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 Posted: Tue May 17, 2022 9:38 pm
Sitting on Scandals Bar’s ground floor on a Wednesday night felt……weird, and more than somewhat so. Not that Piano Bar Wednesdays weren’t enjoyable in their own right, because they were. The last guy to tinkle the ivories had mostly stuck to the classics—“You’re The Top,” “It’s DeLovely’” “I Feel Pretty” (though he’d sung in Spanish, unlike most others Reiki had ever heard play that song at Piano Bar Wednesdays), Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable,” “The Man That Got Away,” “Some Enchanted Evening,” and so on—but there was something lovely about that.
Something historically important, too, judging by the look of the guy as he’d left the keys. Maybe no one would particularly care about what happened tonight at one little queer bar in Destiny City, but Mssr. Classics was easily old enough to be Reiki’s father. He might very well have come of age when more piano bars existed and could draw enough patrons to stay open.
Not that the importance preserving different queer practices took the edge off how badly Reiki wanted to say <******** it,” deliberately disobey both of his drag mothers (under threat of them getting his Mom mom and possibly his Obaasan involved), and just stomp downstairs to where the drag show was happening. He’d need to paint a cute little mug, but he’d thrown numbers together with less preparation before. Even the next pianist starting off with, of all the things, a passionate arrangement of Billie Eilish, didn’t make Reiki feel any less like insisting that he didn’t need a night off and whining like a brat as if it would actually get him added into the show tonight.
The company at his table helped, though. Which had been one of the big reasons that Reiki had texted Levi earlier, asking what he was up to tonight. Unlike most of the people Reiki had ever crossed paths with at any of his garbage ex’s work functions, Levi was so unashamedly real, which made him infinitely more interesting than most people could ever dream of being.
Trying to tell him so……took more nerve than Reiki expected. Probably a side-effect of how infrequently he actually came to Piano Bar Wednesdays; the nuances of the etiquette weren’t as committed to memory as the corresponding unwritten rules at a drag show. ……But other people seemed to be talking amongst themselves, as long as they kept their voices down. And the pianist did have a mic and speakers backing him up.
So, while he treated his audience to an Amy Winehouse number, Reiki leaned onto the table and closer to Levi. “Thanks for coming with me, I……I’m really glad you were free tonight.… Being here alone…sounds like it’d be……” Miserable? Antsy? A really good way to summon my poor grandmother to come down here and make her ask that I explain what I think I’m doing, ignoring my drag mothers’ perfectly valid request that I ““take care of myself””……? “…Well, it wouldn’t be as nice as having you here.”
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Posted: Tue May 17, 2022 10:59 pm
It wasn't often that Levi made it out to bars. There were too many bad memories there, of alcohol-lowered inhibitions and barfights and Problems. But time and therapy had dulled the hot edge of his temper, and if nothing else, Scandals wasn't one of the bars where he'd gotten into a fight before.
....And, anyway, it had been Reiki asking, and Levi was not, he was pretty sure, capable of saying no to Reiki. Especially not considering....things, and the fact that Reiki had finally gotten rid of the good-for-nothing moron he'd previously engaged to, and the crush that Levi had been quietly nurturing since he first met Greg's gorgeous statuesque boyfriend in the cute skirt at some campaign event or other. The details hadn't mattered--all that had mattered was soft gray eyes and a gorgeous smile and a charm that certainly could have brought plenty of lesser men to their knees.
It had been a long time since anyone had made Levi feel like that.
And all of it had been on the arm of Greg, winner of the Most Spectacularly Disappointing Human Being Award multiple years running.
And, anyway, piano bar night sounded nice. Being there to help Reiki take an actual break sounded nice, especially since Levi was equally guilty of wanting to Do, Do, Do.
"I'm glad I was free, too," he said, honestly. "It's nice to get some time to just talk, without anything else being in the way."
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Posted: Tue May 17, 2022 11:32 pm
“‘Anythings else’ are so good at doing that, aren’t they…” Which sounded weird, as soon as it left Reiki’s mouth, and left him wondering what, exactly, he’d meant.… A very good question that probably would’ve been easier to answer without Levi’s face being right here, with his sharp, lovely features and his eyes, with the different tones that came out in different lights (the lights in the bar seemed to bring out the bronze tones more than the blue ones, but they were also dim enough to make it harder to tell).…
God, if lesser men would get lost in those eyes, then Reiki felt perfectly content to join their ranks.
With a deep breath—trying to bring his brain back from being uselessly queer in the face of very pretty boys—Reiki sipped his Coke.… He probably didn’t need to bring up The Man Of Whom We Do. Not. Speak, not even to drag him.… But Sybil and Cherry’s notion in making him take the night off had been largely grounded in making Reiki feel his feelings as himself, without the buffer of wigs and makeup and a cute little costume, so—“Of course, sometimes an ‘anything else’ doesn’t necessarily make himself apparent……except to everyone but the person whose way he’s in. Which he did try his best to continue concealing, but……”
Reiki shrugged. “Turns out, some people are stupid enough to say the quiet part out loud without literally getting paid to be an incendiary a*****e on TV.”
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Posted: Tue May 17, 2022 11:58 pm
Levi snorted, quietly. There certainly was plenty that "anything else" could do to get in the way of things. He took a sip of his own drink, and let his eyes briefly flick to the piano player, but it was hard to pretend to care about anything else around him, really, when Reiki was right there.
And opening up.
He took a breath of his own, and frowned. "Yeah, that.....sometimes you sewe what you wanna see. And not to quote Bojack Horseman, but, you know. Sometimes, if you're wearing rose-colored glasses, the red flags are just. Flags."
Reiki didn't really have the context to understand, Levi knew. He kept the entire affair why Charlie close to the chest. The one time he'd tried dating seriously, and it had been a disaster of fundamental incompatibility, and it was in the past and he wanted it to stay there. But...he also wanted to empathize, here.
"Not your fault that he went out of his way to make sure you couldn't tell what a jackass he was, until I guess he figured he'd wormed his way in far enough." Levi's expression softened. "....Do you want to talk about it? Because we don't have to."
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Posted: Wed May 18, 2022 12:43 am
“That’s sort of a loaded question,” Reiki mused, his feelings jumping the gun before he could let his better judgment have a word in edgewise. “Not as in—it’s not that you’re deliberately asking something that’s loaded because it could trip me up, or put me in one of those ugly positions that Plato’s headcanon version of Socrates is always doing to whoever decides to argue with him today? More just……loaded because I don’t? entirely? know? And that uncertainty feels like watching someone playing with a Zippo in a room full of gunpowder.”
……which, on reflection, sounded like exactly the sort of reason why Sybil and Cherry had sat him down for their “this isn’t an Intervention with a capital-I because we’re trusting that you don’t want to make us do that, but we are also expressing concern as people who love you and to whom you actually listen on a regular basis” talk.
Which felt like a kick in the head to realize, and like maybe a good reason to talk about all this? (And to subsequently get Haruhi apology crepes on the way home. Ne might not get them until later, working night shifts like ne did, but ne still deserved an apology from nis cousin over Reiki……making Levi do a lot less Work on the “getting Reiki to talk” thing.)
Fussing to nudge his fringe back behind his ear, Reiki sighed. “I’ve been thinking a lot about my taste in movies versus his—which I do have a point about? …Because the two disagreements I keep coming back to are Moulin Rouge and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. He never understood why I love the spectacle of the former, and agree that Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman play their characters very well, but honestly cannot with the story……which, as differences of opinion go, feels so much more poignant after the end of a relationship that started with……me blowing a kiss because he shoved a ten-dollar tip at me while I was making slutty, slutty root beer floats to Kelis’s ‘Milkshake.’”
The original plan had been, naturally, for milkshakes. But nothing Reiki, Yuki, and Tiff tried had managed to fix things so the blender would let people still hear the song.
Resting his cheek in his palm, Reiki went on, “Then, on the other hand, he could also never understand why I like Eternal Sunshine so much, and—I always chalked it up to ‘Even at his most commercial and least pretentiously “yes, Chuckles, we get it: you went to film school” off-putting, Charlie Kaufmann simply isn’t for everybody and that’s okay’? But……thinking back on some of the times we tried to talk about it, his problem pretty much always came down to ‘Why won’t Kate Winslet just let Jim Carrey love her, why is she making it messy by being such a b***h’—which is like…I mean, she flat-out tells him…”
Reiki shook his head. He knew every word of the lines that explained perfectly why Greg’s hot take was wrong, and he recited them softly, without any of the venom he’d always heard in them: “‘Too many guys think I’m a concept, or I complete them, or I’m gonna make them alive. But I’m just a ******** up girl, who’s looking for my own peace of mind. Don’t assign me yours.’”
A brief shake of the head. “Which—is very close to what Greg wanted to do. A fantasy at a drag show made him feel alive. Because she was so vibrant and different from everything he’d ever experienced before. I kept going ‘Yeah, no, I don’t buy what you’re saying; you don’t even know me.’ So, he tried to get to know me……but knowing me makes the fantasy feel less real, because he can see all the artifice that goes into actualizing her. So, since I can’t be that—and since, if he were ever really honest with himself, he’d have to admit that truly feeling alive scares the s**t out of him—but since the fantasy got undermined, now, he needs to fix me, and save me, and be that missing piece I’ve always been looking for.”
But the discussion about Reiki’s missing piece, wherever it was—that was a whole separate issue that he didn’t feel like he could get into at the same time as all of this about Greg. “He’s realized, you see, that actually he was complete all along, just like I said, but that I need him to complete me—as if that’s not a fundamentally <******** up thing? To expect from anyone? Like, just because I’m not big on a life of quiet desperation does not mean I want to get that sense of fulfillment from someone else when I know how shitty it feels……”
He huffed, slouching. “But what else can I really expect from someone who, in all of this? I’m not betting on him having a double-digit score for ‘times when you successfully saw me as more person than projected concept.’”
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Posted: Mon May 30, 2022 12:05 am
Levi nodded. The smile that bled across his face was more than slightly miserable. "Most questions anyone could ask me about my ex are kinda like that," he admitted.
Things with Charlie had been....good, he thought, until they weren't, or maybe they had never been as good as Levi wanted them to be. It was harder to say, now, with so many years in between, and having been out of that relationship for so long. In some ways, hindsight made them clearer, and in other ways, it blurred memories and smoothed out the edges, and really, Levi hated dwelling on it.
But he leaned his cheek on his hands, and he exhaled between his teeth, and felt....uncomfortably like this was something familiar to him.
"When I was dating Carlie," he said, and it was a rare thing for him to broach this at all, beyond having mentioned his ex's name once or twice, "I thought....that if I loved him enough and did my best, I might make him into a better person. More mature. Less slobby. Like we could have the relationship that I wanted if I just....tired hard enough." He huffed. "That was stupid of me. Charlie didn't want to change, and I shouldn't have tried to change him."
He swirled his finger around the rim of his glass.
"I did figure it out eventually. That I was doing wrong by both of us by trying to do that. But it sucked, the whole way." He looked Reiki in the eyes. "You deserve someone who wants Reiki, all of Reiki, not just the version of you he's made up in his head, or the shiny parts he likes because they're fun and easy. And I'm sorry Greg wasn't that for you, and that he dragged out figuring it out so long."
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Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2022 2:47 pm
As he hung on Levi’s every word, Reiki still tried his best to……modulate, for want of a better word, the impulse that both of his drag mothers had brought up earlier, during their strictly non-intervening rather strenuous call-out session for their wayward first child. “Being kind, and caring, and compassionate is all one thing, sweetie,” as Sibyl had put it for him, “but it’s a whole different sort of animal, what you do where you play this game like everybody else’s problems matter in ways that yours, allegedly, just don’t.”
Which would’ve been one thing if Reiki had literally ever done that……more than once or twice……about problems that genuinely deserved to be called as such, rather than being any of a multitude of different nonsensical shenanigans that Reiki ever let himself get up to.…… But since carrying on as he usually would have done—i.e., leaning in closer to Levi, holding out a hand to comfort him but still waiting for permission to actually squeeze his forearm, and proceeding to ignore everything that Reiki himself had said in order to solely focus on Levi’s story—probably would have proven Sibyl and Cherry right……well. Reiki had to put in effort to avoid that.
Something about the eye-contact from Levi, additionally, gave Reiki the distinct sense that trying anything like that wouldn’t go over with him, and……so help him, Reiki didn’t want to disappoint Levi like that. Especially not when the long fallout from this breakup was starting to feel like an extended exercise in Reiki disappointing everyone who cared about him, even though the closest anyone got to saying so was Haruhi calling him out whenever ne deemed it necessary.
“Both of us deserve better than what we got,” Reiki said, after a moment to mull over what he wanted to say (and double-check his feelings, lest he run right into the self-neglectful approach that he wanted to avoid). “Not that it’s worth as much as Charlie apologizing for himself? But…I’m so sorry that you went through that with him. You deserve someone who will help do the work—I mean, not that relationships are always work, but…? Sometimes, they are. Sometimes, they have to be, right? And you deserve so much better than some stupid boy who doesn’t appreciate you enough to uphold his side of things, or who expects you to do all the work of carrying yourself, and him, and everything you two have.”
Here, in his mind, Reiki wanted to go on and say more to acknowledge that he, too, deserved good things out of a man, just like Levi had said. But taking a moment to breathe and appreciate where the music had traveled now—closing in on the end of an arrangement of a Dua Lipa track that Reiki knew all too well, as one of the many queens in town who’d ever performed it—also gave Reiki a moment to let his eyes wander……and to land on an all-too-familiar, thoroughly unwelcome figure, all pristine brown hair, pale pink skin, and technically acceptable features that were good-looking without the heart or the substance necessary for beauty.
God, of course Greg would turn up tonight, seated at one of the other tables. He’d only spent the entirety of their relationship refusing to understand why anyone would want Piano Bar Wednesdays to be a thing, and oh, now, he wanted to pretend he cared. Although he wasn’t overly close to Reiki and Levi’s table, Greg’s presence made the entire bar feel suffocating. Claustrophobic, even.
Before he could stop to reconsider, Reiki’s mouth decided to hiss for him, “Oh, <********> me. Ugh…”
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Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2022 12:11 am
Levi broke eye contact briefly to stare down at his drink, swirling his straw around it and making the ice slosh lightly inside. It sucked, thinking about his ex for too long; he and Charlie had been split up for years, and Levi had....never really bothered to try again.
What was the point, in the end? He had his work, and his sister, and the Mirror, and that was enough, no matter how miserable and alone he often felt. He couldn't make someone else play second fiddle to everything he wanted to be, anyway.
(A compelling reason, among a lot of other compelling reasons, that he definitely could not ask Reiki out.)
"Agreed," he said, though, finally. "And, for what it's worth--? I've really liked getting to know more of you, and not just whatever performance you want to or need to put on, today." He ducked his head, a little, feeling like that might tread close to an admission of That Which Must not be Spoken--that is, the massive crush he was nurturing.
But Reiki's hgiss made him jerk his head up, and look, and he didn't bother concealing his displeased sneer.
"Ugh. Where does he even get off, showing up here? Like he didn't complain about every second you spent in this place?"
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