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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- 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!
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[FILL] in something greater
Major Tags: alien vernon, UFOs, woodz is there, vaguely magic realism/urban fantasy vibes?
Additional Tags: N/A
Permission to remix: Yes
sorry this may not be quite as serious as what you had in mind and also sorry i didn't do rocket line for an alien prompt >__<
***
vernon was not so much born as dropped out of the sky. his mother musses his hair til he grumbles and squirms, calls him her little star, says she asked for a child and got one.
you wouldn't know it just by looking at him. he'd be any normal boy, but for the glow about him, the way gravity seems to affect him a little less than everyone else. when he starts asking around about ufo chasers it makes people itch and squint at him; what's a nice young man like him doing trying to find a ufo chaser?
when he finds one, they ask him the same thing. “sure, i’ve seen an alien,” seungyoun scoffs, leans in close over the table of the shitty diner they're meeting in. “have you?”
“i am one, i think.” vernon swills his coffee around like he might be able to hypnotize himself by looking into it. “could you get me home?”
he and seungyoun spend a lot of nights laid out in the bed of seungyoun’s truck, watching the sky for any hint of green among the black. “i wish i could pay you for this,” vernon always says, and seungyoun laughs at him and buys him dinner. he tries not to question where seungyoun gets the money.
and he tells seungyoun why he's looking. “it's not as if i was the only kid in town who glowed a bit all the time,” vernon says. “there was this girl in my middle school who could make plants grow and bloom just by touching them. but like, that made sense, ‘cause her mom could do it too. she was human.”
“and you aren't?” seungyoun always says, one of his rhetorical questions. “isn't it pretty scientifically accepted by now, that most of us come from stardust?”
“yeah, sure.” this is the point in the night where it gets cold, where vernon and seungyoun inch closer to each other on the futon in the truck bed. “i’m not stardust, though. you'd laugh if you ever saw my baby pictures—they're photos of a shooting star, just white streaks above our garden and me sitting all wide-eyed in a charred circle of grass. when i landed i was smoking.”
vernon loves his mom, really he does, but what if he left a family behind on some distant moon? he makes seungyoun help him unroll paper maps of galaxies, mark off promising nebulas.
“i can only get you as far as the spaceship,” seungyoun says. “after that you're on your own.”
vernon barely sleeps anymore. at night he glows a little brighter, feels a little more alive, and he doesn't want to waste that. he sits up long into the night poring over astronomy books from the library, waiting for his phone to ring and seungyoun’s name to be on the screen.
it never comes, and he's starting to get restless, starting to wonder if maybe he was wrong and there’s nothing out there to go back to.
he nods off around 2 in the morning and wakes a few hours later, squinting against the pale light of dawn. it takes him a moment to realize what woke him—a scratching at his window, someone hissing his name outside.
“you couldn’t fucking call?” he mumbles when he pushes up the screen and finds seungyoun crouching in the tulips outside.
“aliens kind of exploded my phone,” seungyoun says. “it's time to go.”
they pile into seungyoun’s truck. vernon isn't really sure whether he was supposed to pack, doesn't know what to bring to space anyway. he grabs an extra jacket just in case.
he fidgets for the whole drive, enough that seungyoun reaches over and pats his thigh like vernon is a nervous dog in a thunderstorm. they sit in silence until they get to the big field where they always sit and watch the sky, and sure enough there's something hovering over it.
“well, bye then,” he says. seungyoun laughs at him.
“man, you really are an alien, huh?”
vernon picks his way across the field and seungyoun follows, standing at a distance as vernon looks up and takes in what could be his family. the ship isn’t a silver disc like he expected, but sleek and brass-colored, shaped like—well. it's hard to say. he's never really seen anything like it.
he steps into the floodlights, hears the smooth whir of the engines.
turns around and walks away.
“what the fuck, dude,” seungyoun says, hands thrown wide. “i did all this work for months to find you a spaceship, and you're fucking walking away?”
vernon shrugs. “i looked at it, and i realized i didn't know what it was.”
they amble back across the field, seungyoun kicking at clumps of grass, swinging his keys from one finger. behind them, the ufo whines softly back up into the clouds.
“i think, if i got on that ship, i would have been just as much an alien wherever it went,” says vernon. “i mean, i don't know for sure.”
“but you didn't wanna find out?” seungyoun asks.
“nah.” it's comforting, how seungyoun's truck sputters when it starts and rattles like it might fall apart as they drive back down the dirt road towards town. the ship above them had been too quiet.
vernon had thought that when he finally saw a spaceship it would feel familiar, but the truth is—this is what's familiar. his house with its peeling paint and the smell of the coffee his mom makes, the potholes in the road and how seungyoun swears when he hits them.
this, noisy and dirty and smudged at the edges, is home.
Re: [FILL] in something greater
Re: [FILL] in something greater
(Anonymous) 2021-12-30 11:53 pm (UTC)(link)Re: [FILL] in something greater
Re: [FILL] in something greater
(Anonymous) 2021-12-30 11:55 pm (UTC)(link)Re: [FILL] in something greater
Re: [FILL] in something greater
(Anonymous) 2021-12-31 03:04 am (UTC)(link)Re: [FILL] in something greater