#Blake's translation of Homer is from Emily Wilson who we love and respect and admire in this house

[thecousinsdangereux]

fic preview: over the wide skies up above (and the earth below)

Pairing: Blake/Yang (RWBY)

Playlist: On Spotify

Notes: This is a preview of a thing that I may or may not be something I actually finish post ski!au. Basically, it’s all for @twelveclara who wanted a Greek Gods AU. You’re lucky I adore you, you dumb bitch. I’ll fix this up and write more for you some day. Happy birthday. <3

                                                           — 

She was picking flowers: roses, crocus, and beautiful violets. Up and down the soft meadow. Iris blossoms too she picked, and hyacinth. And the narcissus, which was grown as a lure for the flower-faced girl by Gaia. All according to the plans of Zeus. She was doing a favor for the one who receives many guests. It was a wondrous thing in its splendor. To look at it gives a sense of holy awe to the immortal gods as well as mortal humans. It has a hundred heads growing from the root up. Its sweet fragrance spread over the wide skies up above. And the earth below smiled back in all its radiance. So too the churning mass of the salty sea

[From the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, translated by Gregory Nagy]

                                                            —

They meet on a Sunday morning, on the first day of Winter, under a cloudy and snow-filled sky.

It’s a collision only barely avoided; she swerves, but the white petals still brush against her cheek, sticking out every which way and thus not as easily dodged as the form carrying them (barreling around the corner without any particular concern or hesitation). The juxtaposition hardly stops there, because the resulting stream of expletives feels in direct opposition to what follows it: an apology that —  when directed at her — sounds soft and familiar, despite the lingering profanities.  

The thought doesn’t make any sense, but she hardly has time to consider its meaning when it first hits her; it’s quickly followed by a scent — floral and strong and overwhelming — that hits just as hard, turns the world over on itself, shifts the seasons, melts the ice around them. 

“Shit, sorry! I’ve got so many of these fucking things that I can barely see and I’ve got to get them to the greenhouse in like five minutes and I’m really running late and are you okay?” 

The flowers — she can see them more clearly now: long-stemmed and white with a brilliant yellow center ringed in red — obscure most of the woman’s face. But her long blonde hair spills outside of the boundaries of the dozens of stems barely contained to the two large buckets she holds in front of her chest. Blake finds herself briefly distracted again (distracted from a distraction), this time by the looping curls, the different colors of gold that glint among the strands despite the overcast skies. But then the woman shifts, trying to see around the stems, and with the movement, a new wave of the scent hits her and it’s all she can think about again. 

“What is that?” 

“What’s what?” The woman laughs and finally pokes her head through the flowers. The bright smile that appears is one that Blake cannot differentiate from the first bloom of Spring. “You mean like, the daffodils or — whoa.” 

She can’t pinpoint the reason for the change, but something makes the woman’s eyes (the color of the sky at 5:30 am in the middle of June) widen when they first meet Blake’s. The surprise steals her smile, but it returns almost immediately, stronger than before. 

“Whoa,” she says again. “Where have you been?” 

Blake’s a college freshman — one who got a fake ID at 16 and has been to frat parties and bars and clubs — and so she’s heard the line before (or something like it, ‘all my life’ tacked on at the end), but she’s never heard anyone say it like this woman does. The emphasis is in the wrong spot, the tone out of place, the emotion behind it incomprehensible. 

(Stranger than all that, her instantaneous thought — one she only just keeps from escaping her own lips — is waiting for you.) 

“I — what?” she says instead. 

“It’s the day before Christmas break! I’ve been here all semester and I’ve never seen you before. It’s not that big of a school. So, like, where have you been?” 

The girl shifts her cargo to the side — as though to give herself a better view — and the warm leather of her coat, the soft wool around the collar, belong on her frame as much as the dark gold belongs around her neck (a woven scarf, color deeper than her hair). 

“Not in the greenhouse,” Blake settles on. “I didn’t know we had one.” 

“Yeah, I could have guessed that.” 

It comes with a laugh and Blake’s not sure whether to be offended or not, but the woman quickly continues, before Blake can settle on any one expression.

“The Botany program is pretty small. Not too many people other than us visit the far field, let alone the Greenhouse.”

“Botany?” It’s not what she expects, but it feels right. 

(Blake’s not sure how she knows what feels right. But she doesn’t question it either.)

“Yeah. Plants are sort of my thing.” The girl lifts one of the buckets as though to prove her point, and Blake is once again reminded. 

“Yeah. What are those? They smell — ”

(Perfect. Like something she’s been searching for.) 

“Really good right?” She laughs again; a breeze, but one strong enough to bend the trunks of trees. “Yeah, people use it in perfumes all the fucking time. But I think I like the pure version of it best.” Leaning forward, the woman tips the bucket in Blake’s direction, allowing her to get another whiff. “Poet’s Daffodil. Narcissus poeticus, if you’d be into me showing off.” 

She’s leaning in, breathing in deep, but her surprise at the name is such that it nearly sends her rocking off balance and crashing face-first into the delicate stems.

“Oh, you are into me showing off.” The woman shifts again, but the flowers can’t obscure the brightness of her grin. “Hold on, let me take some notes for future reference. Is it the Latin, foreign languages in general, or the vast depth of knowledge that does it for you?” 

“No, I — ” Blake barely recognizes the laugh that escapes from her own lips. “No, it’s just. I’ve never seen it before. The flower version of Narcissus, I mean. But I’ve read about it a hundred times. The man, at least.” 

The woman’s head tilts in thought, but her expression clears quickly.

“Mythology nerd, huh?”

“Classics major.” 

“Oh, super mythology nerd.” She tips the bucket forward again. One of the flowers slides against Blake’s cheek. “You better take one then. You can show it off to all your friends. Spin it however you like. Something like, you got a mythological flower from a mythological girl.” She pauses. “Okay that didn’t actually make sense, I don’t think. I meant like, you got a flower from a goddess. Because I’m like -- uh, I dunno -- what’s the hottest goddess?” 

“The last person who answered that question got into an awful lot of trouble, in the end,” Blake quips, but finds her smile aches. (She also finds she has an immediate answer, though it’s not one of the three that Paris had to consider in the contest that lead to such trouble for the Greeks and Trojans both.)

“I think I remember the basics of that one. How about you take the flower and my number instead of a golden apple and we’ll skip the bad ending.” 

It’s sudden, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like Blake’s been waiting for a while. 

“Forward,” she says despite all that, because it’s almost as though she has to. As though there are steps to take that she’s not allowed to skip, lest she upset a balance she wasn’t aware existed before now. 

It’s a dramatic thought; she’d laugh at herself if — when she reaches into the bucket to grasp one of the stems — she didn’t feel the world sigh in relief.  

“I’ve never really seen the point of wasting time.” The woman shrugs, tone and words light, but only in the same sort of way (required, practiced lines). “There’s just not enough of it.” 

“You sound like you’re a hundred years old and on your deathbed,” Blake laughs, but oh, her heart is clenching. And she’s taking out her phone. She’s making a new contact. She’s already thinking about the first time she’ll text this woman and she doesn’t even know her name. 

(There isn’t enough time. Somehow, she agrees, and that makes her want to get all of it in now, while she has a chance.)

“Or I’m someone who is very late in dropping off some daffodils that don’t really like the cold much. Even if I have a very valid excuse in wanting to stick around.” She pulls away with several long strides backwards; it seems genuinely regretful, but she brightens a little, seeing the flower clutched in one of Blake’s hands (and her phone in the other). “818-815-6247. Let me know if you want to see the greenhouse. Or tell me about the prettiest goddess. Or do anything at all.” 

She takes another step back and Blake nods twice, before realizing she’s missing something. 

“Wait! I’m — ” It comes out sounding a little more desperate than she would have liked, but then, the woman turns back towards her quickly enough for a single petal to fall off of one of of the flowers, so maybe pretenses aren’t really something either of them are concerning themselves with. “I don’t know your name.” 

“Yang.” It’s not the name she expects, but it slides into place easily enough. 

“Blake.” (Somehow, that’s not the name she expects either, even though it’s her own.) “I’ll text you. Call you. Soon.” 

“Good.” She catches another flash of that smile before Yang turns away. “And I’ll be waiting. Or —  trying to. I’ve never been very patient, though you’d think I would have learned by now.” 

“A lot of practice?” Blake calls after her, takes a step towards her (doesn’t notice). 

“Too much, I think.” Her laugh carries, blonde curls whip in the wind as she walks off. “So try to have mercy on me this time.”

Afterwards, she smells of daffodils (of dark green leaves, of a meadow that stretches on and on and on, of mint and hay and dirt and weeds and the whole of spring), as though it’s coming from her pores rather than the flower she places in a small glass on her nightstand. The scent persists through showers and nights out and all the smells that come with living in a coed freshman dorm. It lasts for days (or eons) and stretches back in time, too; she finds it tucked away in memories where it has no place, couldn’t possibly exist. 

(She’s five and her mom takes her to pick blueberries, she’s fourteen on a field trip to the botanical gardens, she’s seventeen and trying to find a perfume that suits her, she’s nineteen and stepping out of her late night Byzantine history seminar. And it’s there — it’s always there — just out of reach: the field over, the next flower, a slightly different perfume, a whiff on the wind that she chases across campus for ten minutes before giving up.)  

(She’s older — ageless — and she doesn’t recognize herself, but it’s there too.) 

The scent of flowers lingers and Blake doesn’t mind. 

She also texts Yang before it can begin to fade.

—

They first meet on Helios’s Day, on the morning of the vernal equinox, under a bright and clear sky.

She watches from behind the treeline, but even from a distance, it’s obvious, the way the ground rises to greet her when the woman walks past: stalks lengthening, flowers unfolding, grass brightening into a more vibrant shade of green with each step she takes. The world is in bloom and it follows the unspoken instructions of only one creature that roams its face. 

Hesitation is not a trait often associated with the gods, but the god of the underworld feels it now, unwilling to interrupt the celebration that the very Earth seemingly wishes to partake in, but desiring it all the same. She is used to the damp, dark coolness of the world below, and the sun always seems beats down with an unfamiliar and uncomfortable heat, but today it feels indomitable and irresistible. 

Today, she wants to step out into the light. 

Vines wrap around her as soon as she does — nothing binding or restrictive, but welcoming — a soft touch that greets her in time with the smile of the one who controls them. She does not appear surprised at the intrusion, nor displeased, but when she walks closer and white flowers — fragrant and familiar — spring up all around them, certainty sprouts as well. 

“The receiver of many guests. Giver of good counsel. It’s not often we see you up here.” The tone is teasing, different from what she typically hears, and it warms her cheeks, places a shade of color there that others would not recognize. (She barely recognizes it in herself.) “What have you come to the surface for?” 

She has an answer to the question, but it’s an honest one, not one she typically gives freely. 

She gives it freely now.  

“Sometimes, I miss being around things that are alive.” 

The goddess doesn’t belittle when she responds — though her smile stays playful — like so many others would. 

“I may be able to help you with that.” 

The ground shifts again and one of the flowers at her feet lifts, stem lengthening to four times what would be natural, until it’s sliding between her fingers, depositing itself in her palm, releasing itself from the Earth when she lifts it to her nose and breathes deep. 

“Everything dies when I go below,” she says softly, and with regret. 

“Not this.” 

She stares into the goddess’s eyes (crocus, monkshood, bellflower, wisteria, lilac) and believes her words, impossible though they are. 

“I’m Kore.” The name doesn’t quite suit her, though the king of the underworld had known it before now. “You should call on me whenever you want to feel something that is alive.” 

“And what if I feel that always?” 

Kore laughs. The whole of the clearing blooms. 

“Then you should call on me always, Hades. Whenever you please.”

—

There’s no need for any pretense. No desire for it, besides.

They graduate from text to voice quickly — within the span of a week —  and when Blake calls, Yang answers on the first ring. When Blake asks if she wants to hang out, Yang rattles off seven different options without pause. 

(“I’ve been thinking about what we should do together since we first met,” Yang says, not really an admission, not when the truth is so easily accessible.

“That was four days ago,” Blake feels she has to add, but Yang just laughs.)

Yang — without flowers blocking her face — is more beautiful than anything Blake’s ever seen. It’s more than the sharp cut of her jaw or the muscles of her forearm or the way her eyes crinkle when she smiles; Yang is attractive and anyone would agree, but it’s more than that. (Something curls in Blake’s stomach and settles in place at the sight, roots growing quick and deep.) And maybe it’s more for Yang too, because her expression — when Blake steps into view, climbing up over the crest of the hill that marks the start of the far field  — holds more than Blake can measure. 

College is strange, and the relationships formed within it, stranger still. She’d met Sun at a freshmen karaoke mixer that she’d been dragged to by her roommate, and in the span of a few hours, they’d gone through every stage of a relationship imaginable: strangers (the awkward first meet), rivals (when he and Ilia had picked the same song and Blake had been dragged along in solidarity), possible partners (when mixer had become unofficial and the alcohol had come out), and (finally) best friends (when the awkward flirtation and intoxication was behind them).   

But this — Yang taking her hand and leading her towards the greenhouse — is different, and that must be apparent to both of them, because Yang hardly looks surprised when Blake doesn’t step away, even once they’re inside. 

“Why botany?” Blake asks, tone softer than the question merits.

Yang’s lips curl and Blake gets caught on the corner like it’s a hook; she wants to press her fingers against the indent, and then do the same with her mouth.   

“I like making things grow. Wherever I go.” Her smile is unabashed, even when she continues. “Cheesy, I know. But I like making things come alive.”

(Blake thinks of vines growing in places they shouldn’t be able to, thinks of flowers sprouting from the cracks in pavement, thinks of the roots of trees spilling out over and digging into rock. She thinks — most of all — of Yang’s hands on all of them and on her as well, a different sort of challenge that Yang never took as such.) 

“It’s not cheesy it’s — “ As she searches for the word, Yang’s gaze does something similar with the planes of her face (searching, though Blake doesn’t think she finds what she’s looking for, and finds herself coming up similarly short). “ —  sincere? Earnest?” She shakes her head; neither are quite right. “Whatever it is, the world needs more of it.” 

The honesty doesn’t sound as sweet coming from her lips, but Yang doesn’t appear to mind. She smiles again, wider this time, and the plants around them pulse with a soft sigh, a tangible exhale of oxygen. And when Yang walks along the rows -- running her fingers gently along the leaves and petals and stalks -- when she speaks each of their names, Blake could swear the vegetation leans into her touch. 

The thought is less strange when coupled with her own: that she wants to do much of the same. 

She searches for patience, then. 

She’s had practice with it too. 

(She used to have more of it.) 

—

She doesn’t last long. 

But then, how could she? 

Only a week later, one of Yang’s friends throws a back-to-school party and Blake gets pulled along, as seems to be the new trend. 

(“It’s weird,” Yang says, much in the same way she always does, with a grin lighting her face. “She’s normally a lot more particular about her guest list.”) 

There’s alcohol waiting for them as soon as they walk in, and they each throw back a shot before moving any further, though the (surprisingly) fancy cocktail Blake picks up shortly after is one that she nurses for the rest of the night, at least until her hands find better uses. 

Yang’s hands find them more quickly than Blake’s; she’s tactile and gregarious and fun and she touches people as she greets them, throughout conversations, when she says goodbye. But she touches Blake most of all: her hand on the small of her back, her fingers threading through the hair that rests at the nape of her neck, her chin resting on Blake’s shoulder. 

It builds and builds and there’s not enough time and so Blake reaches down, tugs on Yang’s hand and pulls her outside. It feels like the only place they can be — tucked into the corner of the balcony of Yang’s friend’s lavish apartment with the night sky overhead — when she kisses her. 

There’s no surprise in the action, but there’s plenty of everything else. 

(Blake considers all the Greek words for affection, for feeling, for lust, for every form of love known to the poets, and disregards them all.) 

Her lipstick is dark, and it’s smeared over Yang’s mouth when she pulls back (later — that night and in the upcoming weeks and months and years — she’ll find it in other places: Yang’s neck, her thighs, her sheets). The stains Yang leaves is of a different sort, but Blake first notices it in the taste left on her lips. She runs her tongue along it, brow pinching in thought, and Yang laughs as she watches her try to figure it out. 

“Pomegranate,” she explains. “It’s the lip balm.” 

Blake can’t see how that accounts for all of it and kisses her again, just to be sure.

—

The first time they kiss, the world springs into revelry.

The humans flourish under the bountiful harvest; their yields triple, they write songs about the season, they throw feasts without excuse, and each of the gods benefit from an upsurge of tributes, from the smallest villages to the largest city-states. 

She hardly notices. 

Instead, she focuses on memorizing the way Kore tastes. 

 —

She meets a boy in her Ancient Greek Lit class, finds his translation of the first line of the Odyssey to be interesting. The word polytropos, he argues, should be taken as an active description; Odysseus is not controlled but in control of his fate. ‘Sing to me, Muse, of a compelling man; sing through me the story of a man who could shape the world around him’, the boy writes, and Blake gets caught on the intensity in his expression as he reads it, is taken by his confidence and passion (forgets to argue against the lengthiness and the clear liberties he takes). 

He greets her after class, suggests they study together sometime, and that’s what Yang finds them doing a couple days later, tucked away in a corner of the library, pouring over words translated a thousand times, Adam finding a way to disagree with every previous version of them. Yang slides into the conversation and the seat next to Blake without needing to be invited, her warm smile at ease even when Adam switches to Greek, speaks fast and condescending. 

“Well I don’t know anything about any of that,” Yang says easily. “But Blake told me that myths were supposed to be enjoyed by everyone, right? That they were passed on from generation to generation, like bedtime songs or campfire stories. Seems like getting all wordy and pretentious doesn’t really fit that idea, right?” She smiles, and Blake’s gaze shifts towards it, away from the clear ire in Adam’s eyes. “I’d go with Blake’s version.”

In the hour they’d been at the table, Blake hadn’t offered her own translation (hadn’t been asked), but it’s scribbled there, within the margins of the pages of printed out Greek, and Yang’s fingers brush against the pen strokes as she leans in, their shoulders brushing against each other. 

“Tell me about a complicated man,” Blake reads, voice soft. 

“Yeah.” Yang nods and completely ignores Adam’s glare. Blake finds doing the same to be easy, his magnetism fading away, swept aside by stronger forces. “Sometimes you’ve got to admit that something like that can’t be totally summed up in a word or even in a sentence. There’s something kind of beautiful about that too — I think — admitting the complexity in such a simple way.”

“I… think so too.”  

Adam doesn’t last for much longer, quickly tiring of not being the center of attention. He slams his books shut and shoves his chair out with force when he stands and Blake can’t remember what it was about him that appealed to her in the first place.

“I don’t like him,” Yang says after he leaves, a simple declaration as she steals a sip from Blake’s water bottle.

Blake blinks. Considers. “Yeah. I don’t think I’ll be studying with him again.” 

And she doesn’t. 

(It’s not normally that easy, she thinks, later on, and isn’t sure what she means by that at all.)

—

The humans tell tales about them, before their story is finished. 

Time is odd like that when you are immortal and infinite. Beginnings and ends and middles get jumbled in a way that they never do for those who have a life to live in a linear manner.  

It starts small: maidens whispering to each other, children making up rhymes, mothers telling stories to put their daughters to sleep. There’s a soft reverence in these traditions, and though she does not catalog the words they use, she picks up on the meaning. It settles in her chest — the warmth of it — different from the sort that presses at her heart when Kore is near, but significant in a distinct way. 

The tales change over time, warped by the teller and the listener alike, move further from the truth. But the humans could hardly know of the color of Kore’s hair, the tone of her skin, the color of her eyes, and what did it matter when the genders were confused or the courtship was pressed into a single day? The meaning persisted, the good intentions enough to sate the both of them. 

The stories lengthen, turn into poems, turn into songs, turn into performances, turn into epics. And one day Hermes tells them — amusement in his voice — that they have started to record them, to actually write them down.

But they carry on, much in the same way. 

What harm could human words -- written or no -- have on the lives of the gods?