Work Text:
You’re not perfect.
You’re not perfect.
Waking up, Tsubaki slowly lifted his head up and saw that he’s placed in a mysterious room. A room filled with nothing but mirrors showing his reflection: his long red hair loose, wearing a white t-shirt and teal sweatpants.
Tsubaki slowly got up from the floor and walked to one of the mirrors in front of him, placing his left hand onto the mirror before he heard a sinister laugh behind him. He turned around to find out who’s responsible for that laugh, but only found another mirror behind him. How?
You’re not perfect.
“That voice,” Tsubaki said as he moved to another mirror.
Before he can touch the mirror in front of him, Tsubaki noticed that his reflection is glaring at him while sticking his tongue and both of his middle fingers at Tsubaki. The red-head almost stumbled onto the floor when he witness his reflection moving on its own. Tsubaki turned around to see that all of the reflections were performing something different. One using a knife and cutting himself, almost causing Tsubaki to vomit. Another reflection is laughing crazy while sharpening a knife. And the one that caught Tsubaki’s attention the most is a reflection of himself stabbing himself in the chest several times, speeding up the stabbing despite the amount of blood coming out.
That reflection turned his head towards Tsubaki, smiling at him and red eyes glaring at him, saying, “This is your fate for an imperfect person like you.”
“No…” Tsubaki muttered under his breath, backing up to get away from that revolting reflection. “This isn’t…”
“Yes it is. Accept it!”
“NO! NO I WON’T!”
“Tsubaki, p-please. Don’t m-make this h-harder than it should be.”
Hearing the familiar, soft stuttering voice behind him, Tsubaki saw that one of his reflections transformed into Sakura, tears in her eyes.
“N-no!” Tsubaki can only say. “Sakura, please don’t say stuff like that!”
Appearing next to Sakura, an image of Hana appeared onto the mirror, arms crossed, yelling, “She’s saying that stuff because you can’t accept the fact that you’re not perfect. You’re making poor Sakura suffer! So accept your fate!”
“I-” Tsubaki couldn’t manage to get another word in when an image of Takumi, Hinoka, and Ryoma appeared in the mirror, their eyes glaring at Tsubaki.
“You’re just an eyesore,” Takumi stated to Tsubaki.
“You have nothing to offer to the world,” Hinoka added, her hands on her hips.
“It’s better if you just left this world. Then everyone will be happy,” Ryoma said, looking down at Tsubaki.
“No. No. No.” Tsubaki felt tears flowing down on his eyes and tried to make them go away by rubbing them with his hands. “No, no, no, no! Stop it! Stop it! All of you!”
“You’re not perfect. You’re not perfect.” all of the reflections around Tsubaki chanted. The reflections transformed into people he has known: Silas, Owain, Inigo, Severa, Peri, Oboro, Hinata. Chanting the phrase Tsubaki never wanted people to say to him. He attempted to cancel out the noise by covering his ears, but the chanting grew louder and louder, to the point the chanting turned to screaming.
“YOU’RE NOT PERFECT! YOU’RE NOT PERFECT!”
“STOP IT! STOP SAYING THAT TO ME! JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!” Tsubaki demanded, banging his fists onto the ground multiple times.
However, the yelling grew worse, with more voices added into the chant. Tsubaki didn’t care who was added onto the noise, but he placed both of his hands onto his eyes before he screamed as loud as he can, knees reaching the ground and head looking down.
He didn’t even notice the chanting changed to:
“DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE!”
Tsubaki lifted his head to see a clone of himself placing both of his hands onto Tsubaki’s neck tightly, causing Tsubaki to rapidly lose air. His vision slowly fading, barely making a complete sentence, Tsubaki struggled to break free from the clone’s grasp before his vision started to grow black and can only hear the clone and everyone he knew laughing at him.
“Bye-bye, you imperfect fool.”
“Please, no!” Tsubaki bolted up from his bed, clenching his stuffed Pegasus, Tsubasa, tightly onto his chest, and breathed in and out before he sighed deeply that he just experienced a nightmare. Again.
The third one this week.
“Gods…” Tsubaki looked at his alarm clock to see that in bright neon red lights, it read 3:45 AM. “Lovely.”
Tsubaki attempted to go back to sleep, but for whatever reason, his eyes refused to close completely and kept staring at the ceiling. Not good since he has school tomorrow, but if he can’t sleep, then he might as well get up from his bed and do his homework. Or rather, double check his homework to see if he made any mistakes that he failed to catch.
Getting off his bed without cleaning it up, Tsubaki sat on his desk chair, turning on the desk lamp and pulling his white binder for school. As he’s pulling his math homework from the pocket side of the binder, Tsubaki noticed a folded neon pink paper in there. A paper that his counselor, Cordelia Capulet, gave to him two weeks ago when he was at the hospital for-
No. He didn’t want to think about that.
Anyway, Cordelia told Tsubaki to read it whenever he wants to. Tsubaki did plan to read it when he got out of the hospital, but he never got the chance to due to catching up with the massive piles of school work he missed. By the first week when he returned to school, the pink paper was just left laying on the pocket of his binder despite the blinding color of the paper.
Well, the math homework will have to wait for a couple of minutes. Tsubaki pulled the pink paper out of the binder pocket, and unfolded it to see Cordelia’s handwriting (in very legible cursive) in blue ink:
Tsubaki Miyazaki,
I can understand why you wanted to take your own life away.
Already, Tsubaki wanted to toss the letter away just from that first sentence. He didn’t need to be reminded about that. The scars on both of his arms heavily reminded Tsubaki about that day. But he must read the rest of the letter to see if it’s worth keeping or not.
You felt the pressure to become perfect. No mistakes allowed. Anything below 100% is not enough. You were taught that ever since you were little from your father. For years, you pushed yourself to achieve perfection for everyone you cared for, especially your father.
"You must be perfect to get everyone to at least respect you. Anything less than that, then you're worthless. Remember that."
That never left Tsubaki’s mind since he was seven years old. Those words, haunting him.
Yet despite the amount of praise from countless people, myself included, all of your efforts weren’t enough to make your father look at you long enough. And your ‘best’ that anyone else dreams of were defined as ‘worthless’ to your father.
You wanted to scream, curse, cry out loud from the immense pain you’ve received from your father, but you can’t. To you, a perfect person can’t show any weakness; they’re confident, intelligent, calm.
But it’s okay to feel weakness. It’s okay to cry once in a while. It’s human nature to cry when there’s too much pressure weighing you down. And you have immense pressure from all these years of achieving perfection just to make your father happy.
You’re perfect to me. And I’m sure that anyone that has known you for a long time like Sakura and Hinata will remind you about that every now and then. Don’t forget that.
And just like I said to you for the past ten years, I love you.
Keep on fighting my brave Pegasus Warrior,
Cordelia Capulet
After reading the letter from Cordelia, Tsubaki felt tears coming down his eyes, some of them dropping onto the paper (thankfully not on the words), and smiled at the words Cordelia has written about him.
“Thank you, Cordelia.” Tsubaki muttered, folding the paper back and ripped a clean sheet of paper, grabbed a black pen, and started to write a follow-up letter to Cordelia, thanking her for the letter.