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This round is now closed to further prompts but remain open for fills and remixes (forever!).
About
"Enter any body of water and you give yourself up to be swallowed. Even the stones know that."
"beauty is terror"
"Would you fall in love with me again, if you knew all I've done? The things I can't undo. "
Calling all lovers of poetry and prose, rhyme and reason, screen and stage. Welcome to the Quotes Round, where every prompt must cradle a quotation (or two, or three). Mix the media and let the synergy birth a new order, or keep it short and let the subtext speak its secrets to the right writer.
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exit route
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: fight or flight
Do Not Wants: None
Prompt:
- Whim by Hayley Williams
- Molars by Evelia
[FILL] holding knives
Ship/Member: gyuhan
Major Tags: au: dark academia/magic school, obsession
Additional Tags: life or death situations, sleeping with your academic rival, expecting a knife and encountering a soft belly instead
Permission to remix: Yes <3
***
Three years into this, Mingyu really should have known better than to assume Jeonghan would go easy on him. It was finals season, time to show off what the last several weeks of grueling work yielded, and Mingyu was determined to finally prove himself on his own. He and Jeonghan were rivals of a sort: Mingyu two years ahead of most of the other '97s and notoriously arrogant as a result, Jeonghan running cunning little circles around anyone who got close enough to get pulled into one of his games. Two nights ago, the two of them had gotten drunk in town, frothy beer in clinking glasses, too-loud music blasting at them, and Jeonghan had had that look in his eyes again——reflected twice-over by firelight——that Mingyu found impossible to read. Was it playacting of some variety? Jeonghan was good at pretending to be what he wasn't. Or maybe it was something else, a vulnerability he only let Mingyu see, a gentleness he seemed to be constantly at war with, like he couldn't burn it out of himself no matter how much he sharpened the rest of his edges?
Jeonghan had agreed to look over his work and returned it the next morning with a pat on the shoulder and a demeaning compliment. It must have been solid, Mingyu thought to himself, if Jeonghan didn't even have a correction to offer.
And so he'd gotten cocky by the time he was halfway through the demonstration only for the spell he was painstakingly scribbling onto the chalkboard floor to blow up on him. A single error, a misplaced particle, was all it took, and from one moment to the next he was halfway across the room with an awful tinny ringing in his ears and Seokmin hauling him into his arms to go to the infirmary.
"Jeonghan," Mingyu managed to mumble as Seokmin carried him.
Seokmin made a soothing noise. "I'll send for him. I'm sure he'll want to see you."
"No, no."
"It's fine. He won't be bothered."
Seokmin kept reassuring him, a steady patter that half distracted Mingyu from the full-body throb that wracked pain through him with each step, but he had it wrong. If Mingyu's reaction time had been a split-second slower, he'd have died. The school would have hung is portrait in the university halls alongside the other students who lost their lives during their course. It was dangerous. They all knew that.
But Jeonghan wasn't the question. He was the answer.
He'd sabotaged the spell.
*
When Mingyu next awoke it was dark. A relentlessly recognizable figured haunted the space next to his bed.
"Here to—" Mingyu began, then coughed, soot in his throat gumming up the words— "to finish me off?"
Jeonghan didn't react. "Mingyu," he breathed. "What happened?"
"What happened?" Mingyu mimicked childishly. "Like you don't know."
"I know what Seokmin told me. I know what your professor said. But not how it happened. You're not careless. The formulation was perfect. So what, Mingyu? What happened?"
Jeonghan approached the sickbed and his expression was wretched. Brows tight, mouth twisted, those floodlight eyes looking for something Mingyu didn't know how to give him. Was Jeonghan this good of an actor, really? That he'd try to kill Mingyu and then come weep at his bedside?
More memories flashed through Mingyu's mind:
Their second year, the time Mingyu had challenged Junhui to scale the greenhouse and Jeonghan had come and defused the situation with startling grace, joking and distracting until the both of them agreed to walk away. Only later did Mingyu learn about the wards and wonder what was stopping Jeonghan from letting him splatter himself against the greenhouse floor.
Last summer, Mingyu naked in Jeonghan's bed, fucking him to Jeonghan's simultaneously lazy and exacting standards, thinking idly about trying to hold Jeonghan down or suck a mean hickey into his neck to stop himself from saying something stupid.
Two months ago in the common room, when Jeonghan had summoned a wisp of shadow with such terrifying dark energy that Mingyu dismissed it on an instinct and couldn't stop shaking for hours after. Jeonghan had been upset in the moment but quickly relented. He'd held Mingyu that night while Mingyu described in excruciating detail the way his sister had died just three years prior.
In the infirmary, Jeonghan's eyes held that same clear intensity, like he was trying to see straight through to Mingyu's soul. "It was perfect," he said again. "I checked it myself."
"I thought," started Mingyu. He couldn't finish the thought.
"Think harder next time."
Jeonghan sat next to him then, both of their backs against the stone wall, legs out on the flimsy bed. Jeonghan was so much smaller than Mingyu. His knees were bare in sleep shorts.
It was stupid to underestimate Jeonghan, but Mingyu was beginning to wonder if he'd been looking for vipers in a pit that didn't exist. If Jeonghan's sharpness was exactly what it looked like, and the deeper parts of him were something else.
In a few weeks, they'd likely be pitted against each other in the annual sprints to solve complex, dangerous puzzles, and Mingyu would have to watch his back again. But next to his rival in this sterile, dimly lit room, Mingyu found he could hardly keep his eyes open.
"Sleep if you want," Jeonghan said. "I've got some thinking to do, too."
"About what?"
"About who would be stupid enough to go after you. I'm curious, that's all."
"Yeah?"
Jeonghan nodded an affirmative. "About who they are, sure. And about whether they'll live to the end of the year to regret it."
He said that with a savage little grin, almost boyish in nature, and Mingyu began to wonder if there was that much delineation between Jeonghan's cruelty and his kindness after all.
Re: [FILL] holding knives
Re: [FILL] holding knives
i love your interpretation of the prompt and taking self-sabotage in the other direction and mistaking kindness for cruelty hell yea brother
Re: [FILL] holding knives
Re: [FILL] holding knives
Oh that was lethal to read...looking at each other's work as a form of courtship...examining each other's schoolyard reputations...Mingyu distrusting Jeonghan even as they are sleeping together only to realise Jeonghan has been looking out for him the whole time (and Jeonghan patiently continuing to do so despite being so wrongly perceived!! Either he's a saint or simp or maybe the D is too good to let die)
and the lore drops!! The conspiracies and the casual insinuation this is a school where students can just get killed??!! Casually??!! why do I feel like you wrote this to accommodate a remix... there is some kind of scheming going on here, I can smell it.
And this being the Jeonghan character interpretation of All Time, never quite at peace with himself:
Re: [FILL] holding knives
Re: [FILL] holding knives
this reminded me so much of The Magicians (moreso the SyFy show than the book), have you read or watched it??
Re: [FILL] holding knives
i actually haven't watched or read the magicians! a lot of this was inspired by a svt au written by averytree that was based off of naomi novik's magic school series (scholomance i think) which i ALSO haven't read lmao. the shortform format here protected from having to get too into worldbuilding lolol
[REMIX] juvenile in love
Major Tags: mention of adult/student relationship
Additional Tags: Cram School AU, one sided academic rivalry, a healthy teaspoon of manipulation
Permission to remix: Yes
not quite a pure remix as it's not in the same universe but work does inhale the same gyuhan fumes
***
You see, Mingyu would not have cared about Yoon Jeonghan even as he was beloved by everyone else. It was not Mingyu’s nature to worry about other popular people in circles outside of himself. It was energy efficient this way, pragmatic. Either they drew towards Mingyu in inevitable orbit, or their existence never mattered.
Yoon Jeonghan made himself known, embedded his name like a missile in the soft earth of Mingyu’s belly.
It was an ordinary night, one of those that would have easily slipped into memory as part of an amalgamation of nights, forgotten in its regularity. Mingyu was studying early at the hagwon, accelerating through next week’s homework while curled on the stairwell. Booklet in lap, shoulder against metal. His pencil had hovered over the same question for at least fifteen minutes, possibilities and paths drawn and erased, created and destroyed. It was a pentagon inside a circle, a proof of an equation. Mingyu had sat there until could feel his bones through his ass, mind dry, waiting like a pilgrim for angelic intervention. That was always the case with circle geometry, you didn’t get it until it hit you like a divine epiphany. Mingyu hated it.
“You gotta stop thinking about it as triangles and arcs.”
“Excuse me?” Mingyu looked up. There was a boy standing over him on the step above, hands in his pockets and long hair draped like ghost.
“Question 16 right? Circle Geo,” the boy said. Mingyu could hear the gum in his mouth as he spoke, how it rounded every word as his tongue made space for it. Somehow made the boy cooler for it, “There’s other shapes there. Quadrilaterals.”
“Quadrilaterals…” Mingyu looked back at the diagram, watching the same lines and curves rearrange themselves in his head with meaning, “Oh, opposite angles in cyclic quadrilaterals! The shared side— equivalency—the sine rule—and then—” Mingyu looked up, but the boy was already gone.
Mingyu had already known his name. Yoon Jeonghan. It was impossible not to.
Jeonghan’s name was always the noticeboard, always ranked in the top 5 for the weekly tests in Mathematics II and English. There was always a picture of him every term with the hagwon’s principal and a gift card for topping the course. And there was always a group of students around him like he was their capo and they were his consiglieri, a mafia of try-hards.
Jeonghan voice was soft but his presence magnetic, every day after that night, Mingyu’s eyes found Jeonghan first whenever he walked into the hagwon. Looked for him when he walked past the third year classroom, lingered as he used the vending machine just to see his choice and then buying the same drink. Studied to be on the noticeboard so that his name was a ruler away from Jeonghan’s, wondering if Jeonghan read past his grade, past his own name. Waited after class, talking to the receptionist, copying answers for the exact duration needed for Mathematics II to finish, for Jeonghan to walk out, and then to scurry behind the crowd like a sheepdog, distant enough to be invisible, able to look without being looked back.
It was an accident, a stroke of fate or maybe a landmine that was inevitable, once Mingyu started orbiting around Jeonghan. He had stayed back after class, killing time with the receptionist, but Jeonghan had not come out by the time the flood of students flowed to a trickle. His own teacher had left after tipping him the metaphorical hat, and then to avoid sharing the lift, Mingyu took the stairwell.
He saw the hair first, long, out, fisted in a hand.
A demon’s shoulders, a snake on the maiden’s back, a dragon waking.
Body pushed against the railing, face pushed against face, wet, hopeless sounds. Sounds that he can hear above the sounds of the road and the intermission of convenience store chimes. Sharp like a blade over thigh. Warm like blood.
Jeonghan turns his face away and the creature moves its lips to his neck, lapping loudly, vicious as a firstborn at the teat. Jeonghan tilts his face up.
Mingyu doesn’t know what expression he was wearing, but Jeonghan’s face darkens, eyes shifting into stormy clarity, loud as the sky before it thunders.
He whispers something and starts to push the body away, Mingyu watching the distance between his mouth and the ear grow—but how the mouth latches, the greed sticky as honey, teeth catching on skin and hands dragging over spine and waist, vengeful as Achilles with Hector’s corpse.
Talk to you later, Jeonghan mouths, pushing the man down the stairwell. And then something else, swallowed by another kiss, another obscene touch.
When the man turns away, Mingyu recognises him through the slats in the stairwell as one of the teachers. Didn’t know the name but knew the body, recognised its finesse as built through time and consistent effort, lengths of time impossible now as a student, but attainable after graduation. A body that he had promised to himself, a body that he will exceed. It was the body he saw himself having as an adult, when he imagined himself having sex.
Jeonghan’s expression was blank when Mingyu approached him, but his eyes were locked onto Mingyu’s searching, examining, testing. Even when Mingyu stopped before him, Jeonghan was silent, quiet as a suspect, defiant as a martyr. No excuses. Silent as if holding silence hides guilt like a flag on a coffin, as if he was waiting for Mingyu to show his hand, to reveal the game Mingyu wanted to play.
God, Mingyu thinks. Give me this. He is confident, he is the prodigal son wishing for the lamb, knowing that nothing is beyond the reach of his wanting. He has the knife here, the evidence of a crime, still ripe and beating.
Mingyu can’t stomach it but he can wear the skin of someone he is not if it gets him what he wants, wearing it until it grows onto him, until he becomes the wolf as much as the hunter and the hunter’s daughter. He draws himself up, shoulders back but hips casual, chin tight. Authoritative.
“Do you like kissing boys?” Mingyu asked, tone even, blameless as water and half as pure. He watched Jeonghan blink slowly, chewing the question, tasting the conviction behind it, walking down every possible connotation, intention and parallel world with a whir of his unmatched mind. The question was so inane he had to believe it was deliberate.
Mingyu watched his face as it turned. The calculation, the decrescendo, the eclipse.
Jeonghan relaxed, or perhaps it could be described as a surrender, a body’s sigh. Mingyu didn’t interrogate that thought. He saw the opening ceded to him, and he stepped forwards, holding Jeonghan’s eggshell face in the declining light.
Maybe Jeonghan will never forgive. but then that would mean he would never forget, thinking of Mingyu every time he kissed his lover.
Re: [REMIX] juvenile in love
the horror erotica is making me buzz. Mingyu's fixation with Jeonghan, mirrored and distorted by the teacher-demon's fixation. Mingyu looking at the teacher-demon and thinking that was the body he'd promised himself (double entendre!) and It was the body he saw himself having as an adult, when he imagined himself having sex. jeez louise. And Mingyu stepping in to that role he'd seen from the shadows, playacting at adulthood, holding Jeonghan’s eggshell face in the declining light. Mingyu noting Jeonghan's relaxation as surrender. SO chilling. the language you use in that whole last section is extraordinary. I keep coming back to how the mouth latches, the greed sticky as honey, teeth catching on skin and hands dragging over spine and waist, vengeful as Achilles with Hector’s corpse. CRAAAAAZY METAPHOR WORK HELLO I am unsettled, I am agog I am aghast,
And there was always a group of students around him like he was their capo and they were his consiglieri, a mafia of try-hards. also love this phrase--a mafia of try-hards. it keeps rotating in my brain. thank you for this iteration of gyuhan academic rivals!!
Re: [REMIX] juvenile in love
Two reasons— (1) Mingyu's young and does not understand what he feels re jeonghan, and (2) the moment is white hot for him, it silences his thoughts and burns his nerves and reduces him to a creature of instinct.
therefore, everything about what he's feeling, has to come through the narration; his perspective of the external needs to speak for his internal. that was so fun to work through!!
+ clearly carson eros love being a triangle + themes of possession are on my mind this 17hols!!
+ the jeonghan mafia boss description came entirely from this 2019 video of svt around jeonghan, I vividly remember one of the RTs saying, "he looks like a mafia boss", and I guess that stuck with me for 7 years!!
Re: [FILL] holding knives
Jeonghan approached the sickbed and his expression was wretched. Brows tight, mouth twisted, those floodlight eyes looking for something Mingyu didn't know how to give him. Was Jeonghan this good of an actor, really? That he'd try to kill Mingyu and then come weep at his bedside?
Firstly this makes me Sick just as an image and secondly how Jeonghan is sincere but still all mingyu can see is knives…
It was stupid to underestimate Jeonghan, but Mingyu was beginning to wonder if he'd been looking for vipers in a pit that didn't exist. If Jeonghan's sharpness was exactly what it looked like, and the deeper parts of him were something else.
Again the blend of canon and au is crazy because jeonghan is 100% a knife and he seems to be the only person who doesn't realise it because only he knows that he would (almost) never turn the blade on someone for real. And the banger ending line sums it up so well: is the only difference between cruelty and kindness which side of the blade you stand on?
I also love the fic by averytree you mentioned in another comment and thought of it immediately (though I also have not read scholomance lmao). another 17hols fill from u that will now live in my brain forever ahhhhh thank you for writing!!!!