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occasionaltouhou · 4 years

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good news! it’s been two months since i got this message and i don’t actually remember what your other message was since i deleted it shortly after you sent this one (i do remember not thinking it was that bad until you pointed it out so like, don’t even worry about it)

anyway, here’s some reimari soup. hope you enjoy!

It was a question that she’d been asked many times before; in fact, sooner or later, everyone that she met asked it.

She’d been asked it by humans and by youkai. Sometimes she’d been asked by people she’d expected to be far more discerning, and yet -- well, what was her answer? She supposed that her unsatisfying answer was why.

Because it was hard to pin down, after all. She could say any number of things, but in the end, the question eluded any kind of simple answer.

And here it was, once more.

---

This time it came from one of the two goddesses who’d caused the Perfect Possession incident, Yorigami Joon. She’d been (apparently) working hard at the Myouren Temple, but part of the arrangement was that she would also help to tidy up after the mess she and her sister had caused.

Now her sister had begun to cause another mess with the delinquent celestial, Joon seemed to be spending more time at the Hakurei Shrine than at the Myouren Temple as she assisted the Shrine Maiden’s efforts. And, like so many before her, she’d noticed that whenever Reimu set out to solve whatever problems were being caused, she would invariably be accompanied by another girl.

And like so many before her, she thought she’d clear things up, and simply ask.

“So what’s the deal with you two, anyway?”

---

It would have been easy enough -- and obvious, for that matter -- to say that they were together. Was that enough? Somehow, though, that didn’t feel quite right. Obviously they were together, but…

Reimu had known Marisa since they were both young; since before she was the Hakurei Shrine Maiden, and was still learning about the spiritual powers she would inevitably have to master; since shortly after the youngest child of the Kirisame family vanished into the Forest of Magic, never to return home.

She had been her first friend; the Shrine was so distant that few people visited, and until Marisa, no-one ever stayed for very long. Marisa stayed over all the time, travelling between the Shrine and the Forest of Magic according to her whims. And gradually, Reimu had allowed Marisa to guide her around Gensokyo outside of the limits of her training; the young magician enthusiastically showing her all the bizarre sights she had discovered within the Forest of Magic.

She had brought her to Kourindou, too, and even into the village sometimes; opening up the reclusive Shrine Maiden to all sorts of new people. It was only from Marisa that she even really learnt how to talk to people -- to expand the periphery of her vision beyond what she had been taught.

She wondered, as she grew older, how her mother, and the other Shrine Maidens, had dealt with it; but her memories of her mother were those of a person who was never close, but instead always careful to keep her distance from those around her, even her own child. She was glad, then, that she hadn’t had that same closed existence.

And of course, as they grew older, they developed new feelings for each other, and for others, but it wasn’t like those feelings replaced the ones that were already there; they simply built atop an existing foundation, another layer of the myriad bonds that connected the two. So somehow, a single word answer felt… lacking.

Not that that would ever stop Marisa.

---

Whilst Reimu was thinking, Marisa grinned confidently, as she always did. “We’re partners, of course!”

Marisa had a certain confidence about her that allowed her to say anything with ease. She distilled the complexities of their relationship into that single word without hesitation. But it was lacking, too. “Partner” simply implied that they worked together, or collaborated together. Which was true, but it was barely sufficient. They were more than simply partners, after all.

Marisa had once, after a particularly heated party, asked to marry her. She’d refused; there were certain expectations that came with being the Shrine Maiden. The next morning, Marisa had forgotten all about it. Sometimes, when her thoughts wandered in this direction, she wondered…

Would that be it, then? Would that be the connection that bound them together? But the idea of marriage in Gensokyo was informal outside of the village. It, too, felt too rudimentary. And perhaps it would simplify things too much.

But what did you call someone that you’d known all your life, who had opened up your world, who you owed your very world to? What did you call someone who was your world?

“Partners?”

“Yeah, partners. We’re always together, y’know?”

“Still though, partners…” Joon mused over the word for a moment, and then glanced at the still-thinking Reimu. “Y’know, somehow that doesn’t just fit. Maybe it’s just ‘cause I know what it’s like, but really, you act more like--”

It was strange, really. Reimu rarely overthought things; rarely worried about things; but somehow this was important. Not because she wanted people to get the wrong impression or anything -- she truly did love Marisa, after all -- but because she wanted to get it right; she wanted to be sure that whatever she decided upon encapsulated the depths of her feelings, and the broadness of those feelings -- the childhood friend who’d shown her youkai tracks in the woods, the person who’d sat and helped her cook and clean and mend her clothes when her mother was gone, the person who joked and laughed, who came up with the wildest schemes and never failed to see them through, who followed her on every incident, and competed with her to complete them first; the person who, without fail, had always been there for her.

Marisa was a lot of things. Perhaps this was the easiest way to tie them all together.

“Family, yeah.” Reimu smiled, and took a small drink of her tea, as Marisa sighed. “After all this time, I don’t know what else you’d call it.”

#touhou #reimu hakurei #marisa kirisame #occasional fics #occasional prompts #part of the reason this took so long is bc i was originally gonna write s/t more ambitious but... it didn't pan out unfortunately :(#the other part is jsut bc it's been cold and miserable and it's been hard to work up motivation. you know how it is #either way i'm super sorry to keep you waiting so long

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