Fanfic prompts, sorted by trope
Every prompt below works with any fandom. Swap in your characters, keep the situation and let the follow-up questions fill in the rest.
Enemies to lovers
- Two rivals are assigned the same undercover mission and have to share a single hotel room.
- The hero has to ask the villain for help, and the villain enjoys it far too much.
- Opposing team captains get snowed in at the same mountain lodge the night before the final.
- A duel ends in a draw, so the two of them are bound by a rule that says they must travel together until one wins.
- Rival chefs are forced to run the same kitchen for one chaotic week.
- The one person who always beats them at everything turns out to be their new neighbor.
Alternate universes
- Coffee shop AU: the regular who always orders something absurd finally explains why.
- Heist AU: the safecracker and the con artist used to be partners, and it ended badly.
- Space station AU: the quiet engineer and the loud captain are the last two awake on the night shift.
- Bookshop AU: someone keeps leaving notes in the margins of the same secondhand novel.
- Royal AU: the bodyguard has one rule, never fall for the person you protect.
- Small town AU: the big-city lawyer inherits a bakery and the baker who comes with it.
Fake dating and forced proximity
- Two friends pretend to be engaged so one of them can survive a family wedding.
- There is only one bed at the inn, and neither will admit they would rather share it.
- Stuck in an elevator for three hours with the person they argued with that morning.
- Fake dating to win a bet, until both of them start cheating in the same direction.
- A long train journey with two seats left, side by side, for nine hours.
- A road trip with a broken radio and a lot of things neither of them has said yet.
Fix-it fics and missing scenes
- The character who died in the finale wakes up, and nobody quite knows how to act.
- The conversation that should have happened right after the big betrayal.
- The quiet morning after the final battle, told from inside the camp.
- The time skip the show never showed, five years in five short scenes.
- An apology delivered a decade late, at a reunion nobody wanted to attend.
- The scene where the side character finally gets to say what they think.
Time and fate
- A time loop where the only way out is telling the truth to the one person they avoid.
- Soulmate marks appear on the worst possible day, in front of the worst possible person.
- A letter from their future self arrives with one instruction: do not trust your rival. Then the rival saves their life.
- They wake up married in a timeline where they never met, and the other person remembers everything.
- Every reincarnation they meet again, and every time one of them is on the wrong side.
- A prophecy says one of them must leave, and they spend a year refusing to decide who.
Found family and slow burn
- The crew adopts a stray cat and two crewmates end up sharing custody.
- After the war, the survivors open an inn together and nobody admits it's home.
- A mentor and their former apprentice, now equals, run into each other at the edge of the world.
- Two people keep showing up at the same late-night diner and never exchange names.
- A slow burn told through the same holiday, once a year, for seven years.
- The team medic has patched up the same reckless fighter so many times it has become a ritual.