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Seeing her for the first time is like an asthma attack. She cuts off your airways, chokes you with light, rose-colored and impossible. She is everything you’re not, everything you could ever hope to be if you lived one million years, if you could go back in time and correct all your mistakes.
You can’t understand why she likes you. You’re not pretty, not like the other girls in your class. Not like her, with her smile like firecrackers and hair like cotton candy. You are so white you’re nearly translucent, the blue of your veins showing through like lake weed in skim-milk. Besides that you’re tall and lanky; your legs grew too fast over the summer while you laid sick in bed, so although they’re long they’re pale, toneless. There is nothing you can do to conceal that you’ve been sick, but she doesn’t treat you like a sick person, and that almost makes you forget.
Around her, you gain awareness of things you have never been aware of before. The warmth of someone else’s skin. The way the cheery blossoms spiral to the earth when they fall rather than taking a direct descent, refusing to travel a flat or linear path. How your blush doesn’t remain on your cheeks, it crawls up your ears, down your neck, staining you in red so that you can’t hide from how magical it feels whenever she smiles at you.
These are the things you’re thinking about as you walk home, head bent, eyes burning in self doubt that’s rapidly becoming self loathing. These are the thoughts that take your hand and lead you into your first labyrinth, and change everything forever.
---
You’re not sure when wanting to be strong like Madoka becomes wanting to be strong for Madoka. All you know is that nothing feels better than her eyes sky-wide and lit up for you, her smile so huge and real you could fall into it and never find your way out. There are things you can do to see that smile, and being strong is one of them. It doesn’t matter why you do it, where it comes from. It merely is.
Your magic takes you long time to understand let alone master, so long you don’t even know how long, because the act of doing it makes you get lost in the meaningless of days, hours, mistakes, labyrinths. Regardless, your successes stand out in stark relief, shining and pink amid so much grey smoke, so much confusion.
The first time you defeat a witch, Madoka throws you to the ground afterwards, her arms around your shoulders, lips raining kisses down onto your face, your hair, that blush which covers you like the truth. You tremble beneath her, stunned to see her face is wet with happy tears. “You did it!” she cries, kicking the air.
Mami and Sayaka cheer and dance around the both of you, costumes glittering in the fading tangerine glow of the dusk. Kyoko isn’t dancing; she leans down and pries Madoka off of you, nose wrinkled in distaste, “Are you in love with her or something?” she spits out at Madoka, and your blush grows, extends, makes you cut your eyes to the ground and smile like you don’t have control over your own body. Then Kyoko cracks her gum, reaching forward and squeezing your forearm. She says, “That wasn’t bad,” with a shrug, like you haven’t almost gotten her and the rest killed so many times before, like she hasn’t threatened to spear you through the heart next time you cost them a loss.
Madoka squirms forward on all fours towards you, tiny frame dwarfed by the absurdity of her skirts, ruffles upon ruffles of pink and cream taffeta feathered around her waist like layers of a cake, and you want to bury your face into them and cry, you want to get lost in all those shimmering folds. She pounces you again, springing past Kyoko and catching you in the chest so hard it knocks the breath from you.
“I always knew you could do it,” Madoka coos, lips still so warm, so sticky-sweet with saltwater. You want to stop time,and you would if she could stay with you, but it is your gift, and yours alone. “I always knew you were strong.”
You don’t mean to, but you reach for her hair with a shaking hair, smoothing the kitteny softness with your palm, a touch so light it is almost nothing at all. “Not like you,” you whisper.
“No,” she agrees. Then she sits back on her heels, regarding you with that smile so big it shatters your ribs, splits you like a wishbone. Her eyes glisten, and you hear Kyoko scoffing somewhere behind you, rolling her eyes. Madoka is backlit in sunset, painted in oranges and golds and she looks like something glorious at the dessert table; you want to sob, you want to stop time with her and live in the space between now and the next second forever, if only she could stay. “You’re strong like you. Which is so much better,” she explains.
“Ugh,” Kyoko groans. “Cavities.”
The sun drops below the horizon line of the city, and Madoka helps you to your feet.
---
Before your life was reduced to the stretch of time between March 16th and April 30th, you dreamed of something magical happening to you, something strange and dangerous to save you from the ennui and routine of preadolescence. Something to save you from your weak heart, the hospitals and their cold white halls, sterile and lonely.
You spend a lot of time reading books while you recover from treatments, imagining quest through mythical lands, oracles and prophecies and spells and witchcraft. So often, the protagonists of your favorite books are girls your age, girls who are chosen, girls who fight evil, girls born to fulfill a destiny.
It all seems quite grand and romantic. You lie beneath the crisp hospital sheets, clutching your book to your chest and sighing wistfully, wondering what it’s like to be chosen, to fight evil, to have a destiny you must fulfill. To have your life dusted in glitter, in moon beams, in magic
.
Now, you know there is no glitter, no moonbeams. There is only grit and sadness and the blood of your friends. There is only Madoka, dying over and over again, and nothing you can do to stop it but go back, and try again to save her from it all.
---
Madoka is everything. The pit of every cherry, the pupil of every eye, the thing you hold closest and dearest, from here until the ending of the world. It all comes back to her, the sun of your orbit, the blood in your flesh. You would die for her. You will die for her. If not, then you have failed. That is what’s written on your heart.
---
Early on, when you still have hope that maybe you can change it all, there feels like there’s time for life beyond witches. You want Madoka to live, not fight, so you put as much effort in living alongside her as you do into saving her. You think they might be the same thing. The two of you walk home after school together, you meet at the diner on 3rd street and share shakes through a single straw. You have sleepovers at Mami’s, drawn in by her magnetic loneliness, filling the void around her like waves hugging a shoreline.
That’s where you are now, curled up in a sleeping bag on Mami’s bedroom floor, Madoka nestled up alongside you, hair pale in the moonlight like the sky at dusk. Sayaka snores from the couch, Mami is tucked into her own bed, curved like a bow beneath the weight of her comforter, chest rising and falling steadily. It feels strange to watch these girls breathe, to hear the steady sounds of them living, surviving, when you are so used to seeing them die. Your own breath catches in your throat, and you squeeze Madoka to your chest.
“Homura,” she mumbles sleepily, eyelids drooping. “Do you think we’re doing the right thing? Do you think we’re saving people?”
You don’t know how to answer, because the the truth is far more convoluted than you could ever tell her, a mess of ribbons so entangled they will likely be knotted forever. “Yes,” you eventually answer. “I think the city is safer with us fighting.” But we’re not safer. You’re not safer.
Madoka smiles blearily. “Sometimes it feels like it doesn’t go anywhere. We kill a witch, but another one just rises in her place. It’s like filling a pool one drop at a time.”
“Puddles are better than empty pools,” you say, but it feels like a lie. You don’t care about the city, you don’t care about other people. You don’t even care about the other sleeping girls in the room, Sayaka and Mami, whose floor you’re curled up on, those cake and tea you stuffed yourself with earlier until you felt sick. All you care about is Madoka.
She nods, cheek sliding against your shoulder. “Whenever I get scared, you always make it better. You make me feel like I can keep fighting, no matter what, as long as you’re here with me,” she whispers.
Your eyes sting, your throat feels thick and hot and you try to swallow it away. “Madoka,” you say, but nothing else. You can’t explain the magnitude of your feeling for her, that you love so very much but in the end, you always fail. You always lose her. You inhale raggedly and roll over, wrapping your arms tight around her neck and squeezing like holding her tight enough will keep her here indefinitely. “Don’t go anywhere,” you whisper, desperately.
“Never,” she murmurs, her hands sliding through your hair, untangling the remnants of your braids with slender fingers. There, on Mami’s floor in your respective sleeping bags, you regard each other in the night. You want to stare and stare, you want to memorize the soft curves of her cheeks and the wide, innocent hope in her eyes, you want to keep her like this forever. Before you realize what you’re doing or what it means, you lean down, and diminish the inches between your lips to nothingness.
You have never kissed someone outside your family before, and it feels so terrifying and glorious and different that it doesn’t seem like the same thing at all. She makes a tiny, surprised squeak against your mouth, lips soft and dry and sweet under yours. You kiss her once, twice. Small, chaste brushes of your lips, over and over again like if you do it enough times you might be able to keep her here, drawing the electric magic of this moment out forever in infinite directions.
You dip down again but this time she keeps you there, puts her hands in your hair and makes fists, holding you flush. Your lips slide against hers and she opens under you like a flower, suddenly damp and slick and you can taste her breath, you can taste the tea and cake and her toothpaste and her tears, all of it, and you swallow and swallow, kissing her until neither of you can breathe, until she’s spread out and flushed and panting beneath you.
You’re stunned, amazed that something like this can happen, that something that ends repeatedly in blood, in pain, could feel so perfect, so pure. Maybe this was what I was missing, you think, Madoka’s tongue at the corner of your mouth like a cat lapping up cream, innocent and exploratory. Maybe it wasn’t fighting I needed to save her, maybe it was this all along, maybe instead of pushing her away to keep her safe I should draw her closer, keep her in my mouth, my fist, my heart. It feels like a revelation, kissing Madoka, and realizing that you have tried many, many things, but not this.
In another two weeks, Walpurgisnacht comes, and you watch her drag Madoka away screaming. You watch Madoka’s bones snap, a torrent of blood dripping from those kissed lips, and you decide you were wrong, and turn back the clock.
---
You live through it so many times everything becomes muddied, confused. Each new timeline you create blends into the last, until there is nothing but a mess of melted crayons and dying girls strung out behind you, heavy with rain-mud, clotted with blood. It is your weight to bear, yours to drag behind you as you meet Madoka time and time again, as new and light and glorious as that first time you saw her and she stole your breath.
You forget what she knows, and sometimes you let things slip. Memories that this Madoka doesn’t remember, that this Madoka doesn’t share with you. It is the loneliest feeling, seeing the hazy of confusion cloud her face, eyes wide and unfocused and searching you desperately, trying to make sense of it.
Remember that time we were hunting a familiar by city hall, and you cut your arm on the subway back home? I tore my dress so that I could wrap it up, and you cried because my dress was ruined, not because of your arm. That was so sweet, Madoka, you told her once, sprawled out on your back on the lawn at school, her hand in the crook of your elbow small and soft.
A furrow cut through the elegant white slop of her brow as she shook her head. Homura...she murmured, hair snagging against the grass like spun sugar. We’ve never taken the subway together.
It felt like ice in your gut. You realized you slipped up again, you got confused, lulled by the deceitfully easy calm you felt when you were with Madoka. It tricked you into believing her existence was universal across all your timelines, that she was a constant which followed you beyond time just as you followed her. Sorry, you stammered, cheeks coloring.
It is one of the lesser mistakes you make. Another time you reach thoughtlessly for the small of her back after you defeat Charlotte for the hundredth time, her labyrinth disintegrating to butterfly wing dust around you, Madoka’s costume replaced by her school uniform like the fight had never happened at all. You are not thinking, you are just feeling. You slide your hand under the hem of her school shirt and rub your index finger over the heart-shaped mulberry birthmark in the dip of her spine, between the dimples just above the hem of her skirt.
Her skin is satin-soft and so so warm, you sigh gently because you know that birthmark, you have touched it countless times and kissed it gently, reverently. You know it as you know the imperfections in your own skin, but as you slide your fingertips against this secret part of her, she jumps, pulling away from you, eying you strangely. “I have a birthmark there,” she murmurs shyly like you don’t know everything about her. She grinds the toe of her shoe into the pavement where her eyes are downcast, cheeks pink.
You realize that you have never touched this Madoka like that before. You haven’t even kissed this Madoka, she doesn’t know yet, she doesn’t know you’re supposed to die together, she doesn’t know how beautiful it feels to be in love. Your heart sinks, cracking down its middle like mirror. Seven years bad luck, seven years of April 30ths. Your hands clutch nervously at your skirt and you say “You shouldn’t be ashamed of it”, quietly, sadly. “It’s beautiful.”
“You haven’t even seen it”, she jokes, leaning against you, hooking her arm through yours and letting her head drift to your shoulder. You inhale steadily, thinking that at least Madoka smells the same in every timeline, the same perfect sugared rose. “How do you know it’s not ugly?”
“Nothing about you is ugly,” you tell her. She giggles, stands on her tiptoes, and presses a messy kiss to your cheek. The world drops out from under you, tilting on its axis and making your head spin because even though this Madoka does not know everything, she still is everything. It’s her, with or without her memories, and you are in love with her always, even if she is not in love with you.
Regardless, It’s not fair. It’s not fair that this Madoka does not love you as you love her, that this Madoka does not know the feel of your lips brushing the dip of her back, does know know the way her own name sounded on your lips after she kissed you for the first time. She doesn’t know there was a first time she kissed you. She has never kissed you.
“Homura!” she says, stopping and grabbing you by the shoulders, rubbing her thumbs under your cheekbones to collect the slick stickiness of tears. “Why are you crying?”
“I can’t tell you,” you sniffle, brow pressed into hers, the smell of her hair all around you and her hands sliding down to cup on either side of your neck where the skin is fevered and flushed. “I’m sorry. It’s too much, it’s such a mess,” you choke out.
“Homura,” she murmurs, and leans in, so close you can taste the sweet hot huff of her breath before her lips slide against yours, smooth and hot and salty with your own tears. You hold her tight and kiss her and kiss her, silently begging remember, remember, remember me this time, remember this, please, please, anything.
---
The more times you repeat the past, the further she slips away from you, as if you’re trying to hold the ocean in your palms. You begin to realize that the best way to save Madoka is to stay as far away from her as possible, that you are what endangers her, you are the terror and the pain, trailing magic behind you like a comet’s tail. Still, even as you understand this truth with a growing clarity, you cannot stay away. You love her selfishly and completely, and the thought of abandoning her to make decisions herself, to fall headlong into the trap the incubators set, is agonizing. You cannot do it.
So even though you know that the closer you are to Madoka Kaneme, the more likely she is to make a contract and die on April 30th, you still don’t stay away from her. You want to believe there’s a way to save her and stay close, you want to believe you are not the wormhole dragging the fabric of space-time in to kill her, time and time again. And more simply, more selfishly, you want to stay curled in her shadow so that you can behold her, live for her, rewrite history for her. Your existence seems meaningless if you cannot at least look upon Madoka and imagine brushing your lips against the constellation of freckles upon her cheek, if you cannot twist your fingers through hers and hold her back one second longer, pull her into your arms one more time.
---
You change, she does not. At first you love her as a fourteen year old girl loves another, but each time you go back and tear up the last failed version of your lives together, you grow older, and she stays the same. You eventually love her as a sixteen year old girl loves a fourteen year old girl, as an eighteen year old, a twenty year old. You lose track of the years you gain in repeating the same month and some odd days endlessly, but you are aware than you are older than Madoka, that your wisdom and your experience and the way that you love her have grown far beyond her comprehension.
The things you dream of doing to her when you allow yourself to imagine a universe where you are both normal schoolgirls and there is no magic to enslave you make you feel sick with guilt. They were acceptable things to do with Madoka when you were both fourteen at your core, pure and clumsy and exploratory, a newness to your kisses, an infant fever heating her skin. But now, it’s different. You want her as a woman wants, but she is only a girl, because you won’t let her be anything else. The things you fell in love with, her brightness and her innocence and her youth, are now the things that drive a chasm between you, that make you different, impossible.
You are no longer bright or innocent. You are no longer young.
You hang your head in shame and bite your lip, eyes stinging as you imagine her spread out and pale and sweat-glistening before you, narrow arms above her head, wrists trapped in a single one of your palms so that you can touch her with your other hand. Touch her everywhere, touch her because you love her, because you are hers, because you want all of her before you lose her again. Heat roils in your stomach and sickens you, but you think it is at least better to imagine such things when you are alone, than to act on them when you are together. You hold her close when she embraces you, stunned by her brightness, her innocence, her youth. In contrast you feel black and corrupt, the charred husk of a once living girl. You do not want to leave handprints of soot upon her, but you cannot help yourself.
---
You hate the colors red and pink together. They nauseate you, make you dizzy and double at the waist when you see them. It reminds you of blood in Madoka’s hair, blood on Madoka’s dress. If it weren’t for pink without red, the color of her lips, her cheeks when she flushes, you would wish you were colorblind.
---
Sometimes you try and tell her the truth, but she never believes you. Or, if she does, the others don’t. You bring knowledge from the future, one hundred different outcomes all spattered in blood and still, they repeat themselves, still, they don’t listen.
You are trying to tell Madoka as you have done so many fruitless times, but it comes out all wrong. Throat thick with tears and and trails of snot collecting to drip from your chin, you sob, curled tightly beside her upon the half-moon couch framing the pendulum in your apartment.
Madoka stokes your back, a terrified hesitance in her touch. She has never seen you like this in her memory, you usually seem strong to her, mysterious, adept, older. The things you have grown to be, but aren’t naturally, truthfully, all fragments of an unrecognizable shell. “Who am I?” You mumble, voice wracked out of you as you shake under Madoka’s fingers. “You used to know better than anyone, but not anymore. Never again,” you tell her, hiccuping, wounded, dismayed beyond coherence.
“Homura...” she says, eyes wide and wet. “I don’t understand.”
“I know. You can’t. You never do,” you say, shaking your head and letting her pull you onto her lap. You wipe the slickness of your face onto her school skirt, thinking of all the times you tugged it down over her narrow, girlish hips back when you could do such things to her without feeling sick with guilt after the fact. You sob harder.
“Tell me then,” she pleads, fingers tangled in your hair. “Just tell me, Homura, tell me and I’ll help. I want to help; it scares me to see you like this.”
You inhale raggedly. “I’ve told you before. You never remember. I want you to remember, I want you to remember it all, but you never do.” The words come out of you fast and messy; you’re not making sense, you know you’re not but still, you can’t stop spilling. “We were so in love,” you sob, face crumpling into a mess, hot and red. “We were so in love but you don’t even know me anymore, I don’t even know me.”
Madoka drags you up by your shoulders to look at you, search your face for something familiar. You suspect she finds only tears, but still, she thumbs them away tenderly. “Tell me,” she pleads. “Tell me how you know so much.”
You shake your head, eyes streaming and head pounding. “I just want to keep you from hurting, but I always end up hurting you worse.”
“Homura, Homura,” she says, her own eyes welling up so full and your heart stops because maybe she does remember, not with her mind but with her heart, her body, maybe there are muscle memories she can’t understand but feels all the same. Maybe she loves you like breathing, just a rhythmic, reflexive thing she has no conscious control over.
Beyond resistance, you lean in and catch her lips in your own, tasting the salt of your tears combined. She clutches fists in your school uniform and your sway together, breath labored and messy and scared as you kiss her like kissing her is the same as saving her, something you must do, something you cannot stop. She’s shaking under you, against you, lips slack and wet and soft as you suck them into your mouth, nip them with your teeth. “Do you remember?” you say in between kisses, holding her face between two palms, voice ripped and desperate. “Do you remember how it feels?”
Her brow furrows and she grips you tight, like the tide of sensation might take her if she’s not anchored. She doesn’t remember; not with her mind. But maybe elsewhere. Maybe there is some deeper, more primal knowing, and all you have you have to do is uncover it, plant a seed inside its soil. “Homura,” she says again, like it’s the only word she knows. “Do you...have we...?”
“Yes,” you beg, squeezing more tears out as your face collapses in overwhelm. “Yes, yes, yes.” You slide shaking, tentative hands up her slim thighs, heart breaking at the familiarity of it all, the terrible bone-white smoothness of her skin, the way she arches up into you with her eyes wide and stunned, like her body wants something her mind doesn’t understand. You kiss her throat, her eyelids, her collar bones. “Does it feel like we’ve done this before?” You ask. “What does it feel like?”
She makes a small, wordless noise. Almost pain, almost rapture, some confused combination of the two. She keeps wiping your tears with her fingers, but then she lean in and licks them up, cleaning your face like a cat, salt on her tongue, driven by something as pure as instinct and you hold your breath, moved. “I don’t know,” she eventually admits in a small voice, hips rocking and circling mindlessly as she ruts against you, the couch, the air. “It’s like a dream.”
You smooth her hair, sniffling, fitting you palm to the wild flicker of her pulse and pressing down so you can feel it, count the wild, frantic beats of your heart. “Do you want me to stop? Is it too much?”
Then she smiles a watery smile, the kind that sends needles through your chest and makes your breath catch. You squeeze her tiny slip of a neck in your hand because no one else can snap it, you will keep it white and unbroken if it takes an eternity of April 30s, you will do whatever it takes.
“I want to understand,” she murmurs against your lips, kissing back confused and sloppy and perfect, mouth spreading and opening so you can fit your index finger inside just for a moment, to stroke the inside of her cheek where she’s wet and slippery. She sucks you in up to the second joint and its too much, it reminds you of so many things she does not and cannot know so you slide your finger from the slick, soft plush of her lips.
“Madoka,” you hum, her image cloudy through your tears. Her eyes flutter closed and you trace the blue filigree of capillaries with your spit-wet fingertip. You shouldn’t be doing this, you should not be taking so much for her but she is so willing under you, sticky pink frosting and you’re mired neck deep in it, you are so, so lonely and you love her so, so much, even this version of her, half-terrified of you, lost and confused.
She kisses you deeper and deeper, figuring it out, how good it feels, how badly you want her. She sucks on your tongue and you comb your fingers through her hair, holding her there against you and you wish this could go on forever, you wish Walpurgisnacht was not wheeling her way toward you ever closer, and you could spend the rest of eternity teaching Madoka Kaneme how to kiss, how to let you protect her. Tears leak down your face and she lets go of you to wipe them up, then suck them off her fingers. “This is so strange,” she whispers.
“Not so strange as killing witches?” you ask her, fitting yourself between her legs, feeling a heat trapped between you so humid and scalding it makes you dizzy. She squeaks at the pressure, incoherent murmuring baby-talk, mouth parted and breath coming short and fast as you slide your hands up her shirt, over the heaving ladder of her ribs.
“As strange,” she mumbles, head lolling back and forth upon the couch, making the pink of her hair tangle and snag. “But much better.”
Relief washes over you but it’s short lived, you know it is. Still, your heart breaks, and it feels so good to hear. “You’re not afraid of me?” You ask her, voice wavering. You hook your fingers under the flimsy elastic and cotton of her training bra, and the feel of it makes you cry, makes your throat thicken and lips tremble with the weight of memories unshared.
She reaches out and touches the twitch at the corner of your mouth, smoothing it out. “Never. Even if the others say they don’t trust you, I do. I know you’re good, Homura, I know you just want to help people.”
You shake your head. “No. Just you, Madoka. Just you.” You quiet any response she may have with your lips, kissing her deep, filling her up so that she gasps when you break apart. You know this day well, you have lived many versions of it there is a witch you must prevent her from fighting on the outskirts of the city, you must let Mami die in Madoka’s place, you must keep her here under you, mindless and sublime so that she forgets there are things beyond love, beyond the length of your arms. Please, Madoka, stay, let me, you think, sliding your hands up under the elastic of her bra and feeling the pink divots it created in her skin, cupping the smooth, barely there swells of flesh upon her sternum. She thrashes, she hooks her heels behind your back and fits you closer to her, pushes herself up against your hips as you touch her, as you make her forget. Please, Madoka. Stay. If you cannot remember, then please, please, let me remember for both of us. Let me. Let me.
The pendulum swings and you try not to hear its ever present click-click, steady as a clockwork heart, over the sounds of Madoka’s breath, so savage and pure.