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
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How it works
Prompting
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Filling
- Reply to the original prompt;
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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;
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Art/media
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i will wait for the next time you want me
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: when love isn’t enough
Do Not Wants: None
Prompt:
[FILL] It’s just that you remind me of a dog I once had and loved very much.
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: The Social Network AU
Permission to remix: No
***
“When did you come to Mingyu?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
“When did you approach Mingyu Kim with the idea for your website?”
“At a party at Sigma Chi,” Wonwoo says with great reluctance.
***
“I got punched by the Phoenix,” Mingyu had said triumphantly, a little too buoyed on the night. "I mean, it’s probably a diversity thing– but anyways. Hey. What did you wanna talk about again?”
Wonwoo blinked slowly.
He asked, “You got punched by the Phoenix?”
“Yeah, but– hey, it’s just a finals club, it’s not–”
“Come outside with me,” Wonwoo said.
At least, that was probably what he said.
Later it would be hard to account most of it in a clearheaded and detached manner to the lawyers. With the advantages of age and distance, Mingyu would realize he had missed the moment– the shift in Wonwoo’s eyes as he’d decided the two of them would leave the party.
Wonwoo, who flipped all of Microsoft off in high school by uploading his music production app onto the internet for free. Wonwoo who was funny and acidic and a bonafide certifiable genius. Wonwoo who had a deep well of something dark inside of him. And Mingyu, his idiot business major roommate who wore three-piece suits to class. The two of them, trekking out of Sig Chi and into the January Boston cold on a mission to change the world.
“What’s this about,” Mingyu said, his teeth chattering, leaning against the old brick wall of the house. Everything here had history, held memories.
“It’s about the website. Our website.”
Mingyu raised an eyebrow. A month ago, after a bad breakup, Wonwoo had gotten some crazy idea and Mingyu had scribbled algorithms on their dorm windows with Expo marker and felt young and dumb and sparkly every time Wonwoo looked at him.
“Yeah? What about our website?”
Wonwoo shifted back and forth in his slides, his hands shoved into his Harvard hoodie pockets, and said, “It’s going to be something bigger. Something important. Be my CFO?”
Ask anyone: Mingyu Kim was a deeply pragmatic person. He knew this, even if he lacked a certain amount of self-awareness. He always had a Plan B. He had grown up working hard at how to be liked, and how to dress, and who to talk to, and how to impress his own father.
But a month ago, Wonwoo had told him, “I need you.” And Mingyu had said, without thinking, without breathing, “I’m here for you.”
So that night, Mingyu, naive, young, and in a deep and terrible and painful well of feelings, said, “Of course I’ll be your CFO.”
“Hey, look, what the fuck, I made the second cut,” Mingyu said brightly a week after they’d shaken on it.
He brandished his envelope from the Phoenix Club in the low light of their dorm room. Wonwoo looked up from his laptop, then down again. He was working on the website. His expression was hard to read. He murmured something vague, and Mingyu stood there in the doorway for what felt like another hour.
He wanted to understand the new look in Wonwoo’s eyes. He wanted to fix it, brush it away the way he used to be able to. Only Wonwoo was busy with the laptop, so Mingyu smiled slightly, lowered his eyes, and left the dorm to wrangle together more money, more contacts, anything he could do to help.
But it was fine. It was okay, things were good, because two weeks later:
“You don’t know what that’s going to mean to my father,” Mingyu breathed, leaning over Wonwoo’s shoulder. Wonwoo was shaky on Red Bull and vodka and a week of no sleep, his fingers twitchy where they were tapping on the table.
Right there on the masthead of their website. Mingyu Kim, CFO, Co-Founder.
“Sure I do,” Wonwoo said quietly.
He held Mingyu’s gaze, one, two, three seconds, and smiled.
He did know. He knew more than he’d ever care to let on.
“If there’s something wrong, if there’s ever anything wrong, you can tell me,” Mingyu said quietly. “I want to help you. I’m the person who helps you here. Okay? This is our thing. Yours and mine.”
***
“Were you jealous of him?”
Wonwoo sits up from his constant slouch.
“I’m sorry. Jealous? What would I have to be jealous about?”
There’s a look in Wonwoo’s eyes that Mingyu knows so well. It reminds him of before. The way Wonwoo used to stand at the edges of crowds at parties and at meetings, the way he hadn’t yet truly understood his own power. The way he always had that funny vulnerable lonely kid deep inside of him.
Mingyu’s lawyer had briefed him about an earlier meeting with someone else Wonwoo had fucked over. The other guy’s lawyer had asked, “Why did you go to Mingyu Kim for the money? When you had so many other options?”
“I think you were the jealous one back then, Mr. Kim,” Wonwoo’s lawyer says now. “Weren’t you.”
“I wasn’t jealous,” Mingyu says. “I was nervous.”
“Why were you nervous?”
“Because…”
Because even then, in that Harvard dorm room, there had been a distant, rational fear that sooner or later he was going to get left behind. All that love. What if none of it mattered in the end? What if it wasn’t enough, not when the whole world awaited? What if it all dissolved to lawyers and NDAs and money and who was going to be remembered at the end?
At that other meeting, Wonwoo had said, like it was so very obvious, “I went to Mingyu Kim because that’s who I wanted to be partners with. Because he was my best friend.”
The other guy’s lawyer deadpanned, “Your best friend is suing you for $600 million.”
“It’s raining,” Wonwoo says now, distantly, looking out the window.
Mingyu still recognizes every part of this. Of him. All of his reactions and his defenses. He isn’t looking at Mingyu for a reason. He hasn’t looked at Mingyu much at all in the last four years for the same reason.
Sometimes in the past, before everything went wrong, Mingyu used to think it was possible that he and Wonwoo had known each other as children and had simply forgotten about it until college. Mingyu figured he’d probably loved Wonwoo for as long as he’d been alive, and maybe even longer, if that was possible. He figured Wonwoo had known the whole time, too.
***
A few months after they launched the website, ingenue entrepreneur Soonyoung Kwon showed up to a prospective business meeting in tiger-stripe sunglasses and ordered a series of mai tais for the whole table.
He largely ignored Mingyu. Made fun of the suits and the occasional stutter. He kept telling Wonwoo, “You need to move to California, man.”
Wonwoo did. Fell for Soonyoung hook, line, and sinker, but just for the summer. Mingyu stuck to their original plan. The one they’d cooked up in their dorm room together. He still believed in that, in the two of them. He spent a lonely summer in Manhattan riding subways, trying to find ad revenue for the website, ultimately giving up.
When Wonwoo finally opened the door to the stupid Palo Alto startup house at the end of the summer, Mingyu was defeated, without much progress, and absolutely fucking drenched.
“I waited an hour for you at the airport,” Mingyu said, low and tight. “In the rain. Why is Soonyoung setting up your business meetings now?”
Wonwoo avoided his eyes.
“Wonwoo.”
“I’m afraid if you don’t come out here you’re gonna get left behind,” Wonwoo said quietly. He was looking at the floor. But for a second, he looked up, right into Mingyu’s eyes.
Mingyu didn’t know what to believe. He stayed a little bit, then he left in a haze of envy when Wonwoo kept letting Soonyoung set things up. One day he woke up and froze the company bank account with the spite of a child. Like that would be enough of a slap in the face to make Wonwoo remember that it was supposed to be the two of them, him and Mingyu, he was Mingyu’s, Mingyu was his.
“Come to San Francisco,” Wonwoo said over the phone that night, tense and low. “There are some documents you need to sign, but– but I need you. I want– I need you here.”
Mingyu stood there alone in his lonely studio apartment in Manhattan with tears in his eyes. He could see the stupid house in Palo Alto, he could see Soonyoung and the other employees cracking bottles open and hollering.
He could see Wonwoo, standing outside the house. All alone, too.
“Okay,” Mingyu said, closing his eyes. “I’ll come.”
***
“I was your friend,” Mingyu says.
He thinks about the week after that phone call. Palo Alto. Reduced to angry tears, throwing Wonwoo’s laptop against the ground in front of half of his employees, saying with all the venom in his body that he was gonna lawyer the fuck up. How he’d hated himself for having let it devolve to this, somehow. How he still couldn’t hate Wonwoo for the same crime.
“I was your only friend.”
“I know,” Wonwoo says.
He doesn’t say, I’m sorry.
After they’ve settled, after they’ve signed and gone through the formalities, after the lawyers’ voices have been traded for the patter of the rain, Mingyu finds himself on the top of the roof of the empty parking lot of the office building, alone.
“Why.”
He turns around. Behind him, Wonwoo is drenched, hair all in his eyes.
“Why would you even follow me in the first place," Wonwoo says. "Why did you keep following?”
“I could answer you honestly,” Mingyu says slowly, “and maybe I will. Because when I first met you, you had trouble making eye contact. You’d talk so fast that sometimes it was like mostly you were talking to yourself. You were… you were very sweet. There’s something about your face. This thing still wells up in me. And when I imagine you as a kid, when I imagine you before you knew what you could do, before—”
The Bay Area is spread out below them. The lights shimmering through the encroaching fog. Mingyu had wanted something like this for himself once. At the end of it, there were supposed to be two of them standing here.
But not like this.
Wonwoo murmurs, “You didn’t know me at thirteen.”
“I really wish I had,” Mingyu whispers.
***
title from this andrew garfield + jesse eisenberg interview
Re: [FILL] It’s just that you remind me of a dog I once had and loved very much.
FAV LINES IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER!
So that night, Mingyu, naive, young, and in a deep and terrible and painful well of feelings, said, “Of course I’ll be your CFO.” - BLINDED BY LOVE BLAH BLAH BLAH.
He held Mingyu’s gaze, one, two, three seconds, and smiled.
He did know. He knew more than he’d ever care to let on. - ki I'm gonna eat my own brains thinking about htis.
Wonwoo murmurs, “You didn’t know me at thirteen.”
“I really wish I had,” Mingyu whispers. - I know EXACTLY where you got this and it makes this whole thing worse it's making me worse.
Re: [FILL] It’s just that you remind me of a dog I once had and loved very much.
Re: [FILL] It’s just that you remind me of a dog I once had and loved very much.
Re: [FILL] It’s just that you remind me of a dog I once had and loved very much.
(Anonymous) 2021-12-31 01:08 am (UTC)(link)Re: [FILL] It’s just that you remind me of a dog I once had and loved very much.
anyway. your mingyu is always so good - the downside of puppy-isms where you're doomed to wait and follow after someone who's no longer interested in having you by their side... it's so interesting to see wonwoo through mingyu's eyes, bc mingyu thinks he knows wonwoo so well and he did at one point! or he thinks he did! but at some point wonwoo threw up walls again, his favorite defense mechanism, and mingyu doesn't know how to move past them.
Re: [FILL] It’s just that you remind me of a dog I once had and loved very much.
Re: [FILL] It’s just that you remind me of a dog I once had and loved very much.
Re: [FILL] It’s just that you remind me of a dog I once had and loved very much.
Mingyu figured he’d probably loved Wonwoo for as long as he’d been alive, and maybe even longer, if that was possible. He figured Wonwoo had known the whole time, too.
head in hands, im grateful but also resentful that you made me go through this, ki surjamukhi.....