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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- 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
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- 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;
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Art/media
- Upload your work to any platform (twitter, imgur, youtube, soundcloud, google maps, etc.)
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[FILL] Throughout heaven and earth
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: Post-disbandment, Melancholia AU
Permission to remix: Yes
***
“The learned say that your lights will one day be no more,” said the firefly to the stars.
The stars made no answer.
- Stray Birds, Tagore
***
The night of the wedding, Mingyu is folded into the backseat of a taxicab, sweating through his tuxedo. He tries a few breathing exercises that used to work just fine in the past. He hadn’t intended to take a taxicab at all but one stopped for him where he was panicking on the sidewalk, right there at his feet. It felt just like years and years ago when his parents used to pray their wayward son would find something good to do with his time on Earth, and something good ended up finding him.
Perhaps he should’ve learned his lesson about the shelf life of ridiculous dreams from those six years. But like an old dog, he hadn’t.
Digger of buried bones until the bitter end. Gets into the waiting cab, readies himself for the ride, then ends up at standstill in the fifth arrondissement for half an hour.
When the driver leans his head out the window and yells something obscene, it isn’t even audible over the din of people. The driver turns around to the backseat, says in jagged English they are only stuck because of how close they are to the Sorbonne Observatory. Mingyu says Okay-thank-you and keeps checking his watch.
This is how it will end, then. One knee tucked against his chest because there’s never enough room for all of him, all of his big and yearning body. It’s absurd. All of it is— that he is running out of time, running out of time at a moment and place like this.
Minghao had always wanted to travel to Paris. They talked about it a lot. “Together,” Minghao would say. “You and me, okay?”
Their wildest dreams consisted of going somewhere else, being someone else, choosing another life, for a day or two. They wondered if that was what all struggling artists did. If they were really struggling, if they were really artists. They must be, Minghao had decided, really they would always be, even if there wasn’t such a thing as fate.
As long as all thirteen of them were alive at the same time and on the same planet Minghao thought they would always come home to each other somehow. In another life, Joshua would strum his guitar instead of saying hello, and Minghao would sit next to him and listen. And of course Minghao would keep lines from poems all to himself unless Soonyoung ducked his head down close and asked softly. And without a doubt Minghao would give Mingyu and Seokmin those red string bracelets for the bad years, but only because Junhui’s mother told him to.
Maybe in that life, the planets’ rotations would be a little different and July twenty-twenty-one would not be the official expiration date and right now Seungcheol would be posting everywhere he possibly could with all of his endless open-faced love: We miss you! We will always miss you! We can’t wait to see you somewhere, maybe in our next lives! Will you wait for us?
In that life, waiting would have meant something else. Something more.
Here it’s worth nothing at all.
Mingyu squares his shoulders. He feels like Atlas. He says something hurried to the driver, sticks a few folded bills into the cupholder and chooses to leave the car.
He has to cross the street to get to the metro station. Nearly gets run over twice right there on the sidewalk as he gathers himself, once by a bicyclist, once by a man who is sprinting in the opposite direction, towards the Sorbonne. The sky is darkening, brumous, festering with the kind of despair he used to feel dunked in when they’d have to wake up in the sunless dawn in the winter for early schedules. The only thing that made those mornings bearable was his best friend asleep in the backseat next to him, smelling like something officially called cypress and amber but something Mingyu only knew as Minghao in the morning. When he wasn’t performing for anyone yet, when he was curled up in his big jacket like a little bird, his mouth softly open as he dreamt.
Paris smells like Paris. Cigarette smoke and the stench from the Seine. Worse if you breathe too deeply nowadays, sweet-heavy rotting thing long past its ripening age.
Mingyu holds his breath and sprints across the street. Soon he is panting hard in a seat on the metro amongst all the stubborn businessmen who like to read their newspapers but refuse to accept the news itself. The man in the seat across from Mingyu has his head bowed. He is pressing a folded copy of Le Parisien to his sweaty forehead like a handkerchief. His face is hidden behind the headlines.
Le survol … doublé de taille … et pas pour longtemps…
Minghao in New York two years before the end, reading the Western astrology column from the newspaper stand in the hotel lobby:
“Aries. Remember: when a door closes, another one opens somewhere. You must find it.”
Mingyu hasn’t looked at a newspaper in days. He studies the metro doors to keep calm. The doors open, the doors close. No one is entering, but one-by-one, the businessmen exit. Jumping ship for their wives and children and dinners. Ordinary endings.
Isn’t that enough, though? Choosing to end your days with the people you love?
Mingyu’s stop is approaching. He is seized with a bright terror at the thought of standing up and leaving. After all, if he walks through those doors, it might mean nothing at all. Increasingly it’s been feeling like none of it means anything anymore and perhaps never did. Big dreams and sparkling aspirations for the annals of history that ended in a conference room, in a signing of papers and a highlight-reel of a music video none of them could particularly bear to watch twice.
What can we do about feeling that sort of sad?
Nothing, probably.
But we still dream our little dreams.
The eighteenth arrondissement arrives and Mingyu almost forgets to stand up, hypnotized by the steady opening hiss of the doors. The world could end and the trains would still run on time. There was a time once when he could fall asleep in a moving vehicle and Jihoon would nudge him with an elbow or Jeonghan would squeeze his shoulder, tell him to Wake up, wake up, Mingyu-ah.
He steps out onto the platform and takes a deep breath of the rotting air. Being so alive and so alone is just like a bad dream he can’t wake up from.
The eighteenth is empty. Ghosts of failed artists present in the stacks and stacks of painted canvases abandoned by the side of the pavement. It’s darkening further and the winds are starting to pick up, as forecasted. Mingyu searches for a shortcut to the venue on his phone and finds his hands are shaking.
He wonders what Minghao is wearing. He thought he’d dress himself up. Go out in style. Stand up and say, Hey, my heartbreaker, my stray bird, my lost star, I choose you again. I choose you!
He winds up a steep climbing alleway, his heart juddering through his chest. There’s someone else ahead of him, walking in the same direction. It only takes seconds to know who. Mingyu needs, really, just to see the back of the neck— long, slender, half-hidden by dark hair.
“You’re going to be late to your own reception,” Mingyu calls.
When he looks over his shoulder Minghao is shy and wide-eyed, just like the first time they met, when he didn’t yet know who he was or who he wanted to be.
It passes. Maybe it turns into relief.
“I know,” Minghao says distantly. “Late to the happiest day of my life. Well… are you coming? There’s not much time left.”
Mingyu falls into step with him. It’s just as easy as before— Minghao walks too fast, makes turns without warning, and Mingyu keeps up a little too well and clips his heel. Eventually he reaches forward and takes Minghao’s hand. Minghao lets him, and slows down.
“Why now, Myungho?”
“Why now what?”
“Why get married now?
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you do,” Mingyu says, relieved, impossibly relieved, that they can still bicker like this.
“I guess— why not now? Why all this music?”
“But there is no music.” Not anymore.
“Look,” Minghao says, instead of explaining. “We’re here.”
They enter the elevator. He presses the topmost button. From the invitation in the mail and all the messages exchanged afterward Mingyu knows they must all be on the second floor. Everyone— Minghao’s fiancée, his parents, his friends. And the people who are both his and Mingyu’s. Eleven of them. Of course.
The elevator song is something sad and quiet, piano and saxophone, something Minghao probably knows and loves, but Mingyu can’t hear it fully for all the pounding in his ears. The doors slide open and he steps forward first. On the dark roof the wind is rising. It blows his hair from his face.
A palm presses between his shoulder blades, warm and solid. Home.
He smells a winter morning in their old car. He closes his eyes and shivers when something soft lightly brushes his neck.
“I never thought it would be so dark,” he says. “But it makes sense. It blots out the stars.”
The stray planet hurtling towards Earth is three-quarters of the sky by now.
“Be here with me,” Minghao says from behind him. “For a few seconds. And then we’ll go downstairs and be with them, too. Okay?”
He turns Mingyu by the shoulder, takes his hands in his own. Mingyu goes further, folds himself into the waiting arms, his forehead against Minghao’s.
They both wear their rings, still. All of them do.
The rings are white-gold. The melting point of white-gold is nine hundred and twenty nine degree Celsius. When the stray planet collides with the surface of the Earth the atmosphere will burn and crumple. Someday, even the stars will end. Despite all your choices, everything must.
“Kim Mingyu,” Minghao says, swaying from side to side. “I’m glad you’re here with me. Thank you.”
Mingyu closes his eyes and imagines he hears music.
In another life, maybe Minghao would not be here, on the roof with Mingyu at the end of the end, and perhaps it would not be the end, but even if it weren’t, if he weren’t, Mingyu would still choose to love him til whatever end came. In another life the wayward planet would take its fly-by path and keep going and going, off into space.
In another life, the gravitational pull of the Earth would not be enough to bring it back around.
Re: [FILL] Throughout heaven and earth
- hate/love that you included the bit with soonhao and the poetry
- "Mingyu squares his shoulders. He feels like Atlas" - GAAAAH
- "sweet-heavy rotting thing long past its ripening age" - your descriptions are so good. slightly random but it made me think of baldwin and giovanni's room and how i was so captivated by his descriptions of paris, this makes me feel quite similar
- ok i am incredibly sad. the yearning and the almosts and the futility and finality of it all... gah. this has torn me to absolute shreds. and this is so so so very gyuhao. you've done it, like always!! this is so so so great <3
Re: [FILL] Throughout heaven and earth
Re: [FILL] Throughout heaven and earth
lines i screamed over:
- This is how it will end, then. One knee tucked against his chest because there’s never enough room for all of him, all of his big and yearning body. It’s absurd. All of it is— that he is running out of time, running out of time at a moment and place like this.
- the thirteen boy-isms and how family is layered into kmg recollection and thinking about other lives. the seungcheol part where’d he would post on wv, we miss you, we want to see you (feels like an alternative to i love you that means so much more)
- The only thing that made those mornings bearable was his best friend asleep in the backseat next to him, smelling like something officially called cypress and amber but something Mingyu only knew as Minghao in the morning. pain
- Jumping ship for their wives and children and dinners. Ordinary endings.
Isn’t that enough, though? Choosing to end your days with the people you love? pain (2). i think also though the imagery is so fresh. i love the vision of little businessmen in suits (succession?) hopping off the boat into the deep deep ocean. at the end of the day you do flee your job and you run back home to your little life, private from the rest of the world
- also the we all still dream our little dreams part UGH YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I LOVE DREAMS
- He smells a winter morning in their old car. sometimes life is a series of concentric circles. GOODNESS. using this to pull minghao back in you are genius
- The rings are white-gold. The melting point of white-gold is nine hundred and twenty nine degree Celsius. When the stray planet collides with the surface of the Earth the atmosphere will burn and crumple. Someday, even the stars will end. Despite all your choices, everything must.
reference to your quote alongside svt rings i see. haha. i am perfectly fine.
i adore you!!! thank you for this my wonderful buddy
Re: [FILL] Throughout heaven and earth
(Anonymous) 2021-12-29 08:37 pm (UTC)(link)Re: [FILL] Throughout heaven and earth
Re: [FILL] Throughout heaven and earth
Re: [FILL] Throughout heaven and earth
When you first hit us with that "fifth arrondissement" and I realized this was apocalyptic PARIS of all places... AHHH. The way you slowly unroll this universe is sooooo delicious and awful. The sky is darkening, brumous, festering with the kind of despair he used to feel dunked in when they’d have to wake up in the sunless dawn in the winter for early schedules. The only thing that made those mornings bearable was his best friend asleep in the backseat next to him, smelling like something officially called cypress and amber but something Mingyu only knew as Minghao in the morning. Gosh how beautiful. There are so many visual cues here, I LOVE that we get to actually see Paris falling apart as Mingyu reflects. The way that he's physically rushing across the city feels like a convoluted vers of the hero's journey. I don't know what Melancholia is but I'm moving there ASAP if it's like this!
He thought he’d dress himself up. Go out in style. Stand up and say, Hey, my heartbreaker, my stray bird, my lost star, I choose you again. I choose you! .... I AM OUT OF MY MIND NOW THANKS! YOU'RE INCREDIBLE