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The Wishing Tree (1): A Destiny City Star Festival Tradition to be held every year; In Town Square, there is a beautiful tree with spreading branches. It is tall, but the lowest branches are easily reached. The city has decorated the tree with small, starlike ornaments and glistening lights. Thick leaves and beautiful purple flowers dangle from the branches, along with a myriad of different colored papers with handwritten wishes. Next to the tree is a stack of blank paper with twine attached, and a handwritten sign that explains:

Write your wish on a sheet of paper and tie it to the tree. Take one wish off the tree and do your best to grant it. When you have granted the wish, bury the paper in the park.

The papers are biodegradable and filled with seeds. There are no rules for wishing, but you are encouraged to wish for something vague enough that it can be interpreted in many ways so that it can be granted; you do not write your name on it, but it is encouraged to write something that doesn’t wish for self gain, but rather something that can make the world a better place. Some wishes dangling from the tree already include things like “I wish there wasn’t so much litter in the park,” “I wish someone would clean the graffiti off the old historic buildings,” and “I wish there were more volunteers at the shelter.”

If you choose to use the Wishing Tree, what do you wish for? If your wish is private, you may write it on the paper and choose a spot in the park and bury it yourself instead of hanging it on the tree.


Ah, the Wishing Tree.… Now that Reiki had gotten his head around reality enough to accept that the City’s Star Festival had begun, he’d made a point of coming out to the Wishing Tree again. After all, someone worked hard to put together such a great, wonderful thing, and Reiki wanted to contribute to it as much as he could. Everyone always put up such lovely wishes, trying to put more good things in the world and the town.

……Well. Mostly everyone.

The first wish that Reiki opened to look at made him pull a sour face. Partially because the wish itself was ******** ridiculous—“I wish that more divorced dads in this town would get on Grindr or maybe go to a drag show at Scandals Bar”—but mostly because Reiki recognized the borderline illegible chickenscratch accompanied by a little doodle of a happy, loosely anime-style bunny making a peace sign. Not only that, but seeing Elijah’s handwriting and his hot garbage wish, completely flouting the actual spirit of the Wishing Tree, made Reiki cringe in secondhand embarrassment.

On the plus, Reiki supposed it was nice that one boy he knew was completely Faustite-proof without also being straight.

Well……Faustite-proof unless Faustite becoming a General-King had magically unlocked an advanced form in which he resembled not a troubled-but-cute pretty boy with a harem and a lot of pent up anger or a sapient firestorm, but instead, a middle-aged divorcé with “dad-bod” paunch and a mile-long list of regrets, who maybe got Nostalgic when The Bangles or Def Leppard came on the speakers at the mall. But given the general aesthetic sensibilities of the magical nonsense in Destiny City, that idea sounded incredibly unlikely.

Faustite deciding to respect Elijah’s choices or not might also have been a problem. What he’d tried to do to Cybele, back at Augusta Bank…… Reiki didn’t understand, not really (at least, not yet), but he strongly suspected that Faustite would never have intended to make Cybele pop out those princess wings.

(For starters, having another White Moon princess running around hardly sounded like it was in the Negaverse’s best interests, and having it happen for someone with whom Faustite had so much mutual bad blood didn’t sound like it was in his own best interests at all.…… Maybe in the immediate fallout, sure, if it earned him some wound-licking and general Soothing from Albite, Heliodor, Lilith’s Brother, or whoever else from his harem wanted to give him that. But definitely not in the long run.)

Then again, Elijah didn’t have any literal magic on his side that Reiki knew about—only the magic of makeup, lighting, costuming, sound mixing, and dedication, same as any hardworking drag artist—so, hopefully, it wouldn’t be too hard for Reiki to just……keep his little brother and his “it’s complicated for like seven-dozen different reasons, none of which have anything to do with the attraction and interest being mutual or whatever” separated.

……If some other General-Sovereign satisfied Elijah’s insatiable lust for Hot Dads, then there might have been a problem to address. But as yet, the only General-Sovereign Reiki knew of at all was Faustite, whom he imagined would not rate for Elijah at all, due to being probably 20 years too young, several sizes too skinny, and otherwise not a good-looking divorcé who needed an adorable Manic Pixie Dream Twink with no shame and a fondness for hot-pants to help him through his midlife crisis.

On the less-than-serious downside, the longer Reiki looked at the wish his brother had tossed up there, the more his brain ever so helpfully decided to start up with all of the “Stacy’s dad has got me down bad~ Stacy, can I come over in my ca-aahh-ahhhr (in my car)~ We can change the oil and hang out in the gar-ahhh-ahhh-ahhhge (ménage a garage)~ Did your dad get back from the hardware store~?” and so on and so forth.… They’d agreed to do that number again for a Pride show next weekend. It didn’t feel especially relevant to the theme, but Elijah—in character as Dorian Gay—would probably work out some way to incorporate the progress flag or something, so that his enduring crush on Reiki’s literal, actual father would at least superficially satisfy the theme.

Then again, Reiki didn’t really think that his “It’s the music, not the story” number was nearly half as on-theme for Pride Month as, among other things: his George Michael medley, featuring “Faith,” “I Want Your Sex,” “Father Figure,” “Outside,” and “Fastlove”; his Judy Garland tribute that started with “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” as she’d performed it in The Wizard of Oz, detoured through Rufus Wainwright’s tribute to her (specifically, his “Zing! Went the Strings Of My Heart”), Marina and the Diamonds’ “Primadonna,” and Billy Porter’s version of “The Man That Got Away” from season two of Pose, before finally getting back to Judy herself, closing on her immaculate Carnegie Hall performance of “Over the Rainbow”; or, frankly, even a “number” that was just Reiki-as-Miss-Sayuri-Kurobara-Disobedience writhing around to Pansy Division, Pet Shop Boys, or “Sweet Transvestite” like “I am very gay and I’d like a few dollars.”

But, well…… He didn’t know how much longer he would even be Reiki.

Before he had to figure out how to be himself without his family—maybe without his Cersei, and almost definitely without his Art (not just the art of constructing Looks, but the art of putting together a number and performing it for a live audience in the best bar in the entire universe ever, much less Destiny City)—Reiki wanted to perform his greatest number one last time.… Plus, it did feature Lil Nas X (gay and constantly doing king s**t), David Bowie (outspoken bisexual icon, even if “China Girl” sure was A Choice), Megan Thee Stallion (who’d hinted at being bi enough for Reiki), and Judy and Gloria Gaynor, who had positions of honor with queers for several reasons.… Then, David Henry Hwang might not have been queer, but Song Liling and M. Butterfly sure were.

Anybody who didn’t like Reiki’s number being in a pride show could just deal with it.

Seeing as he owed Faustite a date, maybe Reiki could invite him……if there was a way to prevent him from burning down the bar, anyway. Something like the glamour that protected senshi, Knights, and Negaverse operatives when they weren’t running around in all their magic finery. Reiki didn’t cherish the idea of asking Faustite for that—to pretend, even for a little while, to be fully human when he wasn’t—but……it was an idea.

Maybe Faustite wouldn’t even go for it.… Reiki would simply need to find him and ask, he guessed.

As Reiki stared long into the abyss of Elijah’s wish, a nice breeze wandered through, rustling Reiki’s hair, the branches, and all the other wishes still dangling down. Out of the corner of his eye, Reiki spotted something else: a crumpled up ball of paper, a little urban tumbleweed. Probably easier to catch, Reiki supposed—or at least, it seemed that way to him, since he personally didn’t struggle to get his hands on this specific piece of litter.

Unfurling the paper, Reiki noticed three things: first, two of the page’s corners had ripped. Second, the remaining two corners bore the remains of some tacky-as-in-sticky white substance—Reiki didn’t know its name offhand, but he recognized it as a popular alternative to scotch tape for hanging things on walls. So, either the wind or human hands must have ripped this down, probably.

And third, the paper advertised some open house for prospective students and their parents or guardians, allegedly to be held at Romano’s Constitutional Haven.… Reiki huffed and shook his head. For all the complaints he likes to register about his time at Meadowview, he had to admit: he’d gotten lucky that Romano’s hadn’t existed yet when he’d been a teenager. No doubt, it was a perfectly fine school, exactly as advertised, but the whole vibe of the place put Reiki off. He knew in his heart (read: chose to believe) that, had it been around when he’d been in high school and had he been made to go there, he would have gotten himself expelled in record time by being so much Murasaki’s Grandson.

Which was a polite way of saying “a stubborn, disagreeable, tempestuous loudmouth with no functional respect for authority that had not been sufficiently earned and regularly defended via service to and protection of the people any given Person of Authority believed they were entitled to command (like Sibyl and Cherry’s authority as co-matriarchs of the Haus of Disobedience-and-Poppins).”

………So, like, exactly the opposite of the model Romano’s student, as far as Reiki had ever heard about the school.

Right at the edge of the nearest trashcan, Reiki noticed the portrait of some guy in the corner. Lantern jaw, sideburns and a beard, looked like he belonged on the cover of some beefcake skin mag. Joseph Romano, Commandant of the school.… Not Reiki’s Type, but objectively, a handsome man.… Not perfectly Elijah’s Type, either, but close enough to remind Reiki that he couldn’t very well leave Elijah’s asinine wish hanging on the tree like that.

Once he’d found it again, Reiki had to force himself to read the wish, just to make sure that he really wanted to insert himself into something that, objectively, did not need to be his problem. No matter that Elijah was his little brother by choice and by the bonds of sharing a drag haus, Reiki had no obligation to play his brother’s keeper about something that, in the grand scheme of things, probably did not matter as much as Reiki was building it up within his own French vanilla fantasy. If Elijah wanted to be a ******** menace and utterly, totally shameless all over a community project that was meant to enrich public life and public spaces in Destiny City, then Reiki did not actually have any calling or externally pressing need to make him stop.

Except that, as Reiki read those words from his brother all over again—“I wish that more divorced dads in this town would get on Grindr or maybe go to a drag show at Scandals Bar”—Reiki felt his stomach turn like it wanted him to be sick.

Sliding his glasses up onto his forehead, Reiki sighed into his palm. Pinched the bridge of his nose almost hard enough to hurt. No, he had no external obligation to babysit Elijah and interfere with a choice he’d probably made in earnest and complete good faith. Yes, Reiki would have been perfectly fine to simply walk away, pretend that he’d seen nothing, and wash his hands of his brother’s nonsense, even if somebody got genuinely upset about it later. No, he didn’t think that anybody would’ve blamed him for doing that.

But Reiki also couldn’t not meddle in things, not when letting Elijah do things like this unchecked made Reiki feel complicit in them, and not when this specific Shenanigan disrespected something that Reiki took seriously. He would just……take this wish and bury it, the way that Elijah should have done himself (but likely elected not to do because he’d wanted somebody to see this wish and either get scandalized about it or, no doubt ideally in Elijah’s rabbity little brain, be a hot divorced dad in his area, looking for a good time).

Not because Reiki wanted his little brother to feel any kind of shame about who he was and what he liked—never ever, not in a billion years—but because the Wishing Tree had a purpose. Maybe there weren’t any specific rules that Elijah was breaking, but his wish really didn’t adhere to the spirit of the whole gig that the nice people from (Reiki presumed) the Destiny City Department of Parks and Recreation had in mind in setting up the Wishing Tree. Wishes were supposed to benefit more than just the person who wrote them down. Selfish wishes got buried in the dirt, where at least the seeds could help somebody out.

Shoving Elijah’s wish into his pocket (the one he’d painstakingly added to this skirt because ******** designers who refused to make skirts with pockets), Reiki pawed through some of the other wishes. He’d need to hang up at least one of his own, he guessed, to help repopulate the tree, so more people could participate.

“I wish that more people would be honest with others about their feelings. Quit hiding what you really feel, it doesn’t help anybody in the long run.”

(……Yeah, well. Reiki supposed this one constituted a call-out post where somebody’s god, or the ineffable Alpha-and-Omega magical girl in the sky, or maybe the Invisible Pink Unicorn had decided to @-tag him directly, like adults, instead of subtweeting him with little reminders that Reiki could way more easily ignore. He probably had A LOT of people on his list to be more honest with. Faustite, for one thing, even if Reiki could think of several people who wouldn’t think that it mattered very much and at least one who’d probably use Reiki’s concern for Faustite as some kind of indisputable proof that Mirror sluts were evil to the core by virtue of existing, and she was The True Hero for wanting to hunt them and scalp them like some Inglourious ******** Basterds bullshit, and blah blah yadda.

But Angelica was going to have terrible opinions no matter what Reiki did or didn’t do. Every interaction he’d had with her before suggested that she was going to choose violence and with ******** everybody, no matter what they did, either. So making his choices based on how ******** Angelica would react made about as much sense as wasting good lipstick on a literal pig.)

“I wish that someone would add more stakes to the community garden in North-End Park, it’s so hard to grow tomatoes there without them.”

(Easily doable, and maybe Reiki would run into Pendour. He hadn’t seen her since she’d carried off that weird little Saturn Page after the princess-battle at Augusta Bank, and he knew that she liked to work in the assorted community gardens of Destiny City. Running into her again, he thought, would have been a Nice Thing.)

And finally: “I wish someone would put something beautiful in the world, just to make something beautiful. No reason, just beauty for beauty’s sake.”

Which, to Reiki, sounded like a divine sign that he needed to do his “It’s the music, not the story” number one last time.

Now, he needed to come up with a wish of his own……but for a long time, the only thing Reiki could think of was just as selfish as Elijah’s nonsense about wanting more hot, Destiny City divorcés to get on Grindr so Elijah could hit on them: “I wish I could break out of this ******** Mirror. I just don’t know how.”

At least, since it broke the spirit of the Wishing Tree, it likely wouldn’t read as any kind of special to most people. They’d probably think somebody had decided to troll by writing nonsense and throwing in a gratuitous <********> for good measure.

(Reiki was pondering how best to phrase his objections for Elijah when he spotted something shiny in the grass. Closer inspection led Reiki right to a star-charm, bright orange and glittering there, waiting for him to claim it. Almost as if the universe had decided to confirm his sense that he was right and his brother had not acted in the correct spirit with the wishing tree.)

After some consideration, Reiki added another—“I wish more people would say ‘I love you’ more freely. It does NOT make it less special if you say it more often”—just so he’d be able to sleep tonight. For now, he desperately needed to bury Elijah’s wish, text him about knowing he was better than that, and then get home to Cersei and take her out before he had to be at his next booking.