Tuesday: Song lyrics!

[nagi_schwarz]

Hello, everyone. I’m nagi_schwarz and your host for the week. As a reminder, Sundays are for Lonely Prompts and sharing the fills that you completed during the week, Tuesdays and Thursdays are for new themes and prompts and Saturdays will remain a Free for All. Posting will be done on both DW and LJ so everyone should be able to get notifications.

With that being said, today's theme is song lyrics. Prompts can be lyrics from any song, from pop to opera to folk songs and nursery rhymes.

Just a few rules:
No more than five prompts in a row.
No more than three prompts in the same fandom.
Use the character's full names and the fandom's full name
No spoilers in prompts for a month after airing, or use the spoiler cut option found here.
If your fill contains spoilers, warn and leave plenty of space, or use the above-mentioned spoiler cut.

Prompts should be formatted as follows: [Use the character's full names and fandom's full name]
Fandom, Character +/ Character, Prompt

Some examples to get the ball rolling...

+ any, any, I’m not myself without you in this world (Find Me - Rocky)
+ any, any, you loved me just the same (Yes or No - Rocky)
+ any, any, when I see you, it feels like the whole world is upside down (Chameleon - Rocky)

We are now using AO3 to bookmark filled prompts. If you fill a prompt and post it to AO3 please add it to the Bite Sized Bits of Fic from 2024 collection. See further notes on this new option here.

Not feeling any of today’s prompts? You can use LJ’s advanced search options to limit keyword results to only comments in this community.

While the use of LJ's advanced search options is available, bookmarking the links of prompts you like might work better for searching in the future.

If you have a Dreamwidth account and would feel more comfortable participating there, please feel free to do so…and spread the word! comment_fic


tag=song lyrics

Comments

[brumeier]

Any, Any, Your prison is walking through this world all alone (The Eagles)

Fill: Astro, Shadowhunter AU, Dongmin + OCs, minor character death

[nagi_schwarz]

As a child, Dongmin had thought that time was freedom. While he was helping his mother with the endless chores they had to do to survive — fetching water from the stream, checking the traps for hares and deer, gathering herbs and grasses for their food and the medicines they made and that his mother and younger brother sold in the village — all he’d ever wanted was time. Time to read more than the medical books his mother stored in the chest in the corner of their one-room house. Time to lie on his back and look at the stars. Time to wander and see the wider world.

And then one time Dongmin made the fatal mistake of slipping away from his duties — he was supposed to be rinsing rise — and prowling close to the village, and he learned two terrible truths: his face was beautiful, and he was a monster.

His mother and brother didn’t have deer antlers like he did, but he liked his antlers, because when he shed them at the end of winter and the beginning of spring, they could be sold for knife handles and other ornaments, or carved into charms to sell. Best of all, mother would weave pretty brook-polished pebbles and seeds and feathers onto strings and hang them from his antlers, making him pretty.

He was pretty, all right.

Pretty monstrous.

He had antlers because he was half-demon.

The medicines and charms his mother sold were so potent because of Dongmin’s half-demon magic. He hadn’t even realized he had magic, and he didn’t really know how to use it, not well enough to defend his mother and brother when the humans came with their scythes and shovels and hammers and burning torches.

Dongmin was a monster who couldn’t die. He could be wounded. He could feel pain. But his magic, the magic he’d desperately sent out over and over again to try to save his mother and brother, worked on him instead, healed him.

It was a serious-faced girl in leather armor, who had high cheekbones and curious black tattoos all over her skin, who found him and took him in. Rescued him. Told him what he was.

A warlock. Half-demon. No doubt his mother had been taken in by the demon’s beautiful face, as beautiful as Dongmin was. (Dongmin couldn’t explain that his mother was beautiful in her own right, and that his younger brother, fully human, had been even more beautiful than him.)

Dongmin was powerful. But he had to use his power carefully, to never use it against the humans, or the Council would strike him down.

“What council?” Dongmin huddled against the roots of a giant oak, seeking refuge in its life-force and old, old power.

“The Clave. Shadowhunters.”

“What’s a Shadowhunter?”

“I’m a Shadowhunter. We maintain the balance between downworlders and humans.”

Dongmin closed his eyes and heard his mother and brother’s final screams. “Seems like humans can take care of themselves just fine.”

“Don’t mind the mundanes,” the girl said. “They’re weak and ignorant to the ways of darkness. Don’t know any better. So we protect them, but we don’t tell them anything.”

Like children, Dongmin thought. The way his mother had never told him about his father, about his own magic, about how he was different and how dangerous that difference was.

But she’d told him, hadn’t she? By warning him away from the village and telling him never to go there. He hadn’t listened to her, and now —

“Fine. I’ll leave the humans alone so long as they leave me alone,” he said.

The girl nodded. “That’s the spirit. If one of them comes after you, you can deal with him. But you can’t slaughter a whole village or anything.”

“Even if that village killed my family?”

The girl’s expression softened. “They’re weak. They fear what they don’t understand. Don’t hate them. Pity them.” And she drew Dongmin into a hug.

Her armor was stiff and poky and she was bristling with weapons, but he hadn’t been hugged in a long time, and he hugged her back, and then he cried, and she patted his hair gingerly, trying to avoid his antlers.

“Now,” she said, “I have a place you can stay. It’s warm and comfortable.”

“Does it have books?”

“It has so many books.” She rose, still holding his hand, and led him through the trees.

“Not just medicine books. Story books?”

“All kinds of books. Books you’ve probably never imagined. Books about magic, and lands where the sands stretches as far as the eye can see, an ocean of shifting gold.”

“I’ve never seen the ocean.” Dongmin was intrigued.

She smiled at him. “You can see the ocean, and the desert, and places where people have hair the color of poppies, or yellow camellias.”

“Are they monsters like me?” Dongmin asked, wide-eyed.

She laughed. “No, they’re just people. There are so many people in this world. You’ll see.”

And Dongmin did, with the lovely Park Byeol by his side, but then he realized that Shadowhunters, unlike Warlocks, were not immortal. She went out on a hunt, and she never came back.

Dongmin, who’d been filling his time with reading and learning and magic, making charms and medicine for Byeol and the other hunters so they could be safe, filling his time with all the things he’d done with his mother and brother (except fetching water; being able to magic that was delightful) suddenly had too much time.

No Byeol to talk to.

The other Shadowhunters came to him for charms and potions and medicine and wisdom, as he was the overseer of a vast library of knowledge, about every downworlder under the sun and in the planes beyond.
But they weren’t his friends.

They grew old, and died, and he consulted with their children, and their children’s children, and the time that he had craved as a child had become a prison for him now, locking him away from the mortals around him. As the centuries marched on, Dongmin traveled the world, seeing the deserts and oceans and distant lands Byeol had told him about, collecting new magic and potions and knowledge. He’d spent an age on the Emerald isle, roaming the woods and doling out small charms and healing to the beautiful wine-haired maidens who would shyly press kisses to his cheeks and drape glittering chains and trinkets from his antlers.

He met other warlocks, many who had stories similar to his, idyllic childhoods with human mothers ruined by the scared and ignorant humans around them. The warlocks who’d been raised in the infernal planes were a different beast altogether, and they rarely lasted long on the mortal plane, their chaotic rampages cut short by shadowhunters.

Every now and again Dongmin struck up a cordial alliance with a particular shadowhunter, one who didn’t hold too tightly to prejudices against downworlders and was interested in him beyond what magic he could provide to the Clave and other shadowhunters.

When he finally returned to his homeland, Hanyang had become Gyeoseong had become Seoul, and the woods and villages and towns he’d known as a child had become bustling streets with sleek cars and glassy skyscrapers stark against the horizon.

He was the eldest of the warlocks in Joseon, and one of the strongest. He wasn’t much interested in politics, but the Shadowhunters at the Seoul Institute had records of him, and it wasn’t much of a question: a warlock of his caliber should be the High Warlock of Seoul.

Dongmin supposed he could return to filling his days as he once had with his mother and brother, but as he walked the streets and saw familiar faces, he wondered which of them were the descendants of those villagers long ago who’d taken his mother and brother from him. And he decided it didn’t matter, because they carried no memory of their ancestors’ crimes, and he was outside of time anyway. He was the only person walking the earth who carried his family’s memories, but no one remembered the people who killed them, and that, he supposed, was revenge enough.

He would sit in his gilded cage with bars of time and immortality, and he would wait — wait till he saw his mother and brother reincarnated, till the soul-searching spells he’d cast all those centuries ago came to fruition.

And then he would use his immortality to give them the long, happy lives they deserved, and after that — after that he would have to hope that being half human was human enough to be reborn with them again.

He was sitting at his workbench, carving a little figurine of a bear from a piece of one of his own shed antlers, when he felt a whisper down his spine.

Someone had crossed his wards.

Re: Fill: Astro, Shadowhunter AU, Dongmin + OCs, minor character death

[brumeier]

Oh, man! This is so awesome! And sad. Utterly, utterly sad. Poor Dongmin. I'm sad that his mother didn't better prepare him for the reality of his situation, though I can understand why she went that way. That fact that he's still looking for her and his brother in any form is just...ugh. Heartbreaking. You used this prompt perfectly! Thank you so much!

(Also, hint, hint. A perfect fit for the current AU challenge.)

Re: Fill: Astro, Shadowhunter AU, Dongmin + OCs, minor character death

[nagi_schwarz]

You are so welcome! Your prompts are full of feels so I indeed came with some feels.

(And...yes. I do see that hint. Thank you.)

(Also, sorry Dongmin. Your relatives died. Again. I don't hate you I swear.)

Re: Fill: Astro, Shadowhunter AU, Dongmin + OCs, minor character death

[vonseal]

ooh this is so good and intriguing and IT ENDS ON A CLIFFHANGER???

Re: Fill: Astro, Shadowhunter AU, Dongmin + OCs, minor character death

[nagi_schwarz]

Aw, thank you! (Poor Dongmin is really having a bad time of it lately, his relatives dying.)

And it is a bit of a cliffhanger. But I already know what happens next. ;)