Theme for the chapter: Sis Puella Magica!
"Kyoko." Homura smiles a little.
"Hey there, Homura." Kyoko visibly brightens up at the sight of her. She brings flowers and fruits: blue roses, very carefully wrapped, and a sliced apple. They both keep a respectful silence as Kyoko lays the flowers across the gravestones.
Her movements are uncharacteristically gentle , Homura thinks, for someone with a fast temper and a faster spear . The other takes a long time, too, arranging and rearranging the roses again and again in elaborate formations.
The silence wears on, and Homura thinks of paperweights and broken glass. In one of the earlier timelines, someone submitted a missing persons report early for Mami, who had met her end in a labyrinth. Homura was called in for anything she might've known about the disappearance, then, and she tries to craft a convincing series of lies at the policeman's desk. The session ended without any results, and the policeman placed all the case documents in one pile and put a heavy glass paperweight on top with a thud. There was an awful sense of finality in the sound.
So in the later timelines, she started to establish a distance between herself and everyone else. To avoid thinking of smokestacks and broken glass and paperweights. But as hard as she tried, she still felt the increasing weight of their deaths. The day Madoka first died, death took Homura too - she breathed it in each month and it settled in her lungs like layers upon layers of ashes.
And when Madoka ascended, Homura tethered at the edge of a void. Often she thought- or dreamt- that she saw a land without water, or trees. She couldn't go in any direction and there was little light about her. But there was a statue of a bright-eyed goddess, and sometimes she clung to it for comfort. Near midnight purple winged birds came to tear into her flesh. And she would hold the statue and cling on, helpless, until dawn came again.
She doesn't believe that she is more than the sum of her the birds truly did strip away all the little masks she put on, they would find nothing underneath.
"How're your hunts?" Kyoko asks, breaking her reverie.
"Not much luck, I'm afraid. The wraiths have congregated a lot- but truth be told, I just don't have the magic to face them en masse."
She did have magic. If she truly dies, then she will leave without ever seeing the Cycles. And for the first time in a while she felt fear, worming its way through her, putting a stranglehold on her breathing and loosening her grip on the ebonwood bow. So she's learned to conserve her energy , pick some off the edges, let the rest of the wraiths be.
"I really ought to clear it off, too, before they all exceed containment level."
"You could really just say that there's a lot of wraiths, so let's go kill them." Kyoko grumbles.
"Let's?"
"A divinely generous girl (namely yours truly) is joining you and also demanding half of the grief cubes."
"Generous, I see. Still, it is an offer I will gladly take up. I can trust you in a fight. "
"Yes, yes; you can bow down and praise me now."
"No can do, but I'll meet you tonight here. I'll confirm one hour before so that the timings all work out and see later if I can't draw up a few battle plans. Meanwhile, I've got to meet with a new magical girl to give advice."
"Oh, new ? I didn't know you were out to help some sabre-rattling kids with dreams they'll never fulfill."
The girl asked about shields, and I couldn't turn her down. "You used barrier magic at one point, correct?"
"Well, it's pretty damned inefficient, but I guess you could say that." "Food's on me if you come along, don't pick fights, and don't pester me about it. "
"Deal." Homura is offered a small pack of chips, drawn from Kyouko's vast arsenal of food.
They walked the streets. They talked in snatches, about whatever came to mind- hunts, work, little fragments that lead nowhere. They said nothing about the past, and neither of them made a special effort to keep a conversation going.
Her tongue feels heavy. Most times, she could go through an entire day without uttering anything at all.
Kyouko forcibly stops her somewhere for desserts. "We'll have desserts when we get to the agreed location, Kyouko-"
"But what about second dessert?"
She doesn't know what to say to that. So mostly they walked- and walked, and walked.
