YURI SHIPPING OLYMPICS 2024 - BONUS ROUND 3

[a1c0bb]

For this bonus round, we're looking for prompts inspired by plant/flower symbolism and the language(s) of flowers!

Here are some resources on flower meanings:
Script Florist
Farmer's Almanac
Wikipedia: Hanakotoba
Wikipedia: Plant Symbolism

This round will end on July 1st.

Fills can be in any format, and you can fill your teammates prompts, but you cannot fill your own prompt.

You can post as many fills and as many prompts as you want!

for your prompt post title, please use the following format:

PROMPT: TEAM [TEAM NAME]

for your fill post title, please use the following format:

FILL: TEAM [TEAM NAME]

POINTS - BONUS ROUNDS
For prompts: 10 points each (maximum of 150 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 FIRE EMBLEM

[miyukitty]

"Associated with Buddhism, the white lotus is the flower of spirituality by excellence. This pond plant, which blooms in summer, symbolizes purity, mysticism and reincarnation. With its roots submerged in the mud, the lotus will always produce beautiful flowers above the water. For this reason, the lotus represents the elevation of the consciousness and the spirit." - [hanakotoba] (reincarnation, you say...? 😮)

FILL: Team Kittyuri

[missiletoe]

Ship: Kitty/Yuri
Word Count: 711

did i hear someone say reincarnation yuri??? i also combined it with doomed yuri which kind of goes hand-in-hand

CONTENT WARNING: blood and graphic depictions of violence because it is women with swords & also major character death but there's reincarnation

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There are white lotuses blooming when they die. The battlefield is spilled with blood, the mud caking flesh and metal alike but in sporadic patches across the valley, there are beautiful white lotuses blooming in the sun. Yuri sighs and thinks that there could be worse last sights.

She shifts in her armor, feels the wood dig into her ribcage as the spear that’s got her through the heart tears against her chest. She lets out a hiss of pain as she tries to claw at it.

There are no medics to find her on this field–they won’t come for a fortnight at least–and even if there were, she doesn’t need a doctor to tell her that she’s broken beyond repair. The last of the Emperor’s Guard, slain in an ambush like this. Outnumbered ten to one, but at least they fought valiantly before they died. At least they fought tooth and nail, scraped the bottom of their souls for resolve until they had nothing left to give and hopefully that’ll earn them a line in a two-thousand line sonnet and a seat at the golden table of heaven.

The last of the Emperor’s Guard–unless. Yuri turns on her side, gnaws through her tongue to dull the pain to find her.

Ah. Yuri doesn’t know if it’s relief or guilt that crushes her chest when she turns to see Kitty speared right through the neck. Still hacking wheezy breaths out of her chest–but the breaths of a dying man, not a living one.

They’ve always been together, attached at the hip by more than just sworn loyalty to the Emperor and it seems only fitting that they go out together. At least Kitty won’t have to continue on without her. At least Yuri won’t have to live without her. (She wouldn’t see the point in that.)

“Kitty,” she says, gripping her hand in hers. Kitty’s gaze is loose and languid as it tracks her face. Her blade is shattered on her knee, the tip impaled in a skull next to them. “Kitty, look at me.”

“I,” Kitty swallows, a line of blood trailing down her face. Yuri wipes it away with her thumb and licks it clean. “I guess I shouldn’t have skipped so much training, huh?”

Yuri laughs, her nose in the petals. Kitty makes her shredded heart feel light in her chest.

“You were a shitty lieutenant,” she spits out. It’s all spilling out of her–sincerity mixing with the blood that dribbles down her mouth. “But you’re not bad company to go out with.”

Kitty licks her lips and scowls, defiant even in death.

“Partner,” she insists stubbornly. They’re toying with the semantics even on the brink of death.

Yuri laughs and concedes because it’s Kitty–it’s always Kitty and she’s never been able to say no to a face like hers.

“Partner,” she echoes quietly and her arms buckle under her as she lands with her chin on the dirt.

She wonders if in a hundred years, they will remember the sorry excuse of a battle fought here. She wonders if in a thousand years, the Empire will still stand. She wonders if in ten thousand, there will still be people to walk the path of her graveyard.

She wonders if she will become fertilizer for the next batch of white lotuses, witness to another pair of star-crossed lovers meeting their untimely end.

She closes her eyes. Beside her, Kitty’s chest has gone still in her armor and her fingers have gone cold. Yuri stops wondering after that.

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There is a girl standing alone at the entrance ceremony, looking like a child abandoned on their first day of daycare. Yuri raises one arm in a greeting.

“Hi!” she yells across the field. “You lost?”

The girl turns and there’s something heavy in the weight of her expression. She’s drawn in bold, brash lines against the outline of the crowd, like she’s done in charcoal on a watercolor painting.

They’ve never met before but something like recognition crosses her face when she spots Yuri. She raises one hand and waves back, a smile pressed onto her face.

There’s something glinting in the sun and Yuri squints to make it out.

Pinned to her breast pocket is a small white lotus.

FILL: Team Touhou

[514ko]

Ship: Seiga Kaku x Yoshika Miyako
Words: 876
TW: Possibly unsettling descriptions of a reanimated zombie.

--

Back beyond the temple of Myouren, in the corner of a lovely little cemetery, there lays a small pond. It is hardly thigh deep ordinarily, and a willow overhangs its Southern corner. Its shoreline is regular, its shape mild—its basin a gentle bowl-slope down to its deepest central part, ringed by sodden grasses and lilies and invisible frogs.

It, perhaps, has not always been here—or perhaps it has, a vestige of a bygone age. Certainly, it’d been here for as long as Seiga had been guarding the mausoleum, and some time before; yet the gray-weathered gravestones always seemed a tad too close to the water, close enough that, in the rainy season, the feet of their charge were presumably underwater, and their frontages were slick with condensate.

Perhaps that was why Yoshika took a liking to it.

Seiga didn’t know the real reason—Yoshika’s brain was a tad too rotten to really give much of a reason other than she liked looking at the water, liked watching the frogs, liked stamping around in the mud (she thought Seiga didn’t know, bless her heart). But perhaps, under that dopey smile and unexpressed in those little faux-feral growls she did, there was some sort of cognition going on—some cascading of relays, some crossing of wires, flicking of switches. Perhaps some vague recollection went on in there too.

It was work, keeping a jiangshi animate—even the ones, like Yoshika, abnormally motivated to cling to their new unlife. Joint-loosening massages were in order every few days; the basic anti-decomposition wards only really lasted a week. And of course, Yoshika would always forget to do her calisthenics, so Seiga would oft find her collapsed over a gravestone with her legs or torso seized (perhaps the poor thing passed originally of lockjaw). Scented oil was always in demand too, if she could find it in the Human Village (an anti-decomposition spell can only do so much to combat odor, and the poor wretches do still have a sense of smell after all).

But all the maintenance was hardly a problem. Yoshika performed her (few) duties with aplomb, and she was always notably cheery whenever Seiga came to visit her—a rarity amongst the turned corpses Seiga had known. Besides, it was even somewhat therapeutic, taking care of someone like that. If she were in a frank mood, Seiga would even admit that the little zombie had grown on her—she’d outlived her usefulness somewhat, yet Seiga still kept her around, aimlessly protecting a locale that didn’t need protecting… The mental health of a servant is important, after all.

Thus, when through various groans and growls and occasionally speech Yoshika actually showed a preference for something, Seiga was happy to oblige. Thus she began to perform her weekly maintenance routine at the water’s edge—Yoshika would waddle over to the Myouren pond, plop down against a gravestone (which doubled nicely as a seat), and look out over the water. Ordinarily, Yoshika’s gaze would be drawn all about the lake—the shivering willow, the plops of frogs, the warble of birds perched upon the surrounding stones—even for a zombie, sitting still for a few hours was somewhat of a bore, so at least the pond-view was somewhat pretty.

But one day—it was a day that still sticks out in Seiga’s mind, if just for the shock of it having happened at all—they were partway through the process when Yoshika spoke out of the blue.

“…cen-terrrrrr…” Yoshika groaned, barely opening her mouth as her right arm twitched under Seiga’s fingers, Yoshika’s ancient lungs forcing the consonant out in a wheeze, “Seigaaaa... Lookkkk..."

Seiga’s eyebrows knitted, and in a moment, she realized that Yoshika was trying to *point* at something in the water—a lotus flower. Delicate, pure white, in full Spring bloom, floating impossibly alone amidst the murk. Seiga, paused whilst delicately kneading oil into one of Yoshika’s joints, while Yoshika herself still affixed those willow-gray eyes to the lotus—

“Is that it, my dear?” Seiga said, loosening her grip on Yoshika’s arm so she was free to flail as much as her heart desired, “Did you want to show me it?”

Yoshika sat up, then, bolt-upright—her movement was jerky, unnatural, baring her teeth and opening her jaw up and closing it again soundlessly, her arms flailing up and down and all about, mouth like a fish trying to gulp down gill-fulls of an atmosphere alien to its very nature—

And then, through lips stiffened by rot and age—Yoshika spoke:


The weather… clears…
And breezes comb…
The hair of the young willow…


Only silence followed her words—a call with no response. Yoshika sat back in a corpse-like slack then, as if her body had lost its spirit momentarily. Her jaw hung open, eyes newly sightless—and then she blinked, and then a stiff, slow smile spread across her face, and she burst into a wheezing, grunting laugh.

And from her perch atop the gravestone, Seiga leaned over and down and pulled Yoshika into an embrace, so that each little wheezy flutter rang through her own head too, and she whispered back:


The ice melts…
And wavelets wash…
O’ver the whiskers of the old bog moss.