Homura Akemi meets Madoka Kaname for the first time in the middle of a stuttered, almost-whispered greeting, while she's still a nervous and heart-disease riddled wreck of a human being.
It's not a meeting, per se, because Homura is just standing at the front of the class, introducing herself at the teacher's behest, and Madoka is practically all the way in the back of the room. But still, Homura finds herself meeting Madoka's eyes and she is somehow buoyed by the gentle encouragement she imagines that she sees in them.
She finishes her introduction, and sits down, and at break all the other girls cluster around her to ask her all the questions she doesn't know how to answer. What school did you come from, what clubs were you in, tell me about your hair?
Homura feels like she's drowning, even though she hasn't even opened her mouth to breathe.
"Ah, Miss Akemi?"
The voice is somehow nicer than the others, and Homura clings to it like a lifeline in a storm.
"I'm the nurse's aid for this class, Madoka Kaname." The voice says, and the girls surrounding Homura peel away to give Homura a line of sight to Madoka. "I've been asked to show you around our school. Is this a good time?"
It's not like there's ever going to be a better time. But, something seems wrong - didn't she already get a tour?
"I, uh…" Homura begins haltingly and a little afraid of her own voice. "Yes, that would be fine."
The girls who seemed so engulfing before flit away with their own sundry apologies as Madoka escorts Homura out of the room. Then Madoka turns and smiles.
"The nurse's office is down this way. I'll take you?"
"Uh, okay?" Homura responds, before shaking her head a little. "I mean, okay."
Madoka doesn't look patronizing or pitying for even a second, even though her words from earlier - about showing Homura around - are obviously just a thinly veiled excuse to get Homura down to the nurse for the medicine she needs without making a big deal out of Homura's pitiful condition.
Homura is bewildered but grateful, if nothing else. Not that she knows how to say it.
"Here, we're almost there." Madoka says. "By the way, I'm sorry about those other girls. They're just excited because we don't normally get new students here."
"Oh…" Homura says, trailing off. "It's not your fault, Miss Kaname… but thank you very much for that."
"Please, call me Madoka." Madoka says. "We're classmates now, right?"
"Isn't that too intimate?" Homura asks without thinking about it, before covering her mouth up and blushing.
"It's fine." Madoka says easily. "Is it okay if I call you Homura?"
Homura suddenly feels very much like she has no choice about how to answer.
"I… guess?" She mumbles, put on the spot. "I don't know why you'd want to call me that, though. It's kind of a weird name, isn't it?"
"Not at all!" Madoka says back, with a sunny smile. "I like it, you know - it's pretty cool to be named after flame."
"I don't know…" Homura says, a little embarrassed.
"Take my word for it." Madoka replies, halfway absorbed in thought. "I would know, I've done a lot of thinking about names."
Homura wants to ask what on earth Madoka is talking about, but the nurse's office looms before them and suddenly she has other concerns.
The second time Homura Akemi meets Madoka Kaname, she's neck-deep in the psychedelic and distorted dreamscape she later learns is called a labyrinth. The spawn of a so-called 'witch.'
"Don't worry!" Madoka says brightly, and Homura has to re-evaluate everything she knows about Madoka on the spot. "You're safe now, Homura."
"What." Homura says flatly, too shocked to say anything more.
"I see you're confused." A new voice states, emanating from what looks like a stuffed animal sitting on Madoka's shoulder.
"What?" Homura asks again.
"You see," Madoka begins, "We're magical girls!"
And then Homura realizes that she has to re-evaluate everything she knows about everything , because apparently magical girls are real, alongside monsters and magic and talking animals.
"What!?"
Somehow, it's not as dramatic as she would have expected - the revelation that her beliefs about the state of the world are completely and utterly wrong.
Madoka still laughs at the gobsmacked expression on Homura's face. Homura doesn't feel insulted or belittled, though. Madoka is just too nice for that.
"Miss Kaname, do you really fight those things all the time?" Homura asks later, when the monsters - 'familiars' - are all gone and they're decompressing at Mami Tomoe's apartment.
"Not really." Madoka says bashfully. "I've only been doing this for a little while. Mami is the real veteran here."
"You're too kind." Mami says sweetly, like the sugar-laden tea Madoka is slugging down with surprising politeness. "You were doing great even without my help, you know."
Madoka shrugs, trying to push the spotlight away from her. "But it's true! I only contracted a week ago!"
Homura frowns. "Contracted?"
And then Mami explains the contract they made with the enigmatic Kyubey. Somehow, Homura feels more than a little bit put-off by the whole thing, but she lets it slide.
"What did you wish for, Miss Kaname?" Homura asks, before clamming up at her own presumption. Madoka clams up too, suddenly looking horribly ashamed and guilty from what little Homura can see.
Looking horribly vulnerable.
"I… don't really want to answer that question, if you don't mind." Madoka says quietly, more subdued than Homura has ever seen before.
"Of course, Miss Kaname!" Homura blurts out. "I didn't mean to assume-"
"It's fine!" Madoka says, waving Homura's apologies away. "It's not your fault for being curious."
Madoka never does answer Homura's question, though, and Homura always does wonder. Even Mami - who lost her entire family because she wished on impulse, and didn't try to save them - is more forthcoming about her contract with Kyubey.
But it's probably none of Homura's business anyways. That's what she tells herself.
Several timelines later, it becomes Homura's business.
"You can go back in time, right, Homura?" Madoka asks, as the ruins of Mitakihara crumble around them. Homura is barely able to nod, with the bone-deep weariness in her flesh.
"I will." Homura says resolutely, because she can't stand to see Madoka die like this and let it just… be that way forever. Can't let this horrible wrong go unfixed.
"Thank you…" Madoka whispers, closing her eyes for a moment. "Please, save me from being stupid, from being tricked. Don't let Kyubey fool me again. It wasn't worth it."
"I will!" Homura replies with more fierceness than she expected to be able to summon up. "I swear I'll save you! I'll do whatever it takes!"
Madoka smiles even as she cries.
"Homura…" She whispers. "I'm so sorry… sorry for lying to you… sorry for being so weird and messed up…"
"You're not messed up!" Homura exclaims. "You're my best friend! I won't let anyone talk about you like that, not even you!"
Madoka's smile turns bitter, poisoned by her own dark thoughts.
"I'm so, so, sorry." Madoka says. "If I'm really your best friend, you deserve someone better than me."
She's barely able to finish her sentence before her soul gem crumbles into black, and Homura's shield begins spinning, dragging her back through time.
The third and final time that Homura Akemi meets Madoka Kaname, she's healed her eyes, healed her heart, and she holds one of Kyubey's many corpses in her hand.
She knows Madoka's home like the soul gem on the back of her hand. Which is why she's surprised to see that Madoka's room isn't Madoka's room. It's eerily similar, but wrong in just a few places - which sends chills up and down her spine. The colors are different - the wallpaper all in soft shades of yellow instead of pink - and the stuffed animals are all but gone.
Madoka herself isn't there. Instead, an unfamiliar boy with soft brown hair is sitting at the computer, doing homework and chewing furtively on a pencil.
Homura drops Kyubey's body, transforming out of her magical girl uniform to clean up the blood which covers her hands and sleeves. It's child's play to walk around the house, approaching the front door instead of the window of Madoka's room, and ring the doorbell.
Junko Kaname answers the door, just like she always does whenever Homura comes over to Madoka's house.
"Can I help you?" Junko asks, looking a little worried as she looks Homura up and down. Homura wastes no time.
"Yes. I'm looking for Madoka Kaname." Homura says, doing her best to look like the approachable girl she once was. Junko frowns.
"I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place." Junko says apologetically. "I'm sorry for the trouble, if it's kept you out so late at night."
Homura's heart would have stopped, if it were still capable of such fragile human failures.
"I don't understand." Homura asks weakly. "Madoka Kaname, your daughter? Aren't you Junko Kaname?"
Junko just shakes her head. "I am Junko Kaname, but you must be misinformed. I don't have any daughters."
"No, that can't be…" Homura says, taken sharply aback. "But… I've met her. It can't be…"
Junko suddenly looks at Homura with more than a bit of pity. Homura hates being pitied, but she doesn't let it show because she can't turn away this one familiar figure in a family which has somehow transfigured itself in-between the time loops.
"Do you have a place to stay for the night?" She asks, not unkindly. Homura waves that question off.
"I'll be fine, Miss Kaname." She says. "I'm just a bit confused, that's all, but I guess I must have gotten the wrong address. You really don't know a Madoka Kaname?"
"I don't." Junko confirms. Homura nods and turns away.
"I'm sorry for wasting your time."
A few moments later, Homura realizes her mistake. She hasn't met Madoka properly in this timeline, so obviously Junko was just reticent to tell a 'stranger' about her daughter.
Homura circles back around the house, back around to Madoka's room, and peers through the window. Madoka isn't back yet.
On the other hand, the brown-haired boy is still there, and he gets up at exactly the same moment that Homura walks up to the window. She steps on Kyubey's body as she does so, just out of spite, and in that moment she's distracted enough to stand still.
The brown-haired boy catches a glimpse of her as he gets up, and he pauses. Then he walks up to the window and cracks it open.
"Hello! He says, looking cheerful but a little bit drawn. "Haven't I seen you around school?"
His eyes are pink.
"Maybe." Homura says. "Sorry to bother you. I was just looking for Madoka."
The boy freezes on the spot. And then he folds into himself.
"Who told you about that?" He asks, sounding hurt and confused. "Are you stalking me? How do you even know!? I've never told anyone!"
Homura doesn't even know where stalking comes into things, but she is standing outside of his window, so it's an understandable suspicion.
"No?" Homura replies. "Know about what? I was just told that a Madoka Kaname lives here."
His face absolutely screws up.
And then he closes the window. And the shades.
Five minutes later, Madoka's father comes around the corner, looking livid. Homura is already gone in a flash of altered time.
The next time she meets Kyubey, who is still watching Madoka's home, Homura wraps her hands around it's little conniving throat, and just barely restrains herself from squeezing and hearing the snap she's grown to find quite cathartic.
"Where is Madoka Kaname?" She asks the deceptive creature. Kyubey would have cocked it's head if it wasn't in a death grip.
"No such person exists that I know of." It says plainly, in it's falsely sweet voice.
"Don't lie to me." Homura says. "I know you don't want to waste your bodies, you've made that clear before. So unless you want me to make a lot of waste, I suggest that you tell me where she is. The magical girl you want so desperately to contract with."
The truly scary thing about Kyubey is how easy it is to negotiate with him. The only thing he won't do is compromise on his mission of buying souls with wishes, but it's surprisingly effortless to squeeze him for information, if you bother with it.
"I am telling you." Kyubey begins. "There is no Madoka Kaname. The only one I'm trying to make a contract with is Makoto Kaname. Did you get his name wrong?"
It's then that Homura realizes how much she doesn't know.
"You contract with males?" She asks in her monotone.
"Not normally." Kyubey replies. "We can easily form contracts with any being that possesses a soul, but we find it more conducive to our goals to awaken magical powers within adolescent human females. However, there exists a not-insignificant significant population of deviant males who are willing to convert themselves into females via the wishes we grant for them."
Homura feels a stirring of shock for the first time in a long time, and Kyubey actually manages to squirm free of her grasp.
It looks more smug than ever.
"In actuality, this population of deviant males is almost easier to contract with than normal females." Kyubey says haughtily. Or it sounds haughty, at any rate - an affectation it puts on to sound like it has human emotion. "Their irrational desire to become female is extremely easy to exploit. If not for their rarity, we might contract with them and them alone-"
A serenade of bullets rips through Kyubey's body, turning it into so much cotton and gorey slush.
In her own pocket of stopped time, Homura screams.
She goes back in time immediately, because she has no fucking clue how to deal with this. No idea how to feel about the fact that her very best friend in all possible timelines is, indeed, just as weird as he (she?) claimed.
Several timelines go by just in a haze of research, in libraries, online, in books, and more. At first, Homura listens to what they have to say, and decides that Madoka must just be crazy and deluded.
Then she realizes that she's being fucking stupid, and obviously the libraries and books and websites are the crazy and deluded ones. Transgender people can't be crazy, because that would mean Madoka is crazy, and she obviously isn't.
In this world of magic, and souls, it's not like a boy who is really a girl is so impossible. And even if there was no magic, no soul or inner feminine essence to validate Madoka, Homura would still find it hard to deny her memories of the girl with the pink hair who had become her friend so long ago.
She can't think of Madoka as anything but a girl. Even if right now, she's a brown-haired moron who's going to try to sell her soul to Kyubey because she needs to quell her dysphoria.
The next time Homura arrives outside Madoka's house, she's much more prepared for what to say and do. Obviously, in the past, Madoka must have wished to become the girl Homura knew in the first timeline - although the exact details are a bit unclear.
On the other hand, Kyubey is in the room with Madoka, ready to clear things up on the double.
"I wish," Madoka says, referencing a sheet of paper she's covered with a dense scrawl of legalese, "That I had been born as a biological female, and that everyone would remember me as such-"
Homura shoots Kyubey in the head. Another one takes it's place before the terrified Madoka and begins eating the corpse splattered across the floor.
Homura shoots that one, too.
"This is going to be a long night." She mutters.
Eventually, a small mob of Kyubeys appears, too many for Homura to handle without wasting all of her magical power, and Madoka, in terror and confusion and desperation, manages to complete her wish.
Homura's shield begins spinning, dragging her back in time.
The problem is pretty obvious, as far as Homura is concerned. She effectively needs to save Madoka from herself.
She considers locking Madoka up in a basement, but that's not going to work. It's just so obviously capital-E Evil that it's going to be a last resort.
The next time loop, Homura makes an opportunity to talk to Madoka privately.
"Madoka Kaname," she asks, "do you treasure the life you currently live? And do you consider your family and your friends precious?"
Madoka doesn't even notice that she was called by the name 'Madoka,' she's so taken aback by the question.
"I… uh…" Madoka begins. "Oh, well, I uh... Of course I do. I mean I-I do. My family and my friends, I love them very much and yes they're very precious to me."
"Do you mean it?" Homura replies.
"Absolutely. I couldn't lie about that!" Madoka shoots back.
"Good. Because if that's the truth, then you wouldn't try changing the life you have or the person you are. Otherwise, you'd lose everything you love."
Madoka quirks an eyebrow.
"What."
"Don't change. Stay as you are, Madoka Kaname. Stay as you are forever."
Homura walks away as if the conversation never happened.
The next day, Madoka is pink-haired again, and no-one calls her 'Makoto' anymore. Homura grits her teeth and rewinds time again.
Homura tries locking Madoka in a basement - several times, in fact. It never goes as planned.
The next time loops, Homura spends all of her time researching the nitty-gritty of transitioning from male to female - every last detail. If her research involves holding a few doctors and transgender people hostage until they explain what they know, well, that's just collateral damage.
Her first attempt at giving Madoka an alternative aside from selling her soul doesn't go well. As it turns out, teenage transgender girls are understandably wary of strange girls who offer to give them stolen and unvetted estrogen pills.
Fortunately, Homura has the power of brute-force computing power - to try again and again and again across time until she arrives at a solution.
Finally, Homura stumbles across the solution by pure chance. She's sneaking through Madoka's home in the dead of night, about to wake up Madoka and try argument 13B for why she should transition the normal, non-magical way, when someone turns on the lights.
Junko Kaname takes one look at Homura and swings a frying pan at her head.
"HONEY! THERE'S A BURGLAR IN THE HOUSE!"
Homura gets blindsided, which really doesn't say good things for her future career as a magical girl, and Junko descends on her with the force of an angry god.
"No, I'm not a burglar!" Homura hisses. But it's not like she can just tell Junko why she's really there.
Or wait, maybe she can.
She rewinds time, again.
Freezing time makes it easy to appear in Madoka's kitchen, as if by teleporting.
Tomohisa Kaname looks at Homura from over his newspaper, and is surprisingly unfazed by the newcomer at the dinner table.
"Mister Kaname." Homura says. "Your 'son,' Makoto Kaname, is actually a transgender girl who would prefer to be called Madoka."
Madoka, across the room, drops her bowl of cereal. Along with her jaw. She doesn't deny Homura's words.
"Yeah, yeah, I know." Homura says to Madoka. "It's not nice to out you like this, but I'm no deontologist."
"What." Madoka murmurs.
"Okay." Tomohisa says dryly, as if he isn't confronting a teleporting interloper, and as if he isn't speaking over Madoka's confusion. "That's certainly important information, but I'd appreciate it if you got out of our house."
Homura leaves.
As it turns out, confronting the caring authority figures in Madoka's life with Madoka's situation is a harsh, if effective way of getting her the help she needs. Junko cries for hours that her 'darling daughter' didn't trust her with the truth of her gender, and begins putting red ribbons in Madoka's hair as a way to make herself (and Madoka) feel better. Tomohisa just shrugs and moves on with life like a fucking stoic, and buys a new security system to keep strangers like Homura out of the home. Tatsuya is too young to remember that there ever was a 'Makoto' to begin with.
A week later, Madoka comes out to her friends, Sayaka and Hitomi. Sayaka takes it with infinite grace and poise. Hitomi has an existential crisis, because she actually has a crush on Madoka and "GIRLS CAN'T LOVE GIRLS!"
In the end, Madoka doesn't contract with Kyubey until the end of that time loop, when she wishes to 'become a girl with the power to stop Walpurgisnacht.'
Homura wakes up in the hospital again, and sighs.
"Right." She says. "I have to help Madoka with her gender issues, and stop the witches, and stop Kyubey."
Oh well, she resolves, there's nothing to it. Anything for Madoka.