STARFEST 2022: Mirzam’s hunting around the gayborhood, exploiting her killer boobage to do some happy little energy-draining. Murikabushi, apparently appointing himself to be the Devil of Queers’ Kitchen (resident gayborhood Matt Murdock/Daredevil), invites himself to come intervene.
STARFEST 2022: Pride Season and StarFest are winding down. Reiki is ******** exhausted, and mostly powers up because it’s the best way to remove his makeup after a show, then get home relatively expediently. Alas, tonight is the night when he happens to attract the notice of yet another transcendent Eternal senshi from the White Moon. Honestly, if he didn’t know better than to expect the universe to care about him or anyone, he’d start to feel like this is kind of personal. At least the transcendent Eternal of the day, Encke, is hella cute and good for a chat.
Very much exhausted from Pride Season and StarFest, poor Murikabushi wants nothing more than to just go home. Alas, he must sneak around the aggressively bright, fluorescent aura—and little does he know, Miss Lysithea of Unicorns knows something that he doesn’t, concerning their mutual friend, Monoceros, and his whereabouts.
For well over a week after the misadventure into what Reiki had decided to call “crystalspace,” he kept right on ticking. June might have been over, and same for StarFest, but some of his Pride Season obligations lingered. No matter how badly Reiki yearned to ******** off from real life and just sleep, he couldn’t.
……Well, he could sleep a normal amount, sure—and he was careful to keep doing so, because he knew how little sleep deprivation agreed with him—but he couldn’t take the three-day post-Pride Season nap that he most yearned for. Not until he had the last performances he’d booked done and dusted, and their paychecks in his wallet so he could take them to the bank. But he’d known what he was getting into when he booked himself for all of his Pride Season gigs, when he negotiated about what sort of pay they’d involve, and all of that.
Nothing to see here. Business as usual. Just a working queen, a professional (by his own definition anyway), doing his part to keep Destiny City queer and make sure the rent got paid. Nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever.
Definitely nothing anyone could have or should have attributed to any magical girl nonsense, no, sir.…… Even though the magical girl nonsense constituted a pretty major departure from what Reiki had expected to deal with while he’d booked everything. Some of his gigs for this Pride Season—mostly the ones with a lot of organizers behind them and a somewhat more “official” veneer than the average drag show in a queer bar—had even been booked before he’d broken up with Greg. So, well before he could’ve accounted for magical girl nonsense being part of any sort of picture.
Though not before he’d been exposed to a lot of things that, in retrospect, certainly seemed like they were part of this great unseen magical girl war.… As he skulked home from his last Pride gig—not officially part of the season, but his last show before he’d scheduled himself a break—Reiki couldn’t help thinking that, maybe, he should’ve been able to guess that all of this was happening. Part of him recognized how ridiculous that sounded, how he couldn’t be blamed for not expecting youma or senshi or any of it to be real just because he believed in yūrei and onryō (who made perfect sense conceptually and had been part of his ideas about how the world worked since childhood).
But another part felt like, Are you done making excuses yet, Princess? Or maybe you’d like to ask Alex how he feels about that, or if he’d blame you for believing Obaasan’s ghost stories more than the evidence that this ******** town’s built up right before your eyes for years—oh, right, you can’t. You CAN’T ask Alex anything, because he’s gone, and for all we know, the Negaverse ate his ******** starseed.
Underneath multiple layers of exhaustion, still another part of Reiki tried to point out that this was nonsense. His cognitive distortions had grabbed hold of the wheel and started yelling all kinds of baseless s**t they had no reason to believe in as if they were the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and saying otherwise was tantamount to personally threatening someone. Just because the Negaverse was trash and had hurt Toráin didn’t mean they’d had anything to do with what happened to Alex Masters. Just because they’d hurt Toráin and seemed more than slightly evil didn’t mean they were responsible for every last thing that Reiki didn’t like about the world.
Moreover, he had no reason to blame either them or himself for what had happened with Alex. Maybe there had been ways he could’ve tried harder to help, but he and Alex had, respectively, only been 19 and 20, when Alex went missing.
On Reiki’s part, 19 and still unpacking so much s**t he’d been through while Aunt Satomi had been drinking.…… To say nothing about the spiral of his own that had caught him in its grip, the one that would culminate in Obaasan calling him out about lying to his therapist and sneaking around on the shady message boards where he kept getting “support” that meant “telling him that recovery wasn’t for everybody and it was perfectly fine if he wanted to stay sick”…… For all he knew, trying to do more for Alex back then could’ve done more harm to both of them.
As he mirrorwalked from one of the Court’s convenient travel spots into his bedroom, Reiki tried to tune out all the thoughts about Alex and whether or not he, Reiki, had been a bad friend by not doing more for him. Tried to smother the thought that he was being a bad friend to Toráin right now by even needing to sleep when Toráin hadn’t texted back in a while, which was never a good sign in Destiny City. Tried to ignore the nagging questions once more going RERK!! in the back of his mind, clawing at his brain for answers about why it always felt so cold, and dank, and weird to mirrorwalk, why the cold Reiki felt while mirrorwalking or traveling to mirrorspace didn’t offer any comfort from the summer’s oppressive heat but just made Reiki shiver like a Victim Of The Week from some vintage Supernatural, and why was everything like that in the realm that had allowed him to be a senshi in the first place when Ida’s energy and Kerberos’s felt so warm, and safe, and welcoming.
Once again, it took a bemused look from Cersei to remind Reiki that he needed to power down so his Best Girl would even recognize him. Regardless of the magical glamours that protected his identity, regardless of how the world perceived Murikabushi as someone different from Reiki, he still hadn’t shaken the feeling that his powered alter ego actually belonged to someone else. That much like Beatle George had been a shirt Mr. Harrison had worn for a time, not someone he’d truly been, Sailor Murikabushi was some other queen’s beautiful dress, prepared for some other queen’s beautiful runway walk in some other queen’s beautiful drag pageant. No matter what the world perceived as true, Murikabushi felt like an ill-fitting mess on Reiki because he didn’t know the right hair and makeup to wear for it, none of his corsets crafted the appropriate silhouette, and his alleged “fit” was held together by safety pins, some hot glue, and a prayer.
On the plus, powering down afforded him the opportunity to slip into more comfortable sleep-shorts and a t-shirt. God, though, it felt like so many extra steps right now, and he had letters to write so the people (and one sapient magical cat) who loved and cared about him wouldn’t worry too much. For Haruhi, stuck to the fridge with a magnet featuring art of Jack Skellington and Sally Finkelstein:
Quote:
Ruhi,
Sorry I won’t be up to heat something up for you when you get home from work. Pride Season obligations finally over. Going to sleep. If Cersei needs to go out, can you please take her? She *SHOULD* be okay, probably? Unless you stopped at Gertrude’s or did a patrol or something. Either way, Junsei and Yuki should be by later to feed her and take her on more proper walkies and run her outside again as necessary.
IOU Oreo sweet crepes after this weekend.
heart, Kiki.
For his twin, left on the kitchen table, underneath a coffee mug with fanart of Cersei Lannister looking smug with a wine goblet in-hand, accompanied by the words “I LOVE YOU LIKE A BROTHER”:
Quote:
Hey b***h,
Thanks for coming over to help me with Cersei. Yuki’s gonna come before you to make sure she gets breakfast and a morning walk. I’ll let you know if I need any more help. Feel free to drop in and talk if I’m awake when you come by, but if I’m sleeping, please just let me sleep. This year’s Pride has been the roughest.
Also, if you haven’t read it by snooping on Yuki’s letter: if there’s a floofy, black-and-white longhair cat running around with green eyes and a star on her forehead? She answers to “Soyala” or “Soya.” She’s a good kitty. Please make sure she gets some of the smoked salmon that’s in the fridge. Also, please treat her respectfully? No crazy baby-talk or talking down to her or anything. She won’t appreciate it.
You’re the best.
heart, Jerk.
For his queerplatonic partner, right next to Junsei’s letter, but sitting under a coffee mug with fanart of Garak and Dr. Bashir from Star Trek: Deep Space 9, locked in a passionate kiss:
Quote:
Well Hello Gorgeous,
Why don’t you come on up and see me sometime (unless I’m asleep when you come over, in which case I’ll see your dumb, handsome face later, just let me sleep). Please stay hydrated when you take the Best Girl out for walkies. Make sure she does, too. This heat’s been crazy and I only have one of you both.
Also, if you haven’t read it by peeking at Grumpy’s letter: the floofy, black-and-white longhair kitty who might be hanging around answers to “Soyala” or “Soya,” and she’s a good cat. (In case a different black-and-white floof-monster shows up, Soya is the one with green eyes and a star on her forehead.) Please be kind to her. Not like you’d ever be anything else, but please don’t baby-talk her, or condescend to her, or be like, weird to her in a bad way? And if she’s around, please get her some of the smoked salmon from the fridge? It’s her favorite.
だいすき。
heart, ******** class="clear">
Finally (of the handwritten missives), left for Soya, tucked into the little pile of blankets, pillows, and one of Reiki’s cardigans that she’d assimilated and turned into a nest, in the apartment’s main room, over by Cersei’s dog-bed:
Quote:
猫姫 (Soya),
Sorry if you show up and I’m not my usual sparkling self. I promise, I’m still happy to see you (or I would be, if I’m asleep when you come). But between Pride being one of my “peak seasons” for work, patrolling every night, and needing to learn this magical girl stuff in a more hands-on way, I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for weeks, and I need a nap. Haruhi might be around when you come, and you know nem, so ne can get you anything you need.
If ne’s not around, though (or if ne’s sleeping), you might see either my twin brother Junsei, or my best guy, Yuki. (Queerplatonic best guy; Yuki’s aromantic. Levi-Elsa’s still my romantic best guy or he would be if I were, like, the luckiest guy ever, which I’m not.) They’re both tall and kinda chubby with shorter black hair, but Junsei’s got our Mom’s eyes like me and Yuki’s are brown. Also, Yuki will probably be dressed more for going out in the heat since he’s coming over to take Cersei for walks while I’m resting.
Either way, I told them both to be nice to you and to make sure you get your salmon. Let me know if they don’t, okay? (They should, I trust both of them to do that, but if they don’t, tell me and I’ll scold them or something.)
If I’m not awake to see you until after my long sleep weekend, please take care of yourself?
With his letters all scribbled out and left for their recipients, Reiki could finally flop into bed and curl up beside Cersei. But even then, before he could properly sleep, cuddling with her and Usagi-chan (his crochet-bodied black plush bunny from Aunt Hana), he had to type out a few lines on his phone:
text to Levi
hey heart jsyk pride season’s dusted & i’m taking the 3-day nap i mentioned, so after this weekend, iou one (1) talk about aliens, ******** hawkey, stolen starseeds, & am i a magnet for fluorescent aura’d eternals with glowing space tattoos or what heartheartheart
text to Toráin
hey heart i’m trying not to be clingy but please, can you let me know if you’re okay?
but also if you don’t hear back right away or if i’m an incoherent mess, i’m exhausted & about to take a three-day nap
which doesn’t mean i’m less worried about you, just that i can barely stay awake heart
And he didn’t. As soon as he shunted his phone and glasses onto his bedside table, finally, Reiki went down for the count.
HOMEWORLD BLIGHTED SUMMER EVENT: Pendour is trying to plant some new vegetables to distract the blight monsters, and Murikabushi just wants to make sure she’s okay. (IN PROGRESS.)
a prophecy fulfilled(MANY PEOPLE. but murikabushi played with logos, ida, & amsvartnir; 2,538 words).
ARTIFICIAL COSMIC POWER EVENT: A bunch of unwitting White Moon, Negaverse, Dark Mirror, and Velencian teammates got abruptly pulled to the world of Astraya, because a bunch of sapient robots want to get Starseeds of their own and enter the cycle of rebirth. Murikabushi wasn’t even supposed to BE HERE today. (Murikabushi posts: one, two, three, four, five, and six.)
ARTIFICIAL COSMIC POWER EVENT: Following Logos having a temper tantrum about people disagreeing with her read on the situation and Murikabushi having allies on a different team, Murikabushi got swept away from Ida and Amsvartnir. He would really like to just be upset and get it out of his system. Unfortunately, there is a tiny robot with a tambourine who doesn’t want to let him do this. (IN PROGRESS.)
ARTIFICIAL COSMIC POWER EVENT: Murikabushi runs into Kimadésir, an entertainment and courtesy robot from Murikabushi-That-Was, the asteroid of which he is now the senshi. After both of them are In Their ******** Feelings rather a lot, Kimadésir decides to secure his own future by liberating Murikabushi from the pain of human existence and also liberating his starseed from the inside of his chest. Enter Kerberos, pursuing like a bear. (IN PROGRESS.)
In which Ida hosts a meeting for people who’ve been helping investigate the Blight, Reiki attends with Kerberos, and despite being there with a Transcendent Eternal senshi on the side of Order, Reiki feels incredibly judged and unwelcome, but still wants to help.
In which Reiki runs into Faustite while trying to make himself go patrol and barbs are traded. Then, Reiki realizes whom he’s snarking at and gets apologetic instead. Faustite doesn’t particularly appreciate it, and misses out on stealing some starseeds.
whatever happened to saturday night?(official post; 2,288 words).
backdated to september 10th, before “summer’s end”
Quote:
cw’s: discussion of past alcohol abuse, past self-harm, eating disorders.
“New Year, New Me!” was, hands down, the worst joke that Reiki had ever heard in his life, and he included all of his father and brother’s ridiculous Dad Jokes, as well as everybody’s stupid puns, in that assessment. Regardless of someone saying it in January, February, or September, those four simple words always turned out to be a lie. Little more than icing on the most disappointing cake imaginable.
Skulking around his and Haruhi’s place—not getting ready for a Saturday show at Scandals because he wasn’t booked tonight—Reiki silently cursed the entire institution of self-improvement. More so, he cursed the compulsory happiness that so many people rammed down your throat about trying to do better. What good was the sunshiniest of all possible positive attitudes when everything felt like it was crushing in around him, oppressively heavy because he could not escape an awareness of how fragile, broken, and impermanent it all was? What good was keeping his chin up when the clink of his kettle on the stove made his chest ache, right around the place where golden tendrils had pierced clean through his fuku and tried to tear him apart.
What good was keeping calm and reminding himself that he was somebody!! when, most days since Astraya, he’d only bothered dragging his tired body out of bed because Cersei and Soya didn’t deserve having to put up with any self-indulgent, whiny bullshit from him?
For all half of that motivation mattered when, poking around, Reiki found not Soyala but rather the absence of her, a cold and lonely void that could have been shaped like a longhair cat, reminding him that no matter how much salmon he got her or how many cardigans of his she turned into a nest, he was Her Senshi, but she was not his cat. She didn’t live here. Didn’t answer to Reiki or owe him anything. Guided him only at her own discretion and because she decided to do so. Had her own life, her own interests, and other, more important duties that needed her attention (like, presumably, jobs that her actual bosses had given her, and so help him, Reiki would ignore the fact that Soyala’s actual bosses meant Whatever Vicious ******** Were In Charge Of The Negaverse until either that fact went away in some kind of permanent capacity or Reiki did himself.
Maybe Oscar Wilde hadn’t managed to outlive the heinous wallpaper at L’Hôtel d’Alsace but Reiki Rokugin was young. Strong. Not afflicted with encephalitic meningitis. He could ignore Soyala’s true loyalties for a very long time. Plenty of chances for reality to get its s**t together and conform to what he wanted it to be, instead of maintaining its distinctly unfabulous status quo).
(He would need to make a point of asking her more about her own interests soon, though. Not only because he wanted to do something more personal for her than getting her more salmon for the winter gift-giving holidays but also because……it just didn’t seem like a very balanced friendship, him talking about his life and his interests and his largely self-inflicted, bullshit problems while Soya had so little room to talk about herself.)
At least Cersei was still here, sitting patiently on the linoleum by the stove as if simply making The Face up at her dad would convince him that the food he wasn’t actually making was For Dogs.… Yes, with her big brown eyes of infinite hope and wonderment.… Bless her endless optimism.
……He probably should have made food. Even though he couldn’t really cook, he could have made up some quick eggs, or heated up a can of soup, or gotten on ******** DoorDash like everybody else who had the means to do so.
Yeah, fine, he’d eaten with Haruhi before ne’d left for work—Saturday shifts at the post office, ugh, godawful—but it was getting a bit late. Ne had left pretty early, called in to cover for one of nis coworkers who’d had some kind of family emergency happen, and the fact that Reiki didn’t really feel hungry (not for food) was not an excuse for him to skip out on eating, when he knew all too well how the process of degradation went in this regard.… How his little concessions gave way to larger erosions until everything threatened to collapse in on itself and Reiki got stuck simply trying not to fall apart, or anyway, to avoid doing it completely.
Slouching against the counter, he turned his right arm over and looked at the tattoo inked on his wrist, lettering styled to look like the Nightmare Before Christmas font and stark black, as if that could drown out the thin, faded, white noise of criss-crossing scars that lie beneath it: “I drag myself out of nightmares each morning and find there’s no relief in waking.”
Ugh, he’d been In A Mood when he’d gotten that, and he hadn’t eaten in long enough that it honestly should’ve counted as some level of intoxication. Honestly, a compelling argument in favor of raising the legal age for getting tattoos to twenty-one. Probably wouldn’t do anything to curb how many regrettable late-teenage edge-lord tattoos were out there in the world, but it would’ve spared Reiki, if nothing else.
With a heavy sigh, Reiki held up his left arm in the same way, turned over to expose the wrist. He had fewer old scars there—due not, he knew, to any efforts at treating himself more decently or even some semblance self-restraint, but only to his being left-handed and too regularly dropping anything he’d pressed to the inside of his left wrist—but he had a twin for the other tattoo. The same stark black, but this one’s letters looked thicker, rounder, more bubbly, with the capitals only properly distinguished from the small-caps around them by their star-shaped cut-outs: “Better not to give in to it. It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.”
“Yeah, truer ******** words, Finnick,” Reiki muttered into the aether. To make up for the confusion of Her Person apparently talking to no one, Reiki reached down to ruffle the fur atop Cersei’s head and skritch her behind the ears. “Isn’t that right, Baby. Truer ******** words have not been spoken! And your daddy should honestly know better by now, huh!”
Keeping his tone brighter than fluorescent lightbulbs certainly got Cersei to smile contentedly, but didn’t do much of anything for Reiki himself. Made him feel both slightly more stupid and slightly less inclined to care. Not even about how, when the kettle whistled, he poured the water into his ceramic teapot that had been painted to look like Deadpool, then sat down without even grabbing a piece of fruit, much less getting anything of actual substance.
The twin to the tattoo on his right arm was the only reason that Reiki could still stand the older one. At least with both parts of the quote, he could focus on the aspects of it oriented more toward recovery—when he wasn’t slipping into similar states of mind as the Mood he’d been in when, on a wild impulse, he’d decided to look up a tattoo parlor and get some ink done for his and Junsei’s eighteenth birthday.
When he wasn’t toppling back into habits that he knew that more than a few people in his family preferred to think he was ever truly “over” indulging in.… Mom didn’t. Obaasan didn’t. Ojiisan, Aunt Satomi, and Uncle Mitch knew better, knew from firsthand experience, even if their own histories with alcohol differed considerably from Reiki’s perpetual wrestling match with his “less visible than cutting but significantly worse for his well-being in practice” little problem. Yuki may not have been blood family and claiming him as family might have made Onibaba-sama knce more threaten to disinherit Reiki entirely, but what he didn’t always understand, Yuki worked to get his mind around. Tatsuya—uh. Reiki didn’t know for sure how much his little cousin understood or didn’t, or in what ways he understood exactly? But from the magical pink cloud he lived on, Tatsuya could sense (with frankly disturbing accuracy) when his Kiya was Going Through A Rough Time.
But Dad, and Junsei, and Erika, and Hinami, though? They were fixers. They liked fixing things. Maybe Eri and Hina had more tolerance for creative chaos than Dad and Junsei ever had, but ultimately, all of them liked making things work. And making problems cease to be problematic. And, in the case of This Embarrassing Little Thing of Reiki’s, they preferred to think that he had fixed it by learning that he deserved better than treating himself like that, and therapy was perfect maintenance, and everything would just be wonderful forever, in this specific way.
Not to sound like a petulant teenager, but honestly: they didn’t. understand.
Always started small, when he got like this. First stop, neglecting the treats he was supposed to give himself daily (he’d already skipped the vast majority of them since Astraya, and so far, no one had noticed, or if they had, then they’d silently decided to trust him and let it slide with no questions asked). Then, because skipping out on his treats hadn’t caused any problems, he’d start cutting back on snacks. Maybe someone would start questioning him, but overall, Reiki’s worse impulses would win out, thanks to the prevailing cultural bullshit about how much stronger one was for “resisting the temptation” to snack between Proper ******** ugh, as if language like that wasn’t part of the wider societal problems that fed into all of this.
And now, here Reiki was: sitting at his and Haruhi’s kitchen table, waiting on his tea to steep while Cersei flopped on top of his feet in the way that Reiki chose to interpret as My Person, must protect, must drown in love until Bad Things go away……and cursing himself more than anyone or anything else, because he’d been stupid enough to buy into his own claims of “New [School] Year, New Me!”—as if simply saying those four awful little words would magically erase the struggles that had started well before Astraya and simply turned themselves up to eleven in the aftermath.
Worse, he honestly had no excuse for ever letting himself believe that trash. Reiki had never personally known them to amount to anything. How many times had Dad ever spent New Year’s Eve getting everyone to make some stupid-a** resolution that they never wound up keeping, all while passive-aggressively making faces at his sister, waiting for Aunt Satomi to get the point that her family wanted her to quit drinking? How many times had she ever promised them that this year would be her year, only to end up saying “You’re the oldest and the tallest, Kiya, just act like you’re in college and it’ll all be fine” while asking her fourteen-year-old nephew to buy her tequila? Like running down the block for ******** milk.
How ******** arrogant of him to think that he’d be literally any different.
Besides gender and the specific flavors of gay they were, the only meaningful difference between Reiki and Aunt Satomi right now felt like the fact that one of them was a perfectly normal person who got to live a perfectly normal life and text her nephew pictures or videos of cute dogs that she’d found on Instagram and Facebook……and the other had a duty to Destiny City, one that came bundled up in being Soya’s Senshi.…… Not that she’d ever said anything to that effect, nor done anything to indicate that it was in the fine print of being a Dark Mirror Senshi, but like……why even bother otherwise?
What was the point of having magical superpowers if you didn’t use them to go protect people who couldn’t protect themselves? To <******** help, wherever lowercase-c chaos and turmoil needed dispersing? Even powers like Reiki’s, this psychological horror garbage that certainly made him a <******** monster who’d gotten lucky that Levi had awakened him and not someone like Captain Phoenix-Force. Maybe Reiki was trapped forever in the Dark Mirror now, since it sure seemed like only people in the Negaverse’s specific fetid swamp of capital-C Chaos got the luxury of changing their minds and escaping for the White Moon. But wouldn’t being in the Negaverse just be that much worse?
Honestly, aside from them being the Obvious, Objective Bad Guys (except for people like Toráin, who didn’t belong there anyway, and Soya, who probably just served Chaos as a general concept but took the Negaverse’s job offer for the healthcare benefits or something), how much more would it have sucked, awakening as Sailor Murikabushi of the Negaverse, finding out that he was a broken monster on the inside and a universe-assigned Camp Queer Villain, and having the option of getting out but also needing to live with the fact that he didn’t deserve it?
Girl, no.
b***h, please.
Ugh. Jesus. Gross.
Even the thought of living like that was Just Too Much. Almost made Reiki not want to sip his tea, thanks.… Still, he’d need to get going, soon. As much as he’d found powering up to be a chore of late, he did have duties.
Oldest sibling/cousin duty: go to Gertrude’s for Haruhi’s crepes and put them in the fridge so ne could eat them when ne got home.
Magical girl monster duty: head to Kerberos’s bench. Maybe they’d find somewhere to go together, and if not……everything felt so much more manageable when he was around. Regardless of how much Reiki envied his position as a former servant of Chaos, Kerberos still just……made the world feel so much less disgusting and broken and terrible.
