#self-prompt

[gokuma]

Title: Equilibrium

Fandom: Transformers MTMTE & Transformers Prime

Relationships: Megatron/Ratchet, past Ratchet/Pharma

Tags: Crossover, Medical procedures, Established relationship, Neurodivergent character, Trust

Summary: MTMTE Megatron finds himself in the TFP universe, with Autobots who can definitely use one more medic...

[court-can-write]

When The Sky is Dim

I wrote this a few weeks ago when I was trying my hand at poetry. It’s not exactly a poem, so we’ll just call it creative writing. It’s a short little thing, a very quick read. I hope y’all enjoy! (Because it’s so short, I won’t put in a read more like I normally do.)

Word Count: 237

When the sky is dim and night is falling, I will think of you.

I will think of the last constellations you ever pointed out to me. I will think of your laughter and how infectious it was.

I’ll think about our love -- not a romantic one, that much I knew, but it changed with the sunset, never quite the same on any two given days.

I’ll think about your parting words and how mundane they were, how I never expected them to be the last.

I’ll remember how to feel hope -- the hope that you would return to me in some short amount of time.

It’s been years now.

But that hope is still there. Weak, but present. I have not received word of your passing, so I hold onto that hope, however weak my grip may be.

It would be rightly shameful of me to give up on you, especially after everything we’ve seen together.

Bloodshed. Happiness. Loss. Murder. Birth. Death. The sky, the seas, and the stars.

We’ve seen too much; it’s become such a part of me that I could never forget it, even if I tried.

You’ll forever be a part of me, I promise you that. Just as you have pieces of my soul, I hold pieces of yours.

So, when the sky dims and night falls, just as I think of you, I hope that you are thinking of me.

[theexobition]

Day 7: Self-Prompt

Title: Chansoo Au

Artist: eggheadkyungsoo [instagram]

Prompt Number: Self-Prompt

Featuring Members: Chanyeol / D.O.

Artist Notes: –

[cicciolinx-blog]

[court-can-write]

What Do You

This is a vent piece, so it’s not the happiest thing. 

In any case, I’ve always wanted to write something with Hanahaki disease, just never gotten the chance because I never had any ideas. Well. Guess who just got an idea. 

I won’t waste time on the details, but proceed with caution I guess. This wasn’t written to feel complete. 

Edit: I uh. edited it. because the original was the unedited version. So now it’s a bit sadder. woot woot.

Word Count: 1293

The envelope was sitting on the kitchen counter when he finally got back home that afternoon. Innocuous, plain, with only his name written on the front and nothing else. He approached it warily and picked it up, flipping it over once, twice, three times. The envelope was strangely heavy, and he was almost afraid to open it just for fear of what was in it, but he couldn’t just leave it there. He took a deep breath and failed to steady himself, failed to prepare himself for whatever was in this envelope.

The envelope came open almost too easily, and immediately he was hit with the sickly scent of dying flowers, the sweet scent of vanilla perfume, and some coppery scent he couldn’t quite identify -- or maybe didn’t want to identify. He did his best to ignore it.

Blue hydrangea petals spilled forth from the envelope. He struggled to keep them contained in one spot, some of them drifting to the floor to land at his feet, some floating over to the other side of the countertop. Only a few remained in the envelope, but enough had fallen out to expose a letter.

He raised a brow and removed it, turning it over to check for any outside marks before opening it. Immediately, he recognized the handwriting -- the swirling scrawl of his oldest childhood friend. Just from the first glance, he was worried. Some of the ink was smudged with what he desperately hoped weren’t tears and the edges of the paper were spotted with what he desperately hoped wasn’t blood and the script got shakier and shakier as the letter continued. He brushed stray petals off of the paper and took another faux-steadying breath.

The thought of reading it scared him, but he couldn’t just leave it there. He owed it to his best friend, who rarely ever wrote anything by hand, who felt the need to make sure this got to him -- he owed it to his friend, so he couldn’t just leave it there.

So he read.

----

If you’re reading this, I’m probably dead. Cliche, right? But I’m serious.

You’re my best friend. That’s why you’re reading this in a letter and not hearing it from my mouth. Because you’re my best friend -- or, you were -- and I care about you way too much. Too much for just a best friend.

I’ll get to the point, I fell in love with you, most likely a while back, but I’ve only recently come to accept those feelings. I denied them because they hurt.

In a way, I’ve always loved you. Maybe not in the same sense as now, but I have. I did have a crush on you when we were younger, bet you didn’t know that. But I learned to get over it, because you clearly didn’t reciprocate those feelings. You started dating (people that weren’t me) and I started dating (people that weren’t you), and everything was fine for a while.

Well, then our breakups happened to coincide. We rebounded off of each other, up there in your room on the second floor, having to be quiet because our parents were downstairs, and they needed to remain none-the-wiser. My heart sang at the same time that it broke, because yeah, I finally got what I’d always wanted -- just some time with you in that way -- but I knew it wouldn’t last.

But hope… hope is a fickle and enduring little thing.

It happened a couple more times, and I had to keep telling myself that I was the only one getting attached, that there weren’t any real feelings behind what you were doing, and even though I knew it was true, I couldn’t stop myself from hoping. That was my downfall, apparently.

So you told me you started dating that girl. I’m pretty sure you guys are still dating. Well -- you must be, if you haven’t come back to me yet. I’m second best, I get that. At least I was the best in some way. I was okay with that. (For the most part.)

My lungs, they weren’t. They aren’t. Excuse the red spots, I’m kinda in my final moments.

I started coughing up flower petals. And like, what the hell? So I go to the doctor. It’s called Hanahaki disease. It comes from unrequited love. Just my luck, right? It’s like, these blooms take root in your lungs, and you cough up flower petals. The blooms just continue to grow until they fill your lungs to the brim and you suffocate on heartbreak. It’s fatal, if you hadn’t gotten that.

It’s also curable. There’s a whole surgery for it and everything. They can remove the blooms from your lungs, but it also takes away your ability to love that person. Removing the flowers removes the feelings permanently, indefinitely.

In my case, either way I’m screwed. My case is really severe, as it would happen. The flowers are really deep-rooted and they’re blooming entirely too fast and more are growing even faster. Leaving it alone will definitely kill me, and the surgery to get them removed also has a high chance of killing me.

Nasty hand of cards I was dealt.

But yeah, the thing about that, you didn’t know, and I didn’t ever plan on telling you. I waited until I couldn’t wait anymore, then kept waiting.

You got us alone one more time, and you’re abusing that power that you don’t even know that you have. You know I’d never tell you no, not willingly anyways. So I unofficially make you a cheater, and then you tell me that we can’t do this anymore, because your girl -- you love her (and you love me too, but not in the same way, and you never will, I know that much) and you want to marry her eventually and start a family and so on and so on.

I nodded and smiled, because… I can’t stand it. I love you so much. I would date you without question if you’d just give me the chance. But that’s not in our cards, ya know?

My little disease got exponentially worse after that little night. I went from coughing up petals to coughing up entire flowers. You know how hard it is to cover up the fact that you’re coughing up entire flowers? There was blood among the nature, too, and I could feel my lungs getting ready to burst. Breathing became so hard, and god, it hurts so much. You know, suffocation? It’s literally the worst.

But the worst part about it all? You’re still with her, and you’re still flirting with me. Why am I always the one that has to show some restraint? How can you tell me that we need to stop what we’re doing and give me an empty apology and not even a week later joke about “copping a feel” again? How am I supposed to feel about this? Did you ever think about that?

What do you

----

He flipped the paper over desperately, but that was it. The end of the letter.

Those were tear stains, and those were bloodstains, and those petals -- petals he now realized were indeed speckled with blood, just like the letter had said -- had come from his best friend’s lungs. Because his best friend was in love with him. And his best friend didn’t get to finish this letter, because the flowers--

And he didn’t want to believe it. He reread the nearly illegible parts over and over again, just in case maybe, maybe they’d say something different the fifth time around. The sixth time around. The tenth. But they didn’t.

That was it. His best friend had died of Hanahaki disease because of him. That was it.

[court-can-write]

WC Take 2 / Dark Chocolate

This is the word challenge from this month. It’s gone through the editing wringer four or five times and gotten input from some of my friends so I think this is as good as it’s gonna get. (I need to stop writing in the first person.) I haven’t actually presented this to the other club members because the word challenge is every other meeting? so. lmao. it’ll be a bit before the next one.

While reading, you may notice a distinct lack of gender pronouns... that’s done on purpose. This is a really fill-in-the-blank writing. (It’s mostly because I couldn’t decide what gender I wanted the characters to be, so I decided no gender because... ha)

List (I used all the words this time!):

Tomfoolery (n) - foolish activity/behavior; excessively silly

Exponentially (adv) - increasingly more and more rapidly; to the nth power

Mauve (adj) - purple, pink; very light purple

Paroxysm (n) - a sudden flooding of emotion; a hissy fit

Chagrin (n) - distress or embarrassment at having failed or been humiliated

Panjandrum (n) - someone who claims to be an authoritative figure

Flabbergasted (adj) - shocked or surprised to the point of speechlessness

Ardor (n) - enthusiasm or passion

Bucolic (adj) - Idyllically beautiful -- associated with the countryside

Decathect (v) - to withdraw one’s feelings of attachment from (a person, idea, or object) as in anticipation of future loss

I swear, from the first moment I saw you, I hated you. I didn’t know what it was about you, but everything in me told me that you were bad news and that I was right to feel this way.

Who cares if you were never anything but nice to me? There was something about you, everything about you, that screamed for a harsh dealing, that provoked me into hating you.

Whenever you came around I would be cordial (I’m not a barbarian, thank you), if only to wait until the moment when you were finally unkind and gave me the opening I needed to lash out with my knife-sharp fury. I had to bide my time. I tolerated you, even if everything you did seemed to be laced with tomfoolery and every step you took made everyone paint you like some kind of social panjandrum, like some false epitome of perfection.

As only you could, you mistook my cordiality for kindness. You told everyone that we were friends. You always intruded on my lunch just to spend more time with me. You tried to distract me from my education with pointless conversation just to learn more about me. I hated it. Still, I needed to bide my time. My image would be ruined if I was mean to you now of all times, so soon after being showcased as your friend. No, it would have to be later still.

This was all so tedious. My irritation only grew exponentially as you continued to be sickeningly sweet towards me. You were too engrossed in your own happy fantasy of me and you failed to notice my rage roiling underneath the surface and eventually boiling over.

We were alone together. You were finally being something other than diabetically sweet, and I saw my opening. Finally, I had the chance to express the feelings that had been festering inside me since I first saw you.

To my surprise, however, instead of punching you and maybe breaking that pretty little nose of yours, I leaned forward in a single rushed movement and kissed you.

You were as flabbergasted as I was. A blush spread across your cheeks and over your ears and down your neck as you spluttered for a response. I simply sat there and tried to rationalize what I had just done.

Much to my chagrin, you eventually gathered yourself and kissed me again despite the (apparently not) obvious fact that I hadn’t meant to kiss you in the first place. The next day in class, you held my hand and announced that we were dating. I had to make an effort to keep my face neutral, to keep that smile from crossing my expression. Only you could bring out that smile, so only you should see it.

Wait, no. I was supposed to be frowning.

One day you dragged me along on a shopping trip in some outlet mall I didn’t particularly care about. You picked out a mauve shirt, long-sleeved, and when you asked I told you that it looked fine because I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. You looked better in warm colors; cool colors were not your thing. I was relieved when you picked out a red sweater instead.

Wait, no. I wasn’t supposed to be complimenting you or sparing your feelings.

Another day, you had your head in my lap and I was stroking my fingers through your hair. You were close to falling asleep, but you seemed insistent on conversing with me. You told me your visions of the future, how you wanted to live a peaceful life with me and move somewhere bucolic like Kansas or Nebraska or South Dakota. When you asked me about my own aspirations, I just smiled and said that yours were fine with me. You laughed and told me I was a bit silly for that. I didn’t mind, because being with you was worth it, if only to hear that laugh again every day.

Wait, no. My future wasn’t supposed to include you.

When I was alone, I laid awake in the middle of the night, staring at the ceiling, confused beyond belief. What exactly were my feelings towards you? You were so easy to hate and so easy to love and I wasn’t sure where I fell on the spectrum. Doubtlessly, there was still some infuriation, but it was so tinted with ardor towards you that I wasn’t sure what to make of it. That late night thinking session was all too circular and I fell asleep with your thousand-watt smile and your billion-star eyes on my mind.

We were studying for something as mundane as a calculus test when I made the decision that I would decathect myself from you, then further withdraw once I finally realized that our kiss however long ago was, maybe, a mistake. It was the perfect plan, one I abandoned immediately at the thought of how much that would hurt you.

It came in a sudden realization, a paroxysm like whiplash, and then my feelings towards you were finally abundantly clear to me.

I did hate you, but only when you were away from me, because when you were by my side smiling in that stupidly beautiful way you did, my adoration controlled so much of me that I couldn’t remember why I hated you in the first place.

You were like dark chocolate; a little bittersweet in your nature, but dark chocolate was my favorite anyways, even if I hated it at first.

[ridge-on-lunch]

"Can I rely on you?"

"Like gravity."

[1dclicheficfest]

Hellooo! I have a prompt in mind that I would love to write myself. Should I still submit it or wait till prompts are chosen? Thanks x

Hi there, love! Once a prompt is submitted everyone will have a chance to claim them. This fest does allow self-prompts, so if you absolutely would love to write it yourself then we’d recommend not submitting as a prompt for others and to wait for sign-ups to open. 🥰