![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a1c0bb posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
yurishippingolympics
for this bonus round, the theme is historical fiction! prompts inspired by specific moments in (real or fictional) history.
this round will end on july 15th
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
PROMPT: TEAM FIRE EMBLEM
Date: 2024-07-02 09:54 pm (UTC)Valkyries are attested in the Poetic Edda (a book of poems compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources), the Prose Edda, the Heimskringla (both by Snorri Sturluson) and the Njáls saga (one of the Sagas of Icelanders), all written—or compiled—in the 13th century. They appear throughout the poetry of skalds, in a 14th-century charm, and in various runic inscriptions."
valkyries :D - [source]
FILL: Team Anime/Manga
Date: 2024-07-04 09:14 pm (UTC)word count: 1323
pairing: winter schnee/cinder fall
fandom: RWBY
characters: winter schnee, cinder fall
extra tags: descriptions of death, blood, and so on. lmk if this is too much for dreamwidth and i'll move it! very tempted to write a proper au now because this concept really interests me
//
Winter is dying; she knows that much. She just didn’t expect death to be this — nice?
Hands gripping the sword buried in her gut, she looks up at the shell of the sky and memorises the clear shade of blue, the same colour as her sister’s eyes. The sun is starting to dip towards the horizon, the clearing is empty, and the lone man who ran her through is long gone. All things considered, it’s a pretty easy way to go. She’s always thought she would die in the heat of battle.
Strangely, it doesn’t hurt. It did at first; it has not since. She feels her breath gutter in her throat as though from afar, twitches her fingers around an unfamiliar sword’s hilt and is almost surprised when they respond. Everything feels distant, untethered. It’s nice. It’s alright. She isn’t afraid.
“‘Cause you’re fucking stupid,” a woman’s voice says.
Winter doesn’t think she could turn her head to look if she tried. There’s blood soaking through the hood of her cloak from the wound in her stomach. She opens her mouth to say something, preferably hello?, and the only sound that comes out is a weak, rasping gasp.
“Yeah, yeah. Hold on.” A shift of fabric — stupid, Winter thinks, she should have been on her guard; there could have been someone waiting on the other side of the trees to finish her off — and a head pushes into view, accompanied by a radiant light that makes her wince and wish she could cover her eyes.
A woman, obviously the owner of the voice. The most beautiful woman she’s ever seen. Winter opens and closes her mouth again, realises she looks like a dying fish — or, well, a fish in an equally dire predicament — and tries another word: “What?”
It saps all the remaining strength out of her. Her grip on the hilt of the sword in her gut slackens without her telling her hands to let go; her vision swims, and she thinks, fuck, this is it, I’m going to die looking like an idiot in front of some poor villager. The woman squints at her, which is strange, considering the amount of light leaking off of her; Winter opens her mouth again, wants to say will you tell my sister what happened to me?, finds she can’t speak, can barely suck in a breath anymore —
“Oh,” the woman says blithely, “sorry. You’re not dead yet.”
Funny, because she feels pretty close to it. She couldn’t reply even if she wanted to, can’t even think, can’t manage anything except a noise that sounds like a desperate sob because she’s discovered that suddenly she doesn’t want to die — and a hand settles on her blood-soaked shoulder and a voice, that same g-ddamn voice, says, “Shh. The hardest part is about to be over. Very soon, I think.”
Winter blinks up at her, vision darkening and darkening to nothing, and sees the woman crouch over her, reach down to brush a hand over her cheek. She blacks out —
//
— wakes up, and finds her head in someone else’s lap.
She doesn’t scramble to sit up, because she can’t. Her entire body feels heavy, weak. Doesn’t suck in a breath either, because it feels a little redundant.
The woman from before, bleeding white light, peers down at her. She’s wearing a white cloak; the collar is flecked with blood. It’s clearly Winter’s. She swallows down an apology. “You okay? That was — rough.”
She coughs, bloodlessly, and discovers that she can talk. “Um.”
“Yeah.” The woman’s thumb skims across her cheek again. It’s meant to be soothing, clearly. “You were trying to say something. What was it?”
“Huh?”
“Before.” She lets go of her cheek to gesture vaguely. “Before the — you know. You were kinda… spluttering, I guess? You wanted to say something.”
Winter thinks back. Doesn’t get very far before her stomach lurches unpleasantly. “Oh, fuck.”
“Mm?”
“Shit, fuck. I — no, I died, didn’t I? I died. I’m dead. I wanted —” Her breath hitches in her throat. She sits up, narrowly avoiding headbutting the woman above her, and pulls her knees up to her blessedly un-stabbed chest. Her body — what remains of it — doesn’t follow her, lies limply behind her, eyes staring sightlessly upward. She feels sick. She feels sick. “I — I wanted — my sister, she — my sister, my brother, my mom —”
“Word will get back to them. They’ll be alright,” the woman says soothingly. It doesn’t sound like it fits on her tongue. “For now, I hate to cut this short, but you have to come with me.”
Winter presses her hands over her eyes and sobs.
//
The woman — Cinder, she calls herself; “Cinder the Valkyrie, if we’re being technical” — helps her to her feet. Winter staggers to the side and props herself up against a tree as she leans down to close her body’s eyes, breathing heavily. She doesn’t think she’s ever cried for so long before, not since she was a child.
And it was so nice before. She thinks she would have been content to die there, lying still under the sun.
“Where am I going?”
Cinder glances up. She’s been brushing Winter’s hair out of her eyes, adjusting her hands on her weapon, fixing the despairing twist of her mouth into a firm line. It looks like it fits on her face, she thinks. “Hm? Oh. Valhalla, obviously.”
“But I didn’t die in battle.” Her voice sounds weak, hollowed out by crying. She winces a little when Cinder turns to look at her properly and something like pity crosses her face.
“You’re plenty valiant,” she says, giving her an assessing look. “You’ll fit right in, believe me.”
“I don’t — I haven’t done anything. I don’t deserve —”
Cinder sighs and stands up. The light follows her, pooling around the bottom of her cloak. “I’ve been watching you. I knew you were going to die eventually, you know? You seem like the type to go down in some stupid battle for someone else’s honour. What were you doing out here?”
Winter blinks at her. “Out in the woods? I was tracking down a man who killed a villager. He — he was the one who stabbed me, most likely.”
Cinder nods. “See? Valiant. Heroic, even.” She steps up to Winter, holds out her hand. “I’ll take you up.”
She eyes her hand cautiously. Her fingers are still slick with Winter’s blood, long and callused and streaked with burn marks. But still, she’s holding it out, offering her a future, even in death — and that has to mean something, doesn’t it?
She takes it.
Cinder tugs her, once, and then they’re gone.
//
She sleeps in a room overlooking an endless battlefield. It’s weird; she thought being dead would mean she couldn’t possibly be tired anymore, but here she is.
Cinder doesn’t seem to want to leave her. She sits in a chair next to Winter’s bed, watching her as she shifts and mumbles to herself and, sometimes, cries — and, eventually, climbs into bed next to her and wraps her arms around her waist.
“Are you supposed to do this?”
She hums, pressing her face into Winter’s shoulder blades. “You seem upset. I’d like to stay with you. Being dead is — it’s difficult.”
“I mean,” Winter says, staring at the setting sun through her half-drawn curtains, “I’m not complaining.” It feels a lot more manageable with you here, she doesn’t say. It lingers on her tongue as she lets her eyes slip closed for the second time today.
“Good to hear,” Cinder murmurs. She squeezes her forearm the same way she did when she helped Winter to her feet in the clearing, circling her thumb over her wrist. “I told you everything would be alright, didn’t I?”
“Dying is hard,” she says into darkness, sinking into unfamiliar pillows with a newly familiar body wrapped around her.
“It’s awful,” Cinder agrees, “but the hard part is over.”
Re: FILL: Team Anime/Manga
Date: 2024-07-09 12:50 am (UTC)