Quote:
backdated to ~March 2nd.
The prospect of coming back to Mirrorspace had dogged Reiki’s heels all ******** day, never letting him forget that he had a sacred, magical destiny-flavored duty—or ******** whatever—to return to that gods-forsaken, arctic-freezing s**t-hole and keep entertaining it or, like……whatever he ******** did when he visited. Nothing good, or at least he couldn’t imagine that Mirrorspace got anything good out of him coming.… Part of him honestly hoped that it didn’t, because honestly? Kinda high-key ******** Mirrorspace for, like, literally everything about this entire ******** Mirrorspace for summoning him, or making him feel compelled to visit, or whatever was actually happening when he got those nagging sensations like some TV sitcom grandma whining about how her grandkids never called her anymore, because he didn’t know what those feelings were and at this point, Reiki didn’t ******** care.
The important point in everything was that, in the words of contemporary philosopher Kourtney Kardashian, Kim, there’s people that are dying. People out in the real world, not the smoke-and-bullshit nonsensical ******** void that Mirrorspace occupied. People who didn’t know what was going on with the magical girl gang war, who wouldn’t have been able to protect themselves if they had known anything.
And ******** Mirrorspace for acting like the Good, and Right, and Correct place for Reiki was running around its empty, endlessly copy-pasted hallways full of nothing, or ambling around among the trees and benches that only made themselves any less offensive than the Mirrorspace part rather than the Mirrorscape because they weren’t that morally and ethically offensive shade of <********>, or ******** faffing around, cowering on his stupid little island in the void with nothing ******** on it.
Allegedly, that was supposed to change tonight.
Fair enough, Reiki realized that the crystals he kept finding in Mirrorspace seemed to do things when he cracked them open on that island. The red one he’d broken had given him the floating kitsunebi that illuminated all the empty space, showing him exactly how much nothing Mirrorspace apparently thought its senshi deserved. (White Moon senshi, Reiki recalled as he always did while thinking about this blatant unfairness, got entire planets to themselves. White Moon senshi got worlds full of history to discover, and problems to fix, and an actual promise that they could someday sustain life, if Kerberos’s reports of bioluminescent bunnies and assorted other adorable critters were anything to judge by.)
So, tonight, he meant to break open one of the violet crystals that he sometimes found on his utterly bullshit little heroin-covered baseball field. Allegedly, he’d witness this accomplish something.
As he dragged out his patrols and scampered over rooftops to avoid any unwanted mirrors, though, Reiki couldn’t put any words on why he ******** cared. Not like he could call on Cosmos and expect to hear some kind of answer—from the sound of things per Blossom, she was some kind of Alpha and Omega magical girl, and therefore had better things to do than come play Stanley Kubrick for a filthy little Chaos rat who couldn’t even leave the Chaos realm that he’d been bound to—but he yearned to ask her, to ask anyone who might’ve helped, “What’s my ******** motivation?”
Not getting bothered by Mirrorspace, more than anything else.
Lack of desire to get yelled at by this asinine magical realm.
But the desire not to get hassled could only motivate Reiki to do so much, and as the night wore on, he struggled more and more to let it motivate him into actually sucking up and visiting Mirrorspace, the way he knew he had ******** how did anyone in their right mind purport to be a magical girl and then actively desire to squirrel away in an endless void, wasting their time on pursuits that built nothing, accomplished nothing, stole resources and potential hands-on-deck from people who were dying, and most importantly, helped ******** NO ONE?! Literally none of this was what Reiki had assumed was implied by Levi asking him if he wanted to become a magical boy or by Soya telling him that he could be a Dark Mirror senshi! Reiki had gotten into this for the people out there! In the real world! The people who ******** needed someone to be the bulwark between them and a youma, or between them and some jumped up Negaverse Captain with an ugly ******** bow, delusions of grandeur, and a technically acceptable face.
……Reiki had blamed his reticence to come today on struggling to pick the right song.
After all, when he’d come before—early, at that! without being asked! on his <******** birthday, besides!—he’d gotten the feeling that he needed to make all of his visits into elaborate musical numbers or else.
Or else……what?
Exactly.
So, he’d needed a song on his lips today, and nothing had felt right. He’d considered The Dead Kennedys (either “Holiday in Cambodia” or their version of “I Fought the Law”), only to figure that belting one of those songs in Mirrorspace would no doubt accompany him finally running into someone else and having to explain what the ******** he’d meant by lyrics like “Kiss a** while you b***h so you can get rich but your boss gets richer off you” or “The law don’t mean s**t if you’ve got the right friends; that’s how this country’s run.… You can get away with murder if you’ve got a badge, I fought the law and I won”—which……no? No? Reiki was fine without needing to explain that for anybody, actually.
After them, he’d considered Arctic Monkeys, but the only song of theirs that had come to mind had been “Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High” and Reiki really didn’t feel like dignifying that song with his vocal chords right now. Not that he didn’t like it—as much as it made him feel like a basic b***h to admit, he did enjoy the stupid song—but lately, it had only made him think of one person in particular.…
One person who was very much on fire and probably dying within a couple months, a state of affairs about which Reiki could do literally nothing except show Faustite kindness while having the decency not to patronize him about how he was dying, or stop standing up to him when he was being particularly obstreperous just because, oh, he was dying and according to some people, that was a “get out of consequences free” card for anything related to acting like a jackass.
Not that Faustite had acted like a jackass any more or less than usual, last time they’d seen each other, when Reiki had dived in to get Cybele off of him.… Not that Reiki could take any comfort in this fact (he couldn’t), especially not because he only seemed to find Faustite when he wasn’t actually looking for him, which probably meant that Faustite would die and Reiki wouldn’t hear anything for weeks, if not months, because why would he? Nobody had any obligation to tell him anything about Faustite, or about his condition, or anything like any of that. He’d probably only find out by accident, second-or-third-hand—most likely not even from Albite so much as some friend-of-a-White-Moon-friend who wanted to gloat about how they’d taken such a formidable Negaverse General off the table, as if Faustite wasn’t even a person, as if no one cared about him or was allowed to do so—and when that happened, Reiki wouldn’t have any right to be upset.
Not about the unideal circumstances of such revelations, not about tangentially friendly White Moon types assuming that he couldn’t hate the Negaverse without also hating all the people trapped within it, not even about Faustite dying.…… Acting like he had any right to feel upset about Faustite dying would probably insult Albite and Space-Buns and everyone else who actually did have that kind of right, because they really knew him.
Who even was Reiki to Faustite? Some obnoxious, annoying Mirror-Thing who never listened to him and couldn’t make anything he felt into Faustite’s problem when: A., it wasn’t; B., Faustite had infinitely better things to do than deal with whatever unnameable feelings Reiki had decided to catch about him; C., among those better things, Faustite counted a coterie of cute sluts that at least seemed to include Albite, Heliodor, and Space-Buns, plus whoever all else Reiki didn’t know about; and D., (most importantly) the last ******** Mirror-Thing who’d inserted himself into Faustite’s life had gotten all hacked off about Feelings that he’d caught for Faustite, as if it had even remotely been Faustite’s fault that Sinope’s feelings hadn’t been reciprocated, and then he’d taken it upon himself to murder Faustite’s family, and put him through Hell, and then disappear into the ******** aether instead of taking the consequences of his actions like the ******** adult he’d wanted to act like so badly when he’d been murdering people.
Reiki could not be another Sinope to Faustite.
He would not be another Sinope to Faustite.
He would not listen to Faustite opening up about something so horrific and painful—even if he’d only done it so that Reiki could understand what exactly he’d meant about the Court harboring murderers beyond “I don’t know what you mean but yeah that tracks with what I’ve seen of us and our completely head-a** motivations”—only to turn around and commit the exact same original sin as Sinope had done. Namely, making his own feelings into Faustite’s ******** problem, when Faustite hadn’t even done anything except……exist. Be annoyed with Reiki’s presence. Have a soft, genuine, decent conversation with him before needing to leave.
Nothing to indicate any interest deeper than “hate your Court, not you” and certainly nothing that would’ve justified Reiki acting as if Obaasan hadn’t taught him, his siblings, and his cousins better than that about consent, and respecting people in relationships, and generally not running roughshod over other people’s boundaries like James T. Kirk running roughshod over Starfleet’s Prime Directive.
Never mind the inherent stupidity of doing that over feelings to which Reiki could ascribe an endless litany of song lyrics, but no concrete, descriptive names.
……So, yeah. Better to leave Arctic Monkeys out of this, since Reiki currently couldn’t go there without dipping into all kinds of messy emotional garbage that he had to simply swallow down and deal with on his own. Ditto that for “Devil’s Backbone” and “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God).” Plus, “Rest In Peace” from the musical episode of Buffy (which, frankly, also got ruled out on the basis of “Reiki didn’t want to finally run into another living soul in Mirrorspace and have to explain to them why he thought it was anything but deeply cringe at best to sing a song from a Joss Whedon show in this, the year 2023 of the Common Era, as if he ******** asked whether or not it was cringe”).
(All the literal teenagers running around the magical girl war? That was ******** cringe. How could ANY faction except the aliens like Lysvi claim to have a moral high-ground over anybody else when EVERYONE made literal children fight their ******** battles for them? That, more than anything else, absolutely epitomized the idea of <******** cringe,” in Reiki’s less-than-humble opinion—but nobody had asked him about that and precedent said that nobody would because his opinions didn’t matter to anyone but him, so whatever.)
Reiki had considered assaulting whatever Mirrorspace had instead of ears with Doja Cat, but he hadn’t been able to get through a single verse of “Boss b***h” without his brain first ping-ponging onto Jay-Z and “99 Problems,” and then even more inexplicably, onto Awkwafina and Margaret Cho with “Green Tea”—and frankly, with his luck? Not only would he have wound up running into someone else while going on like that, he also would’ve run into someone else who would not have understood worth a good goddamn why lyrics like “As a matter of fact, got a concave a**, still the hoes line up like a paragraph” or “Said, b***h, I’m the after, you’ve been the before; I been the stallion, you been the seahorse” were brilliant and extremely funny, actually.
Still, Reiki had not (much to his chagrin) been able to avoid Mirrorspace all day, so ultimately, he’d powered up, and thrown himself through a mirror, and gone with the first song that came to mind:
“She’s locked up with her spinning wheel, she can’t,” he started, as soon as his feet touched down in the eerie grayish-white abyss to which he’d chained himself by walking through the gods-forsaken mirror, “recall what it was like to feel. She says, ‘This room’s gonna be my grave, and there’s no one who can sa-aa-aaa-ve me.’”
Briefly, Reiki looked around the entrance chamber. Considered trying the doors into the throne room again, even though he knew by now that they wouldn’t work, that a Super senshi such as himself wasn’t trusted to go in there unattended. (Not without good reason, he could admit, since Reiki currently felt inclined to try making the Black Mirror undo all of this and take away his senshi powers, just send him back to being normal and non-magical and utterly unburdened by putting up with Mirrorspace and it’s assorted garbage.) He thought about traipsing through the halls again, as usual, because at least Mirrorspace felt, to him, like it was more or less enjoying itself when he did that (until it sooner or later got sick of his attitude).
Ultimately, instead, Reiki turned to the mirror that led into the Mirrorscape. “She sits down to her colored thread,” he continued, hesitating with his fingers on the mirror’s surface. “She knows lovers waking up in their beds, she says ‘How long can I live this way? Is there no one I can pay to let me go?’
“‘Cause I’m half-sick of shadows. I wanna see the sky! Everyone else can watch as the sun goes down so why can’t I-I-I-Iiiiiii…” Drawing out that last note of the pre-chorus, Reiki summoned enough will to throw himself through the mirror, into the marginally more colorful section of the void that had the trees, and the benches, and the pathway that led up to the citadel. “And it’s raining, and the stars are falling from the sky, and the wind—and the wind, I know it’s cold. I’ve been waaaaiting for the day I will surely die and it’s here—and it’s here for I’ve been told, that I’ll die before I’m old, and the wind, I know it’s cold……”
Dimly, he recalled finding Faustite on the roof of that motel. Remembered what Faustite had asked him in response to Reiki’s admittedly abstruse description of Mirrorspace, by way of a classic film reference and some nonsense about dead French philosophers. “Do you like being alive,” Faustite had asked him, genuinely, not as some thinly veiled threat.
Reiki had told him “yes.” He’d meant that answer with all his heart. Death usually put such a fine, finalizing point on everything—if not for your starseed, then at least for your current incarnation and consciousness—while life had infinite potential. Had Reiki thought his perpetual love of Star Trek had the right audience in Faustite, he might have invoked a line from Jadzia Dax: “You Klingons embrace death too easily. You treat death like a lover. I think living is a lot more attractive. I think an honorable victory is better than an honorable defeat.”
As Reiki traversed the path up to the citadel, though, part of him wondered if he hadn’t judged that question and his feelings on the matter far too quickly. Given the choice between living as Mirrorspace’s Murikabushi, and letting himself go so someone else could get his starseed and try again……
Reiki couldn’t do it. Not really. He had too many responsibilities. But the way that felt like the only real reason—
“She looks up to the mirrored glass,” he picked up singing, pretty much entirely to get his mind off that line of thought. “She sees a handsome horse and rider pass. She says ‘That man’s gonna be my death, ‘cause he’s all I’ve ever wanted in my life! And I know he doesn’t know my name and that all the girls are all the same to him, but still I’ve gotta get out of this place ‘cause I don’t think I can face another night!
“‘Where I’m half-sick of shadows, and I can’t see the sky!’” Reiki dithered outside the entrance to the citadel, staring up into the endless, empty black, which offered none of the promise of space but only an embrace that made Harry Harlow’s Wire Mother look downright warm and inviting by comparison. “‘Everyone else can watch as the tide comes in, so why can’t I-I-I-Iiiiiiiii?’”
He rode out another round of the chorus still outside the Citadel, but alas, he couldn’t wait around forever. Reiki had, for once, come to Mirrorspace with a specific purpose in mind. Sooner he got it over with, the better for all involved.
Throwing open the doors to the citadel, Reiki continued, “And there’s willow trees, and little breezes, waves, and walls, and flowers.…”
Pacing around the mirror at the center, he sang, “And there’s moonlight every single night as I’m locked in these towers! So I’ll meet my death but with my last breath, I’ll sing to him my love and he’ll see my face in another place—and with that, the glass above……”
Reiki leapt into the center of the mirror. Let himself phase through it.
Dropped into the vast nothingness of his little island with a sigh.
“……her cracked into a million bits and she,” he went on, sotto voce, even though this place, of all places, contained no risk of anybody finding him because he got Too Loud, “cried out, ‘So the story fits! But then, I could’ve guessed it all along ‘cause now some drama queen is gonna write a song for me’…”
As he reached into his subspace pocket—“She went down to her little boat and she……”
As he took out one of his violet crystals—“Broke the chain and began to float away.
“And as the blood froze in her veins, she said, ‘Well, then, that explains a thing or two!’” Looking around, Reiki wondered how much space he might need for whatever came from this crystal. Would’ve been nice, honestly, for Mirrorspace to just spoil the answer for him. He didn’t want to deal with guesswork, with picking some random spot on his void-island and hoping that it worked out. “‘Cause I know I’m the curséd one, I know I’m meant to die. Everyone else can watch as their dreams untie, so why can’t I-I-I-Iiiiiii?’
“And it’s raining,” Reiki sang, picking out a spot near the center of the plane. A little bit off from the true center, just in case, but……well, it wasn’t as though he had anything else around here to bother with. “And the stars are falling from the sky. And the wind—and the wind, I know it’s cold. I’ve been waiting for the day I will surely die.…
“And it’s here….” He held the crystal between fingers from both hands.
“And it’s here for I’ve been told that I’ll die before I’m old. And the wind I know it’s……” Taking a deep breath, Reiki cracked the crystal open.
The glittering fragments lilted to the ground, and where they hit, black roses sprang up. Feeling compelled to move, Reiki started walking. He let the crystal fragments drift down as he moved, and along the trail, more roses grew into being. By the time the crystal ran out, Reiki had a thicket of them, maybe eight feet long.
……Well, they were pretty, he had to give them that.
Under the light from his floating kitsunebi, Reiki couldn’t see any traces of red or purple like you normally saw with the flowers that people passed off as black. Only pure black, which suited him just fine. Might as well enjoy the color scheme, seeing as he was stuck with it, probably until he died.
At least he wasn’t stuck with some atrocious white fuku that would wash out his complexion and make him look like a corpse on his way to a burial plot. But as he paced up and down the length of his rose-thicket, waiting until he got the vibe from Mirrorspace like he was clear to go for now, Reiki had to wonder if the obviously superior aesthetics were even worth it. Not that the White Moon promised anything better, truly. Even if Reiki could get out—something Anser and Dagon both believed in, but of which Reiki remained unconvinced—then who was to say that changing sides wouldn’t simply make him feel worse?
Maybe he wouldn’t have to deal with any guilt, if he lost the memories of his family like people leaving the Negaverse all seemed to do, but……he’d expected this whole magical girl thing to turn out unilaterally good for him, to be That Special Thing his life was missing to make everything finally make sense. From how some senshi talked about their magic and starseeds and all of that, Reiki’s guesstimate should’ve gotten more or less validated by reality. Sure, factor in some wiggle-room to allot for the increased responsibilities of a senshi, because truly, you did not get to have magical superpowers without an obligation to use them for protecting people who could not protect themselves.
But instead of finally feeling whole, Reiki had wound up feeling broken.
Instead of feeling healed, he felt wounded.
Instead of feeling excited and empowered whenever he powered up, he increasingly only bothered because he had that obligation to use his magic responsibly, which allowed no room for doing nothing, as if he could simply opt out of being what he was.
Who was to say that running away to the White Moon would help with any of that? Given Reiki’s luck, it no doubt would’ve done the opposite.
At least the roses that his crystals could grow looked pretty. Felt like polishing the brass on the Titanic, but Reiki would take what he could get.
