title: what we owe to each other
fandom: Guardian
length: 100 words
contents: no spoilers, books, Guo Changcheng & Wang Zheng are library friends

summary: Changcheng wants to understand his place in the world.




Changcheng doesn't understand what they do at the SID, or why. Ghosts, Yashou, Dixingren... how could anyone understand such a world or their place in it?

Wang Zheng takes pity on him; she says books are a good way to know the stories people tell themselves. So much history, politics, poetry; the more he reads, the more he aches with a sadness he can't explain. Something is very wrong.

The next week, she slips him another volume, a modern treatise on ethics.

You want to make things right, she says. But who knows what's right?

Changcheng reads all night, wondering.