Bad night when the best thing Reiki could say for himself was that he didn’t go to CVS for the right/wrong kind of toothbrush—meaning, the cheap kind, most often made from sparkly plastic, with the handle long and blunt enough to stab down his throat until he tripped his gag reflex.
He wanted to do it. Of all the various gods out there, somebody’s had to know how ******** much—how ******** badly—Reiki wanted to turn on the shower and some angry girl music of the indie-rock persuasion and, under the sonic cover provided by said distractions, shatter his years-long clean streak into so many irretrievably broken pieces. At least something undeniably being wrong in his life would’ve improved on the malaise of nothing being right.
Still, he didn’t do it. Haruhi would’ve killed him, for one thing—or worse, snitched on him to any combination of: Mom, Obaasan, Yuki, Junsei, Nariko and Hinami, Ojiisan, Dad maybe, Soya, Levi, Uncle Mitch, Erika, Miss Sybil and Cherry, and any of Reiki’s drag siblings who Haruhi felt up to dealing with—and……y’know what? Ne would have been completely right to do that. Would have had every right to make good on the a**-kicking ne had threatened back when ne had first gone through the Black Mirror.
On the other hand, Reiki also didn’t bother eating.
As soon as he mirror-walked from the Hellhole of the Farnsworth’s basement to his bedroom, he powered down. Shed the ill-fitting and so increasingly hateful sham of a fuku like filing off calluses. Heaving a sigh of relief, he did check the fridge……so he could confirm that Haruhi’s Oreo-stuffed crepes were still there, in the box where he’d left them before going over to Kerberos’s bench, back before the battle with the Blights had even started. So, Haruhi hadn’t been home yet. Good s**t. Perfect for Reiki’s ability to do things that he knew he shouldn’t have been thinking about.
Such as, for tonight’s example, going to one of the 24-hour locations of his off-campus gym, hitting a treadmill, turning on a playlist split about evenly between 80’s pop and Megan Thee Stallion, and running until everything inside him burned. Until he couldn’t feel anything but fire. Until anything that resembled a messy, complicated, ******** up human emotion drowned itself in an orgy of flames, and physical pain, and oh god ******** why did we do this.
On one hand, ideally, it would’ve drowned out everything that felt remotely chaotic, roiling inside of him in distinctly unsanctioned fashions. On the other hand, the pain would’ve grounded him in reality, reminded him to stop being stupid, of course his body was still his own.
In the interests of making more time to run before this ******** Night caught up to him and he passed out cold, Reiki only planned to stay at his place long enough to do three things: 1. check on Cersei’s water bowl (which did need some freshening up); 2. take her on a quick little walk to potty; and 3. write a little note, placed with care on the nest of cardigans and assorted fabrics seated over by Cersei’s dog-bed, which (somehow, inexplicably) his brother and his QPP still blamed on Reiki needing to do laundry, rather than noticing that a certain long-haired girl liked to curl up there when she was over at Reiki and Haruhi’s.
Quote:
猫姫,
Big battle happened while I was out tonight. Abandoned subway station. Those nasty gray spots that have been all over town for the past few months? Found the source, and a bunch of people from all kinds of factions poured in to take it down. White Moon senshi popped some princess wings, then disappeared as soon as the thing was dead and took all the other Order senshi and their knights away with her.
Had a chat with some folks from the Negaverse afterward. Distinctly UNpleasant in nature. Practically ganged up on. Very “In another life, I could have called you ‘friend’” with two of them (young lady officer, Jada, I think? and an Eternal senshi, who answers to “Albite”), plus a third (senshi, dresses in green, “Lils”? Big “little sister” energy off this one) didn’t seem so bad. Their Mauvian was also decent. But the rest came in one of four flavors: terse and kind of callous but they seemed overwhelmed in the first place; smarmy pricks, acting like I should have fallen all over myself with gratitude for the ““opportunity”” to let them use me for my magic and treat me like some combination of a pet and a weapon (one of the smug pricks did, however, point me to a mirror so I could get home, grateful for that); pretty overtly hostile but faking a veneer of politeness, thankfully seemed more concerned with the General than with bothering me; and whatever the ******** their General’s problem is. Whole affair was such a stupid waste of time.
As to that diagnosis? Couldn’t begin to guess and honestly don’t care as long as he follows his own advice (or at least the sensible advice based on what he has indicated that he wants) and stays away from me. Planning to do the same. Get the sense that he’s in SOME kind of pain, but he’s an ill-tempered, vicious ******** who’s treated me like garbage on three separate occasions now, and I’m tired of it. If he isn’t at least going to attempt to act right around people and get through a conversation without insulting me, calling me something like “Mirror Thing,” or screaming at me, seemingly especially when I’m just trying to be decent to him? Fine, then. Not my problem to care about his pain.
The Mauvian really was kind, though. General Miss King b***h of the World called him “Tama,” which I sure hope is short for something because having it as a stand-alone name feels unideal? Silvery-white fur, sort of prissy but also curious, seemed to have a sassy relationship with the General? Spent most of the encounter in humanoid form (skinny, leggy, long silvery-white hair down to the floor like one of the Negaverse’s senshi)? Anyway, if you do know him, I think his desire to help is genuine? There’s supposed to be instructions coming soon on where and when to rendezvous with him. But will also trust Soya-hime’s judgment and stay away from him if you think that’s best. heart
猫姫の戦士、 霊希。
Big battle happened while I was out tonight. Abandoned subway station. Those nasty gray spots that have been all over town for the past few months? Found the source, and a bunch of people from all kinds of factions poured in to take it down. White Moon senshi popped some princess wings, then disappeared as soon as the thing was dead and took all the other Order senshi and their knights away with her.
Had a chat with some folks from the Negaverse afterward. Distinctly UNpleasant in nature. Practically ganged up on. Very “In another life, I could have called you ‘friend’” with two of them (young lady officer, Jada, I think? and an Eternal senshi, who answers to “Albite”), plus a third (senshi, dresses in green, “Lils”? Big “little sister” energy off this one) didn’t seem so bad. Their Mauvian was also decent. But the rest came in one of four flavors: terse and kind of callous but they seemed overwhelmed in the first place; smarmy pricks, acting like I should have fallen all over myself with gratitude for the ““opportunity”” to let them use me for my magic and treat me like some combination of a pet and a weapon (one of the smug pricks did, however, point me to a mirror so I could get home, grateful for that); pretty overtly hostile but faking a veneer of politeness, thankfully seemed more concerned with the General than with bothering me; and whatever the ******** their General’s problem is. Whole affair was such a stupid waste of time.
As to that diagnosis? Couldn’t begin to guess and honestly don’t care as long as he follows his own advice (or at least the sensible advice based on what he has indicated that he wants) and stays away from me. Planning to do the same. Get the sense that he’s in SOME kind of pain, but he’s an ill-tempered, vicious ******** who’s treated me like garbage on three separate occasions now, and I’m tired of it. If he isn’t at least going to attempt to act right around people and get through a conversation without insulting me, calling me something like “Mirror Thing,” or screaming at me, seemingly especially when I’m just trying to be decent to him? Fine, then. Not my problem to care about his pain.
The Mauvian really was kind, though. General Miss King b***h of the World called him “Tama,” which I sure hope is short for something because having it as a stand-alone name feels unideal? Silvery-white fur, sort of prissy but also curious, seemed to have a sassy relationship with the General? Spent most of the encounter in humanoid form (skinny, leggy, long silvery-white hair down to the floor like one of the Negaverse’s senshi)? Anyway, if you do know him, I think his desire to help is genuine? There’s supposed to be instructions coming soon on where and when to rendezvous with him. But will also trust Soya-hime’s judgment and stay away from him if you think that’s best. heart
猫姫の戦士、 霊希。
Normally, he would’ve included “むりかぶし,” the kana that spelled Murikabushi, but tonight, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
Bad enough he’d had to hear all those shady Negaverse creeps on Team Faustite either saying it or talking around it—or worse, having the gall to shorten it to “Muri” (like Albite; mostly Albite had done that) when none of them was Fang (who had Reiki’s permission to call him “Muri” in acknowledgment of how Fang had trouble when words had too many complicated syllables all piled on top of each other) and they categorically did not know Reiki well enough to just assume the right to Personal Name Privileges.
(These being different from Nickname Privileges, as he took with……everyone until he learned their actual names, and sometimes even afterwards. Albite drawling “sweetheart” at him with a snide little smirk would have been fine, even downright adorable—as in “sweetheart (but like, rivalry)” or “sweetheart (but like, enemies”); Reiki might have been swayed by “sweetheart (derogatory)” too, though it probably would’ve taken him more time to accept—but the more Reiki sat with it, the more it annoyed him that Albite had just assumed he had unlocked the privilege of calling Reiki “Muri.”
In all likelihood, he’d forgive Albite, or not put up that much of a fight if he kept saying “Muri” after a hypothetical future request that he please stop. If not for the cracks and that one little moment where he’d advocated torture despite Faustite saying no murder, no injury? Reiki might never have guessed a guy like him was with the Negaverse. Besides, Reiki could easily chalk Albite’s blood-thirst in that moment up to “He was really upset about what Reiki had done to Faustite, and anyway, he didn’t actually do anything, only expressed a vague desire, so it’s fine. No harm, no foul.”)
Worse enough that everyone who Reiki liked outside of his own Court would only—could only—know him as “Murikabushi” when so much of his heart burned, and pined, and perished to tell them Please.… No.… That’s not MY name. It’s just *NOT*. Call me “Reiki,” please just call me “Reiki,” let somebody else be ******** “Murikabushi” because I swear to the Old Gods, the New Gods, the Drowned God, Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Nyarlathotep, Cthulhu, the King in Yellow, and every ******** god out there who might hear me: That’s. *NOT*. My. Name.
(The problem here was that……Reiki really didn’t have any real ideas for names he could’ve had instead. “Murikabushi” consistently felt like someone else’s beautiful name, meant to exist in someone else’s beautiful life, and describe someone else’s beautiful magical girl fantasy……but all the “ideas” he had for replacements amounted to little more than trolling and nods toward his favorite Japanese queer icons.…… Miwa Akihiro-san was next on his list, when he next stumbled into an occasion to lie to someone about his senshi name.)
Even worse enough still that, sooner or later, the number of “people he cared about who couldn’t know Reiki and could only know Murikabushi” would soon include Toráin. Whatever My Little Lysithea was planning, she meant to get him out of the Negaverse and back to the White Moon, where he belonged……which meant, in all likelihood, that he would completely forget Reiki. Who knew if he’d remember Murikabushi or not. But he’d forget Reiki, the real person who happened to be keeping warm the seat labeled “Murikabushi” and……would he even want to be friends, after he purified? Reiki still hadn’t heard from him—which was fair, considering the Negaverse had probably put him through Hell—and……what if he didn’t hear from Toráin before the purification happened?
All of it made Reiki sick to think about, sick to have roiling around inside him with no real outlet.
All of it meant that he couldn’t sign off his note for Soya as “Murikabushi,” even if that was probably how she most saw him.
On the other side of writing his whole missive out, though, Reiki found that he simply……didn’t have the same desire to go to the gym in the middle of the night and self-destruct. Sure, part of him still felt like it was probably the best idea, but significantly bigger parts both disagreed and felt like that idea would’ve involved an awful lot of effort, at the moment. Maybe he’d calmed down while venting his feelings in a missive for Soya (which had been intended for her to find in Her Nest if she came by while Reiki was still at the gym), or maybe it was something about the magic power of Cersei curling up under the kitchen table and lolling over so she was on top of his feet.
Either way, the point remained: doing the self-destructive thing sounded so much less appealing than drawing a hot bath like someone who gave a damn about his own well-being……like he’d planned to do before things with Team Faustite had gone so sideways that Reiki had considered doing exactly the sort of thing he didn’t need in his life.
He also didn’t need the soft whining and the pleading from his Best Girl’s Big Brown Eyes of Infinite Sadness. Not that he’d begrudge her the right to make such faces at him, lurking by the bathroom door while he ran the water to let it heat up. Cersei knew full well that such sounds often meant she was due for a bath herself, and she never particularly wanted to cooperate with that idea (never mind it coming not even two weeks since her last bath). She and the concept of “being wet” mixed about as well as Reiki and the concept of “being anywhere near that gods-forsaken sapient fire-hazard ever again.”
That gods-forsaken sapient fire-hazard who needed to get. out. of his ******** head, already.
It wasn’t fair, his mind making him ruminate on Faustite like a horny, white suburban mom ruminating on Christian Bale (or whichever famous white man equally white, horny suburban moms were into these days……was Jude Law still a thing?) while tossing on a playlist that suited his mood, and slipping into the safe embrace of his bath. Maybe Judy Garland didn’t fix absolutely everything under the sun, but by all rights, her iconic Carnegie Hall performance of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” ought to have functioned as a spell of “Banish Intrusive Thoughts About A Certain Irascible, Violent, Mood-Swinging b*****d Whose Only Redeeming Qualities, At Present, Appeared To Be His Stubbornness And His Good Taste In Friends-And-Probably-Also-Lovers (though the former also easily became a flaw and a very big reason to avoid dealing with him).”
Sighing, Reiki dragged his eyes over the cuts and nascent bruises still left behind from the battle in the subway station. Maybe it was something about senshi magic in general or maybe Kerberos’s skill as a healer went utterly unrivaled, but either way, the injuries didn’t seem as bad as Reiki had expected.… Lucky little slut, getting such nice magic that did undeniably good things for people. How had he even wound up in the cold, unforgiving grip of Chaos in the first place?
Well, stupid question, really. Because Kerberos had offered explanations before.
He’d wound up with Chaos because, on the whole and despite any individuals within it who weren’t so bad, the Negaverse was evil all the way down to its vile, rotted core. Of course, the people in it had thought nothing of exploiting a teenage boy (Kerberos was probably around Reiki’s age and, per his testimony, he’d been in the game a good ten years, so he would’ve been recruited around fifteen or sixteen?), who’d already been going through the Hell of grief and pain and loss. Obviously, that part made perfect sense.
But what had the Negaverse even done with magic like his? Sure, it made sense that they’d need healers and support teammates as well, but……honestly, did they respect support teammates in the Negaverse? Or had the glaring lack of respect, on some level, contributed to Kerberos eventually deciding to leave?
Arguably, Reiki had evidence that they did, in fact, respect support teammates in the Negaverse, but……that also depended on whether or not one counted his own magic as support magic, offensive magic, defensive magic, or something else entirely. Did it count as an attack when the damage it did was strictly emotional, unless it inspired someone to rip themself apart like it did to most feral opponents? It didn’t put up walls or barriers or anything, so calling it “defensive” didn’t feel right, though it did, after a fashion, prevent enemies from attacking, sometimes. Having never had it rebound on him personally, Reiki couldn’t say if the hungers created by the magic were illusory—not that such semantics mattered when the relapses they triggered were painfully real.
So, that all seemed to leave “support” as a likely category for his magic, except for how it didn’t heal anything, or buff anybody, and sure, it debuffed opponents, but not in any reliable fashion. Maybe one person got kicked off the precipice into a relapse, but someone else might have simply run away in search of pancakes. Plus, the argument remained: what you could possibly label “debuffs” sure looked a lot like “attacks” when the one ******** thing they wound up doing……was magnify the victims’ hungers until they became all-consuming.
All up, Reiki had no idea what to call his magic aside from “Evil.”
Which, he supposed, was something that Faustite specifically—not the entire Negaverse, but only that particular a*****e—got to be right about: Reiki didn’t understand his magic.
Frankly, he didn’t see that changing unless Tama and/or Soya dragged him into it, kicking and screaming. No matter how much Reiki yearned to figure out how he could be a magical girl who was good at ******** anything, he wanted to somehow accomplish that without needing to understand his magic. He didn’t want to understand this absolute garbage he’d been cursed with. Not unless it fundamentally changed everything about itself and turned into something less obviously destructive and terrible at everything.
Working with Tama, provided Soya didn’t want to intervene and stop that partnership, had the potential to help, he guessed……but unless there was some Mauvian Konami Code that one of them knew to make Reiki’s magic do literally anything else but pointlessly harm people? Anything that wasn’t “debuffing through means that could easily become emotional torture”? Even something completely useless, as long as it wasn’t this? Then Reiki didn’t honestly see how their work on this project would actually lead anywhere good.
He didn’t want to have to soul-search and explain in copious detail Why Hunger Is Bad And Wrong, Actually in the hopes of maybe, possibly unlocking some mental block or whatever that would allow him to more reliably ******** traumatize people—not least because: 1. traumatizing people like his magic did was BAD, actually and morally inexcusable, thanks; and 2. Reiki should not have needed to elaborate on the first point, or explain what he meant, or anything like that, because it ought to have been <******** understood that traumatizing people the way his magic did was wrong. The basic underlying concept here was not that ******** difficult.
Disgust overwhelmed Reiki enough that he briefly needed to dunk his head into the bath, just to clear his thoughts somewhat. All thanks to remembering how……apparently, certain people he’d met tonight struggled quite mightily with these ideas. How so many people, especially <******** Faustite, had spent this evening trying to tell him how great, and how powerful, and how useful his magic was—as if that mattered when literally all its uses involved, if not solely consisted of, <******** hurting people.
What the ******** did those people even know? Some of them, Reiki presumed, must have seen how his magic had affected Faustite and the man himself had lived through it firsthand. For sure Albite and the hostile little b***h in the fishnet thigh-highs must have, being pretty inferably romantically-or-sexually-or-something-wise entangled with Faustite……which sure explained why they hadn’t joined Tama, Heliodor, and Fafnyra of House Blackfyre in trying to go Have you considered that your magic does not make you a monster because we arbitrarily say it doesn’t, which you should clearly trust above your own knowledge, even though it would just so happen to benefit us and our team for you to change your mind?
(Yeah, Albite had tried to pitch the idea that Reiki would get any help at all from the “support” offered by a whole team of Certified Bad Influences [incapable of being anything else; ultimately, they all served the Negaverse, so……]—but he hadn’t argued with the notion of Reiki’s magic being monstrous. Point in favor of the argument that the alleged himbo was actually the smart one on his team, even if he had missed Reiki’s attempt at making a joke about consensual power-exchange and breath-control. Given the high-stress situation and him understandably worrying over Faustite’s well-being, though, maybe Reiki couldn’t hold that against him.)
Still, the question remained: what did any of these people actually know about Reiki’s magic? Faustite knew how it felt to be on the receiving end, but even he wasn’t the one who had to live with the knowledge of how much pain he’d caused to someone who had, from the sound of it, already been through more than enough. Just because he was a Negaverse General didn’t mean that pointlessly hurting him was okay, or good, or morally justifiable. Hurting him while intervening to save someone innocent—fine, that was one matter (and one that bore no relevance to their current situation).
But triggering him into a relapse? All the stress this had no doubt caused his friends, his boyfriends(? partners?? paramours??? special adult friends???? ugh, whatever, ******** terminology), probably even to more people than had shown up for the party tonight? Reiki had no idea what starseed addiction looked like or what eating them did to people, but it couldn’t be good—especially not when the Negaverse’s senshi had those cracks in their chests, with their starseeds out on full display. And all of the innocent lives……
How many people had Faustite killed because of what Reiki did?
How many starseeds had he devoured because Reiki had thrown his magic around and the spell had decided to go off without a hitch?
How many souls had he removed from all chance of ever being reincarnated? Because of Reiki and his magic.
How in all creation was Reiki supposed to hear something like that and not come to the perfectly reasonable conclusion that his magic was, down to the very core of its being, just. ********. evil? Much like how the only sensible explanation for Faustite’s behavior was that he hated Reiki and wished him gone, how was Reiki supposed to look at what his magic did to people and interpret it as anything other than wretched, and vile, and wrong?
Understanding his magic wouldn’t change a damn thing about what it was or what it did.
Feeling their feelings at each other wouldn’t make it stop hurting people when let out of its cage.
Meditating, or debating Tama about the inherent sanctity of life like it was any kind of question, or whatever the Mauvian had in mind almost certainly wouldn’t fix anything—and unless he had a miracle up his sleeves, Tama likely couldn’t give Reiki what he most wanted for his magic. No one could, though, he was pretty sure, so it wasn’t Tama’s fault.
He will hold me fast. I’ll be home at last. Not a loser anymore, like the last time and the time before……
By all rights, Reiki’s nerves should’ve gotten comfort from the combination of hot water and Natasha Richardson as Sally Bowles. No such luck, though.… Granted, he could’ve stood to put his phone down and stop doomscrolling through Twitter, since it objectively wasn’t helping take his mind off anything from tonight’s emotional inferno, but he doubted that anything would.…… Some grumbling, petulant, borderline conspiratorial part of him wondered if that hadn’t been Faustite’s actual point in all of this, making enough of an impression—never mind doing it so bombastically—that Reiki wouldn’t simply remember him, but find himself hard-pressed to think about <******** else.
…………Probably not, the more Reiki considered the idea. Sounded ridiculous, even only in his head.
All the same, he only felt remotely better-adjacent when, apparently secure in the knowledge that she wasn’t being judged guilty and sentenced to a bath, Cersei padded in and over to him, carrying her well-loved toy lion in her mouth. Saliva-stained despite regular washings, patched up in several places, hand-stitched back together in others, and occasionally refreshed with new cotton stuffing when she’d played with him too enthusiastically, Cersei’s lion had been with her for years. The-Ex-Who-Lost-All-Of-His-Name-Privileges had tried to talk Reiki out of buying it for her, once. He’d whined and hemmed about how Cersei always got so rambunctious, playing with stuffed toys—it was probably the terrier in her unique mix of Dog—and the mess got everywhere when she did that, and Babe, you know how she mopes when toys get thrown out.
Well, that had been ******** opinion, but nothing was ever “too good” or “too much work” for Reiki’s Best Girl. Moreover, she deserved to have a toy lion, considering he’d named her after the Grand High b***h of House Lannister. He’d have felt similarly about getting her a toy dragon if he’d named her Daenerys, Rhaenyra, Rhaenys, or Visenya. Likewise about a toy wolf if he’d named her Arya, Sansa, or Lyanna. Finding or making a toy rose would’ve been a bit of a hassle, but had he named her Margaery or Olenna, Reiki would have done it without question. But, as it stood, he had named his precious baby Cersei, and so she’d gotten a toy lion. Reiki hadn’t been able to fix the squeaker that had initially rested in the lion’s tummy, but Cersei never seemed to mind. By now, she’d even gotten used to being patient whenever Reiki borrowed her baby in the interests of repairing him for her.
This, however, did not stop her from dropping said lion when Reiki reached over to ruffle her ears and scratch the top of her head. Contented by getting this affection from Her Person, she let her mouth fall open, and—whoops. There went her toy. Cersei didn’t reunite with the lion until she laid down on mat, nestling him between her forepaws so she could put her head down on his plush, comfy tummy. Incidentally, this also put her right at the perfect spot for Reiki to scratch the sweet spot on the back of her neck.
Cersei’s ears perked up briefly, then flopped back into place. The huffy little sigh she let out sounded nothing short of blissful.
At least one being in this universe had an actual defensible argument for not thinking Reiki was a monster.…… Her position was largely so defensible because, if need be, she could’ve simply perched on his chest and bestowed so many lick-kisses that Reiki simply couldn’t manage to argue with her, but still. Defensible nonetheless.
Anyway, how was he supposed to be the person his Best Girl believed he was if he let himself use his stupid, cruel joke excuse for senshi magic?
In all likelihood, working with Tama and/or Soya would entail a bunch of uncomfortable bullshit meant to address things like Reiki’s emotional issues about his role as a Universe-Assigned Villain™ and why he couldn’t simply accept that fate but instead chose to make things far more difficult for himself. There’d probably be exercises meant to purge him of his delusions that he might ever get to be a good magical girl who helped people and stood for beautiful ideals like love and friendship. Especially if Soya got involved, Reiki would no doubt need to explain why he objected to things that other Chaos rats seemed to take for granted as Business As Usual (torture, murder, draining energy from sapient beings other than oneself, for all Reiki had not managed to make a mirrorwraith do that to him yet), and then he’d probably disappoint her, or cause her all manner of undue stress, like he’d done when he’d asked for help about going and apologizing to Kerberos for having triggered him.
Why, though, couldn’t it happen for Reiki to simply wake one morning after a night of fitful sleep and awful dreams, and find his garbage magic transformed into something ******** else? Even a monstrous vermin would’ve been preferable at this point, since the most Gregor Samsa would’ve done was, in all likelihood, have a depressive episode all over Reiki’s bedroom.
Why couldn’t that happen?
Why couldn’t Reiki simply wake up and find that, at some point in the night, his sphere had realigned itself to be something nice and good like asphodel, kinship, or orchids?
If not “nice and good,” then he also would’ve settled for something “powerful but fundamentally value-neutral and easily used for good” like plasma, chrysocyon, geese, and porcupines?
Either way, maybe this condemnation to life as a Chaos rat and Universe-Assigned Villain™—this horrible denial of everything Reiki had most wanted out of being a magical girl—wouldn’t have rankled so much if Reiki’s magic could at least allow him to pretend he’d been good enough and lucky enough for a spot on the best side in this high-concept magical gang war.
(Whatever he’d thought at the beginning, it had quickly become apparent to Reiki that the White Moon were the correct and best side to be on. Everyone he’d met who’d inspired feelings of “This is what a magical girl is supposed to be” had been a White Moon senshi. They got to travel to space without being kidnapped there by robots who wanted to steal starseeds or insulted by No-Name Brand Jeff Goldblum and all his inscrutable “wisdom.” No one expected them to care about Mirrorspace when……okay, granted, Reiki had only spent about fifteen minutes there, total, between his two whole visits, but……what did Mirrorspace do successfully? It was cold, it made Reiki’s skin crawl with a feeling like he didn’t belong there, it had exactly zero sexy aliens in it—what was the point of it, exactly?
Furthermore, nobody expected Order senshi to have any goddamn solidarity with the Negaverse, nor to play nicely with them, ever. The Dark Mirror Court may have been small but it seemed like such an obvious ******** on their collective part to put themselves in any kind of position where the Negaverse and Metallia’s agents could leverage any power over them, so why did they ******** do it? Fine, whatever, opposing them was dangerous—but letting them go UNopposed represented a significantly bigger existential threat to the entire ******** planet and everyone who lived here. What was the point of having magical girl superpowers if they didn’t bother using them to fight the people who’d sold Earth and her people out to their evil planet-eating overlord of choice? To protect the people who had no means of protecting themselves?
Not that it made much difference to Reiki personally when, even if he hadn’t been stuck in the Dark Mirror Court by virtue of purification only being an option for Negaverse senshi, his magic surely damned him to playing a distinctly non-heroic role. Best he could hope for would probably be “endearingly quirky miniboss villain who helps the good guys because Kerberos, Ida, and Encke were nice to him, but sacrifices himself to save somebody before he can get an actual redemption arc.”
At that, a redemption arc for him would have to fundamentally change everything about his magic so that using it wasn’t morally reprehensible by default. Or maybe seal it away so his starseed could be reborn but never produce another senshi, if that could ever be an option? Would’ve been for the best, but……Reiki was a selfish, hungry thing and he desperately wanted his magic to just……be better. Not suck. Do something other than pointlessly harm people in ways that the universe, the gods, karma, and whoever else subjected good people to more than enough without Reiki ******** helping them.)
If his sphere wouldn’t change to at least be something less obviously bad than hunger, then……could he at least learn how to do something of literally any constructive value? The way that Tama seemed to think could happen?
A nice dream, perhaps, but probably futile. On a base conceptual level, rehabilitating hunger made no sense. Hunger……was bad.
Felt bad.
The entire point of hunger on a fundamental, biological level was, in fact, to feel bad, because in order to refuel, you needed to know that you were running low, and people were too stupid to pay attention to signals from their bodies unless you made them hurt.
Other perspectives on the issue……valid way of questioning things, except that with three data points to work off, Reiki had a pretty clear idea of how this garbage magic worked. Hunger didn’t necessarily mean something physical, did it. Exactly like he’d told Tama, Faustite, Albite, and the rest of them: you could easily be hungry to continue starving yourself, as long as exacerbating your own suffering and drawing out the deprivation addressed some kind of emotional need for you.
Fang wanted for literal food because Chaos came to his world and created pervasive insecurity. Threw everything out of order. Destroyed his home, slaughtered his family, left him to be raised in the wild, it seemed. Killed everyone, eventually, including his chrysocyon family. Food, to him, was bigger than the literal matter of something put inside his mouth to fuel his body and mind, to keep him running. Food meant home, for Fang. Family. Friends. Belonging, and comfort, and everything that Chaos had taken from him.
Food meant survival, and life, and not having his face shoved, over and over and over again, into lonely, miserable reminders of exactly how fragile a mortal, even a senshi, truly was.
Kerberos’s case wasn’t quite as clear, but only because he hadn’t explained everything as openly as Fang had and Reiki didn’t think it was his place to ask. He could only extrapolate from his personal knowledge of what alcohol abuse could look like and the things that Kerberos had told him: he’d tried to draw some clear delineation between Kerberos and his civilian self, which hadn’t worked. Between that and what the Negaverse demanded of him—what they did to him—Kerberos had suffered immensely. Pain had tried to drown him. Pain, and grief, and guilt over everything he’d done while in Metallia’s service. He’d wanted an escape.
In a way, how he’d reacted to having Reiki’s magic hit him showcased that: faced with this craving that hit him like a truck and probably reminded him of the worst period of his life, Kerberos had run away to his world, up in space, where he could wait it out and bury himself in bioluminescent bunnies until he felt calm enough to rely on more conventional coping mechanisms like his support group.
(More than vaguely, Reiki wondered about Aunt Satomi: if she got in the way of a battle at some point, if he hit her without meaning to, would she be able to weather the storm and get through it, or would she succumb? Kneading gently at the back of Cersei’s neck, ruffling his fingers through her soft white fur, Reiki didn’t know the answer to that question. Knew that even asking would make somebody in the family—her, Aunt Naoko, Ojiisan, Uncle Mitch, maybe but less likely Mom—remind him that no one could know the future. No one would be able to guess what might happen until it did.
But that was exactly the point, him not knowing and desperately wishing that he could. Would an accidental brush with his magic destroy part of his family? Would Satomi yield to temptation, satisfy her craving, and lose her wife and kids, whether immediately like Naoko threatened before Satomi got sober? Or would she find the strength to get through the magical compulsion like she’d gotten through non-magical triggers before? Would she yield without losing everything and if that happened, what would the consequences be later on down the line?)
Which left Faustite to consider, the biggest question mark—outside of the senshi Reiki couldn’t even identify by name, only by her fuku, her shitty attitude, and her willingness to sell out other queers to feed the Negaverse.
Starseed addiction, while nothing with which Reiki had any direct experience, surely followed similar patterns to other addictions. Faustite may not have been human, but he was sapient, with a complex tangle of a psyche, and eating starseeds surely satisfied some need that Reiki had awakened?
Did he want to feel powerful? Certainly would have explained the Negaverse enlistment, and having the wherewithal to make it all the way to General. However much effort that took, he’d also taken to doing active field work (they’d only met because he was so hands-on)—something a senior officer could theoretically avoid without much fuss. Not that Reiki knew for sure the Negaverse worked like that, but he knew enough from having heard about his esteemed maternal grandfather’s service in the Japanese Imperial Navy, and how little work that man’s father had actually done after he’d made Admiral.
Power could have explained a lot—but contrary to the beliefs espoused in certain popular Teen Wizard books, penned by certain vicious reactionary transphobes living in literal Scottish castles, power in itself was rarely anybody’s real endgame goal. “There is only power and those too weak to seek it”—give Reiki a ******** break.
So, if power was on Faustite’s radar as a desire, then why did he want it? What did he seek to do with that power, once he had it in his clutches?
Was it rage that motivated him? He had more than enough to go around. But did that truly make it a motivation for him? Considering he could have just chosen violence at any point with Reiki and he hadn’t……? If rage got him out of bed in the morning (or whenever he woke up, Reiki didn’t know his life), then surely, General Harem Anime Protagonist wouldn’t have bothered caring about any truces, cease-fires, or rules of engagement that stood between the Dark Mirror and the Negaverse. Albite didn’t even seem driven by rage in a larger sense, but he hadn’t held back when angry enough that he felt like ignoring his better impulses and using force to stop Reiki from leaving. Faustite could have easily done the same. Probably would have done, if rage drove him on as much as he seemed to want people thinking.……
No. No. Definitely not. More likely the case that Faustite just harbored a lot of rage, rather than being motivated by it down in the marrow of his bones, like the son of Thetis before him.
(“What if I started carrying around a spray bottle around in my subspace,” Reiki murmured to the ceiling, to Cersei, to his bath-water and its quickly dissipating heat, to John Darnielle’s voice on the little speakers sat on the counter, singing, You are coming down with me: hand in unlovable hand.……
Something must have been off about the way he sighed, because Cersei picked her head up off the mat and peered up at him, making a throaty, grumbly, deeply disapproving sound.
Yet, Reiki said again, “Just a little spray bottle full of water.… Nothing big. Keep it ready in my subspace, in case he tries anything.… Might not even need to spritz him for real, honestly. Threat alone could work better than a taser for a p***k who’s literally on fire.”)
So, if rage didn’t lie at the heart of Faustite’s bullshit, then what did?
Was it loneliness that drove Faustite on? Loneliness and/or the fear thereof? Was that why he collected so many pretty boys? At least Albite and Miss Harajuku Nightmare of the World seemed like they’d probably slept with him, and Reiki didn’t know about Heliodor or Fire and Blue’d, but wouldn’t have put it past either of them or Faustite. Plus, who knew who else was on this idiot’s team, how many cute boys and exceptionally loyal ladies he had attached to him? Was fear of being alone why he’d hauled Reiki around in front of his team like a disobedient puppy? Or why he’d gotten so tense and fidgety, then started pacing around, when Reiki tried to do what he’d thought Faustite had most wanted by simply leaving?
………Nah, maybe not that last point.
Loneliness and the fear thereof made sense for so many other points but that last one. Reiki must have been imagining things. The violent, furnace-hearted pain-in-the-a** must not have actually gotten tense until Albite had pulled Reiki back into the room instead of letting him leave. His nerves had arisen from being forced to spend more time around a person he openly despised, who probably represented to him, courtesy of Reiki’s magic and what it had inflicted on Faustite, a loss of control that threatened to wreck his life on the rocky shoals of Forever Alone.
(Idly, Reiki’s mind wandered back to the first question he’d asked Albite: Does your t’hy’la over here typically appreciate you throwing looks like that at other boys. At the time, he’d only meant it as a mildly flirtatious jest—but now, Reiki really wanted to know: how did Faustite feel about Albite looking at other boys? Was there an open relationship there, as long as Albite came home? Were certain boys off the table? Was Faustite allowed to ******** around while expecting perfect loyalty out of his harem of nasty boys? So many possibilities, each of them so different in its implications than the others.)
All of which ignored the unavoidable truth that none of this was Reiki’s business to know in the first place. None of it had been shared with him willingly, therefore none of it was his to know.
