SASO Referees (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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sportsanime2017-06-25 06:52 pm
referees) wrote in sportsanime2017-06-25 06:52 pm
Entry tags:
Bonus Round 3: FSTs
Please read this whole post before commenting to ensure that your team gets the most points possible.
RULES
- Submit prompts in the form of a short playlist (1-6 songs) and a ship from any of our nominated fandoms. Submit only the track listing and a link to where they can be listened to; the idea is for others to interpret what you present. You may also link to lyrics if you would like.
- Your prompt MUST include some kind of relationship. Platonic relationships are indicated by an "&" between the names (e.g., Lilia & Sara). Non-platonic relationships use "/" (e.g., Lilia/Sara). Please don't say "Any pairing," either.
- Create content based on the playlists of others! Fill prompts by leaving a responding comment to the prompt with your newly-created work.
- Fills may be in any form you choose (except for another FST of course) as long as they are inspired by/fit the mood of the soundtrack they are filling for.
- Remember to follow the general bonus round rules, outlined here.
- Here is a prompt/fill index for your convenience.
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.
If you see anyone breaking the code of conduct (e.g., causing drama, being rude) anywhere (not just DW), please contact the mods immediately.
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)
For fills:First 4 fills by any member of your team: 20 points each
Fills 5-10: 15 points each
Fills 11-20: 5 points each
Fills 21-50: 2 points each
Fills 51+: 1 point 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 (see the line of links below this post).Have a question? Check The FAQ first. If you still need help, feel free to contact the mods. Happy fanworking!
PROMPT: Team Grandstand
Fandom: Yowamushi Pedal
Major tags: none
Other tags: none
Prompt:
Renegades - X Ambassadors
All hail the underdogs / All hail the new kids / All hail the outlaws / Spielbergs, Kubricks
Dream & Reality - Area 11
Is it worth the risk that we take / Gambling our youth away / Waiting and hoping from the side-lines / But this is our moment, our chance to shine
We Are The Champions - Queen
But it's been no bed of roses / No pleasure cruise / I consider it a challenge before the whole human race / And I ain't gonna lose!
Re: PROMPT: Team Grandstand
Re: PROMPT: Team Grandstand
FILL: Team Aoyagi Hajime/Teshima Junta, M (1/2)
Fandom: Yowamushi Pedal
Major Tags: So many. Death (implied), injury, blood, vomiting, illness (not explicitly named but it's cancer), mentions of suicidal ideation, vaguely implied drug abuse, mentions of emotional breakdowns/mental illness, the apocalypse basically.
Other Tags: It's Pacific Rim AU time, ya'll. Bad stuff happens. (Feel free to DM about specific possible triggers!)
Word Count: 2864
Okay, so, this got away from me, but the prompt really hit me over the head to write the sequel to THIS fill from SASO 2015, which I've been meaning to do for a very long time and just hadn't been able to get done. This fill should stand alone without reading the prequel, though.
This isn't exactly what you were asking for, I don't think, but I hope you enjoy it anyway. Sorry? :p
***
Makishima’s living in London with his brother when the first Kaiju attacks hit. Their adopted island home feels like a time bomb tomb until the world realizes that the Kaiju only emerge on the Pacific rim. But any relief they feel from the realization is short-lived -- Great Britain may not be in danger, but Japan is.
“I’m going back,” Makishima tells his brother. Japan hasn’t been hit yet, but Makishima’s a realist. He knows it’s only a matter of time. Ren doesn’t try to stop him, but the hug he gives in the airport is just a little too long and a little too tight.
“Seeya, Ren,” Makishima says as he turns and leaves with a wave over his shoulder.
“Bye, Yuusuke.”
Makishima thinks that a simple goodbye as last words is just as appropriate as anything else.
There are two people waiting in the airport when Makishima stumbles his way off the plane, stiff from a twelve-hour flight and lack of sleep. Still, he can’t help but smile when he sees them. “Hey!” he yells, the stretch of his cheeks almost painful, and then Tadokoro wraps him up in a bear hug that lifts him off the ground and spins him around and echos with booming laughter, and for a moment Makishima forgets that the world is ending around them.
“Good to see you,” Kinjou says. He slaps Makishima’s shoulder when Tadokoro puts him down, then steps in for a tamer hug of his own.
“You too, doctor,” Makishima teases. Kinjou’s ears redden the slightest bit, and he looks deservedly pleased. He’s tried to explain his PhD research to Makishima more than once, with negligible success. Makishima’s proud of him anyway.
“Got any bags?” Tadokoro asks, already heading for the baggage claim before Makishima stops him and nods to his carry-on.
“Figured I wouldn’t need much,” he says by way of an explanation, and the jovial mood falls a little. Makishima coughs against the back of his hand.
Tadokoro clears his throat loudly. “Right. Yeah. Let’s… let’s go, then?”
If there’s one positive thing Makishima can say about Tadokoro’s driving, it’s that it certainly makes him forget any repressed fears he has over joining the Pan Pacific Defense Corps.
Kinjou, with his shiny new doctorate degree, is immediately snapped up by the physics department and the engineers, with barely enough time for a parting wave before Tadokoro and Makishima are ushered together through a whirlwind series of fitness assessments and psych evals and logic and reflex tests and dumped out the other side with initiation packets and the key to a shared dorm room.
And so they come to be a part of the historic first class of the Japanese division of the Jaeger Program’s Pilot Academy.
The class isn’t large to begin with, and it shrinks steadily as prospective pilots fail and drop out around them. The training is backbreakingly rigorous and they stumble to their bunks every night with barely enough energy to shower and make it into bed before they fall asleep. They go weeks without seeing Kinjou beyond glances caught across the mess at mealtimes. He looks dignified in his ever-present white lab coat, but his glasses are grimy more often than not and there are dark shadows circling his eyes, and Makishima frets over the change. Makishima himself, already skinny by nature, simply gets more wiry, and Tadokoro’s signature belly disappears under a mountain of hard muscle.
Someone slaps a tray of food down inside Makishima’s bubble of personal space and Makishima jumps and drops his chopsticks, nearly upending his plate in the process.
“I can’t believe we tied again, this is getting ridiculous,” says a loud voice right beside Makishima’s ear. “Scoot over a bit, Maki-chan,” he adds, and sits down half in Makishima’s lap before Makishima even has a second to respond.
“Toudou,” Makishima says through gritted teeth. He ignores Tadokoro’s knowing snicker in favour of trying to recover both his chopsticks and his dignity. Toudou is still talking about their scores -- the two of them have been leapfrogging for position since the start of the program, and what began as a heated rivalry has somehow evolved into a strange kind of friendship. Toudou’s roommate and his roommate’s assigned co-pilot join them at their table, scaring away a handful of mechanics who were sitting at the end.
The amount of deference pilot trainees get has always struck Makishima as something ridiculous. But then again, he thinks, with morbid practicality, maybe nobody wants to be around the dead men walking. Maybe nobody wants to get close to the people on their self-imposed death row. Maybe they fear that suicidal bravery is contagious. It certainly seems that way, sometimes, when Makishima meets Toudou in the Kwoon Room to spar between classes, and the perfectly matched fight becomes like a dance, a spinning, sweaty dance that has them both panting and laughing and yelling each other’s names until they collapse in a pile on the floor. And they drop their staffs to hold each other, panting and laughing and whispering each other’s names between damp, sticky kisses, because what’s a better place to find love than in the middle of the apocalypse?
“I can’t believe you two are getting a Jaeger first,” Toudou is grousing, having finished his meal and tucked himself up against Makishima’s side. He leans back to push at Arakita’s hip with his foot, and yelps when Arakita retaliates with a stinging slap of a chopstick to Toudou’s bare ankle.
“Of course we are, we’re fuckin’ fantastic,” Arakita snipes, and Shinkai grins his sleepy-eyed grin across the table.
Never to be outdone, Tadokoro gestures between himself and Makishima. “We’re next,” he says proudly, sharing the news of the morning, and his booming laughter is almost drowned out by Toudou’s shriek of indignant surprise.
Sometimes, Makishima doesn’t know how they all seem to be handling the pressure so well, when he’s scared to death and killing himself not to show it. But then he sees Arakita’s stockpile of pain meds, always in the front pocket of his pants, and hears Toudou’s nightmares through the walls, and he’s there for Shinkai’s nervous break, right before graduation. He’s there to rub Tadokoro’s back when he throws up in the middle of the night, and he sees Kinjou’s thousand-yard stare, still lost in his work even when they carve out a few quiet moments to just exist together. So maybe none of them are handling it.
He watches Wolfhound Demonic deploy for the first time with Arakita and Fukutomi at the helm, the last of the Mark Ones, and he cheers for them until his voice goes hoarse. He holds a shaking Toudou close, and leans into Tadokoro’s comforting bulk, and prays that they come back safe, trusting Kinjou’s silhouette up in Mission Control to guide them home.
FILL: Team Aoyagi Hajime/Teshima Junta, M (2/2)
“We got this,” he says, full of confidence, and Makishima smiles back and nods.
Their time finally comes, simultaneously too soon and not soon enough, when the first Japanese Jaeger, Tacit Ronan, goes down in her fourth battle, and her pilots are killed. There’s almost nothing of her left, just a core and splinters of limbs, but she’s salvaged and hauled back to the Osaka Shatterdome and Fukutomi Sr. summons Tadokoro and Makishima to preside over the wreckage.
“She’s going to be yours,” he tells them.
And three months later, Ursa Breaker stands ready for her first deployment, rebuilt and oiled to perfection. Tadokoro is an instant media darling -- and of course he is. He has a huge, commanding presence, every inch the action hero, with the toothy grin and thundering laugh and rakish arrogance to go with it. Kinjou, too, quickly becomes a beloved public figure, explaining the details of Ursa Breaker’s reconstruction and customization in a way that’s easy to follow and pleasant to listen to. Makishima is so, so proud of both of them. He doesn’t have quite the charisma that his friends do, but he knows he looks striking in the skintight black circuitry suits, so he does his best to stand calm and confident while Tadokoro fields the press.
They get good at it. Really, really good. Soon, Ursa Breaker is among the most successful of the Jaegers worldwide, and they get called in for more and more interviews, talk shows, public presentations. The popularity is overwhelming -- Makishima, in his life before the Jaeger Program, enjoyed some degree of notoriety as both a semi-professional cyclist and as a designer. So he thought he’d known what to expect. But the first time a little kid runs up to him with an Ursa action figure and bashfully hopeful request for his autograph, he freezes up completely.
“Maki-chan,” Toudou hisses, digging an elbow into his ribs, and Makishima jumps and forces a smile to his face and signs the toy.
“I wanna be a Ranger just like you!” the kid says with a gap-toothed grin before scampering away. Makishima waits until he’s sure the kid isn’t watching anymore, and then he throws up into a garbage bin.
“I know,” Toudou soothes, holding Makishima’s hair back and rubbing his shoulders gently. “I know.”
Makishima thinks of Toudou sobbing into his arms, benched indefinitely when his drift wasn’t strong enough and he and his co-pilot had both collapsed, seizing in their cockpit before they’d ever left the Shatterdome. He thinks of Toudou and Shinkai standing either side of Arakita at a state funeral, serious and silent in a way that the three of them never are. He thinks of how it feels to stare death in the teeth and the way that the terror doubles and rebounds in the drift with Tadokoro, bouncing between them both until the monster goes down.
He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. Onward, he thinks. Don’t stop, don’t look back, don’t think too hard. Do what you have to do.
So they go out, and they fight. With Wolfhound Demonic and Coyote Tango out of commission, Ursa Breaker is the only functional Jaeger stationed in Osaka, which means they’re busier than ever. Makishima dreams of the inside of Tadokoro’s head and sees his own thoughts from the outside. They’re connected so closely and so often that Makishima finds that he can hear Tadokoro’s thoughts, and knows that Tadokoro hears his.
Ghost drifting, Kinjou calls it, looking over printouts of their brainwaves. Not an uncommon consequence of the neural bridge. His eyes flash with that look he always gets when faced with a particularly interesting problem, but Makishima is just… tired.
It’s primarily because of the ghost drift that Tadokoro knows, almost before Makishima does himself. He shows up in the bathroom, breath fast and hands outstretched, radiating anxiety, even before Makishima is finished spitting into the sink.
“You can’t tell anyone,” Makishima warns him out loud, making eye contact in the mirror.
“But --”
“No.”
He feels Tadokoro in his head, fluttering through his thoughts and motivations and reasons, and then Tadokoro sighs, and relents. “This is a stupid choice.”
Makishima laughs, one loud, bitter bark of a sound, and he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. It comes away bloody. “Of course it is,” he agrees. They wouldn’t be here if they weren’t stupid.
The cough has gotten worse -- and more difficult to hide -- a week later, when the alarm goes off at 4:11am that a Kaiju’s emerged just east of Chiba. Tadokoro’s instant bolt of fear runs through them both like a thunderclap, Makishima’s own following on its heels. They think of their families, obliviously asleep back home -- Tadokoro’s parents, Makishima’s little sister, grandparents and cousins and friends -- and they stumble into their circuitry suits in record time. Kinjou is there, when they reach Ursa Breaker’s bay, and he gives them both a quick, wild hug before launching into a clipped summary of the Kaiju’s movements and the plan of attack.
“It’s close,” he says, voice tight with anxiety. “Wolfhound can be ready, in a pinch. We have pilots for her on standby.” He doesn’t say it, but Makishima knows that Wolfhound Demonic’s still a week or more from being safely repaired, and he doesn’t know which pilots the tech team has on standby, but by that very fact he knows they’re untested in the field.
“Not letting anyone die for us today, Kinjou,” Tadokoro says for them both.
Kinjou nods, the barest hint of a smile on his face. “Take it down,” he says with simple faith.
At this point, drifting with Tadokoro is easy. Like slipping on a sweater. They blend together seamlessly, comfortably, and Ursa responds perfectly. The Kaiju is a category three -- big, but not the worst they’ve seen, and luckily it’s slow enough and they’re close enough that they can intercept it well out to sea, where the risk to their home is minimal.
They’ve had worse fights, but the Kaiju still shatters Ursa’s forearm before they manage to take it down, and they can feel it, feel the burning, ripping pain, and they scream, and they feel the blood pooling in the back of their throat again, and their head swims, and they hear Kinjou’s voice yelling, and Tadokoro’s, and then…
Then Makishima wakes up in the infirmary.
The first thing he hears is a long, shuddering sigh that catches on a sob, and he blinks blearily at Tadokoro sitting beside his bed, absolutely dwarfing Makishima’s hand in his own bearlike paw.
“What…” Makishima croaks.
Tadokoro explodes out of his chair, and Makishima flinches back reflexively. “I told you it was stupid!” he yells, and through the ghost of their link Makishima sees himself double over, sees blood splatter on the inside of his helmet, feels his mind go abruptly silent as his body sags in the harness. Flinches away from the sharp redoubling of the neural load on Tadokoro, feels him snarling and pushing through it to slice the Kaiju from haunch to throat and sees them collapse together, Kaiju and Jaeger, creating a wave that crashes blood and oil against the Japanese shoreline. He sees the entire progression of events in hazy, ghostly shadows on the backs of his eyelids, and he sighs, and coughs.
“Am I okay?” he asks.
Tadokoro doesn’t answer right away, which, really, is an answer of itself.
Later, Kinjou comes in to explain, looking like he hasn’t slept in a week. It’s the Mark-1 cores, he explains. Nuclear radiation. Insufficient insulation.
“Who else?” Makishima asks, mouth dry. He doesn’t really want to know. He needs to know.
“A lot of the techs,” Kinjou hedges, then he pinches his lips together. “Pentecost and Sevier. And Arakita.”
“Is Tadokorocchi okay?”
Kinjou nods, pushes at his eyes under his glasses. “So far.”
Makishima closes his own eyes and takes a moment to breathe. “It’s not your fault,” he says finally, and Kinjou cracks, and breaks. Makishima rubs his back and tries not to think of the implications as Kinjou shudders under his hand.
The implications, it seems, are medical discharge, effective immediately. When he tries to protest, Fukutomi Sr. cuts him off by saying that he cannot pilot a Jaeger effectively in his condition, which is something Makishima can’t refute. Tadokoro stands silent throughout the process, with his arms crossed and a blank, angry look on his face.
“Cheer up, Tadokorocchi. I always knew getting into a Jaeger would kill me someday,” Makishima jokes feebly, after the Commander has left.
“That’s not fucking funny,” Tadokoro retorts angrily, and Makishima shrugs. It isn’t. It’s true, though.
When Makishima goes down for his first treatment, he’s greeted by Arakita, sitting up on a hospital bed with an IV line in his arm. “Welcome to hospice,” Arakita says dryly, gesturing around the bright room. Makishima’s lips twist in a wry grin, and he sits down on the open bed. Toudou immediately jumps out of his seat beside Arakita to pull up a chair at Makishima’s bed and wrap their hands together.
“I’m fine, Jinpachi,” Makishima says reflexively. Ursa Breaker’s on indefinite hold, but Tadokoro’s miraculously unhurt after their last fight, and he’s already being pushed to look for a new potential co-pilot among the second batch of recruits. There have already been headlines -- What happened to Ursa Breaker, Where’s the Bear, The Uncertain Future of Japan’s Jaegers -- but the Jaeger Program’s kept close-lipped on the situation. And Makishima’s fine with that. He doesn’t want the media attention now, and neither does Tadokoro.
“‘Course you’re not,” Toudou says. “None of us are.”
Makishima squints into the fluorescent hospital lights and laughs.
They’re not okay, Makishima agrees, but some nights, squashed between Tadokoro and Kinjou on a tiny bunk as they watch a movie together on a salvaged computer in the middle of the end of the world… some nights, they’re close enough.
Re: FILL: Team Aoyagi Hajime/Teshima Junta, M (2/2)
Re: FILL: Team Aoyagi Hajime/Teshima Junta, M (2/2)