Sitting at his favorite work-station and patting a base of white pancake all over his face, Reiki glanced over at the wall. Although Yuki had his arms folded over his chest and one eyebrow quizzically arched, he rather failed at looking stern. Probably, he wasn’t going for that. Maybe he wanted to think that he was, and if so, Reiki couldn’t entirely deny him that. Finding out that your queerplatonic ******** had spent over a year running around as a magical girl, burning his candle at both ends, getting ~*Entangled*~ somehow with a guy who had—through stories about him, at least—forced Yuki to point out that “better than Greg” was a ******** low bar……
That had been, in so many words, kind of A Lot. Even without the gameboard aspect of it, that series of revelations would’ve been kind of A ******** Lot.
Still, Reiki shrugged and buffed more of his kabuki base-paint down his cheek, his jaw, his nose, then the curves of his neck. “Someone needs to add some flavor other than, like, peppermint……gingerbread……whatever Miss Diamond put in the peach cobbler this year.…”
Wrinkling his nose at the memory of Diamond Espadrille’s “Home For The Holidays” number from the previous year’s Christmas Eve show, Yuki pursed his lips. “I still say she could’ve done something more inspired than having ‘home’ be her goddamn a**.”
“You’re just biased because you like mine better.”
“That too, yeah.” Yuki huffed, leaning his head back into the wall. “Who else do you have on flavor-adding detail, then? It’s obviously not just you.”
“Does Elijah’s Krampus-themed ‘You’re A Mean One, Mister Grinch’ number count?”
“Don’t know. The holiday music makes me inclined to say no, but with Eli being Eli……? Y’know, being as somebody’s Gee-dash-dee made him?” Yuki smiled faintly when that vocal choice got Reiki to laugh. Most of the time, Yuki didn’t mind taking any version of God’s name in vain—but here, he’d pronounced the G–d workaround from written English, and it was (to Reiki) endlessly charming. After a moment, though, Yuki shook his head. “I dunno. I haven’t gotten to see Eli rehearse his number. I’ll decide if he counts as nontraditional flavor after I see what he’s doing with the concept here.”
Reiki nodded, because he supposed that did make sense as an approach. Talking too much wasn’t an option, though. For the most part, Reiki didn’t mind talking while he put on his face……but tonight would probably be his last chance to ever perform this number.
Even once he got a new drag persona set up—he very much still needed to talk to Sybil and Cherry about what was going to happen, but it didn’t feel right to talk to them before talking to Mom and Dad, to Obaasan and Ojiisan, to Junsei and the girls and Ayame for Haruhi (sisters were important)—it wasn’t as if Magdalene Disobedience could resurrect Miss Sayuri Kurobara Disobedience’s “It’s The Music, Not The Story” number and do it onstage. So many queens had Disney-Elsa medleys, or chose to sing as Reiki had done for opening the show with “Last Christmas,” or could turn and buck it out to Divine’s cover of “Walk Like A Man” as easily as Megan Thee Stallion’s “Thot s**t”……
But this number—this medley of so many different artists, dialogue from Full Metal Jacket and M. Butterfly, an actual aria out of ******** ********. It had taken so much work to get everything exactly right, then to rearrange things when Megan and Dua Lipa dropped “Sweetest Pie” and it felt so completely right that Reiki had just needed to add it into the mix.…… Soon enough, all Reiki would have to remember this number would be all the videos of him doing it that Matt and Katie had posted on the Scandals Bar Youtube channel.…… He’d made it too iconoclastic for another queen to ever perform it without eating accusations of plagiarism.
Even when the “other queen” in question would be Reiki himself, just going by a different name.
But dwelling too much on that would make him cry and ******** up his paint. So, instead, Reiki took a deep breath. Acknowledged in his head that he was feeling a preemptive sense of loss, a grief for this life that he’d built up for himself while always looking for some elusive something that he’d needed, that he’d been meant to have and yet he lacked it……and on the exhale, Reiki allowed those thoughts to fly away. He could come back to them later. But for now, he needed to paint on his contour.
Had Reiki been doing genuine kabuki for this number, or had he been portraying a bad b***h oiran in a more serious and less draggy production, then his porcelain doll base would be perfectly fine as it was. But Reiki wasn’t doing either of those things, and so he needed to add more dimension to his face.
“This is so much ******** easier just trying to do some Golden Age Hollywood black and white paint,” Reiki lamented, dipping one of his best brushes for eyes into some blue that Elijah liked to use as a base for painting fake veins all over himself in certain Dorian Gay monster looks. Tonight, instead of going for his eyes, Reiki painted the blue down the arches of his cheeks, following the paths that he’d use for the rest of his contour very soon. “Not even just the reveal that I need the blue for, but contouring in a way that doesn’t totally undermine the oiran image by making it look more like Marlene Dietrich or a Rita Hayworth? Ugh, please.”
“Come off it,” Yuki scoffed, rolling his eyes with inescapable fondness. “You know what you’re doing. And you know that you know what you’re doing. That’s why they’re never gonna cast you on the Race, you know: you’d run away from me, and get all the way out there to some WeHo backlot, and you’d make all the other bitches quake in their pumps with how fierce you paint your mug.”
“You don’t need to flatter me, Gorgeous. I’m always already seduced, as long as it’s you.” Faintly humming a song he only mentally allowed to exist as “I Saw *Daddy* Kissing Santa Claus,” Reiki tilted his face around……scrutinized the in-progress paint job in the mirror, especially focusing on the blue. He wouldn’t reveal the true purpose of the blue paint until near abouts the end of the number, but Reiki had to get his base laid right. “Anyway, the real reason they’ll never cast me is that Kandy Muse is the only one allowed to be The Producer, and I can’t handle the expectation that I should let anybody else to tell my story for me. Starring roles are so December tenth. If I can’t control my own narrative, then I don’t want any of these, y’know what I mean?”
“Guess I have to.… It’s what you and Haruhi need that Princess for, right? In a sense, anyway, yeah?” A bit too late, Yuki glanced around to confirm that nobody was paying them any extra mind, or listening in enough to gather that they were talking about something specific. As Reiki picked up the gray shade he needed for the rest of his contour, Yuki lowered his voice to ask, “What are you gonna do when you get yourself set up after all that? Like, how do you……start the ******** over with all this?”
To illustrate what he meant, Yuki gestured at all the assorted accouterments of drag that surrounded them: the wig-head where sat Reiki’s main hair for this number (a more exaggerated and more ornamented version of an oiran’s traditional hair-crown, split down the middle in bubblegum pink and bleach blonde, a la Nicki Minaj in the “Super Bass” video)……the closet door nearby, where the top layer of Reiki’s costume waited on a hanger……the array of makeup sprawled out before Reiki as he painted his gray shadows around his forehead and temples……
“I just mean to say,” Yuki went on, “you’ve only been doing this since before I met you, right?”
Reiki deadpanned, “Well, yeah, I came out my mom with glitter eyeshadow on, snapping my little fingers and crowing like ‘fierce hunty, yes mawma, yas queen, slay, O-P-U-L-E-N-C-E, opulence, you own everything’!”
“So, Junior LaBeija should’ve sued a baby for trying to make off with his gig?”
“Oh, you know it, Gorgeous. It’s very that.”
“But seriously, answer my question.” Both brows quirking up, Yuki cast a long, inquiring, and very pointed look in Reiki’s direction. “Do you even know how to exist without drag? If you have to start all over as a queen, like……what’s that even gonna look like for you?”
“I’m not gonna start all over—not really.” Reiki sighed and picked out a smaller brush for the next step. White pancake foundation was fine as a starting point, but in order to make it all work, he needed to add some subtle color dimension that wouldn’t necessarily read as dead—not until Reiki wanted it to. Very pale blue got dusted over the apples of his cheeks as he explained, “I have all my experience and my drag coming with me, don’t I? And if I’m not performing on stage for a while……”
Reiki made a throaty, shrugging little noise so he didn’t need to interrupt his painting. “Life finds a way, and so will I.”
“Is……” Whatever Yuki had on his mind to ask, it was big enough that he had to hesitate and think about the phrasing for quite some time. Reiki had moved on to buffing things out with his Beautyblender by the time Yuki spit it out: “Is it worth all of this? Giving up Sayuri, having to take time off of performing…… I get it, okay? Everything you’ve said about how it feels so wrong with the team you’re on right now, and how you really need to do something else, and all of that?”
Pressing his lips together, Reiki checked around them. Assured that nobody was eavesdropping, he quirked a finger to beckon Yuki over. Right up against his ear, Reiki whispered, “Genuinely, I’d feel less wrong in the Negaverse. Still wrong, what they have to do is still not really me? But if I’d found my way to Hi no Akuma—which I probably would have; he’s a ******** boy-magnet, okay—and if I’d found my way to him, I feel like I could probably get away with a lot by virtue of being a cute boy.”
Probably not if he didn’t drain energy off people, the way the Reiki had refused to do for the Mirror for so long. Faustite had standards for behavior among his people, and Reiki ******** off from meeting his energy draining quotas—the Negaverse having such things for real made sense—probably wouldn’t have flown.…… Then again, maybe Reiki wouldn’t have minded draining people as much if Soya had Awakened him into the Negaverse.
Sure, Monoceros and Kerberos had been strong enough to leave them. They’d broken through whatever it was that Negaverse Chaos did to people, however it messed with their heads and made them increasingly okay with the horrible things that the Negaverse so often asked its people to do, and they’d made it out of there. But……Reiki didn’t know if he would’ve been that strong. Especially not if he’d found his way to Faustite’s ranks after being Awakened as a Negaverse senshi.
Reiki’s arm dropped to the table, taking his Beautyblender with it.
Closing his eyes, Reiki schooled himself through a series of deep breaths. What he was thinking and feeling right now—none of it was real. He hadn’t Awakened into the Negaverse, but the Dark Mirror. While the exit process seemed far more complicated for him—all the ex-Negaverse senshi he knew had indicated that they’d only needed Cosmos or a Princess, while Asmodeus had told Reiki that he’d need to do a whole ******** spiritual quest inside of Mirrorspace—at least the heart that Reiki most considered The Real Him hadn’t gotten irreparably poisoned by Chaos.
(He considered, in the back of his mind, what this line of thinking meant about the people in the Negaverse he cared about……and then, he shoved that thought aside. Reiki didn’t have a right to decide what was or wasn’t anybody else’s Real Self. Only they could do that for themselves.)
With another deep breath, he opened his eyes. He resumed blending out his contour as if he hadn’t missed a beat.
“Getting out of the Mirror is worth all this drama,” he told Yuki, certainty in his voice making up for the lack of volume. “You know what I’ve always said about my drag, right?”
“That would be why I’m asking about this, yeah.” The frown twisting up Yuki’s mouth couldn’t decide between seeming unimpressed with Reiki’s nonsense, and sympathizing. “You’ll have to forgive me for worrying about the idea of you being cut off from something so essential to your health and wellbeing.”
“Drag can exist without needing to be on stage, though,” Reiki pointed out, tilting his head around to get a better angle for buffing out the gray and blue on his cheeks. “There are so many avenues for getting out there, and for doing drag. It’s like……” He needed a moment to ponder his phrasing, but ultimately, it wasn’t complicated: “My starseed makes me a magical girl by default, whether anybody likes it or not. But I don’t need a magical destiny to point me toward drag. I would’ve wound up in drag even without Miss Sibyl; she gave me the guidance, but I would’ve found my way regardless. No matter what’s happening for me in my life, I’ll get to drag. Nothing can stop that.”
He glanced up from digging for his best black liquid eyeliner, and looked Yuki in the eye. “‘Senshi’ is who my starseed says I am. Drag is what makes this senshi’s starseed sing.”
While Yuki considered that idea, Reiki couldn’t tell what his best guy was thinking. Not exactly. If Yuki didn’t like something about the idea, he’d make it known, and he wasn’t giving off the vibes he did when he disapproved of anything? But the lack of clarity in his vibes wound Reiki’s spirit tighter than a bodycon latex dress.
“So,” Yuki eventually huffed. “Am I to assume you’ll be getting on TikTok more often?”
A laugh, and Reiki nodded. “There’s a pretty huge gap in both drag TikTok and cosplay TikTok,” he said, “and it’s calling to me like ‘Hey. Heeeey, ********, you really wanna dress up like a gothic lolita drag waifu take on Luo Binghe.’”
Good thing Yuki burst out laughing before Reiki got his liner brush onto his eyelid. The shock of that sound might’ve really jerked Reiki’s hand around, made a huge mess out of everything.
“Well,” Yuki said, “glad to hear that you have some kind of idea.… Yeah.…… Yeah, we can work with that.”
Quote:
火 の 悪魔, Hi no Akuma = “demon of fire” or “demon’s fire.” Unsubtle nickname is unsubtle. Fun nuance is that “akuma” is used for the JPN name of the tarot card, The Devil, and to refer to the mara demons from Buddhism, who work to prevent people from reaching enlightenment. But mostly, the nickname is an unsubtle way of referencing exactly whom you think Reiki’s referencing without naming him, just in case they’re wrong about not being eavesdropped on.
