presumenothing | 3SF ficlets, part 3! (AU galore edition)

Yet more prompt fills from today's 3 Sentence Ficathon harvest, previous archive posts here and here!

A half-sized batch of four ficlets this time, all Guardian… and all from wildly different AUs! Including yet another crack crossover, because nobody stopped me least of all myself. Please fasten your seat belts when the captain turns the light on, et cetera.

GUARDIAN

daemon au [atop novel-verse backstory]

Zhao Yunlan can't help the half-bitter laugh – and here he'd been thinking it some momentous confidence, that moment when he'd leaned in too-close to Shen Wei's ear to whisper the secret is I don't have a daemon, Da Qing's only pretending –

Not that it takes much acting by this point, what with them already living out of each others' pockets, and it just makes things easier for the SID's chief to seem a mostly-normal daemon-having human; Lao Chu and Zhu Hong both suspect the truth, he thinks, but the only ones certain are the few Zhao Yunlan has told himself.

Or so he'd thought… except Shen Wei had already known because he'd been the one to deliver Kunlun's soul into the reincarnation cycle, ancient and solitary beyond even the moment when Nuwa had first pressed mud into human shapes with soul-animals attached, had known and said I'm not sure you should trust me with this anyway and if all this isn't messed up Zhao Yunlan doesn't know what is.

do you want me to spend some time sitting next to you?

"Thought you'd still be out there trying to save the world," Zhao Yunlan sighs, still leaning back against the wall, but he doesn't need to blink open his eyes to see the slight shake of Shen Wei's head.

Nothing to be done, because turns out they needn't have worried about the unrest brewing in Dixing after all; not even the Black-Cloaked Envoy can stop a second meteor.

"Could I…" starts Shen Wei – asks Xiao Wei, voice soft like an admission, and what a shame there won't be time to invent more names than that but Zhao Yunlan reaches up to pull Shen Wei down beside him anyway because at least there can be this: a warm body pressed against his own, smiling into a familiar silence as they wait for the world to end.

The Department for the Regulation of Temporal Incidents

"The risk of becoming untethered in time – anchors as powerful as the Hallows aren't meant for mortal use, Zhao Yunlan, there's a reason the SID's clock portals have such short limits built in," Shen Wei says, and the frustration is all his even if the words are mostly the Black-Cloaked Envoy's.

"That's the first time I've heard you say 'SID', I think, instead of the Department or…" Zhao Yunlan waves a hand to encompass the overly-troublesome full name that only their paperwork (and worse yet, Zhao Xinci) actually uses, because even his approval stamp abbreviates it to Department of Time, but another observation is already crowding to the forefront. "And you're not actually surprised, which means this has probably already happened, to you, and that means – when did you really first meet me, Shen Wei?"

GUARDIAN / WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE

weirdest crossover

Not that Zhao Yunlan had ever hypothesised about what the afterlife might look like, but even on his drunkest night none of this would've been on the cards: pricking his thumb to open their door while balancing a bowl of something that he's pretty sure is not pizza (unless everything he'd heard about America had been false? not impossible), to find Shen Wei looking mildly perturbed in a way that on anyone else would resemble screaming hysteria.

"The man on the radio knows our names and appearances – he called me an angel," he says without Zhao Yunlan even needing to ask, and wow, if all it takes to get actual answers from Shen Wei is waking up in strange towns after dying messily to save the world they should totally do it more often.

…maybe minus the dying part, because even he's gotta admit that had kinda sucked, but you can't have everything and all Zhao Yunlan's ever wanted is looking back at him anyway; whoever Radio Guy is he's definitely correct about angel at least.