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How Nice finds himself in a grungy dive bar, dressed down in the blandest disguise known to man, just shy of midnight on New Year’s Eve — he’ll never know.
He knows some of it. He knows the facts. Moon, going the kind of stir crazy she works herself into every six months or so, demanding they go out for a night on the town. Waving away each and every protest Nice could think of — We’re too recognizable, what if Miss J finds out, I’m going to be stuck there alone nursing a drink at the bar while you flitter around the room like a songbird in heat.
Do birds have heats? Should he have said mating season instead?
He’s fairly sure the result would’ve been the same either way.
And sure enough, he’s here, seated on a creaky barstool in desperate need of being reupholstered, a sweating glass of scotch he’s had for the last two hours in hand.
Wreck is here, too… somewhere. Moon’s counterpoint to his alone-at-the-bar protest backfired within the first thirty minutes of their arrival. Because Wreck might be here, but he’s really out there. Mingling. Unlike Nice, he actually likes people. Strangers. He gets something out of the getting-to-know-you process that Nice only ever considers tedious and stressful.
The ice cubes clink against the sides of his glass as Nice swivels around to face the bar. He lost sight of Wreck anyway, and Moon… Moon should enjoy whatever fleeting time she has, with whoever she wants. They’ve tested the boundaries of Trust before — what is and isn’t allowed, where belief draws the line when it comes to acting out of sync with their manufactured relationship. Moon can have her fun, without Trust taking her out at the knees, and Nice can—
His fingers spasm around his glass.
He takes a sip of his drink. Slow. Measured. Not to savor it, it barely tastes of anything on his tongue, watered down and tepid as it is. He does it — does it deliberately, with the intense focus he used to only reserve for his recitals — to feel himself fall in line. No wasted movements, no fidgeting. Every centimeter of his body under his control, dancing to strings only he holds.
Nice can have this. This time:, alone. In a place no one would ever think to look for him. Where Hero Nice would only venture if it meant a photo-op with grateful citizens.
He can sit here and count his breaths. He can hold the air in his lungs until the world starts to go black around the edges and chase down the burning in his throat with more kindling. He can choose to exhale and feel the aching in his chest like a bruise he can’t help but press on.
Here, he’s one degree removed from being Nice. It won’t last, and it isn’t enough. But it’s what he has.
Nice breathes out through his nose as he sets the glass down — dead-center on his coaster despite the overlapping watermark stains littering the bar top. He lets the music playing over the loudspeakers fade into static in his ears and avoids making eye contact with the faint amber-tinted reflection in front of him.
Moon has the keycard for their floor, and it’s nine-tenths of the reason why he hasn’t cut and run already. He could take a less conventional route and fly up, but he’s not in the mood to weather another one of Miss J’s lectures on destruction of Commission property. Is it really his fault Glimmer Labs hasn’t hero-proofed the Tower’s windows yet?
His glass sweats onto the coaster, darkening the cheap paper. He wipes the condensation from his fingers. Once. Twice. Drags all five fingerpads across his napkin, because he can, because he’s in control right now.
When he finishes this — fourteen sips from now — he’s going to find Wreck and beg to stay over for the night. Wreck won’t like it, the backlash that will inevitably hit Nice when Miss J discovers he spent the night away from his floor, away from Moon, but he’ll give in easily enough. Like he always does. Nice can count on Wreck. It’s one of his many virtues.
It’s also why Nice only sees him once a month outside of scheduled play-fights.
“Oh, hey.”
Nice registers the clatter of the bar stool being jostled next to him but doesn’t turn his head. People have come and gone from that seat all evening, jockeying for space to snag the bartender’s attention, holding court with friends only to disappear to the dance floor fifteen minutes later. One or two of them have tried chatting him up; a cool look and a plastic smile were all it took to turn them away.
He picks up his drink again.
“Hey, um, excuse me? Is anyone sitting here?”
Nice pauses, the rim of the glass resting against his bottom lip. His eyes dart to the corner, narrowing as he takes in the person standing with their knee against the seat cushion and their hands planted on the bar top for balance.
Even hunched over like this, Nice can tell he’s tall. Probably around Nice’s height. Brown hair — short, messy, sticking in damp clumps to his temples and the back of his neck — and brown eyes, the whites shot through with red. There’s a flush riding high on his cheeks and the longer Nice looks at him without offering a response, the further it seems to spread across his face.
Cute, in a puppy dog sort of way. If Nice squints he’d swear he could make out a pair of sullen, flattened ears and a drooping tail.
Nice gestures with his glass. He has fourteen sips left — delaying it for another few minutes won’t make much of a difference. “It’s yours,” he says magnanimously. Given tonight’s track record he doesn’t expect the seat to stay occupied for long, anyway.
The man brightens and half lowers himself, half falls onto the stool. He leans forward, craning his neck to look past Nice. The bartender is at the far end of the bar right now, and doesn’t so much as glance their way even when the brunet makes an aborted hand gesture for her attention. Puffing his cheeks out (like a fucking chipmunk — god), the man sinks back into his seat and practically drapes himself across the bar top, resting his face in the crook of his outstretched arm.
Probably for the best he’s not more aggressive about it: this guy seems to have already had one too many, and Nice isn’t interested in finding out how well a stranger can hold his liquor. He takes a sip of his drink — thirteen to go — and meticulously folds a napkin into ever-smaller triangles.
He has eleven sips until he can make his escape when the man asks, entirely unprompted, “Are you, like, depressed?”
Sip number eleven nearly kills him. “Excuse me?” Nice demands, sputtering, choking on the scotch making a valiant effort to escape via his fucking nostrils.
Blinking slowly, the man pauses, then fumbles for one of Nice’s neatly stacked napkins and—
Continues fumbling it. Right onto the sticky, disgusting floor of what Nice now considers to be Hell on earth.
“Whoops,” his would-be tormenter remarks, offering Nice a lopsided smile. “You’ve got— you’re kinda dripping? S’not drool or anythin’ but you’re, y’know, hot… so you probably care.”
Nice does care. Irrationally, viciously. He grabs another napkin and dabs at the corners of his mouth, restraining himself from stuffing it down this idiot’s throat instead. “Why the hell would you ask that out of the blue?”
The man cocks his head, squinting. “Ask what?”
“If I’m depressed.”
“Oh!” His mouth, which popped open into an O of surprise the moment Nice’s words registered, deflates into a miserable, wobbling line. “Asked ‘cause uhhhhh I dunno? I’m depressed? And misery loves… misery loves… y’know, not being alone! That thing!”
“…company?”
“That’s why I’m depressed!”
Grimacing, Nice crumples his napkin against his palm. There’s something annoyingly familiar about this: in their younger years, before they signed on with Treeman, Wreck would get wasted on cheap convenience store booze. Nice, too conscious of his image, his figure, and his sanity, usually refrained, which made him Wreck’s de facto caretaker. He’s not very inclined to do the same for an overtly sentimental stranger.
He doesn’t get up, though. There are ten sips of scotch left in his glass. And as much as he’d love nothing more than downing the rest of it in one go and leave, he — well, he set this stipulation himself. He decided this. That should mean something.
Besides, he could do without the string of text messages he’d get from Moon and Wreck if they discovered he ducked out before midnight.
So he unclenches his hand, lets the napkin drop to the bar, and sets about methodically smoothing it out while the man beside him grumbles something under his breath about incompetent bosses and… fuckin’ pretty boy whose fans care too fuckin’ much about his ass?
Nice tunes in against his will.
“…ass shots! So many ass shots! And it would be one thing if we’re promoting a… a clothing line. Skinny jeans that cut off your circuit— circul— that show off your big muscly ass. But this is for a toothpaste commercial! He just needs to smile all big and bright and perfect! Why are they sending me so much footage of his ass?”
Oh, Nice thinks, blinking. The thought surfaces slowly, seeping through the crevices of his brain like molasses. He’s talking about me.
On nights like these, where Nice is forced to abandon his homebody tendencies to allow Moon (and often Wreck) a chance to breathe, Moon dresses him down as a civilian. She fits him with a wig (never the same one, somehow, and as often as he’s searched the apartment he’s never found where the hell she’s storing all these), pulls his “least gaudy” clothes from his closet, and needles him into wearing dark brown contacts.
He’s stared at himself in the mirror long enough to conclude it’s a shit disguise, all in all.
They frequent dive bars in part because Nice refuses to go anywhere with decent lighting; he can’t risk anyone getting a good look at his face and calling him out for trying to play civilian for a few hours.
It’s just his luck he’s found himself seated next to someone who stares at his face (and his other assets, apparently) for a living.
“And it’s just, it’s— look, I love Moon. I mean, I like her. A lot.” His drunken companion swivels to look at Nice, then, wobbling atop his bar stool, feet hastily hooked under the bottom rung to keep his balance. “She’s pretty, and she says all these… these things that help me to breathe, to keep going. And I know I write them! I’m basically giving myself a pep talk! But it sounds so much better from Moon, y’know, she just has a way of— but Nice. Nice is… Nice is just—“
Perfect. Ethereal. Almost godly. Those are the favored words whenever his name appears in FOMO’s headlines. Nice has seen them often enough they’ve ceased to mean anything to him — they don’t even seem like real words anymore. So he subtly rolls his eyes, picks up his drink, and—
“ —the worst.”
The scotch trickles from the corner of Nice’s mouth, down the curve of his chin; he feels the cold, wet spread of it across his thigh where it’s soaking into his jeans. It still takes him five seconds for the signal to jerk the glass away from his mouth to shoot from his scrambled brain to his wrist.
Oblivious to Nice’s rising temper, the man goes on, “He’s hot, yeah, he’s got the kind of face that probably has little old grannies trying to set him up with their granddaughters — which would be a slap in the face to Moon, but I doubt they care. Uh. Anyway. Nice. He’s really attractive, he is! And his fights with Wreck are super visually appealing! And, okay, yes, he’s got all these promotional videos with kids and crying moms and students with heart-eyes, he’s a nice guy. He’s perfect. But…”
He seems to lose steam for a moment, his emphatic hand gestures stalling mid-air, mouth hanging open. Nice can almost hear the gears grinding to a halt in his head, sticky with too much cheap beer and god knows what else. The man suddenly slumps forward, arms thrown across the counter, cheek mashed against his forearm. He lets out the kind of forlorn sigh Nice has only ever heard from sixteen-year-old dogs when they flop to the ground at the end of the day.
“I dunno…” Nice is staring. He shouldn’t be — shouldn’t even pretend to give this man a modicum of his attention — but he can’t look away. The man is looking back. Soft, his features relaxing as he nuzzles into his arm, getting more comfortable. Brown eyes half-closed, lashes feathering against his cheeks. “I mean, is that all he wants to be known for? That he’s… he’s Nice with a pretty face?”’
Before Nice can react, he pops his head up like a meerkat emerging from its hole, swaying a few more centimeters into Nice’s space. “And, okay, okay, I’m in advertising, we don’t always get paid to sell people the truth. I’m not, like, totally ignorant. But he’s Nice! Number fifteen! He’s gotta have some control over his image, right?”
You’d be surprised.
He almost says it — straight out, honest. Brutal. There’s a bitter taste on his tongue he can’t attribute to the scotch and a sensation like nails on a chalkboard shivering through his chest and he wants— He wants—
He wants to stand up in a huff. He wants to knock his stool over. He wants to throw his glass clear across the room. He wants to grab this man by the front of his cheap polyester t-shirt that smells more like beer than the counter they’re seated at and shake him until he gets it. Without Nice having to explain himself, or admit to what he’s done to get here, or concede that he doesn’t even amount to the shallow presumptions that come from the persona he’s incapable of discarding.
None of that happens. And Nice doesn’t know if it’s his own self-restraint — his own fear of shattering the mask — or because the next words out of this idiot’s mouth have him vibrating like a tuning fork:
“I don’t get his marketing, anyway. If he was really perfect, wouldn’t he already be X? Why would we need other heroes when the perfect one already exists?”
He looks at Nice again. Blinks a few times like he’s waiting for the world to come back into focus. And he—softens. Around the mouth, at the corners of his eyes. His lower lip juts out, highlighting how chapped it is.
Nice feels himself winding up tight in response.
“Are you a fan?” the guy asks. “Oh, man, you’re a Nice fan, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to dump all this on you… ummmm, I don’t, like, hate him. Y’know? I kinda get sick of looking at him sometimes because wow I wish I looked like that, and had his Trust, ‘cause I wanna help people, I wanna be good like that… but I think the perfect angle is overblown.”
“How so?” It comes out raspy. Raw. His hands are clenched tight around the napkin he’s been toying with, and there’s this urge to—shred it. Tear it apart. He’s too still, too tense; but any movement at all feels as though it’ll crack something vital in him.
He can’t afford to be honest. He can’t afford to show weakness. But he has to know.
The man screws up his face and shrugs. “I dunno. No one’s perfect. Trust can do a lot, but make someone perfect? What does that even mean? It’s just, like, totally non— uh.” His tongue pokes out from between his teeth. “Dumb,” he settles on after a moment of waffling on his word choice. “It’s dumb. I mean, that’s what I meant. A perfect hero would— they’d be X, right. But X isn’t perfect. He’s not everywhere at once, he doesn’t stop every single crime. ‘Cause Trust is weird and powerful and whatever, but it’s… I don’t think perfection is possible. For anyone. So I kinda wish they’d let Nice just be a guy who also saves people. Does that make sense? Oh, fuck, I’m really drunk.”
Nice watches as this man, this stranger, this incredibly opinionated peon rattles on his bar stool and jerks his head around, which he seems to immediately regret as he clamps a hand over his mouth, cheeks puffing up with his gag reflex. And Nice watches because his brain is buffering, and his body is struck between fight or flight, and there are no words on his tongue and no breath in his lungs, and the floor is tilting dangerously beneath him, threatening to crack in two, to swallow him whole—
Distantly, he registers the bar getting rowdier. Patrons reaching for one another, bodies aligning, voices rising in a chant — a countdown. He hears it, and he processes it, and he watches as the man beside him squeezes his eyes shut and groans through his half-parted fingers.
Nice was meant to have control tonight. Over himself. Over his actions. Over his words. Control has been an unyielding grip on his muscles and tendons and bones, holding himself together, staying put when every centimeter of him screams to run. He doesn’t know when that control began to feel like just another hidden compartment of his usual cage, but —
He’s itching for—something. Action. Movement.
Imperfection.
“Don’t you dare vomit,” Nice says, barely audible above the ambient noise of the bar, and it’s all the warning this man gets before Nice pries his hand away from his mouth and leans in to kiss him.
To call it a proper kiss is a slight on them both, but Nice holds on with both hands on the back of this stranger’s neck, fingers digging into the base of his skull, and kisses him. It’s a wet mashing of lips and teeth and just the barest suggestion of tongue — a flick against the man’s upper lip, a hint of barley and something savory he can’t name.
Nice holds on as the countdown reaches zero. He holds on until the hands scrabbling uselessly at his wrists go slack. He holds on until the lips beneath his own go pliant and malleable.
He holds on until his stranger starts kissing back.
Then he pulls away, twisting free of the man’s searching hands. He glances down to find his glass, picks it up, and after a cursory moment of contemplation, knocks the rest of it back in a single swig.
“Hey.”
Nice paid for his drink upfront, so there’s no need to flag the bartender down to settle his tab. He fixes his collar, smooths out his shirt, and plants his feet to stand.
“Hey, hold on — “
A hand catches his wrist. Nice tells himself it’s because he lets it happen. He does a quick sweep of the bar — finds no trace of Moon or Wreck, and resolves to ask for confirmation of life in the morning via text — and then tips his chin down just enough to meet doe-brown eyes.
“You can’t just— do that,” the man insists, his voice gone high and reedy with shock.
“I can,” Nice replies, matter-of-fact. He did it; it’s done. The impulse was strong but Nice… Nice was stronger. He chose to indulge in it. “Are you going to tell me you’re straight? That I’ve sullied your virtue?”
“What? That’s— “
“Because you made a few too many comments about Nice’s perfect ass and my own pretty face for that to fly.”
“Fucking. Whatever! Maybe I’m not straight, who cares. But you still can’t— “
“I don’t have to offer you my bed,” Nice points out, “it was only a kiss. For luck, really. To ring in the New Year. That’s hardly— ”
“Will you let me fucking speak, you jackass?”
That gets a few heads turning in their direction. Nice fights back a flinch, leaning forward again until he’s close enough to whisper. It puts him precariously close to the man’s mouth again, and it’s tempting, but he leaves that breath of space between them.
“Speak,” he says.
“Fuck you, too,” the man says, wrinkling his nose. His eyes stray downwards, though, and his pupils dilate a fraction as Nice licks his lips. “Fuck,” the man huffs, “you. I just want your name! That’s common courtesy! Like, hi, I’m Lin Ling, I’m going to kiss you stupid now!”
Here’s another temptation: to tell the truth, of a kind. He could say My name is Nice. He could say I’m the owner of that ass you’ve been cursing all night. He could say You have a point about Nice’s image. I’d like to set up a meeting to discuss it further with you.
He only has Nice, really. It’s the name that appears on all his official documents. It’s what the public knows him as. What else does he have to offer aside from an icy brush off?
What comes out instead is, “Li Mingyu. I would offer to kiss you again, but I don’t know that you can afford to be any more stupid than you already are.”
The man — Lin Ling — sputters indignantly, and Nice laughs.
He laughs.
The sounds cuts off in a cough that he hides in his fist, and it’s his luck again that Lin Ling only takes it as a vain attempt to spare his feelings, going red from his hairline to his throat and grumbling as he hunkers down in his seat. The bartender is finally making her way to their side of the bar, but Lin Ling doesn’t look all that interested in getting her attention anymore.
Not that that’s Nice’s problem.
He slides his phone from the inside pocket of his jacket to check the time. 00:06. Moon shouldn’t have any complaints, though just to be safe he takes a screenshot he can shove in her face later if questioned.
His drink is gone. It’s after midnight. Nice has no reason to linger here. He can go back to their floor of the Tower, or use the spare key Wreck forced on him years ago to commandeer his guest room for the night. He’d settle for flying up to the highest point he can find and waiting for the dawn in relative silence.
Or perhaps— the thought comes to him when he finds Lin Ling in the corner of his eye.
But he doesn’t let himself dwell on that what if. Instead he leaves the dive bar with all he has left.