An Enhanced Perspective
Disclaimer: the following is a completely unauthorized little work of fanfiction. I don't own Madoka, I'm just... expecting the unexpected...
The mechanism projects me into a different world. From gathering small spices and interesting nuts according to the morning training of Royalty somewhere in a traditional Japanese backyard, I go into the house and am cast through into a bleak, oppressive high-rise apartment. There is a heavy sense of menace, and an old man shuffles about the narrow, decrepit room, not thinking. It's some kind of cruel, blood-stained dystopia and the landscape outside the window has some rough, unpleasant high-rise monoliths, a sky that hangs overhead like gray transparent gelatin, menacing with accumulations of despair, and not much else.
Receiving bad, terrible news - this is an Unstable Region of past time, whose maniacal dictator seems predestined to cause great danger to our present moment. Fortunately, my journey did not cause changes to further destabilize the situation. Time will change, however, and what I taste in the future is infinitely alarming. A great nuclear-looking war occurs as I zoom back into space. What is to be done? As I tell others, there is misbelief and yet more despair accumulating about it inside the inner circle. Some propose and execute self-annihilation, others turn inwards and disperse from endless rotation into a rain of small, malevolent droplets.
The hospital room is dirty and vandalized beyond any belief, a half-eaten moon peering in through one of the half-torn-away panel walls. On the soft bed are a multitude of my old household pets, from before the illness. One of the cats consents to ride on my shoulder for a brief while. The other lazes on the bed ignorantly, and there is also a small monkey I do not remember which runs up into my face, chittering excitedly. It is the reborn spirit of the malevolent dictator from before. For some reason, I countenance having him this close. Why do I trust him? Do I believe the advantage of this universe in shoving him into a macaque? Does he value keeping quiet and undercover to avoid my retaliation? ... at least for now, until his plans have matured?
I turn to the shield at the core of my being, propped up against a plywood partition. This, at least, is familiar.
There is something crucial that I am missing. No matter. I stop the rotation of the mechanism at the core of the shield, and, with the usual click-whirr, cast it - myself - carelessly at the wall like a discus, backwards through time to find out.
The unraveling of time is used to great effect in the architecture of the barrier. Where one corridor leads two weeks back, the other jumps a day forward. They loop and intertwine endlessly like the braid of a maiden, so that the two hunters crisscross the same three rooms over a span of months backwards and forwards without ever seeing one another. They are Mami, burdened with a spectator in Madoka and an overseer in Kyuubei; and Homura, who always hunts alone.
They finally meet in the grand cathedral-like space, emerging from different ends. There are innumerable and ornate wonders arrayed around the shadowy edges of the chamber, but they're not relevant given the most shocking feature of the room, the pictures among the windows.
Further up, in a heraldic display of some sort, is a shield and countless heavy assault weapons set into the wall. An inert doll, too small to make any details, spins slowly on a string beneath the ceiling, sometimes bowing its head in apology to the shield, sometimes turning away in scorn, but it only strikes the tasteful eye as yet more superfluous decoration.
Striking above all else are the grand pictures in silver frames, placed up high among the windows.
"Impossible," Homura states flatly, face condescending to show terrible amounts of disbelief. Her eyes wander upwards to the shield, and she frowns. Evident on her face are the few seconds of careful calculation before deciding whether or not to commit to utter despair.
"It's..." Madoka asks in wonder and a mounting sense of unexplainable horror... "pictures of me?"
Indeed, it is Madoka in the silver-framed images - right down to the school uniform; she has a dull, haunted expression, like an almost-saint who has been rendered catatonic through unimaginable tortures.
"Stay close!" Mami-sempai reassures the real Madoka, whose knees are shaking now. "Those are just for scaring people with. If the witch means to go after you, I'll make sure that's the last decision it ever makes!"
Somehow Mami has gone dead serious, though, which in itself is not very reassuring.
She notes the sudden appearance of the interloper, the mysterious girl with the shield at the other end of the room, but it's just one of many things happening as the witch prepares to attack. The shadows flitting along the ground like a rustling curtain with a cat behind it. The sudden focusing of a shaft of light, refracting and searching the swirls of dust that dance out the tiled pattern in the middle of the room. And the familiars leaning down out of the pictures (an unpleasant surprise for Mami to have mistaken them for the decoration), piercingly so now with the diamond-hard sky of the windows reflecting in their eyes. But they're not looking down at Madoka.
They're looking at Homura.
One of the pictures (on the wall directly behind Mami and across from Homura) has a black frame and represents not a Madoka, but a Kyuubei, in a rough brown suit and with great brutal, unhewn human hands, of all things. It has the air of a chairman of some charitable institution, or some grand religious official presiding over solemn ritual proceedings.
If the little plush abomination on the floor next to Madoka had feelings, it would feel honoured to be represented so prominently.
I disperse through the city like a squirming amoeba, placing 'wanted' images of the missing part of my being. It's a great piece of negative space, and posting it on the wall feels somehow unnatural. As the sludge settles into various back corners of the school, I feel the ashen minty pallor of cigarette smoke and a sharp spike poking into the back of my consciousness, about to puncture it. Somehow twisting it over and over in my mind through three hundred sixty degrees makes it go away. There is a sense of relief, even as the gaping hole left by the spike in the school acts as a great wound and alarm, that draws together - blood? For clotting the school? Some kind of effervescent sludge?
There are three presences down in the punctured hole. One turns to the other and says something. The third is staring straight into me, it is - there's something terribly important in the room - but her gaze is distracting, she's... it's too ridiculous.
I can't bear to look at the wound anymore and stretch out my arm to pinch it shut. But it collapses inward. Well, then, as I fall down, the space beneath will collapse, and the three figures standing there might die.
Again, there's something important I am missing. The second figure? She is... then the third looks at me again. In midair, there's a strange moment of recognition. This is... myself? But myself is myself! It's a strange feeling, like being told that your arm is actually there, and is thinking for itself. In fact, it has come to undo you.
There is all kinds of chaos happening around me. The second figure is the missing part of myself. There is a multitude of frayed ribbons extending from my shield, bits and pieces hanging out, looping in on themselves, which are - their frayed condition makes me far, far more beautiful than I ever was, but it all means nothing, there she is - number two, the one I've been looking to make a part of myself, and it's far, far too late to do anything about it.
Number three is looping up through the ribbons, tearing them into smaller ribbons. Tearing herself apart on them, as well. An oddly symmetric pattern in time.
For some reason, I can't stop laughing at the situation.
Homura looks up thoughtfully at the images of the most important person in her small world, then recognizes her own shield up near the top.
"This is my future," she concludes. The implications are, for the moment, unclear.
She cannot bring herself to strike any of the familiars, nor to allow Mami to do so. Only one thing in the room to take her - feelings out on. She rushes suddenly at Kyuubei, just as Mami falls back from her attack on the familiars. Two seconds. Homura swerves sharply, ascending the wall, with no chance to use time magic. She understands intuitively that the witch perceives her much better when time is stopped. As the light from the windows turns out to be not only diamond-hard, but diamond-sharp, she cradles the stump of a newly missing hand, and reflects for a moment on her inner state.
Great despair counterweighted by absolute, all-encompassing denial. The true combination of feelings in that far-off dystopia Homura has been glimpsing more and more with each passing reset.
"I reject this future. It is impossible that I fail to protect Madoka."
Four seconds. Hanging in midair at the apex of her arc, between the suspended figure and the witch's shield. The little doll turns towards her accusingly and prepares to strike, as the grand Kyuubei in the black frame nods its head approvingly.
Four point five seconds.
As if to prove the impossibility of this whole situation, Homura takes the witch's shield out of the display, and slips her own off the end of her arm into the place of honour. The corrupted shield is then thrown, off into some unknown whorl of space time. It comes back from the opposite direction, and strikes itself, shattering, and the shrapnel flies, back into the path of the shield that was thrown, deflecting it from striking itself, an impossibility, and the previous action is undone, and the ring shrinks a little further with each time.
Three seconds. Two seconds. One second.
The false Madokas all smile at Homura and dissolve peaceably. But only one being in the room really has room to think, enough to appreciate what is happening.
The ring shrinks, further, further, down to a microsecond, and the shield vibrates endlessly in my hands until a part falls out somewhere inside and it's irredeemably broken. Then events proceed otherwise to satisfaction, without my own further involvement in anything. Well, what a pity.