Being an emotionally stable and perfectly normal grown adult, Reiki knew that his queerplatonic Gorgeous could take care of himself. Of course he knew that. For basically as long as they’d known each other—and frankly more so since Reiki, Cersei, and Haruhi had all moved into Yuki’s place—Yuki had done most of the caretaking in their relationship. Genuinely, Reiki had no particular delusions on that point; he knew that he could be a little bit of a handful to deal with (……or a lot of a handful to deal with) and that he didn’t always do the very best job of looking out for himself.

Still, reminding Reiki to take his meds and getting on his case about whether or not he’d eaten today? That all fell into a very different realm from watching out for Yuki when their paths crossed during one of Reiki’s patrols as Murikabushi……or sometimes ducking out of his way to deliberately make their paths intersect so he could make sure Yuki stayed out of any magical girl-adjacent trouble. The pretty vast discrepancy between those forms of caretaking was entirely why Reiki felt no guilt whatsoever about hopping along rooftops that happened to follow the same route that Yuki was taking to get home tonight. Sure, he’d almost definitely go through North End Park and even if Blossom didn’t know who Yuki was, much less who he was to Reiki, Blossom could easily handle any trouble that came and tried to start something with Reiki’s Gorgeous.

And yet, picking up the aura of a nearby youma made the hair on the back of Reiki’s neck stand up. As much as he could manage anymore—which really wasn’t much—he would’ve liked to try and talk any youma down.… Even if they wanted little more than to eat his starseed, they were sentient beings in their own right. Maybe Reiki couldn’t really help them—the only “help” anyone had told him existed as yet was either starseeds or purification, and one of those wasn’t fair on the people whose starseeds got eaten while the other was some ******** bullshit for acting like youma’s lives had no inherent value unless they became human—but……he had to try before just doing violence to them, right? Jet and Faustite were only individual people; they were in safer positions than Reiki to care about youma’s wellbeing, but……didn’t they need someone else to try and care about youma, too? Even though Reiki was also only an individual person? Like, wasn’t one person’s individual effort better than nothing?

(Dimly, Reiki felt pretty sure that somebody who cared about him probably would’ve argued that the effort of one person didn’t amount to a hill of beans if the effort in question consisted of Reiki setting himself on fire to keep a youma warm, but he also didn’t think anything he’d done as yet counted as such. Not really, anyway.…… Maybe he’d gotten knocked around a bit whilst trying to reason with youma who turned out to be a little more instinct-based than intellectual sorts like the cloud of hive-mind fireflies who followed Faustite around sometimes. But Reiki did generally fight back when any given youma proved unreasonable.)

Spotting the absolute monstrosity down the block, though? Watching it lurch through an alley, slithering on a body that seemed like something between a serpent and a giant slice of bacon, and seeing Yuki walking toward that alley, blissfully ignorant and—ugh, Reiki rolled his eyes and bit his lip to keep from screaming—texting while walking? All of Reiki’s normal restraint was out the window.

Youma coming at him—that was one thing. Youma wanting to get his starseed? Likewise. But no matter how much Reiki cared about Faustite—no matter how much getting to know him had made Reiki reevaluate how he interacted with and wanted to treat youma—none of the Negaverse’s soldiers were allowed to touch Reiki’s Gorgeous. Officer, senshi, or youma didn’t matter. They could do whatever they wanted to Reiki, as long as Yuki got left alone.

Taking a deep breath to steel his nerves, Reiki took off running. He made it to the youma’s alleyway in a heartbeat, and as he had so many times before, he drew its attention by jumping down and superhero-landing a bit too loudly on the lid of a dumpster. Rainbow-colored feathery protrusions made up an impressive mane and rustled loudly as the youma turned to look at Reiki with a bone-white face that looked like Anno Hideaki-sensei designed a plague doctor’s mask. Quetzalcoatl tending to Yersinia pestis, with two long, wobbly, almost ribbon-looking flagella undulating out from its sides like arms. Under the streetlamps and the ambient light from the city, said flagella shone like satin, and some big, opaline something at the center of the creature’s body (torso? thorax? <******** words???) glittered like a real gemstone. It glowed, too. How very helpful.

“Sērā Murikabushi desu,” Reiki told it, voice somewhere halfway between a chirp and a snarl, grinning at the thing with no reckless abandon whatsoever and not at all dramatically because he was an emotionally stable and perfectly normal grown adult who really wasn’t that dramatic, all things considered. As he vaulted off the dumpster with a mind to kick the youma in its obvious glowing weak spot, Reiki finished the line he had in mind, “Yoroshiku~!”