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Polar Explorer RPF - Prompt Post 1
This is for prompts for all things general Polar Explorer RPF.
If you've filled (or started filling) a prompt, please make sure to link it in the comments of the Fills Post. And if you would like to cross-post your fills on AO3, here is the collection!
Under this umbrella you can prompt:
Prompts in line with adaptations of Heroic Age stories can also fit here, for example if you want to specifically prompt Hugh Grant!Cherry from The Last Place On Earth getting wrecked (which someone really should).
No blorbo too obscure for this post! EXCEPT: NO PEARY ALLOWED. God I hate that guy.
Rules:
Regular view: https://coldboys.dreamwidth.org/925.html
Regular view, last page: https://coldboys.dreamwidth.org/925.html?page=999#comments
If you've filled (or started filling) a prompt, please make sure to link it in the comments of the Fills Post. And if you would like to cross-post your fills on AO3, here is the collection!
Under this umbrella you can prompt:
- Historical versions of Franklin Expedition(-adjacent) guys (Rossier, Gore/McClure, etc)
- Madhouse at the End of the Earth/Belgica Expedition
- Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration - Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen, Mawson
- Andrée Expedition
- Karluk Expedition
- etc
Prompts in line with adaptations of Heroic Age stories can also fit here, for example if you want to specifically prompt Hugh Grant!Cherry from The Last Place On Earth getting wrecked (which someone really should).
No blorbo too obscure for this post! EXCEPT: NO PEARY ALLOWED. God I hate that guy.
Rules:
1. Be fucking nice. YKINMATO/KINKTOMATO at all times.
2. This meme is CNTW (Choose Not To Warn) but warnings are highly encouraged.
3. Prompts should use this format in the subject line: [SHIP], [DESCRIPTION]
e.g.
Mertz/Ninnis, sex crying
Solo gen can be prompted as well alongside (a) character name and description
e.g.
Gen, Emil Racovitza, discovering a crazy new fish
4. Fills should use this format in the subject line: FILL: [TITLE], [PAIRING], [RATING], [ANY WARNINGS]
e.g.
Fill: The Very Next Day, Cherry/Birdie, E, cw self-harm
5. One prompt per comment please.
6. Multiple fills for each prompt are welcome!
7. You don't have to be anon for your prompts or your fills but we do encourage it because of the vibe. You're also welcome to deanon your stuff by posting on AO3/Tumblr as you please!
8. Feedback on prompts and fills is AWESOME; please take longer conversations to the discussion post.
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Re: Henrietta Le Feuvre/Anna Charlier, ghost romance, M, no cw
(Anonymous) 2023-01-03 02:44 am (UTC)(link)Perhaps this is what draws her eye towards Henrietta. There is a familiarity to her skittishness, a muscle memory. Henrietta is still a nineteen year old girl here, hiding behind her mother and averting her eyes from all of the handsome young men in their fine uniforms.
Call it the crossing of two arcs of light, traveling towards an intersection over a great distance. The sort of mathematical thing that Nils appreciated. A prescribed universal orderliness that brought him calm. All things fated to move in straight lines and converge at some point, if God wills it.
There is a third option. Anna fears that she would not be able to look away regardless of God’s will because Henrietta’s eyes are so dark that they are nearly black, as black as the old fashioned frock she wears. There is a witchy cleverness that lives in the arch of her brow.
Who put a girl like you in such a dress? Anna thinks. When you are so young and full of dreams?
I did. I chose it for myself. Her soft voice in reply, a secret whispered in her ear from across the glittering hall. Sound travels this way sometimes; Nils had told her. In an ellipse.
Henrietta meets her eye. Anna cannot tell where her pupil ends or her iris begins.
Vaddo is cold this time of year. Anna does not dare to travel further north. During the short winter days she attends to her piano lessons, moving her students’ small hands across the keys with the utmost care. At night she pulls out reams of manuscript paper and composes endlessly, hoping that the inkblot notes will arrange themselves on the staff and yield an answer.
One evening she falls asleep on the solitary shore of the Åland amidst the reeds, wrapped in a shawl. Yes, the world has grown much colder lately.
It’s the same old ball but three years have passed. Henrietta finds her easily because death hangs above her.
“What happened to you?” Henrietta asks. The black fabric of her dress has begun to go gray.
A different woman might take affront. Anna finds nothing but relief in the question. People have gone to great lengths to preserve a sense of normality in her company, saying nothing of the tremor in her hands or the streak of white that runs through her hair though she is only thirty.
“I lost my heart,” Anna explains. “It was taken out of my body.”
Henrietta considers this as she threads a gloved hand through one of her dark ringlets, unspooling it. It isn’t a flirtatious gesture, merely one of unsure youth, although most men would wilfully mistake it as an invitation.
“Where did he die?” Henrietta blinks owlishly. There is still so much innocence in her. Even after. Life is always divided into before and after.
“No one knows. They might never know.”
Henrietta nods solemnly. “I think my Henry died sometime in the middle. He couldn’t have been the first, because he was rather unlucky. And he wasn’t the last. He didn’t have the grit.”
Anna is stunned.“Who are you?”
Henrietta offers her hand. “Henrietta. Henry and I were a matching pair.”
Perhaps she falls asleep on the porch in the wicker chair. It is difficult to tell whether she is awake when Henrietta appears there on the shore, as if she belonged there. She has cast off the top layer of her skirts and left them on the wood of the deck, squeezing salt water out of her crinoline.
“Wetter than Limehouse around here,” she says, curious but unbothered.
“I’m afraid I don't understand half of the things you say.” Anna stands, reaches for the discarded pile of black silk and begins to fold it. A reflex. She’s had no one to care for in a long time.
“I suppose we speak different languages entirely.”
“And you still haven’t told me why you come to visit.”
“Because it pains me to say it.”
When Anna studies her face, she sees that same affliction that drives her away from mirrors in the premature lines around Henrietta’s eyes. Sleepless and worry inscribe themselves upon the body.
“Come inside and sit. Then you can tell me all about it.”
It takes a long time for Henrietta to speak. She moves through Anna’s home soundlessly, inspecting the lamps, the lace curtains, the whatnots and clutter, the portrait of Nils on the mantelpiece, each scrutinized with equal interest. She has pictured what it might be like to haunt someone before, in some flight of fancy. Imagining the freedom to observe and pass through the lives of others.
But Henrietta does not seem free.
“It’s funny,” she says, bending over the piano to examine the sheet music on the shelf. “I’ve had half a century to find the words. My heart isn’t in it. Honesty is my guiding principle, you see, although it never gets me much.”
Anna laughs. She can’t remember the last time anyone laughed in this place. “There is very little you can say to upset me, I assure you. I’ve heard it all.” She winces. “I’m sure you did, too. Earnest people with good intentions.”
“The blow is always the hardest then. The doubt that sets in–” Henrietta turns the pages of the songbook absent-mindedly. How strange, her solidity. “I never married.”
A long stillness descends. The waves muted by the ringing in Anna’s ears.
Henrietta recovers faster, as if memory works differently for her wherever she is– or perhaps this was one of her qualities in life as well. She perches herself on the piano stool.
“Do you play?” Anna musters.
“I’m afraid not. I was only ever taught to play the harp a little. I wasn’t supposed to be serious about it.”
Henrietta’s peculiarities are a salve. She joins her, feels the warmth come off of her as they sit side by side regarding the keys. “The two instruments are similar. Look inside of a piano and you’ll see it’s all strings, stretched between two points.”
Anna’s hands hover over the keys as she tries to conjure a melody from memory, but she finds that they shake too much. They fall back into her lap, empty.
“You mustn't worry,” Henrietta whispers. “I think I understand what you mean.” She slips one of her hands into Anna’s own.
The silence that ensues is perfectly companionable.
The next time she dreams it is of a revoltingly empty place, a gray expanse of slate that might be Kvitvoya or King William Land. The sky bluish and bruised. She doesn’t want to look too long. It’s like looking down into a well and not seeing the slightest hint of water. Like looking at her own face in the mirror for too long.
She’s close enough to waking that she wills herself to surface. At first, the room is so black that she wonders if she has fallen through her dream into another, more terrible place, until she feels Henrietta’s weight in the bed beside her. She knows it is her before her eyes even adjust. Something about her old-fashioned perfume, a dense and comforting florality.
“Tell me that it is hopeless,” Anna says.
“Do you want it to be?”
“Yes. I don’t know. I hide his picture in the cupboard and then I take it out again the very next day. It never ends.”
She can hear Henrietta shift gently, curving in to face her. “They found bones. No one was ever quite certain if they belonged to my Henry or not. My brother sent the only picture I had of him to an anatomist. It made no difference at all. You cannot will the whole truth out of bones. They told him that they might not even have belonged to one of Franklin’s men at all. As if that mattered. I keep thinking that someone must have loved him, whoever he was. I never saw the picture again.”
Anna swallows. “Why do you come to me if you know how it is? My family has tried. My friends– those that remain– have tried. Don’t you all see that I would press on if it were so simple .”
Henrietta extends a warm hand and lays it on Anna’s chest tentatively, a gesture that could mean any number of things. “I made a promise to be good and I have been good ever since.”
“But what do you want?”
Anna’s eyes settle in the darkness. She can see moonlight reflected in Henrietta’s eyes. Black as my Nils’, Anna thinks. God do I know how it all comes back.
“To forget about it for a little while if we can.” Henrietta’s hand creeps down, over her heart.
“I never did this with him,” Anna says, quickly and without thought.
Henrietta's voice grows small. “Neither did I. Would you be terribly jealous if I had?”
Something about the youthful concern in the furrowing of her brow is enough to break the tension. “No, my sweet girl,” Anna says, closing the space between them and kissing the corner of her mouth, her cheek, the juncture of her throat. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“How did I find you?” Henrietta asks, the question cutting off with a delicate sound as Anna descends, tastes her, the only real thing that remains. Thinks about how sound travels across the ellipse, fated to be heard somewhere distant.
“I don’t need to know,” Anna says, tracing her fingertips across the bend of Henrietta’s ribcage, which is not fragile at all. “As long as you don’t go away. Not until I’m ready.”
“Yes,” Henrietta says, with her voice and her hands and the insistent pressure of her thighs.
If only one could shed all of their hurt at once, like a dress.
Anna wakes without her, swims in the cold sea, and goes about her lessons. Life continues in the wake of all momentous things, whether one likes it or not.
Anna is at peace. She believes in the sincerity of Henrietta’s promise. Like Anna, she is a woman who sticks to her convictions.
The next time she sees her they are back in the ballroom. The festivities have ended and all of the guests departed. Anna steps over discarded ribbons, feathers, so many small stray things. The past is alarmingly material, she finds.
There were many ghosts in Anna’s childhood. Cold stories meant to frighten children. She remembers only Henrietta’s warmth, and anticipates it when she finds her alone by the grand piano, placing her hands on her shoulders. Henrietta is older now, but still beautiful and still a little fierce.
“What were you thinking about?” Anna asks, as she sits down beside her.
“Oh, nothing really. Something that should make me sad but doesn’t. How remarkable.”
“Tell me.”
“My father. He warned me against marrying him, if you would believe it. Disapproved of his pension. He used to say that poverty always drives love out of the window.”
Anna lets their shoulders brush against each other. “Do you believe him?”
“No. We would have lived gladly in poverty forever.”
Anna smiles, considers the instrument before her. “Would you like to hear something?”
“Oh yes, please”
“Happy or sad?”
“Whatever you think is right.”
Anna ponders this for a moment before she begins to move her hands over the keys. Henrietta wraps her arms around her shoulders as she does. It keeps her steady.
Re: Henrietta Le Feuvre/Anna Charlier, ghost romance, M, no cw
(Anonymous) 2023-01-03 04:15 pm (UTC)(link)Re: Henrietta Le Feuvre/Anna Charlier, ghost romance, M, no cw
(Anonymous) 2023-01-03 09:10 pm (UTC)(link)