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 Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2022 3:38 pm
Figuring out this senshi business was, by and large, going pretty well? Or Reiki thought it was, anyway.… Maybe he hadn’t quite gotten the hang of……most. of the things. That he was supposed to be doing, in his new capacity as a magical femboy? But he was making progress, Reiki felt pretty sure.
Not on compartmentalizing a goddamn thing or finding some way to keep “Reiki” somewhat more separate from “Sailor Murikabushi of the Dark Mirror Court,” but……maybe that would just come together in its own time? Maybe? Perched on the roof of Gertrude’s, in a perfect spot to watch over Scandals, Reiki rubbed one of his eyes and tried to stifle a yawn.… He could certainly hope that he’d get all of these ducks in a row. At the very least, he could continue faking it until he got somewhere in the general vicinity of making it.
All up, having a clearer idea of his mission statement here might have helped. To be sure, Miss Sayuri Kurobara Disobedience wasn’t exactly separate as a character from Reiki, not in the same way that he wanted Murikabushi to be. Sayuri was mostly just Reiki with the shackles of self-limitation thrown off and the volume turned way, way up. On the other hand, in Reiki’s little French Vanilla fantasy about how everything should go in his personal best of all possible worlds, Murikabushi would end up being a character with more of a camp factor, all ojou-sama laughs, Cersei Lannister haughtiness, and Disney villain panache.
Except……who was Dark Mirror Sailor Murikabushi even supposed to be? A villain of sorts, apparently, just judging by all the accumulated evidence, so far: an alliance of sorts with the Negaverse (the faction who dragged people into their ranks without consent and valued their senshi so little that they thought it was perfectly fine to work with creatures who wanted to devour their senshi’s starseeds)… an aura that made people like Sailor Daphne and Amsvartnir of Cosmos judge him as some kind of horrible threat and a monster before even talking to him (though both of them had proven open to learning, in some fashion)… a gorgeous black outfit with impeccable fashion sense, something that would fit right in among Maleficent, Ursula, and Professor Ratigan (and made Reiki yearn to walk a New York ballroom floor circa 1987, when he could’ve heard the legendary Junior LaBeija say of his look, “O-P-U-L-E-N-C-E. OPULENCE. You own everything!”)…
But……what did it really mean to be Sailor Murikabushi of the Dark Mirror Court, professional magical boy? What even was he, now? A champion of……things? Defender of……stuff? People, probably? Places? Things? Nouns? The Dark Mirror, certainly—the crash course from Levi and Soyala had been pretty clear on that point, but……surely, there had to be something more to all of this high-concept magical nonsense than that? Hadn’t there?
Like……why would anybody ever go along with the utter, obvious lunacy of playing Sharks vs. Jets vs. Tony-and-Maria with the Order-slaves and the Negaverse if there weren’t something more going on with all of it? Something that injected meaning into all the stressful encounters with high-strung upstarts like Amsvartnir of Cosmos, and surprisingly reasonable catgirls who would still see fit to kick you, and Valjean and Toráin, insisting that their respective forced corruptions into the Negaverse didn’t matter because, really, destroying someone—destroying every piece of knowledge they had, every love they carried inside of them, every accumulated memory that made them who they were—was a necessary evil?
“Or maybe I just need to call myself ‘Sisyphus,’” Reiki muttered, looking at his mirrorshard, down in his hand. He didn’t know that the mirrorwraith inside it could really hear him, when they weren’t out and about to help him drain people, or understand anything he said? But it felt nicer to talk to them, rather than talk to himself, like talking his feelings out at Cersei—“Who I should get home to, probably.… Not least since Cherry and Sybil only gave back my more regular performing privileges because they think I’m cutting back.… Anyway, almost last call and the son of a b***h still isn’t leaving.… Thought for sure he wouldn’t take that long to clear out, the way he spent the whole show flirting with that ginger…”
But speaking of the Devil, even if only to a mirrorshard, seemed to summon him: dear Michel left Scandals with the same redhead he’d been chatting up—one who looked significantly closer to his own age, for once.… Nothing untoward happened as they exited the bar, nor as they chatted for a moment outside it.…
Ever since he’d resurfaced out of his terrible, unexplained coma, Michel had seemingly been trying to turn something around for himself. According to Ricki at the bar, he hadn’t been ordering any alcoholic beverages when coming in. He did still come in almost every night, and he hadn’t asked the bouncers for one of the “I am either an addict or a minor, do not serve me alcohol” wristbands yet, but with how much certain people loved finding ways to force queer small business owners to close up shop, Reiki couldn’t be too shocked. There simply weren’t enough places for queers to congregate among other queers in this world, without the necessary evil of alcohol.
(Last week, Reiki had stuck a pamphlet in the windshield of Michel’s asinine, self-important Bentley. He still hated Michel’s car—and hated it for not being black, so Reiki couldn’t even pretend that Michel had chosen the car for his good taste in literature—but if Michel did want to turn things around for himself, then he deserved to know about the recovery and support groups he could find at the Dorian Street queer community center. Leaving the pamphlet had made Reiki feel a little bit like the Evangelical assholes who loved leaving Jack Chick tracts on his table at coffee-shops, or in his locker at the gym, or in countless other places for Reiki to find……but Michel did deserve to know that he had options, if he really wanted to work on being less of an a*****e.)
Still, as he bounded along the roofs, tailing Michel and Cute Ginger Boy In The Glasses, Reiki couldn’t tell which potential outcome he expected more: Michel actually learning anything, at least making an effort to learn something and turn out some personal growth from the coma that Reiki and his mirrorwraith had stuck him in……or things going south and Michel’s newfound interest in personal growth withering up in an instant, dead before it truly got a chance to live.
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Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2022 10:23 pm
The Chaos aura Kerberos felt was unusual. Certainly this wasn't the first time he'd felt a Dark Mirror Senshi, but it was the first time in a long time, and he mostly knew of them theoretically at best. So, sue him, he was curious. They were Chaos, yes, but different than the Negaverse--and he had often wondered about that difference.
What would have happened if he'd stumbled into their arms first? Would he still eventually have left? Would his homeworld always have called to some part of him, and would he have ended up in the same place? Or would the relative passivity of the Mirror have left him feeling safe and content?
He couldn't say. Things hadn't gone that way.
But he did want to approach whoever this was and find out what they were up to. And anyway, he liked being in DC's queer district; he only got to go there so often as Keiran, since so much of it was bars, and he just....couldn't, with alcohol, but he could wander a little as Kerberos, and people only looked too hard if they happened to notice that he glowed.
He hadn't really meant to end up in a chase, but....well.
It seemed like the very pretty Dark Mirror was trailing after a civilian, and it was Kerberos's literal job to make sure that nothing nefarious was going on there.
He was glad for Eternal speed--it meant he caught up quickly, and landed on the roof, striding forward.
"Not up to anything nasty, are you?" He asked, as lightly as he could manage.
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Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2022 11:30 pm
Tailing Michel and his ginger was……oddly, sort of relaxing. Nothing untoward happened whatsoever. Michel didn’t even go for a kiss or invite himself up to Ginger’s room, when they stopped at the townhouse where he apparently lived. Sure, there was a kiss, but only because Ginger had leaned up to snag it. The whole scene was sweet, the sort of nauseatingly adorable fluff that mass-market “be nice to gay people, they’re human beings, too” rom-coms were made of.
Which made the sudden intrusion of that. aura. feel so much worse.
Even before it got too close, Reiki hated the way that aura felt. The sort of aggressive, overwhelming brightness that came from looking directly at a solar eclipse, or having fluorescent lights switch on after spending several hours in the dark. Ugh. Jesus. HARD pass. But—maybe he could just……sneak away? He’d wanted to follow Michel and make sure he got home okay, but if it was a choice between that and tangling with whatever vicious ******** had an aura like that? Well, there wasn’t really a choice between those options, was there? At least if Reiki got away, he’d live to fight another day, not get immolated by whoever was following him.
……And then the follower was right there.
Right ******** there, walking towards Reiki in thotty little hot-pants and some Party City harem girl costume, with fluffy white wings attached to his a**. (Elsa’s wings were much prettier, Reiki thought smugly, although it did exactly nothing to help him, right now, this very ********, turning and running would probably just get someone like this to stab him in the back—and with the kind of power it felt like he was packing? Well, just butter Reiki’s a** and call it toast, because whoever this was, it felt like he wouldn’t even break a sweat about leaving Reiki as a charred smudge on the sidewalk.
But surely, Reiki could just……shake his head and back away slowly? Right? Hold out a hand to tell this Order-slave interloper to stay the ******** back but otherwise, work to put distance between them while trying to ignore the both cold dread that had settled in his stomach and the hot twist of shame at how little he was living up to the Cersei Lannister quote he had tattooed on his shoulder-blade: I am a lioness. I will not cringe for them.…
It was such a great plan.
Until it wasn’t.
Reiki had no problems walking in heels. No reason to expect that these ones would give him trouble. Or that his ankles might betray him. Or, as the case was, that he might just slip on nothing, flail about trying to prevent himself from falling, and crash to his a** anyway.
Goddammit—and here it was: a moment of weakness. Perfect time for the enemy to strike. Not if I have anything to say about it.
Whipping his arm out ahead of him instead of doing the gesture, Reiki barked out, “Gnawing Hunger!”
Only for nothing to happen.
No swell of power within him, no apparent reaction on the enemy’s face, no anything.
“Oh, motherfu—you!” Ready to scuttle away, Reiki resumed holding his hand out like stop. If he looked like a trapped rat, then……well, what did someone like this expect, when they swooped in here like the goddamn harem girl Batman with glowing tattoos and flowers blooming under their ******** feet? “Stay back!”
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Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2022 8:58 pm
Well. That was sort of not the reaction Kerberos was expecting, and he frowned slightly. He didn't usually think of himself as particularly scary--he was small, delicate, and dressed like a dancer out of a video game, and generally speaking, that didn't inspire fear.
Except now, it did, and he pushed a hand through his hair, shaking his head a little.
"I'm not going to hurt you," Kerberos said, "as long as you weren't intending to hurt either of the civilians down there." And, honestly, even if this Dark Mirror did intend to harm either of the people walking below, he'd pretty clearly been discouraged from it just by Kerberos's presence, so that was neatly wrapped up, job done.
"Just...relax, it's okay." He held his hands up, as if to indicate that he wasn't armed--not that he needed to be, as a Senshi, but it was the best he could do.
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Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2022 9:39 pm
“Uh huh! Right! And I should just believe you? Because you tell me to?” The words burst out of Reiki’s mouth before he even gave himself a chance to think them over. Or to feel anything other than awe and panic about the sheer level of magical power the person before him was packing. “What happens once you get my guard down? Huh, Blue Steel? You don’t care that I know him—the? The him who didn’t go in the house. His name’s Michel like Foucault, Carpenter like Karen. You don’t care that I drained him a while back, and he’s been trying to turn his life around since the coma, and I wanted to make sure he got home safe! How could you? You don’t even know!”
……Well. Now he knew, Reiki supposed as his brain fumbled to catch up with his mouth. Because now, Reiki had kinda told him. Which was sort of funny, Reiki guessed, or at least it was probably cosmically hilarious how easily all his lovely ideas about making progress as a senshi crumbled into borderline nonexistence in the face of someone like this. ……Or at least Reiki hoped it was cosmically hilarious, because otherwise, he was desperately, breathily laughing for no reason.
“Anyway, I should totally trust you, right? Because that worked out sooooo great for all the ancien régime French peasants?”
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Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2022 10:12 pm
Kerberos tilted his head to the side. Well, that was interesting. It sounded like this was more of a follow-up situation--he couldn't think of a time that he'd really...bothered, back when he was in the Negaverse, to try to change someone's behavior with energy draining.
That was sort of a novel concept. Scared onto the right path, he guessed.
"No, I didn't know," Kerberos acknowledged, "but now I do. Which means I'[m even less inclined to start throwing punches, or magic." He tried to keep his voice as calm as possible. "I don't like getting into pointless fights. I used to do a lot of that, once upon a time, and it didn't do anything for me but make me miserable."
He exhaled.
"Anyway, I'm no royal, and you're not a French peasant circa 1788. I'm Eternal Sailor Kerberos, of Asphodel. You?"
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Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2022 10:44 pm
Uh huh. Sure. All of those words sounded pretty, and nice, and like what someone would have told Reiki in order to make him calm the ******** down.… Which, in all fairness, was probably necessary. Reiki’s heart was still racing, and he knew he wasn’t breathing properly, which only ever exacerbated things with the anxiety.… Had either or both of his poor grandparents been here, Reiki could guess what they would’ve told him, once they got over the “by the way, I’m a magical girl” thing—especially Ojiisan.
Deep breaths. In and out. A few rounds of that, and begrudgingly, Reiki could admit: what this Eternal Sailor Kerberos of Asphodel person was saying did sound like it made some degree of sense.…… Probably enough sense to merit Reiki lowering his hand (though not dropping it completely, just in case).
Still watching Kerberos like a frightened rabbit, Reiki said, “……Murikabushi. Of hunger. And you know that being on your level is basically like being an absolute monarch compared to me and mine, right? I mean, you’re over here, like……” Reiki gestured vaguely, waving his hand in Kerberos’s general vicinity. “Like, radiating with so much phenomenal cosmic power, even your tattoos glow. And you can do that—” He gestured at the flowers beneath Kerberos’s feet. “—and you’ve got those—” And at Kerberos’s butt-wings. “—even though Elsa’s are prettier—oh my god, what the—I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that, I mean I stand by it, but—”
Abruptly, rather forcefully shaking his head did not, as intended, really rattle Reiki’s brain back into place. But it did give him enough of a breather to more calmly get back on his original train of thought: “So, yeah, Blue Steel. You, radiating phenomenal cosmic power. Me? Making—and please don’t think I condone that woman or her horrific transphobia, I’m sorry for this comparison, it’s just what I’ve got right now? But me? I’m making explosions in my own face because I can’t just swish-and-flick correctly. You do see how someone like you might as well be Louis XV relative to someone like me, right?”
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Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2022 11:07 pm
Kerberos blinked.
It had been a long time since he'd been a first-stage Senshi in the presence of someone two levels stronger than him, and he did wince. He remembered what his first aura had been--Zinkenite's, massive and oppressive, and Persephone's, smaller by comparison but nonetheless powerful.
"Sorry," Kerberos said. "Back when I was a basic Senshi, the big, bad auras were usually on my side." Not that he hadn't gotten into his share of scraps with people who were stronger than him, but he'd also usually had backup he could trust. "The glowing tattoos aren't a power thing, though, they're a--space thing? Basically?"
He shrugged.
"I'm not stronger than someone else of my rank because of them, at least. They just mean my planet really likes me, and has granted me a couple bonus protections as a result."
He exhaled. "It's nice to meet you, Murikabushi of Hunger--and what do you mean, your magic doesn't work?" That....was not something Kerberos had ever heard of. Magic worked. It came when you called. It was a reliable friend. Sometimes it changed, sure--like how he had healing magic these days, instead of the pain and suffering he used to have or like the new spell his world had granted him when he first found the First Flower--but it didn't just....not work. Not without something interfering.
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Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2022 11:35 pm
“What do you mean ‘What do I mean’?” Several things Kerberos had said deserved to be addressed, and dimly, Reiki knew he was skipping over them, which wasn’t fair, and oh.… Oh, maybe he should have—“I mean, first of all, okay, how was I supposed to know the space thing? The only space anything I’ve met so far is a cat-girl. She’s on your team. She kicked me and we talked about pronouns. It was the night I drained Michel, actually. Her name’s Daphne.
“Secondly of all, what do you mean your planet likes you? What planet? Like, okay fine, Senshi are named for celestial bodies, Soya-hime said that much, but……you don’t just go? To other planets like that?” …Well, strictly speaking, the fact that Daphne had come to Earth from somewhere else did sort of imply that people could, in theory, go to other planets without having to handle all the redtape and gate-keeping that NASA and their fellow space-travel agencies could throw up. “……Anyway, even if you could go to other planets, it’s not like, like, what? Like, planets are actually sentient? They just have magical energy and that’s where senshi come from, right?”
And……gods, Reiki needed a deep breath. Maybe several. Before he could actually address the point he’d initially started making: “And third-but-firstly: what do you mean ‘What do I mean’? I said what I said, Blossom! And, like—you’ve been here the whole time? You saw me try to throw an attack at you and nothing happened.”
……Huh, if Kerberos was Blossom now, then who did that make Reiki.
Well, ideally, the answer was obviously Him or maybe Sedusa, but right about now, Reiki was pretty sure he ranked down there with the Amoeba Boys.
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Posted: Mon Jun 13, 2022 12:46 am
A cat-girl. Well, that was new. Apparently there were more aliens than the Vanguard; that was...hm. Interesting to know. He wondered how many there were--surely not too many, or it would be much more common knowledge?
"You actually do jsut go to other planets like that," Kerberos said. Then, he frowned. "Well, ah. If....you're not Chaos. Chaos cuts off your connection to your world, replaces the power your planet would normally give you with its own." Or, at least, that was how Kerberos understood the whole thing. "I'd be happy to take you to mine, though, if you'd like to see one. And--I've never spoken to my planet or anything like that? But it definitely does seem to have feelings, to some degree or another." Kerberos shrugged. "Or maybe I'm anthropomorphizing it more than I should, but...it's responded to me before, in certain ways. Granting me Transcendence. Giving me new magic, twice."
He paused.
"Also, selling point: my planet has glowing, squirrel-sized foxes." He grinned, pleased. The life that was returning to his world was a special joy.
"But, I mean--magic isn't supposed to just not work? I've never had trouble with mine?" He frowned, faintly. "Maybe there's something you need to do, to make it work right?"
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Posted: Mon Jun 13, 2022 1:32 am
This was………nice.
Mostly……?
Which meant that there had to be something wrong about the whole situation, like……something that Kerberos was planning to do, as soon as he got Reiki to go along with this ‘friend to all living things’ schtick he was playing up for gods only knew what ******** reason. In particular, the offer of a trip off-world made Reiki frown and wrinkle his nose. “You just met me, I self-admittedly tried to attack you—for all the good it did—and besides that, I’m a Chaos-rat,” he pointed out, as matter-of-factly as a dictionary. “Won’t your planet, like—I don’t know—get mad at you for bringing something like me there? It’s like, burning plastics or dumping nuclear waste in the drinking water, right?”
Considering who the Dark Mirror Court seemed to count as something akin to allies, and considering how these people apparently reacted to being around Chaos, it made sense to Reiki that a nice, respectable world like Kerberos probably had wouldn’t want any Dark Mirror Senshi touching its surface. Especially if Chaos cut off connections to home-worlds or……whatever all Kerberos was on about? Add in Reiki’s tendency to be a nasty queer slut with no verbal self-control, and there was no way this was a genuine offer. None at all.
Shame……the squirrel-sized foxes did sound cute.
Either way, if they were really going to do this thing where the pocket-sized thot in the harem pants decided to help diagnose Reiki’s broken magic—“Hang on, I—I’m usually standing.”
Once he was on his feet, he went on, “Then I, like? There’s a gesture, right?” Reiki demonstrated it in silence, holding out his right arm, bending the wrist back, then jerking down again like he was yanking a string. “And you put it all together like, Gnawing Hunger!”
Except, once again, nothing happened. Even with the timing down pat.
Shoulders sagging and head drooping forward, Reiki sighed. “Ugh, maybe I should’ve just let Niji Kidna eat me.… If my starseed got abandoned for so long that it can’t even do the only attack it has? Maybe it would’ve at least poisoned her or something.…”
……Did youma even get food poisoning?
Oh, whatever, what did it really matter. Either way, Reiki was still a magical boy who was better at being tall than being magical.
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Posted: Mon Jun 13, 2022 12:38 pm
Kerberos shrugged. "I've taken people to my planet in weirder circumstances," he said, thinking of Lyndin, "and it's never rejected anyone I brought before. It seems to trust my judgement, I guess. Besides, you're a person, not a rat."
It made Kerberos uncomfortable, to hear Murikabushi dehumanize himself like that. Even if it was mostly in sass. It sounded too much like things he had genuinely thought about himself, once.
Still, he watched patiently through Murikabushi demonstrating his magic, and frowned. He couldn't see any flaw in the casting, it seemed he knew what he was doing there, and anyway, magic usually responded to intent. Kerberos could cast his Eternal magic without a word and with barely a gesture these days. It was a little different with the newer spells, but he was sure he'd get there in time.
A fire lit in Kerberos's eyes when Murikabushi suggested that he might be better off as youma chow, and he strode forward, gently putting a hand on his chest, over his starseed.
"No," he said, firmly. "Absolutely not. There is not a single one of us who is better off dead or unawakened. Okay, so your magic's a little wonky. That's fine. Maybe you just need practice. Maybe it needs some balancing, if you got Awakened kinda late. But I've seen what happens to a starseed left to fester--I'm glad it didn't happen to you."
He thought of Caedus's, mauled practically beyond recognition, and his heart twisted with pain. No, no one deserved that. And it made sense, that maybe the magic of a Senshi who waited longer than usual might be a little weird, if a starseed became unstable under such circumstances. But this was solvable. It didn't need to become as bad as it had for Caedus.
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Posted: Mon Jun 13, 2022 8:54 pm
Uh huh. Sure. All of that Kerberos was saying sounded perfectly lovely, going on about who he’d taken to his planet before, and about Reiki not being a Chaos rat. But it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. High-concept magical girl nonsense was one thing, but……none of this here could last, right? There was no way. As nice as Kerberos was being at the moment, he’d knock it off sooner or later.
Probably as soon as he remembered that……oh, right, he wasn’t feeling sick from something that he’d eaten; it was from being around Reiki. Not that Reiki had a clue what his own aura felt like to anyone else, but if it was anything like Levi’s, Sappho’s, or Bélénos’s—which seemed like a reasonable conclusion to draw, since all of them were with the Dark Mirror Court—then it’d feel dark, maybe smoky or maybe oily, but probably something that would begin to disagree with such a shining bastion of purity ere too long.
But Reiki couldn’t point that out. Not before he had a hand splayed over his heart and Kerberos looking up at him with eyes that sparkled dangerously, like they were going to aggressively love and be kind to Reiki whether he liked it or not. This—this is what a magical girl is supposed to be, he caught himself thinking. This is how a magical girl is supposed to act.
All the more reason why the universe had, like so many casting directors before it, decided to stick Reiki in a villain role. He was too femme, too camp, and too queer to be anything else. Completely incapable of the sort of direct earnestness that Kerberos was raining down on him. In the face of all this concentrated caring and Goodness, Reiki didn’t even know what to say. Gods help him, he’d have to just……listen to his favorite acting teacher of old and say the first thing he felt.
“Does whatever happens to festering starseeds include, like?” Reiki’s shoulders quirked of their own volition while his mouth fumbled to actually put words on the emotions trying to claw their way to the surface. “Like, feeling empty? Like, always having something inside of you that’s missing, and you don’t know why because you don’t have anything to complain about. Your family loves you. Your friends love you. Your ex-fiancé is ******** garbage but you got his new guy away from him, so that’s good. You’re doing things in your local scene—I can’t? I don’t think I can tell you? Which scene? I’m actually in? If you went poking around with that in mind, naming my scene is as good as telling you who I really am; that’s how much some of what I’ve done has meant to people.
“But then, a talking cat and a beautiful boy who’s too good for you swoop in out of nowhere and save you from a youma. And they take you to a magic mirror, and they make you a magical boy. And Soyala says your name is Murikabushi, but it doesn’t feel like yours. And one of your first nights out, Daphne swoops in out of nowhere and says that being a Senshi is something you are, not something chosen for you, but if it’s something that I am, then why do I suck at it? And when do I stop feeling like me and start feeling like Murikabushi?”
Although Reiki wasn’t crying yet, his eyes had started stinging. Hugging himself didn’t make him stop trembling. <********>, he had to get it together—“And……and—and? If you’re doing something? With……with the touching, just? Can you please stop? Or get it over with? Whichever’s easier?”
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Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2022 7:59 pm
Kerberos exhaled. What Reiki was describing....he supposed he could understand it. If he had never become Kerberos, would he have felt like something was missing? Like there was a destiny he wasn't achieving?
Probably.
"How long have you been a Senshi for?" Kerberos asked, gently. "Because if I seem like I know what I'm doing, it's only because I've been doing this for almost ten years, now. The, uh. Vast majority of my life, sacrificed at the altar of magical bullshit." He smiled, wryly. "Kinda literally, actually."
Considering the hollowing-out of his memory that he'd had to endure for purification.
"But I'm not doing anything, no. I mean, if you feel like you need an energy boost, I can...?" With purpose, he passed some over. "But--just--" He inhaled, and dropped his hand, and stepped back.
"Murikabushi. Trying to draw some hard line between your two lives--it doesn't work. Down that path lies....well, for me, lay a massive drinking problem and then the world's worst rehab, thanks Negaverse. Keep your identity safe, obviously. But don't try to be two different people. It doesn't work, and it will only hurt you in the end." He shook his head.
"The starseed I saw, though, the one that had been left unawakened--it had been left for a lot longer. Like, several centuries. And it had been..." He sighed. "My friend's people needed their Senshi very desperately. And so they tried to force him to Awaken. It....was bad." He winced. "So not exactly applicable to you, and thank ******** for that."
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Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2022 9:10 pm
“Uh…” Reiki sounded like an idiot. More so than he’d probably done this entire time, babbling to an Eternal Senshi about his bullshit problems as if Kerberos, like Elsa, didn’t have better and more important things to do than lead him by the hand through the whole process. Counting on his fingers—or at least tapping them out in a way that started as counting and quickly devolved into simply seeking physical stimulus—probably didn’t help. Certainly made the option of lying evaporate clean out of Reiki’s head. “…About three weeks?”
As soon as he’d said it aloud, he cringed. “Okay, that……that’s probably why I suck at this so much—ugh.” Pushing his fingers through his long fringe, he groused, “I swear, damn to the Infernal depths whoever first had the bright idea of labeling kids ‘gifted and talented.’ …Or at least, I don’t know, I hope the person ahead of them in a really long line always buys the last one of the thing they most wanted.”
Which was probably more than enough, except that Reiki’s mouth had other ideas: “That said, I maintain there’s a special place in Hell for the teacher who first told my parents to get me tested for ADHD because she thought Ritalin would make me stop wearing skirts, and then nominated me for the gifted and talented program with the exact same goal in mind.” A roll of the eyes and a shake of the head, more at himself than anything (…a little bit at the whole stupid situation with Mrs. Delancey, all those years ago). “All that bullshit and I didn’t even get a t-shirt, just a lifetime of losing my ******** mind if I’m not immediately great at something.”
Adding in the responsibility of being the eldest sibling/cousin/drag sibling didn’t help.… Neither, on reflection, did the weight of being Mom’s mother’s single least favorite of her twenty-one grandchildren.… Or everything Reiki ever shouldered that had made Margarita, Julie, Maddie, and Tequila Sunrise stop joking that he should put a “Surface Pressure” number together because no one else was tall and built enough to be Luisa Madrigal, and start earnestly wondering why he didn’t.…
But—no. Not right now. That was all better for Dr. Mjoli’s office at their next session than for the top of a roof, in the middle of the night, with someone who absolutely had better things to be doing, especially from the sound of the story he felt like sharing.
“…I’m sorry,” Reiki said softly, slouching at the hips in an attempt to be marginally less tall (even if Kerberos could still easily leave him a charred smudge on the sidewalk, that didn’t make him immune to any of the Bad Feelings that could all too easily arise from talking to someone so much taller than yourself). “For what happened to your friend, and for what you went through—what the Negaverse put you through. I get the feeling from the senshi of theirs I’ve met, they hear ‘human resources’ and think ‘Well, yes, what else are we supposed to use for Donner Party Stew.’… One because he’s an a*****e—which may not be his fault, but still—and one because…someone in the Negaverse dragged him in against his will and, I don’t know, hurt him until he agreed that they were right.
“And I’m sorry for reminding you of all that, now.” Especially if the Negaverse had tortured Kerberos by, what? Kidnapping him from the White Moon, holding him hostage, and based on everything Ojiisan, Uncle Mitch, Rei-ojisan, and Aunt Satomi had ever said about detox, probably kept an alcoholic from having any liquor or any Librium to take the edge off until his body adjusted to not having alcohol.
“…And I’m sorry for talking so much, I?” Sighing, Reiki tucked his fringe behind his ear. “…I do that a lot. …Which is honestly not helping the magic s**t either, since most of the time, it seems I meet someone, and instead of magical girl-fighting, I distract them into talking about clothes, or pronouns, or what Immanuel Kant would say about forced corruptions…or, uh.” He waved his hands vaguely at the space between himself and Kerberos. “All of this tonight?”
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