Status: Closed
This round has closed. It remains open for fills, comments and remixes, but prompts are no longer accepted.
About
"Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time."
"How inconvenient to be made of desire."
"It's me, hi, I'm the problem its me."
Calling all readers, lovers of poetry and music, screen and stage. Quote collecters and lyric hoarders, unleash your archive. For this round, every prompt must contain a quote - you can combine them, add commentary, link to articles, do whatever. Steal from a literary classic, or copy WeVerse drama.
🛑 HOLD UP
If this is your first time on 17hols please check out our About Page which contains helpful information and links to pages explaining dreamwidth and HTML. We are a prompting fest where all the action happens in the comment section.
Rules
- Sign up is not required.
- Fills have a minimum of 400 words for prose, haiku-length for poetry (3 lines), and 400px by 400px for art (memes are also art). Other mediums are fine too!
- There is no maximum cap.
- Tag and provide content warnings at your discretion, but a good guide are the Ao3 four (Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage) and this list of common CWs (cr: SportsFest).
- NSFW/Explicit content should be tagged
- NSFW art should not be visible, please provide a link and a warning. You may crop the artwork and embed a SFW preview.
How it works
Prompting
- Click on [Post a New Comment] at the bottom of this post;
- Change the subject;
- Copy+Paste the following HTML into your comment and edit the sections. Feel free to add as much detail as you want!
Need ideas? Check out our 2021 and 2022 Quote rounds.
Filling
- Reply to the original prompt;
- You must change the subject to [FILL] - this is to help the mods track. Feel free to add a title
- Copy+Paste the following HTML into your comment, edit the sections, and add your text.
You may also upload your fill to the AO3 Collection.
Remixing
- Post as a reply to the fill you are remixing, using the same HTML as above;
- Change the subject to [REMIX].
Art/media
- Upload your work to any platform (twitter, imgur, youtube, soundcloud, google maps, etc.)
- Using the same HTML code as above, copy the link into your fill or remix. That's it!
- Optionally, you can embed a picture into your comment. Please use the following code instead.
(To explain, the HTML resizes your picture to 400x400px so that it fits on most screens. Users can view the full size if they click on it. You can also add a link to your work on twitter so that others can share it, or to any other website you want)
On dreamwidth, you can't edit a comment once someone has replied to it.
Navigation
|
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
[FILL] i will have you know – my swan song will not be my last
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: Post break-up
Permission to remix: Please ask
***
“And did you get everything you wanted?”
Minghao snaps his focus back to the present, caught off-guard. “Yes,” he affirms automatically. “Yes, I did.”
Mingyu snorts to his champagne flute, gold band on his ring finger molten in the sunlight. “You’ve become so agreeable,” he remarks in disbelief.
Their newly wed mutual friend in the center of the venue has an arm around her husband’s side, other hand holding the knife with him to cut the cake. Minghao returns her smile when they briefly make eye contact. They’d all clamored over Mingyu in the down time between the ceremony and reception with the woes of wedding planning, and Minghao had watched as he took their overbearing advice graciously with a winning smile from the sidelines. “And you’ve become so sure of what you want,” replies Minghao in stride, “On your way to married life.”
“But have you ever–” Mingyu’s jaw sets, stubborn, as he cuts himself off. “I knew you would’ve said no if I asked.”
“But you never asked.”
“You told me to stop being desperate!” Mingyu bursts out. He lowers his voice when the group of bridesmaids turns to look at them. “What was I supposed to do, let myself keep getting hurt from all your rejection?”
“No,” Minghao admits staring straight ahead. Everyone around them starts clapping at something they hadn’t been paying attention to. Mingyu joins in absentmindedly while Minghao continues, “I don’t have everything I want.”
“What?” Mingyu applauds five beats longer than the rest of the crowd.
“But you’re still too impressionable,” Minghao elaborates. “That’s why we broke up, remember?” Just then, a waiter carrying a tray of hors d'oeuvres utilizes the space between their shoulders and cleaves them in two.
***
Some time after the break up, Minghao was sitting across from Junhui at the same hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant they’d been going to for years, eating the same dishes they always ordered and pecking at the pickles the owner always piled high for them for free with their chopsticks when Junhui pointed out suddenly, “Hao Hao, you don’t realize you’ve changed?”
Minghao looked up from the work email he’d been skimming on his phone. “Why do you ask that?”
Junhui only smiled, sheepish and curling in on himself over his bowl of noodles. “Because you have.” When Minghao didn’t reply, he added, “You regret ending things with him.”
“I don’t regret cutting off a relationship before we both got irreparably hurt from it, if that’s what you mean,” was Minghao’s canned response. “And Mingyu didn’t know what he wanted. You know it's dangerous, not knowing what you want. That's how people get taken advantage of."
Junhui placed the last radish on Minghao’s plate gingerly. “You say that only because you think you have to say it.” It was even worse, knowing what you wanted but knowing it was never possible the way you dreamed it to be.
***
Mingyu calls him a week after the wedding. “I just have to understand,” he stammers as soon as Minghao picks up the line, “When you said you didn’t have everything you wanted. Did you mean – shit, this is so stupid, I just… I think I’m reading too much into this, but did you mean me?”
Minghao’s heart is beating in his throat. “Mingyu, this is–”
“Myungho,” Mingyu interjects like he’s afraid Minghao will hang up at any time, “I don’t think I’ve stopped loving you.” A dangerous hope shakes in his voice. “So if you still love me–”
When they were still together, it’d become a running joke that Mingyu was always bombarding him with a never-ending stream of questions, most of which Minghao answered to with some version of no.
“Don’t you ever get tired?” Minghao asked once, half-laughing and apologetic. Mingyu’s thumb was rubbing against the cracked skin on Minghao’s knuckles, dry from the winter. The touch was so tender it stung. “You hear ‘no’ more often than a cold call salesperson.”
“Congratulations on your engagement,” Minghao settles on, hanging up the phone right after. It buzzes with an incoming call less than ten seconds later, and again, and again, and again until it finally quiets like something on its dying breaths inevitably succumbing to the end.
Mingyu on that couch had peered up at him from where he’d been resting his head on Minghao’s shoulder. “All it takes is one yes to make it worthwhile,” he said, playing the part to a T with a full-canine smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
Re: [FILL] i will have you know – my swan song will not be my last
“You say that only because you think you have to say it.” god it's minghao to a tee I'm in pain
“All it takes is one yes to make it worthwhile,” CRIES MINGYU. I HOPE HE'S HAPPY NOW EXCEPT HE'S CALLING UP HIS EX TO CHECK IF HE STILL LOVES HIM WHEN HE'S ALREADY ENGAGED SO PROBABLY NOT [lies face down on the floor forever]
thank you for my pain
Re: [FILL] i will have you know – my swan song will not be my last
Re: [FILL] i will have you know – my swan song will not be my last
Re: [FILL] i will have you know – my swan song will not be my last
Re: [FILL] i will have you know – my swan song will not be my last
Minghao continues, “I don’t have everything I want.”
“What?” Mingyu applauds five beats longer than the rest of the crowd. my favorite line and then of course in the end is the same thing mingyu also latches onto… using junhui as a foil to minghao’s belief that it was simple but also an act of necessity to break up like T__T wow i love you descriptions n the bleakness but also the way you choose your words. thank you for writing
Re: [FILL] i will have you know – my swan song will not be my last
Re: [FILL] i will have you know – my swan song will not be my last
Re: [FILL] i will have you know – my swan song will not be my last