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Homura wakes up in a body that has never been sick, something about that feeling wrong before she can say why. She sits up. Sunlight. A ceiling she maybe knows. A school uniform draped over a chair, pressed and waiting as if laid it out for her. Her chest doesn't hurt. She touches her sternum anyway, checking for a scar or an ache that isn't there, and finds only the normal rise and fall of a normal girl's breathing.
Missing. Something, someone missing.
Not a face. Just a hole in the middle of her, precise as a keyhole, and the unbearable certainty that she used to spend all her strength guarding whatever used to fill it. She goes to school because it seems like the thing a person does, does not remember the walk, only the sense that she is supposed to be new here, and that being new here used to matter enormously, for reasons she can no longer access.
#
Steel meets shadow and neither gives.
"You're doing the thing again," says a voice, breathless, delighted, somewhere behind a wall of frozen light. "Where you don't say anything and then something's just—dead."
"You talk too much for someone swinging a sword."
"And you don't talk enough for someone who apparently holds up time. Literally, I mean. Responsibility-wise, you're very punctual."
There's a laugh, quick and unguarded, and it doesn't feel like something Homura is remembering. It feels like something that is still happening, somewhere else, at the exact time as everything else.
#
Homura finds the girl before she finds her name.
It's lunch, and the girl is arguing—cheerfully, hands on hips—with a boy twice her size about whether it's fair to eat someone's yakisoba bread if you left a note promising to pay them back. She's not winning the argument through logic, but rather, through sheer refusal to lose. "Sayaka Miki," the girl says, when she notices Homura watching, and sticks out a hand. "You're the transfer, right? You look like you're about to fall over."
"I'm fine."
"Sure." Sayaka doesn't let go of her hand right away. "Okay, weird question: do I know you? You've got a face like I should know you."
Homura's heart does something indescribable. "I don't think so."
"Huh." Sayaka squints, then shrugs, already moving on, generous with the not-knowing in a way that feels relieving. "Well. Now you do. Sit with us."
There is no reason for the offer. There is no reason, either, for refusal. So she sits.
Homura starts noticing the form of Sayaka's days: that her left hand curls when she's holding back from saying what she actually thinks, that she laughs loudest right after she's said something she regrets, that she skips breakfast when she's anxious. Homura starts bringing an extra portion of lunch, wordlessly, and setting it down like it's nothing, like it isn't a central, load-bearing pillar of her entire reconstructed life.
"You don't have to keep doing that," Sayaka says, the fourth time, mouth already full.
"I know."
"Then why—"
"I don't know," Homura says, and it's the most honest sentence she's spoken since waking up in this borrowed, unscarred body. "I think I used to—there used to be someone. I don't remember who."
Sayaka goes still in a way that doesn't suit her. For a second something crosses her face—and then it's gone.
"Yeah," she says, "I get that. Isn't that the weirdest thing? Like missing homework you don't remember being assigned." And then there's that easy grin.
"Yes," Homura replies. "Exactly that."
Neither asks the other to explain further.
#
"Left," Sayaka snaps, and Homura's already moving. In the space that isn't space Sayaka's sword comes down exactly where the world resumes.
"You waited too long," Homura manages.
"Exactly long enough." Sayaka's grinning, chest heaving, sword resting on her shoulder like it weighs nothing. "We're good at this. You and me. What do you think, about that, how good we are at this?"
Homura doesn't answer. Past Sayaka's shoulder, at the very edge of where the shattered light gathers, there's a smear of pink: a ribbon, a hem. A shape she cannot make her eyes hold no matter how hard she tries.
It's like water, like trying to look directly at the center of the sun.
"You're doing the staring thing again," Sayaka says. "There's nothing there, Homura," and her tone is not unkind.
"I know," Homura says, turns away, and doesn't know why it feels like it costs her something to do it.
#
There's an older girl at the school gates one afternoon, blond curls, a manner so composed it borders on performance, handing out flyers for a tea appreciation club that doesn't seem to have any other members.
"Miki-san," the girl says warmly, and Homura sees the way Sayaka's posture straightens, some instinct toward respect kicking in automatically. "And a friend. Wonderful. You should both come by sometime: Thursdays, third music room."
"Mami-senpai's a legend, basically," Sayaka tells Homura afterward, kicking a stone down the sidewalk with more force than the stone deserves. "Student council, kendo captain, valedictorian probably. I don't know why but she always looks at me like she's—waiting for something."
"Waiting for what?"
"No idea." Sayaka's grin flickers, just momentarily. "Maybe she thinks I look like trouble, or something."
Homura, who does not remember why the phrase music room makes something in her chest go tight and grateful and unbearably sad all at once, says nothing, and files the ache away with all the others she can't name.
#
It isn't easy, being close to Sayaka. There's one day she doesn't show up to school and Homura finds her three hours later sitting alone on the riverbank, furious about something involving a boy named Kyousuke and a violin and a girl, crying, aggrieved, but in the manner of someone who has decided her own feelings are an inconvenience.
"Go away," Sayaka says, not looking up. "I'm being stupid on purpose. I don't need witnesses."
Homura sits down next to her anyway, close enough that their shoulders touch. She says nothing, but doesn't leave, and after twenty minutes of silence Sayaka leans over, exhausted, her head resting on Homura.
"You're really bad at comforting people," mutters Sayaka. "You didn't say one nice thing."
"I don't know how."
"You're doing fine anyway." A long breath. "Don't tell."
"I won't."
#
"Hey." Sayaka's voice, quieter than usual, in the hush after a witch's barrier folds. "If something ever happened to me—you wouldn't just, I don't know, forget I existed, right?"
"No," Homura says, too fast.
"Good." Sayaka bumps her shoulder, grinning again, softness, grief and want folding themselves back under bravado. "Somebody's gotta keep annoying you. Might as well be me."
Behind her, pink flickers at the tree line and is gone.
#
She dreams, some nights, of cotton-candy clouds, wakes with her face wet and no memory of why.
It's Sayaka who says it first, one of the rare nights she lets herself stop performing fine. "Sometimes I think I miss someone I've never met." She says it like a joke, already reaching for the grin to cover it.
Homura doesn't let her get there. "I know what that's like."
Sayaka goes quiet, not the sulking kind. "Yeah," she says finally. "I figured you might."
Neither of them elaborates on something they don't have, but something in Sayaka's shoulders comes down, a release. She leans into Homura without asking permission, and Homura, for once, doesn't stiffen at the contact.
"You're still bad at comforting people," Sayaka mutters into her sleeve.
"I know."
"Doesn't matter." A pause. "I think I'd rather be bad at this with you than good alone."
Homura closes her eyes. Behind them, she doesn't search. She doesn't need to, not anymore, not tonight.