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Homura didn’t look back. Orpheus couldn’t, and so she wouldn’t either. To look back was to doom her Eurydice, though maybe the metaphor was already tortured by comparison. Where the foolish hero had doomed who he loved, she wouldn’t be so stupid.
To look back was to admit defeat, to process her grief, the most fatal thing she could possibly do.
Besides, Eurydice’s story was over; Madoka’s wasn’t, so long as Homura kept trying.
“Homura-chan?” piped Madoka.
Homura and Madoka ate lunch alone, basking in the temporary peace, the calm before the storm that was Walpurgisnacht. Miki-san was home “sick”, “recovering” from the realization that her very existence was now a shiny blue rock. Sakura-san wasn’t allowed on school property at this point, and Tomoe-senpai was, well…
Madoka took a bite of her food.
Lunch, right.
Madoka re-adjusted her bento on her lap as Homura realized she never responded to her.
“Mm?” Homura “responded”, still thousands of miles away.
How best can I adjust the trajectory of the rocket launchers for maximal damage? I’ve already tried using the bridge over the bay as a staging area, but that only worked a few times, and the shadow girls seem especially incensed when I do so …
“Tell me about your parents.”
Homura froze, a full on-pause.
Her… parents? Where did that question come from? They had been discussing their classwork mere moments prior.
Her parents though… she hadn’t thought about them since loop seven. She had frozen, panic-stricken about whether she’d be someone they’d be proud of. She had been in a labyrinth, the mermaid witch, and Madoka had been in danger.
The panic had only lasted a single, fleeting moment, but a moment was all it took to ruin the timeline.
Time waits for no girl to save Kaname Madoka.
Her parents though? She had no idea.
“I… don’t know my parents.”
“You’re an orphan, Homura-chan? That’s so sad…”
The pang of guilt that shot through her was familiar, with an aftertaste of disgust. Where her ritualistic slaying of witches was easy, milquetoast, boring even…. This was something else entirely. She didn’t mean to manipulate Madoka, it was reprehensible to do so, even by accident.
She had to set the record straight.
“Ward of the state is the technical term.”
“Oh….” Madoka shriveled, Homura’s gut dropping with her response.
Good-for-nothing idiot, ruin it all like you always do, you can’t even save one girl–
She shuddered, and tried to continue the conversation. Anything, any train of thought at all?
Besides, it wasn’t like that type of question even mattered unless–
Homura turned her head to hide the faintest pink of blush on her cheeks.
Madoka wasn’t looking at her, she was staring down at her bento; she was despondent. She wasn’t hungry, not in the slightest.
She had already cried over how Mami-san had no one to mourn her (but her), but Homura-chan? Homura-chan had never had a family to love her.
Homura-chan had no Papa to make her lunches, no Mama to wave goodbye to, or be tucked in goodnight by, or go to parent-teacher conferences. No playdates at the park, no tourist activities overseas… She didn’t even have siblings to play with!
She was alone.
No, that wouldn’t do. She had to find a way to help, maybe…
“Do you want to know about your parents?” she murmured, half-hoping Homura-chan would drop the matter all-together and that she wouldn’t hate her for all eternity because of it.
Homura paused once more, doing her best to force her cheeks to return to their normal hue (still unhealthily pale, but consistently so).
Could she find out? Surely the hospital wouldn’t be that hard to convince to hand over her medical records; they were hers after all.
“I… suppose I do?”
Madoka smiled weakly.
Maybe her slip-up would be useful for some good, and Homura-chan might finally get some closure. She always seems so sad and distant…
The clerk, still absolutely frazzled from an irate senior, looked at Homura with a sort of trepidation; teenagers usually didn’t end up in the queue for the cardiac ward.
“How can I help you?” she smiled, the same placating, customer service smile that hundreds of thousands of people had worn through history. It was just the mask of the job.
“I’m looking to get some of my old medical records, if I can.”
“Oh course, your name?”
“Akemi Homura.” she said plainly. A look flickered across the receptionist’s face; judgement, confusion? Homura could practically hear it, what type of name is Homura? That’s such a strange name, and in the cardiac ward? Did her heart burn out…
The quiet click of a keyboard acted as a backing track to her tested patience. How long would Homura be willing to satisfy a minor curiosity at best?
For Madoka? Eternity, she imagined.
She didn’t expect it to drudge up so many intrusive thoughts though. She recalled she had two grief seeds in her buckler, she’d be fine for at least a week.
“Discharge date?”
“About a month ago.”
“Good for you, you’ve made quite the recovery!” she beamed.
Homura made a noise approximating acknowledgement and continued to wait.
After another few minutes of searching, the chatter in the waiting area quieted down to the point Homura could hear each hum, each sigh, each breath that forced air through her teeth, the whistle grating to say the least.
A wrinkle had formed on the receptionist’s face, a much more familiar look than the previous expression; confusion.
“That’s… odd.” she said quietly, after what Homura could only assume was intense research, clicking, and searching through arcane menuing; she had seen the other side of it when she was a patient here, and figured witch labyrinths made more sense.
“Is something wrong?”
“Uh… No, no. You have medical records here at Satomi Medical, and they can mostly be gathered for you, but uh… some portions of your personal history are sealed.”
What?
Homura blinked at her. Unavailable would have been one thing, lost in some dusty filing cabinet would have been expected. Getting her records in full would have been easy too; easy open and shut closure, Madoka placated, content to know of her family and never meet them.
Instead, she found herself discomforted by the anomaly. Records didn’t seal themselves.
“Sealed?”
“Like, I can see that the data exists in the system, but I can’t see what they contain.”
That was a thing their records system could do? Surely they still kept paper records somewhere…
“What parts are sealed?”
More wrinkles, a deeper frown.
“It seems that the parts we can’t retrieve are… your guardians, past residences, past surgeons prior to moving to Mitakihara.”
Why would someone seal something so banal? Besides, she was treated by doctor…. Doctor…. What was his name again? He had short, black hair… or did he? Hm.
The discomfort mounted, Homura struggling to reconcile that, as capable as she was, there were still parts of her that remained a mystery, even to her. This wasn’t supposed to be possible.
Guardians. If I was a ward of the state as I thought, it would be guardian, would it not be?
“Why would someone seal my records like that?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen that before. How strange!” she laughed nervously, hoping she wouldn’t be written up by the strange patient.
No matter the mystery, Homura was a more capable individual now; she’d get an answer even if it did involve magic.
“Don’t bother–.” she said, her fingers running through her hair with the practiced precision of someone whose nervous ticks were indistinguishable from condescension.
“But Miss Akemi, do you still want those records prepared for y–”
“It’s fine.”
The clerk’s face contorted in response, the unexpected coldness unbecoming of the young girl. No matter; Homura was already on the move.
Homura had scarcely turned the corner before she transformed. A patient room happened to be available, the privacy curtain sufficient to offer her insulation from the outside world. Time ground to a halt and she continued on.
She bounded down the stairs, the door suspended mid-swing as she let go of it. She raced around the bannister of the stairwell as she descended into the depths of the building.
All this to find the records hall.
She twisted through laboratory services, myriad medical rooms she wasn’t familiar with, through two patient wings, still stuck in that purple-blue freeze, before she finally found the records hall. The door was still half-open, some poor nursing assistant still in the doorway.
She squeezed by, to find herself in a space that somehow felt even bigger than it actually was. Seemingly infinite rows of file cabinets lined the room, stretching vertically, their order descending into chaos the deeper she went into the room.
She was grateful, truly, that the institution was so keen as to keep paper records still. Antiquated, sure, but anachronisms like this in a city like Mitakihara made the world go ’round.
Well, at least when you intended to relieve them of something she should have anyways.
Alphabetical. Easy.
She quickly rifled through the file cabinet, a manilla blur under her thumbs.
Akebono… no. Akesaka… distinctly not.
Akemi— No Akemi. Wha–
Wait no, at the back! There it is!
The first thing Homura notices is that the folder is light. Inexplicably light. The other folders she had brushed past were substantial, some nearly 25mm thick; her folder was a meager 2-3mm.
She yanked the folder out with ease, the worn cardstock flopping open. She quickly scanned the pages, glancing over her basic medical history, her immediate surgery profile.
Unfortunately, it seemed that much of the contents were photocopies of the same legal disclaimer, space-filler in something already full of empty space. She very nearly resigned herself to not knowing before she arrived at the last page.
Her intake paperwork, perfect.
She stared at the sheet, her eyes refusing to accept what she knew in her heart, in her soul to be true.
It was line after line of censored text.
Why had it been redacted, the hospital should know who admitted a teenager to a risky heart surgery!
…. But why didn’t she?
Homura was lost in her thoughts, struggling to reconcile the reality of the circumstances, as she felt something on the edge of the folder. She flipped the folder over and found a manilla business card paper-clipped to it.
No text, no embossing, a singular side and a pattern; an emblem, one she didn’t immediately recognize.
It seemed familiar, but she had seen many strange patterns in her time.
Could it have been a grief seed design? No, no, that would have been too obvious. Besides, how would she have seen a grief seed pattern and then have it show up in a paper envelope from before she contracted?
Well, if it wasn’t a grief seed… then what was it?
“Did you find anything about your parents, Homura-chan?” piqued Madoka.
Sayaka was still not back at school (as expected), and Walpurgisnacht was looming ever closer. Madoka had lost her study buddy, and so Homura was obliged to cover her fellow magical girl’s obligations, not that it was any great imposition. It was time spent with Madoka, one-on-one, and she had done this lesson a half-dozen times already.
She still didn’t want to waste time on trite explanations…
“No. I did not.”
“What did the hospital say?”
“My personal records were largely redacted.” she said, a twinge of disappointment in her voice.
“Huh? What does that mean?” Madoka asked, unsure if she understood what she had said.
I wondered if she was a spy, or a princess, when she first transferred in… but I didn’t know being a magical girl was even an option. Why would a magical girl have a censored medical history though?
Homura pulled the file from her schoolbag, notably finite in capacity as she passed the folder to Madoka carefully.
“May I?” she asked, her eyes downcast at the folder, neatly hand-inked writing on the edge.
“Akemi Homura”
She has already seen my whole soul. Nothing contained in this folder could be any more intimate.
Much as she had claimed, the folder was sparse; the contents even less informative than she had anticipated. Much of the paper documents seemed machine censored, or absent. Madoka flipped the folder over, to find the same paperclip, Homura watching in mute fascination.
She had the same thought as I did.
Madoka let out a measly huh as she plucked the business card paper-clipped to the back. No name or address on it, decorated only by a red seal.
“What does this mean, Homura-chan?”
Homura looked at the card once more, a slight frown on her face, more dejected than she had been in her own evaluation of the emblem. Reverse image searches, a trip to the library, all of it had turned up nothing.
And here she was, when they were supposed to be working on a group project, focusing on their studies, with something that was neither magical nor academic.
Was she slipping?
“I don’t know what it means.”
“I wonder if Mami-san…” Madoka began, trailing off as soon as she remembered the nauseating crunch of her mentor’s head falling off.
Tomoe Mami would have survived the Sweets witch, had she known the truth, but the damage that truth did would have killed even more than just herself… and so the discomforting lie was taken to the grave with her.
Homura sat quietly at the Kaname’s dining table, the scraping of keys at the door revealing one Kaname Junko waltzing in with the elegance of a drunk swan. Well, a marginally inebriated avian.
“Madoka, you didn’t say you’d be bringing a friend home!” Junko giggled through slurred speech, her daughter suddenly having cheeks the same hue as her hair.
“Mama, no it’s not what you think, we have a class project, and-and Homura-chan mentioned some family stuff, and–”
“Family stuff?” she purred as she slunk closer to the table, collapsing into Madoka’s usual seat with more effort than sitting down should have demanded.
“I had asked Papa and he said it was okay.” Madoka squirmed, her mother’s response little more than a laborious groan. Tomohisa appeared in the living room and placed a cool glass of water in front of her; Junko’s only response was to look up at her husband, starry-eyed. As she settled in, Junko’s eyes wandered to the files on the table, still displayed as if some crime scene investigation.
“I’ve seen that thingee before.” She murmured, Homura’s attention snapping to the elder Kaname.
“Kaname-sama, I must know; where?”
She frowned a bit, deep in thought, insofar she thought she was thinking deeply.
She was only struggling to recall.
“Isn’t it from a local school? I keep seeing girls with that on their uniforms on the way to work.”
Homura froze. Of course she had seen it before; on patrol.
She apologized profusely for departing so soon after her arrival, and thanked her immediately for her insight and wisdom. Junko wasn’t sure what she did, but she was happy to have made Madoka’s friendship with that girl all the better.
Friendship…. she thought to herself. Maybe I should text Kazuko…
Homura had broken her usual routine. Recall which witch was being slain that day, prepare more explosives, steal more munitions; she was hunting an entirely different type of beast today.
She had assumed those girls in that uniform were merely witch kissed, or wayward idiots in love sneaking out to see their partners. They did tend to be girls, from what she could recall, so a secret girlfriend would definitely fit her assumptions of them.
The skyscraper worked as an observation post, same as always, at least.
As she sulked on her perch, she mused to herself that there were some benefits to enchanting her eyesight; she found one with ease.
A girl, alone at night, schoolbag, blue uniform, emblem on it.
Bingo.
She leapt closer, settling for a mere ten story building as she inspected the girl closer.
Homura cursed herself, realizing in an instant how different the affair was from witch-hunting. She wouldn’t, she couldn’t use guns. The shells would be found, not swallowed by the maw of the labyrinth’s collapse. Such a mess would surely make life more difficult in the coming weeks.
Unless…
Homura quickly inspected the girl’s hand from afar; no soul gem on her finger. Her vision lingered, to make sure there was no colorful nailmark behind obscured by her pace or cadence.
No… she isn’t a magical girl, hm
Guess I have to do this the human way.
Homura landed a block away from the girl, seemingly noticing Homura’s arrival as the cadence of her footsteps changed.
She heard me? No, it must be a coincidence, her hearing can’t be that good.
Homura took wider strides, getting closer to the girl. She thought herself stealthy for only a moment, the girl’s pace increasing to match.
Oh, so she knows I’m here. Time to give chase?
Homura sprinted at her, the girl sprinting towards the next intersection, turning the corner as Homura gasped a bit.
Why the hell was the girl running so intently? And why couldn’t she catch up?
Homura turned the corner to find the girl had vanished.
“Fuck this” was all she could think to herself, transforming as the world ground to a halt. She fixed her hair, dishevelled by the now-frozen wind.
She would get a simple answer, even if it meant violation of the secret. Besides, Kyubey wasn’t here to see her stop time; the risk was negligible.
Homura searched, and searched, and searched. She was on a fire escape, attempting to scale upwards; Homura was almost impressed.
I would not have thought to look up, she is clever, I will admit.
Homura leapt onto the structure as she noticed in an instant that the girl was irregular in more than one way. The school uniform was made unusually well, the fabric hiding what appeared to be a fairly well built girl.
Homura would have blushed, if her target wasn’t, well, her target. She surveyed the girl’s motion and realized in an instant that she had a pistol in her hand, and not one of the JSDF’s standard issues.
She wasn’t a magical girl, but she had stolen firearms? Homura frowned. Illegal, and entirely her brand; rude.
She carefully positioned herself in front of the girl, but notably out of the firing line of the pistol. Homura snatched the gun from her hand and disarmed her, the girl dropping her cobalt sheen as she resumed motion in the frozen time.
She only had time to gasp as she looked up the stairs of the fire escape at her would-be assailant.
“Who are you, and what does that emblem mean?”
The girl gasped; she hasn’t been disarmed since drilling at the academy! She was so screwed if she wasn’t–
“H-How did you–w-what the hell–I’m a L-Lycoris?”
“What is a Lycoris?”
The girl shivered involuntarily as tears began to form in her eyes.
“Y-You look just like—”
She barely had time to stutter out her response to the strange girl who had appeared as if from nothing; Akemi Homura disappeared just as quickly as she arrived. This left one very confused Lycoris staring at her service weapon laying on the metal grating of the fire escape where the girl had been mere moments prior.
She surveyed the scene to try and find the strange girl… to no success. Damn.
She was alone.
She cradled her head as she murmured something about sleeping more, otherwise she’d keep having hallucinations, as Homura in the distance tried to not smile.
There was something satisfying about trying the disappearing act on someone new.
The Lycoris finished her patrol, covering much of the port. While she did draw her service weapon once, and repeatedly used a radio earpiece, something Homura had missed in their encounter, she never fired the gun.
She seemed unaware that Akemi Homura had been following her the entire time. Not from a lack of trying though; the girl was well trained, whoever her instructors were. She just couldn’t keep up with a magical girl.
Where Homura had hoped she would finish her shift and return home, she seemed to return to… some dormitory? A school? The exterior was nondescript but the interior was something she had never seen in Japan.
Homura froze time once more and snuck in again through the open door. She must see this through, if only to understand why her already strange life seemingly gained another dimension of oddity overnight.
They had an armory. An armory.
They had a firing range, rooms for different types of combat scenarios, classrooms spanning multiple floors. Homura’s stomach dropped as she realized that, after some quick mental math, that given the existence of one dormitory for the girl she had followed…
There were likely hundreds of residents here. Hundreds of girls, trained with firearms, trained in combat to patrol the streets.
Kyubey would have had a field day; wait, did that rat-bastard know about this place? No, he can’t have, otherwise she’d have found a witch here at least once.
Who was funding this, and how hadn’t she known about this prior? This would have cut down her early loop JSDF theft timelines by at least a day! A full day!
Homura was incensed. So incensed, in fact, she didn’t notice her time stop failing as the last grain of sand landed at the bottom of the hourglass-buckler.
The nighttime at the training facility had always been quiet, but that didn’t mean no one was awake. Homura, still busily upset with how much time she wasted when she could have been robbing the Lycoris blind, failed to notice a woman sneak up behind her.
A seismic thunk was let out as a pistol’s butt crashed into her skull, the frail-looking magical girl made frail once more, the dormitory lights flashing to life as she was hauled away unceremoniously.
Akemi Homura woke up in a hospital bed. No, no, not that one. This time, she was in handcuffs.
She stared down at her wrist, the shackles connecting her to the bed’s railing.
She probably could break out, but someone had managed to knock her out, and she didn’t even hear them. She had no idea if they knew she was a magical girl, she had no idea what mysterious organization this was, and most importantly, she still had no idea who her mother and father were?
Did they work for this organization? Was that why they were never around? Was that how her apartment, offputting as it was, was funded?
The door opened.
Homura found herself staring at the same girl she had been tailing, in the same uniform she had been wearing.
“You.” Homura seethed.
“Yeah, it’s me. Why were you following me?”
“Your uniform.”
“What?”
“The insignia on it, the insignia of the Lycoris apparently, was in my medical records. I wanted to find my parents.”
The girl’s jaw hung open for a moment before she shook her head. Her story was so absurd, so out there, that it couldn’t be anything but the truth. She stood back up, and knocked on the door.
She stated, to the person on the other side, something that she didn’t expect.
“Madam Nishigi, you can enter.”
Homura watched as a woman in a blazer entered the room, with command and posture. Short cut blonde hair, wine-colored eyes, heels. Homura watched as she slunk the jacket off, the clear holster underneath telling her immediately; this woman was in charge, and she meant to demonstrate this.
The girl Homura had followed nodded once and exited the room, granting them a modicum of privacy.
The woman sat down in the chair the girl had been and leaned forward, her posture changing in an instant.
She was holding her head up with her hands, almost giddy as she sat there idly.
Homura noticed the red ribbon in her hair; ironic.
“I’m Nishigi Chisato.”
Homura said nothing. What could she say? This was her captor, or at least someone complicit in her capture. What would revealing her name do? They seemingly already knew it. Besides, it wasn’t like a secret organization would use their real names so trivially.
“Chisato” seemed genuinely excited to be there, even if everything else about her was fake. Homura figured that the twilight of the hospital/prison (like all hospitals) was yet another lie, a world of lies, a hospital of lies, a past of lies.
Was any of it real?
“Gosh, you do really look like her now. We stopped getting photos when you were transferred between Nagoya and Tokyo.”
Homura scarcely had time to digest her tone before the words hit her like heavy ballistics.
“Photos…?”
No, she couldn’t be…
Chisato grinned wildly as she leapt to her feet, rapping her fist on the door twice. Another woman entered, seemingly the same age as the blonde, though that barely registered to Homura.
Her jaw dropped, genuine and authentic shock on display as she stared at a woman. The new woman, in an equally trim suit looked just like her, or rather, like she might look if she survived to adulthood.
The sheer impossibility of it all finally slot into place as the comments from the girl on the street registered in her mind.
You look just like…
“My name is Inoue Takina, and we missed you so much, Homura-chan.”
Homura couldn’t stop the tears; she was overjoyed and confused.
Why hadn’t they been present in her life? Well, given that her parents were spies, this carried an obvious burden, one not unlike her own.
“Why were my medical records censored, but the calling card was left?”
“Well, it’s good policy to redact or remove incriminating evidence, but even in the digital era, it would have left too big a hole to just remove you entirely.”
“But the calling card?”
Chisato glanced at her wife.
“Well, your mom thought it’d be good to leave a way for you to find a way home, if you ever went looking.”
“It was my being foolish. I didn’t expect you to break in though.”
“How did you do that?” Chisato asked with mute curiosity, Homura averting her eyes as she made her biggest mistake yet; her hands were still above the sheets.
“Well I guess your soul gem explains it.” she murmured as Homura’s head whipped around to face them.
Homura transformed and went to stop time, unaware she was out of sand, still handcuffed to the bed, and so she sat there, in her uniform, her soul gem trickling full of despair.
Her mothers froze, but didn’t seem too surprised; why would they not be surprised their daughter was a MAGICAL GIRL!? Homura didn’t have to wait long for an answer.
They merely held up their own hands.