Armageddon Part 6
Salvation I
Homura opened her eyes and found herself staring at a bland, white ceiling staring back at her. Dazed and confused, she turned her view to the right of her hospital bed, where a short table stood. A pair of red-rimmed glasses lay on the table, facing her. She sighed. Yet another failure against Walpurgisnacht.
'Strange', she thought, sitting up. 'I can't remember anything.'
A pounding headache was persistently making its presence known to the time traveler. Groaning, Homura buried her face in the blankets, hoping that the feel of the blanket would relieve the throbbing. She sighed. The action was to no avail. She stood, sighing again. The marble floor of the hospital was extremely cold against her bare feet as she walked across the room to retrieve a pair of slippers.
"Ah! You're awake now, Akemi-san?"
A nurse stood in the doorway, holding out a set of Homura's old clothes that she hadn't worn for…. however long she's been resetting the timeline. She took hold of the folded black clothes, nodding in gratitude to the nurse.
"I'll go get the doctor then for some final checks, and then you should be free to go."
The nurse left, closing the door. Homura locked it and began to change. The action was so smooth, so practiced, that she barely paid any attention to what she was doing. Instead, she tried to recall what had caused her to fail and reset again so she could try a different approach. Nothing came. She could not remember anything from her previous attempt. The memories from the attempt before were there. As she pondered the reason for her memory loss, something strange happened. Her vision blurred.
'My eyes… I thought I healed them. No matter. I'll just do it again. Maybe it wears off.'
Focusing on her soul gem, she navigated the imaginary lines connecting her magic to her body and attempted to divert some magic into her eyes again. Strangely, she found that she could not direct it to her eyes. While it was unusual, Homura shrugged. She would adapt, just like she has always done timeline after timeline. She unlocked the door, having finished changing, and walked back to sit on the bed while putting her glasses back on. The glasses felt clumsy, awkward, like they belonged to someone else in another time. At least she could see now.
The rest of the day passed as Homura would have expected. With the signing of a few papers, she left the hospital and headed home. The sun was setting, casting an orange light over the horizon of the city as she walked towards her house. About half an hour after leaving the hospital, she approached the solitary purple door which led inside. The paint was chipped in several places from a lack of care. On the ground was a small potted plant, which was beginning to show signs of dying from not being watered; a testament to how long Homura had been in the hospital before she began all this time travelling.
Inside, her school uniform hung on her bedroom door. She collapsed onto the bed, falling into a deep sleep almost immediately. She dreamt of Walpurgisnacht, of her time travelling, and of…
"Madoka…" she whispered in her sleep.
"Hehe, yes, Homura-chan?"
.
.
.
Homura's eyes snapped open, heart racing. Ever vigilant, she woke to even the smallest disturbances but this was something else. Had she just heard Madoka's voice? Normally, the sound of the pinkette's voice would be soothing. Here, whether she had imagined it or not, it filled her heart with...something. Fear. She felt fear. Her heart beat faster. As quietly as she could, Homura began shifting her hand out from under the blanket towards the bedside lamp. Her heart beat even faster; it was starting to hurt. She grasped the chain and pulled. Her heart threatened to explode. Light flooded the room. There was…
"Nothing," she muttered to herself. "It was nothing. Just my imagination. Just a bad dream."
"Was it?" an uncomfortably familiar voice, not Madoka's, whispered in her ear. She turned her head to the left so fast she was sure she pulled a muscle in her neck. Everything was blurry. She could make out a vague figure standing a few feet away. Keeping her gaze on the intruder, she reached for her glasses and put them on. Her vision cleared. There was nothing there.
Homura stood and turned in a complete circle. The room was empty. She was alone. Had she imagined it? She let out a breath, not realizing she had been holding it in. She could feel a chill in her spine. Whatever had just happened, it couldn't be good, at least not for her mental health. Maybe a shower would help clear her head. She grabbed a change of clothes and headed for her bathroom. On the way, she made sure her front door was locked. It was.
[]
Warm water cascaded down from the shower head. As she soaked her hair, she thought back to Madoka. The girl who had saved her from a witch in her first timeline.
'It's strange,' Homura thought. 'I've changed so much, yet I still see her the same way.'
After about ten minutes, she stepped out of the shower. A black towel found its way into Homura's hands. Had she looked in the mirror at this point, she would have realized something was horribly off. Instead, her focus rested on the bright violet Soul Gem resting on the counter. It was flashing, indicating a witch. Or at the very least, a familiar.
'In my house?'
Without a second thought, she scooped up the glowing gem and transformed. The familiar weight of the shield resting on her left arm reassured her. Her hair was still dripping water, but that was of little concern for the moment. Scouring her whole house for an entrance to a barrier, she found nothing. Unconvinced, she looked again. There was no way her Soul Gem could be mistaken about the presence of a witch of a familiar. She returned to the washroom and finished changing clothes. Then, the mirror caught her eyes. If one of them could even be called that.
Horror growing each second, Homura walked closer to the mirror and stared. Her right eye, or rather where it should have been, was a crimson orb. A web of red cracks extended from that eye and ran down the entire right side of her face. Hands shaking, she took her soul gem out of her pocket. It was flashing again. She slowly brought it closer to her eye. It flashed faster. And faster. Even faster. Soon, it outpaced even the rapidly-beating heart of the time traveler.
'I'm...a witch? No, that can't be right. I still have a Soul Gem. Did Walpurgisnacht do this to me? Did it have some type of attack I don't know of? This is going to be a problem when Sayaka Miki, Mami Tomoe, and KyoukoSakura come into the picture. Let's not forget Kyubey either…'
A flurry of thoughts ran through Homura's mind, and traces of the headache returned. Shaken, she decided to sleep again. Perhaps she would wake up and it would be gone. Perhaps this was just all a bad dream. With that in mind, she resolved to return to bed but sleep eluded her. What had happened to her eye? Had it been like that at the hospital? Was it invisible to normal people?
She figured it was, seeing as how witches couldn't be seen by normal humans anyway. This posed a new problem. She could not find witches with her Soul Gem. Eventually, she concluded that she'd have to stay on good terms with Mami Tomoe, since it would be difficult for her to track and hunt witches alone. She just hoped Madoka wouldn't be able to see the witch eye. She continued to think, and think, and think, until finally, exhaustion caught up and oblivion claimed her.
[]
Beep beep. Beep beep. Beep beep.
The incessant ringing of an alarm clock roused Homura from her sleep. She had not slept well, often waking up in the middle of the night, spending ten or so minutes pacing back and forth before going back to bed. Each time, she checked the mirror hoping the red witch eye was gone, but she had no such luck. Sluggishly, she swatted at the alarm clock and turned it off.
It took some self-convincing, but she managed to leave her bed and get ready for school. It wasn't so much that she wanted to go. Rather, she was afraid of what anomalies could occur if she didn't go. Changing into her school uniform took longer than she would have liked, a result of insufficient sleep. The webs had expanded slightly further, almost reaching the bottom of her jaw. She looked less like a person and more like a monster from some horror story. Clinging to the hope that her theory about regular people not being able to see her right "eye", she left and headed towards the school.
Along the way, she noticed something weird. Everyone had a certain type of stiffness to their walk, and cars seemed to jitter as they moved along the road. No one reacted to her appearance as they walked past her, confirming Homura's suspicions that her eye appeared normal to humans. The school came into view. A slight breeze had begun to sweep through the city, swaying her long black hair to the side as she stood on the crest of a hill near the school. She began walking toward the school.
'Now is when it really starts. This time, I will succeed. I swear it.'
[]
As soon as she walked into the classroom, she immediately noticed something amiss. Two things amiss. One, Madoka wore no ribbons in her hair. This had never happened, and while it seemed trivial, time travel taught Homura that the butterfly effect was as real as it could be. Second, a certain blue-haired girl stared at her intently. Or more specifically, the ocean-blue eyes were trained onto the right side of Homura's face. Sayaka had never contracted before Homura's arrival. This put even more strain on the timeline. Now Homura had much more to account for.
As per usual, math class went with the teacher asking around for everyone to try a question on the board. For a reason that Homura could never understand, Sayaka was hopeless at the simplest of equations. She watched as the blunette stood at the board, still as a statue, her hand holding the pen against the board.
"Would anyone like to help Miki-san?" the teacher asked, after a brief pause. Nobody moved. Then Homura stood and walked over, taking the pen from Sayaka. As she did so, she slipped a small piece of paper into the taller girl's hand. Grateful for the rescue from the math, and curious as to the paper from the transfer student, she returned to her seat while Homura finished the question. The rest of the class passed in silence. Soon after, the lunch break rolled around. On the roof, Homura found Sayaka Miki waiting, just as she had asked on the paper.
"Hello, Miki-san. I assume you know why I asked to meet you here?"
"You mean those red lines on your face and your eye, transfer student? Looks nasty. I don't know what happened to you, but you've been triggering my Soul Gem all morning. Mami-san's too. What happened to you? Where are you from, for that matter?"
Homura flinched a little. The blunette's voice held a tone of concern that Homura had never heard, at least not directed at her. Regardless, her own tone of voice remained neutral.
"Tokyo, and I don't know what could have happened to cause this. I hadn't even noticed before yesterday, either."
Sayaka tilted her head in thought, then brightened.
"Ah! How about you come with me to Mami-san's place after? Maybe she knows something about it, Akemi-san."
Homura highly doubted Mami would know anything about the peculiar state of her eye, but it didn't hurt to try. She allowed herself to open a small smile at the blue-haired magical girl. Perhaps she could try to befriend the two this time.
"Just call me Homura. We're both magical girls, after all."
Chapter End
Editor Notes:
This story was written by WinterCactus. The writer has some real talent, really. Since I needed help on a certain arc, I asked Cactus to lend a hand. Gotta say I really did enjoy this chapter when I read it.
As the main writer of this story, I had to change a few details on the chapter just for continuity sake (since WinterCactus and I have somewhat different styles of writing). But everything else was pretty much left intact.
Anyhow, to the reader: You should look at "Doors", from WinterCactus' fanfiction. Some good stuff!
