This week’s Featured Article is all about the end of the world! An Apocalypse AU is a trope where a fanwork is set during or after an apocalyptic event and the characters must survive harsh and devastating conditions. This trope is often associated with fanfiction (sometimes called Apocafics), but it appears across all types of fanworks.
Some fandoms have built-in apocalypse potential that characters fight against in canon. In those cases, the apocalypse is typically averted. For example, in the TV series Forever Knight, an asteroid threatens Earth in one episode; although it does not collide with Earth in the show, some canon-divergent AU fanworks often explore what might have happened should that apocalyptic event have occurred. Other fandoms, like Jeremiah or Battlestar Galactica, are already set in an apocalyptic setting in canon, so fanworks that explore this are usually not labeled as an alternate universe unless a new, different apocalypse is created.
These fanworks explore common tropes like survival, found family, and hurt/comfort. Characters search for food and shelter, fight creatures like feral animals or zombies, build communities, and support each other through shared trauma. Apocalypse AUs can also serve as vehicles for political and social commentary, reflecting current societal fears even when set in distant futures or faraway universes.
How would your favorite characters survive the end of the world? Head over to Fanlore to learn more!
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An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/3
Fandom: The Sandman (TV 2022), Reign of Fire (2002)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus/Hob Gadling
Characters: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Hob Gadling, Destiny of the Endless, Desire of the Endless, Death of the Endless, Despair of the Endless, Destruction of the Endless, Delight of the Endless, Orpheus (The Sandman), Calliope (The Sandman), Unity Kinkaid
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Canonical Character Death, Several of them actually, Nightmares, Dragons, Hopeful Ending
Summary:
What if the absence of Dream of the Endless broke the world much, much more than it did in canon? What if the Corinthian was one of the least dangerous nightmares to escape into the Waking world in his absence? What if Dream got free and discovered a Waking world that needed to be rebuilt as much as the Dreaming?
(And, because I ship Dreamling too hard for anything else: what if Hob Gadling was out there in that broken world, still waiting for him?)
Hi! You always seem to know where to find obscure Sherlock fics. Quite a few years back, I read a wonderful post-apocalyptic story where John and Sherlock are living a rather nomadic life wandering the UK after a terrible pandemic has swept through the population. I honestly can’t recall if it was a zombie story or not. Eventually, Sherlock contracts the virus, and they set up together in an abandoned house in order to hide out from other survivors, and John sets up an isolation curtain between them, to wait until Sherlock dies from the virus. Again, if I recall correctly, Sherlock survives, although he is left terribly scarred.
Does this ring any bell for you or your readers? I would dearly love to read it again! Thanks.
Reply: There are a few that match the first part (wandering the UK during a pandemic/apocalypse/etc.) but I’ve looked through my bookmarks and am not finding any with the detail about the isolation curtain. Here are the relevant lists if you want to have a look yourself:
Apocalypse fics
Zombie fics
And a few more close ones I came across while looking:
Blood spilled among white roses by Aeriane_Parkes (16K, E, Johnlock)
Sherlock must find a way home in the midst of a pandemic, while is barely surviving on his own in an abandoned cottage in the Australian wilderness, but when he meets a man staunchly resembled his lifelong friend attempting to find someone to care for his daughter before his time runs out, Sherlock suddenly find the will to break through this hellish limbo and return home, no matter how dangerous it may be.
Chosen by Remy_Writes5 (37K, E, Johnlock, Mystrade, MorMor)
After the collapse of civilization and the spread of "the sickness", Mycroft Holmes has risen to power. As his younger brother, Sherlock Holmes gets to choose the alpha to see him through his heats. John Watson has been chosen.
Clever Dead by jesso (11K, T, Johnlock)
There's a zombie apocalypse going down and it's too little too late when John finally realizes that they're up shit creek without a paddle. In trying to escape London, Sherlock and John get separated in a way that changes them both, only to be reunited much later.
Five More Minutes by Vanya (16K, M, Johnlock, Mystrade)
Sherlock and John try to survive the end of the world as they know it. Separated from their group, their main focus is to survive and try to get as far North as they can. Unfortunate circumstances follow. Will this world be too much for them to survive?
Haemophilia by kaasknot (10K, T, Johnlock)
It started at Baskerville. A leaky pipe, a faulty experiment left to seed by an absent scientist; in the end, it didn't matter. What mattered was that an epidemic spilled through the medical halls of Baskerville, and no one knew the cause—or how to treat it.
Tomorrow by FivePips (41K, M, Johnlock)
We join Sherlock and John two weeks into the Zombie Apocalypse. Sherlock has barely spoken a word, he's been mostly pacing the living room of 221B. John has been making the flat as secure as possible while wishing it was more Shaun of the Dead than The Walking Dead. But now Sherlock believes it is time to leave London for a sparsely populated area on the coast. On their way out of the city the meet a few familiar faces and they join their party, to Sherlock's dismay.
I’ve made progress with Mary’s diary. As I suspected, it’s more personal in nature than what she wrote for the Order. She writes about things she’s seen in the past, about things she can sense in the wider universe beyond this small world. She wrote about things she’d seen in the past. She wrote down ordinary dreams and visions of futures that were not included in the prophecies she gave to the Order.
I strongly suspect she may have started berry picking her visions at some point. Definitely on her visions concerning Chrono, who she writes about extensively. Or rather, the dreams she has about him, and about her very careful planning to ensure no one is hurt when he comes for her. (She dithers a bit, debating whether it would do any good to leave a note requesting that no one come after her. It is strangely charming.) Reading her plan out how she’s going to leave the Order with Chrono, seeing the mathematical precision of her plans, her analysis of obstacles and how she plans to circumvent them made me feel like an idiot.
I’d been surprised she’d been able to understand demon technology so quickly. I had had a not unreasonable expectation that certain concepts would be difficult for her to grasp. Now I strongly suspect she was looking at our sensors and computing devices and saying to herself, “oh, how clever! They have machines who do all the tedious calculations and tracking for them!” I may have ranted about this a bit to Shader, who was less than impressed with my realization.
“You were looking at it the wrong way around, boss. She wasn’t a medium with a divining rod; she was a networked satellite sensor array.”
“You were surprised too,” I tell her.
“Says the man who just now figured it more than fifty years later,” Shader says in reply. She mocked me at length and then sent me off to make minor repairs in the control center.
It should be noted that Rosette and Joshua are recovered enough, and restless enough that beginning some weapons training lessons are necessary. Rosette would of course much prefer her firearms, but there is a certain shortage of ammunition and gunpowder at the moment. Joshua was eager to begin sword lessons again, and it turns out that Chrono gave Rosette some basic close-quarter shortblade lessons as well as hand to hand. I think she might do well with a long sword.
I had Rosette working on basic exercises while I worked with Joshua. This was mostly footwork, a review of defense and a light spar at half speed. Rosette was greatly distracted out of concern for her brother and suspicion for me. I had to correct her and redirect her to her exercises several times. After sparring with Joshua, I critiqued his form, and then had him briefly work with Rosette.
The activity was diverting for both Rosette and Joshua, though Rosette still grumbled about the lack of firearms. Guns are better than swords. Swords are just dumb long knives. Demons have all this technology but don’t have firearms, so on and so forth. Joshua, for some reason wanting to defend Sinner honor, mentions “the gun decks.”
Rosette’s eyes light up in a way that is absolutely uncanny. Despite being worn down a bit by all the exercise, she wants to see the guns decks. This leads to a trip to the control room, where I show Rosette Eden’s defense systems, which includes the artillery arrays and the firing-spears. Rosette immediately wants to use one and is very disappointed that due to ongoing repairs, the firing spears are offline.
“You could still fight with them as regular polearms,” I point out.
“I could use my .45 like a blackjack,” she says.
“Rifles have bayonets,” I say. “Firing spears are more functional.”
“They have hoses,” Rosette points out. “They are basically tied to their source of ammo.”
“They can also be operated using your own astral,” I say.
We argue about it all the way back to the living areas of Eden. It was rather entertaining. Joshua was certainly amused, and kept switching sides.
I am still having strange dreams. I have been dreaming more often of the burning house, and a woman singing. I know who the woman is, but I am filled with anxiety that I might actually see her. That what I’m hearing is the song of a monster from the depths (beneath the waves, beyond the stars). At the same time, I’m pulled strongly in the direction of the cabin, in the direction of the woman’s voice. I need to see her, to confirm one way or another whether I will see the woman or the monster.
I’m wearing my armor; my sword is in my hand with blood drying on the blade. Again and again I start toward the singing, and each time, Mary is there, blocking my way, blood staining her dress. “No, Aion,” she says in the most recent dream. “Not like this. Not with your sword and your armor. You’ll frighten her.”
No matter what I say to convince her she won’t let me pass, and I can’t move her aside, and the dream fragments into a confusion of images and sensory impressions. Sometimes when I wake up I think I hear flames crackling. More often, I just have a headache and feel like I never actually went to sleep.
“Not with your sword and your armor,” Mary says. “You’ll frighten her,” she says. As if I was choosing to appear in the dream that way, instead of wearing what my subconscious dictated. I was tempted to go to the place where I’d spoken to her before to give her part of my mind on the subject, but I felt a certain caution about it. I do not want to confirm that Mary was somehow in my dreams holding me back from something that was actually there. I do not want to confirm the presence of a “her,” interrupting my sleep with her grief, her burning cabin and her dead husband.
Three flowers = at least three sentences, right? Not that I've successfully kept any of these to one sentence, but still.
"Ah," he said softly. "You're growing."
"They need me to," she said. "And I guess I was ready, anyway."
She shook her head, and he could see now that her hair, still in rainbow curls, was now growing out blonde at the roots--not the bright flaxen color of her first incarnation, but a burnished gold.
"I survived," she said. "I came through all this, still here, and it didn't kill me, and I'm growing. Still growing."
From my main NaNoWriMo project, a Dreamling fic about the apocalypse hitting while Dream is stuck in his glass cage, and it changes a lot of things for pretty much everyone, including the youngest of the Endless.
(It's sort of a fusion with the 2002 film Reign of Fire but that is mostly not something anyone but me needs to know about it.)
It had been almost no surprise at all to recognize the figure approaching him--the only living person or sign of one Dream had encountered in the hours his nightmare steed had been carrying him away from Fawney Rig--was Hob Gadling.
Of course Hob was still alive. Perhaps only Hob, but at least that one person.
His friend. In all the world, however it was broken, however his failures had broken it, he still had one friend.
Also from the apocafic, and a large part of the reason I wanted to write a (post-)apocalypse AU for Dreamling--because we know Hob's going to be there, still going along being himself, and this is a scenario where Dream needs that... a lot more undeniably than he does in canon.
