Tangled Regrets – Chapter 4 – The Blessing Maker (Patreon)

My room… It’s quite a bit like my old room, isn’t it?

The colors I understand, they are mostly my own choice, and I like the same things I liked before, but… the shelves with stuffed animals, the way they are arranged… I don’t quite remember how it got to be like this. It’s just different enough that I don’t get confused, yet, at the same time, it looks familiar enough that I know this is my room. That it always has been.

In a world with millennia of history so different from the one I was first born in, my stuffed animal collection remains mostly the same.

Magic and wishes.

Maybe I should feel trapped by fate or something like this, but I…

I look at Homura, the girl sitting beside me on my bed, the girl who… who did so much for me I’ve often cried myself to sleep thinking about her, about what she went through, what she…

I hug her.

“Ma… Madoka?” she asks, still uncertain, still hesitant to put her arms around me and pat my back, and I almost get mad at her for it, but it would be so utterly unfair of me to do so…

“Homura, it’s all right. You can let go. We are safe.” It feels awful to have to tell her. It feels even worse that I know I can’t just tell her that she’ssafe, because she needs me to be away from danger far more than she needs the reassurance about herself.

She takes a deep breath, her chest pressing against mine, the warmth trapped between our bodies reassuring in a way that I hope she also feels, and her arms clench around me.

Again.

She holds me so tightly my breathing stops, but I can’t protest; I can tell Homura she’s hurting me, even if just a bit, even if not on purpose, because that’s… That could be the very last thing she could stand as she’s right now.

I tell myself that she’s still settling, still coming back to herself. I know Sayaka and Kyouko still have a long way to go, and Mami…

Mami is…

No. This is about Homura. I’ll worry about my adopted sister tomorrow.

And Homura…

“Don’t cry. Or do. Cry as much as you want to. We can afford it now.”

So she does.

Homura cries in my arms. For her, for me, for a thousand things that came crashing down no matter how hard she tried, how many things she lost along the way.

“You must think I’m so gross—”

“Never say that to me again. It hurt every single time you did. I—I don’t want you to lie to me like that.”

“But… but I…”

“You are my best friend. You always were, even if I didn’t know. You don’t know how guilty I feel about—”

“Don’t! No, Madoka, it was all me, I was the one who failed—”

“You didn’t! We are here because of you! The world was saved because of you!”

Her arms don’t relax; they slacken, strength absent from them as her eyes open wide once again in a horror I know far too well.

“Because of your wish,” she mutters.

I want to deny it. To tell her it’s not like that, reassure her, once again, that it’s over, that I won’t become a magical girl ever again.

It’s the truth.

It’s… also a bit of a lie, isn’t it?

So, I can’t tell her that. Because if there’s someone in this world who deserves the whole truth is the girl whose actions made it possible.

My wish reshaped the world, but Homura reshaped me long before that.

“I can show you. You can see what happened,” I finally say.

Her eyes waver, still wet. And then the familiar steel glints under lavender, and her face settles as I, once again, find myself in front of the girl who would battle till her body could no longer keep up with her will. Just to do it all over again.

It’s… It’s a feeling I don’t quite understand. Because I know how awful it was for her to become like this, how much she sacrificed, how each wound never quite healed, but…

I remember once, when I was a kid, I went to the pool with mom. Dad had been busy with something about grandad, Kazuko had gone with him, and Tatsuya hadn’t been born yet. It was just mom and me, spending the day together. We stayed there until the sun dipped low and amber bloomed across the sky, and my arms and legs felt heavy after swimming and running on the grassy field beside the pool the whole day.

Mom helped me change, and we came out, heading for the parking lot. There weren’t that many cars around, and on one of the spots, something glittered all over the floor, hues of white light dazzling and swimming in front of my eyes.

I got near, and I saw somebody had dropped a bag of diamonds all over the floor, and they were catching the rays of the sun and throwing them back at me, transformed into something else, something more beautiful than the light by itself could have been.

“Mama!” I called her, “Mama, look! Diamonds! We’re rich now, Mama!”

And Mama knelt down next to me, chuckling and holding me back before I tried to pick the pretty jewels.

“Those aren’t diamonds, Madoka. It’s just shattered glass. Someone must have broken a car window.”

I turned around in her grasp and looked at her, at a face a bit rosy with the excess of sun that still looked as tender and understanding as ever.

“But… But it’s so pretty Mama! Isn’t that why diamonds are… you know, expin—”

“Expensive. And… that’s part of it, but there are many things that are pretty and cheap. Many broken things are worthless, yet still beautiful to look at.”

I tilted my head and furrowed my brows.

“If they are beautiful, they aren’t worthless.”

Mama chuckled and rubbed my head, still cautious not to let me pick up the shards of glass.

“You are far too young to be this clever, you know?”

I wasn’t. Not that young, and not that clever. And Mama knew that, even though I still didn’t.

And now, looking at the beautiful, broken shards of glittering girl in front of me… I feel as fascinated as guilty.

Just like I felt when I realized my dream about her was true.

“Show me, then,” the bold, brave, shattered Homura tells me in her inflectionless tone.

I swallow, unable to look away from her eyes. And prepare.

***

“Listen to my voice, Homura,” I tell her as we both lie on my bed, face-up, eyes closed.

I feel her nod.

“I can’t… We can’t use telepathy like we used to. I am basically someone without magic, something that almost never happens, because everyone has at least a bit of spark in them, but… I still know. And knowing is enough for some things.”

I take a deep breath. It’s not the first time I do this, but I’ve only tried with Mama before, and… Well, she’s the Curse Breaker for a reason. In every life she chooses to live, Mama is formidable.

“So, try to reach out to me like you’re sending a telepathic message, but don’t do it all at once. Don’t just push the thought, but feel  the way it travels, the path it creates, the way it twists and turns, because it’s never straightforward…”

I start to feel it. A pressure right behind my forehead, something that spins slowly, almost lazily, the strength ebbing and flowing like a sleeping heart.

“Right. Right, you’re doing very well, Homura; this is just what I need. Now… Now don’t get startled. It will feel weird, but… trust me?”

“Always,” she says like she’s announcing that spring comes after winter and Tuesday after Monday.

I admit my cheeks tingle a bit.

“Right… Get ready, then.”

I feel that pressure. I feel its color spreading over my mind, looking for a way to deposit its message.

‘Madoka,’ Homura’s voice echoes through me, caressing each painful memory with its lonely tone.

And then I touch that thought with my will, inviting it in.

At my side, Homura gasps.

“It… feels weird, doesn’t it? Don’t worry; it’s just a bit more than regular telepathy. Projected space, they call it.”

Homura’s breathing steadies, and I, still touching that thought, still pulling it to me…

Open myself.

I feel Homura’s presence rushing toward me, to fill the void I just have let open inside me, and as she slams against me, I entangle a thread of thought around her will. It speeds up, violet steel accelerating, and I let it pull me inside me.

And past me.

I open my other eyes, and Homura is kneeling on a grassy glade, silver moonlight glinting over her black hair like dancing stars over a night too beautiful to ever yearn for the coming of the sun.

She’s wearing her old magical girl uniform, the different shades of violet seeming more vibrant in this place where light and color are more emotion than law.

I walk behind her and rest my hand on her shoulder as she tries to take in air with gasping breath, the transition between material and projection having caught her unaware with its intensity, with the way things are dulled, fading from consciousness until you focus on them and then you realize you can see each and every blade of grass bending and straightening in viridian waves as the air turns the glade into an ocean. But only if you focus on them, and only as long as you let them fill your consciousness with their wavering reality.

“Don’t turn around. Not yet,” I tell her, something of Mama in my voice as I try to guide her as if she was a promising student. “Feel your hands on the ground, the cool, dark earth beneath your palms, the lines the grass you push down traces on your skin. Feel the cool breeze caressing your face, a whisper of a song carried between tree branches. Feel moonlight cascading down your back. And stop breathing.”

She does. The silence is almost overwhelming, and something shifts as the place becomes more real, my words guiding her into sharing the same sensations, the same way of looking at this place. The same perspective.

“Good. You’re doing very well, Homura. You can turn around whenever you want, but please, don’t panic, there’s a reason—”

Homura screams.

Because she turned before I finished my line, and I’m so, so stupid—

“No! No, Homura, it’s all right! It’s just the way I look in here! It means nothing!”

But she’s jumped away from me, her back against a dark pine, her eyes wide like a corralled animal.

“I can’t help it…” I whisper, almost unwillingly.

And I step back until my back finds its own tree, and I slide down the trunk, sitting on the cool grass, droplets of dew soaking through my white and pink, frilly skirt. The skirt of my magical girl form.

I cross my arms over my knees and bury my face on them. Years waiting for her, trying to think of the better way to do this, to reassure her, to help her heal, and I still manage to screw it up, to hurt her once again in a world made so she wouldn’t have to hurt anymore…

I don’t deserve to cry.

But, as I do, as burning tears flow down my cheeks, the rules of this place not allowing me to disguise my emotions when they are this intense…

A hand lies on my head, the warmth seeping through my hair, and the grass rustles in front of me.

I raise my head to meet Homura’s eyes, her face right in front of mine, kneeling in front of me.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

We are still connected, our souls still touching through the grasp that’s allowed us to get here together.

I guess that’s why we say the words at once.

***

We are resting once again, our backs leaning on the same tree, our shoulders touching.

It’s only our eyes that aren’t meeting.

“It’s… This place reflects who you are. Most people look like their own body, just dressed in a way that’s somehow meaningful to them, but us, the ones who were a magical girl once…”

“I understand. I think. It’s like… like when we first transformed, isn’t it? We didn’t choose how we looked, yet it always felt somehow fitting. Sayaka…”

“Yes. Yes, it’s just like that. This place reveals what’s… in your heart, I guess? Some people learn to change their shape, but I haven’t ever managed. I think… I think I am too near to the center of magic to try to fool it, if that makes sense?”

I turn to the side, the gesture unconscious, just a natural part of my question. And I find Homura looking at me, an unsure smile on her face.

“I don’t know if it does. You… said you would show me?” And there’s the shy Homura I haven’t seen in so long, her head slightly tilted, her eyes…

Ah! I was supposed to show her that memory!

“Sorry! It’s just, things ran away from me, and I—”

She’s holding my hand. Lightly, almost hesitantly. I could get out of her grasp without even trying.

I don’t, and her fingers twine around mine as she looks downward, a hint of a blush tracing the underside of her cheekbones.

“Don’t be sorry. Please. I just… I’m sorry I overreacted when you—”

I tighten my grasp around her fingers, feeling skin with a trace of dark earth give way to my own. With my other hand, I touch her lips to silence her.

“How about we both stop apologizing? Just for a bit?” I ask, unsure of how many lines I’m crossing.

She smiles and nods, and my finger rubs her lips with the gesture.

I return her smile and look away, berating myself for my sudden bout of bashfulness at something so… So small. Something that shouldn’t even rate compared to what I’ve been expecting for years, to holding her on the infirmary cot, my legs entangled with hers, feeling her skin in the places where her nylons were torn and—

Aaaaaaahhhhh!

“Madoka?” she asks with that voice that’s always a bit breathy when calling out my name and—

I get up.

And, without even meaning to, pull her up with me. Because I’m still grabbing her hand, and I didn’t even think about letting go, ever letting—

Aaaaaaaahhhhh!

“Madoka?” And now she’s actually confused. Great. I’m such a fantastic spirit guide…

“Right. Right, I have to show you… Ugh, I just don’t want to…”

She pulls on my hand, turning my body so I look directly at her.

“Why?”

“Because… It happened during your last fight.”

Homura freezes, the girl with glasses and braids all too apparent at her brief moment of panic. Then her face slams down, any feelings discarded.

“Show me,” she demands. And her voice is steel once more.

I nod. There’s not much else I can do when this Homura asks me for something.

***

We are in the center of the glade, still holding each other’s hand, side by side, looking up.

At the moon.

“It isn’t always night, but it has little to do with the time in the material world. Different people will even come at night or day according to… Themselves, I guess? But it just means that the moon is there because it has to be there. Because it means something that we need if we want to do what we came here to do.”

“I never heard about something like this. This magic is new.”

“I… don’t think it was. I just think it was a part of it that wasn’t that important. Not until now, until the world changed and we with it.”

“… You don’t speak like Madoka when you talk about this.”

“I… I think I do. Just not like this Madoka.” I hesitate for a moment, my eyes straying from the argent disc to the girl clad in silver by my side. She’s… Like she was in my dream. Like I’ve always wanted to see just one last time. “You’ll understand in a moment.”

I look back up, and the moon shimmers.

“Light in the night, never enough to dispel shadow. Watcher over dreamer and dream. Fake sun, true moon.” The words come easy. I don’t know why, what they mean, but… The other me does. She’s always helpful.

Homura gasps, and her face appears over the surface of a moon that’s so much bigger than it was when I started.

“Dreams are gateways, and gateways are to be crossed. The path opens, because I am the destination.”

Homura is jumping between crumbling buildings, weapons flashing to her hands between shards of broken time. The ticking of a clock echoes around the glade.

“Beneath and through dreaming moon, walk with me. To me.”

The harsh winds of the typhoon whip around me, my clothes snapping at the irregular surges of accelerating, chaotic air. Explosions punctuate the crashing of buildings, and a girl faces a monster who used to be a girl.

At my side, seeing herself fight for the first time, Homura gasps.

I wish she sees what I see, the courage, determination, beauty, and grace she displayed. But wishes are what brought us here, and I shouldn’t abuse them.

“Too slow. Always too slow…” she mutters, and my heart breaks.

I tug on her hand, and she looks away from herself, from the choreography rehearsed through shed blood a hundred times over.

I smile at her, but it’s weak and wavery.

“I was captivated by you, the first time I saw this,” I say, as boldly as I can manage. Which is not much.

Homura’s face twists in disgust, but I know it’s not directed at me. It would be so much better if it was.

And then, the other Homura, the one from my memories, takes just a split second too long to aim, and a balcony slams against her side.

She rockets through the air, her graceful movements, her dance, taken from her by the brutal impact, and she crashes against a pile of rubble, the harsh rain the only thing stopping the cloud of powdered cement from raising.

“Homura!” my voice cries out. Except it doesn’t come from me.

We both turn toward my left and see another me, a me that is wearing her drenched uniform, run toward the place where the mysterious transfer student was just buried by the monster laughing above my city.

But that Madoka stops when the rubble shifts and a bleeding Homura stands once again, her silhouette sharp even through the distortion of the rain before it flickers away and the sound of explosions resumes.

And I see the other Madoka just stand there, Kyuubey by her side, as she’s, once again, entranced by Homura’s movements, her grace. Her will.

“I should have acted sooner. Even if it only spared you minutes, seconds, I should have,” I say with as much remorse as I feel. And I start walking toward the other me. The one closest to the current me.

With a tug of my hand, Homura follows.

“Kyuubey… She’s… She’s going to lose, isn’t she?” The voice is scared. Trembling. Tiny.

“If she hasn’t won yet, I don’t see why this time would be any different. She’s fighting alone against a stronger enemy, after all.” And this voice is childish. Almost playful, for all that it claimed not to understand emotions.

My younger self keeps looking at the battle, her hands clenched to her chest. By my side, Homura’s grasp on my hand tightens, but no matter how strongly she does it, she won’t hurt me in here. Not if she doesn’t mean to.

The other Homura fails to dodge another attack, and she goes through a window. All of us wait for too long to see she isn’t coming out.

“Then… Then I…”

“Will you make a contract?”

And this is it.

The moment everything hinged on, to an extent I didn’t understand back then. Not yet. Not for a few minutes that turned centuries.

The Madoka in front of me is so near I could reach out to touch her. Except I can’t, because this is just a memory. At my side, Homura’s breathing hitches when this other me raises her head, a sliver of determination that I learned just from watching her now glinting on this Madoka’s eyes.

“Not yet,” she says.

And takes out a phone.

“Mama,” her voice trembles, her hand cupped to protect the speaker from the wind and rain. “Mama, I need to do it. I’m sorry, Mama.”

The other side of the conversation is inaudible even from this distance. But I remember, and so, Homura hears.

“I’m sorry, Madoka. I’m so sorry I couldn’t do anything more—”

“No! No, Mama, this is enough, this has to be enough. Please, I’m so lucky to have you, to have been raised by you… but this… I have to do this. Me. I’m the only one who can.”

There was a pause, and I remember almost asking her to put Tatsuya on the phone, to hear my little brother laugh one last time.

“I’m so proud of you.”

Both mes almost cry, and now I’m the one tightening my hold on Homura’s hand.

“The wish, Mama…” I forced myself to say.

“You… You can’t wish to win, because you’d be trapped like them. Nobody escapes once they become a magical girl.”

“I know.”

“But… Wishes have effects beyond their words. Sayaka healed faster because her wish related to healing somebody, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Then… I’m just speculating, because that damn invisible thing didn’t confirm anything useful, but your intentions matter, Madoka. The words shape the wish, but the intention is where the magic comes from.”

“How interesting. It’s a pity adults can’t become magical girls,” the Incubator said carelessly, its head tilted like a cute mascot.

I remember hoping Sayaka and I never stopped Homura from killing it, no matter how futile that may have been.

“Then,” Mama continued, “you need a wish that’s big enough, broad enough, to let your magic be shaped mostly by your intention. What do you want, Madoka?”

“To save her,” I said, with so little hesitation it still shocks me. And Homura gasps.

“And what does she want?” And here’s when I can almost hear Mama’s smile. The one she has when coming up with one of her schemes.

“To… To save me.” There was a hint of marvel in my voice when things started to fit.

“So you can’t save her without saving yourself. You know she won’t ever stop as long as you are in danger, don’t you?”

A crumbled building shifted before a violet-clad girl exploded out of it, shards of stone punctuating the staccato of bullets.

No. She would never stop.

Not until what comes after. I hoped.

“Yes. Yes. So, the wish…”

And the line cut off.

I looked down at my hand, dumbfounded, disbelieving, but that didn’t change the fact that I was holding a dead piece of electronics that would never let me reach Mama’s voice, to hear what she had to say, the end to her thoughts.

At my side, Kyuubey groomed its tail.

“Do you want to come back? Though Homura is likely to die before you get to your mother.”

I almost wished for it to die.

But his words made me look for her, look at the exploding scenery that used to be my city for a flash of movement, for the moments stolen between the passage of the clock’s hand.

I saw her, then, jumping between speeding pieces of torn buildings, a window of reinforced glass shattering as she ricocheted off it.

It may have been a trick of my mind, but I remember catching a glimpse of her face, of the pain shining through the steel of her determination. I remember thinking once again how beautiful she was, and how much I wanted to preserve everything praiseworthy about her and heal everything that had gone wrong. I remember thinking about Homura, about how her whole life had been devoted to saving me.

I remember falling in love.

Just for a moment. A fleeting moment, a glint of light in her eye, a motion of her long hair sweeping beside her, a twist of her mouth refusing to show pain to her enemy.

And, in that crystallized moment, I fell for her.

That may have saved us both. And… well. The whole world?

Because I wanted to save Homura like I’ve never wanted anything in my life, and, as Mama said, that meant saving myself, but…

But all wishes led to tragedy.

Every single one of them led to either an early death or to becoming a monster. Every word out of my mouth would doom the world to face me as the most powerful witch that ever lived.

Every wish, every hope, every desperate yearning led to regret.

And I didn’t want that.

I didn’t want Homura’s wish, the wish to save me, to lead to the regret of seeing me turned into a monster. I didn’t want my wish, the wish to save Homura, to lead to a world where I couldn’t be with her.

And so, almost without thinking, maybe nudged by a flash of pink at the corner of my eyes, I spoke.

“I wish for a world where hope doesn’t mean regret.”

I speak at the same time as the old Madoka. Unplanned. Unprompted.

Because, after all, I’m the flash of pink.

And, at our words, the world comes undone.

Homura and I remain, seeing as my old self is engulfed in the pink light, and then countless Madokas, ones who wished long before this one, keep appearing in a line that extends farther than this me can see, even if the other was able to count each and every one of them.

The light spreads, taking and giving of each one, and the one in the middle, the one whose mind opened to all the others, gasps, her eyes wide to something I can no longer remember and never will.

A flash of pink. That’s all I can offer to them, even as they shine like newborn stars. And I almost break down and cry, even if I don’t know whether it’s in envy or compassion.

The other Madoka turns to me and smiles, then does something I don’t remember.

“Take care of her. For us. For me,” she says.

And the pink light stops spreading to the sides and instead rushes down, each Madoka sliding through them, each one reaching to a lonely, scared girl across time at the worst possible moment of her life, right when hope seemed to inevitably give way to regret.

I can remember their faces, the way they clutched their blackening soul gems as an uncaring incubator stood beside them, or they laid alone on a battlefield, or they held the soulless body of a comrade… Each had her own tragedy, yet each one echoed all the others.

Magical girls. Those who inevitably regretted hoping.

But… But hope isn’t like that. It can’t be like that.

And it no longer is like that.

I blink. And that world is gone.

There isn’t even darkness, because darkness is absence, and absence implies the possibility of presence.

And then, a flash of pink. Older than I am.

And a thousand, thousand Madokas unravel, each one carrying a fragment of a tragedy, of a world that no longer is.

Then they come together and…

And I no longer remember. Because this is the time between the world being born and Mama carrying me once more.

I fall down, exhausted, and Homura catches me in her arms as we both tumble to the lush grass beneath the light of a moon that’s no longer so big.

“I don’t know how it ended,” I tell the girl I fell in love with.

My head’s resting on her lap, her finger caressing my hair.

I’ve lost one of my ribbons. I guess now I know where Mama got it from.

“You… You didn’t have to do this. You could’ve just told me—”

“No. No, I had to. It’s the last thing I had to do.”

Violet eyes look down into my own, and I smile weakly as I reach up, my thumb brushing her cheek as delicately as I can.

“What does that mean?”

I remember the flash of pink. The one I saw that day, and the one I was today.

“It means… Fate is over. The world is finally complete. The world where we can hope without regret.”

Homura nods, and I don’t know how much she understands, but we have time. We finally have a time that goes beyond a tragic month that gets repeated over and over.

It doesn’t matter. She’ll understand.

I mean, I’m not that smart, and I think I actually do?

“I thought this was just a memory. It was what you told me,” she almost whispers, and I think she’s just trying to fill the silence, to keep the conversation going rather than to understand what just happened.

“It… It started like that. I wasn’t sure it would turn into something else. It… It could’ve been another day.”

“But you knew someday it would… end up like this?”

I nod.

Her eyes don’t narrow, don’t harden, they just wonder.

It’s… It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

Because… It’s like the glinting shards are finally coming together.

“Why? Why were you so sure?”

I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and smile.

“Because today I lost the last trace of my wish.”

I feel a soft kiss on my brow that I know doesn’t come from Homura, because she has yet to move.

“Thank you,” my voice whispers. “Make her happy.”

My smile widens, and my tears fall.

Because I will.

I hear my own laugh, more beautiful than I could ever sing it, and moonlight tinkles on it as the Madoka who became magic and law dances away, the last traces of her humanity raining down on me.

Homura’s fingers still for just a moment, just as the laugh turns from melody to wind on leaves, water over rocks, and silence between stars.

Then, she resumes caressing my hair.

And I allow myself to fall asleep.

Beneath a moon only the two of us will ever see, I dream of the girl who became something other, and the something other that became a girl.

Both of them are happy.