This time Madoka has taken to calling her cruel. She is saying this with typical girlish anger. At twelve, cruelty still astonishes her. Fists thrust behind her back, she chides with enough force to make some of the other students pause on their way to class. Homura pushes her against a locker. Each of her thumbs hooks into the girl's clavicles, she can smell Madoka's breath, an odor of raw milk. Children shouldn't go out at night, she says. Or speak to strangers. She has repeated this scene enough times that she knows exactly how to hold the smaller girl without bruising her skin.
When she is released, Madoka's lower lip is quivering, she's trying her best not to cry. You're so cruel, Akemi-chan, she says. If I'm a child, then so are you.
No, she says, I'm not.
Last time Madoka called her kind. It made no difference. Because you're kind, she said, a thin gruel of blood oozing from her mouth. Homura didn't know what to do. Just cradled her limp head. They lay in the shallow lake, water dimpling around their fingertips. I will save you, Homura whispered. She whispered it so many times she forgot she was doing it. After a while she was talking to herself. Then she got up and turned back time with her watch, howling so loud that when she woke in the hospital bed she was surprised no one had noticed.
Before that, she had tried to be aloof. But there was only so much you could do behind the scenes when you were just the one person. Something always goes wrong. Someone cracks before they ought to, or the cat gets to the girl at last, and the girl makes a pact, never looking at the shape the cat's shadow takes. Homura always has to intervene. Her intervention always comes too late.
Before that, Homura had tried to be honest with her. Honest with them all. Please, she had said, holding her hands, imploring her. Just listen to me before you do anything rashly.
They always did. Afterwards they looked at each other with those embarrassed smiles, as though she were a very small child. And each went into her own separate disaster.
When she was just a normal girl, they'd taught her about a woman named Cassandra who was cursed with visions of the future.
Why was it a curse? she'd asked, raising her hand.
Because, the teacher said. Because no one believed her.
Homura chewed on her braid for a second. But that doesn't seem so bad, sensei, she had said. She believed herself, right? So she could change things even if no one listened.
She wants to slap that little girl. She wants to throttle her. She wants to beg her to do things differently.