BONUS ROUND 1: THROWBACK PROMPTS

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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!

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FILL: Team RWBY

[hopelessgemini]

ship: winter/cinder

fandom: RWBY

-

Of all the people Cinder expected to run into in a coffee shop in Western Vale, an actual, honest-to-god vampire wasn’t one of them.

She can’t stop staring. It’s something of a consolation that the aforementioned vampire can’t stop staring, either. It feels a little like she’s seen a ghost — and she supposes she has, technically, because the vampire in question happens to look exactly like Cinder’s dead ex.

‘Dead’ is a generous word, but it’s the legally correct one. Winter Schnee graduated from Atlas Academy with flying colours, broke up with Cinder over an ideological disagreement, joined the military, and went missing in an attack on the barracks in the last two or three weeks of the Great War. Her death is what convinced the SDC to finally pull out of supplying funds to Atlas, meaning that Vale and Vacuo were able to sweep in and crush the majority of their forces in a matter of days. Cinder has the whole fucking timeline burned directly into her brain.

And now there’s a vampire walking around Western Vale and wearing her face. And Cinder has to serve her coffee.

If there’s any consolation, it’s the fact that the vampire literally and factually cannot be Winter, because there wasn’t even anything left of her to bury. The ‘attack’ on the barracks was less of an organised raid and more of an accidental bombing of Atlas’s own forces. The official report was that the air team had been intentionally misled as to the location of enemy invaders, something like that, but it’s hard to see how they could have come to that conclusion, given the fact that the barracks are on Atlas Academy’s compound.

So it’s just a coincidence. Just a really weird and slightly evil coincidence. A lot of vampires have white hair, same way a lot of werewolves have silver eyes. A lot of vampires have high cheekbones and broad shoulders and —

“Cinder?”

Cinder’s jaw drops. She’s been idling by the counter and staring for so long that she almost forgot they were in the same room. And that — that’s Winter’s voice. That’s Winter’s voice coming out of the mouth of a vampire. “Hi,” she says weakly.

-

“The General bit a few of us. Just his top fighters, the people he couldn’t afford to spare. It was meant to be a last-ditch measure to keep us from losing the war.” Winter smiles wryly, lifting her mug to her mouth. They have a syrup that mimics the taste of blood; Cinder wasn’t sure if she’d like it or not, but she knows some vampires won’t be able to eat anything that doesn’t at least come close. “It didn’t work, obviously. But several of us were stationed in — those barracks.”

“Right,” Cinder says. Her hands won’t stop shaking. “So you just — what, went into hiding?”

“Well, that’s the thing.” She sets her mug down. Her hands are shaking too. Cinder squashes the urge to reach over the table and take them in her own. “I sort of realised, after dying and being reborn, that it was — that you were right. That what the General was doing was wrong. So I did the only thing I could, which was take my squad with me and lead an attack on my father’s —”

“You did what?”

Winter shrugs. A sharper, more genuine smile tugs at the corners of her mouth. “I did the maths. We assassinated him, put out an official SDC statement using his biometrics, and now my little brother runs the company by proxy. As far as the world is aware, Jacques Schnee is too busy to make public appearances, given the destruction of some of his most valuable mines following the end of the war.”

Cinder stares. She shrugs.

“And then I went into hiding, yes.”