Chapter Text
Lin Ling crossed the mostly barebones living space to enter the kitchen, opening up the appliance to get some vanilla yogurt he’d kept stashed in there. He slightly pursed his lips when he noticed a few ill-placed X drink cans, reaching out his other hand to twist them until their logos were all facing the front. Satisfied, the incessant itch at the back of his brain and bubbling anxiety gone, he sat down on one of the bar stools placed next to the island.
It has been at least a couple of months since the mysterious Hero Trust Rank poll took the internet by storm. No one has figured out yet who made it, nor why it truly affected the Trust Rank simply by pressing a button, all they could do was adhere to it.
It seemed clean-cut at first back then – Nice taking over X, albeit by a small margin – and Lin Ling having to haul what little belongings he had from the ground floor to the top (consequentially having forced all other heroes to move a floor down). At least it gave him the chance to get rid of that gaudy Nice statue that seemed to stare at him as he slept. Creepy.
Lin Ling hadn’t seen X on his way to the top, which he didn’t think much about considering it was well known one of his powers was teleportation. Stepping out the elevator, he had dropped his luggage and walked right through the penthouse, making his way to the balcony and looked out at the beautiful view, a picture perfect view of the sunset. Yeah, Lin Ling could get used to this.
He’d barely stepped back into the threshold of the main floor when Ms. J had appeared out of thin air in front of him, index finger and thumb massaging her head as she looked at her phone. Before Lin Ling could get a peep out, she was already saying, “You’re going back down.”
Lin Ling had simply blinked.
“What?”
“You’ve been demoted to Rank Number 2 again. X needs this floor, get out,” she explained, jabbing a thumb towards the general direction of the personal elevator.
“Oh – okay,” Lin Ling acquiesced, mentally wondering how he’d already gotten knocked down. Though he supposed it made sense considering the enormity of hero X’s believers – it was a miracle he ever managed to surpass him in the first place.
He gathered what little boxes he had and set towards the elevator once more, finding the second floor as empty as the one he just left. Stretching his back after the physical effort, Lin Ling made his way towards to bathroom to take a bath and get cleaned up when his phone’s ringtone sounded, the cheerful pop song echoing loudly in the empty space.
He frowned seeing Miss J’s name glaring at him as he tapped the green icon.
“Hell-”
“You. Get back up, you’re back to Number 1.” And the line beeped as she hung up.
What the fuck?
And so, he once again transported all his belongs because what choice did he have? This went on for almost the entirety of the rest of the day – his back wrought with soreness and anxiety bubbling at the sweat that was quickly drying on his skin. His eye did twitch on noticing that the floors were always empty when he got to them.
Must be nice being omnipotent and being able to move anything – including yourself – with the snap of your fingers.
By the time it was 10 o’clock, Lin Ling had already went up and down about thirty times already. He had tried asking Miss J for a solution to this but she just replied that there wasn’t a procedure set for this type of situation yet and the higher ups hadn’t responded, probably discussing it for hours upon hours in a meeting currently.
Frustrated from his situation, Lin Ling decided to just take the (slightly undesired) loophole and sleep somewhere that was neither the top nor second floor. He showered as quickly as he could in the bathroom of his current assigned floor and changed into his pajamas. Then, he threw all his belongings into the elevator and made his way to the roof of the Hero Tower.
Lin Ling had went through the rules, he knew he wasn’t allowed to leave the Tower without permission from his PR manager and he simply couldn’t be assed to call up Miss J at this time of night to go to a hotel. The roof was fair game though. He shuffled through one of the boxes before taking out two blankets and a pillow, stepping out the elevator onto the tiled floor of the roof.
He spread the thicker blanket on a relatively clean area – his OCD thankfully not being too bad what with him having just started out becoming Nice properly – and laid down with a content sigh, muscles aching with relief at the reprieve.
“That doesn’t seem very comfortable,” a rich baritone sounded right beside him.
“I don’t exactly have a choice,” Lin Ling muttered back, cracking an eye open to see who could be up on the roof this late at night. He blinked in mild surprise when he saw a figure in a pristine white suit, equally white hair slicked back on his head, and a pair of tangerine-tinted glasses being casually being fiddled with in one hand.
“Finally decided to grace me with your presence, huh?” Lin Ling said, falling back down onto the floor. After cussing Nice out and seeing so many heroes, the novelty had worn off. Besides, weren’t they basically the same rank currently?
X blinked, like he hadn’t expected such a response, a small sly smile gracing his features. “I suppose you’ve been having a hard time moving back and forth the entire day. I apologize for not making time to meet my current successor . . . or predecessor depending on what the ranking currently is, I’ve been busy.”
“You weren’t even here? I thought you were just teleporting yourself and your stuff all this time.”
“I had work to do, I just got back. My ‘stuff’ is stashed on some empty island somewhere, I’m not sure – just somewhere where you wouldn’t have to move it or wait for others to do it,” X replied easily, putting the glasses back on. “So, we had the bright idea to sleep on the roof, huh?”
“I didn’t know what else to do, Miss J keeps calling me still to go up or down, I had to put my phone on silent,” Lin Ling complained.
“I understand. Then we’ll sleep here, I suppose.”
“Wait, what do you mean we-”
Before Lin Ling could even finish the sentence, a jarring snap made itself heard throughout the crisp air and suddenly, the world was tilting and there was a swooping feeling in his stomach before his surroundings became upright once more. He wasn’t on his blanket anymore but an extremely comfortable queen sized bed. There was another one to Lin Ling’s left a few feet away, X sitting on it and having now changed from his white suit to a night robe, his hair falling around his face.
“Isn’t this infinitely more comfortable than sleeping on a blanket the entire night?” X asked, sounding highly amused. He should’ve come across as more insufferable but without the glasses or the gelled-back hair, X seemed . . . softer, for lack of a better word.
Lin Ling couldn’t find it in himself to tell the other off, recognizing that the blatant show of his powers was done with good intentions. “Whose beds are these anyways?”
X hid a yawn behind his hand before answering. “Don’t worry about it, just sleep. You need it with how hard you’ve been struggling to fill Nice’s shoes.”
Lin Ling froze imperceptibly, dawning anxiety creeping in about how X possibly could’ve known, before the rational part of his brain kicked in. Omnipotence. Of course he knew everything, how could he not?
“So you know who I am?”
“I know who everyone is, Lin Ling,” X replied, sending a jolt up his spine. God, it’s been so long since someone’s actually called him by his name. He didn’t even realize how much he’d missed it – his identity.
Lin Ling forced his mind to get back to the topic on hand, realizing something suddenly. “If you know everything, don’t you know who set up the Hero Trust Rank website? Maybe they’re someone who knows FOMO’s secrets, you can help shut it down.”
X didn’t immediately answer that, instead bringing his index finger to rest against his lips in a shushing gesture and gave him a secretive smile. “If I told you about the perpetrator, I fear your worldview would be forever changed for the worse. It would be better to just let everything play out.”
. . . Whatever the hell that meant.
Lin Ling sighed, recognizing he wasn’t going to get an answer out of the other and turning himself onto his back so he could see the sparse stars in the sky. “What’s it like? Being you?”
He’d always been focused on Nice usually, mainly due to his association with Moon, but he’d often watched X fight effortlessly the few times he got caught on video and wondered what it would be like to be so immensely powerful that playing around with your nemeses like they’re barely an insect in your path is second nature to you.
“What do you think it’s like?” X threw the question back at him.
Fun was the first word that came to Lin Ling’s mind but the more he thought about it, that wasn’t exactly correct, was it? “Boring. It seems boring to know everything. I think I’d spend my days just trying to find something exciting to do.”
X hummed, Lin Ling not noticing the way he had a cheek propped up by his fist. “Well, you’re not wrong. I am doing something of the sort, though I don’t think ‘exciting’ would be your first impression of my pastime. You are correct in assuming it’s slightly boring though, I try and do what I can to alleviate it – I’ve seen all the stars, all the people, all the truths of the Universe. It makes for a dull lifespan.”
“Not to invalidate you or whatever, but at least you’ve had the chance to experience those – I haven’t even ever been outside this city, haven’t ever looked at a sky that had more than twenty stars max,” Lin Ling said with a hint of wistfulness, looking up at the current sky and seeing only Venus with perfect clarity due to all the blaring lights in the city.
“I can fix that,” X announced with a lilt to his voice. “Get ready.”
A small pit of dread formed in his stomach, he had a feeling he was not going to like whatever the superhero was about to do. “Wait, hold on, no no no-”
A resounding snap. The swooping feeling in his stomach once more before it disappeared.
Lin Ling looked above him. Space. He looked to his left. Space. He looked to his right. Space. He looked below him past the bed. Space.
He screamed.
“WHAT THE FUCK, WHAT THE FUCK, GET ME BACK ON EARTH,” Lin Ling screeched in what was probably the highest pitch he’d ever reached. He shuffled backwards until his back was hitting the headboard and brought his knees up to his chest.
“It’s okay, you can’t fall, I assure you. Look,” X’s laughing voice reached him and with another snap, he was on the bed next to Lin Ling, his robe slipping over one of his shoulders showing a moderate expanse of his chest. Lin Ling would’ve been more flustered if he wasn’t terrified out of his mind at the current moment. X reached a hand out towards the edge of the bed and seemed to meet resistance, the man giving Lin Ling a look that translated to ‘see?’
When X gave him an imploring gaze, he shook his head at the speed of sound, not wanting to get anywhere near the edge. The other just rolled his eyes, grabbing Lin Ling’s wrist and throwing him to his left as easily as if he weighed the same as a small kitten. He screamed as the void came up to swallow him but instead found his cheek and body smushed against that invisible barrier around the bed, not letting him fall.
So he actually couldn’t fall. It barely did anything to soothe the pounding of his heart, though.
“Can we still get back on solid land, please?” Lin Ling begged, his voice coming out warped what with half of his face still glued to the barrier.
“Why, certainly,” X agreed a little too easily, snapping his fingers once more.
Lin Ling looked around once more, eye twitching at what he found.
Well . . . he was back on solid ground, alright.
“You said you wanted solid ground and you said you wanted to see the stars, I believe I am fulfilling both of your conditions,” X said, a corner of his mouth ticking up in that smile Lin Ling was finding was a constant on the hero’s face.
Now that there wasn’t a void beneath him, Lin Ling felt much steadier, pinching the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “The moon? Really? Now you’re just showing off.”
“No, me taking you to another galaxy would be showing off. This is child’s play.”
Lin Ling sighed heavily, eyes flitting upwards. He had to admit, the view was beautiful – thousands upon thousands of stars twinkling in the sky leaving him in awe. After a few minutes of gawking, he turned back to X who was watching him with an inscrutable expression on his face. “Why are you doing all this?”
X simply shrugged, not a care in the world. “Why not?”
Lin Ling paused at that – he’d heard people gossiping at his previous job about how fickle X was, how he did whatever the hell he wanted on a whim. Sometimes he appeared to take down petty thieves, other times he wouldn’t even appear to deal with world threatening villains. He didn’t even belong to any company unlike the rest of the 99 heroes in the Tower.
If X felt like ‘fulfilling’ Lin Ling’s wishes, then that’s what he’d do.
“I guess so.” Lin Ling shuffled to one half of the bed and laid down again, going back to staring at the night sky with muted fascination. If he turned his eyes a bit to the left, he could see Earth on the horizon. It felt surreal, he’d never even left his own city but now he’s on the moon, in space. And still breathing somehow nor freezing to death (Lin Ling supposed it was probably something to do with the barrier).
He heard X rustling around until he too was lying down. Next to him. Hero X was lying next to him in the same bed. Alright, that’s okay; it wasn’t weird if he didn’t make it weird.
After all, the presence of another human in his bubble seemed to calm him down in the absolute vacuum that was space. Even X’s measured breathing was a welcome sound when it was so damn quiet, he couldn’t hear anything – neither the hum of appliances nor the muted honks of vehicles. The rest of the night they had spent in silence, Lin Ling having his fill of the view until his eyes began to feel heavy and he turned to the side in a fetal position to sleep, facing away from X.
In his sleepy haze, he hadn’t even noticed the other man pulling the blanket over him, lying down himself afterward to sleep the night away.