== Be the snarling tree-demon.

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== Snarling tree-demon: Holy shit, calm your tits.

Honestly, your tits are remarkably calm and have remained that way for quite some years. You also have a name: it's Yuyuko Saigyouji. That has never changed, unlike your physical form. Alright, so perhaps you were flipping the fuck out for a couple hundred years, but that was back when this mess all started. You have become quite complacent in your new role of tempering the mood of Death, which seems to be a snarling tree-demon and not the hooded reaper most people think of.

When you say "tempering the mood", you really mean "getting dragged along for the ride and hoping your calm nature is enough to get it to rethink its actions". It's not, and the tree does not, but it is also a tree no matter how frothingly angry it is and so it can't really move to make good on its threats regardless. You are sort of useless, in the grand scheme of things. You are fairly sure things would not be much different even if you had truly managed to kill yourself and hadn't ended up merging your soul with Death. You are sure the white-haired child who tends the tree's roots would have lost her soul to it regardless. You are equally sure your best friend and sometime lover would have lost it just as utterly as she has now.

== Yuyuko Saigyouji: Reminisce about your best-friend-sometime-lover.

She is still, you maintain firmly, the sweet woman that loved you when you lived. She still comes to see you, once a week. She bothered to learn the screeching eldritch tongue you are now forced to speak in. She brings you souls to hush the demon and she even touches you, very lightly and only around the edges but it's still the most lovely thing you've felt in a thousand years. So Yukari, you say, is still good.

You also desperately want her soul.

You don't know if it's the tree talking or not.

You have romanticized the act, romanticized it to stay sane. And half of your feelings about it are actually based somewhat on fact, rather than based on you turning a blind eye and talking out your ass. Very strong souls do stick around in this void. Some of them have even conversed with you, but only if you can call a wild slinging of incensed insults and slurs in your direction a "conversation". You know that Yukari would be different. You pray that Yukari would be different. She is the thousand-eyed demoness of Gensokyo, has lived for many hundred thousands of years and will likely live for many hundred thousands more. Unless she forgets to cheat during your weekly chess games, which you find unlikely.

Although, with the way she's marinated in, ugh, a veritable laundry list of substances (some very highly illegal, some only worth a month or two in jail), you're surprised she can even form coherent sentences, most of the time. This tree knows more about drugs than you ever will, somehow, and it rattles off the list the moment Yukari stumbles up the stairs and often isn't finished by the time she drinks, wins, and leaves. Psychotropics, narcotics, stimulants, muscle relaxants - painkillers and outsider medications and enough rice wine to kill an entire stable of horses, and so, so much more. You find it to be a small miracle that she can still walk.

You also know she's doing it because she wants to die and she has wanted to die for a thousand years. But whereas you stuck a blade in your gut and slashed and tore and watched your intestines hit the ground in a bloody heap just a little too close to a remarkably evil tree, she seems determined to die in such a way that she probably won't even be aware of her own passing. She'll be lying half-brain-dead on her bed one minute and fully-brain-dead the next, with no fanfare. She'll barely notice. You always feel a bit angry when you think about it, really, because if she's going to commit suicide she could go about it with some goddamn balls like you did, or better yet, she could fork over her soul to you already and stop this idiotic drugged-out farce she's been playing out for a millennia.

God, you want it. So badly. The expression is "so badly you can taste it", but you hesitate to use it because it's hyperbole to humans but completely true to you. You can already feel it curled complacently on your tongue, tasting of alcohol and old-timey heroin cough syrup, royal purple and drunk affection. It wouldn't try to escape like so many others, wouldn't thrash against your teeth in a desperate bid for escape. It would barely even move. It would embrace its fate and nestle softly in your belly and whisper to you at all hours and you could reply without having to scream and gnash in demonic tongues, you could have real conversations again and she would never have to leave to feed her pets (which you doubt she does anyway) or take anything more from the shopkeep. No, she would remain with you until the end of days, and perhaps she would even manage to sober up after a hundred or so years, if that was something souls could do. You might be able to have coherent conversation again. You would like that.

You really would.

So you wait for her to let her king fall.

You wait, in silent patience.

== Yukari Yakumo: Lose.

You already have.