|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Posted: Sat Dec 23, 2023 6:08 pm
Quote: Prompt 1 (Diamond Dust): This time of year, snow is common. What’s uncommon is the single, strange snowfall where each snowflake that fell glistened like tiny diamonds. For the most part, the snow seems fairly normal—it’s cold, wet, and melts just like any other snow, it just also happens to look like tiny little gems are falling from the sky. Depending on who you’re with, it’s either incredibly strange, or incredibly romantic. When the snow is coming down at its strongest, crystalized snowflakes trickle down with the rest of the snow. These are roughly the size of a quarter and are light and hollow. They are fragile, like glass, but glisten like a fine cut gem. No one can explain this anomaly, but these small snowflakes won't melt. And they are all over Destiny City. You can find them gently falling to the ground, or lying in the fresh fallen snow. There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly magical about them, but they are beautiful and make pretty keepsakes.
The idea of a break hadn’t occurred to him before he’d continued trying to carry on with Business As Usual, though. As much as Reiki’s body wished that it would have, he couldn’t very well undo the past. Much like how he couldn’t wave a magic wand and just make it so he’d Awakened as an Order senshi right off the bat—and neither, for that matter, could a princess, despite all the power that they had—mistakes couldn’t be deleted out of existence, only grown and learned from. Mistakes carried inside them lessons that could make you better, if you opened your heart to what they had to teach, just like Ojiisan always said.
Staying out too late, for example, would get Yuki very upset with Reiki. Learning about the magical girl nonsense that Reiki had been getting up to on the regular had explained a lot of things for his QPP, but he also hadn’t really liked several of the answers to Yuki’s questions about “what,” and “why,” and “since ******** WHEN,” and “okay, hold on, back the ******** up, on what ******** PLANET is it even REMOTELY *FINE* that you are in ‘some secret third thing that you don’t even know, it’s complicated’ with some emotionally unstable half……youma? They’re called ‘youma,’ right? Okay, cool. Some emotionally unstable half-youma tsundere who has PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER, is literally ON FIRE, and can FORCIBLY CORRUPT PEOPLE into his ******** NEGA-THING?! How is that okay! It sounds like the exact OPPOSITE of okay to me, ******** Reiki didn’t want to worry Yuki overly much by ignoring what he’d learned and staying out too late. Worse, he didn’t want Yuki to get upset enough to come out looking for him and end up in some kind of Gwen Stacy trouble, splattered against a brick wall somewhere, or made into a target by some jackass who had beef with Elsa or Faustite but significantly fewer scruples about it than Cybele (who already didn’t have very many scruples when it came to Faustite, and fair enough; too much history and too much bad blood there to ask such things of her, really, plus Faustite didn’t have any scruples about her, either). All in all, it was in Reiki’s best interests to get back home as quickly as possible.
Same as it was probably in his best interests to get used to thinking of himself as the new name he’d need to take on, when he’d finished cleaning up his mess……but he couldn’t let himself do that yet. Not before he’d talked to Ojiisan.
Despite knowing that he needed to get home, and despite knowing how important that was, Reiki found himself lingering in North-End Park regardless.…… That was almost home, honestly. Only a couple blocks from Yuki’s, plus he knew that Kerberos liked to hang around out here and that Reiki considered Kerberos a good influence (not so much that Reiko had told him yet about making actual moves to leave the Mirror, but as yet Reiki had barely told anyone about that).…… If Yuki came out to find him, at least North End Park was (relatively) safe. No Negaverse auras out tonight that Reiki could feel, and the snow provided the biggest reason he felt like lingering.
As it came down, the snow looked like little diamonds.
Following no path in particular, Reiki drifted through the park for a while, just appreciating the sight of it all. Sometimes, Destiny City gave you nice things. Feeling a powerful White Moon aura nearby—distinctly not in the vicinity of Blossom’s bench—he perked up a bit, made himself walk more softly……but as he got closer, Reiki saw a familiar mane of soft, white hair and let himself relax.
He only paused briefly, to rummage around in his subspace. While he hadn’t had Pendour specifically in mind while putting together the array of gift-bags he had in there, Reiki had considered that she might be someone he’d run into. The gift-bag he took out of his subspace didn’t look very “holiday appropriate”—not a snowflake or sprig of mistletoe in sight—but the iridescent turquoise backdrop with the papercraft cartoon mermaid seemed appropriate for Pendour. If she accepted it, she’d find a knit scarf in a similar turquoise shade, with silver threads woven into the yarn that made it shimmer, a little notebook with mermaid designs all over it, and a metal water bottle in a shade of blue that went well with the turquoise without being too matchy-matchy.
Bag in hand, Reiki started approaching her again. When he got close enough that he wouldn’t need to be too loud, he called out to her, “Pendour! Hey, you alright?”
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Dec 23, 2023 7:54 pm
Pendour had been more or less stepping away from the Knight life for the past several months. Earlier, she'd pushed herself to the limit. Weeks had stretched into months, and she'd pulled herself thin as a violin string. Her mental health had strained, until, with one last innocent starseed slipping through her fingers, it had shattered. After that, she'd been focused on picking up the pieces. She'd moved in with Encke and the others, officially, so that she was no longer alone with her thoughts all the so much of the time. Once there, it had been a long road to try to be gentle with herself in the same way she was to other people, to stop thinking of herself as useless, to take care. She wasn't going to be able to help much of anyone until she figured that out. She still went to space, though, a few times a week, and she let herself linger as Pendour afterwards sometimes, when it felt like she should. There was magic in the air as winter settled over the city. Pendour could feel it in her shoulder blades, and she could see it in the sparkle of the snow that fell. She sat on a gently sloping hillside in one of the parks, watching the flakes dance in the wind. There was always something she liked about snow. It made everything soft and muffled, but somehow clear at the same time. It made her smile, and the aura didn't stop that, especially as she saw who it was. "Muri," she breathed, turning to face him. She turned all the say. He'd never made her feel like she needed to hide her face. "I'm okay. I don't think I'm about to vanish on you again." It was a joke about their first meeting, and her eyes crinkled as she said it. Was he holding something? "I missed you," she told him.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Tue Dec 26, 2023 3:14 pm
Sitting on the hillside in the snow seemed like A Choice™️, and as Reiki got closer to Pendour, he couldn’t help the quizzical expression on his face.… But on consideration, Pendour’s dress and Reiki’s fuku would clean themselves off perfectly fine with a simple round of powering down and powering back up. Moreover, standing so tall with Pendour being on the ground was going to feel awkward sooner rather than later—so, Reiki took care about how he moved, trying to maneuver around his very fluffy skirt so that it wouldn’t spill too much into Pendour’s personal space.
After some adjustments to his posture and position, Reiki wound up sitting somewhat at an angle, with the gift bag in his lap for the moment and his legs tucked off to the side, but that felt alright. So much easier to look at Pendour, this way. Easier, as well, to return her smile with one of his own, looking a bit tired and drawn around the edges but……it was hard to avoid looking that way when Reiki had felt it so often and so powerfully, of late.
“Glad to hear you’re not planning to vanish,” he told Pendour, some humor edging into his voice while his tone mostly remained earnest. “I’m not either, even though I’ve sort of been……y’know?” Shaking his head, Reiki gently waved a dismissive hand through the air, at nothing in particular. “Had to move, then work on updating some things and setting up some others.… Non-magical, adult life has been doing so much, I’ve barely had time to get up to any senshi hijinks lately.”
What time he had managed to get hadn’t been, per se, monitored? But it had been quite a bit limited, between Yuki making his very long list Concerns about Reiki’s magical girl life known with no room for any plausible deniability on Reiki’s end, and Reiki wasting time in Mirrorspace’s endless labyrinth of identically useless whitish-gray halls, hoping he might either do something to keep Mirrorspace from figuring out that he was planning to leave as soon as he could, or maybe get Mirrorspace to give up the ghost so he could get the eventual confrontation with it over with already. Back around Starfest, Asmodeus had warned him about how he’d meet an illusion of himself, conjured up by Mirrorspace, and while Reiki probably would’ve loved watching that in a movie or on some trashy show he and Obaasan took in together, the idea of doing it himself? In reality?
…………Ehhhh, he didn’t wanna. If it was the only way out of Mirrorspace, then fine, he would? But fighting a duplicate of himself like that sounded like one of the single most exhausting things Reiki could imagine. Could he not get simultaneously read to filth and seduced by Mirror-Things that looked like a Faustite But Less Okay With Murder or a Levi Who Never Lied To Reiki By Omission Without Even Realizing That Was What He’d Done Because Mirrorspace ******** With People’s Heads Like That? Wouldn’t that have been easier? No? Ugggggh.
Reiki barely tolerated dealing with himself in any normal human stuff capacity that he couldn’t somehow wriggle out of. How was dealing with a Mirrorspace-conjured apex predator supervillain version of him supposed to be anything but a punishment set loose from the lowest abyss of Hell, specifically to make him too miserable to leave the Mirror? This was homophobic (in a way where it wasn’t, actually, but it nevertheless inconvenienced Reiki personally).
Externally, though, he kept up a small smile as he nudged the gift bag toward Pendour. “It’s not much,” he said softly, “but……happy holidays.… And it seems like everybody’s been dealing with something terrible this year? So, if that’s true for you, too, then……I hope things start looking up, soon.”
Pendour was always so kind, and sweet, and genuine. Asking that the universe never give her any trouble was unrealistic, sure, but Reiki still wanted to hope that she wasn’t dealing with more than she could handle.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Wed Dec 27, 2023 8:55 am
It was more reassuring than it maybe should have been, hearing Muri say that he was glad she wouldn't vanish. She'd just meant her own comment in the literal sense, making a little joke about those voids that she'd fallen into back when they'd first met. He was taking it deeper than that, though, talking about how he'd disappeared into his civilian life. Pendour didn't know if it was right to tell someone who she'd only really talked to a handful of times about how it had been more than just business keeping her from magical life. She didn't know if she should say just how close she'd come to disappearing from life altogether. "I haven't really been powering up so much either," she told him as he settled in to the ground next to her. "Not because I was busy, more, um," there was no getting away from things getting a little deep, here, "It got to be a lot, always running into the people I couldn't save." Looking over at him, she bit her lip as his black clothes reminded her that he was, technically, Chaotic, and might take that the wrong way. "Um, I'm not trying to pressure purification or something! I'm not talking about that at all. I mean," she swallowed, "Well. Bodies. Broken starseeds." He was right that it had been a year. "You got me a present?" It was easier to push away the distant dark thoughts when she could reach out and feel heavy paper under her fingertips. It was mermaids on the wrappings, too, and when she peeked inside, she saw items in blue and silver. This wasn't a generic package that he could just hand out to anyone. This was for her. "This is so sweet," she murmured, all softness and awe. She'd have to make sure to get him something, later. "Thank you." She peeled her eyes back to him, though, not about to get completely distracted. "This year, though. Wat about you? Are you okay?"
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Wed Dec 27, 2023 10:44 am
As Pendour explained how her own situation had gone lately and what all she’d been up to, Reiki nodded attentively. On the whole, Pendour wasn’t exactly being super-detailed about everything. Mentioning broken starseeds and being haunted by bodies of people she couldn’t save—that gave Reiki a clearer idea of what she’d been carrying around with her this year. But even then, experiences like that seemed, to Reiki, incredibly common for everyone involved in all of this magical conflict, regardless of which faction they belonged to. Pendour wasn’t saying so much that he could deduce anything about the people she felt she’d failed to save.
Which was probably for the best. Not being able to trace them meant that more malicious people couldn’t use them to trace back to who Pendour was outside of her mermaid gown and glowing transcendence marks. She couldn’t be Pendour of Neptune all the time, Reiki imagined, and if someone more malevolent than Reiki had a chance to trace her back to her civilian life, more people than Pendour herself could’ve gotten hurt.
Even with the scant traceable details, though, she was saying enough to indicate that………yes, she had, indeed, been having A Whole Time, recently. As he considered his own feelings, and what he wanted to say next, Reiki held out a hand towards Pendour’s shoulder, and looked to her for an indication of how open she felt to physical comfort right now. Personally, Reiki’s first impulse was just to pat her shoulder without even thinking about it, but even though she lacked the quality of Faustite’s that had made touching his shoulder such a painful learning experience for Reiki (c.f., he is actively on fire, you absolute moron; something something, most people don’t put their hand on a hot stove to check if the stove’s okay, especially if they dislike the brand)……rushing into physical contact might not have been a good idea. Especially with Pendour having carried so much around already.
So, Reiki held out his hand and waited. If she was okay with it, he’d pat her shoulder. If not, though, he’d withdraw his hand with no hard feelings. What, after all, was the point of offering comfort if you were only going to give it on your own terms, with no regard for how the person you were trying to comfort felt?
“I knitted the scarf,” Reiki told her with a small, earnest smile, as Pendour looked into the gift. “The notebook and the water bottle, I obviously didn’t make, and I did buy the yarn, but……” He shrugged. “My aunt’s wife taught me how to knit and crochet when I was younger. And I figured a lot of the people I like could maybe use some extra warmth this winter.
“As for how I’ve been?” Even after taking time to think about it, Reiki……wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted to say. So, as he often did, he gave himself over to his own mouth and just let his lips put his feelings into words: “Well, ah—it’s actually……sort of funny? Or—I don’t know, maybe it’s not, but……” Looking Pendour directly in the eye, Reiki tried to wave his hands in a dismissive gesture. “Please don’t feel like you’re pressuring me or anything? Because I promise that you’re not? This—I’ve been thinking about this……for a while, and more clearly since that night at August Bank, and it’s actually why I had to move and change so many things around, but……”
Reiki paused for a deep, meditative breath. Then, more softly, he said, “……I sort of take issue with the phrasing of it, mind? Like, I understand why, on a cosmic level, the ‘purification’ and ‘corruption’ labels get used? It just still feels sort of stigmatizing, to me personally, and like maybe, language like that might alienate some people? That’s all hypothetical, thought, and on the significantly less hypothetical side, I……”
He swallowed thickly. “……I’m working on it. On getting out of the Court. I still have to ask the Princess that I have in mind—and see if she can take care of me and a family member who’s coming with me, or do we have to call Cosmos to handle my cousin, or what all is up with that—but I just……” A slow, sad shake of the head. A soft, exhausted sigh. “I’m sort of dreading telling some people I care about? Because some of them are happy in the Court and others are with the Negaverse, and I don’t want to run out on them without a word, but I also don’t want them to feel judged for their own choices when I’m not trying to judge them, I just……?”
With another, heavier sigh, Reiki pushed his floppy bangs off his forehead. He left his fingers knotted up in the hair as he concluded, “I haven’t really felt right as Murikabushi since, like, shortly after I got Awakened. It’s been putting a huge drain on my civilian life, too. And the only thing I keep coming back to that explains any of it is just……the person I feel like the Mirror and the Court want me to be? Isn’t really the person I am, or the person who *I* want me to be. Too much of what Mirror senshi are supposed to do doesn’t make any sense to me, and I think it’s pretty damning that I feel more respected by a Negaverse General-King than by the magical realm that’s supposed to give me my power.
“Which—” Reiki shook his head again, waving his hands in a brief “no, thank you” sort of gesture. “That’s not to say I want to go to the Negaverse, because I don’t. However much I care about some of them as individuals, everything I know about how they work as an institution tells me they’d also want me to be a version of myself who I don’t want to meet. I want the white fuku even if it washes out my skin-tone and makes me look like I’m going to my own funeral. I want to go to Murikabushi, the planet, up in space. I don’t want to leave one Chaos team just to run right into the arms of another one?
“It’s more that……Faustite has never lied to me. Maybe that’s a low bar, but it’s important to me. He and his team don’t talk down to me. One of them helped me protect someone I love from a youma a while back, for no reason beyond wanting to help me. One of them was kind about checking on me because, based on how I was talking once, he thought I might do something to hurt myself—which I didn’t, but it was still kind of him to check. Even if they’re all Negaverse, they’re still real and genuine with me in all the ways that Mirrorspace isn’t.”
Huffing, Reiki let his shoulders slump a bit. “……Which is all a lot more detail than you really asked for, and I’m sorry? I—like I said, this has been building up with me for a while. And I do feel it’s all pretty damning on Mirrorspace. Because if I ask Faustite anything, I can trust that he’ll be real with me. I may not agree with him or particularly like his answer? But at least whatever he says will genuinely reflect what he feels or what he knows, and he won’t mince words with me based on his opinions about whether or not I can handle the truth. But whenever I try to get a better sense of what Mirrorspace wants, it just feels like I’m being told ‘Stop asking so many questions. Shut up and go play with your toys,’ which, in the middle of a magical war? Feels extremely like ‘Kim, there’s people that are dying’?”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Wed Dec 27, 2023 1:50 pm
Hand-knitted, too? Well, that was just the sweetest thing that Pendour could possibly think of. "Warmth in the winter," she murmured, reaching into the bag to pull it out and wrap it around her neck. It wasn't like she was even cold right now, but just the thought of it sent a little of that warmth all the way down to her heart. "I think you might be one of the kindest people I know." Reaching out a hand like he was asking for permission was all it took. Maybe he'd just been going to pat her on the shoulder, but Pendour scooted in closer so that his arm was over her shoulder and the side of her head was ever-so-gently nestled against his shoulder. She was ginger about it, of course. She'd back away if he wanted, but if he was okay with it and she could get that physical contact in? That always helped, too. Then, she listened. She didn't say anything as he said that he was trying to leave his Court, or even when he was speaking in a way that made it sound like Faustite was one of his favorite people. To keep herself from flinching at that information, she wondered if he'd got a present, too, if his bag had been covered in hot wheels flames, and had something fireproof inside. He deserved that kind of kindness, but that still didn't really make Pendour all the way comfortable with the situation. "It does alienate people," she told him, after awhile. "Calling it corruption. I have to be so careful with every word that comes out of my mouth, Muri, so that people don't think I'm judging them or something." A moment passed, because she was maybe in that situation right now, wasn't she? "But if you want people to be honest, and genuine, it is corruption, isn't it? I think you can see that. You're saying that you don't like what it's making you into, that you don't like what they're asking you to do. It's a story that I've heard a lot of times." Multiple people had sought her out, overwhelmed and scared. Muri was being more logical about it, but he had the same look in his eyes. "And I've seen it, even in the people who don't hate what they're becoming. Um, Faustite." It was strange to hear someone singing his praises, when mostly she found the opposite among her own friends. Maybe it shouldn't have been surprising, since the man apparently had plenty of husbands, and he must have done something to charm them, but still. "A lot of what he's told me is in confidence, but I don't think it's a secret that he's unhappy. I, um," her gaze went somewhere distant, past the diamond snow. She breathed. "Watched him burn someone in half, to try to burn off that unhappiness. I've watched him lash out a lot, hurt a lot of people. Someone I love. I don't think that would have been his first instinct over therapy or something if it wasn't for all of that Chaos in his system." Although it didn't feel right to talk too much about him right now. It felt like she was edging too close to a line she'd promised not to cross. "Anyway, I don't think you should be afraid of the white," she said. "Look, your skin's not too different from mine, and," she reached for a curl of her white hair, and held it up against her forearm, and then against his. "You don't look like, um, a ghost. You'll be able to see the lavender in your outfit, too, maybe, and the pink."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2023 8:39 pm
Nestling together with Pendour like this……felt very Right. And correct. Even if the conversation currently at hand was absurdly heavy and complicated, with so many nuances on all sides but also some pretty glaringly obvious truths tangled up in everything.…… Being close to someone else like this, with her tucked against his side and his hand on her shoulder. The contact helped Reiki stay grounded, too, because so much of this conversation was so easy to get lost in the weeds about.…… Without someone else to bounce things off and remind him of some of the very real stakes that weren’t the first things on his mind, Reiki knew all too well how easily he could forget about some aspects of the situation.
When everything was as important as this currently felt, you couldn’t go neglecting things like that. Ojiisan had always tried to instill the value of patience in Reiki for that reason, but Reiki was often too much Obaasan’s grandson—which was to say “impulsive, impatient, and generally bad at waiting for things.”
After giving himself a long moment to consider what Pendour had said, Reiki nodded. “You’re right, about it being a corruption in my experience, and I do agree that the language isn’t, on the whole, wrong,” he said gently. “That’s definitely been how I’ve felt about it, like…… The Court loves to say that we’re better than the Negaverse, but are we really? We drain people all the same—well, I don’t, I did it twice and then had this whole argument with a Negaverse senshi about her draining someone I know? And she probably meant what she said as, like, a call for me to let go of my antiquated morality and give in to just taking energy off people, like she does? Instead, she mostly made me go ‘Yeah, you’re right that acting like I have any right to judge who does or doesn’t deserve being drained like this, maybe nobody deserves it, so I’m just not gonna do it anymore.’
“On the whole, though, the senshi in the Court do drain people and they don’t really seem to care about it one way or the other. There’s the one kid—okay, they’re like twenty-one? I’m friends with their cousin when I’m powered down, and I saved them from this one piece of work White Moon senshi who just wanted to kill Dark Mirrors because she had a big, lesbian romantic misunderstanding with one of my friends in the Court. So, after all that—and because I know how much my friend loves his cousin—I try to look out for them, right?” Reiki needed a couple meditative breaths before he could continue. Lete simply tried his threadbare patience on a constant basis in that way. “They have this argument that justifies draining energy by totally misappropriating Marxist theory that they learned from somewhere, basically saying that the Dark Mirror has the greatest need so we should be allowed to drain all the energy we want, and it’s just like……no? That’s not how literally anything works?
“Or then there’s Elsa, he’s……” Reiki sighed glumly, letting himself lean a bit closer to Pendour. “He’s the one who brought me into the Court. I’ve known him for a while in my civvies life. This guy I was with, he worked for a state senator and Elsa’s plainclothes work meant he crossed paths with my ex a lot, or they’d be at the same functions. And every time we talked, Elsa was always so driven, and passionate about helping people. He’s bright, he’s funny, he says what he means, he never gives up fighting for what he believes in. So, after he saves me from a youma one night, he reaches for my hand and says ‘Do you trust me’ and sweeps me off my feet on top of it, which is just……hellooooo~”
In order to help illustrate what he meant—namely, that Elsa was really, really, really, ridiculously attractive and did supremely unauthorized things to Reiki’s poor, gay little heart—Reiki gave up a besotted-sounding Gay Gasp™ and fanned himself with one hand.
Unfortunately, a morose, throaty little noise followed the Gay Gasp™. “Elsa didn’t tell me about the energy-draining requirements until after I’d already gone through the Mirror to Awaken. And, like, at the time, I didn’t think it was a big deal? Because he acted like using Mirrorwraiths to drain energy wasn’t a big deal, like it didn’t hurt anybody or have any inherent serious ethical issues, so that’s what I thought, too? But the more I’ve sat with it, the less okay I feel about this. As long as I’ve known him, Elsa’s always been so upstanding and he’s always cared so much about fighting so people the system ignores don’t get forgotten……but trying to talk to him about energy draining is like……? He doesn’t see? Or maybe doesn’t want to see? How what Mirrorspace demands of us flies in the face of everything he believes and values in the rest of his life? I don’t know, it’s like he just doesn’t……”
Reiki realized far too late that his vision had blurred, his eyes had grown hot, and that it felt like he had dozens of tiny claws pricking at his corneas. Only when the tears spilled over onto his cheeks did he properly put it together that……oh. Oh, he was crying.…… It had been six months or so since he’d had Levi over to his place to talk, and Reiki hadn’t cried about all of it. Not really.…… His free hand leapt up to cover his mouth before he’d allowed himself to sob. Something about letting himself have this felt so indecent—like, what was this? Why did he think he was allowed to feel upset? When Elsa hadn’t meant to lie to him, and from Elsa’s perspective, he hadn’t, not even in the lying by omission way?
Nobody had promised Reiki a perfect delivery on his magical girl fantasy, so where did he get off, acting upset that things hadn’t gone exactly how he wanted?
Even as he told himself this, something about it didn’t feel right, to Reiki. No, he didn’t like that Levi had lied by omission, seemingly without realizing it at all, but if Mirrorspace had ever felt like home to him, Reiki suspected that the omission wouldn’t have bothered him. Even if he didn’t enjoy draining people, even if he had moral and ethical issues with it, he probably could have overlooked how central it was to making the Court function, if Mirrorspace had wound up being anything like what he’d imagined based on his first visit there, when Levi had taken him to the Black Mirror and told him to walk through. Regardless of the inciting incident, Reiki’s pain came from something deeper than the relatively surface-level wound of Levi presenting the truth as he’d always known it, but in a way that Reiki had developed buyer’s remorse about.
“……I’m sorry,” he whispered, still crying, though at least he didn’t currently feel a sob building up. “It shouldn’t be such a mess to just admit that you’re right.… Even if there’s a sense of grief for people I’ve never known, like? I met Faustite last year. And I promise, however I’m talking about him right now, I know who he is and what he does to people. I don’t have any illusions about him being capital-T Trouble in a lot of ways. But if my math is right? While he was getting inducted into the Negaverse and half-youmafying, I was adopting my dog and arranging my classes at DCU so I’d have time to go out on weekends and twirl at the bar where I still perform today. I’ve literally never known who he was without Chaos or without all that pain and trauma, and I’ve probably never known Elsa without the influence of Chaos, either.
“So, it’s like……I can’t decide who they should be for them. I can’t judge for them what would or wouldn’t be better for them, on the whole. There are too many things that would change from making Faustite Awaken as a Knight or Elsa Awaken as a White Moon senshi, there’s no way I can know or account for all those; it’d be very It’s A Wonderful Life teas.” Reiki paused briefly, shuddering, though he still didn’t sob. “But I do know myself. And I know what it feels like when I’m being stifled. And I don’t know how Negaverse Chaos feels, but that’s how Dark Mirror Chaos feels to me: it’s cool and easy and seductive, until it gets you in its arms and wants to choke all the life from you it can. It’s like having a straitjacket on your starseed, or putting your starseed in a cage.”
Reiki huffed, and allowed himself to pout. “……Not dramatically exaggerating about the cage thing, either. ……Might actually be helpful if Faustite and Albite wanted to show up right now. I’d trust the force of ‘For whatever reason, they both seem to like me’ to make sure they put my starseed back where it’s supposed to be. Failing that, I’d trust you to enforce the ‘Muri’s starseed goes back where it belongs now’ rule with them. I’d lose my trust in them, sure, but I can eat that loss. In lieu of you getting to see what I mean for real, though?”
Sighing, Reiki made a series of vague gestures with his free hand, which generally seemed to resemble the shape of a starseed. “Kerberos says that starseeds are supposed to burst with color and light. But Dark Mirror senshi—ours don’t. Kerberos saw mine once, and he said that it was all wrong. Dark Mirror starseeds are being smothered by this chrome-looking gray junk, apparently. I guess Negaverse Chaos goes into a Starseed more directly, and I can’t imagine how much that would hurt, but this? Having this cage made out of Chaos that’s taking all the color and the life from it, making it gray and sterile……? It’s way worse than Negaverse Chaos for me personally because it’s just……
“It’s like all the adults who tried to make me wear the boy uniforms to school when I was a kid. Who tried to make me say my parents had abused me into wearing the skirt uniforms when all they did? Was let me wear what I wanted. Or the one teacher who pressured my parents to look into an ADHD diagnosis, which it turned out I do have, but like……? She thought that I only wore the skirt uniform at Knightside so I could self-stimulate by swishing it, which meant, to her, that me getting on meds would make me take it off. Except it didn’t, because I was just wearing what I was happiest in. It’s like all the parents who bullied my classmates out of being friends with me because they thought I had some kind of contagious gender-confusion that I’d get all over their kids, when—no? I’ve never been confused. I’m a boy, I like wearing skirts and dresses, that’s just me. And it’s like my grandmother told me whenever I’d come home from school upset about all: who are all of these teachers and close-minded parents to tell me that being myself is wrong?”
Sighing, Reiki shook his head once more. “Dark Mirror Chaos feels like that exact same garbage, only bigger. And it’s less about ‘very tall boy wears very short skirts,’ which I don’t think Mirrorspace cares about? Way more about how I fundamentally do not jive with the bottom line of ‘Don’t use your magic to help anybody but yourself and Mirrorspace; ******** them, get yours.’ Maybe that’s more true how the world is, but it doesn’t need to be like that, y’know?”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Dec 30, 2023 4:18 pm
When it seemed clear to her that Muri wanted this closeness, and especially as his stoic, logical ethics gave way to tears about boys who had swept him off his feet and then not quite lived up to perfections, Pendour reached to wrap her long arms around his shoulders. She ran a thumb in gentle circles on his arm, and she did her best to keep her own breath soft and even. She held him there for a while. The thought floated across her mind that it felt nice to be back here after so long that she'd been the one others had to look out for, the one losing her mind. "Not quite the worst possible option, not quite the Negaverse, is a low bar if it comes to trying to be a truly ethical person," said Pendour. Not that she could really analyze the ethics of the Dark Mirror Court when she knew so little about it, but it didn't seem like they were doing much to help the situation in the city, just taking energy and then focusing on their mirrors and their own problems. "But it's a comforting thought for people who find themselves in a situation like that. Um, you're leaving, so you know what you're having to sacrifice to do that. Of course some people aren't going to jump to that choice. Of course they're going to look for ways to think so that it doesn't seem like they should have to." Trying to untangle those justifications didn't often work, Pendour had found. Sometimes, she could talk about how Chaos affected the individual, but so much of the time, what was most valuable of all was just building those relationships. So, she held Muri, although it seemed like he had already made his choice. "It's brave, what you're doing," she told him. "I don't know if anyone's said that to you, but it's something you deserve to hear." She shifted to make sure that she could see him, and her smile was warm. "And I think out of everyone who I've talked through this, you're being the most intentional about it. You're wise." She let that sink in for a moment, let the silence cover them like the freshly fallen snow. She leaned her head against his shoulder. "Is there anything you need help with?" she asked. "Finding a Royal, or a place to stay afterwards? I know there's a lot of logistics." There were some rooms she could offer, if it came to that, and really, she still paid rend on her own apartment, even if she only really stayed with the Bells now. "Or," her smile ticked sideways, "I could sweep you off your feet until you stop crying. I know I'm not pretty the way that your friend must be," and she was ace besides, which might have made a difference here, too, "But they say I give good hugs."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2024 5:58 pm
“Oh, please, Pendour,” Reiki drawled playfully, managing a smile, even though he was still crying, “you are absolutely stunning, okay? When I think about beauty with you, I think more about how kind you are? But that doesn’t mean you aren’t beautiful on the outside, too, because you are. Your hair always looks so gorgeous with your eyes and skin-tone.” He didn’t mention the scar over the one eye or the fact that it seemed like a prosthetic. Whatever had happened there, Pendour had never shared with him before, and he didn’t want to push her about it when, for all he knew, bringing it up might be a trigger for her in and of itself.
“Plus, your bone-structure? In your face? Again, absolutely stunning. I might need to shop for the exact right tones of foundation, concealer, and highlighter, if you ever wanted me to paint you? Because everything can look wonky if you get someone’s basic shades wrong? But if you ever wanted, your face would be an amazing canvas and I’d love to do your makeup.”
It wasn’t just talk, either. Reiki didn’t do other people’s makeup all the time, since doing his own usually took enough time and energy. But whenever someone trusted him enough to paint their face for them, he took that very seriously and always did his best to create whatever sort of look they wanted (or a look that he thought they might enjoy, if they didn’t have any particular ideas in mind to start with).…… For the moment, though, it was neither here nor there. First, Reiki had to actually purify, and he couldn’t do that right now, on this specific night.
He could, however, relax into Pendour’s embrace and lean his head down against hers.…… It felt nice, being here with her like this. It felt safe, to be so honest with somebody who always made such an effort to understand where other people were coming from.
“Anyway, I have my place to land set up already? And I have a royal picked out to ask,” he said after pondering for a moment, gently curling an arm around Pendour’s back. “I haven’t talked to her yet, but……I can’t imagine her saying ‘No’?” Ida-hime-sama wasn’t like that. Maybe they hadn’t seen each other in a while, but she was always so kind and compassionate. Reiki really hoped that she’d say ‘yes’? “And if she doesn’t……I know at least two others I can ask, plus I’ve heard of a fourth but I’ve never met them? And if it somehow falls through with all four of them, I guess I don’t mind trying to figure out how to make Cosmos come down here to help me.”
He’d rather not have to do that, though, since Cosmos sounded like a very busy lady who had way more important things to worry about than two Dark Mirror senshi—one who was too loud, all the time, always, and one, Volterra, who had actual manners—trying to get out of the Court.
“And I don’t know about ‘wise’? Or I probably wouldn’t call myself that. Part of the intentionality on my part if just that Mirrorspace kinda requires it? From what I’ve heard about Negaverse purifications, it’s a lot more direct; you get the Chaos out of someone’s starseed and all. But with Mirror Chaos, and the Mirror-Coating, and all that? We have to go on a quest into Mirrorspace to get back a copy that Mirrorspace made of our starseeds, or else the purification won’t even work.
“Then, part of it is that……I have a lot of stuff that needs to come with me, y’know? Meds, for one thing, because if you lose access to your ADHD meds, getting it back can be a struggle. But then, there’s apparently an upper limit on Awakening ages for senshi starseeds, and I was right on the edge of it by the time a Mauvian found me?”
For a moment, Reiki thought about Soya-hime. Thought about how he hadn’t warned her that he was even moving, much less purifying, because he couldn’t deal with the thought of her disappointment. He wondered if she’d ever shown up at the old apartment to get the salmon he’d left with the new tenants who’d moved in, or if the Huang twins had just gotten to enjoy the fish themselves.
“So, instead of having to balance high school around magical girl duty or anything,” Reiki explained, “I had twenty-six years of feeling like there was something else that I was supposed to be doing? But I didn’t have any of the context I needed to understand what that something even was? So, I threw myself into my art and my performing, and I built up a whole life for myself in the scene I’ve been in. And I know I’m gonna have to start all over when I purify, I’m okay with that? But other people in the scene have relied on me for different things, and I needed time to get things set up so, like……the shows I used to produce would be in good hands, and somebody would know how to help get all the performance videos uploaded online, and all kinds of stuff.”
He’d needed time to tell Miss Sibyl too, because his drag mom was family every bit as much as his biological family.
“Then, I think I get the intentionality thing from my Mom and my Obaasan—that is, my grandmother on Dad’s side? The one who was there to comfort me when I came home from school upset. They’ve always been my biggest heroes, and I learned a lot of who I am and what I believe in most from them. Like, my Mom originally immigrated for school, but her family is kind of a big deal in Kyoto high society? But she walked out on an arranged political marriage to marry my Dad because she loved him and didn’t want to let her parents keep making her choices for her. I admire that kind of strength so much.
“Then, Obaasan is like……she actually met my grandfather on the quad at DCU, back in the day? She was still an undergrad; he’d only just started on his Master’s. She was out with some of her anti-war feminist friends, protesting about the US military sticking their nose into things in Vietnam. The way I always heard the story, she got very in my Ojiisan’s face—and, like, everybody else’s too? About handing out her zines and asking how he felt about the threat of a draft? He was so instantly smitten with how passionate she was that he walked face-first into a flagpole. Broke his glasses over it and everything.”
In fact, Ojiisan still had the antique, broken glasses. Remembering them now made Reiki smile again, more fondly than playfully. Thankfully, the tears had finally calmed down some. He still hurt—was still hurting—about several of the tangled, messy things that had fed into this whole ongoing process. But……at least there was a path out of all this.
“The downside of Obaasan being as passionate, and feisty, and headstrong as she is, though? Is that a lot of people really don’t like it,” Reiki went on, “especially because she and my Ojiisan are both bi, right? People don’t usually guess it, because heteronormativity? But being married to a man has never stopped Obaasan from standing with and standing up for other LGBTQ people, even when it wasn’t popular. So, the advice she’d always come back to with me was, first, something being popular doesn’t always mean it’s right. Then, no matter how many people you manage to make happy, there will probably always be someone who doesn’t vibe with you. Sometimes, it’s worth the effort to change someone’s mind. But other times, people just don’t like you, and changing yourself, or pretending to be someone you’re not? All for the sake of people who don’t like you? That’s such a waste of everything that makes you special.
“Put that together with this one Dolly Parton quote I love? ‘Find out who you are and do it on purpose’? And that’s where I’m coming from about intentionality.… I never want to pretend to be someone I’m not. I don’t want to change myself to make Mirrorspace happy when I feel like it only appreciates the idea of me, and I don’t like the reality of who it is, either. I know who I am. I know what I’m about. And there’s no way for me to do me except intentionally?
“Then, finally, it’s just……” Reiki sighed softly, laying his free hand on top of Pendour’s wrist and giving her a gentle squeeze. “It’s my family. Everything with Mirrorspace and the Chaos on my starseed has been messing me up so much, they’ve noticed something being wrong? It’s got them worried and—I can’t just purify without telling them what’s going on, y’know? Too many people from my class at Meadowview disappeared without a word, or fell into mysterious comas and never woke up.
“One of my friends from back in high school? First his sister disappeared, then his boyfriend, and then him. His parents left town a couple years back because the three daughters they had left all disappeared, too. And maybe they only purified or got corrupted, so they’re still alive, but they’re not the same as they were, right? But their parents don’t know, one way or the other. Losing their kids like that destroyed my friend’s parents. How could it not? And it’s only two of us leaving right now—me and one of my cousins—but……I can’t make my family go through something like that, especially when they’ve already been worried about me. I have to tell them. I just……need them to know that I won’t be alone on the other side, and that I’m going to be okay. Which I guess requires some intentionality on my part, yeah.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Jun 15, 2024 4:59 pm
He thought she was beautiful? Pendour softened a little at that, and she respected him enough not to scoff in disbelief, as hard as it was for her to accept his words. All of her friends were so kind about this, liked to murmur about how beautiful she was, to make her feel better, but ti didn't make looking in the mirror much easier. "You can do my makeup sometime," she told him. "I like art, in all its forms. I would like to see what you came up with." A moment passed, with her looking unfocused into the distance, before she decided she trusted him enough to say, "But it's usually a choice for me not to cover them. The scars." Out of habit, she reached up, and ran a finger over the bumps of damaged skin. "I hate what they look like, and what they represent, and people judge me for them, all the time. A minority of people, but enough." Muri would understand that, she thought. It couldn't be that many people who were getting after him for how he dressed, but the people who did? Their words must sting, all the same. "But it feels worse, trying to hide it. It feels like trying to bury things, to pretend that something didn't happen when it did." She'd gone for the prosthetic eye, for some sense of normality, but she'd chosen a color that wasn't quite right, because there was no getting around the fact that it was fake.She was glad that he was purifying, because she didn't want to have to stop sharing moments like this with him, to stop sharing secrets that even some of the others that she was close to might not quite understand. She wanted to hear more about his family, about his parents who had gotten out of arranged marriages, and his grandparents who had protested for peace and gay rights. She wanted to hear more about them in situations like this, sitting softly together while they watched shimmering snow fall from the sky, and not the way that she had to talk to Livie about her family, on the kitchen floor in the middle of the night while Livie sobbed into a bowl of mac and cheese about how much she missed them. "I can see how you get strength from them," she told him, "And thoughtfulness, too." And maybe a few other traits. With the amount that Muri talked about people like Elsa and Faustite, Pendour could see him getting caught up in his thoughts about them and walking straight into a flagpole. "And it's good that you can get closure on all of the things that you need to, if you can. I know someone who ended up betraying the Negaverse under their noses, and had to get out fast. It tears her up, the family thing. She never got to say goodbye." She didn't know if Muri's intention of telling everyone he possibly could about his plans to leave his Court was the most practical choice, especially with the chances of having family members in the Negaverse, but she wouldn't stop him. At least he wouldn't end up with the kind of regrets that she'd seen tear someone's life apart. "So all I need to do is wait for you, on the other side," she said, and nodded. "I can do that. With tea, or something, and, um, all the makeup you want." She nodded softly into his should. "I can do that. I'll be there."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
