Thursday: tragedy/heartbreak
Mar. 12th, 2015 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tigriswolf posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
comment_ficToday’s theme is tragedy/heartbreak. This can be a relationship failing, character death, the good guys losing – however you choose to interpret it.
The rules, as ever, are:
1. No more than five prompts in a row.
2. No more than three prompts in a fandom.
3. Use the character's full name and fandom's full name for ease adding to the Lonely Prompts spreadsheet.
4. If your prompt or fill contains anything that can be a trigger for the reader, please add a warning for that to give the reader the chance to decide if they want to read or not.
5. No spoilers in prompts for a month after airing. Use the spoiler cut option found here.
6. If your fill contains spoilers, warn and leave plenty of space, or use the above mentioned spoiler cut.
Prompts should be formatted as follows:
Fandom, Character+/Character, Prompt
For example:
Leverage, Eliot Spencer/Alec Hardison/Parker, The Last Job
Once Upon a Time, Jefferson + Regina, “You took my child, Majesty. Fair’s fair that I take yours.”
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 2015 collection.
tag=Tragedy/heartbreak
The rules, as ever, are:
1. No more than five prompts in a row.
2. No more than three prompts in a fandom.
3. Use the character's full name and fandom's full name for ease adding to the Lonely Prompts spreadsheet.
4. If your prompt or fill contains anything that can be a trigger for the reader, please add a warning for that to give the reader the chance to decide if they want to read or not.
5. No spoilers in prompts for a month after airing. Use the spoiler cut option found here.
6. If your fill contains spoilers, warn and leave plenty of space, or use the above mentioned spoiler cut.
Prompts should be formatted as follows:
Fandom, Character+/Character, Prompt
For example:
Leverage, Eliot Spencer/Alec Hardison/Parker, The Last Job
Once Upon a Time, Jefferson + Regina, “You took my child, Majesty. Fair’s fair that I take yours.”
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 2015 collection.
tag=Tragedy/heartbreak
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2015-03-12 05:09 am (UTC)Avengers movieverse, Bucky Barnes + author’s choices, during his healing process, the ex-Winter Soldier never unconsciously defends himself when startled or frightened – but he will defend others
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Date: 2015-03-12 05:09 am (UTC)Leverage, Eliot Spencer/Alec Hardison/Parker, The Last Job
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Date: 2015-03-12 05:10 am (UTC)Once Upon a Time, Jefferson + Regina, “You took my child, Majesty. Fair’s fair that I take yours.”
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Date: 2015-03-12 05:10 am (UTC)The Hobbit (Jackson films), Fili + Kili, one of them survives and utterly wishes he hadn’t
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Date: 2015-03-12 05:11 am (UTC)Avengers movieverse, Steve Rogers, (post-Cap2) his supervillain origin story: he finds the ex-Winter Soldier about three days after he commits suicide (for the reason of author's choice)
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Date: 2015-03-12 08:00 am (UTC)Here at night
In a lost and lonely part of town
Held in time
In a wad of tears I slowly drown
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Date: 2015-03-12 08:58 am (UTC)Fill: (Drabble) Further Tragedy
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Date: 2015-03-12 02:34 pm (UTC)Avengers movieverse, Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes, the story of us looks a lot like a tragedy now
Re: Fill: (Drabble) Further Tragedy
Date: 2015-03-12 02:53 pm (UTC)Thank you!
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Date: 2015-03-12 07:45 pm (UTC)You're just raising your standards
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Date: 2015-03-12 07:53 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2015-03-12 08:39 pm (UTC)Re: Fill: (Drabble) Further Tragedy
Date: 2015-03-12 10:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-12 11:11 pm (UTC)FILL: A Square Peg at Lightsbridge, Part I (Trisana Chandler, Gen)
Date: 2015-03-12 11:50 pm (UTC)It wasn't that she couldn't do the work. She could. She couldn't coast in all of her classes--few were that easy--but she'd struggled harder to master seeing the future on the wind.
The problem was that she wasn't...she fumbled for the right word. Perhaps malleable came close. At eighteen, she was a trained and qualified weather witch, bound to her brother and sisters by a magical bond. They had fought an earthquake, pirates, and a forest fire. She had walked in sewers to find the source of a plague and had acted as a crotchety research wizard's secretary/scribe at the age of eleven. At fourteen, she'd gained two apprentices and had had to search for...what was the term Niko had used? A serial killer? And she, Briar, Sandry and Daja had had to all but fight a war when a visit to Sandry's relatives turned far, far worse than anyone could have expected.
She wasn't young. No one could be, after all that. And she hadn't been especially merry and frolicsome before she'd come to Winding Circle. She'd always been the fat redhead that no one had wanted, passed around to relatives because a Chandler couldn't be left out on the street. It wouldn't be proper.
And if her teachers and fellow students had just acknowledged that she was a bit cynical or loved studying, that would have been fine. They didn't have to know everything about her to accept her as the prickly soul that Tris knew she was. Mildly confused tolerance of her would have been enough.
But somehow that wasn't happening. It was as if every look, every word, every laugh had its own spearhead or knife's edge with which to cut her. Several girls had made pointed comments about her weight and how she would never catch a man if she stayed so fat and didn't wear a more attractive hairdo than her tightly bound braids. Useless to explain that her hair was her mage kit. She had tried telling them that she didn't want to catch a man--or a woman, for that matter--and they'd acted personally insulted. She hadn't told them not to hunt young men...but they'd behaved as if her lack of desire made their craving a bad thing.
The male students were no better. "Short, fat pepperpot" was the kindliest description she'd gotten from them. "Cow" and "sow" were more frequent. So was "know-it-all." One had told her that she was "too independent"; another had said that she was "stiff and unemotional." Tris could have told him that this was wrong; every time she turned around these days, she felt as if her soul was bleeding.
Again, she didn't quite know what was wrong; there were plenty of young women at Lightsbridge, and some were as stubborn and determined as she was. She couldn't say where the difference between those girls and herself lay, either. She only knew that it existed. She could tell that much because the difference ached like a wound.
The worst, though, were her teachers here at Lightsbridge. She'd gotten used to Niko's patience over the years. Even Dedicate Crane, whose sardonic words could sting like a scorpion's tail when he was frustrated or angry, had been willing to concede, when it had been proven, that an eleven-year-old could be good at research and magery.
The Lightsbridge professors were demanding, which she had expected. Some, like the Namorese professor Ela Gleuckin, who handled the Magical Literature and Magical Drama departments, were the best of teachers, fiercely and passionately interested in their subjects and eager to help their students understand them all the better. Tris could have taken Ela's classes for the rest of her life and savored every minute.
But many seemed angry when their demands were fulfilled. One had told her bluntly that he was giving her a zero on a paper that she'd sweated blood over because he'd never seen a first-year student do such thorough work before. Another had informed her that she was simply wasting her time being in his class because his classes were far too esoteric for an ordinary...person...to comprehend. A third, the professor who taught Writing on Magical Subjects, had told her not an hour ago that she was hopeless and would never manage as an academic mage.
FILL: A Square Peg at Lightsbridge, Part II (Trisana Chandler, Gen)
Date: 2015-03-12 11:52 pm (UTC)"You attempt to do it," Professor Sotred said, turning his nose up slightly. "That is not the same thing."
Tris curled her toes tight; it was better than clenching her fists, because people couldn't see it and start lecturing her about why a lady never lost her temper. Tris always had the impulse to introduce such idiots to Lady Sandrilene fa Toren when Sandry was in "defend her family" mode. Sandry didn't lose her temper often, but when she did, Tris would have backed her over an enraged grizzly bear. With cubs.
"What am I doing wrong?" she said, after counting to five. She'd yet to make it to a full count of ten. "I know I do the research--"
"Oh, research," sneered Sotred. "It's the presentation that matters. Your writing...well, it's too clear."
Tris shook her head in an attempt to clear it. "Would you please repeat that?" she asked politely. "I think the sun was in my ears. How can something be too clear?"
Sotred wrinkled his nose. Tris thought that he resembled a deeply offended rabbit. "It's not written for scholars," he said with distaste, gazing down at her as if she was something soft and smelly that he'd had the misfortune to tread in on a hot day. "Anyone could understand it--even a beggar or a street urchin. We can't have that. Knowledge is to be preserved, not scattered before those who will not appreciate it."
"You mean," said Tris in a quiet tone that probably didn't sound nearly as enraged as she felt, "that knowledge of magic doesn't properly belong to the poor, to Traders, to mere merchants--"
"Certainly not," sniffed Sotred, waving away the very notion as if it, like Tris, reeked. "Magic is for the elite."
You are a jackass, Tris thought, looking down her long nose at the man. "And if I managed to master academic jargon?"
"It wouldn't matter," said Sotred, wincing slightly at the word "jargon." "You have the worst thing that a student could have at your age--a writing style."
Tris blinked. "Sorry? That's bad?"
"It's appalling. It means that your mind has set in a certain way of thinking, and it will be almost impossible for you to overcome that. Your mind has calcified, Striana fa Marquard." That was the false name under which she had enrolled; "fer Marquard" had been Niko's surname once, and he was allowing her to use it, as "Tris Chandler" bordered on the notorious.
"It would be best," Sotred continued, "if you simply returned home, making your place available to someone who will truly appreciate it. Doubtless you can find a more entertaining way of wasting your time."
Tris didn't remember what she'd said or done after that. She only recalled feeling as if she had been tossed onto a midden heap to rot, along with the rest of the garbage. She finally came to when she was standing in front of the library. Carefully, and without looking left or right--if she met anyone's eyes right now, she would scream!--she made her way into the Lightsbridge library and hurried to a small heptagonal room in the back. It was filled with the smell of musty books--plays and poetry, mainly--that no one else ever read.
Tris dumped her textbooks on the floor, curled up on a window seat overlooking the sea and pressed her hot face again a cool pane of glass. She felt as if there was an anvil on her chest, suffocating her and making it impossible for her to breathe.
She wished that she could cry, but tears had never done any good. No one ever paid attention to tears. It was better to get angry instead. Only that wasn't working any more. She only knew one way of being herself, and--like every place but with her circle of friends--it wasn't working here. She felt like a baby bird battling a typhoon.
"I want to go home," she mumbled, pressing her face even harder against the glass. "I just want to run away from here and go home."
She wouldn't, of course. She knew that. People who ran away had to have somewhere to run to. And how could she possibly run away to the year that she had been eleven, home for the first time in her life, and loved?
no subject
Date: 2015-03-13 01:41 am (UTC)ugh stupid comment lengths.
Date: 2015-03-13 02:58 am (UTC)original
Date: 2015-03-13 04:57 am (UTC)Somehow he never considered that Len would die before him.
When Mom died he'd been wild with grief, alternately shutting himself away and lashing out. He supposed, looking back with the detachment of time, that this made sense. He'd had too many conflicting, suppressed emotions tied up around her that of course they would explode after her death.
With Len he felt numb.
Alec woke up, fed the cat--he could barely remember getting the cat, but he had a few weeks after Len died at Chris's suggestion just so the house felt less empty--got dressed, ate breakfast, went to work. He didn't seem to taste what he ate much anymore. In moments of clarity, he wondered if it would lose him his job because a chef relied on his sense of taste to provide good meals. Work passed, sometimes dragging for an eternity, sometimes passing in a blink where Alec would try to think back on that day and find he didn't remember anything at all.
It surprised him how little he cried.
Losing Len should feel like losing a limb, that phantom feeling of turning and expecting to see a head of brown hair hunched over the table grading papers or the warmth of Len's body beside him when Alec woke every morning. Oddly, it felt like the reverse of a phantom limb; Len was everywhere and it was Alec who was cut off, missing from the reality he existed in.
Len's desk still had papers on it; half graded term papers, notes for an essay on prosthetic limbs in the Civil War, photos from Evan's wedding still not filed in an album, directions to get to the convention center to hear a scholar talk about research. Len's dresser was filled with neatly folded socks and pants and underwear, his closet full of neat button-down shirts waiting to be worn again. There was a book on the coffee table from the library, a strip of scrap paper crammed between the pages to mark where he'd left off. A tube of toothpaste Alec didn't use because Len liked Crest but Alec had always preferred Aquafresh. The cactus Len barely kept alive that looked like it might actually be dying from lack of water, but Alec didn't water it because only Len knew how much water was okay to give it.
Alec would think that seeing these things would be what tripped him up and made him break. They didn't. They were comforting really. Proof Len had existed and had had a place and that that place still existed even if it was as a hole instead of solid.
Instead, Alec broke down in an elevator because Len would have hated how high up they were when he saw out the window the elevator opened to. Alec couldn't touch an apple without his hands shaking and cutting himself with the knife he tried to peel it with. He cried when he had dreams where nothing happened but Len holding his hand under a tree with green-dappled summer sunshine.
Life carried on, but Alec was the ghost in it, one step away from becoming whole again.
Re: original
Date: 2015-03-13 06:01 am (UTC)Thanks so much for the fill!
FILL: Jupiter Jones/Caine Wise
Date: 2015-03-24 07:15 pm (UTC)They were asleep when it started, when the pain against her lower back increased until it woke her up. The bed was wet, soaked with her blood. The sight of it was almost worse than the pain, and knowing her body had rejected what she wanted so badly made her cry so hard Caine worried she was in horrible pain.
It didn’t take long before someone was next to her, trying to calm her as they took her away from the bloody bed, and gave her something for the pain. She didn’t want it, she didn’t want their comforting words, all she wanted was to go back to the previous day when she still believed there was a chance everything would turn out well. She wanted to return to the day where Caine kissed her belly and told her just how happy he was. No matter how hard she wished every time she opened her eyes she was met with worried expressions, asking how she was, asking if she needed more painkillers.
Jupiter didn’t know how long she was awake, staring into the open space, wondering if she would ever be happy again. She sat like that until she could barely hold her eyes open, until strong arms pulled her up and carried her over to something soft and warm.
“Sleep,” he whispered, so close by but yet so far away. For the first time since she woke up she felt some sort of happiness again as his strong arms wrapped themselves around her.
Re: FILL: Jupiter Jones/Caine Wise
Date: 2015-03-25 06:02 pm (UTC)