BONUS ROUND 4 - PROMPT FUSION

[a1c0bb]

"Fusion is just a cheap trick to make weak prompts stronger!" - a quote from Steven Universe, probably

for this bonus round, it's all about combining two ideas. for example "high school AU" + "secret identity" or "soulmate au" + "mafia au"!

to submit a prompt or fill, reply to this post on Dreamwidth!

Fills can be in any format, and you can fill any prompt (even if it's your own or your teammates)!

for your prompt post title, please use the following format:
PROMPT: TEAM [TEAM NAME]
if you are participating as a vote-only member, use this format:
PROMPT: VOTER

for your fill  post title, please use the following format:
FILL: TEAM [TEAM NAME]
if you are participating as a vote-only member, use this format:
FILL: VOTER

POINTS - BONUS ROUNDS
For prompts: 10 points each (maximum of 100 prompt points per team per round)
For fills:
First 4 fills by any member of your team: 100 points each
Fills 5-10: 50 points each
Fills 11-20: 40 points each
Fills 21-50: 30 points each
Fills 51+: 25 points each

Comments

PROMPT: TEAM FRANMAYA

[ghostvines]

fake dating + soulmate AU

FILL: TEAM CATRADORA

[asaphida]

Words: 1060 (this really got away from me)
Fandom: She-Ra and the Princess of Power (2018)
Ship: Adora/Catra

Catra finishes putting the finishing touches on the soulmark, peeling the prep paper off carefully so it doesn't smudge. Hopefully the girl from Craigslist was able to figure out how to apply it from her instructions - she tried to make them as idiot proof as possible, but she's painfully aware of how creatively people can fuck things up. Her normal fare is simpler than this, but there's always someone who manages to fuck it up.

Making coverups for soulmarks isn't as lucrative as other jobs, and she's glad of that, really. Most of her clients are covering soulbonds that went south for one reason or another - death, abuse, irreconcilable differences that their biology didn't account for. The only clients that don't have a painful story are the escorts. They say a soulmark chills business, but Catra knows how to make it disappear, at least for a week or so.

A lot of her clients assume she's covering a soulmark, and she doesn't correct them.

Anyway. It pays enough to cover rent and canned soup, but when someone reached out to ask if she could fake a soulmark instead of covering it, she was interested enough to bite. So now she was applying her fraudulent soulmark, a rich golden splash, and hoping she can fix anything the client messed up. Grayskull didn't have time beforehand for Catra to do it, and she hasn't frantically texted yet, so she has to assume everything's fine.

She just has to put on the suit she had to buy for Scorpia's wedding and get through a few hours of some holiday party or something. Piece of cake, and it'll pay her rent through the winter. Maybe the escorts are onto something.

She's not giving someone from the internet her address, so she's loitering in front of the library when the car stops. It's older than she would have expected, streaks of dirt speckling along the back, almost obscuring the bumper stickers. If she hadn't gotten half of the fee as an advance, Catra wouldn't have believed this is Grayskull's car, but when the window rolls down she can see the golden soulmark at the base of the neck, just above the collarbone. It looks real - if Catra wasn't looking for it, she wouldn't see the slight texture that betrays its nature.

"Are you Catra?" Grayskull asks, stress in her voice, and - yeah. She's hired a stranger to pretend to be her girlfriend. Catra would be anxious too if she had anything other than money on the line.

"The very same." Catra drops into the passenger seat, and at least the car is cleaner inside than outside. Grayskull is - hot, with lean muscle unmistakeable where her dress reveals her shoulders, skin so flawless it seems to glow. Catra's makeup is perfect, but she has to stop herself from checking it.

"Thanks for doing this," Grayskull says. "They just will not get off my back. The mark was super easy to put on and it looks so good, next time I can probably do this without you."

Catra ignores the flare of disappointment. She doesn't even know this person, she can think with her libido later when this is over and she's home. "So, Grayskull, how'd we meet?"

"First of all," Grayskull says, "if we're dating I assume you call me Adora? That's my name. No one calls me anything else."

"I was just going to call you increasingly sappy pet names all night. Will that work for you, princess?"

Adora's face darkens. Catra's going to make enough money to replace her crap desk chair and have fun. "Sure, uh, kitten."

Hot and awkward. Oh no. "Okay, so you're not convincing at all. Stick to your strengths, which I assume you have."

"Escrima," Adora says, "which, to answer your question, is how we met." She must sense her confusion even with her eyes on the road, because she says, "It's a martial art, I train with a sword. You're not going to have to talk about it, no one will let me talk about it and I want to."

"Never heard of it," Catra says, and Adora launches into a clearly long-stored explanation, and when Catra unfocuses her eyes she can see it, sweat on her brow, hands tight on the hilt of a blade. She's never seen a kalimpan, and she doesn't recognize a number of the words Adora's using to describe it, but she wants to see one, now. Maybe she can get Adora to show someone a picture before the evening is over.

They're parked too soon. When Adora's done smoothing her dress, Catra holds out her hand. Adora eyes it, and Catra says, "I mean, we ought to sell it, right?"

Adora takes her hand, and the skin over her collarbone buzzes with a sensation she's never felt, and goddamn it, it's on the opposite side from the fake one. Catra can barely focus on the fact that this cute weirdo has been assigned to her by fate or whatever because she's way too annoyed that she's wasted all that time designing the fakes, that of course are on the same side.

Adora gasps next to her. "This isn't hap-"

"Yeah, sugar, apparently it's happening." Even the sound of Adora wincing at the name doesn't help. "I have my kit in the car, hopefully my shit will only take long enough to get off for us to be fashionably late."

"Wait." Adora faces her, reaches for her other hand. "We're soulmates. You - I don't want to go to the party anymore. I just want to get to know you."

The majority of the soulbonds Catra sees have ended badly. Catra's not naive enough to believe that a soulbond means anything more than an ugly tattoo two people share. But Scorpia looks at Perfuma like she hung the moon, and Catra's never seen her happier. When she sees the mark on Adora, blue and yellow swirl with a jagged edge that she can't make sense of - she's never felt possessive like this before. What does she have to lose, really?

"If you really want to waste my acting talents, snookums, I guess it's your loss."

Adora smiles and it feels like she's looking at the sun and Catra will have to keep her busted desk chair for a little longer, it looks like.

FILL: TEAM CATRADORA

[hopelessgemini]

words: 706

ship: suletta mercury/miorine rembran

The soulbond snaps into place the moment they meet. Suletta Mercury’s world explodes into colours and light and the greyscale girl at the centre of it all stares at her in a kind of horror, and that is that.

There’s a mark on the outside of her forearm when she takes her spacesuit off, a name scrawled in thin neat handwriting. Miorine Rembran. Suletta traces a finger over it with a mixture of delight and fear, sure she’s going to mess it all up somehow. She usually does.

\

“We can’t — we can’t do this,” Miorine says, sitting with her legs swinging over the lip of Aerial’s hand, “if people know we’re —” she gestures between them, “ — you know.”

(Is she blushing?)

“I don’t follow,” Suletta says truthfully, kneeling down to sit beside her. Something about Miorine makes her want to be close to her all the time, want to press up beside her and hold her hand and —

Miorine makes a frustrated noise. “We can’t be engaged — you can’t be the Holder — if people know we’re soulmates.”

“... Why? Wouldn’t that be really romantic?”

She flushes, turning sharply away from Suletta to face the training field, shoulders hitching up to her ears. “It doesn’t matter if it’s romantic or not. If people know we’re — fated to be together, they’ll lose interest in the duelling game. It takes all the fairness out of it.”

“I don’t know, that sounds pretty good to me —”

“And my father will kill me.”

“Ah.”

A pause. “I’m supposed to be regularly… surveying my options. Talking to different people in the running.”

Suletta tilts her head to the side. She’s going somewhere with this, feeling it out along the way, and she doesn’t think she’s ever seen Miorine so shy before.

“The problem is, I really don’t want to do that.”

She scrunches up her nose. “Oh, please don’t say you have to go on dates with Guel.”

Miorine snorts. “Something like that.”

“I am so sorry.”

Another pause, this one almost pained. Suletta leans over until her chin is resting on Miorine’s shoulder, only half as close to her as she wishes she could be. Maybe it’s just a side effect of the soulmate bond, the wanting. “I suspect my father would lighten up on that front if he knew I was connected to you in — some other way.”

She speaks so haltingly, like she’s afraid Suletta will get up and run away if she pushes too far. There’s something behind her voice, now, but Suletta would rather die than push, so she sits neatly and listens with her head on Miorine’s shoulder, and aches with want.

When she speaks again, her voice is soft. Hesitant. “If I made him think we were dating, maybe —”

Suletta jumps in her seat. “Wh— dating?”

“Dating,” Miorine repeats, suddenly firm. “If it doesn’t make you too uncomfortable.”

“No, no, I —” she sits upright, ducking her head to avoid Miorine’s searching gaze. “I don’t mind. That sounds — that would be okay with me, Ms Miorine. If it’ll help you out.”

“It would,” she says decisively.

And that’s that.

//

She meets Miorine’s father exactly once, on the day of his one and only yearly visit to the school. Suletta stands awkwardly next to her with their hands intertwined and gives him a shaky bow when he pauses in front of her, and when she and Miorine are sitting next to each other at a dinner in one of the school board’s huge and echoing dining rooms she successfully manages to avoid meeting his eyes for the full two hours.

The Holder jacket does, of course, hide her soulmark, and Miorine’s jacket conceals hers, too.

She zones out through most of the stilted conversations that pass over the dining table, joining back in only when Miorine nudges her gently. She manages to avoid committing some kind of Asticassian social faux pas that would have seen her confined to Earth House for a week for fear of being shunned. And — in what she considers to be the biggest victory of the night — she doesn’t even squeak too loudly when Miorine stands on her tiptoes and kisses her goodbye right in front of Delling Rembran, the richest man in the universe.