A/N: When I became interested in fandom again -- and you know, I don't even remember what piqued my interest -- I found myself over on the A/J, C/S side of things. I spent many evenings reading through the AJCS archive and that shaped my fic writing for many months to come. At the time I didn't have the Xena or Hercules DVDs and my VHS tapes were stuffed somewhere I couldn't remember, gathering dust. So I was a Very Bad Girl and began writing fic without any refreshers on the shows. Oh, eventually I found the stations that were running the shows and began watching them (saw a Strife one early on and I do remember that seeing that helped keep up my interest in the fandom), and then a while later dgcandace was kind enough to point out some inconsistencies in my version of Strife vs. canon. So I did finally get around to both watching the right eps and finding my VHS tapes to do the appropriate research, but before that happened, I wrote a fair amount.

This was one of those written during that time. A version of Strife that you probably won't find on AJCS, but the story itself is still riddled with the fanon I picked up from hanging out over there. There are things that just don't make sense, like gods being born the same way as mortals, nursing them, getting pregnant by accident, unable to rid themselves of the kid before birth -- things that just don't work when you're dealing with gods. And of course you have the whole "House" concept floating around, the gods calling each other cute little nicknames and Strife, Cupid and Aphrodite talking in godawful accents. Joxer also shows up along with his fanon-abusive father.

But there is where the AJCS influence really ends. I'd had an idea, what if Strife was really a textbook psychopath? Well, textbook up to the sex part, because this version of Strife would have very little interest in that, except when it came to Cupid, because Cupid would be his one obsession. The one thing he really gave a flying fuck about other than himself. His "interest" in Cupid would actually be a true obsession with stalker-ish tendencies. Nothing any of us would find vaguely romantic, more along the lines of restraining order creepy.

Cupid, though, I had no intentions of making him normal, either. He would be utterly codependent with bottomed-out self esteem, glomming on to whomever showed him the slightest scrap of affection because he wanted it to be True Love. He needed to be needed. So he'd basically be a very pathetic slut. Even after marrying Psyche, because Psyche wasn't enough for him. She couldn't give him that absolute, utter devotion of self, for fear of losing herself in the process. (You can probably see a big flaw right there; doesn't exactly gel with the mythology.)

So that's what was going through my mind when I set out to write this. I ended up with 39038 words and I hadn't even gotten to the part where Strife really grows up. I thought it was some seriously good shit. Unfortunately, when I gave it a reread a year or so later, I realized that it was very immature, writing-wise, and while there are some good ideas there, the whole thing reads more like an outline for the story, not the story itself. There's too much that needs fleshing out, too many things that just don't work and need rewriting, and the prose gets quite awkward and clunky in places.

Is it salvageable? Yeah, I really think it is. But will I ever do it? I doubt it. I'm just not that into C/S anymore and as much fun as writing psychopath!Strife and emotionallyfuckedup!Cupid could be, it's no longer something I want to spend months on, which is what this would take.

So here's what I have of it. There are some serious warnings to go along with this because very few of the people in here are in any way what you could call either mentally stable or emotionally healthy. There's no sex, I never got far enough to worry with that, but there is language, extreme violence and gore, and situations dealing with child rape (not graphic because there's no way I could've dealt with that).

Here it is. See what you think of it and the ideas behind it.

Pairing(s): Never made it that far.

Obsession