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 Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2023 6:38 pm
Reiki made a soft, pensive sound. Without agreeing or disagreeing, he chewed on his lip and what Faustite had to say about the Negaverse’s resources. Next to all the smoke—more of it hanging around than before, Reiki noted glumly—Faustite’s optimism did sound a bit hollow.…
Yet, as he kept up his steady rhythm and silently hoped it offered any small relief, Reiki could also admit that he didn’t know, not with any certainty.… He had vague ideas about the Negaverse’s resources but more imagination than actual facts. Dimly, it occurred to Reiki that he could press Faustite, try to learn more about the reality of the Negaverse and not the version of it that Reiki had cobbled together in his head.…but almost immediately after thinking so, Reiki wanted to slap himself.
Not long after wanting to slap himself, a stray glance down at Faustite’s temple made him wonder, in a voice that in his head sounded not entirely dissimilar from a certain Untitled Goose Girl, Is this about what Jael saw? Before she pounded that tent-spike into Sisera’s temple? How much force did she even need to……
Reiki bit his lip harder. Hard enough to shock himself out of thinking like that. Had he been able to do so without abandoning this thing where he and Faustite didn’t throw invective or punches or magic at each other, Reiki would have hit himself in the face with a hardback book, like his collection of Oscar Wilde’s letters.
He didn’t like the Negaverse. He didn’t trust the Negaverse. He didn’t want to be at the back and call of anybody from the Negaverse, indebted to them for longer than absolutely necessary, or taken for some kind of Token Mirror-Thing Teammate to be bossed around and given orders and condescended to as if fundamentally disagreeing with their goals and values was a simple matter of having the wrong idea (*Albite*). Based on what he knew of said goals and the world-devouring nightmare demon at the center of their operation, Reiki……couldn’t deny Faustite’s earlier accusations about him preferring to stand with Order than with the Negaverse. Because he did. not. like. the Negaverse.
But he did like Faustite.
……Mostly. ……He thought. ……Pretty sure.
…………Ugh, whatever. Feelings were complicated beasts, especially when Faustite kept proving so deeply unpredictable. And maybe, had Anser been here to honk and make a fuss and act like she knew everything just because she was twelve very big years old and had magical girl trauma, she would’ve taken Reiki’s refusal to entertain this particular violent intrusive thought as evidence that he’d lied to her about being on the level last summer and he really was an unsalvageable Chaos rat.
Maybe being kind to Faustite meant that the White Moon never would’ve wanted someone like him among their anyway (except maybe as a <******** you” to Chaos by denying it one more servant, only periodically trotting him out to make a point). Maybe this whole evening proved only that Reiki wishing he’d Awakened as an Order senshi was pointless because, aside from the fact that he could not (as far as he knew/let himself believe) escape to the White Moon, Reiki didn’t belong there. Maybe there was something wrong with him for offering Faustite comfort and a chance to just be, knowing that Faustite was a Negaverse General, and not turning his vulnerability into a way to hurt him or get one over on him or press him for intel.
But so much about being a magical girl in real life already didn’t make sense with Reiki’s fantasy. He didn’t need to exacerbate the issue by compromising everything about himself as a person……by only ever treating Faustite as a Negaverse General Who Killed And Starseeded People And Otherwise Did Negaverse Things……by refusing to honor Faustite The Person, refusing him gentleness and kindness when he clearly needed both.
“Well, my initial, dubious thought here is dehydration. But that’s coming from exclusively human logic, so it’s fundamentally ill-suited to a half-youma problem.… Ignores the totality of you by prioritizing one half over the other.” Like Spock, if he were explicitly queer and also on fire. But Reiki remained uncertain how much Faustite actually knew of Star Trek, so he simply filed that comparison away for later.
“Have you talked to any youma about this? Sure, there’s no guarantee of them knowing more than the humans who’ve been working with you? And there’s arguably still a risk of missing the whole picture by prioritizing one side over another? But……” Reiki hmm’d softly. “It’s like writing history. When we do that, we have to think about whose voices are missing from the narratives, then try to fill in those silences. Going to the Negaverse’s medical staff first makes perfect sense. But…”
Reiki shrugged, letting his hand drift lower so he could gently squeeze Faustite’s shoulder. “If the human perspectives are lacking, then maybe getting some youma perspectives could help?”
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Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2023 6:47 am
Faustite shut his eyes for a time, felt the dull ache behind them as cool fingers made their way from his temple to the ends of his hair. Would be better if he could fall asleep, but they weren't anywhere close to safe enough for that; Destiny City merited auric awareness at all times. Even when a cute boy was petting him.
Especially when a cute boy was petting him. If one of the White Moon came along to challenge them, he would have to utterly destroy them to communicate that Time with Boys is sacred and uninterruptible.
More coughs came, weaker than the last, more for his own lethargy than any improvement in his state of being. The thick puffs of black that came out of him followed the path of their brethren, coating the floor at Murikabushi's feet in a thin layer of smog. Funneling all of his fire into his lungs was becoming exceedingly troublesome. If whatever this was didn't clear up on its own, then would he have to stop wearing the cincher? Would he become untouchable to the people around him to whom he wanted to remain touchable and touchworthy? As if life needed to get more grim —
"Think half-youma's a misnomer," he managed, raspy. "Like… How a werewolf isn't part man, part wolf. It's some third thing that might have," he paused for a tentative breath, "some qualities of both, enough to justify the name werewolf, but the experience is wholly different. The strengths and weaknesses — different."
Faustite felt the shoulder squeeze and felt guilty for it. Rather than stew in that thought, he reached down to unbind the cincher and peel it away from the grate, exposing concentrated carbonaceous smoke to the air. He could breath easier, though it was at the expense of being touched.
"Could ask some youma." No reason against it, really. They tolerated him well enough as a curiosity among Negaverse officers. Some liked him, some begrudged him for failing to avenge the death of that cat youma.
"It's a solid thought. But youma aren't… Alive. They don't have health problems. Think they'll tell me to keep eating starseeds until the pain goes away. It's what they do." And it's exactly what people — and partial people — couldn't do. Nevertheless, some of the smarter ones might know something. Galvorn might know something, if Faustite could find him in the vast Rift. He had to believe that some of them would be more useful, would suggest something more than hastening along his slow youmafication.
Finally he sat up, if only to cough harder and fan himself while the wind paused. "Sorry about before."amorremanet The thought of Reiki hammering a tent spike into Faustite's temple was too good rofl Faustite would let him do it, too, because Boy
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Posted: Sun Mar 12, 2023 12:49 pm
Nodding along as Faustite spoke came easily to Reiki, but it didn’t mean that he wasn’t actively listening. He’d sort of meant to convey the idea of half-youma being a third thing, not entirely separate from either full humanity or full youmahood but also not entirely the same as either of those states of being. Understandable that it might’ve gotten lost, though; Faustite clearly had a lot going on right now and Reiki……perpetually had a lot of things to say about everything, whether you wanted him to or not. Even when Faustite didn’t have something as big as his current illness looming over him, it only made sense that some of Reiki’s words got misplaced or some of his meanings didn’t always come through how he’d meant. In fact, Reiki had relied on some of what he’d said getting lost in the shuffle before—in the basement of the Farnsworth……during his rooftop chat with Heliodor.……
No doubt, Reiki would, sooner or later, end up again using this Judith Butlerian strategy of “make yourself seem very earnest and forthcoming by providing ample details that are more or less true, give or take various degrees of tailoring for the current audience, but keep them largely unhelpful and make them an absolute onslaught, to such an extent that most people will probably tune out.” After all, it kept working.
Just like how paragraph-length sentences full of over-tangled clauses and words she jimmy-rigged together from too many prefixes, suffixes, thesaurus-dives, and academic glue-huffing worked out for Judith Butler, Reiki thought but kept to himself (because……really, it would’ve required too long to explain to Faustite, and much like how some Japanese words were impossible to translate into English, Reiki could not fully convey to someone else the experience of reading Gender Trouble or Bodies That Matter by description alone; one had to experience those books for oneself).
Still, though. Hearing Faustite confirm that his guess, however poorly expressed, had been right? Gave Reiki a momentary jolt of self-satisfaction.
Then, as soon as the relative calm had come—and before Reiki could think of what he might’ve said—Faustite was unfastening his cincher and pulling away.… Was something wrong with the shoulder that Reiki had squeezed? That had so immediately preceded this sudden shift… Only his far more powerful and abiding interest in everything about the magical girl business got Reiki to actually focus on the further information Faustite was offering about youma, about their relative alive-ness or lack thereof.
The apology briefly caught Reiki by surprise, but a soft expression lit up his face without waiting for permission. Not quite a smile, it was nevertheless gentle, earnest, and trying its damn best to stay optimistic in the face of a situation that Reiki knew he didn’t understand, but that definitely seemed to have stuck Faustite with some long odds.
“It’s okay,” Reiki told him, and meant it. There could’ve been a lot of things between them that Faustite meant by that apology, but……it was all okay. “I’ll probably still think about before? But only in my overthinking way like, ‘I was raised in the untamed wilds of a library by a pack of feral historians.’ Not in a way where I’m holding any grudges.” It was all part of how Reiki tried to make sense of the world: turning things past over and over in his head, trying to look at them from a different angle and squeeze from them whatever new knowledge he could.
“…I hope you find something to get you well. From the youma, from anyone.” Appealing to the idea that Faustite deserved to be well for his own sake—that was what Reiki most wanted to do. In most other cases, he would’ve said so without hesitation. Felt like a volatile option, though. Too likely to crash headlong into Faustite’s own ideas about what he did or didn’t deserve, and that could’ve turned into A Whole Thing. His next-best idea didn’t feel as effective in his own mind for a litany of reasons that made sense to Reiki (which, he knew from a lifetime of experience, did not guarantee them seeming justifiable to anyone else).
However, his next-best idea had the benefit of being honest, of not wasting Faustite’s time on patronizing bullshit: “Selfish personal preference? But I like the world better with you in it.”Strickenized_ dfjgkhkdjf, Faustite, please. rofl Soz about you not getting a spike hammered into your temple, babes. Instead, you can have a troublesome case of weaponized Boy being all…… *waves hands* Like This about wanting good things for you and appreciating that you make his life more interesting. heart
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Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2023 7:36 am
The part of him that still liked to dream on in whimsy, like the world could still have good endings in it if you looked into wardrobes and behind hedges and into the hollows of a tree, thought he would've loved to be raised in the untamed wilds of a library by a pack of feral historians. It would've been far superior to his appearances-first upbringing, less silver spoon, more adventure and romance and learning how to read in different frames and appreciate a good book from any angle. If he could have been raised like that, would he still end up where he was now?
But that was a passing fancy that could never be, so Faustite let it sail out of his head on the rivers of smoke that came from his nose and mouth and the gaps where his sides should've been. He understood Muriabushi's statement to mean that he'd think critically on it for an age and a half, maybe write some dissertations, then maybe publish a manuscript on trauma response or something like that. That seemed like something the boy who talked as much as Albite but had severalfold times more brain would do.
Faustite stood when he heard the well-wishes. There was still something distinctly alien and uncomfortable about someone hoping so honestly that he recover, but he couldn't explain what it was or where it came from, nor could he do anything about it. He'd blame that on Schörl.
Faustite nodded back, however. "See what the youma have to say." If they had anything to say. Faustite knew enough of them, by now, that he would find at least one with an opinion. Whether that opinion was that sucks, give me your starseed and I'll make the pain go away or have you tried eating more starseeds was yet to be discovered. If nothing else, it would feel relieving to talk to a youma again; he found conversations with them to be less stressful and complicated than conversations with people. For one, they seldom held it against him if they got into a fight. And even if Murikabushi wasn't going to hold a grudge on it, and neither did his husband, many did.
The last comment caught his attention and Faustite looked back at Murikabushi, unsure what to think. On one hand, <3 sweet boy <3 was a nigh automatic thought, but on the other, this sweet boy wouldn't think so highly of him if he knew half of what Faustite had done in his career. And at that, Faustite felt that he wasn't doing Murikabushi any favors if the boy was genuinely distrustful of the Negaverse and didn't think well of their cause, then perhaps it was better — for the boy's sake — that Faustite limited Murikabushi's exposure to him.
But he lacked a response to Muri's selfish personal preference. There was, certainly, his storybook idea of a response, but he was now old enough to understand that not only did such affairs only happen in mediocre romance novels, but he would likewise burn the boy's lips off. And the reality was that Muri would likely come to hate him eventually.
There was a certain level of embarrassment for not knowing what to say, and he felt hot in the face for it, but he'd ask Albite about what he should have said later. Instead, his response was a quick "Will let you know how the team liked the cupcakes," and a quick vanishing so he could scream Boy Feelings into his pillow at the house.
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