The hallway is painfully bright. She is led out of her room by the hand.
She would have stopped to squint, but the nurse is already pulling her forward, firmly. Her legs move feebly beneath her – she has been sitting in bed for far too long – but she is led steadily onward, towards the line of phones.
"You get one phone call, but then you have to go back to your room," the nurse tells her. She glances at her watch. "No more than five minutes. We can't have you collapsing in the hall."
She picks up the phone. Her wrist trembles with the strain of it. It sits in her hand, foreign.
Helplessly, she stares at it, then at the nurse, trepidation curling in her stomach, twisting upon itself, not unlike the tightly wound braids in her hair. The nurse smiles at her, encouragingly.
Belatedly, she realizes that she should respond, and manages a choked laugh as she fumbles with the piece of paper. One by one, she punches in the keys and holds the phone up to her ear.
Her hands are very pale.
One ring.
Two.
Three.
She swallows, darting a glance back at the nurse – but there is no help there, of course. Just a vague smile as the uniformed woman counts the seconds on her watch.
Four rings.
Someone picks up.
"Okaasan," she says, quietly, her eyes brimming with sudden tears.
"Homura-chan. Are you well?"
She wets dry lips, blinks back her tears, and tries, desperately, to swallow her nervousness. "Y-yes, Okaasan. They - they finished the surgery." She laughs, shakily. "I lived, Okaasan. I lived."
"Of course you did." The voice is vaguely amused. "The nurse should've delivered the transfer papers to you. You'll be starting school next week. You can't let this set you back, of course. If you fell behind a year now, you'd never catch up."
She blinks, rapidly, behind her thick glasses. "Okaasan -"
"Don't argue, Homura-chan. It might not be easy, but life never is. It's a good school. Make sure you do well on the end-of-year exams - they look at first-year grades, now, when you apply at the universities. You can't afford to mess it up. You understand, don't you?"
"Y-yes. But -"
"I might call you again this week, to see how you're adjusting, but I don't have long. If you have questions, the school can answer them. How are you feeling?"
"Lonely," she whispers, clutching at the phone like a lifeline.
Silence. Then, brusquely -
"You'll make friends, I'm sure."
There is a click, and the phone is dead.
She puts it down, numbly, and the nurse walks her back to her room.
The phone is not quite so heavy in her fingers this time, but she still trembles as she picks it up.
Not, of course, from anything as monotonous as a heart transplant.
Walpurgisnacht lays heavy on her mind, but even that is not what makes her tremble - because it is with the energy of the twisting passages of time that she trembles, adrenaline still singing through her veins -
It is with omnipotence that she trembles.
Or so she would have herself believe.
"Okaasan." Her voice is still disbelieving, wondrous.
"Homura-chan. Are you well?"
"Y-yes." Her tongue stumbles on itself. The conversation is familiar. Too familiar. Suddenly, she is helpless again, despite herself. "No. Maybe," she adds, suddenly uncertain.
"Well, figure it out by the time school starts. The nurse should have the transfer papers for you. You'll be starting school next week. You can't let this set you back, of course. If you fell behind a year now, you'd never catch up."
"Of course."
Transfer papers, of course, are the last thing on her mind.
"It's a good school. Make sure you do well on the end-of-year exams - they look at first-year grades, now, when you apply at the universities. You can't afford to mess it up. You understand, don't you?"
"Yes."
"I might give you a call later this week, to see how you're adjusting, but I don't have much time. If you have any questions, the school can answer them. How are you feeling?"
She pauses, and omnipotence washes over her again, leaving her giddy. "I think I need to get ready," she says slowly. "But I think I'll be all right."
"Good."
There is a click, and the line is dead.
Her hands are trembling again as she touches the aegis on her wrist. It is with excitement, and not weakness.
So she would have herself believe.
But still, she is smiling as she tries to think how Madoka will look when her friend comes running up to her, and the surprise on Mami-senpai's face when the little dark-haired girl is not weak but strong –
The last thing on her mind is the possibility of failure, and the very last thing she wants to be on her mind is the voice of her okaasan –
She is still young.
The third time is different, of course.
She does not wait for the nurse. She does not remember that she is to use the telephone.
There are weapons to amass, yes, and Puella Magi to greet, but most importantly there is the Incubator, and his clever, clever schemes –
And yes, she knows that she, as a Puella, is already damned, but that is irrelevant –
There are far more important things –
There is Miki Sayaka to save – it is too late to save Tomoe Mami, but perhaps Akemi can salvage her situation, at least – there is Kyouko Sakura, to beware and to befriend – and of course Madoka–
She heals her nearsightedness and blinks in the sudden brightness - but only for a moment.
Or so she would have herself believe.
The phone sits empty and forgotten, lining the wall with its fellows, reduced to mere decoration in an empty hall.
It does not ring.
Madoka.
When she next awakens in the windblown hospital room, she stops.
Breathes. Deeply.
This time.
This time for sure.
She tells herself the same thing, the next time she awakens.
And the next time, too.
When she wakes, the – eighth time? No, ninth – it is with the beginnings of despair.
Not because of failure, though. No, failure is easy, normal, to be expected.
She despairs because she knows that she has become numbed to the pain – that she can watch them die, all of them, and her heart no longer heaves in her chest.
Miki Sayaka died, soon after becoming a Puella Magi. Because she believed herself a hero, when she found the Grief Seed in the hospital by herself, she sent Madoka to get their senpai, and then walked in herself, head held high and sword drawn.
Akemi Homura did not stop her.
Tomoe Mami killed herself.
She put a musket in her mouth, closed her eyes, and pulled the trigger. It did not kill her, of course – her soul gem was unscathed – but the despair that washed about her apartment was malevolent and tangible, and it finished the job that the girl could not. Homura killed what remained of her golden-haired senpai, and she did not shed a single tear for her. Walpurgisnacht was coming, after all; there were more important things to worry about –
But she lets slip, during the first conversation Kyouko Sakura, that Tomoe Mami was dead by her hands, and – this is perhaps her sole regret – she was forced to kill the red-haired girl, lest she be slain herself.
But she regrets it only because alone, she cannot defeat Walpurgisnacht.
She is not a monster yet.
Akemi Homura breathes, deeply.
And again.
No.
She cried for Madoka.
She is not a monster yet.
She still, of course, does not pick up the phone.
Madoka.
That is the only thought that matters.
Or so she would have herself believe.
She comes very close to transforming, in the twelfth timeline. Madoka contracted, and she could not stop her – and she does her best to fight Walpurgisnacht, but her heart is not in it, and so the others die around her –
She wakes, dry-eyed.
She develops a morbid habit of shooting Kyuubey, sometime between the fifteenth and twentieth timeline. It does her no favors. During one timeline – the seventeenth, perhaps? – she stuffs the creature's cuddly form into the train and torpedoes him at Walpurgisnacht, and she laughs, for the first time since the third.
It does her no good, of course.
She begins to pick up the phone, again, sporadically, sometime around twenty-fifth timeline. Not out of any sense of filial piety, but simply because she decides that she must treasure the few connections to sanity that she has left.
"Okaasan," she says simply. Her voice is empty, emotionless.
Or so she would have herself believe.
"Homura-chan. Are you well?"
The tide of emotion that sweeps through her is unbidden. "Don't call me that," she snarls, surprising herself with her own venom. "Don't you ever call me that again!"
"Homura–"
She slams the phone down in the cradle with more force than was perhaps necessary, and the nurse gives a little squeak of alarm.
She does not care.
At least, that is what she would have herself believe.
Madoka
"You may call me Homura-chan," she says over her shoulder to the two girls. She is particularly magnanimous, this time, to include Miki Sayaka in this statement. The blue-eyed girl has been a thorn in her side for longer than she can remember, now.
"Kind of an odd name for someone so cold," Miki says, frowning.
Homura grits her teeth.
She does not pick up the phone on the thirtieth timeline, but after Oriko lays waste to the school in the thirty-first, she needs someone to get angry with.
"Okaasan," she says without pause, "you are a terrible mother."
"Homura-chan, you —"
"If I was still the child I was when I first came to this city, I would not have noticed. But I have long since realized that you are a terrible, terrible person." Her voice is formal, her tone flat. Her words are ice. "I have picked up this phone smiling, in tears, completely and utterly exhausted, pissed off beyond any means of mortal measure – and you have responded with the same words, time and time again."
"Homura-chan—"
"You do not have permission to address me by my first name. Or my last name. Or at all. I am going to hang up this phone in precisely forty-two seconds. You will cancel my tuition payments, of course, and try to disown me, but I don't care. I have made provisions to ensure your actions will not bother me again." She pauses, for a long, long moment.. "Just once, okaasan – would it have been so difficult to visit, even once?"
Silence. Deep silence - the sort of silence that descends on the city like a storm, muting the streets and the buildings with fog. It is darker than black, more powerful than a draught of despair, more spellbinding than Time.
"You know," she says, thirty-one seconds later, "more than once, I've considered finding you, just to put a bullet through your head."
Akemi Homura's eyes darken, and she runs a hand through her loose hair and tosses it backwards.
"You are not worth the time it would take to do it, okaasan."
She hangs up the phone, hands it to the flabbergasted nurse, and walks back to her room.
She does not cry.
Five timelines later, she calls her mother again.
"They're all dead, okaasan." Her voice is not vibrant, nor hopeful, nor anxious. "I tried, but they're dead. Dead dead dead dead. Very, very, very dead." She laughs, a little bit, and chokes back a sob. "Except, of course, they're all alive."
"… Homura-chan. Are you well?"
She draws breath to explain, and then hangs up.
The nurse is staring at her, with a strange mixture of curiosity and horror. She almost laughs.
Or so she would have herself believe.
But she has not laughed since…
...when?
It doesn't matter of course.
Madoka.
Nothing else matters.
"You," she says to the creature on the other end of the phone, in a rare fit of pique, "have as much emotion as an Incubator, and less intonation, besides."
"Homura-chan. Are you–"
She hangs up.
She does not need to hear anything else.
"Is something bothering you, Akemi Homura?" The creature hops up onto the arm of the couch and tilts its head, widening its wide red eyes.
It is almost second nature, now, to shoot the alien when it appears in her apartment, but instead Homura laughs and rubs a knuckle along its back. It rolls its back, mimicking the reaction of a cat, and she scoffs.
"Was something funny?"
"It was just a thought," she says.
"What?"
"You care enough to pretend."
"And that makes you laugh?" The Incubator shook itself, vigorously, as though ridding itself of the idea. "I don't get it at all."
"That makes two of us." She blinks hard, once, and moves on.
Madoka.
The shock does not fade, sometimes.
The air itself is surreal.
There is no taste of ash on her tongue, no burn of smoke in her lungs. It is deathly still, when moments before it had whipped around her in the frenzied gales of the screaming typhoon. There are no buildings crashing down into the flooded streets.
In the lull before the storm begins, she picks up the phone.
"Okaasan," she says. The sound of her voice in the silence is eerie.
"Homura-chan. Are you well?"
For a moment, she can only sit in disbelief.
Then -
She laughs.
She laughs until she cries.
She laughs until the nurse – who is looking at her, oddly – taps her wristwatch, guides the phone back into its cradle, and guides the half-mad girl back to hers.
"You have an interesting apartment," says Kaname Junko finally, one hand on her hip as she surveys it.
Homura looks around.
The parts from her very first Beretta lay disassembled on the table; the completed second, third, and fifth nine-millimeters are lined up precisely at its side. Thirteen pipe bombs, two with timers attached, are stacked by the window. The Remingtons were left out, also, and Miki Sayaka is snoring on the couch with one clutched in her left hand; Kaname Madoka snoozes beneath the pendulum, the scythe passing dangerously close to her pigtails. The German scripts and ancient pages are on full display, just in front; sketches from the last Walpurgisnacht descent are displayed overhead.
"I could have cleaned up first," she admits, and nudges the RPG-7 with a foot, suddenly self-conscious.
Kaname Junko nods, slowly. She leans forward, pulls the shotgun from Miki Sayaka, and ejects the shell, closes the rifle, thumbs the safety back into the 'on' position. Then she turns back to the silent dark-haired girl, standing in full Puella regalia by the door. There is concern in her eyes.
"Are you well, Homura-chan?"
Homura looks at her.
"No," Junko says, and sighs. One hand brushes brown hair off of her brow, easily, and she sets the shotgun down. "No, of course you're not." She breathes, deeply, in and out. "So," she says, and claps. "What can we do to help?"
She tries, harder than ever, to force Fate to do her bidding, but it is too late, Tomoe Mami is already dead, and somehow the C4 she rigged in the skyscraper south of Mitakihara is set off a day early, and half the city – including the hospital – is destroyed before Walpurgisnacht ever descends, and Kyosuke damn him dies, and Sayaka damn her too transforms, and with a cry of absolute fury she turns away -
"Fuck you." she says, her voice low and harsh, her eyes ablaze with grief and frustration.
The nurse gasps, and her mother says, coolly, "Homura-chan, are you –"
"Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you FUCK YOU!" She pulls out the Beretta and shoots the phone, fifteen times – the full clip – and screams, wordlessly, at the smoking, sparking wreck on the floor.
And then there is blessed silence, broken only by the bullet casings dropping to the ground and the small gasps from the nurse to her right, who could not quite seem to decide if she wanted to scream.
Humorlessly, she turns the empty gun on herself, places the muzzle by her temple, and pulls the trigger.
There is a click.
The line is dead, she knows.
The dark-haired girl hands the Beretta to the nurse and walks away.
Madoka.
Eighty-six? Eighty-seven? The girl can't even keep track.
It is more logical to avoid angering her mother, she has learned. She can make do on her own, of course; but it is a waste of Time to forge the signatures and steal the funds, so she simply remains cordial, if not quite polite.
"Hello." The girl waits three and one half seconds. "Fine." She pauses. "Yes. Yes." Mutely, she sighs and shifts, already impatient with the delay. "Of course."
She hangs up the phone, tosses her dark hair behind her, and walks towards the brightness.
Eighty-eight times.
Ninety-six times.
One hundred and four.
And suddenly, the world ends.
And suddenly, the world begins again.
She picked up the phone, much later.
One ring.
Two.
Three.
Her hands did not tremble.
Four.
The line buzzed to life.
She hesitated, for a long moment, before her lips firmed. "Hello," she said, simply.
"Homura-chan. Are you - "
"I'm well," she said.
"The nurse -"
"The nurse has already delivered the transfer papers, and I'll be starting next week. And make sure I study, because if I miss anything now, it'll set me back a whole year, at least, and I can't afford that."
Silence.
The other woman said, slowly, "I don't have much time, but I'll -"
"Okaasan," said Homura, suddenly. "Come visit me. I haven't seen you since… I haven't seen you for a very, very long time."
Silence.
Homura glanced out of the window. The sun was shining on the river, and the brightness called to her, promising cloudless skies and unblinking luminosity. The hospital was dull by comparison. "Call me, sometime," she said. "I'm going to go meet with a friend, now." She paused, and then added, "Goodbye, okaasan."
She hung up.
The red-haired girl sprawled at the base of the phones yawned, and, in one fluid catlike motion, stood. "That was kinda creepy," she said lazily, opening one eye. "How'd you know she was gonna call?"
Homura closed her eyes. "Perhaps I'll tell you one day."
"Oi, oi. You sound like you're looking for a fight." Kyoko smiles as she bites through the pocky, and cracks the silence in two.
Homura reached back, placed her hand in her dark hair, and flung it backwards, away from herself. It was a sad gesture. It was prideful gesture. It was a symbol.
A symbol of a different Time.
Her eyes will be bright when she opens them.