Puella Magi: A Cyclical Magica
…
-How Sunshine Dies
Magical ammunition bounced off of Chika's sword like drops of rain as she cut through empty air, seeing Mami's bullets and blocking them with an impossible accuracy. Chika's rapid movements made the heels on her small feet act more like stilts than the painful crutches they should have been, adding more distance to her determined lunges.
She approached striking distance. Mami had run out of already-materialized muskets, and her ribbons wouldn't stand a chance—
The blade came down with a Armageddon magnitude, only to miss the target entirely. Mami dived backward, simultaneously creating another musket in midair as her feet swept over the fountain pavement. Her arm extended straight up, taking hold of the hilt while her eagle's eyes saw their opening—
It had to be perfect—
Mami whipped the musket right into Chika's chest as the girl struggled to bring the oversized weapon into another striking position. The trigger pulled back with a supernatural ease—
The searing explosion from the musket's business end didn't garner nearly the expected reaction: Chika stumbled back slightly, caught off-guard and sword grip thrown off-kilter, but far from hurt. Mami created more weapons in the air, grabbing them seconds after she created them, letting off high-powered rounds into Chika's chest without letting either of them stop for breath.
Chika didn't so much as grunt. The Soul Gem changed shape once again—
A green whip choked around Mami like a vice! The muskets around her fell to the ground with an unsatisfying clacking sound as she rose up, feet kicking and hands clawing at the spellbinding noose. She struggled to keep her thoughts above water, but she was virtually pinned—
"You know what my favorite phrase is, Tomoe?"
Mami choked at the air, her windpipe utterly crushed—
"Tit for tat. Can you say it with me, blondie?"
The whip lifted her higher up, leaving her for a brief respite before—
"Tit!"
Mami dived neck-first into solid pavement, her head craning back against the impact. It felt like being hit by a train, her every bone screaming as it was flattened by impenetrable stone. She rose up again, desperately clawing at the bind around her throat—
"For!"
Another nosedive into a different spot. White lights blinked in Mami's vision upon collision; a metallic red liquid spewed into her mouth like a hose. She flew up again, choking on her own blood, unable to see anything through her sheer physical misery—
"What's that last one?" Chika laughed to the ravaged Mami, holding hand to her ear and waiting for an improbable response. "Hum? Nothing? Let me remind you, Tomoe:."
Mami stopped struggling, trying to save her remaining, dwindling strength—
"It's 'tat'!"
…
"Sayaka!"
Kyubey leapt before the somber Sayaka, his legs still bruised from before, but his speed and grace back to their top form. Sayaka jumped up, still in the same place she had left Homura, but her eagerness to affect her own brand of change, fully re-energized. She brushed the final tears from her face with a sleeve and looked at the Incubator with a solid, immovable desire.
"I know what I want to wish for!" She announced.
"Great timing!" Kyubey huffed into her thoughts, his voice sore and hurried. "Mami's in danger!"
"It's that Chika girl again, isn't it? The green one?"
Kyubey nodded. Sayaka did the same, punching her other palm and cracking the knuckles. "If she put a hand on Mami, so help me, I'll bust her face."
"Sayaka, you can't rush in like that. We don't know how powerful you'll be as a new Puella Magi; you might only get in the way—"
"Do you want me to make a wish or not?" Sayaka barked, the deep sapphire of her eyes impossible to argue with. Kyubey's head bobbed disapprovingly, like a sorry parent to a disobedient child.
"That is the only way, of course," Kyubey resigned.
"Ask me already!" Sayaka bounced on her knees.
"Fair enough. What is so valuable that you would pay for it with your human existence, Sayaka Miki?"
Sayaka took in the deepest breath she could grab, closing her eyes and letting the sounds of the city rush over her teenage girl's face for a final time. She knew deep down that the wish was stupid, that the entire situation was ridiculous and out of her hands, but didn't care. This was her last decision as a human girl, and by God, she was going to own it.
"I wish for Kyosuke to be happy," she whispered.
Kyubey didn't hide his shock, straightening up and digging into her with the blood-red eyes, "Sayaka, did you forget what I said? If you don't wish for—"
"I'm not healing Kyosuke's hand because his music isn't enough," Sayaka said. "He needs people who love him, people who would fight for him against all of the odds. Even if I can't give him my love, if I can give him this, then I can move on. You get it, right?
"This is for me, Kyubey," her voice rose slowly but surely, "I'm letting go and moving on with my life. I want Kyosuke to be happy so I can have a chance at it, too. Giving the boy I love a true second chance...that's my wish!"
A blue light began to shine in her chest, filling the two of them with a hopeful illumination, seeping Sayaka, finally, in a sense of purpose—
"Fulfill it, Incubator!"
…
The whip released a fallen and broken Mami Tomoe from its hold, letting her limp body fall on headfirst like putty onto a careless sidewalk. Rubble and debris still caught in her hair and blood staining her clothes and smile, the previously bright Puella Magi had been beaten to a shade of herself.
Chika's whip cracked to the ground beside her, watching Mami struggle to get up and mount some kind of desperate counterattack.
"You get me, Tomoe?" Chika laughed, victorious, as she walked a victory catwalk to her vanquished enemy. "You slam me into the ground a few times, I slam you into the ground a few times.
"Just don't be mad that I'm stronger than you," she gloated.
Standing over Mami, hungry for a final strike but not allowed to deliver, Chika flipped the girl face-up. Mami's eyes were barely open, her chest barely heaving, her limbs and fingers not even bothering. The inspiring glint in her stare had vanished like the pavement.
The sword found itself pointed at Mami's chafed throat, cutting into the skin and pushing ever so slightly.
"Give me the Incubator, honey," Chika ordered with a scathing humor. "Don't make this your final resting place. It's not nearly blond enough for a sunny little girl like yourself."
Light faded from Mami like a candle in a storm. There was no point in carrying this on. Chika put both hands on the hilt and filled it with determination.
"I guess this is how sunshine dies, then!"
Mami braced for the warrior's unsung demise—
The deepest red, almost brown in color and like thick like molasses in its consistency, poured over her like a waterfall. Chika's blade faded, her Soul Gem released from her grasp. It fell against the ground and clattered like a girl's cheap decoration. Mami opened her eyes just enough—
A spear's ivory-white tip stuck out from Chika's midsection, skillfully unstained as it hung through the Puella Magi's organs. Her words came out as wads of blood, caught in her throat and trapped in her mouth.
"That's what happens to rogue Puella Magi," said Kyoko Sakura, standing gracefully on the untouched fountain's edge, spear extended and hair flowing with her red magical girl's dress. "They get punished."
The spear withdrew from Chika's chest, feeling like a weight had been lifted. She fought to turn as the hole in her chest filled with her fluids and her organs struggled to stay in place. Her knees gave way just as Chika managed enough strength to turn her head toward the Puella Magi she didn't recognize and would never meet.
Resting on that girl's shoulders with his stupefyingly smug grin and spiteful, studious, devious green eyes was none other than Xulbey the Incubator.
"Wh...wh..." Chika asked her last question, "Why?"
Her lungs' terminal sigh released as Chika fell forward, lying lifelessly on the sidewalk of a disturbingly uncaring city.
…
Alice watched Madoka Kaname leave the cafe with a misleadingly stoic gait. She faded into the crowd of men and women, her iconic pigtails fading as she approached the train station. It was a bit of a loss to not get her own questions asked, but a fool could see that Madoka didn't have the answers. Rather, Madoka Kaname had no answers.
Alice stood outside, hands in her pockets, a smug grin on her round face. Homura stood on the other side of the entrance, looking the same as usual: revealing nothing, ready for anything.
"How'd you know?" Alice didn't look at her. "Where we were, anyway."
"I've taken Madoka here before."
"No, you haven't," Alice said to the crowd, "At least, she didn't show it. I think she would have looked more comfortable."
"She knew what you were."
"Please," Alice sighed. "You don't know what I am, and you know everything, Homura Akemi the Time Traveler."
Homura didn't have to ask; Alice turned to look at her like a scientist would a dissected pig. "You're wondering about me now, I imagine. You're asking, how does this other girl know my secret? How does she know that I've been going back in time to save the life of Madoka Kaname, the girl I'm so in love with, if even I won't admit those words to myself?"
Homura's barrier of self-certainty fell silently, crumbling into a million jagged shards.
"Or better yet," Alice went on, "You're wondering why, if I know about you and Madoka and the past, why you don't?"
She had talked long enough. "Excuse me?" Homura asked cooly.
"You don't remember how your last cycle ended, do you?"
Silence.
"You don't remember what happened after you left to fight the Walpurgisnacht, right? You remember going alone, toward certain death, just to protect Madoka. There was something about a dead red-head chick and the blue one turning into a Witch or whatever, also. Then you woke up again, in your bed, in a world you didn't create.
"Feel free to stop me at any time," she added.
The time traveler finally had a question of her own. "If you know all of this, then what's your angle?"
"Say it with less obvious heroics, please."
"What do you want out of this?"
Alice twirled a strand of hair in her long fingers. "I want to know why I'm here. You see, Homura, I have my own problems. Like...
"Look at you: you know at least a hundred variants of this month. I know nothing of my entire life except for Xulbey and this last month. Doesn't that strike you as odd?"
"And what, you think Madoka—"
"I thought she did," Alice sighed, "But she doesn't know anything. Madoka Kaname is worthless to me.
"At least, this Madoka is," she finished.
…
Kyoko towered over the fallen Chika, watching her cold body like a piece of abstract art, to be judged and finally forgotten. Mami struggled to keep her thoughts flowing, to keep herself conscious in spite of the overwhelming pain in every body part she could name. The sight of flowing red hair and brown, murky air polluted her vision like a curtain of wounds and weakness.
"This is it, right?" Kyoko asked Xulbey, who sat at her feet like the innocent pet animal he pretended to be. Her long, awe-inspiring lance pointed to the hilt of the late Chika's weapon.
"Take it," Xulbey ordered. When Kyoko hesitated, the Incubator added, "It's perfectly safe. She's dead, after all."
The words hit Mami like the recoil of forty of her muskets.
With an ambivalent shrug, Kyoko knelt down to the defeated corpse and pried the whip hilt from her fingers. Her eyebrows shot up in vague interest: the Soul Gem had disappeared entirely.
"Hey, Xulbey?" She asked, "You know how there was supposed to be a Soul Gem or something in here?"
"Yes?"
"Well, there kind of...isn't one."
"I know," Xulbey turned over on his back to lick at his thighs. "Soul Gems disappear when Puella Magi die.
"Don't ask me how that happens," he quipped when Kyoko opened her mouth for more questions, "But it's not important anyway. What we're here for is still on the hilt."
Kyoko examined the weapon: where the emerald Soul Gem would have been located, in the dead center of the wielder's grip, instead sat the empty gold rim of an outline. The Gem's absence was more than noticeable: without the Gem in the center of the weapon, it seemed more like a broken child's playtoy, incomplete and ineffective.
"We need this, huh?" Kyoko put the hilt in her pocket. "Whatever you say. You're the mastermind here, not me."
"I would prefer you not to think of me as a mastermind, Kyoko," Xulbey said, sitting up and bobbing his head. "I'd like the term 'chess master', come to think of it. It's a lot less supervillain-y."
The crimson magical girl stifled a laugh in her throat.
"K-Kyoko?"
The voice was both distant and impossibly familiar to her ears.
"Kyoko, is that you?"
"It's me, Mams," Kyoko said, standing up and not making eye contact with the defeated Mami. Nonetheless, the grin that spread across the bright Puella Magi was ripped from a firework-scattered night. She tried talking, asking even one of the thousands of questions that had instantly leapt to mind; a shower of blood and hurt followed instead.
"Keep quiet, kid," Kyoko said. "I've got you covered."
"Yuma!" She called out across the blasted plaza. "Come on out. It's safe, and I need you."
Yuma Chitose, already in her magical girl uniform with light green cat ears fit for an infant princess, jumped out from her cover in the trees near the untouched water fountain. "Yuma here~!" She sang happily. "What do you need, sis?"
The sisterly affection drove the stake of guilt further through Kyoko's chest with each passing day. She fought to ignore it, keeping her mind on the task at hand. "That's Mami Tomoe," Kyoko pointed.
"Is she a friend?"
Kyoko felt Xulbey's eyes on her, his ears tracing her every next word.
"In a sense," Kyoko said. "She's in pretty bad shape. You mind doing your thing for me?"
"Nope!" Yuma smiled. "That's what I'm here for!" The little girl waddled to Mami, innocent in both action and intent—
A graceful force dived onto the pavement's remains, startling the inexperienced Yuma and jaded Kyoko—
"Get away from her, you bitch!" said a trimphant Sayaka Miki. Her girlish gait and sense of hesitation had been shed like the dead and used cocoon of a caterpillar; a determination held in her striking blue eyes just as her white gloved hands held tight to a long, steel cutlass. A white cape billowed out as Sayaka stood, unflinching, surveying the scene with a spellbinding confidence.
An ornate blue light shined from the Soul Gem around her neck.
Kyoko put her hand to her head. The loss of words was downright overwhelming.
"Come on, Mams," she groaned. "You already got your blond ass saved once. Do you really need..." She waved a loose hand in the blue magical girl's direction, "Whatever you'd call this?"
"I'm not saying it again!" Sayaka shouted, slicing the cutlass through the air. "If you've put a hand on Mami, I swear—"
"She hasn't," said Kyubey, slinking out from under Sayaka's cape with smooth, controlled steps. "If anything, this Puella Magi has saved Mami's life. It seems I was mistaken."
'Mistaken'?
Sayaka remembered her talk with Homura; the odds that Kyubey was ever mistaken about anything were likely zero. The question concerning how much of this very conflict had been fabricated seemed more than tempting for Sayaka to debate, but for another time.
Yuma had frozen solid, caught in the potential crossfire between the two opposing girls. Kyoko looked at the horrified look on her small, round face.
"Look, Mams here got hurt by that crazy kook of a Puella Magi," Kyoko waved to the motionless and profusely-bleeding Chika Aoki. "I saved her, and now I'm healing her."
"Free of charge?" Sayaka's sarcasm shined through her words. "I doubt that."
"Oh? Then what would you have me do? I mean, I could demand that you give me Kyubey first, but that's just not sisterly."
"Excuse me?"
"We're sisters!" Yuma sang, a nervous pitch inhibiting her natural exuberance. "All of us. Magical girls need to stick together, you know? We're all fighting for the same thing."
"That's why you're with Xulbey, right?" Sayaka taunted. "He's looking out for poor, victimized girls like you, right?"
"Who told you that crock of shit?" Kyoko's words landed like bombs. "Xulbey's making sure there are no more magical girls ever again."
"What's the point of that?"
"The point is, so nobody ever has to sacrifice their lives the way we did. Although if you're still in the business of fighting for Mami's brand of justice or whatever she's doing, I suppose you haven't had to sacrifice a damn thing." The spite in Kyoko's words belonged to a woman much older and far more scorned than she.
Xulbey sat at Kyoko's feet, the lack of emotions in his stoic face utterly terrifying. Sayaka looked to the Incubator for a hint in some form or another, but only found a familiar shiver racing up her spine. Even as a magical girl warrior, Sayaka could still be scared.
She didn't like the feeling; not one bit.
"Tell me, blue bomber," Kyoko smirked, "what did your Incubator say about me? I'm kind of interested now, to be honest."
Sayaka was growing fed-up; it's one thing to help out a friend who might or might not be getting used for some alien cause, but sitting up and debating it in the middle of a ransacked city landmark just felt ridiculous. She lowered the cutlass. "Hurry up and heal her, would you? This is getting dull," Sayaka said.
"We don't get a thanks? You know, for saving Mams' life and everything."
That time, Sayaka's ears picked up the interesting infliction on her friend's name.
Mams? Where'd that come from?
Yuma knelt beside Mami and placed her hands over the girls' heaving and shuddering chest. As the other magical girls watched, one with apathy and another with a nearly tangible distrust, Yuma's hands glowed a bright green to match her outfit. The lights engulfed Mami in their benevolent illumination, coating her in a warm sensation. Mami's breaths became regulated, then slower, to finally a normal rate; her wounds faded like the snow on a fresh spring day. Her outfit reverted to the subtle dress she had worn with pride not even an hour ago, and with a final burst of lime-green light, Mami Tomoe had been fully restored.
…
"See, Homura, there's a thing about your time warping deal that I don't think you realized yet," Alice said, her hair blowing against the high traffic winds like a piece of moving fine art. "I mean, you've either known it or realized it in every other time, but I feel like you didn't figure it out yet."
Homura was growing tired of the games, but wasn't about to start a fight, either. Beating information out of somebody generally led to a lot of bleeding and the information lost. It was better to stand her ground.
"You don't know what I'm talking about, eh, Akemi? Let me spell it out for you."
The steel emotion remained on Homura's face like a vice.
"Every time you warp us into a different timeline, you think you're going back to a base setting or whatever, right? Like, at the beginning of the month, Madoka will be Madoka, that blue girl will still have outrageously blue hair, and you'll still want to get in Madoka's pants, or whatever you want with her. I don't particularly care.
"But the funny thing is, the more times you make a new timeline, the more you're changing the base people you started with. I mean, look at you, for instance. Don't tell me you're still that adorable moe-blob with the glasses. I just wanted to box her up and take her home with me!"
"What are you getting at?" Homura strained, trying and failing to suppress the memory of herself as the one needing to be protected, or the weak girl unable to do anything for the one she loved.
"I'm saying that you need to think about what you've been doing to poor Madoka this whole time. After all, she is our savior."
"Then what are you supposed to be?" Homura jumped at the chance to retaliate. "Tell me that. You know things I don't know about myself. You're not a normal Puella Magi, are you? You're not working for Xulbey any more than I am."
A punishing silence between them, sandwiched between their conflicting emotions and the cold emotionlessness of the city denizens.
"Well, let's say that there is some fiction in your truth, and some truth in your fiction." Alice bounced off of the wall with a grin. "The Animatrix. Great shorts. You should watch them with your girlfriend sometime."
Alice left without another word. Homura felt an electric, instantaneous reaction to go after her, to find out what Alice was and how she could possibly know so much and make Homura know so little—
She resisted the pull. If her tabs on the key players were still accurate, then Mami was still busy and Sayaka was hopefully (but unlikely) unable to do anything. Madoka was unprotected.
That mattered more than any question in the world.
A/N: Man, reviews are wonderful. Am I right?
