Tiny Fandoms Flash

It certainly wasn’t the first time Qiao Ling managed to wake Cheng Xiaoshi in his bed by covering his mouth, but it was certainly a habit he hoped she outgrew and left behind in their childhood years (especially after he gained a roommate!). Besides the customary jerk and muffled shout from the rude awakening, he didn’t even question why she was at his bedside so early in the morning and how she had gotten in. She was the landlady, after all.

“Shh!” Qiao Ling hissed and Cheng Xiaoshi made a muffled noise of protest, jerking against his blanket. Her hand was cold from the morning air and she was dressed for the outdoors, with a jacket and knit hat over her hair.

He froze, and they were both silent for a moment listening to Lu Guang’s steady breathing in the bunk bed above. Several uninterrupted seconds later, Cheng Xiaoshi relaxed, and Qiao Ling did too, finally lifting her cold hand from his mouth.

“What are you doing here?” He hissed at her, clutching his blanket up to his neck like a dishonoured maiden. “Can’t you be normal and call to wake me up? Or wait outside? Why are you so weird?”

Qiao Ling puffed up like an angry bird for a second (which looked hilarious on her knees and bundled up in his thick winter coat and scarf) before she hissed back, “I’m weird? Why don’t you look in a mirror sometime— no. Never mind that. Cheng Xiaoshi! I need you to do something for me!”

Lu Guang shifted in the top bunk, and the both of them froze yet again. It took another few seconds before the two of them visibly relaxed, shoulders coming down from their ears.

Cheng Xiaoshi, morning grogginess shocked from his system from the surprise visit, whispered, “Fine. What do you need?”

Because it had been nearly a decade since the last time she woke him up like this, and it looked as if she had left her house in a hurry, hair uncombed and face free from the shine of her usual morning skincare routine. He was sure that she would get back to it later, but if it was important enough for her to forgo it…

Qiao Ling’s dark eyes took on a glint, and she pushed into his space to say, “I have a job for you two. I need you to help me convince Lu Guang to take it.”

—

The Time Photo Studio had several spoken and unspoken rules. One of the spoken rules (nailed to the wall, even) was that Cheng Xiaoshi didn’t do anything stupid without Lu Guang to supervise. That meant it was Lu Guang who chose the jobs they did on a case-to-case basis, and even Qiao Ling knew her special request would have to go through the white-haired man first.

One of their unspoken rules was that they did not take jobs from foreign clients, and they especially didn’t take jobs from foreign Hunters.

And therein lay Qiao Ling’s dilemma.

“No,” Lu Guang said firmly.

“C’mon, at least pretend to think about it,” Cheng Xiaoshi wheedled as he leaned over the counter with his hands clasped in front of himself and a pout ready. Qiao Ling had left to get the three of them breakfast (jianbing and warm soy milk from a stall that usually parked two streets away, with a bonus of tofu pudding to bribe Lu Guang with), having coached Cheng Xiaoshi on what to do and say.

“We do not deal with Hunters,” Lu Guang shot him down. “Especially not foreign ones.”

It was true. Despite the both of them having awakened as F-class hunters, they were barely on the fringes of government notice. They had to register in order to excuse their abilities, but with the bare basics of an inventory and a skill that took two people to navigate, they were excused from having to raid dungeons.

Dungeon raiding would make far more money than the old photo studio, but Cheng Xiaoshi didn’t feel a need to put himself, and Lu Guang, in danger like that. Neither of them were well suited for combat, but Lu Guang even less so.

“Don’t think of it as a foreign Hunter,” Cheng Xiaoshi pleaded as he leaned further on the counter until his belly was touching the wood, sending him half-sprawled in front of Lu Guang. “Think of it as helping out Qiao Ling’s online friend!”

“Who is a foreign Hunter,” Lu Guang said flatly.

“An online friend,” Cheng Xiaoshi repeated.

“It’s not just a foreign friend, even I have heard of his name before,” Lu Guang denied as he set down the note that Qiao Ling had written about the person she was requesting help for.

Han Yoojin.

A Korean F-class Hunter best known for being the brother of one of the strongest S-class Hunters in the world, according to the latest tournament records placing Han Yoohyun in fourth place. Cheng Xiaoshi himself didn’t know much about the man other than that as he didn’t follow news about foreign Hunters. But Qiao Ling was determined to help him, and he knew her to be a good judge of character.

“It’s for Qiao Ling,” Cheng Xiaoshi continued to wheedle, although by now he had given up on attempting to reach over the counter, instead resting his whole body down on the cool wood, pressing his check against his arm. “She rarely asks these things from us.”

“It has nothing to do with us,” Lu Guang denied, “and nothing to do with her, either. The man is infamous for being a menace to his family. Do you really want to help someone like that?”

Was that right? That couldn’t be right. Cheng Xiaoshi didn’t follow foreign news, but he trusted Qiao Ling. He also trusted Lu Guang.

“If we contact him, then our activity might be tracked,” Lu Guang continued to warn. “Not only by our own government, but by Haeyeon as well.”

The name sounded vaguely familiar to Cheng Xiaoshi.

“But Qiao Ling,” he whined, “and— and, and! For me, too?”

“You don’t even know who it is.” Lu Guang said.

“That’s exactly why I asked the two of you to take this one,” Qiao Ling’s voice rang from the other room, the doorbell chiming to signal her reappearance. There was a moment of quiet as she made her way to the sitting area with several plastic bags resting on her arms and an egg-carton tray of drinks. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold, coat and scarf already off even as she kept the knit cap on. Cheng Xiaoshi suspected she was trying to hide unwashed hair. “Haeyeon doesn’t need to figure it out, either, or at least more than they already know. I’ve been chatting with him for months, and haven’t noticed any surveillance.”

“You’ve been chatting with a foreign Hunter for months?”

“No need to sound surprised,” Qiao Ling responded to Lu Guang’s inquiry as she set down the drinks on the counter, nudging Cheng Xiaoshi in the ribs to get him to slide away so she had the room to set down the steaming food. His mouth was already salivating from the smells of various sauces. “It was through a common interest forum. People still use those, you know.”

“What could you have in common with a foreign Hunter?” Cheng Xiaoshi asked, pulling himself back into an upright position as he waited very patiently for her to dole out the food. “You’re not awakened.”

“That’s not the only thing that defines me!” She protested, handing Lu Guang a small white plastic bag of food first. Cheng Xiaoshi would claim that she was being biased if he didn’t already know that she was trying to get on his good side.

Instead, he made grabby-hands at her and watched as she sighed before handing him a portion of food as well, and then sticking his face into the open plastic bag to get a good long whiff of the tianbing.

The conversation halted as she sat and the three of them started on breakfast, occasionally making comments on how good the food was.

“Actually,” Qiao Ling spoke up after they finished most of the food, hands wrapped around the warm cup of soy milk as she glanced down at the liquid, “we started talking over a video about Hunter Chloe. I didn’t know who he was back then, but he seemed nice enough. I didn’t find out his identity until recently, when he was doxxed. He’s not as bad as the news makes him out to be. I have a feeling that someone is actively trying to slander him, even, and that it’s been getting really bad lately. Something just doesn’t add up, you know?”

Cheng Xiaoshi didn’t know anything about the Hunter they were talking about. He looked between the two of them as he shoved the last bite of jianbing in his mouth, chewing thoughtfully.

“...Am I the only one here who doesn’t know?” He asked them.

Qiao Ling scrunched her face up and made an exasperated noise before chucking her wax paper wrapper at him. Cheng Xiaoshi dodged to the side and let the balled up paper bounce harmlessly off the sofa cushion next to him.

“He’s fairly infamous in his country for bad behavior,” Lu Guang stated flatly. “Han Yoojin has a tendency to survive dungeons where everyone else dies. You can see the kind of picture that paints.”

“He’s not like that!” Qiao Ling protested, and then bit her lip as they turned to look at her. “I heard about those kinds of people, too. The kind that lure people into dungeons and kill them, or run away when they need help… but the person I spoke to isn’t like that at all. He feels— resigned. Like things keep happening to him, and he can’t break free from it. He doesn’t talk about it, but… he’s sad. I can tell. And I’m not being naive about this!”

Cheng Xiaoshi frowned. It wasn’t like Qiao Ling to behave like this, and as an F-rank Hunter, he had been warned plenty of times about the type of teammates to be wary of. Someone who continuously survived whole team wipes was a very large red flag. “Maybe Lu Guang has a point. That kind of person… is kind of dangerous, isn’t he?”

“But I don’t think he’s to blame! I think…” Qiao Ling looked down at her drink again, mouth set in a grim line. “I know there’s nothing I can do to help him, especially since he’s so far away and doesn’t even want people to know who he is. I can’t solve anything for him. Even if you guys help, it might not make anything better.

“But I just think… These things keep happening to him, and people hate him more and more, and he just gets quieter and quieter each time I talk to him, and he keeps going back into dungeons. I just have a terrible feeling that one day he’ll walk into a dungeon and not try to walk back out. And if that happens, I… I don’t want to be the kind of person who contributed to that just by staying silent.”

Qiao Ling’s eyes closed for a second as she sighed, and then she glanced up with steely determination.

“So I’m the one commissioning this case. If it gets to be too much, I want you to stop. But I need to—” She tensed her jaw, head held high. “I need to at least try to do something, instead of looking away and pretending that there was nothing I could have done.”

Oh.

Cheng Xiaoshi suddenly realised just why Qiao Ling was willing to wake him up for this.

Lu Guang seemed to have other ideas.

“Have you thought about whether he would agree?” The white-haired man asked her.

Qiao Ling nodded, and pulled out her phone, swiping in her passcode as she responded, “I asked him. While he might not have believed me… he did send me a few pictures. I asked if there was anything I could help him with, anything he wanted to know…”

She set her phone down on the table, revealing a foreign video app set to a private messaging section. Within were several messages auto-translated, and a handful of snapshots. Photos of photos, it looked like.

Qiao Ling’s voice was pensive as she continued, “He wanted to know where he went wrong. The media paints him out to be this horrible villain of a brother, but… that’s not what these pictures look like. He honestly wants to know. Said that if he could at least learn what he did wrong, then maybe he could— well, he didn’t say ‘make up for it’. But I could infer something, at least.”

Lu Guang quietly turned the phone to look at it, expression still blank as he asked, “Does he even know what we do?”

“I told him the spiel about ‘remembering for people’. He understands the implications.”

“Lu Guang,” Cheng Xiaoshi spoke up, watching as the other man’s face was illuminated by the glow of the phone. Lu Guang’s dark brows furrowed, betraying his frustration on his otherwise expressionless face. He wanted to help Qiao Ling, but he was also on the fence about this job. “...Whatever you think, we’ll do.”

He wanted to help, but there were too many jobs that burned them.

“Please,” Qiao Ling said quietly. “I’ll commission it. If it starts feeling off, you can stop and I won’t ask again. I do think there’s something weird going on, but I won’t endanger you. I just don’t want to sit on my hands doing nothing.”

Lu Guang looked toward Cheng Xiaoshi, who was quietly leaning to peer at the phone.

“What do you think?” Lu Guang asked.

Cheng Xiaoshi didn’t know what to think. He felt like he didn’t have enough information. But he could understand Lu Guang’s apprehensions, and his reluctance. They didn’t involve themselves with Hunters, they didn’t step into politics, and they didn’t entangle themselves in foreign affairs. This one case could break all three rules, and those rules were set for a reason.

But… he was intrigued to know what Qiao Ling saw. He wanted to know why she felt so heavily about this.

On the one hand, there was the logical response. On the other, the emotional one.

Cheng Xiaoshi hoped to compromise between the two.

“...It can’t hurt to give it a try, right?” Who would find out, really? “And like Qiao Ling said: if things get strange, we pull out. The client doesn’t even have to know.”

Qiao Ling said, “I’m the client this time, idiot.”

Cheng Xiaoshi felt his curiosity melt away into a familiar and comfortable rapport, “As I said: the client doesn’t even have to know.”

This time, Qiao Ling threw her finished drink at him.

—

Lu Guang assigned him a very unhelpful ‘homework’ session.

“But I don’t want preconceptions colouring my bias,” Cheng Xiaoshi claimed, refusing to study up on the guy they would be diving into. “I want to learn what Qiao Ling saw.”

Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang’s shared ability, ‘Photographic Memory’, was to help their clients ‘remember’ pivotal information through the use of photographs. On paper, when the two of them were together, they would be able to make out a snapshot from the photo that expanded what was going on. This ability could only be used once per photo, and didn’t work unless they were both participating. Clients would come in with a question or request and a stack of photos, and Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang would help them find the answers through the memories and photographs.

Nearly a quarter of the time, they couldn’t give their clients the answers they wanted.

On paper, this was a D-class ability. Powerful, yes, but with too many stipulations and uncertainties. Useless in combat, and even as support. It was also a rare ability that required two very specific people to work.

They were very lucky to be exceptionally average F-class Hunters that no one would bother with questioning why they only had one skill, and why that skill was D-rank.

(It was Lu Guang who tore up Cheng Xiaoshi’s original Hunter registration papers, burning the shredded remains until no one would ever make out the original skill:

Dive. SS-rank. The ability to enter a photograph and influence the events of the past for a short duration. Limited 12-hours per use.

That, combined with Lu Guang’s SS-rank Eyes in Time ability which allowed him to look at a photograph and see everything meant to happen within 12 hours of the photo being taken (including seeing through the sight of security cameras), meant that the two of them plotted a very careful and elaborate lie to evade curious eyes set on power.

Never change the past. It was a creed Lu Guang drilled into Cheng Xiaoshi’s head. Never, never change anything.

Cheng Xiaoshi had never heard of SS-skills before that, much less what the combination of two SS-skills could do.)

…The skill was just enough to barely keep the photo studio afloat.

Qiao Ling’s commission meant they would be taking up to 12-hour shifts for… however many photos they had to get their answers from.

Lu Guang would warn him time and again that Cheng Xiaoshi had the hard job— that he had to stay vigilant and not give into curiosity or temptation when they were on the clock. Cheng Xiaoshi would spend up to 12 hours in a single photograph, after all, influenced by the emotions of the person who took the picture.

Cheng Xiaoshi wouldn’t claim that his job was easy, but he also didn’t think it was the hardest one: it was Lu Guang who had to be hyper-aware throughout the 12-hour period. Cheng Xiaoshi just had to follow his instructions on where to look, what to do, and what to say. Meanwhile, Lu Guang had to keep track of everything happening in order to not change a single event while they gathered information.

It was a good thing they got a few good nights’ sleep, as such a toll usually took a lot out of them. The skills may be SS-rank, but they were both still F-stat.

“—But are there really no recent photos?” Cheng Xiaoshi asked, thumbing through the photos that Qiao Ling forwarded to them. “These look…”

Old. Blurry. A photo of a photo.

None of them were good quality, as if the sender intentionally took bad pictures of good photographs.

Next to him on the couch, Lu Guang narrowed his eyes at him.

“We could stop here if you’re reluctant,” he said, prompting Cheng Xiaoshi to huff and look over the images with a more discerning eye.

Cheng Xiaoshi only pulled his phone closer to his chest as if protecting it from his roommate, ready with an arm up to defend from attacks. Luckily, this was Lu Guang and not Qiao Ling, and he merely huffed out a light chuckle when faced with Cheng Xiaoshi’s shenanigans.

“I’m serious, though,” Lu Guang insisted with a small smile even as his features returned to that of tiredness and resignation. How was he already so pale before the job even started? He really could match his hair colour at this rate! “Pull out the first moment you feel something is off. We don’t do Hunters for a reason, and you know it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Cheng Xiaoshi agreed, reciting the words from heart, “because we don’t know their hidden abilities and who is watching them. Don’t attract any dangerous attention back to ourselves.”

He relaxed back to nudge his shoulder against Lu Guang’s, feeling his tension even through that small contact.

“Hey,” he said to the other, “thanks for doing this for Qiao Ling. I know you wouldn’t normally have agreed.”

Because Han Yoojin was a wildcard, an unknown, and a Hunter related to an S-class. Who knew how many eyes Han Yoojin had on him? Who knew what abilities those hidden people had? They had to be careful, doubly so, as F-class.

“I still don’t agree,” Lu Guang retorted, but seemed to relax just the slightest as Cheng Xiaoshi nudged him again, pushing with his shoulder and Lu Guang was nearly bowled over. The other man sighed, and then admitted with some reluctance, “...But I can understand her feelings on this.”

“...Yeah.”

Cheng Xiaoshi could as well, with the type of jobs they often got. Regret came in waves, and hindsight was always twenty-twenty. Oftentimes there was already nothing they could do… and those were the easiest jobs. For Qiao Ling to promote a misunderstood man teetering on the edge waiting for an answer? It had to mean something.

…Still. Would their abilities even work on a photo of a photo? It didn’t seem like Lu Guang was having any trouble, though.

“This one should be safe,” the white-haired man muttered as he reached over to scroll on Cheng Xiaoshi’s phone, centering and double-tapping one of the images to enlarge it. It was a photo of two brothers smiling for the camera with autumn leaves in their hair: the older with a wide grin, and the younger with a sweet, shy smile. The photo was off-center and slightly blurry; it looked like a selfie taken with a cheaper phone.

Cheng Xiaoshi stared.

“It… it really doesn’t look like they had a bad relationship, does it?” He asked. The two looked happy there, and it certainly wasn’t a staged happiness. In fact, none of the photos were taken professionally, and very few even looked posed. All of it looked like snapshots of genuine happiness.

(So what happened? That was what Qiao Ling commissioned them to find out.)

“We can’t say for sure,” Lu Guang said with some hesitation. “There could have been resentment building under the surface. Perhaps Han Yoojin thought they were happy and ignored too many points left to fester.”

“Right. Go in, feel things out, look for details to see what actually happened.”

“And remember,” Lu Guang said as Cheng Xiaoshi lifted his arms over his head in a stretch, deliberately tensing and relaxing his muscles a few times. “Follow my lead. Change nothing. And if anything seems off in any way…”

“I come back,” Cheng Xiaoshi nodded. They had a good smattering of photos to use, so it was best to be safe rather than sorry.

He looked down at the photo of the two smiling brothers once more, and then up again to see that Lu Guang had already held out a hand to him, palm up and relaxed. It was a familiar and trusting gesture, soothing out the residual anxiety he felt over whether he was making the right decision or not.

Every job was a risk.

Cheng Xiaoshi sat up straighter and leaned over to set his hand atop Lu Guang’s, feeling the familiar tingle, the electric spark that formed a connection between the both of them. A circuit board of power, completing a cycle in a way that felt like unlocking a door and coming home. He echoed Lu Guang’s voice as they agreed together: