iv. Fresh fish on Fridays, Monday in the mother-tongue

After the first time, he never enters her garden by way of the front gate.

--She will in fact ignore his entrances, leastways until he enters her kitchen (he is a benign invader and she is merciless in her demands: a different cuisine every day of the week!). Once someone enters her kitchen, Yuuko has a tendency to regard them as her personal servant.

(They used to sit on the floor on a set of small braided rugs in colours that were outright loud and they ate together, often with their hands. Yuuko nearly always dripped curry or oil or some of whatever was messiest onto his half of their notes: she hated his lovely penmanship and her own writing was nothing so much as an ill-mannered scrawl because she wouldn't be bothered to slow down for just a moment and look up how to spell the word "phosphorescent.")

"Was Clow Reed a Catholic?" —A historian asks her this somewhere in the twenty-third century, when such questions are less inflammatory than they are curious. Yuuko laughs at the tweedy little man and answers, in a dialect of Latin that was spoken only in monasteries founded before the year 1200, that the fish is too dear at these market prices; one must make do with has been otherwise provided, and please God.


v. The woman in me shouts out

For a few years—it must have been the time just before, or just after, one of those terrible wars, a story unto itself—she found her shop inexhaustibly filled with young women, all of them wishing the same wrong wish.

(Keep me barren for just a few more weeks--)

(Just let him marry me and everything will be all right--)

(Don't let my mother, my father, my grandmother, my brother find out--)

Except one girl with bruised breasts, a cigarette-burned stomach and an abraded throat: she looked Yuuko in the eye (they never do that, you know, not properly) and said, "Make this never have happened." (She didn't dare specify, in case the more malicious ancestral ghosts loitering outside could hear her: but the foetus clung to the uterine wall regardless, striving to survive past this, the seventh week of gestation into the eighth, and a little longer, and a little longer, until a whole lifetime had gone by.)

Yuuko looked back and said, "This thing which you seek can never be returned to you." (But reparations can be made, so she led the girl into the back room and told her what could have been before she took the colour of her eyes on a bright morning and that tiny, fluttering second heartbeat from her.)

(And later, when everything had been taken care of—the bitter tisane swallowed, the ferocious cramping come and gone, what felt like weeks of slow bleeding tapering into nothing—the girl ran away believing that she was one of the lucky ones.)

Yuuko keeps obscure glass jars in one of the storerooms, where she shelves the sad payments for this kind of wish. She says it is a fair price—and it is a fair price, as fair as in those days when Solomon sang and called her sweet and beloved and Sheba. It is that unkind as well.

Yuuko doesn't enter that room if she can help it, and one of the worst fights she ever had with Clow happened when he decanted one of the (too too many) bottles of young laughter and poured it, like a libation, over the front stones of her garden gate.


vi. Yours till hell freezes

And it has been years and years since she tried to remember him (she does it out of habit now, instinctively, like smoking or drinking), but when the gates of her garden are flung open and a child staggers into her domain, Yuuko can hear, achingly, the future's next course (crazy little bitch, the future. She never did learn to slow down--). The world's gone wrong.

The boy is thin and pale and he has dark hair and startling eyes; he is maybe eleven. Yuuko looks down at him for one long moment before she knows and then she is all swift movement, throwing herself at him, picking him up (What have you done? She wants to cry) and carrying him indoors.

"Yuuko, Yuuko," Eriol Hiiragizawa cries plaintively—he is just a boy, such a little boy, and now he is being burdened by the memories of a dead and vastly unhappy man. "Yuuko, I have been split down the center, half of me is lost."


vii. He shall find no life but the sea-wind's, restless

Yuuko looked at Clow critically. "You look like a pirate," she told him at last, "wearing that stupid eye patch."

Clow rubbed his chin in a gesture that he hoped was thoughtful but that, unfortunately, made him look neurotic. "Pirates are clean-shaven, aren't they?" He asked, ignoring her scorn.

"Hello!" she poked his chin with a sharp fingernail, for emphasis. "Bluebeard?"


viii. The story of a flower that has made men mad

She's not really addicted to opium (leastways, not the same way she is addicted to working spells in tandem); she smokes the stuff to calm herself, because there is no other way for her to sit back and wait for ever so many outcomes to hurry up and resolve themselves. Her visions are not as terrifying in their intensity as Clow's sometimes are, but that could be due to the drugs. She recalls her first trance sometimes, and the mere memory of it is enough to send her into a headlong panicky scramble for her pipe.

Working magic with Clow is entirely different: once the pentacles appear beneath her feet and her blood starts to sing with a thousand unknown verbs, Yuuko knows that her more sedate self is one of her great lies. This—the raw power of it, the exquisite commands that they murmur together—is heady and intimate. Yuuko is careless with her movements and quick with her mind, quicker with her clever tongue (Clow is more sedate in his pronunciations, surer, and he keeps his arms close to his body) and she doesn't mind the boneless, overused quality her body takes on as the spell weaves itself into being. It's better than sex, she's decided; more delirious than drugs, and far more intoxicating than those strange and poisonous alcohols she imbibes.

"This is my dragon to chase," she warns Clow when he tries to scold her after one particular spell, because he has no room to talk, not really (and it had been a beautiful thing, that magic: the backlash of power left her drenched with cold sweat, exhausted and gasping, trembling, her laugh a damaged kittenish creature).

Nearly all of her habits are unhealthy. She pretends that she stopped caring a long time ago.

----------------------

Notes (iv): Yes, Yuuko is referencing the Carthusian Order (I'll just bet that during one of their spats Clow spent a couple of decades praying the little hours in Grenoble). The Carthusian Order is the shit.

Notes (v): I know that Yuuko specifically states in volume one that she doesn't accept lives as payment, because the weight of murder is a heavy thing. However, she's a hell of a lot more sympathetic than a back-alley abortionist (although a part of me feels like she would hate this part of her job, because I get the sense that Yuuko can't have kids of her own, and she'd be the bestest most insane and unqualified parent in the history of ever) and the life of the foetus is not exactly part of the payment—or it is, but it's certainly not her payment, it's just one of those overflowing consequences that the wisher has to deal with. Yuuko's job is, in this case, to act as a witness.

I just realized that depending on your position in the whole abortion debate, this note is way unnecessary. And whoa is this longer than most of my fics geez.

Notes (viii): "chasing the dragon" is a euphemism for drug use; specifically, smoking opiates. And PS, yes, I know Yuuko is extraordinarily powerful, but I kind of get the impression that she and Clow did a little marathon magic now and again. Yuuko's character seems to be inherently self-destructive, and I wonder how long she's been pretending that she can die.