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She was much as an alien as Kyubey now, she supposed, as inhuman as Madoka. The thought grounded her, because every time she wondered why she never felt quite right in this world, on this earth, she reminded herself that she had lived—for quite a long time—in another one. In several. Dozens. Her experience had rendered her effectively not human, because humans didn’t get a hundred second chances to redo a part of their lives.
Even now she felt hopeless and a little stupid for expecting Madoka to be anything other than out of her reach: she was a fairy tale, a dream. The place where you went when you died. Homura lived outside the planes of reality, lived in a kind of meta-universe, friends with God, counting down the days until she passed on, and then what? She wanted to see Madoka, badly. That was all she had ever really wanted. It was selfish, but not unreasonable. It was the only thing that was keeping her alive. She knew Madoka was watching, and she wanted to do her proud. Look at me, she would think. I’m doing this for your sake.
No one remembered her, of course, so she never brought it up. The ribbon was a keepsake from a friend, nothing more. She was curt, quiet, not quite impolite, mature, reserved, detached, and fixated on an intangible something that made her disturbing, to some. She acted old for her age. She was deeply uncanny; people found her strange, intimidating, maybe a little... off. She admitted to being somewhat touched in the head. She probably was, in truth, but she would smile her usual half-smile, barely reaching her eyes, and tell them that it was all right. She knew she was weird. It was OK. Someone had to be.
She grew into emotions, of a sort, learned to enjoy things again, and tried to, for her own sake. She tended to work herself too hard; Mami noticed, even Kyouko did sometimes. She appreciated simple pleasures, like being able to live past the date of Walpurgisnacht, because she knew that it took someone’s sacrifice to get her there—her and the rest of the world. She felt no pride in having contributed to Madoka’s world-saving move. She felt hardly anything at all, really, at least not on a deeper level. There was yearning, and not much more. She had fallen for a saint who had devoted herself to the greater good. Pathetic, really. Saints tended not to have much time for individual people.
On a particularly delirious Sunday morning, she tried to recreate the experience on a DVD player: pausing, rewinding, playing, then pausing, rewinding, and playing again, the climax of a movie for eight straight hours. She counted ninety-six times, in all, for a scene that was five minutes long. Was it that many? She couldn’t remember. For her, it hadn’t been quite the same experience over and over again, but the ending had always been the same, at least until Madoka fixed it. The ninety-sixth time, she watched until the end. After those eight hours, the ending felt unfulfilling, but she ate dinner afterward, and at least dinner tasted good.
She developed an embarrassing affinity for the color pink. It did not look good on her in large amounts, but as an accent to her other clothes, it suited her perfectly, and that made her smile. Occasionally she would wonder to herself if she were treating Madoka as if she were already dead. Madoka could not be dead; death was no longer a viable state for her, only existence and nonexistence, but for someone who still saw her as a person and not a concept, it was a valid question. Madoka lived only in her memory and in the verity of the existence of the reality around her. Sometimes she had nightmares that Madoka did not exist. Sometimes she questioned whether Madoka ever existed at all.
She looked for signs. She asked for them, too. Anything. She was the sole believer of a strange new religion, one that claimed that an ordinary middle school student had made a wish to rewrite the rules of the universe and was now the patron saint of its young female protectors, who themselves were the first line of defense against a destructive scientific phenomenon. She did not make an effort to convert anyone, but the exclusivity of it secretly pleased her, since more or less, she had Madoka all to herself. She was desperate to see or feel or hear something, though, because memories were fallible, and hallucinations be damned, she wanted something that wasn’t replayed in her head. She tried very hard not to do anything self-destructive. She wanted the experience to be genuine—or at least, not drug-induced.
Some days she would find herself crying. She could never figure out why, either. She had either too little or too much to cry over: reality fractured, broken, sanity tearing at the seams, cosmic experiences, alien encounters, memories of a sweet and charming young girl, a multitude of grisly deaths, weakness, tragedy, and a deep, harrowing emptiness where her life should have been. She dreamed of falling and Walpurgisnacht. Her head was filled with explosions, a deep rumbling in her chest, vibrations that shook the very core of her being, that rang inside her ears. Smoke and fire. Horrifying magical creatures. Grenades, machine guns, tanks, bombs, artillery, M16s, Desert Eagles, AK-47s, Uzis, shotguns, machine pistols, you name it, she stole it. Recoil was nothing; she healed herself with magic if she got hurt, and she couldn’t die unless she broke or corrupted her Soul Gem. They were her only allies, for a time. Her most reliable partners.
Maybe she was crying for her loss of innocence, she would think. Young girls becoming unfeeling monsters, was that not the worst possible thing that could happen? There was a purity about the young woman that over time had taken hold of the human imagination; ubiquitous or not, Kyubey certainly would have heard of it (possibly even engineered it). Kyubey wouldn’t have cared, though. That meant she shouldn’t have, either.
In the end, she decided, she was crying for her own damned existence, the fact that she was alive for whatever reason, and Madoka was... not alive, not dead either, Madoka was whatever she was, and Homura was here on earth, cursing her own survival mechanisms, the curious mix of chemical signals that drove her to live, live, live. It was unbelievable, what kept her going, because she was convinced she was totally insane, and in the realest of realities, she was lying on a bed somewhere in one of Mitakihara’s mental hospitals, having tripped and hit herself on the head after transferring and everything afterward was a dream she had never woken up from. She would wake up, stare at the ceiling and go to school, propelled by habit; she would meet Kyubey, fight and replenish her Soul Gem; she would come back home and do her homework and go to bed exhausted in every possible sense, hoping to dream of Madoka, and fall asleep. And then she would wake up, stare at the ceiling, and do it all over again.
She questioned who she was doing it for, constantly, if she couldn’t be sure of what was what anymore, if she couldn't be sure that the only person she ever really cared about had even existed in the first place, if, in effect, she really had nothing to live for, in a world—in her head—in a place full of such maddening uncertainty. Routine was the devil. And what was salvation? What was life, if nothing but a series of experiences, flashing before your eyes, filling your senses? What was time but a concept? What was experience but a term coined to describe what lay before you, this strange, mysterious thing?
She was miserable because she was alive, because she felt she shouldn’t be, for some reason. It was such a miracle that she was; what did she do to deserve it? Human life, as she was well aware, was so pathetically fragile, so easily ended. To be able to feel at all was a gift. Whether that mattered or not meant nothing, because it was already there, and significance was a subjective value appended onto objects that existed regardless of how much you cared for them.
She had nothing without Madoka. Shockingly, that nothing was a lot. Everything was trivial; everything was precious, and she held it in her heart that no matter what they would come to meet one day again.