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 Posted: Sat Apr 15, 2023 10:27 pm
Reiki needed to Have Words with whoever-the-student in whichever of Obaasan’s classes had decided to hook the rest of the class up with his contact information. Strictly speaking, he probably more so needed to have words with himself for not even remotely respecting his own boundaries about what a “mental health leave for the semester” even meant. Taking it hadn’t helped him any in most of the regards that he could think of. His sleep was still questionable, his moods left so much to be desired, he was losing weight despite making what had felt like so much conscious, deliberate efforts to avoid any bad habits that felt like backsliding. One of the things in his life that currently made him happiest was probably going away very soon and he wouldn’t hear jackshit about it for weeks if not months (because the thing in question was “running into Faustite,” who was dying, and to whom Reiki wasn’t much of anything, a Dark Mirror senshi who he didn’t hate)……
(The fact that Reiki’s run-ins with Faustite had become something he looked forward to would have, in anyone else’s eyes, probably merited more interrogation and scrutiny—but it wasn’t that complicated, really. Maybe any coherent name for Reiki’s own feelings eluded him, but the allure of an irascible p***k who was literally on fire made perfect sense. Faustite was real, painfully real, in a way most men could never dream of being. You may not have liked his behaviors, you may not have particularly enjoyed what he had to say at any given moment, but he was never, as far as Reiki knew, anybody but himself.
……Something that Reiki had not paid back to him with even a shred of fairness, given all the dissembling, the half-truths, the truths told slant, and the never-ending refrain in his mind of What Would Sansa Stark Do? Even if he’d been earnest when it mattered and given Faustite genuine emotions, Reiki hadn’t given him the same amount of honesty that Faustite had given him. If some miracle decided to let Faustite off the hook—to let him live instead of dying over horrible things that other people had done to him when he’d been a <******** teenager—then……Reiki really needed to give him more in the honesty department. Even if they weren’t really anything to each other, even if Faustite probably had his dance card full up with cute sluts who didn’t give him nearly half as many headaches, he deserved more honesty out of Reiki.
More importantly, Reiki wanted to give him that. To be another someone who at least tried to show him kindness.)
Either way: Reiki’s dubious life choices regarding men didn’t help at all in the face of so many of Obaasan’s students needing him. All the whining and grousing he felt inside, to the tune of I wasn’t even supposed to be here today, paled in comparison to how many of these undergrads worried about their grades, lived in terror of tanking their GPAs on what was supposed to have been a simple bureaucratic requirement, did not speak Obaasan’s particular one-person dialect of English as well as Reiki and therefore did not understand what she wanted. He’d spent all semester making periodic trips out to the Daily Grind, near DCU’s campus, meeting with various undergrads from his grandmother’s classes, who desperately needed him to play the role of sympathetic TA and help them through this.
Today, he’d come to the coffee-shop as soon as it had opened—after barely any sleep, between a Saturday night show at Scandals, a visit to Mirrorspace, and a quick patrol to do his ******** job as a magical girl (protecting people who couldn’t protect themselves, no matter what anyone told him about “blah blah, mirrorwraiths, blah blah, energy, blah blah blah, drain people like a ******** leech”)—and now, it was going on six PM……and Reiki was still here. He’d managed to sneak off for an actual lunch break, sure, but he’d rushed through it regardless, and there were still more of Obaasan’s students who might’ve shown up.
In order to keep from completely vexing the poor staff at the coffee shop, Reiki had made regular trips up for another big cup of green tea (made with two tea bags) and some kind of baked good. Most of the treats, he hadn’t touched yet, or had only broken off tiny chunks from. He’d stopped counting how many cups of tea he’d had.
At least his outfit looked cute, a black blouse with lace trims on the cuffs and collar, paired with thigh-highs, his Mary Jane heels from Yuki, and a hot pink-plaid pleated skirt—a knockoff of assorted styles from Tripp NYC that Reiki had made himself because none of their skirts ever proved long enough for legs like his. Today had dragged on interminably long, but at least. Reiki. looked ********. cute.
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Posted: Sat Apr 15, 2023 11:10 pm
It was a casual trip to the Daily Grind, right off campus. A stop for coffee, after his last class, and also to pick up some pastries to bring home to Holly, because treating his girl was the right thing to do.
Of all the things Will was expecting, spotting the sassy civilian who'd gotten between him and another Senshi a few months back was not it. He was certainly recognizable--tall, broad, with long dark hair and wearing a cute skirt. At the time, Will had sort of assumed her was coming out of the bar nearby that did drag shows, so he was more than a little surprised to see the stranger sporting the same fashion here and now.
It looked good on him, Will had to admit.
He went throguh getting his order, getting those pastries for Iris, and then pondered. He would have to find an in to approach, because truth be told, he was deeply curious about any person who was brave enough to get in the middle of a powered brawl as a civilian. Seemed like a good choice to be brought to Faustite as a potential recruit.
But first, Will had to get to know him better. Get an idea of who he was, what he had going for him beyond a pretty face and a lot of nerve.
So he glanced at the drink on the handsome man's table, went back in line, and ordered another. Once it was delivered, he walked over, and casually set it down on the stranger's table.
"I hope this doesn't come across as weird," he said, "but from one harried student to another," it was a guess, but not a hard one, "you look like you could use some more caffeine."
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Posted: Sun Apr 16, 2023 1:41 pm
The cup settling on Reiki’s table gave him pause. Made him blink and tilt his head at it for a moment. For all Reiki expected people to show up and just sit down with him today, none of them had come with any drinks for him. Some of them had barely even brought drinks for themselves (the appearances of those students had tended to precede Reiki going up for another drink and shoving a couple extra singles in the tip jar because……dammit, honestly? The staff here worked hard and the least these people could do was buy a drink and tip them decently).
After a moment of bemused staring at the cup, Reiki looked up at the guy who’d brought it for him. And—oh, he was handsome. The blonde hair and blue eyes were a little bit All-American Good Boy for Reiki’s tastes (excluding Chris Evans, who was allowed to do whatever he wanted to Reiki, in any imaginary scenario where that was an option), but the fact that his hair was long took some of the edge off. Either way, objectively, the guy was good-looking.
Even with the All-American Good Boy-ness of his looks acknowledged, Reiki might not have said “no” had he been in the mood to make a certain kind of arguable mistake that he’d largely lacked the ability to make recently, because the boy he most wanted to make it with happened to be literally on fire and Reiki preferred not having third-degree burns in sensitive places. (He might’ve been an obstinate, pain-in-the-a** Mirror-Thing who didn’t listen, but he had learned from the burn on his right hand. Even if Kerberos’s healing magic had fixed it up so that it looked more like Reiki actually had touched a hot stove, rather than a terminally ill half-youma, Reiki had learned from it.)
“……Thanks,” he managed to say, despite his brain lagging somewhat in an attempt to rapidly switch tracks. Nudging his glasses up so he could more easily rub his nose, he sighed. “Technically not a student at the moment, but……the library still fills my ILL requests for articles we don’t already have access to and it’s a really semantic technicality. And correct me if I’m wrong, but……you don’t seem like you’re here for a consultation on ‘Help, what does Dr. Rokugin mean by this, I’m scared’?”
For one thing, Blondie seemed older than all the undergrads Reiki had made time for all semester. For another thing, the drink could’ve meant a lot of things, but again……no one else had brought him one. How Blondie reacted to the name “Dr. Rokugin” might have been a good clue, unless he just……told Reiki who he was, or something. DCU had five different “Dr. Rokugin”s running around—Obaasan in women’s, gender, sexuality, and queer studies; Ojiisan and Aunt Satomi in history, though Ojiisan was also on a leave semester right now; Dad in mechanical engineering; and Mom in PoliSci—so if nothing else, Reiki might be able to tell which department this guy stuck to (though there was potential overlap), which family members he’d dealt with (if any), and/or if he knew any particular gossip about the family (from Obaasan’s obviously true reputation for being challenging, to Dad’s largely accurate reputation for being extremely lenient about extensions, to the patently false rumors that Mom’s family back in Kyoto had Yakuza ties or the actually correct rumors that one of her brothers would be joining the art school faculty in September).
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Posted: Tue Apr 18, 2023 12:55 am
Good. The offer of coffee had worked as an in, which was realistically all Will needed. It gave him an excuse to smile, pull out the other chair, and sit down.
Honestly, he rated his odds good, if he committed to the possibility of recruiting this particular civilian, of actually winning him over. It had worked with Ingrid--and he wouldn't be trying the exact same methods there, but. Well. He was persuasive enough. And the Negaverse had plenty to offer to someone with a lot of sass and the bravery to get into a fight between two costumed vigilantes.
"Not exactly," he acknowledged. "I thought you looked exhausted, and I sympathized as someone who has also been studying all day. If you're here as a TA, even moreso." He smiled, wryly. "So, which Dr. Rokugin?" He'd dealt most frequently with Dr. Noshiko Rokugin, personally, but he was well aware she wasn't the only one--so he had to admit, he was curious.
(And that also told him something. Not currently a student, but with a connection to the Rokugins. Probably meant he was academically inclined. Will added that to his list of things to consider, in order to properly make his pitch.)
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Posted: Tue Apr 18, 2023 2:44 pm
……Oh, ho. So, blondie with the ponytail wasn’t going to give away all his secrets that easily. Listening to him, Reiki picked up the offered tea and lifted the lid so he could sniff it more properly. Definitely still in need of steeping, but it would taste good once it was ready.
“Dr. Murasaki Rokugin,” Reiki said, in response to the very fair question. Maybe Blondie hadn’t given up which, if any, of the Drs. Rokugin he’d personally dealt with, but some strategic social play might have been more necessary with him. Give him an inch of rope, wait for him to decide if it’s a line thrown out to save him or a noose with which to hang himself.…… Well, maybe not entirely all that dramatic, but Reiki had been at these “open office hours” all day. He’d earned the right to be ~*Unnecessarily!! Dramatic!!*~ within the confines of his own head.
“Obaasan doesn’t try to terrify students or anything, but……well.” Reiki shrugged. “She fought her way into a PhD program at a time when even finding white women in one of those was like finding a unicorn, never mind the daughter of immigrants from Osaka. Plus, she’s spent so much of her life doing activist work, and nothing ever gets done there without riling up somebody. So, sometimes, her way of being……gets a bit intense, and the undergrads get scared. They get scared, makes it harder for them to understand what she wants.”
Reiki personally didn’t find Obaasan intense, but he could admit his own biases here. She had, after all, gotten him to go to sleep by telling bedtime stories like that of Ōiwa-sama’s vengeance on her philandering, murdering, s**t-bag husband from Yotsuya kaidan. She’d heard him, around age eleven or twelve, whining about being bored at school, decided to have a two-person book club with him, and started them off with A Game of Thrones. Objectively, yes, Reiki could admit that his grandmother was Kind Of Intense as a person, but he’d always known that as Just How Obaasan Is.
He was eternally proud and privileged to be her grandson, and to get her beta-reading feedback on his next ridiculous fanfiction that he hoped would make Grigor Mothman regret selling the rights to his characters to HBO. (Maybe no one needed to ask the question “What if the Night’s King’s so-called Corpse Queen was actually also a boy, and what if he was suspiciously like Levi, and also what if Omegaverse”—but Reiki was stunning and brave enough to ask it anyway.)
Tucking his bangs behind his ear and crossing his legs at the knee, Reiki concluded, “Which is where I come in. I’m supposed to have been on a leave this semester, but……someone from one of her old classes gave my email to a friend, and I couldn’t just hang the undergrads out to dry, y’know? Not fair to let their GPAs suffer just because they got discombobulated.”
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Posted: Tue Apr 18, 2023 3:35 pm
Dr. Murasaki Rokugin. Gender, sexuality, and women's studies. Will wondered if he'd ever taken classes with her, in the great blank Before. Now, of course, the answer was no; he hadn't had occasion to get into any of her classes.
"Ahh," Will said, nodding idly. "I haven't taken a class from her, yet, but I have heard some things. Inevitable, I think. But I've mostly dealt with Dr. Noshiko Rokugin."
Obaasan. Will wasn't exactly fluent in Japanese, but he was pretty sure that was a term that implied a familial relationship, and the way his new...friend, perhaps, spoke of her definitely indicated a lot of admiration.
"Good of you to interrupt your time off," he said, amused. "Not sure most people would have done that for a bunch of strangers, especially since undergrads can be...." He trailed off, shrugged. High strung. Easily stressed. He'd had a few crossover classes, and it was sort of an adventure. "I'm Will, by the way. Will Corday."
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Posted: Tue Apr 18, 2023 8:01 pm
Any semblance of being cool, Reiki promptly threw out the window as soon as the mysterious blonde stranger clarified exactly which Dr. Rokugin he’d worked with. Not that he was ready to abandon any pursuit of answers about who this guy was—but Reiki couldn’t help lighting up in a smile, all bright and eager (the exhaustion notwithstanding).
“One of Mom’s students? So, PoliSci, then?” Seemed most likely. You could still end up in a PoliSci class from a different degree track, sure, and Mom did sometimes teach cross-listed courses, but with the way academia liked to silo off departments……? Either way, this new person in Reiki’s life had studied with Mom, and—“I’m Reiki Rokugin. My mother’s son, my grandmother’s TA, and occasional unicorn spotting down in engineering when someone needs to go fetch my brother or our Dad.
“And right now, well.” Reiki shrugged as though Will were wrong and yes actually, anybody would have interrupted their own mental health leave to come help Obaasan’s undergrads. No, it wasn’t the way the world worked—but it was the fantasy that Reiki wanted to create in the world. “I just know that people who aren’t used to Obaasan can get nervous, dealing with her, and I try to give the undergrads the benefit of the doubt, y’know?”
He didn’t want to be like the TAs, lecturers, profs, et al. who periodically went viral for being an a*****e to a student in crisis, only for said student to end up in the ER.
“But what about you, Will Corday, who might be a PoliSci grad student, and has taken classes with my Mom?”
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Posted: Tue Apr 18, 2023 9:01 pm
Will nodded. It wasn't a hard guess, really, and he wasn't entirely playing mysterious on purpose, though it seemed a little mystery had worked for him.
"PoliSci graduate, yes," Will acknowledged. He'd tipped his hand, inasmuch as it was one, anyway, no reason to beat around the bush. "I've taken classes from both of the Drs. Rokugin in the history department as well--your grandfather and aunt, right? Honestly, they're all incredibly impressive. I always know I'll have an interesting semester if I manage to get into a class one of the Drs. Rokugin is teaching."
It wasn't flattery, either. Will genuinely enjoyed learning, had a feeling he had even before the person he used to be was erased and written over.
"It's nice to meet you, Reiki. Honestly, more TAs probably could stand to learn from your example." He shrugged. "I had a few meetings with professors today, and then spent a few hours in the library working on a paper. Was going to stop here and get some treats for my partner and I, and couldn't help but want to stop and talk to a harried-looking fellow academic."
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Posted: Tue Apr 18, 2023 9:57 pm
“That would be them, yeah,” Reiki answered, smiling earnestly. Not that he wasn’t also listening to what Will had to say about himself—listening was just polite, especially since Reiki had asked—but Reiki loved his family. He loved to talk about his family. Most of all, he loved it when other people also loved his family and didn’t act like he was a lunatic for up-talking them. “Ojiisan would be the Dr. Rokugin who specializes in the histories and politics of revolutions. Aunt Satomi is the Dr. Rokugin who writes about women and queerness in Japanese, Chinese, and Sinitic diaspora histories.”
Or, as Aunt Satomi always put it, I’m a simple Jap-Am femme writing about all the other girls like me who came before because almost nobody else on this planet will even bother doing that kind of ******** work.
Aunt Satomi was a blessing. Reiki loved her so much.
“Either way, it’s been really nice to meet you too, Will,” Reiki told him. “Both because……well, I always love hearing that people have had good experiences with my family.” He wouldn’t have been Noshiko’s Son or Murasaki’s Grandson—at least not properly—if he hadn’t supported his family in their endeavors. “And on the other hand? Because more people in general could stand to learn from your example. Not to be all Blanche Dubois about it, but the ‘kindness of strangers’ seems to be in such short supply, these days.… And thank you, by the way. For the drink. It’s very well-timed.”
Even hearing about the partner Will had to get home to, Reiki might have invited him to stay longer—but he looked up right in time to see a skinny, dark-skinned undergrad in vibrant blue eyeshadow, heading right toward his table, with her own drink in hand.
“Darcy, hi, I was hoping you’d come.” With an apologetic smile, Reiki looked to Will. “Sorry, I hate to kick you out or anything? Especially when it’s been nice, getting to meet you? But…Darcy’s from one of Obaasan’s classes.”
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Posted: Tue Apr 18, 2023 10:19 pm
The thing Will was finding was that he liked Reiki. He'd already known that he respected the man's bravery, even if he'd found it intolerably obnoxious at first, but....he also just liked him. Funny, charming, clearly invested in his family. All things Will couldn't help but respect.
And, moreover, all things that would make him an excellent asset tot he Negaverse. Yes, he would definitely be delivering this one to Faustite, if it all fell out correctly.
"You're welcome," he said, genuinely. "It's a small thing, but sometimes it's worthwhile to just be decent." In innumerable small and large ways. It was a simple balanced equation: no, Will was not particularly soft, as a person. No, he didn't have much interest in being so. But the occasional bit of niceness worked much better than being a surly, cold a*****e all the time.
When the poor undergrad approached, Will nodded.
"I won't keep you," he said, and he stood up. "Good luck," he told poor Undergrad Darcy, and then, with a wave, he headed for the door.
He'd have to drive fast to get home, but oh well.
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