Homura stared, glassy-eyed, at the ceiling. She had long since thrown the covers off in feverish and exhausted frustration, and now lay atop the bed, allowing the brisk night time air to stream in alongside the moonlight from the window opposite her.
Slowly, she reached out and groped in the dark where she knew the nightstand should be. Hot skin met cold wood, and after a minute of blind searching, cool fabric.
The red ribbons were still there, as she remembered. It was real.
So surely then, what she saw earlier must also have been.
It had been the middle of the night when she returned from the hunt, and after bidding farewell to Mami and Kyouko, she was fully prepared to allow her exhaustion to finally overtake her insomnia. Just as sleep began to take her, a flash from beyond the window startled her.
A flash of pink.
Immediately, Homura was back on her feet, across the room and pulling open the window. But only the frigid stars greeted her.
And so she remained awake long past what she had first intended, reaching out every few minutes to reassure herself that the ribbons were still there.
Only when the orange light of sunrise began to wash the pink from her eyes did she finally succumb, ribbons still clutched in pale fingers.
Homura sat on the edge of the tub, staring at herself in the bathroom mirror. Sunken eyes merged into ashen skin and cracked, pursed lips, all framed by unkempt hair; a distressing sight.
She had once thought that mercifully, she would be able to simply coast through this new world. That had been true, but only fleetingly.
At first it had been enough to simply remember Madoka, but then, as the rest of the world steadfastly denied her, it dawned upon the amethyst-eyed puella magi how ultimately fallible memory was.
It became apparent to her first through what could have been mere coincidence; Junko no longer mentioned Tatsuya's imaginary friend. But before long, she couldn't remember such a thing even when prompted. Before, Mami spoke of a "goddess" who would take magical girls when their time came, now it was merely a "phenomenon".
Homura dragged her fingers through her hair in a vain attempt to tame it before preparing for bed. Her hands were already shaking with anticipation and nervousness; she didn't know whether she wished for or dreaded a repeat of the previous night's events.
The state they had left her in didn't go unnoticed by Mami, who asked if she needed a break from hunting while they waited through class. Even Kyouko asked if she was sick later that evening.
Apparently the three of them were already partners when Homura arrived.
And she did arrive, she forcefully reminded herself.
The worst day of her new life had been the one whereupon it occurred to her to ask about the past that she, Mami and Kyouko supposedly shared.
According to Mami, Homura had met them as a normal human, when they saved her from a pack of demons. They had become fast friends afterwards, and she felt no pressure to make a wish immediately, as another girl, Sayaka, threw away her soul for a miracle on the other end of the city and joined them. So instead, Homura had accompanied them hunting; ready to make the contract should an emergency arise.
And indeed, one did.
The resident puella magi group of Kazamino was wiped out, and before Kyuubey's newest contractees could reclaim the city, the unchecked demons began to pour over into Mitakihara. For the four of them, the night's hunt had been business as usual.
But then the demons kept coming.
They had hardly realized how dangerous the situation was until Sayaka stopped healing. Homura joined the battle, but it wasn't enough to save her the sapphire girl, only the city.
"You didn't explain beforehand, and you can't now, so we still don't understand why you did it," Mami had told the raven haired girl, "but you wished for 'a new beginning'."
Kyouko had added, "I dunno if this is what you really wanted when you said that, but you haven't been the same since then, so I guess you got your wish in one way or another."
Homura turned and walked back out into the foyer; the bitter memories of planning for Walpurgisnacht were preferable to those of the new world, if only because they remained firmly in the past where they belonged. Doubt in her own memory, even in her own sanity, gnawed at her. What if what she had seen last night was a figment of her imagination?
Intangible memories, images and lights weren't enough! She needed something real.
"Madoka!" she cried, gazing up at the swinging pendulum.
"Madoka, please!"
The ticking clock offered no answer, it only reflected the faint pink-
Homura went tearing through her home, towards her bedroom, where the faint, flickering pink pulsed from.
But then she was inside, with only the claustrophobic dark, and the frigid stars beyond the window to greet her. Just like the previous night, just like each piece of stability and evidence she had thought she had.
"Please Madoka, I need a sign! I just need something!"
She pulled the red ribbon from her hair.
"Anything!"
Again the world rejected the former magical girl's name, and offered nothing, no matter how many times the raven haired girl repeated it. Soon it stopped sounding like a name even to her, much to her growing distress.
This world was no home to her.
Madoka stared, glassy-eyed, at the ceiling. She had long since thrown the covers off in feverish and exhausted frustration, and now lay atop the bed, allowing the brisk night time air to stream in alongside the moonlight from the window beside her.
The moonlight only made her restlessness worse, and not for the brightness either. It was the fact that said light was borne of a bisected moon that unsettled her; for as long as she could remember, something had felt wrong about it. And she thought as surely as she now looked upon the moon, that the other perverse things she had been seeing were real.
It had happened many times before as it had earlier that night: she suddenly found herself unable to remember what she had just been thinking about or doing, with a flash of violet still burnt into her vision. Minutes had passed by as she stood stock still, stunned and confused, before eventually recovering enough to prepare for bed with shaking hands.
The unease, however, did not disappear, and only when the half moon was finally wiped from the heavens by the sun did she finally succumb to sleep.
Madoka sat on the edge of the tub, staring at herself in her hand-mirror. Sunken eyes merged into ashen skin and cracked, pursed lips, all framed by unkempt hair; a distressing sight.
She had slept fitfully the previous night, and hadn't properly for several before that.
Something-
No, many things were wrong, yet she could hardly find even one. Or when she did, it seemed she was alone.
"Celestial bodies are naturally drawn into spherical and spheroid shapes due to their own gravity compressing them equally from all directions," her teacher, Ms. Saotome, had said to the class earlier that week.
When Madoka had inquired as to why the moon was a hemisphere, she was simply met with, "Don't be ridiculous, everyone knows that's just the way it always has been."
Had it been a day or two earlier, Sayaka might have supported her, but now her friend seemed ignorant to the outlandish sight. Actually, the sapphire-eyed girl had been behaving oddly since Madoka had first returned to Japan. Their reunion had been surprisingly subdued, with Sayaka remarking that it was as though she "never left at all"; a sentiment she surprisingly found herself sharing. Paradoxically, however, Sayaka seemed nearly on the verge of bursting into tears of joy whenever she greeted Hitomi or Kyousuke.
Madoka stood and placed the mirror atop the sink before walking out into the hall.
All these happenings seemed to coincide with her return to Japan.
What had the moon looked like over America? She couldn't call an image to mind; she only remembered that nothing about it ever struck her then.
A noise came from her room, freezing her blood in her veins. The sound of the floor creaking echoed through the house, and faint, distorted laughter pierced the near-silence.
As much as she was frightened, a large part of her strongly desired to add to her portfolio of unnatural events in hopes of finding something approaching answers. So she crept to the threshold, hardly daring to breathe.
Inside was a thing that shouldn't have been. It was a terrifying caricature of a human, or a model by a being who had never actually seen one. Porcelain skin sported a too-wide grin with far too many teeth. The movement of its slow dance through the moonlight was convulsive and uncanny.
Then it whirled to stare at her with solid azure eyes.
Madoka stared back.
Should she be running by now? Shouldn't she be screaming? She was surprised, but she couldn't figure out why it didn't scare her as it should have.
Then it dawned on her: she was well acquainted with familiars.
She knew what familiars were! And that-
But then the floor creaked again, this time behind her.
A familiar voice whispered in her ear, "My apologies; it's hard keeping them out of trouble. You shouldn't have seen this."
Madoka was still blinking the last vestiges of violet from her eyes as she lay in bed.
It, whatever it was, had happened again.
Unable to sleep, she found herself contemplating the wrongness of the moon.
This world was no home to her.