Work Text:
Lin Ling wakes up.
A woman - Miss J, he recognizes, - stalks towards him as he scrabbles fruitlessly in the arms of several bodyguards. He’d emailed her an ad proposal just an hour before. Now, here in this dark room surrounded by men in suits, she looks convincingly like a bonafide, classic film, interrogator/kidnapper/possible murderer. Please don’t be my murderer.
She digs her fingers into his chin. Lin Ling tries unsuccessfully not to whimper.
“You know me! I send you ad proposals, my name is Lin Ling -!”
“-I don’t care who you are, I care what you saw and heard up on that roof ,” she snarls.
He doesn’t need to be told twice. “He floated down, walked right past me, didn’t say a word and proceeded to throw himself off the building.”
"That all?”
“...He did the pose,” Lin Ling offers lamely. Miss J doesn’t grace that with a reply. So starts the rest of his life.
—
“That all?”
Truthfully, that wasn’t all. What was he supposed to say? Should he have mentioned the doves, perhaps? Like, where did they come from?
Nice just… dropped. Thumped limply against a stuck-out section of the building on the way down, like a ragdoll, and came to rest on his back on the pavement below. Forget a hero, or a star - the Number #10 Hero might as well have been a sack of rocks.
Lin Ling tried not to think about it. He had a lot to memorize - Miss J was nothing if not thorough. Her agency marketed Nice as if his life depended on it (which, Lin Ling supposed, it did. Not that it mattered in the end).
Nice’s branding was all about perfection. The more people trusted in that branding, the more perfect Nice truly became. The more perfect Lin Ling would become. Lin Ling knew it better than most people.
The perfect relationship, the perfect home, the perfect hero.
Nice even landed perfectly, Lin Ling mused. Doves, pose, smile, and then flat on his back, no witnesses, just far enough away from the roof so that Lin Ling could catch a crystal clear view of the perfect puddle of blood leaking from his perfect head. That was the kind of person he was about to become.
Lucky him.