A/N: This was my very experimental attempt to get a feel for my own headcanon of Yukari. I was sort of afraid of how she could appear in my main fic here, and because of that, I realized I didn't really understand my own interpretation of her at all.I can't say that I understand so well now, but at least there's some tonal sense for it. It's sort of a look into what it might be like to see every single potential boundary. Or, at least, almost every single one.Don't expect this to make too much sense. I mean, there's already a few broken timelines in there, and for most of this, I had no clue what I was really writing either.
You are Yukari Yakumo.
The Great Youkai Sage, the living boundary.
And you see everything.
＊ ＊ ＊
All states are defined only by their boundaries. Every time something happens to change, there is a border crossed - whether from now to then, or a boundary of greater minutiae.
You have forever seen them all.
It is a shallow eternity, defined only in the reflections of fleeting moments (the future claims that sentiment is so very important).
It is not yet time for the future. It has merely been a hundred thousand years of this day.
Yukari Yakumo - the Yukari that you are, and the countless eternities of Yukari Yakumo and her endless, countless selves and titles - can see each boundary. Seconds last for times that mortals might only imagine as an infinite space. They cannot see.
You can look to one grain of sand and see all that it is, across all possibilities.
It is too much, you have heard. It's too much, you have said, time and time again.
You remember humanity. You remember sentiment.
Yukari Yakumo smiles. It is hard to remember, but it is important.
＊ ＊ ＊
The elder kitsune is centuries old, so famed by myth and person alike. Centuries of but a single, winding path.
But she is ancient, and she can see. And it is because she is ancient that she now bows before you.
There is no fight. There is no careful navigation of a trillion grains of sand, trial and error and infinite habits plotting a course in which not a single one should fall.
She is ancient, and she is wise. She has seen so much of what her world has to offer.
And because of that, she can see that you see so much more than this mere world.
That I have seen it.
There is no purpose… but you accept. It is the path least predictable, the path with the greatest millennia of tiny moments that you have not chosen to read.
It is sentimental. Ran Yakumo, she now becomes. Ran Yakumo, she has been for a million years. She has held that name for a million years for a single minute.
She has come to understand.
＊ ＊ ＊
You understand your limits. The ability to understand all has become the ability to change all, but it carries its prices.
You can see every single detail, every last feeling and choice - and in that, it is too late.
Time itself has long been rendered meaningless. Timelines span an infinite horizontal stretch - your time is worth less than anyone else's in this world, and it is worth more.
There are blind spots. Points where boundaries make themselves unknown, because perhaps in existing, they themselves do not understand the reality that they have so imposed themselves upon.
Treasure these moments. Treasure these blanks in time, these worlds that you can explore only as one, singular self.
Treasure your ignorance.
You have heard rumors of a land that takes power from disbelief, but those timelines are eternities that have passed in a world outside.
With understanding, it is a simple border. Cause and effect, act and consequence. When boundaries form upon boundaries, possibilities continue to blossom.
You are Yukari Yakumo, the Border of Phantasm. You are a living dream, and in this, you are more tired than any who may yet sleep.
＊ ＊ ＊
The great Hakurei Barrier has not existed for an eternity, and it will.
The effort it will take is reflected upon a mirror. A hall of mirrors, perfectly aligned - and, most importantly, left without another to see it.
Yukari Yakumo is the living dream, and you dream, now.
You dream that in centuries of passing eternities, examined and ignored, shattered and rebuilt, sentiment is important.
That dream is now.
You are Yukari Yakumo, and the centuries have taught you that sentiment is important. The choices that people - in their whole, and in their countless, infinite shattered fragments - make are unique.
Outside of your control, and moving in strange emotion, they are irreversible. Little blind spots.
The Hakurei Barrier, it is called. The greatest blind spot of all - and no wonder. It is, after all, yours.
It is mine.
Many things will drive you to make it. The future that speaks to you now, and the past that lead you to cross it.
Awareness expands. Causality shatters.
＊ ＊ ＊
You are the living dream, and you have awoken as Yukari Yakumo. As time has broken, the boundaries have merged again. You are, once again, alive and in one piece.
You are Yukari Yakumo.
And I am Yukari Yakumo.
You have aged, and you are a tired old Youkai. Reverence, meaningless amidst an equal infinity of reflections in which you are instead despised, surrounds you.
Ran Yakumo, ancient Kitsune, your servant. Shikigami.
She is more than mere reverence. In this tiny, tiny subset, she understands you.
She cannot walk your path.
Today - and today alone, carefully picked and painfully torn apart from every other day that so casts the same echo - you have decided to teach her.
You are harsh, because it frustrates her. She is upset, and she is angry.
In these, for just this day so carefully bereft of the context that you are, she is more unpredictable.
You smile. She bristles.
She will learn, you are certain. Your feelings tell you that she is capable, and that she is driven.
Here, the countless reflections do not hold the same meaning.
You are Gensokyo. In one of countless futures, you know that it will not be you alone. In old humanity, in that sacred, infinite blindness, there was more to see.
And so, as there was, there will be. What you now see points you only to your past blindness.
"Your emotions will not aid you, here."
And yet, they are all you have.
＊ ＊ ＊
Yukari Yakumo awakes from another dream, and she understands, now, that she is ignorant.
Gensokyo, and the single, great, infinite boundary that defines it, is her greatest success - a grand success in your quest for complete failure.
It is beautiful. Here, sentiment displays itself with color and truth.
It is at a great cost. It is so very hard to see each reflection, and harder still to see the others' marks upon it. Yukari Yakumo may still walk these lines, but they are thinner than ever before. Or, perhaps, ever again.
Years have already passed. Yukari - who you are, not who you will be, and not you have have been - understands this. Years have passed. They are parallel, forward years.
These passing years have revealed so many things. It was such a strange triumph, to mask each of these tiny, broken pieces so that they might be discovered through action and not vision.
Emotions make sense, now. Sentiment is comprehensible. It is not a mysterious force - it can be seen and measured, in such an approximation as cause and effect can without a mirror's interference.
These truths and lies have become comprehensible as comprehension has faded. They make sense, to the blind, and Yukari can remember what life is, to the blind.
Memory goes back, now. There is a forward direction.
And then it is lost to curiosity. The moment that time fractures into its infinite horizontal breadth is the moment that memory becomes omniscience.
Omniscience, blind entirely to sentiment; that sentiment is now hatred for a simple concept.
It is infinitely difficult to focus on being blind, now - any knowledge of blindness is seen in opening one's eyes.
You are Yukari Yakumo, again. It is a regression, a return into the infinite.
＊ ＊ ＊
She is Yukari. Yukari Yakumo - and she is herself.
She is overwhelmed. Feelings that were barely deciphered make themselves known.
They are in order. This is in order.
The butterflies are gone. The girl is dead. Her choice was utterly unknown.
Yukari had planned the same - it was a sentimental choice. And again, that sentiment is important - the sole entry into a life of singularity. Death seems insignificant - memories of infinitely spanned visions have made it so.
But the daughter of Saigyō is dead. And Yukari wishes her to return.
Causality can be circular, but in this world, it cannot be undone. To progress is simply to choose after an eternity of examination - all worlds explored in visions and calculations. Now, in the dark, in the severed world of sentiment, consequence is simple.
Pain, terror, regret. Were she a short-sighted mortal - or a limited immortal - perhaps these would drive her to turn back.
But this world, this path, this existence, this yet-unmade Gensokyo come from a world in which the greatest, strangest Youkai has abandoned both power and reason in favor of sentiment.
It is an odd chaos, and the living dream will fade to dark for a long time yet. It is the wound of a person, of a life - and it is a deep, deep wound.
Ran Yakumo does not understand, and this once again makes her more of a person, and less of a servant.
In these feelings, the present moment is truly a present moment.
And there is no comfort in that.
Yukari Yakumo, separate from you, walks a long, hard path.
＊ ＊ ＊
And now, it almost makes sense.
"It is a single field more complex. Unnatural, to you, but you will learn."
Ran nods.
Yukari can focus on this single concept. She can explain what it is here, instead of what it might be in an infinite horizon.
She smiles, even as she idly steals food from a place she does not know. Order in a single line of time is a game, and it is amusing.
That forward sentiment is the greatest victory, and Yukari will never again understand it as she has.
As she once did. Horizontal spans of time fall behind. A change in perspective puts futures behind, forcing everything to conform to one, singular line.
The longer this angled line follows, perhaps the less Yukari Yakumo will understand what it meant. You were once her, and she is now her.
Yukari awakes from a dream, and the Border of Phantasm is once again renewed.
＊ ＊ ＊
Yuyuko Saigyouji understands.
The strange, strange fragment that she is - whether a ghost of an echo, or simply something cast away by that without belongings - she understands.
Even she cannot see what Yukari once saw, what is now becoming the past to Yukari Yakumo. Still, through strange, sentimental shifts, she can feel what it would be like.
She is nothing like the daughter of Saigyō. For moments, she wears the same expressions. Yukari wonders just what Yuyuko remembers. Could she see paths that Yukari herself was now blind to?
There are many, many blind spots, and they make the game of life just interesting enough.
＊ ＊ ＊
Yukari Yakumo wakes, as always, from a dream. She is the living dream… and that is all. Dreams remain as dreams, fragments of closed and past realities.
She declines tea simply because she feels like it. It is an unpredictable little thing.
Now is not yet the time.
Yukari produces a book. It's hers, in craft and writing. And again, simple, unpredictable sentiment.
Lines and edges blur. Paper and covers lose their edge.
The book distorts and vanishes, simply destroyed.
It is not the time for that story. Not yet.
Yukari Yakumo knows the time will come. And it is a sentimental knowledge.
"Lady Yukari?" Ran is confused. She understands that her master has changed. She understands her master as only her strange, single experience could.
She has seen the changes, but she cannot know what they are.
"It was incomplete." Yukari smiles. "I will finish it another time."
Ran nods. She's still confused. She's used to it. In some sense, she enjoys it still.
"When it has an ending, it will be written."
Yukari can remember what it was like to know nothing. And she can remember what it was like to know nearly everything.
What were tiny blind spots have become an endless dark; the world may be explored again.
It is easier now than it was then; this strange, strange world is kind, and Yukari is not weak.
Sentiment is important; this lesson had taken the Youkai of Boundaries centuries of countless, sideways eternities to learn. Some mortals knew it, and yet…
It is a marvel, thinks Yukari, to remember as if the past could only be behind us. An endless wonder to look at the present as a single moment, to see the future as that which was merely to come.
Darkness - blindness - surrounds the end of a strange, strange loop. It is the only shattered causality that Yukari remembers.
That is a story for another time.
Yukari Yakumo, the Great Youkai Sage, the Border of Phantasm, the Mastermind Behind the Spiriting Away, smiles. Each name it its own, little story, and each story tells at that which she has chosen, in sentiment and chaos, not yet to know.
And again, sentiment. Whims and unpredictable desires. They mark the only blindness cured in Gensokyo; the only thing that Yukari now sees that she did not before.
And, to the living dream, to the Youkai and the being of the past and future sitting on this strange, strange boundary, it is worthwhile. Where power and knowledge have failed, strange little feelings live on.
"I'm going to pay Reimu a visit," says Yukari. Ran thinks to ask the menial questions of a proper servant, but Yukari is gone.
And, crossing lengths in an instant, the living dream remains awake.