coldboys | Polar Explorer RPF

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:

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.

Navigation
Regular view: https://coldboys.dreamwidth.org/925.html
Regular view, last page: https://coldboys.dreamwidth.org/925.html?page=999#comments

Flat view, first comment: https://coldboys.dreamwidth.org/925.html?style=site&view=flat#comments

Flat view, most recent: https://coldboys.dreamwidth.org/925.html?style=site&view=flat&page=999#comments

Top Level view, first page: https://coldboys.dreamwidth.org/925.html?style=site&view=top-only#comments

Top Level view, last page: https://coldboys.dreamwidth.org/925.html?style=site&view=top-only&page=999#comments

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Pls. It can be Gen. It can be an AU. Just. Pls. My crops need water.

When she is done with her chores in the house, she scrubs the doorstep. Then she starts over and scrubs the step again, for want of anything better to do. She considers beginning a third time, but instead she straightens herself — her back seems to ache in a new place each day — and leans against the door frame for a moment. The view of the street from her front step never changes. In one direction, the row of houses, each grander than the last, ending with the Great House. In the other direction, the forest, almost obscured by fog.

She returns to the kitchen to check the clock. Somehow, it is not yet midday. If a letter comes, it will come at two o’clock. She knows, of course, that there will be no letter, but she finds it helpful to divide her day into smaller portions. Perhaps she might have a visitor this afternoon. It is a while since she has seen Anna, and she would be glad of the company.

If nobody visits, then Mary will bake bread. She will eat it with the jam that she made last week, and then she will write a letter to Robert, which nobody will come to collect. “Dear husband,” she will write. “I hope that your stomach is not troubling you.” She considers that she might bake a cake too. Robert always loved her cakes and then suffered for them later, but Robert and his sensitive digestion are not here. She will bake a cake, then, and eat it herself.

She will begin all her tasks in a few minutes. For now, she leaves by the front door again and descends the three freshly scrubbed steps, down into the little street.

Tidy houses, all in a row. They are so close that when Anna plays the piano on her bad nights, her heartache can be heard in every bedroom in the street.

Mary likes Anna. She also likes Oriana and Kathleen, who share a little house a few doors down. Once, Mary passed by when they were digging in the front garden. Kathleen, leaning on her spade, protesting through laughter that her hair was in her eyes. Oriana, brushing the strands away with dirty fingers.

Mary often thinks of that glimpse into their lives. Perhaps, she is not the only one for whom waiting has turned into ritual. But then there is Anna, who has granted a man a lien over her heart. That poor child Hetty, too.

Last week, Hetty came by to borrow a cup of flour, or so she said, and stayed an hour to confess her small sins at Mary’s kitchen table. Hetty’s mind is sadly vexed by the question of whether she loves God or her Henry more. She remembers that, in another life, someone once told her that no man should occupy more of her thoughts and affections than God. She has tried to be dutiful in this, as in all things. Yet waiting for Henry occupies so much of her thoughts, and waiting for God so little.

Mary suspects that much of what they thought they knew about God was wrong. She remembers Robert’s letters, when she still used to receive them. The agonies of the soul and of the stomach. It would be very like Robert, to expend so much of his life drowning in a deep sense of sin, only for it to transpire that his fundamental assumptions were incorrect all along.

When she talks with Hetty, Mary is glad that she and Robert never had children. To have a daughter like Hetty would be like leaving your heart staked out in the open, for every wild creature to pick at.

Something runs past on the other side of the street, startling her, but it is only a cat. Robert has always loved cats. “Look, Mary,” he would say. “Look at this little fellow.” Her heart would make an impulsive little movement towards him, at the very same moment that he withdrew in anticipation of scorn.

As a child, she once brought home a kitten, which she had found in the street. It grew into a fine, sleek beast, but it never learned to sit in a lap like other cats. When it wanted affection, it would stick its claws into your ankles. “It must have been separated from its mother very young,” said Mary’s own mother. “It’s harder for them to learn to be cats, if they have nobody to teach them.”

Robert, writing from far-away lands. “In the event of my never returning to torment you.” Ah, Robert. What did you want from me?

The houses at the far end of the street are grander. Everyone would like to move closer to the Great House, where Lady Jane and her niece live. Lady Jane is their pattern in all things. Or at least she is their pattern in patience, and patience is the business of their lives.

It is not the Great House that draws Mary’s gaze today. In the other direction, the street falters and becomes a meandering dirt track which eventually enters the forest. Fog lies over the forest, as it always does. It reminds her of the sea, in the days when Robert was with the coastguard. They had their moment of pleasure, then suffered the consequences later — like Robert with his cake, she thinks wryly.

Not one of them has ever walked along the dirt track into the forest. They never go beyond their little street of houses. Yet suddenly, with a certainty that she has never felt before, Mary knows that one day she will be the first. She will take that track into the forest, wherever it leads her, and she will have no need to leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind her, for she will not intend to return or to be followed.

SOBBING SCREAMING BLOWING YOU KISSES

And 😘 to you, dear anon

Polar Explorer RPF - Prompt Post 1

Robert McClure/Mary McClure, literally anything

FILL: Robert McClure/Mary McClure, literally anything, gen

Re: FILL: Robert McClure/Mary McClure, literally anything, gen

Re: Robert McClure/Mary McClure, literally anything