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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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FILL: and the warm weather is holding, Scott/Wilson, E, no cw, 1/2
(Anonymous) 2023-02-27 11:55 pm (UTC)(link)Careful, one says to the other, although they are both sure-footed on the black sand. A steadying hand on the back. Something novel and tentative.
Wilson glances back with a smile, and looks away again. There’s no reproach to it, no vanity. The light reaches his eyes.
“What shall we do tomorrow?”
They camp by the edge of the ice. From their high vantage point, Scott can make out the form of Erebus through the mouth of the tent. A dark brushstroke against a night sky that dims lazily. He recalls one of Wilson’s paintings and marvels at the exactness. What would it be like to see the way he does, God in the air?
“We could try for the peak.”
“Do you want to?”
Wilson’s movements as he stows away the cooking equipment are loose and unhurried. His limbs lack the stiffness one sees in Navy men.
“I’m not inclined to do much hard work at present.”
Wilson hums in agreement. “I hope you’re not still feeling unwell?”
“Not physically. I don’t quite know why I told you that.”
“Metaphysically, then?” Wilson joins him on the furs. Scott turns from his assessing gaze, pretends to look back at the mountain.
“Twenty miles of ice and I don’t see a chance of a break-up. I thought it would do us some good to get away.”
“Away from the cockfighting, you mean?”
Scott does look then, and recognizes a knowing sort of amusement in Wilson’s expression. Something in the curve of his mouth. The easy lowering of his eyelids. Blood rises into Scott’s face.
“Do you think it was selfish of me?”
Wilson’s levity does not abate. “To come here? Or to bring me with you?”
The rhythm of the conversation is elliptical, the path well-trodden. Perhaps both of them are waiting for something to break.
For now, Wilson simply takes his hand in his own. “It wasn’t selfish. I’m very glad we came.”
On the journey South there was already a distance. There’s room enough for another man between them when they lay down to sleep, a gulf of cold air neither of them wishes to speak about.
Not so cold, though, as to justify the way Scott wakes, flattened against Wilson’s back. It’s too warm, in truth. He had not slept well, but it matters little as he takes in the pleasant scent of wool and soap and sweat.
His hand has strayed. Wilson’s chest feels vital and solid beneath his palm.
Scott is unsure whether it is the involuntary, frightened tightening of his body or the cries of the skuas outside that causes Wilson to stir. Without a word or a sign of waking– Scott hopes against hopes that he has not awakened– Wilson wraps his own hand around the crook of his arm.
The following morning, Scott relishes each time Wilson’s shoulder meets his own as they meander towards the beach, side by side. He waits for the ax to fall. It shouldn’t be this simple. He observes the russet of the stones, tries not to remember what blood looks like on ice, red spat out onto perfect white.
His mind is elsewhere when they come across the rookery.
“So many nests,” Wilson says, his eyes bright with amazement.
The landscape is pointillistic in recurring black and white but vibrant with the sound of life. Sun-swept, the starkness of austral summer abating into a gentler beauty. Scott is the first to descend the slope, reaching the bottom with ease.
“One can hardly miss home in a place like this,” He calls up, delighted.
“As lovely as any spring in Cheltenham,” Wilson concedes, before closing his eyes. “But I do miss the color green. And the owls.”
Scott smiles. “Of course.”
“Now you’re teasing me.”
“No,” he answers, seriously, a substitute for all he would like to say about how much it pleases him to hear Wilson speak of the things that fill him with purpose.
The seam between Wilson’s brow softens. “Help me down then, will you?”
Scott scrambles into action, feeling as boorish as one might after forgetting to help a lady down the steps of a train. Wilson chuckles at the eagerness, but allows it. If Scott wasn’t a creature of pure and fixed reality he would imagine that Wilson almost leans into the embrace, even though he is capable of making his own way down.
Wilson’s hands remain on his shoulders. Experimentally, he applies pressure to the right side of his neck.
“What’s this?” Scott tries not to sound hesitant or hopeful.
“You’re exceedingly tense. Your levator scapulae. I could tell from the way you were holding yourself.”
Scott looks anywhere but Wilson’s face though it is inches away from his own. The sensation of Wilson’s thumb hovering by his pulse scours him. Is this what motivates the penitent to crawl to the confessional?
“I slept poorly.”
“Really? I slept quite well.” Wilson’s grayish eyes are very blue today, and full of mirth. He pats him once more on the shoulder and steps away, unmooring him.
“We’d better hurry,” Wilson calls over his shoulder, stepping already into that great expanse. He carries himself with a newfound bravado that is unlike him but suits him extraordinarily well. As if he has swallowed up the other man, who might be here with them.“If you want eggs for supper, that is.”
Scott cups his own neck between his hands, chasing the ghost of a moment, then follows.
“It’s Eden,” Scott declares later, when they’ve eaten their fill of eggs and fried seal livers straight out of the pan. They grow lenient and soft here.
“What do you know about Eden?”
“Nothing.”
They both fall into laughter easily. Scott thinks of the first– the only time he overindulged in drink, as a midshipman.
Wilson’s boot brushes up against his. He notices that Wilson’s feet are somewhat smaller than his own, perfectly manly but with that delicate aspect that colors the rest of him. Oh, like that night when he was young, he must call upon a higher instinct to pull back, to heed reason.
“There’s a stream that leads to the sea. We could examine the density of the ice,” Scott says.
“Or we could take a proper bath.”
Reason does not win out. Scott finds it amusing that an ice bath is Wilson’s idea of hedonism, but he obliges, enjoys the uncommon pleasure of falling into line. Not shrinking or diminishing but bending gladly.
At the shore, everything is very large and small at once, a stretching sea latticed with filaments of conferva that spiral across the surface of the waves in mystic patterns. Maybe he is learning, gradually, how to see.
“This is what I’ve missed the most,” Scott confesses.
“The blue?”
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
He makes the fatal miscalculation of turning back to face Wilson, where he has stripped himself of his clothes entirely. His eyes inquiring, open like doors to that other place he inhabits.
Scott averts his eyes, his gaze landing at his feet. He can see the fine knit lines of his calves, even so.
“Blue, and beautiful,” he says, quietly. “But above all else, one always thinks himself unbound by the sea. I was starting to feel terribly closed in.”
“Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me,” Wilson recites. “Tennyson’s of the same mind as you. Although I suppose he wasn’t really speaking of the sea.”
“Oh?” Scott grows uneasy at the mention of poetry– a language Wilson spoke with one other man alone.
“It’s about death,” Wilson muses, turning unhurriedly towards the steady stream of ice-thaw.
Now that his back is turned, Scott steals a glance and regrets it at once. Wilson’s vigor lies mostly in his spirit and not his body, to be sure. And yet he looks well, better than he has in a long time. Perhaps he strengthens on spiritual sustenance alone.
There were nights during their unhappy march when Scott stayed awake just to be sure that Wilson slept, blindfold wound tight around his eyes, saintly and immaculate. Even then he had not felt that he had been granted permission to touch him, to smooth his brow.
Wilson turns again, knee-deep in the stream.
“Never mind all that. Come here,” he says. “It’s warm.”
Re: FILL: and the warm weather is holding, Scott/Wilson, E, no cw, 2/2
(Anonymous) 2023-02-27 11:59 pm (UTC)(link)And so it is.
Scott isn't sure how much of the heat is tangible and how much of it is sourced from the province of the mind. Wilson seems to feel it too. When they return to the tent he does not dress, but lays atop the furs on his front, eyes closed. His back is constellated with freckles.
Wilson does not sleep, but the pupils move beneath the gauze of his eyelids dreamily. Scott pulls his clothes back on silently and with urgency, so as not to disturb him.
He has other motives, of course. He’d like to keep watch as long as he can. Not the sort of vigil he used to keep on the journey South– that fear has been supplanted by one that is harder to name.
Wilson opens his eyes all the same, possessed by that numinous way of knowing. He props himself up on his elbows.
“You always look away.”
“I didn’t mean to trouble you.”
“Trouble me how?”
Silence hangs in the air like a weight neither of them have the dumb will to haul any further.
Wilson, naturally, is the first to drive forward. “I’d think you disapprove of me if I didn’t know otherwise.”
“No.” Scott chokes, half-coherent; there’s no way to disguise the hurt in his voice. He’d say Wilson’s name out loud if it didn’t feel like spitting out needles.
Wilson rises to a sitting position, bare before him. “But you don’t disapprove of me. We understand each other.”
“I’d hope so–”
“We understand each other better than most people. Do you know how rare that is?”
Scott swallows hard. His throat clicks, sound into void. He tries again, feeling that he must take advantage of a second chance. Men of his ilk are never awarded a second chance.
“Rare enough that I did not think it possible.”
Something gives way within the steel of Wilson’s eye, his bearing dropping lower past abatement into something hungry. It suits him somehow, transforms the ascetic topology of his face, his body.
“Take responsibility, then. For this gift. There’s little I abhor more than wastefulness–”
Wilson doesn’t have to say another word before Scott falls onto his palms on the furs, eager– always too eager–
“Forgive me,” he rasps. He’s in Wilson’s arms in an instant.
“”You don’t have to ask me for forgiveness,” Wilson says. “You can ask God. But you don’t have to ask me for anything.”
“I was afraid.”
“What of? Not damnation, certainly?”
Scott laughs, cheek against cheek, tears offering to come to his eyes. “I thought I would never see you again.”
Wilson’s hand reaches for that familiar place on the slope of his shoulder, fists at the neck of his jumper. “I’m not so cruel.”
“But you can be,” Scott says, adrenaline coursing through him with a painful intensity.
“I’m honest.”
Scott doesn’t have time to answer before Wilson finds his mouth with his own. It starts as an examination, singular in its purpose, then ravenous. Fear transmutes so readily into desire once the waves break.
He lets Wilson guide his hands to his waist, smiling against him when he hears Scott’s sharp intake of breath. He threads their fingers together.
“What’s this?” Wilson skirts the surface of a raised scar on Scott’s palm.
“Oh. That happened long ago, when I was a boy. I hated to see the blood so much that I put my hand away in my pocket until I nearly fainted.”
He’s tempted to laugh at the memory, but Wilson slows. “You must never hide something like that from me.”
Scott tenses in response, thinking back to all that they kept from each other just some months ago. “You will be the first to know. ”
“Do you promise?” Wilson sounds abnormally unsure.
“I promise you– Yes. I promise.”
“Good,” Wilson breathes, firm in his faith.
Leaving his body like this is a curious sensation. Not alien– his profession is marked by the regular need to withdraw from affairs of the flesh, disregard pain and animal panic.
Disregarding pleasure is another matter entirely.
He doesn’t rebuke Wilson for his unabashed fervor. Perhaps it merely happens too quickly, Wilson’s warm hands finding their way beneath his clothes, as sure as a compass needle, a knife.
“May I undress you?” Wilson asks, raking the blunt edges of his fingernails down his chest.
Scott finds himself cursing the brightness of the sky, this always-spring. "Whatever you would like.”
“Wait.” Wilson rucks Scott’s jumper a few inches above his waistband, lowers his face so that he may press his cheek against him, the hair that curls there. He mouths at that space below his navel, eliciting a high, frightened sound from Scott.
“I’d like to–” Wilson says.
“Please,” Scott says. He feels like a glass tipped over, blooming liquid onto the pristine surface of Wilson’s skin, the ice.
Wilson unbuttons him, slips his hand lower. Caresses him there as if he has wanted to hold him like this, for a long time.
“More?”
“Yes.”
Surely, he should have had the foresight to imagine what a doctor’s hands would feel like, during such an act. A man who seems to know his body better than he knows it himself, as if he has observed him, studied him, diagrammed him, dissected him.
His eyelashes are wet against Wilson’s neck.
‘You’ll be alright,” Wilson says. A prognosis.
“I don’t know,” Scott prattles meaninglessly through the oncoming tide of irrational tears, the kind that leave him breathless. Not so different from a sudden, crushing climax, the kind he’s used to drawing out from his own hand, dreaming of the inchoate contours of a sinewy body, never as soft as it ought to be.
Wilson is hard against him now.
“Concentrate.”
“I am concentrating.”
“No,” Wilson says, leaning down to kiss away the tension that furrows in Scott’s brow. “You’re not.”
Wilson’s fingers are replaced by a horribly sober emptiness before he is breached by something thick and abrading.
“Steady.”
Scott swallows, finds his voice with monumental effort. “How is it?”
Wilson responds with a gasp. Within the narrow confines of the tent they steal oxygen out of each other’s mouths, sliding into insensibility. Scott is dimly aware that they are increasingly operating in a void of command. How little that matters, when it comes down to it.
Scott catches hold of Wilson’s shoulders, hoping to anchor him above as well as below. Wilson groans, hips jerking before he can still himself with what must be a herculean effort.
“I might not last long.” Wilson chokes out.
“We have time,” Scott says, only a little fearful.
He needn’t be. Wilson’s eyes are hopeful, too. Something about the way his pupils have intruded upon the limitless blue in his hunger loosens him, allowing him to close his eyes at last and draw Wilson down into his arms.
Scott is the first to wake, an uncommon interruption to the rhythm they have established these last few days. He listens to the sound of Wilson's chest rising and falling beneath his cheek for a while, a clear sound.
The light touch of his palm laid on Wilson’s arm wakes him.
He hums without opening his eyes. “The water for the tea. And the temperature observations.”
Scott hushes him, running his thumb over the river of freckles that paint Wilson’s forearm. “Never mind all that. Breakfast and a wash first?”
“Very un-Captainly of you,” Wilson murmurs. “What if salvation has appeared on the horizon?”
“If you’d like to know the terrible truth, I wouldn’t mind another day or two in the ice.”
Wilson laughs, and it is the sweetest thing one can hear in a place like this.
Of course the ship comes. Scott has learned that fortune works this way here; one thing is always traded for the other, and one is still immensely grateful.
At the very least, they are first afforded their bath in the stream. They are still undressed back in the solace of the tent when the etched outline of the Morning comes into view, a little white tree very far away. The second ship even more crude, as if someone was dreaming it up into being at that instant.
Scott is the first to see. He has awaited such a vision for a long time, and yet he hesitates when he places his hands against Wilson’s chest in a steadying motion, interrupting the affections Wilson lavishes upon his throat.
“I need you to–”
“I know.”
“No, I meant– Well, yes. But one moment, please–”
Wilson looks on, astonished and mussed, as Scott scrambles away in search of his boots.
After they are at last clothed, after they have dispatched the hunters whose camp lays a few miles south– men who have also grown sated on a hearty diet and sunlight, in no great hurry to send the dog teams back with news that they have been plucked from the clutches of death – the two of them prepare to cross the beach to the ice-edge.
Now that the reality of what follows sinks between them like a stone, they are quiet.
Wilson speaks first. “I will stay with you. Unless news from home makes it impossible.”
“It has been a long detention.”
“I didn’t see it as one. Not the whole time, anyhow. Much of it was good.”
Scott stops in his tracks, prompting Wilson to do the same. “The best.”
“A veritable picnic,” Wilson smiles. He steals a quick glance at the shore, but the ships are far. He cups Scott’s face with both of his hands. As if it is something that he treasures more than what lies ahead. Scott does not let himself think about that yet.
“Read your letters first, will you?”
Wilson seems fonder, if anything. “Alright.”
“What on Earth is it?” He says, incredulous, but without censure.
“Wilson laughs. “There’s a look you get, you know. Like you can’t believe your luck no matter how much you try to blink it away.”
Wilson’s eyes are as bright as the sky above the Cape, and so, Scott has no choice but to believe in the love he holds out to him.
“I’ll believe it when I feel the deck of the Morning beneath my feet.”
“When you get me into your berth on board, you mean?”
Scott feels very warm. “If you’d like.”
Wilson answers wordlessly, kissing him with ease as if it were second nature to him already. “Sooner rather than later. Shall we go?”
He turns for the horizon without waiting for an order. Scott grounds himself on the black sand, then presses onward, happy to follow.
Re: FILL: and the warm weather is holding, Scott/Wilson, E, no cw, 2/2
(Anonymous) 2023-02-28 04:24 am (UTC)(link)Re: FILL: and the warm weather is holding, Scott/Wilson, E, no cw, 2/2
(Anonymous) 2023-03-01 11:50 pm (UTC)(link)