SASO Referees (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
referees) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
sportsanime2016-06-23 08:59 pm
referees) wrote in sportsanime2016-06-23 08:59 pm
Entry tags:
Bonus Round 3: Gift Tags
This round is CLOSED as of 7PM on July 7 EDT. Late fills may be posted, but they will not receive points.
RULES
- Submit prompts as a gift tag in the format below. You can specify the size and a characteristic of the gift, who the sender is, who the recipient is, and a one or two sentence note from the sender to the recipient. Descriptions of the package and the included note don’t have to be explicit, see below.
- Package: medium sized cube, rattles
From: Kageyama Tobio
To: Hinata Shouyou
Note: These will help you get better. - Envelope: manila, 12''x17'', very thick and heavy
From: Tezuka Kunimitsu
To: Kinjou Shingo
Note: Enclosed - Play without regrets! - Your prompt MUST include a relationship. Platonic relationships are indicated by an "&" between the names (e.g., Riko & Momoi). Non-platonic relationships use "/" (e.g., Riko/Momoi). Please don't say "Any pairing," either.
- Fill prompts by leaving a responding comment to the prompt with your newly-created work. Fillers can get creative with how to interpret the prompt: your fill can be about the character receiving the gift, one or both characters using the gift, what prompted the sender to send the gift—the physical gift itself can even be excluded from your fill. What’s important is that the gift tag is clearly the inspiration for your fill.
- Remember to follow the general bonus round rules, outlined here.
FORMAT
Bonus round shenanigans all happen in the comments below. Brand-new works only, please.Required Work Minimums:
- 400 words (prose)
- 400px by 400px (art)
- 14 lines (poetry)
Format your comment in one of the following ways:
| If PROMPTING: | If FILLING: | If FILLING as a TEAM GRANDSTAND participant: |
PROMPT: TEAM [YOUR SHIP]
| FILL: TEAM [YOUR SHIP], [RATING]
| FILL: TEAM GRANDSTAND, [RATING]
|
Posts not using this format will be understood to be unofficial discussion posts, regardless of what they contain. They, like all comments in this community, are subject to the code of conduct.
SCORING
These numbers apply to your team as a whole, not each individual teammate. Make as many prompts/fills as you want!For prompts: 5 points each (maximum of 50 prompt points per team per round)
First 3 fills by any member of your team: 20 points each
Fills 4-10: 10 points each
Fills 11-20: 5 points each
Fills 21+: 2 points each
All scored content must be created new for this round.
Etc.
If you're hunting through the prompts looking for what to fill, a good trick is to view top-level comments only.Have a question? Check The FAQ first. If you still need help, feel free to contact the mods. Happy fanworking!
FILL: Team Miyuki Kazuya/Narumiya Mei, T
1919 words. on ao3 in lapslock!
#
It’s easier than expected, in your opinion, to not fall out of touch after high school. Most nights, you fall asleep at your desk while trying to finish your math problem set, and more often than not, it’s with your hand next to your phone, the screen still lit up with the contact name Matsubara Nao.
What is hard is for you to actually see him in person. “We have our own lives now,” he said to you the last time your schedules matched up for enough time for a dinner. “It doesn’t mean we’re not friends anymore.”
“I’m not stupid,” you snarled back, and he smiled, like he always did. It still hurt, you thought bemusedly, when you caught the look in his eye that could only be described as jealousy. And yet. After you argued into paying the tab, you also thought that you would rather not be in contact with him than watch him be happy, without you.
#
Three months later, you wake up to a knocking on the door to your too-cramped one bedroom apartment, and he’s there with a sunny demeanor and a bag of fruit. “Surprise!” he says, and you lean against the door frame before you let him wheel in.
“I don’t take visitors before—” you glance at the wall clock, “—nine in the morning. Come again at a later time.”
“Like hell i will,” he says, and this, you think, is why you could never, ever give him up.
#
He once told you, when you started to play baseball again, that he forgave you. You believed him, maybe not as much as you had wanted to, but it was, wholly, better than nothing. When he found you in the locker room by yourself with all the lights off, he said, “The important thing is for you to forgive yourself,” and the unfairity of it all made your skin crawl, the ugly deep within your body rearing its head at the most inopportune of times. More than anything, you wanted to tell him that you could never do that, not now. You will never see his smile from the mound again, and maybe he’d be in the dugout or the stands and of course you’d always carry his spirit along with your own crammed in the crevices of your heart, but it wouldn’t ever be the same.
“I know,” you said instead, and his face only froze for a beat before shifting again, rearranging into his natural expression.
And it was natural, to slide into the routine of strategizing with him, listening to him yell at you and the rest of your team for another round of sprints, twenty times around the bases, fifty more swings.
It wasn’t the first time, but it always felt like it was: He was studying the scorebook in the dugout, forehead creased as he read over the clumsy mistakes the team made today, yours included. I’m sorry, lilted at the tip of your tongue, but it didn’t slip. He looked up before you could open your mouth and do something stupid, and said, “Have you showered yet?” You shook your head, because you hadn’t, and he smiled. There it was— the gut-wrenching guilt and anger, your heart and stomach all mixed together and your very line of vision crooked. His eyes were looking up, but he wasn’t following the sky either.
“Want to join me?” he asked, and the invitation was concerning the scorebook in front of him, but it was an awfully simple effort, to pretend that it was something more.
“Yeah,” you said, and sat down, leaning close. He smelled like baseball, leather, the sweet tinge of sugar. All of your favorite things.
#
You make the first string of your university baseball team in your second year. “I knew you could do it,” he says, while you’re clutching the phone with sweaty palms, in the now-empty locker room. Your exhales echo off the walls, but all you hear is him on the line, saying, “I’ll come see you play.”
And he does. Not that you ever doubted him, but it’s still a wordless thrill, exaltation replacing the blood in your veins when you look up from the field to see him in the front row of the stands, tiny but still present, still visible. You don’t wave, but you tilt your cap up slightly with your thumb, your eyes trained on him. If he notices, he doesn’t make a movement back, but then your catcher calls for your last warm-up pitch, and it’s time to win.
#
“I’m not a good person,” you told him, after you lost the last game of your high school career. Neither of you had cried, but your teammates had, and somehow, that had been worse. You were standing outside the school grounds, your feet on the field but your mind scattered as far and long as you breathed. “I’m not, I—”
“Stop,” he said, and you listened, like you always did. Somewhere along the way, you unlearned how to walk away, and filled the aching space with the knowledge of how to stay. Then you wondered, if he appreciated any of it at all.
There was so much he shared with you, but it made the water on your skin freeze over when you came to the conclusion that Matsubara Nao was still, entirely, an unsolved enigma.
“I don’t regret it,” you said, even though that was a lie. You did regret it. So many things. He didn’t tell you to stop again, so you plowed on ahead. In the end, it was him that reigned you in on your worst days, your best days, every day, really. “Nao, you can’t just not say anything.”
“I’m sorry,” he said suddenly, and for a second, you were sure you misheard. “I have regrets.”
You swallowed, before you said, “Tell me.”
“I wanted to go,” he replied, his voice desperately soft and enraged. Faintly, you saw the struggle working his throat, the muted anger simmering below his skin. He looked at you then, his eyes furious, determined. “I know you wanted—”
Then your teammates found you, and that was ironic, because you never did find out what it was that you wanted.
#
He agrees, after a slew of messages, to finally celebrate with you your making of the first string.
Five drinks in, you admit, “I miss your coaching.”
“Oh?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. “I was always under the impression that you thought of me as a masochist.”
He isn’t wrong, but the memories flooding back make you relinquish a grating laugh, for whatever reason. No— you know what reason. It’s never felt so far away, the days in which you complained the entire morning about your tie being too tight and your uniform pants being too short, then spending your evenings and nights in the presence of Nao himself. You notice that his hair is getting long; it falls far past the base of his neck, where you would put your palms, your lips, if you were brave enough.
“That’s right,” you snark back, swallowing down the bile rising in your throat, and it isn’t because of the alcohol. “You made us run until we collapsed.”
“You’re still here, aren’t you?” He taps his nails on the table before reaching across, catching your hand as you raise it. He examines each finger carefully, his own hands as soft as you’ve always imagined them to be. Every touch he leaves behind etches itself like a bruise into your dermal layer. Or no; something even more painful, an open gash left to fester.
“You still take good care of your hands,” he says, withdrawing, receding, like at the bottom depth of low tide, when the water is so shallow not even the tops of your feet are submerged. Nothing has happened, and you feel like you’re coming home from a war, battered and broken, but some parts still intact. Still good. You look at the ways he’s changed, the lines of his shoulders stronger, more upright. Your throat narrows traitorously, but not so much that it’s absolutely impossible to bear. After all, you’ve kept it bottled up inside for years; you’re a professional.
You wanted to confess directly preceding your graduation, and you recollect on how you failed, coming up with nothing more than a thank you. Despite everything, you still think about all the ways you’ve come up short, in baseball and in regards to Nao, the boy you’ve been following so blindly for so many years.
What is a journey without an end; a path leading into oblivion? You imagine him saying to you one day that it isn’t polite to go years without confessing, that he would always, forever, be by your side.
There’s only a sip left in your glass, so you down it before you say, “I’m a pitcher, what do you expect?”
He smiles, like he understands, and the wounds along your body start to stitch themselves together, the illness and cure originating from the same source. He smiles, still good.
#
Your very first memory of him goes back to before your growth spurt, when you were immature and thought that you already had the world in your hand. It was spring, and there were petals in his hair. It didn’t fit him at all, you thought, because not even an hour later he was down in the dirt, diving for every stray ball and every hit, on his knees and elbows, grime caking under the fingernails of his ungloved hand, sweat pouring down his face and he radiated: infinitely, positively, intensely, of happiness.
Years later, you still remembered the very first version of Nao you were ever introduced to, and it continued smarting like a freshly popped blister, as if you’d been asking for it all along, trying to get a solid grasp on something that was never fully yours.
Years later, you still remembered seeing his face, sun and sun and sun, the very core of your muscles drawn tight and anaerobic, enough lactic acid building up that your lungs burned, beating uselessly against the hollow cage of bone encircling them.
It was your very last thought, as you dropped a box with a new baseball in it, signed with your own name. A cheeky note included on the flipside of the thanks, saying that he could sell it for millions when you were famous, so he wouldn’t suspect anything was wrong.
The next day, he told you, “I already sold the baseball,” and grinned when you squawked a complaint.
“How?” you asked, and he glanced down, the path of his eyes traveling the curve of your arms, your neck, before arriving at your face. The bottom half. The air suspended, your heart opened to one stone’s throw away.
“Someone offered to buy it for one billion yen,” he said with his face unnaturally straight, and you punched him lightly in the shoulder for the lie. He still had that expression on his face, except now it had a nostalgic edge to it, simultaneously awful and starved. “What did you want me to say? You gave me a baseball that cost a thousand yen at most.”
You opened your mouth, ready to protest, but then. His face softened, and the nostalgia took over his cheeks, the lift of his mouth. So you stopped, and waited. Watched the light that managed to filter through the leaves cavorting across the ground and up higher, higher.
#
Re: FILL: Team Miyuki Kazuya/Narumiya Mei, T
THIS IS SO BEAUTIFUL <3
hnnnnhghjhjkdhlgasjkkl basically everything here okay everything in this fic is just so beautiful
I love how fierce and yet together these two are, how you explore and parallel things - 'natural', 'i know', and all the mixed emotions in between - the difference between being with each other over the phone and being there, physically, with each other.
noooOOOoO O OOo your writing is A PUNCH TO THE GUT HOW ARE YOU SO AMAZING
ALSO I LOVE THE NON-LINEAR NARRATIVE, and how it finishes with a memory, and ohhh, owww, before that, 'you still think about all the ways you’ve come up short, in baseball and in regards to Nao, the boy you’ve been following so blindly for so many years' - sdhfal;ksjkjfljgs you write with such poetry ! this is a masterpiece !!
Re: FILL: Team Miyuki Kazuya/Narumiya Mei, T