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}
you'll never guess who's here
Ship/Member: Any (the obvious choice is Jeonghan, equally intrigued by the non-obvious choices)
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: Character study, idolverse?, political intrigue?, actual doctors au?
Do Not Wants: None
Prompt:
The Hippocratic Oath (translation source)
Â
Shrek (2001)
Â
George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
Â
[FILL] telltale
Major Tags: "creator chose not to use archive warnings", for spoiler reasons. nothing graphic or violent or nsfw
Additional Tags: mild horror, magical realism
Permission to remix: yes
***
Jeonghan woke in the cold smoke of night. He gasped, startled, as if in his sleep he had forgotten to breathe. The room was deep blue, and next to him Mingyu had been turned to marble by the moonlight. Jeonghan touched his hand to Mingyu’s chest, the warm bare skin of it, and felt it rising and falling.
He still felt like a stranger in this house. There's more room here, Mingyu had said, which was probably true but Jeonghan could barely remember their apartment in the city so he couldn't compare. The fresh air will be good for you. All air smelled the same to Jeonghan, which was to say, like nothing.
His feet were silent on the steps. He sat at the table and looked out past the kitchen and the living room, through to the sliding doors, out to the beach and then across the grey undulating ocean— Cavernous, that's how it felt. Like the world was too big to hold him, and he himself too big to hold the yawning feeling of emptiness inside his chest.
He heard now a low thumping noise, and recalled that this was what had woken him. For a moment he thought that the sound was coming from inside him, the beating of his own heart, but then the sensation moved outwards, and he realised it was coming from somewhere beyond the house. He looked back out through the glass doors, and wondered if the ocean was alive whether it would have a heart.
By the time he had this thought, Mingyu was awake. He came down the stairs with a frown, how long have you been down here? He had put on a hoodie, and his arms were crossed in front of his chest. Did something wake you?
No, said Jeonghan. The thumping was echoing in his ears. Nothing.
++
Jeonghan would stand in the shallows, most days, the seawater foamy and livid around his ankles. The saltwater cure, he called it, not that he believed in anything so simple anymore. What did seem to soothe him was staring into the fog, trying to make out the horizon. The line between sea and sky, air and water, one state of being and the other.
All he could see was a roiling grey mist.
Mingyu wouldn't get into the water. He sat on the hard sand a few paces back from the edge. It’s winter, he complained, the water’s cold. But he hadn't even tried. Mingyu was like that, he'd get an idea in his head and there would be no getting him away from it. Obstinate, Jeonghan used to call him. But if Mingyu was a rock then Jeonghan was the water that flowed around him. Was one holding the other back, or was one wearing the other down?
Jeonghan looked at Mingyu now like looking at a ghost, seeing through him to the skeleton and the sinews. Sometimes Jeonghan wished Mingyu was less transparent; perhaps then he would be more interesting. But Jeonghan’s boredom could never overtake his lethargy. It was easier to let the waves take him, easier to drown than to swim.
When Mingyu told Jeonghan he loved him, Jeonghan pretended not to hear. He pretended not to hear a lot of things.
++
Yeah, eomma. I'm okay.
(thump, thump)
Cold, but fine. Yes, I'm eating. I can cook, you know.
(thump, thump)
Jeonghan is—
(thump, thump)
You know. He's always liked the ocean.
++
Jeonghan did like the ocean. The sound of the waves didn't quite drown out the thumping, but almost.
He never told Mingyu about the noise. Even though he knew that Mingyu would be upset to know that Jeonghan was keeping a secret from him, or perhaps because of it. Jeonghan didn't like upsetting people, least of all Mingyu, but he liked knowing that he could.
We tell each other everything, right? Mingyu always wanted to know, to be reassured of something even if it wasn't true.
And Jeonghan each time would smile, fingers carding through Mingyu’s hair, muscle memory, which is what they call it when the body remembers but the mind does not. Of course, he’d reply. I love you.
Jeonghan kept secrets like a musician kept time. As if by doing so he could find a rhythm against which to measure the meaning of his life.
++
Sometimes he dreamed that he was the fog rolling over the ocean. When he opened his eyes again and found himself trapped in his hollow body, it was always with a wash of grief. One time he submerged himself in the bathtub and tried to see how long he could hold his breath. The answer: long enough for Mingyu to find him, and haul him out, dripping.
Don't you dare, Mingyu screamed at him. Don't you fucking dare!
Jeonghan only stared at him. You don't know what it's like to feel how I feel, he wanted to say. But he didn't say anything at all. His chest was swollen with anger. Outside their bedroom window, the ocean thumped violently against the shore.
++
I'm fine, really.
(thump, thump)
No, don't come. Seriously. It's peaceful here.
(thump thump)
Shua-hyung, please. Okay, I will. I will.
(thump thump thump thump thump)
++
Jeonghan let the pale water run through his fingers. Names echoed in the back of his mind, clouded over with faces, voices, someone’s hand on the back of his neck and someone’s arm around his shoulders. He plunged his own head into the ocean, the saltwater like tears, a vastness of grief too immense to comprehend.
When he turned back towards the house, he saw a silhouette in the window. Mingyu was watching him, but with the way the light fell Jeonghan couldn't see his face. The knowledge that he was being observed in secret struck Jeonghan with a sudden terror. He ran up the steps and flung open the glass sliding doors, water pouring from him and flooding the kitchen floor.
Mingyu wasn't there.
Jeonghan careened through the house looking for him, but he wasn't anywhere. Perhaps he had gone into the nearest town for food, or perhaps he had left, or perhaps still he had never been here at all. Every time Jeonghan closed his eyes the house around him disappeared, and all that was left was the bubbling dark ocean.
He didn't know how long it took for Mingyu to return. He was shivering when Mingyu finally put his arms around him, even though it had been so long since he had really felt the cold. He opened and closed his mouth uselessly. There were too many words crammed inside him, too many to set free. All that escaped were a series of anguished gurgles, like water in his throat.
++
In one of Mingyu’s growing absences, Jeonghan crept into the upstairs bedroom and rummaged around in the cupboard. Pictures of them, from this whole other life they had lived in the city, glass and steel and concrete, sharp lines and crisp corners, light that pierced like arrows, and smiles, both of them, smiling.
Jeonghan upturned the box of memories. They didn't belong to him any longer. He rifled through like spying on a stranger's life. Messages in his handwriting, in his voice. Ticket stubs, crumpled candy wrappers, a blade of grass.
The thumping was thunderous now. He scrabbled about in the dark, nails pulling up splinters of wood, screams trapped in his lungs. Finally, a heavy box made of a glossy reddish wood. It trembled in his hands.
He opened it. The clasp was rusted, and it groaned as he unlatched it. The lid unfolded like a flower wilting.
Inside—
A silent, dark, slowly beating heart.
The thumping, that was still coming from the ocean.
++
When Mingyu returned this time, Jeonghan was knee-deep in the surf. They looked at each other across the line between water and sand. Mingyu didn't cross over. He never did. The water was cold, after all.
I love you, Mingyu said.
Jeonghan held in his hands the grotesque, pulsating, heart. He could feel it lurching towards him, towards the haunting, beckoning, emptiness in his chest.
Why, Jeonghan cried out. Why?
++
What he meant was:
Why am I still here?
++
He flung the heart into the ocean. It landed with an unceremonious plop, sank quickly beneath the hissing waves. His question had been answered long ago, if only he had been listening.
He was not the only one who knew how to keep a secret.
Mingyu stared at him. His gaze was hard, but brittle.
++
Another way of asking the same question:
What would it take for me to die?
And, yet another:
What would it take for you to let me?
++
Jeonghan woke, gasping. The night was a suffocating blanket of cold, dark, smoke. His mind, a deep fog. His chest, aching, empty. Next to him, Mingyu was asleep, his shoulders undulating as he breathed.
There was a noise that Jeonghan could hear. A low, distant, thumping. Like a hammering heart, perhaps. He climbed out of bed, abruptly frightened though he knew not what of.
But no—listen closely.
He stood at the glass doors, looking out at the black ocean. It was only the waves, beating endlessly against the shore.
***
a/n: title and inspiration from edgar allen poe's 'the tell-tale heart'.
Re: [FILL] telltale
Re: [FILL] telltale
and
The gyuhan thesis... I fear no one will ever get it like you do. And the seamless blend of metaphor and meaning in this can i get a YEAH
Oh my... you're really not pulling punches with this one huh. Also the way you've chosen to write the dialogue without quotation marks is such a cool choice, adds an uneasy hush to the story that viscerally recreates the way Jeonghan experiences the world. Especially in the bathtub scene; Mingyu is screaming but it almost feels like we can't hear him.
This is such a bleak, haunting portrait of a person in deep pain. What does love even mean to someone who can't feel anything? How do you tell the person that loves you and have it do anything but hurt them? Can you? Should you try to? I have no answers, just awe for your skill and insight
Thank you so much for taking my bait and for your work as always <3 <3 <3
Re: [FILL] telltale