Status: Open
Prompting is currently open. Prompting is open from 28 December 2024 to 19 January 2025.
About
"the poem begins not where the knife enters, but where the blade twists"
"beauty is terror"
"you'll just have to taste me, when he's kissing you"
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 a hit tweet.
🛑 HOLD UP
If this is your first time on 17hols please check out our About Page which has helpful information about 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.
|
![[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}
don't you know who i think i am?
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: morality complex/corruption arc
Do Not Wants: None
Prompt:
[FILL] don't you know who i think i am?
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: the wisp of a corruption arc from afar, network fishery-esque setting ((aka Network Love members have a store that handles fish and people))
Permission to remix: Yes
***
i started out writing this in a very different direction and then i got a postype notification and my brain got hijacked. please forgive me
Fish were small. Familiar. Easy to clean. But sometimes he plunged his hands into the cool water of the basin and couldn’t quite remember where the eddies of red had come from, this time; was the metal on his tongue from a fresh arterial spray, or the rising gorge of an old, old memory?
But eventually it recedes, and he nags Hansol to remember to scrub underneath his fingernails, too, keen to instill the habit of using a bristled scrub brush early. It just wouldn’t be right to let him get used to the sight of thin lines of red crusting underneath his nails, against the base of his skin, even if it were just from the persistent guts of one too many fish.
Should always be, if the world was fair.
*
The first time he killed, he had no choice. And the next, and so many that followed thereafter, even if he had been the one to choose to keep Junhui’s back pressed against his every time. His only port of safety in the merciless Shanghai streets they had been dragged to.
(That very first time, he had cried and cried and not even the beating it had earned him had stemmed his tears. The pure tears of a child, ceaselessly pouring out as if they were sufficient to wash off the splatters of red still clinging to the creases of his palms, the side of his face.
In the end, he merely drained himself of all his tears with nothing else to show for it.
The next time they dragged him out, he didn’t cry at all, even when they pointed him towards a child smaller than him.
It took him until meeting Junhui to stop throwing up after the deed was done, though.)
*
Whenever they asked him, in private, Joshua always maintained that he had only kept Hansol around because he needed someone to speak English to—for the sake of his sanity.
Accordingly, with him in the shop they made sure to keep their jokes in Korean about benign fish, maintaining that the basement was off-limits to untrained hands, toned down on the pace of their extra activities until the four of them had fallen into enough of a routine together to begin to relax.
Perhaps a little too much—was Minghao’s thought, when he first caught sight of the smaller tail following him one night, watching him clean up after himself.
The process of getting blood out of his work clothes was all the same no matter the source, but with his watcher in mind he was more diligent about pulling on latex gloves to apply peroxide to the stains, letting it soak.
The least he could do was demonstrate the correct way to do things, if he would be sneaking out either way.
*
The first time Hansol really comes to him for help, he’s got a half-dried smear of blood on one side of his face, flecks of it still determinedly clinging beneath his fingernails.
Minghao gently scrubs the underside of each nail clean and lets Hansol tell him about the boy he had rescued in the alley, who looked to be the same age as him. He lightly probes into how he’s feeling, after such a violent experience, only to have Hansol blink at him and say he felt good.
He was glad to have protected the boy—he’d do it again.
(Hansol explains that he had only knocked the thugs out after sneaking up on them, before pulling the boy after him as they made their escape.
Minghao thinks about sharp rocks and head wounds, and will finish what Hansol started.)
*
Joshua is the most opposed to his proposition, when he brings it up, but in the end even he agrees it’s better for Hansol to be supervised where they can see him—learn the right way of doing things from them—rather than getting into more trouble on his own.
Even so, Joshua never speaks plainly around Hansol—always using euphemisms to allude to the nature of the work. In Korean, at least; Minghao isn’t sure if he ever addresses any of it when he talks with Hansol in English.
*
One night, Boo Seungkwan sneaks around the back of a storefront, and sees something he was never supposed to. The boy he remembers as Vernon hears his gasp and turns around with adrenaline thudding through his veins and blood on his face and tells him not to worry—he already killed him.
Re: [FILL] don't you know who i think i am?
Re: [FILL] don't you know who i think i am?