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“Sayaka Miki.”
“…Homura.”
“Come. Sit. Don’t just stand around taking up space,” it’s almost a tease, and it would be one too if she hadn’t kept her face straight and her eyes on something far away. Her skin is gaunt and stretched over her body snugly, like she’s too big for her body, like she’s too small for what she used to be. she could fix her appearance with a snap of her fingers, could change herself fundamentally, but she doesn’t care enough to and so she sits, frail as she started off as.
Sayaka, against her better judgement, sits, and finds herself blinking to feel the warm porcelain of a filled teacup. It smells flowery – Rose Tea, she thinks – and despite herself she sniffs and feels impressed. Not just any Rose Tea, but the expensive stuff, the valuable stuff, the stuff you can’t get your hands on at a standard convenience store at least. She’d tried it once, on the rare days her parents were home – and she thinks the nostalgia she feels is cruel and unwanted.
“You want something, Sayaka Miki?”
“…I want to help.”
She blinks, and there’s a grin on Homura’s face that touches her temples, mouth filled with a thousand sharpened teeth and a hundred blinking eyes, eighty-four pitch black wings fluttering and a hundred thousand hungry maws gnashing between the feathers, with a hundred and sixteen dead bodies covering the tiny space between Sayaka and Homura and six hundred and sixty-six writhing, screaming faces. If Sayaka looks hard enough, she can see her own face.
And then she blinks again and sips her tea, pretends she never saw that, and when she looks up again it’s to see Homura looking as she did before.
“I want to help,” she repeats, azure gaze hard and soft and everything between, eyes begging for a thousand things Homura didn’t know the names of, and a hundred things she did. She blinks again and the look is mirrored on Homura’s face for a second, split as it was. And then it’s gone again, shut down and wasted, left to die in the emotional vacancy that Homura has become, left to rot in the void that is her heart.
“Let me help you. Please.”
Homura sips her tea and eyes the woman, the begging ghost of a lifetime’s lifetime ago. She can’t breathe and yet everything’s clear. She’s a goddess and a small girl all at once, she’s a creature and a human, an angel and a devil. She’s herself and something else and entirely confused and enlightened all at once.
She’s Homura Akemi and she knows this dance, but she’s never danced with Sayaka before, so perhaps she doesn’t know it after all. Her thoughts are erratic, but they centre this woman, this girl, this being larger than life and smaller than an ant. She eyes this Puella Magi, the self-proclaimed secretary of Madoka Kaname’s empty, shallow existence as a god.
She grins, unpleasant, toothy. Fifty voices talk with her and yet she’s clear. A hundred hands grope and grab at her clothing yet she remains pristine regardless. A thousand words are said in a single sentence, a million things unsaid in a single word.
“You wish to help me, Sayaka Miki? And,” she leans forward and folds twenty pairs of arms and leans her chin in one of them, eighty purple eyes blinking lazily. “How, exactly, would you go about doing that?”
Sayaka blinks and Homura’s sat there, one arm resting on the plastic white table, the other resting on its elbow with her chin in the palm, and the resting arm has fingers dancing to a tune she doesn’t know.
Sayaka breathes – in, out, just like that Sayaka, in, out – and smiles. Sadly. It’s a sad smile that speaks of depressing realisations and the death of an ideal. It’s the same smile she’s seen herself make in the mirror, the same she gave when she died in every single timeline and the same she gave when she died to a horde of wraiths. The same she gives Homura now, empty and knowing and too filled with self-realisation to be anything but a martyr’s grin.
“Madoka made me her secretary to help with her duties, yeah?” She leans forward and puts her empty teacup to one side. “But I failed at that – and I failed you, time and time again and-”
Her breath hitches and guilt wriggles up her throat, pools in her mouth, but she swallows it down and clears her throat with a few pointed coughs. She won’t give in today – give in, give in, fuck off Oktavia – but she will allow herself time to wallow. Later.
“Madoka – she…when you ‘took over’,” Homura snorts and Sayaka sends her a lopsided, empty smile, “well…I realised somethin’ up there.”
“Oh?”
Sayaka sighs and looks away. “Madoka’s way of things – the way she went about them – is nice ‘n all but…it ain’t right.” She looks back and blinks, staring into Homura’s fifty sets of sixty eyes. She blinks again and finds she doesn’t care anymore. Homura could look like a cat and it wouldn’t matter. “When I saw what you did, becoming what you are…it hurt, but I got it, you know? The Devil needs to bring people freedom, even in chains. God needs to bring chains and promise freedom.”
“How philosophical of you,” Homura drawls, licking her paw lazily, purple slanted eyes taking her in, black ears twitching atop her head. When did she-? “But I understand. Madoka’s way of running things was untenable, and you decided things had run their course. Time for a new job, so to speak?”
Sayaka stares at the cat-Homura and nods, once. “Yeah,” throat dry, “I guess. I…don’t like how you did it, but I like how it turned out, if that makes sense.”
“It does,” Homura nods, hands splayed on the table, eyes blinking lazily. Somewhere in the distant nearby, a crow caws and a rooster dies. “So, Sayaka Miki, you wish to help me.”
“Yes.”
“That would mean forsaking Madoka, and her ‘Godhood’. It would mean becoming my secretary instead of hers, so to speak.”
“…I know. I just – I just want to keep them safe. Puella Magi like us – like they used to be – don’t live happy lives, you know? It’s nice to see them living like normal people. And I want to help with that.”
“…of that, we can agree.” Homura hums and taps the table in a rhythm Sayaka thinks she’s heard before but forgot along the way that didn’t exist. “Alright.”
“Alright?”
Homura leans over and lifts a pale, delicate, frail-looking hand for her to shake. Sayaka doesn’t even blink, clutches her hand tightly.
Oh now you’ve done it, fuck off Oktavia
Sayaka doesn’t really care that she’s essentially made a deal with the devil, sold her soul to someone who would use it, bargained her life in servitude. This is new to her but not at the same time. When you think about it, Madoka’s just a different kind of devil, so Sayaka’s used to selling her soul to higher powers by now.
So when Homura grins, Sayaka grins back, and doesn’t regret a thing, even as the corruption spreads through her veins.