Chinese water torture (n); a form of torture in which water is made to drip for a long period of time onto a victim's head to drive him (or her) insane.

You worry, sometimes, that you allow people to believe that your hair, your ribbons, and your Soul Gem are gold, instead of pale yellow. It is your former apprentice, not you, who used illusion magic, but Fate is fickle, you have learned, and her first and greatest love is irony. Assumptions grounded in logic are the most treacherous of all.

Your strength, your power, your character and integrity - all of them glitter, like gold, but not all that glitters is gold, despite what the crow believes

"It's getting away," your swordsman pants. She is badly winded. Though her wounds are sealed, the effort has taken its toll. If she goes after this familiar, she will die. You know it in your gut, in your head, in your heart of hearts.

So you make your mouth smile, lean forward - your back, your neck, and your legs all shrieking in protest - and lay a gentle hand on your protege's head. "It's all right," you tell her. "I'll take care of it, Miki-san."

She wants to protest, but exhaustion is sagging her head and her eyelids, and the dented sword has slipped from her white-gloved hand to clatter on the roofing tiles. "I can come," she insists doggedly.

"It's all right," you say again. You bob forward and press a playful kiss to her cheek. "I'll take care of it," you reassure her, tapping her on the shoulder.

She believes you, bless her; a white glove rises to cup your cheek. "Be careful, Mami-san," she says sincerely. "Don't die." Water wells in her eyes, and tears begin to carve furrows in the dust on her face. "Please don't die."

It is an awkward hug, with her half-kneeling half-crouching on the rooftop, so you lift the girl up, prop her up against the chimney, and embrace her tenderly. "It's all right," you say, for the third time. "I'll be right back." You are not quite lying, but you are also not telling the truth. So you tug her ear, playfully, and give her a gently push, and she totters back to fall onto the roof as you whip ribbons about your form and fall, so gracefully that you are almost flying.

You find no familiars that night, of course, and you tell yourself it was simply because it had fled too fast to be found.

You visit with Sakura Kyouko, two weeks after you take on tutelage of Miki Sayaka; the two of you meet at a coffee shop - though of course you order tea - and you are hoping against hope that somehow, something good can come of it. She is rattier than you remember; you are sure that she is wearing the same exact same sweatshirt and shorts that she wore when you had last parted, two years before. She smells terrible, and she knows it, too. She enjoys the way you try to hide your dismay when she leans close.

"I hear you picked up a new apprentice somewhere," she says conversationally, after three minutes of idle chat. You freeze, halfway through lifting your teacup to your mouth, and Sakura bares her teeth in a smile, pleased at rattling you so easily. "And just as much a white knight as you, huh?"

"She's the real thing," you say with quiet firm intensity. "I'm lucky to have her."

"Yeah?" But Miki Sayaka is nothing but a talking point for Sakura Kyouko, and she is the sort of person who is deaf to the tap-tapping on someone else's skull, and - to be completely fair - she has not heard the quiet intensity of your anger for a very long time. "How's the tea?" she wonders aloud.

"Delicious," you say with perfect and chilling manners.

Her smirk fades, and she realizes that she has missed something, but Sakura Kyouko is as hopelessly lost in conversational subtleties as you would be in back street brawls and she knows it. She he picks up her plastic cup of water and pours a little bit of it onto her hand, scrubbing the most offensive of the dirt from her hands and her face, wiping them firmly on her sweatshirt to clear them of water, and your heart softens.

"You are always welcome to come to my place should you want to tidy up, Sakura-san," you say, keeping your tone as gentle as you can.

She does not miss the subtleties this time, you know.

The redhead sighs wearily and reaches across the table, picking up your teacup and giving it a hopeful sniff, more, you think, out of habit than actual interest. "You're kind, Mami-san," she says. "You know I can't, though." She sets the teacup back down, leaving grimy fingerprints on the pristine white china.

"Why?" You manage to keep the desperation out of your voice, probably, as though you are not clutching at straws, as though you didn't care.

She looks at you seriously for the first time, without a hint of the mocking sneer she has displayed thus far, without the veil of ease and the shield of arrogance. "Because I would make a mess," she says. "I'd make a mess, and you'd get stuck with all sorts of trouble. You'd have to help me. And it doesn't sit well with me, you know?"

You eye your teacup and pick it up gingerly, lowering it surreptitiously to your lap to wipe the fingerprints away, where she cannot see you do it. You know that she is right.

"This new girl, though," says Kyouko. "She's good for you?"

You close your eyes and remember the sweet thrill of dancing in combat with Miki Sayaka, her delight in victory, her joy in movement, in talking, yawning, stretching, listening to music and conducting with a well-timed dancing finger, naturally graceful, completely at ease. "Yes," you say. You look at your wayward apprentice and allow yourself a soft smile. "She is."

"Oh." Her face goes slack for a moment. Her right hands moves, seemingly independent, and finds a stick of pocky somewhere in a pocket. Her teeth clamp firmly around it, and she scowls, moving the stick in her teeth, up, down, right, left, reminding you, inanely, of one of those Nintendo cheats she used to tell you about, in the late hours of the night, where she would be sitting on your couch, scowling at the handheld set. raised. "What the hell did you want to meet me for, then?"

"Eh?"

She leans back in her seat and finds some other scrap of food in a pocket - beef jerky, you think. "Why did you want to meet me?"

"Is there a reason that I should not?"

"Yeah." She moves onto french fries. You have no idea how she manages to store so much in her faded patchwork pockets, "I took your charity and spat it back in your face. You should be angry. You shouldn't have wanted to see me, ever."

You look at Sakura Kyouko and you see the younger version of her, buried somewhere inside barriers of bitterness and simmering rage. You remember her, for a moment, how she was, lost and confused, despairing, and you remember how she changed as she stood there, balancing on a razor's edge of disillusioned resolve and seasoned apathy, finally moving as according to her own code, holding her own, fiercely, in a hostile world. "I think you and I remember it differently, Sakura-san," you say.

"'S that right?" Sakura lifts her empty water cup and turns it upside down on the table. "I remember it just fine."

She finds your gaze and holds it for a long moment. One hand rummages in her pocket, and she comes up with a box of pocky, offering it to you. When you take one, delicately, she lets the box drop, and you have to catch it, before it falls. She is already strolling towards the door by the time you look up. Her eyes meet yours, briefly.

"Sayoonara, Mami-san," she says.

And then she is gone, and you are alone, and your tea is almost cold, so you take tiny sips of it until it, too, is gone, and then you turn it upside-down, walking away - hearing, as you do, the last drops of it tap-tap against the table.

You are grateful to your latest kohai. Were it not for Akemi Homura, it would have been quite likely that both Miki Sayaka and Sakura Kyouko would have died poetic deaths, shish-kabobed prettily upon one another's blades. As it is, you blink -

- and the dynamic duo is frozen in a world washed bare of color, and Akemi Homura is clutching at your elbow with clammy hands, trembling, eyes wide behind red-rimmed glasses.

Though rattled, you manage a smile for the weak-hearted child. "Well done, Akemi-san," you say warmly. "We can't have them killing each other before we share a cup of tea, hmm?"

"Th-that girl," Akemi says shakily. "Who is she?"

"Mmm." You stretch out a gloved hand, and red ribbons cocoon the troublesome pair. They come to life, spluttering and shouting, struggling with all of the furious energy of rats in a cage. "An old… an old acquaintance of mine," you say. "Yes. Someone that I knew."

You had almost used the word friend, but that would have been too strong a word for Sakura Kyouko, and it wouldn't have done, to scare Akemi Homura into thinking that you would be friends to such a creature; that would disturb the delicate nexus of threads that you have arranged in your life, the illusion of order that keeps you sane.

So you smile brightly and reel the ribbons in, letting both girls swing like fish on a line, back and forth, wriggling. Miki Sayaka is outraged. Sakura Kyouko's snarled curses could have sent high school counselors into shock. "Now, then," you say, clapping your hands together. "Let's start from the beginning, shall we?"

You manage to restrain Miki Sayaka, and then you manage to talk Sakura Kyouko down from her seething fury. Then, and only then, as the red-haired girl strolls away unconcernedly, the lance-spear slung across her shoulder, do you unclench your hand enough to let the blood drip to the ground, one drop at a time, from the fist you had clenched so tightly behind your back that your fingernails had etched bloody wounds into your skin.

"She is unbelievable," Miki fumes. "Completely unbelievable! Gah!" She paces, faster and faster, backwards and forwards, her hands gesticulating her outrage. "How is someone like her a mahou shoujo?"

You think, at first, that the question is rhetorical, but she is staring at you, as though expecting an answer, one foot tap-tapping on the ground.

Ah.

She is expecting an answer.

You are the veteran, after all, the musketeer, the golden-haired girl with smiles and teacups and glittering aurelian light in the ring on your finger. It would not do for you to be caught flat-footed "The worth of a mahou shoujo is determined by their ability to harvest cubes," you say. "However unpleasant their means."

Sayaka nods, processing this, over and over in her head, and you watch with dawning horror as what you never meant to be more than the barest thread of truth is paved in concrete and set in stone. "I'm heading out tonight," she says.

"You can't," you interject, your tone rising sharply. "You don't have enough strength for that, Miki-san!"

"Shut up," she says darkly. You flinch, as though hit, but she is not even looking at you. She is facing the wall, clenching her hands together until her bones creak in protest. "I just need to get more, right? I just need to get more than her."

You blink, you try to conjure up ribbons, ribbons of words that will bind her fast to safety, but you have already used your ribbons in battle, and they cannot be used again so soon. "I'll come with you," you offer, tasting the futility of it even as you speak.

"No," she says darkly. "No. It has to be me. Just me."

She turns to you, now, eyes blazing with sullen fury, and that is the last time that you see Miki Sayaka with light in her eyes and breath in her body.

The day after Miki Sayaka dies, Akemi Homura calls your cell phone, though you do not ever recall giving her your number.

"Thirty-four hundred Seventy-six North Mitakihara Boulevard," she tells you. "Second floor."

Then she hangs up.

You are expecting an apartment not unlike your own. It is Akemi Homura, after all; surely, it would be an ordinary sort of place, perhaps quieter than yours; dirtier, quieter, a paler shadow, if you flatter yourself, as you are so often wont to do.

But this is different.

This is a behemoth, a creature from another age, squat and dark, arching high into the Mitakihara skyline. Gothic. Dark. Brooding. You would not think that it was hers, but the door proclaims, in bold letters, Akemi Homura.

You raise a hesitant hand to tap twice on the door.

When she opens the door, you think at first that it is Akemi's sister, or perhaps even her mother; the Akemi Homura you know does not have such hard eyes. Her braids and her glasses are gone and every cold line on her face has been etched a thousand times in stone. She sees in an instant that you are taken aback. She does not rush to assure your feelings or to soothe away your fears.

Without a hint of a stutter, she says, "Come in."

The door is chained, but she undoes it with the unmistakable ease of long practice, holding it half-open for you to walk in. She swings it shut, deadbolts it, hovers a hand over the chain, then decides against it and lets the metal links swing free. "This way," she says, passing you without a glance or a bow. You follow her down the hallway.

"Akemi… Akemi Homura-san?" you venture uncertainly.

Her stride does not break tempo. "Yes," she says.

There is a hologram on the wall, a great scythe of a pendulum, frozen in time. The dark-haired girl finds a silver remote and turns the display off with a press of a button. Her movements are sharp, not clumsy; her face, which has always telegraphed every flicker of her feelings, is inscrutable.

"Are you alright, Akemi-san?" Something of the senpai in you lends stability to your voice, masking your fear with concern. "You're not yourself."

"Worrying for me?" The dark-haired girl does not quite smile. "Don't."

A cast-iron teapot warmed by a candle is waiting on a table, and she pours you a cup of steaming chamomile, never spilling a drop.

Akemi Homura sits across from you. Without preamble, she says, "Miki Sayaka is dead."

You sip at your tea without tasting it, never noticing . "Taken by the Law of the Cycles."

She puts her teacup down. "Miki Sayaka is dead," she says again.

Something breaks in you, something that you had been struggling to maintain, and you put both hands over your face. "Yes," you say. "She is."

Akemi waits as you shudder, wiping tears from your face that drip onto the table, one at a time. Eventually, your sobs subside. You wipe your nose with a sleeve.

"And you, Tomoe-san?"

You blink.

Akemi Homura closes her eyes for a moment - in exasperation, you think. Or exhaustion? "Are you well, Tomoe-san?"

"Of course," you say, wiping at your eyes. You force smile for her from, beneath your mask of tears, trying, desperately, to maintain some illusion of strength. "I wouldn't be much of a senpai if I took the news worse than my kohai, would I?"

If you had not coincidentally dropped your gaze to her hands, instead of her piercing eyes, you would not have noticed how her pale hands tightened around her teacup, gripping the clay with such force that you are afraid it will be crushed to powder. You glance up. Hardly a flicker of emotion stirs in her violet eyes.

"Akemi-san…?" you venture.

"It's nothing," she says. She rises and fills your empty teacup, every move sharp, and you curl your fingers around the warmth gratefully. Akemi Homura keeps her house cold.

"You're different than you were yesterday, Akemi-san," you say. You hadn't wanted to be direct, but this is not the weak-hearted, nearsighted, slip of a girl that you had known up until yesterday.

"Am I."

You pull your hands a little bit closer to yourself, but some things need to be said. You meet her eyes worriedly and say, more strongly, "You're not the same person."

You expect fully to be eviscerated by a dark-eyed stare, but her eyes drift past you and away, floating somewhere in space, far beyond the sky. "Yesterday," she says, quietly, "was a very long time ago, Tomoe-san."

You would say something, but this is not your kohai; this is Akemi Homura, now, dark-haired and as pale as a ghost, and you can do nothing for this strange girl but watch as she grapples with her teacup, brief, intense flashes of contained pain and desperate anger flashing across her face before she forces it into stillness again, like smoothing ripples on a lake after a single drop disturbs it.

One of her hands rises to her face, her fingers parting around her eye. "My apologies," she says without explaining. She hefts the teapot. "More tea, Tomoe-san?"

This is what she has learned from you, then.

The thought catches you unaware and takes your breath away. She is not inscrutable. She is every bit as unable to hide her feelings as she ever was.

The mantle of veteran, you realize with dawning despair, suddenly suits her well.

Sakura Kyouko tries to destroy the city the next day. You would be worried, but your former kohai has attempted the apocalypse with some regularity, with abysmal success rates, to date.

But this is Mitakihara, not Kazamino, and rarely have you seen Sakura Kyouko fight Wraiths with angry tears pouring into her snarl.

The Wraith is large, and there are several, smaller ones scuttling around it, but any puella as fiercely independent as Sakura should have dealt with it deftly with a minimum of collateral. Instead, she has been cornered in an overgrown patch of empty space, an old parking garage and a row of sixty-year old condominiums flanking her on either side.

Your Soul Gem is already in your hand, but then there is a great explosion, and a cloud of billowing dust, and by the time it clears, Akemi Homura is standing next to a kneeling Sakura, her great wings billowing ravenlike behind her.

"If you wish to die so badly," Akemi says, her voice pitched to carry, "I am happy to oblige, Sakura Kyouko."

There is a pistol in her hand. She points it casually at the ruby gem, her face impassive.

Alarmed, you start forward, already summoning a golden ribbon that shrieks for this dark-haired angel's death, but long before you could intercede, a deafening explosion sends dust billowing up. Akemi Homura hefts her smoking pistol. Violet eyes stare intently at Sakura, lying spread-eagled on the ground with something between shock, anger, and muted disbelief on her face.

"You flinched," says Akemi simply. Then she walks away.

You take Sakura Kyouko to your house, while she is still too glassy-eyed to protest, and you slip her into the bath, and fill it with clean water and golden light, and you sit next to her as she floats, her magnificent read hair fanning out. You watch the ceiling, where the shadows dance as the water moves.

"That girl's messed up," Kyouko says after a long, long silence. She sits up in the bathtub, her hair clinging to her neck and her shoulder, wreathing her face with muted red. She brings her knees up to her chest and wraps both arms around her legs, looking more vulnerable than she ever has.

You think of the dark-haired girl with her eyes set in stone, and you remember the girl with braids from where this new girl had sprung. "What you were doing was dangerous," you chastise. "Whatever else she may have done, Akemi Homura may well have saved your life."

"I was fine," Kyouko says sullenly.

"You were not fine!" you suddenly shout. There is a sudden hysteria in your chest that belies your conscientiousness and overtakes your will. You stand bolt upright, fists clenched. "Kyouko, you were trying to kill yourself!"

She freezes, a deer caught in headlights, caramel skin gilded with bathwater, dripping, dripping, in the silence. The street rat you knew would have snapped something hostile, clenched her teeth - but Sakura just stares at you, frozen.

You burst into tears and hug her tightly to you, awkwardly, across the bathtub rim, pressing her soaking flash into your clothes, muffling the sound of the dripping, feeling the warmth of her, treasuring the sound of her beating heart, all else forgotten, but for this singularity in time, this moment of desperation.

Slowly, hesitantly, Sakura Kyouko embraces you back, wrapping her skinny arms around your back. "Oh, Mami," she says softly. "Oh, Mami. I'm sorry. I'm so, so, sorry."

You meet in your living room, once you have cried every tear you had, and once Sakura Kyouko has clothed herself once more in ratty, unassuming clothes. The sun is setting, and Mitakihara is bathed in shades of orange and pink.

You make tea carefully, as though every one of your limbs is made of glass, as though every spoon, countertop, and spoon that you touch will break if you press just a little bit too hard.

Akemi has brought cheese, and dark red apples, cut precisely, arranged with deliberate care on a white plate. She has placed this on your glass table, along with a box of jam cookies. You could have made better cookies, but you also did not want to, and something in the way she offers them to you says that Akemi knew both of these things, and saw no need to remark upon either.

Kyouko has brought pocky, of course, and little else, but you had already known what to expect. More importantly, she has brought with her a shadow of nonchalance and an appetite, and those are things that neither you nor Akemi can provide, and for the first time since you can remember Sakura Kyouko has also brought the quiet reverence of a soul that has found a modicum of peace in a war-torn world.

You pour tea, in a steady stream, never spilling a drop, and the three of you watch as the sun sets on Mitakihara City, and the skyline is gradually illuminated by a thousand streetlights and ten thousand stars. The Miasma is thin, tonight; all but invisible.

"The tea is good," says Akemi quietly.

"Arigatou," you say.

Wordlessly, Kyouko offers you the box of pocky, and the three of you sit together as the sky fades from pink to purple, as twilight fades to dusk, treasuring the silence.

It isn't heaven, it isn't paradise, but it is there, and it is beautiful, and for now, that's all you can do. And even if you are not quite happy, you are more at peace than you have ever been.