Tangled Regrets – Chapter 3 – The Curse Breaker (Patreon)

I don’t know what to do with my life.

Which shouldn’t be a big surprise. I’m not even out of high school, and I’ve got years to figure out if I even want to go to college, what degree to pursue, and what jobs are actually available after graduating from something as utterly ridiculous as Classical Philology or another similar waste of four years—

“Your face’s going to get stuck like that, Junko,” Kazuko, my best friend, says as she pokes my forehead, her nose scrunching beneath her round glasses because of a smile that almost closes her eyes.

Cute.

Ah! So unfair! Do you know how much effort I devote every single morning to making sure I don’t have a single hair out of place?! To find colors that match my ridiculous aubergine shade? And Kazuko just has to wear her hair and glasses exactly the same way she did four years ago to be cheek-pinchingly cute. She’s like a human hamster!

So. Unfair.

“You’re thinking something rude, aren’t you?” she asks with a moue that only enhances the sheer unfairness.

“Not half as much as always assuming I’m thinking something rude,” I say, resuming our walk to Mitakihara before our little diversion makes us late.

“Stop rushing! And that means you were thinking something rude!”

“Don’t want to be late,” I acknowledge the first part of her line.

“You’re neverlate. I swear, it’s like you’ve time magic or something…”

“I don’t have any magic, much less something as ludicrously powerful.”

“Well, of course. Dad says we should start our classes today. Excited, by the way?”

“Stop asking that.”

“Ah. Surly, then?”

And now I stop and turn around. Because she’s dangerously close to pissing me off.

“Kazuko, when have I ever shown the slightest interest in magic?”

“When… When your dad—”

“Exactly.”

And she frowns before going pale.

“Oh. Oh, Junko, I’m so sorry, I didn’t even think—”

“Of course you didn’t.” And that may be a harsh thing to say, but…

Kazuko flinches.

Damn it.

So unfair.

“Hey, look, it’s not your fault. I just… I kinda miss him, and I kinda don’t, so… I try not to think too much about this. The magic thing just leaves a sour taste.”

“He’s… Still confined, then? No contact?”

And I sigh. It looks like this is a conversation I’m not getting out of.

“Too much curse accumulated before he went back to base. They have him locked up until he either pulls through by himself or someone invents a new cleanser. Mom’s not holding her breath on that one,” I say with careful flippancy.

And she hugs me.

“You don’t have to act so strong,” she says, her face right next to mine.

“I’m not acting,” I lie.

And she giggles before her arms tighten for just a second, and she almost lets go, her face now in front of mine.

“I know. You’re the tough, composed one. But maybe you could pretend for a bit, just so I don’t feel out of place?”

… Unfair.

So, in the middle of the park we always cut through to get to school, beneath green leaves rustling with a mild April breeze, I hug my best friend and shudder just a bit while she pats my back reassuringly.

Just because she’s so unfair.

***

“Some of you may have already had your awakening. We know it’s related to heightened emotional states commonly experienced through puberty, but that doesn’t mean it’s always an emotional, or even noticeable affair. Maybe you noticed some colors stand out more than they used to, or that you prefer sitting in certain spots rather than others. Maybe a change in your sleeping routine? Everybody has their own experience, but the one constant is change…”

Mister Saotome is the most boring man alive—something that Kazuko, thankfully, hasn’t inherited.

This is it, the moment most of my class has been waiting for since literal years, the moment when we are finally given official permission to actually learn magic, and… Half the class is asleep.

I mean, obviously the official part of the permission hasn’t stopped most of us from sharing some… ‘leaked’ information, because either older siblings or worried parents can’t help but let something slip from time to time, so what our dear teacher is droning about is, quite frankly, old news.

Boring old news.

Being the daughter of a state magician may have made me a bit less prone to excitement over the whole thing, but even I know what my classmates are hoping to find out today. What’s their affinity? Their potential? Their astral shape?

Oh, excuse me, projected shape. Wouldn’t want to be caught using old-fashioned terminology, would I?

Suppressing yet another sigh (and seeing Kazuko failing to mask an unfilial yawn behind her hand), I patiently wait for the boring man to get to the point.

As discreetly as I can, I sneak a glance at Tomohisa. The clueless guy is just fiddling with his glasses, not even noticing when I stare at his gentle—

This is embarrassing.

And… Not a very good idea. Specially because Tomohisa may not be sharp enough to catch my sideways glances, but…

He’s also missing Kazuko’s glances.

Really, could this be any more cliché? Two best friends falling for the same, ridiculously unambitious guy? For all I know, his only aspiration is to be a househusband! He doesn’t deserve someone like Kazuko looking at him like that, she’s the one who should be pampered and taken care of, not the other way around! Really, Tomohisa, shape up if you want to deserve two beauties like us fighting over—

I don’t want to fight with Kazuko…

I also don’t want to waste time throwing longing glances at a guy who’s always too busy fussing over his glasses to notice two girls looking at him like that. Really, how self-absorbed can you—

“So, without further ado…” Finally! “Let’s start checking your sensibility. Atsuki, come up here.”

And so it begins. Or some other, suitably dramatic, line.

One by one, each of my classmates go up to our magic teacher and stretch a hand between his own cupped ones. After a while, they report their feelings, the way they process whatever it is he’s doing. Some very sensitive people react before even touching whatever it is he’s weaving out of his inner reservoirs (probably a random selection between the standard shapes, if what I read about the subject holds).

Then it’s my turn.

“I don’t feel anything, Mister Saotome,” I say, frowning at the space between his hands and my own. Maybe it’s a bit hazy?

He frowns, staring at the very same point I am.

“Curious. Most theories state magic potential has a genetic component, and given who your father is—”

“I know who my father is, Mister Saotome. I still don’t feel anything.”

For a moment, he looks chastised, which is a very curious sight to see from the usually dour man. There are a few whispers from my classmates, the pack of hyenas likely too tired of seeing me excel to contain their glee at my one failure.

All right, I’m being dramatic. It’s not like I always get straight As.

Just… most of the time?

Oh gods, I’m insufferable, aren’t I?

“I’ll try to raise the output. It usually is unnecessary, but maybe I can brute force—”

Everything else Mister Saotome says is lost in the rush of memory.

‘Junko…’ Tomohisa whispered in my ear on our wedding night, his seed warm in my belly, and I hoped it would take this time. Not because I was desperate to be a mother, but because it would be so perfect to have this night be when I became his and then we had something of ours…

‘Junko…’ Kazuko said, tears in her eyes, after her latest boyfriend turned out to be yet another disappointment, another waste of almost a year that she would never get back…

‘Junko!’ my boss exclaimed, pleased as ever to see me come back from a successful deal.

‘Junko,’ Dad said, a smile on his face as he bounced both grandchildren on his knees, not a trace of the veteran mage I’ve known for the past years on the face of the humble shopkeeper.

‘Junko!’ Mom said, clenching my hand as I laid on the hospital bed after a delivery that was a bit rough, but nothing I can’t handle, so you shouldn’t be this emotional, mom, I’m sure everything will be all right…

Something’s wrong.

‘Mrs. Kaname,’ Sayaka greets me, once more making me let out a sigh at how this girl whose diapers I changed once upon a time keeps treating me like some kind of distant, idolized figure…

Parallel lives memories… They aren’t like this.

‘Mama!’ little Tatsuya cheerfully greets me as I come in from work, night already fallen and the taste of bitter beer in my mouth.

They diverge, they don’t compound on one another. They don’t echo until becoming a single, clear note.

‘Mama,’ Madoka says, grim and solemn. Sad. My own daughter saying goodbye with the word as she rushes to—

Ah. I remember.

My daughter. Madoka.

The center of this whole mess.

‘She… She’s come back. Again and again, to save me. And each time she’s had to fight, and fight, and fight, and I don’t think she even knows how to stop, Mama. Ineed to save her. To stop her. Before it’s too late, before she becomes… That.’

My stupid, far too good of a daughter.

‘And I don’t know what to do, or how to do it, and… And I’m too dumb to come up with a plan, but you’re smart, Mama. You’re so smart. So… if not for me, for her. Please?’

I look at my daughter, at the Madoka I know would never kid about something as serious as Sayaka’s death. At the girl who’s rambling on and on about the impossible, about magic, and witches, and wishes.

I remember hoping she had gone mad with grief.

‘Madoka, I know this has been hard for you. I’m sorry if I haven’t been—’

‘No! No, Mama, please, don’t blame yourself, this… I should have told you sooner. Should have showed you. I…’

I hoped she was… unwell. Something tragic, but that could be undone.

But she’s my daughter. The baby I held in my arms as I fed her, as she cried , as she drifted to sleep. The girl whose very first word was ‘Mama,’ and I was so proud, my chest bursting with a joy I never knew I could feel…

And it is cruel to hope this is all her imagination, a wild fantasy to make sense of a tragedy that I myself find too hard to believe, because I don’t want the world to be a place in which cheerful little Sayaka can be found dead after being missing for days, the police saying it may have been suicide, Kazuko and I grieving over hard liquor after years of…

But it is crueler to think she’s right. That this is a world where innocent girls are doomed to turn into monsters.

I don’t want to believe her. Everything in me, as a woman, as a mother, wants to cradle her against my chest and let her cry until she can face reality.

‘Madoka… Tell me how wishes work.’

I ask.

Because… More than anything, I want to trust my daughter.

And then she turns to the side and speaks with the thing I can’t see, relaying each of my questions and giving me its answers.

Its pointlessly cruel answers.

Its nonsensical, devoid of empathy, answers.

But there’s a logic in it. A shape I can make out of the words, of the tragedy.

And… I don’t have a solution. Not yet.

But if tomorrow there’s a typhoon, a witch… My daughter will know what to do.

This, as her mother, I swear.

I gasp, not knowing when I’ve fallen on my knees, whorls of pure magic swirling around me as Mister Saotome stands there, completely shocked.

I know magic. Better than anyone who’s ever been born in this world.

After all, I gave birth to it.

With a twitch of my fingers, a soft pink coalesces around my knees.

I stand, my skin unbroken, my thighs torn.

“Physical manifestation at this age—Junko, how—” Mister Saotome gapes at me.

With the ease and confidence of a thousand lives being Junko Kaname, the always on point executive and mature mother of two, I brush my hair back behind my ear. I have a red ribbon tying it parted that hadn’t been there this morning.

It’s my usual style, but better, more refined.

And the last time I saw this ribbon, it was on the hair of a girl going out to save the world.

I guess you took after me more than you thought, Madoka. You really overshot your goal.

My heart almost bursts with joy, knowing it’s only a matter of years until I can hold you again, bring you into this world that you set on a fate to bring us together once more, because how else would the current Junko Kaname be born in a world with such a different history if not through magic and fate? How else would I repeat the stupid, childish tragedy of falling for the same clueless, wonderful man my best friend has fallen for? How else would I go to Mitakihara once again, repeating a childhood that’s so similar yet so different?

And… There’s that certainty. That sense of something clicking, of pieces falling together to form a shape…

“Are you—”

“I am processing new memories, Mister Saotome. Please don’t interrupt.”

There are gasps behind me, because I’ve once again effortlessly excelled beyond all reasonable expectations.

Except, like always, I haven’t. It’s the province of the mediocre to think those who go above and beyond don’t work for it.

In this case, over too many lives to count, even if they were all mostly the same except for that last, fateful month before the world ended and my daughter brought a new one.

A better one.

Maybe one with fewer childish mistakes.

***

I’m the Curse Breaker.

Which makes me rub my temples whenever I think how ridiculous the name would’ve been in my past lives. Something out of a manga with people wearing long, black coats regardless of the weather.

It also makes it a bit awkward to face Dad, who now seems far too young. And it’s still bizarre to treat him like some kind of veteran combatant after having known a version of him who never so much as raised his voice in anger.

But… he’s still Dad. Alive, well, healthy.

Free from the curse that was set to devour his mind from the inside out if I hadn’t come up with my own variation on a cleansing circle suited for a living person.

I can live with a chuuni name if that’s the price I have to pay.

Still… There are some downsides to being a woman with enough experience accrued to count as the most mature being on the planet (Collectors aside), and…

Still having to attend school.

“Ah! You’re frowning again! You’ll get wrinkles, Junko!”

No, I won’t. I make sure to massage my face every night, I moisturize, and I’m getting as many of the products I know actually work as a schoolgirl can reasonably get away with. My skin will be pristine by the time I reach my thirties, just as it was last time around.

“You worry too much about those things, Kazuko. Now, have you brushed your teeth?”

And there’s that cute moue again, the one she didn’t seem to get rid of even in her thirties. The one I was always silently glad she kept, even after everything catastrophically went down.

I’m seeing much more of it, now that we’re living together.

Because of a lie, but who cares about the small details?

“I have; you don’t need to ask me every night… In fact, why would you even ask me once? It’s not like we’re still children!”

Because you are. You all are, to me.

By some unintended mercy, I can somehow keep separate this Junko, the current one, from all the others. I can react seamlessly like I would have if the memories never came, but… But I still know. I know so many things, things about everyone that’s around me, that I can easily plot around them, turn them away from something a past-future me would consider distasteful, or toward something I’d be glad they reached for.

And… being the most powerful mage of my generation, possibly in recorded history, makes my word have a certain weight.

The word of a schoolgirl, and all the movers and shakers are eager to lap it up. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so disappointing. Mostly because of how little I had to work for it this time around, and how much higher I’ve already reached than the last time.

“Kazuko…” I sigh and drop down on my bed, the salmon covers rustling with the weight I allow to press on them, still getting used to this particular ability. Then I pat the spot beside me, because her own bed is still hidden beneath mine.

“Junko?” she asks, her eyes a bit wide in that adorable, cute way of hers.

“You haven’t had any memories yet, have you?”

“No… I’m sorry, but I haven’t so much as had a flash. I’m starting to think I’m a regular person…”

I take a deep breath, and suppress the mature Junko for just a bit.

“That’s because you are.”

“Eh?”

“I… I lied. I am not… I am not a regular mage.”

“Of course you aren’t, you are the Curse breaker—” And there’s a note of awe in her voice that I just can’t stand coming from her.

“That’s not it, Kazuko. I never was a magical girl.”

“What?”Because everybody knows. Everybody knows that a girl with parallel lives was a magical girl. Very few people know how many of them became witches, but… That’s not the issue. The issue is that I just told my best friend I’m impossible.

Something she may have already deduced a few years back, after the epic crayon dispute that we agreed to never talk about…

“I remember… I remember far more clearly than most, because my lives weren’t that different: I was an executive, mother of two. Married.”

She focuses on that last word.

“So, no battles? No magic?” Yet she avoids commenting on it.

“No… Not me. My daughter.”

This is something I’ve never told anyone else, something I likely never will. But what are friends for, if not to exchange world-shaking secrets?

“But no one has ever gotten parallel memories due to somebody else—”

“My daughter created this world. I think she may have played favorites.”

And she shuts up.

I wait for a while, letting the almost audible whirring going on inside her head slow down.

“You’re joking,” she finally says, her tone completely flat, much in the way someone who has just heard a joke wouldn’t say those words. Though I guess they are usually aimed at things that aren’t jokes, so that’s far from unusual.

Ah, I’m stalling, aren’t I?

“You can never tell anyone. Please. I trust you, Kazuko. With my life. With my unborn daughter’s life.”

But that’s cheating. Because when one friend takes this step, this leap of faith, they don’t know how the other will react. They can guess, they can hope, but until you’ve put something that matters in the hands of another, you can never know what they will do with it.

Yet… Yet I know. I know what she will have done a thousand times over when hurt, betrayed, left behind. I know the girl who stood by my side at my wedding to the man she once loved and maybe never stopped longing for. I know how pointlessly hurt she’s been time and again by her need to be a good friend.

I know that, no matter the world, Kazuko Saotome is the one person I can rely on not to turn against me. Even after a stupid, childish fight that led to decades of loneliness.

And… I love Tomohisa. I’ll be his bride, not only because I want to, but because I need to, because I must be Madoka’s mother no matter what.

I know there’s a fate, and it’s been set for me.

A path I must walk.

Doesn’t mean I can’t meander.

“Why are you telling me?”

“Because I love you. I always have.” And that’s a lie. But not quite.

One I couldn’t say if it wasn’t at least somewhat true.

“I… Junko… Tomohisa…” Ah, she already knew about him. Just how long did you plan on acting like nothing was wrong, bestie?

“He’ll be the father of my daughter.” She nods, her eyes unfocused like she’s listening to one of her father’s lectures. She was so much better as a teacher… “And I hope you’ll be her mother.”

Her face whips up, eyes suddenly focused on mine.

“What?”

I clench my teeth, and my hand reaches toward her cheek. She doesn’t flinch away as I cup the warm, soft skin, my thumb brushing right beneath where tears may have already gathered if not for my interruption.

“I just said I love you, Kazuko. After a thousand lives, after so many memories, I trusted you with a secret no one else will ever hear from my lips. What did you think I meant?”

It is manipulative. I can tell myself I’m doing it for her, for a better future, but, at the end of the day, I’m leveraging my experience and knowledge on someone who doesn’t have them. It is as far from a relationship between equals as one can get.

I won’t say I don’t care, because I do, because I don’t want to do things this way, but I’m alone, unique, and I can’t ever hope to have a relationship with someone like me because they haven’t been born yet, and when they do I will just watch over them, like a mother or a mother-in-law should.

Because this whole world was remade for your sake, Homura. And I know my daughter never hesitated, that she thought you deserved every sacrifice she could ever make in your name, but…

She’ll be my daughter, so I’ll have to see for myself.

And right now… Well, I should tend to the girl who may possibly become your second mother-in-law.

She’s still stunned, her eyes still wide, frozen, the words not quite making sense.

Just as I expected.

“Was… Was it like this? In your memories?” Just as her question is expected.

And this could be the turning point. Just a single lie, one more that won’t even matter after the lifetime of lying and secrets I have ahead of me. Just tell her yes. Weave a tale of how happy we three were in a world less accepting of these things than the current one.

Tell her how happy we were on our wedding night, how Tomohisa took us both, but omit enough details that she’s just flustered and intrigued rather than shocked.

Tell her how happy we were raising our kids together, how Tatsuya and Madoka were so relentlessly cheerful with one another. Mix the lie with the truth, so I won’t have to remember that much. Just tell her how, at the end of the day, when I came back from work, she was there to greet me, and we would share a drink and commiserate over our jobs while Tomohisa took a well-deserved rest after caring for the kids and the house.

Lie to her. A happy lie, so she can be happy.

“No. No, it wasn’t.” The words hurt as they leave my throat.

And she looks confused for a moment, then sad, then cheerful. And the last one is a lie.

“Ah… Well, you were happily married, and I, I, I should wish you good luck, and—”

I lean forward and kiss her silent.

Her eyes shoot open, but she’s still too gentle to push me away, which makes me feel awful about just taking her first kiss like that, but…

I lean back, still close enough that her hazel eyes fill my whole world.

My heart is pounding. I did not expect that.

“No,” I tell her.

“No?”

“No. I was happy. Very happy. There were days I could barely believe how lucky I was, how blessed to have held my children between my arms.”

“Then you should—”

“Shut up,” I tell her, with perhaps too much of the teenage Junko in my voice. “Shut up and listen to me: I was happy, but you weren’t. And after a thousand lives, I couldn’t bear a single more where you suffered.”

“That doesn’t sound like a good reason to have—”

I lean forward and push her down.

I am straddling her on my bed, my hands on her shoulders, and there’s panic in her far too cute, effortlessly adorable face.

She’s also blushing.

Going by my burning cheeks, so am I.

It would be laughable to have unflappable Junko Kaname, recently christened as the Curse Breaker, be flustered after confessing to and kissing a teenager. But we aren’t laughing.

Which is a shame, because years of intimacy have taught me that laughter is a very important part of the process.

“Look at me, Kazuko. I am a woman who has lived a thousand times, who remembers a world before this one was born. I am the mother of the little girl who risked everything to make this one a better place than the previous one. I love my daughter, Kazuko, in a way that I hope you’ll understand in the future, and she almost died for this one wish, this one chance to make a brighter world. Do you think I could ever do anything but live up to her wishes?”

“I—Junko, I don’t—”

“Listen. I want a better world like I never wanted anything before. And in this better world, I won’t allow my best friend to suffer and drift away—”

“That’s not love! That’s charity! I don’t want that!” And the outburst is so unexpected from the usually cheerful girl that I…

I stop.

Because this isn’t going the way it should. Not the way I planned, envisioned, because I’m not feeling like I expected.

I am not a mature older woman playing with a younger girl’s feelings so that she can have a chance at a better life.

No. No, the mature, older Junko would perfectly know what I am at this moment.

A precocious brat thinking she’s smarter than she actually is and making a mess out of things.

And so, this time, I laugh.

I drop down on top of a very confused Kazuko and hug her to my shaking chest, because…

Well, Madoka wouldn’t have wanted all of us to suffer like that just because of her wish, would she? That would have been precisely the opposite of what she wanted.

So, we have enough memories to understand ourselves, to learn about our other lives, to perhaps be more mature about our choices.

But… I think we still are who we are supposed to be. And I’ve been fooling myself for two whole months, thinking I’m a woman I’ve yet to grow into.

So embarrassing.

“Junko? What… Are you having another memory?” she asks, worried, and she pats my back.

“Yes…” I let out with a raspy voice.

“What about?”

I lean back, look at her. Really look at her, at her cute, hamster cheeks that never seemed to lose all the baby fat. At eyes that were dark enough to seem warm, light enough to never seem anything but.

“About how much of a mess we made back then.”

And this time, without having the ghost of Junko Kaname holding me back, I take her lips, and push my tongue past them.

She lets out a sound that’s at least part squeal, and her arms flail wildly at her sides, not knowing what to do with them.

It’s okay. We’ll learn together.

After I lean back from my last, first adult kiss, her eyes are slightly glossed over, unfocused, her cheeks still rosy, and her chest noticeably rising and falling with every labored breath.

Which… The older Junko? The experienced, mature, wise one?

She noticed these things. She really did.

She just never pushed herself to actually realize what they meant.

So, thank you, Madoka, for this last chance to get things right. I guess even I can learn a thing or two.

“I won’t take your first time today,” I tell Kazuko with a smile so wide it hurts.

“What?” she answers in a way that’s trivially predictable.

“I won’t have sex with you today. Because I, once again, made a mess of things. Because I told you all the wrong things, and you deserve to be courted and to have nice dates before we take that step.”

“Junko, what are you even—”

I lay a finger on her lips, my smile broadening even further.

“I told you a lot of things, and plenty of them are nonsense, but it’s nonsense I didn’t understand until I said it out loud. So, let me make one thing clear. One that’s actually important. That isn’t nonsense.”

I take a deep breath, willing my lips to relax so I don’t come across as manic and giddy as I feel.

“What I feel for you, Kazuko? It’s not charity. It never was.”

I lean down, my finger getting out of the way just in time for my lips to take hers once more, and this time I feel her tongue timidly react to mine as her eyes keep looking at me, wide as I ever saw them.

It takes a while for the kiss to finish. I don’t even think I’m the one deciding it; it just happens.

Then I lay on my side, an utterly disoriented Kazuko wrapped in my arms.

I don’t let her get her bed out tonight, insisting we have slept in the same bed plenty of times and that nothing will happen other than some cuddling.

I’m not even lying.

Not tonight.

***

Today, I drove to school.

I usually don’t. I’d rather take a walk than get the car out of the garage unnecessarily, but…

Well, it wasn’t hard to guess that something like this may happen.

That being my having been trapped in this metal cage, pointlessly taping the driving wheel after having checked my phone for the umpteenth time.

Finally, as I’m about to check for the umpteenth and one, I see Madoka walking out of the school.

She’s keeping Homura steady, the taller girl still visibly shaken in a way that I can perfectly sympathize with, and they take their time walking to where I parked the car this morning, but I no longer need to anxiously check the phone.

It’s… All right. Everything’s all right.

Other than my daughter dragging her possibly-fiancée to spend the night at our home, but, well, we knew this was likely to happen when we came in. Thus the car.

Not everybody is as lucky as Sayaka and Kyouko.

No, seriously, if they weren’t so adorable, I would complain about the risk of diabetes.

The rear door opens, and Madoka helps Homura get in before she gets around to the other side and takes her own seat.

Behind me. Not in front. By my side.

Right, just have to keep being sweet and composed for a while longer. The girl deserves the best, and I won’t let petty concerns get in the way of that.

“How are you doing, Homura?” I ask, my voice gentle and non-threatening because I know if someone has been conditioned to see threats everywhere is the girl in the rearview mirror.

“I… I’m still getting used to it. You… You remember, Ms. Kaname?”

I nod. She swallows.

“And how do you…” she trails off, but the meaning is obvious.

“One day at a time.” I smile reassuringly, and she answers with her own frail gesture.

Then I turn the ignition key, and the electric motor whirrs as my daughter hugs the girl she created a new world for.

… All right, I admit it: it’s also endearing.

Looks like Sayaka and Kyouko have competition.

***

It doesn’t take long to get to our house, because if it did, I would take the car far more often. When we do, I give Madoka permission to bring Homura up to their room and postpone the introductions until tomorrow.

The girl has already gone through too much; it would be sheer cruelty to get her to meet all the in-laws before she’s had time to settle.

I’ll just bring them dinner later. Speaking of which…

I pass by the living room, greeting Mami in passing, who looks as polite and deferring as ever.

Which is a problem for another time, and I’ve had enough on my plate worrying myself sick about Madoka the whole day. I need to recharge before I’m up to dealing with anything else.

And that is precisely the reason why I head straight to the backyard.

Where Kazuko is bouncing Tatsuya on her knee, my little bundle of joy giggling at his second mother’s wildly expressive, hamster-like face.

They don’t see me, too busy with their playtime, so I lean back on the red brick wall, the rough texture pleasantly digging into my stiff shoulders through my clothes.

After a while, a hand bigger than mine hands me a glass of whisky, and a voice that is masculine only by the barest of margins whispers in my ear, “Rough day?”

I turn from looking at my son and wife to look at my husband, who’s smiling his almost perennial, gentle smile.

“Not anymore,” I say.

His smile widens, he leans down, and takes my lips.

And, once again, I’m grateful for second chances.