hs_olympics | BONUS ROUND 4

Bonus Round 4

Mobius Double Reacharound FST - Revisited

Hi shippers! Welcome to Bonus Round 4! Bringing back a favourite from last year! (Sorry for the delay, we're very busy!)

Here’s how this is going to work: somebody will submit a selection of 3-6 songs without comment. Then somebody else will come along and create a companion fanwork to fit the soundtrack!

Rules

If you are submitting a soundtrack: submit only the track listing and download or youtube links. The idea is that people should ~interpret~ your selections!

You are not allowed to fill soundtrack prompts with your team's ship, nor are you allowed to fill your own soundtracks. (Filling your team's soundtracks is okay!)

Soundtracks count for 5 points each, for a maximum of 100 points per team.

Fills may be in whatever format you choose (except FST, of course) so long as they link the songs by mood and/or lyrics in some kind of narrative.

Post your fill as a comment to the prompt post, using the title format described below.

This challenge will run until 11:59PM EST August 3rd.

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 per team: 30 (per entry)
Entries 6-10: 20 (per entry)
Entries 11-15: 10 (per entry)
Entries 16+: 5 (per entry)

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

We would prefer that any questions about this challenge or anything else in the HSO be emailed to us at homestuck.shipping AT gmail!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Mine by Christina Perri
Who Knew by P!nk
Colorblind by Say Anything

This isn't how it goes.

Karkat explains what happened as Vriska kneels by the body with green seeping into gold and fingers twisted through hair too short for her to get the kind of grip she needs right now. To get a grip on anything like she needs, because she’s going to fall to pieces if she doesn’t, what with all the crazy talk Karkat is babbling on and on and on. At first, all she can think of is how perfect it could have been. Eridan storms in, announces his intended treason, duels and blinds Sollux (‘cause who really cares about that arrogant little snot anyway, certainly not her), turns the wand on Feferi — and is blasted to pieces when it backfires due to a sudden lethal luck deficiency. Oops, her bad, but funnily enough everyone turns to stare at her, shell-shocked and awestruck, and suddenly she isn't the crazy one anymore.

Suddenly, she’s the hero, as it should always have been and now actually really truly is. Hmm, maybe she should let him kill Feferi so no one can say that she acted too quickly or that he didn't deserve to die, but no—Feferi’s never been anything but friendly to her, and Vriska doesn't want her to be dead, so she gets to live, and anyone soft-skulled and rotten-panned enough to doubt that Vriska did the Hard But Necessary Thing like the big damn hero she is can kiss her nook. She might forgive them (magnanimity is a virtue) eventually, if they beg for it, worship her like the god and hero she is.

That's the right reality; this one is all wrong. Important things don't happen when she's not around to be part of them. Important people don't die. Kanaya doesn't check out before she can watch Vriska kill the demon and see once and for all that her moirail isn't a stupid little girl anymore. Is this what she gets for wasting time on Tavros? That can't be it; she can do all of the things and play all of the roles — all of them, all of the time. If she wants to kill someone, everyone else with a homicidal agenda needs to wait in line, that means you Eridan—

Wait a minute, you don’t need to know. Whoever you are, that’s been watching her, you don’t need to know how it really went. All you need to know it how it’s supposed to go, the one in the reality that’s all right.

"I did kill Tavros," she blurts out suddenly, glaring at the girl before her, the quiet girl who lets Vriska vent as she always did when she… when she was alive. Alive like she still should be, because (not that she’s admitting it or anything) it’s now that she needs her moirail more than ever.

"Oh God, what?" says Karkat, but she isn't talking to him. Why would she be, when he’s just useless, not the hero she should be or the leader he claims to be? When there’s nothing—not a single damn thing—he can do to make this reality the way it should be. The way she needs it to be, only it isn’t, but instead she just glares more at a girl she once thought was practically immortal. Fighting off zombies and revenants and daywalkers-evil and who knows what else, only now… to die at the hands of an arrogant sea-thing? No. This isn’t how it should be at all.

"I killed Tavros," she repeats. "It was his own stupid fault for challenging me to a duel, but he's so far beneath me I could have snubbed him. I just didn't want to." She yanks on Kanaya's hair, jerking her head around without resistance, her anger only growing at the blank stare in those glassy eyes. Oh, what she wouldn’t give to touch Kanaya again, hug her and know that there was still something there for her in those marvellously expressive dead eyes. She wishes she could still call her her friend, and what she wouldn’t give for those days to be back again and the reality playing out in her mind to not be as utterly unreal as it seems to be. "Are you listening, Maryam?” she spits instead, refusing to admit her eyes are wetter than they should be. She’s the Big Damn Hero, she doesn’t do something so pathetically weaky-weak as cry. “You liked him, riiiiiiiight? That's what you get for not paying attention to your moirail!"

"Oh fuck no," says Karkat. "Not three of you."

Three of them? He’s babbling gibberish again, just has he has been the whole sarden time, because Kanaya isn’t dead and Eridan isn’t as nuts as murdering a girl she could have sworn was his friend and she’s the hero. She’s the hero. She’s got to be the hero, because if she’s not the hero none of this has any meaning whatsoever and therefore it’s all wrong-! “What’s her deal, anyway?” Vriska snaps to conceal her burgeoning… ah, distress, that’s as good a term as any.

He looks at her like she’s a moron. When he speaks again, she thinks she is, and always has been. “She loved you, you bitch.”

That shuts Vriska up — but only for a moment. Then she screams, and the room floods with light as violently bright as the Alternian sun.

“This isn’t how it goes,” she whispers, a single tear tinged cerulean dripping down her face and falling through the green-gashed bleeding hole. “This isn’t how it goes at all.” What has she got to do to make them all realise… she can’t love? She doesn’t know how to love, doesn’t deserve to love, and why can’t she find out just why she’s broken enough to not be able to love the one troll who really, truly mattered?

“No,” he agrees softly, too-softly, and when she looks back up it’s with horribly pale eyes.

And here comes the sadness she’s grown to hate so much, that lonely aching coming from each all-wrong word and too-wrong touch. But it’s a change from the void, from the all-encompassing nothingness of memory’s picture gallery. The grays and blacks and replaying of her life in ways she can almost pretend are real, and…

This isn’t how it goes.

It never has been.

But does it hurt so terribly much to play pretend?

BONUS ROUND 4

Bonus Round 4

SOUNDTRACK: TEAM ARADIA<3SOLLUX

FILL: TEAM Eridan <3< Vriska