Archive of Our Own

Kyoko shivers, pulling her coat tighter around her shoulders. The cold is way harder to deal with when she can’t do anything about it. Sometimes, backwardly, she wishes that every bad thing in the world were caused by Demons. They were something she knew how to deal with. Something she knew how to fix.

Well, at least she had a coat at all. It’s not that she needed one, she’d been doing fine without, but Mami had insisted, and, well. It was hard to say no to that face. She’s too sweet for her own good, that one.

Which is why, of course, Kyoko is standing in front of her door at nearly midnight in the snow. She hesitates, but it’s too cold to be indecisive.

Mami opens the door a minute later, rubbing her eyes. She’s clearly been sleeping, only taking the time to pull a long shirt over her head, and suddenly Kyoko feels horribly, awfully rude. It’s a feeling that only Mami brings out in her. “I’m sorry,” she stammers. “I, I shouldn’t have—”

“It’s okay,” Mami smiles. “It’s one of those nights, I guess.” She steps out of the doorway, letting Kyoko step through and revealing a dull-eyed Homura, sitting at her table, her hands curled around a cup of tea.

“Oh,” says Kyoko. “Hey.”

Homura gives her a nod, as unsurprised as Mami is to see her. Kyoko sits on the cushion next to her and takes the steaming cup Mami offers her. “What’s bothering you, Kyoko-chan?”

Kyoko flushes, hyper-aware of Homura watching her, although her gaze is surprisingly light. “Nothing,” she snaps.

Homura cocks her head. “You’re just here for the cake?”

Kyoko glares at her, but Homura’s eyes are still strange and dull, like she’s been crying, and it takes all the fire out of her. She looks back at Mami, a little unnerved. “I was... wondering. What did we do with S-Sayaka’s body?”

Homura puts her cup down a little too hard on her saucer, but doesn’t say anything.

Mami’s smile flickers. “We decided it was best to leave her on the bridge where we emerged from the labyrinth. If we’d moved her it would have been easier for police to trace it back to us.” She firms her lips with an effort. “Though in a way we are responsible for her death, it would be hard for any of us to fight the forces of evil from jail.”

“We’re not responsible for her death,” Homura says, sounding strained. “Not the way you mean, anyway.”

Kyoko stares at her. “You okay, Akemi?”

Homura shifts on her pillow to look at her. “Why are you asking about Sayaka?”

Kyko sighs sharply. “Fine, fine. Turn it around on me.” She takes a gulp of her tea. This is, after all, why she came. “I’ve, um, been dreaming.” She closes her eyes because it’s easier to ignore Mami and Homura’s stares. “In, in my dream I’m still in bed, but I-I’m not alone, Sayaka’s next to me but she’s not breathing, she’s—”

She’s pale and cold and pretty in the same way the stained glass windows of Kyoko’s father’s church are pretty and she’s lying so still she can’t be anything but dead. But in her dream Kyoko still curls around her, soul gem in hand, keeping her warm, keeping her safe—

“—she’s dead, I didn’t even know her that well and she’s dead and in my dream I’m so, I’m scared that there’s nothing I can do.” She opens her eyes. “But there really is nothing I can do. She’s already gone, and we left her there.” She stares hard at her hands. “We weren’t really even friends.”

Mami reaches over to pour her more tea, and slides a slice of cake across the table to her. “You were friends,” she says. “Sometimes bonds form faster than we think.”

Homura is holding her teacup again, though it’s bone dry. “How many times have you had this dream?” She asks.

“Five,” says Kyoko. “I couldn’t sleep at all tonight, I was too scared—concerned,” she corrects herself, not wanting Homura to know how completely and totally terrified it made her feel to have Sayaka there but not there. “That it might happen again.”

“It’s only been a week,” Mami says softly. “No wonder you look so tired.” She sips her tea. “As it happens,” she says, “Homura is here because of her dreams, as well, although she refuses to tell me what they’re about.”

“I know what mine are about,” Homura says, “and it’s not something you’d understand.” She sighs a little. “I’m sorry, that’s rude. But I know what yours are about, too, Kyoko.”

“Oh yeah?” Kyoko says through her cake. Me too, she wants to say. They’re about me being an idiot and losing the only friend who maybe actually liked me for me and not just because I’m strong or useful. “Go on, then.”

“Love,” says Homura.

Kyoko freezes, fork halfway to her mouth. “Excuse me?”

“You used to love stories about heroes and hope and love,” Homura says. “Sayaka reminds you of them.”

“How do you—”

“You told me,” she says simply. “A while ago.”

“I never—”

“It does make sense,” Mami interrupts. “After all, you’re a hero yourself, Kyoko-chan.”

“I’m not—I didn’t—” Kyoko slams her fist into the floor at her side.“I’ve never mentioned that to anyone, certainly not you, and it doesn’t make sense anyway, why would Sayaka remind me, I barely knew her!”

“I think it’s just how it works,” Mami says thoughtfully. “We magical girls have so little time to live, we have to love fast, hm?” She cocks her head. “More cake?”

“You’re insane, both of you.” She wants to accuse Homura of—something, being psychic, spying on her, somehow sending the dreams or hiding Sayaka from her or something equally insane but she’s so, so tired. “I’m not. I don’t love her.”

Homura shakes her head. “Not now,” she says. “But you could have. Would have, if.”

“If,” Kyoko spits bitterly. “I hate this.”

Homura leans over and runs her fingers over Kyoko’s reddened knuckles. “It could be worse,” she says coolly. “Trust me.”

Mami nods. “Sayaka’s gone, but we’re here, and we’re healthy, and we can do good in the world.”

Homura squeezes Kyoko’s hand, just a little, and lets go.

“But you won’t be much good in battle if you can never sleep,” Mami continues, and scoots over on her pillow to sit next to Kyoko. “Let me see if I can help.”

She manifests her soul gem and grips it in one hand, raising the other to Kyoko’s temple. Kyoko closes her eyes, and suddenly she sees Sayaka again, but alive, her sword clutched in her hand. Her knuckles are bloody. Her other hand is fisted in her own shirt, and she’s breathing hard, too hard, and staring at Kyoko with a mixture of caution and fierce determination, and this isn’t a dream or a fear this is a memory, it’s the first time they met, it’s Kyoko trying to kill her, she’s wounded because Kyoko hurt her—

Something yanks her away from Mami’s fingers, and she strikes out at it blindly, hitting Homura in the side of the head. Homura drops her with surprised grunt and turns to glare at her. “You were shaking. I thought you might pass out.”

“Sorry,” Kyoko mutters, rubbing her back where she fell. “Don’t do that.”

Mami is staring at her with wide eyes. “I think you may be right, Homura-chan,” she says. “There’s a deep connection there, like. Like many threads, connecting Sayaka-chan and Kyoko-chan, all tangled up.”

Kyoko frowns. “You can see all that?”

Mami shrugs. “It’s part of my power, I guess. We all have a lot of threads between us, but the ones between you and Sayaka are particularly numerous and tangled.” She frowns a little. “Homura-chan has a lot that are cut off, tied up in bows. I thought that’s just what happened when someone dies, but yours aren’t cut at all.”

Kyoko glances at Homura, who stares back silently, sipping her tea. She sighs and looks back at Mami. “What does that mean, though? Like. Why am I so tied to her? And if you say love I’m gonna punch you in the face, I don’t care how good your cake is.”

“Thank you for the compliment,” Mami laughs a little. “But unfortunately, I don’t know. All I can do is try and untangle them, maybe? There’s one that’s binding very tight.” She raises her index finger to Kyoko’s throat, and draws a line across it. “Here.”

Kyoko swallows. “I, I don’t know. Does that mean you would be there? In the dreams?” It feels weird to imagine Mami seeing her that—that vulnerable. It feels weird to even acknowledge that she can be that vulnerable. “Is there maybe a way I could work on untangling them myself?”

Mami sits back on her heels. “Maybe,” she says. “Why don’t you try?”
“Yeah,” says Kyoko. “Uh, sure.” She stands up. “I guess I’ll go do that, then. Somehow.”

She bends and shoves the last bite of cake in her mouth, and then turns to go.

“There’s a moment right before you fall asleep,” Homura says slowly, “where everything is simultaneously enormous and very small, where you are both inside and outside of your body, and you can see yourself inside and out.” She looks up to meet Kyoko’s eyes. “That’s where my powers work best, where I can see the most.”

“Thanks,” says Kyoko, a little thrown.

It’s nearly three when she finally gets home, or as “home” as she ever gets these days. Her hotel room is tiny and disgusting, filled up with discarded food wrappers and candy boxes. She should get around to cleaning it one of these days, but somehow the little things get lost in all the enormous things that are her day to day life.

She wonders when someone will notice that she hasn’t been to school in months.

She sits on the edge of the bed and pulls off her boots, weariness numbing her fingers. Slumping backwards, she closes her eyes, not bothering with the rest of her clothes. If this doesn’t work, she’ll be awake again soon enough, aching with the effort of shoving life into the lifeless.

In a surprisingly short time, she feels the sort of pulling-away-elastic-swing of that moment just before sleep, and she tries to hold on to the part of it where she can really see herself, but it slips from her mental fingers and her shoulders are tense and she’s awake again. “Dammit,” she mutters to herself, and pushes the heels of her hands into her eyes. “Dammit.”

She tries again. This time she holds on to it for a minute, concentrates on looking at herself from the outside, a too-tall girl in a too-small bed, pale and rumpled and angry even in sleep. She tries to see what Mami can, threads stretching out from—where? her hands? no, one was around her throat, choking her?—and then she’s lost it again and her head aches and she’s so fucking tired.

She sits up, reaching across the foot separating her bed from her desk, and rummages around in her drawer for headache medication. She flips off the cap with a thumbnail.

Sayaka catches it.

She’s standing in the middle of Kyoko’s mess, impeccably dressed and alive and Kyoko rubs her eyes, bleary and disbelieving and she wants to pinch herself but she’s too sure Sayaka will go away. “This is new,” she says instead.

“I’ll say,” says Sayaka, and she sounds so normal and alive and Kyoko’s so tired that to her complete and utter horror she starts to cry, great fat tears that make no sense at all. She tries to wipe her eyes subtly but Sayaka’s not an idiot, and crosses to her immediately, catching her wrist. “Hey, hey,” she says. “You okay?”

“No,” says Kyoko, “and neither are you.”

“I know,” says Sayaka. “I’m dead. Madoka told me.”

Kyoko blinks at her. “What? Who?”

Sayaka laughs a little, and her fingers are still around Kyoko’s wrist, not really preventing her from doing anything, just there. “Oh man, nevermind. This is gonna be weird.”

“You’re telling me,” Kyoko says.

Sayaka lets go of her wrist and settles on the bed next to her, pulling her legs up to her chest. She’s still pretty, but it’s not stained-glass-pretty anymore, not shattered, and Kyoko kind of just wants to sit here and stare at her.

You could have, Homura’s voice says in her head. Would have. If.

Sayaka turns to look at her, and she feels her cheeks go red. She drops her eyes. “So,” says Sayaka. “I’m dead. Just dead?”

Kyoko wipes her face, surprised out of her embarrassment. “What do you mean, just dead?”

“Nothing, nevermind, nevermind.” She licks her lips. “Were you there? When I died.”

“Yeah,” says Kyoko. “Do we—do we have to talk about it?”

“Of course not,” Sayaka says. “I’m just curious, is all.”

“You told me,” Kyoko says, and swallows. “You said you had no regrets.”

Sayaka stares at her, her head tipped to one side, and then, incredibly, she starts to laugh. It’s quick and bubbling and Kyoko’s pretty sure she hasn’t heard anyone laugh since—well, since Sayaka died. Probably a while before that. Sayaka laughs like maybe she’s never laughed before, curling in on herself at Kyoko’s side. Kyoko just watches her, more confused but somehow lighter than she’s felt in ages. Sayaka flops backwards, her giggles fading into ragged breaths, and Kyoko slips down beside her, scowling with no real anger behind it. “You done?”

“Yeah,” Sayaka says. She stretches her arms upwards, her fingers laced together. “Will you tell me a story?”

“What?” Kyoko blinks. “Um. What kind?”

“Something with heroes.” Sayaka turns on her side so she’s facing Kyoko, inches away. She smells clean and slightly flowery. “Something about hope.”

Kyoko’s pretty sure she still smells like blood, and maybe always will. She wants to move backwards so Sayaka doesn’t have to smell it, but doesn’t want to lose the perfect strangeness of the moment. “You know,” she says, and it comes out much wobblier than she meant it, “That’s two people tonight who know I like stupid knight stories, and I’m pretty certain I haven’t told either you or Akemi about it.”

“Homura knows?” Sayaka says, surprised, and then grins wide. “Oh. Of course. That makes sense.”

Kyoko frowns hard. “Um, no, it really, really doesn’t?”

Sayaka smiles at her like a cat with a secret. “Ask her about Madoka.”

“Who the hell is Madoka?” Kyoko demands. “You’ve mentioned her twice now.”

“Like I said,” Sayaka says, “ask Homura. She can explain it better than me.” She wrinkles her nose. “I don’t really get it myself, to be honest.”

Kyoko rolls onto her side so they’re face to face. “That makes two of us,” she mutters.

Sayaka puts her hand over Kyoko’s where it lies on the bed. “Don’t think you’re getting out of it that easily,” she says, and her eyes slip closed. “I expect an excellent story from you.”

“Fine, fine,” Kyoko grumbles, but it’s really, really hard to be angry this close to the sweep of Sayaka’s eyelashes against her cheeks, and when Sayaka’s fingers thread through hers it’s completely impossible. “Once upon a time,” she begins, “there lived a princess in a tall, tall tower.”

She wakes up alone and surprisingly rested. Her hotel room smells stale but her sheets smell faintly of flowers. She wipes a hand across her face and stares at the ceiling for a long, long time.

By the time she convinces herself that she’s hungry enough to move it’s nearly noon. She pulls on her boots and coat, digging in the pockets for any spare cash and, not surprisingly, coming up short. Sighing, she opens her door. Someone’s left a brown paper bag on her doorstep.

Picking it up, she discovers it’s filled with bread, cheese, and apples. She glances around, but there’s no one on the walkway. She turns, slowly, scanning the rooftops surrounding her, and is slightly disappointed to see Homura, sitting with her legs dangling off a nearby balcony. She settles the bag more securely in her arms and leaps lightly across the alleyway to join her. “What are you doing here?”

“Good morning,” says Homura. “Expecting someone else?”

“Kind of,” Kyoko admits. “I saw Sayaka last night.”

“Not dead, this time?”

Kyoko eyes her sideways, her mouth full of bread. “Nnnm.” She chews, swallows, and then says very carefully, “She told me to ask you about Madoka.”

Homura stops swinging her legs and stares hard at her knees. “Ah.”

“I wanted to talk to you anyway, about what you meant at Mami’s. That I’d told you that before, about the stories. Sayaka knew, too, and I know I never told her, either.”

“They’re the same question,” Homura says, not meeting her eyes.

“Are they gonna get answered?” Kyoko asks, polishing an apple on her sleeve.

“Madoka is my very best friend,” Homura says. “Sayaka’s best friend, too. You’ve met her.”

Kyoko frowns. “No I haven’t. She’s like us?”

Homura grins at the sky. “No, she’s not very much like us at all.”

Kyoko punches her in the side. “If you’re just going to speak in riddles, I’m going back to sleep.”
Homura still doesn’t look at her. “You don’t remember her because Madoka changed the shape of the universe.”

Kyoko stares at her. “What? I’m pretty sure I would remember that.”

Homura shakes her head. “Partially because of my own actions, she became the most powerful magical girl in the world, powerful enough to rewrite the laws of reality itself.” She touches the ribbon in her hair. “She rid the world of a great evil, and in doing so, changed the course of our lives. What happened to Mami and Sayaka, to you—it was undone.” She finally turns to face Kyoko. “In the world before Madoka you, Mami Tomoe, and Sayaka Miki were all dead, and I myself was dying.”

Kyoko stares at her. She could be lying. She’s lied before—in fact, if what she’s saying right now is true, she’s basically done nothing but lie for the entire time that Kyoko’s even known her. But she has her fingers tangled in her red, red ribbon and she’s smiling the saddest smile Kyoko’s ever seen and she brought Kyoko food. “Shit,” Kyoko says, heartfelt.

Homura nods, just a small dip of the chin. “The Sayaka you’re seeing is the Sayaka of that world. I can only think that Madoka is sending her to you because she knows that, somehow, it will be good for you.”

Kyoko swallows. “Did we—I mean, is she—did I love her, there?”

Homura stands up. “Feelings don’t change,” she says simply. “In every world, every timeline, the emotions we feel are the same. The only difference is time, and the actions that we take.”

She steps off the balcony and is gone before Kyoko has time to be angry at her. Instead, she just stands up, suddenly aware of the sharp chill in the air. “Thanks,” she says, only a little bit grudgingly, and goes home.

She spends the day cleaning. If Sayaka comes back (and she’s not going to think about how much she wants that ‘if’ to be a ‘when’) she doesn’t want the place to look quite so much like a pig sty. And even if she doesn’t, it would be good for her to live somewhere that doesn’t make her ashamed of herself every time she steps through the door.

It’s easier to convince herself it’s good for her during the day than it is late that night, when she’s sitting in a too-clean, too-empty hotel room, alone and cold and angry with herself for getting her hopes up.

She tries Homura’s exercises again, but what works for Homura, she’s realizing, probably doesn’t work so well for her. Homura is all about time, and so of course there’s a literal moment when she is strongest. But Kyoko—Kyoko’s about, what? the only thing she’s good for is battle. Everyone’s wish is related to their powers except hers. God knows she’s not any kind of great speaker, or leader, or prophet. The only thing she’s good at is tricking people, and in this case, the sucker is herself.

Of course Sayaka’s not coming back. Why would she?

She sleeps fitfully, images of that first fight with Sayaka flickering in and out of her dreams, and she wakes up angry. She eats the rest of Homura’s bread and cheese, angrily, and leaves the core on the floor of the hotel room in some stupid childish act of rebellion that she knows very well is stupid and childish and tries not to care but does anyway. She goes out early, for lack of anything better to do, and wanders through the streets in search of any Demon marks. She wants to hit something.

By late afternoon she finds herself in the streets near Homura and Sayaka’s school, not actually following any kind of trail but just wandering, wearing herself out in the hopes that she’d be able to sleep that night, maybe even dreamlessly. She’s balancing atop a telephone pole, about to run across the wires and up onto a fourth-floor porch, when she hears a voice below that twinges something in her memory.

She looks down to see a light-haired boy and a green-haired girl walking arm in arm. She’s seen the girl before—she’s a friend of Sayaka’s, she would have said Sayaka’s best friend before yesterday, and seemed like a sweet enough girl. The boy is talking animatedly, waving a long-fingered hand, and suddenly Kyoko knows exactly who he is. He laughs, and fury fills her to the tips of her fingers. It’s been a week, one week, and Sayaka’s friend and the boy that Sayaka gave up her soul for are laughing and talking as if nothing had happened, as if they didn’t even care. Her clothes have morphed with barely a conscious thought, and her hand is white-knuckled around her spear. Her soul gem burns bright in her hair.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Sayaka says, about an inch from her ear.

It’s all she can do not to fall off the telephone pole. She balances herself, with difficulty, and spins to see Sayaka standing on the wires at her side, her feet perfectly and delicately placed. There’s a sudden swell of joy in her heart that’s immediately subsumed into the fire of her anger, smoldering all day and blazing now. “Look at them!” she snaps. “They’re—they’re laughing! They don’t even care!”

Sayaka looks down at her friends, her face sober. “Of course they do,” she says. “But they’re moving on with their lives. That’s what you do, right? Death passes for all but the dead.”

Kyoko stares at her. “But—” she looks back down at the pair as they disappear into the fading light. “I wasn’t going to... Just let me scare them, let me remind them—”

“Remind them what? How weak they are? How thin the line between life and death really is?” Sayaka’s eyes are hard. “You really think they don’t know?”

“They don’t!” Kyoko snaps. “Not like we do! They can’t, or they wouldn’t be so, so happy!”

“You don’t know they’re happy,” Sayaka says, her voice soft but in no way giving, soft the way a tigress’ fur is soft over her muscle. “Did you never laugh, after your family died?”

Kyoko’s rage rises in her throat. “Shut up. You don’t know anything about my family.”

Sayaka shook her head. “I do,” she says, louder now. “I know because you told me. If you can look down on my friends and tell me that because they’re laughing they don’t mourn me, then you also have to admit that every time you’ve been happy, every single time you’ve smiled or laughed since their deaths, is proof that you never loved them.”

“Shut up!” Kyoko swings her spear, tears in her eyes, and Sayaka dodges sideways, off the telephone wires and into the street. Kyoko lunges after her, screaming out all her rage and despair and helplessness. “Why are you defending them? Why are you defending him? He never even thanked you!”

Sayaka has her sword drawn, her face set. She sidesteps Kyoko’s initial lunge but doesn’t press the advantage. “I’m not defending him,” she says.

Kyoko skids to a halt. It’s starting to snow, the street slippery under her boots. She rounds on Sayaka. “You are! Your stupid crush is making you blind!”

Sayaka just shakes her head, which only makes Kyoko angrier. Why can’t she see how unfair it is? She swings her spear around in a long arc aimed at Sayaka’s side, and Sayaka blocks with her sword. “You’re so stupid,” she spits, and spins, aiming a slicing blow at Kyoko’s stomach.

Kyoko leaps back, grinning. “There you are,” she says, but she’s still so tight-wound and furious. “I knew you’d fight for him if I gave you enough encouragement.”

Sayaka rolls her eyes. “I’m not fighting for him!” she insists again, but dances forward, her sword flickering left, right, keeping Kyoko on her toes. She fights beautifully, her feet sure on the pavement, but her heart’s not really in it. Kyoko sees an opening and takes it, thrusting at Sayaka’s right side. Sayaka throws herself backwards, but doesn’t have enough traction on the wet pavement, and the tip of Kyoko’s spear tears through shirt and skin. The bright bloom of blood shocks everything back into horrible, stark perspective. Kyoko freezes.

Sayaka winces, just the slightest bit, and then steps forward and around the spear to close with Kyoko, her sword at her throat. “I’m not fighting for him, and I’m not defending him. I’m defending you.” She smiles, just a little, and her sword and outfit dissolve, leaving her wound to stain her school uniform. “I told you before. I have no regrets.”

It’s too much, it’s too real, and Kyoko dismisses her weapon and outfit with a gasp like a sob. “Sayaka, I—I’m so—”

Sayaka steps back from her just a little, glancing down at her wound and sealing a hand over it with no apparent discomfort. “It’s okay,” she says calmly. “I’m good at pain, remember?”

Kyoko wants to cry, every particle of her rage converted immediately to guilt and horrific shame. “I—I would never—”

“Please don’t say you’d never hurt me,” Sayaka says dryly. “I know you’re good at fooling yourself, but you’ve never been that good at fooling me.”

“I’m sorry,” Kyoko says finally, like a gunshot, like the most important thing she’ll ever say. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Sayaka looks up from her wound, from what Kyoko did to her, and steps right back into that too-much, too-real space. She places delicate, bloody fingers under Kyoko’s chin. “I said it’s okay. You’re still missing the point.”

“I’m not,” Kyoko says, in almost a whisper. “The point just doesn’t apply to me.”

Sayaka runs her fingers up Kyoko’s jawline. “No?”

Kyoko closes her eyes so she can think straight. “I regret everything,” she murmurs, all of her focused down to the thin line of warmth Sayaka’s fingers are drawing across her face. “I regret my wish. I regret not being able to save my family. I regret leaving them, I regret fighting all of you when we first met, I regret, god, I regret not being able to save you—”

“Would it help to know,” Sayaka says, and she’s so close that Kyoko can feel her breath, “that in at least one place, you did?”

Kyoko’s eyes fly open, and Sayaka steps back, her cheeks pink from the cold. “I didn’t,” Kyoko denies. “Homura told me you were dead, we were both dead.”

Sayaka nods. “You saved me nonetheless. C’mon, let’s go get something to eat.”

They end up back at Kyoko’s apartment instead, because Kyoko doesn’t have any money and neither of them are sure whether anyone else can even see Sayaka and the last thing Kyoko needs is to be seen talking to herself in some burger place. She scrounges up some pocky and they perch at the edge of the bed, splitting it between them.

“You cleaned up,” Sayaka says. She scuffs her toe at the apple core lying on the carpet. “Mostly.”

“Oh,” says Kyoko. “Yeah, I—It was pretty gross in here, I didn’t want you to have to deal with that.” She grabs the apple core and tosses it into the trash can.

“You know,” Sayaka says, “where I come from you have a much nicer hotel room.”

“Yeah, well.” Kyoko mutters, hands tucked under her legs. “Where you come from, I probably still steal all sorts of stuff. But you told me once, you get what you pay for. You wouldn’t eat my food because I didn’t buy it. At first I thought you didn’t get it, like, you were some rich bimbo who didn’t understand being hungry—”

Sayaka shakes her head. “I’m not rich.”

“No,” says Kyoko. “I figured that much out. I still think... well, you can’t understand the way starvation feels, can you, because you haven’t felt it. But you understand way better than me what’s fair, and even more what’s right, so. I still. I mean, I gotta eat. But I take what I need, now, not what I want.”

Sayaka smiles, sudden, and tucks a strand of hair behind Kyoko’s ear. “I’m proud of you.”

“Shut up,” says Kyoko. “That’s not why I do it.” But she catches Sayaka’s hand as it falls and laces their fingers together, too nervous, waiting for Sayaka to pull away. She doesn’t, and when Kyoko’s swallowed her heart back down into her chest, she says, “Tell me what happened?”

Sayaka bows her head, her hair falling over her face a little. “What did Homura tell you about what Madoka did for us?”

Kyoko thinks back. “Just that she ‘rid the world of some great evil’, and that without her intervention we were all dead. She saved us, I guess, and that’s why we’re here.” She frowns. “But not you? Why didn’t she save you? She was your best friend, right?”

Sayaka’s still smiling, just a little thing, slight and sad. “I don’t think she could. Not and still rewrite the rules into what they needed to be. I think somehow, I always had to die.” She takes a breath. “I didn’t just die, Kyoko. That’s not how it worked, in the old days. When our soul gems became too tainted with our despair, we.” She lets out a shaky sigh, and her hand tightens on Kyoko’s “I became one of them. A Demon, but worse, so much worse. We called them witches.”

“You became—” Kyoko’s stares at her wide-eyed. “Did, did we fight you?”

Sayaka nods jerkily. “You and Madoka. You were trying to bring me back—you thought Madoka’s voice might wake me—but I was too far gone, and Madoka wasn’t a magical girl yet. So you.” She broke off.

“Just me and Madoka? Why? Where were Homura and Mami? Why weren’t we all trying? God, if there was even a chance—”

“Mami was already dead,” Sayaka says, and she has a blank sort of look on her face. “She died three days after I met her, eaten alive by a witch. And Homura—Homura got there in time to save Madoka, as she always does, but it was too late for me.”

“A-And what about me? You said I saved you, but—”

“You did,” Sayaka says. “The witches, they're like. Manifestations of our despair. And my despair was--I was so angry at a world where I could do no good, so helpless with it. I wanted--I wanted a new world that I could control, and that meant being alone. Forever."

Kyoko nods, shivering a little. It hits a little too close to home, to the feeling she gets when she’s cold or hungry and she can’t do anything about it, to the lead weight of helplessness that’s been living in her chest ever since her father died.

"But you weren't going to accept that. You didn't want to let me go." Sayaka tips her head sideways to rest it on Kyoko's shoulder, her voice dreamy likes she's reciting a fairy tale. "So you killed me."

There’s a rushing in Kyoko’s ears. “I—what?”

Sayaka turns to curl into her, hiding her face in Kyoko’s shoulder. “You killed me, and then you killed yourself.” Her fingers are curled in the collar of Kyoko’s shirt. “So that I wouldn’t ever be alone.”

Kyoko stares at the top of her head. “No,” she says, “why—”

“I don’t know,” Sayaka murmurs, her fingers tightening. “I don’t know. I, I was hoping you could tell me.” She swallows, and then takes a ragged breath. “You told me once you only do things to serve yourself, so why? Why would you give up your life for me?”

“Because I don’t matter,” Kyoko says immediately. “I just don’t. Not like you and Homura and Mami.” She settles a hand on top of Sayaka’s head. “Mami called me a hero, but that’s all you. I’m, I’m the villain, or at the very most a girl with a life-long series of mistakes that ends in a meaningful death. I’m here to teach you guys what not to do, I figured that out long ago.”

Sayaka shakes her off and turns so she’s leaning into Kyoko’s space, her hands on Kyoko’s leg. “Yeah, well,” she says, “That’s not what happened. I’m dead and you’re alive, so what’re you going to learn?”

Her eyes are bright, and Kyoko doesn’t think she’s ever felt as useless as she does in this exact moment. She lifts a hand to brush away the tear caught in Sayaka’s lower lash. “Sayaka...”

“I don’t want you to think that way,” Sayaka says softly. “I don’t want you to think of yourself as disposable, because as soon as you do, you are.” She holds Kyoko’s gaze for a second too long, and then drops her eyes. “There are too few of us left. Don’t make what Madoka did into a mistake.”

Kyoko closes her eyes, feeling hurt and displaced and like somehow she’d made a choice and it was a wrong one. “What, exactly, did she do?” she asks. “Besides bring me back.”

“I don’t get it, fully,” Sayaka apologizes, but continues anyway. “She didn’t bring you back, really, except by taking away the thing that killed you.” She smiles, crooked. “She destroyed me, rewrote me, changed me so my transformation never happened. I just...died. Not just me, but all of us. She erased whatever piece of fate or magic made despairing magical girls into witches, replaced it with one that just made us dead.” She leans back on her heels. “So here I am.”

“With me,” Kyoko says.

Sayaka’s smile gets less forced. “With you. Like you promised, I’m not alone.”

“But I never did promise you,” Kyoko manages, her head too filled with guilt and confusion and half-remembered dreams to process what she’s saying. “Not this me, not the me right here. I never. I never realized who you were to me, I never had that moment where everything clicked, I never kept your body warm, hoped against hope that we’d regain your soul. I never sacrificed myself for you. And it's not fair. It's not fair that you know all of this stuff about me that I never told you, stuff I never tell anyone, and I don't know anything about you, or even why I told you. I don't--I don't know you, not like the other me did!" Her hands are clutching her sheets. She feels wrong, displaced.

"Who am I to you?" Sayaka asks. "Why did Madoka send me here?"

"I don't know," Kyoko says. "I don't know anything."

Sayaka runs her hands through her hair, and then pauses. "Kyoko," she says, a note of warning in her voice, “there’s something...” and then Kyoko feels the swell of heat and fear that means Demon. Her soul gem manifests itself at her elbow.

Sayaka's is hovering in her cupped palms, but it's pale and inactive. "I can't sense it the same way," Sayaka says, frowning. "It's just. Like a blur, in my head."

"C'mon anyway," says Kyoko. "I could use your help."

"I dunno if I'll even be able to fight," Sayaka warns. "I'm not sure how much I'm really here."

"Me neither," Kyoko says, standing up and wrapping her fingers around her spear as it appears. "Let's go find out."

The demon is curled around a support pillar in the subway station, a black shadow with a million lipsticked mouths, whispering at the passersby. The track is rumbling with the approach of a train, and as Kyoko and Sayaka jump down the last few steps onto the platform a woman with shimmering lipstick marks below her ear sways towards the edge of the tracks.

“Kyoko!” Sayaka yells, and Kyoko’s already moving, shoving herself towards the woman. She plants her spear on the edge of the platform, swings for a split second into empty space, and then tackles the woman bodily back onto solid ground. The train rushes by behind her, the screeching of the wheels not quite enough to drown out the hissing rage of the demon. There’s a sound like the crunch of a spine and an eye opens in the shadow, coiling out on an arm of dark to stare at Kyoko.

Kyoko stares back, pushing herself slowly to her feet. Next to her, the woman murmurs and groans in her sleep. The rest of the platform fades as the demon-space takes over the real. Kyoko concentrates, manifesting her spear in her hand, but before she can strike Sayaka is there, swinging her sword up and through the demon’s arm, once, twice, leaping backwards before the demon can counter.

It doesn’t even try. Her sword passes through it without effect, without even making any noise. The eye, lidless and browless, still somehow manages to look smug.

“Dammit,” Kyoko mutters, and shoves her spear into its pupil. Whistling, tea-kettle screams bounce off the walls of the subway tunnel, deafening her, and the arm of shadow recoils into its main body. It winds upwards around the pillar and spreads out like a canopy across the ceiling of the tunnel, blocking out the fluorescent lights one after another. Kyoko leaps, bouncing between pillars and upwards, aiming slashes at its edges, but she only manages to slow it a little, and soon the tunnel is black as night. The only light comes from her soul gem, blazing bright fire from its pin in her hair, and from Sayaka. Sayaka, who has a pale moon-glow over her skin, her whole body alive with some unearthly light, brightest at her heart.

“Woah,” says Kyoko.

Sayaka lifts a hand and examines it. “Huh,” she says, and then her eyes flick to Kyoko’s left. “Kyoko!”

Kyoko dodges right on instinct, but not fast enough. Pain blooms outward from her side, and a sticky heat slips down her side and into her boot, squelching between her toes as she stumbles. The shadow scythe pulls back to hit her again, and she brings up her spear to block just in time, her hands ringing with shock as it shatters in her grip. The scythe disappears into the mass of darkness above.

Kyoko’s sobbing a little, her eyes stinging, her whole body aching with shock. She won’t bleed out and she won’t die, her control is good enough for that, but she’s never been good at blocking out the pain of it, not while still being able to fight. Usually she can just take out the demon fast and spend a while eating or sleeping while her soul gem does its work, but she can’t see the damn thing.

Cool hands slide up her back. “It’s okay,” Sayaka says in her ear. “I’m here.”

“Great,” Kyoko mutters, to cover up the wild flutter of gratitude in her chest. “You’ll be really useful. You can’t even touch the damn thing.”

Sayaka wraps her arms around her, surprisingly solid against her spine. “True,” she says, her fingers tracing very, very lightly over Kyoko’s wound. It feels like butterfly kisses over a sunburn. “But I can touch you.”

She presses her mouth to the back of Kyoko’s neck, her breath in Kyoko’s hair, and very deliberately bites her.

Kyoko jolts. “What the—” she starts, and then Sayaka shoves her fingers into her wound.

For split second it hurts more than anything Kyoko’s ever felt. She’s pretty sure she screams, and half sure blacks out, and then cool, perfect relief spreads outward from Sayaka’s fingers. She can feel an itch follow in its wake as her skin knits itself back together, as muscle un-severs and organs flesh out. It’s the same and completely different than when her soul gem heals her, accelerated a thousandfold and filling her up entirely with cool and calm.

“Sorry,” Sayaka says, in the pure, perfect silence that follows, her arms still wrapped around Kyoko’s body. “Had to distract you.”

She lets go, and Kyoko shakes her head, trying to rid herself of the dizzyness the loss of contact causes. “No problem,” she mutters, without thinking about what she’s responding to, without thinking anything but come back. Sayaka feels like a piece of her now, a ghost limb, and the space where she should be is the only part of her that still aches.

In fact, she feels better than she has in weeks. “Did you know you could do that?” she asks, spinning so she can actually see Sayaka.

Sayaka grins a little. “Had a hunch. But no.” She’s glowing brighter now than before, and Kyoko grins back. Above them, the demon rumbles, and a torrent of tiny hands darts down at them, hacking and slashing with fingers like knives. Kyoko spins, slicing them off at the wrists as they get near. She feels fantastic, like there’s lightning in her blood.

“I got an idea,” she says, when there’s a break in the rain. “Can I use you as a night light?”

Sayaka blinks. “What?”

“I gotta see it, right?” Kyoko says, and points upward. “Up there.” She crouches low, her hands spread out on the shaft of her spear, held horizontally in front of her. “C’mon.”

Sayaka stares at her. “What? I don’t—oh.” She grins and flickers backward, getting a bit of space between them before dashing forward. Kyoko braces herself, and as soon as Sayaka’s foot hits her spear she launches her upwards. Sayaka flies, glowing bright, past roiling masses of darkness, and Kyoko forces herself not to stare at her, but at the musculature of the beast she’s revealing, at the shifting muscles and beating veins. There’s a steady rumbling coming from above, and as Sayaka arcs past the edges of the shadow Kyoko can see why. Tiny hands, like the ones she’s been slashing apart on the platform but curled into fists, are pounding away at the ceiling at such a speed that they’re mostly a blur. A spiderweb of cracks runs outward from where they’re hitting and to the edges of Sayaka’s light, almost certainly beyond. As Kyoko stares upward, tiny shards of concrete start raining down into her face. She shakes them off. “Oh god,” she says softly, and then shouts, “Sayaka! Get down here, now!”

Sayaka turns in midair. “Easy for you to say,” she shouts back, but twists so she impacts the ceiling feet first and launches herself back at the ground. The shadow around the place where she pushed off shivers with ripples, and as Kyoko dodges a larger chuck of concrete she sees something within it, pulsing.

Sayaka lands next to her. “C’mon,” she says, grabbing Kyoko’s arm. “We’ve gotta get you out of here, this place won’t last long.”

“You go,” Kyoko says. “I got something to do first.”

“You’re kidding,” Sayaka says. “You’re the one that’s gonna get hurt if you stay!”

“I’m also the one that can kill this thing,” Kyoko says, and shakes her off, her eyes trained on the pulsing thing hidden in shadow above. “Go on, I’ll meet you out there.”

Sayaka stares at her. “Like hell. What if you need me? Besides, I can’t get hurt here.”

“We don’t know that,” Kyoko says, sparing an annoyed glance for her. “You might get killed by falling rock as easily as me.”

Sayaka shakes her head, but sidesteps a piece of concrete as tall as she is anyway. “Are you really going to stand there and argue with me, or are you going to finish this this off?”

Kyoko grits her teeth. “Fine. if you’re not leaving, get over here.”

Sayaka does so without hesitating, her face set, and when Kyoko jerks her chin behind her she steps forward and wraps her arms around her again, face pressed to Kyoko’s back. Kyoko’s heart is pounding too much to just be from the adrenaline of combat, but she ignores it and focuses on a large piece of concrete just starting to break free from the ceiling. “Ready?” she asks Sayaka, but she can feel her heartbeat and knows the answer before she gives it.

As the chunk of ceiling breaks away she pushes off upwards, adjusting for Sayaka’s weight plus her own, directly towards the falling rubble. She turns at the last minute, ricocheting off it and further upwards, her momentum renewed. Coiling arms of shadow converge on them, and Kyoko shouts with incoherent rage and joy as she slashes at them. Sayaka’s arms are tight around her, but not in fear. She can hear Sayaka sharp intake of breath, and then her voice, whip-sharp: “Now!”

Kyoko shoves her spear forward, right into the shifting, pulsing heart of the demon.

Everything dissolves around them as they fall, and Sayaka is laughing in her ear like bells, and the rumbling of the ceiling turns to the rumbling of a subway train, and then they land, narrowly missing a crowd of teenagers, leaning against the pillar of the subway, texting and chattering.

They collapse apart. The teens look up from their cell phone screens to stare at them, but Koko ignores them, nudging Sayaka with her toe. “Hey,” she says.

Sayaka sits up. “Hey.”

Kyoko runs a hand over her side where her dress is torn, feeling the smooth, new skin. “Thank you,” she says, pretending to only mean the healing.

“Yeah,” says Sayaka, her eyes smiling, and nods to the side. “Look.”

Sitting in the shadow of the pillar is the woman they saved, holding her head. “God,” they hear her say faintly. “How much did I drink?”

Kyoko grins, but Sayaka’s still looking at her. “There,” she says, and points.

Next to the woman’s foot is a small, dark box. Kyoko pushes herself to her feet and goes to scoop it up, awkwardly close to the woman. “I hope you have a good night, ma’am,” she says, and the woman blinks up at her.

“Oh,” she says. “Thank you, miss.”

Kyoko smiles sideways at her and rejoins Sayaka, reaching up to pull the pin from her hair. “Kyubey will be back for this later,” she says. Sayaka shivers, and Kyoko reaches out to take her hand. “What is it?”

“I know it’s a different Kyubey,” Sayaka says. “But ours was...” She shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter. It’s fine.”

“Okay,” says Kyoko, but runs her thumb over Sayaka’s knuckles anyway. She takes a breath. “Stay with me tonight?”

Sayaka looks at her, raising her eyebrows. “Stay—?”

“With me. In, in my apartment.” Kyoko stares at the ground. “If you’re there, the nightmares might not come. They didn’t last time.”

“I’m not sure I can sleep,” Sayaka says, “but I can try.”

Kyoko looks up at her. “Yeah?” she says, too quickly.

“Yeah,” says Sayaka, and her fingers tighten on Kyoko’s.

When they get back, it's ungodly late. Sayaka curls up on one side of Kyoko’s bed like a cat, her hands tucked under her knees. “You’re not cold?” Kyoko mutters, sitting awkwardly on the edge of the bed and taking off her boots. Sayaka shakes her head minutely, her eyes already mostly closed. “Healing is hard,” she says, staring at Kyoko’s knees “It’s not like with healing myself.”

Kyoko shrugs a little. “You didn’t have to do it,” she says, off-kilter. “I would’ve been okay.”

“You didn’t see yourself,” Sayaka closes her eyes. “I never want to see you bleed like that.”

“So why complain about it, if it was worth it?” Kyoko snaps, feeling awful but unable to stop herself talking. Sayaka’s obviously exhausted, drained of all her color.

Her eyes pop open. “I’m not complaining,” she says. “I’m just—it’s new, okay? I was just talking about how I felt!”

“Well maybe I don’t wanna hear that you wasted all your energy doing something stupid ‘cause you thought I couldn’t handle myself!” Kyoko says, hating herself for it. But anger is easier than whatever is thrumming under her skin. Anger’s a wall, anger’s a blindfold.

Sayaka sits up, brows together, caught halfway between concern and rage. “That’s not what it was about, you stupid jerk. Don’t you get it?”

“No!” Kyoko says, almost shouting. “I don’t get anything! You’re acting like we’re, like we’re.” Her hands are fisted on her knees, her nails digging into her palms. She relaxes them with an effort and swallows down her anger. “Homura says...says feelings don't change. Your world to mine."

Sayaka nods, silent.

"You asked me who you were to me," Kyoko says. "But. Who am I to you?"

Sayaka licks her lips. "I don't know. A friend. More than that, but I don't--" She shakes her head. "We didn't have time, you know? To be anything at all."

"But we do now," Kyoko says, her voice cracking.

Sayaka smiles, just the tiniest bit. "Yeah, we do."

Kyoko lies down, mirroring Sayaka's former position, facing her. She closes her eyes. "Good."

She hears Sayaka lie down, too, and then she takes Kyoko's hand. Kyoko sighs, tension she wasn't even aware of seeping out of her. "During the fight," she says, already almost dozing.

"Mm," Sayaka murmurs.

"You bit me."

"Sorry," Sayaka says, sounding as tired as Kyoko feels.

"I didn't mind it," says Kyoko, and falls asleep.

She’s once again curled around Sayaka’s pale form, and feels herself sink into despair. It didn't work. She sits up, running her fingers over Sayaka's still face, tears in her throat. It's so much worse now, the nightmare, now that she knows her, knows the weight of her at her back, knows the cool bliss of her healing touch. Her hands are shaking, and Sayaka--

Sayaka stirs and murmurs. "Kyoko?" She blinks open tired eyes. "Are you okay?"

Kyoko let's out a sigh like a sob. She's on her knees over Sayaka, one of her hands cupping her cheek. Sayaka's eyes flick to her hand, and then back to her face. "U-um."

Kyoko feels her face heat. "Sorry," she says. "Sorry." She starts to pull away, but Sayaka slips a hand over hers, trapping her fingers along her jaw.

"Is this what you have nightmares about?" she asks softly.

"Not this part," Kyoko jokes, trying to laugh it off. Sayaka glares at her, and she ducks her head, embarrassed., and then swallows. "But...you're here. You're dead, but I'm desperate to keep you warm." She shakes her head. "I don't know what it means. We left your--we left you for the cops to find, I didn't..."

"Not in my world," Sayaka says quietly."I told you, you wouldn't let me be alone." She reached up to thumb along Kyoko's jaw. "Madoka said they found me in your apartment, days after we were both gone."

“They found—” Kyoko frowns. “But you said you became a witch?”

“My soul did. You thought if you kept my body safe and somehow called me back from my despair...but...” Sayaka drops her hand to her breast. “I don’t know how it works for you, but for us...our bodies aren’t real. We’re synthetic copies of our human selves, and our souls are stored in our gems.” She closes her eyes. “The reason I can handle pain so well is that I recognize the separation between my soul and my body.”

Kyoko stares at her, at the parting of her lips, at the curve of her brow. “You’re—synthetic?”

Sayaka opens her eyes and takes Kyoko’s hand from where it’s still absently lying on her cheek and presses it open-palmed to her heart. “This body isn’t mine,” she says. “My body died the day I made my wish.”

Kyoko presses down on her chest enough to feel her heartbeat. “I’m sorry,” she says after a minute of just them and just breath, because she has nothing else to say and she has to say something. “I’m sorry. You’re. It, it doesn’t matter. To me.”

Sayaka stares at her, and then chuckles a little, wrongly, in the back of her throat. “Thanks,” she says.

Kyoko sighs. “I just mean—I don’t know. I know you don’t care what I think.”

“I do,” Sayaka says, “actually. But.”

“Yeah,” says Kyoko. She coughs, and adjusts the bow on Sayaka’s school uniform to have something to do with her hands. “I don’t understand it, what Homura said.”

“Who does?” Sayaka mutters, her cheeks pink. She lets go of Kyoko’s hand to stretch upward, shifting under her. “I think she likes confusing us. Most of what comes out of her mouth is either condescending or a riddle.”

Kyoko laughs, startled and breathless for reason’s she’s carefully leaving unexamined. “Yeah,” she says. “Mostly.” She flops off of Sayaka and stares at the ceiling.

Sayaka slides an arm over her stomach and buries her face in her side. "So?" she asks, a little muffled.

"She said feelings don’t change, your world to mine.” Kyoko closes her eyes. “But how can they not? I’m not the same. I’m not your Kyoko.”

“You are,” Sayaka says, tightening her arm around her.

It takes a long time for Kyoko to fall asleep, but when she does, it’s dreamless.

Three days later, they’re walking home from the mall, Kyoko’s arms full of shopping and Sayaka dancing along at her side. “Why’d you buy so much?” she asks curiously, eyeing the bags, which are full to bursting.

Kyoko shrugs a little. “I dunno,” she says. “Felt wrong just buying for me, now that you’re here for good.” She doesn’t mean to say it, certainly not with such surety, except that as soon as it’s out it’s a terrifying relief.

Sayaka doesn’t even blink, just laughs a little. “That makes no sense. We’ve established that I don’t need to eat.”

“Needing to and wanting to are totally different things,” Kyoko blusters. “And. You can touch me, right? So I was thinking. Maybe if I.” She swallows, hoping that Sayaka can’t see how bright her cheeks are. “If I fed you, you could eat?”

Sayaka wrinkles her nose. “I’m not five, Kyoko.”

“I know!” Kyoko snaps. “Duh, I just thought.”

Sayaka sways in and kisses her on the cheek. “I’m kidding.”

Kyoko is suddenly glad of the enormous amount of grocery bags in her arms, because if they weren’t she might do something stupid like reach of up and run her fingers over the place Sayaka kissed, or grab her and kiss her back, or worse. She’s so lost in gratitude that she nearly trips over a note left on her doorstep. Sayaka steadies her and catches the can of instant coffee that rolled off the top of their shopping. “Careful,” she warns.

Kyoko picks up the note. ‘Snap out of it,’ it says, and it’s signed, ‘-H.’

Kyoko frowns. “I’ll be in in a minute,” she says to Sayaka. “I think Homura wants to talk.”

She finds her on the same balcony, but not nearly in such a good mood. Her face is like stormclouds. “You can’t keep doing this to yourself,” she says when Kyoko lands next to her.

“What?” Kyoko asks. “Doing what?”

“This whole charade with Sayaka,” Homura says, as if it should be obvious. “You’re exhausting yourself.”

“Charade?” Kyoko says, affronted and baffled. “I’m...exhausting...? What are you talking about? I fought a Demon like four days ago but I handled it—”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it,” Homura snaps.

Kyoko stares her down. “No,” she says. “I don’t.”

Homura scans her face. “You really...” she says wonderingly. “You really don’t?”

“No!” Kyoko says. “I wish everyone would stop acting like I should know what’s going on!”

“You should,” Homura says. “You’re directing it.”

Kyoko is pretty sure she’s never been this frustrated in her life. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Homura shakes her head and stares at her feet for a long moment. “Right. Okay. Change of plans. Come to Mami’s tonight, eight o’clock.” She raises her eyes to Kyoko’s face. “Alone.”

Kyoko returns to her apartment, troubled, to find it empty, her shopping sitting in front of the door. Her heart rises in her throat. She runs out the door. Homura’s gone from the balcony, and there’s no one in sight. “Sayaka!” She calls, a little panicked. “Sayaka?”

“I’m here,” Sayaka says from behind her. She takes Kyoko’s hand. “I’m here.”

Kyoko feels tension slide down her arm and ito Sayaka’s. “God,” she says. “I thought you’d vanished on me.”

Sayaka smiles a little. “Nah,” she says. “I want to try your idea about food. It’s been a long time since I had a good meal.”

Kyoko arrives at Mami’s angry, which, in retrospect, is probably why it all goes to hell. But she doesn’t want to be here. Between Mami’s cloying sweetness, Homura’s lofty arrogance and the constant air that they knew everything a level beyond where she did, it was shaping up to be an unpleasant evening—especially in contrast to the last four.

“So?” She demands when Mami lets her in out of the rain. “Any reason you insisted I come here alone? It’s not like you could even see Sayaka if I did bring her. She might be here right now.”

“No,” says Mami, at the same time that Homura says, “We can see her.”

Kyoko blinks. “What? You can? But you said Madoka sent her to me—”

“I was wrong,” Homura says. “I figured that out the day after we talked last time. I thought you had, too.”

“Wait a minute,” Kyoko frowns. “How do you know you can see her? Have you been spying on me?”

“We were worried,” Mami says, kneeling at her table and gesturing for Kyoko to sit, too. “Those nightmares didn’t sound good.”

“They weren’t,” Kyoko agrees shortly. “But that doesn’t give you the right to invade my privacy—”

“Privacy?” Homura repeats. “That’s a human right, is it not?” She sips her tea. “As I’m sure your Sayaka has told you already, we no longer count among that race.”

“Cut the bullshit,” Kyoko sneers at her. “Stop acting like you’re so much better—”

“Sit down,” says Mami, commanding, and despite herself Kyoko does. Mami pours her a cup of tea. “Human rights aside,” she says, back to her sweet self, “we can see Sayaka, and that’s part of why we need to talk to you so desperately. When was the last time you took a look at your soul gem?”

Kyoko blinks at her. “Uh,” she says, “During the fight with the demon a few days ago, probably?”

“Summon it now,” Homura commands, and Kyoko bristles, but she’s too curious to disobey. She closes her eyes and concentrates, and slowly it forms, the red-gold glass of her father’s church, the red-red blood of her family’s blood, the clear cold shine of her own hard heart. She likes taking time when she summons it, likes how calm and centered it makes her feel. Usually.

This time, though, something is jagged under the hands of her mind. The gem is clouded with grey, the shine dulled. She opens her eyes to see it wobble in the air in front of her. “What—what’s wrong with it?” she whispers, cold to her fingertips. “I fed the demon to Kyubey the day after we defeated it.”

“It’s not tainted,” Homura says. “You’re using it up.”

“But I’m not—I haven’t been using it at all,” Kyoko says, and dismisses it. Looking at it makes all the edges of her ache—the space between her teeth and her gums, the joints between bones. “I haven’t used any magic in days.”

“Haven’t you?” says Homura.

Mami pushes Kyoko’s tea into her hands. “Homura saw it first,” she says. “I noticed it when you were coming back from the battle with the demon. I was just checking up to see if you were okay, if you needed help, when I saw the two of you. But something was off.” She puts down her teacup and starts to draw lines in the air in front of her. “You remember when you were here last, and I told you I could see the connections between people, like strings? It’s part of my power, related to my wish.” She gestures to Homura. “Homura’s, because she wished to erase something that had already happened, gained the power to travel through time.”

“And I got nothing,” Kyoko says, “because, whatever, I’m not as important as you guys. Yes, I get it, let’s hurry this along.”

Mami exchanges a quick glance with Homura. “Not nothing,” she says, “and it has nothing to do with importance. But we’ll get there. When I saw you and Sayaka, you looked normal, from the outside, but when I looked for the strings...” She stares down at the cup in her hands. “There were none. At all. Not between the two of you, not between her and anyone.

Kyoko cocks her head. “So? She’s from another world, guys. All her connections are just with the versions of us over there.”

Mami shakes her head, and Homura speaks up. “Mami said that night that I have a lot that are tied off, you remember?”

Kyoko nods.

“They’re to Madoka,” Homura says. “Madoka, who doesn’t even exist in our world, who wrote herself out of existance altogether. If connections don’t cross between worlds, I wouldn’t have all those pretty bows.”

Kyoko shakes her head. “Still...”

“There’s also the fact that you had already been physically close with Sayaka for some time before I checked,” Mami says. “You’d been talking and interacting for two days. It doesn’t take that long for the threads to form.” She drains her teacup. “You had more threads connecting you to the Demon you’d just killed than you did to Sayaka.”

Kyoko’s hands are fisted at her sides. “So what are you saying?”

“We’re saying she’s not real,” Homura says bluntly. “Madoka never sent her. You made her up.”

“I made her up?” Kyoko demands. “What the hell? But you can see her!”

“That puzzled us as well,” says Mami. “But we think it’s your power.”

“”My power?”

“Truth,” Homura says, “and illusion. Your wish gave your father the ability to persuade anyone of anything, simply with the power of his words. We think your powers are an extension of that, that you can create wholesale things so convincingly real that you even fool yourself. You’re using yourself up, creating her, because she was supposed to...” She smoothes her hair back, her fingers lingering on her ribbons. “To fulfill some part of you that can’t be filled by anything else.”

“No,” says Kyoko. “No, I don’t believe you. She has to be real, how could she be telling me about the other world—”

“She’s not,” says Homura. “You’re remembering it.”

“You started to even before you created her,” Mami reminds her. “Your nightmares. They’re memories, right?”

“How can I possibly be remembering?” Kyoko demands. “I wasn’t there! Not this me!”

Mami cups her palms around her teacup, her brow creased. “What Madoka did wasn’t perfect,” she says. “If it was, Homura wouldn’t remember, either. We think...” she swallows and looks up at Kyoko. “We think some of the other universe is bleeding through. I, I’ve also been. Dreaming.” She’s too pale.

“But I thought.” Kyoko turns on Homura, feeling empty and horrible and alone and betrayed. “You told me it was Madoka!”

“I was wrong,” Homura says simply.

“No,” says Kyoko. “No, you weren’t, you can’t be, you’re never wrong.”

Homura laughs, a horrible little strangled thing. “I have been wrong more times than you can possibly imagine,” she says quietly. “I’m sorry, Kyoko. I really am.”

“She has to be real,” Kyoko says faintly. “I, I need her.”

“I know,” says Homura. “Trust me.” She reaches over and takes Kyoko’s hand, her fingers cool and thin, so like and unlike Sayaka’s, and suddenly Kyoko is filled with furious flame, bitter smoke rising into her mouth. She tears herself away from Homura.

“Fine,” she snaps. “Fine, so she’s not real. Who cares? We’re none of us real, right? Synthetic bodies, short-lived, too-bright hearts. Who cares how real she is? She’s here and she’s mine.”

Mami shakes her head sadly. “Not yours. Just you. And you’re killing yourself keeping her here.”

“I don’t care!” Kyoko shouts, rocketing to her feet. “What does it matter?! I’ve killed myself for her before! What difference does it make? Why should I live when she can’t? It’s supposed to happen this way, right?” She glares at Homura. “Tell her! Tell her how many times it’s happened!”

Homura is watching her wide-eyed, and for the first time in the months Kyoko’s known her, her voice comes out faltering. “Th-three, at least,” she says hesitantly. “But not like this, it’s different—”

“Bullshit,” Kyoko snaps. “Why’s it different? Nothing’s different. I am not meant to live without her!”

“What’s different is the intent behind it,” Homura says, finding her voice again. “Every time, Kyoko, you’ve killed yourself in sacrifice. You’ve saved Madoka and I from the witch Sayaka becomes, and, maybe more importantly, you did it so that Sayaka wouldn’t be alone.” She spreads her hands. “This? This death would be for you. You wouldn’t join her, because she doesn’t exist. Not the Sayaka you’ve grown to need.” Her eyes sharpen. “This death would be inherently selfish.”

“And isn’t that just like me?” Kyoko’s fingernails bite into her palms. “Isn’t that what I’m good for? You get what you pay for, and if the price is myself, so be it.” She looks to Mami. “I think we’re done here.”

Mami doesn’t meet her eyes. She glares back at Homura, who looks, irritatingly, sad. “Goodnight,” Kyoko snaps, and slams her way out of Mami’s apartment.

She gets about halfway down the block before she collapses against a wall, her breath coming in great gasps of rage and sorrow. She slumps to sit on the sidewalk and summons her soul gem, trying desperately to breathe some life back into it. It hovers between her palms, pulsing gently with her heartbeat. She stares at it for a long, long time.

She gets back to her apartment as the sun is rising over the streets. Sayaka’s sitting on her bed, her knees drawn up to her chest, her face worried. She leaps up when Kyoko pushes her way through the door, trembling with exhaustion.

“Oh my god,” she says, rushing to her and holding her up. Kyoko, somewhere in the back of her mind, can’t feel her hands at all. “What happened?”

Kyoko shakes her head. “Not important,” she lies, and it occurs to her that it’s the first lie she’s told since the first night Sayaka arrived. She stumbles over to her bed, flopping down on her back. “Can we just sleep?”

“Sure,” says Sayaka, uneasily, and that was all wrong, that wasn’t Sayaka at all, and Kyoko fists her hands in the sheets, feeling awful and helpless, and Sayaka’s whole body flickers, vanishes, and reappears.

“No, we can’t just sleep,” says Sayaka frowning. “What on earth is going on?” and that wasn’t right, either, or maybe it was, and the fact that she doesn’t know makes Kyoko want to cry, but there’s nothing left in her but exhaustion. “Please,” she mutters without knowing what she’s asking.

“What do you need?” Sayaka says, leaning over her, and Kyoko can’t quite breathe right, and she reaches up a hand to cup Sayaka’s face.

“I can’t do this,” she says softly. “I’m sorry, just. I need you to leave. Just, just for a while, please, I can’t.” She swallows. “Please.” The word is like a drumbeat, the only thing keeping her in rhythm.

Sayaka draws back, nods, and is gone.

Kyoko curls in on herself and sleeps alone.

When she wakes up, she walks to the corner and buys herself a cup of coffee, walks back to her apartment, and tries not to think about anything at all. After about an hour of frustrated inability to do so, she turns her desk chair to face the bed and then says, “Okay.”

Sayaka flickers into existence, sitting on the edge of the bed, and watches her. “What’s wrong? What did Homura and Mami want to talk to you about.”

Kyoko threads her fingers together on her lap. “You, mostly.” She itches to sit next to Sayaka, touch her, pull her close, discover that everything last night was a horrible trick or dream and this, this is what’s been real all along.

Sayaka raises her eyebrows. “Me?”

Kyoko nods, sharply. “Sayaka, I.” She swallows. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re—” Sayaka reaches out. “What? Why?”

Kyoko shoves herself backwards in her chair. “Please don’t,” she says.

Sayaka drops her hands, her face hurt. “Kyoko...”

“This isn’t you,” Kyoko says. “You wouldn’t want to touch me.”

“What?” Sayaka demands. “You’re not making any sense.”

“I should’ve known, really,” Kyoko says bitterly. “I should’ve known it was too good to be true.”

“Too good—” Sayaka blows out a frustrated breath and pushes herself forward off the end of the bed, kneeling instead in front of Kyoko, her hands on Kyoko’s knees. Kyoko flinches at her touch, but Sayaka ignores her. “Stop it,” she says firmly. “Whatever’s gotten into you, stop it. I told you I don’t want you talking like that.”

“Sayaka...” Kyoko says, hardly above a whisper. She closes her eyes.
Sayaka’s fingers slide along her jaw. “Look at me,” she commands, and Kyoko can feel the strain in the back of her mind, feel the way her soul gem is shifting and pulsing with the effort of creation. “I told you to look at me!”

Kyoko opens her eyes despite herself, and Sayaka-not-Sayaka smiles up at her. “I love you.”

Kyoko stops breathing, a pressure in her head and heart like nothing she’s ever felt. She feels like she’s going mad, like she’s been pulled into five opposing directions. Sayaka’s hands are hot and cold on her knees and not there at all, and she’s smiling and she’s not smiling and she’s smiling the way she smiled when she realized she couldn’t feel pain, and she’s every moment of Sayaka that Kyoko has ever seen and she’s nothing at all. “No you don’t,” Kyoko says through someone else’s mouth. All her bones ache. She is a cage around something pale and dying. She is hollow, and her voice echoes inside her own skull, her voice is the pressure, is the pain, it’s all her, herself. “You never had the chance.”

Sayaka’s mouth opens like she’s going to say something, but Kyoko has no voice to give her, it’s all caught inside herself, tangled up in a thousand threads with no place to go. Instead she leans forward and kisses Sayaka softly. Sayaka’s lips part slightly and she sighs into Kyoko’s mouth, impossibly warm, and then Kyoko pulls back. “Goodbye,” she whispers, and Sayaka is gone.

*

For the third time in three weeks, Homura leaves something on Kyoko’s doorstep. It’s another note, this one an address: Shichifuku Cemetery, 112 Nakimichi St.

Kyoko takes the train. There are memories in her head of things that never happened, of Sayaka’s voice, of an uncertainty that she thought she’d never feel again.

Sayaka’s grave is covered with flowers. None of them are from her. She kneels in the soft dirt, traces her hands over the inscription. Torn from us too soon, it says. You will live on always in our memories.

Kyoko buries her face in her hands, overwhelmed with a horrible, crushing guilt.

“She had no regrets,” says a voice she doesn’t recognize, and she looks up to see a girl perched atop Sayaka’s gravestone. She’s dressed in an elaborate outfit adorned with red ribbons, her pink hair loose around her shoulders. “Regret seems like a poor way of honoring her memory.”

“Madoka,” Kyoko breathes, because it can’t be anyone else. She sees, now, how completely obvious it must have been that Sayaka was not here because of Madoka. Everything the girl is touching glows with an indescribable light. The air ripples with her power. “How—”

Madoka hops down and lifts Kyoko’s chin. “You have a choice, Kyoko-san. I know how tired you are. If you want, you can stop now.” She smiles gently. “She’ll understand. They all will.”

Kyoko swallows. “But..”

Madoka, apparently without any effort at all, summons Kyoko’s soul gem. It’s dim, nearly all the red lost in greying black, but it’s not entirely dark. “But if you die now, you would not be able to face her, am I right?”

“I used her,” Kyoko says roughly. “I was selfish, I thought she abandoned me and so I created—I made a mockery of her, the real her, I didn’t—I never even knew where she was buried.”

Madoka lets Kyoko’s soul gem twist and turn between her hands. “So.”

Kyoko takes a shaky breath. “So.” She swallows, and stares hard at the garve before her. “I can’t give up.”

“It will be hard,” Madoka warns. “I’ve never seen a soul gem so clouded without dying.” She laughs, a sound like bells tied around a new kitten’s neck. “And I have seen many, many soul gems.”

“I don’t care,” Kyoko says. “I, I might not be like Sayaka or Mami or even Homura—”

Madoka’s smile grows a little bit.

“—But I’m still. There’s a reason I’m here, and it’s stupid to give up if I can still fight, right, that’s a waste of everyone’s time.”

“You’re amazing,” Madoka says, to every appearance completely sincere.

Kyoko shakes her head. “I don’t understand you.”

Madoka grins at her. “Here,” she says, and floats Kyoko’s soul gem back to her. “Take better care of it, okay?”

“I will,” Kyoko says, still bewildered.

“Thanks,” says Madoka. She turns, and then pauses. “Oh,” she says. “Also, can you give a message to Homura for me?”

Kyoko sighs, dreading even talking to Homura again, but nods. “Sure.”

“Tell her...” Madoka grins, a private expression. “Tell her I like the way she looks in my ribbons.”

Kyoko gapes at her. “Are you serious?”

Madoka blushes a little, like Kyoko’s caught her off guard. “What?”

“You’re—you’re the most powerful magical girl in the world, and you want me to help you flirt with Homura?”

“I’m not flirting,” Madoka protests weakly. “She’s my best friend! I’m just glad she likes—”

“Oh, come on,” Kyoko interrupts.

Madoka presses her lips together in embarrassment. “You don’t have to,” she says.

“You know, Homura once told me that you’re nothing like us,” Kyoko says, “But I think she was wrong about that, too. You could just visit her yourself. I know she’d be happy to see you.”

Madoka’s face grows serious. “I can’t,” she says. “It’s part of the rules, I can only visit people in this world when they’re dying.” She shifts from foot to foot. The air literally ripples around her. “I miss her,” she admits softly. “I miss all of you.”

But her most of all, Kyoko thinks privately. “I’ll tell her,” she says instead.

Madoka smiles, all bubbling joy again. “Thank you, Kyoko-chan,” she says fondly. “I’m glad you chose to live.”

There’s a noise like wind-chimes that rings through Kyoko’s bones, and then she’s gone.

Kyoko pushes herself to her feet, brushing the dirt from her knees. “Me, too,” she says, and is surprised to find she means it.