They were children when they met. Both had incipient breasts and got excited over just about everything. Their acts of kindness and cruelty came spontaneously, like things outside of them.
One of them was still a child. Homura found her innocence monumental. Is this how the blind are? she wondered. Raising their heads with equanimity to the rain and the sunshine alike? Accepting the good along with the remainder, not because of strength or fortitude, not because of anything like that but instead because they cannot do otherwise?
Tragedy, for Homura, was a spiritual and material fear so great, suffered for so long, that she could now even endure it. Sometimes in the middle of the night she jackknifed upright on her bed with her spine calcified into rigidity, screaming and clawing at the empty air in front of her. At thirteen she had the mannerisms of a forty-five-year-old. She spoke quietly, without passion or inflection, and walked with one foot in front of the other, as though she always had somewhere to be. Sweat broke out on her face if you spoke to her unprompted, and she would have jumped at the slightest noise if she were not so disciplined. The tinnitus which she developed after a rocket-propelled-grenade misfired had become interminable, like feedback from a microphone. A thorough medical examination, had she sought one, would have yielded diagnoses of: post-traumatic stress disorder; minor depression; deterioration of her sensory and motor cortices (normally seen in patients who suffer seizures); and advanced cellular apoptosis in a specific part of the temporal lobe that humans use to perceive time.
Not that it would have meant anything to her. What she didn't get, what filled her with fear and rage was why, each time she redid it, tried to alter the script somehow, things got so much worse for Madoka. Her own body's pain was nothing to her; psychic stress she endured as well, enough for both their sakes. But these were nothing compared to the terrific deaths the other girl suffered.
It always ends like this.
Madoka turns around and smiles, a little apologetically at her. "I'm sorry, Homura-chan," she says. "I just couldn't bear to see you in so much pain."
Then she collapses. Screaming, she writhes in the water, arches her back and thrashes her hands. Her voice turns into a kind of maelstrom of pain too big for her, and that's how Homura knows she's about to change. There is a great violence in the sky, a kind of crackling and the smell of ozone, and Madoka, in a way that is both balletic and horrifying, is flung into the air, throws up her arms become eldritch shadows into the sky, her pink skirt turning into stygian velvet. The thing she's become was hill-sized at first. Now it's so big it seems to curve over Homura's head, the way skyscrapers do. Homura can't see past it, even after craning her neck. She has to rewind time more and more quickly. Otherwise, she finds herself being sucked into the witch's gravity, alongside uprooted trees, globules of water, the remnants of the lunch Madoka had packed for both of them.
Her goodbyes became wordless, telepathic, uttered in the moment after she pulls the lever in her aegis and before she wakes up in the hospital. –click– Madoka wait I'll Madoka next time Madoka—
Through some cosmic voodoo, the other girl is being hurt for all the needles Homura is sticking in her own body. Her flesh means nothing to the universe. Willing as she is to negate it and mortify it, it is an offering that goes untouched.
Her own body's deterioration vaguely interests her. Cats raise their hackles and hiss when she's nearby, and radios are filled with static. A few of the Sayakas invariably give her nicknames like magnet-chan, and each Mami seems to take the fact that her body is stranger even than theirs as an indication of her wickedness. Madoka never says a word about it; just smiles in that fatuous, astounding, self-effacing way of hers.
So it's not so much that she hasn't changed. She suffers in her own way, suffers in living, in bearing the knowledge of all their accumulated tragedies. Madoka suffers in death. Madoka suffers because she does not know why she suffers. Not because of strength, Homura knows, but because she does not know better. The monstrous unfairness of this situation makes hernauseous, makes her want to crawl out of her own flesh.
Now, when they tell her she's rude or callous or that she isn't listening, why won't she listen, she doesn't tell them it's the tinnitus, that she literally cannot hear them over the ringing in her ears, that thousands of detonations have rendered her almost deaf. She doesn't even laugh hysterically at the backwardness of it all, not anymore. (Not listening? she could say. Ha ha. Ha ha HA HA ha HA.)
She doesn't do those things. She tries, once more, to make herself be understood. Calmly, serenely almost, because she has learned that if she allows even the tiniest bit of emotion into her voice, it will be the first drop of a liquid whose sheer quantity will drown her.
If she is believed, so much the better. If she isn't, she deals with it. She will harden her heart, because they can't.
Past the ringing, she can hear a little girl's crying.
It's Madoka's, of course. "She's dead," Madoka is keening, holding Sayaka's corpse. "Oh my god, my god. You killed her."
"I did," Homura says. "It was the kind thing to do."
Kindness can get you into all sorts of trouble, she wants to say. But she wouldn't be able to without letting heat into her voice. They are after all, just children.