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.)