Sunday Six

The spaceship rental fic is so far more [words] than my drafts tend to be, but whatever, I have words outside of brackets.

Shen Wei's first memory was someone telling him his father had died.

His life had been a life of loss. His father to an illness, his mother to a landslide, his grandmother to old age, his world to the meteor, his brother to a villain, countless comrades to war, Kunlun to a wormhole, then his world again, this time to the unstoppable hands of time. As such, he had no knowledge of sustained, close bonds beyond the one love he felt for Zhao Yunlan. On occasions, he'd fantasized of parents, but he knew his desperate dreams of youth had little bearing on the real deal.

The world had played a cruel joke on him in more ways than one when it woke him up from the ground's embrace. One aspect of the joke was that, even if a *father* would forever be out of his grasp, it had given him a mentor.

Alas, Shen Wei was no more that simple youth, and had turned into a fugitive from the scrutinizing light. He was a soldier, a time traveler, a Dixingian – and no one must ever know. Not even the reasonably kind-hearted Professor Zhou who'd taught him the joy of discovery and eagerly led Shen Wei onto the path of science.

Thus the occasional fantasy of a loving father turned into fantasies of an accepting mentor; Shen Wei confessing his true concerns and Professor Zhou being able to advise him on Dixingian politics, on learning to stop charting exit routes from every room he entered, on learning to live in the loud-bright-fast modern era he'd woken up in. In his daydreams, Professor Zhou was nothing but accepting and had useful advice to give.

Fic will feature: Hallows, bureaucracy, Shen Wei having The Worst day and falling asleep on Zhao Yunlan's shoulder. This snippet will probably be from the latter half of the fic, after Bureaucracy, Part One, but before Bureaucracy, Part Two has fully kicked in.