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Cyan thumbs through the rack of clothes the PA just finished wheeling into her dressing room. The outfits are incidental, in her opinion; they’re meant to be promoting the perfume line they collaborated on, not a designer brand that costs—
Cautiously tugging a dress free, she squints at the label and does her best to match it to a price point she’s seen online.
Oh. No thank you.
Her stomach threatens to drop out of her shoes, so back on the rack it goes.
Cyan has money now. She knows that—abstractly. And she also knows how lucky she was as as child: never wanting for anything material, never going hungry, never worrying about having a roof over her head. But that brief brush with what if when she escaped the orphanage has never really left her. Her luck saved her, then; without it… who knows how she might’ve ended up.
“Maybe I can just match with Queen…”
Surely that can’t hurt, right? The point is for them to compliment each other, anyway. Elegance and youthful eagerness, pleasantly intertwined. Whatever that means. Her manager ironed out the details of the campaign with her weeks ago, and she’s glanced over them a few times since, but admittedly the whole concept goes right over her head.
The only thing she’s really in agreement on is that Queen’s perfume is absolutely divine.
The perfume company they’re partnering with sent samples to DOS’ office ahead of the photoshoot and Cyan politely took a whiff of hers so she could smile and thank the representative for their hard work on the collaboration. She liked it well enough—it had a sharp, sort of minty smell to it that reminded her a little too much of toothpaste but did match the “refreshing” part of her slogan.
When Queen spritzed a little of her own perfume on her wrist and offered it for Cyan to test, Cyan—
She’s not a pervert, okay. She’s not.
(And Luo can kindly go fuck himself for daring to suggest otherwise.)
She just… She really likes Queen’s perfume. It reminds her of the tea they sometimes share in Queen’s apartment. And the flowers that Luo is trying (and largely failing) to grow on his balcony. And there’s this little bit underneath all that that makes her think of the rum Luo turned up with on her 18th birthday, which knocked them both on their asses the next morning but makes her smile whenever she recalls the taste of it now.
Also vanilla. A nice, sweet scent that mixes surprisingly well with everything else.
Queen’s perfume overall is exactly as advertised. Lovely. Elegant. Mature.
…Enticing.
So, the thing is, when Queen let her get close to sniff the perfume sample, she—may have made a noise.
A perfectly innocent noise! Just, like, an inhale. A sharp inhale. With something sort of… also happening in the back of her throat. It was not totally dissimilar to how she might’ve sounded the first time she tried Little Johnny’s double fudge brownies.
Queen, bless her, only blinked and lifted her wrist to her nose again, giving it another cursory sniff. “I wasn’t sure about this combination, but the perfumer convinced me… I suppose that’s why he’s the professional and I’m merely the face here to sell the product.”
Meanwhile Cyan was willing her Trust-gotten luck to kick in and force Luo to trip over his own feet and drop his phone (whether through Looney Toons-style antics or some Rube Goldberg chain of reactions), because at the moment he was giving her the most egregious shit-eating grin she’d ever seen, phone lifted and clearly filming the entire ordeal.
She managed to get through the rest of the meeting with her face only slightly on fire and the faintest waver in her voice, with Queen apparently none-the-wiser about her earlier slip-up. She even kept her cool on the drive back to the Tower, chatting as nonchalantly as she could manage about her and Luo’s ongoing List of Things to Do Now That We’re Not Trapped in an Evil Orphanage. They parted ways when the elevator opened to Cyan’s floor, and Cyan gave Luo until the doors closed before she tackled him to the floor.
Her luck won out: he didn’t drop his phone, but he did swipe his fingers across the screen in the scuffle, and the video he’d recorded went right into the trash—which then conveniently emptied itself as per its usual schedule.
Doubly lucky was the fact that Luo—now a DOS trainee after Cyan made it a stipulation in her contract that he be given a chance to work alongside her—had an all-day outing his manager planned that coincided with the photoshoot for the ad.
So, at least very least, Cyan doesn’t have him sitting around in her dressing room right now, haranguing her about whether or not she’s going to be able to get through the shoot without “popping a lady boner for Queen.”
Ugh. She’s already blushing just thinking about his crass comments.
Scrubbing a hand futilely over her face, Cyan grabs the nearest set of matched clothing and gets herself dressed. The PA’s going to be back any minute anyway, there’s no use delaying things and prolonging the shoot.
Hair and makeup arrive just as she’s sliding her arms through the suit jacket she’s chosen, and she spends the next forty-some minutes in silence as her team gossips over her head.
It would be peaceful if not for the fact that her heart’s threatening to bust through her rib cage and her stomach’s making noise about a possible rebellion.
But she endures. She smiles, she thanks her team. She follows the PA out into the studio and greets the photographer again before taking her place beside Queen.
Lucky again: they are matching. Queen’s dressed in a black suit of her own, with a white blouse, a stylish belt, and black hat Cyan thinks might be a fedora? Or something like one, at least. Women’s fashion is honestly beyond her; she just buys what she likes and what looks good on her these days, largely at Luo’s insistence.
But Queen is beautiful, as always. They’ve done her makeup in mostly neutral shades, with a dash of sparkling gold across her eyelids and a touch of glitter on her cheeks. Bold, but understated enough you’d miss it at a glance. It lets her natural features shine, highlighting her eyes and high cheekbones.
Luo’s smirking face pops into her head, and Cyan belatedly realizes she’s—staring. With her mouth open. Like an idiot.
She’s not a pervert. She’s not a pervert. She is definitely, one hundred percent, not a pervert—
Oh, god. She’s wearing the perfume.
Maybe she’s a little bit of a pervert.
Warm notes of vanilla and bergamot wash over her, and Cyan has to admit that she goes hot under the collar from the proximity alone. Her only hope is the foundation and blush they applied is enough to hide her rapidly spreading flush.
“Cyan? The photographer’s asking if you’re ready.”
Startled, Cyan whips her head around to stare at Queen, who’s watching her with a puzzled expression that’s verging on concern. Oh, no. No, no, that won’t do. She’s supposed to be a professional today! She can’t have Queen thinking she’s doing anything less than her best to represent DOS well.
“Sorry, yes, I’m ready! Just got lost in my head for a second there.” She offers Queen a sheepish smile, pressing her hands together in mock-prayer as an apology. “I’ve been tinkering with lyrics for a new song and the melody’s all I’ve been thinking about lately.”
Not a lie. Luo’s spent the last three nights crashing on her floor of the Tower with his guitar at the ready, helping her work through the first draft.
This is totally a love song, Luo pointed out once he’d read through the half-formed scribbles on her lyric sheet. You’re writing a love song. Oh my god. Everyone’s going to think this is about me again. Cyan, how am I supposed to get a date when the entire city thinks we’re, like, childhood sweethearts? You’re killing me, Cyan. Killing me dead. I hope you get so lightheaded from Queen’s perfume you faint into her arms and put me out of my misery.
Cyan shunts that thought away with vicious efficiency.
Not today, Satan.
“Oh? You’ll have to play it for me when we’re done here,” Queen says, quirking a smile as she turns to face the camera.
“It’s not even close to finished,” Cyan hedges, following suit.
“I like the in-progress versions just as much. Sometimes more, if I’m honest. It’s interesting to see how you and Luo work out the creative kinks. There’s a logic to it that I can’t follow most of the time, but I enjoy trying to unravel the threads of it anyway.”
“Oh,” Cyan says, blinking. For some reason that’s doing her in even worse than the perfume. Damn. “Yeah, sure, I’ll play it for you, then. It’d be my pleasure.
“Wonderful. I’ll look forward to it.”
That’s the last conversation they manage for the rest of the shoot, too busy adjusting their poses by degrees and trying to project whatever aura the photographer asks of them. Queen nails it more often than Cyan does, but she doesn’t mind much. A stage is easier than this—more authentic, more sincere. And Queen’s always been better at donning whatever mask she needs to sway the public to her side.
It’s a fun shoot, all in all. Even with Luo’s curse about fainting into Queen’s arms hanging over her head just as tangibly as the cloud of Queen’s perfume.
(She stalks the perfume company’s website afterwards. The second their collaboration products go on sale, she buys a dozen of Queen’s.
Luo finds the box of them in her closet a month later and laughs so hard he pulls three different muscles and complains about it for a week.)