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Growing up with so many historians in the family, Reiki couldn’t avoid dwelling on the past sometimes. He never underestimated the importance of histories, of historical contexts, and unfortunately, this made him all too familiar with how easily he could get lost in them. All those stories, all that evidence of lives and the people who’d lived them, all of the disparate pieces, swirling and turning in an endless stream that stretched back, and back, and back into times that even oral histories would have long forgotten.

He couldn’t fathom how Junsei (his own twin), Hinami (their middle sister), and Erika (the cousin closest to them in age, younger by only a few weeks) all just……did that. How they so easily pushed ahead on something—could’ve been anything—without pondering how they’d gotten there, what could happen from them pursuing their preferred courses of action, all the contexts that made their current situations possible in the first place, and so much more. Part of him envied their ability to just……do that and not feel bad about it later. But a different part felt like, Does our family’s work mean nothing to you?

(Not that Reiki always thought things over in the moment, either. Had he ever tried to claim that, he could think of at least six different people—Haruhi, Yuki, Junsei, Brandy, Sybil, and Cherry—who’d pop out of nowhere, like revealing that they’d been camouflaged along the wallpaper this entire time, just to call him out for lying, if not outright put some of his greatest hits of Failure To Control His ******** Impulses on blast for everyone and their various gods or lacks thereof to hear. But he did tend to reflect on the contexts of his impulse control moments after the fact, which made them very different, please and thank you.)

As he wandered around the Wishing Tree, with Cersei trotting along beside him on her leash, that tendency of Reiki’s rushed right to the foreground. Today was a rare sort of day for Pride Season. For one thing, Reiki was wearing pants instead of a skirt (……well, running shorts, paired with a pastel rainbow crop top that read “NOT GAY AS IN HAPPY, QUEER AS IN <******** YOU”). Moreover, though, he didn’t have anything planned until his evening show at Scandals. Sure, he’d participated in arranging a fair decent number of bookings for today, but he’d given all of them to other members of his Legendary House. So, as long as he made it to the show on time (meaning early, since Theater Time meant that early was on-time and on time was late), he had all the freedom he wanted to do whatever he pleased with his Best Girl (and to keep her as far away as he could from the park where he and Fang had found that dead spot; Reiki shuddered to think of what that place could do to Cersei).

Currently, “whatever he pleased” meant traipsing around the Wishing Tree, looking at the things other people had already hung up. Reiki’s process for choosing wishes to look at was simple: whenever Cersei paused to sniff the grass or nose at something—probably the smell of another dog who’d come here before her—he picked out a new wish to read. One of them read, “I wish someone would clean the graffiti off the police building downtown.” (Very maturely, Reiki let slip an “ugh” and stuck out his tongue at that one. Part of him was tempted to take it down and set it on fire. A different, but no less vocal, part of him wanted to write “I wish whoever wrote this would stop simping for the pigs. Black Lives Matter and the first Pride was a riot. ACAB” and hang it up, just to be petty, ********, that wouldn’t be in the spirit of the Wishing Tree, and he didn’t want to call any unfortunate consequences down on himself because he’d decided to be a b***h to someone who’d probably written that wish in good faith. Besides, Reiki still would’ve let Nicholas Angel and Danny Butterman, Sanford Police Service, take him to bed and do whatever they wanted, so honestly, he shouldn’t have been judging anybody.)

Moving on, another wish he found read, “I wish somebody would pick up some of the trash out near the reservoir.” (Although he considered things for a moment, Reiki left it behind for someone else. If he got anywhere near the reservoir, it’d probably be with cousin Tatsuya, Erika’s younger brother. In all likelihood, going out there with Tatsuya would be a whole ordeal, one where Reiki would honestly need Haruhi to come with, so Reiki could keep an eye on Tatsuya, Haruhi could keep an eye on Reiki, and Tatsuya could keep an eye on Haruhi while seeming like he wasn’t keeping much of an eye on anything.)

Yet another read, “I wish more people would comment on my fics on AO3.” (Reiki left that one, too. Sure, it had honored the spirit of the Wishing Tree somewhat by failing to leave a username that people could look up, but it wasn’t really in the spirit of things. Besides, who knew what kind of fanfiction this person wrote? What if they didn’t write anything Reiki liked? Better not to get their hopes up and let them down.)

Still another read, <******** Amazon, I wish more people supported Destiny City’s brick and mortar bookstores!! #ShopLocal” (Reiki ripped that one down and pocketed it. He preferred the local bookstores to Amazon, any day of the week, and with Yuki’s birthday coming up in August, he could definitely fulfill this wish by shopping around for something.)

All of the wishes he looked at, even the ones that made him roll his eyes……someone had written them for a reason. They’d hung them up for a reason. Probably several reasons, really, in many of these cases. Every slip of paper had some story behind how it had gotten there, some tangled up series of events that had created the person who wrote the wish down and created the moment they’d inhabited while doing so. Staggering to think about all of them, to try and imagine how these wishes had come to be.

When Cersei next paused for an investigative sniff-around, instead of looking toward the wishes, Reiki glanced over at the pile of papers. He’d taken someone else’s wish, so it was only fair and keeping with the spirit of the Wishing Tree that he write something down, himself. But…what to wish for, actually? So many of the ideas that rushed to mind were selfish wishes (and honestly, most of them were things that either Reiki had no control over—“I wish that I were Levi’s type. I don’t even know if I’m ready for a new relationship yet, I just want to be his type”—or that he couldn’t expect anybody else to make happen for him, like “I wish to get better at being a sailor senshi and stop embarrassing myself already”).

Maybe Reiki’s perpetual drive to excavate the past was a side-effect of being so close to two of his family’s historians—of being Obaasan’s dedicated little helper for as long as he could remember, of looking up to her and Ojiisan almost as much as he did Mom, of being the kid who wouldn’t brag about how his Dad could build a robot that would beat up your Dad, but rather how his Obaasan was secretly a magical superhero who wrote books, and taught college, and helped fight bad guys so Uncle Mitch and Aunt Satomi could marry Sidney and Naoko, or so girls like Erika and boys like Tatsuya could be allowed to just be girls and boys without anybody telling them that they were wrong for how they felt or trying to make them into someone different. Maybe he was driven in that direction because being in both theater and therapy since childhood had made him learn and learn well how to suss out his own motivations. Maybe he’d just never gotten over the Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego? video game he and Junsei had had as kids, or how much he’d adored Ms. Carmen Sandiego and her fabulous red trench-coat.

Regardless, as he sat under the tree to stare at his slip of wishing paper, Reiki couldn’t help thinking about one, Alex Masters.

He’d been thinking about Alex on and off after running into Eien no Bishounen Kerberos-chan, after hearing his whole story about how trying to draw a stark line between his civilian life and his senshi self had fueled a drinking problem that he’d apparently only broken because the Negaverse had locked him away somewhere to forcibly sweat out the detox. Since running into Fang—since making him break down and feel like he was dying, because apparently, Reiki’s powers did do things to people—Reiki had been thinking about Alex even more. Every time he started wondering what he’d actually done to Kerberos, once he’d finally gotten his attack off, sooner or later, his thoughts wandered back to Alex Masters.

Out of their class at Meadowview, Alex hadn’t been the only one to mysteriously go missing since graduation. He hadn’t been the only one to be, even back in school, pretty obviously troubled. But he had been one of the former classmates Reiki had liked the most, and how could he not have? A pair of unapologetically queer social outcasts, each troubled in their own ways but trying their damn best.

He’d known Alex back when Aunt Satomi’s drinking problem was hitting its breaking point and threatening to tear the family apart over alcohol all over again. Back when she was forgetting Reiki at the mall, driving Hinami and Erika home while wasted, and arguing to Dad that forgetting Reiki like that, forcing him to find his own way home with almost no money in his pockets and a dead cellphone that had s**t reception at the mall anyway, hadn’t been nearly as bad for him as the time when he was eight years old and, on the annual visit to Mom’s family in Kyoto for Obon, her middle brother had gotten Reiki drunk on highballs he’d made out of shōchu and canned strawberry soda.

Back when Reiki was halfway moved in to both Uncle Mitch and Sidney’s guest room (because few people he could’ve run to had felt as safe and relatively stable as his godfather), and to Jude’s (because escaping there for more of Miss Sybil’s lessons in the art of drag had been a perfect reason to not be in the house, with the family, alternately drowning and suffocating under the collected weight of every single elephant they’d allowed to move into the living room, everything they’d never discussed about what Ojiisan had meant when he said he’d gotten sober because of Reiki, Junsei, and Erika, because he’d wanted any chance at all to know his grandchildren).

No, Alex hadn’t been exactly good to be around, at the time. Considering his own drinking problem, being around him too much had sometimes been stressful as Hell. But relative to Aunt Satomi, whose idea of listening was buying Reiki a Tom of Finland artbook and bribing him to try and buy her tequila behind her wife’s and brother’s backs?

Relative to the fights between her and Dad about her using his son as her liquor-mule, or her and Dad about how she could do this to her family after everything they’d gone through as kids themselves and some incident where he’d had to very illegally drive her to the ER because Ojiisan had been too drunk to do it himself, or her and Dad about so many other things Reiki had barely begun to understand before Ojiisan interjected to break it all up, to try calming things down?

Relative to such collective, family problems with so much unspoken history behind them and how insurmountably big they’d felt, Alex’s drinking had felt comparably manageable, something that Reiki theoretically could’ve had a positive effect on. (He’d never really felt like he’d helped much, but he’d wanted to. He’d tried.)

And then, like so many others from their class, Alex hadn’t been there anymore.

That was oversimplifying things somewhat, in fairness. As with everything else, there’d been a whole series of events leading up to Alex’s disappearance. He’d gotten more erratic, for a while (in ways that, frankly, Reiki couldn’t judge him for, since balancing his undergrad at DCU with his up-and-coming drag career had made his schedule a hot mess too, and that had recently made Reiki wonder if Alex hadn’t been Awakened). Then, his boyfriend had mysteriously gone missing, which, while tragic, had mostly upset Reiki for Alex’s sake because Luka……had been fine? Nice. Sweet. Kind of a himbo, really. Reiki could see why Alex loved him so much, but he hadn’t been Reiki’s type, personally. Then, came the depression, complete with, as far as Reiki had been able to tell, Alex diving headfirst into every bottle he could get his hands on.

Then, Alex had gone.

Alex, one of the people who’d least deserved for anything like this to happen and most deserved better in his life. He’d just……gone.

Ever since he’d disappeared, Reiki had prayed for Alex. He didn’t know that Alex would’ve appreciated it or not, but at the same time, Reiki made a point of only lighting candles on his own (whenever he was allowed to, since the DCU dorms didn’t let you play with fire and Greg had always acted ******** weird and inexplicably jealous over Reiki lighting candles for another guy), at Ojiisan’s Buddhist temple (where the congregation was open-minded enough that no one seemed to mind Reiki’s aggressive queerness), and at Christ the Good Shepherd (an explicitly queer church, whose founding priests had left Catholic seminary to be together, where they’d kept the drama, the ritual, and the #Aesthetic of Catholicism, but largely ignored Holy Mother Church and her garbage ideas about everything from queer rights to vaccinations). If Alex would’ve minded any vigils for him, then hopefully, the queerness or at least openness of those places would’ve balanced things out somewhat.

Down on the ground, Cersei rolled over to expose her belly, twisting her head around on Reiki’s thigh. Had she had her eyes open, maybe she would’ve given him A Look like Daaaaad, why are we sitting instead of playing? As far as Reiki could tell, though, she was enjoying herself.… Both of them would need to get inside ere too long and get some water, though, and fortunately, Reiki knew what he wanted to write down.

“I wish for Alex Masters to find peace, wherever he is.”

As he hung it up, Reiki stood by that wish, but on consideration, it also felt like maybe it wasn’t really in the spirit of the Wishing Tree. After all, nobody knew where Alex was or if he was even alive, so it wasn’t like anyone could actually make it happen.

Hastily, Reiki jotted down and hung up a second wish—“I wish for people to be kinder to people struggling with substance abuse”—and as he let Cersei tug him off in the direction of Another Dog, he grabbed another one to fulfill. He’d hung two up after all. It was only fair.