Forgive the late correspondence, again. The past weeks (or equivalent) have not been good. We reach an uncomfortable predicament. If it was something that ever could have been prevented...

Don't bother asking. I wouldn't know.

The clocks in the room keep ticking, but they don't count any further. The front door to the apartment leads to the corridor's door number fifteen. I see no reason not to presume the reverse is also true, but even in times (or lack thereof) like this I'm not willing to test, just in case I ever find out what's behind it.

I'm not going to keep track of the passage of time in here. It's been long, though. Long enough for me to confirm we aren't aging.

She's hardly moved in that entire time. I've taken to feeding her, washing her, dressing her, medicating her (though neither this nor the food has depleted at all), putting her to bed, waking her, trying (and I do stress trying) to keep her as intellectually stimulated as I can.

It's not the most demeaning thing I've endured for her. I'd be amazed if it needed a mention in the top ten. I've tried counting, but...

I don't know anymore. What do I look for in the past? No, not the history of the universe. I mean my past. What do I want from it? Do I think if I hope hard enough, I could get her back?

Madoka.

My Madoka, specifically.

Not to dismiss the no-less-wonderful woman I've elected to spend the rest of my life with, it's only that I can't stop telling myself:

"She'd know what to do."

She's not here. Gott ist tod, Gott ist tod, Gott ist tod.

When I'm not doing all the aforementioned, I sit before her for hours on end and silently take in her beauty. You might think such a thing would diminish in times like this, but you couldn't be more wrong. When she triumphs over insurmountable challenges, it's the most beautiful thing in the world.

She manages: "It's not a challenge. It's not a trial. It's not an enemy I have to beat, Homura... I'm just sick."

Ah.

I failed to mention, too, that there are times where she can read my thoughts. Or at least something that resembles it.

"Yes. You're right. I'm sorry."

"I'm tired of this."

"I understand."

"You do...?"

"They never really tell you just how exhausting it is to sit around all day without the strength to do anything, do they?"

She laughs so faintly, but no less sweet than she always does.

"So, how are you feeling? Better? Worse?"

"I don't know."

That's not all she says, but I can't make out the rest. I'm also not intent on bothering her any more than I already have.

Let's zoom out.

The passage of... let's call it time, even though I can feel it's something else, is wearing on her. Her soul's connection to her body frays and wears thinner. I don't think any of her emotional energy is reaching her brain. I suppose for a voyeur like you, this will be demonstration enough of whether or not Maekiu (excuse me, but my keyboard can't do that special character as far as I know) was right about the interrelation of brain and soul.

She can't get around without her chair at all in her current state. I've had to tie her hair back to keep it from interfering with eating, and we keep the glasses on her face because her eyes don't seem to focus on their own now.

Like this, she bears a striking resemblance to someone.

I feel haunted. Don't you agree?

...

What did I expect, really, choosing a power that lets me run back in time, lets me reunite with old friends I only come to know as the recently deceased? Of course I'm haunted. It's only now I'm seeing the suggestion of someone I don't want to see in the image of someone I do.

Still. This is my responsibility, as much now as ever. I should see to it, instead of crying on the shoulders of yet more phantoms like your own transcendental self.

Must I bear this alone a moment more?

Feh. Of course. That's my lot, isn't it? I didn't ask for the world to revolve around me. It's taken me too long to even notice that this is how it is.

I've spent too long like this. Too long waiting for someone else to help. For what, so I can disregard their advice like everyone else's?

I have you already. And I need to start paying attention.

Let's hope that with your advanced intellect, we can divine an answer sitting far beyond my worldly ken.

So, without further ado... allow me to offer a preemptive [sic], in case such a thing proves necessary.

"what i would suggest would be outside help from within the narrative. admitting whats happened to someone who can talk to both her and madoka. id say for madoka, only being able to talk to homura about her issues is not the ideal scenario right now.

so yea my advice is go actually open up to kyoko and sayaka. they can give both homura and madoka someone to talk to about this besides one another, which considering homuras actions here is definitely needed. not the kind of advice she was looking for or advice she'd like, but it's what ive got i guess." - daisychain540

...

I don't want to do this.

My options grow shorter by the hour, and I will resort to anything. But I hope you understand I don't want to do this.

The first part of your plan I object to is letting myself wind back down to my natural state: omniscience. I'm tired of each Homura's brain containing more than it ought, but if I'm trapped in this apartment, isolating myself further from other timelines won't help anyone. The longer I stew in regrets, the more my inaction adds to the pile, ability to alter the past or no ability.

It's been too long, hasn't it?

Time to jump into another timeline to learn how to save Madoka. I've become quite good at it, I think.

I'm in the Mikis' apartment. There is a family who, save one member, I have not cared to learn anything about. There is a potential second member here too, should the blossom of love eventually bear fruit.

I still wear glasses in this timeline. This is not particularly common, but not unheard of either. I had just arrived. I was to meet them to discuss the matter at hand, something I had already arranged in the past. Or, am arranging. My keeping track of tenses is only for your convenience; determining the present is a pointless activity behind my eyes all-in-one.

We finish discussing the idea of summer jobs (a matter relevant at this point in the timeline) before Kyoko dictates that we cut to the chase.

I nod to her. "Okay, there's a lot I have to come clean with."

"Right."

"There's a timeline I can't stop thinking about, can't stop focusing on."

"Oh, timeline crap? I'm out."

Sayaka shakes her head. "Come on. Let's at least hear this out."

"Right. As I was saying, in this timeline, Madoka and I are together. But... something terrible is happening to her. The closer I get to her, the more she's beginning to fade from her own life. She can't move, now. Can barely talk. And I think it's because the longer we're together, the more I learn about her, the more definition I'm giving her presence in my timeline."

"I don't like where this is going."

"But what if I'm envisioning her wrong? What if I'm understanding her into being, but I'm understanding incorrectly? What if it's me that's doing this?"

Kyoko stares, shocked, but not at me.

Sayaka has doubled over with laughter. "What... what if it's you doing this? Hahahahaha! That's a great question!"

"I'm serious."

"Of course it's you doing this! Have you been paying no attention? This isn't the product of you getting close to her; this is happening in THIS timeline too! Heck, is this occurring across EVERY timeline?"

I...

I look.

It is. Slowly, but unmistakably, this is her fate in every single timeline.

Kyoko admits, fearfully, that she doesn't understand. I want to do the same.

"Ha. And I thought I was the group idiot. You really don't get it, do you? Her very existence isn't congruent with reality, in any timeline! And who's responsible for that? Well, I'm just guessing here..."

"That's not possible. I thought it was the worst-case scenario that this would be all my fault. But if you're telling me this is just a consequence of her living...?"

"Then this isn't just your fault, Homura. This is something you did on PURPOSE. Hahaha, I can't believe it! Had you already forgotten what I told you would happen if you ever hurt my oldest friend?"

The colors of the room, of the furniture, the walls, the people in it spare Sayaka and myself, turn to liquid. We find ourselves in a whirlpool. A hideous watercolor parody of a medieval knight's helmet forms around her face.

This is getting nowhere. I erase this timeline.

Thank you for the suggestion. I now feel more guilty than I did before. To tell you the truth, it had been a while since that had last happened. I was beginning to get nervous.

That all but confirms it. Higher life like yourself is just as stumped as I am. It may be that there is no solution at all.

Well, there is...

No.

I still care for her, make no mistake. In fact, I lament the wedge I've driven between us so much more than I do her current condition, even if I can't help feeling that both are my fault.

Back in the singularity, it appears I'm making tea.

"The singularity". You know, I haven't called it that in front of anybody before. How could I have? It's something I've been thinking about for a while, though. It needed a name.

What do you think?

Well, I'd like to be out of here before I need to think of something better, thank you very much.

The leaves in the teapot's strainer have formed the image of the time she was forced to kill Tomoe. I'd be fine if Madoka was only forgetting things: that would indicate some neurological illness. I would know how to feel about that, and it would be sad. But for every memory she forgets, something else remembers two.

I don't know how to understand what's happening, let well alone feel.

Still.

Moping, dreading, confiding... none of these things are going to get tea served, are they?

I place two cups upon a tray, and a metal straw in one for her, before pouring.

You know, I've started to wonder: what if things don't get better? And if I keep thinking that, might I accidentally will it into being?

I shouldn't doubt myself so much, I suppose. Do I presume my repertoire of time magic to mean nothing? I can...

Hahaha...

You know, I was going to say I can chaos control, like she said.

I carry the tray in. Her face perks up suddenly, at my presence.

"What if she comes back?"

I blink. "I'm not sure what you mean...? What if who comes back, darling?"

I sit down with a cup of tea for myself, and place the tray, which still holds the other, neatly across her chair.

"The one you loved."

"But... that's you. You're the only person I've ever loved."

She mumbles, "Please stop looking through me."

"Looking through you?"

"Like... I'm not all here."

I sip my tea cautiously. It's a little sweet.

"You've seen me in so many lives... but you look at me like you expect me to keep up."

"That's not fair of me. I'm sorry."

"She knew, though. Didn't she? She could see all the worlds."

"Yes."

"If you could choose between us."

"That's not a fair question."

The lights in the room dim and redden.

"I don't know. I'm sorry. You're the same person."

"I don't feel like it..."

"Well, if you're going to ask me a question as damning as that, all I have is an answer just as painful, I'm afraid."

"Then... did you love me more in the past?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I was scared of you."

She doesn't nod, but something tells me she would if she could.

There are no further questions, but she's starting to unnerve me too.

Cut.

I have to wonder how far out of her body she is by now. Can she feel the cuts I make? Can she see time the way I can?

Wishful thinking.

I wasn't expecting this chapter to be as inside my own head as it is, and it feels rude that I should make it all about me. But I don't know what else it ought to be. What else do I have?

There are other timelines we could explore, but even something as inconsequential as rotating this one facet of my boundless consciousness around reality feels irresponsible.

I need to be here for her, until she gets better. And she won't get better.

I fetch her more tea. She uses all of her willpower to concentrate first on it, then on me.

"Thank you, Mama."

I've heard of this.

People having trouble with their memories accidentally substituting a person's name with another they know, they can feel, has the same amount of importance in their lives.

I don't know what to say. I know how much she loves her mother. Am I really just as important to her? Am I more than a lover and a friend, am I home to her?

The time for second-guessing, for yearning for a peaceful time after this curse, is over. Now it's down to me to actually strive for it.

"I'm Homura."

"Homu... of course. Yes. I'm sorry."

"You have nothing to be sorry for. Your mother is a wonderful woman, and I appreciate the comparison."

She frowns at herself. One of the room's screens descends, with an unseen controller scouring its database for something at inhuman speed. It finally settles on an old photo of myself, her, and the other three. We stand side by side, transformed into our outfits, smiling proudly. About what, I don't recall. It never mattered. The four of them were invariably killed by witches and/or one another and/or themselves.

It's not from this timeline, not from this universe. Nobody is meant to see this aside from myself.

"Did you do that?"

I snap at her, but walk back my tone mid-sentence. That was a bit too much.

She doesn't answer. Would she even know if she'd done it?

"Homura... Can I ask a question?"

"Of course."

Presently I find myself with my palms together. I swore not to affect her memories, and I don't recall making this gesture, so I must have erased my own. How long, I don't know. There is no way of knowing.

What did she ask me?

I could un-forget it, but maybe I already have, and wiped it again. I wouldn't be able to tell. A sight best left unseen, at any rate. A question I don't want to hear.

There are our shadows all across the walls of the room, ballroom dancing together. I can't stand when they do this, it makes me motion-sick. Here I am, the infinity of time in my mind, the whole of creation in my labyrinth, and a few oddly-moving shadows make me uneasy. A year ago, I was complaining to you about the restrictions of my own flesh, now here I am again.

It's in dark moments like these that I secretly begin to wonder if she was right to do... what she did. But time and time again, I have to reassure myself that even though existence beyond the firmament is many, many things, it's not life.

Is this my ideology, then? That the only thing more terrifying than living is its opposite? That doesn't sound right. These past two years have been the best in all my lives.

We both know, you and I, that it's all because of her. That's why I can't keep falling back to hopelessness the moment I feel overwhelmed. I know how hard she's fighting to stay conscious and lucid, and I have to fight twice as hard to help.

But I can't.

There's nothing left for me to give, is there?

How typical.

Cut. I need a distraction.

Anything else, on your end? I'm still listening.

"madoka asked you what she did to make you want to change who she was, and you told yourself that you couldn't tell her for "obvious" reasons. kyoko told you you'd rather own up to your behaviors than do anything to change them, and then literally owned up to that tendency without changing it! let me be blunt, i don't think you're right that there is no truth left anymore. from my perspective, there is still a truth to your and madoka's story, from when you first met to when you brought her back from the cycles. i think you do need to come clean to madoka and tell her that story; how she was in the past, and why she is how she is now. it's what she seems to want, and i don't think she'll be receptive to anything else. if she knows that truth, it's possible that she might want, or need, to forge her own path without you. but i think even in that scenario, it would be preferable for her to have peace than to have this. and there is still a chance that letting her process everything that has happened could make reconciliation possible. i know going this route seems agonizing, but truthfully speaking, what do you have left to lose?" - SplitSuns

No.

I don't even want to entertain this one. If I tell her that she left me, left her friends and her family and her community to endure eternal servitude as the Law...

I'm not going to put that idea in her head.

Though, I must admit, the idea has nagged at me. The advantages of doing so are great and numerous. It's only that they don't mean anything weighed against the disadvantage of her erasure from reality a second time.

But if she is so eager to hear the truth, maybe I do owe it to her at least to compromise. I'll tell her about the world of witches, but only what I'd feel no shame in recounting, and not a word more.

Don't think me arrogant. I fantasize about telling her everything in every passing moment. There are just... a few things left which I would still consider immoral, after everything I've wrought. I have promises to keep. You know this. I've been skirting around that sort of thing this entire correspondence.

So, alright. I'll tell her the basics, but this certainly is the last time I'm asking your advice.

"Madoka?"

Her eyelids flinch, almost imperceptibly. That might be all I can ask of her for now.

"You were asking about her, weren't you? About you-before-yourself. It's time I told you, isn't it?"

I feel a chill which I can only imagine means yes.

"This is a story... only two and a half years old, by some measures. Inarticulably ancient, by others. I prefer the latter. The time weighs on me like that, anyway. Let me stretch it out, in fact, so that you can understand how long, long ago it feels to me.

In the pacific typhoon season of 1895, a cyclone hit just south of Honshu's central coast. All things considered, it was far, far weaker than you'd expect a cyclone I consider worth mentioning more than a century later to be. In the end, only eighty-three people died. But it had brought to the people of a port town in its wake (at the time a half-established burg called "Misakihara", though why its name was changed in the end I cannot say) such destruction, and displacement, and ill health, that the town was soon set upon by an outbreak of scarlet fever.

And so the best doctors the country had to offer made the trek to Misakihara to treat this outbreak, and to teach the locals how to treat it themselves. One thing led to another, and before long, the town had its own institution of medical education. Immediately one of the country's best, no less.

We jump forward a few decades to the nineteen-fifties, where a combination of factors made what is at this point the Mitakihara Institute of Medical Research almost unrecognizable less than a lifetime later. For one, there was the rapid urbanization of the city. For another, it being hit relatively lightly by the war meant that the federal government was issuing out tremendous grants for the MIMR to offer its services and resources to more heavily affected regions nationwide. Third, with how much it had evolved by way of the first two factors and the addition of a more open border welcoming in international students, it quickly garnered a reputation as one of the best medical schools on Earth. Now it's only one department at Mitakihara University, but this still holds true.

Now we move ahead almost the same amount of time again, to where the cardiology department at Mitakihara General Hospital had become the best in Japan. In 1994, almost exactly ninety-nine years after that fateful disaster, there is a man and a woman. They each go about uninteresting office jobs in an uninteresting block in Nagano, which, while I've only spent about three weeks there which I actually remember, is nothing to write home about either. They each believe that dating isn't for them, and have opted to live solitary, uninteresting lives in uninteresting apartments. I would say they only lived across the hall from one another, but nothing that interesting happened to them either. They were fundamentally boring people.

They met, and each believed the other to be the most wonderful person to ever live. Having the omniscience to quantify this now, I can safely say they're straddling the limits of the top sixty percent of people.

In the March of 1997, they were married. A little over a year later, they had a daughter.

I must stress "a little over". If the mother had given birth during the Olympics being in her very city, that would be far too noteworthy for a life like hers.

If anything was interesting, it was in a genetic deformity (coarctation, they were initially told, but with the years found it to be more complicated than that) in their child's aorta. She would spend her youth in chronic pain and fatigue, and would struggle to put on weight or develop muscle. If there were to come anything after her youth, well... she would call that "up to God".

So she would spend the first fourteen years of her life moving from city to city, to anywhere, really, which had a specialist who could address whatever symptoms arose of her condition.

The (she would learn much, much later) completely bastardized teachings of her God would teach her to hate herself, and to live by a bitter and resentful reverence for her parents, and since nobody else at any school she transferred to had any expectation that she'd stay around long, she lived presuming a constant emotional distance from everybody was normal. Even herself.

When she was fourteen years old, her situation became so dire that she was admitted to Mitakihara General, where she underwent the most intensive surgery of her life. She was told this treatment saved her life, but she wouldn't know for how much longer until she went for another checkup a month and a half later."

She hasn't reacted at all, this entire time.

"I'm boring you with details at this point, I'm sorry. This is where things turn around.

Nine days after she's let out of hospital, something out of a fairytale comes into her life: she meets a flamboyant, prideful girl with pink hair on her first day of school, and this girl shows her so many incredible, impossible things. She shows her how to whisper their thoughts privately between themselves without once moving their mouths. She shows her how to ignore her chronic pain altogether. She shows her how to walk between hours and days and weeks as easily as someone else might walk from one room to another. But something else, more important than any of that... she shows her to her place in the world. She loves her, and she introduces her to other friends who love her.

Then a storm, much more terrible than the one which had hit their city one hundred and eighteen years earlier, threatened to take that away. The sick girl, knowing what she knew now, ran back in time, back, and back, and back, hoping each moment was another she could use to better prepare herself and all her new friends from the tempest.

I don't know what it was, but for some reason it wasn't enough. For some reason the winds blew stronger and the rains fell heavier than all the time she spent preparing could account for. She and the pink-haired girl were, like the people who once stood where they did now, lost and displaced. They survived, each in their own way, but they were so convinced for the longest time that they'd never see each other again.

They didn't in that life.

But in the next, that same pink-haired girl had just flown back from the other side of the world to find the old friend she had never met in her very class at school. And the rest, they say, is history."

She responds faster than I would expect of her even at her most awake. "Except that isn't what happened, is it?"

"It is."

"What are you trying to hide from me?"

I

let the moment get away from me.

"This isn't fair. This isn't fair! I've told you the truth, just like you wanted! Why can't you just be happy with that?! Why do you have to demand more, draw it out of me so humiliatingly!? Do you have any idea how much I've done for you? I am dead, because of you! I am animated only by an undying need to make you happy! So why can't you just be happy when I do as you say?!"

"Homu... ra..."

I scream. I don't think I've ever screamed AT her before. "When is it going to end, damn it!?"

She tries to muster the energy to cry. In the threshold, I see number four, Coldheartedness, jeer at me. I want to rot. I want to be anyone but myself.

But, I'll settle for anytime but now.

Cut.

Some time has passed, and as you can tell by now, nothing has improved. In fact, the dancing of lights without sources around the room tells me that something terrible is about to happen.

She has slipped back into her coma, this time with her eyes open. I can't get any response out of her, no matter how much I try.

Hold that thought. Something's happening.

She is pulled, as if by strings, out of her chair. High above eye level. Halfway to the cavernous ceiling of this poorly-designed apartment. The screens in the room reconfigure themselves in a row extending either side of her, and each displays a close-up of the plumage on an assortment of white birds' wings. One more screen opens behind her, with a photograph of the twenty-two degree ring framed by parhelia as her halo.

I could presume this symbolism is supposed to mock me, somehow, but I felt the same about the way she was dressed earlier in this exact correspondence. I'm quick to judge, aren't I?

Then again, I'm not sure if a rational course of action exists for this scenario.

There is one more source of answers, if it really is a "rational course of action" I seek. That's all he ever seems able to provide. But given I've trapped him in a cycle of eternal agony, I'm not sure how helpful he could really be.

If this anhedonia becomes particularly overwhelming, I might as well be nice and kill him.

Yes, yes, of course! I should be frightened to death of my girlfriend turning into some horrifying facsimile of an angel, but I'm not. I'm just tired. I haven't been anything short of tired in too long.

"Are you hurting?"

I call to her. Nothing.

"Do you need my help?"

Nothing. I wouldn't be able to tell when she can't and when she won't speak, anymore.

I want to help her, though. I have to. There's no other reason for me to exist, isn't that obvious by now?

But I can't.

There's nothing I can do. Not without completely unpredictable consequences, at least.

Would that be better than this?

I don't know.

I really don't know.

More screens form a spiral staircase up to her. Each cracks under the heel of my shoe as I ascend. I sit on the edge of the highest one and look up into her face.

Sunlight once again pours from her eyes like tears. Now that I'm paying attention, now that I know what I've done to her is wrong, I see the problem.

There's a hole in the fabric of time and space, inside her. It may be something so severe I can't heal it without her disappearing forever, but...

But maybe there's something else I can do.

Something I should have done years ago.

Something that would show up the dolls wagering on which of us would destroy the other first.

I'll bring both of us to nothing but ruin and regret. But we will be alive, and we will be in good health.

All that's left is to muster the courage. Not to do the deed, but to admit to it.

"This is all my fault."

She doesn't say anything to contradict this.

"I made you a promise. A promise that I'd never use memory manipulation magic on you. I'm sorry, for breaking it. I'm so, so sorry."

She mouths, "When did you...?"

I bow my head. "In advance, that's all."

My hands are raised before now, in a silent prayer that she might say something, anything, to change my mind.

Nothing.

I clap, once.