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CW: discussion of self-harm and suicide, and making threats of such against a romantic partner (imagery of these things invoked, no actual depictions).

backdated to mid-January, after january dry, hard, glittering, cold


Almost two months of this s**t and traveling to Mirrorspace had yet to get any easier for Reiki.

In terms of energy expenditure and how much focus it required to get there, the opposite held true. As much as Reiki hated the process of slowing down enough while mirror-walking to actually reach the place that he more properly thought of as Mirrorspace, nothing about it felt remotely complicated or exhausting. Tedious, for sure, in the same way that Reiki had once found it tedious to endure listening to anyone who’d thought to ask why he was getting engaged so young, or who’d asked, after he’d left a certain Greg Who Shall Not Be Named, why Reiki had even been with him in the first place.

But it wasn’t exactly difficult to get to Mirrorspace. It wasn’t challenging. It didn’t mentally engage Reiki at ******** all, but rather dared him to try and stay conscious while the process insisted on trying to bore the ever-living ******** out of him.

He’d started carrying around a squeezable stress toy that Hinami had given him, shaped like strawberry boba with a little cartoon face designed to be nauseatingly adorable.

…………It didn’t really help? But it made Reiki feel slightly less alone, he guessed.

Slowing down tonight, all Reiki could think about was Faustite. Stepping out of his slowed-down state into Mirrorspace’s endless, anemic void of whitish-gray, Reiki couldn’t help but worry about someone who wasn’t here and, frankly, deserved not to be. After everything that members of the Court had done and failed to do by and for Faustite—after everything he’d lost in Mirrorspace and everything this place had done to him—he deserved more than anyone to stay as far away as possible.

“Maybe you’d stop ******** nagging me if I brought him with me, though, huh?”

As usual, Reiki spoke to no one in particular, save Mirrorspace itself. Faustite’s confirmation of the realm’s sentience only made it easier to do so. It wasn’t as if Reiki had run into anyone who had a more comprehensible physical form and could judge him for seemingly talking to himself.

The worst Mirrorspace ever seemed to do was emote at him, trying to make sure he knew that Mirrorspace didn’t enjoy him being snarky with it, didn’t like him counting down the minutes until he’d be allowed to ******** leave, and generally didn’t appreciate him acting like a real person with his own needs and desires that did not have time for all these daily derailments to go wander around and appease a godforsaken magical void that, apparently, could only sucker him into staying by whining like Reiki was refusing to buy it a pony and a new Ferrari for its Super Sweet Sixteen.

Worse: sometimes, it felt like a boyfriend who’d threaten self-harm or suicide to make sure that Reiki never left him.… For every terrible thing he could say about Greg, at least the a*****e hadn’t been that flavor of a*****e. He’d accused Reiki of cheating on him while doing the same himself, he’d asked pointed questions about Reiki’s body that he knew were wrong but that would chew on Reiki’s self-doubt like rats going at electric wires and make it that much harder for him to check himself, and he’d tried his damn best to get as much distance as possible between Reiki, his drag family, his blood family, his Yuki, and everyone who mattered to him.

But Greg had genuinely never made himself cry on command and snarled that he’d take a razor to the inside of his wrists if Reiki so much as thought about leaving him.

“Too bad for me but exceedingly lucky for you? Faustite would never go for the idea,” Reiki said off-handedly. “He might try to burn you down to cinders, and I’m not convinced that I shouldn’t let him.”

……As much as Faustite could manage something like that, with him being so ill and no one knowing what to do about it. When Reiki got done here tonight, he’d need to chase after Team Spicy Eggplant again. Which, in practice, meant following after any old Negaverse aura until he managed to locate one of the General’s assorted cute sluts, rather than one of the (presumably) many, many Negaverse agents whom he didn’t particularly care to meet. (There had to be a more effective way of cross-faction communication, but Reiki didn’t know it and “while aimlessly wandering until Mirrorspace gave him the feeling like he could finally leave” was not the time or place to think about it too hard.)

From the vibes Reiki was currently getting—somewhere between “I don’t know why you’re not fair; I give you my love and you don’t care” and “Everything you want and everything you see is out of reach, not good enough; I don’t know what the Hell you want from me”—he was probably looking at a long night of rolling his eyes through the most godawful appeasement project he’d ever taken part in.

“If you really care about anything that *I* want,” Reiki deadpanned, “then let me go home and stop ******** summoning me unless you’re going to whine at me about something of actual interest to literally anyone. There’s s**t to do back in actual reality. I do not have the time in my life to waste multiple hours daily just……” Making a frustrated sound, Reiki waved his hand at nothing but also everything, “just screwing around until you decide that you’re <******** bored.”

Although the only nearby sounds came from his breathing, the click-clack of his heels, and the rustling of his skirts, Reiki got the distinct feeling that someone, somewhere, was staring at him with the biggest, most cloying, most pathetically wounded puppy dog eyes—like the pleading face emoji magnified by a power of ten—and whimpering like “Aw, but, Baby, why would you say something like that?”

“You know good and goddamn well why I’d say it,” Reiki snapped. “So, don’t you dare try to play me like you have no idea whatsoever why I’m feeling ******** annoyed right now.”

Glancing up at a corner of the particular ever-shifting hallway that he’d wandered into this time, Reiki narrowed his eyes. He didn’t see any security cameras there—nor did he expect to, honestly—but looking up like that made him feel as if he were actually speaking to someone (someone more coherent and less intangible than Mirrorspace, anyway). Like maybe there really was a room in here somewhere, full of closed-circuit televisions that could see what everybody who ventured into Mirrorspace got up to, give or take a security guard eating donuts and drinking some vile sludge with not enough caffeine that purported itself to be coffee.

But there wasn’t such a room. Not as far as Reiki could tell. Honestly, it was probably immoral of him to even vaguely wish for something like that to exist. Making it a reality would’ve required a security guard to be A Person Who ******** Happened, and Reiki only saw two options for how that could have come to pass.

Option A: Mirrorspace would have to kidnap them from the real world (probably without any consent on their part and almost certainly without adequate compensation, never mind genuine fair pay—at least, the fact that Mirrorspace required its senshi to drain people’s energy sure suggested to Reiki that frozen s**t-hole did not particularly care about workers’ rights).

And Option B: Mirrorspace would need to invent the security guard whole-cloth, out of whatever the wispy, not-quite-white bullshit was that made up everything else. As much as Reiki did not enjoy the idea of Mirrorspace kidnapping a hapless innocent to do its bidding, he liked the sound of this idea even less. Who knew what sort of artificial intelligence Mirrorspace would ******** invent? Who knew whatever or not any part of it would be remotely safe?

Well, maybe it wasn’t exactly knowledge or certainty, but as he passed by another new wall decked out in mirrors—which looked more or less indistinguishable from every other endless, white-but-not-really wall decked out in mirrors—Reiki had to imagine that Faustite would’ve argued that no Mirrorspace-operated AI could possibly be safe.

Even acknowledging that neither of them could know for sure until such a thing happened in actual reality? Reiki felt inclined to agree with Faustite. Him secretly being rather endearing helped, but more importantly, his tack on Mirrorspace increasingly seemed like the only correct assessment of this ******** place. At most, Reiki would’ve considered compromising with some different takes being equally valid—but only if they condemned Mirrorspace as roundly and unflinchingly as Faustite did.

Despite Reiki not even saying that out loud, he felt a deliberate, purposeful tugging at something inside his chest. Christ on toast, this was ******** pathetic.

“What do you even need me for!” Snarling like a wet cat, Reiki lobbed his stress-boba at one of the walls. Caught it when it bounced back at him. Repeated the process a few times, the sounds he made increasing in frustration until Reiki gave up and full-body groaned. “How many other senshi do you have, you ******** needy-a**—? It is a distinctly non-zero ******** amount, right?! So, why don’t you go bother one of them and give me a ******** break already? I haven’t had a single night off from dealing with you since New Year! And I mean Gregorian New Year, at that, not Lunar New Year!

“Every single night, as soon as I power up, it’s all kinds of bad vibes off any mirror I pass by because you’re feeling sooooo. deeply. ********. chuffed. that—oh, nooooo—you had to go a whole fourteen hours without me wandering aimlessly like we’re accomplishing ******** anything like this! I’m over it! My magic might be a ******** mess, but even if I don’t understand why the Senshi of Hunger is anything that should ever ******** exist? I know damn well that there are way more important things going on in the universe—in the *REAL* world, you know, the one out there—and hey! Maybe somebody should, I dunno, do something about them?”

Crossing his arms and cocking one hip made Reiki feel a little better, he supposed—but it did jackshit to change the fact that he was standing in a mostly empty hallway, raising his voice at an endless void that ******** around with middling bullshit in its color scheme and refused to commit to just being white (which was and would always be the Worst Color Ever In All Creation, yes, but Reiki at least would’ve respected the necessary gumption to commit one way or another).

“I’m a ******** senshi, whether you like me or not,” Reiki said (because it seemed perfectly sensible to conclude that Mirrorspace didn’t like him—why else would it keep summoning him to its frozen depths for punishment time?). In a gesture of passive-aggressive faux-maturity, he made an effort to dial things back and not scream like a goddamn banshee.

“Why even have senshi if we’re not supposed to be out here, helping people? Protecting them? You know, fulfilling all of the great responsibilities that tend to come imparted with great power? Literally everyone else seems to get that senshi belong out there, in the real world. Maybe Negaverse senshi are ******** assholes who drain people for their world-devouring eldritch nightmare from outer space, but at least they’re doing a REAL job.”

For several overly long moments, Reiki got no vibes off of Mirrorspace in response. Go figure—just like how screaming at God played out for everyone who wasn’t named Job.

He turned on his heel, only to find a wall had sprung up behind him.

With a roll of the eyes, Reiki stomped off down the hallway. “You can’t even make any logical sense out of your own corridors. Why am I expecting you to give a damn about anything that actually matters.”

As if on cue, the hallway jerked him down an abrupt, hard right turn. Ugh, Reiki could practically hear Mirrorspace pouting at him. Well, if it didn’t want him to have an attitude, then it should’ve left him the ******** alone, shouldn’t it? ******** idiot.

The hard right turn, soon enough, led Reiki to a door. Opening it felt like a bad idea—who knew what sort of senshi-eating monstrosity might not have been on the other side?—but with no other pathways open to him, Reiki sucked it up and wandered in.

Thankfully, no hungry monsters emerged from the nothingness to consume him whole.

Unfortunately, the only thing waiting in the room was a little table—distinctly more solid-looking than the one that Reiki had once tried to fashion specifically so he could knock it over.

“Nice to know you’re capable of doing more,” Reiki grumbled, “you only hold back if it’s me trying to ask about anything.”

On the table sat a little pillow, and on that pillow sat a silver bell. Small and round, with a ribbon in the same violet shade as Reiki’s fuku. Dangling off the end was a metal charm that looked like the incomplete ouroboros symbol on Reiki’s brooch and henshin pen.

Reiki sighed. “Great, so you’ll steal my color and my little snakey guy, and let somebody ******** else have them?”

Finally, he got a Vibe like Mirrorspace deciding to talk back: No.… Take it.… It’s yours, now. For you.…

“Uh huh, and Charon only offered Persephone those pomegranate seeds because she looked so hungry. I’m sure there’s not a ******** catch to this at all, huh?” Not that his perfectly sensible reservations stopped Reiki from picking up the bell. Letting it dangle, held between two knuckles, Reiki swung it back and forth like a pendulum, a few slow, fluid motions.

Huh. A surprisingly pleasing tone for something out of Mirrorspace.

Finally, as he drank in the sound of this little bell, Reiki felt a lightness in the chest, like his time down here was up. And wouldn’t you know it, a full-length mirror sat right in front of him, just in the other side of the room.

“I’m going home now,” he called out to Mirrorspace, one hand pressed against the mirror’s surface without phasing through it just yet. With a shake of the head, he scoffed. “Yeah, right. As if you even care.”