#i think they could be friends | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

softquietsteadylove · 1 year

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i think you wrote something like that before, with thena and gil meeting dane, but i thought about the deleted scene with sprite and dane in the museum where sprite says something about thenas statue and how they never get the statues to actually look like thena. so i thought maybe you can write something where thena and dane meet for the first time and dane is like a little fanboy because he works in a museum and loves history and he thinks about the things sprite said about her statue and name and of course he is afraid first because of thenas blank face

Dane comes down the stairs, observing the gallery floor. There are only a few people dotted around the exhibit this early in the day. He tilts his head; there's a woman staring up at their Goddess Athena.

He approaches her quietly. She's just standing there, almost frighteningly still. He can't even see her breathing as he gets closer. He moves past the skeletal model in the centre of the exhibit and gets to see a little more of her face. She almost looks familiar, but he can't quite place why.

Before he's within distance to reasonably ask if she has any questions, she turns to him. Her eyes are frighteningly sharp, and they make Dane feel like she can see under his skin and bones.

She looks a little like the statue herself.

Dane clears his throat, stuffing his hands in his pockets, "e-enjoying the exhibit?"

The woman continues to stare at him.

Dane stands a respectful and appropriate distance away from her (and maybe a little farther than that, because she scares him). He glances up at the Goddess fora second. "It's a lovely plaster, isn't it? We got it in from a restoration done in Athens."

"Hm," the woman tilts her head at him, and then at the statue. Her long, blonde hair folds against her shoulder from the movement. "It's not quite right."

"N-No?" he squeaks, and suddenly he's worried that maybe she's a visiting historian and he's assumed she's just a tourist because of subconscious sexism. Is she actually a curator from another museum? Perhaps she's one of the experts who are visiting to help them with the new artifacts recovered from the site of Tenochtitlan.

"No," she murmurs, and her expression is unchanged. She looks at him again, still frightening him with those eyes. "Do you think so?"

"W-Well," he flounders and fumbles, trying to think of a diplomatic answer that includes his honest opinion. She's waiting, and he can almost imagine her smiling at his discomfort. "I think...we'll never get any depiction of a god - or any historical figure - quite right, will we? Between different sources, and artistic interpretations, we may never have one definite image to reference."

"Hm." Not much of a talker, the mystery woman. She seems pleased by his answer--at least sufficiently placated.

Dane's eyes bounce between the woman and the statue again. He does that a few times before choosing a different avenue of conversation. "Are you from London or are you...visiting..."

She looks at him in a way that makes him feel as if she has triggered a survival instinct in his hindbrain. But she smiles, although he doesn't get the feeling that it's really for him. "I am here to see my sister."

"O-Oh!" Dane gulps, offering a smile of his own that he hopes doesn't seem like he's about to sweat through his shirt. "Well that's lovely! Is-"

"Hey, you."

Dane and the woman both look over, and he sees a massive, massive gentleman walking over to them. The closer he comes, the more Dane notices that his jacket can barely contain his arms and his shoulders look twice the width of his own.

"Hey," the blonde smiles, letting the warmly smiling man come right over to her side. They both look up at the Goddess. "It's a decent attempt, I suppose."

"Nah," he dismisses, with even less attempt to contain his disdain for the depiction. He waves a hand at it, "doesn't hold a candle to you."

Well, that's a very sweet thing to say to his...partner. Perhaps they're husband and wife, Dane thinks as the frightening woman loses all her sharpness in the face of the man beside her.

"What do you think, Dane?"

He blinks. He never told either of them his name, but now they're looking at him with matching - almost mischievous - grins. He fidgets with his tie. "O-Of the statue?"

The newcomer holds a hand up to his wife's admittedly beautiful face. "Do you think it does her justice?"

Dane feels as if he could hyperventilate. This is a lose-lose situation, right? Is he supposed to agree and compliment the man's wife right in front of him? Or does he disagree and say that he can see the resemblance between the statue of a woman in front of him and the actual statue on display?

"Stop it!"

Dane gulps, coughing a little as he swallows the wrong way. He looks over as Sersi comes trotting down the stairs and right over to them. She's looking at the two visitors with annoyance all over her lovely face. "Sersi?"

"You are antagonising him," she accuses, entirely correctly given their shrugs of agreement. She wags a finger at them, "it's not like he sculpted it."

The man rolls his eyes, wrapping an arm around the blonde's waist, "I remember, Sersi. We were there, remember?"

They were...they were where?...when?!

His wife gives him a look, and a grin, "you gave the sculptor hell the entirety of the time it took him to even get the marble shaped."

"He wasn't doing it right," he argues in his defense. He turns his attention entirely back to his wife again, tipping her chin up, "no one can capture how beautiful you are in person."

Dane blushes; Sersi rolls her eyes.

"Dane," Sersi addresses him, folding her arms and giving the visitors one last look. "This is Thena and Gilgamesh, my visiting family from Australia."

Sersi's family, yes--she had mentioned them coming to visit her. She hadn't actually clarified who was the sister, who was the brother, and which was the in-law. But he knows they've been married for 'longer than any of them can recall'. Apparently, that was not a humorous exaggeration.

"Sorry for messing with you," he - Gilgamesh - nudges Dane's shoulder in a friendly gesture. "It's nice to finally meet you. We've heard plenty from Sersi."

"Y-Y-Yes!" Dane tries not to stutter as she shakes Gilgamesh's hand. He extends it to Thena, before taking the cue from everyone present that she's not the handshake type. He nods his head to her, "I've heard about you as well."

Thena looks at Sersi, whose back goes straight reflexively. Apparently she just has this effect on people, even of her own ilk. But the women share a smile, which both makes Dane more nervous and more at ease. "I approve."

He didn't think he needed their approval, but he will gladly accept it. He gets the impression it's not easy to attain. "Thank you--Thena, was it?"

"Hm." Back to this, then.

"Thena is exactly who you think she is," Sersi says to Dane, lowering her voice accordingly. She looks up at the statue and then back to him. "Remember what Sprite was telling you?"

She was right; the statues really haven't gotten the woman's face quite right. And it's a very unique face, at that.

"Wow, o-okay, um," Dane fidgets again, and Sersi rubs his shoulder in support. But he's standing in front of history! He looks at Gilgamesh beside her, "a-and you're-!"

"Well, the story is pretty different," Gilgamesh shrugs with a gentle and easy smile on his face. "A lot of that is Sprite giving us shit. Y'know, family stuff--except when she does it, it goes down in the history books."

Dane looks at Thena again, who is waiting for him to spit it out. "H-How...how did the 'A' in A-Thena come about, then? If I may, that is."

Thena seems propitiated by his request to ask the question to her directly. "It is simply the correlation between Athens and my name. Eventually, the two became synonymous to the humans there."

"You never," Dane paused, pursing his lips faintly, "corrected them?"

"Crowds aren't really her thing," Gilgamesh excuses for his wife easily, leaning on her shoulder as he does. "Spent most of our time there trying to hide from 'em. It was a long couple hundred years, let's say."

A couple hundred years. A couple hundred years, they spent in Athens. Some of the most remarkable advances in civilisation as they know it stemmed from these people!

Sersi sighs as Dane looks at her with wide eyes. "I'll tell you more later. We were going to catch up over dinner?"

"Right," Gilgamesh laughs, "I wanna see what all the fuss over fish and chips is really about."

"Hm."

Dane wonders if he'll have to ask all of his questions through Sersi to get real answers from the Goddess of War herself.

"Come on," her husband nudges her, at least getting a smile for it.

"Your food is better."

"We're guests," he reminds his other half, who nods her agreement to behave. He gives her cheek a kiss, "we should indulge in the local stuff."

"Very well," she purrs as his lips linger against her skin.

Sersi huffs and starts walking away without checking if any of them are following. "Good to see nothing has changed."

#Thenamesh AU #I think Thena and Dane should meet #I think they could be friends #I just really think #Dane would be scared shitless of her #and Thena would be like Dane is funny #he shakes sometimes when I look at him #and poor Sersi is like stop terrorising my boyfriend!#but Dane is like tell me everything you've ever witnessed historically #and Thena is like okay this is going to take a long time #Sersi and Gil are like well let's go check out the London Eye I guess

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inkskinned · 9 months

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at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

#every time someones like ''AI will replace u" im like. u will have to fucking KILL ME #there is no replacement here bc i am not filling a position. i am just writing #and the writing is what i need to be doing #writeblr #this probably doesn't make sense bc its sooo frustrating i rarely speak it the way i want to #edited for the typo wrote it and then was late to a meeting lol #i love u people who mention my typos genuinely bc i don't always catch them!!!! :) it is doing me a genuine favor!!!#my friend says i should tell you ''thank you beta editors'' but i don't know what that means #i made her promise it isn't a wolf fanfiction thing. so if it IS a wolf thing she is DEAD to me (just kidding i love her)#hey PS PS PS ??? if ur reading this thinking what it's saying is ''i am financially capable of losing this'' ur reading it wrong #i write for free. i always have. i have worked 5-7 jobs at once to make ends meet.#i did not grow up with access or money. i did not grow up with connections or like some kind of excuse #i grew up and worked my fucking ASS OFF. and i STILL!!! wrote!!! on the side!!! because i didn't know how not to!!!#i do not write for money!!!! i write because i fuckken NEED TO #i could be in the fucking desert i could be in the fuckken tundra i could be in total darkness #and i would still be writing pretentious angsty poetry about it #im not in any way saying it's a good thing. i'm not in any way implying that they're NOT tryna kill us #i'm saying. you could take away our jobs and we could go hungry and we could suffer #and from that suffering (if i know us) we'd still fuckin make art.#i would LOVE to be able to make money doing this! i never have been able to. but i don't NEED to. i will find a way to make my life work #even if it means being miserable #but i will not give up this thing. for the whole world.

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