, but all Aphrodite wants is to torment her with her touch and her tongue teasing the shell of Phoebe's ears where her serpents took Cassandra away.
3For generations she is called Sibyl, no matter where she is found, and spends her lifetimes a pale woman stooped in the dark, fingers trailing across the still waters under Delphi, watching the life of a fickle young goddess. She has only the promise of love in some future life and the certainty of one who knows destiny.
4Phoebe spends a decade with Venus' mouth on hers, drinking kisses like honey wine until she thinks she might drown. Rome burns without her; she dies young and happy and cannot care that the next life will not be so sweet.
5Men come and sack the temples, call Venus the Goddess of Whores and rape her priestesses in the square. Phoebe is burned alive for witchcraft a dozen times, never knowing who she is.
6She goes down to the pool in the cave when her moon blood comes without fail; she had her children lifetimes ago when her father's son took her. She tries to poison her womb with herbs when her father gives her away in this life and prays for beautiful woman in her dreams to save her until the blood and the dead child slip out of her and she slips away into her next life.
7Phoebe's mother found her when she was a small child and raised her as her own, but never aged a day. Phoebe dies an old woman with her head pillowed on her mother's lap; her mother sheds crystal tears down her porcelain cheeks, stroking her daughter's sliver-white hair away from her wrinkled face.
8Her name is Miriam and she can see the future in a pool of water at the base of the hill. She knows that somewhere there is a very beautiful, very sad woman weeping for her lost child, just as sure as she knows their paths won't cross this lifetime.
9They bleed Abigail Tuesdays and Fridays, but still she has visions of a daemon woman who steals the virtue of a dozen men every night that leave her sweating and agitated. They light a candle for Abigail every Sunday and tie her hands to the bedposts every night to guard against her spoiling what soul the succubus has left her further in her sleep.
10Grace finds Hannah on the eve of her marriage to the butcher's son. As she's running for a ship setting sail for Greece at dawn, she thinks her mother will be sorely disappointed she will have to pay for the good cuts of beef again.
11Phoebe is born self aware with wise milk-white eyes, blind to the here and now. The three days she is alive before they drown her in the river she sees more than she has seen in seven lifetimes and knows Grace will find her again in the next.
12Sarah wants a little gray kitten with a pink nose and a white paw more than anything she has ever wanted and she knows the pretty faerie lady with the wavy black hair will bring her one for her birthday. Her mother laughs and says, "If wishes were fishes," but for that year and every year of her life the faerie lady comes and gives her her birthday wish.
13Helen and Cassie became sisters when Cassie's husband Andre introduced Helen to his brother Lem. Everyone in the village says heaven was looking down on Lem that day, but privately, as she braids daisies into Helen's hair in the afternoon sun, Cassie thinks it was her the angels were smiling at that day.
14The poet whimpers, delirious as her lover suckles her breast. She rocks her hips against her Aphrodite's thigh until it's slick with her juices and cries out her completion.
15Huldah is 25 when she meets a woman so beautiful she thinks she must be imagining it, until the next time she sees her, years later, and realizes that the picture she has of Grace in her mind doesn't do justice to her actual beauty. She spends years between sweet stolen kisses behind the barn and is grateful when she gets them.
16She says, "Your face is so familiar; I just can't quite recall where I've seen you before." The woman sighs wistfully and says, "You never do," before paying for the cloth and walking out of the shop.
17Mariam's mother tells her it's nothing but sinful vanity the way she covets pretty things like buttons and ribbons and the like, but she can't help herself when the new girl (so pretty she doesn't need any silly adornments) tucks a purple petaled flower behind Mariam's ear, just peaking out of her bonnet. Mariam presses the flower in the middle of her prayer book and keeps it hidden there until she can no longer hold the book in her withered old hands.
18Phoebe falls in a pond when she's eight and sees her father die. She is twelve and has been living in the muck for a week after her father's widow cast her out when Grace finds her and tells her that nasty woman wasn't really her mother after all.
19Abbey finds her magic on her own, makes the flowers in her garden dance and tells Hester Mayfield her true love's name. She's burned at the stake before she even knows that someone is looking for her.
20Grace found Phoebe when she was a little girl and swept her away to a life of magic. By the time Phoebe is 17 Grace has lost interest in waiting and taken up with a painter who finds her smile enigmatic.
21Aphrodite's lips are red, puckered around Phoebe's pink nipple as she sucks. Phoebe moans and wishes it could always be like this.
22Ares slices her in half when she's six months old and leaves her tiny bleeding body in the bed of his slut wife. Aphrodite takes herbs that night and takes away any hope he might have had that she will ever give him a child.
23Deborah never finds true love. She dies alone.
24Rachael waits for true love until she's afraid she'll be barren. She has 36 great grandchildren when she dies, still wondering what might have happened had she waited just a little bit longer.
25Daphne sees a woman who could be the spitting image of Venus on the Half Shell out of the corner of her eye one day. She thinks it very odd that Venus should be so very sad.
26Ulga's husband is killed in the war. Her sons follow in their father's footsteps and her daughters stolen away by the barbarian hords.
27Ares raises Phoebe as his daughter. Though her mother's wanton infidelities disgust her, she can't stop herself from watching them every night with one hand dipped in the pool of Oracle and one hand dipped in the pools of her skirt.
28Sister Mary Esther and Sister Mary Grace live one cell down from each other for forty years and never touch. Though Mary Esther never says so out loud for the sheer folly of it, she secretly thinks Mary Grace must be an angel sent from God just for her.
29Nothing remarkable happens the whole of Beatrice's life, so she follows the glamorous lives of the Ladies of the Ton in the papers. One Lady in particular captures her imagination, bright and beautiful as she is.
30Sarah can't stand the monotony of her life, so she runs away to the city. She falls to a life of prostitution, and quite happily into the arms of the madam who takes her in.
31A wild-eyed, crazy woman comes through her window and kidnaps her in the night, tells her she is a goddess, and locks them up together in cave. Phoebe has never been happier.
32While Katrina knows that Bella has the attention span of a gnat, sleeps with any man who looks her way, and never remembers important dates like birthdays and holidays and anniversaries, she just shakes her head and smiles, because despite all that, Katrina knows true love when she sees it. Bella, she thinks, knows it, too.
33An angry man bursts into her bedroom, purple with rage, and drags her lover away by her hair. Her lover screams, "I'll find you, I promise, I'll always find you!" as the door slams shut.
34Everyone deserves a shot at true love, even her, she believes this, no matter what anyone says. She turns to her friend, runs her fingers across Grace's cheek to brush a lock of raven's black hair out of her eyes, smiles shyly and stands up on her tip toes to kiss her.
35In her whole life she sees her cousin Grace (twice removed, on her mother's side, the spitting image of their great-great grandmother, or so everyone says) three times. Once when she is a little girl Grace gives her a doll with stovepipe curls almost as pretty as her cousin's, once at her coming out party when Grace introduces her to a handsome young man named Richard, and once at her wedding, where Grace looks ethereally pretty with three perfect tears streaming down her face as Richard says, "I do."
36They move around a lot. Phoebe sees all the ways they could be found out, watches Ari or her father or some random mob of disapproving neighbors steal into their house and drag one or both of them every time she touches the surface of a pool of water, but she does it every morning when she wakes up, because while it hurts her heart, it makes it that much easier to hide.
37Elayne shivers deliciously hot in her belly every time Grace's fingers brush against hers. For years she wishes that Grace would touch her somewhere, anywhere, everywhere else, but she never says and then Grace is gone.
38She laughs and kisses Grace on the nose. She can feel Grace's fond smile on the back of her neck as she pays for the puppy.
39"I can't fall in love, it's practically pathological with me," she tells her new friend in a sort of over-serious, woeful fashion and falls back onto her bed dramatically. Her friend laughs and says, "I think I can help you with that."
40Rachael sighs happily as Grace brushes her hair. Grace sweeps her hair back from her neck after the hundredth stroke and presses her lips to Rachael's throat, just below her right ear.
41Phoebe is blind jealous when the Oracle shows her Grace is sleeping with Ari again. When she storms in to confront them, Grace slaps her and tells her she can't be bothered to waste all her time protecting Phoebe if she's just going to run around waving a flag in front of the bull.
42A frighteningly beautiful woman finds Phoebe when she's very young, drags her to Apollo's door and leaves her there, throwing, "She's your problem this time," over her shoulder as she goes. Phoebe is so annoyed by this treatment she doesn't even bother to ask the Oracle who the woman was, or what her problem is, doesn't even think about her again ... much.
43Phoebe Valentine knows who she is (what she is) and that Grace Valentine isn't her mother (or her lover, or really anything to her at all beyond her friend, despite the niggling little voice in the back of her mind screaming otherwise). She breathes deep and quashes it every time she feels her jealousy of anyone in Grace's life start to rear it's head - they're both happier that way - and Ari leaves them be.
44In the end they both give up; Aphrodite gives up her need to be relevant and fades, and the Oracle gives Phoebe one last gift - it gives her up. They die side by side, mortal and truly beautiful in that way that only old women who have been both loved and lived full, happy lives can be.