Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

After what must have been the most nerve-wracking and stressful two hours of his life, Miss Juan and her posse of bodyguards leave him alone in the hotel room, with only the threat of skinning him alive if he tried to run again.

It’s a needless reminder, in all honesty. Lin Ling knows a bodyguard is probably, one hundred per cent most likely, waiting outside the door to catch and drag him back if he tries to book it.

So there’s no other choice for him but to stay and await his fate—but what exactly lies ahead for him?

Pretending to be Nice?

Lin Ling cringes as the reminder hits him dead-on like a physical blow. As lead marketing specialist for all of Nice’s advertisements—former now, but that only happened a few hours ago—he’s intimately aware of what exactly makes up the image of this perfect hero and paragon of all that is good and glorious.

Made up Lin Ling corrects himself again. Another thing that’s former now. At least, for the time being, because Miss Juan seemed convinced that he, the most common of commeners, could take Nice’s place, after taking a closer look at his face and white-dyed hair.

Lin Ling moves closer to the mirror, his hair wet and still dripping from the shower he had taken to rinse the paint out of his scalp. What greets him is the same sallow-eyed, greasy-faced person who pulled a week of all-nighters coming up with the latest, hottest promotional video that only ever landed him the reward of getting fired.

Definitely not the epitome of perfection material.

Lin Ling shivers, not so much from the water dripping down brown strands to wet his neck, or the cool of the air-con whirring in the background.

What was he thinking, going on that rooftop? Well, that’s easy—he wasn’t thinking at all. His former boss's acrid words resounding in his mind, and fresh off the shock of losing the only important thing in his life, he had disassociated and let his mind go on autopilot.

Before he knew it, he was on that damned rooftop, looking down on the pavement while eyeing the drop below.

He still doesn't know why he went up there. Now that the whammy of being fired has been overshadowed by a much more distressing turn of events, Lin Ling curses himself for ever thinking he would actually jump. He’s not suicidal!

Sure, the only light in his life was the making promotional content for his idol and her now-deceased boyfriend, but he's too much of a coward to jump off a building.

He’s sure that even if his so-called suicide attempt wasn't interrupted, he would have scrambled away from the edge the moment his brain computed the long and scary distance between point A: him, and point B: the cold, hard ground.

And now, because of his brain’s over-dramatic need to catastrophise, he’s going to potentially end up living a double life in place of someone who dared to go through with jumping!

Lin Ling groans, dragging a hand down his face. What kind of bullshit coincidence was this? Nice just had to choose the very same rooftop he was on—and at the very same time Lin Ling was on it, cursing said hero’s name out.

Nice had appeared so suddenly and so coincidentally that Lin Ling’s brain had blue-screened so hard that he let a man walk and fall to his death right in front of him.

…Nice hadn’t had a hint of fear on his perfect, handsome face. All suave calmness and charming confidence befitting his status. Absolutely no sign that he wasn’t going to let his powers carry him off the ledge and into the air, the same way he had arrived on the rooftop, polished shoes transitioning from free flight to concrete, a flock of doves heralding his arrival like he was some messiah descending from the heavens,

Seriously, how was Lin Ling supposed to know until the hero’s body hit the pavement head-first with a deafening splatter, that he wasn't going to fly instead of fall?

What, did he see Lin Ling standing on the ledge and suddenly get inspired? The ass couldn’t have chosen some other random building to commit suicide on? He could have just decided to stop flying while in the middle of the air, and it would have sufficed—he didn’t have to walk off the ledge and throw Lin Ling his signature finger-guns as though he was at a fan meet-and-greet and not walking straight to his voluntary death!

Lin Ling sighs and shoves his face into the admittedly soft pillow. Even on short notice, Miss Juan had thrown him into a luxury four-star hotel. At least he wasn't being held in that warehouse they had dragged him to.

…Did Nice see him on the rooftop and decide to commit suicide then and there to shock Lin Ling into not doing it? If so, still a dick move. If he were truly suicidal, he might have jumped right after him.

Also, the trauma of witnessing someone commit suicide in front of your very eyes? 0/10; despite being a literal building’s height away, he thinks he can somehow still hear the sickening crunch of bones meeting point B and picture the way the hero’s body hit the building ledge before bouncing off and onto the pavement, like the world’s fleshiest basketball.

…Maybe a part of him is still in shock, if he’s throwing out such morbid comparisons.

But Nice had walked off that ledge with his picture-perfect smile. Had pitched himself to his death without any hesitation. If he was in that state of mind, well…he must not have cared about anything anymore, much less about affecting bystanders like Lin Ling.

That was what suicidal people were like, right? What else could drive people to end their own lives willingly?

The pillow, warmed from his body heat and all his tossing and turning, suddenly feels too hot. Lin Ling flips it over, the coldness of the other side only a monetary relief before his brain starts whirring away again.

What could compel someone like Nice to end his own life? The hero is—was the literal embodiment of perfection. He must have had everything; fame, riches, power and a girlfriend. And not just any girlfriend! He was dating Moon for fuck’s sake! A goddess on Earth!

And yet!

And yet…

Lin Ling closes his eyes. In his head, the sound of that advertisement, glitching behind him in blinding bursts of oversaturated colours, as his mind struggled to comprehend the death he just witnessed, loops like a broken record.

Before he falls into blissful oblivion, his last thoughts are of Nice. That snapshot of stillness just before the white-haired man fell to his death, the perfect hero smiling in that immaculate, camera-flashing, swoon-worthy way Lin Ling had memorised down to the very crease of his lips, through the barrier of his work laptop screen.

How, despite that picture-perfect smile, Nice’s eyes were empty. Devoid of light, like a dark abyss.

“But really, the statue is really gaudy.”

Moon lets out an exclamation of agreement from where she’s slumped over the couch, stained from head to toe in tomato and strawberry juices. Lin Ling shoves down the fleeting fear that shook his heart at the sight of her covered in crimson—just a bad dream, just a nightmare—and the urge to coax her off so he can clean the couch, its white leather upholstery similarly painted with splatters of red.

He is very careful not to look at himself. At his dirtied sleeves and ruined pants. White makes even the slightest speck of dust stand out; Lin Ling practically hears his newly worsened OCD yelling at him to go and change and wash up.

He won't do it, because that would be proving Moon wrong, that he’s different from Nice—Nice, the dirt-hating perfectionist who made his fake girlfriend so annoyed that she practically celebrated his death. Nice, who was so self-obsessed that he put up an ostentatious statue of his likeness right in the middle of his living-cum-bedroom.

Nice, who Lin Ling has agreed to keep pretending to be.

“Even for a stuck-up perfectionist like him, I thought this was going too far,” Moon shoots the now dirtied statue an even dirtier look. “And he was so particular about it! Told Miss J that he needed to have it look a certain way. Modelled the pose right then and there!”

“It needs to be exactly like this! My hand needs to be stretched out at this specific angle, at this specific height!” Moon pitches her voice low, obviously imitating her once fake-boyfriend, even flapping her hand in the shape of a yammering mouth.

“What a dolt. And after raising all the hoo-hah over having his very own statue, he went and killed himself.”

“The statue’s a new thing?” Lin Ling prods curiously, gaze flitting away from the expression of consternation on her face.

“Yeah. It only got finished two weeks ago, but I’m sick of it already!” Moon’s voice rises in outrage as she throws a scathing—and adorable—glare at the camera watching them.

“Agree to the marriage, and the statue can go,” Miss Juan’s voice sounds out over the speaker, interrupting their conversation. Moon lifts her hand to unabashedly give the CCTV in the corner, and their manager watching behind the screen, the middle finger.

Meanwhile, Lin Ling looks at the statue again, appraising it in a new light. Two weeks ago was quite recent, even if the statue must have taken some time to be commissioned and built.

How strange that Nice would ask for a statue to be built of himself, only a few weeks before he decided to take his own life. It seems uncharacteristic—even if Lin Ling never knew the man personally. He wonders if Nice hid it well, this depression, that in the end, drove him to leap off a rooftop.

Miss Juan and Moon didn't seem that surprised when they learned he had committed suicide. If at all, they seemed to take his death in stride, already moving on to other concerns. And he was told Nice had no living family. While this at first made Lin Ling relieved that he didn't need to fall to such levels of depravity as to pretend to be someone’s son or brother, it also made him sympathise with the former hero, orphan to orphan. That kind of loneliness could be truly all-consuming.

And now, more than a week in this persona, Lin Ling realised…it seemed that Nice didn’t really have anyone who would mourn his death openly. Fans were one thing, but if they couldn't even tell their hero had been replaced by someone else.

Did Nice even have anyone in the first place?

Lin Ling shutters his eyes. Suddenly, the sight of that statue, bathed in red, is too much for him to take.

It’s not like Lin Ling hasn’t been hyperaware of the changes happening to his body–it is his after all. But between the dizzying learning curve of learning to become Nice and the subsequent ‘sink-or-swim’ reality of portraying the hero, Lin Ling’s never really had the time to just. Stop. And really look.

Lin Ling moves closer to the mirror, his hair slightly damp from his morning shower, but brushed to tousled perfection after he had applied the assortment of oils and serums he was instructed to use after every shower as part of his daily routine.

What greets him is, well, not not his face. He and the original Nice indeed shared remarkably similar bone structure. Triangular-shaped, smooth angles, and pointed chin. And now with powder white hair and azure blue eyes, Lin Ling was a good enough dead-ringer for the dead hero that even his old boss couldn’t recognise him.

Granted, his old employer never cared much for Lin Ling–see Appendix A: his employment termination form–and he was dosed to the gills on Fear, but five years was five years, and Lin Ling had sucked up to that man like the world’s most plucky mosquito.

Pinned under that scrutinising gaze that he’s been made all too familiar with over the past almost half a decade of working under that man, first as an intern, than a salaried employee. Lin Ling had felt his heart beat in double time under the lights of the studio. Even after Lin Ling defeated him, he was still waiting for the other shoe to drop, for his old boss, or Enlightener, or heck, any one of his fans to do a double take and go: “Hey…you’re not Nice.”

It was almost a relief when Moon called him out on the act. That someone finally saw past the pretty veneer and gloss to see that underneath it all, it was just him. Lin Ling.

And it wasn’t like we looked identical, either Lin Ling ponders to himself. He raises a hand to the familiarly unfamiliar face.

Caressing it slowly, feeling the pressure of touch but not really computing that it was his own hand touching his face in the mirror, Lin Ling absently notes down down the differences between it and Nice. Like how this chin was more rounded, and the contour of the cheekbones more defined.

Fingers trail up, across the mouth with lips that weren’t quite as full, to graze over the bridge of the nose. Slightly less pointed, and not exactly perfectly symmetric either, being just short on the left.

A blunt fingernail traces the crescent under a sky-blue eye; Nice’s eyelids were also more curved, and the set of his eyebrows was ever so slightly off–the only imperfection on an otherwise flawless face. How no one noticed when there were thousands of devoted fans sharing fancams and pictures of him on FOMO was beyond him, but to Lin Ling, it was so obvious.

He might have the advantage of knowing the ruse was there in the first place, but anyone with keen enough eyes would be able to sort out the minute disparities between him and the original image of Nice that he remembered.

Feeling like he has some point to prove to an unseen audience, to a crowd of adoring but blind fans, Lin Ling smiles. The face in the mirror smiles back—and it should look like Hero Nice’s signature stunner of a smile, but to Lin Ling it just feels..off.

Feeling his lips twitch in reflex, but wanting to maintain the expression for closer examination, Lin Ling closes the gap between him and the mirror even more, the reflection swimming between his eyes until all he can focus on is that smile. Unbidden, his mind conjures up a memory—the first time he ever saw Nice, even before he started his marketing internship.

Nice was fighting again his then-not-yet official nemesis, Wreck, and Lin Ling, who had stumbled out of his former part-time job at a convenience store, had caught the tail-end of the fight when Nice had landed the finishing blow on his opponent.

With Wreck down and out for the count on the cracked road, Nice had bent down, kneeling beside the villain. The cape had obscured what happened next, but Lin Ling thought he saw Nice fixing Wreck’s mass, aligning it with the rest of the yellow arrow painted across his outfit. And after that–

Nice smiled, his gaze turning softer, almost lidded, his lips curling up as though privy to a secret unbeknownst even to their owner.

And oh. That was the difference.

Lin Ling lets his hand drop.

He supposed he’d known, considering the circumstances under which they met, and how he ended up becoming Nice in the first place, but at some point, Nice’s smiles stopped being genuine.

On paper, it was textbook perfect. But just like what he saw, on that day on the rooftop, there was something in the tilt of his eyebrows, the curve of his lips, that just screamed fake to Lin Ling. Along with the absence of true warmth in his eyes, which turned them from bright skies into abyssal trenches.

By the time he started working on Nice’s advertisements, he had forgotten what real happiness looked like on the hero—or at least, buried the memory, until it resurfaced when it was already far too late.

Too late Lin Ling thinks to himself. Would it have made a difference if he saw through Nice’s pretty veneer and gloss?

(Perhaps. If he had just reached out…

But he would never know.)

Chapter Text

“Miss Juan, did Nice have his own phone?”

Miss Juan raises a judgmental eyebrow, as though to say, “Of course?”, and Lin Ling backpedals. “Like, for personal use and all?”

Not whatever HR-sanctioned, probably heavily monitored phone Lin Ling had been given. He wasn’t stupid; he would eat his cape if that little metal slice Miss Juan had handed to him wasn't being tracked, filtered, and watched, like Lin Ling was some criminal instead of a top 20 hero.

(But was he truly a hero? Pretending to be someone he wasn't? Maybe criminal wasn’t too far off the mark—he stole Nice’s identity, after all)

Nice’s hero suit lacked any pockets or such that could fit a device, so Lin Ling knows for certain that the hero wasn't carrying a phone when he…made his choice.

So that still left the question: where was it?

“…He had one when he was just a new hero. I saw him using it until occasionally we broke into the Top twenty rankings.”

There. The use of ‘we’. Miss Juan didn't bring up the real Nice unless she had to drill some point into Lin Ling’s head, but usually when she did, she often used ‘he’ and ‘we’ interchangeably. Like they were a pair, a team.

‘He gained huge popularity after he started dating Xiao Yueqing,’ and ‘we skyrocketed to the top of the polls in this one live stream. ’ Nice’s successes were her successes. Lin Ling thought that it wasn't so much that they were friends as Nice was her life’s work, and Nice’s life's work due to her.

That sort of inseparable relationship which lasted for at least five years. He doesn’t think he’s wrong calling it just as close as anything Nice and his supposed girlfriend had.

And he likes to think that Miss Juan isn't some sort of completely heartless person. Her face when she leaned across the rooftop ledge, the way her eyes widened in shock, and the guards held her back by the arms…it wasn't an expression a completely detached manager who only saw Nice as their job would make.

“After that, I didn't see him using it,” she finished, gathering the papers scattered around her.

“I see…” Lin Ling muttered to himself. Miss Juan not seeing Nice use his phone was much more telling than it sounded, considering she was around him almost 24/7, whether in person or through cameras.

It meant that Nice deliberately took steps to conceal his actions, whether by only using his phone late at night when monitoring was more lax, or taking it out only when he was in one of the cameras’ blind spots.

There were only so many places one could hide something in a room where they were watched nigh-constantly. And Lin Ling, thrown into this almost-draconian situation of pervading surveillance, had learned quickly what those places were.

“One more thing,” Miss Juan says, standing up, brushing invisible dust off her blue pencil skirt. The light glints off her glasses, masking her eyes. “That performance you gave. It wasn’t bad.”

Without another word, she left him alone, the black-suited bodyguards trailing behind. One of them throws him a grin and a thumbs-up, and another mouths the words “good job”. Lin Ling’s just glad they didn't have the gall to do Nice’s signature pose at him or say his namesake.

He leans back into the couch, staring at the ceiling. Outside, the sun melts into the horizon, dissolving into shades of orange and pink that he would have once fished out his phone to take a photo of.

But now he just feels…tired. Moon left yesterday, and it feels like she took a part of his heart with her.

The days they spent together weren’t that long when compared to two decades of his life, but Lin Ling hasn’t fooled himself into thinking that he doesn’t grasp for any sort of human connection like a man starved of water, starved of comfort; an unfortunate product of being an orphan, and drifting through life without any real connections. An already unstable foundation made worse by his current situation of isolation.

And until approximately twelve hours ago, he thought Nice was the same.

He knew it was depraved of him to do so, but Lin Ling had taken some facsimile of comfort that the person who inadvertently left him to deal with the blowout of his death had been like him—alone and miserable. No family, his pretend girlfriend hated him, and the company he worked for only saw him as an asset.

(Perhaps even more twistedly so, Lin Ling felt happy that someone like Nice, who once had nothing, was able to ascend to such heights. If someone like him could become a hero…maybe Lin Ling could…)

But he’s wrong about that; Nice had one person in life, one person who seemed to care more for the person behind the mask of perfection than the pristine image paraded to the public and cameras.

Nice’s nemesis, Wreck. Who was called up to their staged wedding proposal to play a part, but ended up being the most genuine one there.

Lin Ling can only infer so much between keeping up an act for the cameras and the sudden derailment of the script he was given, but somewhere between Wreck’s hissed questions, the real-as-can-be anguish and worry in his voice, and the hysteria in his movements, Lin Ling realised that he was wrong.

He had thought—assumed, based on the reactions of the people around him, that Nice was just like him. Because it made everything easier; no one to mourn him, no one to fool.

No one but himself

But Wreck had seen straight through Lin Ling’s act, and, ripping off his mask, demanded the truth of what happened.

And after that…

Lin Ling glances at the camera mounted in the corner of the room. Miss Juan had no reason to be watching him now, not after Lin Lin had proved himself to be obedient enough not to run away with Moon yesterday.

One eye on the CCTV, Lin Ling walked over to the bed, levitating himself to float to bypass the water fixture’s marble platforms. Instinctively, his hand smoothed out the slightest wrinkles in the sheets, planes of pure white that matched his hair and his clothes.

White, white, white; the colour of perfection. Pristine and pure, yet the easiest to dirty. He thinks he’s starting to dislike it.

Lin Ling digs a hand behind the mattress, against the headboard, shimmies it around until his fingers catch on something distinctly metal.

Lin Ling pulls it out, and the black screen of a phone stares back at him. He recognises it as being the same brand as his previous phone, the rather affordable price-point and reputation of durability being enough reason for Lin Ling to open his constantly pinched wallet.

It's one of the older versions—like Lin Ling’s was, from a few years ago. His heart pounding in his chest, he powers it on with a press of the side button. The screen lights up, and an icon of a face and a lock appears. One convenient face scan later, and Lin Ling is swiping through the sparse apps dotting the phone’s home screen.

A press on the messenger app brings him to a startlingly empty list. Even Lin Ling had more contacts than this, though it was all clients and co-workers. There’s only one contact saved, right at the top, and Lin Ling already knows who it is even before the split second it takes for his eyes to register the name—unfamiliar, but he knows who it belongs to all the same. He presses a thumb over the unread message count: 154 messages left unseen by the person who needed them.

It was a bit silly, Lin Ling thought, to be hesitating: He had already gone so far; invaded Nice’s life, took his place, his identity. But remembering Wreck’s genuine, inimitable grief, it felt even more intrusive to be poking through Nice’s personal phone.

But he had to know.

Lifting his thumb from the screen, the chat opens up. He’s instantly bombarded with what seems like a never-ending stream of messages, some short, some long. Taking note of the date the messages started getting left unread, Lin Ling scrolls down, eyes flitting from text to text.

It starts as questions enquiring about Nice’s day, Nice’s mood. Then, playful jest—Too busy being perfect to answer me? It’s only a few days of being ignored that Wreck starts asking if Nice is ok, the worry evident even through pixelated characters on a screen.

The day Lin Ling made his debut as Nice, concern shifted into demands, the tone vacillating from anger, fear and sadness.

Then, the very last message, right at the bottom: If you won't respond, I'll get the answers right from your mouth

Wreck was invited to play the role of villain, a role he was long accustomed to. For as long as Nice existed, so did his nemesis—he had spent just as much effort as his heroic counterpart into building up the character of ‘Wreck’, bit by bit, piece by piece.

And yet, he threw it to the wayside for his—

…Lin Ling doesn't know, actually. It was clear Wreck cared for Nice deeply, their close relationship so abundantly evident even to an outsider like him.

His thumb scrolls back to the top, before the unread messages. Scrolls and scrolls, past the desperate attempts of a man trying to reach someone who seemed to have shut himself away, closed his heart from the world. A few texts above the first message Lin Ling saw, the chat comes to a stop.

Lin Ling stares in slight disbelief; did Nice clear his chat history? Dumbly, he tries again to go up but is stopped once again. A date only just three months ago blinks back up at him.

There’s no way that was the full extent of their communication. Which means Nice must have done a wipe of their chat history.

But why? is the question that runs through Lin Ling’s mind. To avoid anyone from invading his privacy once he departed? If that was the case, why not delete the contact entirely, or do onto the phone the same thing he did to himself?

Feeling a gnawing in his heart, he exits the messenger app and looks for a gallery, which he opens up promptly, only to be greeted by emptiness. Lin Ling at least had some random photos and screenshots lying around on his phone, so it points to Nice doing another mass clearance; this time for photos instead of messages.

Swiping out of the gallery, he peruses the other apps on the screen. All of them seem like standard, default features—settings, app store, notes, clock, phone, notes—

Two Notes apps?

Lin Ling swipes back, eyes comparing both apps more closely. On second inspection, one of them appears to be a non-default, downloadable app; the only one on the phone. Tapping on it brings him to a password screen, which reads:

What is it that you truly desire?

For a moment, he remembers Moon; Moon, with her uncombed hair and rumpled clothes, a suitcase and a pair of sunglasses. In that moment, she looked nothing like what Lin Ling dreamed of, yet everything that he could ever dream of. Meeting the real Moon, the one who threw tantrums, ate messily like a kid and loved to swing herself into the air; it was the greatest fortune he had ever received.

Yet, the same thing that allowed him to meet was the very same thing that doomed them to be apart, to never quite align, their hearts folded into two, but the halves not quite overlapping. She wanted to be free from Nice, free from being a hero, free from the role she had been forced to play and—

Lin Ling is Nice now. He represented everything she wanted to run away from, because she knew with her whole heart, body and soul, what she didn’t want.

Have you found the direction your heart desires?

He wonders what Nice truly wanted in the end. He wonders if he’ll ever want that someday, too. If he’ll wake up one day and realise, far too late, what he wanted.

That day, do I have to make the same choice you did?

Lin Ling shuts the phone off. Slips it back where he found it. Washes up and turns in early for the night.

When he lies on the bed, he thinks he can feel the slight bulge in the mattress under him, from where the device is hidden. He feels like the delicate princess from the fairy tale story, the one who endured a restless night due to a single pea under twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds.

He wonders if Nice felt the same way as him; if he, like Lin Ling, has lain in this bed, drowning in white sheets, wanting so desperately to dissolve, melt into the waters surrounding him.

He thinks he could almost see it now, between the ebb of his blinks, a waking dream. An afterimage of that white-cloaked figure, his back turned away from Lin Ling, as though refusing to acknowledge the fake who stole his identity.

He clenches his eyes shut tight, pressing that hazy vision between his eyelids, seals it between his teeth and lips like a promise, like an unspoken understanding. Whether or not Nice would despise him for taking his place if he were still alive, Lin Ling knows now that he and Nice aren't so different at all.

And just like him, come morning, despite how his sleep went, Lin Ling will wake up, poised and refreshed, as ‘Nice’. He won't be plagued by eyebags, public perception colouring in untouchable perfection, and not a single hair will be out of place when he steps into the world.

And if he dreams of falling that night, planes of glass and cement whipping past him—

Well. No one else will know. And they do say that falling is one way of flying.

The first thing he does when he steps over the threshold of the apartment is to transition into a float; His boots, caked with mud and sewer grime, would leave tracks on the floor.

He glides past Miss Juan, who’s consulting her trusty tablet and going on and about something related to his trust value and rankings. Her words fall on deaf ears—all he can focus on is getting out of his dirty, dust-stained clothes. As soon as he had placed down the toppled statue of Firm Man, slowly lowering its weight from his shoulders, his mind had zeroed in on one thing only.

Getting clean.

The bathroom door shuts behind him, and he wastes no time undressing, folding his clothes into neat little squares that are stacked on top of each other in the laundry basket. He stacks his muddy boots in the corner, hating how they dirty the floor just with their presence, but he knows it's best to clean them later.

He emerges from the bathroom, cape-less but having changed into his spare hero outfit—he doesn't have anything else and these days it feels wrong to wear the black undershirt without the collared shirt-jacket on top—and floats back to Miss Juan, who’s cradling her phone between neck and elbow, her hands still occupied with typing away at her IPad.

“Yes, yes, I'll tell him. We’ll schedule a program for him to thank his supporters tomorrow. Yes—I’ll handle the moving also.”

“Thank you for your time, Mr Shang. I'll take care of everything,” she promises, waiting for the other person on the line to end the call before turning her attention back to the hero.

“Are Firm Man and Wolf Girl ok?” he blurts out immediately. It was hard to focus on anything else with the weight of a nearly 2m tall statue constructed from diamond pressing down on him—a bit overkill on their part, but at least the statue had some symbolic meaning to it, unlike the one placed in the middle of the room they were in—and the ensuing mess but the last time he saw them, the hero and villain duo were both getting swarmed by black-suited men presumably from the agency.

Miss Jun raises an eyebrow. “Firm Man is recuperating. As for Wolf Girl, she’s likely been taken into custody.”

“I see…” he murmurs. That was to be expected. Even though her heart was in the right place, and she didn’t mean any actual harm, Wolf Girl was still a villain who slandered the name of a hero and blew up a good chunk of Hero’s Avenue. He’ll have to go check online later if anyone was injured in the explosions. Maybe convince Miss Juan that it’ll be good PR for Treeman to donate to any possible victims affected.

“Did you hear what I said just now?”

He snaps back to reality and, seeing his manager’s miffed expression, shakes his head in consternation. “Sorry, Miss Juan. I wasn’t paying attention.”

In response, Miss Juan turns the screen of her tablet towards him, letting him see for himself what the fuss was all about.

“Oh,” he dumbly realises, seeing a shining number ten below his hero symbol.

“Firm Man gave up all his trust value; combined with your televised rescue of him, you skyrocketed to tenth place in the hero rankings.”

“Congrats, Nice,” she says, a genuine smile gracing her face.

The name echoes in his head, resounding. Over and over, like a knell.

‘Nice’ smiles back in return. All pearly whites, lips etched into corners, and a curled wink of his eye. As a finisher, he points his signature finger guns at her.

“Nice,” he simply responds.

Miss Juan rolls her eyes, slight amusement flitting through her gaze. “Your name was the greatest and worst idea marketing ever came up with.”

She shakes her head lightly, as though banishing such banal thoughts. “Anyway, you’re scheduled for a promotional livestream tomorrow at 5.30 pm. I'll send the script to you later.”

“Until then, your time is yours,” she finishes with one last decisive swipe on her tablet. Miss Juan looks up, seemingly debating something in her mind, before reaching out a hand to lightly pat him on the shoulder.

“Good work.”

And with that, she leaves. Again. Like every other day, once he’s no longer needed for the spotlight. Make no mistake—Nice’s successes were her successes, yes, but her successes were not his. He was not privy to her joys or woes because he was not her friend, no matter how much time they spent together.

‘Nice’ wonders if she would celebrate after this. Perhaps she would treat herself to a fancy dinner, or call up her parents or friends to share the good news—if she had any. He didn't know.

He indulged himself in the brief, fleeting fantasy of knowing, before shutting down that line of thinking. It wasn't his place.

Skyscrapers tower into the night, cutting through the boundaries of twilight. A beautiful sight that makes him contemplate whether the view from the very top is any different from the levels below it.

Maybe it does, to the one who stands at the pinnacle of all heroes. However, all ‘Nice’ can think of is how long the fall would be till the ground.

That night, he dreams.

He’s on a rooftop—not the one that haunts his nightmares, the one that led to all of this.

It’s wholly unfamiliar, at first. A triangle of intersecting metal plates and glass panes. When he looks down, strangely enough, a forest of greenery and shrubbery is under his feet.

Then it clicks. He’s on top of the hero tower, and above him, the sky melts in the colours of early dusk. A hazy twilight, chased by shades of pink and orange, and right in front of him, the centrepiece of the magnificent view, is the sun, setting below the dip of the horizon.

Or the person standing in front of the sun.

Nice stands opposite him, silhouetted by the last rays of day. Exactly the same as when he last saw the hero; adorned in gold and flowing white.

And yet, in this moment, both of them are pretenders, donning personas that threaten to consume them whole.

Nice is saying something. Lin Ling can’t hear what he says, but he feels his mouth move to answer, giving a response unbeknownst to him.

Whatever he says—it makes Nice smile.

It’s genuine. He could see it in the tilt of his eyebrows, the curve of his lips. The same expression he saw on the hero’s face the first time he saw him. The only difference is that Nice’s eyes are closed, like he can’t bear to see the person in front of him.

In slow motion, he watches as Nice’s mouth moves again, and then, he tilts back, arms folded behind him.

And falls.

When ‘Nice’ wakes up, his eyes are wet.

Have you found the direction your heart desires?

No matter who you are, just be yourself

And everyone can become heroes!

Watching the advertisement he slaved away on what seemed like a lifetime ago, appear on the screen, he’s plunged into memories of before.

Days of working tirelessly, accepting harder and heavier workloads with marginal pay increases, all because he loved his job—not his boss, his insouciant coworkers, or the stress—certainly not all of that.

He loved that it took him as close as he could to the world of heroes. Everyone knew heroes were built on trust, but trust was built on public opinion.

Advertisements, marketing, promotions—all of it was the lifeblood of trust. By making that new, shiny advertisement, he was able to draw in new believers for Nice and Moon, a new faith that would in turn translate to their powers and their acts of good.

This sort of second-hand, behind-the-scenes work would never come close to touching the heels of real heroes, but it was something he could do, and something he enjoyed doing.

So he stayed.

Remained even when other prospects came and went. Poured his heart and soul into every advertisement he made for heroes. He indirectly helped them gain trust value, something he thought was a form of sustenance in disguise.

But his old boss was right. Lin Ling was deluding himself into thinking he would be satisfied with just that. When in actuality, he was always trying to ‘play hero’ and run away from the truth; that he was a mediocre, normal person who had no special attributes or character that would appeal to the masses.

No normal person would accept being forced to play the replacement for a dead man as readily as he did. But Lin Ling tasted the rush of fame, of fortune, of power, of faith, and got drunk off the heady euphoria of having his childhood dream be realised; he was a substitute, yes, but a substitute for a hero.

What he always wanted and wished for.

But despite all his power, as Nice, he has to stand by and watch as Moon—the girl who could have continued to hate him solely on the principle of who he was pretending to be, but still found it in her heart to encourage him to chase his desires—is threatened by a villain because of him, her life and safety hanging in the balance.

Moon never wanted to be a hero. She just wanted to be free to follow her heart’s desires. A pure, innocent wish that harmed nobody. And yet, public opinion warped, chaining her to someone she hated. And after she escaped, she still found herself dragged back into the midst of danger.

(Did Nice ever want to be a hero. Did he want to be free, to be able to follow his heart’s desires? What were his wishes? Did public opinion warp him, chaining him to an ideal of perfection that he hated?

Was falling the only way he could escape?)

What’s the point of being a hero if he can’t even save one person?

…

Fate allowed him a chance to become Nice. Fate gave him the opportunity to meet his idol, who inspired and gave him hope.

For Lin Ling, whose mediocre and meaningless life was never meant for great things, even as the experience of being ‘Nice’ took more and more from him, he won’t ever say that he regretted becoming a hero.

But if the very same fate that gave him the chance to fulfil his dreams wants him to sit by and stand still as Moon’s life is threatened…

(If fate wants him to sit by and stand still as he fails to save yet another person)

He’ll go against fate itself.

(If everyone can become a hero, then just this once, let Lin Ling be a hero.)

Chapter Text

Lin Ling peers at himself in the mirror, hair still wet from the shower he had taken, and a towel slung over his neck to catch the droplets.

Usually, he’ll move on to towelling it as dry as he can before doing his whole haircare routine, a habit he’s inclined to keep up even after he’s stopped being Nice, but he finds himself suddenly arrested by the sight of his face in the mirror.

After getting beaten black and blue by Enlightener, his face had swollen up to the point where it looked like he had two bāozi stuffed and bulging in his cheeks, an ugly mess of more bruise than skin that made even Miss Juan wince in sympathy.

Luckily, his newly gained trust accelerated his recovery, and six days later, he looked almost as good as new, except for a few off-colour patches on his face that weren’t visible unless you were staring right at them. Lin Ling predicted they would clear up by the end of the night.

But despite how it looked like a few days ago, it was Lin Ling’s face looking back at him right now. Not Nice’s.

Lin Ling raises a hand to the familiar face, which he feels like he hasn't seen for far too long, mentally deciding to run down his mental checklist of differences.

Nice’s chin was less rounded, and the contour of the cheekbones less defined. The former hero’s lips were also fuller, his nose more pointed, and perfectly symmetric; his eyelids were also more curved, and the set of his eyebrows was ever so slightly off—the only imperfection on an otherwise flawless face.

And then there was the eyes and the hair. Brown on brown, not snow white and firmament blue. The clearest differences, of course, but Lin Ling thinks that with five years of his eyes kissing every pixel of Nice’s face, and the more recent experience of pretending to be the deceased hero, he deserves to say that no one is more familiar with Nice’s appearance than him.

Lin Ling watches in the mirror as the smile he didn’t know he had on his face drops.

Nice was really dead, huh?

A cool wetness on his cheeks startles him out of his thoughts. He realises, dimly—always late, always too late, never when it mattered—that he’s crying.

A finger swipes away a tear, and another, and another, until he’s wiping them away with the back of his hands.

What’s the matter with me? Lin Ling thinks, hysteria rising in his chest, ballooning like a glass-spun bubble, as the tears keep coming; beading and beading until they form rivulets which carve paths down his cheeks.

Of course, he knew Nice was dead. Their first meeting was also their last, with the hero plunging to his self-embraced death in front of him. Every moment Lin Ling had spent pretending to be the former hero was a reminder that the true Nice was deceased.

Except.

Nice was truly gone now. The person, and the brand. Lin Ling had watched as the former killed himself, and the latter he had destroyed with his very own hands right on national television. Nice was gone, and in his place was ‘The Commoner’. Like all other heroes, the public and the fans would mourn, and then…

And then they would move on. Give their trust to the next up-and-coming hero, like Lin Ling himself. And Nice’s image would only be preserved in records; FOMO clips that would one day no longer gain new likes or views, magazines and articles that would fall behind in time, and advertisements that would never get aired again.

Lin Ling knew how ruthless the world of heroes and marketing was. No one remembered or cared about the heroes past their prime—even if they were former Xs like the original E-Soul, DJ Shindig or Bowa—always moving on to the next new hero.

A less rounded chin, with the contour of the cheekbones less defined. Fuller lips, a more pointed and perfectly symmetric nose. Eyelids that curved, and an ever-so-slightly off set to his eyebrows.

White hair, blue eyes. A soft, lidded gaze, and lips that curled as though withholding a secret. Lin Ling had already almost forgotten how Nice truly smiled once—even with this checklist that he developed, half for himself, and half to preserve the memory of a man he never knew, would he forget like all the rest, the true face of Nice?

(Or maybe it never mattered in the first place. Such surface-level and skin-deep observations would never take away the fact that he never even knew the real Nice.)

Lin Ling laughs, voice catching on a sob, walking back from the mirror, step by unsteady step, until he hits the bathroom wall. He slides down, slumping onto the ground.

This whole entire time, wasn’t he just assuming and pretending to know how the original Nice felt? What he thought, what he wanted, what he desired—and all while it was never his place to do so, as someone who only met him once, and couldn’t even save the hero from committing suicide.

From the very moment their eyes met, and Lin Ling watched as Nice disappeared off the precipice of a rooftop, this entire facade was doomed. Nice’s end had been written—was inevitable, in the way that tragedies could only be, and Lin Ling was nothing but the person penning the postscript.

He was no different from those fans who screamed their love for Nice to the world but couldn’t even recognise when he was replaced. He hadn’t even noticed when Nice had stopped smiling genuinely.

For fuck’s sake, he didn’t even know the man’s name! Not whether he had any family, his friends, his likes or dislikes, whether he loved Wreck back, whether he hated Moon back.

Nothing, nothing but that inherited persona, the experience of what it felt to be ‘Nice’, and even that is gone now.

Lin Ling drags a hand down his face. Pathetic he thinks. Trying to chase a ghost that was never there in the first place.

Like assembling puzzle pieces, fitting them together to his liking, where they best slotted together, but ultimately the result was distorted, because he never knew what he was trying to solve in the first place.

Eventually, Lin Ling stands up. Leaves his hairbrush and bottles of oil and serum on the bathroom counter and exits. They brought up all of Nice’s furniture for him from the fifteenth floor, even if he wasn’t Nice anymore. And so, Lin Ling slides his hands between the mattress and the headboard to retrieve the only real remnant he has of Nice.

Nice’s phone beams up at him. He had felt bad for disabling the face login the second time he looked at the phone, but now that he’s lost Nice’s image, he’s grateful that he did.

Lin Ling goes to check on the messenger app again, and navigating to the first and only contact on the phone, he hesitates, staring at a phone number he’s already memorised.

His thumb hovers over the call icon. Just a press away from getting the chance to put a name to the ghost that he’s been chasing blindly for far too long.

(Do you deserve that knowledge? The peace of knowing—when you’ve never had a claim to it in the first place)

Lin Ling stares, and stares at that foreign name. And shuts down the phone. Watches the screen darken before throwing his arm across his face to shield sore and reddened eyes.

It’s nighttime, and above, a waxing crescent wavers, a sliver of white about to be devoured by the night. Yet its light casts the entire floor into lonely shadows, illuminating a hot-pink gun.

In the aftermath, Lin Ling sits on the bed, silent and alone. The sheets are still wrinkled.

He had delighted in deliberately messing them up, having felt like the weight of the world had been lifted from his shoulders with the reveal of his fake identity. Not even the burden of Firm Man’s statue, all 472,466 kilograms of diamond, had measured up to the mental strain and stress of pretending to be Nice.

He had cemented a place for himself in the public's eyes, not as the hero born from perfection, but as himself—Lin Ling. Former advertising worker, common everyday man and Moon fan.

Just a few hours ago, he was on cloud nine, feet treading sand and water, the sun’s setting rays bathing him and his goddess in amber radiance.

And yet, it feels so far away now. A dream, fleeting and ephemeral, iridescent, that popped right in his hands like a bubble when he tried to hold it, as innocent as a child who didn’t know that the world could be so cruel to what was already so fragile.

The grit of sand, coarse against his palm, the smell of ozone and smoke choking the air, and red that couldn’t be washed away even when he scrubbed and scrubbed until his skin was pink.

Less than a week ago, he had resolved himself to rescue one person—his idol, who gave him hope in his darkest times. A beacon of light when he was sinking in darkness. A woman who, in actuality, was far from the complementary image of perfection to her boyfriend that he had once helped to cultivate, yet was perfect in his eyes.

Everything he had suffered as Nice would have been worth it if he could just save her.

But he failed.

(Once again, he failed)

Moon died, wide-eyed, not even comprehending the merciless bolt of lightning that had gouged through her skull, a shapeless bullet hitting its target right on the dot. And Lin Ling had stood there and watched it happen. Stood there, as the fucking murderer, the bastard rank nine hero E-Soul, got away.

(Always too late)

Have you found the direction your heart desires? Moon asks, just before she walks away forever, and his final memory of her is one stained in blood, a corpse cooling at his feet, lilac eyes lifeless and dull.

Lin Ling jolts, as though that same electric shock that had ended Moon’s life had blitzed through his body. His mind had snagged on a memory, a vision he dismissed as merely a haunting dream.

Until it became reality just a few hours ago.

But how? Lin Ling wonders, feeling a sense of sickly trepidation creep up his throat. The air conditioner whirs, too loud in a silent room, but nothing compared to his swirling thoughts. Aside from her clothes, and the backdrop of sand, it could practically be one-to-one—the two blood-stained images he has in his mind.

That night, did he somehow have a prophetic dream?

(Or was it ‘Nice’ who had one?)

Fingers trembling, he retrieves the tucked-away phone from the bed. Tongue swiping over too dry lips, he brings up the locked notes app, the password screen beaming up at him.

What is it that you truly desire?

He had dismissed it as Nice addressing himself in the third person the first time he saw it—a bit strange, but Lin Ling had done so plenty of times before when psyching up or berating himself for something.

Because who else could Nice be referring to, except for himself? It was his own phone after all, and one that he deliberately took action to hide from prying eyes like Miss Juan.

But…

(Leaping off the very same rooftop at the same time his future replacement was on it. A lucky coincidence that saved Miss Juan from losing her job, and landed Lin Ling the opportunity to become his own hero down the line.

Deleting most of his message history, but leaving the phone intact, when he could have just taken it with him to the grave just as easily.

And a password reminder, set by a person whom Lin Ling has no doubt would have had no problem with easily recalling the input.

Just before he fell, when Nice met Lin Ling’s eyes, his gaze turned softer, almost lidded, his lips curling up as though privy to a secret unbeknownst even to their owner. The same expression he had when Lin Ling saw him for the very first time. That genuine smile, who he only showed to his friend, Nice had directed towards a supposed stranger.

Alone, they were just odd occurrences and coincidences. But with the possibility that what Lin Ling had dreamt of when he was still Nice was actually an omen of the future…

What if they were intentional?)

The password bar blinks, empty, and Lin Ling feels half insane for doing this, that be might be going crazy from Moon’s death and Nice’s, but he types in his answer.

The X may at first seem like the title for the number one hero, but its hidden meaning is that…

“Even nobodies like me can become heroes,” Lin Ling finishes his own words, an echo of that fateful day resounding in his mind.

He presses enter, and the screen dissolves into white, revealing–

A snap brings out in his ears, and the world shifts. Planes of existence fizzle out in jagged bursts of oversaturated colours—dizzying oranges, punchy pinks, glitching greens, peeling away the fabric of reality, washing it out in vivid neon hues as everything tilts on its axis, inertia and gravity displaced in a sea of shapes and shades.

Lin Ling clenches his eyes shut, overwhelmed by the deluge of sensations, vertigo pulling him tight by the chest, but the moment passes, and when he wrenches his eyes open, reality has stitched itself back together, everything slotting neatly back into place.

Except, when he looks at the screen of the phone he had clenched in his grip—thankfully not hard enough to break—the Notes app is gone. Lin Ling gapes in disbelief as he furiously swipes through the phone, double-checking, triple-checking, only to find no sign of the app. Vanished into a pixellated abyss, just like someone had gone through the phone and deleted it.

Something nudges against his foot, and Lin Ling jumps, nearly tripping over the offender.

A metal can, which Lin Ling prods suspiciously with his shoe, before picking it up for inspection. It’s a canned drink, and emboldened on it is as branding is a huge, glaring, X.

Bright sunlight reflects off the glass windows of nearby skyscrapers, fragmented beams showering the throngs of people on the street below, all moving to the beat of their own special tunes. Lin Ling sits alone, next to his own window, in the corner seat of a cafe. Hood pulled over his hair, especially to hide the eye-catching streak of white that stood out among brunette bangs, he watches life go by at its own pace.

The sky is a clear, undaunted blue, with nary a cloud in sight. Bright and vivid, but still too light to match the blue he sees in his dreams, in memories, in frames caught between stillness when he glances twice at the mirror every morning.

Ling Ling hears him before he sees him—the sound of footsteps; far from timid, with their heavy footfalls and even pace, but not quite certain either. A sort of hesitance that made it stand out above the rest of the bustle of the cafe.

Lin Ling slides his attention away from looking out of the window, from looking at the sky, and meets ombre purple eyes. At first, from a distance, he had mistaken them for black, onyx even, as they darkened in inconsolable grief at the news of tragedy.

But up close, Lin Ling could see even the way Wreck tried—and failed—to hide that he was observing Lin Ling just as close, eyes scanning his face as though to catalogue the differences between him and the ghost he pretended to be.

Wreck slides into the empty seat opposite. There’s a bandage taped over his nose, and a giant gauze pad affixed to his left cheek with bandages. Right where Lin Ling had socked him.

After a second of averted eye contact, where Wreck fixes his vision on the table between them instead of a face so similar yet unfamiliar, he looks up to meet Lin Ling’s gaze.

“If you’ve already invited me here, then there’s no need to keep quiet.”

Lin Ling exhales, letting out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. Wreck sounded far from friendly, but he didn’t sound like he was about to re-enact their last meeting in the middle of a crowded cafe full of civilians either, so he would take it as a win.

“Are you well? No injuries?” Lin Ling starts by asking, because even if he was the one who contacted Wreck, he didn’t have a plan in mind on how to talk to him. And he was concerned—has been, ever since he punched Wreck with no holds barred, sending him plummeting to the ground from hundreds of metres in the air.

Wreck snorts, a dark expression flitting past his face. “Well, you nearly cracked my jaw in half, but I’m not dead.”

Lin Ling sighs. “That was never in the plan, even if you derailed it. You would have known if you finished reading the original script.”

Ironically, despite not finishing the script he had been given for the fake wedding, Wreck had ended up following it almost to a tee; he was to use the same terraforming move that he pulled off to get Lin Ling alone, to send all three of them out of audience and camera view so they could more easily fake Moon’s death.

True to the spirit of the script, Lin Ling had descended back down to Earth with Moon ‘dead’ in his arms. And originally, Wreck was to make his escape through one of Treeman’s blimps waiting on standby, though in actuality he didn’t so much as get ferried by the blimp as he did crash on it.

The moment Miss Juan’s bodyguards squirrelled him and Moon’s ‘corpse’ out of view, he had turned to Miss Juan to plead with her to spare Wreck’s life—to let him go, in exchange for Lin Ling’s future obedience.

Wreck glares at him, unmollified, then stretches out a hand towards Lin Ling. “Give it to me,” he states, not a request so much as it is a demand, blunt and to the point.

Lin Ling doesn’t have to prod for clarification—he knows what Wreck is talking about—and quickly retrieves Nice’s phone from where it’s burning a hole in his pocket. Wreck snatches it from his grasp as soon as it enters grabbing distance.

Lin Ling just watches silently as the man does what he did when he first found the phone; sweep through it and its contents. Only Wreck does it with the frantic desperation of a drowning man clinging to the last vestiges of air in a dark, lightless sea.

Abruptly, his eyes snap back to Lin Ling’s, incomprehension and rising fury warring on his face. “You…” he snarls, voice like a live current, sparks a warning before the fire “Did you—!?”

Lin Ling almost feels guilty, shaking his head. In a way, things would be easier if he were the one who deleted most of the personal traces of the owner of the phone from the device. At least Wreck would be able to rightfully direct his powder keg of emotions at someone who wasn’t a ghost.

(Even if Lin Ling were to bear the brunt of the explosion, well, he had some guilt in this, so it wouldn’t be all misplaced.)

Wreck looks like he wants to scream, to shout, to upend the table and send it crashing to the floor, and grab Lin Ling by the collar of his hoodie and pour his anger and grief out in violence. Lin Ling braces himself, but instead, Wreck just deflates, slumping back into his seat like a marionette with its strings cut, the phone clasped loosely in his hands like a prayer.

Lin Ling feels something open up in his heart, something he thinks has been in the making ever since that fateful day on the rooftop, where he failed to save someone for the first time.

That same person haunts Lin Ling now, and the person in front of him.

In a way, though it makes Lin Ling seem like a fool for chasing after a dead man he never knew, he and Nice are similar in this regard.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Wreck.”

Lin Ling has never liked such empty words, especially as an orphan, but he thinks that Wreck’s grief deserves to be acknowledged. That Nice’s death, not as a brand, or as a hero, but as the person underneath the mask, gets to be acknowledged too.

The farce had dragged for far too long with Lin Ling, who by acting in lieu of him, had refused to let Nice’s spirit rest. But at least, the world now knew that Nice was dead. And the ones who knew Nice could finally grieve him truly.

(His heart pangs, as blonde hair and lilac eyes flash though his mind)

“...You know my name,” Wreck’s voice breaks through the heavy silence. “Why don’t you use it?”

He scowls, pinning Lin Ling with an accusing glare. “Is it because you think you're better than me? Mr ‘brand new top ten hero’, who escaped from the act he was forced to play, while the villain sulks around in defeat, crying over someone who never loved him back?”

Wreck’s eyes widen as his last words leave him in a choked hiss, his breath hitching as though trying to swallow back into his heart what was already said.

Lin Ling just shakes his head. An action he seems to be repeating far too much in front of a person seeking just as many answers as him. But it’s the only response he can give. “No. I don’t use it because I think you wouldn’t want me using it.”

“You’re right that the only way I learnt it was by digging through Nice’s phone. I would do it again, because I’m selfish, and there was just so much I didn’t know–and still don’t know,” Lin Ling admits truthfully. He had nothing else to offer, after all. “But that doesn’t make any of it right.”

“So I won’t use your name. Not because I think you’re any less than me, or that I’m morally above you—but because I think you’ve been hurt enough already.”

“Especially by me,” Lin Ling finishes. When he dares to look back up at Wreck—and when did he look down?—the black-haired man has seemed to calm again, observing Lin Ling with a sort of scrutiny that, strangely, doesn’t make him feel picked apart, like all the other inspections he’s been subjected to recently, as Nice and The Commoner.

It feels more like…understanding.

“You’re even more of a perfect hero than that bastard,” he eventually concludes. Reaching into his side, Wreck pulls out his own phone, tapping on it a few times before placing it face up on the table. Lin Ling watches as the Wreck presses play on what seems to be a video.

“...under your perfect appearance is a miserable soul!”

Lin Ling’s eyes widen.

What is a hero?

As the advertisement he made plays out on a cracked television, recorded with shaky hands, Wreck explains.

“That God’s Eye person seemed to know the truth behind Nice’s death, so I took out my phone to record. Ended up catching your advertisement.”

“It is yours, right?” Wreck asks dryly, sweeping his hair off his shoulders with his hand. “It’s your voice, and you worked at the marketing agency that did Nice’s advertisements; I figured you created it.”

“Yeah,” Lin Ling confirms unsteadily, feeling his throat close up. It was his first time seeing the advertisement after the fight with God’s Eye, and he was overtaken by a rush of emotions. Relief, and joy, mostly, that he had been true to those words. That he never strayed from his dream, and in the end, this reminder of his true desires was the push that enabled him to be the hero he always wanted to be. “It’s mine.”

Even if he failed twice now, to be a true hero, both times at the expense of a life, he knows that Moon would have wanted him to keep moving on–to chase his heart’s desires, and live freely.

(What would Nice have wanted for him?)

The advertisement comes to an end, with a resounding, To Be Hero X, and Lin Ling opens his mouth, to ask Wreck—

Hold on Lin Ling thinks, eyes narrowing in confusion. His hand reaches out, pressing on the screen to rewind it. It takes him a moment—one where Wreck eyes him with increasing puzzlement, but otherwise doesn’t slap Lin Ling’s hands away from his phone—but Lin Ling manages to pause on what incited his notice.

In a split-second frame, there’s a small white smile painted on the left of the end screen, near the bolded words, and a hand pointing to the big red X.

(Bursts of oversaturated colours. An X-branded soda can. The sound of snapping fingers.)

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Wreck finally decides to question, tone skating on something he might call concern if stemming from someone else. Lin Ling slowly lifts his head to look outside the window.

Affixed to the building facing the cafe is one of the city’s dime-a-dozen giant electronic billboards—but what catches Lin Ling’s attention isn’t the screen itself but what’s on it.

‘18 DAYS LEFT UNTIL THE 21ST HERO TOURNAMENT’

“I don’t know,” Lin Ling says. He thinks of dreams vivid enough to be premonition, of being on a different rooftop, with a ghost that smiled so prettily before taking an encore’s bow.

“But I think I’m going to find out.”