Peerless Perverted Actor Has a Celebrity Harem?!

He sat up slowly, but a curtain was drawn around him in a tight half-circle.

He had to take back what he’d just said about the absence of pain though — because the moment he was upright, the back of his skull woke up too, a dull throb pulsing in steady time with his heartbeat.

He reached back, fingers brushing the dressed wound, and found gauze taped down neatly over something he couldn’t read by touch alone.

’Mmm. Got a wound there, then.’

He couldn’t tell, by feel, whether they had stitched him up or simply slapped a fancier sort of first aid over the damage and called it good for the night.

’Stitches, hopefully. A man wants a real scar out of all this. Something to point at later; And that, ladies, is where the universe tried to file me away. Touch it. Yes~ just there.’

Gathering strength — and there was so much of it, an abundance far more than his old starved frame had ever managed to stockpile across a lifetime of skipped meals — he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and parted the curtain.

The ER opened up in front of him under buzzing strip lights. Plastic chairs. A toddler crying somewhere. A vending machine that had clearly been losing arguments with patients for at least a decade.

’No futuristic pods, glowing alien tech or floating monitors humming in foreign languages from a wing of the multiverse I haven’t braced for. Just good ol’ human misery.’

’I like it. Feels real. Feels solid. Feels like a place a man can still get hit by a car if he’s careless about it.’

The ER was big, though. Properly big like a quiet flex of importance — the body he had inherited had been considered worth transporting somewhere good.

What grounded Park next, more thoroughly than the lights or the smell or even the gentle ache of his stitches, was the sudden, insistent call of nature.

’Ah. The sacred piss. Nothing reminds a man that he is, in fact, alive quite like the urgent diplomatic need to drain the main vein. Take nothing for granted in this life, gentlemen. Especially bladder diplomacy.’

He stood but then blinked.

’Wait.’

He stood again, just to be sure.

’...I am not this tall.’

Or was he? It was hard to say now — past him and current him were, after all, the same person in some way he had not yet had time to sit down with properly. More or less but also different. Possibly more than the memories he’d got suggested.

The seam between the two of them was still raw enough that he could feel it, if he pressed his attention on it the wrong way, and he chose, very deliberately, not to.

But he was sure of one thing. The old him had never commanded this kind of height. Had never, in any audition or any mirror, owned a build like this one.

He looked down at himself — the broad expanse of shoulder draped in a thin hospital gown engineered for smaller frames, the lean carved length of forearm where his old soft skin used to be, legs that went on with the easy authority of a man who had never been overlooked in a crowd.

A slow grin clawed across his face — the grin, the playboy’s grin, the one he had only ever been able to wear inside his own head because his old face had never quite earned it.

’Well, hello, handsome. The old me would have sold his soul for this build. Hell. I practically did.’

He moved and that was the second revelation. Not just the size of him but the grace — his weight redistributed itself with predatory ease, hips loose, shoulders unhurried, every step carrying that quiet settled power of a body that had been trained well and used recently.

He approached the nearest nurse; a petite, sharp-eyed beautiful thing really, whose professional frown did nothing to soften the dangerous little waist the uniform was clinging to like it had something to prove.

’God help me, that curve could make a saint reconsider his vows.’

Her lips were painted a quiet shade of trouble with a clipboard in her hands that might as well have been a prop; the way her eyes flicked over him carried the reluctant spark of a woman who already knew trouble when it walked toward her in a hospital gown and a too-perfect smile.

’Now that is a waist a man could write odes to,’ he half murmured, already lining up the rhyme scheme. ’Lips like a small sin under good lighting. Hips that have ended wars and started better ones. Oh, darling, if I were not half-concussed, freshly resurrected, and on a deeply pressing diplomatic mission concerning my bladder, I would be asking for considerably more than bathroom directions.’

"Excuse me," he said, in a voice that came out a full octave deeper than the voice he had owned that morning. "Could you point me to the — "

The nurse looked up.

Her eyes widened sharply and the clipboard in her hands gave a small, betrayed creak under fingers that had suddenly forgotten what they were doing.

’Careful, darling. Keep looking at me like that and I might start believing the universe actually wants me to enjoy this second life.’

Then a woman in a nearby plastic chair leaned across to whisper something to her companion, and the companion’s head whipped around with the speed of a person who had just been informed of an excellent piece of gossip in extremely poor timing. Two beds down, an old man peering over his crossword pulled his reading glasses off entirely, the better to see.

Then another head turned. And another. A child stopped crying mid-wail. Somewhere behind him, a phone came up out of a pocket with the unmistakable snick of a camera app being launched in a great and untrustworthy hurry.

The whispers spread like cracks across thin ice — soft, fast, travelling — until half the ER was staring at him in one form or another, a nurse near the triage desk had gone the specific shade of pale that meant I should not be reacting like this in uniform. A pair of teenage girls in the waiting area were openly clutching at each other’s wrists.

The old man with the crossword had simply forgotten to put his glasses back on and was now squinting at Park with the slow dawning envy like he was being asked to confirm a ghost.

Park paused mid-stride.

The grin on his now familiar mouth slowly curled into something darker. Something crooked. Something that recognised, with the calm sigh of a professional, that whichever lottery ticket the universe had handed him on the way out of the snow, it had very clearly been a winning one — and somebody in this room had apparently seen the draw on television.

’What,’ his thoughts said, soft and amused and dangerous, ’in the name of every cheap god still taking my calls — ’

’ — the hell?’