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Nice celebrates his birthday one of two ways: drinking, or drunk.
Some years, he starts early. An hour or two before the clock strikes midnight and the tenth turns over to the eleventh. He starts harder, then, too—breaks out the vintage, the Good Stuff, and he never lets his glass sit empty for more than a few minutes at a time.
He drinks enough, fast enough, that his minor regenerative powers—courtesy of the public’s ironclad belief that he can never look more than “handsomely disheveled”—can’t quite keep up. A pleasant buzz sits just beneath his skin, warmth spreading all through his aching limbs.
He rides out the day in a hazy stupor.
Juan-jie knows not to schedule last-minute events; Moon learned she was better off shoehorning in as many solo photoshoots and interviews as she could manage.
Wreck—
Nice blocks his number then, when he surfaces long enough to remember.
Other years, though, there’s no getting around it. He’ll have a scheduled fight he can’t miss, a shakedown ordered from on high he can’t refuse, a commercial shoot with such a strict deadline they won’t budge even for Treeman’s finest.
So Nice does what he does best: He puts on the perfect mask.
Parading around in front of starry-eyed civilians, turning brilliant, beatific smiles on anyone he makes eye contact with. Executing the choreography of a fight he’s memorized so completely it feels like just another dance—one he’s somehow always known the steps to.
Everything is practiced, poised. Perfect.
Because he’s Nice. He’s always Nice. For all the world knows—or cares—he’s always been Nice.
And Nice can never be less than perfect.
But the moment the spotlight shuts off—the moment those eyes turn away from him and he’s left alone with himself, with his thoughts, with his reality—
He’ll have a dozen cases of beer delivered to his floor in the Tower and settle in for a long, unpleasant night.
This is one of those years.
Nice slumps at his kitchen island, rolling a rapidly-warming can of convenience store swill between his hands.
Or, he slumps as best he can. There’s always this—pull. This insistent, incessant tug, like… like strings tied around his joints, constantly tweaking his position with a subtle jerk here, a sharp yank there.
He doesn’t like the imagery: himself as a helpless marionette. So he tends to drink until it blurs into indistinct feelings of inadequacy and pointedly doesn’t let himself bring it back into focus.
Anyway.
Good posture is simple. Sit up straight, roll your shoulders back, keep your chin up.
Perfect posture means doing that all the time. Never slacking off, not even for a moment, not even when you’re out of the public eye.
And it’s exhausting.
But he deals with it. He pops the top of his can and drains half of it in one go. Elbows carefully tucked against his sides so they don’t rest on the counter in front of him.
He used to drink this brand often. It was the one indulgence he and Wreck allowed themselves in their trainee days. It was terrible, and it hardly ever got them past tipsy, but it was cheap and easy to sneak into the dorm. So that’s what they fell back on.
He drinks it now because, well.
The taste is familiar. The condensation that chills his palms is soothing.
He drinks it now for the same reason he blocks Wreck’s number. Which doesn’t make any sense, and he knows it doesn’t make any sense, but—
It’s his birthday. He’s allowed this much, isn’t he?
So Nice drinks, and drinks. And he lines up all the empty cans along the edge of the counter, stacking them in neat little rows like bowling pins.
He tries to remember why he’s here. In this Tower. Ranked fifteenth. With a girlfriend who hates him and his best friend for a villain.
This won’t get him drunk. It won’t help him sleep, either. But it’ll make it a bit easier to lie awake in the center of his bed, staring out through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the glittering lights of the city below him.
He can taste the cheap, watered-down hops on his tongue and convince himself that he’s right to see another year through. That as long as he keeps trying—keeps being the perfect hero the masses want, that Director Shang De needs—he’ll make it to number one.
And then it’ll all be worth it.
It has to be worth it.
“Happy birthday to me,” Nice murmurs to the faint, wobbly reflection of himself in the can before he crushes it in his fist.