Cersei Rokugin was, in Her Person’s less-than-humble but utterly unbiased opinion, a perfect angel who had done nothing wrong ever in her life. On the walk over from the house, she’d behaved herself wonderfully, not even remotely tugging on the leash when she and Reiki had walked past Another Dog. The golden retriever, apparently named Steve, had worn a bandana around his neck with a pattern that looked like Captain America’s shield. He’d seemed like a sweet, energetic guy, and his person (some ostensibly human man maybe around Yuki’s age, give or take a little bit) had likewise seemed nice……but Reiki and Cersei hadn’t had the time to stop and get to know Steve and his own person.
No, they’d needed to traverse the few blocks from home over to North-End Park, specifically heading for the bench in this park that Reiki knew better than anywhere else. There was a brief pause in their adventure so Cersei could handle some personal business and Reiki could clean it up, but for the most part, they made the journey in about as much time as Reiki had planned on. Rocking up to Kerberos’s bench, though, Reiki couldn’t help but sigh.… Nobody was there tonight. That……maybe made sense? He didn’t rightly know if he and Cersei were showing up too early for Blossom to have settled in for soul-saving detail, since this was supposed to be one of the days when Reiki could reliably plan on finding him here.
“Maybe we just got here early, baby,” Reiki muttered, taking the seat that he usually occupied when he came to see Kerberos with boba, or hot chocolate, or whatever.
No such treats had accompanied Reiki today, but he had still worn a cute little outfit. Not exactly the same as his fuku. He hadn’t had the energy to get into full lolita today, so underneath his coat, he had paired a black-and-pink, pleated plaid skirt with some layered t-shirts. The top shirt, basic black, featured fan-art Lovely Star Hinata-chan—the sparkly-eyed and pink-pigtailed protagonist of Rei-ojisan’s magical girl manga—decked out in her Princess Hina garb, beside the words Not everyone can be a *:･ﾟ✧ PRINCESS ✧ﾟ･:*. Someone has to clap when I walk by.
His henshin pen weighed heavier in his coat pocket than usual, today. But that was only because this meeting meant so much to him. Coming to see Kerberos as Reiki, for what was going to be the last time, meant the world to him. Sure, Blossom could get to know him as Kiyoshi, and he looked forward to that, he did……but this whole time, Reiki had wanted to meet his White Moon friends as Reiki, instead of only being able to know them as Murikabushi. Considering he and Haruhi were both ready for what they needed to do, that had to be tonight.
Down on the ground, Cersei sniffed around Reiki’s feet for a moment, batting her tail against his black thigh-highs with the glittery pattern of stars all over them. Then, abruptly but not unwelcomely, she decided to hop up into the spot where Blossom usually sat. Brown eyes all bright and eager, she looked to Reiki for affirmation that she’d done a good job. He rewarded her with a soft huff and a warm smile, a ruffle of her ears, and finally, a little kiss on her nose.
“Yes, baby, yes,” he told her softly. “That’s my good girl.”
Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2024 1:07 pm
As much as Kerberos tried to vary his schedule, there were still days that he tried to more reliably be on his bench. Not every time, not every week, but there needed to be some consistency. Besides, true randomness was impossible and he would just drive himself crazy trying.
It was early in the evening, but once things were closed up at Puppy Paws, Kerberos liked to get out as early as possible. The more time he spent on his bench, the more likely he was to catch someone who was looking for him, since he couldn’t exactly make appointments. He was used to this part of North End Park being pretty empty when the sun was going down, and so he wasn’t exactly concerned about some ordinary civilian spotting him, all aglow in his pretty dancer’s outfit, and having strange questions.
Perhaps he should have been more vigilant, because as he approached the bench that he liked to think of as “his,” he found it occupied. By a person, and a dog.
Some alarm-bell part of his instincts screeched that this was some kind of ambush, but a quick glance around didn’t reveal anyone else nearby—and once civilian and a dog weren’t exactly a raiding party. So, he approached, cautiously.
“Not many people stay out in parks after dark,” he said, a little warily. “Are you and your furry friend alright?”
Yeah, he spent a good deal of time out and about without being powered up, so it wasn’t like he was entirely unaccustomed to going through town without them? But usually, when he was out in North-End Park, he did have the ability to sense other senshi’s auras. If he’d shown up to this bench early on some other night, bringing hot chocolate or boba with him instead of Cersei, he wouldn’t have been caught off-guard by Kerberos finally approaching, nor taken a moment to blink at his friend and wonder why he was acting so guarded.
…………Right. Because of the glamour. And after everything that had happened last year with the ******** up ambush that had led right to Faustite’s ascension to General-King, Reiki guessed that Kerberos had more reason than most people to be concerned about someone he didn’t know showing up on his bench.
“Yeah, we’re okay,” Reiki said gently, trying not to treat Kerberos like a frightened rabbit instead of a person but now also feeling a bit uncertain himself. Which he didn’t really like feeling, both in general and with Kerberos, specifically. Like……yes, this was a new-ish context for them to meet each other, but at the same time, Kerberos was Reiki’s friend. Scooting down the bench a bit, he coaxed his Best Girl into coming with him, which cleared up some more space for Kerberos to come sit, whenever he felt safe enough to do so. “She’s sweet, friendly, and up to date on all her shots, if you want to pet her or anything? …Her name is Cersei.”
Which was probably a really solid clue about who Kerberos had on his bench tonight. Aside from how Cersei wasn’t a particularly common pet name—and far more likely to be found on a cat than on a dog, most of whom were more likely to end up named after one of the Starks or their dire wolves, something like Sansa, Arya, Robb, Lyanna, Benjen, Jon Snow, Lady, Nymeria, Summer, or Ghost—Reiki had told Kerberos before, while here as Muri, that he had a four-footed Best Girl back at home. He’d mentioned that her name was Cersei. He’d explained how he’d named his baby after Cersei Lannister because she was kind of a terrible person and made her trauma everyone else’s problem but she’d suffered a lot of things that Reiki personally identified with a lot—including and especially the way that so many people in her life had always tried to make her into whatever object most suited their own needs instead of letting her be a complete human person—and he simply had no choice but to stan.
A long-ponytailed, gray-eyed someone turning up on this bench with a white pit-mix named Cersei had to be a good clue.
In case Kerberos needed something more concrete, though, Reiki reached into his coat pocket. “She was being kinda clingy when I went to leave tonight, so I let her come with. I figured it’d be okay because there’s basically no way she won’t love you,” he pulled out the henshin pen and held it up so Kerberos could see the Murikabushi violet, silver, and red, and the little insignia of the perpetually unsatisfied ouroboros, then added a nickname he felt certain that only he ever used, “Blossom.”
(For her own part, Cersei Rokugin briefly tilted her head at The Strange New Person? But Her Person greeted him as a friend, and something about him felt so kind, even when she nudged down the bench a bit, she looked back to him with a tongue-lolling smile and her brown eyes full of warmth. Was he going to be a new friend? Oh, she very much hoped so!!)
Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2024 1:08 pm
Cersei. A pitt mix, very friendly, sitting next to someone with a recognizable sense of style—it was starting to tug at something, for Kerberos, even before the civilian in front of him pulled out that familiar-looking henshin pen.
It was always a bit of a Moment, when the glamor lifted. When a stranger was suddenly recognizable as a friend, and one you only couldn’t recognize because of magical interference. As soon as he realized who it was, Kerberos broke into a broad smile, and came over to the bench much more relaxed. He dropped down in the now open space, extending a hand to Cersei for her to sniff before he started petting.
“Murikabushi! Or—what’s the name I should call you? I’d guess you aren’t here for one of our usual chats, if you’re here as…yourself,” and Kerberos knew this had to be something serious and heavy—but he had hopes for exactly what it could be.
If Murikabushi was meeting him out of fuku, then that might just mean that the person he was meeting wasn’t long for this world—but hopefully in the best way possible.
Hopefully, it was almost time to bring Murikabushi home.
As soon as Kerberos recognized him, Reiki breathed a sigh of relief and put his henshin pen back in his pocket. Better not to risk losing it, or worse, letting it get seen by someone he couldn’t trust as much as he could Kerberos.… Would it change, too, when Reiki did what he and Haruhi needed to do tonight?
“It’s—I’m Reiki like this,” he said as Cersei first sniffed at Blossom’s hand, then all but dove face-first into it, so eager to receive pets from a New Person and be showered in affection. “And I dunno, I could probably still tell you about Asswaff fandom drama,” meaning from the fandom for A Song of Ice and Fire, based on a popular attempt at pronouncing its acronym (ASOIAF), “or about how some moralizing troll commented on one of my old Thorki fanfics to accuse me of ‘invalidating adopted family’ when, like? Of course adopted family is valid family, Internet person? That’s why it’s tagged ‘sibling incest’; because I know that they are brothers and want people to be able to filter it out if they don’t want to read it.”
Huffing softly, Reiki tucked some of his hair behind his ear and shook his head. “But yeah, no. My cousin’s last day at nis job was today; ne’s getting ready for the trip to go fight Mirrorspace for our exit passes. We’ve told the family about what we’re doing, and why, and all of that. Given how much I’ve been worrying them lately, they’re not thrilled about not being able to talk for a while, but they do trust my qpp to look out for me and make sure I don’t do anything too stupid or crazy. He’s also very firmly in favor of keeping me and Faustite separated because I don’t have, y’know……” Reiki gestured at Kerberos, first a bit vaguely and then more clearly at his glowing, pink transcendence marks, rather than in a general vicinity that could have been mistaken for his tattoos. “The transcended senshi insurance policy against hot, half-youma boys dragging me off to the Negaverse.”
As much as Reiki desperately wanted to believe that “Is possessing a broken doll that looks like me worth the cost of losing *ME* by fundamentally breaking me as a person?” would keep Faustite from getting too grabby at his starseed and injecting it with more Chaos than some of the other gay boys in town had lip-fillers……well. He couldn’t deny that he was placing an awful lot of trust and faith in someone who may or may not have actually deserved it.
With a shrug, Reiki gently ruffled a hand down one of Cersei’s sides. “Meeting you as Reiki was the last thing on my list to do before we go into Mirrorspace. So……here I am?”
He considered, for a moment, whether or not to add something more when he’d already given Kerberos rather a lot, there? But—the truth, he felt, needed to be said: “Honestly, it doesn’t feel all that different, for me. There’s only been one time since I started all the magical girl stuff that I felt like Murikabushi was actually me and my own identity.… It was when Faustite let me borrow some time with Tama-sensei—a Mauvian who works with his team—to work out the issues that I was having with my magic back then.”
Another shrug. “Pretty much every time I’ve come here like ‘What’s up slut, I found a new smoothie place’? I’ve felt like I’m not really Murikabushi. I feel like plain, simple Reiki, dolled up at Miss Continental in some other queen’s beautiful heels, pads, wigs, and performance outfit, trying to fake my way through some other. queen’s. probably immaculately choreographed talent portion, and dying of stress while I wait for somebody to figure out that I’m just plain. simple. Reiki so I can stop pretending already—which was also the case before Kima ripped out my starseed? I just thought, y’know, maybe it was a side-effect of Awakening late and it would resolve itself eventually as I got more used to being a senshi.”
Obviously, it hadn’t. Obviously, Reiki was still kind of a ******** mess.
Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2024 1:08 pm
”Well, it’s nice to meet you, Reiki, and to finally get to meet Miss Cersei in person,” Kerberos said, sincerely. There was something special about being trusted in this way, even before he and Reiki were on the same ostensible magical side. But he had done this too, hadn’t he? Powered down in front of Eurydike, and gotten to meet Hitch, right when he was at his lowest and needed a hand.
“And…this probably sounds cheesy to you, but it means a lot to me that you trust me,” he said. Once he was sure Cersei had judged that pets were acceptable, he did start bestowing on her the affection that such a sweet girl deserved—ear skritches and affectionate petting—but that didn’t mean he stopped listening. He shook his head a little in bitter tiredness at the latest fandom drama, but as Reiki got into the more serious reasons for his visit—well. Kerberos did try to keep his expression as serious as possible to match, but he couldn’t help but feel…delighted.
He was right, it seemed. Murikabushi was ready to come home, and he was bringing his cousin along. Two Senshi, pulled from the Mirror, made into the people they were meant to be. It felt amazing, and Kerberos was delighted to get to help.
“So you’re ready? All set up with your family, and with yourself?” He hadn’t thought to do any of those things, but then, he hadn’t really been sure what he was doing, the night he showed up at this very bench. He reached over and brushed a thumb down the arm of it. “You know, it’s funny that we’re having this conversation here. This…is where Hvergelmir talked me into letting her help me. Into leaving the Negaverse.”
He rarely talked about why he’d chosen to sit vigil at this bench. Those like Ida, who knew who used to be here, knew. Or at least undoubtedly knew some of it. But to most people, now, it wouldn’t have mattered—and to some, it probably would have been a risk to open up that much.
“And I’m glad you’ve got plans, for after. I was…a hot mess. But if you need or want a job, I own a little cafe—it’s called Puppy Paws? And I’m always happy to bring in people who are starting over, shall we say. So there’s a place for you there.” He gave Cersei a particularly affectionate ear skritch. “And some fancy treats for Cersei, too.”
He exhaled.
“And…hopefully, when that mirror coating comes off your starseed, Murikabushi will start feeling like you.” He wanted to turn away or try to hide from what he was about to say, but he needed to treat this seriously, and he knew it. “I can’t say I ever felt exactly the way you described? But I know that for a while, when I was at my rockets bottom, I…tried to treat Kerberos like he was separate from the person under the fuku. Because I’d seen those visions of that awful future I told you about, and in them…I was Ascended, so the person I’d been was basically dead. But Kerberos was still around, a hollow shell filled with Metallia’s will, terrorizing innocent people.” He shook his head. “So I thought—clearly Kerberos and Alex--that was my old name—were totally separate, since Kerberos could go on after killing Alex off. But it doesn’t work that way, and I was only hurting myself by trying.”
cw: explicit/detailed discussion of alcohol abuse and sobriety, and of Reiki getting bullied as a kid/teen for being femme and gender-nonconforming. Also, the backstory of Sadako Yamamura from the Ring franchise, which includes (fictional) rape and anti-intersex bigotry.
Cersei certainly seemed to be in Heaven, happily being lavished with affection by two whole people at the same time. Even if the conversation with Kerberos was very serious—even if he was revealing such personally meaningful things as how he and his Hvergelmir had met up here before, and how her influence was why Kerberos kept his vigils at this bench, and how what he’d seen in the horrific dystopian future had ******** him up so badly—Reiki couldn’t help but smile softly. Mostly, it was thanks to Cersei, who was ever a calming and soothing presence for him, but……being trusted with such important details also contributed.
Didn’t mean that Reiki could reply too quickly, though. Everything Blossom had told him, he needed a silent moment to chew over in his head. When he did speak, the first thing he managed to say was, “It’s sort of funny that your old name was Alex? I had a friend named Alex in high school. We weren’t, like, the closest best friends ever or anything, but still, friends? Then, he disappeared—like? Things were messy for him, and he had a lot of problems? Vodka was one of them. But his twin sister had gone missing—which I super-empathized with since my brother and I are also twins—and then he disappeared himself for a while. The gossip I heard was that he went to a detox or rehab program? Something like that? So, things were looking up for a little while. Then, his boyfriend went missing too, and then finally, it was him.”
And for all the times that Reiki had thought about Alex Masters since Awakening, he hadn’t actually spoken about his old friend very much. “Alex’s parents have left town by now,” he said softly, resting a hand toward the bottom of Cersei’s back. “I can’t blame them, really? His other sisters all disappeared too, even the youngest one, and I think she wasn’t even eighteen yet when she went missing. Losing all your kids like that, I’d probably leave, too.”
Idly, he really, really hoped that none of his siblings and non-Haruhi cousins were any kind of magical. For one thing, Tatsuya would probably get himself in trouble if he were, given his interesting relationship with reality. For another thing, Junsei and Erika were both probably too old to Awaken as senshi, given how much trouble Reiki had had (Ayame, Nariko, Hina, and Tatsuya still could have been senshi, though Hina and Tatsuya were probably old enough to have the same issues as Reiki). Junsei and Erika, though—both of them were twenty-eight now, which sounded like it would cause Problems for them if they had senshi starseeds. Sure, they could have also been Knights, who didn’t seem like they had an upper age limit on Awakening, but what if they got Awakened into the Negaverse first and had to risk forgetting everything in order to purify?
What if any of them were magical and got forcibly dragged into the Negaverse, the way that Yuki feared Faustite might try to do to Reiki?
Of more immediate importance, though: the family was already going to struggle with Reiki and Haruhi needing to become Kiyoshi and Kyoya. Even becoming Rei-ojisan’s children on paper didn’t entirely help because they had to keep some distance from the family for a while. If the family had to lose any of his siblings or cousins like that again later, Reiki didn’t know what they would do.
“I would like to talk to you about a job, though,” he said, ruffling a hand through his own bangs instead of Cersei’s fur for a moment. “Fair warning, I’m pretty hopeless in the kitchen, like? I actually told Remarque this joke a little while ago, but it’s so painfully fitting that the senshi of hunger can’t cook, right. I can make sandwiches, and drinks, and stuff, though? I actually have a number I used to do at my drag shows—very classic burlesque teas—where I’d use one of those personal size, battery-powered blenders to make my best guy a milkshake, set to ‘Milkshake’ by Kelis. Usually dressed like a slutty fifties diner waitress.”
Which, strictly speaking, did not count as Relevant Work Experience™, but did probably count as evidence that Reiki could be trusted with milkshakes more than he could with, like, baking cookies or anything else that required the extensive use of an oven.
“What you’re saying about the whole Kerberos vs. Alex distinction, though,” Reiki went on, voice earnest and soft, “it sounds more like my experience with my drag than with being a senshi. Like, my experience thinking about the distinction between Reiki the person and Sayuri K. Disobedience, the drag queen, first daughter of the House of Disobedience-and-Poppins. Not that it’s really how I think about my drag right now, mind? And definitely not how I always thought about my drag? Because, y’know, some people look at my age, and they look at how I started performing at my home bar in 2014—so, five years *after* Rupaul’s Drag Race first started airing—and they go ‘Oh, okay, you got into drag because of that show.’
“But I didn’t, actually. I got into it because one of my drag moms has been friends with my aunts for ages. Miss Sibyl used to get ready before shows at Aunt Satomi and Aunt Naoko’s place, using Aunt Naoko’s craft room. And at the tender age of five, I would see Jude go into the craft room and apparently disappear, because he wouldn’t come out; Miss Sibyl would. You know the whole ‘Clark Kent wears glasses. Superman doesn’t wear glasses. Clark Kent can’t be Superman because how would he even see’ argument? That was exactly my tiny child logic about why Jude and Miss Sibyl had to be different people. I finally got it when instead of going down for naptime, one day, I snuck into the craft room and saw Jude with only half of his beat finished for the show that night.”
The story all sounded very Cupid and Psyche, original pre-Disney-fication Beauty and the Beast when Reiki put it that way. In truth, it had been anything but that. Instead of sending him away, Miss Sibyl had invited him to come sit at the mirror with her while she put on her face.
(Sensing that Storytime had started, Cersei decided to get more comfortable by lying down and depositing her head in New Sparkly Friend’s lap.)
“Since I was still a kid, Miss Sibyl talked to my parents before teaching me anything? But I was already wearing girls’ uniforms to school and driving my teachers and other kids’ parents crazy about it.” To say the least, considering all of the bullying and the teacher from first grade who’d only gotten Reiki his ADHD diagnosis because she’d thought that Ritalin would make him stop wearing skirts. “Suffice to say, I was entranced by the idea of this art form where you got to dress up however you wanted, and dance, and people loved you for it instead of bullying you or calling you a freak. So, Miss Sibyl started teaching me about makeup and wigs and the whole art of drag really early. It was mostly only for Halloween or messing around at home, though, since I was like six, the first time she helped me get all dressed up.
“But then I was a teenager, and Aunt Satomi’s drinking was getting out of control, and it was, y’know, not a fun time to be the eldest sibling-or-cousin? Because I’m the eldest child of my Obaasan and Ojiisan’s elder child—who’s also their only son—” Not that it meant much, since they only had the two kids, but still…… “—and so there’s this feeling like I have to be there for my siblings and cousins all the time, and I need to have everything together always, and I need to be able to just endure it when my Dad and Aunt Satomi are screaming at each other because she was drunk and forgot me at the mall, then drove home with her daughter and my middle sister in the backseat.
“It’s very like—well, at the time, I mean? It was very like……I’m the eldest, so I have to take it for everyone else, even though I didn’t know how to get home on the city buses. And I had to get help from this older guy who thought the sad-looking teenager in the homemade dupe of the Saint Magdalena’s uniform skirt was probably lost because I wasn’t trying to get into Scandals with a fake ID or anything. And after I’ve had a <******** time getting home, I just wanna take a shower, then have tea and book club with my Obaasan—”
Reiki had mentioned his and Obaasan’s book club to Kerberos before. Their little private thing they did together, where she gave him books she thought he’d like because he felt so bored and frustrated at school, and they debated them together, or sometimes, she helped him work on his writing.
“—but I can’t, because Dad and Aunt Satomi are screaming so much that they don’t really notice me come in; they just keep going.” Reiki sighed morosely, letting himself slouch. “Ojiisan had to intervene and shut them up because he noticed me and I’d started crying. That wasn’t even the only time he had to step in to make them stop. And it’s like, I know that what they went through growing up is a big reason why my Dad got like that with Satomi, because Ojiisan used to have a drinking problem too; he has his whole book he’s written about it. On top of that, I know my Dad went extra hard on his sister in that case—and a few others that involved me, like, y’know? The time she tried to bribe me with vintage gay skin mags if I’d go to the liquor store for her, even though I didn’t have a fake ID; she was just like ‘You’re tall, they’ll totally believe that you’re in college’?
“He went extra hard on her about it because it involved me. Not even just because I’m his son and my Dad loves me, my siblings, and my Mom more than anything? But specifically because it was me, because I was having the worst ******** time at school right then? And he felt like he couldn’t do anything about it. Which I really wasn’t helping, frankly, because I always went to my Mom and my Obaasan first.
“But like, Meadowview would let me wear the girls’ uniform to school because they were rightfully terrified of my Obaasan and didn’t want to get sued? But otherwise……?” Reiki shrugged. Shook his head. Rolled his eyes. “******** my gender expression, basically? Maybe it would’ve been at least a little bit different if I’d been a trans girl, or pretended to be one? But I’m not about that life of pretending to be something I’m not. Especially not in that way, because my same-age cousin—Aunt Satomi and Naoko’s daughter—actually is a trans girl, and I never wanted to disrespect what she was going through by claiming it, even as nominal self-protection, when I’ve always known I’m a boy.
“So, it’s like…I have friends at school, sure. But I mostly have a ton of bullies, and nobody in the faculty or administration will stand up for me. The official position is, like, ‘Oh, you have the right to express yourself by wearing a skirt if you want? But you also have to accept the responsibility of being called a subhuman monstrous freak, and accused of trying to prey on your cis, straight boy classmates—even though none of them are your type—and having your uniform stolen out of your locker during gym class, and so on, and so forth. That’s called consequences because you having the right to express yourself doesn’t shield you from other people’s right to dislike the way you do so. Because you, gender-nonconforming little gay boy, wearing a skirt to school is totally the same thing as white supremacists spewing bigotry. If you do anything to stand up for yourself or push back when you get bullied, you are at least equally wrong—if not more so, because you could choose to be normal and make all of this stop right now, but you won’t, and that’s on you.’”
Pausing with a sigh, Reiki reached out in front of himself with the intent to grab a bottle of water out of his subspace pocket. He grabbed at thin air for a couple moments before remembering that he wasn’t powered up.
“Ugh—right—dammit,” he muttered, shaking his head. “A b***h is so used to just being powered up when we’re here together.… Forgot that civilians don’t get to have subspace pockets.”
With a huff, he rolled his eyes at his own shenanigans. “Y’know, the point of all this being: it ******** sucks for me at school, at that age. I don’t even really get a break from that when I get home. I needed somewhere to go where I could be a ******** mess. Maybe if I’d gotten Awakened at that age, it would’ve meant running out to go punch a youma? Or if I’d been with the Negaverse, it probably would’ve meant Negaspace. If Elsa had sold me on the Dark Mirror because it was working out for him, maybe it would’ve meant Mirrorspace.
“But for all I had a lot of unfulfilled and pent-up feelings that have gotten a lot better from just Awakening as a senshi? I didn’t have the escape into senshi stuff, back then. Instead, I had the whole eating disorder problem on one hand, and a habit of running away for the night on the other. Not that I ever ran anywhere unsafe? Because however bad things were at home and school, I didn’t really want to get hurt or die; I just……needed to get away. Sometimes, I’d run away to my godfather’s place, and he and his husband would let me stay over and tell my parents for me. But a lot of the time, I ran to Miss Sibyl’s to like, watch To Wong Foo and Hedwig and the Angry Inch while we played with makeup and wigs, or to talk about ideas I had for numbers I might do when I turned 18 and she could start getting me booked to perform.
“It’s in all of that messed up milieu that I start trying to pin down what my drag name is gonna be, and I considered some very hashtag-Choices names before I got to ‘Sayuri Kurobara Disobedience.’ Like…Cherrylicious Sexbomb was one, for a while. It got dropped because Evgeni Plushenko started doing exhibition skates to ‘Sexbomb’ by Tom Jones, and as a lifelong stan of Johnny Weir, I want nothing to do with the jackass who robbed him of several medals that should have rightfully been his.” Which Reiki said with the utmost earnest seriousness, because men’s singles figure skating was Very Serious Business.
“I was Grand Duchess Anastasia Kumonanov Disobedience for a while, but it was mostly to piss off my maternal grandparents because they’re racist and xenophobic against basically everyone who isn’t Japanese? But it’s especially bad against: Chinese people; Filipino people; Americans; and Russians. Taking a Chinese or Filipino name would annoy the s**t out of me because too many people already think all East Asians are interchangeable, and I can’t be more American than I already am, in my maternal grandparents’ eyes. So, a Russian name was a good way to piss them off, and it was a Star Trek joke, besides. La Vida Loca was also on the list. Ricky Martin hadn’t come out publicly yet when this started, but he came out in the middle of it all and even before then? I was certain that he was one of us queer boys. That name got vetoed because I didn’t want my name to be that derivative. That’s also why I ruled out Sadako Saeki Disobedience—though that one had another level, like……”
Another shake of the head. “Kayako Saeki is one of the main onryō from Shimizu Takashi’s Ju-On movies, and his English adaptation, The Grudge. And Yamamura Sadako is the main onryō from Suzuki Koji’s novels, Ringu (Ring), Rasen (Spiral), Rūpu (Loop), and S., plus their movie adaptations. Obaasan and I used to watch those and a lot of classic J-horror together, and I was, y’know, having a rough time? So I really identified with the idea of ghosts born from the grudges of people who’d been abused and mistreated, who came back to punish their abusers and the society that allowed their abuse to happen.
“Except most people in the States don’t know Yamamura Sadako; they only know Gore Verbinski’s cheap knockoff, Samara Morgan. And Samara is a fundamentally different character from Sadako because Verbinski understood the basic, 101-level concept of onryō as a spirit of vengeance? But he didn’t understand all of the heavily Buddhist and Shinto spiritual underpinnings of all stories about yūrei, and especially about onryō. He grokked this American idea of an individual grudge for horrible things done to someone who died, but he didn’t understand that part of what motivates an onryō goes back to questions like the whole debate about justice vs. vengeance, and people failing to uphold their communal obligations to each other or honor each other as human beings.
“The original Japanese movies are weird about how they present Sadako’s backstory too, so it’s not like Verbinski and the screenwriter pulled their ideas completely out of nowhere? But they made Samara this demonic little enfant terrible, who happens to have powerful psychic powers and dies after being thrown into the bottom of a well, but who is violent and murderous even before she dies. In the novels, though, Yamamura Sadako-chan survives so much bullshit. Losing her mother, losing most of her access to her father—he contracts tuberculosis—dealing with the societal stigma of being seen as an orphan, being feared because of her powers, being outed as intersex, being raped, and being exposed to ******** smallpox by the a*****e who raped her. Then, she gets thrown into the bottom of a well to die, and her remains are never given a proper burial or the observances you owe the dead. Only after all that does Sadako-chan get violent and start cursing and killing people. And I could go on, but like……I didn’t want to get into all this every time I tried to explain my drag name to people, so……”
Shrugging, Reiki took a moment to pause. Breathe. Let himself silently think that……well, if Kerberos had had any remaining doubts about his identity, Reiki probably would have squashed them by talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talking like he always did.
“So, like……the theme in all those names? Is that, at the time, I was really thinking about my drag as a way to escape from everything,” Reiki said, reaching back into a pocket. This time, though, he slipped his hand into one of the pockets on his skirt and pulled out his phone, not his henshin pen. As he started typing something out on the touch-screen, he explained, “I was still thinking about it like that by the time I started performing, too. You can see it in the videos of a lot of me onstage at Scandals from back then. Because yeah, things at home had calmed down, and there was still harassment sometimes? But DCU has actual student conduct rules against bullying me for being a femme boy who wears skirts, and they actually got enforced, so people couldn’t get away with it. So, it’s more like……I wasn’t taking my recovery seriously, and I was trying to escape from the fundamentally unsolvable problem of just being myself.”
Having pulled up the video he wanted, Reiki clicked it and passed over his phone, flipped to its horizontal orientation so Kerberos could really see. When the Youtube ad either finished or got skipped, Kerberos would see a video of Miss Sayuri Disobedience’s three numbers from when he—only barely age eighteen at the time, still in school at Meadowview even—had won Miss Amateur Scandals.
First, a random-draw performance where Miss Sayuri danced, flipped, twirled, hair-flipped, and lip-synched to the “STOP!” remix of Britney’s “(You Drive Me) Crazy” while wearing hot pink pigtails and his slutty dupe of the St. Magdalena’s uniform. There was heart in it, and obvious passion for the art of drag. No matter how sexy she looked, though, Reiki could easily admit that something in Miss Sayuri’s face looked disconnected from the reality of her performance. Something reeked of desperation—not for the love that Britney sang about, but to be seen as sexy, and cool, and smart, and beautiful.…… All the things he’d felt, at the time, that he absolutely wasn’t.
Second, one of the two numbers that Reiki had gotten to prepare for himself, after making it to the Miss Amateur Scandals finals. In this one, the visual inspiration from Yamamura Sadako and Saeki Kayako was on full display, with Miss Sayuri wearing a long, tousled, black wig that looked like it had recently gone through at least seventeen wringers and probably worse. The artful rips in her white dress not only gave her an onryō sort of look, but they also looked more than a little bit slutty. She’d painted her face extra pale, with undertones of blue to make her face look bloodless and her eyes done up to look ghostly but glamorous. Moreover, after a brief interlude from a suspiciously British voice at the start of the track—“Citizens, rejoice! Your lord and Master stands on high, playing Track 3…”—Miss Sayuri started throwing herself around the stage and eventually the crowd, acting sort of like an onryō who’d been filtered through a lens of anime fanservice, to the tune of Scissor Sisters’ “I Can’t Decide.”
Finally, in the number that Reiki was most proud of in the trio, the video started with Miss Sayuri in her natural hair, albeit braided rather than in a ponytail, seated at a table that she was using all of Reiki’s Theater Kid skills to delude herself into believing was a vanity mirror. Although not immediately visible, given the quality of the video, Reiki remembered he’d worn a microphone for that number, borrowed from Matt and Katie, with much appreciation, then clipped to the neckline of his cute little dress. While rhinestoned and sequined so it would have enough sparkle, the magenta dress was nothing special, but it also wasn’t the focal point of the number.
The point partly lay with the quartet of boxes seated around Miss Sayuri as she pinned her braid up, wrapping it to the back of his head, and singing (to the tune of Jesse’s live piano), “On nights……like this……when the wooooorrrrrld’s a bit amiss……and the lights go down across the trailer paaaaark.…… I get down. I feel had. I feel on the verrrrge of going maaaad. Then, it’s time to punch the clock.…… I put on some makeup—” She applied another coat of pretend blush to her already perfectly made-up face (complete with tear-stained cheeks that Reiki had made by using a menthol stick on himself to make himself cry). “Turn on the tape-deck. And put the wig back on my head.……”
Removing a chocolate brown wig, styled in a high, Ariana Grande-looking ponytail, from the box furthest to her left, then settling it where it belonged, Miss Sayuri sang, “Suddenly, I’m Miss Midwest Midnight Checkout Queen, until I head home and I put myself to bed.…”
Throughout the number, three more wigs would come out of the other three boxes and end up atop Miss Sayuri’s head in a similar fashion.
He sighed softly, delicately leaning over Cersei to watch the video with Kerberos. “I’ve spent some of the time getting things ready, like? Setting up new social medias for my new drag accounts.… Starting over is gonna suck, but……worth it, I think. To stop feeling like I’m ******** broken for just being myself.”
Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2024 1:09 pm
It was strange, really, how things coincided. A missing sister. A stint in rehab. A missing boyfriend, and then the Alex Reiki knew…gone himself.
It almost felt like too much of a coincidence, and he couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps he had accidentally tripped into someone he used to know. Couldn’t help but want clarification.
“Was this all in mid-to-late 2015? I just….it feels a little too much to be a coincidence. Because I lost my sister, and I—” Kerberos inhaled tensely. “Before I got out, I got my boyfriend corrupted. I didn’t know it was him, until it was too late, but…that was a big reason I eventually left. And I have to wonder—maybe I was your Alex, I just…don’t remember most of that part of my life.” All of the person he was for most of his life, erased because Chaos had to take something on the way out.
He fell silent again, though, listening to Reiki talk about his experiences with drag performance. It did sort of sound like what he’d tried to do—carving off a piece of himself and putting ti in a box, because maybe that box could protect the rest of him. Reiki had done it with wigs and makeup and on-stage flair, and Kerberos had done it with magical girl powers and lots and lots of alcohol.
It was different now, better. He couldn’t imagine separating Keiran from Kerberos--and he hoped that whatever magical girl dysphoria Reiki was having, it might feel better once he was home. Once he had his world laid out in front of him, ready to be taken care of.
He did take in the videos with interest—and there was an obvious love and dedication to the craft in them, and Kerberos had to admit that he was impressed with the physicality, but...he could see what Reiki was talking about, if he really focused on Miss Sayuri Kurobara Disobedience’s face, and especially on her eyes.
Even in a grainy, old Youtube video, on a small phone screen…it was there.
“...Yeah, I think I see what you mean,” he said, gently. “Like, you’re performing with a lot of panache, and I can tell how much went into it? The makeup tears for ‘Wig in a Box’ are impressive as hell, for one, and that onryo look…” He shook his head and whistled. “But yeah, I think I can see that desire to escape. To be someone else.”
A wry, tired smile.
“It never works that way.”
Because it didn’t. It just….didn’t.
“And I’m sorry you went through all of the bullshit that you did, that made you want to do that. And, honestly, who wouldn’t want to trade the Meadowview boys’ uniform for the girls’? Those ******** shorts have never done a single favor for anyone,” he deadpanned. “But high schoolers are ******** mean.” Not that he remembered much of his own high school experience. Or, uh, any of it, really. “As for a job after you come over? We can figure something out. Basic lattes aren’t much harder than a milkshake, so if we keep you on front counter and maybe barista, I think you’ll do fine.” This smile was much warmer, and fonder. “No relevant work experience required.”
For a moment, Reiki thought to ask how Kerberos possibly could have guessed exactly when everything with Alex, Cait, and Luka. Fortunately, Blossom made his thinking clear very quickly, and it left Reiki looking stricken. His mouth dropped open and his eyes went wide, while his brow furrowed up in confusion and an earnest, intense attempt at understanding.…… Or, more accurately, sussing out any details that might have pointed him in one way or another about believing this. Even with Blossom naming the exact correct date and time of year, which certainly suggested that he was right, Reiki’s brain wanted something else.……
The idea that Alex had been right here, this whole time? That he’d been so close, and that he had been okay, exactly like Reiki had hoped he’d be? Yes, Reiki wanted this for his old friend, but having that wish right within his grasp didn’t entirely feel possible.
Even though……Blossom’s hair had the same dark blue to light blue ombre that Alex’s had had (which wasn’t a shade that you saw very often, not even in Destiny City). The style Blossom wore was different, but it had been almost ten years since Alex had gone missing and since Kerberos had purified, so that wasn’t a disqualifying point by any means. Maybe…… Maybe it would be best to just ask outright.
“Does the name ‘Alex Masters’ mean anything to you,” Reiki said, softly and gently, still wide-eyed as he looked at Kerberos. “Because……it was around then in 2015 when Alex went missing.… The rehab stint happened in February.” Reiki remembered because Scandals had just expanded the “no alcohol” wristbands to include under-21 patrons, rather than just under-21’s who wanted to perform. He’d wanted to invite Alex to a Saturday night show for Reiki and Junsei’s birthday……except Alex hadn’t been available to ask. He’d come back in time, but how tacky would it have been to invite someone who’d (allegedly) just gotten out of rehab to a show at a ******** bar? “And his boyfriend, Luka? He went missing that June. Cait, Alex’s sister? She went missing in late 2013……like, December. Close to Christmas.”
Not that most of those details mattered if Kerberos didn’t remember them.… Negaverse Chaos could take so much out of people when they purified, or if they got forcibly corrupted, at least based on everything that Reiki had heard. Which, now that he thought of it—“It’s okay if none of that registers for you, though? You can’t help what memories got lost when you purified. And for what it’s worth? If you were my Alex, I’d rather have you as you are and not remembering anything, than have you remembering high school but miserable, self-loathing, drunk, and still in the Negaverse. Or worse, dead.”
Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2024 1:10 pm
Kerberos couldn’t help himself. He laughed,a little, as he nodded.
“I don’t remember being Alex? But I know that was my name, before. Funny how that worked out, us finding each other again without even knowing it.” Sometimes, when the universe worked in mysterious ways, it was for the better—delivering an old friend to his bench, even if he didn’t remember. Someone who had cared enough about him to still think of him, so far on after he disappeared.
“I wish I remembered, because it sounds like I had at least one friend I’d like to still know. But we get to start over, yeah? Get to know each other as who we are now. Which I think I’m looking forward to.”
He reached over. Squeezed Murikabushi’s shoulder.
“Do you want me to call Ida? Are you ready for that?”
Listening to Blossom voice his side of this, Reiki couldn’t help but smile. It was soft and a little bit sad around the edges, but also earnest and full of hope. This…… It was real. Maybe Kerberos wasn’t Alex anymore, and maybe he didn’t remember any of being Alex, but……he had still been Alex once. Which meant that, after all this time, Kerberos-Who-Had-Been-Alex really was safe (relative to the standards of the magical girl gang war), and he was happy, and he was doing so much better, exactly the way Reiki had hoped he might be.
“We do get to start over, yeah,” Reiki agreed, nodding seriously as he gently ruffled a hand through the fur on Cersei’s side. She was still lying down with her head in Blossom’s lap, looking comfortable and quite content with everything. “I haven’t really been able to get a fix on how much Dark Mirror purifications affect the memory or not? But whatever I’m like on the other side of all this, as Kiyoshi? I can’t imagine it’ll actually be that much different from Reiki. Probably, I’ll still get moments where having grown up bilingual means that I can’t find the right word I want in English or Japanese. I’ll likely still be annoying about stanning my faves in men’s singles figure skating. I really don’t see my gender expression going anywhere, so I’ll still be making the vast majority of my own clothes. It’s like…”
He shrugged, sighing softly. “If I had any real ability to be anyone but Reiki, we might not even be having this conversation. Because I wouldn’t have minded Mirrorspace expecting me to compromise on who I am just to reap all the benefits that other Mirror senshi clearly feel they get out of it. Not even in the way where I object to Mirrorspace asking its senshi to drain energy. Remarque told me recently that he’d do the work himself to drain energy enough to compensate for any Mirror senshi who had a moral or ethical issue with doing it—but, like……”
It was hard to put words on. Just like so many things about Mirrorspace was hard to put words on.
“Mirrorspace acts like it just wants to be your friend and make you the happiest you’ve ever been in your life,” Reiki explained, as much to himself as to Kerberos, “but if your idea of what happiness looks like doesn’t line up with what Mirrorspace thinks your happiness should look like? Well, ******** your drag, right. Because Mirrorspace knows what it wants for you and it thinks it knows best in all things, always. But if you don’t agree with it about that, and if you dare to insist that you have your own ideas about what will make you happy? Mirrorspace will go off the ******** chain at you. Just for having your own mind, your own sense of agency, and your own ideas about what you deserve in life. Never mind how it’s incapable of giving anyone a straight answer about anything, and it’s fundamentally unstable, and everything about it just screams ‘I am the nastiest skank b***h you have ever met and also a lying a*****e, do not trust me.’”
Remarque spoke about Mirrorspace like it was a safe space. A home away from home. A fortress, in his own words. He spoke about Mirrorspace like he would actually trust it with his children because it was the only place where Mirror senshi could be safe. Frankly, Reiki thought that he deserved a gold medal in self-control for not having answered Remarque’s claims with a resounding, b***h, *WHERE*?!
Feeling his phone buzz in his pocket, Reiki took it out. A text from Yuki stared back at him.
“Yeah, though,” Reiki said to Kerberos. “About calling Ida-hime? My queerplatonic best guy and my cousin are on their way over. Volterra, so we can go to Mirrorspace. And Yuki, so he can take this little princess,” Reiki pointed down at Cersei, “back home. Giving Ida a head’s up that it’s time is a good plan.”
Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2024 1:10 pm
Kerberos nodded, and reached down to give Cersei a brief skritch, since she seemed quite content to stay with her head in his lap.
“I don’t think I can imagine you as anything else, frankly. You’re pretty irrepressible.” It was one of the many things he liked about Murikabushi—about Reiki. He was loud, certain of himself, refused to bend to what other people wanted. That was the sort of thing Chaos wanted to grind out of existence.
Kerberos was glad it had failed, here.
He looked thoughtful, as Reiki described his experiences with Mirrorspace. That was…different than what he was used to, but it made sense. It was hard for him to imagine any Chaos entity being less hungry than Metallia—and he knew, intimately, how hungry she could be. Perhaps that was what Chaos was, at its core. Mirrorspace just looked for a different way to feed.
“It wants to make you in its image,” Kerberos said, quietly. “That makes sense. The Negaverse—Metallia—wants that too, it just goes about it differently. Pulls different threads, in the end. But Chaos is Chaos, in the end. And what it wants is loyalty. Servitude. For those it corrupts to bend the knee and become its good little soldiers, feeding the machine until they’re ground to dust.”
He exhaled, and pulled out his Senshi phone. “Let me text Ida. It might be a little bit, who knows where she is.”
Text to Ida
Murikabushi’s at my bench. He and his cousin need your help. They want out of the Mirror. Come meet us?
The ping of a message came as a surprise. Even more so the contents of the message, once Ida had opened up her phone.
Murikabushi? And… a cousin?
There was a thrill of excitement to that, as well as a wash of buzzing nerves. Did this mean that Murikabushi was finally ready to leave the Dark Mirror? And… he wanted Ida to help? The answers could only be found at the bench in the park, though, as much as the questions danced through her mind. So Ida turned away from her patrol and oriented herself on where she knew Kerberos was, making her way there as quickly as she could without making it a mad rush.
—
There were two figures at the bench when Ida got close enough to make out the dark silhouettes, but only one of them had a senshi signature. Another shape resolved itself into a dog, and even more confusion on Ida’s part.
The one was definitely Kerberos… the signature she could feel was familiar and comforting, holding that bit of extra sweetness that said it was transcended. But then, who was the civilian with the dog? Had Murikabushi left? And then some well-meaning civilian out for a late walk had stopped to talk to the oddly dressed man waiting on a park bench? She supposed Kerberos did look friendly… Ida approached slowly, hesitant, looking to catch Kerberos eye when she stepped into the lamp light of the park to see if it was okay to approach.
Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2024 1:13 pm
……Reiki really missed having aura-senses.
It had been bad enough when he’d just been waiting here for Blossom and heard him rather than sensed him. But this second time, Reiki noticed exactly nothing until Cersei perked up and glanced toward one of the streetlamps. She didn’t sit up fully, simply lifted her head and looked at something other than Kerberos’s face or the inside of her eyelids, but not having felt the approach of another person was starting to make Reiki feel……completely inept at everything. Which, no, was certainly not realistic, but since when did emotions care about that?
At least he could mostly relax when he followed where Cersei was looking. Only mostly, but that was neither Cersei’s fault nor Ida’s. On one hand, everything about tonight was going to be stressful as ******** until it concluded. On the other, though, rummaging in his skirt pocket for his henshin pen left Reiki feeling awkwardly, uncomfortably aware of the fact that wearing a shirt that said Not everyone can be a *:･ﾟ✧ PRINCESS ✧ﾟ･:*. Someone has to clap when I walk by had definitely been a Choice™ on his part tonight, of all nights, when an actual princess was essential to………literally all of this. Even with the magical girl fanart beside it and the obvious joke of it all, wearing this shirt around Ida felt……weird, now that she was here.
Weird in a way like somehow, he’d done something wrong by wearing a shirt with a joke that went back to things he’d wanted to be when he grew up while other kids were saying considerably more reasonable things like “doctor,” “veterinarian,” “teacher,” “artist,” and “famous.” Weird in a way that Reiki didn’t have time to kick himself over, not tonight, not really.
Better to just focus on getting things over with, Reiki thought as he looked to Ida and held up his henshin pen, turned so she could see his symbol on it. “……Hi, Ida,” Reiki said softly. “……Sorry? For not being all up in the correct senshi geish? I just……” He shrugged a bit. “I wanted to meet Blossom like this for the last time, and Cersei down here wouldn’t let me leave without her, and until my queerplatonic best guy gets here for her, I kinda didn’t want to power up?”
It hadn’t taken long at all for Ida to arrive, and that was a relief. Just feeling her approach made Kerberos’s heart feel a little lighter—the comfort of the presence of someone he adored and trusted implicitly. And she was exactly who they needed.
“Hey, Ida,” he said, and he scratched behind Cersei’s ear. “I know this isn’t exactly traditional, but is any purification ever wholly traditional? Is there a traditional for this type of thing?” It felt like a reasonable enough question, all things considered.
And on top of that, all of this felt…full circle. Years ago, he had come to this very bench, and Hvergelmir had talked him around to accepting help.
Now, Reiki was here to get exactly the same kind.
Hvergelmir would be proud of them, he thought—glad to see him and Ida helping people the way she had tried to, once.
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