A/N: You can only input two crossover categories on Fanfiction dot net, but this is actually a four-way, including the webcomic Gunnerkrigg Court and the anime Soul Eater. However, it's meant to be enjoyable without knowing any of the source works~
You could see it as five threads being pulled on knitting needles toward each other. Or maybe four threads, since Mami's and Kyoko's are coming from basically the same place. The threads, as threads often do, represent lives. Five lives from disparate worlds, pulled together in a single scene. There isn't a need for explanation or justification, because the scene isn't big enough. It will fill itself in. This is a tiny flash of time in which the threads can connect. This is the point where the knitting needles touch.
It's something commonly known as a crossover.
Red and yellow light flickered and danced on the stone walls and mixed in interesting ways. The two magical girls were holding out the small glass domes that were their soul gems, and the light of their soul gems was showing them where to go. Up dirty, unused stairs and through rotting, wooden doorways they stepped silently, and the gems brightened, until they finally stepped out onto a balcony and the gems' light was overshadowed by the sun's.
Kyoko covered her eyes. "Aagh... This one is light-themed, isn't it. And we're already in its labyrinth. That must be it."
"We're not in the labyrinth," said Mami.
The gems were still pointing outward, as far as she could tell in the glare; outward across the gap toward the next building over, which featured a covered walkway, on which she thought she saw...
"Look over there," she said, pointing. "Is that a person?"
What with the darkness of the walkway and the lightness of everywhere else, it was pretty much a silhouette against a larger, slightly lighter silhouette, but it seemed to be moving, just a little.
"Whatever it is," said Kyoko, "the soul gems are pointing right at it." Experimentally, she waved her gem back and forth through the air, and it did indeed become slightly lighter when it was held closer to the edge of the balcony and the other building. She drew her weapon -
- and the silhouette drew its weapon too.
"Some kind of witch trick?" Kyoko clenched her teeth.
"Maybe we are in the witch's labyrinth already," Mami mused. She stepped into a combat stance, positioned at Kyoko's right, a rifled musket shimmering into being in her hands. Kyoko pointed her spear threateningly, and the silhouette seemed to match her movements. Mami squinted, trying to see through the illusion. She looked at Kyoko shifting her spear from side to side, and their adversary on the other side doing the same, as if it were a mirror. And a funny thought came to her - because, Mami was on the right and there was a large pillar blocking their view directly on the silhouette's right side, so it was plausible that -
"Kyoko, I think that's your shadow."
Kyoko looked at her. She dropped her arm to the side, and the silhouette did the same. Then the ridiculousness of the situation made itself known and they they both started laughing, weapons disappearing into the ether and the tension of danger evaporating, just before Kyoko's shadow crouched and leaped from the walkway toward them, twin swords blazing blue in the sunlight.
The blades hit Kyoko's spear tip with the scream of grinding metal, and the silhouette landed on the balcony in front of them. Its purple sheet of hair flapped behind it. With a mighty shove of spear against swords, Kyoko knocked it - her - stumbling back toward the edge, where it met with the end of several muskets Mami had called into existence.
"Woah, okay, never mind!" the former silhouette called out, leaning her swords against the stone edge of the balcony to place her hands above her head. "Didn't mean to fight, I thought you were ghosts!"
When the magical girls didn't move, she managed to add "sorry," which seemed to come from a place deep in her throat that was hard to reach.
"Who are you?" said Mami, lowering all the guns in unison, but slowly and suspiciously.
"Stocking Anarchy," the swordswoman said, contrite and a little embarrassed. Even seeing her in good light, it was hard to judge her age - her body could have been as young as them, but her movements seemed older. As she picked her swords back up they became long black-and-purple striped socks - stockings, rather - which she slipped onto her bare feet, utterly casual. "I could just see your silhouettes, because of the glare," she explained, "and I was sent to find a ghost here, so…"
"Perfectly understandable," said Kyoko, failing utterly to hide a grin. "My friend Mami here falls for that trick every time."
"'K, well, I'm off to find the actual ghost," Stocking said, climbing onto the low stone wall to jump back across the gap. As she landed on the opposite side, Mami called from behind her: "We'll come with you! My soul gem is pointing the same way." And so the magical girls landed behind her, and they continued down the walkway as a trio.
Soul gem light painted the wood beams in front of Stocking, giving her a stretched-out shadow. Stocking herself was only going this way because she'd already come from the other direction, and the ghost had to be around here somewhere. Someway or another she'd ended up taking the lead, which was an odd feeling since she was usually one of an equal pair - like Mami and Kyoko were, actually. But her sister wasn't here this time...
"You said you were sent here," said Mami, trawling for information or possibly just making conversation. "By whom were you sent? Maybe we know it."
"Well, by God, by way of these really cryptic hints," said Stocking, as they walked past an overgrown planter whose vines were creeping up the walls.
"…you believe in God?" asked Kyoko, her tone a little sharp, like a speartip. With them walking behind her, Stocking couldn't see Kyoko's expression.
"Eh, not like capital-letter 'Believe'," Stocking said. "I mean, I just kinda know he's there. I'm an angel myself. It's not a matter of faith. If there's anything I really believe in, it's sweets."
"Wait, really?" Kyoko jogged up beside her. "You're a foodie?"
"Now you've done it," Mami said in mock-warning.
"Hey, can it, blondie!" Kyoko grinned back at her. "I'm still sore that you got to appear in Kazumi Magica and I didn't!" She turned back to Stocking. "Okay if you're into sweets do you know that one shop with the chocolate-covered-cherry-covered-chocolate things, that was -"
"- destroyed right after opening?"
"YEAH!"
"Yeah..." Stocking sighed, a gloom cast over her face.
"Yeah, well, it's back!"
"What?"
"Yeah!"
"Oh man! Where?"
"I don't know yet but oh man!"
The two were all but vibrating in place, feeding off one another's excitement. Stocking almost dropped the purple stuffed cat she was carrying, but caught it at the last minute.
"Oh, hello. Who are you?" said Mami, which confused everyone until they noticed there was someone else present.
A redhead in a school uniform was sitting on the railing just ahead of them (Stocking noticed she also had a stuffed animal - in this case a white wolf). "My name is Antimony Carver, or Annie." The girl waved and gave a slightly awkward smile. She hopped down and fell into step beside Mami. "The three of you look like a hunting party," she said. "Am I right?"
"Uh, yeah, in a way," Kyoko replied as they continued walking.
"How did you know?" asked Mami. "Are you hunting here too?"
"Ghosts?" asked Stocking.
"Witches?" asked Mami.
"Some other third thing?" asked Kyoko, half joking and half curious.
"No," said Antimony. "But do you mind if I walk with you anyway?" And Mami would have said no, this will get dangerous, but she could sense the magic on Antimony, just as she could on Stocking; she may not have exactly been a magical girl, but she was something special and powerful, so Mami said, "alright," and then they were four.
"Hey, Stocking," said Antimony, as they passed by an area of broken windows and crumbling wall on the adjacent building.
Stocking paused her animated dialogue with Kyoko. "Yeah?"
"I noticed you have a magic stuffed animal, just like me."
"Oh, no," Stocking said, glancing at her purple cat. "Honekoneko isn't magic."
"It isn't? I thought..." Antimony frowned. "Well, in any case, Reynardine is."
Stocking heard a creaking of the wood floorboards, and turned to find that Antimony's wolf had become a full-sized actual wolf, loping along behind them with an alchemical symbol on its forehead.
"Hey," said Reynardine.
"Hey," said Stocking.
"You named it bone cat?" smirked Kyoko, translating the nonmagical cat's name from Japanese. "That's weird."
"You're weird," shot Stocking.
"Simmer down, girls, you're both weird," said Annie, stepping in between them.
"Nice," Mami said.
"Thank you," said Antimony. "I'm training to be a medium. Which is a lot like a mediator, sometimes."
The three girls in the front now filled just about the entire walkway, so that Stocking and Kyoko would have to suck in their gut or lean to the side to get past the occasional empty bookshelf or planter. Mami continued behind, but a bit to the left, to avoid the large drop on the right. Her soul gem was still pointing straight ahead, past Stocking. Thar be witches.
"Anyway, her official English name is 'Hollow Kitty'," said Stocking, a bit suddenly.
"That's clever," said Antimony.
Kyoko dropped back beside Mami. It was pretty dark on the walkway, and her dark red outfit looked like blood. She wondered if this Antimony really knew what she was getting into, going after witches. In short, maybe she shouldn't be here. But like Mami, she could tell the girl was special...
"I think you said you were going after ghosts?" Annie was saying to Stocking, up front.
"Yeah. Should be one somewhere around here. It's probably gonna jump out when we least expect." Stocking rolled her eyes. "Wish it would do that soon."
"I... know some ghosts," Annie said, choosing her words carefully. "But they're not something I'd want to hunt. I mean, they're friendly."
Stocking raised an eyebrow, but then her expression softened, due to some private memory. "Yeah. I get you. I mean, I know not all ghosts are bad."
"It's like, when you just hear stories, they seem terrifying," Annie continued.
"But when you meet that one, it's like... the word 'ghost' kinda... kinda starts to mean something different to you, you know?" And this was a side Stocking hadn't yet shown. Thoughtful, and almost... sweet.
"Yeah. I know what you mean," said Annie.
"Of course, most ghosts are still pretty terrible," said Stocking, getting the general tinge of scorn back into her voice.
"Oh, I'm sure," said Annie. "I mean, I don't know many, and I'd expect the personalities to be quite varied..."
"You could say that," said Stocking. "Varied, yeah. But almost all obnoxious."
"Floating around all white and transparent -"
" - all green and black -"
"I got pretty mad at this one ghost once. But I think I was unfair to him."
"Too bad you didn't bust him. It's a really cool visual effect when they explode."
Annie's footsteps were just slightly off-tempo with the white wolf Reynardine's behind her.
She turned to Stocking. "I... kinda think we're talking about two different things," she said.
"Maybe. I think we kinda are, and kinda aren't," said Stocking.
After that, they fell silent.
Until about a minute later, passing a door that was painted shut -
"There we go," whispered Stocking, stopping and whipping out an arm for Annie to almost bump into. Here eyes were fixed straight ahead, and the others squinted to see on what.
"The ghost," Stocking said. "That's the ghost."
A bloated, roundish shape hanging in the air. It was dark ahead, but this certainly wasn't another person. Light glinted off of its skin as it silently rounded the corner out of sight.
"Let's go!" Stocking screamed, and she took off running, her feet banging dangerously on the wooden boards at an almost cartoonish speed. The magical girls were close behind her, Annie riding Reynardine bringing up the rear. The wolf's claws dug furrows in the walkway as he skidded on the turn; in front, Kyoko had stalled her momentum by actually jumping and pushing off from one of the pillars lining the walkway's edge. As she performed the aerial feat seamlessly, Annie could detect a hint of red, a taste of flicker around her - her magic helping out. There was something special about her, too.
Stocking was gaining on the ghost, and Mami was running alongside her, close enough to notice what was beyond Stocking's quarry - something she had halfway expected all along. "Wait!" she said, just as Stocking leaped into the air, swords held high.
The woman who was running beyond the ghost turned her head - (and a high-speed camera could have captured and frozen on the single instant of terror) - and then she pivoted her whole body, pushed her hands out in front, and force.
Stocking bounced back and crashed onto the floor, while Mami skidded to a stop just before the force wall. The others could be heard halting their own progress with varying degrees of efficiency. (Annie's hair was a blown-about mess, and her face as white as a ghost.)
The new woman was holding up her translucent magic barrier and shivering in her silly hat. Behind her, Stocking's quarry floated up and into plain view - an oversize black tadpole staring balefully down at its attacker.
"Congrats, Stockin'," said Kyoko. "You did it again."
"Oops," Stocking picked herself up, blushing, but looking amused more than anything else. She held a symbolic hand over her mouth. "My mistake."
"Don't you dare hurt my friend," the woman croaked
"My mistake, my mistake," Stocking said dismissively, "I thought it was a ghost." She smiled and offered a hand to the force wall, to shake. "We cool?"
A few minutes later, they were once again traveling down the neverending walkway, their band now consisting of six people and two animals, if you counted Reynardine as both.
"I think it's fate you joined us," Kyoko was saying. "In fact, I think we're fated to continue down this walkway for eternity, picking up more and more girls with various magical attributes and animal companions."
The woman's name was Eruka Frog. She had short white hair, but she didn't look particularly old. There were black dots painted on the edges of her mouth, and her orange hat had a froggy-looking face.
"I hope not," Eruka replied. "I have to be somewhere."
"Where is that?" asked Antimony.
"Secret," Eruka said, bluntly.
Antimony wondered if, despite having joined them, she hadn't entirely forgiven them for chasing her down.
Eruka was at the front of the group, but kept glancing back; presumably to be on guard for another attack, Kyoko thought. Then she realized the glances were for some reason mostly toward her and Mami, and not Stocking. She shot a glance back, and Eruka jumped a little when she accidentally made eye contact.
"Sorry," Eruka said. "It's just -" squinting "- are your souls in a weird place?"
"That's a weird question," Antimony commented.
"No - yeah - they are, though." Kyoko touched the gem set over her chest; Mami indicated the one placed like a flower in her hair. At some point they had returned to their 'part of the outfit' locations, not currently in use for tracking.
"We're magical girls," Mami explained. "Souls extracted from our brains and into gems, in order to more efficiently use our bodies in combat."
"Wow, alright then." Curiosity sated, Eruka turned back to the fore.
"Surprised you could tell," Kyoko admitted. "What kind of magical thing are you, then?"
"I'm a witch," Eruka said nonchalantly.
What followed was the deepest silence Antimony had ever experienced - greater than the silence under the tree in the secret field with Kat, because that silence was peaceful, and this silence was charged with the unrealized potential for speech. In the few seconds it lasted, she glanced at Stocking first, standing beside her - she looked a little bit amused, and her slight smile said 'sh*t's about to go down with me safely out of range'. Then she glanced back at the magical girls. Mami looked simply perplexed, maybe about to ask a question, but something was happening with Kyoko. Emotions were fighting under the surface, something like anger, something like shock, something like disgust. When the silence broke, it was a greater relief than it should have been given the short span of time.
"Please don't call yourself that," Kyoko said through tight lips.
Eruka looked at her. "What - no, I mean like, literally that's what I am."
"If somebody told you that - you can't let them bring you that low. They're the ones who are messed up." Kyoko's manner had changed. She could almost have been patiently explaining a theory, but there was a hardness to her words, like you'd never be able to push them over.
"It's not a question of 'letting them'. I know I'm a witch." Eruka increased her pace, but Kyoko followed suit.
"You 'know' you're a monster?" she countered. "You 'know' you're a predatory, tangled mess of insanity? Look at yourself!"
"Lay off," said the witch.
"Look, Eruka, I get it. When someone important says it, it becomes your truth. But - but you have to take charge of your own truth. You have to make it fit reality by yourself!"
"Kyoko, stop it," said Eruka, turning to look her in the face. Her expression was that of someone smelling something they didn't want to. "I'm a witch and nothing is going to change that. If you're a - a 'magical girl', or whatever, which sounds like the same d*mn thing, then go have fun being better."
Kyoko stared at her in frustration. "I didn't... mean it like that? I'm not saying I'm better! That's literally the opposite of what I meant! Or, almost the opposite!"
Antimony's voice cut through the rising tempers like a brisk autumn breeze. "Okay, that's enough."
Which Mami thought was pretty brave of her. But then again, she had a wolf with her.
"I think that, as so often happens," Antimony continued, "you are merely arguing over definitions. Where Kyoko comes from, a witch is a big monstrous thing... basically an animal, maybe?"
"Yeah, pretty much," Kyoko said.
"They hatch from these little black 'Grief Seeds'," Mami supplied, indicating the size with a finger and thumb.
"And to Eruka," Antimony said, "a witch is a person; one with magical powers... but in many respects normal."
"Yeah," said Eruka, blushing.
"And maybe they ride broomsticks."
"Not so sure about that part," said Eruka.
There was a second silence. It was broken by Kyoko's "Oh." She kind of knew how Stocking felt, now. She glanced back at Eruka. "Why didn't you tell me I was describing something else?"
Eruka was looking fixedly in the other direction.
Of course, the thing left unexplained is why Kyoko has such a strong reaction to the word "witch". This crossover has no intention to keep you in the dark, so let's take a small detour away from the meeting of threads, and follow the bright red one - Kyoko's, naturally - back and back, to before she even met Mami, but after she became a magical girl.
As a magical girl, she fought witches. Her work was meaningful, and she'd also saved her father from despair, but only for a while. There was a grave misunderstanding, and her father called her a witch. That moment, that insult, was pressed deep into her mind by the events that followed, in which everything around her broke down and fell apart. And it became a strand in her thread, coiling forever forwards with the others.
So, two magical girls, an angel, a medium, a wolf, a witch, and a giant tadpole walk into a bar...
"This whole hunt," Kyoko said aloud, "is starting to feel like a joke. Are we even going the right way?" She was at the front of the group now, impatient. She pulled out her soul gem and moved it back and forth. Then she stopped walking. "Oh," she said. "As a matter of fact, we're not."
The gem was dimmer when she held it forward, brighter when she held it back.
"What?" Mami brought her own out. The whole group had stopped now.
Stocking rolled her eyes. "Walking behind me this whole time, I hope you didn't think I was leading."
"No..." Mami muttered, testing with her yellow gem. "Um, my gem still points forward. The way we're going."
"Well, mine's pointing backward," said Kyoko. "It's almost as if..."
As if on cue, both magical girls' eyes slid to point at Eruka. She glanced between them, confused... and then tensed defensively, as she figured it out too.
"Don't worry," said Mami. "We're not about to decide that you're our kind of witch. But, maybe you gave the gems a false positive."
Kyoko melodramatically leaned rested her cheek on her palm and sighed. "Aw maaaaan. I guess our part of the story's done. Oh well, I got too much screen time anyway... bye, everyone, we're off to find an actual witch."
She tromped back down the way they'd come. "Sorry," she murmured, bumping into Stocking's arm as she squeezed between her and a bookcase. The cat plushie, Honekoneko, was knocked from Stocking's arm and onto the ground. Stuck in its back was a little black Grief Seed.
The soul gems just had time to blaze up bright before it hatched -
Then the world simply melted away and they were cast into a maelstrom, with the echoing sound of hissing and colorful graffiti-esque arrows and shapes whipping around then in a frenzy. Up and down were gone and they were flying, but with no reference points to understand from where or to where they were going. The sheer illogicality of the situation was painful to look at and Eruka squeezed her eyes shut, wanting to scream - where was she?
"It's like Zimmy's thing!" Annie's voice. Nobody knew what she meant, or where she was. They were in a spaceless space, and now the arrows were spinning closer to them, and when they touched they shredded skin. Cuts were appearing on Eruka's arms and legs and -
a monster
a predatory, tangled mess of insanity...
That's where she was. Of course. A witch's labyrinth. It made a lot of sense now, that Kyoko hadn't been talking about her witches. Except she couldn't say that to herself, not really.
It had hit her back there in the passage like an injection to the heart, like an infusion of darkness that spread through her veins; it was in her veins, because she couldn't get rid of it now that she knew it. She knew exactly what Kyoko meant, and that she hadn't missed the point, and that she, Eruka, understood this 'other' kind of witch better than she maybe understood anything, because she was reminded of it every day of her life.
And that was when her feet hit ground. She opened her eyes, and she was standing on another arrow, larger, stationary. This world was taking form, and she didn't like what it was forming - black snakes like living tattoos, some small and some enormous, slithering toward like they smelled her blood - but she was filled with anger now, something white-hot and not unfamiliar, and she hoped the snakes would come at her so she could lash out at them.
Somewhere else in the labyrinth, Mami and Kyoko were fighting, and so was Stocking (they had assured her that, as with ghosts, the defeat of a witch resulted in payment). Mami's muskets blared and Kyoko's spear stabbed and Stocking's swords sliced at the snakes, and their replacements, their reinforcements seemed to get larger and meaner for it. In their peripheral vision as they fought, the shape of the labyrinth began to emerge. It didn't exactly have Euclidean space, but it had a center and a floor, and lumps in the floor moving slowly toward that center, and these - if you followed the snake motif - could well have been victims swallowed by the witch, on their way to a central stomach. In that center was something that stretched high above them and out of their sight.
Annie wasn't fighting, but the white wolf Reynardine was prowling around her, batting off snakes that meant to attack her and ripping them apart in his teeth. Annie seemed to be in a trance, and in truth she was doing what she could, as a medium. She was finishing what she'd started and making sure it all turned out as elegantly as possible.
More specifically, she was pulling at a bright yellow thread that normally lay just next to Stocking's. She was bringing it close, not connecting it to the moment but holding it nearby to the intersection, just enough to make sure things went the right way -
And in front of Eruka, a staircase rose to the heavens.
Her hands were slick with the ink from tattoo-snakes, and a brigade of tadpoles hovered by her, magically summoned to help. As she mounted the staircase she hardly thought about why she needed to, and as she did so it was almost as if another girl mounted it with her. Another girl from another thread, not really here, but visible as an echo, an apparition, a ghost.
"Frog girl!" Kyoko yelled from somewhere else. "Get up the stairs! Destroy the top part - we've got the bottom! Kill it and we can get out of here!"
Eruka and the ghostly girl climbed together, matching each other's motions, synchronized, and as the other girl opened her mouth to speak, Eruka did so too, because it seemed utterly right.
"Kyoko, you've got that wrong," she said. "I am a witch. Or maybe not even that, because I couldn't stand up to other witches. But that's why I can't let myself be weighed down by -" and she felt an inexplicable urge to swear, despite the PG rating of the story "- by f*ckin' regrets."
She could just barely see something past the top of the stairs. Something scaly.
"A witch is powerful," she said, "and she plays by her own rules, and makes her own rules, because the regular rules don't accommodate her." She was breathing hard, and the next line she shouted, at the abomination that the others - that everyone - thought was what a witch looked like. "I am a witch! I don't give a f*ck about snakes or arrows. I'll crush anyone who tries to control me!"
And there it was, rising above the battle, and she rising to meet it. Like a snake, but - so not like a snake. So much more. Mouths moving in more than three dimensions. Red inside-mouth flesh on places it shouldn't have been. A creature, but completely wrong, a science experiment, a synthetic thing that couldn't survive outside of carefully maintained conditions. "Get it into your creepy reptile brain!" she shouted, "I'm the frog witch, Eruka! And I do what the h*ll I want!"
And that last time she said 'witch', it sounded just a little bit different than all the times before...
But she couldn't concentrate on that because she was casting a spell. "Frog frogs, frog frogs…" Nobody saw the spell but her. They were all down on the ground. It was a giant frog's tongue that launched out, not from her mouth from a kind of magical facsimile, and grabbed the snake-witch and pulled it in and crushed it into bits, and when it did that she was falling again, or flying, or something, but anyway the ground was gone until suddenly she was back in the creaky wood beams and shade of the real world, standing on solid walkway.
And it took her a minute to readjust to understanding the normal world, but when she did, she could hear Stocking going "hey, I thought it was supposed to drop money?" and she could see the magical girls demonstrating that their 'payment' was this now-dead Grief Seed which could be used to purify their soul gems, and Stocking flipping them off and leaving and then coming back to make a date with Kyoko to go to that new sweets shop and then leaving again.
Leaning on the walkway railing, Eruka caught her breath. She didn't notice Kyoko wanting to say something to her, but finally leaving with Mami without doing so. The 'witch' was defeated. Their part in the story was over.
"It's interesting how the same words are used for different things," said Antimony, who was sitting on the railing beside her.
Eruka didn't respond, or not yet.
Antimony glanced toward Stocking, who was walking quickly down the walkway away from them, already once more in search of her ghost. "Do you wanna catch up with her?" she asked. "Or is everyone splitting up now?"
Eruka watched the angel turn the corner.
"I don't think I actually need to go that direction," she said.
"I was thinking," Annie continued, "how some people might now be asking 'which kind is really a witch?' And how I'm glad I'm not that kind of person."
"That sounds a little stuck-up," said Eruka.