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How could Michel resist the urge to investigate anything with so much fire and smoke?

And energy signatures, though they seemed to be scattered and fleeing.

Probably not anything he should have worried about, there were skirmishes all the time.

They just often didn’t leave this much destruction.

With the diminishing energy signatures he wasn’t much worried that he’d wind up in any trouble himself, and if things got problematic he could always dip out and visit his wonder.

The only energy signatures even close to him were below his rank, and it was just a Senshi and–oh, what the hell were those things again? He hadn’t seen a Dark Mirror Senshi in ages. Their Chaos was a bit more palatable than anything the Negaverse had but his nose wrinkled anyway.

He found himself redirecting his path to intercept the signatures before he’d really even thought about it and figured he could interrogate them to see what he’d missed.

Not that he was complaining; he wasn’t much for social gatherings, anyway.

If he were being honest, he anticipated finding two star-crossed lovers locking lips while everyone else was distracted.

What he didn’t expect was to find Fang, even if he was unconscious and in the arms of some Chaos Senshi.

Michel immediately bristled and gripped his weapon a little tighter. The clock hand was versatile enough that he wasn’t sure if he was prepared to swing it or hurtle it, but Fang was in the way so it wasn’t like he was jumping into combat right now.

“Interesting cargo you’ve got there.”

Fang looked hurt, he could see blood. Senshi didn’t usually make someone bleed. Didn’t usually try to run away carrying them like they were something precious, either, but he didn’t even pretend like he understood the Dark Mirror Court.

What he did understand was that if Fang was hurt he wasn’t going to let some stranger carry him off to some dark corner of Mirrorspace.

Michel’s eyes darted to Fang for a brief second because what the ********, Fang, why were you making friends with Dark Mirror Senshi? Like yeah, sure, the lesser of two evils, but still evil, and with his aversion to Chaos–why?

Naturally he assumed the Dark Mirror Senshi in front of him must have been some sort of conniving trickster taking advantage of Fang’s friendly, gullible nature, but to call him a friend–

Well, that could have been in self preservation.

He had a good story to back it up, at least.

Michel almost didn’t even mind it until he heard Faustite’s name.

Who decided it was a good idea to make Faustite a General King? He was a runt, a tiny ******** flame that should have been snuffed out a thousand times over, and there was a burning, seething rage in the pit of his stomach because he knew he should have just killed him. He knew it.

Lysithea was going to be livid.

Michel didn’t blame her. He couldn’t even be glad to hear about another Princess because he heard Faustite’s name and he was seeing red. He gripped the clock hand tightly enough that it bit into his hand and hurt.

God, this Dark Mirror Senshi talked a lot, and Michel might have been mad if he wasn’t piecing together a horrible ******** story from it. Faustite, really?

Really?

“You’re never going to make it to the hospital with him,” he pointed out. “You’re going to run into half a dozen or more people like me who come to investigate and you’re going to get held up by every one of them. And what are you going to do, dump him on the doorstep of the hospital? Carry him in looking like that? Hand him over, I’ll take him. You stick out way too much. How bad is he hurt?” he asked, and already seemed like he expected Murikabushi to hand Fang over.

He didn’t want to take him by force but it wasn’t off the table.

Fang stirred, ears twitching as the argument pierced the haze of pain and fog of sleep that flooded his brain. He made a soft whimpering noise, ducking in closer to Muri and nuzzling at him, before he recognized the other voice that Murikabushi was arguing with.

"MIchel?" he whispered, voice splitting, cracking, scratching painfully at his throat like Ida had never partially healed his throat. It made his head hurt.

"M-Muri help," he said, barely above a whisper, trying to make himself heard. His eyes finally opened slightly as he sought Michel's face.

Please, trust, he mouthed as he shivered. He slumped again, the effort of trying to make two of the people he trusted most stop fighting taking a toll on him.

“Temee. Baka to muchi ka kono yarou,” Reiki sneered. The desire to add Just like every other mediocre straight white boy to the end of that insult burned within him—silenced not even by his awareness of how he couldn’t actually assume he was right about any of those adjectives (except “mediocre,” which was a personal opinion and therefore fine), but only by the fact that Fang had reacted to this a*****e’s presence with recognition.

On the other hand, he had also clung to Reiki initially. He had insisted that Reiki had been helping him. You know, like Reiki had said from the beginning.

Not that there was time to gloat about Michel’s assumptions being stupid and wrong. Arguably, Reiki had gotten more than his fair share of Petty Satisfaction by slinging at Michel a string of insults that could have been sufficiently rendered in English as <******** off, you stupid, ignorant ******** Michel knew enough Japanese to know what Reiki said. Maybe he only knew enough about human speech to pick up on the general tone. Didn’t matter, either way. Insulting arrogant, self-righteous bastards like Michel always felt so much more satisfying in Japanese. Aside from the inherent rudeness of insulting them in a language they may not have spoken, there was also the level like telling them “You are so far beneath me that I can only properly read your a** by using a language so intensely nuanced that it requires several complex grammatical systems for understanding and expressing people’s relative social positions.”

“Yeah, ‘villain’ came straight out of my mouth because I’ve met enough people like you to know how you all think.” Not that it stopped Reiki from coming closer, with an intent to shift Fang into the Saturn Knight’s arms so he could be the big damn hero and save precious innocent baby Fang from the dumb slut Mirror-skank who had to be capital-E Eeeevil!!!, and probably just as bad as Faustite in this self-righteous ******** twisty-a** garbage-brain, because well, duh. Obviously.

Chaos all same. Want death. How could you.

The fact that the memory of those words that Fang hadn’t really meant—coupled with the stress from the rest of tonight, and especially the lingering emotional devastation of that Negaverse senshi’s attack—put tears back in Reiki’s eyes made his throat burn with shame and humiliation.

“If I hadn’t been trying to help Fang, you would’ve shot first and asked questions never, Michel.” Really, it was so offensive for this rude-a** Saturn Knight to have that name when one of Reiki’s favorite dead gay philosophers also happened to be named Michel. So obscene. Foucault didn’t die for this (a complaint that Reiki sort of realized was purely Bitches Eating Crackers-level nonsense, but……meh, he could beat himself up about not being His Best Self later, like when he wasn’t so close to crying in front of someone who had managed to very swiftly join Arsenolite and Sailor Huge-Tits of Who-Cares at the top of Reiki’s personal Biggest Assholes List). “Just like all the others on your side who act like you’re always righteous because you got. ********. lucky. about either Awakening White Moon, or Awakening Negaverse and having a simple, straightforward escape plan.”

As opposed to the Dark Mirror, where it had taken Reiki a <******** year to find out that leaving even was an option and that he was not condemned to this forever—for all the ******** good it did when he didn’t know anybody who knew a goddamn thing about how to actually make good on that escape.

But whatever. Michel didn’t care. He was just another self-righteous b***h who didn’t appreciate how much dumb ******** luck had influenced his position in life. Reiki just needed to hand Fang over and get the ******** out of here, before Michel did something, like……accuse him of faking the tears, or call him a weak b***h like Reiki didn’t already know that about himself, or whatever other godawful bullshit thing Michel had it in him to do.

Reiki openly rolled his eyes—why bother trying to hide exactly how ******** Over It he was? Maybe for somebody else, he would’ve put in the effort to be polite, no matter how much he wanted to scream, cry, punch a ******** mirror as if that made any kind of point aside from getting glass lodged in his knuckles? But with this mediocre jackass who seemed to think that he was smarter and stronger and better than everybody else, and who pretty clearly hadn’t had enough people dare to stand up to him before in his life?

No.

No.

Absolutely not.

Somebody like this was never going to like Reiki, no matter what he did—and frankly, the sentiment was mutual—and so the only reason to hold back on anything? The only reason to not snap at him like “There’s a difference between ‘unloading my emotional trauma’ and ‘explaining why I know that you’re just like Angelica and everyone else on your side who doesn’t have any ******** manners,’ but I suppose I can’t expect anything from the avatar of toxic masculinity” (which Reiki realized, on some level, really wasn’t fair and was a more apt description of Arsenolite than Michel……but Arsenolite was at least kinda sorta trying to be a better person)?

The only reason not to go off like “You don’t know ME at all either, a*****e. You don’t know who I am, or what I’m about, or how ******** BADLY I want this Chaotic straitjacket OFF of my ******** starseed, or how much I try to HELP people so I can at least make the best of my bullshit situation instead of wasting my powers and letting innocent people die? The ONLY reason you have to justify ANY of how you’ve treated me is what I’m wearing, but that didn’t stop you from swooping in here like you owned the place, talking about Fang like he wasn’t even a person—by extension implying that *I* saw him as a thing—and acting like you had any ******** right to walk all over me”……?

The only reason not to do those things was Fang.

Fang, who needed Michel to get him to the hospital, like, now. Fang, who’d vouched for Reiki and that still hadn’t gotten Michel to look past the black fuku and see an actual human person who’d only wanted to help his friend. Fang, who was innocent in all of this and stood to be hurt the most by Reiki and Michel continuing to bite and snap at each other just because Michel was a judgmental, self-righteous p***k who desperately needed to get himself some manners so he wouldn’t look so damn stupid, and Reiki was so much Murasaki’s Grandson, which was to say needlessly defiant and compulsively anti-authoritarian.

Fang, who was in Michel’s arms and didn’t need Reiki anymore.

“Maybe,” Reiki said, tone dropping like a hanged man as he ducked around Michel’s side and nudged through, trying. “But you’d like that, wouldn’t you.”

He didn’t parse it as a question because, as far as he was concerned, it wasn’t. It wasn’t really an accusation, either. Just a statement of what seemed, to Reiki, like plain, simple facts. Maybe Michel was on the Most Correct Side in the grand scheme of all things magical girl-related, but he was obviously cut from the same cloth as Angelica, the cloth of All Chaos same and Hunting Dark Mirrors for sport because Sappho messed up and hurt me romantically is morally justified because of Reasons. After tonight, even if Fang stood up for Reiki later, Michel wouldn’t even learn anything or question his preconceived bullshit ideas because people like him never did. They always had to be right, they could never accept that they were wrong, and asking them to consider any other perspectives or learn jackshit anything was morally offensive and Not Allowed.

“One less parasite to worry about,” Reiki added, because he was still within earshot, and ******** Michel. Maybe Reiki couldn’t hurt him, not really, but he could at least satisfy himself by making his feelings known. “One less death-worshiping Chaos rat to infest your city.” As if Reiki hadn’t grown up here, too. As if Sappho’s brother and his husband weren’t kind of a big deal in certain scenes in town. As if anybody died and made you king of anything.

Reiki paused and, deciding to learn absolutely nothing from either Orpheus or Mrs. Lot, he glanced back at Fang, one last time. “One less Mirror-thing to make friends with your people, right.”

Again, not a question, and why should it have been?

Faustite, Reiki could not help thinking, would never treat me this way. Sure fine whatever, he’s with the Negaverse, but he has more reason to hate Mirror-skanks like me than you do, and he has more reason to be pissed off at the entire world than you do, and he still makes better choices about how to act than you do.

Maybe the “would never treat me this way” part would stop being true as soon as Reiki figured out how to get out of the Court, but if that happened, he’d still have the memories of Faustite ever being kind to him, in his own, uniquely Faustite way.

Michel, on the other hand? Reiki didn’t doubt that Michel would’ve hated him even if Reiki had already been a White Moon senshi tonight. Maybe it wasn’t fair of him to think, maybe he was projecting this terrible meeting onto a hypothetical situation that no one would ever know the truth about. But still, it made sense. At least having been Chaos for this first meeting allowed them to rip that bandaid off, instead of letting Reiki—or whoever he’d be right now, if he weren’t still with the Mirror—waste any time on trying to make friends with somebody who would never see him as deserving basic human decency, much less accept him or even remotely like him.

But with his piece said, Reiki took off in the opposite direction. The sooner he got away from Michel, the sooner Fang got ******** help, and that was the important thing.