rthstewart | Three Sentence Ficathon 2022

This post is NOW CLOSED TO NEW PROMPTS! PLEASE POST YOUR NEW PROMPTS HERE, IN POST 2! Do continue to fill prompts here but please put all new prompts in Post 2.

Welcome to the Three Sentence Ficathon!

Here's a Friending meme!

What is the 3 Sentence Ficathon?
This is an open exchange where you answer a prompt with a fic consisting of only three sentences. It's open to all fandoms and you can post and fill as many prompts as you like, as many times as you want.

What do I do first?
You can start 3SF by posting prompts! When posting a prompt please format it this way:

fandom, character(s), prompt word/sentence.

Only one prompt per comment please. So, for example,

Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi, I don't like sand."

Open ended and anthropomorphic fills are popular too, such as:

Any, Any, "I don't like sand."

or

Earth geography, sand, "I don't like humans very much, either."

What happens after that?
You answer other posters' prompts in three sentences (or more if you can't stop yourself) and fill as many prompts as you want, as many times as you wish. If you see that a prompt you loved has already been filled, go ahead and fill it again! Multiple fills of the same prompt are allowed and even encouraged! (We get really fun stories going this way).

Can I still post if I need more than 3 sentences? Or should I just abuse grammar in ways the English language never contemplated?
Yes. Yes.

But I'm not a member of Dreamwidth
No problem. You can comment anonymously or through open ID

I'm really overwhelmed by all the prompts and how much there is and how fast it goes. I can't read 1,000 prompts and fills. It's too much.
I hear this a lot and it keeps a lot of people from participating. The 3SF is big and it moves fast, especially at first. I get overwhelmed, too, and I'm hosting the thing. With 2020 and 2021 sucking so badly you don't want something that's supposed to be fun cause you anxiety. I have a couple of suggestions for managing the 3SF volume.

First, really, you don't have to read every prompt and fill on every page. You can start at the last page of this and just go forward, or back a page or two. It's fine.
You can come and go as time and energy allow, you don't have to participate the whole time, and it drops off quite at bit after about 2 weeks and especially once we open a new post because this one is approaching 4,500 comments.
Even after the 3SF and new prompting end, people fill prompts all year long.
You can fill an already filled prompt and you can can leave a prompt that's already been prompted before. People do it all the time.

Always make sure you're looking at top-level comments only, not threaded. That helps a lot. Your screen should look like this.

But shouldn't I read everything to see if someone already prompted the same prompt I want to leave if someone already filled it?
No. Prompt as many times as you want, as much as you want. It doesn't matter if someone prompted the exact same prompt. Go ahead and prompt again!

I left a prompt and no one filled it. Can I prompt it again?
Absolutely!

Can I spread the word?
Yes, please. I generally fail at creating banners and embed codes but if you create one and make it really idiot-proof, I might be able to post and share it. Feel free to cross-post this entry. If you create your own banners or icons, let me know and I'll share!
Please share the 3SF with your followers, friends, and any channels and comms you are active on. I'll post on fandom calendar, Tumblr, and Twitter, but I don't have many connections in other spaces such as Discord.

Here's my attempt at a text box that might go horribly awry.

How long will it go?
The 3SF closes to new prompts on February 13, 2022. The entry stays open permanently and people post fills all year long. (There were a bunch of new posts to the 2021 3SF this week!)

Are there any rules about cross-posting?
Nope, you can post wherever you want, whenever you want. A lot of folks collected their responses together and posted them on AO3 under the 3 sentence fiction tag. 3SFs are a terrific prompt for remixes and could be helpful for Yuletide bears, too.

What about spoilers, content and archive warnings, triggers, pairings, ratings, tags, and squick?

I thought a lot about this. It boils down to reader beware. In my experience, this typically gets too big, moves too fast, and the stories are too short for content warnings and ratings to even apply. It is too big for me to moderate in this way. You should assume spoilers are fair game and that the initial poster and the responder have opted to use no content warnings or tags. This means AO3 content warnings for dubcon, violence, canon character death, underage, etc. COULD be present (and much more). I've found personally that I can skim and scroll by stuff that, from the prompt, I can tell isn't my favorite flavor of delicious cake. Use your best judgment, protect yourself, and be prepared to skip over things that aren't your thing. In this format, the obligation is on you, the reader, to protect yourself from triggering content.
Some posters do include warnings and spoiler tags or include spoiler space, but they don't have to do so.

Why is 3SF split among several posts? That seems confusing.
It is confusing and we always lose momentum once we have to move to a second post. The reason is because at 5,000 comments to a single post, DW installs a human test CAPTCHA, which is a pain for users. So, once this entry gets to the upper 4,000 comments, I open a new post. If you've been waiting until things slow down to participate, when we open a second post is often a good place to join.

If I have questions, what do I do?
I'm rthstewart everywhere, here, Twitter, Tumblr, gmail and AO3.

A special thank you to

conuly .
Last year, Conuly started logging all unfilled prompts.
This year's (2021) unfilled prompts are here.
Last year's (2020) unfilled prompts are here.

Conuly asks that you not reply, as they want to be able to edit and add more prompts to the list.

Here, have some icons and banners and let me know if you've created your own!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

any, any, family traditions

"Do I want to know why you're bringing a box of mice when you're babysitting my daughter?" Sakura asked, crossing her arms.

"Because she's too young for anything bigger yet, obviously," Kakashi said reasonably, and Sakura raised a brow, "she'll work up to bigger prey with experience. And as she gets older."

". . .that I am still allowing you in. . ." Sakura said, smothering amusement and leaning up to kiss Kakashi's cheek. "I'll be back before dinnertime; she's napping but I expect she'll wake up in the next hour." she told him, heading out past Kakashi and wondering if he would actually get her daughter chasing mice.

Most things that Jack remembers being a yearly event growing up, he doesn't feel any need to pass down to his son.

They had some normal traditions, sure -- Thanksgiving turkey, church on Christmas -- but that's not what sticks with him. Dad's bad mood from his hangovers on New Year's Day, gambling away money they couldn't afford on too many holidays with his buddies and the arguments that came after, years of his mom's smile frozen on while she told him there wouldn't be presents, her complaining about Jack being underfoot too much if he stayed home as he got older and not caring about them if he went out; that's what he remembers best, what feels like the real traditions.

Matt won't have that. Jack goes without whatever he can to make sure there's something under a tree and a tree for it to go under every Christmas, figures out where to go for the best fireworks on the Fourth, buys egg coloring kits on discount the day after Easter so they'll be there next year. He starts bundling Matty up for a New Year's walk when he's still in the stroller, so it already feels like a tradition by the time he can walk on his own, and he starts teaching himself how to cook, so Matty can have meals he'll want to come home for by the time he's old enough to go spend holidays with his friends.

Matty's gonna have things he wants to remember, someday, days that felt special and a house he wanted to be in. There's not much that Jack won't do to make sure of that.

I killed my own aunt, the mother of my half-brother, and hid that truth for almost twenty years. I waited every day for the chance to kill our father; the father who killed my mother through his weakness, his vanity.

Now that same brother stands before me, blade drawn, and it only seems right that things are going to end this way—and if it means Ludger might break free from the things we Kresnik's have done to one another, it's more than I could ever hope to deserve.

"Mother had to leave her bees at the dower house when she married Mr. Buchance," Jemis said as he and Jack ambled through the coppice wood of Arguty Manor, his words puncturing one of the slightly awkward silences that still fell between them more often than Jack wished. They were on the far side of the grounds from the house in question, so the statement fell groundward even more abruptly than it might have done in another location.

"That's a pity," Jack said, casting his mind back to the simpler days of his youth. "She brought a hive from the Woods Noirell when we married. The bees were irritable that first year, no doubt missing the limes and the magic of the Woods, but your mother spent hours in the garden singing to them and to a wild hive that had nested in a lightning-struck oak nearby. She told me she had brought a hive without a queen, both because her mother would permit no breeding queen to leave the Noirell hives, and because it was easier to broker peace with the local bees if she could promise new blood for their lines without the presence of a potential usurper to agitate them."

He paused, attention briefly focused on avoiding a swathe of icy mud that had swallowed several lengths of the path. Green buds might haze the tips of the maple and poplar branches, but winter still fought a fierce rearguard action against the coming of spring, and he had no wish to lose a boot or spend the rest of the walk with a sodden, filthy sock.

"I had never considered that bees might have politics as complicated as ours," Jack continued, "but your mother treated them with as much dignity as the Good Neighbors, and they respected her in return. They might sting me, if I startled them, but never her. And never you, either -- did that change, after the Fall? So much else failed, or went awry, and I was hardly home long enough to ask much of anything."

He glanced sideways, still unsure how Jemis would react to the memory of that wrenching month when he returned home to find Olive married to another man, his reputation in tatters, and Jemis a tight-wound ball of misery.

Jemis ducked a stray branch, one hand on his hat brim to steady it, then shook his head as he rose. "Not anywhere in South Fiellan. I don't recall much about the bees of Morrowlea. The university had dozens of hives, of course, but after my first year, I was rarely assigned to tasks that required patience and careful hands, or that would keep me away from-- that would keep me occupied for more than an hour at a time." He grimaced, and Jack ventured to set a comforting hand on his son's shoulder. Jemis shot him a grateful smile.

"Do you want to purchase a hive or two for our new tenants?" Jack asked, returning to Jemis's original statement. "Or see if you can sweet-talk your mother's swarm into returning?"

Jemis shrugged. "Perhaps. I wouldn't know where to start coaxing a feral swarm back into a human-built hive. Mostly I wanted to--" He paused and looked more intently at his footing than the lightly graveled path required.

Jack walked beside his son and hoped his silence conveyed support and acceptance rather than the judgment Jemis often seemed to expect.

"It's difficult to keep bees in town," Jemis said eventually. "The neighbors complain, especially if they have small children. I hated that we had to leave the bees, but Mother was happy with Mr. Buchance. I've been happy living in Ragnor Bella, and I feel out of place here and in the Woods Noirell. But Arguty Manor will be mine someday, which means I'll have to reaccustom myself to the grounds and accustom myself to the main house."

Jack silently cursed Vorel once again for the wrongs he had done to Olive and Jemis. Lady Flora bore much of the blame there, but Vorel was nonetheless the one who had married her and eagerly taken her words to heart, racking up mountains of debt and dabbling in black magic while his nephew and sister-in-law scrimped and starved, barred from the very house that should have been Jemis's birthright.

"I wondered if a hive might make Arguty Manor feel less unfamiliar," Jemis finished. "It was an idle thought, not a proper plan or request."

"But a thought from the heart, and those are never foolish," Jack said, once again resting his hand on his son's shoulder. "We can make it a proper plan together."

Jemis's answering smile was shy and slightly embarrassed, but held an echo of the unbearable joy that still shone in his eyes now and then when he spoke of the Woods on the border of the Lady's country, where the pain of death transmuted into peace -- the same joy that had spilled from Jemis as he passed on messages from Olive and Rinald and Benneret Buchance, promising that Jack had not failed as a man or a father, that they cherished and respected him, and Jemis felt the same.

Jack pulled his son into a hug, and swore that he would live up to that faith.

Three Sentence Ficathon 2022

no subject

Stimulating Prey Drives (Naruto; Kakashi & Sakura)

Daredevil (Netflix), Jack & Matt

Tales of Xillia 2, Julius

A Metonymy for Love (Greenwing & Dart)