hs_olympics | BONUS ROUND 1

Bonus Round 1

Genre-Mixing

Hey, shippers! Welcome to your very first bonus round proper--we hope you have lots of fun with it! This time around we're going to be asking you to mix it up a little--each fanwork posted for this round will be a mish-mash of two different genres, blended together in a delightful incestuous slurry to create an UNSTOPPABLE CREATIVE CONCOCTION--er. Or. Something.

Yeah, we're genre-mixing. That's what we're doing this round.

Rules

Submit prompts! Prompts should consist of two different genres and one ship. This cannot be your team's ship! These are worth 5 points each, for a maximum of 100 points per team.

Look through the prompts and fill whichever you like!

You may not fill prompts for your ship, nor may you fill your own team's prompts.

Fills should be posted as replies to the prompts which they are for, following the format below. They may be any medium.

Title Format
If you are starting a new thread, please use this format in your title.

Replace [YOUR SHIP] with the name of the team YOU belong to; please use the characters and quadrant, not whatever portmanteau or nickname you've come up with.
If your team name is not in this format and in the title we cannot guarantee that it will be counted.

If you are filling a prompt, use this format in your title.

Replace [YOUR SHIP] with the name of the team YOU belong to; please use the characters and quadrant, not whatever portmanteau or nickname you've come up with.
If your team name is not in this format and in the title we cannot guarantee that it will be counted.

Posts not using this format in the title will be understood to be unofficial discussion posts, no matter what they contain. They, like all comments on the comm, are subject to the Wank Policy.

Scoring
For prompt posts: 5 points each (maximum of 100 per team)

For fills (as stated here):
First 5 entries in each post: 30 (per entry)
Entries 6-10 in each post: 20 (per entry)
Entries 11-15 in each post: 10 (per entry)
Entries 16+ in each post: 5 (per entry)

All scored content must be created/assembled new for this round.

If you have any questions, please ask them at the FAQ post here, or email them to us (homestuck.shipping at gmail). Otherwise, we cannot guarantee that we will see them in a timely fashion!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

On the fifth day of the fourth month, you find Aradia at the ancestral burial grounds. She lights up the incense sticks as the rain drizzles around you, each (d- --- -ri-- --- ---- ---p) a teardrop from the crying sky.

(Chrysanthemums on a grave, paper burning in a fire. Someone has hung a willow branch over the temple door.)

She eyes it and laughs, I will not be warded away so easily.)

“What are you doing here?” you ask.

“I came to see you,” Aradia replies.

“Why?” you ask and for a second, there’s nothing but quiet. It’s an unsettling quiet though, one devoid of emptiness and full of blurry sound, bleached out noises like the voices of the dead creeping through the air and into your skin. The hair on the back of your neck prickles.

“What I want is not important,” Aradia finally answers. She turns to stare at you, her gaze heavy with the weight of infinity. “What you want is more important.”

And then, quietly but surely, the carefully crafted indifference you walk and talk with slips away and in that moment, you are just Dave, sixteen years old, all nervous angles and pinched smiles, throat pinched tight with the weight of grief. “I want my brother back,” you say, swallowing audibly.

“You can’t bring back the dead,” she replies matter-of-factly.

“I know,” you interrupt quickly, “I just - I don’t know.”

“Do you want to avenge him?” she asks and even though you do not reply, she sees the answer in your eyes. “You aren’t ready to face Jack Noir right now. I can help you prepare.”

“Really,” you say and her lips curve upwards.

“Even though it seems we have little in common, we in fact have very much,” she says cheerfully, “Just trust me!”

(In your hands is a cup of wine. Reflected within the surface are full moon eyes, half-moon smiles.

Let’s -- --- drink --- ---- ---- to us, she says with a laugh.)

You know you shouldn’t - she’s unsettling in ways you can’t explain and you barely evenly know her - but her smile lingers in places both familiar and strange, and you say yes before you can stop yourself.

When you do, Aradia’s face splits into a grin that’s brilliant and blinding, almost even terrifying, as if all the light in the world was pouring out of something utterly cosmic and divine, and you can’t bring yourself to care. For the first time in many weeks, the ghostly space between ribcage feels a little less like darkness and a little more like light.

-------

On the seventh day of the seventh month, everything changes.

For months now, Aradia has lived by your side in cheerful serenity. She doesn’t just humor your jokes, but patiently listens and laughs, even when she doesn’t understand everything you say. Even when she teaches you how to fight, she does so with a patience as endless as time. But most of all, she fills you to the brim with warm happiness. It almost scares you how pervasive the light of her smile is.

And for months now, the skeletal grasp of shadowy loss becomes more and more real. During the day, it prickles in your ribcage, beating louder and louder with each passing. During the night, the face that haunts your sleep grows sharper still, until one you day you see it clear: moon-shaped and ashy-pale, elegantly curved cheekbones and almond eyes that shine ink black and peony red. The face is terrifying, ancient luminescence and depthless darkness trapped in a human frame, but under all the unearthliness, it is undeniably recognizable; the face is Aradia’s.

You wake up shaking. All along, the shadowy breath within your veins and the face that haunted your dreams has all been the same, alive in the girl sitting by your side. Even though Aradia is soft smiles and softer curves, she is as much a monster as she is a girl. You wonder how you could have missed all the signs – skin like ashen tombstones, teeth as white as bleached bones, the way her hair doesn’t reflect the gleam of the stars but inverts it instead, refracting the darkness into her wavy curls – the little things that made her unearthly presence even more unreal. How could you have not noticed?

(A bridge of stars, a flock of magpies. Like Zhinu, she descended from the heavens in a shower of stars. But this is not your legend - you were never cursed by circumstance as much as much as you were entangled by human mistake.

Listen closely and -- --- ------ -he –a-- -r-- my words, she says, And you will remember me in your next life, as I remember you.)

Is she a ghost? Is she a god? What do you call something that haunts your life so thoroughly that it lives in every breath you take? What do you do when the darkness that lurks within is not some indefinable monster, but a vibrant fairy of a girl whose laughter lights up your world? There are no good answers.

“So, what are you exactly? Some kind of ghost fairy?” you ask after a moment of silence.

“Yes and no,” she replies, “I was once human. Who knows what I am now?”

“I figured as much,” you say and Aradia hesitates, apprehensive and excited.

“How much do you remember?” she asks.

“Not much. Just bits and pieces,” you reply and that much is true. The flashes of unknown memory are still fragmented and dusty, like you’ve been staring through fogged glass layered in thick dusty layers of dream and time, but one thing has always been constant: she is always there. Always has been and always will be.

For a moment, you want to crack a joke but you see the apprehension in her eyes and fuck, you didn’t know ghosts and gods could look so scared until now. It tugs at you, deep in your chest where her heart beats in time with yours and for once, you reply truthfully, plain and simple, with no lies or sarcastic remarks. “I mostly remember you.”

You tell her about wine cups and temple grounds, of the burning taste of something more bitter than sweet, and then haltingly and briefly, about the ghost in your ribcage and the shadow that plagues your sleep. Although you don’t tell her everything, she reads between the lines easily enough.

“I never wanted to hurt you,” she sighs, earnestly and painfully sincere, “It’s just that I’ve been trapped on earth so long that I thought that if you remembered everything, things would be easier.”

You have nothing to say to that; easier isn’t the word you’d pick to describe the haunting repetition in every dialogue and action or the phantom heartbeats spaced between yours.

“Does it bother you?” she asks and you wonder, does it? She is beauty and she is terror, but she’s happiness too. She suffuses you from skin to bone with radiant warmth, and lights up the desolate space within your chest; every beat of your heart is hers too.

“No,” you say. It is as much a truth as it is a lie.

(May this be -- --- ----- the last ---- time we part.)

When she leans in to kiss you, her lips are corpse-cold.

-------

On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, Aradia finds you lying in a pool of blood.

Although you’ve grown up with a sword in your hand, your blade has never truly been put to the test until you fought Jack; the man is liquid negrocity, primal and feral, all slick darkness and pitch-black snarls, but he is only mortal. By the end of the fight, he lies dead at your feet. It doesn’t really matter though; you are dying too.

When Aradia arrives, you can barely see her against the darkened sky. All you can make out is a smear of red, the reddest of reds you have ever seen.

“The decision is up to you,” she whispers as she leans in close, “If you wish to remember me again, just remember what I said before.”

And then, with her soft hands around your face, she kisses you gentle and deep until there’s nothing but fluttering eyelashes and voluptuous curves; the world is Aradia and Aradia is the world, and you fall at the speed of light into her ghostly radiance.

“Whatever choice you make, I will be waiting for you,” she whispers against your lips.

(In your hands is a cup of tea. Within it, reflects eternity.

Will you drink it? Every last -- --- ----- --- ---- drop?)

This will not be the last time you see her; the string of destiny entwined around your ankle, bright like your eyes and dark like her lips, means you will always meet.

As lotus-shaped lanterns bear you down to hell, you close your eyes. Darkness swallows you whole.

-------

When you open your eyes again, you find yourself sitting in the terrace of the venerable old lady, the Goddess Meng Po.

“We meet again,” she says. Her smile is as terrifying as it is sublime. “Do not think of cheating this time. I’ll be watching carefully to make sure you drink it all.”

Without hesitation, you tip the cup into your mouth. The waters of oblivion slide down your throat like liquid jade and this time, you swallow it all.

(do not drink the last drop)

It doesn’t matter anyways. Whether in this life or the next, Aradia will always find you.

BONUS ROUND 1

Bonus Round 1

FILL: TEAM AUTORESPONDER<3ROXY (2/2)