#I'm so sorry this took aaaaaageeeessss

[inkblackorchid]

Hi. This is not a new fic. (Sorry, it's still in the works, but rest assured, it's coming!) But after talking about it off-handedly for literal months, I finally, finally went back and cleaned up the duel in Mirror. Since parts of it were genuinely pretty sloppy, some of the edits ended up being bigger than expected, so there's some new stuff that wasn't there before! Rest assured, the plot has stayed the same, though, Aki and Sherry just got a few spicy, new lines. (And I also used this opportunity to clean up a few, stray spelling errors and also sprinkle in some stuff to thematically tie this fic even tighter into the series.)

So! If you ever wanted to give this story another go (or just wanted to read a very snarky Aki VS Sherry solo duel as a sort of prelude to their canon finale duel), here you go!

Summary: Several months after seeing Divine for the last time, Aki reflects on how she's spent that time trying to fully learn to control her powers—without him. Her judgement ends up not being in her favour, and now, with the start of the WRGP just a few days away, she worries something will go terribly wrong. As she ruminates on what to do, she encounters not one, but two unexpected, but familiar people who give her a lot to think about while she tries to prepare for the match against Team Unicorn. Sequel to To Bloom or To Wilt and Chase the Sunlight. Set directly before episode 98.

And that stupid hairpiece. The power inhibitor she still couldn’t rid herself of, however much she hated the very sight of it at this point, the familiar weight still tight against her head, as usual. Right in that moment, she wanted to tear it out of her hair, to throw it away, see if she could toss it hard enough to break it completely as she did so. She wanted to cut her bangs, her hair, hack it all off just to see whether it would calm the ugly feelings inside her, whether it would bring her freedom. Years of always requesting the same cut, of habitually rolling up her hair around the hairpiece, of straightening her bangs after, satisfied when everything sat just the way Divine had suggested it should. She wanted to tear it all out, burn it away, maybe shear it off. The obvious, visual reminder of how much Divine had influenced her made her sick.