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 Posted: Sat Apr 08, 2023 12:30 am
Quote: slightly future-dated to happen after Easter and Passover. future-dated relative to when this first posted, but ultimately, the timing is “After Kerberos tells Muri that Faustite full-youmafied” and “Before Cybele’s Princess ORP, where Faustite was very NOT full-youmafied.”
More than fair enough, considering they’d been the beans about Arsenolite murdering a man—stealing his starseed, even—right in front of Reiki, and acting like nothing about this was objectionable, as if Reiki ought to simply agree with Arsenolite’s actions because both of them had Chaos auras. And at the time, Reiki hadn’t denied that what Haruhi had spilled to Levi had been important and emotionally ********. However, it had been Pride Season and StarFest Season—truly the most wonderful and important time of the year—and Reiki had not had the spare mental capacity to have that conversation without jeopardizing one of his biggest money-making periods. He’d burned his candle at both ends for almost two months straight, between the usual gigs and trying to add magical girl nonsense to the mix.
Maybe he and Levi could have talked in August, after everything had calmed down. Maybe they should’ve done, exactly as Reiki had planned……except that Astraya had happened. And Reiki hadn’t been able to make himself bounce back from that as easily as he’d wanted.
Since then, he’d tried reaching out to Levi about having A Conversation, like he’d promised, but they’d kept missing each other. Levi had his work, and Reiki had his shows, and then, and then, and then, and then…… All of those “and then”s had added up so quickly that they’d found themselves in ******** April, and at this point, Reiki wondered if talking about any of this was even worth it. Levi had only asked about Reiki watching Arsenolite starseed someone and feeling too paralyzed by fear and shock to stop him, but that felt like an entire lifetime ago, for everything that had happened since (including Arsenolite……coming to Reiki, of all people, for advice on how to be a better person about Queer Things, something that still felt like the sort of Bizarro World fever dreams that Philip K. d**k might’ve had after knocking himself on ketamine and molly at a certain famous grave near a certain famous temple in Sugamo, Toshima, Tokyo).
It hadn’t been anybody’s fault, Reiki told himself. He and Levi had both participated in the “missing each other” thing. Neither of them had meant for it to happen……but just before Easter, Reiki and Cersei had both had their annual physicals and well-visits. Hers had come back perfect, gold stars all around, especially for a shelter-rescue pit-mix who was going on eleven. Reiki’s……had gone less than well. For the most part, his assorted annual tests and whatnot had come back fine……except that, apparently, Obaasan and Ojiisan had been right to worry about whether or not Reiki had lost enough weight to merit comment, especially in light of certain notes in his medical records.
Unwittingly, he had made himself a liar to his grandparents—the ones who’d always loved him as he was and who’d inexplicably, unconditionally forgiven him when he’d been younger and had deliberately lied to them about this specific problem—and……that wasn’t good. Maybe they would believe him that he hadn’t meant it? Precedent distinctly didn’t favor Reiki’s side on this (because precedent said that Reiki’s “I ate earlier” meant “I didn’t” while his “I’m fine” meant “If I let myself drown quietly, it won’t bother anybody, right?”), but……after he had taken a mental health leave semester and distinctly not gotten any less ******** up? Maybe he could get some grace from his family about this.
Maybe he could convince them to believe that he hadn’t intended for this to happen……that, when he thought about it consciously, he’d been making efforts not to skip meals, not to deprive himself of anything, not to listen to the ever-present nagging little impulse that always told him how much better and more manageable everything would feel if he let himself chase the dragon of not eating until it gave him enough dopamine to make him feel “happy people just don’t shoot their husbands” levels of okay.
Maybe a lot of things would happen. Reiki didn’t know. Per one pearl of recovery wisdom that he ignored pretty damn consistently, he wouldn’t know anything about how anything might go until it actually happened.
But curled up on his and Haruhi’s sofa in flannel pajama bottoms, with a mug of tea steeping on the coffee table and an unzipped hoodie tossed over an old black t-shirt bearing the cover art from his favorite Hole album? Reiki couldn’t avoid the sinking feeling that he needed to suck it up and make this conversation with Levi ******** happen already. Glancing over at Soyala’s nest made that feel even more imperative. If he didn’t talk to Levi on his own, like a grown-up, Reiki didn’t doubt that Soya-hime was perfectly capable of impressing upon Levi that she felt worried about Reiki until Levi took initiative about starting things. Then, the conversation would happen, not even remotely on Reiki’s terms, and knowing himself, Reiki would make everyone involved regret the experience by lashing out like a trapped animal.
Besides, Obaasan had, in so many words, admonished him for this exact habit: “If you can use your mouth to lip-synch that delightful little song from Cardi B. and Megan Thee Stallion, Kiya, then you can use your mouth to tell that boy you fancy him.”
Not exactly what she’d had in mind, but—frankly, emotional triage ranked “how much Reiki wanted to kiss Levi on his stupid perfect mouth” distinctly below “everything else about which they’d spent nearly a year playing We Don’t Talk About Bruno, because that always works out so well for everybody.”
Reiki was so absorbed in his thoughts, he didn’t notice anybody else moving in the apartment—not until the cushions dipped and, with a grumbling sigh, Cersei flopped down to put her head in his lap. Staring up at him with those big, brown eyes……probably did not actually mean “Please reach out to Levi already” so much as “I love you, Dad, please give me skritches?”—but at least Reiki could text Levi one-handed.
texts to Levi [hey]
[i know we were supposed to talk about serious dms things WAY before this and i’ve been guilty of a LOT of procrastinating on it, i’m sorry about that, especially for the times when i’ve intentionally wanted to avoid talking]
[but i’m tired of missing each other and i really need to talk]
[are you free? can you come over?]
[please? <3]
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Posted: Sat Apr 29, 2023 1:05 pm
It wasn't that Levi was unaware that he and Reiki needed to Talk, Very Seriously. In fact,h e was deeply aware of that fact. There were so many conversations that had slipped by them--things that Levi should have been there for, as the one who brought Reiki into the Mirror. That made him responsible for Reiki in a very serious way, at least in his opinion. And it was a responsibility he had badly failed at.
But the thing was, Levi had also found powering up into Elsa to be....strange, of late.
There were things....wrong with him, as a Senshi, and he knew it. He shouldn't be having blackouts. Shouldn't be left wobbling on his feet after using his Eternal magic. Shouldn't feel a roiling, boiling bloodlust, every time he ran into someone else.
Yeah, okay, he had a horrifying monster for a sphere. But he'd never heard of anyone experiencing bleedover before. And whatever was happening to him, it made him afraid to be Elsa, and it made him more avoidant of all the serious conversations that he and Reiki had owed each other for months. Nearly a year, now.
When the messages arrived, he felt his heart jump into his throat. But.....but it was....Reiki was right. they needed to talk. He didn't have to open up about anything happening to him, didn't have to share his fears, because Reiki didn't need to be worrying aobut him.
texts to Reiki [I'm free, I'll be over asap]
And he made good on that promise. Yeah, he showed up in a slightly old Fall Out Boy t-shirt, comfy sweats, and with his hair in the world's laziest ponytail, but he did show up as quickly as he could. Reiki deserved better than Levi had been giving him, and he needed to make good.
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Posted: Mon May 29, 2023 8:34 pm
For all Ojiisan had tried to teach him better over the years, and for all he had nominally worked on various forms of mindfulness and presentness and grounding techniques in therapy, Reiki had always been and currently remained Bad at meditation. At least as Bad as he was at video games, if not more so. Whenever he tried to breathe deeply, clear his mind of the worries cluttering it, thank his anxieties for their input and then quietly ignore them, and simply inhabit the moment, Reiki’s mind always managed to find new things to worry about.
His brain was in top form with that today, no matter how many skritches he bestowed on Cersei (partially because his Best Girl always deserved them and partially to keep himself grounded in the tactile sensation of ruffling her soft fur). By the time she started stirring like she could sense someone coming down the hall, Reiki’s left hand was all covered in a small ocean. Practically enough to make a second dog, he thought, recalling his Dad’s favorite joke (told every time he got begged for pets and attention, only to end up similarly covered in fur), rubbing her back and only making the problem worse.
The knock finally roused Cersei out of Reiki’s lap. At attention and eager (as if she had not just been half-asleep in Reiki’s lap, mere moments ago), she scampered over to the door and danced around, both excited to have someone come visit and unwittingly doing her best to prevent Reiki from letting them in. “Hey,” Reiki told her gently, but probably audible enough from the other side. “Get back.… Baby, the door needs to open, okay?”
Thankfully, she took the direction well, and soon enough, Reiki gave Levi a tired smile and welcomed him in. “Do you want some tea or anything to drink,” he offered, trying not to get distracted by the fact that Levi still looked gorgeous even without putting in any effort.
Unless he’d put in a lot of effort to look like he didn’t care and Reiki was being taken for The Ride, but……Levi didn’t normally do things like that. Or anyway, Reiki didn’t think that he did.…… But Reiki had also assumed that, when Levi had said “Do you want to become a magical boy?” then held out his hand and asked if Reiki trusted him, Levi would’ve meant that he was part of a magical girl team that more actively tried to help people,
“Not like I’m—” Briefly cutting himself off in frustration with the English language (and more so at his own brain for not words-ing the comprehensibleness so well right now), Reiki waved his hand at nothing in particular, like batting away flies. “I don’t want to avoid any of the serious conversations or anything? I’m not trying to do that? But, A., tea helps and B., I sort of don’t know where to start on……all of that?”
Where even was there to start? Reiki could’ve started at the thing most prominently on his mind about senshi anything, but he didn’t even know the answer to that question. A lot of him felt like screaming about Faustite, and what had happened to him, and how it wasn’t fair, and how Reiki hated basically everything about the Negaverse as an institution but he didn’t have it in him to hate Faustite the Person (in fact, what had happened to Faustite the Person made Reiki’s inability to accept the Negaverse as an *institution* feel that much more justified).
But a lot of Reiki also felt like flipping over the kitchen table about Mirrorspace, and how it wasn’t real—or, well, the location itself blatantly existed, sure, but it didn’t really make anything. Plus, it was cold all the time, and when he visited, Reiki constantly felt like he was being Watched by someone.
Then, there was the question that had been nagging at the back of his mind for months now, the one that Reiki would’ve stolen from Mitchell and Webb. There were the things that Fang had said under the influence of Valjean’s magic, and there was the pain of knowing that he and Monoceros could only hang out whilst powered up anymore. There was the way that, every time Reiki skulked out to Kerberos’s bench, he desperately wanted to just tell Kerberos his name—his real name, the one that actually felt like his and not like some other queen’s beautiful drag that Reiki was trying and soundly failing to make the best of—because having Kerberos address him as “Murikabushi” increasingly felt like the European colonialist exaggerations about lingchi, the “death by a thousand cuts.”
There was the man who Arsenolite had murdered last summer—Raymond Callahan, a pretty nice-seeming science teacher who’d only been around to get his starseed stolen in the first place because he’d gone to Reiki’s show at Scandals—and how Reiki had only meant to postpone that Talk with Levi until after Pride season ended.
Eyes bright and tail wagging eagerly, Cersei paced about, threading little figure eights as she walked around Reiki’s legs, then over to Levi and around his legs, than back over to Reiki. With a sigh, Reiki looked over to Levi. “So……a drink? And maybe you can tell me where to start with everything?”
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Posted: Fri Jun 23, 2023 2:45 am
Levi couldn't help but smile, a little, hearing Reiki talk to Cersei. It was obvious, from literally any interactions, how good she was for him, and how much he adored that wonderful dog.
Sometimes, Levi wondered if he ought to get one. But, really, he was just...too busy. And it wasn't like he could shuffle it off on Lav and Rhona--they were married, they had their own lives, and Levi....lived alone in the same apartment he'd lived alone in for years, because that was the life he'd chosen for himself.
Still, it was easy to smile when Reiki opened the door.
"Tea sounds great," he said, "and also some time to figure out exactly where we want to start with....everything."
God, he was a total failure at being a decent Dark Mirror mentor. He couldn't even make himself start the conversation. And it wasn't even like he didn't like his life with the Court! It was all...fine, really, and good, and he had people he cared about, and...all of that.
"How...have you been figuring it out? The magical girl thing? It took me forever to find my feet."
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Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2023 2:19 pm
With Levi finally in the apartment, Cersei Rokugin found herself quite torn. On one hand, Levi was A New Person—at least in that he had not previously been in the apartment today—and therefore, she needed to sniff at him while pacing around his legs again. Maybe there would be pets? And attention? But on the other hand, Reiki was Her Person—the one who’d always been with her, ever since wandering into her life and giving her a home—and this meant that she needed to stay with him, always, as much as possible, forever……and he wasn’t going back to the couch, where they’d been before, except for a brief duck back that way to get his mug off the table. Oh, no, he went into the Food Place.
All of which amounted to Cersei briefly trailing after Reiki before doubling back. True, she could have waited and seen whether or not Levi would move himself toward the kitchen without her help. But consider: he needed to be in the kitchen, where Cersei’s Person and also the food were. So, in the interests of helping, Cersei nudged her snoot at the back of Levi’s legs, then ducked around him and trotted toward the kitchen……for a few steps, before looking back to make sure that he was following. So help her, she would repeat this process until everyone—all both of the humans currently in the apartment—was in the kitchen, as seemed most sensible and appropriate (and also Haruhi, if ne came home from Wherever This “Work” Place Was).
As Cersei worked on herding Levi, Reiki set his own mug on the kitchen table and worked on cleaning out the kettle. Arguably not entirely necessary, since it had only boiled water before and was only going to do the same thing now, but……so much of what he had to say for himself felt so impossibly complicated. Not only did he need a moment (or ten, even though putting this conversation off for so long had already constituted him taking several Moments too many if you asked Reiki), but he also desperately needed something to do with his hands.
“That’s……sort of a complicated question,” Reiki supposed with a pensive frown, filling the kettle partway with water, adding unscented soap, and gently swishing it all around. “Like, on one hand, I feel that I got the hang of the magical girl business pretty quickly? I mean, I’ve been primed for it since before I even met Him We Don’t Speak Of—” Meaning Greg, whose only true, redeeming quality had been that his work had introduced him to Levi. “—never mind finding out that all of it was real. But on the other hand……I don’t know.”
Sighing, Reiki dumped out the swishy-mixture, leaned back against the edge of the counter, and took to scrubbing the inside of the kettle with a dishrag. He didn’t want to just outright say “Levi, are we the baddies?”—not least since the original Mitchell and Webb sketch was about a pair of Nazi soldiers realizing that they were, in fact, The Baddies and subsequently ******** off, which felt at best seriously tone-deaf when Levi was Jewish—but……so many of the initial problems Reiki had had went back to that. So many of the Issues that Mirrorspace seemed to have with him and with his conduct (at least in how he interpreted Mirrorspace’s general Vibes, since it wasn’t like the b***h would deign to ******** talk to him in a way that Reiki understood; he’d given Mirrorspace plenty of time and opportunity, and the b***h either couldn’t actually talk to him or didn’t feel like speaking to him was necessary)—but so many of the Issues that Reiki felt existed between them all went back to how Mirror senshi weren’t the same as Order senshi.
All went back to what Sailor Huge Tits of Who-Cares had said when Reiki had tried to make her <********. off. from draining people around Scandals. “Moralizing who you drain from is such a pointless exercise. It’s all the same in the end,” or something like that. Tactfully stepping around what she should’ve said—which, in Reiki’s mind, should’ve played more like some Elim Garak tea: “It’s time to face reality, [sweetheart]. You’re a magical girl who dreams of being something other than a parasite because you know, deep down, that you’re not. Oh, I’m a parasite myself, but I’ve accepted this about myself, and you’ll find it’s set me free.”
Idly, Reiki wondered what Sailor Huge Tits of Who-Cares was up to, these days. He didn’t really care that much, but still, he hoped she was still enjoying herself. Good for her, if so. (And better good for Cersei, who seemed to take Reiki working on the kettle as a sign that she should stick to Levi if she wanted pets and attention.)
“Like, when you and Soya said that Mirror senshi work with Mirrorwraiths to drain energy, all of it sounded like it made sense? Or I felt like it made sense, anyway.” Scrub, scrub, scrub at the inside of the kettle. Didn’t feel like enough yet, even though it probably had been. Reiki took a deep breath. “But then I actually did drain people, all two of them, and…? It really quickly stopped making sense. Not that I got to that realization entirely on my own, but like……this outer space nekomimi White Moon senshi called Daphne swooped out of nowhere and kicked me after I’d set a Mirrorwraith on ******** Michel.”
Not someone Reiki had complained about with Levi as much as Greg, but as The ******** Guy Who ******** Around And Hurt Two Of His Drag Siblings, Including And Especially Elijah, Michel had come up before.
“So, Daphne basically went ‘Look at your life, look at your choices’ and by the time we’re done talking, Michel is non-comatose enough that I feel bad about just leaving him in the alley and take him to the ER instead. I think Arsenolite was next after her? Oh, no, wait.” Reiki huffed, shaking his head as if that would rattle some screws loose. “First of all, Michel does the damnedest thing and starts actually, like? Turning his life around? Being less of an outrageous a*****e? Then, this Cosmos Knight gets all up in my and two other Mirror girls’ business because we’re standing in a park and talking. He actually apologized later, he’s a good guy, doesn’t have enough queer friends, which is just depressing, but……well, he does have me now, so there’s that. Then, this pocket-sized, Eternal White Moon thot all dolled up like harem-dancer Barbie got herself blue hair and pronouns? He swoops in while I’m checking on Michel, and we actually have a really good talk, once I get over having the fear of God put in me by a transcended Eternal senshi crashing in on me out of nowhere.
“And then there was Arsenolite murdering this Meadowview science teacher on Judy Garland’s birthday—and murdering every potential reincarnation that Raymond Callahan’s starseed could’ve had.… He—Raymond Callahan, he—he was only even out by Scandals to go see the show I had last night. And, I cannot stress enough, it was Judy. Garland’s. birthday. Like, excuse you? Whomst the ******** do you think you are, sullying one of Judy Garland’s days like this?”
Which was extremely rude of Arsenolite on top of everything else that was horrible and wrong about what he’d done that night. Not that respecting Judy Garland was the point of anything, but as Reiki rinsed out the kettle and filled it with actual water, he also couldn’t bring himself to consider giving Arsenolite a pass about it. Judy Garland deserved better than some ******** starseeding people on one of her holy days.
Regardless, Reiki sat the kettle on the stove, rolled his eyes, and went on, slouched back against a different counter: “Arsenolite is, like, aggressively unimpressive. Peak cis, straight white boy mediocrity, wrapped up in Negaverse Chaos and a bow like he thinks he’s ******** Hawkeye. But after him, I got to meet someone who gets to be very important as the story goes—a General, Half-Youma, his name’s Faustite—and I end up talking a lot of s**t about Kerberos because he tried to help me with something about my magic and it made him run away, and I feel like s**t because it didn’t even seem to do anything. Turns out later that what it did to him and to Faustite, when he asks me for a demonstration, is trigger a pair of addicts.
“But I don’t learn that for a couple months, and in the meantime, there’s some Sailor Untitled Goose Girl assuming that I’m trying to hurt one of the regulars from Scandals when he passes out from heat-stroke and I try to take him to the ER. There’s some lesbian Christmas Elf who attacks me out of nowhere because Sappho, one of my girls in the Court, had a big, lesbian romantic misunderstanding with her, but justified it by acting like all the Court does is drain people, and hurt them, and s**t’s only gotten worse with that one, too. Last I saw her, Angelica was on some bullshit about hunting Dark Mirrors for sport, going on about murdering some new senshi called Lete, who is just……”
Hugging himself, Reiki quirked both eyebrows and puffed out his cheeks. Let his eyes get wide. Shook his head again to help illustrate the point he had in mind, then nudged his glasses back up because the bridge of his nose was sorely in need of rubbing.
“Lete’s a ******** handful in their own right, but, like? Last I checked, we didn’t punish mildly annoying but overall harmless younger sibling behavior with execution, y’know? But after my first meet with Angelica, there was this big titty goth gee-eff Nega-senshi who took exception to being told not to hunt people around Scandals, and I wanted to just ignore what she was telling me? But the longer I’ve sat with it, the more I feel like……maybe she was kinda right? And all of that plus a bunch of other garbage—including more run-ins with aggro White Moon jerks who act like Existing While Dark Mirror is punishable by death, and like trying to get someone who obviously got roofied to the ER means you’re a monster as long as you have a Mirror fuku? All of it just comes together and makes me feel like……what Dark Mirror senshi are supposed to do doesn’t really make sense anymore? Like, magical girls help people, right? But……do we actually help people? Does the Court help anybody except for other people in the Court and like, whatever the ******** Mirrorspace is supposed to do?”
Groaning softly, Reiki let his head loll back into the cupboard behind him. “……Also, this isn’t the point, but? One of the most offensive things about the situation with Miss Angelica the Aggro Lesbian Christmas Elf is that the b***h is cute. If she’d get the ******** over herself and just get on any of the sapphic dating apps that isn’t totally overrun with TERFs being disgusting? She could have, like, fifty girlfriends in a New York minute. But oh. Oh, no. Noooo, we can’t do that. That would be, like, reasonable person behavior. No, instead, we have to hunt Mirror senshi for funsies until Sappho feels guilty enough to dump the girlfriend she already has for this aspiring serial killer in red tights with a ******** pinecone print all over them.”
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Posted: Sat Aug 12, 2023 12:05 am
Levi laughed, a little, when Cersei herded him towards the kitchen; she was such a sweet dog, and clearly she was not going to allow him to linger in the entryway when there were other places to be.
"Alright, alright, I'm coming," he told her, and there was a laugh in his voice as he came into the kitchen, and her leaned aganst the counter with a soft, fond smile.
The smile did not last. Not once Reiki started answering his question--and he wasn't kidding about it being a complicated one to answer.
That....was undoubtedly a lot. The more Reiki talked, the more Levi's heart sank. It wasn't like he didn't know that he'd brought Reiki into a complicated, messy world; certainly that was the truth. But...well. He was glad for Cersei sticking to him, so he could reach down and pet her, which made for a very good soothing gesture, which he really needed right then,
And at the end, they got to the heart of Reiki's feelings, and it made Levi's heart ache.
"I think," Levi said, "that it's....more complicated than that. I think that there's plenty of self-righteous assholes in white who think that a black fuku means you're a monster, who don't understand that there are plenty of people in the Negaverse who want to slaughter us all just as much as the White Moon does. I think that we are very, very on our own in this mess, and there's not enough of us." He exhaled. "I've had White moon and Negaverse friends, over the years, but I've had people from both sides treat me like s**t, too, so--I don't know. Are we helping other people? Maybe not...in the grand scheme of things. But how much help can we offer to other people, when we're just trying to survive?"
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Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2023 8:56 pm
“Negaverse officers and their senshi can’t slaughter us, actually. Straight up not allowed,” Reiki pointed out with a sigh that came from a deeply Tired place. “So, back at the end of last summer? First of all, did you see the splotches of, like, inexplicable gray death that showed up in all over town last year? Well, they were some kind of weird Chaos monster. They started up in space at different White Moon senshi’s homeworlds, or some of their Knights’ Wonders, then made it down to Earth. One of the White Moon senshi who’s been good to me, Ida? She looked into them and found out that they had something to do with an entity called the Blight.
“All of which culminates in this big battle in an abandoned subway station because, y’know, of course it does. Everybody and their mom’s best friend’s cousin-twice-removed’s chiropractor, all coming out to fight this thing. I think I and some teenager called Quetzalcoatl were the only Mirror senshi there, but otherwise? White Moon, Negaverse, some ostensibly unrelated aliens, some of whom I met in space before a robot from Murikabushi-That-Was ripped my starseed out because he thought it could make him a real boy in the Pinocchio, ‘inorganic becoming organic’ sense of the term—the gang was all there, basically. Fighting a common enemy, for once, instead of trying to murder each other.”
It did not occur to Reiki, as he related this winding tale, that what had gone down on Astraya with Kima and Kerberos would have struck most people as something that deserved to be its own story. Granted, had that happened to Faustite, Levi, Haruhi, Kerberos, Acubens-oneesan, Monoceros, Albite, Fang, Amsvartnir, Heliodor, Daedalus, Fang, Pendour, Encke, Anser, Ida, or basically anyone else—even a feral murder gremlin like Miss Cybele or an aspiring serial killer like Angelica—he would have more easily recognized that a robot ripping out your starseed didn’t just happen to people every day. Would’ve more easily remembered that it was serious, that it had been very dramatic at the time, that he might not have made it back to Earth if not for Kerberos having been there to save him……
……and for something being Fundamentally Broken And Wrong with Dark Mirror starseeds. That part, Reiki did remember—hard to ignore it chilling him to the core with the reminder that, whenever he’d wished to be a magical girl, he’d failed to specify for the universe what kind of magical girl he wanted to be, then made the same mistakes as Sayaka-chan about the fine print and not reading it worth a good goddamn. Still, he had a story to finish, so Reiki gripped onto the edge of the counter to pull himself back into focusing.
“So, in the battle against the Blight,” Reiki went on as if he hadn’t just admitted to something that was, frankly, horrifying, “everything wears on a while and people start getting exhausted. Looks bleak while folks are running out of magic and getting too hurt to keep fighting. But Ida—ugh, she was amazing?!” Reiki didn’t have room to Gay Gasp, at the moment, but that didn’t stop him from making a ridiculous swooning noise. “She pulled some kind of ridiculous, over-the-top senshi power out of who-knows-where, and then she had wings and a crystal; honestly, she’s, like, everything that a magical girl princess should be.”
Idly, Reiki thought that, maybe, it wasn’t fair for him to talk up a White Moon princess like this when the Dark Mirror had their own royal senshi……and Remarque was fine? Almost certainly, he did a lot for the Court that Reiki didn’t know about or account for most of the time? And when Reiki wasn’t unfairly thinking of Remarque without considering how he was stuck in the same tragic situation as the rest of the Court, Remarque seemed like a perfectly fine person?
But how was Reiki supposed to talk about Remarque the same way he talked about Ida-hime-sama? Would’ve been like discussing Ken in the same terms as Barbie. Idly fiddling with the cuff of his sweater’s sleeve, Reiki thought about the marketing he’d seen around for Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Barbie movie: She’s everything. He’s just Ken.
………Ugh, that really wasn’t fair of him to think about Remarque. At least, however, Reiki didn’t have to make his unfair feelings into anyone else’s problems. Keep them secret. Keep them safe. Keep them to himself. Bury them deep inside him where they belonged because they were unfair and since when did the universe at large care about what Reiki thought, anyway.
“Thanks to Ida’s shiny princess power-up magic, everyone rallies and the Blight gets destroyed. Then……” Reiki shivered and hugged himself, just remembering that moment. “Ida and everyone from the White Moon, they all disappeared. Off to her home-world, apparently, not that it mattered for me because all of us who are with Chaos, and the unaffiliated aliens? We got left behind. Which led to me having a sort of crisis because all my friends who were present were with them, and that led to Faustite sort of……borrowing me?”
Temporarily abducting.
“To a conversation with some of his team?”
Which just so happened to have taken place in a burned out hotel basement.
“Part of the basis for Faustite’s whole complaint at the time? Was that me being a Dark Mirror meant that he couldn’t kill me, but that we kept running into each other—” All of twice prior to that night. “—and at the time, he thought that he wanted me to go away, but Negaverse rules about how to handle us meant that he couldn’t kill me. So……” Reiki shrugged. “Whether or not anybody in the Negaverse wants to slaughter us, they can’t. I dunno what will happen to them if they disobey that order, but considering everything else they can dream up, I think it’s probably unpleasant.
“For that matter?” Folding his arms and idly batting his foot at the linoleum, Reiki looked down at the floor. “I genuinely haven’t met anybody in the Negaverse who seems to want to kill us. Even with Faustite, it wound up being like……” Reiki pinched the bridge of his nose again because kinda high-key ******** his life, the entire situation was so ******** stupid when he broke it down to a Cliffs Notes version. “I thought that he just didn’t like me? Because he kept acting like he didn’t like me. Which……okay, cool? He doesn’t need to like me. I’m an acquired taste; I’ve known this since I was five years old. And even if I didn’t have serious concerns about how the Race—Thai and Filipino franchises excluded—edits their East Asian, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander queens? I still wouldn’t want to compete because I know that I’d be a divisive character and really easy to give a ******** Villain Edit.”
Almost every casting director he’d ever met had thought so. Fate, or the Universe, or Cosmos, or something must have agreed because Reiki had wound up stuck in the Dark Mirror. Why would the world’s largest platform for drag queens ever be any different? Considering how s**t had gone in the past few years with that show, their editors would’ve handed him a Villain Edit specifically to hold a future All Stars season over his head because his entire drag career would have depending on the editors “redeeming” him for the public.
Which was every bit as stupid and dehumanizing as the way people like Anser and that trigger-happy Neptune Squire talked like it was impossible to choose being a good person if you had the taint of Chaos on you. Never mind the words that they used for it, as if purification wasn’t absolutely loaded with hellaciously terrible linguistic baggage.
“So, I proceed through our interactions with the assumption that Faustite just doesn’t like me and that’s okay, even understandable because my magic triggered him when he was trying to stay clean……” Reiki sighed, dramatically. “But it turns out, he was actually being a tsundere, and trying to give him the space and freedom to not like me made him think that I didn’t like him, because……”
He shrugged. Shook his head. Made a halfhearted little noise that didn’t make it all the way to I don’t know. “Because this might as well happen? Because this is my life now, I guess? Getting offered a bit role as Recurring Different Faction Boy in the weirdest harem anime that I never asked about because I wasn’t aware that it existed.
“But fine, Faustite is a special case. Outside of him, pretty much everyone I’ve met from the Negaverse assumes solidarity with us on the basis of us all being tainted by Chaos. Most of the active Negaverse folks out there seem to take for granted this idea that Dark Mirrors are the exact same as them. Pretty much all of Faustite’s team just assumed that the ideal solution was for him to make me a member of their team in some capacity, when all he said was that they couldn’t kill or torture me because the Negaverse higher-ups don’t want them coming after us like that? And I guess they wouldn’t have the rules if not for people actually coming after us, but at the moment……?”
The kettle whistled, providing a perfect excuse to not finish that sentence. Which was good, because Reiki didn’t entirely know how to finish it without repeating himself—though, as ever, he still had a lot to say. As he got down the mugs and poured the hot water over the tea leaves, he went on, “Y’know, when it comes to us, the Negaverse and the White Moon agree on more than they seem to realize. Like, we—the Court—are the only people who consistently disagree with the idea that the Dark Mirror and the Negaverse are exactly the same. Most of the White Moon people I’ve met who disagree do it because they know or knew one specific Mirror senshi in particular.
“And like……if we’re really trying so hard to survive that we can’t do anything else, then why don’t we just stop draining energy?” Shrugging, he handed Levi a mug, black with art of a chubby cartoon unicorn with a rainbow mane, sitting there and eating cake. “I mean, that seems to be the really, appallingly obvious solution here, right? If we want to survive, then we need allies. If we want allies, getting them from the Negaverse is like getting in bed with Littlefinger Baelish.”
Bold words for the man who took his tea in a mug featuring fanart of Cersei Lannister and her iconic words When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground, but Reiki never claimed that his taste in fictional bad bitches reflected his real world morals. “Even if we can’t care about making allies, then we could still do a lot more with our time if we didn’t waste it on either, A., draining energy that doesn’t belong to us, or B., ******** around in Mirrorspace when it doesn’t really do anything successfully.”
Except give Sinope a place to dump the corpses of Faustite’s family after murdering them, but that…… Reiki couldn’t expect Levi to answer for that. He didn’t even know if Levi knew Sinope from a hole in the wall.
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Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2023 2:45 am
Levi exhaled, tensely. Maybe Reiki had more interactions with whatever specific Negaverse officers these were--but the unfortunate truth was that Levi had experience on his side. The story fot he battle in the subway felt like the kind of thing he'd seen over and over again--though the details of Reiki getting tangled up with some robot alien who wanted his starseed? That was new, and Levi wrinkled his nose and wondered, briefly, fi he should ask--not that there was much space to interject.
He'd have to press later.
The problem, fundamentally, was that it seemed Reiki had made a classic mistake. One that Levi himself had made, in his early days as a Senshi. He'd taken the Negaverse at their word, assumed that their rules meant anything more than what each and every individual officer decided they meant. Unfortunate, really.
"That's their official policy, yeah. But you don't get any less dead because the person that killed you got a slap on the wrist for it after," he said, flatly. "I've been assaulted by officers. Had one try to pull my starseed, before. Just because the rule is that they're not supposed to kill us--because there's a fun little detente--doesn't mean that rule is actually followed."
Maybe the modern Negaverse was better. But Levi could never forget the one that had come for him. Could never forget the myriad of horror stories he'd heard.
(And maybe, just maybe, hearing that Reiki had gotten romantically involved with this Faustite broke his heart, a little, but that was his own fault. He'd never done anything to act on his feelings, never expressed anything about what he wanted--so if Reiki wanted to kiss tsundere Negaverse boys, that was his choice, and Levi didn't get to have feelings about that.)
"Also, draining energy is fundamental to our continued survival. We stop draining energy, Mirrorspace collapses, we don't power up anymore." He accepted the mug, though he didn't drink from it, just held it, like the warmth of it might make him feel less miserable about everything happening here. "It's the fundamental source of our power. The thing that makes us Dark Mirror instead of White Moon. I'm not sure what else it has to do successfully."
Normally, Levi appreciated Reiki's snark, his biting attitude, his refusal to accept things the way they were. Right now, when the thing he'd sunk his teeth into was the Court that had been Levi's life for the better part of a decade? It was, to say the least, less charming. But here they were.
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Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2023 6:27 pm
“There are a lot of people on the White Moon side who want to kill us for just existing, too,” Reiki pointed out, “and the key difference between them and the people in the Negaverse who feel the same? Is that people in the Negaverse nominally won’t get away with it. Which……okay, maybe you’re right that that fact doesn’t mean so much to us, personally, if we’re the ones who die—” Though, seeing as Reiki and Levi were on the subject, since when had it been part of the magical girl job description to care more about yourself than about other people? To care more about yourself and your own interests than about using your powers to help people? Okay, fine, that seemed to describe a lot of people’s behaviors in all of this magical bullshit? But……
“—but if the Negaverse and the White Moon are both bad options? If both of them are actively dangerous to innocent people—which I really don’t feel is up for debate with the Negaverse? Considering how it all, as an institution, runs on harming and exploiting its own people, and twisting and breaking them until they have literally nowhere else they can go, then telling them to be grateful for having everything else in their lives stolen from them? And most of the White Moon senshi and Knights out there, as far as I’ve seen, at least try to help people? But they’re doing the same stupid bullshit that you see with like, baby progressives who think the only way to have an egalitarian and—and—and—”
Wrinkling his nose in frustration and seething, Reiki waved a hand at the air in front of his face. “********>, I know this ******** word. Like, E-word? Like ‘equality’ and ‘egalitarian’ but also, like, their cousin, who’s taller and smarter and better looking? E-quark—” Grumbling in disjointed, aimless upset, Reiki snapped his fingers. “Equine—” And again. “Equus—no, wait, no, that’s the full-frontal play about the animal-murder and the ******** horse-boy—” That was, at best, a very bad approximation of an idea of what Equus was about. For a moment, Reiki continued seething, muttering a string of words from English, Japanese, and Spanish all mixed together in a frothing, bubbling pot of incoherency.
Finally, out of nowhere, it hit him—“Equity! Or, well, equitable, at any rate.”
Now that he had the word he wanted and could settle down, Reiki sighed. Then, picked his train of thought back up: “It’s like when you’ve got baby progressives who try to say that it’s, like, reproducing the structures of the white supremacist cis-hetero patriarchy to have basic level organization in any given group. And it’s like ‘No, Mikayleigh, if you don’t have some kind of structure, power is just going to collect in ways that ultimately lend themselves to tyranny—like, I don’t know, some feral murder-gremlin White Moon senshi unlocking a Princess power-up and deciding that they should be the God-Queen of all sapient life, or that, ell-ehm-ay-oh, they think they’ll just reconfigure the universe in pursuit of their own selfish desires today, like Homura-chan with terrible style and not enough self-respect to wear literally any other color but ******** white.’
“Soooo, that should be where we come in, right?”
The math seemed pretty obvious to Reiki. If the Court had to be some secret third thing—if they had to be the Trio Master who swooped in like Rayquaza to prevent both the rise of some charismatic White Moon tyrant and the beginning of absolute dominion by the Negaverse—then that would Make Sense as a role for them to fill in all this mess. It would give them something to stand for. Something to fight for. A reason to do any of this magical girl bullshit aside from, what? Self-serving martyr complexes? Garden variety thrill-seeking? Being a dumbass like Lete and refusing to take anything seriously because it was all a big joke to her?
With a guiding principle like that, then maybe all of their efforts would actually mean something.
“But then……we obviously don’t do that? That’s just……not what we’ve decided our magical girl powers are for?”
Transitioning away from the nice dream scenario of how things could have been, Reiki tried to will his hands to stop trembling around his mug. To no avail, however. The vast discrepancy between the potency and the existence—the discrepancy between Reiki’s fantasy and the reality; between what (he thought) he’d been promised and what (he perceived) now stood before him; between what he’d wished for and he needed—all weighed too heavily on Reiki’s mind.
Remembering Faustite’s fate—something lost, no doubt irreparably given his general standing with people among the White Moon ranks, because his own flames had consumed the gestalt existence that he’d had and turned him full youma—didn’t help. Even though Reiki had, for the sake of debate, temporarily accepted the logical conclusion of Levi’s point about the Negaverse and the White Moon being effectively the same—even though he had let himself get emotional about it because unfortunately, Reiki just had a lot of feelings, all the time, always, about ******** everything, whether anybody wanted him to or not—that wasn’t what he really thought. Wasn’t what he believed. None of it squared up with what he’d personally seen out there in these streets, all of which seemed to suggest that the Negaverse and the Dark Mirror were, if not outright they exact same sort of parasites, then definitely closer to being like each other than either of them was to being like the White Moon.
So, who knew if Mirrorspace wouldn’t decide to do to its own senshi something like what had happened to Faustite? Reiki didn’t know where Mirrorwraiths came from, but surely, Mirrorspace wouldn’t balk at the idea of making some out of its own senshi? Seemed to Reiki that something like that fell perfectly on Mirrorspace’s alley.
“And I get it,” Reiki conceded, “there’s an imbalance in the numbers……but doesn’t that just give us more reason to stand for something, to do it with actual conviction, and to tell the other two factions ‘No, you move’?” Or something else that Reiki hadn’t borrowed from a seven-year-old Captain America movie. Whatever. His point stood. “Like, it’s not just about those of us with power. It can’t be. I mean……where do all of the people who don’t have power like we do end up in all this? Energy-sheep for us and the Negaverse, and acceptable losses to every faction because what is the measure of an unpowered person? They’re fundamentally denied any ability to influence any of this, or a voice in any of these discussions, or the means to protect themselves from dangers that they don’t even know exist……but this war harms them anyway.
“They still suffer, and lose people, and die just like we do……but who’s looking out for them while all of us endearing, brightly colored magical misfits play our game of ‘whatever we have instead of thrones’?”
This…… All of this was simple, wasn’t it? Maybe inter-faction issues had more nuance to them, more complications than necessarily made themselves apparent at a first blush, but one fact remained true above the rest: senshi, Knights, and officers, all of them had power that non-magical people didn’t, which carried with it a duty to use that power well, and responsibly, and in service of those who didn’t have access to it. And Levi……he knew that, didn’t he? Given all of his work outside of the secret magical life, everything he wrote about and campaigned for, Levi had to know this. He knew that power went hand in hand with responsibility, and that the people who bore the brunt of massive drama usually wound up being those who had the least resources available to help them withstand it.
…………So, why did Reiki have to spell it all out for him?
“And I know, I get it: we don’t have the same numbers as the White Moon and the Negaverse. I’m pretty sure Faustite has……” A sharp inhale. A tight gulp, “had more boys in his harem than all of the Dark Mirror senshi I’ve met in the past year.” Levi. Haruhi. Acubens. Sappho. Bélénos. Rana. Little Miss Can’t-Be-Wrong, back up on Astraya. Quetzalcoatl. Morpheus. Remarque. Lete.…… Okay, maybe Faustite’s harem hadn’t exceeded that, but his team sure had. “But……I’m sorry, but ‘There are more of them than of us’ isn’t convincing me that we should only play defense and look out for ourselves to the exclusion of helping other people? It……more seems to support my idea that we should? Like, where do we get off hiding in Mirrorspace when we have magic like we do?”
Which brought them back to the worst part of this whole discussion, the part that Reiki least wanted to deal with, when Levi was telling him things that sounded………like he and Reiki might just have an irreconcilable difference of opinion on the subject.
“And as for Mirrorspace itself……” Reiki swallowed thickly, trying to school his hands back into behaving as they started trembling again. “It doesn’t have a right to take energy from defenseless people without consent. We don’t have that right. And if we can’t maintain our power without stealing it from innocent people, then maybe we shouldn’t have it.” That didn’t align with what Reiki had heard from other senshi—White Moon senshi—about how starseeds worked, and how it was a starseed that made a senshi who they were……but neither did Levi’s claim that they got their power from Mirrorspace. None of that math worked out in Reiki’s mind. “Our starseeds are supposed to be enough on their own.… But then ours are just……”
Broken, Reiki thought, but didn’t say. That idea……probably wouldn’t go over well, would it?
Even if it was true.
Aside from the silvery sheen they apparently had instead of actual light and vibrant color, there had to be something wrong with them if they’d wound up here, being like this, rather than being proper senshi whose power stood on its own, like Kerberos or Albite (the latter of whom did drain energy, as did all Nega-Senshi, but it was to feed their eldritch Nega-God masterful abomination thing so she could destroy the Earth and its people, not—as far as Reiki knew—just to keep the ******** lights on so their own powers would work properly).
“So, do you……” Feeling thrown out of himself, Reiki tried to tell himself to shut up. Screamed at himself to just shut up. To drop it and leave it alone and stop asking because Levi was already upset, and he was upset because of Reiki, and the question burning up Reiki’s lips would only make it worse, and he should really just. shut. up. and yet—“Does everybody have to go through the Mirror before they learn what it means? Or was it just me?”
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Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2024 2:03 pm
There was something cold settling in Levi's chest. A realization that, ultimately, he had made a mistake--that somewhere along the line, something had gone very wrong, and Reiki had a very incorrect idea about the shape and structure of the war. An idea that, it seemed, was going to be incredibly hard for him to dislodge.
He gripped the mug a little tighter. Wished that he had been less terrible as a guide, that he had made more time, focused on helping guide his friend into the Mirror so that whoever in the Negaverse or the White Moon or both had gotten into his head and convinced him of these....stupid, ridiculous things, assured him that one side was somehow better than any other in this mess--so that someone would have been counteracting all of this bullshit.
But it was too late, now.
"Just because we have to borrow energy from ordinary people doesn't mean that they're just sheep or cattle. And why should it be our job to force some kind of middle ground between reincarnated space alien warriors and a bunch of jackbooted thugs with the power to rip your soul from your chest?" He shook his head, firmly. "The Negaverse and the White Moon--they're all twisted up in a thousand-year-old conflict over the fact that the Princess of the Moon wanted to hit it with the Prince of Earth and some people thought that was a terrible idea and now this poor, stupid planet is caught in the middle. We're the only ones not bound up in that stupid old war."
A huff. A shake of his head, and suddenly Levi found himself needing to pace, so he set down his tea mug and started doing just that.
"You're talking about responsibility. How is it not an abdication of what we are, if we were to just...stop gathering energy and let Mirrorspace die? It gives us our power, gives us the ability to create and sustain our Realms, makes a place for us--what kind of ingratitude would it be to just....not pay it back? No, i don't like it; it'd be great to be like the White Moon. But Chaos is what it is; it needs to be fed. It's kinda like taxes, isn't it? Nobody likes giving up money, but part of the social contract is that the government is supposed to handle certain services, so you fork over so they can do that because we live in a society where money is a necessity.
"Our government services include 'fighting monsters' and 'making sure the Negaverse doesn't turn an entire subway train into a ******** horrifying amalgamation of youma again,' and other fun things that keep people from dying." It made perfect sense to him, didn't it?
That last question froze him in his tracks, though.
Slowly, he turned, and he knew his face had to look as stricken as he felt.
"Reiki....I didn't lie to you, if that's what you're trying to imply. No one really knows what they're getting into with this until they're in it."
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Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2024 1:49 am
Listening to Levi properly proved a challenge when Reiki’s emotions were going about a million miles a minute. Even without his heart racing or trying to claw its way out of his chest, Reiki felt so much rushing and whorling through him that it threatened to make him sick. He didn’t…… How was Levi not getting this? How was he pacing around Reiki’s floor and defending the fact that Mirrorspace forced them and everyone else in the Court to act like parasites instead of acting like magical girls?
How had this entire conversation gone so wrong, so quickly?
“If energy draining is like taxes,” Reiki said, “then why aren’t they coming from us?”
He inhaled deeply. Wished desperately that he could’ve had Ojiisan here to advise in favor of being patient, or to somehow find where Reiki and Levi weren’t understanding each other, and resolve the conflict, and make everything okay and completely sense-making again (which, in Reiki’s mind, could only include an ending where somehow, any of what the Dark Mirror Court did either made sense as a good and correct option for protecting people, like magical girls were supposed to do, or got accepted as Equally Bad And Wrong As The Negaverse And White Moon Apparently). Accepted the fact that he had to handle this conversation himself and pressed forward.
“That’s literally how taxes are supposed to work, Levi. You pay them with your money, not money that you stole from someone else.”
His voice came out calmer sounding, on the surface, than Reiki felt. A perfect mirror of how, externally, Reiki sat cross-legged on the sofa, only shifting his posture any when Cersei hopped up beside him and he moved a hand to rest on her back, perfectly calm……but internally, Reiki sat in the middle of a hurricane made of fire while the Bakkhai were tearing him limb-from-limb.
“If energy draining is like taxes,” he went on, despite his increasing fear of his own voice and its eerie, sere sobriety, “then it sounds, to me, like we are like feudal lords, taking energy off of normal people in the name of the King—that is, Mirrorspace. Not to belabor the Pythons, but: how did Mirrorspace become King. I didn’t vote for it. Giant, glimmering Chaos whatsits lying in the Void, distributing magical realms is no basis for a system of government.”
For all his first statement took the rhetorical form of a question, Reiki wasn’t really asking. Genuinely, he didn’t expect there to be an answer. Moreover, he didn’t expect that any answer that might have existed would have satisfied him.
“More importantly: how is it not an abdication of our human responsibility to care about the people who are affected by our actions? You know, when we make the Mirrorwraiths drain them? Or worse, when we abandon them—because we’re so above-it-all with the war, apparently—to go <******** around in Mirrorspace and play with pretty crystals like it’s some kind of middle-aged, New Age woo-woo white lady convention?”
Although he made himself look at Levi directly, Reiki had no functional sense right now of what his face was doing. Didn’t matter, really. All the hangdog sparkly eyes in the world couldn’t save this conversation, probably, no matter how much they conveyed the sense that Reiki’s heart was breaking.
And his heart was breaking. Reiki had no place and no business saying so, not when he was upsetting Levi so much and probably massively letting him down. But after losing Faustite to full youmafication so recently—and worse, knowing how much pain Albite, Heliodor, Alkmene, and their whole team had to be in—hearing Levi say all these things that just……didn’t make sense with Reiki’s magical girl fantasy.
Which, of course, did nothing to change the reality in front of him.
But the simple fact of this situation’s reality, likewise, did nothing to stop the chill spreading in his chest, nor to ease the ache that accompanied each heartbeat.
“How is it not an abdication of our human responsibility to take our magical powers and only use them to help ourselves? Sure, we fight youma……because they’ll come for us first over a civilian, any day.” Reiki would know. He’d stolen Levi’s You want a snack? Come have a senshi routine more than a few times while sass-mouthing some youma or other. “And sure, we obstruct the Negaverse……but that’s also self-preservation first and foremost, because they’re such a major existential threat to us personally, right?
“So, we help ourselves in ways that just so happen to technically also benefit the normal people who don’t know that any of this is happening. Then we make them foot the bill so we can continue to do this only if and when we feel like it? That does not make any sense to me, Levi. Even a magical girl who started as a <******** duck can help people without making them pay for it, so why can’t we?”
Slandering Duck-chan from Princess Tutu did not make Reiki feel good. But if it helped make his point, then he’d do whatever it took.
“Or worse,” Reiki went on, “what about how, sometimes, we can only help people if and when Mirrorspace allows? Because Miss Thing almost makes it not worth the effort to power up sometimes, with the way she won’t quit whining at me to go waste my time stomping around a bunch of functionally identical, visually offensive hallways that don’t do anything, or to play with crystals on my ******** island that doesn’t do anything, or to otherwise <******** around when it’s like ‘Kim, there’s people that are dying.’
“In all my dealings with Mirrorspace since I got the super-senshi glow-up? It has had the most massively condescending, ‘Jareth telling Sarah to go play with her toys and her costumes when he literally just kidnapped her infant brother’ energy since David ******** Bowie. Dealing with a Goblin King would genuinely be an upgrade, at this point. At least Jareth could keep his promises. They were seductive, manipulative bullshit, but he objectively had the power to honor them, unlike Mirrorspace, which might as well be home-base for the Pirates Who Don’t. Do. *Anything*.”
Finally, after a while of being still when everything inside of him felt like screaming, Reiki had been getting increasingly wound up again, despite Cersei putting her head in his lap and the grounding gesture of stroking his hand down her back over, and over, and over again. He knew that, and he didn’t like it. Getting wound up would make it that much more likely for him to say something that he’d regret. He’d already done it by implying that Levi had lied to him, regardless of how he felt about the situation.
Yet, even knowing better, Reiki did very little to actually practice some emotional regulation as he went on, “Sometimes, the only reason I power up is because not doing so would betray everything I’ve ever learned from my family, and Mirrorspace makes it a <******** nightmare for me every. single. time. Like, I’m sorry, Lana, but I’m just not that into you. If you could hold a candle to even the worst parts of the real world, maybe, I would be, but seeing as you can’t……maybe take a hint and let me do my actual job now, thanks? My senshi job? The one imparted to me by my starseed and its magical destiny—which, hey?”
He briefly lifted his hand off of Cersei and, very much without regard for the fur that had started amassing on his palm and fingers, Reiki waved it back and forth. Then, he gestured at himself and Levi.
“You are aware that we are also reincarnated space alien warriors, right,” he pointed out. “That’s why we’re senshi, Levi. Our starseeds, in our chests, which should be able to work perfectly fine on their own. Not because of Mirrorspace. Even Soya-hime said that!” Maybe not in so many words, but the whole reason why she’d found Reiki in the first place was because of his starseed, and Tama-sensei had echoed it when giving Reiki advice about his magic. Starseeds were what made senshi, point blank, period, end of discussion. “If Mirrorspace is necessary for us to be magical girls and boys and all the other genders, then something about us and our starseeds is fundamentally broken.”
Reiki hadn’t meant to say that.
He’d felt it, very strongly and for quite some time, but he hadn’t meant to say it.
Still, the words had come out and he couldn’t take them back. All Reiki could do was deal with the fact that he’d said this—which meant hanging his head and going still.
“……Something is broken about us, isn’t it,” he asked softly. “That’s why you’re standing so firm by things that don’t make any sense. It’s why Nega-senshi can pull starseeds, and White Moon senshi can revive planets, but all we can do is go play with our toys. It’s why our starseeds don’t shine with color and light like everybody else’s. Because we’re broken and Mirrorspace is literally the only place that will take us? And if we don’t go with Mirrorspace, our starseeds will go necrotic.”
Like Blossom’s alien friend, Reiki thought, but managed not to say. He didn’t even know said friend’s name, much less his entire story, only that his starseed was in godawful condition because he hadn’t been allowed to awaken properly and his people had tried to force the matter.
Had he realized what the quickly blurring vision meant, Reiki might have tried to stop it. But this revelation—this realization that maybe, Mirror senshi were all just fundamentally broken inside and that was why they had to be Mirror senshi in the first place—it made Reiki start tearing up. Being stuck on some Isle of Misfit Magical Girls was never what he’d wanted. Going his entire life without knowing better about his magical destiny, no matter what sort of necrosis it inflicted on his starseed or what sort of unfulfilled longings he had to live with, that would’ve been preferable to ******** this.
Would’ve been infinitely preferable to knowing that everything he’d spent his entire life hearing from small-minded bigots who were supposed to have been wrong, who’d only said what they had because they’d refused to get their heads around the apparently earth-shattering idea of a boy in a skirt………had actually been correct, this entire time.
They’d been right, and Reiki was broken.
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Posted: Wed Jan 03, 2024 1:53 am
This was wrong. It was all wrong, and Levi hated it, and he didn't want this to be happening when instead it could be...not happening? He could instead be having a conversation that made sense, where Reiki understood that just because Order wore white didn't make them the good guys, that energy draining was regrettable but neceessary, and instead--
Instead, this.
Instead, Reiki refusing to acknowledge that he was taking the worst possible faith interpretation oft he Dark Mirror and its role in the war--twisting efforts to keep themselves alive and to feed the being that empowered them in their particular Chaos mien into abdications of responsibility. And, on top of that, looking at him in such a way that--
It hurt, to see Reiki look at him like that. And to feel the potential of anything between them dying, slowly, killed by this great divide in their perceptions of the Mirror more surely than it was killed by Reiki's affections for a General, or Levi's cowardly refusal to spit out his stupid feelings, or....anything else.
At least this was his own fault, too, just like his other failed relationship, because he had failed to explain, or--he didn't know. But two for two on losing boys he liked to the Mirror, one way or another. Charlie hadn't taken it seriously. Hadn't taken him seriously. And Reiki....almost felt like the opposite problem. Like he wanted to pick apart everything, wanted to see only the worst of it.
But his description of his experiences with Mirrorspace made Levi stop in his tracks. wrinkle his nose. Turn to face Reiki, all confusion.
"Mirrorspace has never interfered with anything I do," he said. "It never seems to expect s**t from me. It's never tried to make me stay when I wanted to leave. It bows to us, not the other way around."
That was the fundamentals of it, wasn't it? Mirrorspace was theirs. Whatever madness was in the deeper parts of it, whatever had afflicted Altea and her kingdom, which was a bit of history that, Levi decided, was best left in the dust, that wasn't their curse. They were stronger than that. By virtue of the very Senshi starseeds that Reiki pointed out were so important.
"Something about us and our starseeds is fundamentally broken."
Something in Levi's chest froze. It felt like anger, but the kind of anger he really didn't like, that he'd worked so hard for so long to control--and he took a deep, tense breath.
"We are not broken. We could be White Moon. But we're not. Not bound in service to some dead world with nothing to give us but dust and old bones. We get to build our own world, and we can protect Earth at the same time. But if you don't see it that way, fine."
He hated this. All of it.
"I should leave. Thanks for the tea."
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Posted: Wed Jan 03, 2024 3:21 am
Since ******** when does Mirrorspace bow to us, Reiki wanted to say, because he had never felt that kind of energy when dealing with it.
In what ******** universe does that logic even remotely work, he wanted to ask, because the logical snag seemed appallingly ******** obvious to him. If Mirrorspace is what empowers us, then it can take that power away whenever it wants. The imbalance here pretty clearly does not favor us, if we’re the ones who have to bow and scrape and beg for it to make our broken starseeds do literally anything, if we’re the ones who have to hurt people because if we don’t, Mirrorspace won’t shower us with its alleged gifts.
I wish Faustite really would come and take me away, said some part of him that didn’t want to feel any of this (didn’t want to feel anything at all, never again), ……right now. At least if the youma he’s become eats my pathetic, broken excuse for a starseed, it will do something good for somebody and harm no one in the process.
And still another part of Reiki’s mind went on like, It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me. At teatime, everybody agrees.……
So many words rushed through him as the tears fell freely down his cheeks. All the thoughts fought so loudly for his attention, screaming at him to say them.
Ultimately, he wound up saying, “Dust and bones is a better description of Mirrorspace than any White Moon senshi’s world. The places it gives us to build? Are baseball fields that look like they’re made out of heroin. If White Moon senshi work hard cultivating their worlds, those planets can sustain life. They can make a home for magic fireflies, bioluminescent bunnies, and chirpy little foxes. If they put in the legwork and forge a bond with their world, they can unlock power that feels warm, and vibrant, and alive—instead of cold, and dead, and the most heinously noncommittal shade of <********> that I have ever seen in my entire life.
“And when White Moon senshi do unlock a bond like that, that power never leaves them. We have to pay Mirrorspace daily obeisances just to keep the lights on, but White Moon senshi can have that kind of power forever, even into their next reincarnations. White Moon senshi revive their worlds, build up something that can last. We make heroin-colored sandcastles and have to drain innocent. non-consenting. people. just so Mirrorspace won’t kick them over. Even if it doesn’t kick them over, the whole everything is so offensively solipsistic. Nothing we make in there is even real in any way that matters. It can’t leave the bounds of Mirrorspace, so what does it do successfully, except make us feel undeservedly better about ourselves?
“I don’t like this either,” Reiki said, voice low and trembling, “and you have no. idea. how much I wish that it were different. But if we need Mirrorspace so badly, just to pull off an infinitesimal, tiny fraction of what every White Moon senshi has a chance to do, even the literal elementary schoolers? The smallest, most insignificant consolation prize fraction of things that White Moon senshi take so much for granted, they act like it’s nothing to be able to do? As if some people wouldn’t tear themselves apart and give up everything to be able to build what they can? And, again, if we quote-unquote ‘need’ to parasitically drain energy from people because, if we don’t, then Mirrorspace can take away what pathetic little it allows us to do literally whenever it wants?”
A deep breath. “How am I supposed to interpret that as freedom, Levi? Because all it sounds like to me is ‘Broken, but with extra steps.’”
But………whatever.
Saying all that had been more for Reiki’s benefit, probably. In all likelihood, Levi hadn’t really heard it, wouldn’t remember a single word, and didn’t care. All because Reiki had done the logical math, and he had announced his conclusions, and they didn’t agree with Levi’s fantasy. Maybe Mirrorspace was just as ******** up as the Negaverse, when it came to getting people young, and breaking them down, and making them feel like they needed it. Maybe, where the Negaverse had half-youmafication, Mirrorspace had its own form of chains and Reiki simply hadn’t discovered the form they took yet.
Reiki didn’t get up to let Levi out. It wasn’t like the door was hiding, and Reiki didn’t want to take his hands off of Cersei when they itched so badly to hurt himself in ways he’d regret later.
He did, however, speak up with one last thing: “Take care of yourself, Levi.”
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