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It is a perfectly ordinary morning when he first feels the gears of fate stop, get stuck, and move again.
Someone dies. His Trust hangs in the air. Someone else inherits it, and their Trust slowly leaks to him. The public knows him as another person, but he knows that the person wearing Nice’s outfit is not Nice.
Fate never dies. Fate would’ve died long ago if it could—there are too many things that could’ve killed it. A speech, a man, a post, a murder, a stalker, a boy, a girl, a friend; all of these would’ve stopped fate in its tracks if it could.
Instead, fate simply redirects its course.
Once something disrupts it, it falters, hesitates, and moves off towards a whole new direction. Those that were able to make it stop in its tracks for even just a short while were always those that would be the protagonist of a story; those who would go on to change the world as they knew it, for better or worse.
And this ordinary, common person was able to disrupt its pattern. A person as ordinary as he always wanted to be and wasn’t.
Interesting.
X first meets the Commoner on a rooftop.
He snaps his way up onto it one late night— one of an advertising firm, it seems— and finds the younger man sitting on its ledge. Something tells X that this isn’t the first time he’s been here, with the way he knows what crevices he can grip onto, and which ones have already been broken in a fit of rage.
Lin Ling looks back and sees the man.
“A-Ah, X! What are you doing here? I didn’t expect to meet you!” Lin Ling stammers, flustered at the sight of the No. 1 hero. He almost falls off, and he holds onto the ledge harder, trying to balance himself. X can’t see the hero Commoner in front of him; right now, he only sees Lin Ling.
How much he longs to return to those days.
“Just taking a midnight walk. The view of the city from above is truly amazing,” X replies, sitting down next to Lin Ling. His legs hang off the edge carelessly. “You’re familiar with this place?”
“…This was where he killed himself,” Lin Ling replies.
X stays silent.
“You should already know everything, given your powers…the HAC briefed me about you once, including the bounty. I think you already know about that too anyways.” He scratches on the concrete. “Honestly, why would you even come see me? Maybe it’s because I’m Rank 10, sure, but…”
Even without seeing his eyes, X knows what Lin Ling is feeling; pain, confusion, inferiority. He watches those feelings from a distance, the weight of them muddled through water. Fate is a brutally efficient thing; it never likes to get into the nitty gritty things like ‘feelings’ and ‘emotions’. It simply trudges on for the big picture.
“I just fell into this role. The thing about Nice— I just piggybacked his Trust. How else would people believe in a commoner talking big?”
Maybe he really was talking big, sure. Maybe he was selling an unreachable dream, one he seemed to be living— but not without blood shedded. “Even a commoner can become a hero”— that was what he said, right?
They sat side by side— an ‘ordinary’ person with an unordinary story; an unordinary person who wished to be nothing but ordinary. Both were marketers of the ‘ideal’, one of being common, the other being the opposite. They say that humans long for what they can’t have— so maybe it shouldn’t be a mystery to the omniscient X why he was so drawn to the other. Yet it was.
If Lin Ling was selling a dream, could X buy it?
Could X dream?
“Maybe the world needs more commoners like you,” X could only say.
Lin Ling remembers the first time his world shifted off its axis.
One second, he was being thrown against a wall, broken arm and bleeding nose not helping with his pathetic state; the next he was thrown into a garbled mess of colours, world fluttering and twisting into things it shouldn’t, time and space flying by his eyes.
He found himself in X’s arms when the flashing ended.
“Are you fine?” X asks.
“U-Uhm, I’m fine! I’m ok! Wait, hold on, the villain! Where-“
“I took care of it.”
“Really, you didn’t have to-“ Lin Ling then starts coughing out blood, crimson dripping down his chin.
A beat.
“You didn’t seem to be in the best shape then. Not saying it’s any better now.”
“Thank you for your help, I’m really grateful , I should repay you for thi–Where are you going?!”
“Home.” X yawns. “I don’t do overtime. No need to repay me.”
“W-Wait, hold on, I-“
“I said, there’s no need.” He walks away from the battered Lin Ling, extruding calm confidence with every step. As if he was a product of the gods, or maybe some mystical messenger of them.
Who was X? What was X?
What was it like to be the embodiment of a hero?
Lin Ling feels hopeless, only being able to lie on the ground helplessly, watching the extraordinary X snap himself away, colours flying out like all too-bright sparks of a star.
So blinding. Yet so dazzling.
And so, the unordinary and ordinary intertwine— as nature would’ve liked.