Work Text:
The Bunbunmaru Newspaper was in dire straits.
For a few decades, it had done quite well; Aya had been the only tengu truly interested in the human village, and had been able to monopolise both the audience of the humans living there and the reporting of all the news that came out. The problem came about when other tengu also began to get interested.
Aya was fast, but that wasn’t nearly the advantage that she claimed it was. Many of the younger tengu had abilities that allowed them to cover the news without ever leaving their homes, and they produced their works at a far greater rate than Aya could ever manage. Little by little, her competitive advantage was worn away, as the likes of Hatate became more and more involved in the affairs of the village.
She’d been drinking to her woes in Geidontei when she’d taken a piece of advice that she probably shouldn’t have.
You’re not going to give up here, are you? Not when you’ve still got that ace up your sleeve.
She’d thrown herself back into her work, gathering interviews, scrounging up every little bit of gossip she could. The long-discarded idea, the cancellation of which had once salvaged her reputation from a terrible pitfall, was revived in a moment of desperation. The circumstances were different, she told herself - or perhaps she was told by someone else. This time, there was no vested interest in twisting the truths. Indeed, all that remained would be the truth.
As a result of the publication of the first issue of the Bunbunmaru Weekly, and the chaos that had temporarily unfolded following its release, the tengu printers were no longer accepting her work.
Like all tengu, of course, she had her own printer, but it was old, slow, and– and–
Her thousand-year-old pride stung, to be reduced to the level of an amateur once more. The idea of starting from scratch brought more pain than any physical blow ever could have. She’d started to zip around, looking for news, but her miscalculation had made her a pariah everywhere she went. She tried to write about the slight amounts of news she’d uncovered, but found that she simply lacked the drive to do so.
And so, the energetic Aya sat alone in her office, surrounded by stacks of worthless truth. She wondered, idly, if there even was a way for her to catch up to the younger tengu. Her internal sense of superiority warred against her gradual realisation that the only reason she’d made it that far was because she had already been ahead. Age and experience had been her greatest weapons; weapons that lost their edge as others gained that same experience.
An issue of the Kakashi Spirit News sat upon her desk, and she flipped through it idly. She wanted to deride it as rubbish, as misleading falsehoods, as… But the truth of the matter was that these days, Hatate’s work was finer than her own. It stung her to admit that, even for a moment.
She gazed up at the ceiling, and whispered quietly, “I’m not going to make it on my own.”
The newspaper slipped from her hand, and something slid out. From the corner of her eye, she watched it go. For a moment, she was trapped by the inertia, and then she sighed, leant down to pick it up - and stopped.
It was not, as she’d expected, a page from the newspaper; instead, it was a note, written in a quick, sharp hand. And it was an invitation. A time and a place. And a name.
She stared at it. Then she looked back at the fallen paper, and scowled. So that was how Hatate had done it, huh? Well, if she could do it, then so could Aya.
After all, if she couldn’t make it on her own, then she’d just have to take whatever chance she could to claw her way back. And once she had…
Her mind began to fill with beautiful visions. Triumphant, dominant, beloved and trusted by all, her words bringing about a new age for the tengu, and for Gensokyo as a whole…
And all it would take was another sacrifice to her pride. If she would just cast away its last few vestiges, she would be able to build it back up again, tenfold. She could finally expose the truth, and by doing so, she’d reclaim the world that was rightfully hers.
Lost to the bitterness of defeat and the delusions of success, it never occurred to her to wonder how that note had so conveniently come to fall into her copy of the Kakashi Spirit News.
The location had been one of the empty houses that sat outside the village. Every so often, an ambitious human would attempt to build a home outside the security of the village’s walls, but sooner or later their nerve would break, and they’d return back to safety.
She landed on the ground lightly, silently. But the door swung open anyway, revealing the dimly lit interior. The windows had been boarded up decades ago, back when the kappa had briefly used the abandoned homes as storehouses. But they’d stopped using these places, too, and now they simply sat empty, forgotten.
But it wasn’t abandoned today. In the far corner, a woman in a violet dress was sitting, watching the door with golden eyes, and smiling as Aya slowly entered, walking towards her.
“Good afternoon, Miss Shameimaru,” she said.
An alarm bell went off in Aya’s head. She ignored it.
“You weren’t expecting someone else?”
“Perhaps. But you’re as welcome as any other. Actually, to tell the truth…” The gap youkai’s smile sharpened. “You’re far more acceptable than most of the others.”
“Good. I want you to do for me whatever you’ve been doing for–”
“Assuming,” interrupted Yukari, “that I have been doing something for anyone else, why should I then do that for you? In this world, you don’t simply receive something for nothing.”
“Tell me what she did for you, then.”
“Whoever could you be talking about, my dear Miss Shameimaru?” Yukari’s smile changed once more, this time to a satisfied smirk. “If you want to negotiate, you need to make your aims clear. Otherwise, you’ll never get what you want.”
Aya clenched her teeth. Two impulses, now, were telling her to leave; her sense of righteous fury, the wound to her pride of this youkai toying with her, and the other, deep down sense that something about this was wrong. She crushed them both. If she left here, now, that would be a final humiliation worse than any other.
“I want you to give me the things you’ve given to those lousy upstarts! Influence, prestige, power - I know you have enough connections with the daitengu that you can get me back to what I once was without even lifting a finger. That’s what I want from you, Yukari. I want you to give me my old life back, and then keep giving me more. Is that satisfactory to you?”
Yukari’s eyes shone, and her smirk widened once more into a smile.
“That’s quite a lot, Miss Shameimaru. What are you offering in exchange?”
Aya stared directly into those glittering golden eyes without hesitation.
“If you do that for me, I’ll take you up on that offer you once made me. I’ll become your shikigami, until you bring back my old life.”
Those golden eyes flashed, and the smile widened further, the deadly grin of a predator.
“Those are rather imprecise terms,” said Yukari. “Aren’t you worried that I’ll simply never give you back what you had, and keep you as my shikigami forever? After all, you were so against being one before.”
Aya broke eye contact, just for a moment.
“One year. I’ll serve you for one year, and if you haven’t fulfilled your end of the bargain, I’m free to leave, and you’ll never speak of this.”
And, she thought, I’ll be free to write an article all about the way you really live, Yakumo Yukari.
“One year, one year…” mused Yukari. “Very well. From the day you become my shikigami, you’ll have one year. And if I haven’t provided you with what you want, then you’ll be free to stay or leave as you please. Are those the terms?”
The alarm bells were really beginning to scream at her. But she wasn’t so lowly to get trapped so easily. If anything, it was almost as if Yukari had left too many loopholes in her favour; the terms were what she wanted, and the outcome was that she could choose to leave. As much as she tried, she couldn’t see the trap.
She simply hadn’t grasped the true nature of a shikigami; nor the true nature of the creature that sat before her, smiling at her. To a tengu, one of the strongest and proudest of all youkai, the power of a youkai extended only as far as the oni; it was impossible to imagine something beyond that.
“One year,” confirmed Aya.
Yukari nodded, and held out her hand. “Then let’s shake on it, my dearest, newest shikigami.”
Aya took her hand–
She’d had her eyes on the crow tengu for a while. Swift as the wind, masters of gathering information; they would be the perfect means of keeping an eye on Gensokyo, if not for their fickle natures and their tendencies towards exaggeration. There was no good having a shikigami who couldn’t provide her with accurate reports, after all. That was the main reason she hadn’t meaningfully pursued that path.
But it had been kept in the back of her mind. She’d narrowed down her options for a while, but then one in particular had caught her attention. Of all the crow tengu, Shameimaru Aya had been one of the few interested in the world outside of the tengu’s political squabbling, visiting the village and the rest of Gensokyo to gather her articles.
They’d gone unappreciated by the other tengu, of course; most tengu were only interested in tengu. The other residents of Gensokyo didn’t much care for them, either; like all tengu, Aya had the unfortunate habit of being rather dismissive of those below her, and like all tengu, Aya considered basically all other youkai to be below her.
Admittedly, Yukari didn’t find much value in the articles themselves. It was the act of writing them that had sparked her interest; even as Aya was an incredibly tengu-like tengu, she was anomalous, an outsider who rejected the insularity of the other tengu.
She had thrown herself further and further into her study of Gensokyo, perpetually twisting the facts to suit her own ends. Even Yukari herself wasn’t safe, but that occasion had also been the one in which she’d been able to make Aya her offer for the first time.
Of course, if Aya had accepted that offer at the time, maybe she’d have retained the prestige she’d been slowly gathering at the time. Yukari, who had already lived through an era of fierce, bitter competition, knew that a single person, working alone, drawing attention, would eventually fall.
At first, it had only been a few of the younger generation of tengu who had followed in Aya’s footsteps, but they were sharper, wiser, better at framing their stories to suit their own ends. Part of Aya’s appeal, to Yukari, had been the rather sloppy work; but the likes of Hatate were much more effective. And their works had attracted more and more attention, and more and more tengu began to rush around Gensokyo, writing on everything that happened. The niche that Aya had monopolised for almost a century was being filled faster than she could catch up.
If she’d had the time, Yukari might have helped them along, but in spite of Aya’s accusations, she hadn’t even needed to. In the end, all she did to corner the earnest reporter was suggest to the daitengu Iizunamaru Megumu that Aya had designs of gathering together all the crow tengu who investigated outside of the mountain under her own wings – an impossibly absurd claim, of course, but like all daitengu, Megumu was fiercely protective of her own position. From there, all it took was the whispering of a kudagitsune for Aya to conclusively corner herself.
And once she was cornered…
Youkai, beings of spirit, were vulnerable to vengeful spirits and the like. But a vengeful spirit was little more than a thought. If one could create such a spirit, then one could control a youkai.
And the boundary between a thought and a lack of thought was so thin as to be transient.
But one had to be careful. Meticulous. Delicate. Interfere too much, and the original youkai would vanish, defeating the entire purpose of the selection process. But implementing too few protocols would result in the process not fully taking hold, and then it would have to be done all over again. It was a delicate, careful balancing act.
Fortunately, it was one she had experience with. After a few false starts, long, long ago, she had refined the process perfectly. Where other shikigami users might have settled for more easily manipulable youkai, she had claimed one of the strongest of all youkai for herself. Compared to that kitsune, a crow tengu was simple.
Even so, she was careful. The slightest wrong move could ruin all her hard work.
Once the mind was done, the complications didn’t end. A shikigami required a new body; that cluster of souls could never maintain a form on its own. And it couldn’t be merely any body; it needed to be highly compatible, or else the body would reject the invading soul and destroy it.
She had long since acquired a new body. In exchange for a favour provided to the ruler of Former Hell, she had attained a hell raven. She knew, already, that they were exceptional hosts; it was not every entity that could act as a shrine for Yatagarasu, after all. Of course, this one’s new spirit would be much less powerful, but much more was asked of it. There could be no trace of the body’s original mind. The transfer would have to be perfect; a mind and body operating in complete synchronisation, until the mind overrode the body and returned it to its ideal state.
And once all of that was done, once the mind’s spirit had been infused with a small army of vengeful spirits until there was no distinguishing between what had been added and what had been there before, and once the mind had been added to the body, fused with elaborate care to ensure no potential of rejection or disruption, and once the body of that small raven had twisted and distorted into the human-like form of a crow tengu–
-Yakumo Aka awoke.
It was a familiar room she had never seen before. She glanced up at her master, the person watching over her carefully. She opened the mouth of a body she had never used, and felt the odd sensation of breathing into foreign lungs.
These feelings passed as quickly as they had come. She was simply waking up.
“Good morning, Aka,” said Yukari brightly. “How are you feeling?”
She blinked. She still felt as if her mind was drawing itself together. Something nagged at the very edge of her thoughts. Something was… something was…
She blinked again, and it was gone. “I feel quite well, Lady Yukari,” she replied. “How long…?”
“Oh, a few months,” stated Yukari. “I can count those against your year, if you’d like.”
“My year?” repeated Aka.
“Just a little joke,” replied Yukari. And she smiled as she said it. “More important, if you’re up and about, I’ll need to run tests to ensure that your body’s working properly. Alright, stand up.”
Aka stood. It hadn’t even been a conscious movement.
“Lift your right arm.”
For another few hours, they went through these tests; and then, satisfied, Yukari nodded to herself, and told her to rest again.
“I’ll just need to make one slight adjustment,” she remarked, “and then you’ll be ready to go.”
The next time she awoke, Yukari had given her clothes. A white blouse, a long black skirt, a black shawl, and a faded red tabard, bearing a stylised depiction of a tree shedding its leaves. The final parts of the outfit were a red tokin and a pair of red geta. She smiled to herself as she put them on, savouring their familiarity.
And then she’d been told to head out, to travel through the gaps between worlds and gather a full report of that day’s events in Gensokyo. With the effortless ease that could only come from experience, she opened a portal from Yukari’s home to Gensokyo for the first time, and shot through it like a bullet.
She was the fastest in Gensokyo, still. The pair of immense black crow wings that emerged from her back had made her faster than ever, carving through the air when needed and being perfectly streamlined when not. Her new clothes fluttered through the air, but the drag barely affected her. She turned on a dime, and shot across the skies like a missile.
And she wrote the entire time, frantically, delighting in the joy of it. Everything she saw that was slightly unusual was worthy of copying down into her little notepad, carefully noted in a shorthand that she had developed over centuries. She mused to herself that she’d have to copy it all out properly if Lady Yukari was to read it, but that would be fine. She was used to having to write out her shorthand.
She returned home, copied out her notes, handed them to Yukari, and summarised the important notes on request. Yukari had had the same smile she’d had earlier, the smile of an artisan endlessly pleased with her own work, the smile of someone who knew a joke somebody else didn’t.
The next day was the same. The next week, and the next month…
Sometimes, when she encountered someone, they looked at her strangely, but that look went away when she introduced herself. They’d known her before she was a shikigami, of course, but that time wasn’t important anymore. It’s what she was doing now that mattered.
There had only been that one person…
She’d run into the crow tengu whilst in the village. In the past, she’d had to come in disguise; now, as an agent of Yakumo Yukari, she could appear as her true self. It was far more pleasant – those human clothes had always been a bit too tight, and her aerodynamicity was far less efficient than it would normally have been.
And she’d been there on her own time, too. After a brief period of the same strange looks, a while of keeping her at arm’s length, she’d been gradually welcomed back into Geidontei. She knew that something had changed in her relationship with the others, but that didn’t matter to her overly much.
But she’d been on her way there, when–
“Aya?”
A surprisingly common mistake. She turned to face the person who’d made it this time, and saw that it was another crow tengu. In disguise, of course, as they all were. She seemed somewhat familiar, but the name was slipping from her memory.
No matter.
“It’s Aka, actually,” she replied. “Yakumo Aka, the fastest information gatherer in Gensokyo!”
The other tengu looked at her like she’d gone mad. “Aya, did you really vanish so you could start working for that gap youkai?”
“No, I-” Aka’s words caught in her mouth. Why did she start working for Yukari again…? She’d been trying to…
The tengu was looking at her with concern. Or was it suspicion?
What had she been trying to do? This tengu… had something to do with it…
She’d been trying to get back her prestige, of course. She’d fallen so low, but now that she was Yakumo Yukari’s shikigami, she was doing better than she’d ever been.
“Oh, don’t worry yourself, Hatate,” said Aka smoothly. “I’m sure a small-fry reporter like yourself wouldn’t understand, but I’m simply doing something more important than I used to be.”
Hatate didn’t look convinced. “More important than distributing the truth?”
“Most people don’t care about the truth at all,” replied Aka. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be buying your newspapers!” She laughed. “No, it’s all about who you report to. And I report everything, the entire truth, directly to Lady Yukari. That’s the only audience that matters to me, in the end.”
Hatate’s expression had changed again. This time it almost seemed to be pitying her.
Well, that didn’t matter. Aka turned, and began to walk off. “You keep up with your newspapers though, Hatate. We’ll see which of us has the bigger impact in the end.”
The crow tengu had lingered there for a few moments longer, then she too turned and walked away.
She’d thought of bringing it up in Geidontei, but… despite everything, it had left a sour taste in her mouth. Something about it nagged at her. But that nagging sensation went away after the first drink, and she stopped thinking about it at all after the second.
The year passed and went, and she never even noticed.