Homura Akemi has lived the same month so many times that counting has lost all meaning. She's known it by heart, right down to the weather each day will bring. Usually, that's independent of anything she does, but there have been exceptions. There have been exceptions to everything - to everything except the one inescapable fact that she's given her soul, everything she is, to change.
Madoka Kaname always contracts. Madoka Kaname always dies. And the world is always doomed and very, very bleak afterward, but it's never mattered before.
Then, it changes. Finally, Madoka is... something other than dead. She is still gone, but Homura's wish has... been rendered unnecessary. The following day comes.
It's a sunny afternoon and there's a red ribbon in her hair.
There is another night, another wraith, and this time no one dies.
It rains for the first time - after - and the air stays soft and gentle. It smells of flowers and sleep instead of fuel and smoke and whiffs of sulfur.
Everything about the world Homura has known is different. It is emptier, but that isn't the only change. She notices it first when she's alone, forcing herself to go over each detail she remembers with meticulous scrutiny - even those she's tried to forget. They have a new value, and it's all rooted right around her. Only she knows, only she remembers, and she has to keep it that way.
At first, she anticipates a jealousy to follow and fall into the long shadow of the single-minded determination that has eaten away at everything else that was left of her for so long. Years. It doesn't. Instead, simple loneliness starts to fill up the space. It's still a hollow, a sometimes aching, sometimes numb vacancy, but it's... warmer than jealousy. Quieter than bitterness.
She feels it, resting inside of her, spreading outward from her chest in a forgotten cavity warm and full of blood. It's not there - not really - and it's not really true in the most practical and technical of senses. Nevertheless, she feels it. Through all that has happened, Homura Akemi feels the faintest, most tenuous trace of a connection to her soul.
