#time to put in my mandatory cosplay appearance before I realize I am old and need a nap

[crowtrobotx]

crowtrobotx (left) and Crow T. Robot (right), loving father and son.

[idk-mlb-is-reals-cute44]

Mirror

(AO3 Link)

Mirror. A reflective surface, often framed and decorated, in which your own appearance may be seen.

The first time Kagami snuck out was in the middle of July. She was supposed to be studying next year’s coursework, and she had gotten as far as cracking open the brand-new pre-calc textbook before she was suddenly standing, full of energy and not sure what to do with it. She fiddled with the choker Ladybug had finally entrusted her with that winter, and before she even made the decision to, she found herself on the roof, wrapped in an armor of spandex and magic. That first night was full of a dread that made her movements sloppy, her jumps often stumbled and her heart over-fast. Her mother had trusted her to study, to stay in her room and do as she was told. Slipping back through her bedroom window to find her treachery undiscovered filled her with a heady rush. A secret. She had a secret.

From then it became a habit. About once a week, often more, when she was supposed to be studying, she climbed out her window and took to the rooftops. She hadn’t realized how little of Paris she had seen until then. She visited kitschy sandwich shops and outdoor farmer’s markets. One particularly tepid August day, the week before school started, she stumbled upon a dance battle outside a small hip hop studio (she didn’t win, not by a long shot, but something about the feeling of being a part of a crowd, of a moment, thrilled her). After years of magical ladybugs and rampaging akumas and mayor’s daughters becoming superheroes, it was practically mundane to have a girl dressed in a dragon-y onesie visit your grocery store. She’d been complimented on her “cosplay” at least three times. She didn’t tell the other superheroes. She didn’t quite know why. It wasn’t against the rules or anything. Rena Rouge regularly picked up pizza before team hangouts, and Chat Noir had been spotted frequenting a flower shop once or twice. It was nice, though. To have something that was just hers. That wasn’t for anybody else. That she did just because she wanted to.

The first time she got a B on a homework assignment was an equal-parts mixture of confusingly exhilarating and nerve wracking. At first she was sure she would burn it. Shred it or rip it up and hide it in a dumpster where no one could find it. But instead she smoothed it out from where her tight grip had crumpled the paper, and slipped it in her backpack. She taped it to the back of her locker, and every now and then she would look at it and smile. She didn’t have any friends at school to ask her why. Even if she had, she wasn’t sure what she would say. Something about the curved letter, splashed in bright red across the top right corner of her history paper, made her feel like she was tethered. One large, egregious stomp of a footprint where before she had tiptoed, barely indenting the sand.

She was friends with the girl who butchered fish at the deli. Kagami wasn’t sure it was a deli, to be clear. It sold sandwich meats and cheese, but also fresh fish and honey cakes when the owner’s elderly mother made a batch, and a collection of awful romance novels on a shelf in the back that the owner collected and nobody bought. But the sign out front said “Alberts’ Deli,” so, Kagami was friends with the girl who butchered fish at the deli. Or, more specifically, Ryuko was. But Ryuko was more Kagami than Kagami was Kagami, most days. The girl was blonde and overwhelmingly foul mooded. She was rarely spotted without pink bubblegum scrunched between her teeth, and she was pessimistic in a way that made Kagami feel positively bubbly in comparison. When Kagami ordered fish, the girl went out of her way to find interesting newspapers to wrap it in, a sort of inside joke between the two of them. Kagami had never properly had an inside joke with someone before. Kagami didn’t know what to do with the fish that she bought. The money wasn’t a problem, she had a weekly allowance and nowhere to spend it barring the few times a month she and Adrien got together, but she hated wasting the fish, and it wasn’t like she could just leave it in her refrigerator. Her mom still didn’t know she’d been sneaking out, and mystery fish wasn’t easy to brush off. So far she’d been leaving it on Marinette’s balcony, because she seemed like the type of person who knew what to do with spare fish. But this weekend her mother was out of town until Sunday afternoon, and Kagami had an idea. Kagami didn’t know how to cook. Maybe she should have spent more time contemplating that, but she pulled up a recipe and googled how to use the stove. She burned herself three times, twice on her pinkie finger and once across her palm, but she ended up with an arguably passable cooked fish. It was a little burnt and a little under seasoned, but she ate the whole thing, and hand washed her plates and the pan, returning them exactly where they had been. It felt like a victory.

“I’m gay,” she said to an old man as she helped him cross the street. He looked a little confused, due to her being a complete stranger, but shrugged and said, “Whatever floats your boat, Missy.” “I’m gay,” she said to the girl who worked at the deli. “Am I supposed to act surprised?” Adelaide returned in a bored voice, scrounging up a copy of the funnies that she’d saved at the bottom of the newspaper pile in the case that Kagami stopped by. Kagami smiled. “I’m gay,” Kagami tells Ladybug, on accident when the two of them are partnered up on patrol. She hadn’t meant to. She’d wanted to keep her life and Her Life separate. But it was out there now. “Oh,” Ladybug said, looking a little shocked. “Oh, okay.” “Is that okay?” Kagami asked, hesitating before her next jump and fumbling the landing. “Yes,” Ladybug said, and Kagami knew that she would say yes, she did know it, but something in her breathed a sigh of relief anyway, “Yes of course it’s okay.”

Kagami joined a hip hop class. Not Ryuko-Kagami. Kagami-Kagami. Kagami, face bare of any mask and hands exposed to the open air, asked her mother if she could sign up for a dance class at the studio where the dance battle had been. She didn’t tell her mother about the dance battle. Her mother had been confused, at first. But she’d agreed. Reluctantly, but she’d agreed. Kagami’s first class went poorly. It was November, so everyone else was leagues ahead of her, and she kept messing up the moves. Her arms felt jerky and awkward and her feet were never quite in the right place it seemed. She didn’t know if she’d ever been that happy in her life.

The B on her homework didn’t become a common recurrence. She kept the history paper taped to her locked, and it was joined by one pre-calc assignment and a lab write up, but overall she kept her grades up. She knew her place in the hip-hop class was more or less dependent on her school and fencing performance remaining unchanged. She’d made one friend though. “What’s that about?” George asked the first time they walked together to their lockers, hers and then his, in order of closeness to their final class, “You do know that you get the top grades in, like, the whole year, right? You don’t have to torture yourself with the few average grades you get. Anyone would be jealous to just have 3 Bs.” “No,” she said, “It’s not about that.” He seemed to want to ask what it was about, then, but she shrugged. They walked in silence to his locker, and she leaned against the wall as he stuffed back-breaking textbooks into his backpack. “My name means mirror,” she said finally, and he looked up, curious, “Sometimes it’s nice to… remind myself I’m not just the things people want to see in me. I guess.” “That’s… poetic,” George said, but not like he was mocking her. Kagami felt half her mouth lift in an awkward smile. “Thanks.”

She ends up not being very well suited to hip hop. Which isn’t to say that she quitted, just that she discovered her “worst in the class” phase wasn’t much of a phase at all. The gap became smaller, though. Penelope, a girl not much younger than Kagami, asked Kagami to help her with the footwork she forgot. The teacher corrected her less and less. She stopped feeling like a fish out of water and more like an average fish in a school of particularly exceptional fish… or something. They had a dance battle again. The studio puts them on once every three months, and participation isn’t mandatory but there’s no shortage of friendly peer-pressure. Kagami finds out that it’s scarier to dance in front of a crowd when you know them and they know you. When you’re not just a stranger in a mask. She didn’t anticipate how much sweeter the failure feels when, upon hopping off the makeshift outdoor stage, you’re surrounded by friends (and they are her friends, she has so many more friends than she could have ever imagined) whom holler and yell about how “AMAZING you were, Kagami, oh my god you killed it!” Penelope shyly asked if Kagami could show her how to do the jump Kagami had made up. It was a weird jump, kind of stumble-y and very awkward. Kagami shows her anyway. (She was still the worst in the class. She really didn’t mind.)

“You seem different,” Adrien said off-handedly one evening. The two of them were eating ice cream in the park, watching the newly sprung-up grass sway in the breeze. There was still some snow on the ground, leftover from the last big storm of winter. “I know,” Kagami said, “I feel different.” “You seem happier,” he added, getting chocolate all over his face. She smiled, and handed him a napkin, and stared up at the sky. “I spent so much time trying to be what other people wanted me to be,” she said, taking a contemplative lick of her strawberry ice cream, “And then I decided to figure out who I was when I wasn’t.” Adrien was quiet for a moment. “I’m not sure who I am all the time,” he confessed. Kagami giggled. “Me neither.”