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Everyone was asleep.
Well, almost everyone.
The Australian Outback had more than its fair share of dangers, the primary one being venomous snakes. Thena had long since accustomed herself to listening for hissing and watching where she put her feet.
She was less cautious when the Mahd Wy’ry took over, but she couldn’t do anything about that.
Thena cautiously wandered to the small structure where she’d left her drawings, and found them disturbed. A crawling discomfort tickled her skin: She didn’t like others looking at the drawings, although she had become somewhat less sensitive to Gilgamesh doing so. It was difficult to describe what she felt when he did, not quite horror, not quite shame, but… Pieces of those, and so many other things, creating a threatening sense of instability.
Like he- or Thena- might go insane if they looked too long.
This time, it would likely have been Sersi. Other than Gilgamesh, she was the only one who had left the house for any real period of time that night, and after she’d returned Sersi suddenly had the answers for the crisis they found themselves in.
It made Thena’s stomach roil to think of Sersi looking at these. Obviously she was only a seeing a pale adaptation of what Thena had seen, but to the average person it was still a disturbing sight. Sersi was a gentle soul, and though Thena was not in the habit of coddling anyone, she was not convinced that that gentleness would endure if Sersi ever had the devastating misfortune of seeing what Thena had seen in her visions.
Especially since those visions were actually memories.
The wind picked up, blowing Thena’s hair into her face and threatening to carry off some of the drawings. She quickly replaced the rocks she’d used to pin them down; she’d lost drawings before, too out of it to stop them from blowing away, but the thought of someone somehow finding one and examining it felt like someone was dragging a rusty nail across her brain.
“Thena?”
She started slightly, shoulders slumping with relief when Gilgamesh came around the corner. “Here.”
“This is an awfully popular spot today,” he observed with raised eyebrows and a small smile.
The one she offered in response was weak. “Unfortunately.”
Gilgamesh glanced briefly at the drawings before making a point of averting his gaze- he was aware of Thena’s discomfort and made an effort not to make it worse. “How are you feeling?”
Thena offered a noncommittal shrug in response. That the world would soon be coming to an end was shocking enough, but contextualizing that in terms of the Mahd Wy’ry, the idea that Thena remembered happening before, wasn’t something she’d quite processed yet.
“I guess the silver lining,” Gilgamesh posed, “is that you aren’t hallucinating. You’re just…”
“Severely traumatized?”
He grimaced. “Yeah, I guess it doesn’t sound that much better.”
But it did provide some context. Thena wasn’t hallucinating, she was remembering; she wasn’t randomly breaking with reality, she was being triggered by things that she subconsciously related back to those memories. Laid out all together, there wasn’t too much that was functionally different between her and a human soldier experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder.
Although since she was actually a ‘fancy robot’, as Kingo put it, the actual neurological processes that went into it were probably different.
“It…” Thena frowned and shook her head. “It doesn’t- it doesn’t feel like vindication, to know that what I’m seeing is real- or was real. I don’t feel good about this- I feel so much worse. I don’t want to be delusional, I don’t want my mind to be completely falling apart, but this is not…”
Reality wasn’t presenting her with a particularly enticing alternative.
“If what Sersi says is real, then everything I’ve seen is real, and everything I’ve seen is absolutely-” Thena’s voice cracked, and she covered her mouth and squeezed her eyes shut.
Gilgamesh’s arm looped around her waist, pulled her close. “It’s okay.”
“No,” Thena groaned, her head bumping against his. “It’s not, it’s not okay, I don’t want the things I’ve seen to be real.”
There weren’t words, or any amount of art supplies, that could capture the visceral horror of her visions. There was a very specific sort of terror one experienced when confronted with a life-threatening situation that was immediately beyond their ken to solve, and every time Thena experienced those memories, every single emotion she had felt at the time came back too.
She- and the other Eternals- had died in previous emergences. In some of these memories, Thena remembered feeling the vertebra in her spine snap. She vividly recalled cowering (cowering!) with an injured Sersi as the world broke apart around them. She recalled Druig lying with his skull partially caved in. There had been others too, forms clad in the armor of the Eternals whose names and faces Thena simply didn’t recognize here and now.
How many friends and allies had she lost and forgotten?
How many memories did she have of her friends now, stuck in stasis somewhere in the World Forge?
Had Gilgamesh been with her? She (thankfully) didn’t have any memories of him being killed, so maybe they had never been on a planet together before.
Or maybe they had; it would explain why they had been drawn to one another so quickly after they’d arrived on Earth.
They stood together for a while, Gilgamesh’s hand running up and down Thena’s back as she tried to collect herself. Crying had gotten a little too easy for her in the last five hundred years.
“I don’t want to be like this in front of the others,” Thena whispered, reaching up to rub away the tears. “I don’t want the pity, or the scrutiny. Kingo’s only just stopped looking at me like he thinks I’m going to jump him the second his back’s turned.”
“I might, if that camera ends up in my face again,” Gilgamesh grumbled.
Thena giggled. “He hasn’t changed. None of them have. Druig probably hasn’t either.”
“I doubt it.”
Thena knew she had changed, although she didn’t think Gilgamesh had: He was every bit the patient, steadfast, good-humored warrior she’d known and loved for the first six-thousand five-hundred years before the Mahd Wy’ry.
She leaned up and kissed him for a moment, hands squeezing his shoulders.
“That was nice,” Gilgamesh said mildly, a grin spreading across his face, hands resting on Thena’s waist. “What was it for?”
“In my memories,” she whispered. “Eternals died during the emergence. If Druig won’t help, or the plan fails, we’ll simply die and be remade by Arishem, all of our memories of Earth stored away.” Thena let out a weak, slightly unhinged laugh. “All of these years, you may have wasted all this time trying to help me save memories that will just be lost anyways.”
“It wasn’t a waste, and never will be,” Gilgamesh insisted, pulling her a little closer. “I’m glad you did. You have a right to your memories.”
“Yes, well…” Thena sighed. “There’s still a real possibility that things might be ending soon. It doesn’t seem like a time for things to go unsaid.”
“That’s fine with me.” Gilgamesh pulled her into an embrace. Thena set her head on his shoulder, relaxing. “I know it hasn’t always been easy,” he muttered. “But I’ve never regretted the time I’ve had with you, Mahd Wy’ry or not.”
“I don’t regret it either.” Thena frowned. “Except for the moments when I’ve nearly killed you. Those I regret.”
Gilgamesh chuckled, a warm and pleasant sound.
They walked back towards the house. The moon was bright, and illuminated the way easily enough.
“Do you suppose,” Thena ventured, wanting to ask the question before they were in earshot of the others again. “That Druig will agree to help?”
“I don’t see why not. He broke away from us because he couldn’t stand watching death and destruction anymore.”
“Do you think it will work?”
Gilgamesh was quiet as they reached the front door. “I guess we’ll find out,” he said eventually with a heavy sigh. He went to push open the door, and then turned to Thena with a little smile. “Most of the beds are taken. Want to share mine?”
Thena smirked. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d shared a bed by far. “I suppose I could tolerate it just for tonight.”
And every other night afterwards, if he’d have her.
If the world was going to end, it was Gilgamesh that Thena wanted to be with when it happened.
-End