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Her heart is a traitorous thing from the very day she's born. A defect makes it flutter when it shouldn't, has her breath coming up short and stars waltzing in circles in her vision, and while other children race amongst the reeds and the city streets, she's cooped up in an empty home, trapped like a prisoner in her own bed. Activity makes her faint – fainting ostracizes her from her peers. From the start, her body is self-isolating and self-destructing. (The rest of her grows to become just like it.) The day Homura is interred into the hospital – shackled to medical machines, spoken to like an infant by a thousand different nurses – she knows that her childhood is over before it's even had the chance to begin.[break][break]

A FALLEN STAR FELL FROM YOUR HEART

Homura's only just found herself growing accustomed to her daily rituals (pills in the morning, exorcizes in the afternoon, more pills at night, lather, rinse, repeat and repeat and repeat) when one of the nurses, the one with bright eyes and bushy hair, comes rushing into her room preaching high news. The world outside has become a thing to be feared, having spent so much time removed from it. This woman means well, of course. She can't understand the anxiety that comes welling up within the poor girl in the bed, seeping in through each of her every pores at this latest (unwanted) development: Homura's going to school. A real school, not like the watered-down studies force fed to her in paperback textbooks left on her bedside table. One where everyone will be staring at her, asking her questions she can't answer, expecting her to be someone that she's not: interesting, exciting, intelligent... wanted. There's some joy to be had in the knowledge that she's deemed fit enough to lead the life of a normal teenaged girl, but that doesn't stop the doubt for climbing up her throat like bile. What if she's not fit enough? What if something terrible happens and she ends up right back at square one – or worse, dead?[break][break]

The nurse just smiles at her, shiny teethed and genuinely happy for her sake. She tries her best to smile convincingly back.[break][break]

It's as much a nightmare as the girl had expected when her first day of school finally arrives. She can't stop shaking when the teacher sets her up, front and center, before the entire class, and she can't even tell them all her name without stuttering like a child with a speech impediment. They bombard her with all kinds of questions - “What school did you come from?” “Were you in any clubs?” “Your hair is so long! Is it hard to try to braid it?” - and she feels herself collapsing beneath the weight of their words, toppling in on herself like a house of cards. Salvation is the arrival of a classmate she'll come to know as Kaname Madoka, a rainbow personified who butts in to tell them all that it's time for poor old Akemi-san's noon-time pills and goes on to lead her through the massive labyrinth that is Mitakihara's middle school halls. And she talks, oh how she talks, about all kinds of things. When she asks of the quieter's name and gets an answer, her first reaction is to call it “cool”. Homura is an odd name for a child of her age, though, and even if its meaning, “flame”, is as “cool” as this sparkling student says, it has an owner who certainly can't live up to it.[break][break]

“How about you just be cool yourself, Homura-chan?”[break][break]

It's such a simple suggestion – something right out of the mind of a middle schooler, no doubt – but it catches her off guard, all the same. How easy it would be for anyone else of their age to mold themselves into their namesake, as lively and malleable as a flame, but not her. She's not like the others. How could she be? The others don't stare at the math board without a clue what any of the symbols upon it mean, nor do they nearly pass out from exhaustion during the warmups in their physical education classes. All she does is cause problems for everyone – a complete and utter embarrassment to all.[break][break]

Maybe it would be better if you just died.[break][break]

Homura hears these words in her mind like a thought all her own, and for a second, she thinks she could agree. In the next, however, she realizes that the words did not come from her own mind. In fact, thoughts aren't the only thing being injected into her perception; the world around her has been twisted in her stupor into something dark, twisted, and absolutely otherworldly. It doesn't matter if she doesn't think herself better off dead. The decision is being made for her. Gates erect themselves around her, trapping her like an insect in a spider's web, and she's just had enough time to realize she's never made her peace with God when the first of many monsters comes tearing across the checkerboard pavement to put her out of her self-inflicted misery. The pain she braces herself for, however, never comes. Her salvation has returned to her, one again in the form of the ever-beaming Kaname Madoka, followed by an unfamiliar girl in just as bizarre an outfit, and as she looks on their battle, all of her regret and self-deprivation melts away. All that's left in its place is awe. (Madoka, she thinks, really is beautiful.)[break][break]

AND LANDED IN MY EYE

Magical Girls. The stuff of fiction, manga, protectors of all that is good and destroyers of creatures that would seek to prey on the innocents. Homura has never paid them much heed in the past – truthfully, they always seemed so childish to her, too... ideal – but now that she has seen them in action, real ones with her own eyes, not just jumping out of the pages of a comic, it'd be hard to look away. The one in yellow, Tomoe Mami, is apparently the veteran of the two and older to boot, training your classmate to be a fully-fledged defender of peace before a frightening beast by the name of Walpurgis Nacht descends on the city in the weeks to come. It'd be a terrifying thought, the monster the she describes to her wreaking havoc across the city, but she looks to Madoka (fearless, satisfied if only for the lives saved from the slaying of a witch), she thinks that there is nothing that could harm Mitakihara ever again.[break][break]

They'll succeed; this, she knows with certainty.[break][break]

I SCREAMED ALOUD AS IT TORE THROUGH THEM

“... Then I'll keep going.”[break][break]



It wasn't supposed to happen like this. Mami had been training Madoka specifically so that there would be extra power in the fight against a witch they already knew would be too much for one Magical Girl to face alone, and their combined efforts should have earned them a hard fought, but total victory. Casualties would be minimized and the frightening Walpurgis Nacht eradicated from the planet's surface, never to raze another city again. This isn't what they're left with, though, evidenced by the way Homura finds herself crying her eyes out over the fresh corpse of her senior, fallen in combat for the sake of her loved ones. She'd be lying if she said that she was close to her in the weeks preceding her death, but in time, they could have been, and someone as heroic as she didn't deserve to die like this. The threat doesn't become real to her, though, tangible until the last Puella Magi standing speaks her mind, bow in hand, eyes on the titan (stronger than any of them had been expecting) staining the horizon. She intends to press on – to fight death itself, alone. It's a suicide mission, and Homura tells her that, tells her that no one could blame her for running away with her life now. Houses may be uprooted, towers rendered to dust, but the people might be safe, they've already made it to the evacuation center -[break][break]

“I'm so happy that you and I became friends,” she says, instead, smiling through the hurt, a ray of hope even in their darkest hour. “It's a point of pride for me that I was able to rescue you. I think it's so great that I got to become a Magical Girl!”[break][break]

“Don't go,” Homura tells her, but her words are a whisper to a voice that could shake mountains, and they don't stop her from turning on her heel and combating everything the world has to throw at her head on. It's amazing – David standing up to Goliath – and you can do nothing to stop the inevitable. The sun shines once more over the wreckage, and the witch is gone. (At what cost?) She'd wanted her to live on, even if it cost her her own life, and she wishes in the mist of an almost-rain that she could go back, turn back the clock, twist time to her whim so that she could redo it all as a stronger Akemi Homura, one who didn't sit back to watch her friends die before her eyes.[break][break]

The incubator grants it at the cost of her soul, and the second hand unwinds to accommodate.[break][break]

AND NOW IT'S LEFT ME BLIND

Homura's only just found herself growing accustomed to her daily rituals (pills in the morning, exorcizes in the afternoon, more pills at night, lather, rinse, repeat and repeat and repeat) when one of the nurses, the one with bright eyes and bushy hair, comes rushing into her room preaching high news – and all of this is suddenly very familiar, like deja vu, like a movie seen once long ago. Memory floods in, however, when she sees the dull purple glow of her Soul Gem in her hands. This has happened before, a month ago, when she was weak bodied and weaker willed. This time, she swears to do right.[break][break]

Things don't go the way they did their first time around. The girl thinks of her beckon of light in trying times and emulates her radiance: her name spoken loud and clear, and grin that could rival the brilliance of the sun decorating her face. So excited is she, in fact, that she tosses her caution to the wind and walks straight up to Kaname-san, her hands in her own, words light as she says: “I've become a Magical Girl, too! Let's do our very best together!” With a brighter head on her shoulders, she might have understood the look she receives as embarrassment laced with confusion, but it, like her incompetence with math and her lack of ability to keep up in sports is drowned out by the elation pumping into her veins like a drug.[break][break]

Mami takes her under her wing as the newest member of Mitakihara's newest Magical Girl trio and suggests to her, upon inspection of her time-stopping powers, to look into a weapon sturdier than a golf club. An unexpected side effect of her transformation is an increase in physical strength, a body that can support a child in brutal combat. It cures her heart, too, the thing that had alienated her to begin with, but it doesn't fix her lack of physical prowess. Changes or no, she still tires with conventional weapons, and unlike the thousands of guns in the eldest's magical arsenal and the evaporating-and-reassembling bow in the perkiest's, she's only got a shield to her name. Offense will have to come from her own efforts. The best thing to pair with time manipulation, then, are time bombs. (Words don't describe the relief she feels when the first one doesn't go off on her face, nor do they describe the happiness she feels when Madoka pulls her close in a victory hug after their first successful witch hunt as a team. Walpurgis is a wall she'd been thinking unclimbable. In this moment now, though, the raven-haired girl thinks that they may just stand a chance.)[break][break]

The world repeats itself: Mami dies, the witch deteriorates, but Madoka lives on. (Magical Girls become witches. Homura turns back the clock through her tears.)[break][break]

AND IN THE DARK, I CAN HEAR YOUR HEARTBEAT

Variation is Miki Sayaka, and Homura tries so hard not to think badly of people, but how can you not when she turns the rest of the group – the one she knows, the one she's watched die – against her? Kyuubey is tricking them, all of them, but Sayaka can only deny and deflect. No one questions her about the hows and the whys of a Magical Girl's transformation, almost like they don't believe her at all and don't care to hear what “lies” she has to spout on the matter. Instead, it's a matter of her weaponry choice and how her bombs have become a hazard to the fourth member of their trio-turned-dysfunctional-quartet. But she doesn't want to hurt the bluenette as much as she doesn't care to be blasted by friendly fire in the midst of a witch battle, so she lets it go, finds a new medium. Mami wields guns too big for her to carry, but a handgun will do just fine in a pinch, and if this is what will make them all happier, then she'll smile and accept it, hope that with four of them in the fight, they'll be able to make it this time, this time will be the one -[break][break]

A team out of sync can only last so long, though, and she knows the sign of a Puella Magi's descent into despair. The battle against Sayaka is a nightmare, even with the fiery Kyoko, another outlier, on your side – but it's what comes after her wards have crashed down around you that things spiral terribly, horribly downward. Kyoko's gem shatters into a thousand pieces, Homura founds herself bound in ribbons, and the barrel of a rifle aims its sights on the girls that have lived to see this vile moment. “If our soul gems just turn into witches –” Mami says with murder in her eyes, and Homura squeezes her own shut in the face of her own death, “– then the only thing left for us is to die, right?” The sound of glass breaking interrupts the still of the empty warehouse's air once again, and for one split second, she pauses to be grateful that her senior at least made her demise a painless one. When she dares to open her eyes, however, expecting to see an afterlife, all she sees is the form of Madoka, bow in hand, posed as though she'd just taken shot, and her aforementioned senior is no longer in her direct line of... Oh.[break][break]

She runs to her the moment she sees the pinkette start to fall to her knees, and it's her support that keeps them both standing, teary eyed, ruined. The time traveler has seen her friend at what she'd imagined to be her worst – watching her role model die before her eyes, become a witch just after saving the people she loved – but each and every time, there was still hope glimmering in those eyes, an anchor that those around could tether themselves to. That hope is gone, now, lost in despair. If Madoka cannot be Homura's hope, Homura will be Madoka's.[break][break]

“We'll defeat Walpurgis Nacht together!” she says. (When did she start to lie through her teeth?)[break][break]

I TRIED TO FIND THE SOUND

This is how her story ends: soaked by broken plumage and rainwater, bruised and broken, laid out motionless parallel to her paragon, but victorious. None have died in the wake of the witch this time, and while there is destruction, it is nothing the civilians cannot rebuild in the years that are to come. It's a shame that they won't be able to see it with their own eyes. Homura understands, even if she's never felt it before, what the pain that pulses through her body now is. It's different from the aches and the soreness of a battle won; it's internal, and its source is her deteriorating soul. There are no more grief seeds to spare. This is how her story ends.[break][break]

There are awful, terrible things in the world they live in, and she tries to imagine what it would be like to twist and turn into one of them, to break down civilization with nothing but her bare, corrupted hands. She'll do terrible things, make people sad, tear humanity down like it never existed at all – and it's fine. She can accept it. It's her inescapable fate, one that she'd once tried to run from, but if Madoka is at her side in death (the death of her humanity, at least) she thinks that just maybe –[break][break]

“I lied.”[break][break]

It's the feeling of something tapping against her very essence that pulls her out of her garbled reverie, and when she focuses back on reality, back on the smiling face of her closest companion, she realizes just what's happening. There was one grief seed left, not none, and Madoka is using it to save her. Why? Why? Time and time again, she's gone off dying, leaving Homura to pick up the pieces as though her death is something she could ever come to accept. Will she ever learn that she'd rather Madoka live, even at the cost of her own life?[break][break]

“Homura-chan, you said you could go back in time, right? That you could change history so that something like this doesn't happen? … I've got a favor to ask. I want you to go back before Kyuubey tricked us... find the stupid me from back then... and save her. Can you do that for me?”[break][break]

Of course she will, of course. Anything that could be asked of her in this moment, she would do. Every reset, every redo has been with the intention of rescuing this girl from her death, and if preventing her from becoming a Magical Girl in the first place is what will make that happen (even if it won't, it's her dying request; how can she hope to refuse?), then it's simply what she must do. There's time, a whole buffer between the day she'll wake up in the hospital and the day school begins anew. She'll protect her, no matter the cost – even if it means having to shatter her soul gem with her own hands now. (She says “Madoka” miserably, pistol trembling in her hands, but Madoka just smiles all the wider.)[break][break]

(“You finally called me by my first name! That makes me... so happy...”)[break][break]

BUT THEN, IT STOPPED, AND I WAS IN THE DARKNESS

No more glasses. No more braids. No more spineless Akemi Homura, trembling in her boots while the others twist her words out of her control. Kyuubey can die a million times over, but she doesn't need to kill him permanently; all she has to do is make sure that she keeps him far away from her, make sure that the risk always stays higher than the reward. No one will believe her when she tells them the truth of their nature, so she won't try. No one can help her to defeat Walpurgis Nacht, so she'll train until she can defeat it with her own hands. Magic cures her physical ailments, but determination and cold, long experience makes her a cut above the rest in the world of Magical Girls. Witches break beneath her foot in combat, and you know that this timeline will be the last. Madoka may not stand at her side as her closest friend – she doesn't even bother attending Mitakihara Middle School this time around, too focused on keeping that Incubator running in circles around the city – but it doesn't matter if she loses her friendship, so long as the pinkette does not have to lose her life. She refuses to rely on anyone but herself from now on. Madoka will never have to fight again.[break][break]

(He finds her when you face up against the apocalypse itself, and Homura can only watch on in horror as she becomes first the strongest Magical Girl in the world, then the strongest witch in all of history. Failure, failure. This timeline means nothing to her now.)[break][break]

SO DARKNESS I BECAME

How long had she been trapped in that bloody cycle, forced to watch her most beloved die to the cruel hands of fate time and time again? Whether it was a submission to despair, murder by a witch, or death by another Magical Girl who would rather her dead, no timeline would ever let Kaname Madoka escape alive and as herself. Years, Homura thinks, must have passed before the very last, where all had died – Mami to Charlotte, Sayaka to her own grief, Kyoko to forgotten compassion – and she'd tried to take on the world by her lonesome. She'd known from experience that letting Madoka too close to the war zone would only result in another failed timeline, but even her best efforts hadn't been able to keep her away in the end. She'd found her just as she was about to embrace her own demise, and it was then that the girl-turned-goddess did the one thing she'd never expected: made a wish that she could not undo.[break][break]

Witches no longer exist. There is no pain at the end of a Magical Girl's time, no suffering, no mutations. It's said that those who have fallen before choke on their sorrows, then find their peace before being taken away. (Taken to be with her.) Kyoko cries when Sayaka disappears and Mami speaks as though this is something for them to feel remorse for, but they'll never understand what a blessing is to live under the Law of Cycles, nor how fortunate Miki Sayaka really is for being the first to give in. Homura wishes, sometimes, that she could have taken her place. But evil has not been cleansed; simply rerouted. Miasma chokes the streets at night, compelling society to do terrible, awful things to themselves and each other, and the only way to prevent the whole world from going mad is to combat it with the life that she has saved time and time again. Her love for Mitakihara has been lost to time – but the Goddess, once, had been determined to protect it once.[break][break]

Homura remembers it. She'll never forget it. And that's why she'll keep up the fight.

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