Chapter Text
The beeping of her phone woke Kuroe up.
She looked at the ID, and it said exactly the name that she expected. Iroha was the only person who called her, anymore. She picked up the call.
“Hello…” She managed to get out, still half-asleep.
“Kuroe-san…”
“What is it?” She sprung up, suddenly, realizing that there had to be an important reason for her to call. “Is there a witch about? Do you need backup?”
Ever since the day that they had met, and Iroha had saved Kuroe’s life (that she wasn’t particularly sure she wanted saved), Kuroe had wanted to keep fighting by her side. She had already repaid Iroha for the grief seed, but she felt like each time she helped the girl out, fighting the witches in Takarazaki and making the city safer, piece by piece at a time, the sins that she had already committed, putting herself before others, would be washed away.
Of course, that never happened, with the unabating waves of her guilt continuing to eat away at her.
“No, it’s nothing like that…” Iroha said, and Kuroe allowed herself to calm down a bit at the thought that she wouldn’t be fighting tonight. “I was just thinking… remember what we talked about? About being able to talk to each other?”
It was something that they had discussed the first time they had met. Iroha had suggested they swap contact information so that they could share information, as well as discuss their worries. Not just about Magical Girl things… but because they were Magical Girls, in the first place. Whether they liked it or not, they were different than everyone else now, and that bond that united them separated them from everyone else. Kuroe had already seen it, with the way that her relationship with her boyfriend had broken down around his inability to see the new her (or had she been like that, all along?).
“Yeah…”
“Well…” Iroha started. “I’ve been having a few weird dreams lately. They seem to be about some girl, but I’m not sure who it is…”
Kuroe had had dreams too. A girl telling her to come to Kamihama, where Magical Girls could be ‘saved’. She didn’t know what it meant, but being saved from this life was quite an appealing prospect. But… she didn’t want to leave the people of Takarazaki, and Iroha, in the dark without her help. It would just be another way of putting herself before everyone else. So, she couldn’t follow the track of what those dreams were leading her to. And if she shared them with Iroha, she might want to go to Kamihama, and leave Kuroe alone in Takrazaki, where she would surely end up dying all alone. Then, she wouldn’t be able to save anyone anymore.
“I see… does she say anything to you?”
“No… she just looks at me… it seems like she wants to say something, and sometimes, I feel like I can even see her mouth move, but… nothing comes out.”
So Iroha wasn’t having the same dream after all… Kuroe wasn’t sure if that made her feel better or worse. On one hand, it meant that she was less likely to leave. On the other… it made Kuroe feel even more alone. Even as Magical Girls, there were things that separated them.
“Oh…” She responded, and then remembered why Iroha had said why she had even called in the first place. “So… how can I help you? Or, I should probably ask… is there any way I can help you with it? Or… however you’re feeling.”
“No, not really,” She said, in that cheerful tone of voice that Kuroe couldn’t hope to match. “I just thought I’d feel better if I told someone about it.”
“Well… do you?”
“I think so,” Iroha responded, and Kuroe wasn’t sure what the warm feeling inside of her that sprung from hearing those words was. It felt… different from the feeling that she got when she saved people from witches, in that this was being able to help someone close to her, an acquaintance. Wait… could she call Iroha a friend?
“That’s good.”
A beat. “So, Kuroe…”
“What is it?”
“I was thinking… um…” Iroha stopped speaking, and for a few seconds, Kuroe wondered if the line had gone dead. “There’s this ice cream that’s near the center of town, and I… I was wondering if you’d like to go, sometime. I mean… with me.”
Iroha was inviting Kuroe… somewhere out with her? As in, not just an occasion where they fight a witch together, and then go home? The prospect sounded appealing (the last time she had been able to enjoy herself seemed like so long ago…), but with the way things had gone for her, if she went to go do that with Iroha… she’d almost certainly find out later that someone had gotten injured or killed by a witch while they were out having fun. And even if she didn’t… she’d be thinking about that possibility the entire time.
“I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t…” she manages to force out.
“Oh…” Iroha almost sounded disappointed, and it made Kuroe feel bad. Not only was she a failure as a Magical Girl, but as a normal human being, too. “Well, I’ll let you get some sleep, then. Talk to you, soon!” She tried to infuse those last words with a bit of pep, but they didn’t sound right.
“Yeah… talk to you soon.”
She had failed again, and this time, it wasn’t even because she had delayed fighting the witch for something else. The moment Iroha had called, she had been up on her feet towards the designated meeting place, where the witch was already wreaking havoc inside its labyrinth when they made it there.
Iroha, as the stronger of the two (and Kuroe knew that logically, the power gap between them was not very large, but it seemed enormous), handled fighting the witch, while Kuroe took it upon herself to try and get all of the humans who had stumbled in somewhere safe.
But the witch was better at… being a witch than the two of them were at coordinating duties, because a random stray shot flew past Iroha, right towards Kuroe. She had jumped out of the way, and instead of hitting her, it hit… it hit…
She had only gotten a few people out, but after that, there weren’t much more people left who could be save.
She had managed to put them out of her mind for a bit as she reconvened with Iroha to defeat the witch (Iroha had saved her life, so she would be damned if she let Iroha die first while Kuroe was the one living on borrowed time), but after the two of them had defeated it, and the labyrinth had faded away to the dark corner of Takarazaki where the witch had holed up, the two of them were left with the few people who Kuroe had saved… and the remains and the smell of those who didn’t.
Even when she transformed back into her school clothes, somehow, the blood was still there.
“Kuroe-san…” Iroha tried to put an arm around her shoulder, but the second that she felt it, she broke away and ran for home. She didn’t deserve that kind of sympathy.
Her parents didn’t notice the red on her uniform that contrasted the black. They didn’t notice how she wouldn’t speak to them, or even meet their gaze as she entered (if she did, all she would see was more people to fail), and then immediately hurried her way to her room to get the offending garment off of her. Or they did notice these things, and they didn’t care. It seemed like they didn’t notice a single thing about her as of late. Once that task was done, she collapsed into bed and let the tears which had previously been streaming down her face as individual trickles, separated by moments of time, release themselves in full force.
After some time, during a lull in the sobs (not because she was feeling any better, but because she simply didn’t have enough energy to cry forever), she noticed that her phone was ringing. She didn’t make it to it in time to catch that call, but she did eventually grab it from the windowsill, in order to check who it had been
Oh. It was Iroha. That made sense, since it wasn’t like anybody else called her. That wasn’t terribly surprising. What actually did surprise her was how many times Iroha had called her, because Iroha had called her nineteen times. Her phone changed screens by itself, and before the ringtone even started playing, she knew that it was now attempt twenty. Did she want to answer Iroha? …Something like that was irrelevant. She had given up thinking much about her own desires. Should she answer Iroha? Well… she wasn’t sure if the girl was ever going to give up calling, and she shouldn’t make her waste her entire night on the phone, making calls that wouldn’t go through. So, she should probably answer. She took a second to try and gather her composure, wiping away her tears that had stained her pillow (even though Iroha wouldn’t see them), before hitting accept call.
“Tamaki-san…”
Then, she lost all of that hard-won stability in a moment as another sob forced its way through her body, the waterworks returning.
“Kuroe-san!” Iroha sounded worried. If the obvious sound of her ugly tears bothered her, she didn’t show it. “I tried to follow you, but you ran away too fast, and then I called you, and you wouldn’t answer, and you wouldn’t answer, and you wouldn’t answer, and-“
She was probably going to go on forever. “Tamaki… san,” Kuroe managed to choke out. “Why?”
“I was worried! When you didn’t pick up, I thought you had gone and done something drastic, but I had no idea where you could be, so all I could just do was call and hope you’d pick up…”
“That’s not it. I mean… why do you care so much, Iroha?”
“Well…” A pause, and Kuroe took it to mean that she was struggling to come up with any reasons. But… “You’re my friend, Kuroe. My best friend. The happiest day of my life was the second time we met up, because it was the first time that I felt that I had met someone like me. Someone who cared about me.”
Someone like her? That was… ridiculous. She was nothing like Iroha.
“…I suppose it would be the same for me,” she admitted. “I don’t… really have anyone like that, either.”
“Don’t you have anyone at home like that, Kuroe? Like… your parents, or any siblings, or anyone?”
“My family hasn’t really shown interest in anything I’ve done since I became a Magical Girl. I could probably set myself on fire, and they’d just say that I’d get over it…”
“…Then they won’t care if I visit, right?”
…What? What was Iroha even asking? Surely she didn’t mean she was going to… come over to Kuroe’s house. She thought about it for a moment, and realized that she had never even had a friend over before.
“Well…” Iroha was probably right, but Kuroe wasn’t sure if she should say it.
“I feel like you shouldn’t be alone right now, Kuroe… so tell me where you live, and I’ll be right over.”
“Train service has probably ended for tonight…”
“Well,” Iroha said, her voice perking up. “Hopefully the walk won’t be too far, right? Besides…”
“Besides what?”
It took a few moments for Iroha to respond. “This would be the first time I've been over to a friend's house, before."
Kuroe caved instantly.
As it turned out, Iroha didn’t actually live that far from her, because only about thirty minutes later, there was a knock at the front door of Kuroe’s home. Her parents were curious about who could be here at that hour of the night, but the second that Kuroe said that it was a friend of hers, they dropped all of their complaints, just as she suspected. And the second that the two of them were alone in Iroha’s room, she found herself enveloped in a warm hug (When was the last time she had been hugged? She couldn’t even remember) and even though she knew it didn’t change anything in her life, it didn’t change the mistakes that she’d made, so it shouldn’t make her feel better. But it did, a bit.
They didn’t do anything of note, or even talk about much of anything. But for some reason, just having Iroha around as she tried to calm her emotions, tried to tell herself that things would be okay, made things feel like they might be alright.
But that night, she had the dream again.
Eventually, she reached a breaking point. Even with Iroha’s support, there was only so much of being a Magical Girl that she could take. And the dreams increased in frequency until she had them every night, becoming impossible to ignore.
In Kamihama, Magical Girls could be saved.
In Kamihama, she could be saved.
In Kamihama, others could be saved from her.
The closer that she got to Iroha, the more she worried that she would lose her, and knowing the kind of person, the kind of Magical Girl that she was, it would probably be her fault. Then, she would have to go on living (because if she chose to die, Iroha’s sacrifice would be completely for nothing) without her.
One day, she called Iroha to breach the topic to her, hoping that she would want to come with her (even if Iroha hadn’t had the dreams, she was a Magical Girl too, right? She should be saved, too). She had seemed… more ambivalent to the idea (saying something about how she liked being useful as a Magical Girl… which was the same thing Kuroe had thought, before she had found out that she wasn’t useful at all).
The witch had taken them to Kamihama anyway, their struggle to get rid of it made moot when it was torn in half by another witch. If they had struggled to defeat that one, they definitely had no chance against this one. Her borrowed time that she had been carrying, ever since the first time that she met that witch had run out, it seemed.
But then, it was dispatched with incredible ease by an older girl with blue hair, who had given them a stern warning not to come to Kamihama again, and two grief seeds (because she needed another reminder that she was the only one who would put herself first).
Perhaps the witches in Kamihama were just too strong, for weak Magical Girls like her and Iroha. The blue haired girl had said it herself, and that there was no salvation in Kamihama, and to tell everyone else not to come.
So, there was no salvation. There was no way for her to stop being a Magical Girl, other than her own death. So, there was nothing else to do but die. Die, so that others could take the grief seeds that she herself was taking. Die, so that nobody would die for her.
She had tried to shut Iroha out on the train, to distance them. Maybe if Iroha had thought that Kuroe had gone cold on her, she would stop caring about her, and leave her alone. Then… Iroha could be safe from her and her weakness. If there really was a God who worked in her favor, He would let her work the same magic that seemed to work on everyone else on Iroha, and everything would be alright. But… it didn’t work. All the way to Kuroe's stop, Iroha kept talking to her, trying to break through the walls.
But that night, in her dreams, she found herself on the train again. And on the screens, she found a new god, who told her that it wasn’t her fault, that it was the fault of the people who wanted to exploit her. That there were many, many that were just like her. That maybe it wasn’t just her fault, but the fault of people who wanted to exploit her, and Magical Girls as a whole. That in Kamihama, there was a way to be saved. That she could be saved.
That the Wings of the Magius would save them from this life.
Finally, she knew how to finish her essay question.
After turning it in, and having her teacher prove the very thing that she had written about, that her teacher was trying to deny, the fact that she could no longer be understood by humanity and had no place among them… she quit school. That night, she put her nighthawk doll in the closet, because she had no need to speak to a God who was not for her, who was for people who weren’t Magical Girls.
Their God would save them, if He wished, and her new god would save her.
On the day before she planned to leave for Kamihama, to find the Wings of the Magius, however, she received a phone call in the middle of the night (although she wasn’t asleep this time, her stress ruining most of her attempts to do that). Of course, there was only one person who it could be.
“Kuroe-san.
“Tamaki-san?” Her voice was duller than it had been before. She wouldn’t take her calls again after today (she got the feeling the Wings of the Magius wasn’t something you were supposed to talk about, so she probably shouldn’t bring it up to Iroha who seemed like she was taking the blue-haired girl's words about staying away to heart, and didn’t seem like she was big on the idea of salvation. Besides, losing the thing that made them the same would hurt too much for her to face…), but it couldn’t be too much of a problem to indulge herself with talking to her just once more.
“I… I have a sister.”
“…Okay?” Kuroe had known Iroha for a while, but she hadn’t mentioned anything about a sister.
“She’s… the girl who I’ve been dreaming of. The one I made my wish for, when I became a Magical Girl. I wished for her to be healthy, since she was sick. But… now, she’s disappeared.”
Her wish… Kuroe remembered her own wish. In the end, she had gotten nothing out of it except for a reminder of her own emptiness. So, Iroha’s wish had been for nothing, too. She had had this life forced upon her for no gain, too. It honestly surprised her, considering how well the girl seemed to keep her head up, compared to herself.
“Disappeared to where?”
“I saw this place in my dreams… Satomi Medical Center?”
Kuroe recognized the name, vaguely. It was the name of a hospital in Kamihama.
“I’m planning to go there,” Iroha continued. ”And… see if I can find anything out about Ui. I don’t really want to go alone, though, so… I was wondering…”
“Wondering what, Tamaki-san?”
“If… you might want to go with me? To Kamihama, that is…”
She had been planning to go to Kamihama, anyway. To be saved. She was doing that, so… so she wouldn’t end up hurting Iroha for her own sake, out of her own cowardice. So that nobody would need to get hurt because of her, anymore. So, she definitely couldn’t accept Iroha’s offer.
But… Iroha was the girl who had saved her. The girl who had stayed with her, during one of her darkest nights. As much as she had tried, she had never quite seemed to be able to repay her infinite kindness.
Besides, maybe if they were in Kamihama, maybe they’d stumble upon the salvation of Magical Girls that the Magius offered. They could be saved, together. Then, Kuroe wouldn’t end up hurting her… but she wouldn’t have to leave her, either.
“I’ll go with you, Tamaki-san.”
As it turned out, Yachiyo was actually pretty nice, once Kuroe got to know her.
After the incident at the Séance Shrine, she had ended up moving in at Mikazuki Villa. She had stayed out with Tsuruno that day, since she didn’t have anyone she wanted to meet (most of all that girl… she didn’t want to face her guilt), but that didn’t stop her from seeing the monstrosity that sprung from Iroha, or the blonde girl who shot her down and then told her, Yachiyo, and Tsuruno to stay away from her (which was insane, since she had known Iroha longer than any of them, and she knew that she definitely wasn’t dangerous). They had both agreed not to tell Iroha anything about what happened, but the incident still mystified them, and they had agreed to try and figure out more about it if possible.
And after the incident where they finally encountered the Wings of the Magius, the organization who had been trying to contact Kuroe all that time ago (although she no longer had the dreams, not since she came here), Iroha had moved in as well, alongside Felicia.
While Iroha had enrolled in the local school, Kuroe had not. Her response to the admissions essay question had been based on a hypothetical, but they were still fully her beliefs (no matter how much her instructor wanted her to say something she didn’t believe in), and they wouldn’t change so easily. It was not a place, a system, for someone like her. Yachiyo had put up a bit of a fight (although she didn’t push nearly as hard as she seemed to push Felicia to stay in school), but eventually acquiesced. Kuroe expected that to be the end of it… but the next day, Yachiyo had come home from university armed with a bunch of teaching materials she had picked up from the store. It seemed like her educational career wasn’t over quite yet.
So, the two of them spent a surprising amount of time together (Kuroe apologized profusely for making Yachiyo take time out of her day every day, but the model insisted that it was no problem at all), and upon conferring with Iroha, it turned out that they were learning just about the same things at the same time. Was Yachiyo secretly in league with Iroha’s teachers (who she had learned were formerly Yachiyo’s own teachers)?
It didn’t really matter, because it wasn’t so bad when it was with her. Under Yachiyo’s guidance, topics that used to be difficult to her (she was never much good at math) seemed to come easier, with the university student refusing to move on from one thing to the next until she was sure that Kuroe had grasped it, that she wouldn’t be left behind.
Eventually, Iroha jumped from the top of the Chuo Radio Tower, and had returned with Sana Futaba, the Radio Wave Girl connected to the spam texts that she had been going on about for days. While she got along with Tsuruno and Felicia fine, Sana was much more her social speed. She was the first person that Kuroe had really been able to talk books with ever since… back then, and a bit of a fire sparked in her heart at the thought of actually being able to enjoy something that her old self enjoyed. While Kuroe was more well-read than Sana in general, the other girl had a number of recommendations (a lot of books about cats… not that Kuroe really minded) that Kuroe hadn’t been aware of, and Kuroe shared her recommendations in return.
So, there were six of them now (Tsuruno didn’t live at Mikazuki, but she was around enough that it seemed like she did), and it felt so different, with so many people almost… vying for her attention, instead of ignoring her existence and anything she had to say, like it was with her family. Felicia would ask her almost every day to play games with her (Kuroe wasn’t good at video games by any measure and Felicia never went easy on her, so she usually lost, but she kept playing since she could tell that Felicia enjoyed it), Tsuruno insisted on giving her cooking lesions after she had said she had little cooking experience (she had never really had anybody to cook for…), and of course, her and Sana shared a hobby.
That was to say nothing of Iroha and Yachiyo, whom she spent the most time with of all. Of course, there were Yachiyo’s lessons, which meant that almost every day the two of them sat down together and talked (but Yachiyo was a teacher who was a Magical Girl, her presence felt much more comforting and understanding than those she had before, even if her demeanor wasn’t of someone outwardly kind). And for a bit, she had worried that Iroha, who seemed better at socializing with others, would leave her behind for her new friends. But that didn’t happen. Even on days where both of them had been busy the entire time, Iroha would find a way to check in before Kuroe went to sleep, and if she didn’t… she would wake Kuroe up to do so (much to the detriment of Kuroe’s sleep, which had been generally improving ever since she moved in).
The small Kyubey that had been hanging around them from time to time, appearing at the oddest occasions and disappearing just as suddenly was strange, and stranger still was that while the person it clung to most was Iroha, it seemed to like Kuroe just as much, and after a while she had started barely even getting distracted from whatever she was doing when it jumped onto her shoulder for a bit, or gave her a curious look whenever it was perched on Iroha’s.
But just as Iroha had this cooler and focused side that seemed to come out against witches all the way back when they were fighting in Takrazaki, or when she had resolved to jump from the radio tower, although she had seen it less and less recently, since both of them struggled greatly with fighting the significantly more powerful witches that resided in Kamihama (and Yachiyo had strictly forbidden either of them, as well as Sana, from entering a labyrinth without her, Felicia, or Tsuruno as backup), Yachiyo turned out to be a dork sometimes.
She had seen it when Yachiyo had gotten sidetracked by the 10-point sale, while they were looking for the Séance Shrine (and the next time one was held, she found herself dragged along). There was something about how she treated a good deal with the same life-or-death gravity that she would a battle against a Witch or Uwasa, and it made her regular self much less imposing, like imagining someone in their underwear making them less scary (not that she would imagine Yachiyo in her underwear, of course!).
A few weeks or so after Sana had joined them, on a normal day, Kuroe got a call from Yachiyo, who was out running some errands.
“Kuroe-san.” Although Yachiyo seemed to be warming up a bit to her, she still had a pretty flat tone of voice, so Kuroe couldn’t be sure if she was just imagining that first part, or if that was just how Yachiyo always spoke, regardless of her internal emotion.
“What is it? Did you find something out about another Uwasa?”
“No, that’s not it. Tamaki-san’s shown interest in a show that’s playing tonight at the Sakae Theatre, and I’ve decided to accompany her. So, I was wondering… would you like to come with?”
Was Yachiyo inviting her so that Iroha would have someone whom she was more comfortable with attending as well? Felicia was… not a theatre person, Tsuruno had a shift that night, and Sana, in general, from Kuroe’s perspective, never seemed terribly enthused about going out anywhere (She would often mention something about her reading backlog from Kuroe’s recommendations keeping her tied up, and not to mention her invisibility would make securing her a seat next to Iroha and Yachiyo extremely difficult). So, it made sense that she would ask Kuroe, for Iroha’s sake.
There was the other possibility, that Yachiyo was the one who wanted her to come with (and indeed, when Yachiyo named the show, it turned out to be one that Kuroe had mentioned during their lessons that she had read the book of, back before she had become a Magical Girl in the first place. That had been a month ago… had she really remembered?). But something like that seemed silly.
“If I can ask… why me?”
“I don’t have to answer that,’ Yachiyo cooly responded. That was a typical answer whenever Kuroe asked Yachiyo something about herself, and it never changed upon further prying. So, Kuroe knew that she probably wasn’t getting an answer.
Did Kuroe want to go? She didn’t really feel like that was a relevant question. The thing that she knew she should be asking herself is if she should go.
As much as she enjoyed living at Mikazuki, it felt like a distraction to her. She still had no idea what she wanted to do with her life. She had made no effort to change ever since she had come to Kamihama, instead leaning on Iroha and Yachiyo and everyone else’s help, and doing the things that they wanted to do, setting no path for herself. The only thing she had come to this city with Iroha at all for was to help her search for her sister (And with them finding themselves up against the Wings of the Magius, it seemed like salvation would be beyond their grasp if they continued to interfere with the hooded group. While Kuroe knew they had a point, and maybe in another reality, she would have been on their side... if they were against Iroha, she would be against them, regardless of if it was rational. She had promised to herself that she would stay at Iroha's side, to repay her by helping her find her sister). When they found her... what would she do beyond that?
She couldn’t keep enjoying herself, while all of the people who had died because of her weakness lay behind her, watching her, waiting for her to change so that there would be no more victims like them.
What would she do with herself? Who did she want to be?
Until she was able to figure that out, she wouldn’t be a complete human being like they were. She would always be flawed, with a hole in herself that sucks up the world around her like a vacuum but never fills.
“I… I’m not feeling well today,” she lied (but also told the truth). “I think it’s probably better if I stay home.”
“…Alright.” Did she sound… disappointed? Kuroe was probably imagining it. “I hope you feel better soon, Kuroe-san.”
“Yeah… thanks.”
“I’m hanging up now. Be well,” she said, and Kuroe heard the click of the phone hanging up before she could get a chance to respond.
Kuroe laid on her bed and stared up at the ceiling, waiting for an answer that wouldn’t come.