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backdated to New Year’s Day 2023, a little after midnight; continues from stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror
Plunging into the mirror, Reiki didn’t know what to expect. He could have simply walked right through to the full-length mirror in his bedroom. Would’ve been quick and easy to do so. He probably would’ve saved himself a lot of hassle. Something familiar within him—something that he knew too well probably counted as one of the “impulse-control issues” that had gotten him slapped with an ADHD diagnosis as a kid—thrummed with a mix of expectation and impatience. Itched for Reiki to listen to it and ******** off out of here already. After a busy holiday season, a godawful semester from Hell, a robot trying to steal his starseed in outer space, and the perpetual uncertainty he kept calling on himself in regards to Faustite, hadn’t Reiki earned the right to go home and rest?
Probably, he had—but something else inside him told Reiki to just breathe deeply, let himself slow down, and trust. Pretty big ask when so little of this made logical sense to Reiki. But whatever, apparently, he wouldn’t get any peace until he cooperated and went along with this……so, fine. Whatever. He stopped moving and hugged himself. With a dramatic sigh, he rolled his eyes, then closed them. There, okay? He was trusting and if making himself stand still didn’t count as slowed down, then he didn’t know what would.
When he opened his eyes, he recognized where he was: Reiki didn’t know the name of this room, but Levi and Soya had brought him here for his Awakening. Acubens had brought him and Morpheus through this room after that when the holes in reality back during Starfest made her worry about Mirrorspace, about whether or not it was okay.
“Seems fine to me right now,” Reiki muttered to no one, drinking in the room around him, since no matters of significantly greater importance forced him to move along elsewhere.
……Gods, but it was ******** dull in here. Both times he’d come through here previously, he hadn’t stopped to linger or truly appreciate what the Common Room looked like: a whitish-gray room with a whitish-gray floor and whitish-gray walls decked out in equally <********> shapes that looked like they were probably mirrors, because that was truly so original and creative.
About the only things that didn’t disappoint were the stately doors that Reiki knew led into the throne room, where the Black Mirror lived, and the ornate golden mirror opposite them. Incidentally, they were the only things in the entire common room that actually seemed real, not like they’d been spun together out of lies, and spiderwebs, and cotton candy, like the vast majority of his surroundings. Ugh, the sheer lack of reality spinning around him right now made Reiki’s stomach lurch.
Honestly, wasn’t it bad enough that Mirrorspace didn’t have the decency to shape itself out of darkness visible, like John Milton’s viciously anti-Catholic hot take on Hell, or at least commit to genuine shades of gray? Wasn’t it bad enough that the space lingered in these heinous, white-tinged shades that looked so atrociously, impossibly, unforgivably tacky? Did the entire space need to be covered in mirrors too? What would any non-Dark Mirrors who came through here even think of them, based on such unimaginative, antiseptic, lackluster interior decorating? Ugh, there wasn’t even a little decorative table with a potted plant that Reiki could knock over out of spite, like a cat whose humans had tried to forbid them from doing anything.
Turning toward the doors Levi had taken him through before, Reiki paused.… Okay, what the ******** was going on in here this day, exactly? Because there had not been anything behind him when he’d looked the other way. He knew there hadn’t been. Especially not this weird, mismatched something-or-other that looked not entirely unlike someone had taken a painting by van Gogh or Picasso of a little decorative table and potted plant, then left said painting out in the rain like Donna Summer’s cake.
The vague shapes were more or less correct for a decorative table and potted plant, Reiki guessed? But something about the table looked distorted and just plain wrong, like it seemed to stand on its own in total defiance of all decency and also the laws of physics. How were the legs even attached to this thing? How did the potted plant stay in place with the table’s surface tilted at an angle clearly meant to evoke a sense of visual perspective? In a painting, fine, Reiki could buy a trick like that making sense to the eye and mind. But on something meant to be real and three-dimensional, the table part wound up not connecting quite right to three of the four legs, all different sizes in a way that, by all rights, should not have worked.
On top of that, both the table and the alleged plant were the same atrocious shade of whitish-gray as everything ******** else in here. Truly, what was the point of having a full, vibrant color spectrum when you, too, could get whitish-graywashed by some completely incomprehensible magical realm that had felt so much more impressive on Reiki’s last two visits, but now, only filled his mind with the dulcet tones of Shania Twain: Okay, so you’re Mirrorspace. That don’t impress me much, oh oh ohhh. So you’ve got the junk, but have you got the touch. Don’t get me wrong, hey, I think you’re alright.…
……At least Reiki could knock something over and make a mess now, he supposed. That might be fun.
“I don’t think that I could take it, ‘cause it took so long to bake it,” he sang faintly, tracing his fingertips along the rim of the alleged potted plant and opting for Donna Summer, rather than Shania. In case anyone happened to be lurking about, eavesdropping, “Macarthur Park” had so much more wiggle room for plausible deniability if Reiki tried to say it didn’t reflect what he was actually feeling in this moment. “And I’ll never have that recipe agaaaaain……”
Emulating Ms. Summer’s iconic laugh that took “Macarthur Park” from a slow, emotional ballad to an uptempo disco number, Reiki reared his hand back. He swept it down like he wanted to win Best b***h Slap on some ridiculous MTV awards show that only existed to make trash TV seem more important than it was. Slapped at where he saw the alleged plant in its alleged pot.
His hand careened through nothing. Only darkness and empty air.
Sure, this slap disturbed the whitish-gray, wobbly-looking lines that made up reality in here. Briefly sliced through them with a sound like whiiioosh. But they slithered back into their previous places all too easily—“Oh, what in the <********> Come through, magical c**k-block, isn’t that just ******** adorable,” he grumbled.
What kind of condescending bullshit even was this? Since when did Mirrorspace just vomit up half-assed recreations of actual real-life objects you might have wanted? Why even bother if it wasn’t going to let Reiki do with said object the only thing he even wanted it for?
After a pause to petulantly swat at the vaguely table-and-potted-plant-adjacent nonsense once again, Reiki stomped off toward the doors Levi had taken him through before.…… When they refused to open for him, he doubled back and slapped the nothing-space that made up his so-called table again. As the thing reformed yet again but refused to topple over, he could’ve sworn he heard some kind of distant, chittering laughter—but considering it sounded like something out of Majora’s Mask, Reiki chalked it up to his own overactive imagination and moved on.
Nothing of value or interest seemed likely to happen in the common room, and he didn’t trust the corridors in here worth a good goddamn—how could he, when nothing else about this place seemed real?—Reiki took a deep breath and shoved himself through the golden mirror that stood opposite the doors.
He closed his eyes for the journey through, and rubbed them hard when, on opening them again, he seemed to be……somewhere that looked like the outside world. A plot of dirt and grass, growing trees scattered throughout, some benches……except instead of a sky, this place had an ocean of endless black around it. Something like stars glittered there, but even from this distance, something about those pinpricks of light seemed too sharp, somehow too wrong, to be real stars.
Then, there were the floating islands. From here, Reiki couldn’t discern anything about them, only that there were too many to bother counting, they all seemed to be of different sizes, and even worse than the whitish-gray bullshit in the common room, they had the complete indecency to be pure white. Ugh.
Somewhat more concerningly, this area of Mirrorspace……didn’t have anybody in it. Not that there’d been anyone in the common room, either, but……this place had clearly had people in it, at some point? The benches didn’t seem to be made from the same whitish-gray nothing that Mirrorspace used to make other things, so they’d probably come from real people? Plus, with this much space, and especially considering how he’d been drawn in here tonight, Reiki would’ve expected to see someone else, at some point……even a single other person……? Even just in passing……?
Instead, he called out into the vast expanse, “Hello? …Hello?”—and heard even less back than he’d heard from the mirror that had brought him in here, this time.
Slouching, Reiki shook his head. “Who the ******** was calling me, then,” he groused. Kicking at the ground, he unearthed something red and glistening. Warm to the touch, it reminded him of the blue crystal he’d found with Acubens, then given to the merchant when Levi had taken Reiki to meet him. But it didn’t have any answers for him about what was going on. “Well……come on, feet.”
An arrangement of stones carved a path from where Reiki stood to a towering, Gothic structure all in black. “Now, that?” He huffed in something like amusement. “That is what I’m talking about. Oooh, she’s giving me very ‘Anon out of the earth a fabric huge / Rose like an exhalation with the sound / Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet— / Built like a temple, where pilasters round / Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid / With golden architrave…’”
Not that John Milton and his viciously anti-Catholic hot takes made the citadel come any closer.
Nor did Reiki keep them too much in mind while he stomped his own way up to the Dark Mirror Court’s own personal Pandaemonium. For one thing, Milton’s Satan was the biggest literary pissbaby Reiki had as yet encountered, and he absolutely included Edward Cullen and Draco Malfoy in his assessment. “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven”—gurl, please. Ms. Apostate Angel Supermodel of the World over here only undermined his own idea in basically every other book of the poem by constantly making himself miserable on purpose, then blaming it all on everybody else and lashing out at them over s**t that he himself had made happen in the first place.
“To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell: / Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”—b***h, sit your a** down and shut the ******** up. God, that entire tirade out of Satan was the worst. Generations of people taking William Blake’s deliberate misreading of the text at face-value had rendered an admittedly well-written line tackier than Spirit Gum and more exhausting than Taylor Swift’s boyfriend du jour calling her and he’s like “Oh, I still love you.” Milton was “of the Devil’s party and did not know it?” Oh, Reiki did not think. No, no, the explanation was much simpler: William Blake just couldn’t deal with liking a poem that very explicitly disagreed with his own spiritual and political beliefs, which he projected all over Milton’s text instead of meeting Paradise Lost on its own terms. Jackass.
Worse, the shifting sands of time and linguistic drift had left the speech sounding glorious and inspirational to twenty-first century audiences, when a more accurate rendering of the line in contemporary English would have gone something like <******** you, Dad, you don’t KNOW me, this isn’t a PHASE, it’s WHO I *AM*!!!” or “No, ******** *YOU*, Dad! I’m gonna build MY OWN Heaven! With BLACKJACK! And *HOOKERS*!!!”
For another thing, though, it took work to call up and recite the sections of Paradise Lost that Reiki had memorized, motivated by Obaasan and her belief that poetry was meant to be read aloud and experienced as much as possible by all five of the scientifically recognized human senses. Significantly easier for Reiki to let his mind wander onto a song and, since nobody else made themselves apparent, let himself enjoy singing it:
“I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser, midnights become my afternoons.…” God, if he didn’t know that feeling better than he knew some of his own cousins, Tay-Tay. Mostly on the maternal side and for the most part, he didn’t want to know them, but still. Looking around the landscape as he walked, Reiki felt the weight of that sentiment even more clearly than usual. “When my depression works the graveyard shift, all of the people I’ve ghosted stand there in the room.…”
Tucking his bangs behind his ears, Reiki tried not to think about who might or might not have shown up in that room for him. “I should not be left to my own devices, they come with prices and vices, I end up in crisis—tale as old as tiiiiiime.…”
One of the stones slipped beneath his feet as the path directed him around another corner. Reiki didn’t fall, didn’t twist anything either—but something about the road doing that while he was trying to play along and follow where it led? Felt like somebody or something within Mirrorspace personally had it out for him.
Then again, maybe that persecutory bullshit was all in Reiki’s head.
“I wake up screaming from dreaming, one day I’ll watch as you’re leaving—” Another glance around him, and again, Reiki couldn’t find anyone else. Loneliness clawed up his insides like icicle-knives, and thanks, he hated it. “—‘cause you got tired of my scheming for the last tiiiiiime.”
A deep breath, and he started up the incline that, as far as he could tell, marked the home-stretch of the path to the citadel. Huh, it had seemed further away, over by the golden mirror. Maybe Disney princess powers were real after all? And in lieu of animal friends, they let Reiki travel faster without needing to run?
Whatever, it wasn’t like anyone was going to explain jackshit to Reiki anyway.
“It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.” That idea felt cold and heavy in his chest, in the pit of his stomach. Still, he persisted: “At tea time, everybody agrees. I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror.…”
Briefly, Reiki paused outside the citadel’s door. ********, did he need a key? Or to solve some kind of puzzle, like the ones in Resident Evil that Yuki complained about whenever those games came up?
Fortunately, no: Reiki had barely touched the doors when they rushed open for him.
Unfortunately, the citadel’s insides proved……something of a letdown. There had to be some hidden pathway up to the spire, but Reiki couldn’t see it and he doubted if he ever would. Sounded like the sort of thing that only someone of actual importance in their Court, like Remarque or Acubens or Levi, would have access to.
The room that Reiki could access, though, didn’t seem to have much in it either. Out of the whole thing, the biggest point of interest lay in the center of the floor, and—“Oh, b***h, now you’re just being nasty.…”
Part of him meant that statement seriously. Part of him did not. Still another part of Reiki mostly wanted to smack himself for expecting anything other than what lay there before him: another ******** mirror, in case anyone could have possibly missed the ******** theme by now.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think someone was punishing me.” Grumbling softly, Reiki batted his foot against the edge of the stupid thing. “‘I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror,’ indeed.”
Regardless, his heels clink!ed on the glass like walking across the glass floor at the CN Tower. Hugging himself, Reiki made for the center of it. That was where you usually had to stand to make magical things happen, right?
“It must be exhausting,” he amelodically deadpanned, “always rooting for the anti-hero.”
His feet came to a rest in the center.
A moment passed in nothing but deep breaths and silent impatience.
Then, something lurched in the pit of his stomach. The mirror beneath his feet disappeared. Or maybe it turned to liquid? Except he wasn’t wet, or at least he didn’t feel like it?
Whatever had happened, Reiki was falling, now. That much, he recognized.
It felt like mirrorwalking, though? Except for all the ways it didn’t.
Except for all the ways that it felt, so clearly and unavoidably, like plain, simple falling. All that truly, ultimately felt different? Came from the sensation of freezing cold hands reaching out for him. Which might not have been so bad—or at least Reiki would have tolerated it—if they’d don’t anything ******** helpful…?
Instead, they simply let him fall.
Maybe the magical girl s**t of it all should’ve made Reiki stick a graceful landing, at the end of whatever trip this was supposed to be. Maybe he should have conducted himself with grace and dignity, like he had any functional understanding of how not to embarrass anyone who ever trusted him to reflect well on them. But when he came out of that mirror-fall, Reiki landed on his a**, unceremoniously and the absolute polar opposite of the poise and perfection he was probably meant to show.
Pushing himself to his feet, he dusted some mysterious white dirt off of his fuku. At least, it felt like dirt against his hands, but as he looked out at the field before him, Reiki wondered if Mirrorspace didn’t fashion these islands out of powdered heroin.
“So, what am I doing here, then,” he wondered aloud, as if anyone was ******** listening. “Is this place supposed to be mine now or something?”
Although the endless black void around him said nothing, something in his chest vibrated like it wanted to very much to tell him “Yes. Is it too much to expect? That I would give you this place to build and call your own?”
Reiki supposed it wasn’t. Perfectly within the parameters of magical girl nonsense, he supposed.
“But I think I’d rather keep the bullet,” he murmured, not meaning anything in particular, not meaning anything at all and still only really wanting to get this over with and go back home. “And you still can’t have your sweater back.”
The connections here probably only made sense to him, and that was fine. If he was going to get summoned into Mirrorspace like this just because he hadn’t been able to visit since July—nor had he really put any effort into trying—then Mirrorspace could deal with him being salty about it and quoting Richard Siken out of context.
With a sigh, Reiki unpocketed the red crystal he’d found on the way up to the citadel. Part of him wanted to throw it off the edge of this heroin-colored, baseball field-looking tract of land for which he was apparently supposed to be ******** grateful, just to see what would happen. But ******** around too much with Mirrorspace’s patience sounded like a good way to get his a** kicked, so the part of Reiki that won out only tossed thr crystal up in the air.
It crashed to the ground and burst open, letting loose a flock of flaming wisps like kitsunebi. They danced around him as they came out, then flitted away to different corners of Reiki’s patch of nothingness, dancing to some inaudible tune as they illuminated this spot, now freshly assigned to him.
The display was probably meant to be beautiful. Probably, it was meant to appeal to Reiki being such an aesthetically inclined ho with such an irrepressible penchant for drama. Probably, he was making himself the new dictionary definition of “ingratitude,” right now, this very second.
But as his little orbs of flame kept waltzing for his attention, all Reiki could think was, White Moon senshi get to have entire planets, full of history, and stories, and life that’s actually worth living. Blossom’s place has bioluminescent bunnies. How, exactly, is this ******** dust-heap supposed to come off as anything but the universe’s biggest nothing-burger?
Again, nothing answered him. Reiki sighed. ******** one-sided conversations. And he was supposed to believe that Mirrorspace genuinely wanted him around, when he couldn’t get a straight answer out of it to save his life?
Served him right, he guessed, for so desperately wanting something real.
wc: 3,512.
