girlsfest | Round 1: Quotes

Each prompt should be centered around words that have already been said.

Possibilities include a quote of any kind:

Existing works (books, poetry, TV shows, movie scripts, video game scripts, song lyrics, articles)
Speech (celebrity, netizen, anonymous)
Anything else that fits!

Example:

Characters/Ship: ITZY Ryujin/Chaeryeong
Tags: alternate universe - fantasy, ryujin is marceline chaeryeong is pb!!
Prompt:

Marceline: I dreamed about you while I was in my poison coma. I was all old and withered, and you were still nice and pink.

Princess Bubblegum: You think I'm nice?

-- Adventure Time 7x12, "Stakes Part 7: Checkmate"

Click here to view the fest rules.

RULES

You are not required to have a Dreamwidth account to participate. There are no signups necessary. You may post anonymously if you want.
There will be 4 rounds of this fest and 1 round will be opened each week of the fest. Rounds will be left open for fills and comments, so there is no deadline for participating.
Prompts do not have to be claimed before you write them, and they can be filled by more than one person.
There is no minimum or maximum word count for fills. In the spirit of the fest, we encourage you to write shorter works!
Users are allowed to crosspost their fic on any other site, such as AO3. However, we ask that when possible, writers post the text of their fills as a reply to the prompt and include a link to an AO3 post if they choose to do so, instead of just linking to an AO3 post in their comment. This helps keep discussion in our community!
Feel free to subscribe and join the comm to keep track of updates and view them on your reading page.

CONTENT
Prompts and fills have to center around K-pop girl group member(s). This includes:

All active and former girl group members
Female soloists
Female members in co-ed groups
Any female idol or trainee affiliated with K-pop (e.g. GP999 contestants, AKB48 members who featured in Produce48)
Slash, gen, het, and trans works are all accepted as long as they involve at least one girl group member

PROMPTING

To prompt, reply to a round post and copy the following template in.

It will look like this when empty:

Characters/Ship:
Tags:
Prompt:

Fill out the form with your prompt. You can also write in "Any" to give the writer freedom to choose their own. For example:

Characters/Ship: Any
Tags: canon compliant, no major character death
Prompt:

Blow all my friendships
To sit in hell with you
But we're the greatest
They'll hang us in the Louvre

- Lorde, The Louvre

FILLING

To post a fill, post a comment reply to the prompt you wrote for and copy the following template in. Title your comment with [FILL] followed by the title of your ficlet.

It will look like this once filled out:

[FILL] still I fall

Characters/Ship: Aespa Winter/Karina
Tags: idolverse, predebut, shared trauma
Permission to Remix: Please ask
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Content of fill here...

Please provide content warnings for Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, and Underage as well as NSFW/explicit content.

REMIXES

You are welcome to remix fics that the original author has approved for remixing. A remix is a work directly or indirectly inspired by another work.

To post a remix, post a comment reply to the comment you remixed and copy the following template in with your info. Title your comment with [REMIX] followed by the title of your remix.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Characters/Ship: rv, any/any (wenseul?)

I know that’s what people say— you’ll get over it. I’d say it, too. But I know it’s not true. Oh, youll be happy again, never fear. But you won’t forget. Every time you fall in love it will be because something in [that person] reminds you of [them].
— Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Characters/Ship: red velvet seulgi/wendy
Tags: exes, everything reminds me of you but really its just me remembering how you remember me, mention of blood
Permission to Remix: Yes
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Seulgi still dreams of the sea in her hometown.

Her mother used to take her around the harbor with her old bike and she would tell stories of the ocean and the secret it keeps.

Do you see those waves, Seul-ah? The sea is never asleep, even on its calmest days, it’s never still. They’re always chasing back the land, no matter where in the world you go. You have to be careful of all their dangers, but if you know where to look, you’ll see all their wonders, too.

She remembers the small ‘lost and found’ station run by the local fishermen, a big box full of objects said to be found in the sea. She never once saw anyone claim a name to them and once asked her mother if she could take a small hairpin she got her eyes on. You shouldn’t take others’ belongings without their permission, my princess, her mother said while brushing her hair. But they never came by to take it, she doesn’t say.

By the end of the year it had turned from a box to two.

At ten, they’re just any other objects—hair tie, shoes, torn books, scarf—things that left her a wonder for life beyond the sand of her home. At twenty, they make her stomach turn over in a way that she can’t explain. Sometimes some things lost are lost forever.

In her dreams, the waves are gentle when they reach her feet and there is an empty box next to her with a familiar ‘lost and found’ tag on it.

When Seulgi wakes up it’s always the same: her skin is itching how it only ever is when she needs to feel the weight of water on it.

Seulgi dreams of her kitchen.

Seungwan likes it here, the natural lighting is so good, I always wanted to have a kitchen like this, she says. Then you can have it, just live here, Seulgi replies—some say it might even sound like a silent plea. Seungwan laughs brightly at the blatant proposal, only moves behind Seulgi to tie her hair carefully.

“You’re making sujebi, right? Need me to get something?” Seungwan asks, her breath warm on the back of her neck.

“I have a list.” Seulgi takes off a piece of paper latched on the fridge and hands it to her.

Later, she would receive a photo of a bear-shaped chocolate drink from Seungwan with a message: it reminds me of my friend seulgi, do you know her? ㅋㅋ

“You like Klimt.”

“I do.” Seulgi answers. “Why?”

“There’s an exhibition in Jeju.”

Seulgi jumps, runs to where Seungwan is sitting to look at her phone. Bunker de Lumieres, sixteenth of November, it doesn’t look real to her. Seulgi glances sideways and meet Seungwan’s eyes, her smile is wide enough to reach each corner of her eyes. It looks more real, now.

“Let’s go.”

“Oh? When did you take this?”

Seungwan doesn’t answer, only beams and lets Seulgi browse through the pictures she had taken of her as if saying: here, look at this, this is how I see you. Seungwan has this way of seeing things as they are, asking nothing except for them to simply continue to be, like being is enough.

Seulgi is no exception.

“You’ve gotten better.” Seulgi wonders what kind of look Seungwan has while capturing her flat on the square of her screen.

“Right?” Seungwan says, thrilled. “You always take pictures of me like this.”

This is the first time the sky looks so blue in her dreams.

She so rarely thinks of Seungwan without thinking of blue, of light slanting through the window as Seungwan plays a song on her guitar and sings for Seulgi, of the glint of in her eye that turns golden where the sun touches, of a smile that once meant something to her, and still does.

The next time Seulgi dreams, there is a mirror in front of her.

She catches her reflection in it and suddenly looking at herself becomes a hard task. So this is how you might see me.

She couldn’t help imagining Seungwan’s face staring back at her in the mirror and, just once, she wanted to see what Seungwan would look like all broken up. Like her.

Her knuckles bloom a shade of red when she’s finished with the mirror. It’s hot and bright down her wrist, if anything, Seulgi thinks it’s too pretty. She thinks about that red and imagines Seungwan with her, maybe, the only beauty on par for challenge is the sight of Seungwan who might take Seulgi’s hand to her mouth and kiss it so her lips would come off the same red.

You see, Seulgi likes to make herself laugh this way, imagining things.

She places the shards of glass inside the box, one by one, her hands smeared with blood.

When she wakes up, they are clean.

Seungwan appears one night in her dream.

She’s already waist-deep in the water and the tide is pushing against her mildly. Her shirt is hanging off her shoulder, and in her hands are shards of glass with all its edges leveled. She doesn’t get washed ashore towards Seulgi, she is so still it makes Seulgi restless.

She flinches when Seungwan—dream Seungwan—finally speaks, “What are you doing here?”

“It’s my dream.”

“Why am I here?”

“I’m not quite sure.” Seulgi says, her gaze lowering. “Maybe I’ve been thinking about you too much.”

“Why?”

Half a laugh is forced out of her lungs at this. Because I still love you, and I know you don’t anymore. I want to be with you, I want it all, I want you to be with me today, tomorrow, and even the day after, and you. Do you know what you’ve been doing to me? Making this graveyard of a sea all around me, leaving something of yourself behind so I would pick up my spoonful of sujebi and taste you, feel your skin like a sheet of paper when it brushes my hand, hear your voice in every shutter of my cameras. You did this and I didn’t even know it until all this water overflowed as I tried so hard to keep them at bay.

“Guess I’m just counting my losses for the year.”

“And I’m one of them?”

“I didn’t want you to be.”

“Seulgi.” It’s the first time in so long she heard her name from Seungwan, it all felt a little too real to be a mere dream. “It doesn’t have to be a loss.”

Seulgi wakes up, wishing she didn’t.

One day the dreams stop, but Seulgi doesn’t forget.

She gathers the stuff she doesn’t use anymore, some reminding her of Seungwan, and puts them in a box. She rows for the harbor and places it where the ‘lost and found’ tag is still hanging, rusty and jagged.

FREE TO TAKE, she writes on the box with a marker.

Every other day Seulgi will take her bike and imagine she is ten again, with her mother on the pedal. She would pass by the harbor and see the box there, tomorrow and the day after, until it disappears. She never stops passing by, taking her time inhaling the salt in the air and the never still water.

There’s a metaphor somewhere in there for how all seas are one. Maybe this water she’s walking on will simply curve itself and turn her path over and bring her where she starts, whether that be further or closer to Seungwan.

Maybe by letting things get lost, she can feign some time as an excuse to find them, or herself.

And then, well.

Then Seulgi doesn’t know what she will do, only that this wind rushing past her doesn’t feel so suffocating for the first time.

this is really beautiful, thank you for sharing it!! i especially love the dream sequence where seulgi cannot even tell seungwan the depth of her remaining want, and the way that even then she can still move on one day. (it is so troye sivan "in a dream" to me...) the imagery of the sea is just so perfect ♡

Round 1: Quotes

no subject

[FILL] things we carry to the sea

Re: [FILL] things we carry to the sea