There are shadows in the mirror. Sometimes, a shadow appears behind you. Maybe it’s far behind you, barely noticeable. Maybe it’s hovering so close that you feel its breath on you. It’s impossible to make out its shape; it never seems to be the same. It changes depending on the time of day, the lighting, the angle of reflection–but it’s there.
Sometimes, it moves. Aside from the odd visual, most people won’t notice anything is amiss.
For Dark Mirror Senshi, it’s a little different. When they pass through the mirror, they might feel something grab their wrist or try to trip them. They may wind up bruised or winded when passing through mirrors. There is a strange sensation of being watched, of being hunted.
No major damage befalls them as they Mirrorwalk, and if they stop in Mirrorspace, there doesn’t seem to be any threat to them. The shadows linger in the mirrors, though. Watching.
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The shadows in the mirror were odd, but they weren’t much trouble for most people. Now, something is certainly wrong. Sometimes, mirrors will shake and rattle for no apparent reason. Occasionally, a mirror will wind up toppled over or knocked onto the floor. Broken glass isn’t so surprising—accidents happen, right?
But if you look closely enough, sometimes you can see the shadows moving—charging towards the mirror like they’re trying to break out.
Sometimes, the mirror cracks—broken from the inside. It happens quickly; a ring of force appears on the mirror and a sharp, shattering sound. Then, silence. The shadows are gone, moved on to another mirror.
It’s worse for Dark Mirror Senshi. Sometimes the mirror will break as soon as you attempt to mirrorwalk, and it can cause sharp stinging sensations or cause actual physical damage. It may also feel as though someone is trying to violently drag you into the mirror. If you stop in Mirrorspace, many of the mirrors on the wall will appear cracked or broken, and it looks as though you can see something moving inside the ones that aren’t. No matter what path you take in Mirrorspace, there are always broken mirrors—or breaking mirrors. It doesn’t feel safe here. In the distance, you can hear shattering glass.
As he hauled Lete with him into Mirrorspace, Reiki couldn’t shake the feeling that something was just Off with her tonight.
Frankly, he’d gotten his first inklings of such when Lete’s summons had come through on his compact. Usually, she started everything off with some trilling “Hey, bestie!! Wanna go check out Mirrorspace,” or maybe a laugh that thought way too highly of itself, accompanied by either an “hermano~” that sounded the way the pleading face emoji looked, or the sort of affectionate teasing that Reiki realized (mostly from his long-standing friendship with Leandro) was just part of how his and Gabi’s biological family talked to each other, something like “Puta” (“b***h,” but to paraphrase the words of a significantly more famous queen than Reiki, Lete seemed to mean it in the way you’d call your grandmother a b***h, i.e., all in good, queer fun)……
“Altito” (“tall” with a diminutive of familiarity tacked on the end of it because Lete had been very specifically told not to comment on any other aspect of Reiki’s body shape, and at least she had so far respected that request)……
“Plateadito” (“silver” with the same affectionate diminutive suffix, apparently because Gabi/Lete didn’t think it sounded fabulous enough to acknowledge that Reiki’s eyes were gray, not really silver)……
“Bonito” (“pretty boy,” without the valence of an insult, the way that phrase could so easily have in English)……
“Reinona” (“drag queen,” though Reiki had also heard it could be used in similar ways to a certain homophobic slur that started with F, which sometimes got playfully thrown around by other queer men. Either way, the term was accurate, so as long as Lete didn’t assume that she had the right to call him something far more derogatory like “pato” or “maricón,” and since she hadn’t assumed that privilege, hearing her call him “reinona” was all okay with Reiki)……
and/or “Perra” (once again, “b***h” but in the way that you’d say something like, “Ooooh, yes, b***h, fierce, turn it, werk!”)
None of that had come out tonight, though. Lete had been relatively sedate on the compact-call, even shy. She’d called him “Muri” instead of anything else. When she’d asked him to come pick her up at South Side Park—why she’d wandered down there in the first place, Reiki felt like he probably didn’t want to know, because considering Lete, it could’ve been a lot of things—for one of their trips into Mirrorspace, Lete had asked it as if she was hovering outside some cold, emotionally distant parental figure’s office, begging for a moment of their time.
As much as Reiki preferred to avoid Mirrorspace Time these days—or at least to give it as little of his time as possible until he was ready to leave because putting up with its weepy-eyed, pleading face emoji, “Video Games”-era Lana del Rey bullshit annoyed the ever-living ******** out of him—guilt had slithered around his heart and twisted, hard. None of the reasons he wanted to leave were Lete’s fault, and taking them out on her felt like a low blow. Like punching down on a younger sibling who needed guidance and protection. Would’ve felt equally bad to take them out on somebody like Hybris, who sometimes seemed more like a kitten drowning in a basket than a senshi.
That did not, however, mean that Reiki enjoyed the feeling when he slowed them down, the sharp, stinging sensation and the sense that somebody was trying to pull him in. All the more reason, he thought, not to visit this ******** place too often. If Mirrorspace was leaving its “Video Games” del Rey era behind in favor of its “Creepin’ Up On You”—Darren Hayes era or its “Meant To Be Yours” Off Of Heathers era? Then Reiki wanted ******** none of it. Thanks but no thanks, Mirrorspace did not have an invitation to see him with those hands.
The common room loomed around him as they landed, full of unspoken threats in every godforsaken surface. Since he didn’t seem injured from the journey inside, though, Reiki turned to Lete. He motioned for her to let him see her hands, her wrists and forearms, anywhere she might’ve gotten injured. “You okay after all that, hermanita?”
Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2023 8:39 pm
Things hadn’t been right with the mirrors for the past couple days. Of that much, Lete felt quite certain.
Not that she could explain any of it worth a good goddamn, because she couldn’t. Nothing like this had ever happened before, in her (admittedly limited) experience as a Dark Mirror senshi. Before the past few days, Mirrorwalking had always felt perfectly safe: maybe not super warm (though that had proven perfectly lovely during these summertime months, when everything else had honestly been Too Damn Hot), but the embrace of Mirrorspace had felt pleasant, and sweet, and special. Walking from mirror to mirror had always given Lete a rush of warm, bubbly, pink feelings in the pit of her chest because nobody else but Mirror senshi had this ability, and no one else but Mirror senshi had the privilege of slinking away into mirrors when things got too unpleasant in the real world.
Lately, though, mirrorwalking had felt downright dangerous. A couple days ago, Lete had tripped and felt like something might’ve been laughing at her. Just last night, passing from her bedroom mirror to one near the DCU campus, there’d been a feeling of hands seizing at her, trying to catch her by the wrists, the ankles, the elbows and pull her in (which they didn’t need to get so grabby and graspy about!! Like, honestly, Lete came to visit Mirrorspace as often as she could get a ride!! It wasn’t her fault that she couldn’t come on her own). Tonight, when Muri slowed them down so they could get into Mirrorspace Proper, Lete bit her lip and tried to choke down assorted whimpering noises because whatever was going on, it <******** hurt.
Sure enough, as she checked herself over—the way Muri’s question implied she should—Lete found a couple bruises on her forearms, a couple more along her legs (specifically, her upper thighs, and she certainly hoped she wouldn’t find more later, when she powered down and could see the places currently covered by her stockings), and a smattering of little cuts. She sniffled piteously, holding her arms out toward him, forearms pointing up, specifically because she knew that Muri always had a first aid kit in his subspace. Maybe he got all ******** up about wanting to protect White Moon senshi—as if they needed protecting when there were so ******** many of them out there in the wilds Destiny City—and maybe he had some kind of attitude problem about Perfectly Normal Mirror Senshi Activities, but at least Muri came out prepared.
“I just don’t get why Mirrorspace is acting like this,” Lete said, pouting more than slightly. “What’d you even do to make it so you didn’t get hurt?”
“Gurl, please, do I look like I know literally anything? By which I mean, do I look like I know anything specifically about the how’s and why’s of Mirrorspace. Because I really, truly don’t.” Huffing softly, Reiki dug the first aid kit out of his subspace pocket. He didn’t like how often he wound up needing it, but for all the complaints he yearned to register about Mirrorspace, its temperament, and its general everything-ness, Reiki supposed that needing these supplies for Mirrorspace Nonsense reasons was ultimately better than needing them for Lete Decided To Start Another Fight reasons.
At least the two of them only had to deal with Mirrorspace adding more marks to Reiki’s internal, mental tally of Reasons Why Faustite Was Right About Mirrorspace. Not that this situation was necessarily good by any definition, but it distinctly was not as outright terrible as Lete getting herself in trouble with one of the Knights or White Moon senshi who wouldn’t show her as much patience and understanding as Fang, as Amsvartnir, as the weird little Saturn Page with the Hot Topic Hello Kitty stationery.
“Anyway,” Reiki said, getting out the antiseptic first (he didn’t know where Mirrorspace had been recently! he didn’t know what sorts of germs it had! how could he trust it not to give Lete some kind of ******** up Chaos Plague if her wounds didn’t get cleaned properly), “the only reason you think it hasn’t hurt me is because all the bruises are underneath my thigh-highs. The past few days have made me wanna give up on Mirrorwalking entirely, they’ve been so rough.”
As he gently applied the antiseptic, Reiki knew that wouldn’t do that, not until he properly ******** off outta the Court. As much as he preferred to patrol on his way home from Scandals, the fact remained that sometimes, a b***h did not have the energy to do so when he got done hosting a show, or doing an extra number than he’d planned for because some other b***h had had something explode or whatever backstage, or performing a normal amount of times in one night but leaving his whole soul on the stage. Sometimes, a b***h needed to just Mirrorwalk from the backstage area into his bedroom, power down so Cersei wouldn’t be confused by him looking like Her Person while not feeling the same, and flop out into bed.
Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2023 1:50 pm
At the first sting of antiseptic, Lete gasped and winced. But once she’d gotten over that, the rest of the applications didn’t hurt so much. She didn’t hold back from sniffling quite a bit piteously—Muri hadn’t shied away from getting annoyed with her before, or from threatening to snitch on her to Leandro in some capacity, so it probably behooved Lete to remind him that she was marvelously sweet, perfectly innocent, a 264-month-and-one-week-old baby—but at least she didn’t make any sounds of real pain.
As much as she wanted Muri to remember that hurting her was Bad—that he didn’t want to hurt her or for her to be hurting; that both of them were Mirror senshi and he wanted very much to care about her well-being—Lete didn’t want to come off like the picture of complete incompetence. Didn’t want to feel weak, the way she did whenever her magic decided to punch her in the face or else just Not Work Properly. Whatever Muri or anyone else thought about her, it wasn’t as important as what Lete thought of herself, and she couldn’t wake up in the morning and pretend to respect herself if she did too much wibbling like a b***h.
“Ugh, how am I gonna explain these to my girlfriend,” she lamented, as Muri finished his work with the antiseptic and got to laying bandages over Lete’s wounds. “Like, it’s one thing to say ‘Mirrorspace is acting all weird and inexplicably hostile, I don’t get it, it’s actually kind of scary,’ but saying it when the cuts are all over my wrists like this? Honestly, what’s she supposed to think about that?”
“Mn,” Reiki told her noncommittally, keeping his tone as neutral as possible when he fundamentally Could Not be neutral—or at least acknowledge his own biases and subjectivity or sense of positionality, while also trying to remove them from his own internal calculations—when it came to anything about to do with Mirrorspace. “Honestly? If she’s worried about you, it just means that she cares. But you can probably put her mind at ease with the fact that they are pretty clearly not self inflicted.”
Pausing briefly between bandages, he traced a finger through the air along the paths of some of Lete’s injuries. “Placement’s way too random. Not that there aren’t ever exceptions, because there are, but it’s easier to hide self-inflicted cuts if you put them in strategic locations, keep them to pretty specific lengths and depths.… True, not everyone is as intensely ritualistic as all that, but a lot of people are, for very practical reasons. But all the variety in the length, depth, and placement? Suggests that you didn’t do them on purpose so much as got attacked. Plus……”
Very gently, Reiki guided Lete in turning one arm over. As expected, she also had cuts on the outside part. “Defensive wounds,” he explained, starting another round of applying the antiseptic. “Usually, you see bruises and lacerations on this part of the arm because you held your arms up in front of somewhere more vulnerable, like your face or chest, trying to protect yourself. So, I presume your girlfriend might still be concerned—because, y’know, she cares about you—but the physical evidence supports your truth about not hurting yourself on purpose. Who knows? Maybe with the defensive wounds, she’ll even be proud of her big, tough senshi for trying so hard to keep herself safe.”
That last comment had the cadence and upward lilt of playful teasing, but Reiki’s heart wasn’t in it. Not really.
Maybe she should think that you’re involved with something dangerous, he mused but kept firmly to himself, outwardly focusing on nothing more than making sure Lete’s wounds got treated to the best of his abilities. Maybe she should have some questions regarding whether or not Mirrorspace actually gives a ******** about you, or me, or ANY of us, and maybe she should put on the sad puppy eyes or whatever else will penetrate your absolutely adamantine little coconut head and get you to THINK about what’s happening right in front of your eyes. Maybe your <******** GIRLFRIEND, who presumably loves you, should have more than a few reasonable questions and concerns about the fact that someone she cares about is all tied up in some kind of garbage with a magical, eldritch realm that runs on broken promises, nightmares, and other assorted bullshit.
MAYBE she should tell you to get the ******** out of here before you completely lose yourself in all of this unadulterated garbage. If you ask me, anyone who actually gives a damn about you should tell you to GET. OUT. of ******** Mirrorspace before it’s too late—but hey, that’s just me, though.
Not that Reiki didn’t stand by those thoughts, because he absolutely did. But what was the point of saying them to Lete? Time and time again, she’d proven that she didn’t want to acknowledge the reality of the situation she’d gotten into when Tantalus (Whoever The ******** He Was, Some Dark Mirror Eternal Or Other Apparently) had taken her to the Black Mirror. She didn’t want to admit that this was a war and that the stakes were higher than having her really fun night just, like, super ruined by someone from the White Moon. She didn’t want to reckon with the fact that people could and did get hurt from having their energy drained, nor to listen to a damn thing Reiki told her whenever he tried to point out that she didn’t understand this or that concept that she’d misappropriated from Marxist theory in some absolutely bullshit attempt at justifying the entire energy-draining project.
Telling her that she should have been afraid? That her girlfriend should have worried about her and told her to get the ******** out of the Mirror while the getting was good? Only would have made tonight’s misadventure into Mirrorspace more painful than it was already all but guaranteed to be. Last thing Reiki needed to deal with was Lete being even more of a brat than usual while all they had was each other and the endless labyrinth of whitish-gray bullshit that remained the most visually offensive trash that Reiki had seen in his entire life, as yet.
Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2023 11:24 am
As soon as Muri finished up with his ministrations and deposited the first aid kit back into his subspace, Lete was off like a shot, scampering down one of the hallways that branched off from Mirrorspace’s Common Room and dragging Muri behind her by the wrist. She didn’t think about which one she ventured down, nor about whether or not she and Muri had traveled that way before. Why should she have? What did it matter, really, when Mirrorspace always changed the hallways up regardless of any given thing or other? If Mirrorspace wanted to let them get somewhere—If Mirrorspace wants to reward *ME* for being so good to it and so good about gathering energy, Lete thought but didn’t say out loud because it would’ve been mean (and probably elicited another threat that Muri would snitch on her to Leandro if she didn’t behave herself); If Mirrorspace thinks that *I* deserve a treat instead of showering them on some rudely tall idiot who doesn’t even appreciate the gifts that it gives us—if Mirrorspace wanted to let Lete and Muri find their way to anyplace in particular, then it would let them get there, no matter which path they took.
First thing was first, though: something about Mirrorspace didn’t Feel right.
Didn’t look right, either, Lete noticed but distinctly did not want to say. Every time before when Muri had brought her on some excursion here, the hallways of Mirrorspace had risen around them, all whitish-gray and impermanent, but beautiful, ornately decorated, like something out of some glamorous historical period-drama, with mirrors everywhere because why wouldn’t that be the case? They wouldn’t have been Mirror senshi without any mirrors, right? So, of course Mirrorspace would never let them go without constant access to the thing above all other things that really made them special, that made them different from their comrades among the Nega-senshi and the White Moon senshi, who were mostly pretty terrible and not worth dealing with at all, though a couple exceptions like Demeter and Urania existed also.
Tonight, though, cracks had appeared in Mirrorspace’s pristine image.
Worse than that, cracks had appeared in the mirrors around them. Practically each one they passed by, Lete noticed at least tiny cracks, little spidery things around the edges, like the start of a web that could spread if somebody didn’t fix them. Like getting tink!’ed in the windshield by a tiny pebble while Tío Raúl took a turn to give you [meaning, Gabi personally] lessons in driving on the freeway, and because the little ding in the laminated glass didn’t seem to be that big—because it didn’t seem that serious and fixing windshields cost money that could have gone to something else—you let it slide, and let it slide, and let it slide, until one day, finally, it was five years later and the crack had rent its way so far across the windshield that it looked like Tío Raúl’s car had gotten hit by a wild turkey instead of the original tiny pebble.
Other mirrors, though, seemed to have already progressed to the wild turkey stage of destruction. Those cracks came out huge and violent-looking. Sharp and jagged, forking off from different points of impact all throughout the mirrors, looking like someone—probably someone tall, and dark, and ponytailed, who took their good fortune as Mirror senshi for granted, and didn’t appreciate any of what they had (any of what Mirrorspace had so generously given them!), and was no doubt either rolling his eyes while Lete dragged him along the hallway or at least very strongly thinking about doing so, and probably also considering a lecture about why it wasn’t okay for Lete to make friends with cool Nega-senshi like Guinevere, as if he didn’t have some General-King boyfriend waiting for him when he got done being such a massive hypocrite—had wanted to smash these precious things to pieces.
Wrinkling her nose and hauling them around a corner, Lete cast a glance back over her shoulder at Muri. Hrmph, maybe she had entirely the wrong idea about her profile of the culprit here. Unfortunately for Lete’s theory, Murikabushi seemed just as confused by the current state of Mirrorspace’s corridors as she was, all pensive frowning and lost puppy faces as if someone had demanded that he drop a perfect Klingon or High Valyrian translation of the Bhagavad Gita on them at the drop of an immaculately designed hat when he did not, as far as she knew, have any intimate knowledge of the Bhagavad Gita nor any particular fluency in either Klingon or High Valyrian (a fan of Star Trek and George R.R. Mothman, yes, but that didn’t mean fluency in their conlangs). Even if Muri wasn’t the one who’d broken all these mirrors, though, he also had not, in Lete’s mind, done anything recently to earn any real grace from her in these considerations.
Palling around with so many White Moon senshi and their ******** Knights? Sticking up for them instead of taking Lete’s side, as if they were his real friends and teammates, instead of Lete, and Hybris, and Meleph, and Tantalus, and Prince Remarque, and everybody else who actually belonged to the Dark Mirror Court? Acting like Lete didn’t have a right to defend herself from them sneaking up on her, even when his weirdo space-puppy bestie thought that Lete had done nothing wrong in that situation because she hadn’t, because she had been the victim there? (The most victimized ever in her or anybody else’s life, even!!!)
Ugh. Gross. Somebody needed to kick his a** and remind Murikabushi where he ******** belonged.
But since Lete couldn’t very well attack him without any immediate provocation, lest she let him spin some kind of narrative that acted like he hadn’t done several things very appallingly *WRONG* in this entire ******** up situation that was entirely HIS fault because HE had started ALL of this by never being *SATISFIED*, Lete had to settle for something else. For acting like everything was completely normal and fine, just business as usual: “So, what kind of tunes are we feeling today, bestie,” she said and immediately had a tune in mind. But going right for Angelica Schuyler’s big feature song out of Hamilton might have been a bit too on-the-nose—and unfortunately, as a Distinctly Musical Theater Gay, Murikabushi probably would’ve picked up on exactly Lete’s intentions with choosing that song—Lete instead opted for something else from Lin Manuel Miranda:
“This is our home, we’ve got every generation! So full of music, a rhythm of its own design. This is my family, a perfect constellation: so many stars and everybody gets to shine!”
Strictly speaking, Reiki’s actual answer to “So, what kind of tunes are we feeling today, bestie?” had absolutely jackshit to do with Encanto. It had absolutely jackshit to do with Into the Woods or The Little Mermaid. It had absolutely jackshit to do with Beauty and the Beast, Muppet Treasure Island, or Taylor ******** Swift.
Reiki’s actual answer to Lete’s question had nothing to do with anything he’d sung for Mirrorspace before—whether with or without Lete in tow—though maybe he could get her to knock it off without being excessively mean. It helped, he guessed, that he could express his feelings with a different song, so maybe Lete wouldn’t take it personally. Maybe she’d only assume that he had different music in mind, rather than that he wanted her to take the song’s title to heart and shut up for once:
“Hello, Darkness, my old friend,” Reiki sang, rather than picking up the tune Lete had left there for him. “I’ve come to talk with you again. Because a vision softly creeping left its seeds while I was sleeping, and the vision that was planted in my brain still remains within the sound of silence.”
Even if Lete didn’t know the song offhand herself—or even if she only knew it from the ******** Arrested Development memes from a few years back—then at least Reiki’s intention spelled itself out right there in the lyrics.
