So apparently the traditions of being chucked out of the triad gang are that, once you’ve stabbed yourself in the leg (for reasons not entirely clear) you have to walk (or limp) a gauntlet of your former fellow gang members who beat you with big sticks as you go… cue lots of whump with a nice side serving of angst…
“When I came out of the asylum, the person who collected me was Edward Hardwicke. He took me to an Italian restaurant. I had a pasta and a glass of red wine. He then drove me back to my home where we sat and had a cup of tea. It was Edward Hardwicke. He is one of the loveliest people, and I suppose he is the best friend that any man has ever had….in life. Which is after all how Doyle describes Watson.”
Characters: Shěn Wēi, Zhào Yúnlán, Dà Qìng, Yè Zūn, The SID Team
Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Angst with a Happy Ending, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, (…yeah the established relationship comes before the pining and slow burn), Mind Manipulation, Hurt/Comfort, Alternate Universe – Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe – Canon Divergence, Fix-It, Overthinking Guardian canon, Good thing fic has an unlimited f/x budget, word count: 50k-100k
Summary:
Ye Zun tries a different tactic to defeat his brother, that may tear apart everything Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan have worked to build between them.
“Trust me,” Zhao Yunlan says.
Shen Wei actually huffs at him, as if he is being so patently ridiculous that fear-tinged fury would be too dignified an answer. “How can I trust you?”
***
And so it begins… The final line here was the third #fictober18 prompt, and quite derailed my participation in that particular project. Because apparently you can’t just write a nice angsty scene with no explanation or resolution and leave it at that?
“But @xparrot ,” I tried to argue. “If I do that I’m going to end up writing a fix-it for the entire show!”
Somehow that wasn’t a persuasive enough argument not to write, and here I am, over 60k words deep and ready to drag everyone down with me. And how is it going? Well, good enough to win such praise as “you managed to make this at least 80% less stupid than it is in the show!”
Misogyny and ageism aside, the message that older women should leave fandom and stick to conservative activities like “knitting and taxes” reveals a major ignorance of the nature of knitters.
To follow-up on my many, many words about Brotherhood being a story about mercy and breaking the chain of violence, another thing I appreciate about it is that it acknowledges the difficulty of sticking that course. Being kind in a world that thrives on hatred is hard. And it’s dangerous: Ed ends up impaled by a steel beam because he tried to take Kimblee alive rather than take the easy way out of killing him. But he accepts that consequence in the end, even going so far as to tell Kimblee’s newly turncoat bodyguards, “If this is what mercy’s gonna cost, then I’ve gotta learn to pay the price.” It’s a powerful moment in what’s already one of the show’s most gut-wrenching scenes, and it speaks volumes about the maturity of thought Arakawa put into this tale.
(Also, he refuses to give in and die to his pain because he doesn’t want to make WInry cry “over something this stupid” and look I really just love how much they care about each other okay)
That point in a piece of fanfiction where you can tell something embarrassing is about to happen so you start fucking around on tumblr because you’re a huge baby with a crippling overabudance of empathy.
I do this with every media I consume. I pause movies and have to walk around and prepare myself for second-hand embarrassment sometimes.
Lady Karasu 