Chapter Text
The rain had been falling since morning. The heavy kind, where it hammers the ground and shakes with the wind. The streets turn into a fast flowing current and vision is hazy.
Madoka stood at the edge of the overpass, pink soul gem balanced in her open palm, and watched the city below dissolve into grey. Her own soul, her entire being, held in her fragile hand. Her nails are painted pink. They have been since she made her wish, body frozen in time, nail polish included. Three loops. She turned the gem over with her thumb, the way she had started doing lately without meaning to, feeling for the weight of it. It always surprised her, how something so small could hold so much; her insecurities, her cowardice, her meager ambition.
Sayaka was late.
That was fine. Sayaka was always late in this loop, she stopped to help a man with a broken violin case on the corner of Fifth and Hikarizaka, and the conversation ran long, and she arrived flushed and apologetic and smelling like rain. Madoka knew this. She had stood here before, in this exact spot, watching the same grey city, waiting.
The small moments are what break you during time travel. She has to pretend to live in the moment when she is always several moments ahead, several moments behind. One step forward, and three steps back. The way she already knew Sayaka's apology word for word before it was spoken. The way she knew the crack in the pavement three steps ahead. The way she knew, already, that this loop would not be the one. She could feel it the same way she could feel the weather shifting before it broke, a pressure behind the eyes, a certainty that sat in her chest like something swallowed wrong.
She closed her fingers around the soul gem.
Walpurgisnacht was coming. It was always coming. And she was not nearly strong enough yet, not in the way that mattered, and the girls were not together in the way they needed to be, and somewhere in the city Homura Akemi was walking to school with her long dark hair and her quiet eyes and absolutely no idea. Shy, with glasses and her hair in braids.
Madoka let out a slow breath.
She thought, not for the first time: I'm sorry. I'm still trying.
She thought: I'm going to get it right. I won’t let you suffer any longer.
Down on the corner below, she spotted Sayaka's blue coat cutting through the crowd, bright even in the rain. Right on time. Madoka smoothed her expression into something easy and warm, tucking the soul gem back into her pocket, and turned to face the stairs.
She could do this. She had done it twice already.
She could do it again.
⏮
It had been raining then, too.
She had known Homura Akemi for eleven days.
That was the part that kept catching on her, afterwards. Eleven days. Not long enough to know her, really, not long enough to know anything more than the shape of her: the way she sat at her desk like she was bracing for something, the careful distance she kept from everyone in class, the way she had looked at Madoka sometimes when she thought Madoka wasn't watching, like she was trying to memorize her, like she was frightened.
Madoka hadn't known what to make of it, but she had wanted to ask. She hadn't gotten the chance.
Walpurgisnacht arrived on a Thursday.
Madoka remembered the sky cracking open over the city like something had been waiting behind it all along. She remembered the sound, enormous, mechanical, wrong, like the gears of something ancient grinding together overhead. She remembered her mother pulling the curtains shut and turning the television up and telling her not to look, and Madoka had listened, for a while.
Then the lights went out.
She found Homura in the street three blocks from her house, standing in the rubble of what used to be a building, her soul gem blazing violet in the dark. She was alone. She had been alone the whole time, Madoka would realize later, no backup, no plan that could have worked, just Homura and her shield and whatever she had left, which by the time Madoka found her was almost nothing.
She was losing. It was obvious, even to Madoka, who didn't understand any of it yet. Homura was losing and she knew it and she kept fighting anyway, kept pulling herself back upright every time the witch's stage sent her sprawling, and there was something in her face that was worse than fear. It was the specific expression of someone who had already accepted an outcome and was simply waiting for it to arrive.
Madoka ran to her without thinking.
She didn't know what she intended to do. She wasn't a magical girl. She had no weapon, no magic, nothing. But her legs were moving and the rubble was sharp under her shoes and then Homura turned and saw her, and for just a moment the expression cracked, something broke open behind her eyes that Madoka didn't have a name for yet.
"You shouldn't be here," Homura said. Her voice was strange. Worn thin, like fabric washed too many times.
"Neither should you," Madoka said. It was a stupid thing to say. She said it anyway.
Something that might have been a laugh moved through Homura's face and didn't make it out.
The witch moved.
What happened next was fast and terrible and Madoka would spend a long time trying not to remember it in detail. Homura pushed her out of the way, she didn't have to, she could have moved herself, but she pushed Madoka first, and the impact when it came was wrong, the sound was wrong, and when Madoka scrambled back up from the ground Homura was down and not getting up the same way she had been getting up before.
The soul gem was flickering.
Madoka crossed the distance between them without knowing she had moved. She dropped to her knees in the rubble and the rain and put her hands on Homura's shoulders and Homura looked up at her with those grey eyes that had been memorizing her for eleven days and said nothing for a long moment.
Then, very quietly: "I failed again."
"Again?" Madoka said.
Homura closed her eyes. Her soul gem pulsed once, dim and slow. "It doesn't matter. It's over."
"It's not over," Madoka said, and she didn't know where the certainty came from, only that it was there, solid and unreasonable in her chest. "It's not. Tell me what to do. Tell me how to fix it."
"You can't." Homura's voice had gone very far away. "There's no time. There's no… I can't go back again. I can't do it again, Madoka."
The name hit her strangely. She hadn't told Homura her name.
She looked down at the soul gem. It was almost dark now, the violet barely a suggestion, and she thought: she's going to die. The understanding arrived without drama, without softening. Homura Akemi was going to die in the rain on a Thursday in the rubble of a city she had apparently been trying to save, alone, and something about that was so unbearable that Madoka felt it physically, a pressure behind her sternum like her ribs were closing in.
She thought: no.
She thought: not like this.
She had been aware of Kyubey for a while now, she could feel him nearby, the small specific weight of his attention. She had been refusing him for eleven days. She looked up into the dark and the rain, and she said, clearly, so there would be no confusion:
"I know you're there. I want to make a contract."
Kyubey appeared on a chunk of broken concrete beside her, tail curling, red eyes patient and without expression. "I've been waiting," he said. "What is your wish, Madoka Kaname?"
She looked down at Homura. At the dying light of her soul gem. At the face of a girl who had been trying, alone, for longer than Madoka understood yet.
"I want her power," Madoka said. "The ability to go back. To try again. I want to inherit it, so that she doesn't have to anymore. So that she can rest."
Kyubey's ears tilted. "That is an unusual wish."
"Can you grant it?"
A pause. "For you, yes."
Homura's eyes opened. She was looking at Madoka with an expression that was between horror and grief. She looked so helpless and defeated.
"Madoka," she pleaded, desperately. "Don't. Please, you don’t understand."
"It's okay," Madoka told her. She meant it. She didn't fully understand what she was agreeing to yet, but she meant it the way she meant most things, completely, without reservation, with her whole chest open. "I'll figure it out. I promise."
She felt the wish leave her like an exhale. Felt something new settle in her chest in its place, heavier and stranger than anything she had words for yet. Her soul gem bloomed pink in the dark.
Homura stared at her. Her soul gem flickered once more, and then went still. Her eyes glazed over, permanently pleading silently for Madoka to run away from all of this.
The rain kept falling. The raindrops rain down Homura’s face as if she were crying, even as she lay still. The raindrops dripped down Madoka’s hair onto her face, each drop cold in a way that stings her to the core.
Madoka sat in the rubble for a long time, holding Homura's hand, waiting for something she didn't know she was waiting for. Then the world pulled tight around her like a drawn breath,
⏮
and she was standing in her bedroom, in the morning, and the sun was coming through the curtains, and downstairs she could hear her mother making breakfast.
She sat on the edge of her bed for a long moment.
Then she pressed her hand to her chest, felt the faint warmth of the soul gem beneath her fingers, and thought that she could figure it out. She could prevent the pain and grief and helplessness that she saw on Homura’s face.