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The rain let up here. Not stopping by any means, but almost eerily calm compared to the downpour Homura had fought through up to this point. Overhead though, chaos still reigned. And not just with dark clouds and howling winds, but stranger apparitions still. Stray clouds warped with static, with floating tombstones flickering in and out of view around them, all circling around a central point. Homura grew closer with every step, her clothes soaked by rain and braids swept back by the wind.
A small hint of green, almost buried amidst the fallen telephone poles and chunks of discarded buildings. Homura might’ve missed it entirely, but she didn’t. She broke into a run, feet splashing noisily, though the water barely reached her ankles.
“Hitomi-chan!”
Raindrops washed out the tears before they could properly form. Homura could barely see through her glasses, splatted thick with rain and fog. But she could see well enough. Hitomi lying on the ground, her body broken, her shield shattered.
“Homura,” Hitomi said weakly, struggling to open her eyes. Her head turned a fraction towards the direction of Homura’s voice. “You shouldn’t… have come here.”
“Hitomi-chan,” Homura said again, falling to her knees as she reached her friend’s side. There was nothing else to say. She was too late. “You’re hurt—You can’t die, Hitomi-chan!”
In a flash of green light, Hitomi’s magical girl attire vanished, replaced by her Mitakihara school uniform. Somehow, all the rips and tears carried over, Hitomi’s wounds still running red with blood. Staining the tan fabric of her uniform, exaggerating the size of the wounds. They looked bad enough without any help at all.
“There’s no choice this time, Homura,” Hitomi said, almost managing a laugh before it turned into a cough. “I ran out of chances… can’t try again. Please, run away already. Save yourself.”
Laughter danced through the air around them, mocking and foreboding. Despite how hard Hitomi had fought, Walpurgisnacht yet loomed over the wreckage of the city. And Madoka… Homura couldn’t think about Madoka. Couldn’t ask Hitomi, couldn’t speak a word. Her voice caught in her throat, collapsing with her arms wrapped around Hitomi. There were no sounds of fighting overhead, nothing but the rain pouring down.
“I’m sorry, Homura. I’m so, so sorry,” Hitomi whispered. She might’ve been crying too, but Homura couldn’t tell with her face buried into her chest. “I tried to save you. And Madoka too. But I guess I’m not—”
Hitomi coughed again, Homura feeling it wrack her all the more fiercely, with their bodies pressed so close together. She could feel the life draining out of Hitomi, but there was nothing she could do.
“I’m sorry you have to see this,” Hitomi apologized again, as if any of this was her fault. “But before I lose the strength… Promise me, Homura. Don’t listen to the Incubator. Don’t believe its lies.”
Homura tried to lift her head up. She owed Hitomi at least that much, to look her in the eye one last time. Her eyes were green and wide, and then something shattered. Hitomi went limp.
“Hitomi-chan…?” Homura said, frozen in disbelief. She shouted it louder, then screamed it. “Hitomi-chan! Hitomi-chan!”
Still clutched in Hitomi’s fingers, the gold casing of her soul gem lay empty on top of a rock, poking just above the waterline. Emerald shards sunk down below the surface, before evaporating into light all at once. And then Hitomi was gone.
The rain kept falling all the same. Homura’s tears still mixed up in all of it, her heart nearly tearing in two.
“It’s a real shame. Hitomi would have made a wonderful witch.”
Homura’s body seized up. A voice, but there was no sound to it. No emotion. Something boiled up inside of her, and Homura pushed herself up, hands shoved hard against Hitomi’s shoulders. Against her corpse.
“Don’t you dare speak her name!” Homura shouted. She wasn’t one for anger, but there was nothing else she could feel at this moment. “Hitomi-chan was… She was…”
She was gone. Maybe Madoka was too. Everyone else had failed, leaving only the pitiful, powerless Akemi Homura behind. Just her, and the witch who had murdered them all. And the Incubator who had let it happen. Kyubey sat on the back side of a fallen stop sign, unperturbed by the rain. Unperturbed by the body of Homura’s friend lying on the ground in front of it. Red, empty eyes stared into her, its body unmoving save for a stray flick of its tail.
“Is this the part where you ask me to make a contract?” Homura asked. Even after everything that happened, she still felt no closer to knowing what to wish for. No closer to an answer for if she should make a wish at all.
“If you’d like,” Kyubey said, rather ambivalent to it all. “I don’t see any point in that though. Only Kaname Madoka held the potential required to possibly defeat Walpurgisnacht alone.”
Horuma’s heart stopped in her chest. She had already known, but hearing it made it real. Only one girl might’ve made a difference, and she was dead. Madoka.
“That didn’t stop Hitomi-chan from trying,” Homura said, though it felt hopeless to try to convince Kyubey or herself. She looked down at Hitomi’s body, the tears welling up again. “She didn’t give up because she was too weak, even after Madoka-chan… Even after…”
Homura shut her eyes, trying desperately to stop crying. Why did it have to end like this? Why did they all have to die? Not just Hitomi and Madoka, but Sayaka, Mami, even Kyouko. Homura’s whole world, ever since she first got out of the hospital.
“Why do humans insist on fighting impossible battles?” Kyubey asked. “Even if you made a contract now, you’ve never once used magic before, Akemi Homura. Walpurgisnacht could come to crush you at any moment, there would be no time to learn your powers and grow strong enough to matter.”
Kyubey didn’t have to say it. Homura could figure that much out herself. Madoka was so much stronger than her. Hitomi was so much stronger than her. And yet the both of them together hadn’t been enough. If a veteran like Mami could be defeated by a much lesser witch, how many years would Homura need to hope to stand a chance against the witch before her now? Would even an entire lifetime be enough?
Homura briefly wondered if Kyubey expected an actual answer. It sat there, unblinking as ever, giving no tells one way or the other. For sure, it didn’t understand humans at all. But did it care enough to actually ask, or was it simply impressing upon Homura how hopeless it all was?
“You can’t say something’s impossible without even trying,” Homura said, wanting to defend Hitomi’s choice whether or not she truly believed it. She owed her that much. “For Hitomi-chan… defeat was unacceptable. She refused to live in a world where it was hopeless, so she would win, or she would die. And that made her braver than you could ever possibly understand!”
“You really didn’t know anything about her, did you?” Kyubey said. “I suppose it makes sense she wouldn’t tell you, a single month is too short to build up much trust. But why do you feel so strongly about someone who was practically a stranger?”
It was like a punch straight to the gut. Suddenly, Homura became all too aware her hands were still on Hitomi’s shoulders, struggling to scramble off of her with a yelp and a splash of water. She couldn’t touch Hitomi like this, what right did she have? Homura hadn’t known her like Madoka had, or Sayaka had, or even Hitomi’s other fellow magical girls. Could she really claim to understand Hitomi…
No. Don’t listen to the Incubator. Don’t believe its lies.
“I knew her better than you,” Homura said, forcing herself up to her feet, staring Kyubey down. “I knew her as a person, and not just another victim you tricked along the way… Is that what this is about? Hitomi-chan’s wish?”
Needless to say, Homura knew nothing about how Hitomi became a magical girl. She knew bits and pieces of her earlier years, just from what she could pick up from Madoka and Sayaka. But never a hint of what she had wished for, or even how long she had been a magical girl. Longer than her friends, maybe even longer than Mami.
“In some sense,” Kyubey told her. “Of course, I can only speculate what she wished for. Up until she attacked me a month ago, we had no record that Shizuki Hitomi had ever been a magical girl. She was an anomaly that defied explanation.”
Somewhere inside Homura, she felt that should be shocking. But she was too numb to react, too exhausted to wonder what Kyubey was trying to say. Too weak to tell it to shut up, and never speak of Hitomi ever again.
“Even now, I don’t know much more, but there is one thing I had managed to confirm with her directly,” Kyubey went on, having met no objection. “Shizuki Hitomi’s magic allowed her to not only stop time, but reverse it. Under what conditions, I unfortunately can only guess. But I’m certain she had already given up on this timeline from the very moment Madoka made her contract. That was the defeat she could never accept.”
Homura stood there stunned, refusing to believe what she was hearing. The Incubator was trying to trick her, that was all it ever did. And yet, despite Hitomi’s warnings, Kyubey rarely seemed to outright lie. It made too much sense anyway, to be anything but the truth.
“That’s how she knew me,” Homura said, the realization coming to her at the same moment it left her lips. She stared down at Hitomi’s body, suddenly flooded with memories. “That’s why she was so insistent Madoka and Sayaka should refuse you, why Madoka kept talking about how much she had changed… All this time…”
Though Kyubey was not one to make up its own details while telling Hitomi’s story, the pieces all fell into place in Homura’s mind. If not the truth, then something close enough to it. How many times had Hitomi done this? How many times had she failed? Why did she have to die today, if she had such a power? If magic was capable of such a thing, then—
Homura looked back up at Kyubey. Was it a trick? Did it even matter? Only by the whims of Walpurgisnacht was Homura still alive, she had very little left to lose.
“Turning back time…” Homura said, wondering if she should even dare to voice the thought aloud, lest Kyubey take it as her wish. “Hitomi-chan wasn’t strong enough to defeat Walpurgisnacht, but her wish still gave her that power. Does that mean… I might be able to make a similar wish? That I could save Hitomi-chan this time?”
Homura tried not to let herself hope just yet. But the temptation was too great, seeing Hitomi’s broken body, wanting to deny such a thing could possibly be real. Hitomi couldn’t be gone forever. Madoka couldn’t be dead. They were her friends. Her only friends.
“You have more potential than Hitomi did,” Kyubey said, falling just short of confirming anything at all. “But would you really wish for such a thing, Akemi Homura? The last words of a friend… isn’t that what humans call a ‘dying wish’? The only thing Shizuki Hitomi asked of you was not to form a contract. Wouldn’t making a wish like that spit in the face of your friend’s sacrifice?”
Consistent to the end, the Incubator spoke without emotion. Simply asking Homura what she might feel, never claiming to understand any of it.
“Why does it matter to you?” Homura asked. “You’ve been telling me from the very start to become a magical girl, and now you’re trying to talk me out of it?”
Only once Homura said it out loud did she realize quite how strange it was. Hitomi’s reasons made sense to her, whether or not she agreed with everything she did. Hitomi wanted to keep Madoka safe. To keep Homura safe. To bear all her struggles alone… None of that remotely sounded like rationale that Kyubey might share.
“I admit, it would be preferable not to introduce another anomaly to the timeline, so soon after the last one was taken care of,” Kyubey said. “It’s unlikely a future iteration would yield significantly better results than the energy Kaname Madoka has already provided us.”
There was something incredible about Kyubey so succinctly revealing how it viewed Hitomi and Madoka both. Now that they were gone, it saw no need to feign sentiment, valuing them no more than they were worth to it. All Homura could think was that Kyubey might be serious about not wanting to form a contract, if it wasn’t even trying to pretend to be anything else.
“But it’s true that on their own, human wishes—even ‘dying wishes’—have no binding power,” Kyubey went on. “If you wish to render the sum of all Hitomi’s efforts pointless, and trample upon her sacrifice, it isn’t my place to refuse.”
“That… That’s not right at all!” Homura shouted, defending herself to Kyubey only because there was no one else left. “Hitomi-chan… She didn’t tell me not to make a contract, not at the end. She just told me never to listen to you!”
If all of this had been a trick to rile Homura up, it worked. Kyubey’s supposed reasons for its hesitancy made sense, but that didn’t mean it really understood Hitomi. Would Hitomi be okay with this? Homura was much less sure than she had tried to sound. Or worse, she was growing certain she would do it regardless of what Hitomi might’ve wanted. The thought that she didn’t need to be tricked in the first place twisted her heart up all the more inside.
“So that’s it?” Kyubey said at last, giving off an odd sound that might’ve been a sigh. “Shizuki Hitomi fought for her life and her precious friends. Day after day, lifetime after lifetime. Learning everything she could, even the things we prefer magical girls never to learn. Every scrap of knowledge, every ounce of wisdom, every last desperate tactic… And this is where it got her, this was the best she could leave you with. Are you really so sure you wish to follow in her footsteps?”
“I’m sure,” Homura said, shutting her eyes tight, one hand at her side balling into a fist. “It’s enough, it has to be enough. If Hitomi-chan could tell me nothing else, at least she taught me not to trust your kind. That much I know is true.”
She hadn’t voiced her wish aloud, not in so many words. But she could feel it start to build now. Raindrops sizzled against her skin, evaporating on contact. The howl of the wind was nothing compared to the torrent inside her own head. And then… calm.
Homura opened her eyes, finding a thin veil of raindrops frozen in midair between her and Kyubey. It leapt off the fallen stop sign, landing just short of Homura’s feet. She looked down toward it, and found a shield on her left arm. Hitomi’s shield, whole once more.
“Your wish has surpassed entropy, you are now a magical girl,” Kyubey spoke absently, as if it had played no part in the now unraveling timeline. “And yet, I still can’t help but wonder…”
Homura’s hand was already instinctively reaching into her shield, before she realized Kyubey had started to speak again. Freezing too late, already finishing her twisting motion, she only barely caught its parting question as the world disappeared.
“Who do you think taught her that, Akemi Homura?”