City Between AU I Will Never Write
I just finished my City Between reread, and I am now fascinated by this idea:
Shortly before book one, North needs something from Zero. Maybe in this AU the kidnapping attempts on Sarah have escalated more quickly; maybe someone else makes a play for her. Regardless, she needs Zero's help and she's suspicious of Upper Management, so she offers him the same flash drive of information in trade that she eventually offers him in canon.
He wants information on his mother, so he accepts.
Unlike in canon, this transaction goes smoothly. He doesn't free Sarah from her contract, but he protects her from the current threat, and she still has some time before her deadline. He gets the flash drive and looks at it immediately.
. . . and promptly discovers some things about his half sister and her descendants.
I don't think we ever got a full picture of exactly what was on that flash drive, just what conclusions it eventually led Zero to, so let's be generous here.
He finds out his sister married and had descendants. He finds out their names. He finds out his sister's daughter died of natural causes at a respectable age for a human.
He finds out her granddaughter did not.
That she was, in fact, one of the peripheral victims he's been largely ignoring in the case he's investigating.
And he finds, in the file, that the granddaughter had a daughter of her own. A daughter that the police file records frustratingly few traces of.
A daughter that might be missing. Might be dead.
Zero would never have dreamed of approaching any of his sister's descendants. He knew all too well what happened to humans he got close to.
He could never have approached her granddaughter. But investigating her murder . . .
Well, he had already assigned himself that string of murders anyway. It's not like he can do her any harm now, and maybe he can at least avenge her.
And the child the police report refuses to name - maybe he can avenge her too.
(Maybe he can find her. It's too risky to put himself in her life, but if she's been kidnapped, surely she'd be better off if he looked for her -)
He goes to the house to investigate. There's something odd there. He's not sure what yet.
A few days later, another of the murders occur across the road, JinYeong finally catches up to him, and Athelas shows up to investigate.
JinYeong questions nothing. Athelas notices that Zero had already purchased the house.
Athelas is not suspicious, exactly, for obvious reasons, though for form's sake, he does remind Zero that he's entirely at his service, and if Zero would rather they not investigate this particular murder too closely - A poor joke, my lord, of course.
And Athelas is quite genuinely poking his nose around to see why Zero was already here and why Athelas failed to notice it.
Zero . . . trusts Athelas. He can probably trust him with this. If the child is dead, he can certainly trust Athelas with this; it's only if the child is alive -
If the last remnant of his sister is alive, and through Athelas his father learns of it -
No. He just needs to pick enough fights to drive the others off without making them too suspicious so that he can investigate the house and its strangeness in peace -
There's a child hiding in the kitchen cupboard. A teenager, she informs him hotly.
JinYeong and Athelas have already seen.
. . . That doesn't mean they have to know. No one has to know.
Athelas certainly can't know, and yet he clearly suspects something -
Pet knows why she's panicking about this situation, but she's entirely unclear about why the giant man with the sword is.
(I don't know that it would change much about the overall plot for Zero to know Pet's his (great-great-) niece from the beginning, but it would certainly change some emotional beats . . . and probably complicate things between Zero, Athelas, and JinYeong, given the already complicated tangle of trust and mistrust between them at the beginning of the series.
