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Backdated to New Year’s Eve.

To say the least, things hadn’t gone well with Levi when they’d spoken back around Easter. When Reiki had invited him over, he’d hoped to get some kind of clarity, advice from a Dark Mirror senshi who’d done all of this for so much longer and who could hopefully get everything to click into place in Reiki’s head. Reach into his mind, pluck out any cognitive dissonance that he couldn’t help himself resolve, and give him an explanation for what this all meant that made everything stop hurting.

Instead, they’d argued. Gotten increasingly wound up and gone off at each other—which Reiki had started, unquestionably.

So many things had put him in his feelings back then, and so many of them no longer felt like they mattered: everything inside him had roiled in chaos and confusion (as he sat in his craft room, packing up a gift bag, Reiki’s heart and nerves felt still and calm for the first time in ages); Faustite had gone full youma, allegedly, leaving Albite, Alkmene, Heliodor, and probably several other senshi boys who loved him with the knowledge that seeing him again would never be the same, that he’d sooner eat their starseeds now than kiss their faces (Faustite was fine—relatively speaking and as far as Reiki knew—and rather than fully youmafying, he’d ascended to the rank of General-King); Reiki had felt—had tried so powerfully to deny feeling—like maybe, everything about him had been broken all along (not true, he’d realized by now, but the circumstances were such that he could not endure)……

Heaving a deep sigh, Reiki combed his eyes over everything he had to arrange. The gift bag, a rich, dark blue with glitter-spangled art of a full moon and aurora borealis, shining above some pine trees, a polar bear, and her cub. Maybe something more religious would’ve been better, as a sort of apology for having missed Hanukkah and bringing a gift on New Year’s Eve—but Reiki had found all the gift bags with menorahs and magen Davids off-puttingly tacky. Not even fit to give children, who might have appreciated and been a significantly more appropriate audience the cartoonishness of the designs, much less an adult with class and taste.

The silvery-white tissue paper, however, did have a pattern of little glittery stars. It crinkled like it knew something Reiki didn’t as he first wrapped it around a book. Guilt twisted a bit in Reiki’s throat, since he’d also given Kerberos the first volume of Mo Dao Zu Shi’s official English translation. But it helped ease his mind that he had very different intentions in giving the book to said boys. Plus, Levi and Blossom would probably enjoy different things about the story.

Five Pink Post-It Notes for Levi, attached to the title page of MDZS volume 1 (7 Seas Translation)
Obaasan and I have been into this lately. All the author’s works, really. I just thought you might prefer the gay magical murder mystery/sociopolitical revenge thriller

to the isekai satire where the biggest tension is the idiot protag’s comphet nonsense, or the sprawling epic of love, revenge, redemption, obsession, whatever the ******** character I really like] is doing, and whether or not gender goes on avocado toast. But if you do like the sounds of either, they’re called Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System & Heaven Official’s Blessing.

In this one, I hope you’ll like Lan Wangji & Jin Guangyao. Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng are *my* favorite boys? But LWJ + JGY both remind me of you. LWJ has the loyalty & going where the trouble is

just because he want to help people with no concern for his own glory. JGY has the pragmatism & the struggle to do good for others in shitty, unideal circumstances. So, yeah. I hope you like them. 🖤

Next, Reiki wrapped up another book, but of a considerably different character. Where the first volume of Mo Dao Zu Shi had a full color illustration on the front, professional quality layout work inside, and all the marks of having a lot of money put into its production by a company with sizable funds behind it, the next little book had a functional layout thrown together by somebody who’d been learning as he went and asking his Obaasan for rather a lot of help. The relatively understated cover art—a crossed pair of henshin pens, one bearing the perpetually unsatisfied ouroboros from Reiki’s own pen and the other, the snowflake from Elsa’s tiara (Reiki had totally blanked on Elsa’s actual senshi symbol), surrounded by an array of eight-pointed stars—had been drawn by hand, with a mix of black, blue, and purple pens, on paper that was only somewhat heavier and sturdier than the printer paper bound up inside.

The little book’s contents were what made it special, not least because Reiki had written all of the stories. None of them featured any characters he’d made up on his own, but aside from Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, the late Anne Rice, and George RR Martin, the characters’ original creators weren’t very likely to put them into situations like the ones that Reiki had (and honestly, Grigor Mothman tended to be overall pretty vanilla in his tastes, if you ignored all the consent issues and incest). Still, Reiki had written the stories himself, and various aspects of them made him hope that Levi would like them.

Once he had the two books tucked in the bag for Levi, safe and sound, he carefully added the water bottle (metal, painted a bluish shade of black, with a pattern of silver stars all over). Next came a hand-crocheted, cotton-stuffed plushie, very much like Reiki’s own Usagi-chan (the black rabbit that Aunt Naoko had once made for Reiki), save that the plush he’d made for Levi was a bat and a similar shade of blue to Levi’s hair. As Reiki crinkled a couple sheets of tissue paper, wrapping them around the plush bat, Cersei’s identification tags jingled behind him, over near the threshold. Her nails scraped along the hardwood floor as she padded over, and without concern for any laws of physics, she wriggled around Her Person’s legs to slip under the desk.

With a soft sigh, Reiki paused his work to nudge his chair back, all so he could ruffle his hands up and down Cersei’s sides, her neck, and her face. “Awww, did you come to help me pack this up for Levi, baby,” Reiki cooed at her as Cersei panted at him and got the closed-eyes, lolling tongue, and general blissed out expression of a Very Happy Doggo. “What a good girl.… What would I ever do without you, huh?”

Being incapable of answering with words, Cersei Rokugin responded by leaning up to lick at Reiki’s face. Right up his lips and nose, smearing saliva all over his glasses in the process, but Reiki didn’t care. Wiping off his glasses was easy, and while he did so, Cersei decided to lie down on his feet. What a wonderful, unimpeachably marvelous little helper. Perfection, no notes.

Not that Her Person had very much left for her to help with, really. The only gift left to put in the bag was Levi’s scarf, and Reiki didn’t bother dressing it in tissue paper first. Unlike all the other scarves Reiki had made this year, he’d gone a bit more ham on Levi’s—hopefully not so much so that anybody could trace him enough to grok that Levi Burningham and Eternal Elsa of the Dark Mirror Court were the same person? But still, Reiki had added some embellishment: the scarf’s main body, he’d crocheted with a dark blue yarn that had strands of silver woven in, and along end-edges, he’d stitched on little cloth decals in the shape of silver stars.

Nestling the scarf in around everything else, Reiki let go of a sigh that might as well have been coming from his soul itself.… He’d given himself a treat by getting precious about the arrangements within this gift bag, but he didn’t have any more time to waste. As soon as he’d gotten this bag over to Levi’s apartment (and left it hanging on the handle rather than impose by sticking around), Reiki had a meeting with Faustite, one that he’d specifically asked Faustite for. He didn’t dare be late.

The only thing that Reiki allowed to hold him up was simple: he grabbed up a postcard-sized art print that he’d somehow wound up with doubles of. This one featured his beautiful baby puppy’s fictional namesake, Cersei Lannister, looking primped and plucked and perfect on one side of her face—every inch the Grand High b***h of the Seven Kingdoms—while the other side of her face looked haggard, and worn down, and dirty, shorn of her glorious golden locks and glowering with murderous intent. Against the Lannister red backdrop, she was framed by Reiki’s most very favorite quote of hers: I am a lioness. I will not cringe for them.

This art print got tucked in safely with everything else, just as soon as Reiki had jotted a note down on the back:

Note for Levi, tucked in the gift bag
I’m sorry. For whatever it’s worth, you and the Court aren’t broken. It’s just me, and you never could’ve expected that. (Not to TSwift, but I’m gonna TSwift: “It’s me, hi. I’m the problem, it’s me” is the story of my entire life right now.)

I don’t blame you for anything that’s happened, and I don’t blame you for staying when your work outside the Court is so important, and your sister and Acubens need you. What I’m getting ready to do, I can’t ask of anybody else. In a lot of ways, I don’t want to do it, either. I wish there were another way, but I can’t live like this and (with apologies to Siken) I just don’t want to die anymore.

Please take care of yourself, Levi. 🖤

Yours, 霊希.






cw: nothing outright Not Safe For Gaia is said below the spoiler cut, but there are implications about Not Safe For Gaia things, including (fictional) sibling incest (House Targaryen out of ASOIAF/GOT/HotD), (fictional) consent issues (intoxication), and Omegaverse.

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The specific ten stories in the little homemade zine that Reiki put together for Levi are:

  • “what tangled webs we weave” (Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Elim Garak/Julian Bashir. Fake dating for Starfleet + Cardassian spy reasons leads to very real ~intimacy).

  • “i would have followed you (my brother, my captain, but not my king)” (A Song of Ice and Fire, Daemon Blackfyre/Brynden “Bloodraven” Rivers. A last moment of tender Not Safe For Gaia intimacy before Bloodraven goes and snitches to one half-brother [currently King of Westeros] about the other half-brother’s plans to do an insurrection).

  • “if i cannot satisfy the one” (MDZS, Wangxian Omegaverse. Wei Wuxian is digging up graves during the Sunshot Campaign when his body decides to remind him that he is an Omega with needs. Extremely Not Safe For Gaia Things Ensue, right there in the graveyard, like some Mary Shelley nonsense).

  • “bleeding, not just making conversation” (Dragon Age: Inquisition/Baldur’s Gate 3, Dorian Pavus/Astarion Acunin. Listen, this one doesn’t even remotely pretend to have a plot, okay? Reiki just wanted his Dragon Age boyfriend of choice to kiss his BG3 boyfriend of choice For Reasons).

  • “you’ll always be my favorite ghost” (Hannibal [Bryan Fuller], Hannibal Lecter/Will Graham. Mutually codependent murder husbands on the lam together after the finale episode’s cliffhanger, getting Especially Husband-Like with each other immediately after doing one of their ridiculous modern art installation murders, and maybe a bit rough about that intimacy, but they both like it rough).

  • “burned, about to burn, still on fire” (MDZS, Nie Mingjue/Jin Guangyao. Mutually admiring leader/subordinate to enemies who play nice for a mutual loved one while having, shall we say, aggressive negotiations when Lan Xichen is not around to make them behave. The massive difference in their physical sizes is repeatedly made A Thing, like NMJ noting how small and delicate JGY relative to him, or JGY having a Standard Romance Novel amount of feelings about NMJ’s enormous bigness).

  • “played with love or not at all” (The Vampire Chronicles, Lestat de Lioncourt/Nicolas de Lenfent. It’s sad, it’s hurt/comfort-y, the central emotional Thing is about Lestat and Nicki’s growing alienation from each other, and the central justification for the Not Safe For Gaia parts is that Nicki’s fingers look exceptionally beautiful when he’s playing his violin).

  • “whispering about the places that you’ve been” (MDZS, Jin Guangyao/Lan Xichen. Basically a Not Safe For Gaia missing scene-style fic set while most of the cast is doing other things, but Lan Xichen is with his beloved sworn brother, trying to use ~intimacy~ to play “I Can Fix Him 🥺” and “Please, A-Yao, Let Me Save You 🥺”…… Unfortunately, they love each other, but that doesn’t end up saving the day).

  • “where the wild roses grow” (Star Wars Prequel Trilogy/Clone Wars era, Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker. Something something, secret Jedi mission, something something, mysterious flower with weird pollen, something something, Obi-Wan is deeply concerned about the growing darkness in Anakin but at the moment, the somewhat more pressing concern is that Anakin will die if Obi-Wan does not administer a Not Safe For Gaia treatment).

  • “we have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven” (Star Trek: TOS, Kirk. Spock. Pon farr. That’s it, that’s the fic. It’s one of those fics that, when you see it on AO3, it has a fancy Richard Siken title and the tags are just utterly filthy).