(no subject)

[meatbrained]

( five + one )

how it works:

i. post a comment with the characters you play.
ii. go around and prompt other players with a 5 + 1 prompt (e.g. "Five times Hope said sorry and one time he didn't")
iii. write a fic for the prompts people leave you!
iv. enjoy your fic? we hope?

Comments

[mismanagement]

five times Matt did the right thing and one where he didn't

five times Kate toed the line and one time she crossed it

interpret as you wish :)

1/2

[meatbrained]

| five times Matt did the right thing and one where he didn't

First rule: be a friend to those who need it.

Matt likes to think he follows the rules his mom lays out with that tone only a mother could (strict and warm all the same) as best he can. Be a friend. Listen to your mom. Do your chores and your homework. Perfection remains out of his grasp all the time - sometimes he rushes his weekend chores in order to spend more time playing video games, or he forgets a few problems for his math class (in his defence, the textbook pages stuck together and he didn't realise there were more between the end of the unit on graphs and the beginning of the one on algebra) - but he tries. He does the right thing where he can, listens to his mother and spends evenings helping her cook, doing laundry on the weekends, all these skills she says he'll need once he's at college and she isn't around to pick up the slack every night.

He's the kid who'll help an old lady cross the street if he sees her struggling with an overactive jack russell and too many bags of groceries. That kid who stops arguments but tries to stand up to jerks where he can.

Be a friend to those who need it.

It's scary, sometimes. A lot of the time. His house is loud with the constant comings and goings of people, of children who need attention and fuss, but the strained screech of arguments so rarely makes its way inside the walls. Sometimes doing the right thing means he must ignore the part of him that just wants it all to be over, to be quiet and happy - or loud and happy. (Really, happy is all he wants.)

But then he hears be a friend to those who need it. And he has to be.

He stumbles into friendships with the girls this way, ends up tagging into the circle that the boys have created and being a friend in more ways than simply standing up for them. He chats and plays games, dates and loves and drinks and does all the silly things a teenager does.

Emily finds herself seething at Hannah's flirtations towards Mike and Jess comes up with a solution.

Matt decides to be a friend to those who need it once more.

He chooses wrongly.

2/2 INTERPRET AS I WISH HMMM. have an au then

[dedikated]

| five times Kate toed the line and one time she crossed it

「IT'S BEEN A LONG ROUGH ROAD AND I'M FINALLY HERE」
Sprinting, Kate finds, is very different to the triple jump. You're held in position, left with the anticipation building in your veins, thundering in your ears with each shift

Ready.

Set.

Her fingers shake.

She stays behind the line until the gunshot echoes in her ears and suddenly everything is a blur of pulsing speed and rushing air.

(She takes home silver. Not quite quick enough.)

「I MOVE AN INCH FORWARD」
The next time, she goes home without any medal at all. Her feet don't find the push to start until the smoke of the gun has cleared and by then it's too late.

Her competition - girls three years older than her at least - smile and gossip and never quite include her. Too young, too short to be part of this, even if she does reach the age group limit.

「FEELS LIKE A YEAR」
She goes back to triple jump for a while, springs with a hop skip and jump and starts taking home medals once more. It's beautiful, easy. Gold begins to line the wall of her father's office again and she hears him gushing to his new teaching assistant about how great his kids are, but Kat-

Well, just look at what she's achieved. We'll see her in the Olympics soon enough!

She flushes pink but grits her teeth at practice, fails a jump when the kids who were practicing for the 400 meters dash by.

Triple jump is never quite the same after that.

「EVERYTHING I FEEL SEEMS SO UNREAL」
It's mid-practice when her coach turns to her - he's a burly man, a former weightlifter that never really explained how he moved into coaching triple jump, of all things, with no hair and a constant case of sunburn because he thinks sunscreen is for girls - and snaps.

Concentrate, Galloway! Stop drooling over the boys!

(The men's relay teams are training and she keeps watching, engrossed in the thud of trainer against rubberised asphalt and the swell of muscle. The men are secondary, they exist as nothing more than vague concepts of where she could be, rather than smashing her ass into sand again and again.)

"I'm not. I'm done. This isn't what I want any more."

She crosses the field and talks to the sprint coach instead.

「IS IT TRUE?」
She's twenty, finally.

But more importantly, it's the Olympics. Finally.

Her eyes flick to the stands before the announcement begins, catches the glint of her father's glasses, the nick of her mother's head, the sight of Marc buzzing in his seat next to his own parents (and hears the go get 'em! echoing in her head). She scans more faces, lowers her eyes towards where her coach sits, legs folded neatly and sunglasses on-

and catches the sight of a bald, sunburned head and the rare sort of smile her ex-coach only ever used when she held a gold medal aloft at local competitions.

When the gunshot rings, she's the first to pull away from the line. In time and ahead.

One gold for Team Great Britain down. There's more to come.

[dogsanddaughters]

!!!!!!

Wow! I didn't expect the direction either of these went in. I'm still in the middle of the playthrough for Until Dawn, so I haven't had a chance to see much of of Matt in action just yet, but that last bit just made his character click for me. I'm used to seeing him through Emily, if that makes sense, and now suddenly he's got motivations and a life all his own. It's so simple and it's easy to see where he could think he'd done the right thing, because he's the guy who helps! He's helping! Only it goes wrong, and he's left with this thing that happens, which really doesn't click with who he's supposed to be.

And Kate as an olympian! Unexpected, but oddly perfect? She struggles and finally gets it in the end.

Thank you for sharing these :)

[meatbrained]

YEA MATT DISAPPEARS FOR THE LONGEST ASS TIME it's a little rude tbh. WTF UD writers. :| But he's such a cutie and it is really nice to play someone who actually attempts and mostly manages to be a normal, decent person /puffs out cheeks. ;-; His involvement in the prank is a bit of a difficult one to think up reasons for tbh because he's generally just nice and that so isn't??????? But I can see it being a mix of "don't want to argue with Em and Jess" and "Em's clearly hurt about this we should do something" with a pinch of "it won't be THAT bad right?"

This canon pains me. >X

IT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF HER LIFE DIDN'T GO FULL BATMAN. ;-; I hurt myself writing happy AUs oop.