Quote:
backdated to ~February 28th/March 1st.
ooc note: the vast majority of this solo takes place in Murikabushi’s own head! Things are close-zoomed-in on his POV, but the way he perceives things is not reflective of reality. Mirrorspace itself is not talking to him (that’s not within the scope of its canon degree of sentience), and the Soothing Bell item does not have the ability to make magical realms do that. What appears to be a dialogue is more Murikabushi projecting his own internal conflict and perceiving it as a dialogue when it isn’t.
ooc note: the vast majority of this solo takes place in Murikabushi’s own head! Things are close-zoomed-in on his POV, but the way he perceives things is not reflective of reality. Mirrorspace itself is not talking to him (that’s not within the scope of its canon degree of sentience), and the Soothing Bell item does not have the ability to make magical realms do that. What appears to be a dialogue is more Murikabushi projecting his own internal conflict and perceiving it as a dialogue when it isn’t.
For his and Junsei’s birthday, Reiki got up early. Fed Cersei and ran her out for a good, long walk. Put on a cute little outfit with a black-and-purple plaid skirt that Yuki had bought for him, and black thigh-highs with lace trim around the tops.
Then, once Cersei seemed content to snooze on her little pillow-bed, Reiki could let himself power up.
Not that he’d never powered up in front of her before—on the contrary, he’d done so plenty of times—but Reiki increasingly found the idea……unseemly. As if extreme disapproval lurked beneath her confusion over someone existing who looked, smelled, and talked like her Dad but who so clearly was not her Dad. Like somehow, simply by powering up, Reiki wasn’t being the person his Best Girl believed him to be. Turned his stomach, the thought of disappointing Cersei or letting her down like that. For the best, then, to only put on the ill-fitting pageant gown named Murikabushi when Cersei wasn’t paying attention.
Once he’d powered up, Reiki took his little silver bell out from his subspace and clamped his hand around it, being careful not to let it ring just yet. He’d gathered, since finding it, that the bell had limits on its noise-making abilities. It’d ring whenever, sure, but you had to be careful because the ringing would only mean something once a day. Maybe it soothes the nerves all the same, no matter where you used it, but the best time and place for using it, Reiki had discovered, was Mirrorspace.
Slipping into the noncommittal, whitish-gray void that he begrudgingly had to acknowledge as home, Reiki let the bell dangle between his knuckles. As he set off down one of the infinite indistinguishable corridors, he let it ring. Instantly, a sense of calm washed over him—as calm as he could feel under these circumstances, anyway. Something in the pit of his stomach still writhed uncomfortably, gnawing at him and aching in his bones like everything about this situation always was and always would be hopelessly, inescapably wrong. But for the most part, Reiki felt at peace with the idea. Wasn’t as if he could do anything about it, at any rate.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, he mused idly, swinging the bell like a hypnotist’s pendulum while he walked.
Even though he hadn’t said anything out loud, Reiki felt Mirrorspace bristle around him. He thought of male birds puffing up their chests and charging into each other’s faces in some endless war for mating privileges. He thought of all the times that Ginger, the hands down worst of Aunt Satomi and Aunt Naoko’s cats, similarly adjusted her posture, then huffed away and knocked something of Reiki’s over on purpose. Oh, for ******** sakes—
“I came to see you early today, jackass,” Reiki groused, clamping his hand around the bell again. As usual, looking around didn’t give him anybody real to talk to. So much the better for Mirrorspace, probably. If it had taken on a physical form and come to bother him, Reiki might’ve tried to start a cat-fight. “I got dressed up all pretty and came to see you without you even nagging me once. You want to quit getting a ******** attitude with me for being realistic?”
Strictly speaking, Reiki had no right to criticize Mirrorspace for any alleged attitude problems (not least since his primary reason for coming early had been to keep Mirrorspace off his back later on tonight).
But on the other hand, he kinda, sorta, really honestly didn’t give a ********: Mirrorspace was acting like a little b***h when all he’d done was think something—a provably true something, as far as Reiki was concerned: he couldn’t change the circumstances of his powered life and he was stuck being a Dark Mirror senshi. If Mirrorspace wanted to get mad about feelings that Reiki had kept to himself, then he had every right to clap the ******** back at it for being an invasive b*****d.
At least the huffy, offended feeling all around him petered out when Reiki let go of the bell, resumed his walking aimlessly and swinging it. What did he know? Maybe the soothing properties of the bell applied to Mirrorspace as well as to Reiki.
—Except that thinking so made Mirrorspace bristle again. This time, the mood it projected felt like a wrinkled nose and a jut-out lip, the universe’s stupidest-looking pouty-face. Why, the void around Reiki seemed to ask. Why do you always judge me so harshly? Why do you just assume that my intentions are nefarious?
“Gee, I don’t know,” Reiki deadpanned, lips curling in distaste. “Let’s start with how you demand that your senshi drain energy from innocent people who can’t even defend themselves. I do not believe I should need to elaborate on why that’s fundamentally wrong and morally ******** indefensible. Are you even doing anything of actual value with that energy? Or are you just hoarding it so aforementioned innocent people can’t have it anymore?”
They’ll grow it back!
Reiki rolled his eyes. He’d noticed this, about ringing his silver bell in Mirrorspace: it made the conversations feel a little less one-sided, as if Mirrorspace could actually use words to talk to him. Maybe the translation matrix that the magic created left something to be desired. Maybe certain nuances got lost, applying actual words to the vibes that Mirrorspace projected at him, the way that English would never effectively communicate what it meant when Onibaba-sama sneeringly addressed him as Rokugin-kun in front of people. Maybe it was the magical realm equivalent of how he’d have needed to say “f*****t” in order to communicate what she meant in calling him “okama,” but even that would’ve required a lengthy footnote about why that slur got the closest to her intent and how she used the word, but missed several important cultural subtleties and levels of tacit implication.
Whatever was happening, Mirrorspace felt like it could actually use its words, which in turn made Reiki feel marginally less out of his mind while throwing words out into the endless, pointedly-not-quite-whitewashed void.
Taking a deep breath, Reiki took a left and started up a flight of stairs. These never led anywhere interesting, in his experience, but nevertheless, he welcomed the change of pace. “If you’re going to pry inside my head when I’ve told you to knock it off,” he pointed out, “then you oughta know that my issue with the energy-draining? Has nothing to do with whether or not the energy grows back.”
All around him, the air rustled like it wanted, but couldn’t manage, to shake off an oncoming storm. He could practically hear Mirrorspace whining. But it *does*, though! All they have to do is sleep it off—
“Not if your Mirrorwraiths straight-up kill them! Not if they can’t make it somewhere safe! Not if one of your senshi thinks it’s ******** funny to attack somebody, drain them dry, and leave them in the snow!”
Whoever had done that to Amsvartnir, Reiki still didn’t know. Given how infrequently he ran into other Dark Mirror senshi who weren’t Haruhi, Levi, Sappho, or Bélénos, he doubted that he’d have an easy time figuring it out.
Worse, in light of the advice he’d gotten from Dagon, Reiki would probably need to suck it up and actually talk to Remarque, if he wanted to make any kind of positive difference for anybody in this entire godforsaken Court with the ostensible allergy to learning (or teaching) their own history. Pain in the ******** a**, every single piece of it, from the fact that Reiki had yet to meet anyone else in the Court who even pretended to give a damn about said history to the fact that he was going to need to bother Remarque and didn’t even have the name of a senshi to discipline, or the first clue if Remarque even would discipline her, or anything of real value.
What do you want him to do about her, though? Mirrorspace vibed at him, apparently abandoning the discussion of its relative morals and ethics (or more accurately, its lack thereof). She already drained your contact among the Cosmos Knights; that much cannot be undone. Why make such an issue out of it?
“First of all? Amsvartnir is not a contact, you heartless p***k. He’s a person, and he’s my friend.” With a huff, Reiki swished out his ponytail. Even though it wouldn’t add any extra power to the approximate-soothing, he started swinging the bell back and forth again. “Secondly, I don’t know what I want him to do about her; I don’t even know what he can do. But it might be nice to get some verification that we aren’t supposed to attack White Moon agents who are trying to make friends, then leave them for dead.”
Are you sure the Cosmos Knight is really your friend? He could be stringing you along. Why are you so suspicious of what General Faustite’s team wants with you, while trusting some Order-slave without a second thought?
Wrinkling his nose, Reiki followed a sharp corner that seemed to come out of nowhere. “You’re acting like I trusted Ams right off the bat,” he pointed out. “If you knew even half as much as you think you do, you’d know that I didn’t trust him, at first. Or Kerberos, for that matter. Or Encke. I did with Ida, but only because she came with a recommendation from Kerberos. ********, I even regarded Fang with some suspicion at first. About the only Order people I have genuinely trusted without question? Were Pendour, Dagon, and Demeter—and two of those were very extenuating circumstances!”
At least, Reiki couldn’t think of anything else to call them, when he and Pendour had found each other around the weird rifts that cropped up during StarFest, and Reiki had found Demeter laid out in the snow, surrounded by little bunny footprints and drained nearly to death (thanks, Negaverse!). If a world-threatening danger and Demeter nearly dying didn’t count as extenuating circumstances, what ******** DID?!
………Dagon, on the other hand, would’ve been fair to hold against him, in terms of Fraternizing With The White Moon. He did trust her right off the bat, pretty much entirely because she’d been a fierce-looking Starfleet senshi, she’d seemed kind, and she’d reacted with recognition to the name Murikabushi.
If he hadn’t known better, Reiki would’ve sworn that he heard Mirrorspace sigh. Why do you want Remarque to make such a fuss over a Cosmos Knight who didn’t die, but you never asked any of our own for help with your magic?
“That’s not how……” Reiki exhaled between his teeth. “That’s an extremely disingenuous, bad faith description of what happened, and don’t you dare forget it. Y’know, you’re really making me regret coming here by playing these mind-games. Again. At least when Faustite’s people do it, they have the decency to be interesting.”
That was one word for it, at least.
“Anyway,” Reiki huffed, “I would’ve figured things out on my own eventually. It just so happened that, instead, I got kidnapped for a couple hours or whatever and subsequently worked on things with Tama.”
Something in the air shifted like Mirrorspace wanted to grow a head, specifically so it could beat that head against a wall.
Probably, it was petty and immature, but Reiki allowed himself to indulge in a smug little smirk about that. Good to know that, even if he couldn’t do anything about his garbage circumstances and even if he was stuck with the barren, arctic s**t-hole of Mirrorspace instead of the infinite panoply of real space, Reiki could make the experience of having him for a senshi as unpleasant for Mirrorspace as possible. Even if Reiki could never be a real magical girl—meaning, an Order senshi, though even being a Negaverse senshi would’ve been preferable to being a Dark Mirror for the sole reason that they could call on Cosmos or whoever and get ******** out—then at least he could frustrate Mirrorspace for as long as this incarnation for his starseed decided to go on.
“You ******** regret summoning me all the time yet, a*****e?” Why bother keeping that thought to himself when Mirrorspace was going to peer into his head anyway. “How long are we gonna go on like this?”
What, exactly, so you want from me?
Reiki rolled his eyes. “I don’t think I’ve been particularly subtle about that.”
I just don’t understand. None of my other senshi are so unfairly harsh with me. Even you used to be eager to visit! Acubens could hardly keep you on a leash when she brought you before!
“That was in July. Circumstances change. Keep up and stop expecting me to have static ******** opinions.”
Nothing about me has changed since then! Not in any measurable way!
“I didn’t say that *you* were the one who changed, did I!” Ugh—Reiki shook his head, stomping up another flight of stairs. Why did talking to Mirrorspace have to be such an exhausting, pointless exercise? They never listened, not really. All it did, as far as Reiki could tell, was project onto him all its own fanciful bullshit ideas about the nicer, sweeter, more placid and undemanding Mirror senshi that it wanted him to be, then judged him and whined eternally about him not being them. “The thing that changed was that I learned more, and what I learned made me significantly less okay with how you want us to do things! Which, again, I have not been ******** subtle about with you!”
Truly, in what way was a statement like I do not believe I should need to elaborate on why draining energy from innocent people who can’t defend themselves is fundamentally wrong and morally indefensible remotely in the vicinity of subtle? Not that anyone had asked him? But Reiki felt pretty sure that he was putting the “B” in “subtle” over here.
For a moment, the shifting of the air and general vibes almost felt like Mirrorspace was laughing at him. Not in a way that he could respect, though. If Mirrorspace had pointed and jeered while falling over, flailing and kicking its legs, then it would’ve been one thing. Would Reiki have enjoyed enduring it? Absolutely not. But he would’ve respected Mirrorspace for having a shred of ******** honesty about how little it respected him.
“What do you even care how I feel about you,” Reiki pointed out, (he thought) quite sensibly and rationally. “You don’t give a damn about my feelings in any other way that matters. If you did, you’d never insult people I care about by calling them contacts and acting like the only reason they exist is so I can <******** exploit them on your behalf.”
Again with the feeling of a weary sigh and Mirrorspace burying the face it didn’t have inside its palms. You don’t even try to understand my perspective—
“I understand it perfectly, Gaslight-Tron 5000! You demand that your senshi go out and drain energy from people—which is, like I keep telling you, morally ******** indefensible and an obvious, undeniable form of <******** exploitation—and you don’t tell us what it’s for, or how you’re using it, or anything.”
Why are you so set on calling it “exploitation”?
“Because it <******** IS, a*****e!”
Murikabushi, sweetheart, you keep using language that’s so deeply, unfairly prejudicial—
“Do not ******** ‘sweetheart’ me! You don’t get to sit there and treat me like I’m ******** stupid, then turn around and call me ‘sweetheart.’” Glaring up at the nearest corner where a security camera could have fit, Reiki jabbed a finger toward one of the mirrors lining the wall. “Disrespect me like that again, and I’m going ******** home!”
This place could be a home for you, if you would only allow it to be.… When Reiki only responded with a skeptical quirk of his eyebrow, Mirrorspace went on, Either way, how have I treated you like you’re stupid? I don’t recall doing anything like that.
“Yeah, no, I’m sure you don’t, actually. Because you seem completely allergic to considering anything from my perspective—”
You do realize, yes, that I could say the same of you?
Pursing his lips and closing his eyes, Reiki gave himself a moment to seethe quietly. Hopefully, letting it simmer out of his system instead of just lashing out would move this conversation literally anywhere besides “around in ******** circles.”
“The difference between us is that I’ve tried to think of things from your perspective and I still don’t think what you demand from your senshi is remotely justifiable.” He cocked a hip in the way that normally accompanied him being particularly sassy and fed-up with someone else’s s**t. “But you don’t try to think about my perspective at all. Apparently, you can see into my head and hold me accountable for thoughts that I was keeping to myself for a reason—thoughts that might have been intrusive, or transient, or otherwise not indicative of how I really feel—but you can’t pay any ******** attention to who I love and idolize the most in my life? Or who has personally terrorized me more than anybody else in my life? And you can’t then connect those dots to the obvious conclusion that I’m not going to be fooled by you trying to play me like ‘Oh no, please don’t call it genocide apologism; we prefer to think of ourselves as preserving Japanese national honor and dignity from Chinese Communist brainwashing and the scurrilous wartime lies of American propagandists.’”
For a moment, Mirrorspace fell into a reflective stillness. When it vibed at him again, those vibes felt like, Would you kindly answer those questions for me, then?
Reiki didn’t really want to do that, no. A very large part of him only trusted Mirrorspace to use knowledge like this against him.
But on its surface, the request felt so reasonable that he couldn’t deny it: “My Mom, my Obaasan, and my Ojiisan,” he explained. “I have other people who I love and regard almost as highly, yes? But the first people I remember looking up to that much were Mom and Obaasan. Ojiisan, I’ve always loved, but he’s progressively become more and more of a guiding light as I’ve gotten older. Either way, he and Obaasan are historians.
“Mom is a sociologist with a strong background in history. Obaasan fought for her right to get a PhD at a time when it was rare to see any women doing that, never mind a woman of color who was born in Osaka, not the United States. It’s thanks to all of them that I have as much respect as I do for the deep, abiding importance of history, and in this case? Learning from the examples set by historical euphemisms for inexcusably terrible things, or the way people will deny that the terrible things even happened. Historical precedent tells me that what you’re doing with trying to wriggle around the exploitation and dehumanization inherent to the energy-draining project here? Is a red flag of epic proportions.”
Idly, something in the back of Reiki’s mind felt like he needed a better word than dehumanization, something that wouldn’t forcibly exclude Faustite and other half-youma or judge them by how well they conformed or failed to conform to human standards, how much they stifled themselves in order to give humans some semblance of comfort. But that wasn’t really the point right now, so Reiki would have to think about it later.
Unfortunately for Reiki, he’d brought up another issue with Mirrorspace, so he couldn’t simply leave things off where they currently sat. “As for my biggest emotional terrorist? I call her ‘Onibaba-sama,’ and frankly, her alleged husband is not much better.”
*Alleged* husband? Mirrorspace’s confusion felt genuine, which was probably fair.
Reiki shrugged. “Calling Sakurazawa Ryou her ‘husband’ implies a certain level of personhood that he does his best to renounce at every possible turn. The man regularly has to run for re-election to keep his job but he’d rather build scale models of so-called great battles from Japanese history—a list on which he includes the Rape of Nanking—than actually do that job. Onibaba-sama does all the work for him. He actively eschews any sense of human connection with anyone but her. Aside from their genuine if twisted love for each other, his mix of pride in and deep resentment toward my mother, and how much he hates me and my third-born uncle? He treats other humans with as much disregard as humans in this town show to half-youma.”
Hugging himself tighter, Reiki asked, “So, where exactly do we draw the line here? He goes out of his way to avoid anything that feels like life. He exists, sure, but it’s like his blood runs at absolute zero. Making him deal with actual life will show you how much rage and hatred he has inside him. But no matter how much comfort that anger gives him, he’d still rather use his money and influence to avoid feeling anything at all. Thinking about it like some Slaughterhouse Five teas: at what point do we look at those behaviors from Onibaba-sama’s husband and stop giving him full credit for being alive?”
Mirrorspace rumbled thoughtfully. I don’t suppose I know the answer to that question.
“Yeah, me neither. All I know is that that man still thinks that he’s the victim for a bullshit stunt that he pulled all on his own when I was a child.” Huffing, Reiki shook out his ponytail. “Man took advantage of how much I wanted him and Onibaba-sama to love me. Convinced me we were going for an actual grandfather-grandson outing together. Took me to this extremely contentious shrine in Tokyo. It’s contentious, see, because it houses the remains of several Class-A war criminals—men who oversaw and took part in some serious crimes against humanity—and sort of deifies them? It…it’s complicated to fully explain that part.
“But because that’s obviously not bad enough,” Reiki let the sarcasm ooze from his tongue like melting chocolate, “the history museum at this shrine also teaches historical revisionism. It describes unjust invasions of other sovereign nations as ‘protecting them from American imperialist tyranny’—as if Japan was any less imperialist, at the time! It teaches that medical experimentation and mass rapes of which there is objective proven evidence? Didn’t really happen, it was all made up by the Chinese Communist Party and by American pigs, so they could slander Japan on the international stage.
“Never mind how America actually actively helped to cover up a lot of these atrocities on the international stage! There’s even evidence that the CIA hounded this journalist, Iris Chang, literally to her death just for writing about them, some sixty years after the fact……but oh no, see? That obviously never happened, because it might undermine the idea of Japanese supremacy that this shrine promotes……and that my garbage maternal grandparents love as much as, but distinctly not more than, they love each other.”
As Reiki tried to steady himself so he could wrap up this explanation, he got the distinct sense that Mirrorspace had no idea what to say to or about any of this. In fairness, for once, he couldn’t hold that fact against it. From how Mirrorspace made things sound, most of its senshi tended to just show up and contentedly vibe alongside it, rather than storming around in a perpetual state of “I really wish that I wasn’t here right now” and going off about Imperial Japan’s myriad atrocities and Japanese supremacist historical revisionism, when pushed to deliver some emotional vulnerability.
On the other hand, it wasn’t like Reiki could do anything about that. Sure, he chose every member of his drag family and vice versa—but that hadn’t been an option in the matter of his blood family.
“So yeah,” Reiki said, after several long moments of gathering himself back together emotionally. “I’ve spent my entire life dealing with my maternal grandparents’ bullshit about using more polite euphemisms for horrific atrocities—assuming we even acknowledge that they happened, today. Whenever we visit the family in Kyoto, I have to listen to them get all like ‘Oh, don’t call it genocide, call it defending Japanese sovereignty. Don’t say that Imperial Japan did any atrocities, say that they aggressively protected the interests of the Japanese people on the international stage. Don’t call us homophobic; we only degrade you and use these slurs to encourage you to grow up and just be normal.
“So, with all that in mind, do you have a better idea yet of why I am. not. ********. here for. any of this bullshit about ‘Please don’t call energy-draining a form of exploitation, that perfectly accurate description is so negative and it really hurts my feelings’?” Sorry not sorry, but Reiki saved all his sympathy in this matter for the victims who had their energy drained. “You asking me why I’m dead-set on calling it like I see it feels like you might as well ask me why I’m set on calling bathroom bills ******** transphobic.”
Truly, Mirrorspace had been exceedingly patient for much longer than Reiki was used to—and finally, it hit another limit where it could only sigh in exasperation. That isn’t remotely comparable to my senshi draining energy for me, Murikabushi.
“Thanks, I know that!” Reiki protested, “But I wasn’t saying that it is!”
Somehow, in his wandering, Reiki had come to one of the infinite, indistinguishable corridors that seemingly acknowledged how many flights of stairs he’d jaunted up while enduring this day his daily garbage and giving Mirrorspace its mandated round of ******** attention. With a huff, crossing his arms over his chest, Reiki peered over a bannister and down into a whitish-gray void. For all it only showed hints of the floors he’d passed by on his way up—no real shadows to speak of, and the different visible slips were hard to distinguish from each other, being all the same overly light color—he still felt something like peering down from a great height.
Turned his stomach somewhat, and yet, he welcomed that feeling. It broke up the overall monotony of Mirrorspace, gave Reiki something he could feel besides bone-deep nausea, some inexplicable chafing in his soul, a persistent nagging feeling like there had to be something Wrong with him, and, every so often, a pressing desire to vacuum his and Haruhi’s apartment while wearing a candy-pink cowl-neck sweater with no sleeves, a slutty black leather mini-skirt, his best and most very favorite pumps, and black thigh-highs with a garter-belt.
Turning away from the overlook, Reiki glanced toward the ceiling. “I’m not comparing the objectively, materially different matters of trans panic bathroom bills and draining energy from defenseless people,” he insisted. “What I’m pointing out is that you play the same weaselly word-games as the people who defend those bills. They say ‘Oh, we just care about protecting young girls in public restrooms’ when what they really mean is ‘We want to make trans people feel so unsafe and unwelcome in public life that they go away and stop making us uncomfortable by simply daring to exist.’
“Likewise, you come along and say ‘But I need that energy, we’re really just borrowing it, the victims you drain grow that energy back, don’t they’ as if what you really mean isn’t ‘The consent and bodily autonomy of defenseless people does not matter at all to me, even though they could be unawakened or powered down senshi who might now be driven into Order or the Negaverse and made hostile toward my Court, all because one of my senshi attacked and drained them.’
“By trying to squirm your way into a debate about how to describe things in a way that doesn’t hurt your feelings? You’re completely ignoring how the entire energy-draining project fundamentally rests on exploitation and dehumanization, on you and your senshi arbitrarily deciding who does or doesn’t deserve to have their own lifeforce, with no real accountability unless an agent from the White Moon or the Negaverse beats the ******** s**t out of us. Add in the consent issues, the inherent power imbalance of us having magic while civilians don’t, and the fact that we have a responsibility to use these powers to help people? And do you maybe start to understand why I will not back down about saying that draining energy is morally indefensible? I do that because it is. *Period*.”
Around him, Mirrorspace bristled uncomfortably. Struck Reiki with the image of someone getting called to the carpet, unable to look away from their own feet (no doubt terribly interesting) because they knew they had no counterargument at the ready.
“Mind you, even if we weren’t arguing over the semantics like this, draining energy at all is still something I take issue with,” Reiki went on. “Like, people need that energy? To live? Therefore, stealing it is a problem because it makes it harder for them to continue being alive? It should be obvious why it’s a problem to demand that someone give up their own lifeforce in support of a magical realm that doesn’t even see them as real people unless they put on Dark Mirror fukus.”
……And yet: Reiki would’ve seen no honest personal benefits from letting Faustite drain him, but if it could’ve helped keep Faustite alive, then Reiki would’ve done it. He’d draw the line at giving the General his starseed—and given the chrome coating that, per Kerberos and Kima, suppressed the light that should have shone out from that little magical rock, Reiki couldn’t even guarantee that Faustite would’ve gotten any benefit at all from eating his soul like that—but……if his energy could’ve helped at all? If he could’ve given Faustite any respite from whatever was (probably) killing him? Then that would’ve been its own reward.
(Again, Reiki felt Mirrorspace groaning, trying not to scream, wishing for an actual head that it could have beaten into the nearest wall in frustration. Honestly, he deserved a medal for not tugging down his eyelid and sticking out his tongue.)
