Just let me lie here on the tile

sundial_exchange really delivered a ton of goodies this year, for Guardian and Lost Tomb Reboot and smaller fandoms, and I haven't gone through half the things I bookmarked yet.

I received:

Squared Black Pots and Their Kettles by BadPennyGirl
Shen Wei wakes with the worst headache in the world. But there are bigger problems in the dark where he's trapped with Zhao Yunlan on top of him.

A gorgeous, INTENSE h/c story full of my favorite tropes: cave-ins! "Leave me and go"! Self-sacrifice! Hiding a wound! It's got it all, and some delightful post-canon worldbuilding into the bargain.
This is the author's first story in Guardian fandom and she made her way to the deadline through some major mishaps, so please check it out!

Gorgeous artwork by naye for my story Under a Cloudless Sky. Such a thrill to get a treat like this, with a great choice of headshots for Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei, full of suffering and tension (sigh, that's the good stuff).

I wrote:

A Tolerance for Pain (Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan, rated T, angst, h/c and Presumed Dead, 18k words) - my main gift for xparrot
Shen Wei faced the storm and let it break around him. In the center of catastrophe, he closed his eyes. He could hear no heartbeats, could feel no life around him other than his own.

Zhao Yunlan. Where are you?

I worked on this story for ages, and then in the last week before the deadline I managed two short stories as treats:

like thunder under earth (Gen, 1726 words, Chu Shuzhi & Shen Wei)
Chu Shuzhi is wounded and his Lordship can’t help him, but that’s all right. He doesn’t deserve the help, anyway.

Tailor-made (Rated G, 1905 words, Shen Wei and his tailor)
"You mean to tell me—you sit here drinking my tea and you mean to tell me that you have been visiting shops that sell leisure apparel?" Lao Xie could not have sounded more horrified if Shen Wei had confessed to being a crime boss.

So I got very lucky for this first Sundial Exchange - frith_in_thorns wrote me a Guardian story! And she obviously read the heavily encoded secret signal of my heart, because she wrote me a "WHAT IF SNOW?" story, AGAIN. She is amazing like that. And as I may have mentioned before, that slogan just covers everything I want out of fanfic, because it's hurt/comfort stripped down to its bare bones. What if snow? What if hurt? What if frozen? What IF?

But I should clarify that this is not any kind of remake - this is a new and original story, with a clever take on Shen Wei's powers that I just love, and with a gorgeous, intense setting that I would love to see on film. And Shen Wei is hurt, and Zhao Yunlan is there for him, and oh, happy sigh...

Ice and Shard (5367 words) by frith_in_thorns
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shěn Wēi/Zhào Yúnlán
Characters: Shěn Wēi, Zhào Yúnlán
Additional Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Snow and Ice, Dixing powers do what I want them to, Fever, Delirium, handwavy post-canon
Summary:

Zhao Yunlan didn't know what made him realise that something was wrong. But something definitely was.