Prompt Challenge 8: Bawdy Ballads, Tides

[senmut]

Welcome to the eighth prompt for Half a Moon 2020!

Today's prompts are:

Bawdy Ballads

and

Tides

No prompts are required, they're just here to provide the challenge if you need one. You can post your works as a response to this post or separately to the community, just remember to tag your works appropriately.

Please remember any works using a canon female character are welcome: graphics, gifsets, meta, links, fics, graphics, art, and recs.

Day One | Day Two | Day Three | Day Four | Day Five | Day Six | Day Seven

2020 Welcome Post | FAQ | 2020 Prompts - full list

Comments

MCU, Carol/Maria

[senmut]

Carol waggled her eyes as the movie moved toward the infamous bar scene.

"No, aww no," Maria said at that.

Talos and Soren were torn between the movie and the unfolding drama as, with flair and sass, Carol mimicked the small pilot making a play for the woman with an ancient Earth ballad of heartbreak.

Maria wound up covering her face, embarrassed, as Carol made her way over, crooning out the lyrics before planting herself in Maria's lap.

"I still got it," Carol said, grinning impishly.

"Girl, you gonna get it, is what this is," Maria said, kissing her soundly.

Re: MCU, Carol/Maria

[singedsun]

Love it. I can hear Maria so much in that last line too.

Re: MCU, Carol/Maria

[senmut]

Thank you!

Black Sails - Miranda Barlow

[ioplokon]

It was before dawn. Looking out the window, she could see the sapphire sky that Dante described as he finally emerged from hell and stepped onto the shores of purgatory. However, for Miranda Barlow, there was no long climb to paradise. New Providence was mostly flat. That was how so many had fooled themselves into thinking that they would find a level playing field here.

Miranda knew better, she thought. The world here was precarious, just like back home. Living on an island meant that your whole world grew and shrunk daily with the tides. The trick of it was not to fight an uphill battle through a dark and unfamiliar wood, but rather to endure the constant shifts of fortune.

But however much she tried, she could never quite manage to be genuinely indifferent to dispreferred indifferents. Her thoughts drifted back to Dante, to the lowest part of his hell, where frozen traitors gnawed endlessly at each other and themselves. There were, she thought, some things that could not be forgiven; some passions that shouldn't be purged.

There were some things she would choose to let gnaw at her, even if the tides rose and flooded the whole island, even if her world were washed away.

Re: Black Sails - Miranda Barlow

[fhionnuisce]

OMG even though you and I talked about this directly AND I checked the comm what I thought was every day, I completely missed this until the master post. Brb reading....

So I was hoping to leave two comments but then I put it in the wrong place to begin with....

Anyway I love this, I love how she is wise and befuddled and frustrated at the same time and it really resonates and how she almost can get there but can't....ahhhhh.

I'm so glad you wrote this!

Re: Black Sails - Miranda Barlow

[ioplokon]

Somehow your reply slipped through the cracks & I only saw it now!

Anyway, thanks for your kind words. Miranda's such a fascinating but difficult character. I think for me, I'm always torn because the character we get is pretty interesting but... when we first met her I thought she was going to like, Have a Philosophy? Which is something you don't see a lot of women do in fiction... so I think the goal here was to like, try to give some of that back to her in a way that still fits with who she actually becomes in canon.

Re: Black Sails - Miranda Barlow

[fhionnuisce]

That makes a ton of sense to me. :) Thank you for writing it!

Critical Role, Jester & The Traveler

[singedsun]

She's sitting in sand with the wand between her fingers like a paintbrush as she draws the lines of a lollipop. She hears the sound of the waves before the water flows over her toes, sitting in small wet grooves. Her drawing washes away in the dark water glowing with the energy of sunset. She giggles, surrounding by the cold water and the sensation that it might drag her out into the sea as it retreats.

Her seat is safe though and she swipes her hand over the wet sand, smoothing it back into place suitable for a new drawing. There's a chuckle on the wind all around her as she moves from one sweet drawing to the spiraling lines of something more lewd. The wind ruffles her hair and sets in motion the ribbons and bells tied to the jewels on her horns.

"Where are your friends, Jester?" A voice whispers above her.

She turns her face up into the clouded sunset and grins as red hair tumbles from a green cloak over her head.

"They're sleeping." She folds her legs, crossing them in front of her body as another small, cold wave sweeps under her. "Dreaming. Probably about me. Beau said they all have a crush on me, did you know that?"

The Traveler chuckles. "That's not hard to imagine."

Jester gives him a sweetly smug smile. "I was waiting for you. I know sometimes you like to wait until it's like kind of dark and like everyone's sleeping and you're getting stronger so they can kind of see you now."

He laughs. "It's nice to have you to myself for a little while."

Her smile turns wistful and she wiggles as if better settling in to converse with her God. "We have so much to do still. I want to help you with everything."

He kisses her forehead and smooths over the spot with his thumb. "I know you must have lots of ideas already."

"So many!" She begins frantically drawing in the sand again, making a list on one side and small drawings on the other. The water laps at the edges of the first few lines, but seems to hit an invisible force to keep it back. She notices and shakes her head. "It's less fun that way, Traveler."

He tilts his head and the water trickles into the grooves of her letters, under her legs, over his sandals. He wiggles his toes. "How right you are."

"I know."

Cycles - Game of Thrones - Daenerys Targaryen

[cmk418]

She walks along the beach at Dragonstone, hearing the whisper of the waves as they gently lap against the shore. She loves this part of the morning, when the sand reveals everything that the tides have brought in over the course of a night. It relaxes her, not the sound of the water, but the idea that the natural cycles return that which rightly belongs to a place. Power goes through the same cycles- Baratheons take from the Targaryens, Lannisters take from the Baratheons, and one day soon, the tides of power will return a Targaryen to the Iron Throne.