#and of course mells wrote up a version of the backstory and dynamics

[infini-tree]

shaking the zhen and chameleon and zhen and han dynamics. it could have been so. AUGH. i keep rotating them to the point where i made a fill-in-the-blanks sort of concept to their whole thing.

ok in my personal headcanon zhen's bio parents were probably part of han's criminal group. thick as thieves (ha). they have a kid. which... isn't ideal since they're active in the criminal underworld, but it ain't han's business unless it actively impedes on their whole thing.

and then zhen's parents are killed off by whatever made chameleon rule juniper city. and now its han's business since he Acquired Baby after a set of circumstances that make him feel obligated to take care of her. then something something canon events happen. zhen tries to steal from the chameleon. the chameleon keeps her. zhen never comes back to her first family.

i feel like chameleon is spiteful enough to sic zhen on han and his group (both to teach the group a lesson and to test zhen). so that adds fuel to the fire. han is heartbroken, there's a callback to the Rules Of The Street (he got hurt! and no one cares about his feelings), he tries to keep his band of thieves together.

(as a sidebar. but you know what. as much as i love han being a pangolin. in this concept i think it would've been cleaner/jumped through less hoops if he was a fox. of course, this adds another sense of complication if she refers to another fox as just an 'old mentor', but zhen's already an unreliable narrator as she is so that actually adds layers if played right. plus its a bit of a knife twist to have your estranged daughter just refer to you as a near stranger.)