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She freezes time and suddenly he comes walking through, wearing aviator sunglasses and dressed in a crisp suit with a scratched record as its only childish embellishment. There are turntables atop gears floating beneath his hands and her first thought is analyzing him as best she can from a single adrenaline-riddled once-over. He doesn't feel like a witch or a familiar. He doesn't even feel like the other magical girls.
And then he opens his mouth and says, "What the hell," in a perfect monotone. She takes the opportunity to pull out a semiautomatic and fire off a hundred rounds at the witch she'd been fighting and unfreeze time.
Homura Akemi has always been good at English, but his drawl is something she's never heard before. "Who are you?" she asks haltingly. Luckily he's good at dodging the witch's attacks, and he knows how to use the broken sword he produces out of nowhere against the witch's familiars (although she suspects it's a bit like the infinite storage behind her buckler); she doesn't have to expend extra magic to ward him.
"Dave Strider, day forty-one, three hours fourteen minutes thirteen-point-four-one-three seconds," he rattles off. The eerily specific time stamp is jarring and Homura ducks a second too slow, a magically hurled blade barely missing her head and shearing off three centimeters of her hair. "Who are you?"
This is my fourth cycle, Homura thinks. Madoka has already died three times. I will not let it happen again. "Akemi Homura," she says, absently lapsing into Japanese.
"Hohmurrah?" the boy (no, Strider, she corrects herself) sounds out, syllables drawled and slightly mangled on his tongue.
"It is close enough," Homura says, reminded that he doesn't speak Japanese. She freezes time and runs; he follows at a certain distance.
--
Later, when the witch has succumbed to her home-made explosives and left nothing but a Grief Seed on the ground, he walks up to her. "Where are we?" he asks.
"Mitakihara," Homura says. She pockets the Seed.
"Japan?"
She nods.
"I didn't know Japan still existed," he mutters.
"How is that you are unaffected by my freezing time?" she asks, words flowing out of her mouth rapidly. She lets his strange remark go. (How could Japan not exist? Was he from a timeline where Walpurgis Night had destroyed everything?)
"What?"
Homura shoves down the frustration at realizing she'd switched languages again. "How can you still move when I freeze time?"
"You're freezing time?"
She nods again.
"Well, that's why. I'm the night of time, Homura."
"The night... of time?"
He raises an eyebrow, and then he surprises her. "[Not night, Knight,]" he says, his accent heavy and the same drawl he sported in English dragging out his syllables.
"You can speak Japanese."
"It's a respectable level of irony, so yeah, a little."
Homura blinks, not connecting what irony and profiency in Japanese had to do with each other. "[Why didn't you say so from the beginning?]"
Strider shakes his head. "Can't understand you when you're going that fast, Homura."
She doesn't press it. That was an answer, after all. Albeit an unsatisfying answer, but an answer. "You can stay with me if you don't have anywhere to go."
"Much obliged, Homura," he says, tipping an imaginary hat. Something about the way his mouth is tilted says he doesn't mean it quite the way the words make it sound, but she doesn't ask.
--
He's good at going unseen, for a boy who is clearly foreign and has nothing more than several swords, three suits, and a set of (time-manipulating, she finds out) turntables to his name. He says he has money, but it's not any currency Homura has ever seen before.
She pays for his meals without complaint. Walpurgis Night is coming. If she fails she will go back to the state of her bank accounts being exactly as they were when she was released from the hospital.
He seems to suspect nothing, with the way he skulks in the trees outside Mitakihara Middle School and appears seemingly out of thin air to walk with her as she leaves school and goes on patrol.
--
"Boondollar for your thoughts," Strider says one day. She's eating lunch in a belfry overlooking Madoka and Sayaka's rooftop; he's stealing her octopus sausages and she lets him. He'd packed her lunch anyway, claiming it was ironic to be a rapping kitchen ninja. (She doesn't know what to make of his surprise when her refrigerator did not contain swords.)
"Boondollars aren't worth anything here, Strider," she retorts, mildly. They talk in mixed Japanese and English, syllables distorted into a more or less functional pidgin.
"Tell me what's up, Homura," he says.
I have watched Madoka die three times, she thinks. I will not let her contract. I will not let her die this time. I will have to kill Walpurgis Night alone but I will not let her die. "You know exactly what's above us, Strider."
"Have to say, I've never seen a school with its own belfry before. Magical girls, jewelry that turns you into monsters, adorabloodthirsty mascot creatures who keep coming back after you kill them, fighting evil by moonlit drug trips from hell—it's like every shitty anime I've ever heard of has come to life and I'm just waiting for the random naughty tentacles to show up."
Homura thinks maybe she ought to feel insulted, somehow, but can't bring herself to particularly care. Strider is full of remarks like this, riddled with slang and occasionally difficult to understand. "I'll let you handle the next witch if she pulls any out, although they will probably be covered in thorns or something as unpleasant."
"And here I thought Japanese girls were supposed to be prudes. You're awfully kinky, aren't you Homura?"
"Please stop sexually harassing me, Strider."
He laughs, voice wry.
"Have you figured out how to go home?" she asks.
"Shit, I don't even know how I got here," he mutters. His monotone slips just a little. Homura doesn't know when she started being able to tell.
"Have you tried time traveling?" she asks.
His poker face hardens slightly. "This isn't an alpha timeline to begin with. The last time clone I made wandered away with a mark on his neck." Strider winces. "He was dead the next morning. Had a picture in the papers and everything. I'm not doing that again."
"A witch's kiss."
"Is that what that was? Nice to know you people have a nice visible marker for when somebody decides to go take flying lessons without his Unreal Air ."
"You already know what I spend my time fighting," Homura says. She is nearly as good at the monotone as he is now; the corner of his mouth tugs upwards for a split second before his face smoothes back into his usual inscrutable expression. "It is what they do."
"I knew a witch, once." Strider isn't looking at her anymore. "One of my best friends. She's not the kind of witch you fight here."
Homura cannot imagine a witch who does not do harm. She knows where they come from. Knows what they used to be. "Did she make a contract?"
"A what?"
"A witch who didn't make a contract? How is that possible?" How did she not kill you, Homura wants to ask. How did she stay sane?
"She's a witch the same way I'm a knight. It's just a title," Strider says. "Too bad she's not a sorceress. I could have played her blonde knight and Egderp could probably have been the President of Esthar."
"Why does the sorceress' knight need to be blonde?"
"Guess they don't have Final Fantasy 8 here. Go figure, I land in the Japan without the million and a half Square Enix games all on Sony consoles. I suppose there aren't any ironically shitty Tony Hawk games either."
Homura thinks she is getting a little better at reading him, if the faint impression of grief she catches is any indication.
--
The creature runs flicker-swift, white plush edges and deceptively adorable face showing no shift in expression. It isn't running towards the Kaname house this time; Homura pursues it relentlessly regardless. She cannot allow it to get to Madoka.
It stops in front of her flat, in front of a pair of slacks-clad legs she's become familiar with over the past week.
=I don't usually contract with boys,= the thing says, =but you are an interesting one, Dave Strider.=
Strider raises a brow at Kyuubey and shifts to the left as Homura freezes time and fires two shots. When she restarts time's flow the creature darts out of the way, although one bullet blows a hole in its fluffy tail. It doesn't so much as flinch.
"Look, my girl Homura doesn't like you, so let's cut to the chase. Who are you and what the fuck do you want?" Strider drawls, accent becoming particularly more pronounced.
=I want you to contract with me, Dave Strider,= the creature says. =I'll grant you any one wish if you make a contract with me and become...= It pauses. =Gender particulars are so very strange for your species. I suppose "magical boy" is appropriate here.=
"Don't do it," Homura says, suddenly seized by doubt. What if he doesn't listen? What if he wants to go home badly enough that he would make that wish? What if--
Strider glows red, surrounded by the shape of a spinning red gear. Kyuubey halts, frozen in place; the broken sword in Strider's hand is suddenly whole and Homura doesn't even see it move before Kyuubey falls apart, neatly sliced and diced into several pieces.
Another Kyuubey darts in and calmly devours the remnants of its other body before sitting back on its haunches. =You won't contract with me? Even though you're one of the last four humans alive from your Earth, playing a game you're doomed to lose? Even though you can't go home because you have time powers but not the ability to manipulate space? Even though your brother is dead?=
"Shut up," Strider growls, and his monotone is wearing thin.
=Are you too afraid to make a contract? Even though you could make everything right again? Don't you miss your friends?=
"Gog, you are the shittiest devil-figure I have ever had the misfortune of encountering," Strider says, and the finger's-width of monotone detachment has worn down to a hair's width. "Nothing in this miserable conksuck of a situation could make me trust you when people you contract turn into the kind of douchebags that make your time clones jump off buildings."
=You could be the alpha Dave,= the creature says, thoughtfully.
Strider's shoulders sag very slightly. Homura notices the corner of his mouth curve up slightly, as if he'd found the answer to a particularly difficult question he'd been mulling over. "Fuck you," he says instead. "Get lost before I decide to dice you up for dinner. I feel like having one of Lalonde's Squiddleterrors for dinner tonight and I think you'd make a good side dish."
--
"What does it mean, to be the 'alpha Dave'?" Homura asks later.
"Technicalities," Strider says, waving a hand flippantly. "Logistical bullshit. Side effect of being fucked in the head on wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey shenanigans and making choices when you haven't had the chance to come down. How HIGH do you even have to be?"
Homura raises an eyebrow at the obvious evasion of the question, but lets it go. "And time clones?"
"Ever time traveled, Homura?"
"... Yes."
"Stable time loops. Or unstable, but that gets me killed. Where's the takeout menu? We're having kalamari tonight, I feel like vivisecting some tentacles."
Homura thinks about her time traveling, about how every time she goes back she changes the timeline, about the abandoned timelines where Madoka is dead and there is nothing left for her. "You had a brother?" she asks instead.
Strider visibly freezes. "... Yeah," he says at last, after a long, pregnant pause.
"...Excuse me for bringing up such a painful topic."
"You live here by yourself, don't you?" Strider asks, suddenly.
"Yes." It doesn't bother her anymore, not like it did when she first got out of the hospital.
He waits for her to say more.
She meets his gaze squarely and doesn't elaborate.
"... So, I guess we're more alike than I thought," he says, when the silence stretches too long.
"I didn't take you for an octopus-on-your-pizza kind of person, Strider," she says, handing him the takeout menu.
"I'm not," he retorts. "... Call me Dave."
--
"Bro was kind of my dad and my older brother rolled into one ironic beatboxing puppet-pornographer ninja DJ package," he says out of the blue as he deflects a barrage of ice skate blades.
"I see," Homura responds, running up a clothesline before freezing time and lobbing a pipe bomb at the witch.
"He gave me my first pair of shades," he continues, slicing through now-frozen familiars without missing a beat. They screech and dissipate as Homura unfreezes time. "He..."
She waits for him to finish his sentence, but the words are drowned by the percussive blast of the witch's demise. The witch's bubble of nightmare space dissolves.
Strider's shoulders are shaking slightly. "Fuck," he whispers, breath hitching. "Fuck this is uncool."
Homura looks away, not quite fast enough to avoid seeing the liquid running down his cheeks.
--
"Why did you contract with that thing anyway?" he asks over dinner.
Homura pauses, about to bite into a slice of pizza. She closes her mouth and puts the slice down. "I wanted to save someone," she answers.
He makes a sound like 'mmhmm' and looks at her.
"She is my everything," Homura says, helpless to explain all of the things she feels about Madoka. They well up inside and threaten to choke her words, cloud her Soul Gem, steal her precious second (third, fourth) chance.
Strider looks at her. "How many times have you gone through this timeline?"
"... I have rewound time four times already."
"Didn't manage to save her, huh?"
"No. Not yet."
"... Good luck," he says, and it is not the same kind of monotone that makes Homura think he is being insincere.
"Thank you, Dave."
--
Sayaka and Kyoko are dead. A smashed CD is all that is left of Sayaka, broken as she warped into a witch. Of Kyoko, there is nothing, not even the ribbon that tied her hair. Homura balls her shaking hands into fists and takes inventory of the arsenal stored behind her buckler.
Dave picks up a handful of the CD shards, eyeing the characters he can read. "Classical," he remarks. "I've never mixed this one before."
Homura says nothing.
"Hey. Homura."
She looks at him and he's standing next to her.
"Let's go."
Sayaka hadn't dropped a Grief Seed. Homura fishes out an older Seed with one use left and purifies her Soul Gem, tossing the Seed over her shoulder for Kyuubey to devour. It does, as expected.
She takes the hand Dave offers her and they walk home in silence.
--
Dave packs her lunch and kisses her cheek. She lets him. He's wearing an apron she thinks her mother might have used to wear; she doesn't know where he found it.
"Have a good day, honey," he says, not serious in the slightest. She thwaps him in the shoulder, but they walk to school holding hands. She squeezes his hand like a lifeline at the gate.
Later he tells her about John, who loves Con Air and other terrible movies; Rose who likes the occult and psychology, and Jade with the dream robot and rifles and smiley-peppered green text.
She tells him what Madoka was like when they first met, how she was cheerful and bright and said to call her just Madoka, how she said her name was cool, how she saved her life.
They order Chinese and fight over the last dumpling and split it with almost a smile between their faces.
--
Walpurgis Night blasts Dave's red-suited form backwards. He flits out of sight and stops a score of familiars with the familiar light of his spinning red gear, slicing through them all with deadly efficiency.
Homura freezes time and fires off salvo after salvo; she kills familiars and hurls bomb after bomb at Walpurgis Night. Her arsenal of explosives dries up, her ammunition runs out, and Walpurgis Night continues to laugh horribly. A blast of power throws her back into the crook of a giant tree's branches. Dave is nowhere to be found.
Madoka stands on a cliff overlooking the battle, Kyuubey by her side. Homura can't hear what she says, but Kyuubey's words are all too clear. "No!" she shouts, desperately willing her voice to carry to Madoka. "No, you mustn't listen to him, you mustn't contract!"
Another blast of power from Walpurgis Night and the branch beneath Homura is gone. A light flares at the top of the cliff.
"NO!" she screams, plummeting into the darkness below.
--
=I didn't expect her to be this powerful,= Kyuubey says, sounding nearly cheerful. =I knew she would be strong, but to defeat Walpurgis Night in only one hit... And of course, now that the enemy is gone, the only thing left for her now is to go from the strongest magical girl to the worst witch. She'll probably destroy your planet in a few days, but that's not my problem anymore. I've more than filled my quota.=
Homura turns away, sick to her stomach.
=Aren't you going to fight?= the creature asks.
"No," Homura says, and walks away.
=Are you, perhaps...?= the creature asks, but she ignores it.
A familiar red-suited figure picks himself up out of the rubble of what is left of Mitakihara and looks at her. "So we failed."
"Yes."
"All right," Dave says. "Go back. Go save your girl."
"What about you?" she asks.
"I'll send your girlfriend your greetings, compliments of your rapping kitchen ninja," he says.
"You can't win." Part of her wants him to say he'll come back with her.
"This isn't my timeline. This isn't even my world. It's not my job to win," Dave points out, and his monotone is oddly soft. He pulls off his sunglasses.
His eyes are red, almost as red as Kyuubey's. "Dave—"
"I was doomed to begin with," he says. "Sometimes it happens. I make shitty choices along my fucked-up-on-timey-wimey-shenanigans way and I split myself off into a doomed timeline. Maybe I was an alpha Dave once, but now I'm just a doomed one."
"How are you going to get home?" Who is going to make jokes I don't get and eat pizza with octopus on it because you're irritated at Kyuubey?
"Go back, Homura. Sorry babe, but we have to divorce now. I know you wanted all of this fine Strider coolkid for a house-husband, but your waifu will probably cry if you don't go back and play time-traveling prince charming."
She takes two steps forward and grabs his collar, meaning to yell at him or hit him or at least tell him that he is not allowed to just write himself out of her life like that. She kisses him instead.
It's a brief kiss and not very good. He gives her an actual smile for a second before his poker face slips back into place.
"Go."
He pulls away, turns and grips his broken sword. Its blade phases between half and whole. Then he's gone, running towards the monstrous witch in the distance who had once been Madoka.
"Goodbye, Dave," she says, and turns the clock back.
--
Dave Strider knows something is wrong when Jack charges an attack he's never seen before. Aradia's multiples (god tier or not) aren't fast enough to deflect it; he's in the middle of summoning other time clones when the ray strikes his timetables and sends him careening through the whispery, nausea-inducing coils of the horrorterrors and straight into a nightmare terrain being navigated by a single Japanese girl in what looks like a school uniform and a buckler on her arm. Monsters freeze around him as she does something, but he walks on.
"Who are you?" she asks.
"Dave Strider, day forty-one three hours fourteen minutes thirteen-point-four-one-three seconds," he answers, and doesn't immediately turn his timetables to send him flying back the way he came. Instead he asks in turn, "Who are you?"
"Akemi Homura," she says, Japanese perfect and primly accented. Dave's time sense tangles itself into a knot right around the buckler she wears. It's then he knows he's doomed.