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It hadn’t rained the first time Homura Akemi was here.
It had gotten cloudy, certainly, and she had worried herself half to death over whether it would actually go any further, and maybe she even felt the lightest drizzle of rain dust her head as she stepped inside her apartment, but she was sure, very, very, sure, that the clouds had never fully broke; it had never really rained.
And now it did.
The rain only beat down harder as she took the frigid, wet walk back home. In a moment of weakness, she had decided earlier to watch Sayaka & Madoka’s confrontation at the bus stop from a distance – she knew, vaguely, what was usually said during the exchange, both from Madoka’s & Sayaka’s individual testimonies in earlier loops, but she could never fully pry what went down from either of them. So she had watched. And now she regretted it.
It wasn’t that what Sayaka had said was irreparable. Over countless timelines, she’d seen those two get through thick and thin, with and without her. It was knowing what came after, what she could not stop, no matter what.
Homura had tried, tried, tried again and again to stop Sayaka from becoming a witch. At every critical point, she had tried every course of action, seen all worlds, watched every possible thing to do become a thing done, and then, soon enough, a thing failed.
She had prevented Madoka from getting to the bus stop. She had held back Sayaka, she had walked both of them home under a hastily stolen umbrella, she sat between them as they waited, she brought Kyoko, brought Mami, brought Kyoko and Mami, every combination of the girls, and even Kyubey. (But never again.)
Once, she kissed her.
The rain had been pouring down so hard, and her heart beat in her ears louder than she’d ever heard it before, and Sayaka cried and yelled and screamed at her about how she couldn’t understand, could never understand, wasn’t even trying to understand how she felt. And in that moment, realizing that she had already fatally, fundamentally fucked it up, everything fell away. The way her hair stuck to her face, how wet her socks already were, how her homework was almost certainly being ruined from all the rain, it all stopped mattering. So she grabbed her collar, put a hand on her back, and kissed her. And it was good. And she felt warm and loved and disgusting, so disgusting, so filthy over the way that Sayaka pushed her against the glass wall and put a hand on her hip, so utterly irredeemable that she barely waited a half second to abandon that timeline when Sayaka pulled away, and stared right through her with a look that asked her for anything but a reason why.
Homura didn’t know when it had started consistently raining today. She knew that the first time it happened was on her sixteenth loop, but the last time it hadn’t rained eluded her. Not that it really mattered; the important things still stayed the same.
Normally, later, Homura would follow Kyoko to Sayaka, and try to provide a grief seed for her to use. But tonight, she decided to stay home.
She could still hear Sayaka’s transformation, all the way at the subway station, over the din of her bedroom TV.