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 Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2023 4:54 pm
Things with Fang had ended just fine. No complaints out of Reiki, save that he and Fang had been put in that situation in the first place, all because Valjean hadn’t waited around to work out a compromise and had attacked instead. Fang was sorry for what he’d said, and moreover, he never would’ve said it otherwise. He wouldn’t have meant something like that. It wasn’t like him.
Except, as Reiki made his way toward home after sharing those sandwiches, the words that Fang hadn’t meant—would never mean—kept playing, over and over again, in his head: “Chaos all same!”
But—it was okay. It had to be okay. Because Fang was sorry, and Fang hadn’t meant it, and Fang never would’ve thought something like that, never mind saying it, without Valjean’s magic influencing him. Without Valjean being a stupid, trigger-happy ********>, Fang never would have attacked Reiki once, much less seemed ready to do it a second time before realizing what was going on.
Even if Fang had genuinely done any of that, it wasn’t like Reiki could blame him. Same as he couldn’t blame Anser for lashing out at him with her geese (because she’d assumed, based on her previous encounters with other Chaos rats, that Reiki had been responsible for Gabe ending up in the state he’d been), or that jumped up Neptune Knight for coming at him a couple weeks ago (because he’d assumed that Reiki had been the one who’d ******** up Aiden rather than the one trying to help them to the ER), or Ida-hime-sama for leaving him behind after the fight with the Blight, which had meant he was ripe for Faustite to temporarily boy-nab (which arguably hadn’t turned out that badly in the long run, and anyway, even if Faustite had actually been in a mood to torture or murder him, Ida’s choice to leave Reiki behind had probably been made in the interests of the greater good.…… She couldn’t be expected to know everyone on the White Moon side, or to know what kind of traumas they had with Chaos, and really, it was only fair to assume that the presence of one Dark Mirror senshi could’ve been enough to ******** up everything).
Chaos all same!
Because tarnish marred every surface of Reiki’s gutter soul. Maybe his starseed sang enough for Soya to hear that he was a senshi, but it didn’t shine with light, the way it should’ve done. Something about Reiki, on some kind of deep and fundamental level, was wrong. Cracked like a Negaverse senshi’s chest and forehead. Fraying like someone hadn’t sewn his hems quite right. Tried and convicted and sentenced to wallow in its own insufficiency. Broken.
Even if none of that had been true, Reiki was still in thrall to Chaos, and Chaos was always hungry.
Chaos never brought anything good or decent to the universe, so far as he could tell, only suffering. Chaos swallowed up worlds and destroyed people’s lives. Chaos left nothing in its wake but pain and anguish—and no matter how you sliced it, no matter that he’d sold his gutter soul to Mirrorspace like a ******** idiot instead of selling it to Metallia, who might have at least given him a decent price for it? Didn’t matter. Reiki was a servant of Chaos.
Chaos all same!
Dark Mirror Chaos vs. Negaverse Chaos was a stupid, meaningless distinction. All it ever (negatively) seemed to mean to anyone in the Negaverse was that Faustite specifically had trauma related to a different Dark Mirror boy and couldn’t punish Reiki for insubordination whenever he got mouthy. Everybody else seemed to assume solidarity on the basis of them all wearing black: Arsenolite, Albite, Heliodor, Sailor Huge-Tits of Who-Cares from last summer, Miss Jada, the very naughty Sylveon senshi from not too long ago. Trying to make “fetch” happen about “Dark Mirror and Negaverse are really super different actually, I swear” would probably get people killed. Just like Anser had said.
(Taking advice from traumatized eighteen-year-olds wasn’t necessarily a good idea. Reiki knew this. Their trauma didn’t mean that they knew everything. But someone needed to listen to her, to Xenia, to all the other senshi who’d gotten drafted for a magical girl war out of ******** middle school, if not earlier. In this instance, it simply happened to feel like Anser was probably right.)
Arguably, everyone on the White Moon side who kept giving Reiki chances just because he’d been good and behaved himself for them? Kerberos, Monoceros, Amsvartnir, Encke, Fang, Ida, Dagon, Pendour, Lysithea, Demeter, Lilith whenever she got things sorted out so she could leave the Negaverse—weren’t they all doing something terrible? By trusting Reiki, by giving him any opportunities and welcoming him anywhere (to their Wonders or their worlds, even just to their benches), weren’t they setting a precedent that other Chaos rats could exploit and use to wreak all kinds of havoc? Or what if he got them in trouble with other people in the White Moon’s ranks because what reason did they have to trust that he hadn’t drained anybody in almost a year, that he wasn’t going to do it again? Why should some hypothetical strangers have believed him when, honestly, the people he called friends (or friends-of-friends) had no reason to do that either?
What if Reiki made it harder for the actual magical girl heroes to do their jobs by hanging around them like a stupid groupie instead of playing the role that the universe had assigned him like so many casting directors who’d thought themselves clever and progressive for wanting The Witch (Into the Woods), or Heather Chandler (Heathers), or Mme. Thenardier (Les Mis) to be played by a little Asian boy in drag?
I’m stupid, Reiki mused, walking through a mirror stashed in an alley a few blocks away from his and Haruhi’s apartment. A stupid little boy with stupid dreams who never learns.
That thought—and the chill of Mirrorspace besides—made Reiki gasp. Made his eyes burn with a threat to tear up. For a moment, he really thought that he could hold himself together. But he walked through the full length mirror in his room……
It could’ve been enough for Cersei, down on his bed, to rouse and stare at him in confusion, utterly failing to recognize him, just because of his stupid dress. But Reiki just had to look at his reflection, too. His thought had been to assess the gashes left behind from Fang’s attack—but he got caught on the reflection’s face. On watching it move with every shift of his brows or lips. On waiting for it to stop mimicking him so perfectly, then tug one eyelid down and stick out its tongue to tell him what it really thought.
Nothing like that happened, but it should have.
It should have.
Because Murikabushi, reflected in the glass right there, he should have been someone else. He wasn’t Reiki. Didn’t feel like Reiki. Not at all.
Looking at Murikabushi and his perfectly fitted fuku in the mirror felt as deeply, viscerally wrong as Reiki had felt at Meadowview, when his skirt uniform had gotten stolen from his locker during gym class, and he’d had to endure the rest of the day swimming not only in pants, but in Junsei’s pants, several sizes too big for him.
Dimly, Reiki thought about a movie he loved, that he hadn’t had the heart to watch recently. The only Disney Princess movie whose princess had ever looked like him, even though Hua Mulan was Chinese, not Japanese, and wasn’t actually a Princess, she just got counted in the line-up anyway. He thought of her song, of her singing, Why is my reflection someone I don’t know?
And that broke him.
The tears came out, hot and sick, as he powered down. They kept coming as he threw off the cute skirt and top he’d been wearing, and wrapped himself up in enough sweater and plaid pajama bottoms to hide………all of this. He shuffled out to the sofa, like a ghost. Nominally, he hadn’t wanted to disturb Cersei. But she got up and followed him. And when she hopped up on the couch beside him, Reiki didn’t hold back; he hugged her and buried his face in the top of her head, which did nothing to muffle his sobs or make him stop crying.
Chaos all same.
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Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2023 6:46 pm
Haruhi came home not long after, using the mirror in nis room. It was easy to use the full length mirror home from nis job as a quick escape--clock out, duck into the bathroom, and no dealing with the more sociable coworkers on the way out the door! It hadn't been all that bad today, other than the poor customer Haruhi had helped with the burned down apartment. Ne really felt for the older woman, but there wasn't much ne could do about her still needing to pick up her mail instead of having it delivered. A temporary forwarding service or address change wasn't quite right when Miss Maggie was couch surfing between friends until she could secure a new apartment. It was these aspects of the job that really didn't do much to alter nis embittered perspective of the world. Even if ne was one of the most pleasant workers and really helped Miss Maggie feel better about her situation when there wasn't much to be done, the fact still remained that there wasn't any structure in place to help people like Miss Maggie at the moment. Or to persecute the s**t landlord with the s**t hiring practices for getting new wiring done. Ne sighed, slipping into nis civ self after traversing the mirror and dropping out of the uniform. Stupid polo shirt and black pants. Tossing on a long sleep shirt, ne went out to the living area and paused. Oh, no. Whoever had made Kiki feel like this would have to die soon. Just that simple. Ne quickly entered the kitchen and started making macaroni & cheese. It would never be as good as Uncle Mitch's, but it was still mostly homemade, and exactly what Kiki needed right now. Twenty minutes later, ne carried steaming bowls of mac'n'cheese out to the living room, setting both on the coffee table. "Would you like to have me feed you so you don't have to let go of Cersei?" ne teased gently, gauging the mood Reiki was in after having time to just cry it out while Haruhi cooked.
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Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2023 7:44 pm
Reiki managed a wan little chuckle at the joke, but it also sounded more pathetic than he wanted it to sound. But with Haruhi’s weight shifting the couch cushions, he managed to at least extricate himself from Cersei somewhat. First, he looked up at Haruhi, with his eyes all red and tear stains still quite clear on his cheeks (though Cersei tilted her head back to kiss-lick at one of them, because she was the Best Girl, and always so good). Ruffling his hands down her sides, Reiki shook his head (then leaned down to kiss Cersei on hers). Making Haruhi feed him would’ve just made him feel worse about the situation in about seventeen different ways.
“Really wish there’d been, like? A part of Levi and Soya’s magical girl pitch session? That had gone into how much I’d end up feeling like, ‘I’m upset about this but it’s not my thing to be upset about, it’s not about me, I can’t let my upset drain someone else when they’re going through something bigger and so much more and……yeah.’”
With another sigh, Reiki let go of his Best Girl and reached for one of the bowls of heavenly Cheese Noodle. He ignored the fact that none of how he felt was actually new or specific to being a magical girl. The situations might have been, but he did the same fundamental thing with all his pain from when Aunt Satomi had still been drinking: she’d apologized, she didn’t mean any of it, she was sorry, and she needed support right now, as part of getting and staying sober. No, she hadn’t said as much, but it had been obvious. Ojiisan had been working on his memoir about this back then; it wound up getting delayed to include new stuff he wrote about dealing with Satomi’s sobriety. But Reiki had read some of the draft chapters with Obaasan, and family support had come up again and again as an essential part of how Ojiisan had gotten sober.
So, it had stood to reason that Satomi had needed that kind of support. Which meant that there wasn’t any time for Reiki’s own feelings to be hurt. After all, he’d gotten home from the mall fine after being forgotten there. Nobody had called the cops during any incidents when Satomi had tried to make him, age fourteen, buy her tequila with just “be tall and pretend you’re in college” to help him. And she had never done what Rei-ojisan, Mom’s middle brother, had done and gotten Reiki s**t-faced while he was underage. So, no harm done. No reason for Reiki to feel upset.
Same as he had no reason for feeling upset when Ceros remembered him and still wanted him around (they just couldn’t hang out as Reiki and Whoever-Ceros-Was-Now-Because-It-Wasn’t-Toráin anymore), or when he wasn’t actually anything to Faustite and never would be because he was dying and his actual harem of cute sluts needed the support right now not Reiki (because being upset that the world had treated Faustite so terribly and it wasn’t fair or right for him to die over terrible things that people had done to him when he’d been a ******** teenager—that wasn’t the same as an actual relationship), or when Fang never would have meant something like what he’d said under the influence of Valjean’s magic and needed the reassurance that Reiki knew he was a good boy who would never have said that otherwise.
After a few bites of the magical cheese noodle, Reiki added, “Please don’t get any ideas about any of this, okay? It…… What happened tonight—it was somebody’s fault, but he’s only slightly shorter than I am and built like a ******** fridge. And I don’t think he’d have any compunctions about throwing you off a roof or some s**t.”
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Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2023 8:29 pm
"Tch. Mind reader," Haruhi said, snorting and scooting in to cuddle up on Reiki's free side. Of course Reiki knew that Haruhi was planning something. Haruhi didn't have the best poker face, not really. "You're an idiot, by the way," Haruhi said, taking a large bite of nis own cheese noodles. "Just sayin'. If I came home all upset and said something like 'oh, the other person didn't mean it, they were also having a bad time, I'm not allowed to feel bad', you'd ask me if I needed to be hospitalized for insanity. You deserve to get to feel bad, and have space for feeling bad. Just because it was an accident doesn't mean you don't need time to heal or deal with the injury, physical or emotional."
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Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2023 9:49 pm
Reiki opened his mouth to protest, but as if sensing that Her Person was about to say something incredibly stupid, Cersei grumbled and flopped down so her head was in Reiki’s lap. The look she shot up at him was long-suffering and deeply tired of his nonsense, and……okay, yeah, Reiki did deserve that. Kind of a lot.
“I know you’re right,” Reiki said with a deep sigh, then paused for a few more bites of cheese-noodle. He was absolutely a hypocrite in this way; he knew it and he’d pointed it out about himself before. “I just hate knowing why people did things that hurt me, and feeling like it’s not their fault—or if it is, then they’re in some kind of bad way, like Aunt Satomi not being sober at the time, or Rei-ojisan not being sober at the time, or whatever is going on for someone—and still feeling ******** up about whatever is going on. Like, if I know that something wasn’t a deliberate harm on anyone’s part—or if it was, then it happened because they were sick, like some of the s**t I said and did before I started taking therapy and recovery seriously—then……I want to just forgive them? And give them the same kind of grace that people gave me when I needed it?”
He took a moment to think about how he wanted to end this train of thought, gently ruffle-scratching the fur on the back of Cersei’s neck. “I just……want to make a positive difference in the universe, y’know, Ruhi? Even if it’s only a little bit. And—I feel so guilty for still feeling bad when people are sorry.
“Which, honestly, is probably why I’m not ******** up at Faustite anymore. Like, ******** up about what’s happening to him? Yes, absolutely. But I’m not ******** up at him, even though his faction is the one I have the most problems with.” Reiki huffed, and made himself eat more of his noodles. “Like, with him, we bit and snapped at each other, failed to understand each other, had temper tantrums at each other, then managed to talk like real people and worked things out and—well, to paraphrase the philosopher Kate Bush, if I only could, I’d make a deal with God, and get Her to ******** fix this because I don’t care that life isn’t fair; what the universe is doing to him is sick and it’s wrong and oh boy, diagnose me with drag delusion, but Faustite dying doesn’t make sense with my fantasy.”
Inhaling deeply, Reiki slouched back further into the cushions. “But then there’s things with Monoceros, and I’m not mad at him. I’m not upset at him. I’m happy for him that he got out of the Negaverse……but I really miss hanging out as us us, not senshi us, and he doesn’t remember Reiki at all, just <******** Murikabushi, and it’s like—?” Reiki made a soft, frustrated noise. “I know that us being able to hang out like that is completely not the ******** point, and his happiness and well-being are more important, and I don’t want to feel upset like some petulant <******** child, but it’s just……”
Reiki dropped his head onto the back cushion of the sofa and stared up at the ceiling. “He isn’t gone. He didn’t disappear. He actually called me before he left and it means so much that someone cared enough to let me know before something like that happened. But knowing that he doesn’t remember me me? It ******** hurts.”
If Faustite weren’t dying, the pain of Monoceros forgetting Reiki would almost be enough for Reiki to drop all the ******** senshi geish and just……be himself in front of Faustite. Maybe the fact that he was dying only made a reveal like that more important. But with Faustite’s time so limited, Reiki couldn’t justify wanting more of it, not when Albite, and Heliodor, and Lilith’s Resting b***h-Face Brother all needed to make the most of that time with him so much more than the annoying, loudmouth Mirror-Thing who Faustite didn’t hate.
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Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2023 10:32 pm
"Oh, Kiki," Haruhi said with a soft sigh, scooting in closet to rest nis head on Reiki's shoulder. "I know. You're just so... impossibly you." Ne snorted, pulling back again to shovel more food unceremoniously into nis mouth. "You want to be more good than your human nature allows you to be." Ne shrugged. "You wanna make a deal with God, you gotta be God first, and Kiki, hun, we're both just humans. Dealing with dumb human s**t like still having feelings about stuff when objectively we should be fine. Well... that's just not how it works. Even if what happened with Monoceros was good for him? It still left you missing half of your friend. You still lost something. It's okay to grieve that. I don't know what happened tonight, but you can still grapple with these hurt feelings and take some breathing room for yourself while knowing you'll still be their friend again later. It'll be easier to forgive them fully if you let yourself acknowledge that they hurt you, however much they didn't mean it, it still happened."
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Posted: Sat Apr 22, 2023 1:41 am
Reiki sighed, listening to Haruhi (lovingly and supportively) read his a** and wilting as several things decided to start catching up with him all at once: the exhaustion of how hard he perpetually pushed himself at all of the things. The drain from trying so hard to be a good magical girl, to protect people who couldn’t protect themselves. The weight of knowing that someone he loved was back in chemo and someone he complicatedly cared about in some kind of fashion was dying but didn’t even have the option of chemo or something equivalent. The wear and tear from this bullshit night specifically—from Mirrorspace, from Valjean’s magic, from what Fang had said, even though he didn’t mean it.
“What happened tonight was so……” Reiki shook his head. “This Negaverse ******** named Valjean, right? He dresses like the sort of stripper you’d hire for Robespierre’s bachelor party if he had ever been capable of loving anyone more than he loved Madame Guillotine. And he was having some kind of altercation with my friend Fang. I wanted to try and work out some kind of compromise, but Valjean just threw his magic at us and booked it, like a ******** jackass.” Making a supremely mature noise somewhere halfway between blech and eugh, Reiki stuck out his tongue—you know, like an adult. “I don’t know all of what Fang felt? But I felt like I had the absolute right solution. The best way to fix everything for all time and make everybody happy, even if we don’t deserve it. And Valjean wasn’t letting me even try because he ******** off to who-knows-where—probably back to the Negaverse.
“But the way I was trying to express my solution? It really set Fang off, whatever he was feeling. He lashed out at me with his attack, which hurts like a ********. But the worst part was what he said while caught up in the grip of it all.” Reiki sighed, and repeated it in a flat, removed voice, “‘Chaos all same. Only want death. How could you. Muri was friend.’ ……And he didn’t mean it. He was really ******** up and apologetic when the magic wore off and he came back down? Fang would never think something like that when he’s fully in his own mind, much less say it, but I still just feel……”
Too worn out to start crying again, at least. Not that it helped much. “Feel like hitting me with a train would be nicer than making me admit that I’m different from a White Moon senshi, not just……the same thing but with better fashion sense and enough self-respect to know that white is a terrible color that only looks good on Cersei.”
Who was literally perfect and everything looked good on her always because Cersei was the Best Girl.
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Posted: Sat Apr 22, 2023 1:00 pm
Haruhi finished eating nis bowl of mac'n'cheese as Reiki spoke, letting him get everything out. Ne really loved nis older cousin, but ne could be really dense sometimes. "Yowch. No wonder you're all ******** up right now," ne said very tactfully, leaning in and rubbing Reiki's back. "....Kiki.... we're going to have to figure out a way to purify. I know you hate wearing white, but... being a 'white moon senshi but with fashion sense' isn't working. And I think you know that. No matter how much you're liked by some people on the White Moon side of things... Even Fang seems to have instincts to avoid you or dislike you, probably rooted in his trauma, and I bet it was brought up by Valjean's magic. Even if he loves you as a friend, right now, you're still someone dangerous to him." It felt mean, to be so blunt about it, but it was clearly something Reiki needed to hear. "I mean, once we figure out how to purify, you can try taking a sharpie to your outfit?" ne suggested, trying to lighten the mood a bit.
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