rthstewart | Three Sentence Ficathon 2022 Part 2

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Three Sentence Ficathon 2022 Part 2

UPDATE 14 FEBRUARY 2022 -- 3SF 2022 IS NOW CLOSED TO NEW PROMPTS! Do continue to fill prompts already posted but the 3SF 2022 is now closed. We'll be back next year in a new comm (If I can get my act together). Thank you again!

THIS IS THE NEW POST FOR PART 2 OF THE 3 SENTENCE FICATHON -- ALL NEW PROMPTS SHOULD BE POSTED HERE
You may continue to fill prompts (but not leave new ones) at the original Post 1 here but please post new prompts here, not there. And if you're asking, hey is just me, or did this get enormous really fast? Why yes, yes it did. Last year, it took us ten days before I opened a new post. This year, it took us about 5.5 days to get there. So, by all means, go back and fill in Post 1 and post new prompts here!

Also woops, in an indication of how busy I've been with other things, I neglected to post that for a third year in a row the awesome

conuly started a master list of unclaimed prompts and has been updating it as time permits. Obviously a huge task! Thank you!

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!

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

*snickers* This is delightful!! I love that you chose Bilbo & Lobelia for this.

Actually, I almost ended the whole thing on a joke for the last line, but thought it was way too lame a way to end that build up. I'm glad I changed it.

Thanks for the comment!

I'm glad you liked it, thanks for commenting!

I've never written her before, so I'm glad you liked it!

Confession time--the image of someone being covered in bats going over military stuff is a reference to Wild Magic by Tamora Pierce. But is suits Narnia so well, someone needed to do it, so I decided to be the one to do it.

Truthfully, there a fewer feelings more unsettling to me than feeling what you think is the itch of a loose hair on your limbs only to look down and see a fucking spider crawling up your leg. I HATE it and that's coming from someone who's pretty chill with spiders.

Zag and Artemis's friendship is one of my favorites in the whole game, so this was a joy to write. Thank you for commenting!

His shoulders are crooked, her mother’s ladies say, brows furrowed as they watch Richard move through the castle, and I don’t care, Anne thinks, stubborn, small, bursting with a child’s devotion.

He is an exile, Isabel points out, meaning only to be practical, and yet It doesn’t matter, Anne wants to say, still stubborn but old enough to hold her tongue, old enough to rein in a woman’s passions.

He is not forgiving, George tells her once she is Edward’s princess, Seek your forgiveness from Edward, if the time comes, for Richard will give you none, and almost, almost she says, He will forgive me anything, before she stops, too stubborn to admit there are things even love cannot forgive.

I honestly love the thought of Irene enjoying her solitary, peaceful nights of sleep before Gen bursts in! the startling singular pleasure of silence is such a great way to describe it, and she's a woman who could use that peace.

“Spar with me,” she says, a brisk command as though he’s one of hers and not some leftover she sees as other, lesser, apart. “Not over that,” she adds, as his hand drifts over the saber hilt at his belt, “just for fun - or is that one of those things you’re not supposed to have?”

That settles it for him - he’s not supposed to have a kid either, or a darksaber, or a face - and when he gets lucky, gets the better of her and pins her to the floor, he takes the chance to say, “Remind me to tell you about the other things I’m not supposed to have sometime,” before she heaves him off; it’s worth the blood on his lip her headbutt leaves him with.

It’s easier for them both in the dark, she thinks, where his face can stay hidden and she doesn’t have to see herself reflected back in it, where they’re just two bodies sharing heat like twin suns, and nobody’s Mandalorian or not, nobody’s a fighter, nobody’s a traitor or a terrorist or a rebel.

The dark doesn’t smother voices, though, doesn’t stop his when he says, “It should be you - you’d be a good Duchess.”

Doesn’t stop the tide of sick shame those words rip through her, doesn’t stop the bitterness in her voice when she says, “You don’t know anything about me,” doesn’t stop her from gathering up her armor in the blackness, some sixth sense in her understanding his connection to his own even as she hates him; doesn’t stop her from fumbling her way out the door into a slice of blinding light, not looking back once at whatever he’s revealed.

(a little bit of laertes/claudius slipped in here. cw for suicide mention.)

“I bought an unction of a mountebank so mortal that—” wait, hold on, they’re getting in a little too deep here, aren’t they? After seeing what a dead sister does to Laertes, Claudius knows for certain that the noble youth will not survive being the one to cause yet another death with his own hands, however much his rage tells him that it is his only option.

More lies are probably not the answer at this point, but Laertes needs to believe in his vengeance at the moment the foils meet, so he cannot know the prince will wake until after the deed is done.

-

Gertrude does not drink wine if she can help it, lest her body revolt at the memory of too many sleeping draughts, at a time when she was young enough to deem the dreams preferable to what her life had become, but she will make an exception to toast her son.

She doesn’t notice the taste right away, but once she does it is unmistakable, bitter and lethargic at once, with no hope of rest. By the time it starts to really hurt she’s moved both goblets out of her husband’s reach because she *cannot* let him be in danger.

-

“My lord, I’ll – I’ll hit him now,” says Laertes, because it has to be now, because he’s spent all this time holding back and now the mother of his enemy is going to die and she’s done nothing to deserve it, so he must end it here even if it means that he will die for it.

“Thank God, Laertes, you’ve made it through!” says a king who Laertes last saw falling to the ground, a king who rushes to explain, “The blade got you near the intestines so you were in danger longer than the rest of us – we thought it would go septic, poison or none.” He’ll demand answers later, but right now he just has to bring Claudius near enough to kiss from the sheer delight of being alive.

I can't stop giggling at the thought of screeching raccoon!Bilbo chasing after his pilfered silver. That's fantastic.

Ah yes, Odysseus would see the worth in her, over and above her prettier or more forceful cousins. And he'd make sure she saw it, above anything else!

Ouch. I can't like her (and you can guess why), but I do feel bad for her, thinking she could escape a curse. That just isn't the way her world worked...

“How long do you plan to fight me, Alina?” he asks, circling her like a prowling cat, heedless of the sparks trailing from her fingertips. “What would you even do with me, I wonder, if you won?”

“You’re the one who keeps telling me we have an eternity,” she says, and leaps at him, a cracking bundle of light like a storm in his arms, breathing into his ear, “so I have the time to find out,” and maybe this time, he thinks, it’s worth it to burn.

He’d expected the pain.

Expected the punches and kicks, the knives carving shallow paths down his skin, the bullets whining past his ears, the clubs just missing his skull; expected the frustration, the bitterness, the sea of rage ebbing and flowing inside him, welcomed it as the only thing keeping him afloat, keeping his head above the sick terror in the bay, the sucking, crushing loneliness in the dark.

Now, he watches Inej skim across rooftops in the blackness, watches her climb and fly, hanging an impossible length of time suspended in the air, his heart in his mouth, and knows the taste of fear, knows the sting of uncertainty, knows-

-nothing at all of love, Kaz reminds himself, turning his back on her haunting silhouette; distraction will not become another of his many vices.

One of these nights will cause him to lose it, Aleksander Morozova knows, one more night at another ostentatious party thrown by his employer, desperate to show off his status and wealth (and even more desperate for Aleksander and his people to keep it flowing in while hiding the particulars of just how that happens) - and now, the first chance he gets to slip out, his fucking lighter isn’t even working.

“Excuse me,” he asks a mousy intern lurking nearby, straining to turn on the tired remains of his charm and tossing her a “-nice shoes,” because they’re not half bad, cheap but gold and sparkly, eye catching in a way she herself isn’t, “you wouldn’t happen to have a light, by chance?”

“Oh, sure - and thanks,” the girl says, babbling some nonsense about not smoking herself but carrying a lighter for her friend that he half listens to, reaching out without thought to shield her wavering flame.

When her fingers blaze with light on contact with his, half his cigarette going up in ash before his shocked inhale even reaches it, the girl’s eyes going wide, flaring gold as her shoes, Aleksander knows this much - his night just got far more interesting.

Surely you wanted a random four sentence modern Darklina AU, right?

Edited 2022-02-13 08:53 (UTC)

She is very slight still when Richard first gives it to her, a band of gold near as skinny as she, but still too large to sit firm on any finger other than her largest, so that she giggles when he slides it on, and forgets to ask how he’d obtained it.

“Someday I shall give you better jewels,” he promises, “but for now this will have to do,” and shocks her with a quick kiss, pressed swift and soft to her lips, the first of her young life, before he smiles and ducks away, leaving her with a hand clutched to her heart, knuckles pressed white to ensure she won’t lose his precious token.

(When they ask, after her marriage, about the thin band of gold set now on her narrowest finger, she dismisses it as a sentimental trinket of childhood; if she sits in idle hours, twisting it round her finger until her skin wears pink, no one else bothers to look.)

She laughs when Eddis comes to her despondent after her first fight with Sounis, gives sharp-tongued advice, listens to newlywed woes and waits for the return of her friend’s natural sun.

She does not speak of her wedding night when Eddis asks after her first argument with Gen, does not tell of the storm of tears and accusations, does not think of the blank rage on Gen’s face when she’d thrown at him the words how could you possibly love me?, the deadly silence that followed, the things she’d seen that lived behind his eyes then, the words that he’d poured out into her, passion and hate and love mingled into something akin to worship, something that had left her overwhelmed, trembling in his arms.

Instead, she smiles, and pats Eddis in what she hopes is a consoling fashion, and says, “You know Gen - I couldn’t possibly keep track of all the things he finds to disagree on,” and ignores Eddis’s searching look in return, too like her cousin’s for comfort.

Shadow & Bone/TGT, The Darkling/Alina, you only know what i want you to//i know everything you don’t want me to//your mouth is poison, your mouth is wine//you think your dreams are the same as mine

Shadow & Bone/TGT, The Darkling/Alina, hey december/guess i’m feeling unmoored/can’t remember what i used to fight for

Greek Mythology, Aeneas/Cassandra, this pain makes you who you are/this pain makes you who i love/your brain, your deep and ragged edges/you can give me your pain/i can take it all

Greek Mythology, Aeneas/Cassandra, when you hold me i know/i was born lucky/hold me even though/the days are short and the shadows grow

Shadow & Bone/TGT, Alina/The Darkling, do you think of me in the dead of night/when you dream of this, does it still feel right

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Three Sentence Ficathon 2022 Part 2

Re: shiny, shiny silver

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Re: Ballet! My secret weakness!

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Re: It's the feel of them against my skin I hate

Re: The game's inconsistent about how much they can communicate, so I'm doing my own thing

Far Too Ashamed (Historical RPF, Anne/Richard III)

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Anger Is Just Love Left Out (The Mandalorian, Din/Bo-Katan)

There’s a Fix for Everything (The Mandalorian, Din/Bo-Katan)

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Re: shiny, shiny silver

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Healing for a Hollow Wound (S&B, Darklina)

My Stubborn Ways (S&B, Kaz/Inej)

Like Tinted Glass (S&B, Darklina, modern AU)

All Your Gravity (Historical RPF, Anne/Richard III)

But Never Doubt (Queen's Thief, Eddis & Attolia/Gen)

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