Chapter 25

Confession

"Before I proceed, I beg you for one thing, Madoka. Please... please hear me out. It may... it definitely will sound strange, impossible even... but please." One final chance.

Homura was counting the days until Walpurgisnacht... on the fingers of one hand. Damn it Kyoko, I could have used you. That annoying, hideous laughter echoing through my head... It had become a familiar nexus point, the end of one journey and the beginning of the next. Synonymous with failure. Repetition. And a spark, a glimmer, of hope.

Rarely had she felt more eager for the sands of time to reverse once more. But also so tired...

And seeing Madoka in her outfit kicking ass, even freshly Contracted, had been wildly exciting, despite it signalling her failure to keep a promise to the very same girl. Well, perhaps not the very same, but someone I loved. Love.

"This is... so confusing. I... I'm sorry if I ramble. I know what a great listener you are, Madoka, but tell me if I get...

"Okay. Ah... I w-will begin... by telling you about my very best friend in the whole world. I had... well, I had just transferred to a new school... no, not your school... exactly. I had been in the hospital... my father and mother died a few years back, and... well, something was wrong with my heart. I had... surgery. It... was... unpleasant."

Pull yourself together! This is my only chance...Homura thought in a desperate attempt to rally from the painful memories.

This time, at least. Nothing left to lose, a small voice inside her said, for once vaguely encouraging.

"S-so, it took a while to... recover. Once I was on my feet again, I was transferred to M- to a new school. With the wait for a donor, the surgery, the... recovery, I'd missed... a lot. Of school... and other things. Life, I suppose.

"I was... overwhelmed. It was like everyone in the whole place was staring at me, I couldn't help thinking they were judging me. I... I was uncomfortable. Terrified, really."

Putting her hands to her cheeks, feeling the heat radiating from them. I was so weak!

"I... met someone. Or, actually, someone started talking to me. She was so nice, so cheerful, and most of all... she welcomed me! She made it seem like she was happy that I had joined her class... happy just because I was there. She even thought my name was cool...

Pink eyes narrowed briefly.

"I... didn't see her later that day. I had been... friendless. For a long time. My illness... it made others uncomfortable. The orph-... the place where I stayed was... well, looked down on, to say the least. Kids at school could be so cruel, I felt like... something was wrong with me. Some kind of fundamental flaw. When I didn't see her after school... I had hoped to 'accidentally' bump into her, but she never appeared. I felt... It's silly, we had only talked for a few moments, and never made plans or anything... hardly more than a few sentences, really. But I felt like I had been abandoned. Forgotten about.

"I know that was an over-reaction. Even at the time, I knew it... but it didn't stop the feeling from eating me up inside. Like someone's leaving you behind, going somewhere you can't follow... that feel of something slipping away."

Her eyes averted, Homura didn't notice the pinkette's quick intake of breath.

"How could I blame her? I was just me, glasses and braids... Yes, Madoka. Braids. Quiet, lonely, unremarkable... and friendless.

"It was on the walk home that the Witch reached out to me...

Madoka's eyes were wide, watching Homura with an intense feeling of... not foreboding. Foreshadowing? Like she was about to learn the answer to so many of the questions that had arisen since the transfer student had arrived in her classroom with an arrogant flip of her long, black hair. Before that, even. The dream.

An operation... orphaned. Her heart broke a little bit at the thought. The wounded look in Homura's eyes was almost pitiful, coming from the once so self-assured girl. But the transfer to a new school... and thinking her name was interesting... It tickled that almost imperceptible sense of... something, whenever she was around Akemi Homura. Something... familiar?

"The Witch was right. I was worthless. I was convinced that I wanted to die, a stop to all the pain and sorrow, hoping for a friend... someone to share life with, who valued me... and meeting turned backs and snickering whispers. My parents were gone... nobody to even visit me in the hospital... Death, at least, is an end to the pain. There's some comfort in that...

"That's what I was thinking, ready to have it all end.

"And that's when she showed up. I had walked... or rather been pulled, into a Witch's labyrinth. But it wasn't anything in the barrier that captured my attention... it was... her.

"She is, simply, amazing. So vibrant, so caring... so good. She rescued me, slaying the Witch with ease, despite her only having become a Puella Magi days beforehand...

"She had come for me. She saved me.

"She became my dearest friend. It was her, she convinced me that I had value. As a person. As a friend. I guess it's ironic that it was a Magical Girl who was the first person to treat me as a human being in such a long time.

"She helped me... overcome some things. Helped me grow, gain confidence. It was her who I longed to see every day, spend as much time with as possible. She let me accompany her, sometimes, when To-... time allowed."

That sense of deja vu began to wash over the fascinated pinkette, her ire long forgotten as the black-haired girl poured her feelings out through her story, an overwhelming sense of misery and loneliness... until it seemed to take a turn towards happy. She found herself caught up in the story, and was fascinated by Homura's inability to meet her gaze. Those purple eyes had never shied away from her before! Madoka was sometimes uncomfortably aware of this fact.

Like me and... a wave of sadness washed over the girl sitting cross-legged on her bed, the liquid bands of pain that seemed to encase her heart, which she had worked so hard at trying to ignore in order to continue functioning, became hard, sharp... the thought of Sayaka, of never seeing her again, freezing that overwhelming sense of grief and loss, jagged splinters of icy emptiness stabbing themselves into the very core of her being, an inescapable feeling of almost drowning in the pain, unable to breathe-

"I... owe her everything. She was, is, my one true friend. She let me follow her around for weeks, included me in her hunts and protected me at the same time. And then, on Walpurgisnacht, I watched her die.

"I watched her save, basically, the world. At the cost of her own life. Her friends had already fallen, she was the only one left to stop it. She was so brave...

"Stop it she did. But... at such a price...

"As I stood over her lifeless body... the body that had once contained a spirit of such vitality, an inspiring and compassionate and most of all loving and kind soul... e-empty. Gone. S-snuffed o-o-ut..."

Madoka watched in horror as the girl drew a shuddering breath, tears leaking out of her downcast eyes, pain etched deeply in her face. She could barely stand it... that poor girl...

"I... I c-couldn't allow that to happen. I... just couldn't. The world could not exist without her... the person who made life matter. She was so good, why did it have to be her..?

"Kyubey was there. He's here, too, somewhere. I don't care anymore. He can hear me. I have nothing to hide, not anymore. After the battle, standing over the beautiful, still corpse... I Contracted. I'd save her. I'd go back... and this time, I'd be the strong one... I'd protect her!

"Then I was back, at the beginning, sort of. The day I was released from the hospital. The week before I started school, a new school, with new people... but that didn't bother me anymore! Not one little bit. Because I knew, with ecstatic certainty, that my best friend was alive and waiting for me at that school!"

Madoka's mind was reeling, puzzle pieces fitting together but the overall picture confused and incomplete. Time travel... is that was this "going back" was about? It was chilling: her entire relationship with the transfer student, her coldness, her warnings, following her... everything was starting to take on a slightly shifted, twisted meaning.

"I was... exuberant! Our reunion was a bit once-sided, of course, since she'd only just met me... but I'd known her for months... and loved her almost as long as that. She was just so amazing... she helped me grow in entirely new ways than our, well, "first" time around. Most important of all was how to fight as a team.

"Against us, the Witches never stood a chance. It was blissful, success after success, but again Walpurgis appeared, and again Kaname Madoka died."

Homura brought her eyes up to meet Madoka's for the first time, lilac sparkling with tears, blinking trails of glistening lines down her cheeks. Madoka's thoughts were frozen, unbelieving, even though she'd begun to have her own dark suspicions as the story developed... What kind of trick... but it didn't feel like a trick. It didn't even feel like Homura was crazy, as much as the pinkette preferred that to the alternative...

"It was you, Madoka. Always you. Who made life... worth living. I... I needed you. I couldn't... I can't... I'll never let you down... except...

"I already have. I've lived this life, these last few months, over and over. Seriously, over and over and over... and I will continue to, until I finally save you, Madoka. B-but... I made a... promise to you. Not you, you... an earlier you, who'd figured out that Kyubey had tricked us all. There were... complications; no matter what we tried, we couldn't ever win.

"So... you asked me to make sure you never Contracted. I... I've missed you so much, Madoka, but I've had to try and keep my promise, I had to try and prevent you from dealing with that filthy Incubator... I... I'm s-so s-s-sorry!"

Homura paused her weeping after a few moments, lifting her head up as Madoka poured her thoughts into the black-haired girl's mind.

All this is very, very confusing, she projected. But I'm certainly not angry if you failed to keep a promise to some other "me" that I, as in the real me, do not agree with.

And yet... something about this seemed to strike a chord, deep inside her subconscious. A tickling, instinctive feel that Homura wasn't lying, and wasn't insane.

"But it's worse that that! I'm so sorry, Madoka, but there's... a reason... why you asked... asked me to...

"This isn't the time, maybe, but... I'm sure Kyubey never told you. Witches. There's a connection, between them and Magical Girls. Witches are Puella Magi. The stronger the girl, the stronger the Witch...

"And you are the strongest of all."

Madoka's bruised and battered mind, assaulted by tumultuous emotions and frightening new revelations, began to feel numb, detached. She desperately wanted to dismiss what the girl before her was saying... but at the exact same time knew intuitively that she was telling the truth.

"Sayaka... I'm sorry, Madoka, I really am. But Sayaka, she turned Witch every time. Except... this time, something happened. I think Kyoko was involved... but she didn't turn. I've seen Mami turn, and Kyoko... and...

"I don't want to fail you, Madoka. But I can't help feeling happy to have failed! I hated being the scary person keeping you safe from a danger you could never know about... I missed you so much! When I saw you in your outfit, all the old memories came flooding back... I love you more than life itself. You are my life... I will keep trying, trying to find a way-"

The raven-haired girl, kneeling at the foot of Madoka's bed, broke off as she felt arms wrap around her chest, squeezing, and her breath caught. It was a feeling of wires and energy, a spark of life jumping between the girls, energizing her. She took a deep breath, blinking the tears from her eyes, as she felt a hand stroking her hair comfortingly. She closed her eyes, her body shuddering within the slim arms that held her, feeling like the sobs wracking her body would shake her apart except for that warm, electrifying embrace.

Madoka felt energy flow from her into the weeping wreck of a girl, a satisfying sensation, lending some of her own strength to Homura's battle against the mountain of anguish that weighed upon her soul.

The pinkette focused, trying to project her feelings. She'd listened to Homura's story, almost despite herself, feeling spellbound. For the first time since walking her to the nurse's office the first day she arrived, Madoka was able to understand Akemi Homura as a human being. Stripped away of her flawless mask of competence, the pinkette was able to empathize with the girl's plight... and as she slowly grasped the complexity of what Homura was telling her, she realized that she could never understand the true extent of what the girl had suffered.

Concern, empathy, respect... appreciation. Homura lapped up the feelings like she'd been dying of thirst, embracing it, disbelieving.

Madoka held on to the transfer student, wonderingly. It was like something out of a fairy tale... the selfless wish to save someone, the dedication, commitment needed to keep going, even in the face of what appeared to be insurmountable odds...

That, definitely, did not bode well. Neither did this waffle house thing that apparently kept killing her.

But that was then; this is now. Madoka basked in the feeling of confidence welling up inside her, and examining her thoughts realized that she was excited... eager, essentially, to no longer be alone. She'd felt frighteningly isolated these past two days, and the Witch last night was a close call...

For the first time in forty some hours, Madoka felt a flicker of hope... a feeling of a future sun cutting through the present-day cloud of misery and gloom.

"You really... think I'm brave?" the pinkette asked shyly. Homura could only nod her head, long black hair cascading off her shoulders.

"I believe you, Homura-chan. It's crazy, but I do. I feel like... like I've known you. You really love me... so much? I've always felt there was a... connection or something. Between us... I forgive you, for anything... and you... you m-must f-f-forgive m-me f-for the things I s-said..."

The two girls knelt on the floor, supporting one another, sobbing on the other's shoulder, letting out all the pent up sadness and depressing memories wash away in a torrent of tears.

Downstairs, hearing the howling sobs coming from her daughter's room, Junko smiled indulgently, hooking an errant lock of purple hair behind an ear. She changed the channel, observing the Nikkei's closing numbers, confident that her daughter and her new friend were working things out.

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