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dmitri-smerdyakov · 10 months ago

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In the notes of your Newtina titanic story you said that you wanted to write about Tina/Theseus’ marriage and life, and all the bits in between Newt dying when the ship sank and Tina dying as an old lady, so I just wanted to ask what things you had in mind about them? There’s not a lot of Theseus/Tina in the fandom but it intrigues me, and I feel like there’s a lot to be said about them getting married after the deaths of their respective lovers etc. Hope that makes sense, have a good day!

Hello! First, I'm glad you seemed to like my story and are curious about it, I like when people ask me about my writing!

I don't know if I ever will write a fic one day - if I did, it would probably just be a series of oneshots for my own amusement, including some "what if" Newt survived that night on the Titanic ideas - so I don't want to go into too much detail just in case, but I'll tell you the general idea I had in mind when I was writing the fic.

Some of these are mentioned in the fic, but I thought I'd give a full outline just to clear it all up:

As stated in the final chapter of the story, Theseus and Tina got married so that her son wouldn't be a bastard, and because Theseus knew his brother would want him to take care of Tina/the baby - he felt like he had to. Neither of them had any intentions to become anymore than friends, and - as Theseus said before they agreed to marry - if in a few years Tina had fallen in love with someone else, he would have agreed to an annulment so that she could have had a marriage of love. It was a tough decision for Tina because she had just escaped a loveless engagement with an abusive man, but she also knew that Theseus' proposal came from a place of genuine care, and it was also practical given that she couldn't have afforded to raise the child on her own with the small money she was making.

They started sharing a bed a month after the baby was born, but NOTHING (I feel I have to stress this) happened between them; it was, again, a matter of practicality because the apartment they lived in was tiny, and poor Theseus was putting his back out sleeping on the couch every night. If anything, they were like really good friends who lived together, with him helping Tina raise his nephew. Neither of them had any desire to have any relationships after losing their lovers on the Titanic; they had loved Newt and Lally far too much to consider it, and the loss of them hurt for the rest of their lives.

When the child - Leo - started calling Theseus "Dad," Theseus wanted to correct his nephew but Tina didn't see the point - the whole point of the marriage was so that she wouldn't have be seen as an unwed mother, that no one would know that her son was born out of a four-day affair on a doomed ocean liner, and it would be too confusing to explain that to a child. They always said, "we'll tell him one day, when he's older", but that day never came because Theseus and Tina couldn't bear to talk about Titanic as they continued to live their lives.

Theseus went off to fight in World War I, obviously, and was a war hero. It was only once he'd been called to fight and was gone that Tina realised how much she had - against her better judgement - come to care for him and depend on him. Whatever the reason for their circumstances, they were raising a child and living together, and that had inevitably brought them closer. It wasn't that she needed him - she was independent, proudly so - but more that she wanted him in her life by this point, because she had already lost so many people in her life. When he came home, it was a happy day for all of the family because Theseus had missed her and the little boy terribly too.

It was during the time that Theseus was off fighting that Tina took up writing, thinking about how a freckled and kind man she still loved had wanted to write a book about the animals that he loved so dearly - and she knew she had to do it in his place now that he was gone, knew that she had to because he was the only reason she was alive and free.

April 14th and April 15th were always the hardest two days for Theseus and Tina - the night and day that haunted them constantly. They always passed those two days without comment, merely keeping to themselves and sometimes sitting together with tea and books. Neither of them could think of the right words to say, no matter how many years passed, and it was easier to just not talk about it.

On April 15th 1919 - the seventh anniversary of the sinking - that Tina turned to him in the early hours of the morning and buried her face into his neck. This was not in itself unusual, at this point they were both fairly comfortable with each other, and for a while they had just laid there finding comfort in that embrace, not speaking. It was then that she realised how safe she felt with him, how much she cared for him, and she didn't think before her mouth was suddenly seeking his desperately. When he gave a start, she softly pleaded with him and - despite the fact his brain was screaming that it was wrong - he melted; he couldn't turn her away.

Let's be honest, neither of them had had sex with anyone since Titanic; the last time for Theseus had been the night before the collision, when Newt (and the Swedish man sharing their cabin) hadn't been around, and for Tina it was mere hours before the collision - it had been seven years for both of them.

(That first time between them can be found in the fanfic, obviously, and while I could very well have written a much steamier and longer scene to show it, I decided against it at the time because the fic was monstrously long and I was scared of pissing people off. I may choose to extend it one day, who knows? The point is, they slept together.)

After it was over, she cried and he slept on the couch that night, both of them very lonely. The next day, despite being angry at themselves for allowing it to happen, they talked it out together; truthfully, neither of them saw the other as their deceased lovers, and while the love wasn't the same as she had once had with Newt - and he with Lally - there was still love there. Perhaps it was in part because they had gone through that very same traumatic event, they had both lost someone, they were both haunted by what they had lost... but they did have love for each other.

They agreed that they didn't want to talk about Newt, Lally or Titanic ever again - the memories were too painful. This is actually something many Titanic survivors (including crew) in real life experienced; the memories of that night, the fact that most of the survivors had lost loved ones, meant that they didn't want to talk about it because it was just too painful and traumatic to remember/discuss.

Theseus and Tina had a daughter in November 1921, and no one would have ever been able to guess that there was a difference between Leo and Evelyn. They were treated exactly the same, and neither of them ever had any inkling of what happened in their parents' past. (It does also mean that they were half-siblings AND kind of cousins which...is not something I considered until now, but oh well). The family moved to a small but cosy house shortly before the new baby arrived, and Tina asked Theseus if he had ever considered going back to England; despite their agreement to never discuss that night, Theseus just smiled wryly at her and muttered, "Tell me, do you really want to get back on a boat after...?" and that was that.

After nearly a decade of hard work, Tina published her first book - a concise but still somewhat charming encyclopedia that was titled Fantastic Beasts. She had written it more for herself, more to ease an ache in her chest, but it - to her surprise - started to sell extremely well. Many an animal enthusiast and zoologist found inspiration reading it growing up, something she found herself rather proud of.

Over the years, their family went from being dirt poor to thriving; Tina began to write more and more books, from fiction to non-fiction, from thrillers to children's novels (though not romance - never romance), and earned many prizes during her career. Theseus started working as a patrolman, later moving up to police work and even within the government; he liked to joke that Tina would have done well in the job herself, but he meant it - her crime novels were scarily accurate and brilliant. The Scamanders weren't "rich", per say, but they were comfortable as the years went on.

Tina never did see Seraphina or her sister again - but she saw in the newspaper one day that Queenie was marrying someone called "Kowalski", an infamous baker in the New York area whose shop was constantly thriving and who had plans of expanding his business further into a franchise. Tina's eyes were filled with relieved but happy tears when she saw the photo of her beautiful little sister printed in a paper, the headline "Socialite Marries Star Baker" far less interesting and heartwarming than the clearly joyous look on the bride's face as she held her husband's arm.

The children went off to college and began to lead their own lives; Evelyn later married and had three girls of her own. Leo got married twice; his first wife, Amara, was a woman he met during his travels shortly after university, and they had a son together - Rolf (b. 1952). Not long after Rolf was born, Leo and his wife had an amicable divorce, and he remarried to someone called Elizabeth (who, thankfully, loved Rolf as if he were her own); he and his second wife had a son called Arthur (b. 1955), and he and Rolf were inseparable growing up.

Leo died in 1979, at the age of 66, from cancer; his wife died a year or so later. It was, understandably, very difficult for Tina; the only solace that she had was that both of her grandsons were enough like their father that the memory and spirit of the man she'd once loved didn't die completely.

In mid-January 1981, a week after what would have been Leo's 68th birthday, Arthur and his wife welcomed a daughter who they named Ellie - a small but healthy little thing with reddish-brown hair and big blue eyes. She wasn't the first great-grandchild, but she was the one Tina undeniably had a soft-spot for (despite how much she tried to deny it)

It was a shock when Ellie's parents died in an accident two years later; there were limited options for where she'd go - Theseus and Tina, and then Rolf (her grandparents on her other side were, to put it simply, on the other side of the world and not interested in taking care of her given that she had shown "behavioural issues" which were in fact just early signs of autism). Tina and Theseus, despite their advancing age, didn't hesitate to take her in; technically, Rolf was her legal guardian but he travelled often, so she was with her great-grandparents for most of her life.

Much like Newt was autistic (undiagnosed, of course, given the time period he lived in), Ellie was too - she was diagnosed as a child; Tina and Theseus knew when they noticed that - like Newt - she struggled with eye contact, when she liked to stim, when she cried at certain noises or lights... she was like him in a lot of ways, perhaps even more than she was like her strong formidable great-grandma.

"great-grandma" and "great-grandpa" were a mouthful for a toddler/young child, by the way, so all of the great-grandchildren called Tina and Theseus "Nana" and "Pops".

Theseus died in 1988, aged 104; Tina was 93 by this point, and while she was still pretty healthy and kick-ass for her age, Rolf made the decision then to stay with her and help her look after his niece. It was an admittedly strange family to live in - a great-grandmother, an uncle and a teenager - but it worked for the leftover Scamanders.

Theseus had almost-exactly the same experience that Tina later had when he died; he was young again, walking up the grand staircase, the people waiting for him, his brother smiling and squeezing him tight, thanking him for looking after Tina and the family - and Lally, as beautiful as the day he last saw her, grinning as she threw her arms around him and kissed him full on the mouth without a care in the world.

Ellie's special interest in Titanic began about three years before the events of the story after reading a book about it that she'd borrowed from the library; Tina knew about how obsessed her great-granddaughter got, and a few times she considered saying something to her, but every time she thought about it she ended up with a horrible lump in her throat that she couldn't get rid of. Besides, at eleven years old, it was probably too young to give her all the details.

Tina truly had no intentions of ever telling anyone what happened on Titanic - but then she saw Luna Lovegood on the television, saw the long-lost drawing, and she knew that the time had come to unburden herself.

And...yeah, that's pretty much a detailed summary of it all. I know it's a super long summary, probably a little too long, but these ideas were all written (in much shorter bullet points and less detail) at the bottom of the document I used to write the story (the entire story was written on one document that ended up reaching 179 pages in total), and I wanted to put it all into the fic originally. But at the end of the day, it is in fact a Newtina story at its very core, and I felt that writing paragraphs upon paragraphs about Theseus/Tina at the end of the fic was unnecessary, especially as most of the blanks can be easily filled in by the reader.

Anyway, I've spent WAY too long delving into explicit detail about a fic I know very few people read, so I'm going to end it here. Have a good day, anon, and thank you for indulging me!

#too long post is too long #i got carried away but anyway #newtina #newt scamander #tina goldstein #theseus scamander #fantastic beasts #fantastic beasts fanfiction

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