Work Text:
Lin Ling is haunted by Nice’s ghost.
He stands in Nice’s shadow, trying to conform to the shape of the dead hero. Smile like Nice, move as gracefully as Nice, be as flawless as Nice until Lin Ling is not Lin Ling. Until Lin Ling can look into a mirror and see not himself, but Nice.
It never fully works.
As much as the world saw Nice when they looked at him, a part of Lin Ling stubbornly refused to change. Lin Ling clings onto that part, perhaps afraid of forgetting who he was, even if it meant never being the hero he always wanted to be.
And then, he stops pretending.
He becomes his own hero: The Commoner. He no longer looks in the mirror to remember how to be Nice – how to smile and laugh and breathe like the copy of Nice he tried to be.
He breaks free of Nice’s ghost, his long shadow.
But sometimes, Lin Ling will sees things in the corner of his eye.
There is a cold spot around his shoulders no matter how hot the day is, or how he burrows himself in his blankets at night. He wakes in the morning to the smell of spring flowers still touched by the frost of winter; an alpha’s smell but Lin Ling is an omega and not even masquerading as Nice changed that. The phantom pain of a bite on the back of his neck, of the imprint of teeth in skin but every time Lin Ling goes to touch the skin there, his collar remains, the skin there unblemished and unmarked.
“There’s nothing there,” Lin Ling tells himself. He rubs and rubs at the back of his neck because it’s proof that nothing has happened, no alpha has been with him and marked him. “There’s no one here but me.”
Lin Ling repeats this to himself, the omega collar around his neck unbroken but the lights behind him flicker, haloing him darkly.
Yang Cheng remembers a boy.
He was an ordinary, normal boy just like Yang Cheng, who bonded with Yang Cheng over their shared love of heroes. An ordinary boy, who whole heartedly wanted to become a hero because he wanted to help others, to become a reliable person who could save others. As children, they had been inseparable.
When Yang Cheng loses his parents, that boy is the reason why his Trust Value does not plummet to zero, but remains a single, steady 1.
For that alone, Yang Cheng has always loved Lin Ling.
Lin Ling, his childhood friend, who believed in him when he had no one else. Lin Ling, whose memory Yang Cheng clung to as he struggled and fought to be recognized, to become someone worthy enough of meeting E-Soul once more. He clung to Lin Ling’s smile, their shared love for heroes, as he took his first step as the New E-Soul.
Would Lin Ling be proud of who he has become?
Yang Cheng ponders this, as he stares down at the rapidly growing number on his wrist, as though he could will Lin Ling’s number to shine brighter than the others, as though one person’s Trust could mean more than anyone else’s.
Yang Cheng becomes New E-Soul, then the only E-Soul, and now he is the number nine hero in the world. Yang Cheng wears the crown of E-Soul, paid in blood and it is only the thought of Lin Ling that keeps him from breaking. He thinks of how proud Lin Ling will be when he learns about Yang Cheng’s rise to heroism and how hard he has fought and struggled and triumphed against all odds. He thinks of child Lin Ling’s smile, beautiful and perfect in the way all wonderful childhood memories were, and Yang Cheng lives on.
Are you watching me, Lin Ling?
Then, on an unassuming, innocuous day that was like any other tedious day, he reads a news article about an employee freshly fired from a job, jumping off the roof of his former workplace.
The employee’s name is Lin Ling.
Yang Cheng spends hours that night, staring at the number on his wrist with an ever expanding hollowness inside him, trying to remember if he ever noticed the fall of a single number among all the rapid escalations and drops of Trust Value as though it could allow him to pin point the exact moment Lin Ling’s number disappeared from his wrist.
Yang Cheng thinks a part of him dies that day, along with Lin Ling.
The world moves on, dark and hollow until the day God’s Eye hijacks the news network and Lin Ling appears, alive and whole once more. And then, Lin Ling’s a hero just like him.
Yang Cheng remembers a boy.
The boy is now a young man, an unmated omega and Yang Cheng is an unmated alpha. Yang Cheng wants to believe this is fate, this is inevitability – proof that Lin Ling and him were meant to be.
But when Yang Cheng looks at Lin Ling, he sees the shadow of something wrapped around his shoulders. When Yang Cheng steps a little too close to Lin Ling when they talk, hungry for just that sliver of contact, for that one extra second of being able to smell Lin Ling’s scent, a glass shatters near them, startling them both and forcing them apart. When Yang Cheng looks at Lin Ling because his eyes always find themselves looking for Lin Ling – a sunflower following his sun – the angry, bloody ghost of Nice glares back at him.
Nice as a ghost can say nothing that Yang Cheng will be able to hear but Yang Cheng sees the way Nice wraps his mangled arms around Lin Ling’s shoulders, watches the way his split open head drips phantom blood over Lin Ling, his lips tickling Lin Ling’s cheek as he silently whispers into Lin Ling’s ear with a smile that is as perfectly terrible as the rest of his ghost.
In death, Nice is hungry for a love he can’t have anymore but for Nice, that doesn’t matter. He loves Lin Ling more than anyone, more than Yang Cheng (how dare he look at Lin Ling, how dare he try to talk to Lin Ling when Lin Ling was hishishis) ever could.
He deserves all of Lin Ling, in life – his whole life – and in his eventual death as well.
Lin Ling, my Lin Ling, he says with a ghost mouth that cannot speak human words but is filled with his terrible human love so he breathes out the iciness of death against Lin Ling’s neck, his dead teeth futilely biting into Lin Ling’s living flesh.
So what if it doesn’t take? Nice has all of death to try and mark Lin Ling and Lin Ling already belongs to him anyways.
He is the perfect hero, Nice. So he will do this perfectly too.