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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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Scott/Cherry, surviving Bilson
(Anonymous) 2023-01-09 05:50 pm (UTC)(link)FILL: No Return, Scott & Cherry (hints of Scott/Cherry), G
(Anonymous) 2023-07-20 05:58 am (UTC)(link)England loves a man who has won, and loves even more a man who has lost honestly: with honor, sweating and bleeding and staggering home. The photographs cause a sensation, and the— The deaths, he says aloud, to practice. Con speaks and lunches; he becomes less of a stranger to his son; he smiles at Kathleen even when she inspects him too closely. She would flay him, he thinks ungraciously. She wants to know who he is underneath his skin, which still prickles and numbs unpredictably. Even if he knew, he doesn't know what he could give her.
It is cruel that widows must continue to live under their husbands' names. Sitting in the small, airless room with Mrs. Wilson—Mrs. Formerly-Wilson, Mrs.—he had bowed his head and said, "He was cheerful to the last. He was true—" and then his throat had corked and he had reached blindly for her hand.
She had not wept. Her hand lay in his as lifelessly as a liver. After an appropriate time, she had risen and said, quietly, "Thank you for telling me." Then she had showed him out and closed the door between them. From behind the wood paneling had issued a human sound he had never before heard. God, he had thought, his hand on the latch with the idea half-formed to open it, and then an odd blank existed, and then he had found himself by the sea.
He finds the water again now, though he has exchanged the rumpled hills of New Zealand for the knobbed sycamores of Battersea Park, and the clean wash of seawater for the choked Thames. The grass struggles up through a warm summer, untouched for two weeks by rain. A new miracle each day to see it again. Bill would have loved it anew: the rush of air through the leaves, the wheeling birds. He would have loved it better; he would have known how to greet it.
Beside him fall familiar footsteps. "Scott," says Cherry, who went south a boy and came back a man with eyes like bitter almonds.
"Cherry."
They walk together for a time. They have talked over what there is to talk over. Or Cherry has, anyway, boiling with sunny rage, burning it for fuel. He moves more quickly now, and less carefully. Con watches him for signs that the fuel might run out, and that the fire might spread. Now, in the absence of a formal hierarchy, he is not above its reach.
“I’ve had a letter from Mrs. Wilson."
"Please send her my regards."
Cherry snorts. “I should like to continue membership in her good graces."
"Then know she has them."
"She knows," says Cherry to the path. "She doesn't want to remember you."
Con stops. From behind the door had come a sound, wordless, and he had known its meaning, and he had wanted to make it himself. A wolf howling to hear its howl join the others.
But he will not justify himself to a man who has made himself a nuisance in museums and in Victoria Street, in the service of some ending other than the one he was given. "There's no need for you to remember me. I’m here.“
Cherry pauses, several steps ahead, but does not turn. "I can't forget," he says. "I thought I would. But everything is—" He taps his temple with two fingers. "I don't want to, I think."
"Don't want to remember? Or forget?"
"Yes," Cherry says, and does turn, enough for a smile that leaves his eyes unmoved.
“You won’t forget him.”
The smile, such as it is, vanishes. “I know that. In what world could a man like him desert memory?”
“In this one.”
“Never. Not in this one; not in the next.”
Cherry is furious now, rigid and icy-eyed. “I shouldn’t have to—remember.”
“You’ve something to say, say it.”
“I’ve said it. I’m sick of saying it. You left with a good man and came back without him.”
“So did you. So did we all.”
“You think I haven’t— That I don’t—”
“No,” says Con, moving slowly and quietly forward. “I think you loved a singular man, and I loved a singular man, and we went to a dangerous place, and every possible circumstance conspired against us.”
Cherry’s hand closes and opens. He lifts it to tug at the knot of his tie. “I experience the strangest sensations,” he says. “I dream of voices in the snow. I’m certain I can reach them. But as I advance, they recede. I shout after them, to stay where they are, that I’ll find them, and then I wake and it’s time to buck up and not be one to make a fuss.” His eyes are shut, his fingers hooked into his collar. “It’s my—”
“Stop,” says Con, closing the distance and pulling Cherry’s hand away from his throat. “It’s not yours to take. He had scurvy the first time, you know. It was awful, and he kept it from us. But he banished illness, and came again when I asked. Because I asked. He left the world. He would have done anything to come back to it.”
Cherry laughs softly. “Eaten one of his penguin dishes.”
“Almost anything.”
“Hauled until he couldn’t.”
“I didn’t leave him,” Con says. “He was steel until he wasn’t, and then all there was for it was to wait.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t leave him.”
“No one who knew him could have.”
It’s not true, exactly. Con did leave him, after life had its turn at departure. He could have stayed, and been a braver man. Instead, he pried Bill’s journal and sketchbook and green-backed book of poems from the cold that was in him forever now, and leaned his own life homeward.
Cherry accepts an arm linked through his. He accepts the suggestion of a stroll, rolled wordlessly body-to-body along the path. As they walk, he tucks his head down and to the side, as if he and Con are the sort of friends who share confidences. The heat of his hand wends its way under Con’s skin. He imagines the particles of warmth, collected like coals. At the end, Bill had slipped as easily from this life to the next as he had once slipped from his first life into Con's. Con had had no warmth to offer. He would have, he thinks. He would have offered of his body, of his heart. "I would change places with him, if I could," he says. "Every day, I wish he was the one who had made it back."
"So do I," says Cherry, and draws his elbow closer in so that Con can feel his ribs, the muscle beneath them, and beneath that something cavernous he has no name for. There are dark wells so deep that a dropped coin will offer no echo. Con drops a coin, and listens.