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feat. Reiki/Murikabushi. backdated to New Year’s Eve 2022/right around midnight.
Saturday night, where else would Reiki be but Scandals Bar for one of his regular shows? It being New Year’s Eve only made his presence even more imperative. For one thing, the liquor would flow like water in a bar full of queers who could’ve gone anywhere else for the holiday, but had decided to come spend their time at what was, in Reiki’s less-than-humble and extremely biased opinion, the single best queer bar in Destiny City, if not the entire universe. Free-flowing liquor meant Reiki could count on some decent tips to come his way.
Hell, Reiki went backstage with singles and five-spots practically spilling out of his costume, all for a frankly pretty basic number to Natasha Richardson’s version of “Mein Herr” from Cabaret—only distinguished from any other number because Sibyl let him jerk the timing around so the New Year’s countdown in the song lined up perfectly with the actual countdown clock propped up by the stage tonight. Because with some sparkle, some shine, a latex-tight lip-synch, a few well-timed displays of flexibility, and an opening strip-tease out of an old trench-coat that Reiki had stoned and bedazzled out of its mind? You sure could earn yourself some good money on a night when even a lot of people who didn’t really drink felt like cutting loose and getting a little wild.
Backstage, Reiki had a simple plan. Thank any of his drag siblings for their compliments on his performance, but keep it as brief as possible. For one thing, he wanted to go home; he loved them all, but he wanted to go rest.
For another, significantly more important thing, too many of their compliments wanted to focus on things he couldn’t talk to them about. How could he know if he was putting them in danger or not? Everything wound up proving dangerous. If he’d seemed to inhabit the number more than he would’ve on other nights, well, Natasha’s attitude as Sally Bowles was something Reiki wished that he could channel at Faustite (but strongly suspected that he would not remotely keep in mind, whenever their paths next crossed)—but he could hardly go explaining that to anybody who knew him knew him.
Like, really knew him. Knew Reiki, not the ugly, ill-fitting pageant gown facsimile of a person called Murikabushi. Aside from how all of them were civilians as far as he knew, Reiki had a vested interest in keeping anything to do with Murikabushi as far away as possible from the people who cared about him, the real person.
(Maybe there existed some debate about that question.… The way that some people in this magical underground talked, they would’ve said that Murikabushi was the real person and Reiki was the costume he wore to satirize normal people, or whatever Quentin Tarantino pseudo-intellectualism, Kill Bill vol. 2 bullshit they decided to believe in about people’s real lives, the lives they had outside of the magical girl gang war.)
All his drag siblings and their mothers, Reiki couldn’t risk finding out how they would see him if they knew about Murikabushi. Try as he might, no matter how much he loved them, Reiki couldn’t imagine that their reactions to Murikabushi would be anything but terrible. How could they not be?
Plus, he realized on several levels that there existed very few ways of describing Faustite or his nonsense that wouldn’t make his drag siblings, Sibyl, and/or Cherry immediately think of Greg and start drawing all kinds of unflattering comparisons that Faustite did not remotely deserve. Whatever else you could criticize about him in good conscience, Faustite hadn’t displayed any behaviors that made Reiki suspect that his MO, when he actually liked a boy (which he obviously didn’t with Reiki but—whatever, Faustite wasn’t obligated to ******** like him), involved trying to make that boy be anything but Entirely Himself. Judging from how he’d defended Albite and Stinkface, Faustite genuinely seemed to be Greg’s complete polar opposite, in this regard. Lucky for Albite, Heliodor, Stinkface, and whoever else was all tied up in whatever ridiculous harem-shaped polycule was going on over there, Reiki guessed.
Worst of all, but entirely unrelated to Faustite: as he worked on packing up his workspace, Reiki couldn’t help the feeling of something watching him.… Someone, maybe? Checking over his shoulder, he kept seeing nothing—nothing that lined up with what he felt, anyway. By the time he had his wig off and his drag packed up, all Reiki could think of was getting out of the dressing room. It was madness, on his part, but……his skin had started crawling as he looked at the mirror.
Powering up in the alley cleared off his makeup, gave him a subspace pocket to put his drags in, otherwise offered him a way of cleaning everything up—but on his path home, he kept running into mirrors. Shouldn’t have shocked him, really; he’d learned locations around town where the Court kept some stashed, because that had seemed like a great idea at the time. But now, it was like they meant to stalk him around town, jumping out from around corners and making him feel that same sense of being watched that he’d felt at the bar.
One waiting for him on top of a roof where there hadn’t been a mirror just two days ago? That was the last straw.
“You’re not going to let me have any ******** peace tonight, are you,” Reiki snapped at the thing, crossing his arms as if that offered him any protection. (Protection from what, he didn’t know.)
The mirror said nothing back.
While his transparent overlay’s new sleeves slipped around each other but refused to latch on, Reiki shook his head. “I don’t have time for this,” he said, and hoped that nobody was lurking nearby to listen to him acting like a lunatic, having some asinine tantrum at a mirror that, even by his own, magical girl awareness-having eyes, wasn’t doing any harm to anybody. “What the ******** do you want from me. Make your intentions plain or I’m going home and you can die mad about it.”
Although the mirror still said nothing, something made its desires clear.
Something in his chest felt like it had on Astraya, right before Kima had ripped his starseed out. Cold like an industrial freezer, and tight like a heart attack, and sharp like impossible golden tendrils were stabbing into him all over again, trying to kill him.
As he approached the mirror, Reiki couldn’t tell if the pain got worse or better. Nothing felt like he might get some reprieve until he splayed his hand out on that silver surface.
“Ugh,” he huffed, frowning. “For the record, diva behavior like this isn’t ******** cute. And you aren’t backing it up nearly enough to sell me on the fantasy. It’s honestly kind of pathetic.”
Not that this stopped him from, with a deep breath and a roll of his eyes, stepping through the mirror. Unlike normal mirrorwalking, this felt like getting shoved beneath the surface of a frozen lake. But if this was going to be A Whole Thing, Reiki guessed he needed to get it over with.
wc: 1,195
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continued in it’s me. hi.
