|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2024 1:26 pm
After he and Volterra split up, Reiki took out the little bell that he’d found lying around before. As he took his first steps into Mirrorspace’s labyrinth, he batted the backs of his fingers at it. Its clear sound rung out, and the familiar warm, steady feeling of calm tried to wash over Reiki. Tried to put him at ease.
Dropping the bell back into his subspace pocket, Reiki shook his head. His heart still shuddered in his chest. Nerves still frayed, fraying, about to utterly unravel. Maybe the anxiety clenching his heart put Reiki beyond the bell’s ability to help.
…………Whatever.
With a deep breath, Reiki squared his shoulders. Tilted his head up. Summoned all of the haughty self-assurance and bravado that he’d long since learned from the queens who’d come before him: Crystal LaBeija. Divine. Cherry and Miss Sibyl. All of the fire that had gone into sneering declarations like She knew you had it fixed for Harlow! She told me, “Crystal, darling, don’t go! Because you’re not going to get it!” And that’s why all the TRUE beauties didn’t come!
Maybe, though, Reiki’s nerves wouldn’t settle. Maybe the bell wouldn’t help at all, this time, and nothing had anything to do with him. Any visits he’d made to Mirrorspace since all that garbage with the shadow-things back in September, Reiki had spent them feeling taut like a violin string, or a rubber band about to snap, with even more of that phantom sensation of something crawling along his skin, that feeling of something being wrong about his continued presence here.
Which wasn’t entirely inaccurate, Reiki guessed. For far too many reasons, his presence in Mirrorspace was something Wrong.
He could have pointed the finger at the Court, at how he couldn’t see any way in which a policy of self-isolationism and prioritizing their own interests over using their magical girl powers to help other people was anything but selfish, fundamentally unsustainable, and at best deeply ******** unhelpful. As the son and grandson of historians, Reiki knew all too well how that went. Sequestering yourself from the rest of the world only ever led to cultural stagnation. Stagnation like that inevitably led to weakness. Then, your enemies would set upon you from all sides and catch you entirely off-guard because you didn’t know what to expect.
Especially frustrating were the Dark Mirror senshi who thought, as Mirrorspace seemed to do, that they could find peace by avoiding life. That refusal to engage with the rest of the universe held the key to happiness and real safety. That indecision was anything but a recipe in giving someone else the chance to strip you of your power to make your own choices. Waiting around in Mirrorspace would never make anybody happy, not when Mirrorspace could only offer them illusions and promises, promises and lies.
Reiki didn’t need the bell to ******** work, he decided as he closed a fist around it. He’d never needed that.
None of the Court’s senshi were bad people, Reiki mused sullenly, as he stormed through the endlessly twisting, perpetually identical corridors made up of mirror-mirror bullshit that refused to commit to being either white or gray instead somehow both but also neither. All of this would’ve been so much easier by every conceivable measure if Mirrorspace’s other senshi were bad people. Simple choice to ditch them and commit to the values Reiki had learned from the best members of his family……except it wasn’t actually the choice before him.
Because they weren’t bad people, really. Sappho. Bélénos. Acubens-oneesan. Hybris and his constant impulse to hide behind alleged uselessness and seek protection from someone more willing to throw down. Persephone, probably, though Reiki had only met her the one time. Even Lete, who refused to take anything ******** seriously, despite being repeatedly warned that she’d end up as cannon fodder for the Negaverse or some more unhinged White Moon operative if she didn’t get her s**t together. She wasn’t a bad. person. or anything like that?
Reiki didn’t know if he would have called her a good person, either? Nor did he know that he could say that about anyone in the Court. After that talk with Levi some several months ago—wherein Reiki had heard Levi not only defend practices that seemed to go so hard against everything that Levi had always (ostensibly) believed in, but also act as though said practices were simply the only way for things to be—Reiki didn’t know if Mirrorspace allowed anybody among its ranks to stay any kind of good person in the long term.
Would’ve been easier if any of them were bad people, in the same way that it would’ve been easier to just hate everyone from the Negaverse as if Reiki’s heart didn’t ache for Faustite and yearn to offer him kindness for as long as he wanted to receive it……as if Albite hadn’t selflessly thrown himself into danger—even fought a youma when they were the Negaverse’s creatures and he could’ve gotten in trouble for it—and helped Reiki protect Yuki, somebody Albite hadn’t known and had no reason to fight for……as if General Jet weren’t trying his best to protect his people and make the Negaverse of today better than it had been before……
“Ugh,” Reiki muttered to himself, “it’s not about that tedious good and evil nonsense.”
No.
No.
Absolutely the ******** not.
Reiki needed to focus on his real reasons for leaving: the Chaos coating that crushed around his starseed like a straitjacket. The way that Mirrorspace kept demanding that Reiki hide away in its endless labyrinths when he wanted to be out in the streets, helping people, like magical girls were supposed to do. How could Reiki fade away into this endless abyss, in all its visually hateful grayish-white, when he’d seen enough of space to know that it got painted in vivid Technicolor?
Where did Mirrorspace think that it got off, offering him seventeen-thousand different flavors of Kansas when even the non-magical life that Reiki had led before Awakening had been Oz, compared to all this garbage?
Even entirely failing to awaken would have been preferable to all this bullshit, to all the lies and at best half-truths, to all the self-deception that seemed necessary to survive in Mirrorspace: Lete with her TikTok-flavored irony-poisoning…… Hybris being too wrapped up in himself to care much and taking comfort in the idea that he was useless…… Acubens-oneesan running away from endless war and pain with Blanche DuBois’s commitment to “I don’t want realism; I want magic” but only a normal human amount of moral or ethical ambiguity (as opposed to the scale of such things reserved exclusively for Tennessee Williams protagonists and their insatiable need to be The Drama).……
Getting out of Mirrorspace needed to be about Reiki. Could only be about Reiki saving himself from living a life in which he wasn’t being true to himself.
Reiki had to think about that as he strutted through the infinite array of more or less identical hallways. Couldn’t afford to dwell so much on questions of morality when he literally did not care. What was anybody’s sense of moral righteousness worth when everybody had blood on their hands and swearing allegiance to any of the magical factions operating in Destiny City meant a risk of tacitly condoning, if not outright benefitting from, atrocities that somebody you didn’t know had committed while you, personally, had probably been sneaking out your bedroom window and running away to play with makeup at your drag mom’s so you didn’t have to listen to the umpteenth round of your dad and aunt having it out about her drinking?
If Reiki got bogged down in fundamentally flawed trash questions about black-and-white morality, maybe Mirrorspace would never let him go.
Besides, Reiki of all people had no right to judge anybody else’s actions. In the vast majority of cases, he didn’t know their stories, didn’t know all the nuances of those situations, didn’t know all the interwoven matrices of need against need against need. Quoth the Nietzsche: “That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.”
Stomping more insistently, as though it made some kind of point that he couldn’t entirely articulate, Reiki picked up the pace. Clacks from his pumps echoed through the undulating, whitish-gray nothingness. The walls of endlessly matchy-match corridors shifted around him as he pressed through, deeper and deeper into a maze that could only ever lead to nowhere.
He needed to remember why he was here.
Needed to focus on that, above all else.
Needed to keep his mind zeroed in on what he wanted, because if it wandered too far, then Mirrorspace wouldn’t give up the goods so Reiki could ******** off out of here.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2024 1:27 pm
He didn’t know how long it took, nor how many corridors he twisted and turned through. Finally, though, Reiki came to a door that stood out from all the others. Its appearance didn’t, not really. But something about this door felt different, the way that he’d consistently wanted to get out of Mirrorspace and its assorted garbage, so Reiki turned the handle. Threw himself past the creaking door, into whatever room or trap or void he’d find on the other side.
Immediately, Reiki’s chest started pulsing. His starseed—he had the right place, then.
And there, that silvery, eight-faced isohedron floating before him, that had to be Reiki’s quarry: the Mirrorseal, the illicit copy of his starseed that Mirrorspace had made for whatever nefarious Mirrorspace reasons that Reiki did not want to understand.
Seething, he bit back the nausea and the looming threat that he might vomit in a corner at the very thought of what Mirrorspace did to its senshi, and what this Mirrorseal represented (in Reiki’s opinions that he had decided on without fact-checking them for accuracy). ******** possessive jackass, using these things to keep senshi chained to it when they could have it so much better and deserved that chance more than anything.
As he stomped toward the offensive, heinous little thing, though, Reiki tried to shove those thoughts aside. He’d have time to be upset later, after he fixed the problem before him.
“You have all the time in creation—or anyway, you could.”
Hearing that voice, Reiki fumbled to a stop. Nearly bowled himself over, just trying not to run into the person who coalesced into being before him.
Impeccable fashion sense—for all he threw his forearm up to block an attack that didn’t come, Reiki had to concede that much. Their midnight black gown fell to the floor with a long, broad train. Red and violet embroidery sparkled under whatever Mirrorspace had for a light source, elaborate visions of rose gardens, sometimes punctuated by a vision of the same unsatisfied ouroboros symbol on Reiki’s brooch. Almost but not quite furisode-looking, the bodice wrapped around the person left over right. Panniers worthy of Marie Antoinette had to sit beneath the garment, though—either those or a crinoline that backed up its bustle with similarly wide hips. Nothing else explained the silhouette.
Either way, the undergarment helped create a slit where a furisode should not have had one, fabric draping open from just beneath the scarlet obi, revealing so many layers that, by all rights and basic logic, should have disguised how tightly this person had cinched their waist (though the panniers probably helped redefine whatever shape the fabric covered up). Aside from the ruffled pink petticoats, the lowest layer Reiki could see—black—fell only barely past the obi. Good thing, perhaps, that the layered robes done up in violet, crimson, and pink all reached the floor. True, the “party in the back” train would’ve kept the bottom layer modest enough from behind, but worn on its own, it would have been absolutely indecent.
Amidst all the swishing fabric, as this person’s heels clacked and they shifted between Reiki and the Mirrorseal, he managed to catch glimpses of long, toned legs in black thigh-high stockings with trails of little pink bows going up and down the side-seams. Likewise, he spotted half-fingered black gloves on this person’s hands whenever they darted out of the enormous sleeves. He knew them well, and how could he not? The gloves and the hands that wore them resembled Reiki’s own too much to be allowed.
Atop of everything but the obi sat an all-too familiar piece of hateful, violet fabric: the overlay that marked out a Dark Mirror senshi. The main body of it cascaded down the other person’s torso and their gown, with two matching swathes covering their sleeves. A lurch in the pit of Reiki’s stomach made bile rise in his throat while he drank in the sight of it all and tried to get his head around what, exactly, he was seeing. Oh, for the chance to set that gown—and more than the gown itself, its overlay—on fire.
The wings coming out of the other person’s back were similarly hateful: massive and feathery, like the ones that Ida-hime-sama and Cybele wore when they brought out the princess powers in full effect, but black where Ida and Cybele’s wings were white. Normally, Reiki would have preferred that, but the feathery, black monstrosities before him now looked like nothing short of a mockery, a perversion of everything that senshi were supposed to be.
As Reiki took in the picture before him, a chill dropped into his chest, arctic and heavier (he imagined) than Empress Masako’s formal jūnihitoe. He didn’t need to trace his eyes up over the obi, tied with a large bow in the back, with its own version of the rose garden embroidery and the ouroboros symbol.
Didn’t need to take in the whole picture of the long sleeves that swung so elegantly with every shift of this person’s arms. Detached from the bodice and covered by their own cut of violet overlay, they couldn’t properly be furisode sleeves. Still, they’d clearly stolen their inspiration from furisode in every aspect from their cut to their floor-sweeping length to their own echoes of the rose garden embroidery from the gown.
Reiki didn’t need to narrow his eyes at the other person’s tiara, so impossibly like the one that sat on Reiki’s own head, then finally bring his gaze to rest on their face. Taking in the mirror-image of his own eyes, his own cheeks, his own lips, Reiki recalled what Asmodeus had told him would be waiting for him if he really intended to leave Mirrorspace: a “weird clone version of [him]self” that wouldn’t want to let him go without a fight. He didn’t know what else he’d expected, if not the exact b***h who stood before him, but whatever Mirrorspace wanted to play at, Reiki already felt exhausted with it.
Unfortunately, the b***h had more than enough gown and undergarment-manufactured hips to trip him with. Being a phony conjured up by Mirrorspace, they probably weren’t limited by the normal people laws of physics, as Reiki was. Ducking and dodging around her little copy-self to get at the Mirrorseal probably wouldn’t work So, with a deep breath to steel his nerves, Reiki forced himself to look at them directly.
“Well,” Reiki deadpanned to this Dollar Tree parody that looked exactly like him, “aren’t you feeling gorgeous today.”
Flipping and swishing their own long ponytail, the imitation smirked. Affected a coquettish little giggle. “You know what? I really do. Looking this good must be terribly high maintenance for you—but it’s really quite simple for me.”
“What do you want, a medal? You think you’re ******** special because you can look nice in a pretty dress?” With a huff, Reiki crossed his arms over his chest. “Puh-leeze, Miss Thing. You only look so good because you ripped off the canvas from me in the first place. Plus, real talk though? The pretty dress isn’t that great.”
That was a lie. The gown, undeniably that great, would haunt Reiki’s dreams for months, no doubt. Utterly impeccable, chef’s kiss, zero notes but tens all around.
But here Mirrorspace was, once again sticking its nose in where it categorically did not belong and acting like it had any claim on Reiki, his time and energy, his mortal soul, or anything else about him, ever. So, would Reiki yield or concede anything that fell in Mirrorspace’s favor, even if the credit was well deserved? Absolutely ******** not. Plus, with Little Miss Xerox frowning bemusedly instead of running his mouth, Reiki had plenty of room to pop off.
“Sure, it might take me a while? Especially on all the embroidery, and I don’t know if I could afford actual silk.” Reiki shrugged, trying very hard to project the nonchalant image of a boy who could not be bothered. “Still, I could make a better gown with my own hands and a sewing machine—and it would have the distinct benefit of being real.”
The bemused frowning intensified as the simulacrum tilted its head. “Am I not real?”
“Gurl, seriously? Try that on somebody else, why don’t you. Nothing about this ******** place is real.”
“The fact that I exist before you begs to differ.”
“Sweetie. Listen. Maybe you can pull that out with all the other dumb-a** bitches who come through here,” Reiki drawled and squared his shoulders, remembering what Asmodeus had warned him about, “but I know what you are.”
A knife’s-edge smirk. “And what does our darling Murikabushi think I am, exactly?”
Although very little about the Mirror-Thing’s stance changed, something seemed to shift in the air around it. Or something about the whole picture. Instead of some silly, frivolous little nonsense, flipping its hair and tittering about whatever, the way the Mirror-Thing angled its head struck Reiki as some cousin to a venomous serpent. Practically slithering, the Mirror-Thing undulated through righting its posture. Pulling itself back up to its full height and Reiki’s. All the while, its eyes never drifted away from Reiki. As it raised a hand—as its sleeve slouched down, exposing a familiar sight: silver vambraces atop the black opera gloves—he set his jaw.
“I think you’re tacky and I hate you,” Reiki deadpanned.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2024 1:27 pm
“Tragic,” said the Mirror-Thing, waving that hand ever-so-dismissively. “Hating yourself like that sounds like such a waste of time. Never mind a waste of your potential. Certainly not something worthy of a Princess’s atten—”
“¡Cállate!” Reiki didn’t know why his mouth had gone for Spanish, rather than a language he spoke more fluently, but the sentiment remained the same: “Shut your whore mouth, swanning in here in your ‘All shall love me and despair’ geish like the b***h Queen of Angmar—like, like, what? As if that petty, amateur bullshit can intimidate me into staying? Get <******** the Mirror-Thing wanted to be a viper, then surely, the strike would come now, wouldn’t it?
Reiki kept shooting off at the mouth, refusing to buy what this fake-a** b***h wanted to sell him, arguing with the inborn stubbornness of a brick wall. That must have pushed the Mirror-Thing, and maybe it had been too far. Now, wouldn’t Reiki get what was coming to him? Shouldn’t the pretender lash out at him with violence because he deserved that for all his carrying on? If Mirrorspace had so many delusions of grandeur, then frankly, why wouldn’t it expend a little effort to come and strike Reiki down for having the absolutely unadulterated, sheer Oscar “I have nothing to declare except my brilliance” Wildean audacity to be his own person, with his own mind, his own priorities, his own dreams and ideals?
With this vicious ********, it did take nerve—and now that Reiki had mouthed off, there’d come the storm, right? Because Reiki had the nerve to know that nothing of who he was lined up with Mirrorspace and what it wanted him to be, and dared to assert his truth?
Except the Mirror-Thing only laid a perfectly manicured hand out on its chest. Long, black nails sparkled like they had stardust in their lacquer. And up on its stolen face, the Mirror-Thing had the thrice-distilled, whole-grain gall to pout at him. Wide-eyed and putting on a sparkly show of earnestness, it wouldn’t beat Reiki’s snarky “b*****d child of Lana Del Rey and the pleading face emoji” allegations against Mirrorspace any time soon.
“If you had died during that little incident with the shadow-creatures,” it said, its ostensibly calm voice more warning than reassurance, “then that would surely have been real. You realized this truth at the time, did you not? When you accepted such a fate—”
“Because anything seemed better than another minute as one of your ******** pets!”
Flaring hot with outrage, Reiki briefly wished that he could have dealt with an illusion of Faustite or Albite instead. Faustite and Albite could be talked to……reasoned with. Could discuss things like real people and be expected to react like real people, with allowances made for Faustite being half-youma and Albite being………as someone’s god had made him. Whatever he was. Even if you had to try and meet them where they were—and even if where they were at any given moment might not have been where you personally wanted them to be—a b***h could have a conversation with them and expect it to move literally anywhere.
Faustite and Albite were alive. Full of warm blood (or whatever ichor Faustite had instead, being half-youma), full of dreams and pain, full of recycled stardust given new life inside them both. All Mirrorspace had to offer was the dull, underwhelming throb of going nowhere slowly because everything around you always looked exactly the ******** same.
Either way, the Mirror-Thing didn’t rise to the bait, only dropped its free hand to its immaculately snatched waist—so, Reiki rushed in to fill the dead air: “Nothing in here lasts worth a damn—”
“Does anything do that in your so-called ‘real world’?”
“Nothing here gets halfway close to reality—”
“You still haven’t told me what you think I am.” The Mirror-Thing chuckled, quirked its unfairly accurate copies of Reiki’s shoulders. “Not really, anyway.”
“Isn’t it obvious what I think you are?”
“Only in that you clearly believe I have been sent here to ruin your life.”
Reiki coughed up a bitter little laugh. “Close enough they oughta name you ‘Glenn.’ Not how I would’ve phrased it, but you’re clearly the latest installment in the ongoing saga of Mirrorspace absolutely <******** with me.”
The Mirror-Thing arched one of its stolen eyebrows. Incredulously, it echoed back, “‘******** with you’?”
“Don’t play stupid; you know exactly what I mean.” As if it helped illustrate his point, Reiki flourished his hand around his temple. “Messing with my head, jerking me around, acting like you know anything ******** me when you can’t even make a table that looks like an actual table, instead of some bullshit rip-off of Van Gogh.”
“Are you still hung up about the little end-table? Raising such silly, nonsensical objections? Objections which, by the way, represent you telling on yourself more than you seem to realize?”
“Oh, yeah? What’s that supposed to mean?”
The Mirror-Thing heaved a sigh, resembling Reiki far too much for his liking. “Murikabushi. Darling. Sweet boy. Why don’t you use that labyrinthine, tangled-up brain of yours for once. That incident happened on your first visit by yourself—the first time you’d come at all in a good five or six months, I might add—and you hadn’t shown any love for Mirrorspace in even longer……when, truly, you are asked for so little—”
“Oh, so, you measure love in the amount of energy stolen for you, huh?” Drumming his fingertips along his elbow, Reiki waited for an answer. He could already guess what it would be, but damn it, Little Miss Xerox owed him the courtesy of telling him straight.
Eyes locked with Reiki’s own, the Mirror-Thing nodded. “No one else seems to struggle with this concept. Mirrorspace requires energy to sustain itself. Energy can be obtained from humans. So, it falls on you, as one of Mirrorspace’s senshi—”
“You can use your ******** first-person pronouns; you were doing it just fine before. And for the record, patronizing me by acting like you’re anything but Mirrorspace doing some bullshit? Not a good plan.” Shaking his head probably didn’t emphasize anything enough to bother, but Reiki did it anyway. “Not unless you want me to come back with a Negaverse General-King and burn you to the ******** ground.”
Not that they could pull off such a feat as that, regardless of how enticing it sounded.
Not that Faustite would necessarily agree to such a request anymore, either, not when he knew that Murikabushi was leaving Mirrorspace and Reiki soon wouldn’t exist as Reiki anymore.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2024 1:29 pm
The thought of everyone he was running out on made Reiki hug himself more tightly—but he had to keep on, until he managed to out-Socrates this piece of work: “Maybe nobody in the Court struggles with the idea of draining innocents because you, Mirrorspace, brainwash people. No…… No, wait, that’s not fair. Brainwashing would require honesty on your part—”
“I have been nothing but forthcoming with you, Murikabushi, not to mention generous—”
“Generous?!” For a moment, Reiki could only let his mouth hang open in shock. When he shook himself around, he threw himself into pacing—but if the Mirror-Thing wanted to watch him like it couldn’t hardly wait for the opportune moment to strike, then two could play that game. “What exactly have you done that’s generous?”
“Everything!” Something flared up behind the Mirror-Thing’s eyes. Something almost like anger, almost like a breath of life. “You came to me with Elsa, yearning to be a magical girl; I made you one—”
“My starseed did that, actually. Come on, b***h, even the Negaverse senshi know that—”
“You wished to know what gifts I can provide, and I gave you a realm of your own—”
Reiki hacked up a skeptical almost-laugh. “You mean the heroin-colored baseball field with nothing on it?”
“A canvas, Murikabushi! Blank space for you to fill to your heart’s content, and paint in the form of those crystals that I provide!” Shaking its ponytail in agitation, the Mirror-Thing started moving, with Reiki but opposite him. Two lionesses circling each other, raring for a fight, and maybe Mirrorspace could beat him for brute strength, but with that gown as deadweight around the copy’s shoulders, surely Reiki would beat it for speed and agility. “You wished for gifts as proof of my devotion, as reasons why you ought to stay; I provided you with several. When, in spite of my magnanimity—in spite of the largesse I have provided—you wished to learn more of the senshi who previously owned your starseed, did I not make it so you could?”
Although his nerves itched to argue back in kind, Reiki couldn’t think of anything to say.
His heels clacked as he paced, but he couldn’t think of anything to say.
The Mirror-Thing’s gaze weighed heavy on him, but he still couldn’t think of anything to say.
This would’ve been so much easier if the Mirror-Thing had offered him blatant lies, or veiled half-truths, or gaslighting about things that had never happened. As it stood, however, every accusation Mirrorspace had thrown in his face, Reiki richly deserved. He knew that he deserved them. Hadn’t he told himself far worse in his own head before? Sometimes while imagining himself talking to Mirrorspace? Hadn’t Reiki himself put harsher things into Mirrorspace’s imagined mouth?
Was this b***h really reflecting what it thought he wanted back at him? Like, really really? That was the game that Mirrorspace wanted to play, right now? Giving him some kind of grand high b***h villain fantasy, all because Reiki wanted for Mirrorspace to be that?
……Well, if that was remotely accurate—felt like it was, because Reiki couldn’t imagine any version of himself he would ever want to be, if that version were to stay with Mirrorspace—he couldn’t knock the whole-a** commitment to the mirror, mirror schtick. At the same time, however: <******** UGH. When he got back to Yuki’s as Kiyoshi, after Ida-hime-sama got this Chaos bullshit off his starseed, Reiki was going to cover every godforsaken mirror in the house with bed-sheets out of spite.
The Mirror-Thing huffed in something almost like amusement. “Nothing to say for yourself?”
“Oh, wow, you have really suffered,” Reiki deadpanned, rolling his eyes for good measure. “You must be exhausted from living up to my expectations, Miss Fairy Princess Jareth of the World. That sounds terrible for you.” He briefly considered leaving off Some ******** Drama, which arguably served no purpose, then decided against that: “‘Dear Mirrorspace, I’m sorry I came to your party. Dear Mirrorspace, I’m sorry I came to your party and seduced you and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.’”
Not like Richard Siken was ever not on Reiki’s mind somewhere, lurking in some corner or other, ready to assault Reiki with gay little feelings all wrapped up in the fancy princess gown of poetry. But the man had been more so, lately, ever since he’d become the only reason to bother checking Twitter in between rounds of adulting one’s way through moving to a new place, getting settled there, and deleting one’s entire life.
As Reiki kept up his pacing, he thought of Siken upending so many queer twenty-somethings’ little heads by suggesting that they read Sorry about the blood in your mouth, I wish it was mine from “Little Beast” through a lens of heavy sarcasm. Thought of how that same idea probably didn’t apply to other poems of Siken’s, but how the original lines in Reiki’s selection from “Litany In Which Certain Things Have Been Crossed Out” had already been so deeply unserious that reading them with earnestness would’ve betrayed everything about them.
Thought of how he, himself might need to up-end this Mirror-b*****d’s head in a similar way in order to get past it, to get at the unholy copy of his starseed.… Question came down to a matter of How? and in all likelihood, Reiki would need to wait for the opportune moment.
Reiki hated ******** waiting.
“That’s funny,” the Mirror-Thing told him evenly, placidly. That tone was the most egregious, hateful garbage Reiki had ever heard this week, and he counted it as a miracle that he didn’t start throwing punches. “You’re very cute. But that’s the thing that you don’t understand about Mirrorspace—”
“You mean about you,” Reiki sneered.
“About Mirrorspace,” the unfortunate, detestable Mirror-Thing insisted.
“Saying it again doesn’t make Mirrorspace stop being you. Just like how standing there in that ostentatious atrasmacy of a gown doesn’t make either of us a ******** Princess.” Scoffing, Reiki tacked on, “What, did some watery Mauvian tart throw a sword at you and let you start getting ideas?”
“Hardly.”
Lips pursed so tightly that they almost disappeared, the Mirror-Thing regarded Reiki for a moment. Felt like it wanted to X-ray his soul, but thankfully, the moment soon passed. Holding its hands out, cupped together as if waiting to catch rainwater, it closed its eyes. Seemed to focus quite intently.
A moment, and then, a crystal appeared there, jet black and floating above the Mirror-Thing’s hands. At first blush, it looked so much like the crystal that Reiki had seen Ida-hime-sama use down in the subway. The more Reiki drank in the sight, though, the more he noticed differences between them, aside from the colors.… For one thing, the shape resembled a rose blossom more than anything else.
“Do you see what I’m trying to tell you, yet?” The Mirror-Thing spoke softly, almost pleading.
But only almost.
Just like how ******** else in this place was only almost whatever it was supposed to be.
Despite this fundamental lack of reality, the Mirror-Thing went on, “Maybe you aren’t a Princess yet, Murikabushi—but you could be.… Mirrorspace can make your own crystal, just like any other Royal Senshi’s, a perfect replica of the one some dead, forsaken rock up in the void of space will probably never deign to grant you if you leave. You could unleash magic like no one else’s.… What is that phrase, from that song you like? Something like ‘The best way that I’ve found to be the best you’ve ever seen’?”
Reiki looked back up from admiring the black rose crystal.
Staring dead-eyed at the Mirror-Thing before him, he dimly hoped that it could feel fear and shame or at least anything adjacent to those emotions.
“Keep. My Hedwig’s name. Out your <******** *mouth*,” he told it, inflecting properly but not raising his voice. Wasting the energy on telling this b***h off? When Reiki still needed to get around it and grab up his Mirrorseal? Oh, he did not think. “Anyway, go ******** off with that garbage. You already have Remarque and Persephone’s wife. You don’t need another Mirror-princess. Even if you did, you’ve got Acubens, and Hybris, and all kinds of senshi who actually want it. You don’t need me to be one.”
“And then White Moon already has your Ida-hime-sama, do they not?” Brows arched with the pointedness of a sassy half-Vulcan science officer telling off a disagreeable Southern-fried Doctor, the Mirror-Clone tilted its head ever so slightly. “Plus, they have Cybele and Lysithea, and those are only the princesses whom you know about. Given how many White Moon senshi there are, don’t you think there must be more princesses out there as well?”
“Oh, I’m sure there are. Don’t doubt there are dozens of White Moon senshi who deserve to unlock that kind of power, too.” Dimly, Reiki recalled Cybele mentioning a Ganymede? That was their name, right? He was pretty sure? He’d never heard of them outside Cybele bringing them up, though, so their whole life and story felt like Probably Not Reiki’s Business. “Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard, by the way?”
The Mirror-Thing frowned bemusedly. “Why is that relevant?”
“Yeah. Exactly my point.” Maybe Reiki shrugged a bit aggressively, but truly, this whole Socratic dialogue had yet to prove itself anything else but bullshit. “What’s it matter to me if the White Moon has ten, or twenty, or fifteen-hundred ******** Princesses? I didn’t vote for them. Only three of them even know that I exist, so why should I ******** care how many of them there are? They’re doing their own things, I assume. Good for them.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2024 1:30 pm
This protest earned Reiki a scrunchy, pouty, offended-looking face that made his heart ache with sympathy for everyone who’d ever needed to watch him twist his own features into that exact expression, probably whilst wringing his hands about the inherent duty to use magical girl powers responsibly, the sanctity of sapient life, the way a boy he liked was sad and misunderstood and obviously too good for him, even if the whole “Negaverse General-Sovereign” thing had a tendency to make people think otherwise, which was to say wrong about about the ******** who cared? Reiki didn’t know. Whatever nonsense he’d let himself get on about at any given point.
“You gonna stop wasting my time now,” he asked the walking, talking plagiarism, his voice dry, impassive, and distinctly not in the mood to tolerate any further garbage, “or do I have to beat your ******** head in.”
“Nothing here is in your way.” Too much like Reiki for his own liking, the phony version gave a haughty huff and shook out its head. “The only one standing your way is you, yourself.”
Probably, the copy meant some kind of deep, esoteric, metaphysical point about that……but silently, Reiki quirked a brow and cast a long glance at the clearest, quickest path from where he stood to the unauthorized duplicate of his starseed, impeded by the unnecessary son of a b***h in the bootleg princess gown.…… The Mirror-Thing could protest too much all it wanted, but only moving would change the reality that it was clearly standing in Reiki’s way.
For a long moment, Reiki traced his eyes back and forth over the space and the heap of finely embroidered gown that cluttered up the floor, but he didn’t open his mouth. Saying anything out loud would have undercut the vibes that he wanted to project. As he looked back up at his current problem, Reiki shrugged by way of letting Miss Fake b***h of the World know that he’d punted the ball back to the forgery’s side of the court.
Glowering, the ersatz wannabe held out his little ersatz crystal. “Why would you want something so small, and limited, and insignificant as that thing? When I’m trying to offer you something so much better?”
“Oh, yeah, really really, I am sure.… Anyway, we’ve been over how I feel about your bogus promises.”
“Who says that it’s bogus? Did I say that?”
Reiki hummed, peering around the copy on one side, then the other.… If he couldn’t make this jackass shut up, maybe he’d need to get physical about this.… Best to assess how the two of them were really laid out in this room, how much room Reiki really had on either side of the cheap imitation.… Just thinking of stomping all over such a pretty gown set a guilty twist shivering through Reiki’s chest, but if his escape plans came down to that—
“Murikabushi!”
“Uh huh?” Although the interjection had broken his focus, Reiki forced himself to keep surveying the scene. To act as supremely and utterly unbothered as possible. “What can I do you for?”
One of the copy’s hands—the one not currently preoccupied with holding up the black rose crystal—fell to its side. Hidden behind the fake’s panniers, it refused to let Reiki catch a glimpse of it. But turning his attention to the similacrum’s face and its flushed, twisted up expression, Reiki could imagine how it had probably balled up a fist in impotent frustration.
Letting a hiss slip out between its teeth, the copy scowled as if Reiki had refused to budge about buying a pony and an S-class Benz for the faker’s super sweet sixteen.
“Who,” it told him, speech slow and enunciation crisp, “says that anything I can promise you is bogus? Or that it’s phony? How would you even know? When you have spent the past thirteen months only coming to Mirrorspace in some kind of strop, doing little more than wandering around until you have felt like leaving? With the power you could get out of staying here—with all the gifts that Mirrorspace would offer you if only you would open your heart—you could be great. Not only a simple Princess, but the best, the most wholly actualized Princess you are capable of being……”
A quick shake of the head, and the copy threw Reiki a flat, unimpressed frown. “All of this will go so much easier if you stop pretending that you don’t want this—”
“Are you ******** stupid,” Reiki snapped. “Of course I want it, genius! I’ve told Cybele, and Heliodor, and I don’t know how many others about how long I’ve wanted to be a Princess. I wanted that before I knew magical girls were even real. But hey, we should wrap this little meeting, don’t you think. Can’t be late to shoot your cover for the next issue of ‘Holy s**t, That’s Not Even Remotely The Point’ Quarterly’!”
Ostensibly impervious to Reiki’s nonsense, the mirror-copy maintained its same implacable look. “Then what is the point, then, Murikabushi? Enlighten me.”
“Well, you, my dear Mirrorspace, clearly believe the point is buying me off so I won’t ******** off outta here—and by the way?” Reiki pinched his thumb and index finger together. Pressed them to his lips and blew the most sarcastic chef’s kiss he could manage. “Love-bombing and bribery to distract me from the underlying problems? We love to see it. Not like similar behaviors contributed to me walking out on my ex or anything……which you oughta know, if you really know me half as well as you think you do.……”
Whether he’d hit a nerve, caught the fake-a** Xerox b***h off-guard, or some secret third thing, Reiki couldn’t say. But as he kept sizing up his avenues for escape, the copy pouted at him in perfect silence. Oh, that was cute. Trying to make Reiki feel bad for calling out its garbage. If Reiki could have laughed without ruining the airs that he’d put on for this impromptu performance, he would have let himself fall over, howling with delight over the ******** facial expressions the Mirror-copy kept giving him.
“As for me,” he went on, “I think the point is that, yeah, you put on a nice show with all your swish, and pretty words, and the panache that you stole from me? Under all this buffoonery, you can’t have any actual respect for me, though. Not if you think it’s okay to treat me this way.… I mean, I don’t think I’ve been particularly subtle about letting you know that I think any promises you make to me are absolutely bullshit? If, as you have suggested, your ability to live up to your promises is contingent on your senshi draining energy from innocent people, people who can’t protect themselves and lack the context to know they need in order to give informed consent? Then that’s even worse, as far as bullshit goes.
“Like, listen, I know it’s a movie and all? But at least when Jareth came at Sarah like ‘Fear me, love me, do as I say, and I will be your slave,’ he had the basic decency to only promise her things he could have given through his own power. His offer was lying, manipulative garbage for other reasons, but you cannot deny that the Goblin King kept his promises. The only time he even hurt an unrelated innocent was when Sarah literally asked him to.”
Most thoroughly unlike Mirrorspace, who not only demanded that its senshi drain energy from defenseless civvies, but had the unmitigated gall to hide that clause in the fine print and not bother making that clear until you’d already gone through the Black Mirror and come out the other side.
……Well. Okay. Being fair, Levi had been the one who’d done that, rather than Mirrorspace itself. Reiki didn’t know how any other Eternal Mirror senshi got about this issue, or how they approached the matter of recruiting new brats to train, or whether or not they told people the requirements upfront.… Maybe Acubens, and Remarque, and Persephone’s Wife all did better than Levi had with Reiki (or would have if she ever powered up, in Leto’s case).
But, in a way, didn’t that make it more clearly Mirrorspace’s fault, instead of Levi’s?
Whatever this place did to people, obviously, it got into their heads with bullshit promises it couldn’t keep, and sweet nothings about how it could keep them safe and how it knew what was best for them better than they did.
If Levi had been thinking with his normal mind when he first brought Reiki to the Throne Room, he would’ve remembered everything that he damn well knew about informed consent and bodily autonomy. If he was the only one who withheld the fine-print detail about Mirror senshi draining energy for the sake of some heartless, lying a*****e who’d dressed up as a magical playground for Halloween? Then the reason why had to be because Mirrorspace had convinced him that any of this garbage was okay.
Mirrorspace must have lied to him, the same way it must have lied to all of them.… Maybe Reiki couldn’t do anything about it now, the way he was, barely keeping it together on any given day? But once he got himself right enough, then maybe…… Maybe he’d come back, try and help the others see through all the empty bullshit they’d been seduced with.…… Help them all escape this eldritch, sapient, magical hellscape that didn’t ******** respect them, so they could really live and have the freedom—the real freedom—that they all deserved.……
First, though, Reiki had to fix his own s**t. That whole Please secure your own mask before assisting others principle.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2024 1:30 pm
He narrowed his eyes, edging closer to his Dollar Store Mirrorverse knock-off self, focusing on the path he saw around the stupid b***h and over to his Mirrorseal.… The forgery’s guard hadn’t wholly come down, yet. It hadn’t forgotten that it wanted to stop Reiki from escaping Mirrorspace to the real freedom that he deserved.
But if Reiki could play with it a little bit more.…… If he could repartee keep this going just a little longer, if he could whittle the forgery’s resolve down until it cracked and lost its concentration, then he could make a break for it.…… Run after the Mirrorseal, grab it up, and get out of here. Get back to Blossom, Volterra, and Ida-hime-sama. Go up to her planet, and get the Chaos-taint off his Starseed already. Become the senshi he was really meant to be. Then stomp back home to Yuki and Cersei and pass out in bed for the next few days.
Good plan. Excellent. ******** party.
“So, with all that in mind,” Reiki told them, mind clear and heart focused on getting the ******** out, “I think it takes an awful lot of nerve for you to stand here, trying to make me stay by going all ‘Oh, ohhh! The White Moon really has soooo many princesses already, and you only know of two in Mirrorspace. Oh, ohhhh! Clearly, you’ll never earn those pretty princess wings if you leave me! Don’t you see how much you need me, sweetheart. Without me, you’d be nothing, sweetheart. Why won’t you shut up and let me make you better, ooo-woo-ooo.’”
Pronouncing the “uwu” emoji out loud like that probably didn’t help make Reiki sound like he meant business, but at the same time? ******** it. As long as he kept the b***h sufficiently distracted, Reiki could care too much about how he sounded later, when he knew for sure whether or not his plan had worked.
“Anyway, this whole setup is ******** tired,” he said, when the copy left him with inexcusable dead air instead of a response. “It was tired when Double-Trouble read Catra to absolute filth about how she only tries to play the big, bad villain because nobody in her life needs her and she pushes them away. It was tired when Tyler Durden told Edward Norton ‘I am smart, and capable, and most importantly, I’m free in all the ways that you are not.’ It was tired when Ikari-kun and Asuka got called out on their teenage bullshit in the form of eldritch abomination angel ******** sessions. It’s been tired during every fight with Evil Morty or the Council of Ricks. And it was <******** exhausted when Dean Winchester squared off with his African dream-root nightmare double.……”
Putting on the cocksure affect and the ‘please believe how totally cis het butch masc I am’ strut that Reiki had watched with Obaasan too many times to count, he drawled the humiliatingly familiar lines, “‘I get it: I’m my own worst nightmare, is that it? Huh? Kinda like the Superman III junkyard scene, a little mano a mano with myself?’”
He took a beat, hoping briefly that Mirrorspace would quip back at him, Joke all you want, Smart-a**, since it apparently wanted to give him everything he’d ever wanted.
But it didn’t. All the phony b***h in the gown did was screw their face up in a frustrated pout.
“For that matter,” Reiki went on, since the floor was still his, “this entire setup was ******** tired when Christopher Reeve duked it out with himself in the scene Dean Winchester referenced, there. It’s been ******** tired since Junior out of Dostoevsky’s Double took over Golyadkin’s life and drove him absolutely hat-stand. All those examples might have been exceptionally well done, but the underlying ideas of the scenes leave rather a lot to be desired.”
“And yet,” the Mirror-Thing finally spoke up, “you engage in this premise you find so tedious.”
“Are you really giving me any other option here, Your Highness? Because I don’t feel like you are.” Reiki shrugged, once again casting a long, pointed glance toward the space between them, which the Mirror-Thing and its dress so steadfastly occupied. “About the only things like what we’re doing I’ve seen lately that haven’t been some of the most tired bullshit you could ask for? Were Everything, Everywhere, All At Once and Beckett Mariner beating the s**t out of Boimler’s holo-deck simulation of her. ‘You only break rules because you know that’s what everyone expects you to do. If you really were a badass, you’d do the hard thing and just be. a good. officer’—chef’s kiss, no notes. You oughta synthesize yourself up a Paramount Plus subscription and check out Lower Decks sometime, does it even work that way or—”
“Aren’t we skirting around the real subject of discussion, Murikabushi,” Miss Fake b***h of the Universe said without actually asking a question, back to using that deceptively calm voice while tilting its head like an incredibly perplexed snake. “Everything you quoted at me just now, I might as easily say of you yourself. Here I stand, offering you anything and everything: do you want a version of your General-King? Perhaps one who’s more agreeable, less temperamental, less violently explosive? One who could tell you things like ‘I love you’ without being so……as he is about it?”
“No,” Reiki said as easily as breathing because he didn’t need to think about it. “First of all, Faustite’s not my anything; he’s his own person and if you can’t respect that, then we’re just never going to agree on anything. Secondly, some doe-eyed, well-behaved version of him sounds like it would be Faustite in appearance only, and that doesn’t interest me. Thirdly, maybe you should fix your own s**t first, like address the lies-by-omission that you allow otherwise good people like Elsa to commit while giving their little recruitment talks.”
“I can give you an Elsa who would never lie to you.”
“But it wouldn’t really be Elsa that way, would it? Anyway, giving me a magical bullshit Elsa-Bot wouldn’t make what you made him do any ******** better.”
“Then stop attempting to distract us and let me give you what you have most wanted for as long as you have known how to want things. All I ask is that you open your heart to me, fully, truly, and unreservedly—”
“Yeah. Uh huh. As we’ve established, I don’t trust you or your offers worth a good goddamn—”
“Yes, my point exactly: you wish to run away when all I want is to give you your heart’s desire—”
“Can you let me go to my planet? Like, in the very real, tangible, ‘go outside and touch some grass’ sense?” Reiki crossed his arms over his chest, still pacing and hoping that some of his movement might get the copy to give this up already. “Can you take your little Chaos-cage off my starseed?”
“You know very well that I can’t.” The Mirror-Thing’s face scrunched up as if they’d sucked on a lemon and didn’t understand why the lemon had started talking quantum mechanics to them. “How else am I supposed to empower you, if we do not have that connection?”
“And that’s my point exactly, genius: you are literally incapable of giving me anything that I actually ******** want!”
If only Reiki had packed a brick to throw at the Mirror-Thing’s face as a perfect punctuation to that retort. Unfortunately, he hadn’t thought that he might need a brick, so he had to settle with imagining how such an action might have looked.
“Your heart’s truest desire, Murikabushi—the thing that you have wanted since you could want anything—is to be a Princess. I am telling you to stay here in safety, work with me rather than being so adversarial, open up your heart, and I will give you that power for yourself.” If Reiki hadn’t known better, he would’ve let the Mirror-Thing dupe him into believing the pain it affected with its on-the-brink-of-tears pleading face, or the agony and yearning it forced into its voice as it said, “Why won’t you just let me do this for you? Why won’t you give me the honor of making you happy? Why won’t you accept the power that I offer you, the power that we both know how much you want?”
“Maybe because wanting that power should automatically disqualify me from ever ******** getting it!” Stomping, objectively, accomplished nothing……but it did Reiki’s heart good to add that punctuation as he whipped back to full-on facing the Mirror-Thing. “Maybe I know that wanting to be special so badly is the most tedious, basic b***h quality about me and I don’t want to indulge you in enabling me anymore. If I ever feel like I deserve to be a Princess, then that means I’m an insufficient candidate, not cut out for such a role.”
The Mirror-Thing slumped its shoulder, unimpressed. “You don’t even like the book you’re referencing, sweet boy, nor do you agree with it.”
“Okay, do you want me to list off all the reasons why I should. not. *ever*. be a ******** Princess? Is it gonna take that sort of self-dragging for you to get the concept through your head?”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2024 1:31 pm
Met only with expectant silence, Reiki started ticking reasons off on his fingers as he rattled off: “I talk too much and don’t shut up. Most of the time, I don’t even say anything that’s remotely relevant to anybody. I get confrontational over s**t that’s obviously stupid, without stopping to consider the consequences. When I do pause, I usually decide to do the stupid thing anyway and that the consequences are probably worth it, even if they aren’t. I get offended when people don’t know my exact, specific favorite version of ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ but practically everything I do onstage at Scandals has a serious risk of genuinely offending somebody.
“Have we mentioned the way I get when something reminds me how, underneath the makeup and bravado, I am probably the most pathetically basic of all possible pathetically basic bitches? Nothing about me is actually unique or noteworthy, from the overreliance on things I learned from my parents and grandparents in situations that they literally could not have prepared me for, to the way that I try to act all sweet, and starry-eyed, and innocent like I wasn’t ready to leave someone for dead until a magical cat-girl from outer space ******** kicked me and told me to rethink my life. Nowhere is this all fundamental basic-ness about me clearer than in the constant references to one thing or another that I didn’t come up with. Come on, those are all unforgivably basic. Disney, check. Star Trek, check. Richard Siken, John Waters, and Foucault, check. Judy Garland, check and it probably makes me both cringe and corny as ******** because civilized, twenty-first-century gays aren’t supposed to identify with the entire metaphor of Dorothy Gale running away to Oz and all of its vivid technicolor, thereby escaping the horrific, stifling monochrome of Kansas.”
(The Mirror-Thing rolled its eyes at Reiki’s choice to invoke The Wizard of Oz, but that made no sense to Reiki personally, so he elected to ignore it.)
“And it all gets worse,” Reiki went on, “because the fact is, I know that I am basic, and I know that I am cringe, and I know that I’m nobody of any real consequence—but instead of letting go and accepting that I’m not important, or maybe trying to work on myself to change that? All I ever do is lash out in envy because I so desperately wish that I were special. Not to brag, but I talk an awful lot of s**t about everybody else for a queen who’s only done three things of any meaningful, material significance to anyone since awakening. None of what I did was even important on its own merits, either! It all goes back to how my actions affected someone else: one, used my magic on Faustite and caused a lot of ******** problems because his specific strange addiction just happened to be starseeds. Two, stepped in to stop him and Cybele from killing each other, and now they’re a General-King and a Princess, respectively. And three, somehow managed to trick several actually important magical people into thinking that anything about me is remotely worth their ******** time!”
For no apparent reason—at least, none that Reiki could immediately discern—this made the Mirror-Thing before him frown as if were actually capable of feeling sympathy for him. As if it felt anything at all, let alone bad, about anything that Reiki had said. Punching the stupid thing only would’ve allowed it to claim the endgame victory, so Reiki couldn’t let himself do that. But as he clasped his hands together behind his back, he couldn’t help the way they itched to just skip the rest of this debate and choose violence already.
“One has to wonder, Murikabushi,” the Mirror-Thing chimed in while watching Reiki pace, “why you would ever want to leave a place of safety and security for the sake of people who have made you feel so unimportant?”
“Oh, I don’t know, genius. Maybe because none of them have actually done that to me?” Reiki quirked his shoulders and shook his head as if asking the Mirror-Thing what it honestly expected him to say in this moment. “It’s like throwing shade: they don’t need to tell me that I’m not important, special, or unique because I know that, regardless of what I want to be, I am actually deeply insignificant, mundane, and tediously run-of-the-mill.” With a heavy sigh, Reiki shook his head. “None of them would ever say anything like that, anyway. Plenty of them, like Kerberos and Albite and Pendour, would tell me straight-up that I’m wrong, and I’m talking nonsense, and I’m being unfair, or hypocritical, or ********>. Maybe somebody would patronize me with that insipid Doctor Who line about a time-traveling space-immortal never having met someone who wasn’t important before.
“But, again, they don’t need to say that I’m not important; I already know.” Reiki swallowed thickly, taking a moment to prepare himself so he could say, “Used to be, I thought being a magical girl would make me special. But with how many dozens if not hundreds of us are running around in Destiny City, that hardly feels accurate. Plus, new ones filter down from space on the regular, and the Mauvians are always Awakening more of us. And all I ever do with my powers is run around, trying to help individual people as much as I can, which doesn’t really accomplish anything in aggregate. Oh, sure, there’s that passage from the Talmud about how saving one life is the same as saving the entire world, but that’s more esoteric than I’m talking right now. In plain, cold, materially relevant truth, my schoolgirl heroics aren’t doing anything about the larger, systemic issues at play. They’re fundamentally incapable of that.
“And I can only chalk so much of that failure on my part up to the Chaos taint you smeared all over my starseed, right? Because the fact is, yeah, the Chaos taint makes organizing kinda difficult for me—but even once Ida-hime-sama gets you and your stench off of my starseed, organizing with anyone is gonna be asking a lot from me because, pardon my nihongo, but I’m sort of a heinous b***h to deal with, yeah?”
“Are you, though, Murikabushi? Are you, really?”
“I think it’s a pretty fair assessment of my character, yeah. Consider: I act like a b***h when I feel threatened. I act like a b***h when I feel exhausted. I act like a b***h when I feel more or less happy, or at least relatively content. I act like a b***h when I feel kind of bored and pointlessly dissatisfied with my own existence. Given how often and how many circumstances in which I act like a b***h, I think it’s safe to say I fall more on the ‘b***h who sometimes does decent things and behaves himself’ side of the spectrum than the ‘Good, kind person who sometimes cracks under pressure and goes off at someone’ side.”
“You don’t really believe that,” the Mirror-Thing pointed out, its tone flat and hopelessly long-suffering. “With all the hand-wringing and self-flagellation you’ve done about blaming yourself for starseeds your General-King devoured after encountering your magic? Isn’t the reality more that you dream of being a b***h because you know, deep down, that you’re not?”
“Excuse you, who gave you permission to interrupt me,” Reiki snapped. He continued counting off his reasons: “Even knowing that, once I’m out of here, Faustite will be able to pull me off to the Negaverse whether I want him to or not? I don’t plan to stop seeing him unless he should ever want that. Because I know who he is, and I know what he does, and I heard Encke and Cybele about how Faustite will probably never change in a way where he gets better, and I know that a lot of people would say he isn’t worth it, especially when I can’t even put a word on what we are to each other? But no matter how many reasonable arguments I can imagine people making against it, I just don’t see why caring about Faustite as a person is supposed to be bad. Maybe it’s not a smart approach to the situation? But I just……I don’t wanna give up on him.
“Reality and I don’t play nicely together in general, if we’re honest, and most of that’s on me because I just don’t wanna. About the only time recently I haven’t gone ‘This doesn’t fit with my fantasy so I’m gonna ignore it’? Has also been with Faustite, and that’s because I don’t want to be another b***h who tells him he’d be better off as someone else instead of letting him decide who he wants to be. Frankly, the fact that I think more harm than good would come out of forcing him out of the Negaverse should disqualify me from being able to find any White Moon Princess who should want to save me, let alone from ever being one of their royals. Maybe Cybele and Ida-hime-sama won’t put me down for it, but I wouldn’t have any good arguments for somebody who wanted to. Pretty sure that their way of doing things ought to forbid them from bringing in some idiot who doesn’t want to save Faustite and doesn’t want to fix him, but only wants to show him kindness and avoid hurting him as much as possible.…… Well. Avoid hurting him again, I mean.
“As far as things I talk about an awful lot go? A b***h says tons of things about not wanting to hurt people for somebody who lashes out with insults without even needing provocation. For the past year-and-a-half, I’ve progressively let my real life fall the ******** apart because I got it in my gay little head that being a magical girl was supposed to fix me, and it hasn’t. If General Jet were ever to decide that he thought it was better for me to stay away from Faustite, I would not have a good argument against him. If he ever thought, as Faustite’s friend, that I should leave him alone in the name of his best interests, my choices would be basically ‘do that’ and ‘make myself a ******** liar about not wanting to hurt him unnecessarily.’
“Because Faustite probably would be better off if I left him alone. He doesn’t need me around to wreck things up for him. Same as Kerberos doesn’t need me to distract him from the important job that his Cosmos Knight friend entrusted to him, and Fang doesn’t need me to distract him from restoring his homeworld, and Ida doesn’t need me clinging to her skirts and wishing I could be like her when I grow up. Same as Elsa doesn’t need me bringing him down when he’s happy with you, and his sister and Acubens are happy with you, and no matter what I think about being one of your senshi entails, it’d be ******** shitty of me to manipulate him into leaving when he doesn’t even like me that way. None of the people I care about need me in the same way that I need them. Not that knowing how little they all need my bullshit in their lives will stop me from hanging around them anyway.”
Pausing for a deep breath, Reiki carded his fingers back through his bangs, which stubbornly flopped back into his face. “I hurt people, you know that, right? I let them down as easily as breathing. I try to help people all the time, and I say that it’s just who I am, but it’s more that that’s how I was raised. If I don’t follow everything my parents and grandparents taught me, it feels like I’ll find out that I’m nothing. Or like I’ll find out that, secretly, I’m worse than every petty drama or stupid mistake of mine that I’ve ever tried to justify. I try so hard to act compassionate because I’m afraid that, deep down, I’m not. I try to set myself on fire for everybody else because maybe, there isn’t anything about me that deserves my own story, or because being happy when others are miserable makes me a terrible person and I have to atone for being selfish, or <******** whatever. Plus, my ex wasn’t exactly wrong to say that I’m a slut for ******** attention. I’m worse than Tinkerbell over here, Miss Thing; if I don’t get applause, I might literally implode and *DIE*, okay?
“I always act like I’m being logical and rational, when the truth is, I think with my heart more than anything else and my *heart* is a <******** idiot. I get along better with Faustite than with certain White Moon people I’ve met, even when they’re friends-of-friends, or just trying to help, and I should honestly behave myself and be grateful that they aren’t attacking me on-sight. I say that I’m against all kinds of exploitation, but the simple facts right now are that I’m exploiting Ida-hime-sama’s kindness to make this happen, because I don’t trust that Miss Supermodel Senshi of the Cosmos or whoever she is would actually show up for me if I prayed to her. Maybe she’d show up for a feisty fighter like Asmodeus, or someone who deserves redemption like Kerberos, or someone who never even wanted to be a Mirror senshi and only wound up here because of me like Volterra. But for me, though? Get real.
“Honestly, consider that idea and ask yourself if it sounds realistic. Cosmos objectively and unquestionably has more important things to do than clean up a mess that *I* made *my*self, because I’m a <******** idiot and I wanted a cute boy to ******** like me. So, really, Miss Cosmos showing up for some arrogant gutter-trash with delusions of grandeur who can’t even get his s**t together while one of his friends is dying in his arms, and someone else can get him help in a way I can’t? Mmmn, I don’t think.”
Miserably shaking his head, Reiki thought of that arrogant p***k Saturn Knight who Fang inexplicably trusted, who’d probably given Fang all kinds of warnings about why not to trust a b***h in a Dark Mirror fuku, no matter how much cheese Reiki gave Fang. Worse, he couldn’t think of an actual, solid argument against whatever hypothetical argument that Knight had made. No, Fang hadn’t given him any indication that his Knight friend had done this, but after how Reiki had acted with him, it would’ve been stupid for aforementioned arrogant p***k to not give Fang a lecture about making better choices about his friends. The idea that Fang might have been ignoring someone he clearly cared about and trusted for Reiki’s sake filled him with a stomach-churning chill. Fang didn’t need to do that for him. Fang was sweet, and Fang was kind, and most importantly, Fang was good—too much so for his own good, sometimes. He could’ve easily found so many better friends than Reiki.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2024 1:32 pm
In the silence, Reiki didn’t know where to go next. But seeing the Mirror-Thing’s mouth start opening, he rushed to continue, “I don’t even buy that the White Moon is really the best option for alliances and if anybody trots my story out as some kind of perverse recruitment talk, I absolutely will go off on them about it. Because I don’t want to play some simpering, self-flagellating caricature of myself who supports them in trying to manipulate anybody else’s choices by brow-beating them about how the only way to be a good person—allegedly—is for them to abandon Chaos. I can’t help but notice that Chaos never gets to speak for itself about this, not really. And by that, I do not mean you, or the Chief Queen b***h of the Negaverse, but whatever the Chaos is that empowers both of you.
“Which, again, should honestly disqualify me from deserving enough grace to escape this place and have another chance at being a real magical girl. That I want to get away from you more than I really want to join the White Moon should probably condemn me to stay here forever, until you so thoroughly break me that I’ll never again dream of leaving. That I think the question of White Moon vs. Chaos is stupid, and empty, and intellectually dishonest at its absolute best, probably definitely means that I’m an idiot and an active danger to all sorts of people even without meaning to be. That I not only told Faustite my ex’s name but let him see a photo of that rotted pig, knowing perfectly well what he offered to do to Greg and mostly only feeling like ‘Wow, it’s so nice to be cared about like this’? Should probably definitely mean that no White Moon princess oughta give me the time of day—and the fact that I’ve lied by omission about it to everyone on that team who knows me should bury me six feet deep in my own hypocrisy, in a coffin made out of your goddamn ******** MIRRORS.
“That I wish I had enough poison to remove you from this universe? Or the power to wreck up every mirror in this place, tear you down to studs, and set you on so much fire, nobody would ever manage to rebuild you, no matter how many innocent people they drained dry in your name? Should probably definitely mean that the only thing I deserve anymore is not liberation, but having my fuku torn away, all my hair cut off, and my body shorn before you make me walk barefoot and naked from North-End Park to Southside, so every. other. magical. ********. freak. in this entire <******** city can see me for what I am and humiliate me into submission for you—because gods forbid you ever have enough integrity to do your own dirty work.”
The skin of Reiki’s left shoulder-blade prickled at the idea that his mouth had proposed with only about sixty-five percent input from his brain. Without thinking, he crossed an arm over his chest as if he could reach far enough back to touch the spot that itched. No need, anyway. That patch of skin only cried for his attention because of the words from Cersei Lannister that he had there as a tattoo: “I am a lioness. I will not cringe for them.”
But she did cringe for them, in the end, Reiki thought as he tried to steady his breathing. It had gotten erratic as he’d let himself get swept up in his monologue, in the utter annihilation of how thoroughly to filth he’d decided to read himself, in the unleaded drama of burning down his own fields and salting them to Hell and back, all in the name of his own freedom. Cersei didn’t mean to cringe, the way she did. It wasn’t weakness on her part, either. Trauma like what she went through that day—the absolute violation of her body and spirit that came from being paraded around like that, not to mention how it all tied back to every trauma that she’d endured before? Anybody weaker than Cersei Lannister would have broken before they’d left the marble steps outside the Sept of Baelor. Me, I would’ve shattered long before she did.
Yet, a calm washed over Reiki as he looked back on the pathetic, soulless phony that stood before him. Fire still pulsed through him, crackling like the air before a thunderstorm, as if he could explode at any moment and he’d be powerless to stop it. The way his starseed pulsed in his chest, resonating with the empty copy tying it to Mirrorspace—it seemed like a bomb, like the only way to save anybody else was to crack his starseed and detonate it inside Mirrorspace, at the cost of his own life and every other life his starseed could’ve had. Worse, Reiki didn’t know what might or might not have set things off, in that hypothetical idea. For all it wasn’t real, the thought of it—the thought of embracing his own death like that, even if it could ruin this place—made Reiki want to be sick and leave Mirrorspace to clean up his vomit while he stomped away to freedom.
Still, as he drank in the sight of that poorly made gown draped around a body that only looked like his at the surface level, because it otherwise failed to capture any of his essence? Reiki felt powerful. The sort of power that no one could take from him, because it came from admitting all the ways in which he was broken, and flawed, and a messy ******** b***h with at best questionable taste in men and an insatiable need for <******** drama………and then asking the universe what, exactly, it planned to do about those qualities.
“You realize,” the Mirror-Thing said, with all the faux-sympathy it could muster aching in its borrowed voice, “that you have only made a case for why you should stay with me, yes?”
Reiki quirked an eyebrow. “I really don’t see that, no.”
“You have counted off so many sins on your part, Murikabushi. I offer you absolution from them, a chance to have the slate wiped clean with no effort on your part beyond opening your heart to me, the way things with us used to be……before you let that cat-girl, the irksome twink in the long blue hair, and Sailor Untitled Goose Game convince you to forget about our cause and stop draining energy for Mirrorspace.”
“I’d been off that s**t for a few weeks before I met Anser, actually.”
“Does it matter? Is that specific detail truly relevant?”
“Check your facts before you come for me, alright? That’s all I’m saying.” Resuming his paces, Reiki kept his steps more leisurely. Languid. Perfectly unbothered if perhaps a bit too pointed about it. “Anyway, I literally grew up Catholic—partially Catholic, anyway—and I don’t even accept absolution from priests. The one I see at my cool, queer church that is definitely not sanctioned by the Vatican? He never gives me a clean slate like you’re trying to do. More like homework for self-improvement.”
“Why? Why even bother with that? So much work—are you not exhausted?”
“You’d like that if I were, wouldn’t you.”
“Why do you feign asking questions of me when you’ve already made up your mind,” the awful little Mirror-Thing interrogated, seeming sillier than ever as it allowed tension—genuine tension, even—to creep into its voice. “All I want—no matter how much you insist that I must surely be incapable of this—is for you to be happy, Murikabushi. Why won’t you allow me the privilege of giving you that gift?”
“Counterpoint: why should I accept your thesis that you remotely care about my happiness when I’ve already told you—multiple times, I might add—that your ideas about my happiness are not ******** real?” Reiki scoffed, “Why bother repeating myself when you haven’t offered me any indication that you’ll change any of your ideas to account for my understanding of happiness?”
“Your entire argument is that you don’t want to be happy!” Scowling and seething in obvious frustration, the Mirror-Thing stomped one of its little pumps into the floor. “All you’ve said while carrying on like this? Is that you want to run away from me because you don’t feel like you deserve to be happy! And for what, Murikabushi? For silly little character flaws that your fellow Mirror senshi would happily ignore so they could focus on your admirable qualities instead? Why abandon them when they would have you despite everything you’ve said?”
Stopping with his back to the jumped-up Xerox b***h, Reiki let his silent judgment hang in the air between them for a moment. Then, for another. He moved slowly and deliberately as he threw an incredulous glance back over his shoulder.
“You really don’t understand a single thing I’ve said here, do you.”
“Spell it out for me then, why don’t you!” Thumping impotently at the floor, the Mirror-Thing couldn’t help choking out a half-baked, disheartened little scream. “What was the point of so viciously listing all of your perceived character defects if not to justify your own misery!”
“My point, idiot, is that nobody as impulsive, messy, and deeply unserious as I am has any ******** business being a princess. Honestly, how was that not obvious? I literally told you what my thesis was at the beginning.”
“Oh, what, do you think that your Ida-hime-sama stopped being a normal person when she unlocked her current power level?”
“b***h, that’s a whole new sentence.” Heaving a sigh, Reiki once more turned to face the stupid thing more properly. “I never said that princesses can’t be flawed. Of course they can be, same as anybody. But with the sort of power that princess-senshi have, you must be absolutely ******** joking me if you think for a single second that it should be in my hands. We are talking about a b***h who makes most decisions in the heat of the moment, trusting only what feels most right at that exact moment, instead of—oh, I don’t know—trying to be ******** responsible. Never mind how I’d rather kiss Metallia than ever be a princess of ******** Mirrorspace. If that’s a prerequisite for being a princess, then ******** it, fine, I’ll find something else to want.”
“But why, Murikabushi,” the Mirror-Thing protested, whining more than slightly. “Why go through so much trouble of killing off the person you already are when you can just have the thing you’ve wanted since you knew how to want anything? How long will you carry around the guilt of going through with this? It isn’t even as though you’re likely to learn anything from carving out your own heart. You’ll still use yourself as charcoal for everyone else’s fire and then have the audacity to get upset about the third-degree burns, won’t you?!”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2024 1:32 pm
“Maybe you’re right……which only makes this whole ******** production that much more nonsensical, don’t you think?” Hands folded behind his back and gaze locked clean on the Mirror-Thing, Reiki advanced toward it. The tacky, wannabe princess gown only protected a semblance of personal space behind the Mirror-Thing, leaving Reiki with more than enough room to get into the fake b***h copy’s face. “All you’ve done, throughout this entire conversation, has been tell me that I’m weak but staying in Mirrorspace can make me strong, put words in my mouth instead of listening to anything I say, demand that I do things I’ve already told you I find morally unjustifiable, and complain about my behavior like I’m obligated to listen when you are not my mom, my Obaasan, my drag mom, my friend, or anyone that I recognize as kin.
“At this point, I gotta ask: if I’m really so <******** terrible to you—if there’s literally nothing that we can agree about and all I ever do is stress you out—then why are you wasting so much energy trying to keep me here, like…? To quote the decorated contemporary philosopher, Taylor Swift: ‘It’s me. Hi.’” Putting on a sarcastic smile and imitating how the Mirror-Thing kept bemusedly tilting its head, Reiki gave the thing a little wave. “‘I’m the problem, it’s me’—so, why don’t you solve the problem and let me go?”
“Because I want to help you,” the Mirror-Thing insisted, all pleading face emoji eyes and letting their eyebrows carry the performance. Damn if they didn’t sound like they believed their own hype, though. The yearning. “Murikabushi, sweet boy……please don’t do this. Think about what you’re proposing.…… The process you seek, it won’t be easy. Once you leave us, you won’t be able to go back to being Reiki whenever you decide to come back home. You will have killed off one self and painstakingly built up an entirely new one, only to make all that drama and that suffering completely pointless because you’ll have to do it all over again.”
Reiki pursed his lips, briefly uncertain how to begin answering such a ridiculous proposal.
“What part of anything I’ve said,” he ventured, “makes you think that Mirrorspace could ever be my home?”
“What makes you think that Mirrorspace would ever be anything else,” Miss Fake b***h of the World answered him as easily as breathing, as if it didn’t need to think at all. “Whether you like it or not, you first awakened as one of Mirrorspace’s senshi, which means that you belong here. This place is your home, and you can’t change that. If you run away now instead of working with us, you will return someday in sorrow.”
“Remarque would have to be a <******** moron to let me back in here once I’m gone. Seeing as he generally doesn’t seem to be, though……?” Reiki pretended to think for a moment before shaking his head. “Trust and believe, sweetie: the only reason you haven’t gotten punched out already is that I don’t want to give you the satisfaction.”
“Do you ever listen to yourself? Why would violence satisfy me?”
“Mostly, I’m thinking that Mirrorspace might send out some kind of snitchy mc-snitch vibes and whine to whichever of its pets will listen about how it’s totally the victim in this situation.”
“Nothing actually works like that, Murikabushi. All that I want is for—”
“For me to be happy, yeah, you’ve said that……but it’s only happiness on your terms, isn’t it?” Reiki edged further into the Mirror-Thing’s personal space, leaning in perilously close. “What sort of happiness do you honestly see me having if I let you imprison me in this stupid Court? Sure, fine, I could be a Princess, but would it mean anything? Or would I be a Princess over ashes and dust? Am I supposed to be impressed that you want to give me a ******** baseball field, when I know that there’s an entire planet waiting for me up in space? Why should I be satisfied with a Twinkie when I’ve tasted a dark chocolate molten lava cake and I know that the latter is just. *better* by every conceivable measure? How could anything you offer me possibly compare?”
Looking dead into gunmetal eyes that the Mirror-Thing had stolen from him, Reiki told it, “Letting Faustite turn me into the Negaverse’s lowest, weakest, most debased youma would make me infinitely happier than being any kind of Princess in ******** Mirrorspace.”
Without speaking, the Mirror-Thing projected all kinds of But Why? vibes with its eyes alone.
“You say that you want to give me Heaven, but you cannot build Heaven by avoiding life. What does your picture-perfect happiness even mean without the blood, and the tears, and the pain to compare it with?” Right up against the Mirror-Thing’s ear, Reiki whispered, “From the bottom of me heart: ******** your Heaven and ******** you for trying to buy me off with something so pathetic.”
For a long moment, the Mirror-Thing spluttered inelegantly, failing to create any words from the syllables that managed to escape its lips. Reiki almost felt bad for it—but only almost. Maybe it could have blossomed into a genuine, fully realized emotion, given time enough……but an idea struck Reiki like a flash of lightning, all from the proximity between his body and the flea market dupe that Mirrorspace must’ve stolen off the back of a ******** truck somewhere. Slithering a hand around its shoulders, resting it on the back of its head, holding the Mirror-Thing in place, all these motions felt perfectly natural to Reiki.
Exhaling softly, Reiki pressed their foreheads together. He considered saying something, but no perfectly suited clever words came to mind. Maybe any dazzling wit or a well-placed zinger would’ve undercut the moment more than anything.
A deep breath, then Reiki yanked the Mirror-Thing into a kiss.
He’d never thought about what kissing himself might be like. Technically, Reiki didn’t suppose this counted anyway. When the Mirror-Thing certainly looked like him and moved its lips in a way that more or less accommodated how Reiki moved his own, but it didn’t understand him worth a good goddamn? Felt like trying to count “I thought you were dead on the roof of a motel and burned my hand because I shook your shoulder to check that you were okay in the most spectacularly bone-headed fashion” as a date.
Besides, the kiss wasn’t the point.
Breathlessness probably didn’t matter with the Mirror-Thing. Did it even have lungs to worry about? Whatever—Reiki neither knew nor cared. But with the Mirror-Thing’s guard sufficiently down, he slipped both hands onto its shoulders. Lip, bitten. A stray chuckle. One last deep breath to steady his nerves, and then, a firm shove.
The pain of betrayal flashed across the Mirror-Thing’s face as it realized what was happening. But it slammed down to the floor in perfect silence. For all the gown looked lovely, its balance proved far from optimal. All that fabric weighed too much, and the undergarments that made up its structure took work to wear properly. As he stepped over the heap of useless b***h beneath him, Reiki allowed himself a smirk. Trying to pull off something as important as this allegedly was to Mirrorspace without investing in a dress rehearsal or five? Couldn’t be him.
“To paraphrase a b***h’s most very favorite b***h,” Reiki said, finally snatching up the Mirrorseal, “a true senshi does what they will, not what they must.”
Cersei Lannister had meant her line about men and masculinity. But that wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t as if Grigor Mothman had allowed feminism to exist in Westeros. More importantly, though, Reiki pivoted on his heel. As he strutted past the heap of Mirrorspace’s utterly pathetic, phony nonsense—heading toward one of the mirrors that would get him out of here for the last time—he started humming the perfect tune for this moment (in his own opinion): “And who are you,” the proud lord said, “that I should bow so low? Only a cat of a different coat—that’s all the truth I know—
“Wait,” the Mirror-Thing croaked as Reiki reached for the mirror.
Looking back always ******** people over, but what could something so flimsy really do to Reiki? It had no power over him. He could deign to give it one last glance. Down on the floor, trembling and wide-eyed, the Mirror-Thing looked like it could have started crying.
“If you leave……” Its breathy little gasps, likewise, sounded like a threat that it might start crying. Disgusting. “If you leave for the White Moon……they’ll never let you be a princess.”
“Who says I need to be a princess,” Reiki quipped back without a need for second thoughts. “Whatever happens, I’ll always be a queen.”
Did he mean his drag? Yes.
Did he mean being dramatically gay, flamboyantly queer, and extravagantly delulu? Also, yes.
What mattered most was simple, though. Reiki’s retort made the Mirror-Thing shut up for the last time. Its nonsense thoroughly thwarted, the Mirror-Thing shattered, dissipating into a shower of glass shards that almost managed to look like stars. Steeling himself for the next part of this whole production, plunging into the mirror to make his way back to reality, Reiki picked up his humming: And so he spoke, and so he spoke, that Lord of Castamere.……
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reply
