war stories ficathon
Jul. 21st, 2013 12:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anythingbutgrey
War Stories: A Comment Ficathon
Welcome to the war stories ficathon. Some quick guidelines:
What can I prompt and how do I do so?
Basically whatever you want, as long as there's a core component of a war story therein. Can be pre-, post-, or intra-war as long as it is, at its core, about the war. I'm pretty general with my concept of fictional conflicts, so if you've got a battle or a zombie apocalypse or a revolution, you're good to go. That means you can take a fandom that has a canonical war (like, say, Harry Potter) or you can take a fandom that doesn't have a war (like, say, New Girl) and plop them into a Hunger Games war AU or a zombie apocalypse. Have fun with it. I'm grim about my war stories but you don't have to be.
Prompts should contain the following format:
Fandom (not optional, can be multi-fandom or crossover) - Characters/Ship (optional) - Timeline (optional) - Prompt (which may be a plot, song lyric, quote, etc., but is not optional)
In other words, you can leave a character and/or a ship, and/or a timeline, which are optional, and a prompt, which is not. If you want, you can just leave a set of song lyrics and see what people do with them. If you want, you can just leave a timeline with those lyrics, or a just a character, or all three.
How do I respond?
There are no restrictions in terms of word count, format, tense, point of view, etc. Please title all of your response fics as such in bold at the top of your comment (make sure to close the bold tag!) since LJ took out comment titles because they're dumb:
Title - Character/Ship - Timeline
Presumably, your fics will contain these three things even if they weren't in the prompt. You can also fill prompts that have already been filled. If something speaks to you, as it were, it doesn't matter if there's already fic for it. You can write your own.
How do I promote?
Here's a tumblr post (gen image if you have no idea who Mako Mori is in which case go see Pacific Rim ASAP and thank me later)
Promotion link with image:
Other banners:
More incoming
Text link:
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no subject
Date: 2013-07-21 10:05 pm (UTC)I apologize that I went like insanely off prompt here. D: This is probably not what you were expecting or thinking, haha.
---
She is born to a woman with steel shoulders and a man with scars across his palms. They tell her stories of stars when she
is young, of bright lights and giant cities. Stories about the ships in deep orbit that were left to drift in the black after
everything happened.
She’ll meet a boy, later in life, with close-cropped hair and a toothy smile, who goes a bit quiet when people mention the
pulse. His eyes skip across her face as he plays with a buttonhole on his shirt and worries at his bottom lip.
“My mom was up there,” Stiles tells her, even later, when they’ve been drinking and Lydia has her head in his lap (she’s
watching Allison though, her eyes sharp).
“I’m sorry,” Allison says, and she means it.
(Her mother has red on her hands and red on her skin and her clothes and Allison is trying to stop it, trying to hold back a
river with human hands.)
“You know how it goes,” Stiles says, shrugging, and Allison nods, because she does.
---
They found each other after everything had happened, after the draft.
“Well that’s some shit luck,” Kate tells her when Allison calls her after her number shows up in the morning paper.
“Seriously,” Allison says as she scrolls through the other numbers on her tablet, although it lacks heat. Kate enlisted; Allison
doesn’t begrudge her that.
“How’s your dad?”
“Coping.”
“And you are too?”
“Yeah,” Allison says.
“Well, I guess I’ll be seeing you soon, kiddo.”
After they hang up Allison picks up one of her knives from where it’s sitting on her desk, staring at it for a moment before
she throws it across the room.
It stays embedded in the wall until she ships out.
---
Allison is born to a steel woman and a scarred man and she is born human. She grows up hearing the stories about how
humans went to the stars, and came home, built on the technology they had learned from the black.
Something happened out there, something besides tech got brought back, and the people who went back to the stars were
only playing at being human. They called them h+.
Her parents tell her these stories, of the tall, lithe, almost-humans with something alien, something robotic, in them,
something that makes them a bit harder to kill, a bit harder to read.
She is told to stay away from them, she is told to watch out for them after the pulse, when her father and mother vanish for
stretches at a time and come home more worn.
(And the time her mother leaves home for the last time in a box of bone and ash.)
Scott, though, she knows Scott is good, and she’s not wrong.
---
Lydia is her bunkmate. She’s got hair past the regulation length and refuses to cut it, choosing instead to braid it and wind it
up at the back of her head.
“It’s my hair,” Lydia says, like this is the most basic thing possible.
(Later, Allison will run her fingers through it, when this is over, and Lydia can let her braid down.)
There are four of them in that room in the end, Lydia and Allison, and Danny and Stiles.
“I probably just should have enlisted,” Danny says one night, when they’re jogging on the track behind the barracks. “My
family’s all military.”
“But?” Stiles prompts, because Stiles is a splinter.
“There was a guy,” Danny says, like it’s nothing, but Allison recognizes something in his words.
She finds him later, when it’s almost lights out and Lydia and Stiles are still missing.
“H+?” She asks, and he looks at her in confusion for a moment. “Your guy.”
“Yeah,” Danny says, quietly, and they spend the rest of the night side by side, making sure their side arms and combat
knives are in working order.