This is niche even for me, but ... I've got this whole concept for an AU of my own
Guild Wars 2 fic (which is also slightly AU and pretty specifically tailored to my interests). The new AU is not just AU in the sense that it's not consistent with the previous fic, but also ... the characters, even original characters, of the first fic all exist, it deals with similar concerns, etc etc, but a different person is the main character of the game's storyline (while Althea, the main character/PC in
pro patria, becomes the love interest).
Mostly this is because Althea had the noble origin/storyline, which can be a bit obnoxious at times, and I find the street origin/storyline much more potentially interesting these days. The street origin PC is implied to have extricated herself from a bandit gang, one of her friends is an open revolutionary and the other gets dismembered for crossing the gang leader, and the PC gets vengeance through helping plot and carry out the extrajudicial murder of said gang leader.
Oh, and I always choose the backstory where your sister was a Seraph (they're a mix of soldiers defending the country and police) who got ambushed in a brutal raid and whose body was among those that couldn't be recovered or identified. But that means my character was at one point a bandit with a sister in the Seraph, and I thought these two sisters who grew up in profound poverty taking these opposite (but both flawed) paths could be really interesting, especially if they were estranged when Deborah (the sister) got ambushed.
Anyway, I started sketching out my headcanons for this AU to sort of clear out my head, and I got reasonably far along (further in the main plot than
pro patria itself has, actually). But it just became increasingly fic-like as it went on, and eventually my resolve snapped. So the point of all this:
Gwen knew the Seraph would come for her one day.
She didn’t think about it too much. It was easier not to, especially after her fool of a sister went and joined up with them. Gwen and Deborah screamed at each other for an hour that day, until Deborah stormed off to her new Seraph friends and Gwen slipped away to help plan the Bloodcrow bandits’ next heist.
Gwen felt sure she’d made the better choice, whatever Deborah said about stealing from innocent people on Manor Hill. Innocent nobles, hah! In the year after that last fight with Deborah, Gwen came to regret many things about joining the Bloodcrows—but robbing nobles was not one of them. It wasn’t even hard. The way their gazes flitted past the struggling poor of Kryta and their own overworked servants, she only needed a touch of illusion to get away with everything.
So she’d always known it wouldn’t be the aristocracy who tracked her down, and it wouldn’t be their toadies in the Ministry Guard. If anyone found her, it’d be the Seraph. And most people did get found out sooner or later. It’d happen, eventually. But she was still young, only twenty, and eventually wasn’t today.
Until it was.
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