Work Text:
This isn’t right.
I’m supposed to be someone else. Something else.
* * *
This must be what a ghost feels, thinks Homura. She’s not a part of this living organism called a ballet theatre anymore; some people see her, wandering the maze of hallways and rehearsal studios and offices and dressing rooms, but there’s nothing she can touch. Leaving the office where she’s just sat to meet with the artistic staff about her future after the injury and to talk about the timeline of her return, pathetically glad that she’s recovered enough not to be using crutches or visibly limping anymore, she passes rooms where she once danced, doors behind which she once lost herself in the music and the roles, posters that freeze her jeweled or feathered body forever in a moment in time, on pointe or in the air. The lights are brighter and harsher than she remembers, except when they buzz and flicker.
“Miss Akemi!” Homura, lost deep in black thoughts, collides with someone as they both come around a corner in opposite directions. It takes her a few moments, trying to keep from stumbling, to realize who it is: Kaname Madoka, one of the girls in the corps de ballet. “I’m so sorry, I wasn’t looking where I was going!” Madoka seems more flustered than an accidental collision in the hallway would justify, even for someone as shy as she is.
“Homura, please,” says Homura, reaching out to carefully straighten the ribbon around Madoka’s bun that’s been knocked askew.
“Are you back to stay? We’ve all missed you.” Madoka fidgets with her hair nervously. “They asked me to dance Odette, after you…Maybe you already know. Sorry.” So that’s why she’s so flustered. Homura has heard, in the way that her parents (she imagines) might tell her what's happened to people in her hometown whom she hasn't thought of in years, whose marriages and babies and new jobs don't affect her anymore. Of the Odettes in potentia that wait in the corps, she’s glad it was Madoka. "Don't worry, I'm sure it's just for this season! I know I can't do it like you can. I'm all right with the White Swan, but with the Black Swan...The choreographer says I dance both of them the same way. I keep thinking about what I'm doing wrong, but I can't fix it."
"Come with me," Homura says. "I'll take a look." She starts down the hallway towards a rehearsal studio that she remembers is usually empty at this time, turning over her shoulder to see if Madoka is following.
Madoka stands motionless in surprise for a moment, then hurries to catch up. "Thank you!"
In the dim studio, with the afternoon sun slipping through the windows onto the floor, Homura has Madoka run through the Black Swan’s variation, first all together and then in fragments as Homura critiques it. The choreographer is right: Homura doesn’t need to watch Madoka’s White Swan to see that her Black Swan is too gentle and timid in her movements, too ethereal and noble in her bearing, as though Rothbart’s magic replica of Odette is indeed perfect. Madoka isn’t at all stubborn, but Homura grows frustrated pointing out where Madoka’s steps could be more daring, her turns less restrained, her limbs looser and gaze sharper. As she demonstrates what she’s saying about arms for her at one moment, the thought occurs to Homura: maybe this will never work. Maybe it’s better, even, if Madoka only ever dances Odette so she never needs to change.
“Please,” Madoka says, clasping Homura’s hands in hers when Homura lowers them — Madoka’s hands are cold, her circulation is poor — “show me how you’d dance Odile.”
Everything seems to freeze except Homura’s heart, beating like the wings of a thrashing bird. “I...don’t know if I can, Madoka,” she says. Of course she's been training since she was healed enough to start again, pushing herself more and more every day — today was no exception, she even has her shoes in her dance bag here with her like a charm — but she knows she's not there yet, not at a level where she can let other people see, or be an example for someone.
"But I know you can," says Madoka, squeezing her hand once before letting go. She goes over to wind the music back, and waits. Homura can't say no to her.
She laces up her toe shoes, and the slow solo movement begins again. Homura tries to be evil, to be powerful, to be everything the Prince has dreamed and more. It's very different from her White Swan, as delicate as glass. She's always given good face, and her injury hasn't changed anything about how her eyes can throw out a challenge that's also a seduction, how the twist of her lips can be a smile and a spell. If nothing else, she knows how to shut out the eyes of the court and dance for the only person who matters. But she can’t reach as high as she used to; she feels the stretch and burn in the muscles of her legs and loves the hurt of it, and stretches further, foot higher, on the next battement and the next arabesque, but always too short. She feels graceless on her toes; thinks in one wild flash that her legs aren’t the length she remembers, in another that the weight of her arms will topple her to the ground instead of balancing her. Dancing this part again, here, now, feels like flinging herself off a cliff, unfurling her wings wide to fly and falling. And like gravity, she can’t stop; as unready as she is, the vivace begins and she hurls her body into the thirty-two turns that define the role. Right from the beginning, they’re wrong; she’s traveling when she should be in one place on the floor, she has the power for the spins but doesn’t have the pointe, she’s caged by her body. Her face is probably slipping but she can’t focus on that. When she can’t keep going, she doesn’t bother to finish out the solo with something easier; she stumbles to the barre and grasps it hard, letting it support her weight as she sinks to the floor, music blaring triumphantly in her ears.
“Let me try?” Madoka asks, and Homura can only nod.
And Homura watches as Madoka throws all her imperfections back in her face. Madoka dancing Homura’s Odile is at once utterly foreign and wrong on her, and maybe — elevating someone else’s performance, redeeming it — the only way Madoka could do the role. Everywhere Homura failed becomes part of Odile: the visible, tawdry effort Odile has to put in to reach the grace that Odette displays effortlessly, the rigidity and tension in her shoulders as though her torso can be a fortress around her heart, the knowledge that she has to be perfect and, somewhere deep beneath her flashing eyes and bewitching smile, the fear that she’ll fail. The thirty-two revolutions that entrap her just as much as they entrap Prince Siegfried, or more, a cycle that she has to see through to the end if it kills her, that seems to go on forever. And, at the end of it all, the fact that she still can’t be loved as much as Odette is.
The music goes on, where Siegfried's part would come in, but Madoka holds Odile's final pose, eyes locked on Homura, pinpricks of sweat glistening on her forehead, breathing hard in a way she'd never let anyone see in performance. Then the moment breaks, and she lets out a dazed laugh.
Homura's tongue feels heavy and dry in her mouth. "I don't think that's what the choreographer wants Odile to be," she manages.
"It should be!" Madoka's smile is sudden and brilliant. “Give me Carabosse, Koschei! Every witch and wicked fairy — this is what I was born for! Give them to me, and I'll make them mine."
(Homura brings down the curtain on this world.)
* * *
"Red spider lilies," says the client. "To remind me of my mother." Red spider lilies are complicated, finicky things, and they’re not one of the flowers Homura can draw well from memory. She sketches the vague shape of a few of them on paper, lets the client gesture and explain, and re-draws a couple of times, ending up with one lonely cluster of flowerets that looks — she thinks to herself — like a little globe collapsing in on itself, sending out trailing sparks as it dies. She explains that she’ll take some time to find references, and then e-mail him a less roughed-out version before he comes in for his ink.
After she’s sent another client home with the next part of his Benkei bodysuit tattoo completed, she logs onto the internet to look for pictures of red spider lilies. Nothing seems to quite match the shape of the sketch in a way she feels that she’s up to referencing for the interlock and curl of the petals, the light and shadow in different shades of red. But she isn’t out of ideas yet. Turning out the lights and locking her shop up behind her, she walks downstairs, past the usual judgmental glare of her neighbor smoking in her usual spot outside her restaurant, to the flower shop on the ground floor.
The apron-clad florist is deep in an animated conversation with a customer about arrangements for her newly opened hotel, guiding her around the small shop to show off her wares. As she waits, Homura closes her eyes, breathing in the scent of flowers and imagining that she’s somewhere far outside the city, letting their excited voices fade into the hum of bees and the chatter of birds.
“Excuse me — can I help you?” The voice interrupts Homura’s reverie, and she turns, startled. The florist’s face breaks into a smile, making her look like some benevolent floral spirit, framed by blossoms; Homura thinks in one thunderstruck instant that she should draw this, to use as inspiration or to lock away. “Oh, it’s you! I’m so glad you came in.” Homura is used to making an impression — to impressing people, whether they’re her clients or passers-by — but less used to them being happy to see her, and especially didn’t expect it from this neighbor she’s barely seen, still less spoken to. Madoka, if the name on the shop is her name, is already working when Homura arrives in the morning and hours gone when Homura is finished closing up; they’ve maybe exchanged a nod on a few occasions if they’ve passed each other going to or from the convenience store. And their clientele doesn’t exactly overlap much.
“Yes,” says Homura to the first question. “I need a few red spider lilies — I’m doing a new design, and I’d like to draw them. Any small arrangement you sell with them is fine.”
Madoka laughs. “I don’t need to sell you a whole arrangement for a few flowers! Unless you want one to cheer up your shop — I’d love it if you bought one, of course. You can buy a few lilies on their own if that’s what you need. But if you want, you can stay here and draw them, if you have time. We’re neighbors, and it’d be nice to know each other better, don’t you think?”
Until this moment, Homura would have said that she could go either way — that she was perfectly content, or even that she preferred, to have her shop two floors over Madoka’s and see her cheerfully selling flowers through the window as she passed and nothing else. But now she wants to stay here in Madoka’s orbit, to seep into this little world and tell Madoka about herself and maybe see Madoka smile at her like that again.
“I’ll be fine with a few of the lilies, thank you,” says Homura. Madoka only seems a little disappointed as she wraps them up in cellophane and rings up the purchase.
Homura takes them back to her house and places them in a glass of water on the coffee table, adjusts them until they look the way she wants so she can sketch them. Before she sleeps, she moves them to her bedside, and the first thing she sees when she opens her eyes the next morning is the red of them, still out of focus, against the whiteness of her wall.
When Homura arrives at her studio, she can see that there’s something on the doorstep even before she reaches the door. It’s a small pot of flowers, white forget-me-nots (her heart skips a beat) and purple flowers so dark they're nearly black. Her first client of the day comments on it, where Homura’s moved it inside, and Homura says it’s a gift from a friend. At lunch, she buys an extra tea. She noticed on her way out, stopping to watch for a few moments, that Madoka’s shop seemed crowded and busy, but it’s mostly an excuse to stop by and bring it to her, to be the one to get her what she needs and, for a few moments, to be the center of her attention.
Homura starts getting up earlier to spend time in Madoka’s flower shop each morning before she opens the tattoo parlor, leaning against the counter and talking while Madoka prepares for the day, then taking in the sight of her dealing with her customers, happy. It's against her better judgment to get close to Madoka like this and risk ruining everything, but she can't stop herself. She knows she's messed up for real when Madoka starts coming by in the evening while Homura cleans her equipment and takes care of the accounts.
“I should get a tattoo,” says Madoka one of these evenings, sitting sideways on one of the waiting-area chairs with her legs stretched out to the one next to it. “Would you do one for me? Something small, maybe a cute design?”
Homura assumes from Madoka’s tone that she’s joking, but she thinks about having Madoka’s bared skin under her needles, warm and smooth and unmarked, and is surprised by how viscerally she hates the idea. “No. No, I don’t think so,” she says.
“Why not?”
“You might regret it. It’d be on you forever.” She’d never make a living if she said this to everyone who came in her door, reminded them about beaches and onsen and so on. But she would never think of saying it to anyone else. It’s not even that she doesn’t care — she likes being able to transform other people with the work of her hands, to have them as her canvas. Madoka is different, somehow.
“I know. You’re right, I’d be worried about choosing the wrong thing.” Madoka sighs. “But I guess I want to do something permanent. Make some kind of change. I’m happy, I like making other people happy with my flowers, but I always feel like I’m supposed to be doing more with my life than this. You’re right, just doing something to my body wouldn’t be enough to make that feeling go away.” Her eyes stare far out past the walls of the little tattoo parlor, and her lips move silently: I’m supposed to be doing more than this.
* * *
— Madoka’s mother kisses Audino’s pink forehead before Madoka closes him into the Pokéball, then kisses the Pokéball too for good measure. One last kiss and a tight hug for Madoka herself, and then Madoka, ten years old and setting out on her Pokémon journey, skips out to meet Homura at the gate. “Come on,” says Homura, bouncing on her toes, her Eevee in her arms. “I heard there’s a nest of Mismagius on the road out of town! We have to help each other become the best if we’re going to be rivals when we grow up —
* * *
— The lady of the spider lilies wrote to the lady of the ribbons, in heavy brushstrokes on soft purple paper so thin the light could pass through it: “What delight to see you at the poetry contest!
My clumsy sleeves trail in the clear yet barren brook, which pours out its all.
Far off, the lapis-blue sea endlessly produces pearls —
* * *
— by the time you read this, my first letter to you, the cherry blossoms may already be past. I feel as though we barely had a chance to get to know each other this winter, yet somehow at the same time I feel that I know you perfectly and you know me. So, it is only a question of putting my heart on paper for you so that you are able to carry it close to you, if you would consider doing this for someone whom perhaps you only see as the silly awkward little girl in pigtails that you tutored through cram school. When you read my letters, will you picture me happy here, because of you? Oneesama, dear Oneesama, if you knew how elegant and fashionable the other high school girls are, it’s truly devastating — oh, it is good to know that someone is listening to all my chatter! —
* * *
— Madoka steps from the gangway onto the dusty ground, the light of the planet's third, brightest sun reflecting off the glass of her helmet. She lifts it and takes in a deep breath of air, thinner and colder than Earth's but — yes — breathable, as the diplomatic mission was promised and as the spacesuit’s readings confirmed. "We're further from Earth than any human has ever been," she murmurs, the longest sentence she's said in days that she hasn't frantically practiced in the aliens' language, knowing that the fate of all of humanity is in her hands. To Homura, whose hand has not left the blaster at her hip since the ship’s hatch opened, her face looks both terrified and excited —
* * *
Mitakihara City. Some people call it the city of dreams. They don’t know how right they are. Things get weird here sometimes. You think you have someone’s number, and they turn out to be someone else. You find yourself on the other side of town from one moment to the next, with no memory of how you got there. Or maybe that’s just me.
I’m Akemi Homura, and I solve problems for people. Actually, that’s not the whole story: I create problems for a lot of other people. It doesn’t make me the most popular girl in school, but I don’t mind. All in a day's work for a private eye.
I was on a date with a bottle and a front-row ticket to watch the ceiling fan go round and round when I heard a knock on my office door. The bottle wasn’t as chatty a date as I'd hoped for, and it wasn’t as cheap a date as I’d hoped for either, so I got up and opened the door to see who’d decided to pay me an evening social call.
The woman on the other side made me think of candy. Pink dress, sweet, you know she’s going to be bad for you but it’s not her fault. You’ve got no one to blame but yourself. “My cat’s gone missing,” she said, nearly falling into my arms. Her hair smelled like rosemary. I hadn’t gotten this far with anyone in longer than I liked to think about. “I called the police and the fire department, but they don’t care! You’re the only one who can help me.”
I could have told her to put up some flyers, but if she was going to pay me for this, I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. And besides the money, something told me that she’d be important. Call it a P.I. sixth sense. You know, I thought, why not. I’ve got a sweet tooth. So I let her take me home. On the bus, she told me her name: Kaname Madoka. She’d been out with friends after work, and came back to find Amy gone.
You can find out a lot about someone from their home. Little details that crack a case wide open, secrets they’d never tell you themself. “That always been there?” I asked, gesturing to the gaping ragged-edged hole someone had knocked through the apartment drywall.
“No.” Ms. Kaname laughed nervously. I kept half an eye on the door in case I needed to make a break for it. “I’ll make a police report about it tomorrow morning — my jewelry box is gone, too. But I couldn’t wait — Amy could be anywhere right now.”
We were already messing up the crime scene, and I didn’t want her moving around in my blind spot. “Take a seat somewhere,” I suggested. I checked out the windows and the lock on the front door. Whoever was here hadn’t broken in.
The upshot, after an evening and a morning of good old-fashioned door-knocking and reviewing security camera footage with Ms. Kaname sticking close at my side, was that the previous tenant of Ms. Kaname’s apartment hadn’t lived the most upstanding life, and some of his associates had come by for a visit after they saw her leave. For three years, my client had been going to sleep every night with her head only a few feet away from a cache that must have been worth millions — stolen goods or drugs or something like that — but she wouldn’t be doing that anymore. The cat was an innocent party in this whole business: as far as I could guess, she’d made a dash for it through the open door after one of the thugs stepped on her tail, and I tracked the little bastard down to where she’d decided to start two-timing Ms. Kaname with an old lady a few blocks away.
But it was Ms. Kaname herself who managed to coax a name and phone number out of the owner of the internet café across the street: the guy who'd been casing her place for a week. Those big puppy-dog eyes, the downright symphony of distress in her voice, the way she made it seem like making her happy would be the best thing you could do with your life — it’d be a great acting job if I didn’t know it was real. She was good at getting people to trust her, I guess. I realized that at some point, somehow, I'd become one of those people.
But the internet café guy was the police’s problem. As for me, my work here was done for now. Back in my office, Ms. Kaname dumped Amy in my lap while she went through her purse for my payment.
“It’s really amazing, how much you’re able to find out,” she gushed. I thought that was the end of it, and was about to tell her I was just doing my job, but she kept going. “Do you need an assistant? I felt so helpless — I want to be able to help people, like you do. I can watch you, I can learn how to do what a detective does.”
I didn’t know what to say. I could see how it could help to have a pretty face asking questions, but I was used to this being a one-woman job. I didn’t want to see her get tangled up with the kind of people my work sometimes threw at me — I needed her to stay safe, where she was. I held my breath, on the knife’s edge, knowing that the next thing I’d have to say would be a yes or a no.
“Idiot,” said Miki Sayaka, sitting at the secretary’s desk outside my office door. (I hadn’t had a secretary before.) “She doesn’t want to get out of the labyrinth, she wants to get to the middle of it.”
(That’s when I closed this case.)
* * *
Once upon a time there was a princess as fair as the dawn, who had lived trapped in the castle of a wicked fairy for as long as she could remember. This princess loved all living things so much that she would cut out her own heart if it would save the life of the smallest beetle that crawled on the floor, and yet they all loved her so that not a one of them would ever accept that sacrifice.
The wicked fairy gave the princess everything she could want: dresses of silk and satin and velvet, precious jewels that sparkled with their own light even at night, dolls so lifelike they seemed to be alive, wonderful feasts of delicacies from every corner of the world and fantastical fairy morsels beyond description. The princess passed most of her days quite happily with the wicked fairy. They made music together, played games, sewed together on the same tapestry, and spent evenings dancing together by candlelight. Most of all, though, the princess liked to wander through the maze of hedges and brambles that the fairy had raised around her castle by magic. It seemed to her sometimes that everything the world could contain was here amidst its green leaves and twisted branches. At every turn, she would encounter some marvelous new flower, creatures whose like had never been seen before sporting with each other, or some fountain or bush sculpted in an extravagant shape. Then she would fall to playing with and patting the creatures, or listening to the music of the fountain, or breathing in the scent of the flower, and she would soon forget again the reason why she had turned down that particular path, until evening fell and it was time to return to the castle.
“Why are you wicked?” the princess would sometimes ask the fairy. The wicked fairy would give her a different answer each time: how she had been cursed to be so; how to fairies, up was down, black was white, and she was considered the most virtuous of the virtuous; how she had made a wish to be beautiful and the price of that wish was her goodness; how it simply gave her pleasure to take whatever she wanted and make others do as she wished, or how she loathed the world and all that it contained. The real truth was none of these things, and was a secret. The real truth was that she had become wicked out of true love, for true love is selfish and will make you cruel.
We have said that the princess was happy most days. It would be better to say that she was unhappy, but only sometimes, and she could never say why. One day, she was wandering the hedge maze alone, and all the delights that the wicked fairy’s magic placed in her way could not put a smile on her face, or keep her attention for long. The creatures gamboling at her feet, chattering to her as though she could understand their speech, she carefully stepped around after a few moments and pressed on down the path she chose. She paused as though to smell the flowers — whose scents were not the scents of ordinary roses and lilies and cherry blossoms which are the same to all comers, but were Dreams and First-Kiss and Lost-Love — but then she thought that in truth there was no reason to do it, and passed onward, only brushing the blossoms with the tips of her fingers.
She came at last, the hedges growing ever more gnarled and thick, to a place where the path sank below the ground. Here, instead of walls of branches, were walls of roots and thick-packed earth as she soon left the daylight behind her. Though the princess had, in many places, still to choose the right-hand fork or the left, she never feared that she would be lost forever under the earth, any more than she feared being lost in the sunlit part of the garden. For one thing, the wicked fairy’s magic still unfolded here beneath the ground, raising up flowers in the dark that bloomed with a faint light and released the sound of bells when the air of her passing stirred them, and rough sculptures of clay that seemed more ancient even than the castle itself. Even these, though, could not please her or halt her on her way. This was the other thing which kept the princess from feeling any fear: it seemed to her that she did not wish to return to the daylight and the castle and all the things that gave her pleasure.
The princess sensed indeed that she was now no longer walking under the garden maze which surrounded the castle, but under the foundations of the castle itself; she fancied she could feel the weight of its stones above her. Here, some of the roots which crept away into the soil to feed the hedges of the far-off maze broke off and crumbled into dust where they jutted from the earthen walls, for they had been here for many hundreds of years. Presently the princess came out into a great chamber under the earth, low enough that her head nearly brushed the ceiling but large enough that she could have tossed her golden ball without hitting the far wall or sung together with her own echo, with paths furling out from it in all directions. There was only one thing at the center: a single flower, one pale pink rose growing underground as though it received the care of the most solicitous gardener and the light of the balmiest sun. This, though the princess did not know it, was the one place in the castle and all its grounds where the wicked fairy desired her never to go.
Careful of the thorns, which gleamed red as blood, she reached out to the rose. Suddenly the earth began to tremble and shake around her, dust raining from the ceiling and beginning to slough off the packed walls of the chamber, for the wicked fairy sensed at once that the princess was there, and shook the castle to its foundations and beyond with the wordless bellow of her rage and fear. This rose, it must be said, was the fairy’s heart, which she had taken out and buried deep in the earth to keep it hidden from all knowledge but her own, and from it grew the whole of the maze and even the castle itself. Within the rose was the secret of the fairy’s true love, which could destroy all that she had built.
Still the princess stretched out her hand, in spite of everything, to the rose, and with the trembling of the earth, notwithstanding all her care one long, sharp thorn pricked her finger, drawing a drop of blood like a ruby. She plucked the rose.
“I remember everything,” said Madoka.