ix. You're the swingingest thing

Whenever they tried to dance with one another the movements were made a mockery, reduced as they were to stuttering, horribly graceless maneuverings. This was probably because she always insisted on leading and Yuuko wasn't very good at managing her skirts or traditional ballroom styles. (Could you be anymore goddamn spastic? Clow snarled once after she had backed him into a low table and nearly dislocated his shoulder during an abortive spinning movement. Yuuko didn't dignify that with a response—giddily, in the back of her head, she couldn't seem to stop seeing what steps came next and confusing them with how she was supposed to be moving now.)

x. Love, unconquered in the fight

Men who are good husbands and fathers and who lay down their lives for their country make Yuuko feel depressed and satisfied in the same breath. She admires these beloved dead; she keeps books of their last words locked in an old desk drawer. (This is an inelegant gesture: a great many pages read only as choked cries, the names of wives, stunted prayers, the word 'mother.')

Clow tries to understand this yearning of Yuuko's, at least a little, for he spends long and complicated afternoons telling her about his mother. (She listens to him too, and she doesn't poke fun. Clow wonders if this preoccupation is a sign of just how inexperienced, how lonely she really is, despite her centuries spread out over the earth.)

xi. In other tongues, despair

They reign in their magic with a sort of hideous strength that compels others to wonder: how have they ever won a battle before in their lives?

xii. O that thou would hidest me in the grave

Or maybe it's really like this:

She has lived hundreds, maybe thousands of lives—because no matter where you go, what dimensions you retreat to, she is the only incarnation of herself.

It's a curious immortality, one that is not without it's own fair price: she dies every sixty years or so, because it's simple addition—all those little potential lives, making up her one own long one.

(She passes away in her sleep sometimes, and spends the night speaking with the dead. But of course it is not always this simple: she has been murdered at least fifteen times that Clow knows of. Each of these deaths is a little more violent and far worse to awaken from: for instance, once she spoke of the time she awoke and could not draw breath—someone was holding a pillow over her face and they wouldn't stop pushing down.)

xiii. Ere the spider make a thin curtain for your epitaphs.

She had plenty of regrets—heaping piles of them, she should have had many more neuroses that she did, actually—but she wasn't stupid enough to let them hinder her (at least, this is what she said aloud: sometimes she found herself pacing in the halls, cursing the fate of the Sibylline books). Clow, on the other hand, wrapped his many sorrows about him like a shroud and took to smiling sweetly and brokenly before he died.

That self-pity of his made her furious: but this was of course her way of hiding yet another hurt.

xiv. That thing with feathers

If Clow's wretched emotional retardation is enough to drive her mad, Yuuko knows that the dilemma that is Yue will send her spiraling so deeply into a berserk rage she will never quite climb out. Yue is (she fumes) the living definition of angstbucket. His picture is probably nestled next to Kodansha's very own explanation, in big fat type: YUE, noun. ANGSTBUCKET. (See also: CLOW REED, emotard).

(She is really angrier with Clow for creating Yue with a heart like that. It's a great cruelty, to make a creature so haughty and lovely and crippled by servitude. Yue loves Clow, impossibly—it's so painfully obvious that even Cerberus cannot bring himself to tease Yue about it, and Yuuko doesn't dare say a word for fear of what else might tumble out of her prophetic lips.)

xv. In the end it is not well

Yuuko plays cat's-cradle with his secrets whenever Clow isn't looking, pulling them this way and that, thief-like. Some of them make dread crawl into her belly and smoulder deep within her, like adulterated embers. She doesn't weep at these unwarranted exhibits: she studies them, her eyes becoming carbon-and-topaz hard as she twists and pulls and needles and insinuates things.

This snide habit irritates him, of course, although he will never say so to her face or within her hearing –that would satisfy her too much—because the whole routine of it is subtle and compelling and painful, like a canker sore blooming slowly on the tip of the tongue. Clow is a walking consequence and Yuuko doesn't so much take advantage of this as she reminds him, every waking moment in her presence (the sores are migrating to the lower line of his gums, the split in his lower lip: raw and sore and tasting irresistibly of metal, infection, and a winter full of sickness. He keeps shunting the feeling against his teeth, abrading the hurt until it swells into a magnificent whole) that there's a price to be paid for who and what he is: he doesn't have to like it, but she is his very own Charon and he's going to pay the toll she demands whether he likes it or not.

This is only fair.