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cw’s: discussion of past alcohol abuse, past self-harm, eating disorders.
“New Year, New Me!” was, hands down, the worst joke that Reiki had ever heard in his life, and he included all of his father and brother’s ridiculous Dad Jokes, as well as everybody’s stupid puns, in that assessment. Regardless of someone saying it in January, February, or September, those four simple words always turned out to be a lie. Little more than icing on the most disappointing cake imaginable.
Skulking around his and Haruhi’s place—not getting ready for a Saturday show at Scandals because he wasn’t booked tonight—Reiki silently cursed the entire institution of self-improvement. More so, he cursed the compulsory happiness that so many people rammed down your throat about trying to do better. What good was the sunshiniest of all possible positive attitudes when everything felt like it was crushing in around him, oppressively heavy because he could not escape an awareness of how fragile, broken, and impermanent it all was? What good was keeping his chin up when the clink of his kettle on the stove made his chest ache, right around the place where golden tendrils had pierced clean through his fuku and tried to tear him apart.
What good was keeping calm and reminding himself that he was somebody!! when, most days since Astraya, he’d only bothered dragging his tired body out of bed because Cersei and Soya didn’t deserve having to put up with any self-indulgent, whiny bullshit from him?
For all half of that motivation mattered when, poking around, Reiki found not Soyala but rather the absence of her, a cold and lonely void that could have been shaped like a longhair cat, reminding him that no matter how much salmon he got her or how many cardigans of his she turned into a nest, he was Her Senshi, but she was not his cat. She didn’t live here. Didn’t answer to Reiki or owe him anything. Guided him only at her own discretion and because she decided to do so. Had her own life, her own interests, and other, more important duties that needed her attention (like, presumably, jobs that her actual bosses had given her, and so help him, Reiki would ignore the fact that Soyala’s actual bosses meant Whatever Vicious ******** Were In Charge Of The Negaverse until either that fact went away in some kind of permanent capacity or Reiki did himself.
Maybe Oscar Wilde hadn’t managed to outlive the heinous wallpaper at L’Hôtel d’Alsace but Reiki Rokugin was young. Strong. Not afflicted with encephalitic meningitis. He could ignore Soyala’s true loyalties for a very long time. Plenty of chances for reality to get its s**t together and conform to what he wanted it to be, instead of maintaining its distinctly unfabulous status quo).
(He would need to make a point of asking her more about her own interests soon, though. Not only because he wanted to do something more personal for her than getting her more salmon for the winter gift-giving holidays but also because……it just didn’t seem like a very balanced friendship, him talking about his life and his interests and his largely self-inflicted, bullshit problems while Soya had so little room to talk about herself.)
At least Cersei was still here, sitting patiently on the linoleum by the stove as if simply making The Face up at her dad would convince him that the food he wasn’t actually making was For Dogs.… Yes, with her big brown eyes of infinite hope and wonderment.… Bless her endless optimism.
……He probably should have made food. Even though he couldn’t really cook, he could have made up some quick eggs, or heated up a can of soup, or gotten on ******** DoorDash like everybody else who had the means to do so.
Yeah, fine, he’d eaten with Haruhi before ne’d left for work—Saturday shifts at the post office, ugh, godawful—but it was getting a bit late. Ne had left pretty early, called in to cover for one of nis coworkers who’d had some kind of family emergency happen, and the fact that Reiki didn’t really feel hungry (not for food) was not an excuse for him to skip out on eating, when he knew all too well how the process of degradation went in this regard.… How his little concessions gave way to larger erosions until everything threatened to collapse in on itself and Reiki got stuck simply trying not to fall apart, or anyway, to avoid doing it completely.
Slouching against the counter, he turned his right arm over and looked at the tattoo inked on his wrist, lettering styled to look like the Nightmare Before Christmas font and stark black, as if that could drown out the thin, faded, white noise of criss-crossing scars that lie beneath it: “I drag myself out of nightmares each morning and find there’s no relief in waking.”
Ugh, he’d been In A Mood when he’d gotten that, and he hadn’t eaten in long enough that it honestly should’ve counted as some level of intoxication. Honestly, a compelling argument in favor of raising the legal age for getting tattoos to twenty-one. Probably wouldn’t do anything to curb how many regrettable late-teenage edge-lord tattoos were out there in the world, but it would’ve spared Reiki, if nothing else.
With a heavy sigh, Reiki held up his left arm in the same way, turned over to expose the wrist. He had fewer old scars there—due not, he knew, to any efforts at treating himself more decently or even some semblance self-restraint, but only to his being left-handed and too regularly dropping anything he’d pressed to the inside of his left wrist—but he had a twin for the other tattoo. The same stark black, but this one’s letters looked thicker, rounder, more bubbly, with the capitals only properly distinguished from the small-caps around them by their star-shaped cut-outs: “Better not to give in to it. It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.”
“Yeah, truer ******** words, Finnick,” Reiki muttered into the aether. To make up for the confusion of Her Person apparently talking to no one, Reiki reached down to ruffle the fur atop Cersei’s head and skritch her behind the ears. “Isn’t that right, Baby. Truer ******** words have not been spoken! And your daddy should honestly know better by now, huh!”
Keeping his tone brighter than fluorescent lightbulbs certainly got Cersei to smile contentedly, but didn’t do much of anything for Reiki himself. Made him feel both slightly more stupid and slightly less inclined to care. Not even about how, when the kettle whistled, he poured the water into his ceramic teapot that had been painted to look like Deadpool, then sat down without even grabbing a piece of fruit, much less getting anything of actual substance.
The twin to the tattoo on his right arm was the only reason that Reiki could still stand the older one. At least with both parts of the quote, he could focus on the aspects of it oriented more toward recovery—when he wasn’t slipping into similar states of mind as the Mood he’d been in when, on a wild impulse, he’d decided to look up a tattoo parlor and get some ink done for his and Junsei’s eighteenth birthday.
When he wasn’t toppling back into habits that he knew that more than a few people in his family preferred to think he was ever truly “over” indulging in.… Mom didn’t. Obaasan didn’t. Ojiisan, Aunt Satomi, and Uncle Mitch knew better, knew from firsthand experience, even if their own histories with alcohol differed considerably from Reiki’s perpetual wrestling match with his “less visible than cutting but significantly worse for his well-being in practice” little problem. Yuki may not have been blood family and claiming him as family might have made Onibaba-sama knce more threaten to disinherit Reiki entirely, but what he didn’t always understand, Yuki worked to get his mind around. Tatsuya—uh. Reiki didn’t know for sure how much his little cousin understood or didn’t, or in what ways he understood exactly? But from the magical pink cloud he lived on, Tatsuya could sense (with frankly disturbing accuracy) when his Kiya was Going Through A Rough Time.
But Dad, and Junsei, and Erika, and Hinami, though? They were fixers. They liked fixing things. Maybe Eri and Hina had more tolerance for creative chaos than Dad and Junsei ever had, but ultimately, all of them liked making things work. And making problems cease to be problematic. And, in the case of This Embarrassing Little Thing of Reiki’s, they preferred to think that he had fixed it by learning that he deserved better than treating himself like that, and therapy was perfect maintenance, and everything would just be wonderful forever, in this specific way.
Not to sound like a petulant teenager, but honestly: they didn’t. understand.
Always started small, when he got like this. First stop, neglecting the treats he was supposed to give himself daily (he’d already skipped the vast majority of them since Astraya, and so far, no one had noticed, or if they had, then they’d silently decided to trust him and let it slide with no questions asked). Then, because skipping out on his treats hadn’t caused any problems, he’d start cutting back on snacks. Maybe someone would start questioning him, but overall, Reiki’s worse impulses would win out, thanks to the prevailing cultural bullshit about how much stronger one was for “resisting the temptation” to snack between Proper ******** ugh, as if language like that wasn’t part of the wider societal problems that fed into all of this.
And now, here Reiki was: sitting at his and Haruhi’s kitchen table, waiting on his tea to steep while Cersei flopped on top of his feet in the way that Reiki chose to interpret as My Person, must protect, must drown in love until Bad Things go away……and cursing himself more than anyone or anything else, because he’d been stupid enough to buy into his own claims of “New [School] Year, New Me!”—as if simply saying those four awful little words would magically erase the struggles that had started well before Astraya and simply turned themselves up to eleven in the aftermath.
Worse, he honestly had no excuse for ever letting himself believe that trash. Reiki had never personally known them to amount to anything. How many times had Dad ever spent New Year’s Eve getting everyone to make some stupid-a** resolution that they never wound up keeping, all while passive-aggressively making faces at his sister, waiting for Aunt Satomi to get the point that her family wanted her to quit drinking? How many times had she ever promised them that this year would be her year, only to end up saying “You’re the oldest and the tallest, Kiya, just act like you’re in college and it’ll all be fine” while asking her fourteen-year-old nephew to buy her tequila? Like running down the block for ******** milk.
How ******** arrogant of him to think that he’d be literally any different.
Besides gender and the specific flavors of gay they were, the only meaningful difference between Reiki and Aunt Satomi right now felt like the fact that one of them was a perfectly normal person who got to live a perfectly normal life and text her nephew pictures or videos of cute dogs that she’d found on Instagram and Facebook……and the other had a duty to Destiny City, one that came bundled up in being Soya’s Senshi.…… Not that she’d ever said anything to that effect, nor done anything to indicate that it was in the fine print of being a Dark Mirror Senshi, but like……why even bother otherwise?
What was the point of having magical superpowers if you didn’t use them to go protect people who couldn’t protect themselves? To <******** help, wherever lowercase-c chaos and turmoil needed dispersing? Even powers like Reiki’s, this psychological horror garbage that certainly made him a <******** monster who’d gotten lucky that Levi had awakened him and not someone like Captain Phoenix-Force. Maybe Reiki was trapped forever in the Dark Mirror now, since it sure seemed like only people in the Negaverse’s specific fetid swamp of capital-C Chaos got the luxury of changing their minds and escaping for the White Moon. But wouldn’t being in the Negaverse just be that much worse?
Honestly, aside from them being the Obvious, Objective Bad Guys (except for people like Toráin, who didn’t belong there anyway, and Soya, who probably just served Chaos as a general concept but took the Negaverse’s job offer for the healthcare benefits or something), how much more would it have sucked, awakening as Sailor Murikabushi of the Negaverse, finding out that he was a broken monster on the inside and a universe-assigned Camp Queer Villain, and having the option of getting out but also needing to live with the fact that he didn’t deserve it?
Girl, no.
b***h, please.
Ugh. Jesus. Gross.
Even the thought of living like that was Just Too Much. Almost made Reiki not want to sip his tea, thanks.… Still, he’d need to get going, soon. As much as he’d found powering up to be a chore of late, he did have duties.
Oldest sibling/cousin duty: go to Gertrude’s for Haruhi’s crepes and put them in the fridge so ne could eat them when ne got home.
Magical girl monster duty: head to Kerberos’s bench. Maybe they’d find somewhere to go together, and if not……everything felt so much more manageable when he was around. Regardless of how much Reiki envied his position as a former servant of Chaos, Kerberos still just……made the world feel so much less disgusting and broken and terrible.
