Are you a human, or are you a youkai?
Reimu had planned to sleep for a few hours after returning from the shrine, but sleep wasn't coming to her. Instead, the question had been haunting her thoughts.
She still felt human, but doubts kept squeezing their way into her mind. They'd been there for days. Every time she felt Yukari's presence in her head. Every time she opened a gap, or looked at the sky and found herself effortlessly picking out constellations that she'd never learned.
Even after the point when most of her friends were youkai, she'd always associated it with the darker side of all things. Youkai were, at their hearts, creatures of selfishness or darkness. Whatever was at her heart felt like it had gone mostly unchanged.
It wasn't what she'd wanted out of her first meeting with the new shrine maiden. She'd blown it. Nearly gotten into a fight with her, even.
The worst part was, she wasn't even sure if Shiko had been in the wrong.
Reimu had been tossing and turning for—three hours, twelve minutes, fifty-eight seconds—when a knock came on the door. "Reimu," Yukari said from the other side. "Can I come in?"
Reimu pushed herself up to sitting and looked at the door in confusion. Yukari should have still been asleep for another hour or two. "Yeah, sure."
The door slid open, and Yukari stepped inside. She was wearing an outfit that Reimu had never seen before, and it took a moment for her to put a word to it: night gown. Like Patchouli wore, but even plainer. Her hair was also down too, without a single bow in sight, and with no hat. It was strange seeing her like this. Reimu had always been aware that Yukari had to sleep in something, but even Yukari's most casual outfits had meters of lace and ruffles and ridges, usually with multiple layers. Such a simple outfit looked almost stark, by comparison.
Yukari closed the door behind herself. "Am I to take it that the meeting with the new shrine maiden didn't go well?" she said, as she crossed to the foot of the bed.
How did you know? Reimu almost asked, but stopped herself. Mental link, right. Sometimes it was hard to remember that Yukari could spy on her emotions as well. "... a little. Shouldn't you be sleeping?"
"Shouldn't you? Besides, I haven't heard about the new shrine maiden yet. It's important to stay informed about this kind of thing," Yukari said, in a tone of voice that didn't even attempt to hide the fact that it was just an excuse to help Reimu sort through her thoughts. "So, let's hear it."
Sitting cross-legged, Reimu glowered at the bedsheets. She couldn't find a satisfying way to put her thoughts into words. Looking back on it, the confrontation felt far too petty for her to be getting this worked up over.
Instead, she pulled the memory up in her head. It was only a moment's work to package it up, and with a mental gesture, she shoved it toward Yukari. "Here. Just watch it for yourself."
"Hmm? Let's see here..." Yukari's eyes drifted shut. "... ahh, so this is what it feels like to be you? I'd be grumpy all the time, too."
"Just shut up and pay attention."
"Right, right..." Yukari went silent. The ghosts of expressions flickered across her face. It was strange. Reimu wondered if Yukari's face was mirroring her own actions in the memory. When it seemed to come to an end, her body slowly returned to its regular posture, and she let out a long breath. "... I see."
"That's it? 'I see'?"
"There was a lot to consider," Yukari said. She seemed more restrained than usual. Her posture was stiff. Was I really that upset when I left the shrine? Reimu wondered. "... I have another riddle for you, if you're in the mood for it."
"Huh? What is it?"
"What is the difference between humans and youkai?"
Reimu stared blankly at Yukari as she considered that. It was one of those questions that sounded so straightforward that it had to be a trick. Her first impulse was to give a dismissive answer—youkai eat humans, humans exterminate youkai—but she resisted the urge. Yukari seemed serious, for once. "Youkai are created from human belief, and they scare and eat humans."
"Hmm, but gods are sustained by human belief, too. What's the difference between a youkai and a god?"
"Gods are the good and awe-inspiring things, and youkai are frightening and unclean ones," Reimu recited. She might have messed up the shrine maiden job pretty badly, but she liked to think that she knew a few things.
"Can gods not inspire fear, though?" Yukari's voice was taking on an increasingly challenging tone. Reimu knew from experience that it meant that she was in for a long argument. "Are there not awe-inspiring youkai?"
"Just what are you getting at?"
"My point is, there's no clear division. There are youkai-like humans and human-like youkai and everything in between."
Reimu frowned. "You can't just say they're all the same thing."
"It's the opposite, really. Every youkai, god, and human is unique in their own way. There is a massive, multidimensional spectrum. Like color or gender, the lines that humans use to divide them are more reflective of humanity's perceptions than the underlying truth." Yukari took a seat on the edge of the bed. "There are certain inescapable facts of your new existence. You'll always be linked to me. Your body will continue changing to reflect your new nature. But everything else... how you behave, who you make friends with, what you do with your life... that's all up to you. Whether you become a human, a youkai, or a god, you'll always be Reimu."
"I guess." It wasn't entirely reassuring. Reimu had always sensed that the lines between youkai and humans were thinner than Gensokyo's social order would imply. Yuyuko was less likely to attack humans than a random teenage boy was, she was pretty sure. Seeing the entire social order reduced to a meaningless abstraction, though, was a step farther than she was immediately comfortable with. "... so if the categories are pretty much arbitrary, why even bother?" Why did I spend ten years of my life defending humans from youkai, if you have to squint to tell the difference?
"Why? Well, humans find it very hard to function without sorting things into categories. You could say that dividing things up with boundaries is the basis of all thought." For a moment, Yukari's smile looked very, very... distant. And then, she patted the bed and stood up, back to her normal glib self. "But sitting around arguing philosophy is no way to help you relax. It's still a few hours until dinner, but why don't we make something quick for ourselves, then start your training for tonight early? Some good, wholesome exercise might do you well."
Reimu took a deep breath and concentrated on Yukari's hands. Cupped in them was a gleaming pile of one yen coins. Fifty of them, to be exact. Focusing, she could pick them all out, and assigned them each a number to keep them separate in her head.
"Are you ready?" Yukari said.
"Yeah," Reimu said, and let her breath out slowly. "I'm ready."
Yukari nodded, and drew her hands downward. Then, in a single motion, she thrust them back up. Fifty coins took off in parabolic arcs, spinning and wobbling through the air, gleaming in the moonlight. Before the last one had left Yukari's hands, Reimu's head was already filled with the humming machinery of her new mental software. In the blink of an eye, she calculated fifty trajectories, adjusted for air resistance. She performed fifty mental divinations on the coins' final resting positions. She projected collisions, calculated friction, and made adjustments.
She raised her hands, and with a single grand gesture, filled the air with hundreds of tiny gaps.
The coins disappeared, only to re-emerge a split-second later from different gaps, at new angles. The air filled with a metallic clamor as dozens of them impacted one another. They ricocheted back and forth, rebounding off one another, bouncing into gaps, and repeating the process. It was a flashing storm of light, and it roamed through the air, herded along by an ever-drifting cloud of gaps.
One coin dropped out of the mess and landed on the front step. Another coin landed on top of it. The other coins continued bouncing in the air until, one by one, they funneled downward to land, one atop another.
The last coin fell into place with a tinny click of metal on metal. Fifty coins, in a tidy stack, all denomination-side up. Reimu breathed a sigh of relief.
"Hmm." Yukari raised one eyebrow and walked over to the pile of coins. She crouched down to inspect it. "Did you figure out what you were doing wrong before?"
"I hadn't thought about the engravings on them. They affect stuff a little with the air," Reimu said.
"Very good~. We'll teach you to think like a shikigami yet."
"I hope not," Reimu said. The analytical way of thinking no longer left her exhausted, but it didn't quite come naturally yet, either. She suspected that the entire point of these exercises was to help accommodate her to it. There was certainly no other circumstance where she was going to need to sort a bunch of airborne coins. It was a way to show off her abilities in a controlled environment, and nothing more. A parlor trick. Like the time Marisa had proven that she could Magic Spark a sake bottle off of a fairy's head, given enough attempts and a large enough supply of fairies.
Yukari scooped the coins up and deposited them in a gap, then walked across the lawn to take a seat at the base of a tree. She patted the ground next to herself. "So, did it work? Is your mind clear now?"
"I... oh." Reimu sprawled on the ground next to Yukari. The training had lasted for hours. In the time they'd been at it, Ran and Chen had come home, had dinner, gone to bed, and the sun had set. At some point, she'd stopped fretting over her confrontation with the new shrine maiden. "... yes, actually."
"Good, good. Try to keep it that way. Worrying is for humans. It doesn't suit us youkai."
"Uh-huh." With a yawn, Reimu squirmed against the grass to get comfortable. During the night's activities—hours of sorting coins, dodging wave after wave of attacks, refining the few spell cards that she'd put together—she'd been too focused to pay much attention to anything else. Now that she was laying down, her lack of sleep was catching up to her.
Above, the sky had gotten dark, and the stars had finished coming out. They were... amazing. She'd never paid much attention to them before. Marisa had pointed out constellations to her dozens of times, but she'd never been much good at seeing the patterns on her own. Now, though, the heavens contained more information than the thickest book. She knew the names of the stars, and could pick out every constellation. She knew their paths, and the infinite cosmic dance that had brought them to their current positions. Like a rich painting, whenever she thought she'd seen it all, a new detail jumped out at her.
It was a warm night, the stars were beautiful, and the only sounds were the soft chirps of crickets in every direction. It was a relaxing enough situation that she wasn't even aware that she was drifting off until Yukari scooted over and lifted her head for just long enough to rest it in her lap. "Ngh. What are you doing?"
"Helping you relax. You look tired."
Reimu couldn't bring herself to protest. Yukari's lap was pretty comfy. It was the kind of situation she never would have allowed as the shrine maiden, but... she was no longer the shrine maiden. Yukari's fingers started brushing through her hair, and she found the gesture comforting. Lowering her mental guard, she allowed herself to taste Yukari's emotions, and found warm, lazy satisfaction mingling with her own. Like the distilled essence of lingering in bed on a warm morning.
When she had been the shrine maiden, Yukari's unconditional-but-teasing support and affection had seemed manipulative. Just another youkai attempting to curry some favor with her, and not even bothering to be subtle about it. Now that Yukari didn't have much to gain from her, she had to consider an even more terrifying possibility: that Yukari actually meant it.
Not that she could give in quite that easily. "You're too bony to be a pillow," she said, as her eyes drifted closed.
"I assure you that Ran is doing everything in her power to fatten me up," Yukari said. Her fingers kept toying with Reimu's hair, but she went silent for a minute before continuing softly. "Starting tomorrow, I think that we'll make your training less formal. You've learned the basics. You should take some time to relax. Go visit friends that you haven't seen since your accident. Drink tea all day, or... whatever it is that you did as a shrine maiden. Just enjoy life."
"Sounds pretty nice," Reimu murmured. She was too tired and cozy to make a show of being suspicious about the offer. With another yawn, she rolled onto her side and shifted her head a few times to get it into the exact right position on Yukari's calf. "Sure, I'll think of something."