"Want one?"
Homura stared at the apple that Kyouko offered. "You cannot expect to earn anything from me with food."
"Really? Great," Kyouko said, before taking a loud, crunchy bite out of the apple. "Wouldn't want to waste this."
Homura shifted her blank gaze from the apple to Kyouko's face. It was, by now, a practiced move.
"Mami put me up to it. I mean, what the fuck do I care? Now that poor Mami-senpai's off to high school, things have been lonelier. So I hear. And I guess she's too shy to approach you directly, so she left it to me."
"And then why did you agree?"
"We're friends."
Homura nodded. "Oh."
"Fuck, haven't you known us for a year already? This isn't news, is it? We're friends."
Kyouko crossed her arms. As far as Homura was concerned, Kyouko could be as defensive as she wanted. She wouldn't press the issue. Maybe, once upon a time, she would have kept going, more to spite the girl than anything else. Maintaining a distance was easier when the feeling was mutual.
"Look," Kyouko said. "You wanna talk practical? We can do that. It's a pretty well-accepted fact that you, the most talented magical girl in Mitakihara, Japan, and probably the world, have a reputation of unreliability. You know this, right?"
Homura blinked. "I wasn't aware that I had a reputation at all."
It hurt a bit when Kyouko looked at her like she was stupid. Nobody had ever looked at her like that when she was aloof and mysterious. The most she ever got from Kyouko was this hungry, questioning gaze, which Homura eventually came to interpret as Kyouko evaluating her as some sort of curiosity, some valuable commodity. Kyouko's endgame had been for Homura to defeat Walpurgis Night, at which point Kyouko would kick her out of Mitakihara, which was Kyouko's by right/might. Then Kyouko would rule over her infinite expanse of corrupted emptiness, queen of a million tortured, demented souls who would feed off her, neither knowing nor caring about her.
So Homura had never cared about Kyouko's endgame.
"Of course you have a fucking reputation," Kyouko said. "You know the business that Mami's running?"
Homura shrugged. "I'm vaguely aware."
"Well, everybody knows the only reason she can basically donate grief cubes to the surrounding prefectures is because we can obtain them at very low risk. Except when you decide to vanish. Mami and I can't keep up."
With a huff, Kyouko turned away from Homura and sat down at the edge of the rooftop, dangling her legs over the edge. It was a rather overdone show of ambivalence, which only served to heighten Homura's guilt. Maybe that had been the purpose?
"I'm sorry."
"You should be."
Kyouko bit into the core of the apple, teeth cutting straight through the bitter interior of the fruit. "We're animals," she said, in between bites. "But we're social animals. Unless you're a psychopath. But you're not a psychopath, right?"
Homura shook her head.
"That's what I thought," Kyouko said. "Unless you're lying to me. But I don't think you're lying to me either. There's plenty of evidence besides your word to suggest that you're not heartless. And I'm not too sure how psychopathy would fuck with your magical girl potential."
Homura's ribbons fluttered in the breeze. "What's your point?"
Kyouko sighed. "You don't have any friends is the point. It won't hurt, will it? All Mami wants is somebody besides foul-mouthed, rude, arrogant me to interact with. Is that so much?"
"You know Mami doesn't really care about that."
"And she doesn't care that you're cold, infuriatingly silent, and almost as arrogant either."
Homura tilted her head. "You're still one of the worst diplomats I've ever met."
"I've got a 'cooperation through honesty' deal going on," Kyouko said. "In other words, I don't give a fuck."
"How pleasant."
"We're getting off track here," Kyouko said. "I always get off track when I talk to you. With other people, it's fine! I just lay out what I want them to do and what they can expect me to do. That whole civilized relationship thing, you know? But you? I have to delve through layers and layers of bullshit just to talk to you. And I don't even know what the bullshit's made of! For most people it's just insecurity, but for you? God fucking knows!"
"You're getting off track again."
"Thank you!" Kyouko shouted. The concrete under her fingers cracked as she tightened her grip. She wasn't idly dangling her legs anymore. If anything, she looked like she was resisting the urge to jump off and run away.
Finally, Kyouko stood up and turned around. "Mami complains about you all the time. I humor her, of course, but I never knew why. And now I do. Always the fifteen-words-or-less responses, like you're trying to offer yourself up as a sacrifice to the ice gods, this goddamn uncaring stare on your face all the time, like everyone you knew could just drop dead and you wouldn't give a fuck."
Homura flicked her hair over her shoulder and opened her mouth, but Kyouko kept going. "But the worst part is that I still want to be friends with you. It might be because I'm desperate and selfish."
Kyouko stood there, one figure against the night sky. From below, she and Homura were both invisible, tiny shadows absorbed by the darkness. But to Homura, Kyouko's figure dominated her field of vision. The light from the city below set the maroon red of Kyouko's clothing on fire, and for a moment she was fascinated.
She remembered that Madoka had always believed that Kyouko was a good person.
"Why?" Homura asked.
Kyouko shrugged. "Who knows?"
Maybe because you're lonely, Homura thought to herself.
"Wait, no, fuck that," Kyouko said, shaking her head. "I know. I don't need to spell it out, or talk about—talk about how much I regret some things. You know and I know that we're the same."
The silence was filled by the sound of cars gliding across slick black pavement. Tiny droplets of water appeared as if out of nowhere on Homura's arm, making dark spots across the white of her costume.
Maybe it was a sign?
Kyouko sighed. "I've spent too much of my fucking life wondering what it would be like if I could go back in time and fix everything. But I can't. And neither can you. There is one fate, and we've gotta suck it up."
It was beginning to rain in earnest now. Homura knew that if she were to look up, there would be no stars. She would see only the clouds, giant rolling hills, obscured by darkness, from which the river of the heavens poured. Homura was struck by an urge to strip naked and bathe in the waters, right in front of Kyouko, who might not even care. It didn't really matter whether or not Homura suppressed the urge, because she already felt stupid for entertaining it in the first place, and either way she wasn't actually going to strip naked. And really, that wasn't a great idea in front of Kyouko. Rain didn't make the black powder inside Kyouko's heart any less volatile, and neither did blood or tears. Homura had seen it.
"What is it that Tomoe-san wants from me?"
"Don't call her that to her face. I mean, are you even paying attention? Literally everyone calls her Mami-san."
"Answer the question, Kyouko."
Kyouko rolled her eyes. "She didn't want squat. She didn't even ask me to do this up-front. It was just hints and indirect requests and polite bullshit like that, and as you can tell—"
"You don't have the patience."
"Maybe you are paying attention. Anyway, even if she were to actually speak to me directly, I doubt that she had anything specific in mind."
Homura blinked. "So even if I were willing to entertain these attempts at 'bonding' and 'friendship,' nothing would be done."
"Wrong. We're having a picnic. Here, same time, tomorrow. By my decision. Bring something."
Wind whipped at Homura's hair, slapping her ribbons against her face. She toyed with them absent-mindedly as she moved them back into place. "There are probably more convenient places."
"We're mahou shoujo. Rooftops are our thing."
Their 'thing'? Homura turned her head from side to side and saw nobody but Kyouko, and when she looked down it was demon fodder clogging the streets from horizon to horizon. Maybe it was their 'thing,' maybe just as bits of their souls were embedded in lifeless rocks, other bits of their souls were part of the concrete and steel capping the city. They were above the lid, looking down on the mortals contained below, if only for a few hours before plunging back inside.
"Are you going to be there?" Kyouko asked.
Dozens of answers flitted through Homura's mind—"we'll see," "who knows," "that depends," "I might," but instead she just said, "Yes."
-x-
Kyouko showed up with boxes and boxes of snacks and junk food, tossing them onto the rooftop in a giant pile. There was reluctance in Kyouko's eyes as Homura took from the dragon's hoard to nibble on a bit of Pocky, but she didn't do anything beyond that.
Homura did not really do anything besides be a magical girl. Mami cooked and bought cakes and watched movies; Kyouko stole food and loitered and once Homura had seen her beating a yakuza member unconscious. For her part, Homura walked through school in a semi-hypnotic daze. When she went to her apartment, she mostly tracked the swinging of her pendulum before going out on patrol. So actually stepping outside and preparing for something was uncharted territory. She was Columbus walking through the automatic doors of a convenience store. The harsh white lighting and brightly colored packages were a brave new world. She had brought fruits and ice cream and some microwavable curry—whatever had looked tasty. She was no chef.
Mami's offering was an absurdity.
Shabu shabu, Homura thought. She was just staring at the pot of soup in front of them with a raised eyebrow. This is impressive.
Well, Kyouko answered, I'm too busy salivating to be impressed.
Mami fired a bolt of magic under the pot, lighting the fuel underneath the soup and setting it to boil. A few seconds later, a gust of wind blew out the fire. Mami frowned at the skies for confounding her plan to make delicious stew, but before she could re-light the fire Homura had already done it. The wind seemed to die down.
"Thank you, Akemi-san."
Half-formed words floundered on Homura's lips, but the struggle really went deeper than her tongue. Here she was Columbus all over again, but now she realized that the unknown was really something scarier than a convenience store. She looked up and saw an infinite expanse of the alien, she looked down and the lights dazzled and blinded her. What did it take to step into the jungle of the future? For a moment, more than anything else, Homura wished that she could see the stars. She wanted to be guided by their light—she knew that if she could see the stars, then everything would become clear.
"Hey, Homura," Kyouko said. "You know, Mami, you can call her Homura."
"I wouldn't want to be rude, but if it's all right…"
"Please," Homura said, trying her hardest not to fidget.
"Okay, then," Mami said, smiling.
They talked about mahou shoujo politics for a while. Kyouko had outsourced the Mitakihara hunting territory to some other Japanese magical girls for the night, to cover for them. They could do this, of course, because any magical girl would jump at the chance to gain some favor with the Mitakihara group.
But soon enough, they moved on from that, and talked about their wishes, and their hopes. They talked about the past, and Homura bit her lip and cast her gaze downwards. They talked about those who had walked before them, and Homura could feel eyes from the past boring into her skin. They spoke in hushed tones about names long gone, and when Homura looked up to see the same expression of regret on Kyouko and Mami's faces, she thought, Maybe they are the same.
-x-
The corpse of this year's April lay rotting at Homura's feet. She could see in its lifeless eyes the memories of that April and every other April before it and could watch as decay ate away at what once was. She sat, with a sense of mounting panic and impotency, as the chains binding her anchor to the sea bed rusted away.
It was an odd, frustrating feeling to wake up and remember something she had once known but had forgotten. Homura had very quickly come to despise all forms of magic that had to do with time or memories, and if nothing else, she had hoped that the new world would do away with that. She didn't know if this Homura was the same Homura that had been awake twenty-four hours ago; she wondered if the two Homuras could be different and yet the same, called by the same name, indistinguishable to most observers.
Madoka smiled. "It's been a long time."
Homura nodded slowly. She felt disoriented, and she knew that the vaguely-defined emotion within her was straining to be set loose. It yipped and howled, but Homura needed to regain her balance. "People have been asking about you," she said. She fidgeted with her fingers behind her back.
"Have they?" Madoka asked. Homura looked at Madoka strangely. She had given some thought to the matter, and she was reasonably certain that Madoka was omniscient, what with the "transcend time and space" babble the Incubator had spouted in the timeline when she had ascended.
"Yes," Homura said. "They ask me what death for a magical girl is like. I think that they believe that I must have some way of cheating it. I never asked to be a demigod, Madoka."
"Well, I hope you don't refer to me when you answer them."
Homura shook her head. "I don't," she said. "Madoka, how much are you doing this for my benefit?"
"This meaning what?"
"That," Homura said. "You know what I mean. Aren't you just pretending that you don't know? You already know about everything we're talking about. At this point, isn't it just going through the motions for you?"
Madoka shrugged. "I didn't know what this referred to, even though I did know that I would know."
"I have no idea what the difference between knowing and knowing that you will know is."
"That's good," Madoka said. "That is the human part of you speaking."
"Please try to explain," Homura said.
There was something challenging in the way Homura said that. If the human part of her was the part that did not know the difference, then Homura wondered if there were any other parts. She wanted and needed to know, to find any way to bridge the difference between god and human. Madoka was silent, almost reluctant in her contemplation. Homura just stared pleadingly ahead, until the silence became too much to bear.
"I'm sorry—"
"Knowing what I am going to experience, say, and feel is not, contrary to intuition, very limiting. I find it quite freeing. I know that the actions I take are not in spite of what I know. They are, ultimately, those actions that Kaname Madoka takes. We are all defined by ourselves. So, yes, I know exactly what is going to happen to me, but I also know that I do not and never will be very concerned by that ultimate fate. I'm sure that it would be different for a human being, but I am not—"
"—exactly a human being," Homura said.
"Something that we will both, in time, come to accept."
Homura looked into Madoka's eyes and was shocked and slightly horrified to find regret. Doubt began to dominate her thinking processes. There was something undeniably selfish in the way she had framed the situation, that she had been the one who had been nailed to a cross (contracted to an Incubator) for the despair of humanity. Somewhere along the line she had forgotten, or maybe she had never internalized, that Madoka had been the one to…
Well, what was death if not this? Or maybe they were empty in their own ways.
"How are Mami and Kyouko?" Madoka asked.
Homura glanced downwards. "I haven't spoken to them very much," she said. There was something almost embarrassing in the way she lied to an omniscient being.
"But you are speaking to them more."
Homura bit her lip. "Yes." Then, the curse was lifted and she could speak again.
"I'm not supposed to be friends with them," she said. "They had their business and I had mine. I was a periphery to them. I didn't matter. All Kyouko cared about was Sayaka. She barely had the time to recognize that you or I existed. And Mami? Mami never cared about me. You know that. They would only—they'd do nothing but get in my way. Make it harder for me to do the one thing that I cared about. None of them had any—any sense of how to control themselves. So what am I betraying if I consort with my enemies?"
Homura looked into Madoka's golden eyes. She could see herself, tinged yellow, inside them. "Who am I betraying?"
"Are they your enemy, Homura?"
"Yes—no, I don't know. I don't know anything. Why do all the conversations that we have devolve into therapy sessions?"
Madoka shrugged. "When we last met, I was in the state of mind of a prepubescent girl who didn't have enough self-preservation to see that many downsides in martyring myself. One of my best friends had just died, and the Incubator had revealed to me the awful truth about a universe that was large and a human race that was insignificant. I…well, I was at peace. I could do that much."
Somehow, these words hurt Homura. She didn't really want to admit them, maybe because the past glittered too much for her to really ascribe it any negative qualities. If she looked forwards and saw only tiny glimmers of hope, and looked back at the past she was tethered to and uncovered its grimy surface, then where was she to go? She could just let the chains do their job.
"Meanwhile, you were on the precipice of despair. You were having an existential crisis over your failure to save me. You left broken and confused. And I left a God, but I assure you, Homura, I doubt, and I am afraid. I am afraid that even though I am a God, it is not enough. I know that it is not enough.
Madoka sighed. "I don't think it's too unwarranted that we at least acknowledge these things."
People used the word "bandage" disparagingly when they made analogies concerning problem-solving, but right now, Homura didn't want anything more than to bandage the whole problem up. She wanted to close her eyes and turn away from the ugly, pus-filled, swollen gash on the side of her mind. She didn't want to gaze upon the diseased, infected surface of her psyche. She wanted to hide it and never look at it again.
Homura shook her head. "There isn't any point."
"What do you mean?"
"There's no meaning for me in this world. Sometimes I see tantalizing flashes, but one day everything that reminds me of you is going to fade away before me, and then what? I can't be saved."
"I made it my mission to save all magical girls," Madoka said, placing a hand on Homura's shoulder. "I'm certainly not going to abandon the one most important to me."
Homura bit her lip. Those words served as a reminder that she was bound to the woman in front of her, and that she would never truly be free. It was almost cruel, in a way, and Homura found herself conflicted between resentment and gratification, both of which she hated herself for.
"How will you save me?" Homura asked.
"If I tell you, it certainly defeats the purpose, doesn't it?"
There was nothing more appealing to Homura in that moment than for her to reach back into those deceitful halcyon days and then stop time. To be saved, she would have to spend the rest of eternity with Madoka. All else was shadow. She would spare Mami and Kyouko too, spare them from being made into replacements.
"I can't leave you," Homura whispered. "I can't go back there. Please, keep me with you. I promised that I would fight on for you, but why?"
"Would you betray Mami and Kyouko?"
Homura blinked. At first, she imagined that she could do that quite easily, but then something guilty and horrible began settling in her stomach. Slowly, she shook her head.
"Even if they're not me, you would fight for them. Isn't that good enough?"
"I can fight for many things," Homura said. She clenched her fists. "This means nothing."
"You want to deny that you could live for something other than me," Madoka said. "Because living for me is something so central to your being that you cannot imagine an Akemi Homura who lives without doing so."
Homura wanted to cry out, "You got to martyr yourself, not me," but there was something so fundamentally twisted and warped in that statement that the very fact that she thought about speaking those words frightened her.
Madoka bowed her head. "I'm sorry."
"No," Homura said. She at least had the resolve to do that. "Do you miss me?"
"Of course."
Homura smiled sadly. "So if both of us miss the other, I'm the only one desperate enough to constantly beg for you to come back."
"That's not true," Madoka said.
Homura looked up. Madoka had a very solemn look on her face, and Homura wondered what it meant when a God thought that something was worthy of that sort of expression.
"If I could, I would cheat Death itself," Madoka said. "When you die, I would use all of my power to save your soul not only from despair but from eternal nothingness, and you would walk with me for as long as I lived. If I could, you would be with me right now. If I could, I would break all the rules for you, to make up for the time I did it for everyone else. But, I cannot.
"I know that you suffer unjustly in this world because of what I've done, and that it's my responsibility to save you. But beyond responsibility, I loved you, Homura. And I still do."
"Then if you can't do anything, what hope is there for us?" Homura asked. A strange smile split her face. "You should know."
"What hope is there?" Madoka repeated. "Hope is just a word that people use to describe something complex and abstract. It can mean many different things given the context of the situation. Using most of those meanings, I'd say that we have no hope. But, perhaps…"
"You said that you knew exactly what the future holds," Homura said. "Maybe for us, hope is the idea that we fight on, even if we know, with perfect certainty, exactly what doom awaits us. And that, even if we will only ever meet like this, we can still love each other."
Madoka smiled. "I like fighting on." She leaned forwards, almost as if she wanted to share a secret.
-x-
"You seem distracted, Homura," Mami said.
It was true. It felt like the wires in Homura's brain were crossed, and when she tried to remember what had happened, she could only come up with a blur of warmth and softness and pink, certainly something very pleasurable, but nothing that she could define exactly.
Homura surreptitiously rubbed her eyes. "It's nothing," she said, before resuming the hunt.
-x-
(yeah, i'm still alive)
(i dunno if anyone reading this is also reading free sky, but there will be a long stretch of that and a long stretch of not-this for some time)
(as always, reviews are appreciated, regardless of what you have to say. knowing what people think is always cool)
