BONUS ROUND 1: THROWBACK PROMPTS

[a1c0bb]

In this round, we'll be using prompts from last year's bonus rounds! You can either come up with a prompt based on the previous themes, fill a prompt from previous bonus rounds, or fill a prompt that's been posted this year!

Here is the tag with all the previous bonus rounds!

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]

If you're filling from a 2023/2024 prompt, please link to their prompt in your post!

To participate, reply to this post!

Comments

PROMPT: TEAM YELLOW TANABE

[arsquare]

For prompt fusion:

Wingfic + Prophetic Dreams

FILL: Team RWBY

[hopelessgemini]

fandom: RWBY

ship: winter/cinder, vaguely implied winter/may in the same way you had that deeply codependant girlbestfriend relationship when you were a teenager

content warnings: discussions of physical parental abuse, discussions of domestic violence (no depictions, only mentions), unintentional misgendering (one character comes out as a trans woman over the course of the fic. pov character uses her last name and incorrect pronouns to refer to her before she comes out and the correct first name and pronouns after she comes out)

-

Winter dreams that she learns how to fly.

-

(Age 7)

Mother is busy trying to keep Father from throwing glass bottles at the walls again, so Winter takes Weiss on a walk. She’s barely tall enough for the pram; she has to rest her chin on the handle, flapping her wings a little to push them both up the hill at the back of their property.

She tells Weiss about her dreams as she walks. Weiss doesn’t respond, of course, but the sound of Winter’s voice makes her babble happily, and she kicks her little feet against the plastic rain-cover as they trundle along. Winter makes two whole laps of the property before Klein comes outside to prepare her for dinner.

She goes to sleep, and she dreams that she learns how to fly, and it isn’t enough. She dreams of Weiss, grown up, falling, falling —

-

(Age 12)

Winter’s dreams mean things, she tells Marigold.

Marigold looks at her like she’s insane. Winter can’t blame him. His cousin got his wings cut off for the sake of fitting in more easily to Atlesian elite society — even though most Atlesian elite have wings, and most Atlesian elite aren’t exactly in the business of cutting them off. Everyone around Marigold has been behaving a little insane recently.

“No, really. I know you’re going to run away from home. I saw you, you were down in the Crater and you had long hair —”

Marigold shuts the book he’s been reading and glares at her. “Winter, I told you that I didn’t want to hear about it.”

“But it’s important,” she insists. “If you’re going to run away, you have to take me with you.”

She doesn’t mention the rest of it: that in the dream, Marigold had definitely been a woman. That’s not the kind of thing you mention to people out of nowhere. It doesn’t seem fair.

“Why would I do that?” he asks. It’s a genuine question. “Don’t you like being, you know, the heiress to the most powerful company in the world?”

She remembers this question, too. “My father hits Weiss,” she says simply, and Marigold winces. “He does it to punish me. So I’m leaving, one way or another, and I’m taking her with me.”

(In the dreams, she doesn’t. She can’t.)

-

(Age 16)

“I’m not cutting off my wings,” Marigold says, “and also I’m a woman now. Surprise.”

Winter blinks at her. “Your wings?”

She shrugs, and her wings move with her, splaying a little in the guttering blue candlelight. Winter has always hated how the candles in the manor make her wings look. “My parents made Henry cut his off.”

“That’s abhorrent,” Winter says, as though Father hasn’t been threatening her with it for years. “Why?”

“Control.” She shrugs again. “It’s May now, by the way.”

“Because it’s alliterative?”

“I did always want an alliterative name,” she says thoughtfully.

(Winter has known the General for years, but tonight is the first time he appears in her dreams. She doesn’t see much of him — just the broad shape of his shoulders, the way his hands are angled around the hilt of a gun —)

-

(Age 17)

Her dreams never concern themselves with Whitley, so Winter goes and knocks on his door the day before she leaves to say goodbye.

She hopes she’ll never dream about him. It’s been awful, lately. She managed to convince Weiss to stop wearing her hair in a braid because it matched the way she looked — looks — is going to look when she falls; she can’t stop looking at the General and seeing his blank expression, the barrel of his gun.

“I’m going to miss you,” she says, and Whitley makes a sound curiously close to a sob.

“Don’t lie to me. You’re running away from home; that’s what this is.”

“I — I can’t stay. I think I’ll die if I stay.”

He buries his face in her shoulder. Winter wraps her wings around him, and he around her, and they stay like that for a little while.

-

(Age 17)

She has never dreamed about Cinder Fall before.

Cinder Fall is — different. And it’s definitely not a good thing. She’s rebellious, she’s angry with the world and the way it treated her, and she attracts the General’s ire on her second day at Atlas. But Winter can’t quite bring herself to be angry with her. And she doesn’t know why.

There’s a draw there, she supposes. Cinder Fall is a blank spot in the carefully woven future, Cinder Fall could maybe stop Weiss from falling, could keep May from leaving her behind, could —

-

(Age 18)

Cinder frowns critically, looking at the full shape of her wings, splayed out behind her on the bed. “Do you know how to fly?”

“...No?”

She flexes her own wings, and that searching, sharp expression turns into a grin. “Do you want me to teach you?”