Status: Closed
This round has closed. It remains open for fills, comments and remixes, but prompts are no longer accepted.
About
"If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more."
"What is grief, if not love persevering?"
"You kept me like a secret but I kept you like an oath"
Calling all readers, lovers of poetry and music, screen and stage. Quote collecters and lyric hoarders, unleash your archive. Each prompt must contain a quote - you can combine them, add commentary, link to articles, and more. Steal from a literary classic, or WeVerse drama. Have fun!
Examples
Minghao + Ocean Vuong
The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.
Ocean Vuong - night sky with exit wounds
Hoshi/Anyone; "Beauty is terror"
Thinking about these two quotes together and the idea of on/off-stage personas:
"Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful we tremble before it. And what could be more terrifying or beautiful, to the Greeks to to our own, than to lose control completely?" - Donna Tartt, the Secret Histories
"I am calm in everyday life but when I put on my in-ear device and step on stage, I can feel the tension and hear the cheers getting louder as the music gets louder. When the staff tells me it's time to step on stage, I feel something boil inside me. I feel it steaming inside and I think I have to give a burst of something, spill what is inside me." - Hoshi in Hit the Road Ep. 04
Any ship; "It's been so many years"
Hello, hello there, is this Martha?
This is old Tom Frost
And I am calling long distance
Don't worry 'bout the cost.
'Cause it's been forty years or more
Now Martha please recall
Meet me out for coffee
Where we'll talk about it all.
Tom Watts - Martha
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 to something interesting;
- Copy+Paste the following HTML into your comment and edit the sections. Feel free to add as much detail as you want!
Filling
- Reply to the original prompt;
- Change the subject to [FILL], you may add a title or stay chaotic;
- 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)
Note!
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] There will come soft rains
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: Sci-fi, space, vague interstellar-esque timey stuff
Permission to remix: Pls ask!
***
It was a soft kind of science, but he enjoyed it anyway. He didn’t speak to many people since it wasn’t necessitated by the job. He woke up every day at 0500, at the first blue limning of the pods, although the neurologists had designed it to be a gradual and gentle awakening. He drank tea alone in the mess then retreated to his lab to continue his efforts to try and save the fate of humanity off-planet. He tended to his hydroponics trials, experimented with the ionic balance of the water, grew baby carrots half the size of his little finger, and read poetry to the potato eyelets.
“Wow,” Lee Seokmin said, “would you look at that!”
Seokmin was the pilot, and as such had no reason to be standing as close to Minghao as he was.
Tucked into one corner of the lab was a nascent bloom of a camellia flower Minghao had been working on reverse-engineering, its green stem curled into a delicate C-shape in the terraplanter. Minghao had forgotten to hide it. Flowers were a waste of time. A farce, nothing as important as the real crops. But above the upturned collar of his leather bomber jacket, Seokmin’s face glowed, entranced.
Science was about admitting what you didn’t know. Minghao didn’t know Seokmin.
The sound of his laughter, his cheerfulness in the face of the dark silence of space, the loose and easy way he moved through the gray, disconsolate walls of their government-chartered ship. The way he looked at Minghao sometimes although they were nearly strangers to each other, just two people both hired to spend the formative years of their lives on an impossible mission. Minghao’s worldview was set by then, it was minimal, he did his job, he survived. People like Seokmin, with that ridiculous, unsteadying smile — Seokmin was incomprehensible. Made Minghao all off-kilter.
“So you’re the botanist.”
“Yes,” Minghao said, resisting the urge to say, No shit.
“Did you work with hydroponics on Earth, too?”
“No.”
In college, he’d interned in a greenhouse. He had risen with the sun every morning. Now his lab didn’t even have a porthole.
Seokmin rested his elbow on the table and leaned his cheek against his palm, grinning as if to say, Go on. Minghao cleared his throat, unaccountably flustered.
“Well, my grandfather was a farmer,” he said reluctantly.
“What kinds of things did he grow?”
“Maize and sorghum, mostly.”
“Ah. Do you remember them much? The fields?”
“Look, Captain Lee. With all due respect, I have a lot of work to do today.”
Up close, the larger-than-lifeness of Seokmin’s personality became something sweet and intimate and unstudied. When he smiled at Minghao now, it made Minghao want to hide his own face in his hands.
“Of course. I completely understand. But I had just one question. Why all the flowers?”
Shit. Seokmin must’ve caught a glimpse of the other flowering terraplanters Minghao had inelegantly shoved behind a wall of maize net pots when the knock on the lab door first came. Minghao took a deep breath, immediately on the defense. “I know it’s not— I know it’s not a part of my duties. You have to understand I never work on them on paid time, and—”
Seokmin leaned forward. Minghao’s words caught in his throat.
“They’re lovely, Minghao,” Seokmin said softly.
Minghao exhaled. Looked away. The flowers were really what he lived for. What got him up in the morning. He could rationalize it as a mystery he was trying to solve. Really, though, their beauty sustained him.
“Abscission,” Minghao said eventually.
“Abs-what?”
“I woke up one morning, before I’d tried anything with flowers. There were petals on the floor, under the wick systems… pink petals. I didn’t know where they’d come from, if it was some kind of— developmental mutation, or what.”
“Petals…”
The only other soul Minghao had told was their physicist Wonwoo, who had a working theory about wormholes and time dilation. Minghao wasn’t sure what to believe. And despite himself, he preferred a touch of romanticism. He reflexively said, “The way they’d fallen… they reminded me of patterns in a maize field, like… like crop circles. Like birds in migration. Biology tries to tell us things, sometimes.”
“I remember birds,” Seokmin said wistfully. “My eomma loved to feed them. They’d sing all day long outside our window.”
“Seems like a silly way to spend the time. Maybe that’s why they died off first.”
Seokmin looked briefly startled before he laughed.
“I always forget how dry your sense of humor is,” he said, almost to himself. This didn’t make much sense, because it was the first time the two of them had talked to each other like this. “Maybe you’re right. I guess we can’t afford to waste time like that, under the circumstances.”
Earlier this morning at 0530, after drinking his tea, Minghao had spent fifteen minutes outside the showers listening to Seokmin sing. Staring off outside the porthole at the moons of Jupiter. They were passing by Europa, the moon of ice. Beneath the ice there was thought to be an ocean. Privately, after months of watching his flowers bloom and color even under the barest of experimental conditions, Minghao thought that theoretically there could be flowers on Europa. Flowers with a parabolic shape that grew in the dim slant of the sun.
Sunflowers. On a moon of Jupiter. What a silly, beautiful thought. But it meant life. It meant, perhaps, another place for humans. Another place under the sun.
The flower in the terraplanter abscissed. It was sudden. One minute Seokmin was smiling at him and Minghao’s entire being felt flooded with warmth, and the next minute Minghao broke eye contact to look at the bloom and it was limp, lying on the table.
“Oh,” Minghao said, frowning.
Seokmin picked the flower up, then impulsively tucked it behind Minghao’s ear.
It made Minghao feel like he was standing on Earth again. On solid sunwarmed ground, barefoot. Seokmin was looking at him with those big eyes the way he always did, but now he was so close, so unbearably bright, getting closer and closer.
“Please don’t look at me like that,” Minghao whispered.
“Like what?”
“Like that. You look at me like that whenever I see you. Even in passing. I don’t know what it means.”
“Sorry,” Seokmin said. Seokmin didn’t look; Seokmin stared. He stared like he had known Minghao for years and years, like he knew Minghao entirely, like he knew much, much more than that, too. His thumb ghosted against Minghao's mouth, and the fluttery feeling in Minghao was familiar, as if he could remember it from somewhere, sometime.
Memory was a strange thing. The earliest one he had was as a child on his grandfather’s farm. Watching the birds fly above the green, green field.
It occurred to Minghao then that the first time he’d heard Seokmin sing was the same morning he’d found the petals on the floor. The same morning he'd crouched down and thought: This could mean something, couldn't it.
***
Re: [FILL] There will come soft rains
Re: [FILL] There will come soft rains
Re: [FILL] There will come soft rains
(also your vocabulary in this is so cool... maybe it's just my lack of knowledge in biological sciences but this world has /so/ much depth for me, partly because of the really interesting word choices + descriptions you use!! They were so fun I felt like I was genuinely exploring *__*)
Re: [FILL] There will come soft rains
and as always your seokhao makes me sigh like i'm in a historical romance novel... "You look at me like that whenever I see you. Even in passing. I don’t know what it means" yeah.. yeah... just very them.
ALSO BIRDS!!!! AND SUNFLOWERS!!!! oh youuuu!!! i love this universe so much my godddd so immersive and strange and so WONDERFUL <3 thank u for writing!!