"Disclaimer stuff: I don't own Puella Magi Madoka Magica, its spin-offs, or any referential content. Neither does the author. Spoilers include parts of the Wraith Arc, the original PMMM series, the Rebellion movie, but nothing is necessary to understand this fic, probably. Also, I love you, but I also hate you, because I can't hold you," Wraith Madoka says tearfully to the stars above from within a disclaimer that's not quite exactly an author's note but totally is.
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As I walked along my street, I found a few cats strolling leisurely along separate paths. Each cat observed the other with thinly veiled disdain. Only instincts honed from experience and nonverbal kitty agreements were what allowed the peace to remain relatively unbroken.
That, and conditioning born from being in my presence.
They knew just as much as I did that any situation devolving into yowling and territorial squabbles was going to be stopped by their resident big cat, and unfortunately for them, I was the big cat. I mean, not literally, but the neighborhood's cats quickly found out, as I did, that I'm physically unable to stand by and watch their little scrabbles turn into murder. It would hurt me too much otherwise!
I recognized black and white cats immediately- which brightened up my morning by a tiny bit. My bandage-covered arms moved forward to a polite distance for the little hand sniffers to greet me.
"Hello, Molly Murder!"
The other comes up behind her sister for her share of human, "Hello to you too, Yuri!" I frowned at the shape of a new scar over her left eyebrow.
The feral siblings were serial killers, but in slightly different ways. Molly will kill anything that moves for fun and Yuri was a… actually, I had no idea what she was. Yuri just happened to always be around other cats, but strangely only the female cats. She had no interest in male cats. Regardless, they were my adorable little killing machines.
Despite our philosophical differences in how we treated other lifeforms, I had no real opposition to the nature of our relationship -they didn't choose to be cats and I had the misfortune to have that annoyingly human disability to feel lonely for no reason at all. Henceforth, long hours of petting and mutual attention seeking.
Kyubey abruptly came to mind at that moment between ear scratches.
I could almost imagine I was petting two of his drone bodies instead of two normal cats. It made me feel like I was petting humans instead of cats, which would've been a weird enough thought on its own if I didn't also suddenly want to punch something. Odd. I wonder what petting humans would feel like?
Yuri yowled, as if to say, 'Are you hesitating? I did not tell you to stop. Do not stop, human.'
I paused, thinking on what to say, or if I should say anything at all. Cats don't really make for good conversationalists. But if I had something on my mind, and infuriatingly, I did, then I couldn't just let the moment be and go on with my life.
Yuri seemed to be able to read my mind at that moment, 'Very well then. Tell me your woes, human.'
"What is one person to do against something that can be almost anywhere, listening at any moment? What are you supposed to do when that thing decides not to play by its own rules?" My mouth spat out words before I knew what was happening.
In return, the kitties headbutted my hands. Was that supposed to be encouragement? Can I explain more?
It's an opportunity, I guess.
So I told them about my self-doubts. Nothing particularly important, at least to begin with.
I felt like nothing was happening as it should've. Something positively not positive was always there, hiding in the background of my subconscious like an animal stalking in the background.
I knew what it could've represented, of course, but with the nature of human paranoia and active imaginations running wild, I couldn't be sure if it was important or not.
Some might simply say that you're "just seeing things that aren't there," yet others still would say that trusting your "gut-instinct" is more important than trusting the words of a stranger. I'd say that the body I was currently inhabiting was full of mental inefficiencies that could've been better solved by replacing this bag of chemicals with something more reliable.
'Or by not swapping your magical core-thingy inside with the soul of an alternate Madoka Kaname in the hopes that it would stop Homura from having a multiverse-wide tantrum for longer than a second so that you could try to convince her to fix this mess…' But I'm not that good at math to begin with so...
Where the feck was I leading this into again? Kyubey. Right.
See, the thing is that people were committing suicide under suspicious circumstances all the time, yet no one here was batting an eye. People seemingly don't care and it's just weird, if you think about it in hindsight.
How does one "accidentally" piledrive off of the railing of a seven-story building into heavy traffic during daylight hours and not have the entire building be police cordoned off to be scrutinized for murder?
People with families, individuals barely into the cusp of adulthood, the peaceful and the seemingly happy, with promising futures and ambitious goals… One and all, suddenly and inexplicably dying or disappearing for reasons that nobody can determine.
It's like sudden desires to die without warning were being used to blame things that didn't matter for no reason! National media outlets frequently suggested copycat narratives of a "green-cult mass suicide" that apparently happened a few years ago, to a politician's underhanded acts spreading violent, suicidal urges across the populus. The overwhelming work hours of corporate conglomerates were making people outraged enough to immigrate to other countries, to do the exact same thing. It seemed that talk show hosts only cared about sending the message of constant pressure from overseas politics for increased Japanese militarization or some other was leading into a cascading effect of losing influence and Japanese agency being slowly taken away from right under them, and the examples are everywhere, do you hear me?! Weak leaders are pushing us into armed conflict!! We are losing our sovereignty to the West!!
It doesn't actually do anything useful. Nobody says anything useful either.
Vaguely, I understood on some level that there was a heavily skewed life balance of Work-Work-Work that was being a major contributor to overall low happiness. And the general 'go with the flow' mentality didn't help matters either.
But… are the adults of this particular universe really just that dumb? Is intelligent discourse simply not a thing if you don't have a predisposition toward the supernatural? The answer is easy, if you are lucky enough to know what to look for. The presence of all manner of unexplainable deaths was a dead-giveaway that Kyubey was still alive and active.
"It's Witches." I nodded sagely at Molly.
Molly stared at me blankly, as cats were to do when already unconvinced by the argument you were about to make.
I continued with conviction in my voice, "Yes. Too few would understand this relevant statement by design."
I recalled a few universes where Kyubey began his work on Earth a few dozen millennia later than usual, thus creating worlds where less lethal Witches were being outpaced by their worlds' technology. All of the humans there followed an attention toward negative events, like cats smelling catnip in the air.
Horrible things happen everyday, yes, but why would people want to focus so strongly on that negativity? Why would anyone actually go looking for it? To what extent must every existing instance of violence have to be examined and talked about? Shouldn't a thriving society want to embrace the good even more and downplay the evil?
This is just a hypothesis, but I think that those worlds simply had less of a reason to worry. Because they didn't necessarily need magical girls to deal with their Witches, they didn't have to force themselves to believe the world was a safe place. They already knew it was.
However, most people in other universes don't have this luxury.
I raised my arms up for emphasis, "This is why there's always this feeling, this veiled discomfort. This fear that is entrenched within communities… It makes them believe they're not just failing their people, but also propagating the invisible threads of danger that society itself cannot see. Problems rarely solve themselves, and when they do it becomes such a big uproar of celebration, therefore local newscasts focus on that small victory for as long as they can.
"Then afterwards, the deep-seated fears and regrets of the past wash back up to the present along with a boatload of other future problems. Where people fail far more often than they succeed, the willingness to see the good is exceedingly high."
For her part, Molly and Yuri stayed silent in my lap.
"On the other side of the coin, where the ugly cannot be ignored, society instead urges everyone into not looking too deeply into the present issues. This is how a vicious cycle starts. Fear builds into itself, people grow distant. Since the dawn of human consciousness, it's become an eternal decline that no one can explain." I informed Molly.
Yuri pawed my leg lazily, claws extended out, 'Get to the point.'
"This is the inevitable result: A society conditioned to believe that 'it can't happen to me or anyone around me. And if it does happen, then I'll make someone else pay if I get no answers. No justice, except my own.'"
I shrugged, "There are no easy-to-reach escape goats when death by invisible monster is a common occurrence. The only viable option, for a society that feels constantly, unknowingly victimized, is to push those in relation to the victims into the spotlight. Gazing eyes targeting in and pushing toward center-stage the victims' family members, who themselves can provide no answers.
"Give up the ones already within the peripheral sphere of the victims. Nature will sort things out. Let them who bear the most responsibility decide how to figure out the situation, and if they cannot, let them drown so that the masses may have a piece of mind for wasting all of their efforts. Instead, They become the proxy by which others can force the issue on, and thus their own security through majority numbers. A frightening vindication takes hold in the absence of justice."
Molly still hasn't said anything, but I almost wished she asked, 'What about the violent criminals? Can't everyone just use that as their scapegoat?'
I gave her a deadpan, "Violent criminals? What is this, America? We barely have that here, and the times that we do is so small compared to the greater population that it couldn't account for everytime a Witch killed someone through suicide. And it's called an 'escape goat, please.'"
'That's incorrect. The original word is scapegoat, a reference to-' Yuri tried, but I didn't let her.
I shook my head, pink hair flying, "No, no, no. It's not scraping on by, it's literally in prison by false accusation! How else is the goat supposed to escape?"
'But-'
"Shhhh…" I gently raised my finger and pressed it to Yuri's lips.
Other than an attempt to chomp on my bandaids, the cat had no response to this, so I continued.
I felt the expansion and contraction of my lungs as I breathed out, "And it's all like this. Everywhere, all over Japan and likely the world, people don't want to deal with the dark reality that we live in. Most just try to forget. Compartmentalize. Break away from the sad truth that there are no answers to many of these unknowable, unsolvable cases."
Or, as often happens, they retaliate in the only way they know how and Kyubey shuts it down, but that goes unsaid.
Yuri yawned as if to say to me, 'I asked how you are doing, not for the societal decline of our great nation. Please stop.'
"Think of your cousin or sister- maybe even your twin." I ignored her, before realizing something important.
"Actually, what is your relationship here anyway? I thought you two were sisters…" I glanced curiously at Molly, then Yuri, the latter of which proceeded to slowly blink a couple of times at me. Right, makes sense.
I continued on like I didn't just ask two cats their relationship status.
"Your loved one disappears." I said factually.
"No one has any clue what happened to them. Then the authorities find the body, or parts of one, and identify it as belonging to your loved one. Or in the worst case scenario: They don't come up to you with any information at all. 'Too much goes unnoticed,' they say. The searches go on for days, then a few weeks, until the case is finally dropped, because there's already several new cases swimming at the door."
A big dusty truck rolled by, narrowly missing me by just a few feet when it swiveled onto the opposite side of the road from me. I pay only half a mind to the fact that its presence would've been considered odd, had I not been mentally preparing myself for my next act.
I have both cat's rapt attention now as my brow narrows, my body getting into character. I pretend like I'm Homura scolding Madoka.
"However, if you so foolishly decide to continue to pester the police, or even take up the mantle of responsibility by yourself, then you'll be doomed from the start. No one has time to work on a deadend and others will slowly start to admonish you for going after a lost cause. No one knows, and no one else will, however you don't know that. This won't go away until you see it to the end, because that's simply not-"
Yuri sneezed, the tiniest bits of quality phlegm shot into my face.
I tasted kitty nostrils on my lips, the smell not too dissimilar to what I imagined all nostrils to smell like, except it had an additional salty texture to it, with a slimy consistency that wasn't all too dissimilar to jelly. Who knew or wanted to care about that though?
I just had to record all of the information of this current experience, while I was frozen in surprise. The biological processes of this body still even to this day continue to amaze me as I felt it automatically applied into hard memory without my consent. The human body was designed to remember a negative experience over a positive one; when confronted by both, it will choose to remember the former. The psychosomatic nature of humanity was not to be taken lightly, as it amplified the shock in my mind- so that when it would suddenly and inevitably return to me without warning at a later date, I knew that I would feel like I was re-experiencing the full feline nasal exhaust special for the first time again. Like Satan herself was making sure I wouldn't forget.
What should've been simply a nice morning with my not-pet kitties, ended up with me feeling disgusted and gross.
I didn't know for sure if it was a deliberate attempt at sabotaging me, or because my Homura impression was that bad that the cat had to resort to biological weapons. This was a betrayal of trust…
Then my brain caught up to me.
Foreign pathogens! Bacteria! Goddesses, no! My mouth was open!
Close eyes. Try not to be too upset… Inhale. Exhale.
'How do you make it seem so easy?' The thoughts came unbidden, although I had no idea who they were directed towards. An image of raven-black hair came to mind.
The convenient handkerchief that I used to wipe away the mucus and tears came out of nowhere.
Once I was done, I addressed the situation calmly, "Okay, first off. Yuri, could you please cover your mouth next time? Second, we are going to get you checked, that isn't normal for a cat." They're going to be booty-prodding you so hard, I'll almost feel bad…
Yuri gave me a pointed glare.
"...Sorry. I forgot you don't have hands."
The cat's eyes grew with such an intensity that I felt as if I would die within a few moments if I didn't give in to her demand, 'We aren't going for a check up, human.'
I gave her a glare, "No butts! I mean! You must have caught something!"
I winced as Yuri hopped off, claws ripping into my flesh before she dismounted. The black cat simply walked away without looking back, leaving me alone with her catfriend.
My eyes followed as the little Queen began running off like she was physically discomforted by being near me. It hurt almost as much as the pain in my calves.
"...She's just an animal. I suppose it doesn't really matter anyway. Now, where was I…" I ignored the feeling of abandonment. I still had Molly, right?
I cleared my throat, "A Witch's barrier is its own pocket dimension and will trap anything that gets in. Anything that gets left behind at the scene is almost certainly the left over results of one of three things: One, a familiar who escaped the barrier and began killing. Two, a suicide. Or three, an inexplicably dead girl. You don't know any of this; it's all effectively the same thing no matter your specific case.
"You can't trust the authorities anymore. You take everything into your own hands and search everywhere for another possibility. You'd have to hope for a miracle to find out who did it, but now there's a real risk to you. A family's reputation can get tarnished after the resources used in the searches inevitably go to waste. Do anymore than necessary in your quest and you will be vilified. The only ones who care to continue to work on a missing person's case months later are those who have an emotional investment in them. Their efforts to coordinate with other like-minded groups fail often due to loss of hope or backlash for not moving on. Sometimes, those who search for the missing become missing themselves.
"Multiply this situation a thousand, million times over the course of human history and you'll find that many, many other people, living and dead, were just as desperate as you are to discover the truth behind why your loved one was taken from you."
I glanced up at the sky, at the clouds.
"What's left for you? What do you do? What choice is there to deal with these lasting emotions?" I let my words hang, then looked down at the cats, "Any idea what to do?"
I knew that there was a built-in solution for pent-up negative emotions. The quick and easy fallback, the natural metabolic emotional reaction to reconcile your loss is to get angry. Outsiders and despised groups. Disliked coworkers and those who do not fit the mold. Those who lose the people closest to them inevitably become victims themselves in more ways than one.
What does it matter to ruin someone else's life if you can manage to convince yourself that they had done something wrong? If you don't do something, you will be in the same position that those clueless and lost are in.
There are help groups, those who work on the emotions together to let go, but it's essentially the same as giving up. It treats the symptoms and it will never fix the root of the problem. Nobody really believes that suicide would cause so many to want to leave their loved ones. To encourage otherwise seems like another way of denouncing, forgetting, letting the victims die once more.
So… this burning anger won't go away and the sadness never seems to stop…
Blame someone else who seems justifiable enough in your eyes, if you want to believe. You're not alone either, and none of you really had a choice to begin with. Hundreds had gone through similar stories and hundreds more felt that disgruntled frustration- that need to find the one person or thing responsible and make them pay, even if they have to 'find' who did it by making someone responsible. All the while, those rampant emotions run along silken strings, pulling along the crowds, cultivating dependencies toward mob mentalities so that when they inevitably bring themselves to despair knowing that they had damned an innocent in their vengeful crusade, the ending feast would grow ever sweeter.
Witches gorged themselves on the negative emotions of humans, with the numerically and more potent feasts granting greater levels of grief collection, and thus leading to stronger Witches.
If you want the grief of love to mean something, then you must close your heart off to the pain of others. Including quite possibly yourself. This is what it means to live inside of the kind of abusive system that Kyubey ignorantly champions. You become an abuser yourself or you struggle to maintain your independence.
I didn't explain any of this to Molly. It's the closest in general that I think most non-magical girl people could relate to, and it should've been where the story ends. It doesn't end here.
"Since people are too afraid to make more than superficial connections, willing parental guardians are rare. An entire demographic of orphaned children, who have lost their parents to the direct and indirect influence of Witches, never find the love, attention, and adult commitment necessary to grow into well-adjusted adults themselves. They are left emotionally stunted at best.
"Some even think it's better not to create social or emotional attachments and so the government rewards them by offering them free income and housing. An act of desperation to secure the population's future generations. But they're horribly planned and badly thought out in important details, granting teens their own spacious living arrangements without any real form of support. Others see other people living in isolation, never leaving for anything other than work or food, and wonder what the ideal really is. They don't see the cage, so they assume nothing wrong in their world.
My voice grew mellow, "But all of this allows for a state of affairs that's only barely enough to exist."
Molly stared at me, an indecipherable expression in her fuzzy face. She leaned into my hand as I began rubbing her chin.
"Everyone has felt loss, even secondhand. Each human being has felt this sense of shared victimhood. That feeling that something has been irrevocably taken away from you or someone you know. Very few go without desperately desiring, wanting to believe, wishing for a better tomorrow." I smiled, finishing by patting her small head, "I'm glad you little kitties have it kinder, by comparison."
By accident or by design, all of these systems help to create those young girls who would be most vulnerable to the manipulations of a wish-granting magical creature. Girls contract with Kyubey, becoming Magical girls, who themselves eventually become Witches. Witches eat people, who grow angry and frustrated with each other, their governments, and the lack of answers. Humans everywhere funnel their personal grief into places where unseen predators of the night can scoop them up for a snack, who themselves become condensed meals to a magical girl. And an uncaring, emotionless monster that cared little for how any of these internal mechanisms of this vast machine actually worked, was willing to give up absolutely nothing, all for the chance to start ruining themselves over an energy quota.
No one is happy. Everyone is secretly lonely and afraid. But it's all anyone can do to continue living. That's all anyone has known about what it means to live.
There is just nothing to understand. No evidence to grasp means that a logical, fair conclusion cannot be achieved. Any possibility of concluding the truth of the matter had vanished the moment Kyubey decided behind the scenes that the evidence is too dangerous to let be, so he intervenes in favor of an ignorant population.
Repression. Self-subjugation. Pacification. Sociocide.
This is the true tragedy of Kyubey's manipulations: This world of many, where humanity cannot truly bond, self-respect, be honest, love, or most of all, hope.
I looked into Molly's eyes and declared, "This world, every world, needs the opportunity to hope and have that hope granted. It needs a destiny unbound by the restrictions of Kyubey's creation. It needs…"
The translation of thought to spoken word trailed off. I still don't know how I can solve anything. I can't make Kyubey not exist. I can't prevent him from noticing the Earth or else risk him not uplifting humanity. My self-imposed mission of figuring out an answer only got this far before I found myself having to question if it's not Kyubey, but the humans themselves that were at fault.
I sighed. Molly leaped off my lap as soon as I rose up from the ground to begin my walk.
Despite as much as I might want to, despite the appeal of the idea that erasing all emotions from humans might make them look unusable to Kyubey, and thus might make him actually leave the planet… No, there had to be another way that didn't lead to directly changing human nature.
Madoka wouldn't want that, and by proxy, neither would Homura. But still, I need to do what could possibly go against their interests. If it's in service of a greater good to defeat a greater evil, then I can only do what I must to remove Kyubey from the equation. Without Kyubey, there'd be no witches or unnatural deaths, and thus, no reason for Madoka or Homura to become the Law of Cycles and Demon of Unreality.
And he's the main overall problem, isn't it?
That… thing exists on practically every multiversal level of existence, and the reason why he does anything at all has nothing to do with pragmatic morality. He doesn't care about preventing entropy from destroying the universe he lives in -that is merely a side-effect of his actual goal. Certainly, new galaxies have been created by him and he has uplifted countless civilizations in his long existence, but neither solve the true issue. And no solution ever will be made, by him or any other being.
Because the reality of the matter is that Kyubey only wants to feed himself. He doesn't want to die, but his body is in a constant state of death. Expanding, slowly eroding away to nothing through the near unstoppable force that is time and energy loss.
Kyubey is a part of the fabric of reality. Kyubey is the universe itself. And Kyubey is brother to other Kyubey, in other universes.
Conceptual power or not, nobody would ever want or be able or to remove him, let alone all of them, and he knows it. That's why he never needs to lie or tell the entirety of his deals. He has no concept of how much information is enough information because he already knows everything about himself, and for him alone, that is enough. Humans are nothing more than the tiniest cattle on just one of many finte, innumerable, but infinitesimally irrelevant worlds located within him. The fact that some part of humanity exists outside of his universe is the only reason he cared about them at all, because he saw a resource that could sate his unending appetite.
The only person who ever had the necessary strength of will and circumstances to change this status quo of the multiverse, and directly take power away from Kyubey, was…
'Ah! I see something else now. Maybe I got it all wrong, taking human emotion as my focus of study…? Maybe if I -yes! That might just work! I'm thinking, Homura!' I thought happily, while jumping up and down excitedly, flailing arms.
Perhaps someday, in the not too distant future, I'll make my own wish to save them -my Homura, the original Madoka, all Magical girls and all humans. For all of my fellow Wraiths… I want to shape the destiny of this and all universes, I want to restore the fate of humanity, I want to free everyone and break the shackles of curses and miracles!
No matter what, I'll make it happen.
Because I exist... To end the suffering of existence itself.
