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yurishippingolympics2024-07-16 11:56 pm
a1c0bb) wrote in yurishippingolympics2024-07-16 11:56 pm
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“Well, we’re fucked,” Cinder announces.
It does seem that way. Winter looks around the clearing, feeling instinctively for her sword. No one has made a move yet — not them, not the Grimm, who seem intelligent enough to wait — but she could get the upper hand quickly if she just —
“Nope,” Cinder says, shifting until they’re standing back to back. “None of that. We do this the old fashioned way.”
Winter snorts before she can help herself. “What’s that? Laying down and waiting to die?”
The hand pressed against her forearm burns hot suddenly. Winter yanks her arm away, hissing between her teeth, and Cinder laughs. “The old fashioned way,” she repeats. “Whoever takes out the most Grimm wins.”
“Wins what?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she says, and moves.
//
Something cold and wet splatters across Winter’s back. Already covered in dissolving Grimm fluid, she yelps and flicks her own handful of black liquid back at Cinder over her shoulder. It used to be half of a Nevermore’s eye; it dissipates into steam before it gets very far.
“Gross,” Cinder says, but she doesn’t sound particularly offended. “How many was that? Like, twenty?”
Winter looks down at the Nevermore corpse. “This is my twenty-fifth.”
The woods are mostly silent now, save for the occasional rustle of branches in the wind. What they did to attract so many Grimm to one spot is beyond her, but she supposes it must be something to do with lingering traces of Salem’s mark on Cinder’s body. She’s too tired to give it much thought until it becomes a pattern.
Cinder looks up at the sky, tracing the path of the sun. Winter watches her jaw work as she thinks, flicking more Grimm fluid off her hands. “It’s not too late,” she says eventually. “If you hit fifty by the end of the day I’ll take you out on a nice date in the next down we come across.”
“You’re just saying that because you lost,” Winter mutters. Cinder laughs.
“Oh, miserably.”
Ship: Harrow Nova/Camilla Hect, The Locked Tomb
Words: 265
Notes: Harrow Nova exists for only one scene in canon, and Camilla isn’t in that scene. I don’t care. I am biting and tearing and ripping.
Contains blood, description of non-serious injuries, and a brief casual fantasy of suicide, all of which the POV character seems to enjoy.
——
If anything, it’s even better than Harrow Nova imagined it.
Camilla stands atop her, her boot digging into Harrow’s sternum, her rapier at Harrow’s throat. If Harrow wanted to, she could impale herself before Camilla had time to react. She savors the cold steel pushing up against her skin without puncturing it, savors the equally cold glare of her opponent, savors the taste of blood in her mouth and the feel of new bruises forming within her arms and chest, layered over the old ones.
“Yield.”
Camilla doesn’t even give Harrow the dignity of a question.
Harrow won’t give her the satisfaction of an answer.
Camilla holds her gaze for perhaps a second longer than necessary, then abruptly withdraws both sword and boot.
“You’re impossible, Nova. You could have won this duel if you wanted to, or you could have stood down and prevented it, but you didn’t. Why?”
Silence. Harrow recalls the moment Camilla’s shoulder slammed into her chest, relives the sensation of striking the floor. And, finally:
“The Reverend Daughter has forbidden you from fighting. I won’t help you violate her orders again.”
She probably believes it in the moment, is the thing. But Harrow knows which buttons to press, which pages from her catalog of weaknesses to exploit, how to keep her fighting but force her to win.
No, Camilla Hect will duel her again.
Harrow laughs the moment Camilla is out of earshot, lets the blood spill over her lips to stain the white of her paints red.
Sure, sex is great (or so they say), but this?
This is perfection.
Words: 265
Notes: Harrow Nova exists for only one scene in canon, and Camilla isn’t in that scene. I don’t care. I am biting and tearing and ripping.
Contains blood, description of non-serious injuries, and a brief casual fantasy of suicide, all of which the POV character seems to enjoy.
——
If anything, it’s even better than Harrow Nova imagined it.
Camilla stands atop her, her boot digging into Harrow’s sternum, her rapier at Harrow’s throat. If Harrow wanted to, she could impale herself before Camilla had time to react. She savors the cold steel pushing up against her skin without puncturing it, savors the equally cold glare of her opponent, savors the taste of blood in her mouth and the feel of new bruises forming within her arms and chest, layered over the old ones.
“Yield.”
Camilla doesn’t even give Harrow the dignity of a question.
Harrow won’t give her the satisfaction of an answer.
Camilla holds her gaze for perhaps a second longer than necessary, then abruptly withdraws both sword and boot.
“You’re impossible, Nova. You could have won this duel if you wanted to, or you could have stood down and prevented it, but you didn’t. Why?”
Silence. Harrow recalls the moment Camilla’s shoulder slammed into her chest, relives the sensation of striking the floor. And, finally:
“The Reverend Daughter has forbidden you from fighting. I won’t help you violate her orders again.”
She probably believes it in the moment, is the thing. But Harrow knows which buttons to press, which pages from her catalog of weaknesses to exploit, how to keep her fighting but force her to win.
No, Camilla Hect will duel her again.
Harrow laughs the moment Camilla is out of earshot, lets the blood spill over her lips to stain the white of her paints red.
Sure, sex is great (or so they say), but this?
This is perfection.
Alestes stands very, very still, but she’s glowering.
Anh grins. “Scared, Lestes?”
“You wish,” Alestes says, and furrows her eyebrows in that way she does where she’d really like to tilt her chin upwards but can’t because there’s an apple on her head.
This is the latest installment in Gammon’s little games, and Anh’s going to win. She doesn’t really give a fuck about the money, or about the lecture Gammon had held forth among a crowd of pirates about noble Odysseus and his quest to eliminate all his suitors — Anh’s never been a history girl. Especially not Greek history.
What she does like is the opportunity to see Alestes like this: furious, immobile, and entirely at Anh’s mercy.
She twirls the knife a little more, and watches a little bit of terror spark in Alestes’s eyes before it’s smothered again. Her grin widens.
“Hurry up! Hurry up!” someone calls on the sidelines — Kyle’s parrot. Anh briefly considers chucking the knife in that direction instead.
She can do this, she tells herself, eyeing the bloodred target upon Alestes’s head. She could do this in her sleep. Knives are second nature to her, even when they’re on a ship in the middle of a rocking ocean. Maybe especially then.
It’s just — if she messes up, Alestes —
Won’t be around to fight with anymore.
“Just do it, Annie,” Alestes says, then narrows her eyes at her. “Unless you’re the one who’s scared?”
And in that instant, Anh throws.
Alestes freezes. Good. The knife sails through the air and —
Crunch.
The apple falls neatly in twain.
Her fellow pirates fall into an uproar behind her, but Anh stays still. Lifts her chin.
Alestes stares back at her, silent. The apple lays at her feet.
“Told you I could do it,” Anh says, then winces. Her one-liners are usually better than that. She doesn’t want to imply she has anything to prove to Alestes.
“Hm,” Alestes says.
“What?”
Alestes pauses again, and then — smiles at her. It’s crooked and slight and lovely. Anh’s breath stops somewhere in her throat.
“Must’ve been luck,” Alestes says. “Luck and the wind.”
It takes Anh a second to realize she’s insulting her, but leaping over to punch her in the nose shuts her up. Alestes shoves her in the shoulder and Anh lets herself grin for real when she dodges her right hook.
Fuck Gammon. This is the kind of competition she likes.
Edited 2024-07-20 12:26 (UTC)
may have channelled catradora a little bit w this one
//
“I thought you’d be taller,” Cinder remarks.
The werewolf looks at her in the moonlight, ears flicking forward. Her expression switches rapidly from transfixed to bored, as though whatever she’d found interesting had quickly crumbled and died. “Oh, everyone says that,” she says, equally boredly. “I thought you’d be, I don’t know. Ghostier?”
Cinder snorts, squaring her shoulders. “Bold statement considering whose territory you’re on.”
The werewolf’s mouth flicks up, half of a fanged smile. She could probably tear Cinder apart with those teeth alone, never mind the rest of her. “I’m just passing through. You don’t need to worry.”
Cinder regards her, regards the silvery moonlight spilling through the trees and turning her white hair silver, regards the sword at her hip and the way she carries herself, and says, “On a full moon?”
“Is it?” the werewolf says, mouth curling sharper, “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Espionage, right? Inconvenient time to choose to do it.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say inconvenient,” she grins.
She thinks she’s already won. Cinder worries her bottom lip between her own teeth — not quite showing her own fangs, but close enough to remind her that they’re there — and takes her in, all five and a half feet of her. Werewolves tend to be cocky, tend to be convinced of their own superior strength, and it never does them any favours.
“If you want to fight me you’ll have to be smarter than that. My territory, my rules.”
The werewolf shrugs, spreads her arms wide. “I brought a sword for a reason. I thought we could at least be fair about it.”
“Do big dogs even know how to hold swords?” Cinder asks, trying to imagine a huge white-furred wolf holding a weapon that small and failing. “Do you evolve, like, at all? You know, vampires have adapted to —”
“My darling, I really don’t give a shit,” the werewolf says airily. “I’m on your territory, so do something about it.”
That’s what this is, Cinder realises; she came all the way out here because she was looking for a fight. There’s unwound tension in the corners of her mouth, the set of her shoulders, the way her hand lingers on the hilt of her sword. This isn’t espionage or an attempt to claim territory for her own stupid pack; she needed the feeling of skin splitting between her fingers and this was the only place she could think to go to find it.
Cinder tilts her head to the side, examining her. If it’s a fight she wants, it’s a fight she’ll get. “Fine, but no transforming. I trust you have the self-control to manage that?”
The werewolf flashes her another grin, far too feral to be anything but satisfaction. “More than enough.”
sorry i wound up going. a little bit feral with this? cinder is queen of not explaining her thought processes to anyone
//
“We’re not even dating,” Robyn protests, “you really don’t have to do this, dude.”
Cinder rolls her eyes. unimpressed. Winter raises her hands, not wanting to be caught inbetween whatever is going on between the two of them, and pulls out her phone as a form of shield. “You may as well be.”
“I’m a lesbian.”
“And he’s your beard. Come on, do you really think we can’t do it better? Do you even know me? Do you know how many suits Winter owns?”
“Three,” Winter supplies. Help me, she messages Weiss.
i don’t know what it is, comes the reply, but no.
Why :(
its cinder related isn’t it
...Yes?
“See!” Cinder says emphatically, pointing to Winter. “Three! We can match!”
“Or we could all match,” Robyn mumbles. “It’s a wedding. It’d be nice.”
convince her not to outdress ruby at her own wedding
thats my moral support
I mean, I can try
She’s competing with Robyn
I think
SIGHHH ok fine tell her youre coming to mine
Am I coming to yours?
you have a key you can come in any time
//
“What are we fighting with Robyn over this time?”
Cinder groans, sinking down on the couch. She puts her feet up on the coffee table; Winter lets her. “Not fighting, amicable bickering.”
“Over…?”
“I don’t fucking know. Romantic gestures, this week.”
“And you’re sure you didn’t dig your own grave,” Winter says, stepping over her legs, “and that this is purely Robyn’s own competitiveness. Robyn, who is single, and not together with Qrow.”
“She’s his beard,” Cinder says. “But they do like, shit together.”
“We also do things together,” Winter points out. “And I really don’t think they’re involved.”
“Ooh, involved. I forgot you talk like an old Victorian ghost.”
“Well, whatever I talk like, it doesn’t change the fact that I’m right. There’s nothing to beat.”
Cinder pauses, looks up at her in the half-light filtering through the curtains in the living room. The tension in her upper body unwinds instantly. It would be gratifying if she wasn’t giving her one of her glares, the kind that Winter doesn’t know how to read.
“Whatever,” she says suddenly, “just dress up nice for me, alright?”
//
Qrow is wearing cheetah print, so they’re obviously winning. Not that there’s anything to win in the first place, Winter thinks, but they’re still doing it. She catches Cinder looking at him incredulously several times throughout the course of the night, including when he stands up to give a speech about Ruby and makes roughly two thirds of the room cry.
“Ask me to dance.”
“What? Why?”
“Guess.”
Winter glances between her and the rest of the room — Cinder lounging back in her seat, fiddling aimlessly with the jewels on her eyepatch; Ruby and Penny and Weiss standing awkwardly in the corner of the hall and holding hands, Jaune nervously talking Emerald’s ear off, the tables being cleared away for what she assumes are dance floor purposes — and finds what she’s looking for, which turns out to be Robyn politely refusing the handkerchief Qrow is trying to hand back to her.
“I’ll never understand your thing about them,” she says, but stands up anyway. “You know I only know old Atlesian formal dances, right?”
“Yes, it’s very hot, all the women go crazy for it,” Cinder says idly. She rises out of her seat and slips under Winter’s arm, presses into her side. “We’re going to have to introduce dance cards just to keep up.”
Winter follows her gaze back to Robyn and Qrow and asks, “Do you think that you have to have a rivalry with Robyn just because Qrow and I did?”
“Oh, please,” Cinder snorts, “that wasn’t a rivalry, you just disliked each other intensely. I’ve done rivalries. They’re more homoerotic.”
“You just like being annoying,” Winter guesses.
“I love being annoying, my dear,” she smirks.
Cinder has never been one to hesitate before. First District girls with flashy white hair and swords generally don’t elicit her sympathy; she’s pounced on two or three kids just like her before, dyed hair and bright eyes and weapons that seem ill-fitting for a competition like this — and she’s killed them all quickly, so why —
“Stop,” the girl underneath her repeats, hands raised, “stop, wait. Please.”
Okay, yep, there it is. Cinder raises her axe again, angling for the kill, and nearly drops it when the girl kicks her leg and sends her sprawling sideways into the grass.
“I told you to stop,” the girl says over the sound of her ears ringing, rising to her feet. Her hands are still raised, her sword still in its sheath at her side. She doesn’t seem like a threat, which is good. It gives Cinder time to come back to her senses. “I was trying to say — I have food, and you seem hungry.”
Cinder has never not known how to be hungry. She spits out a mouthful of dirt and lifts her head off the ground, clenching her fist around the hilt of her axe. “That’s the point, Schnee.”
The girl startles a little, blue eyes widening in the dim light of the undergrowth. “You know who I am?”
“Oh, come on, it’s obvious,” Cinder mutters. “How many white-haired sword users are there in the whole of Remnant?”
She looks at her strangely, stiffly. “Quite a few, if I had to guess. Everyone in the First District is trained in swordplay.”
Cinder glares at her. “Everyone?”
“Everyone,” she echoes. “My younger sister was drawn, I volunteered. I’m the eldest. My name is Winter. People keep sending me food, and I have more than I know what to do with. If I leave it it’ll rot before it can be of use to anyone. Stick with me?”
She eyes her, rubs at the spot on her jaw where it hit the ground. “How do I know you won’t kill me in my sleep?”
“How do I know you won’t?” Winter challenges. She’s still looking at her weirdly; it makes Cinder want to squirm uncomfortably in the mud and grass, makes her want to blind her so she’ll never look at her that way again.
They regard each other for a moment. Cinder thinks, and then realises that she doesn’t need to — or rather, that she isn’t in the first place; that she’s letting the break from all the fighting and the desperation to live wash over her.
“Fine,” she spits out, when it’s dragged on long enough. “Fine. Food for protection.”
Winter smiles, pats the sword at her hip. “I don’t need protecting, but I appreciate the sentiment.”
//
“What will you do if you win?”
Cinder looks at her over the campfire, finds her patient, expectant. There’s a clearly rehearsed response there, a ploy for attention from the Capitol. She must have been coached in what to do, what to say.
Cinder has never really thought about surviving beyond the first few days.
“Uh,” she says eloquently, “live?”
Winter’s lips quirk up, like that was the response she was expecting. “Yes, I suppose.”
They look at each other over the campfire for a little while longer before Cinder realises she’s supposed to ask the question back. “So. What about you, Atlas?”
Winter hums (rehearsed), turns her head up to the stars (rehearsed), sighs. “I don’t actually know, but I’d like to figure it out.” She pauses, fingers lingering on the hilt of her sword. “Sacrificing myself was always the plan. If either of my siblings were chosen, I’d take their place. And I couldn’t —” genuine emotion leaks through, drips through the cracks. She pauses a second time, breath hitching. “I can’t leave them alone. So that’s — what I’m doing, when I win. I’m going back and I’m keeping them safe.”
“How old are they?” Cinder asks without thinking.
Winter looks down, looks away. “Twelve and eight. Kids.”
“We’re kids,” she says.
“We are.”
They don’t talk for the rest of the night after that.
Suletta settles her head on Miorine’s shoulder, watching her work. Her fingers skim idly over her wrists, follow the movement of her hands — it could be almost domestic, if it weren’t for the world falling apart around them.
“When you fought Guel that time,” she says, turning her head into Miorine’s neck, “were you trying to win your own hand in marriage?” She pauses, drums her fingers on Miorine’s wrists. “How would that work?”
It’s such a random question that Miorine laughs, giving up on trying to cut the sandwiches properly. “Touchy today, are we?”
Suletta pouts. “Nooo. I just missed you.”
“I’m not seventeen yet,” Miorine says, nodding towards the calendar. “Ask me again when we’re married.”
Her pout melts away into something like bliss. “Married,” she echoes, soft, “and I’m going to beat Shaddiq so good he’ll never challenge me again.”
“Correct,” Miorine says idly, thinking of signatures on legal documents and the cold Grassley House halls.
“But, um. Why?”
“Why what?”
“About the duel with Guel.” Her fingers pick up their drumming against Miorine’s wrists again. “You fought him so you could have control over your future, right? But how would that work? Wouldn’t you just become the Holder?”
“That was the point.” Miorine picks up her knife again, gets back to work. If Suletta wants to risk a few fingers, so be it. (Still, she finds herself moving gentler.)
“And then you’d be engaged to yourself.”
“Technically.”
“I don’t think that’s — entirely how engagement works,” Suletta says slowly, like she’s trying to work out the logistics of it in her brain.
“It would have forced my father’s hand, which was the point,” Miorine explains, counting the sandwiches on the countertop. “Having no Holder means that I’d be free to do what I want. I was banking on the defeat being humiliating enough for Guel that he backed down.”
“And if Guel backs down, it’s a sign,” Suletta finishes the thought.
“Yeah. Pass me the boxes, will you?”
Suletta straightens up like she’s been given the most important task in the world and lets go of her to rifle through Miorine’s cabinets. She misses her warmth immediately.
HELLO??? I AM FERAL??? I AM ON THE GROUND??? THIS IS FUCKING AMAZING!!! I love this rarepair, this series, and Camilla fucking Hect! Thank you for blessing my eyes with this today <3
To: Winter Schnee (winterschnee@remnant.com) From: Cinder Fall (fallmaiden@remnant.com)
send me your book pitch
//
To: Cinder Fall (fallmaiden@remnant.com) From: Winter Schnee (winterschnee@remnant.com)
Good afternoon.
How is your draft going? I must admit, I’m confused as to why you asked me for my pitch, but here it is:
Yours sincerely, Winter Schnee
[Atlas_Pitch.docx]
//
To: Winter Schnee (winterschnee@remnant.com) From: Cinder Fall (fallmaiden@remnant.com)
thanks
ok now here’s mine. what the fuck
[pitch draft 1.docx]
//
To: Cinder Fall (fallmaiden@remnant.com) From: Winter Schnee (winterschnee@remnant.com)
Good morning.
I concur. What the fuck? Great minds think alike, I suppose. I trust you haven’t hacked into my computer and stolen my drafts, and aside from right now we haven’t spoken to each other since we started work on our novels, so I can only assume that is the case. Good luck with your pitch!
Yours sincerely, Winter Schnee
//
To: Winter Schnee (winterschnee@remnant.com) From: Cinder Fall (fallmaiden@remnant.com)
girl what
//
To: Cinder Fall (fallmaiden@remnant.com) From: Winter Schnee (winterschnee@remnant.com)
Good afternoon.
????
Yours sincerely, Winter Schnee
get meta w/ it- your ship participating in the yuri shipping olympics
early 2010's tumblr hipster vs fandom bloggers
playing some sort of game in order to get a loved one back from death/a god of death (a la orpheus and eurydice)
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