Chapter 927: Two Reasons
Just like the clothes fitting yesterday that had almost stolen an entire night of his life he would never see refunded — the cosmetics shoot proved every bit as exhausting and roughly twice as maddening.
It was a siege of hands:
Four makeup designers and three wardrobe designers descended upon him in rotating waves, and at no single moment in the entire ordeal was Phei’s face permitted to remain simply his own. A brush here. A sponge there. A thumb tilting his chin toward a light he had never consented to meet.
Someone dabbed at his hairline; someone else erased the dabbing; a third arrived to restore it with religious fervour.
He was peeled out of one ensemble and into another, then out of that and back into something that looked suspiciously like the first, photographed through every transition, and commanded — by a director who treated the word pose as a complete and sufficient sentence — to angle, lift, soften, smoulder, give her less but also more, hold it, hold it, don’t breathe, and then breathe incorrectly, ruin the take, and begin the entire liturgy again from the top.
A man who had folded a progenitor into his own soul and watched a Prince of Earth wet himself on marble was now being informed that his pose "wasn’t reading."
Between takes his makeup was demolished and rebuilt from the foundation up, after which the nightmare of flashbulbs resumed — that strobing white assault that left ghosts swimming in his vision and a low, resentful ache building behind his eyes.
He learned to loathe the little mechanical clack the shutter made.
Over the course of two hours he developed a personal, abiding, and entirely irrational grudge against a reflector.
Sometimes it was only him while times Landon and Brian were being shot in their own corners of the mansion, and then the three of them would be herded together for group work — and that was its own particular circle of hell, because the director and her camera crew had decided, in some earlier planning séance, that the three of them were not men attending a commercial shoot but a debuting idol group.
They were posed back-to-back. Made to lean closer to one another. Arranged in a descending diagonal of brooding intensity that the crew milked for every drop of manufactured tension and then demanded a little extra, calling for "more chemistry, boys," and "Landon, hand on Brian’s shoulder — yes, like you’d die for him," until even Phei’s legendary composure developed a visible fracture.
Landon and Brian, naturally, were having the time of their lives.
Not because of their own shoots, which they endured with the stoicism of men who had seen worse.
No — what the two of them were truly feeding on, with the open, unrepentant joy of vultures at a particularly succulent carcass, was Phei’s suffering.
Every grimace he swallowed, every flinch he buried, every time the director said "smoulder" and Phei’s eye performed that small, dangerous twitch — Landon and Brian harvested it, treasured it, and wherever possible, recorded it for posterity.
And it wasn’t only the boys. His women — his own beloved, allegedly loyal women — had colonized the area behind the camera line and converted it into a dedicated heckling gallery.
"Smoulder harder, baby!" Maddie hollered, hands cupped around her mouth. "The rent depends on it!"
"Six," Amber announced to no one and everyone as he held a pose.
"Six?" Elena scoffed. "Look at the jaw commitment. That’s an eight at minimum."
"The jaw is carrying the entire production. The eyes have already clocked out and gone home. Six."
"Excuse me," Victoria called sweetly toward the director’s chair, "do you take requests? Could we possibly get one where he’s wet?"
"Victoria."
"It’s for the brand, Sierra."
A dozen separate phone angles of his torment were being captured and archived for future roasting by his women, the way other families preserved baby photos — Delilah narrating hers in a low, solemn documentary voice, Catrina filming while pretending, very badly, to check her messages, Cassiopeia not filming but visibly committing every second to memory.
Only the goddess remained sympathetic.
’I should reward her after while I ignore the traitors, hmmp!’
Only she watched him with soft eyes and the faint, sorrowful smile while witnessing her great man endure a small indignity — and only she, when Maddie’s phone drifted too high, reached out and gently pressed it back down with one finger, like lowering a small, overexcited dog from a table.
Which Phei noted. Which Phei would remember, the next time any of them wanted something.
But — and this was the saving grace, the twin pillars holding the entire tedious cathedral upright — it was not all bad. Phei endured, and he endured for two reasons.
Both of them beautiful.
There were two women on the design crews, one in makeup and one in wardrobe, and their presence was the single thread he clung to while the rest of the day attempted to unravel him.
The first was the makeup designer — cool, stoic, economical of word, the sort of beautiful that did not announce itself so much as quietly take attendance and find everyone else wanting.
She took particular care with his face. Where the others swarmed like moths, she lingered. Where the others rushed just to get their hands on him, she attended.
Her soft hands moved over his features with an unhurried thoroughness that had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual time required, fingertips tracing the line of his jaw, the high plane of his cheekbone, the delicate skin beneath his eye, pausing in places that did not, strictly speaking, require pausing.
There were moments — the worst and best of the day, depending entirely on his mood — when the shot called for some shimmering, light-catching substance to be applied across his bare upper body, and the entire set went quietly, hungrily envious.
She took her time with that as well.
Her palms warmed against his chest, smoothing the liquid shine across the planes of him in slow, deliberate strokes, her thumbs following the ridges of muscle like a cartographer committing new territory to memory, her cool composure never once slipping even as her hands spoke in a language her face refused to translate.
The men of the crew, meanwhile, had problems of their own — though not one of them could have named the problem if pressed at gunpoint.
Because a shirtless dragon was even a more dangerous dragon, and the Dragon Dominance rolling lazily off all that bared skin did not distinguish between rivals and lighting technicians.
The male half of the set simply found itself, by an extraordinary and entirely coincidental series of urgencies, needed elsewhere, feeling inferior and insecure.
The head photographer discovered a sudden, critical fault in a lens that had functioned perfectly all morning and retreated to the far end of the garden to contemplate it in solitude. Two grips elected to take their lunch break forty minutes early, standing side by side, facing the lake with the posture of men who had remembered urgent business with the horizon.
A boom operator who had no conceivable function at a stills shoot drifted to the property’s outer wall and remained there, ostensibly studying a hedge with the intensity of a man decoding ancient prophecy.
By the time the shimmer was being applied in earnest, the area around Phei had quietly reorganized itself into an exclusion zone of worshipful femininity and one deeply confused intern, while the men at its perimeter stood with the alert, unsettled posture of stags who had caught the scent of something on the wind and would very much prefer not to discuss it.
And she only ever performed that particular service after first chasing the rest of the crew away.
High above it all — far past the rooftops, far past the reach of any mortal sightline, parked in the bright empty blue with her arms crossed and her katana drifting beside her hip like a loyal but increasingly judgmental familiar — Yuzuki Hayashi was having a professional crisis.
Surveillance was surveillance.
She had watched targets eat, sleep, scheme, commit treason, and floss. She was a Sky Sovereign on assignment; her eyes went where the mission pointed them, and the mission, presently, pointed them directly at a shirtless Cosmic Dragon being slowly, methodically oiled by a makeup artist whose hands were operating with a thoroughness that bordered on devotional.
And Yuzuki had seen male bodies before. Obviously. Plenty. She had grown up around warriors, trained beside men built like siege engines, cut a few of the prettier ones down without her pulse so much as acknowledging the occasion.
A torso was a torso. Muscle was simply meat arranged with ambition.
This one, however, was—
The light moved on him even when he wasn’t moving. That was the thing. The shimmer caught along lines that had no business existing outside of marble or myth, planes and ridges stacked with the casual, almost insulting perfection of something designed rather than grown, and when he shifted his weight the entire arrangement flowed like liquid authority.
Yuzuki’s brain — her disciplined, mission-calibrated, blade-saint brain — produced, entirely without permission, the single treacherous thought:
’I would also like to apply the substance.’
She physically recoiled from her own mind.
’No. Absolutely not. We are working.’
