![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Three Sentence Ficathon 2025
Feb. 8th, 2025 09:47 pmFilling prompts at Three Sentence Ficathon are always a lot of fun, but especially this year! Post 4 is still open to new prompts until around midnight PST on February 9th.
My fills below:
any, any, sexy tiger backup dancers
There had, of course, been something of an outcry when people started talking of reviving the Coilheart Games, given the whole unpleasant business of the Sixth Coil...but then again, it had been four years since the last Games, and every expert in London swore that the Sixth Coil showed no signs of breaking its seal, and whatever else you could say for the previous Games, it certainly had been good for intra-Neath cooperation (and the officials, who at least had enough sense not to trust any event in the height of false-summer, promised that they'd move the Games to false-spring instead), and so despite their never-quite-ending grumbling, the Londoners gathered into the newly-rebuilt stands, placed their bets and cheered their favorite teams, and kept an eye on the darkest and shakiest corners of the Neath just in case.
As it turned out, the most sensational part of the new Games came not from a resurgent Fingerking or some new fight for London's survival, but from Port Carnelian's contribution to the reimagined Tournament of the Imagination: the glossy-furred, well-built tigers gyrating in perfect coordination behind the Striped Chanteuse. Mr. Huffam's headline the next day described the wave of fainting from the particularly sensitive Surface visitors in the audience; later, scholars would blame their sinuous motions for the ruin of at least four young rakes, a new school of poetry, and two assassination attempts in the Foreign Office...but that's another story.
Any, Any, I love you. I want us both to eat well.
Orpheus never has had a head for figures, but Eurydice's done all the calculating - cost of living, average wages, caloric requirements per individual.
There's no way they'll make it, she thinks, not unless they start eating each other instead, and while she would give her very flesh to Orpheus and he to her, she's willing to take a chance on another way.
It's one less burden on him while he finishes his song, she tells herself, right before she tells him goodbye and starts on the trek to Hadestown.
Harlots, Charlotte & Lucy, flowers
Even since Charlotte began her trade, she has been showered in more flowers than she can count - violets and daffodils, lilacs and camellias, bouquet after bouquet of red roses.
You are truly a rose, a fresh bloom, a lily that needs no gilding, the men tell her, and Charlotte privately wonders whether they think about their compliments at all before they say them. Lucy would be better suited for the flowers, little Lucy who has not yet learned to hide her heart - she could fit among all these soft petals like a shepherdess in her field, but Charlotte is too much a creature of the city to feel anything but suffocated by all this nature.
Her mother, practical as always, gives her pitchers of water to refill the flower vases and reminds her what clever girls do with gifts from promising culls and potential keepers. Accordingly, she puts yet another set of the dull red roses from Sir Howard on prominent display on her vanity, writes to thank Lord Repton for the camellias and asks Lucy about a sketch of the flowers on her note, and learns to accept everything from humble daisies to brilliant orchids with a charming smile.
But in some quiet late mornings, when Charlotte is nearly choking on the sweetness of flowers, she sneaks a few blooms from their vases and steals to Lucy's room - "will you put one in my hair?" her little sister asks, and Charlotte puts on a scowl and says "very well, but just this once, sprat," as she always does, her fingers already twining blossoms into Lucy's braids as the scowl breaks into a smile.
MASH (TV), Margaret, a small indulgence
In the bottom drawer of Margaret's nightstand, she has a dozen bottles of nail polish. They come in sunset pinks and sunrise yellows, in royal purple and robin's-egg blue and six different types of red - a rainbow's worth of colors and then some, almost searingly bright against all the olive drab.
No matter what fresh hell is pressing on the 4077th, Margaret tries finding moments to sit down with her personal rainbow and paint her toenails in neat, even, calming strokes; it's a small enough indulgence, she reasons, and if some sniper's bullet finds her, by God, they're going to lay her in the ground with nice-looking toes.
MASH (TV), Frank, the one thing he's good at
Contrary to what those reprobates in the Swamp might think, Margaret's not blind to Frank's faults - she's subtly guided his scalpel in the OR and talked him through his tantrums too much for that.
What Frank's good at is believing - believing in rules and discipline when everyone else mocks them for it, believing in the Army when no one else is this outfit does. And he believes in her, nodding at her suggestions with wide earnest eyes and trusting her to run the 4077th beside him with that same steadfast and unblinking belief, and for that alone, she can love him.
any, any, trying to hold an orgy but the participants keep getting distracted
In hindsight, it had taken a surprisingly long time for Hawkeye and Trapper to announce plans for the First And Hopefully Only Annual 4077th Orgy and General Bacchanalia - six months and some change into the war, after two weeks with no casualties but also nothing else to break up the monotony, on a weekend where Frank and ("unfortunately," Trapper sighed) Hot Lips were off at a medical conference and Father Mulcahy was on R&R. It was, Hawkeye enthused, going to be an unprecedented dive into the deep end of depravity, featuring a blindfolded Korean four-piece band (all the way from Seoul and bribed with ungodly amounts of booze), an all-naked dress code in the room stuffed wall-to-wall with mattresses, and real champagne and steaks rerouted from General Mitchell's personal shipment.
It certainly turned out to be a notorious party, maybe quite not the way Hawkeye and Trapper hoped but still something of a success - sure, the mattresses didn't get much use after one of the band members spilled his champagne and dropped his cigarette and set the whole room on fire, and they had to deploy poor Radar to keep Mulcahy distracted when he came back from R&R early...but everybody agreed that the steaks had been fantastic and the real highlight of the party, at least until General Mitchell showed up with four MPs in tow...
any, any nun or nun adjacent character, religious guilt
The Duke has given her an hour to think over his proposal and prepare her answer, and so Isabella kneels before the convent's altar, the familiar prayers feeling heavy on her tongue.
Her actions in the past few days have been a series of almosts - almost good, almost right, the betrothed lovers all reunited and the broken promises restored, and yet it has not happened through lawful mercy or open justice but by sordid bargains and false friars and lies told in the dark.
She has had to compromise and compromise again - for her brother's life, for her own vocation, for justice in Vienna - and she wonders, now, if she even has a place among the votarists of Saint Clare anymore, if what she's done has already left her soul too stained for true holiness.
any, any, funeral
Once she's finished arranging the body inside the shallow-bottomed boat, she pushes the boat out only waist-deep in the river before lighting it with her torch - the proper way would be with a flaming arrow, she remembers, but the only weapons Arya has on her are the daggers, the ones she had just cleaned of Stoneheart's blood.
I didn't like archery anyway, she thinks, settling on the riverbank to watch the boat burn, kicking her feet aimlessly in the water like she had when she was small and her mother had been teaching her to swim in the godswoods' pools ("you really are half a trout!" her mother had once said, laughing, as little Arya took off paddling across the pool, and Arya now bites her lip at the stab of memory).
The flame consumes enough of boat and body so that Stoneheart will never rise again, but as the fire starts to gutter out Arya approaches the charred boat and starts collecting bones - Catelyn was a Tully of Riverrun but she was also a Stark of Winterfell, and Arya is going to bring her, finally, home.
any, any, dark lady, white knight
Cersei has taken to wearing black since Robert died, Jaime notices - it might have been mistaken for a widow's devotion, but Jaime recognizes what his sister looks like radiant with satisfaction and knows better.
Jaime himself has taken to wearing the white armor since he returned to King's Landing; it makes people whisper harder when they see him gleaming and spotless all in white beside his black-clad sister, and he tries to quiet the part of him that tells him he is not worthy of the armor at all.
None of it matters in the deepest parts of the night, when the black dress and white armor fall away to to reveal pale naked skin, and Jaime's world dissolves into the green of their eyes and the gold of their hair and their lips gleaming red, Lannister red.
Any, Any F/M Ship, "Breathe, my dear."
"Breathe, my dear," she told him just before they entered their first harvest feast together. Ned had taken to lordship well, all things considered, but opening banquets had never been comfortable to him the way it had been to Brandon; Cat, though, had been leading feasts ever since her mother died, and over the years she knew Ned had been watching her, learning when to guide and when to let her take the lead, taking this strange dance they'd been thrust into and making it their own.
Ned kept her hand tight in his own - his hands always surprised her, so warm for a man who thrived on cold - and kissed her gently, and let her lead him into the great hall where their duties waited.
ASoIaF, Joyeuse Erenford, familiar
The lands of House Erenford lie on the Green Fork a few miles north of the Twins, on marshland choked with reeds - an unhealthy and unfruitful place, people say, but Joyeuse spent her whole life there until sixteen, and she has learned to love the soft ground beneath her feet and the heavy stillness of the air.
The Twins is anything but quiet, she realizes quickly - nothing here feels like home, and especially not the squeals and screams of her new squabbling family and the constant jabs of elbows and knees rushing in the too-crowded halls with absolutely no care for who they're touching (and the hands, gods, the hands of her husband and - but she cannot think about it, just squeezes her eyes shut and concentrates on the feeling of her daughter in her arms instead, while listening to stories of Freys steadily falling dead outside the castle walls).
She takes her daughter and a horse the night her husband dies - she doubts her stepfamily will grieve her going any more than they've grieved their many already dead - and when she's finally returned to heron calls in her ears and sticky mud beneath her boots, she takes a breath of familiar air and feels finally at peace.
Any fandom with dragons, Any, The dragon and its pet.
The maesters wrote that Nettles had tamed Sheepstealer, but this was a lie; Sheepstealer had lived too wild for too long to ever accept a rider who thought herself his master, and Nettles never tried. She brought him sheep every day instead, nice and fresh and plump, and she joked to the sailors at Hull that the dragon had trained her to do his bidding more than she'd ever trained the dragon.
The first time Sheepstealer glanced up from the huge ram she'd brought him to devour and and instead nudged her playfully with his snout, she knew good and well what it meant - that she belonged to the dragon now, that the dragon had figured her to be someone worth keeping.
ASoIaF, any, heart-tree
Sometimes, when Cat finds Ned at his prayers, he asks her to stay with him for a while. The godswood still is not Cat's place - she never feels more southron than she does here - but Ned's low voice and solemn eyes reassure her that she is welcome here, and the heart-tree's gaze feels kinder when she nods and kneels beside him.
Ned's gods, she has learned, do not expect the ritual and ceremony that hers do; their presence fades into the quiet of the woods as Cat and Ned share their worries and make wishes for their children and (every once in a while) sleep, cushioned by furs and fallen weirwood leaves and warmed by each other's arms.
ASoIaF, any Targaryen, mourn
Harrenhal suits her - stark and bleak as a tombstone, too cold for tears. Here, Rhaena looks out her bedroom window and sees the God's Eye stretching out to the field where her brother plummeted to his death; she lights candles in the sept while whispering the names of her murdered friends and lost lovers and the child who's disappearing more and more beneath a septa's robes; she feels the godswood's cool breezes on her face and wonders where the winds scattered her daughter's ashes.
Harrenhal is haunted, but so is Rhaena, and Harrenhal's ghosts are easier to live with than her own.
any, any, brother doesn't mean 'my father's son'
"I wish we'd had the same father," Leia tells Luke once.
She feels his confused amusement as soon as she says that, but she's too wistful and too drunk to bristle much about it. They'd both had maybe one or two more nogs than sensible and she'd just finished telling him how her father had taught her to climb trees out in the mountain forests of Alderaan; she's not sure whether it's the drink or the memories that are making images and emotions flow through their connection more than usual, but she knows he can feel what had been in her mind when she'd told him that wish - a shared childhood in the palace, getting into scrapes together and getting their father's scoldings and hugs together afterward, Bail Organa watching over and guiding his twins as they grew as a family.
Luke never knew her father, and she is not Luke's father's child (and neither is he, no matter what he says, she thinks fiercely and privately, he's not Vader's in the ways that matter) and despite it all Luke's still her brother. He's her brother, and it feels right that he's her brother, and so the family they've decided to be matters more than blood or memories or family history or anything else, but - "I just wish sometimes, that's all," she says, shrugging, as Luke shifts slightly closer to her on the couch and she catches a half-smile and some wistful flickers of imagination from him, something that makes her think he might wish sometimes too.
"Yeah, it would've been good," he finally replies, and nudges her shoulder with his, and asks for another story about her father.
any, any, it's not my blood
It hadn't been her smoothest fight, not by a long shot - the Wild Karrde was going to take days to repair even with the crew scavenging parts from the pirates' cruiser, and while they hadn't lost any cargo to the pirates or to the firefight, that last detonator had sent enough gore flying that Mara absolutely dripped blood when she caught up with Karrde again. "None of it's mine," she informed him crisply, handing him the datachip with the pirates' most lucrative stolen codes and trying to ignore the tackiness of the drying blood between her fingers.
Karrde took the chip without appearing to even notice Mara's bloody fingerprints on it - a professional as always, she thought, but when he met her eyes again she thought she felt something shift through the Force she was trying hard not to use nowadays. Like in his never-ending evaluations and calculations he saw some new possibility for her, something she'd earned for herself completely apart from anything she'd been before. "Aves told me this captain rigged up a shower in his quarters with real water," Karrde said, pocketing the datachip, "and with all due respect, Jade, you look like you could use it - why don't you go clean up and we'll debrief afterward?"
Mara can't help a small smile as she thanks Karrde and goes to hunt down her shower - a sonic would be more practical, and she might scold herself later for the waste of water, but now more than ever she's liking the idea of a fresh start.
Any, any, wet hair
"Believe me, you don't want to see what it looks like if I don't comb it wet," Leia tells Han, lifting a handful of hair off her shoulder and attacking it with the same look of concentration she got when she calculated nav coordinates, and when she glances at Han again in the mirror this cramped 'fresher suddenly feels even smaller than normal.
It had been a couple of days since they'd kissed and Han's still figuring out what that means for them now, exactly; it's still two and a half weeks to Bespin and no sane betting man would take any chances while they're stuck together for so long with no way out, but right now Leia's standing in his 'fresher in a robe she borrowed from him with her hair down around her shoulders, and Han had never liked figuring the odds anyway.
"Want some help?" he asks, and right when he's about to call the mission a failure and head back to the cockpit, Leia raises her eyebrow and quirks up her lips and offers him her comb.
Star Wars, Leia & Luke, alternate first meeting
She finds him in the aftermath of a Rebel attack on an Imperial supply depot, following the smoking wreck of his X-wing after she shot out its lower left S-foil; he must know exactly who she is (well, she thinks, maybe not exactly who she is, how they're really related) when she touches down in the jungle clearing, because as she emerges from her TIE he tenses up and shakes his sweat-soaked hair out of his face and jabs his just-ignited lightsaber toward her - stang, his footing is absolutely awful, he must barely knows how to use it.
There's some tickle of familiarity in her mind, she realizes as she ignites her own blade, some long-ago bond that hasn't quite broken yet; she prods at the connection like a tender bruise as she takes her first swing at him and he wheels clumsily backwards, and she wonders if he notices her frustration spiking at just how much training he still needs before he can be any kind of useful to her.
But still, he can be taught, and if he can be taught he can become an ally, and if she can make an ally of him they will have the power to overthrow the Emperor and all his whims and cruelties (the way she no longer believes Father ever will) and remake the Empire in her own design.
Star Wars, Han/Leia/Luke, My hand was the one you reached for / All throughout the Great War
They've all touched each other easily, right from the start - Han's hand covering Luke's and guiding him on exactly which lever to hold while the Falcon wobbles through hyperspace, Luke's hand finding Leia's and holding tight while they run from stormtroopers, Leia's hands and Han's catching each other after their victory hugs and holding on as long as possible as if daring each other to be the first to let go.
(Their hands find each other in darker, quieter moments too, in celebration after Yavin and exhaustion on Hoth and comfort on the anniversaries of Alderaan's destruction, and in all the little moments of victory and despair and sheer need to connect to someone and something real in the middle of a war).
It should be different, now that the war is over and all the truths are known, but as they sit on an Ewok bridge and watch the victory fires burning down below, they glance down at Han's left fingers entwined with Leia's and his right fingers looped around Luke's hand and burst out laughing at how, maybe, this part of them doesn't have to change after all.
any, any, they're more like guidelines
Chewie's better than Han at rules - which isn't saying much, granted, but even in the tightest spots Chewie can and will remind Han of things like "the deflector shield isn't built to take that kind of fire, Han" and "you don't have many parsecs before that black hole sucks the ship in, Han" or in this case, "you know that you can't overload the hyperdrive without cracking it, right, Han?".
"Yeah, I know," Han replies, handing Chewie the hydrospanner, "but trust me, okay?"
And Chewie, despite his better judgment, does; as Han punches the hyperdrive and they shoot into lightspeed just ahead of the Imperial cruiser, he thinks that where he and Han and this improbable boltbucket of a ship is concerned, the rules are more like guidelines anyway.
any, any, A scheme to raise giant squid in the sewers.
"I still don't know how she got down here, exactly," Krobus said, "but she likes the slimejacks - she even said she might bring her family here and we could catch a new line of products for the store - do you think there's too much competition in the market for deep-sea fish around here?"
The farmer - quite unusually for them - stood completely quiet and stock-still beside Krobus, breathing more and quicker than humans normally did in a sewer; when Krobus followed their stare across the sewer-muck, he saw a huge sucker-lined arm rise through the sewer-steam and undulate languorously at them.
"She likes it when we wave back to her," Krobus said cheerfully as he wiggled his hands towards the squid, and after another, deeper breath, the farmer slowly lifted their own hand and joined in.
any, any, cherry soda
The kid gives her a weird look when she comes to the soda fountain for her cherry soda; at first she apologizes, wondering if she grabbed his drink by mistake, but then he tightens his fingers around his own cherry soda and clutches it closer - then blinks again, loosens his grip - then cocks his head, like whatever ghost he's seen looking at her has already fled and there's only a vaguely benevolent curiosity left behind.
"Ma'am," he says softly, "are you all right?"
A wonderful question, she thinks, one she's been asking herself ever since Blanche went to the asylum - but Eunice is watching the baby and Stanley will be home from the poker game in a few hours and asking herself questions will only land her right beside Blanche in a matching straitjacket, so she smiles weakly, and takes a sip of her soda, and musters up all her gracious girlhood manners and assures the young man that she's perfectly all right, thank you ever so much for asking.
Tortall, Kel/Yuki, dance
Yuki had been the one to teach Kel the dance of the fans, years ago when they were young girls - a beautiful sparring game where two dancers weave gracefully around each other, their shukusens flicking open delicately and slicing the air with the beat of the music, and the dancers' pride is in how fluidly they move and how closely they can flash the shukusens toward their partner without the blades breaking the skin and without either of them ever flinching.
They resume the dance when Yuki comes to Tortall, but it has new dangers now that they are grown women, and new meanings too; Kel has to watch herself so that she doesn't bring down the full power and force of her knight's training while she dances, and it's somehow harder as she watches Yuki too, who lingers teasingly too long on the downbeat and crinkles her eyes when the shukusen whistles close to her ears and takes every moment to duck and dart around Kel so that Kel feels her body's warmth around her for every moment of the dance.
They end the dance without either of them cutting the other but with their arms twined and their chests pressed close together; the shukusens flick closed but Kel feels that the dance is not yet over, and when they lean in to press their lips together, neither of them ever flinch.
My fills below:
Fallen London
any, any, sexy tiger backup dancers
There had, of course, been something of an outcry when people started talking of reviving the Coilheart Games, given the whole unpleasant business of the Sixth Coil...but then again, it had been four years since the last Games, and every expert in London swore that the Sixth Coil showed no signs of breaking its seal, and whatever else you could say for the previous Games, it certainly had been good for intra-Neath cooperation (and the officials, who at least had enough sense not to trust any event in the height of false-summer, promised that they'd move the Games to false-spring instead), and so despite their never-quite-ending grumbling, the Londoners gathered into the newly-rebuilt stands, placed their bets and cheered their favorite teams, and kept an eye on the darkest and shakiest corners of the Neath just in case.
As it turned out, the most sensational part of the new Games came not from a resurgent Fingerking or some new fight for London's survival, but from Port Carnelian's contribution to the reimagined Tournament of the Imagination: the glossy-furred, well-built tigers gyrating in perfect coordination behind the Striped Chanteuse. Mr. Huffam's headline the next day described the wave of fainting from the particularly sensitive Surface visitors in the audience; later, scholars would blame their sinuous motions for the ruin of at least four young rakes, a new school of poetry, and two assassination attempts in the Foreign Office...but that's another story.
Hadestown
Any, Any, I love you. I want us both to eat well.
Orpheus never has had a head for figures, but Eurydice's done all the calculating - cost of living, average wages, caloric requirements per individual.
There's no way they'll make it, she thinks, not unless they start eating each other instead, and while she would give her very flesh to Orpheus and he to her, she's willing to take a chance on another way.
It's one less burden on him while he finishes his song, she tells herself, right before she tells him goodbye and starts on the trek to Hadestown.
Harlots
Harlots, Charlotte & Lucy, flowers
Even since Charlotte began her trade, she has been showered in more flowers than she can count - violets and daffodils, lilacs and camellias, bouquet after bouquet of red roses.
You are truly a rose, a fresh bloom, a lily that needs no gilding, the men tell her, and Charlotte privately wonders whether they think about their compliments at all before they say them. Lucy would be better suited for the flowers, little Lucy who has not yet learned to hide her heart - she could fit among all these soft petals like a shepherdess in her field, but Charlotte is too much a creature of the city to feel anything but suffocated by all this nature.
Her mother, practical as always, gives her pitchers of water to refill the flower vases and reminds her what clever girls do with gifts from promising culls and potential keepers. Accordingly, she puts yet another set of the dull red roses from Sir Howard on prominent display on her vanity, writes to thank Lord Repton for the camellias and asks Lucy about a sketch of the flowers on her note, and learns to accept everything from humble daisies to brilliant orchids with a charming smile.
But in some quiet late mornings, when Charlotte is nearly choking on the sweetness of flowers, she sneaks a few blooms from their vases and steals to Lucy's room - "will you put one in my hair?" her little sister asks, and Charlotte puts on a scowl and says "very well, but just this once, sprat," as she always does, her fingers already twining blossoms into Lucy's braids as the scowl breaks into a smile.
MASH
MASH (TV), Margaret, a small indulgence
In the bottom drawer of Margaret's nightstand, she has a dozen bottles of nail polish. They come in sunset pinks and sunrise yellows, in royal purple and robin's-egg blue and six different types of red - a rainbow's worth of colors and then some, almost searingly bright against all the olive drab.
No matter what fresh hell is pressing on the 4077th, Margaret tries finding moments to sit down with her personal rainbow and paint her toenails in neat, even, calming strokes; it's a small enough indulgence, she reasons, and if some sniper's bullet finds her, by God, they're going to lay her in the ground with nice-looking toes.
MASH (TV), Frank, the one thing he's good at
Contrary to what those reprobates in the Swamp might think, Margaret's not blind to Frank's faults - she's subtly guided his scalpel in the OR and talked him through his tantrums too much for that.
What Frank's good at is believing - believing in rules and discipline when everyone else mocks them for it, believing in the Army when no one else is this outfit does. And he believes in her, nodding at her suggestions with wide earnest eyes and trusting her to run the 4077th beside him with that same steadfast and unblinking belief, and for that alone, she can love him.
any, any, trying to hold an orgy but the participants keep getting distracted
In hindsight, it had taken a surprisingly long time for Hawkeye and Trapper to announce plans for the First And Hopefully Only Annual 4077th Orgy and General Bacchanalia - six months and some change into the war, after two weeks with no casualties but also nothing else to break up the monotony, on a weekend where Frank and ("unfortunately," Trapper sighed) Hot Lips were off at a medical conference and Father Mulcahy was on R&R. It was, Hawkeye enthused, going to be an unprecedented dive into the deep end of depravity, featuring a blindfolded Korean four-piece band (all the way from Seoul and bribed with ungodly amounts of booze), an all-naked dress code in the room stuffed wall-to-wall with mattresses, and real champagne and steaks rerouted from General Mitchell's personal shipment.
It certainly turned out to be a notorious party, maybe quite not the way Hawkeye and Trapper hoped but still something of a success - sure, the mattresses didn't get much use after one of the band members spilled his champagne and dropped his cigarette and set the whole room on fire, and they had to deploy poor Radar to keep Mulcahy distracted when he came back from R&R early...but everybody agreed that the steaks had been fantastic and the real highlight of the party, at least until General Mitchell showed up with four MPs in tow...
Measure for Measure
any, any nun or nun adjacent character, religious guilt
The Duke has given her an hour to think over his proposal and prepare her answer, and so Isabella kneels before the convent's altar, the familiar prayers feeling heavy on her tongue.
Her actions in the past few days have been a series of almosts - almost good, almost right, the betrothed lovers all reunited and the broken promises restored, and yet it has not happened through lawful mercy or open justice but by sordid bargains and false friars and lies told in the dark.
She has had to compromise and compromise again - for her brother's life, for her own vocation, for justice in Vienna - and she wonders, now, if she even has a place among the votarists of Saint Clare anymore, if what she's done has already left her soul too stained for true holiness.
A Song of Ice and Fire
any, any, funeral
Once she's finished arranging the body inside the shallow-bottomed boat, she pushes the boat out only waist-deep in the river before lighting it with her torch - the proper way would be with a flaming arrow, she remembers, but the only weapons Arya has on her are the daggers, the ones she had just cleaned of Stoneheart's blood.
I didn't like archery anyway, she thinks, settling on the riverbank to watch the boat burn, kicking her feet aimlessly in the water like she had when she was small and her mother had been teaching her to swim in the godswoods' pools ("you really are half a trout!" her mother had once said, laughing, as little Arya took off paddling across the pool, and Arya now bites her lip at the stab of memory).
The flame consumes enough of boat and body so that Stoneheart will never rise again, but as the fire starts to gutter out Arya approaches the charred boat and starts collecting bones - Catelyn was a Tully of Riverrun but she was also a Stark of Winterfell, and Arya is going to bring her, finally, home.
any, any, dark lady, white knight
Cersei has taken to wearing black since Robert died, Jaime notices - it might have been mistaken for a widow's devotion, but Jaime recognizes what his sister looks like radiant with satisfaction and knows better.
Jaime himself has taken to wearing the white armor since he returned to King's Landing; it makes people whisper harder when they see him gleaming and spotless all in white beside his black-clad sister, and he tries to quiet the part of him that tells him he is not worthy of the armor at all.
None of it matters in the deepest parts of the night, when the black dress and white armor fall away to to reveal pale naked skin, and Jaime's world dissolves into the green of their eyes and the gold of their hair and their lips gleaming red, Lannister red.
Any, Any F/M Ship, "Breathe, my dear."
"Breathe, my dear," she told him just before they entered their first harvest feast together. Ned had taken to lordship well, all things considered, but opening banquets had never been comfortable to him the way it had been to Brandon; Cat, though, had been leading feasts ever since her mother died, and over the years she knew Ned had been watching her, learning when to guide and when to let her take the lead, taking this strange dance they'd been thrust into and making it their own.
Ned kept her hand tight in his own - his hands always surprised her, so warm for a man who thrived on cold - and kissed her gently, and let her lead him into the great hall where their duties waited.
ASoIaF, Joyeuse Erenford, familiar
The lands of House Erenford lie on the Green Fork a few miles north of the Twins, on marshland choked with reeds - an unhealthy and unfruitful place, people say, but Joyeuse spent her whole life there until sixteen, and she has learned to love the soft ground beneath her feet and the heavy stillness of the air.
The Twins is anything but quiet, she realizes quickly - nothing here feels like home, and especially not the squeals and screams of her new squabbling family and the constant jabs of elbows and knees rushing in the too-crowded halls with absolutely no care for who they're touching (and the hands, gods, the hands of her husband and - but she cannot think about it, just squeezes her eyes shut and concentrates on the feeling of her daughter in her arms instead, while listening to stories of Freys steadily falling dead outside the castle walls).
She takes her daughter and a horse the night her husband dies - she doubts her stepfamily will grieve her going any more than they've grieved their many already dead - and when she's finally returned to heron calls in her ears and sticky mud beneath her boots, she takes a breath of familiar air and feels finally at peace.
Any fandom with dragons, Any, The dragon and its pet.
The maesters wrote that Nettles had tamed Sheepstealer, but this was a lie; Sheepstealer had lived too wild for too long to ever accept a rider who thought herself his master, and Nettles never tried. She brought him sheep every day instead, nice and fresh and plump, and she joked to the sailors at Hull that the dragon had trained her to do his bidding more than she'd ever trained the dragon.
The first time Sheepstealer glanced up from the huge ram she'd brought him to devour and and instead nudged her playfully with his snout, she knew good and well what it meant - that she belonged to the dragon now, that the dragon had figured her to be someone worth keeping.
ASoIaF, any, heart-tree
Sometimes, when Cat finds Ned at his prayers, he asks her to stay with him for a while. The godswood still is not Cat's place - she never feels more southron than she does here - but Ned's low voice and solemn eyes reassure her that she is welcome here, and the heart-tree's gaze feels kinder when she nods and kneels beside him.
Ned's gods, she has learned, do not expect the ritual and ceremony that hers do; their presence fades into the quiet of the woods as Cat and Ned share their worries and make wishes for their children and (every once in a while) sleep, cushioned by furs and fallen weirwood leaves and warmed by each other's arms.
ASoIaF, any Targaryen, mourn
Harrenhal suits her - stark and bleak as a tombstone, too cold for tears. Here, Rhaena looks out her bedroom window and sees the God's Eye stretching out to the field where her brother plummeted to his death; she lights candles in the sept while whispering the names of her murdered friends and lost lovers and the child who's disappearing more and more beneath a septa's robes; she feels the godswood's cool breezes on her face and wonders where the winds scattered her daughter's ashes.
Harrenhal is haunted, but so is Rhaena, and Harrenhal's ghosts are easier to live with than her own.
Star Wars
any, any, brother doesn't mean 'my father's son'
"I wish we'd had the same father," Leia tells Luke once.
She feels his confused amusement as soon as she says that, but she's too wistful and too drunk to bristle much about it. They'd both had maybe one or two more nogs than sensible and she'd just finished telling him how her father had taught her to climb trees out in the mountain forests of Alderaan; she's not sure whether it's the drink or the memories that are making images and emotions flow through their connection more than usual, but she knows he can feel what had been in her mind when she'd told him that wish - a shared childhood in the palace, getting into scrapes together and getting their father's scoldings and hugs together afterward, Bail Organa watching over and guiding his twins as they grew as a family.
Luke never knew her father, and she is not Luke's father's child (and neither is he, no matter what he says, she thinks fiercely and privately, he's not Vader's in the ways that matter) and despite it all Luke's still her brother. He's her brother, and it feels right that he's her brother, and so the family they've decided to be matters more than blood or memories or family history or anything else, but - "I just wish sometimes, that's all," she says, shrugging, as Luke shifts slightly closer to her on the couch and she catches a half-smile and some wistful flickers of imagination from him, something that makes her think he might wish sometimes too.
"Yeah, it would've been good," he finally replies, and nudges her shoulder with his, and asks for another story about her father.
any, any, it's not my blood
It hadn't been her smoothest fight, not by a long shot - the Wild Karrde was going to take days to repair even with the crew scavenging parts from the pirates' cruiser, and while they hadn't lost any cargo to the pirates or to the firefight, that last detonator had sent enough gore flying that Mara absolutely dripped blood when she caught up with Karrde again. "None of it's mine," she informed him crisply, handing him the datachip with the pirates' most lucrative stolen codes and trying to ignore the tackiness of the drying blood between her fingers.
Karrde took the chip without appearing to even notice Mara's bloody fingerprints on it - a professional as always, she thought, but when he met her eyes again she thought she felt something shift through the Force she was trying hard not to use nowadays. Like in his never-ending evaluations and calculations he saw some new possibility for her, something she'd earned for herself completely apart from anything she'd been before. "Aves told me this captain rigged up a shower in his quarters with real water," Karrde said, pocketing the datachip, "and with all due respect, Jade, you look like you could use it - why don't you go clean up and we'll debrief afterward?"
Mara can't help a small smile as she thanks Karrde and goes to hunt down her shower - a sonic would be more practical, and she might scold herself later for the waste of water, but now more than ever she's liking the idea of a fresh start.
Any, any, wet hair
"Believe me, you don't want to see what it looks like if I don't comb it wet," Leia tells Han, lifting a handful of hair off her shoulder and attacking it with the same look of concentration she got when she calculated nav coordinates, and when she glances at Han again in the mirror this cramped 'fresher suddenly feels even smaller than normal.
It had been a couple of days since they'd kissed and Han's still figuring out what that means for them now, exactly; it's still two and a half weeks to Bespin and no sane betting man would take any chances while they're stuck together for so long with no way out, but right now Leia's standing in his 'fresher in a robe she borrowed from him with her hair down around her shoulders, and Han had never liked figuring the odds anyway.
"Want some help?" he asks, and right when he's about to call the mission a failure and head back to the cockpit, Leia raises her eyebrow and quirks up her lips and offers him her comb.
Star Wars, Leia & Luke, alternate first meeting
She finds him in the aftermath of a Rebel attack on an Imperial supply depot, following the smoking wreck of his X-wing after she shot out its lower left S-foil; he must know exactly who she is (well, she thinks, maybe not exactly who she is, how they're really related) when she touches down in the jungle clearing, because as she emerges from her TIE he tenses up and shakes his sweat-soaked hair out of his face and jabs his just-ignited lightsaber toward her - stang, his footing is absolutely awful, he must barely knows how to use it.
There's some tickle of familiarity in her mind, she realizes as she ignites her own blade, some long-ago bond that hasn't quite broken yet; she prods at the connection like a tender bruise as she takes her first swing at him and he wheels clumsily backwards, and she wonders if he notices her frustration spiking at just how much training he still needs before he can be any kind of useful to her.
But still, he can be taught, and if he can be taught he can become an ally, and if she can make an ally of him they will have the power to overthrow the Emperor and all his whims and cruelties (the way she no longer believes Father ever will) and remake the Empire in her own design.
Star Wars, Han/Leia/Luke, My hand was the one you reached for / All throughout the Great War
They've all touched each other easily, right from the start - Han's hand covering Luke's and guiding him on exactly which lever to hold while the Falcon wobbles through hyperspace, Luke's hand finding Leia's and holding tight while they run from stormtroopers, Leia's hands and Han's catching each other after their victory hugs and holding on as long as possible as if daring each other to be the first to let go.
(Their hands find each other in darker, quieter moments too, in celebration after Yavin and exhaustion on Hoth and comfort on the anniversaries of Alderaan's destruction, and in all the little moments of victory and despair and sheer need to connect to someone and something real in the middle of a war).
It should be different, now that the war is over and all the truths are known, but as they sit on an Ewok bridge and watch the victory fires burning down below, they glance down at Han's left fingers entwined with Leia's and his right fingers looped around Luke's hand and burst out laughing at how, maybe, this part of them doesn't have to change after all.
any, any, they're more like guidelines
Chewie's better than Han at rules - which isn't saying much, granted, but even in the tightest spots Chewie can and will remind Han of things like "the deflector shield isn't built to take that kind of fire, Han" and "you don't have many parsecs before that black hole sucks the ship in, Han" or in this case, "you know that you can't overload the hyperdrive without cracking it, right, Han?".
"Yeah, I know," Han replies, handing Chewie the hydrospanner, "but trust me, okay?"
And Chewie, despite his better judgment, does; as Han punches the hyperdrive and they shoot into lightspeed just ahead of the Imperial cruiser, he thinks that where he and Han and this improbable boltbucket of a ship is concerned, the rules are more like guidelines anyway.
Stardew Valley
any, any, A scheme to raise giant squid in the sewers.
"I still don't know how she got down here, exactly," Krobus said, "but she likes the slimejacks - she even said she might bring her family here and we could catch a new line of products for the store - do you think there's too much competition in the market for deep-sea fish around here?"
The farmer - quite unusually for them - stood completely quiet and stock-still beside Krobus, breathing more and quicker than humans normally did in a sewer; when Krobus followed their stare across the sewer-muck, he saw a huge sucker-lined arm rise through the sewer-steam and undulate languorously at them.
"She likes it when we wave back to her," Krobus said cheerfully as he wiggled his hands towards the squid, and after another, deeper breath, the farmer slowly lifted their own hand and joined in.
A Streetcar Named Desire
any, any, cherry soda
The kid gives her a weird look when she comes to the soda fountain for her cherry soda; at first she apologizes, wondering if she grabbed his drink by mistake, but then he tightens his fingers around his own cherry soda and clutches it closer - then blinks again, loosens his grip - then cocks his head, like whatever ghost he's seen looking at her has already fled and there's only a vaguely benevolent curiosity left behind.
"Ma'am," he says softly, "are you all right?"
A wonderful question, she thinks, one she's been asking herself ever since Blanche went to the asylum - but Eunice is watching the baby and Stanley will be home from the poker game in a few hours and asking herself questions will only land her right beside Blanche in a matching straitjacket, so she smiles weakly, and takes a sip of her soda, and musters up all her gracious girlhood manners and assures the young man that she's perfectly all right, thank you ever so much for asking.
Tortall
Tortall, Kel/Yuki, dance
Yuki had been the one to teach Kel the dance of the fans, years ago when they were young girls - a beautiful sparring game where two dancers weave gracefully around each other, their shukusens flicking open delicately and slicing the air with the beat of the music, and the dancers' pride is in how fluidly they move and how closely they can flash the shukusens toward their partner without the blades breaking the skin and without either of them ever flinching.
They resume the dance when Yuki comes to Tortall, but it has new dangers now that they are grown women, and new meanings too; Kel has to watch herself so that she doesn't bring down the full power and force of her knight's training while she dances, and it's somehow harder as she watches Yuki too, who lingers teasingly too long on the downbeat and crinkles her eyes when the shukusen whistles close to her ears and takes every moment to duck and dart around Kel so that Kel feels her body's warmth around her for every moment of the dance.
They end the dance without either of them cutting the other but with their arms twined and their chests pressed close together; the shukusens flick closed but Kel feels that the dance is not yet over, and when they lean in to press their lips together, neither of them ever flinch.