Interlude: The Lamentations of The Lady in Violet

2015, Spring

The time quickly passes with the two chatting about in Sanae's room. At first it was Sumireko telling even more stories of her trips across the globe, now more focused on her bouts with the supernatural and stories she previously refrained from when she was still presumed to be mundane, but soon the green hair went with the flow and joined in and started retelling the Usami her first days in Gensokyo.

By the time the moon and stars had already replaced the sun's position in the sky, the voices of the room have already been replaced by the light snoring of a contented Sanae, and the occasional tapping on a smartphone. The owner of the smartphone, who was also the owner of the left arm that became the pillow for the former, can't help but silently laugh at the relaxed image of the normally passionate and hardworking shrine maiden.

Before the brunette's plan to take a telepathy-aided selfie was accomplished, however, an extremely light but familiar magical signature appeared from the outside the Moriya shrine. Feeling this, the smile on Sumireko's face lowered a bit and became mellow. With the aid of her telekinesis, she carefully raised the sleeping green-haired girl from her arm. Sumireko laid Sanae down on a pillow and slowly tucked the latter in her futon. Sumireko gave a telekinetic rubdown of her body, removing the signs of the bed hair and plenty of creases from her uniform to look more presentable, as she silently walked out.

The night outside the Moriya shrine is eerily quiet, except for the occasional cold breeze stirring up the leaves of the surrounding trees. There was no obvious sign of activity from afar, and that's observing from the summit of the Youkai Mountain. The skies were starry and cloudless, with the moon taking the center space, unnaturally bright yellow and nearly full. If it wasn't for the confirmation of the exiled Lunarians, nobody would have believed that Knowledge had just locked the entirety of the moon with a conceptual star dome just the midnight before.

The esper however ignored all of this as she walked with relaxed yet heavy steps on the stone path. Her eyes focused on the top of the torii gate looming above from the entrance of the shrine's inner sanctum, on which an unmistakable gap of purple severes reality with a precision that it looks unnatural and, in Sumeriko's mind, an half-closed eye-shaped purple vantablack with ribbons and dotted with unblinking red eyes, was floating.

And above the said gap sits the back of a blonde sporting a violet dress with exaggerated hems of white. At the sight of this, Sumireko gave herself a wry smile, before teleporting herself to be above of the same torii gate, and positioned herself so that she ends up sitting beside the lady after half a second of falling.

Sumireko followed the lady's stare and the two only looked up in silence for some time, before the former went bored from moon watching and immediately teleported her smartphone back her hands. She did not bother hiding her boredom as she swung her feet widely, with eyes back on her phone games. At this, she heard the lady on her right give a chuckle.

"A schoolgirl intentionally causes chaos to a world she never has been in before, and even when she was hunted for that she just straight out beat them up back to where they came from," the lady started talking just to pause to wait as the next breeze made the leaves stir noisily. "Your entrance to Gensokyo is certainly one of the most amusing."

"Of course it would be, I always aim to please," Sumireko grunted distractedly, not even looking away from her smartphone. The lady chuckled again, now taking her eyes off the moon and looking down to the schoolgirl whose back was hunched as she appears to be near the climax of her game. The lady patiently waited, and soon Sumireko threw her phone away and raised her hands like the champion that she was.

"And when she was about to be beaten, she pulls a heel-face turn and revealed to be working against a Lunarian conspiracy to invade Gensokyo," the lady continued. "Working with a magician she only met once before, and from half a decade ago. Who herself admits having been preparing a massive scale ritual from that said time."

"You must be elated knowing that somebody will feel the same disappointment you felt in your previous attempts at an invasion," Sumireko finally looked at the lady with a menacing grin. The lady in violet steely stares back straight to Sumireko eyes for a few seconds, the latter only widening her smile, before turning away. Had anyone been around, they would be stupified to know that one of the strongest youkai in Gensokyo had just lost a staring contest to a human. It seems that this youkai was not acting herself right now.

"It's been a long time since a human had that attitude around me. I almost applauded you for your stupidity," the lady tried to sound internally condescending and angry, but the two people atop the torii gate knew she didn't fool anyone.

"You said almost because you know I'm not really stupid, right, Yukari? "

"You…" The blonde instinctively tried to counter, but stopped from further embarrassing herself and from falling for the obvious trap. She took another breath, stared at the moon, and forged her expression stoic. Even without looking, she can feel the brunette being smug beside her.

"When you first entered," Yukari started talking, not breaking her stare at the moon. "I really wanted to join the fight. But-"

"You would be ruining my own plans," Sumireko finished for her. Yukari only nodded in agreement. Sumireko ponders for a bit while still looking at the blond that was looking at the moon, then made a devious smile before continuing. "You know, for a thousand year old hag, you oughta have magnitudes more of patience than me by now."

At this, Yukari's face actually went livid, and looked back at Sumireko, "Okay, at first I just wanted to make some small, reunion talk, but now it is clear to me that you are just mocking me. Try pushing your luck more and I might just do the unforgivable."

Sumireko's reaction to this however was a sigh of relief. The high amount of tension Yukari previously missed from the former was released. This time, a genuine smile covering her face. "Ah, there we go. Finally we are being real to each other."

Yukari paused at Sumireko's unexpected reveal of her real motivation.

"You were being so uncomfortable around me that you didn't even realize the things the computer part of your brain had been shouting at you," Sumireko explained herself further. "I'm no different from any other human being, my powers aside, so you should be able to see my 'intricate master plan' from light-millennia ahead."

For a minute, Yukari stopped talking and made a closer look at Sumireko sitting beside her, her problematic mental state not really hidden from view. After she appeared to realize something, she closed her eyes, and sighed. She offers back a small smile, and opens her mouth, "For a second, I thought the world was ending when you admitted to being in the same level as any other humans, but it was actually setup for another ridiculing of my age."

"Now that's scary, coming from someone actually has the power to stop world-ending threats herself."

The two stared at each other's eyes with a deadpan, before chuckling together.

"Okay, now that that's out of your systems, you can now tell your side of the sobstory," Sumireko said, wiping a tear from her eye. Yukari just rolled her eyes. "So, why were you so impatient to meet me?"

"Well, you'd be disappointed then that it was just me wanting to flaunt my, well, everything. And yes, I'm talking about all the things I worked hard to earn all these thousands of years of lifetime that I have-"

"And I'm very, very proud of you for that."

Yukari expected the hug that came after that. She honestly did. But she can't stop her emotions now. Not after Sumireko's earlier ice breaker.

Yukari, for the first time in a long, long time, voiced out her emotions. She may have lost all the tears, but not the emotions. Not when she is a youkai. Not when emotions were what gave birth to them in the first place.

"You wouldn't understand how much I suffered through all of those years, you wouldn't understand how much I lost, how much I hurt…"

Sumireko only nodded as she continued to stroke the blonde's trembling back and listened to the gap lady's untelling words. Sumeriko, knew that it wasn't because of distrust, nor was it because of trying to hide the sides that are darkest to Yukari from latter that she wasn't really telling exactly what actually happened.

"You may have been always watching over us from that crystal ball of yours, you may claim to have known everything that happened to me, but you weren't there! You weren't there when they tried to harm us, when they tried to kill us!"

And know things, Sumireko did. Yukari can't really say the right words,

"You weren't there when I lost them, you weren't there when I was about to lose all hope!"

It was because there were no words that can fully tell what Yukari experienced. Their sheer number is too much that it all has blended into one big collective downwards cycle of despair. And Sumireko knew that this was the case only for herself: as Yukari proclaimed, Sumireko doesn't have the experience nor the time nor the eidetic memory to digest everything Yukari had experienced in her long life. Sumireko knows she will never do, even if she decides to spend the rest of her life trying to scrying those events using her postcognition. In contrast…

"You weren't there when I kept searching for my lost hope without guidance-"

Yukari remembers every single second of her life. A blessing Sumireko knows that isn't anything but a blessing for any immortal. There is a reason why one of the most powerful youkai is widely known to sleep most of the time…

"-and you weren't there when the hope I keep finding turns out to be bullshit, and comes biting us back in the end!"

As sleep is the closest thing to what she seeks the most.

The two returned to a more morose silence for a while. Yukari immediately returned to stoicism, and the school girl hugging her from the side doesn't stop her. Sumireko knows she can't really correct Yukari for the coping mechanism that the latter has been using for several generations already. Nor does she have the right to do so. Instead, she started to play around with the blonde's hair as she redirected the subject.

"So, how much were you projecting me when you started with this I-am-superior, holier-than-thou persona of yours?"

"Really?"

"Really what?

"I just told you my sobstory and the first you ask is about yourself!?"

Another pause, and another collective laugh, though the blonde appears to be amused, inside she was appreciating the diversion.

"But, I guess, that's it," Yukari wiggled out of the grasp of a reluctant Sumireko, and stood up the torii gate on her own feet.

"You got what you wanted?" Sumireko distractedly levitated up to Yukari's level while readjusting her uniform.

"Yeah, not the way I wanted, but apparently the way I needed."

"Very hip to the youngsters indeed."

"By the way, I was not joking, push your luck one more time and you will have your small and large intestines a kilometer away from each other."

Sumireko only gives a bigger grin at Yukari's death glare.

"Ooh scary, won't Renko be even more disappointed to you if you decided to cannibalize her ancestor?"

Yukari's glare actually went furious for a moment, but she clearly read Sumireko's intention this time around, and sighed.

"It's times like these that your self-proclaimed limited omniscience becomes questionable, and you appear to be a mastermind that had been manipulating the events of the entire history all along."

Yukari had realized that Sumireko had no idea of what actually happened, or would happen in the future, to Renko. Well, not yet as of now. Sumireko just took a shot in the dark, and got it right that Yukari still feels that Renko should be disappointed at her. And from Yukari's own reaction when she got caught off guard, Sumireko got her answers.

"Who knows, maybe I really am," This time, Sumireko gave an alarming grin that revived a long forgotten but engraved instinct in Yukari's brain.

"Sumireko, what did you do?"

Ah now that's a phrase I haven't heard in a while, Sumireko felt glee from the five words that she already personally considered as the cue for her punchlines.

"Oh nothing. Just that-"

Sumireko snapped her fingers, and a smartphone teleports in her grasp. Only then did Yukari realized her gravest mistake for the night.

"Oh, Aya will be licking my ass for these pictures of The Great Yukari losing to a human-!"

Unfortunately, Sumireko had pushed her luck too much that night. Yukari, the monstrous youkai that she was, ended up atomizing a pitiful smartphone with a photon beam large enough that it could have been worthy of being stolen by a certain ordinary magician, and cut a human girl named Usami Sumireko in half, with a purple vantablack.

And because the said monster had been stalking the said human from the moment she entered Gensokyo, the monster knew that she did not need to give mercy to someone who could clearly survive being atomized by an eternally burning phoenix.

It did not help that the human has yet to be considered a resident of Gensokyo, and thus is not yet protected by the danmaku rules.

"…"

"Owie… I feel my small and large intestines… are still kilometers apart…"

Sumireko was down on the ground under the torii gate, with her hands safeguarding her unblemished and unwounded stomach, which is visible only from between the gap of her horizontally severed bloodied violet uniform.

Standing in front of her was the goddess she was forced to pray for when Sanae won the frog spotting challenge half a decade ago, and the shorter of the two goddesses Sumireko had pretended not to see until only very recently.

"…"

"She made me fall… with the torii gate going … through me, the horror…"

The face on the goddess, however, was anything but pity to the girl curled underneath her.

"So when were you going to tell us these so-called sages, which you just revealed this morning to be the most powerful people in Gensokyo, are buddy-buddy with you?"

Sumireko deadpanned, all her previous look of being in pain gone in an instant, and pointed at her visible midriff, with some red droplets that came from the bloodstained clothes.

"You call this buddy-buddy!?"

"What did you expect when you did what you did?"

"…Trains?"

"Human, you think that's not as bad?"