2023 Three Sentence Ficathon - Post #1

[3sfmod]

Welcome to the 2023 Three Sentence Ficathon!
As of 16 Jan 2023 this post is NOW CLOSED TO NEW PROMPTS! PLEASE POST YOUR NEW PROMPTS HERE, IN POST 2! Do continue to fill prompts here but please put all new prompts in Post 2.



This post will remain open for new prompts until we hit 4000 comments, at which point we'll open a new one to avoid captcha as long as possible. New fills and comments on fills will always be welcome.


How to Prompt

Prompts should be one prompt per comment, formatted in this way: fandom, character(s), prompt word/sentence

Example: Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi, I don't like sand

Prompts may also be open ended, unspecific, or anthropomorphic, such as:

any, any, I don't like sand
or
Earth geography, sand, I don't like humans very much, either

Prompts for relationships are welcome; a / is used for romantic/sexual relationships and an & for platonic. A prompt that uses both means the relationship can be written as either romantic or platonic, such as:

Star Wars, Anakin/&Obi-Wan, I don't like sand

Prompts may be repeated if they are unfilled; there is no obligation to read through every prompt to make sure yours isn't a repeat. This year's 3SF will stay open for new prompts through Sunday, February 12th.

How to Fill

Respond to your chosen prompt with a short fic of three sentences containing the fandom & characters requested!

Prompts can be filled more than once, as many times as someone has a new idea for them.

Notes & Rules

No, fills do not need to be exactly three sentences! It's more of a guideline. Please abuse grammar and punctuation as much as desired.

3SF is a Choose Not to Warn space. Spoiler and content warnings are not required, though writers are free to add them if they please. If you see something you don't like, just scroll until you do!

A Dreamwidth account is not needed to participate. Anonymous prompts/fills are welcome, or you can use Open ID.

Cross-posting is encouraged; there is a 3SF Collection on AO3 if you'd like to post fills there as well.

Note that the comm is searchable! Tick the 'include comments' button when searching to easily find prompts for your chosen fandom/characters.

And most importantly, have fun! If you have questions, check the Sticky Info post and if they're not answered there, head to the Contact the Mods post.

Comments

Flight to You (a very depressing beach episode)

[ruanchunxian]

Yuheng had learnt over the months that Gu Nanting disliked sea-view hotel rooms, even if she did not understand why, and when she was in charge of checking the crew into hotels in a location by the sea, she would often request a room without a seaview for him. Today, given the stress of everything that happened onboard, she absent-mindedly handed him a keycard that Gu Nanting only realised once he had arrived in the room was for a room that fully faced the waters.

But for once, the view of the sea did not bother him.

Perhaps even ghosts from the past could not speak louder than the hollow pain of having to witness a passenger die on a flight.

It wasn’t his fault, logically Gu Nanting knew that. It hadn’t been his decision to make, and he had to, for now, believe that Jiang Tao had made the decision he deemed most appropriate, but that didn’t change the fact that Gu Nanting was still a captain of Luzhou Air, and the passenger had died on a Luzhou Air flight.

He looked down at the message from Wang Chao, the flight attendant who had accompanied the passenger and his father to the hospital. Apparently the passenger had died from an aneurysm, which was exacerbated by the change in pressure of the aircraft landing. So even if Gu Nanting had been the pilot and had the power to order a diversion, the passenger might have died regardless. And yet, knowing this, Gu Nanting couldn’t help but illogically wish he had been the captain today instead. Perhaps he would find it easier to live with what had happened, if it had happened as a result of a decision he had control of, rather than knowing he had no choice but to leave the decision to someone else, sit back knowing that a man had been dying behind him all that time.

~*~

The next morning, from the balcony of his hotel room, Gu Nanting could see a small figure exiting the hotel and making her way down to the rocks by the edge of the water. He had watched her do the walk-arounds often enough when they flew together, but he didn’t realise that her figure had become so familiar to him that he could recognise her even now, from this faraway. This walk, too, was different from the confident posture Cheng Xiao always held when doing the last minute checks on their aircraft. Now, as Gu Nanting watched her sit down on the rocks and stare out into the sea, he could see the way her shoulders hunched forward. She looked weary and tormented, even from here.

His earlier wish that he had been flying yesterday’s flight seemed absurdly selfish now. It hadn’t been his flight, and there was little he could have done about yesterday’s situation. But it had been Cheng Xiao’s flight. She had wanted to divert, but that decision had been taken out of her hands too. Now she would have to live with the consequences of her captain’s decision, and it was a situation a thousand times more painful than the what-ifs that Gu Nanting had to face.

She was so young, still. She had such romantic views of this job, of the sky and its endless freedoms. All he had tried to do when he first started teaching her was to make her understand that behind all that freedom for her, were lives that people had entrusted into their pilots’ hands. He had watched Cheng Xiao grow from that cocky cargo pilot who did not understand the full weight of all the lives in the cabin behind her, to where she was today, one of Luzhou’s most promising pilots.

Even when he was being hardest on her - and he admitted he had deliberately made things very hard for her at the beginning - he would never have dreamed that she needed whatever lesson yesterday’s flight was supposed to teach her.

How Gu Nanting wished he could spare her this senseless lesson.

~*~

He watched the lonely figure of Cheng Xiao on the rocks, with the sea lapping at her feet, for a few more minutes. Then, even if the sound of the waves still choked him, Gu Nanting made his way down to the beach too, and sat down next to her.

Re: Flight to You (a very depressing beach episode)

[raisedbymoogles]

this was not at all what I expected to get but I am delighted. you know, in a sad way.