Waiting... something new she hadn't done before, no matter what, she always had something to do, no matter what, be it tracking down and removing every which in the vicinity of Madoka, stocking up on grief seeds, taking care of "problems" before they become problems. such as pre-emptively removing Oriko from this world, killing Kyubey, and many other things.
But now, for the first time in years, maybe even decades, there was nothing. No looming threat. No clock counting down to disaster. No grief clouds blooming on the horizon.
Madoka was safe.
Homura would find her again, no matter how long it took. For Madoka, it would only be a short while, a few seconds, maybe a minute. For Homura, it might be decades. Centuries, or even longer, but It didn't matter. She could wait.
Like she always had.
like she always did.
Everything she did was for her.
She could spend some time waiting. For Madoka, A couple more decades meant nothing.
A faint, fleeting smile pulled at the corner of her lips as she leaned back against the pillow, her violet eyes softening. The steady beep of the heart monitor filled the silence, steady and patient. The world she had fallen into was strange, but there was a sense of peace here. No magical girls. No grief. No Incubators quietly steering the fall of humanity.
Homura traced the ceiling tiles with her gaze, each one a perfect square in a perfect pattern.
She had nothing left she needed to do.
And for the first time in an eternity, she let herself be still.
She would wait.
---
It took less than half an hour for the dull ache of boredom to settle in.
Homura stared at the ceiling, then the wall, then the window. The same dull, white ceiling tiles. The same pale walls. The same view of clouds lazily drifting by. She let out a slow sigh and shifted positions, rolling onto her side, then onto her stomach, then onto the opposite side of the bed.
It wasn't like she had a phone. No internet access. No books. No Grief Seeds to polish. No Kyubey to shoot. Nothing to dissect about this world before meeting anyone else.
She had no way to learn what this world was like, how it worked, what rules it followed, or how the power balance lay between those with quirks and those without. And it wasn't like she could risk wandering around without a plan, not after everything.
So she lay there.
Minutes stretched.
The clock ticked.
like it always did
But this time... it just felt a smidge slower than it always did.
---
An hour passed.
Homura, having spent most of it staring at the ceiling in utter stillness, finally exhaled a sharp breath through her nose. She was done with this. Boredom gnawed at her far worse than any wound ever had.
A dangerous thought crept in.
She could test her magic.
It was risky. She had no idea if her power still operated the same way. No idea if it was even still finite. Back in her old world, grief weighed on every magical girl. Magic was tied to their soul gem, and the use of power fed the decay. The more magic they used, the closer they came to despair and witchhood.
But here… no grief, even after her multiple uses from before.
She wasn't sure if that meant she was truly free from those rules, or if the consequences simply hadn't caught up to her yet.
Homura sat up, pulling her legs in and resting her elbows on her knees, gaze locked on the clock. She thought carefully.
If the sand had already fallen to one side, she couldn't stop time. That was always the rule. The sand marked the limits of her ability. She could rewind the hourglass, but once the sand dropped, time manipulation was off-limits until she reset.
Except… now that wasn't happening.
Even though she hadn't rewound time yet, even though in theory the magic should be spent, she could still feel it. That pressure at the edge of her senses. The familiar weight of her magic, heavy but usable. Like an old friend breathing down her neck.
The sand continued to fall.
And she could still touch that side of her power.
That wasn't how it worked. Not before.
Why?
Had something changed when she was sent forward?Had the system that governed magical girls been severed with Kyubey's absence?Had the way it somehow broke and repaired it, somehow altered the rules?
Or maybe it hadn't gone back at all.
Maybe it reset,
Forward?
A ridiculous thought. A stretch, even for her. An idiotic idea, yet...considering how-
Click.
The world fell silent.
Colour bled from the room, turning the walls and floor into pale, washed-out shades of grey. The second hand on the clock froze mid-tick. Dust motes hung in the air like tiny flecks of glass suspended in nothing.
Time had stopped.
And she was still standing, no longer back in that same usual hospital room. Even though everything she knew screamed she should not be able to.
Yet it happened.
It left her frozen, staring out at the stillness.
It perplexed her.
Not because she had never felt confused before, but because it had been so long since she had to face something unfamiliar. So long since a new variable was introduced into her life.
But that was to be expected, right?
For a girl who spent countless loops reliving the same forty-five days over and over again, conditioned to see every change as a threat, something outside of the known pattern was bound to feel dangerous. It was a survival instinct.
For Homura Akemi, who had lived in a world of fixed rules and predictable tragedies, this was something new.
Something unfamiliar.
And that Unfamiliarity made her chest tighten, making it a little hard to breathe.
It wasn't because of relief. It wasn't through fear either.
It was the uncertainty of the situation that made her feel this way.
And that uncertainty was terrifying.
The idea of having to face a future she could not prepare for. Of losing the advantage that knowledge had always given her. Of moving forward blind, in a world where the rules might no longer be the same.
It filled her with a deep, foreboding, fear. that clawed at her every cell...
And yet…
Maybe... just maybe, deep down in that tired, broken and shattered heart, it stirred something else too.
Maybe excitement.
Maybe relief
Or maybe hope.
Perhaps she had grown to despise that monotone, useless repetition. That endless cage she built around herself, which only seemed to benefit only every few loops.
Now that she was free of it…
Now that the world no longer followed her rules…
No longer followed the rules of that one wish
so
so
very long ago.
Maybe, just maybe,
This time around,
She could afford to act just a tad bit more selfish. to act upon her own desires, just a little smidge more than usual.