A/N: Hercules/Strife is a very rare pairing to see. I only know of two others who've done it. Corona's trilogy ("Messenger," "Consequences," and "Cause and Effect") was the first and though I don't know where you can find it online anymore, if you can get hold of copies, they're worth a read (grammar SNAFUs aside). Candace is the other person to have attempted it with Children's Games, a truly wonderful piece that makes you think very hard about Strife and just what makes him tick. When I started writing this story, Candace hadn't written hers yet and I was treading in relatively new territory. Now, though, with her example in mind as well as some advice from the Herc and Iolaus side of the fandom, I think I developed a much better grasp on where this story was headed and how.

I've been working on this thing, on and off, for four years. It's one of my long standing WIPs, and the first one to be finished. Parts 1 - 12 were written back in '03, part 13, bits of 16 and most of 17 sometime between '04 and '05. The rest, however, was done in the span of a couple months in the summer of '07, I also went back through 13 and the other bits, heavily edited them and adapted them to fit my new vision of the story. It took years, but I finally figured out where this thing was going and, more importantly, exactly how it would get there. Considering that I'd come to the decision not to finish, to just dump it in the WIP Graveyard, I'm pretty darn happy with my progress on this, and the results. (More on that here.)

This isn't a conventional style fic. The early parts of this story are constructed in a "snapshot" style, loosely connected scenes that don't always flow easily from one to the next. By the middle, however, they become more and more closely connected and less time passes between each one.

Yes, I'm aware that the tone is uneven some of the time and the story gets more than a little wobbly in places, but this is one of the exceedingly rare instances when I honestly don't care. I'm so stoked to have finished it at all that I'm just not up to the major rewrite it would take to fix everything. Typos, grammar errors, etc.? Please point those out. That doesn't take more than an instant to fix and I'm always happy to have someone catch those. Otherwise, it's just going to stay as it is now.

Pairing(s): Hercules/Strife, Autolycus/Joxer, Deimos/Strife, (a touch of Jett/Joxer and Ares/Xena)

Shackled