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 Posted: Wed Apr 05, 2023 1:41 am
At least Mirrorspace had enough of something vaguely resembling decency to spit Reiki out somewhere that he recognized, this time.
The environs around him and the mirror he’d fumbled out of seemed familiar, at least. In an alien sort of way that Reiki had gotten increasingly accustomed to, when Mirrorspace tossed him back out into the real world in a corner of town Reiki knew decently well. Digging his bag and metal water bottle out of his subspace pocket, he didn’t immediately put his finger on why everything felt familiar? Ostensibly, on the first glance, not much about the alleyway in which he found himself set it apart from any other alleyway in town.
As Reiki powered down, though, he noticed. A fading mural smiled down at him, a painting of dancing cartoon animals, almost definitely older than Nariko, Tatsuya, and Ayame, done during some city beautification project that Reiki didn’t remember. Maybe the mural was older than him, Junsei, and Erika as well—the collective “eldest children” among their coterie of siblings and cousins who might as well have been siblings and not only because technicalities of blood this and sperm donors that said that Erika and Tatsuya counted as half-siblings—but the age of the insipid thing didn’t matter. Not really.
Smoothing out his little skirt with its pleats of black-and-purple plaid, Reiki turned left from the mural and made his way out to the sidewalk. Sure enough, he found himself at the intersection of Grand and Chapel. Only a few short blocks away from the best place that he could have possibly wound up right now. Truly, the best of all possible places.
……Felt sort of strange now, stopping in North End Park as Reiki. To hover near a bench currently lacking in both asphodel blossoms and the cute slut who grew them with his magic feet, knowing that people would look his way and only perceive a very tall someone, broad in the shoulders and wearing a cute little outfit, fussing with a phone whose obnoxiously pink, glittery protective case bore a sticker featuring fanart of Alucard from the animated Castlevania series on Netflix, done up like Saint Sebastian, somewhere between the subtle eroticism of Guido Reni and the erotic horror of Yamamoto Takato. Maybe they’d think he looked a bit pale (he probably should’ve eaten something before going into Mirrorspace so as to get the daily visit over with). Maybe they’d wonder if his coat was really heavy enough for weather like this (probably not, Reiki had some regrets). Most likely, they’d take one look and decide to ignore him entirely because, whatever they thought his deal was, he didn’t fall into the category of Their Business.
Either way, nobody got to perceive him as a ridiculous, overly talkative, self-torturing, moronic Mirror-Thing.
Nobody got to feel his aura and decide for him that he was lying, treacherous, good-for-nothing, morally bankrupt garbage, not for any reasons based on his own actions or choices but simply by virtue of having Chaos’s taint all over him, literally smothering his starseed. (Though, in fairness, considering all of the bad that Chaos wrought on the universe, how could Reiki blame anyone for assuming that about him? Dark Mirror, Negaverse, unaligned—Dagon had made it sound like it didn’t much matter, as if the only difference was whether someone punched you in the face like an adult or got your guard down before making a bloody mess out of you in a dark alley, then leaving you there.
Or, to use closer imagery to what Dagon had said, the difference between someone punching you in the face like an adult and lurking deep in the black water while you swim on, oblivious, then abruptly dragging you down to the depths.)
People looking at him only saw Reiki, The Actual Human Person. Nobody saw Murikabushi, the beautiful lie……Murikabushi, the empty façade……Murikabushi, the person who Reiki was supposed to be, because he had the starseed that picked him out as the senshi of hunger, so powering up every night and being Murikabushi, even when he didn’t know what he was as doing, should have felt good, and right, and perfect, because he was meant to be doing this, the same way that Reiki’s first time on stage at Scandals had felt, nearly nine years ago.
For that debut number, he’d sung live to “Wig In A Box” from Hedwig And The Angry Inch, a song he sometimes knew better than he knew himself.
In the politest terms possible, it had been a hotter mess than a nuclear dumpster fire out back behind the Party City. Sure, he’d put heart and passion into that performance, but it had been a whirlwind of glitter and gangly limbs, chaos and confusion that miraculously hit all the right notes but damn sure didn’t have anything else figured out, disarrayed motions made from the desperation to do something interesting rather than deliberately, with any real sense of purpose. A mess so hot that the surface of the sun wanted to sue for trademark infringement.
The primary use for the surviving video of that incident was embarrassing him when Sibyl and Cherry felt like reminding their first-minted daughter that he hadn’t always known how to to serve polish or put together a more elaborate number—the drag family version of humiliating baby pictures. But the only harsh judgment Reiki felt for the ******** eighteen-year-old in the video came over how thin he looked and the deep, jarring, arctic ice bath feeling of that image fundamentally disagreeing with how Reiki remembered feeling about his body that night. On every other count, he felt happy for the boy he used to be. The warm, snuggly feeling of knowing that, no matter how hot his mess, he’d been perfect on that stage and flitting between the tables to snatch up tips.
Reiki had been perfect that night because he’d finally known for sure: getting dolled up in his room or at Miss Sibyl’s place hadn’t been some passing fancy; he had A Calling to the art of drag, the way some people had A Calling to medicine or spiritual ministry or activism. Whatever cosmic dust had come together to make him and his starseed happen, it had wound up in an arrangement made for drag. And even falling all over himself from nerves and more exhilaration than his too-skinny body had had room for, Reiki had felt good in ways that his cocktail of issues hadn’t let him feel in ages before that night, and right in ways that the little personal satan in his head told him he didn’t deserve to feel, and perfect because prancing around the performance space had so clearly and obviously been what Reiki was MEANT to do.
The magical starseed-related destiny aspect of it all meant that Reiki should have felt the same way about being a senshi, didn’t it? He was meant for this; the crystal in his chest <******** said so. Therefore, it stood to reason that being Murikabushi should’ve felt good, and right, and perfect, at least as much as it felt to get in his geish as Miss Sayuri Kurobara Disobedience. Cosmos, or fate, or whoever had put this starseed in Reiki’s body—they’d made Murikabushi his true self, and ordained him as a future senshi.
So why, anymore, could he only make himself power up after a self-directed brow-beating about how he Was Not Allowed to sit and do nothing when he had the power to help people, to protect them when they couldn’t protect themselves? Why did Reiki need to beat himself into using his henshin pen because skipping patrols Was Not Allowed, because Obaasan and Ojiisan had raised him better than that, had worked hard to teach him that people all had a duty to help each other, and when you had more of any given whatever than someone else, you had a duty to use it responsibly?
Why did his hands tremble so much that he almost dropped his phone, simply from the realization that, no matter how anybody in the part right now might have judged him—someone whose figure screamed obviously a man, who wasn’t remotely trying to pass as a woman, but who nevertheless stood here in North-End Park wearing a mini-skirt, thigh-highs, and Mary Jane heels in shiny black pleather—or how much they might have hated him for existing as he was, at least they hated him, Reiki, and NOT Murikabushi?
Why did his breaths get shallower and faster at the thought of Kerberos—of how unfair it was that they could never hang out as Reiki and Whatever Kerberos’s Off-Duty Name Was, of how much he hated having to power up in order to bring Kerberos boba with a “what’s up, slut” even when the biggest thing on his mind was “I desperately need the Hot D fandom to get off Henry Cavill’s d**k, he was not that hot in ‘The Witcher’ and he should absolutely NOT play Aegon the Conqueror, ugh,” of how Reiki caught himself hoping more and more often that Kerberos didn’t question the times when Reiki showed up with only one drink or only one snack which was always meant for Kerberos, of how much s**t Kerberos could have theoretically gotten himself into if someone with even more harshly anti-Chaos-rat opinions than Anser found out that he regularly hosted Reiki at his bench without preaching at him to repent and pray to Sailor Cosmos or whoever and magically turn into an Order senshi, as if it could ever be that easy?
(It could not possibly be that easy; that much was certain. Reiki’s unparalleled code-cracking abilities and infinite capacity for rationalizing himself into a massive shopping mall food court’s worth of logical pretzels had told him so. Maybe Dagon and Anser before her had been right that there was a way out of the Dark Mirror Court, but it couldn’t be that easy, or else more people would have done it. Even if most of the other Dark Mirror senshi preferred the endless, freezing emptiness of Mirrorspace to the real world where real people needed real live senshi to help protect them, Levi would have left by now, if leaving were actually that easy.
He would have, wouldn’t he? ……Of course he would have. Obviously.)
Why did Reiki’s head spin and his lungs shrivel up like the prelude to a panic attack, forcing him to sit on this stupid bench when the cute slut who made it worth coming this way wasn’t even here to listen to him bullshit about whatever was on his mind today, whether it was some serious magical girl dilemma or not?
One thing that made sense, though: Reiki didn’t feel like he could breathe again until he heard Yuki’s voice on the other end, telling him, “Hey, Birthday Boy. You’re on speaker for my Twitch audience, so behave yourself, okay?”
“What d’you mean, telling me to behave myself?” Reiki didn’t know how he could slip so easily into this when the dread about powering up kept scratching and yowling at the door to his mind, as if he had just let it outside only for it to decide that it wanted to be inside actually. But either way, he didn’t miss a beat in reminding Yuki, “Both of us are exceedingly lucky that Rei-ojisan had a really good sense of humor about what happened when you first met him, Gorgeous—”
“Hey, hey, aiaiai—hey!! We don’t need to go over that on speaker-phone, do we, ********? I mean, do we, really?”
“No, no, you’re right. It’s not polite to tell your audience the story on speaker-phone.” Reiki sighed, grip tightening around his phone as if he didn’t already know the answer. “So, can I come over, then? I can tell these lovely people the story in person and anyway, you’re probably cold without me there.”wc: 1,980.
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Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2023 9:19 pm
Getting over to the little place that Yuki had on rent-to-own was easy. Getting inside was likewise easy: in the same way that Yuki knew the front door code for Reiki and Haruhi’s building, and had a key into their apartment, Reiki had one of the spare keys to Yuki’s place. He kept it next to his own home key, on a rainbow-striped lanyard that he’d bought at Hot Topic forever and a day ago. (……The day that Aunt Satomi had forgotten him at the mall and he’d needed to try and find his own way home despite the patchy cell-service back then, his phone’s battery trying its best to die on him, and part of him really not wanting to go back, not when he knew good and goddamn well that Dad would not be happy about his sister coming home drunk, without his teenage son.
But as he unfastened his shoes to leave them by the door, Reiki took several deep breaths, telling himself to just……put those thoughts away. Put them away. Put them away and then leave them there. Memories of things Satomi had long since apologized for weren’t important even when it was an appropriate time for them. If such a time existed, “right before joining Yuki on one of streams” distinctly didn’t count. Reiki had no business dwelling on things that happened in high school and had mostly only upset his ******** Dad.)
Thankfully, the time it took Reiki to pad upstairs and down the hall gave him enough room to breathe deeply and clear his mind of any such distractions. Outside the room where Yuki kept his gaming setup, Reiki gave himself an extra moment to adjust his bag, to summon all the energy that he had in him, to ready himself for a new audience (even if precedent said that he usually wound up ignoring them sooner or later). Conceal, don’t feel, put on a show, Reiki told himself, because it was the only sensible approach to the emotional tempest dogging at his heels today. Time to get out of his own head and into the head of the Reiki he played whenever guest-starring in any of Yuki’s videos.
Step one, a swift, sharp knock to announce his presence.
Step two, a few beats until—“Door’s open,” Yuki called from the other side.
Step three, insides crackling like live-wires—as if someone had replaced his soul with freshly lit dynamite—Reiki stomped inside with an exceptionally put-upon groan (overselling it somewhat, he realized, but he wanted Yuki’s mics to pick up any noise he made). He yanked the door shut too harshly—definitely loud enough for the viewers to hear—and dropped his bag by the wall. A quick huff over into the glow of Yuki’s ring-light, and without any fanfare (nor waiting for Yuki to hand him the black kitty ears headset), Reiki flopped into Yuki’s lap. With a sparkly-eyed pout, he twisted himself around so he could get himself comfortable, leaning against Yuki’s soft chest and belly. Clearly too gay to sit properly, Reiki draped his long legs over the arm-rest and out of the chair.
Dropping his head, Reiki nuzzled at Yuki’s shoulder and whispered, “The neighbor kids put googly eyes and pipe-cleaners on your mailbox again.”
“Well, I do love being the luckiest man alive here, ********,” Yuki deadpanned as if Reiki had said something Yuki could do anything about right this second, “but you know you need your mic on for the folks at home.”
Although he played at sticking out his tongue and acting supremely aggrieved by this practical consideration, Reiki didn’t mean it. All part of creating some kind of narrative within the stream, spinning how he actually felt today into something that might entertain Yuki’s viewers and, somewhat less likely, help Reiki make any internal sense out of his emotions. Maybe he betrayed some of the game in how little he actually fussed about putting the head-set on, or maybe that happened with how, once he’d handled that, he cheated his body more toward the camera.
“I said,” he drawled, allowing a very slight whine to creep into his voice, “what game are we playing today, Gorgeous? Also, hi, Internet people~!”
That got a snort out of Yuki—probably at the blatant lie that no one else would be able to clock Reiki on. “That’s a bit up in the air right now, actually? We were gonna play some Skyrim, but something ******** going on with my mods or something. It keeps crashing and a livestream of me fixing the stupid thing doesn’t sound as fun as a livestream where I actually play a game, y’know?”
For a moment, Reiki pretended to consider that (really, he was squinting at some of the current comments in the chat: a lot of people saying “hi!” at him, a couple people suggesting different games, a mod warning one commenter to stop suggesting Hogwarts Legacy or they’d get banned, someone else telling people to check off <******** guest stars” and <******** in thigh-highs” on their bingo cards……the usual suspects, really).
Sticking his tongue out ever so slightly, Reiki shook his head. “No, you’re right. Not enough money-shots of your sexy hands in that kinda stream to be worth it. Now, a livestream of you messing around with my brother’s Roomba, on the other hand…? Something where you can actually use those magic fingers?”
“Duly noted, but since Grumpy’s Roomba is presumably at his apartment……” Yuki snorted fondly, clicking through his library of games. “We could pick up letting you react to one of the Fallout games from a historian-adjacent perspective?”
“Mmm, maybe nah?” Reiki wrinkled his nose. “I don’t really wanna analyze the New California Republic’s tax policies or whatever on my birthday.…”
“Hey, yeah, that’s right—everybody in the chat? It’s ******** and his brother’s birthday today, so you all need to be extra nice to him, okay?” Perfectly on cue, “happy birthday!” messages rushed in to fill the chat. Some came with stickers or emojis of confetti, cake, and party hats. “Yes, exactly,” Yuki said. “That’s the kinda attitude I like to see.”
“Love you, too.” Ducking in to kiss Yuki’s cheek probably wasn’t necessary, but consider: Reiki felt like it. “Mn, what kinds of new things do we have to look at?”
Yuki hmmm’d. “Oh, there’s the new monster boyfriend otome game I was telling you about, if you want?”
“Oooh, from the indie studio with the cool name? And you know some of the artists?”
“Roomed with one of them at Northwestern and everything.” Already anticipating the selection, Yuki opened the game. “So, I know there’s some hidden, deeper story going on here like in Hatoful Boyfriend? But I’ve been avoiding the spoilers, so I don’t know anything about it.”
“I hope it’s a way to unlock a polyamorous route….”
“It won’t be, ********, but as always, I admire your relentless optimism and refusal to stop hoping for cool things like that.”
As he shrugged, Reiki made a throaty little sound that mirrored the gesture. “Not about hope in that sense, honestly? I simply believe that we deserve a queer otome game that has actual polyamorous routes that are unique unto themselves, y’know? Not like those ‘polyamory’—” Careful not to knock Yuki’s precious face, Reiki gave a theatrical gesture and mimed deeply sarcastic quotation marks with his fingers. “—mods for Dragon Age and Mass Effect, where all it does is let you romance as many companions as you want. Y’know, instead of exploring a whole new story, the way it should be for actual polyamory.”
“That’s as may be,” Yuki supposed, “but I honestly don’t think the hidden ‘finish all of these endings to get the real story’ s**t will be a polyamorous route.”
“Okay, so what do you think that it’ll be?”
“Genuinely no idea, ********. I haven’t even started any of the routes in this one yet.”
“Awww, Gorgeous, were you waiting for me or something?”
No words came for the answer out of Yuki. All he did: lean over and kiss Reiki’s cheek.
Which hardly counted as unusual for them, not even in front of Yuki’s Twitch audience. Showering each other in open affection had defined their relationship for almost as long as they’d had one, despite Greg’s best efforts at shaming Reiki and emotionally brow-beating him out of being so intimate with someone else—no matter how many times Reiki had tried to reassure him that Yuki was aromantic. That, as far as romance went, Reiki was monogamously committed to Greg. As soon as he and Yuki had been able to return to acting how they damn well pleased with each other, they’d swiftly done so. None of this cheek-kiss should’ve registered as anything more than cute.
And yet, Reiki’s cheeks and neck flooded with heat. He buried his face in his palms, but to no avail. As Yuki reported from some of the comments people threw out there, Reiki did exactly nothing to hide how red he’d gotten. “Like the gayest, most fabulous strawberry I’ve ever seen in my life,” according to somebody who gave Yuki a sizable tip for the privilege of guaranteed acknowledgement and being specifically read aloud for everybody else.
Worse, as Reiki tried to calm himself, he couldn’t help but wonder, Would we still do this if Gorgeous knew about Murikabushi?
Would he still let me sit here if he knew about Murikabushi?
He’d look at me differently, wouldn’t he? Of course—how could he not? How much differently, though? Would that Mirror-Thing be the only aspect he could see anymore? Could we even try to salvage anything?
How terrible a person am I for even remotely doubting him, or worrying about any of this? Is it stupid? It’s stupid, isn’t it?
What is the matter with me? You’d think a girl would learn……
At least all the loading screens had finished their business by the time Reiki dragged himself back into the moment.
Bunny-wrinkling his nose, he tilted his head at the main title screen. “Okay, but if the secret hidden endgame isn’t a polyamory route, I’m calling ‘homophobia.’ And ‘shenanigans.’”
Snickering indulgently, Yuki shook his head. “And why, dare I ask, will you be doing that?”
“I mean, what else am I supposed to call it? You cannot put make-believe boys who look like this—” Reiki pouted more than entirely necessary, pointing at one of the vaguely anime-looking boyfriends on the title card. Everything about this pale little a*****e screamed “tsundere, and probably some kind of demon” from the twisty little horns and black irises with fire-red pupils to the pointed scowl and the pristine, high-end outfit he’d tried so desperately to rumple up. “—in a game with make-believe boys who look like that—” Next, he pointed at a darker-skinned boy with vibrant blue hair, a studded black leather jacket, and a charming, megawatt smile. Offhand, nothing about him looked especially monstrous, but the crescent moon charm dangling off his necklace, right next to a Magen David, made Reiki inclined to guess sexy Jewish werewolf. “—and then tell me that I’m only allowed to romance one of them, okay? Like……ugh! No!”
“For the record, guys? He’s been pointing at these two pretties.” Helpfully, Yuki traced his cursor around their faces. “So, I guess I know who we’re going to try and chase after, huh?”
“Uh yeah, duh. We’re doing both of them.”
“First one, then the other? Or are we really gonna try to beat the game into giving you polyamory like ‘Oh, please, it’s his birthday and he’s too gay to pick just one’?”
“Yeah, exactly. My birthday, and I like living dangerously with my otome boyfriends.” Idly bobbing one foot up and down to no particular purpose, Reiki smirked. “Let’s try to seduce them both. Don’t I deserve two cute monster otome boyfriends?”
“Two might be underselling how much you deserve, actually. You’d have a million cute monster otome boyfriends if I had anything to say about it.” Humming pleasantly, Yuki clicked through to the new game screen. “None of them could compare to yours truly anyway, and it’s not like you’d love me any less because they can write sad love poems about you in their diaries. Anyway, what should our protag boy’s name be, Princess?”
After a little debate—and a failed attempt at naming him <********>, thwarted by some asinine censorship programming—they settled on calling the protagonist “Momo” just to get it over with and get on with the game.
Initially, it sure seemed like the only things that made this any different from any number of other otome games were the cute monster boyfriends and the fact that they lived out in the open about being cute monsters, like Monster High dolls. Even the option of playing with a male main character wasn’t that special, since plenty of other games out there had that option (or were just outright gay).
Still, they got dropped into a fairly standard high school setting (some weird amalgamation of American high school and Japanese high school, though that made sense, given that the game devs had likely wanted to include some standard high school romance otome tropes but they weren’t Japanese or working for a Japanese studio). Right at the start of a new term, because that made the most logical sense. Why would you start at any other point unless the protag is going to be a new transfer student, which Momo distinctly did not appear to be?
Immediately, the “childhood friend who’s always been in love with you” boy made himself apparent, a socially awkward Frankenstein’s Creature kinda boy named Adam. After him, they got to the “hot glasses senpai who’s bad at showing his emotions but will probably go feral to protect you” boyfriend (a half-vampire named Himena, whose father “definitely wasn’t anybody that you’d know”). Soon afterward, they also found the “hot class rep who’s totally on top of things externally, but Reiki knew that boy had to be hiding his massive emotional and/or mental health issues somewhere” (a dragon-boy whose only downside was having been named “Ryuu,” as if that weren’t the most predictable name imaginable).
Took them a while to find the magical boyfriend characters who Reiki wanted to chase after. Judah, the one with the blue hair, they found in the Gay-Straight Alliance after-school club. He introduced himself by listing his “he/they” pronouns—
“Ohhhh, he has blue hair and pronouns?!” Reiki kept his eager bouncing to a minimum, since he was still in Yuki’s lap, but that gave him a bigger challenge than he liked admitting. “I love him, I need him, I’m going to marry that boy—”
“We haven’t even gotten to your demon boy, ********,” Yuki reminded him, the roll of his eyes obvious even without Reiki checking the viewfinder on Yuki’s camera. “Calm down, okay? Don’t rush things.”
—and almost immediately thereafter, Judah announced his intent to change the name of the club. “Gay-Straight Alliance,” he argued, was good for promoting solidarity and building some sense of community. Where it failed, though, was that, A., it opened the floor too much for the straight members to dominate the conversation instead of listening, and B., it left too many people out because although plenty of people could say “gay” to describe themselves, they also didn’t necessarily feel explicitly included by that word. Making sure everyone who belonged in the space felt welcome there was one of Judah’s top priorities as club president.
“I’m considering putting it to a vote at our next meeting,” Judah told them, spelled out on the screen and read in his VA’s vibrant, energetic tenor. “Do you have any ideas for other club names?”
The options had a few ideas, including two different ways of refusing to directly answer and one option for keeping the name exactly as it was, but only one option made Reiki’s heart go doki-doki: “Oh, oh! ‘Queer Voices Coalition’! Tell him that we should try to call it the ‘Queer Voices Coalition,’ I love that name, it’s perfect, awww!”
When that choice went over well, Reiki had to wonder if any choice would’ve had more or less the same effect.
It took them somewhat longer to find the demon boy who Reiki was looking for—long enough for them to have spent two lunch periods with Judah and get a special secret admirer note in their Momo’s locker—but eventually, they managed it. The trick, it seemed, was going down behind the school during lunch block. Lurking there, Elegy sat atop one of the dumpsters like a Boy Who Would Be King but with his legs cocked open at the exact right angle to show exactly how few ******** he wanted everyone to think he gave. His attitude, exactly as Reiki had predicted, screamed “tsundere” louder than anything, but damn if he wasn’t endearingly feisty about it. Seemed like it’d take a little while to get anywhere, though.
After a second meeting, it seemed like maybe it might take less time than Reiki had thought.
Then, they found Elegy skulking around the library around the same time as Momo, and he blushed his way through insisting that he hadn’t come here because he was thinking about Momo or anything. It wasn’t like he had Momo on his mind! He didn’t need anything special or want to see you, he didn’t even know why he was here, he really didn’t know, but anyway, maybe, could Momo meet him later tonight? Like, over by the park?
On one hand, Momo had an actual proper date with Judah for tonight.
On the other hand, though, the park wasn’t too far from the place where Momo lived with his Dad, so it wouldn’t have been too hard to let Judah take Momo home from the date, then go out to the park.
“Y’know, it’s kinda funny,” Yuki commented airily sometime after they got Elegy to start opening up, partway through the date.
“What,” Reiki said, gently mussing his fingers over Yuki’s hair, “you mean the way that our demon bae is probably stalking us to this bistro right now?
“No, I mean……” Yuki huffed, tilting his head a bit. “Like, that thing he just said about making his own chocolate, even though he’s allergic to it? Doesn’t that guy you like—”
“Let’s not talk about that, Gorgeous!!”
Protesting aside, Reiki did give Yuki a nod. He’d gotten that correct: Levi did make his own chocolate. He had an Etsy storefront where he sold some of what he made. And while Levi obviously had better things to do than watch some random stream of Yuki’s that happened to occur on Reiki and Junsei’s birthday, Reiki still didn’t want to risk too much. The Internet lasted forever. If someone clipped this part of the stream and reposted it, then who knew what kinds of trouble could have happened?
Fortunately, the game kept moving, and soon enough, they had something else to talk about.
“Ugh, he’s being so shady, ********. Noooo. He’s not shady—”
“I mean, sure, not in the same sense of ‘shade came from reading, but reading came first,’ but—”
“But nothing!” (More or less) Playfully, Reiki swatted the back of his hand at Yuki’s shoulder. No real intent behind it, and it definitely wouldn’t hurt. Reiki simply needed to make a point about how his QPP needed to stop being mean to his demonic make-believe boyfriend. “He just wants to take us somewhere special. How does that not read as making progress with him?”
“It’s the middle of the ******** night!” With a huff, Yuki pushed his glasses back up. “Who the Hell wants to take you to meet his friends in the middle of the night?”
Reiki’s first impulse screamed, Well, Faustite would, but you haven’t met him.
His second impulse screamed, I plead the Fifth on the grounds that I have an inalienable right to not air my dubious choices with certain Negaverse boys all over the ******** Internet.
He went with his third impulse and told Yuki, “Well, I think that we should trust him, so click on the agree option.”
“Oh,” Elegy responded when Yuki did the thing. “Oh, that—thanks. Yeah, that—I mean, not that I care or anything? But my friends, y’know? They’re great, I’m sure they’ll be crazy about you.”
Absolutely nothing untoward about that, then. Not that Reiki had a right to gloat or preen, right this second. He hadn’t won anything, and admittedly, the game had plenty of time to vindicate Yuki about his whole “Ooooh, it’s so shady and weird for a guy to want you to come meet his friends in the middle of the night, this probably isn’t on the level, ********, why are we trying to romance him anyway” nonsense he’d decided to be on about.
For one thing, Elegy was fictional and fictional boys could never break your heart or hurt you in the ways of which real boys were capable. For another thing, Elegy distinctly was not Faustite, and he certainly wouldn’t do anything so crazy as—
“Is this a ******** burned down hotel?”
Pursing his lips, Reiki considered the scene surrounding Momo and Elegy, the place where Elegy had taken them.
“It……” he said. “It does……certainly seem to be, uh.……a place that is no longer in the best condition—”
“Yeah, ********! Because it’s been burned down!”
“Just because that’s true doesn’t mean…” Reiki shook his head. “Maybe it’s just a scenic detour—”
“After you,” Elegy said, with remarkably little snapping, holding open the door to the burned-out hotel. “My friends are just down in the basement. They’re kinda wild, but don’t worry, okay? You’re safe as long as you’re with me.”
Reiki took a deep breath and steadied himself exactly not at all.
Deflating, he nodded that they needed to go inside. At this point, he wasn’t okay with backing down, so he had to see this through, even if the end result made him want to scream into a pillow.
What the ******** was this game, exactly, and who gave it the permission to plagiarize his <******** life.
wc: 3,685.
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