Tangled Regrets – Chapter 10 – No Longer Fated

Madoka’s lips brush against mine with a kiss so tender it’s like a spring breeze flitting by.

Then her hand cups my cheek, and the heat is a summer afternoon, the sun drifting to evening.

Then I open my eyes and look at entrancing pink. And there are no seasons, just an eternal moment.

“I wanted to wait,” she whispers, her breath both soothing and scalding on lips she just wettened.

“Wait?” I ask. Because I can’t do anything else as long as her gaze holds me in place beneath a moon brighter than I could ever see.

“That was the plan, I think,” she almost fidgets, her body moving just a tiny bit before going back to how she was before, to cupping my cheek and refusing to let go. “I wanted to let you do this at your own pace, to let you heal and ask more of me as you felt comfortable doing so.”

I remember another Homura. A desperate, frantic one scrambling for any sign of the naked trust and affection that made her start down a road with no end in sight. A Homura who told Madoka how gross she must be to her, who wavered and doubted the only thing a Homura must never doubt: Madoka’s kindness.

I know what that Homura would hear in these words. The rejection, hurt, and abandonment she would feel.

That… That Homura was wrong. Madoka’s shown me.

So I look into searching pink and allow her to seek whatever it is she wants to find.

“Plans… It took too long for them to go the way they were meant to. Too many things that happened and shouldn’t have happened, too many people hurt that I couldn’t save if I wanted the world to be what it is if I wanted hope to win in the end. I sometimes wondered if I could have endured a few more worlds, a few more battles just to have that bit more power and make this into a better world than it is.

“Then I always remembered I wasn’t the one paying that price, and I felt guilty, and awful, and…”

She hugs me, her body pressed against mine, her mouth right against my ear.

“You must think I am so gross…” she whispers right through me.

And I hug her with as much strength as this world lets me, not even caring about the gasp she lets out when her body empties itself of the air we aren’t really breathing.

“Never,” I tell her with the tone I always thought I would say ‘forever.’

She chuckles.

Her hand trails down my straight hair.

Her breathing warms my ear.

And her scent fills my world.

“See, Homura? That’s… that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. You could never be anything like that to me. You could never be anything other than the beautiful, lonely, brave girl who kept fighting for me over and over again. You could never be anything other than… the girl I was captivated by. Inspired by. Fascinated by.

“The girl I fell in love with.”

I clench my eyes shut, the words almost painful to hear.

She’s told me. She’s explained how she sees me and why. And there’s a part of me that’s desperately relieved, another that’s… happy, because there’s no better word for the feeling of joy like a bird frantically flapping its wings inside my chest.

But another… Another part is the wrong Homura. The one who clung to her as she berated herself as she allowed grief, pain, and loneliness to pour out in a rambling diatribe. The one who had lost faith in Madoka being able to love her.

And I know that part is wrong. That Homura is wrong.

But she’s the latest one, and I don’t know how to get rid of her.

Madoka keeps clinging to me, the heat of her body even more apparent in the slight chill of this moonlit night, and she seems to be waiting for something.

I think she doesn’t find it, because she sighs.

“That was the plan, you know? To tell you this as many times as it took, to let you heal over a lifetime if that was what you needed. To be there for you, waiting.

“But that plan was made by a goddess, and I am… me.”

Madoka stops balancing on the tip of her toes, letting her heels back into dew-covered grass, into glinting silver swaying with the breeze that ebbs and wanes with her breathing.

I look once more into searching pink, but now it seems like she’s not so much trying to find something inside me as pushing something in.

“That plan was fate. And fate is over.”

I blink, unshed tears still held back as I try to understand what she’s telling me.

And the hand gently stroking my hair goes to my nape.

She drags me down, my neck craning, my knees bending slightly as Madoka makes me kiss her, as our lips meet and what starts as soft caress turns insistent, our chests pushing together in a way that makes me far too aware of the frills she wears in this place as they add texture and roughness to her softest part pressing against mine.

She half turns, and I follow, far too late to realize that the twist of her body means she ends up holding me, one hand on my nape and another on my lower back as she slows my fall to soft, lush grass.

I feel cold dewdrops penetrating the fabric of my blouse, my skirt, my stockings. I feel each distinct spot of thrilling ice touching me as my body heats up when Madoka straddles me, her hair that bit longer that makes her twin tails fall in pink curtains separating the two of us from the world that surrounds us. The air between us fills with the touch of lavender over sun-kissed earth that is her scent. Not the scent of her magic that overpowers all else in this place; no, this is the scent of her body, of her hair, a fragrance I learned what may have been decades ago and never forgot.

Then I see her eyes looking down at me, and the spell is finished: my world is Madoka.

Except I am wrong. Because she speaks, and both the sound of her voice and the words make it so what I was feeling a moment before is but a pale reflection, a mirage, of what was to come:

“The goddess wanted to wait. I am… only human, Homura. I need you. I can’t wait anymore.”

Madoka drops down on top of me, the weight of her body pressing on my chest and belly, the heat of her thighs surrounding mine, her lips taking mine.

Her tongue presses, not insistently, but also not expecting anything other than to be granted entrance. Because she’s Madoka, and I am Homura, and in what world could the latter deny the former?

I moan, a short, almost whimpering sound that gets devoured by Madoka as her tongue slowly goes over mine before circling, reaching below, coaxing me up and inside her.

My eyes are shut, unable to take the vision of her face on top of everything else, on top of her heat, her touch, her sweet taste. I just follow her lead, her unstated instructions, as she takes from me what would be our third kiss—and three is a magic number, an important one, but that magic is far too weak compared to what Madoka is weaving in and through me, compared to the way she takes my soul and shapes it with tender touches, with longing sighs, with warmth I had given up on.

With the full weight of her hope.

Hope for a better future, a better world, even a better past.

Hope… for me.

I can’t help it: I cry.

The emotions overwhelm me. The surge of desperate longing, the shattering of the resignation damming up every tear-stained, bright and cheerful memory, the cracking determination to push forward no matter what finally confronted with a reason to stop, to yield.

Madoka’s hands grab my cheeks, and she backs away for but a moment, a moment that’s enough to send me reeling with the feeling of her absence before she dives back in and licks my tears with delicate, gentle, short movements.

I blink, my eyes blurry, and she smiles back at me.

“It’s okay. Everything’s okay. I love you. We’re together. We’ll always be.”

My hands raise of their own volition, the face on top of mine impossible to resist, and I cup her cheeks before dragging the girl who will always be a goddess to me down to imperfect, broken, too human Homura Akemi.

And I kiss her.

No, I devour her.

There’s a trace of salt on her lips, a trace of my tears, but I wash it away as something that had been holding me back (together) finally breaks, and I let my yearning, my thirst, my hunger show.

I let Madoka see this one part of me I never showed her, the part that craved not just her gentle smile, not just the warmth of someone better than I could ever be, not just… not just the idea of Madoka.

But her.

The graceful curves, the bright lips, the flashing hair. The stretch of skin showing between the hem of her skirt and the top of her white stockings, the way her bust raises when she takes a deep breath and puffs out her cheeks, the way her backside pushes out her skirt when she cheerfully bounces in place, the…

I love Madoka. No, I worship Madoka. And that’s all right, even if I am so far below her, she shouldn’t have ever noticed.

But I also lusted after her, spent too many lonely nights consumed by touches I imagined to be hers, and that… that was too shameful to—

Madoka moans.

She throws her head back, but her fingers tangle through my hair and drag me up, placing my lips against her neck, demanding I continue what I was doing, telling me to keep devouring her.

So, with the last thing that could’ve held me back finally removed, with Madoka’s disapproval absent, I open my mouth and take her.

My lips close and suckle around a beating vein, the very tip of my canines grazing against it as she shivers, and my hands travel from the cheeks to her nape and the accommodating curve of her lower back.

But that’s not enough. Even if it is for me, even if I could spend years just delighting on the taste of her skin on the pointed tip of my tongue as I trace, over and over again, an elongated circle. I could be happy just with the pressure of her body on mine. I could die in ecstasy just at a single of the sweet moans I can’t believe I’m making her let out.

It’s not enough for Madoka.

She tilts her hip forward, and I can feel even more heat than that the rest of her body surrounds me with. I can feel the warmth at her core reaching out to mine. I can feel how she presses against me, almost rubbing in a way that makes me close my eyes and suck that much harder on her neck as she lets out a gasp that raises goosebumps all over my forearms.

Then she reaches back and grabs the hand at her back and drags it down to the soft curve I never dared hope would be in my reach.

“Touch me… Homura, I want you to touch me…”

I feel dizzy, the ground swaying beneath me, but that doesn’t stop me from tightening my fingers against yielding flesh.

“Hah! Yes, please… please take more of me. Take as much as you want.”

I go from her nape to her scalp and drag her lips back to mine. Because if she says one more thing, I may faint, and I couldn’t forgive the Homura who would take my place in a frenzy of no longer held back yearning for what she would do.

But Madoka isn’t satisfied with that. She has to push, to make me give ground with every second outside a time I can no longer control, because as I suck her tongue into my mouth, as I surround it with my lips, spiral around it, she shifts on top of me, and one of her legs goes between mine and presses down, and I see white—

I am on top of Madoka. I am once again biting down on the side of her neck, and a traitorous, blasphemous hand is grabbing her right breast, feeling the soft flesh beneath silky fabric. And Madoka’s hands, both of them, are grabbing my… my other cheeks, and the feeling leaves me breathless as waves of sensation keep crashing up and within from where her fingers are buried beneath my skirt, her palms warming me through the pantyhose, all traces of cold, wet dew forgotten as I burn at her touch.

I throw my head back and howl a moan I can no longer contain as she tears my pantyhose to shreds.

“I am… I am not the goddess, Homura. I am me. Just me. Childish, imperfect, immature me. And I want you to want me. I want you to take me. I want to show you I am in your reach and will always be.”

I look down, incredulous at the words I would strike any other for. At Madoka denying Madoka.

Except she isn’t, and I know, I know that she’s the girl I first met, the carelessly compassionate girl who would throw away a world-changing wish to heal a stray cat.

That’s who I fell for. The one I came back for.

That’s who she still is, even after all that happened, all that she remembers, all that she went through.

The goddess… That was something I built in my mind over countless lives thrown away in her name.

It’s not something she wants.

Not something she chose.

So I am the blasphemous one, the one still pushing that image on her even as she has done everything in her divine power to be something other.

And… Part of it is a sacrifice, I think, because I witnessed a divine spirit laughing with unfettered joy as she departed to dance between the stars.

But… But she’s gentle, caring, loving Madoka. And even if I wasn’t here, even if the love she says she feels for me was a lie, she wouldn’t have abandoned her mother, her brother, her father, her friends.

Madoka’s power is hope, and hope is nothing but love yet to be realized. How cruel would it be to separate her from the ones she feels so much for?

“You don’t have to do this. Not with me. I would be happy just watching you be happy. I would drink your joy, would burn your smile in my heart without you having to do this with somebody who—” I try to tell her how I feel, the truth I have found.

She rips my blouse open.

My cheeks burn as Madoka looks defiantly up at me, a hint of anger burning in pink.

“I want you. I mended worlds for you. I stayed for you. And you want me… don’t you, Homura?”

Her voice wavers on my name, and something bursts in my chest.

“Too much. I want you too much,” I whisper with a barely repressed shiver.

And dive down.

To warm, soft lips. To a yielding body. To her fingers sinking into my bare breasts and exposed ass.

She moans into my mouth, and I answer in kind.

Then I roll to the side, fresh dew once more lancing through me with countless icy spots, and Madoka is on top of me, her flushed cheeks beneath lidded eyes telling me how much she’s fixated on my bare breasts, my nipples answering to the touch of her heated gaze. And I unbutton her dress.

It takes effort. My fingers tremble at my daring every time one of the ivory pieces slide through the slit in unsullied silk, but with every one of them, a bit more of Madoka is exposed, a thin line of skin widening ever so slightly as I go from the top of the square cleavage to between her breasts, to below them…

I am mesmerized by it, by the smooth, resplendent stretch of skin between her breasts framed by shimmering, creamy fabric. Then Madoka gently takes my hands and lowers them as she straightens, her body perpendicular to mine.

And she undoes the next button.

She’s smiling. Shyly, hesitating, but she sees something in my eyes that makes the smile widen in surety, that glint of determination I so adore (even as it frustrated me to no end again and again) shining as she keeps undoing one after another, the line of almost glowing skin stretching to show me her navel, the spot of shadow capturing my attention so I don’t notice when she stops, when the last button is undone.

And then she pauses, waiting for me to look up once again into warm pink that wavers even as it glints.

And she lets go.

The flaps of silk hang loosely from the point where they meet her puffy, short sleeves.

And I see Madoka’s breasts for the first time.

They sit higher than my own, a gentle, upward slope culminating in rosy nipples surrounded by gooseflesh as a cool breeze makes long twin tails sway, errant strands of glossy hair going over them in a translucent caress.

My mouth is suddenly dry, my body rigid.

And them Madoka takes my hands once again and places them on her chest, my palms over rigid nipples, cool skin warming at my touch.

I feel her heart beat.

Her skin is soft and tender. Her breasts pliable beneath fingers I don’t dare move. Her body as beautiful as I ever dared dream.

But her heart beats beneath my touch, and that makes all the difference.

It’s not a steady, calm, slow thing. It’s not waves from an ocean older than time (my time) cresting and waning. It’s not something beyond my scope, beyond what a mortal looking at the divine could ever understand.

It’s a bird frantically flapping its wings against her chest.

I smile. Relieved in a way I don’t dare understand, I smile.

My hands slide just a bit downward, cupping firm breasts just slightly smaller than my own and my fingers find firm nipples that I press on just enough they roll when I brush index and thumb against each other.

Madoka, again, moans, and heat beats inside me at a sound that doesn’t bring me any shame. Just marvel, excitement, and love.

“You know what I feel for you, Madoka. You know my love isn’t healthy. Can’t be,” I tell her as I try to tear my eyes from breasts I shamefully dreamed about for years.

“We are here to heal, Homura. We’ve got our whole lives to do it,” she whispers with that warmth she always put in my name when she knew enough to do so.

When I didn’t push her away because the warmth was too painful.

“You… I want you. Don’t ever doubt that, please, because the last thing I want to do is to hurt you, but I… I don’t think I can hold back if we go any further. I’m greedy, Madoka. I want all of you, and if—”

Two slender hands with deft fingers cover my own and press them against a bust that is marvelously, captivatingly soft. And I look up at eyes that burn with something adjacent to determination.

“I don’t want you to hold back,” she tells me.

I surge up, my lips taking hers once more, the burst of excitement, the thrill of acceptance overriding everything else one last time as I let the Homura who doubts and frets rest.

Madoka’s hands busy themselves taking off my ripped blouse, having to tug insistently so my hands leave her body for the moment it takes to have her pull the sleeves over my arms. My palms feel the ghost of her touch all the while, and I return them to her body immediately, the right to her breast, the left to trace down her spine, and my tongue to her neck as she arches her back at my touch.

She unclasps my skirt, and, somehow, takes off hers.

And then she starts raising up, her hands on my head to keep me kissing her neck as she prepares to do something.

But I’m greedy, selfish, and no longer holding back.

So I deny her that as I twist both our bodies and get Madoka beneath me, her fingers digging just for a moment on my scalp as I leave her neck to pepper her collarbone with feather-soft kisses that manage to be light only because they don’t want to delay on their way to their destination.

I kiss from one shoulder to the other and back to the center, to the small, circular dip where I lick a drop of sweat off before heading down, licking and kissing at the smooth line of skin I was entranced by just moments before. I kiss all over her breastbone before once more reversing my course and kissing up.

Then, when I lay one last, gentle, slow kiss right in the middle of her chest, I head to my right, and I can delay no longer as I take Madoka’s nipple between my lips, my pointed tongue flicking at the rubbery flesh before spiraling around it.

“Homura… That feels so good…”

I vibrate a moan at her words, the verbal acknowledgment enough to make the heat inside me burn in overflowing liquid as her fingers trace lines of fire across my scalp.

And then…

My right hand is cupping her breast, keeping it steady beneath my mouth’s assault, so my left…

I hesitate once more, that troubled Homura rousing from the sleep I vanished her to.

“I… want you so much… Have wanted to feel you for so long…” Madoka says.

And she says it at precisely the right time, with the tone I could never dream of denying, with words tailored so perfectly to what I need to hear that, just for a moment, I doubt Madoka.

Because she says fate’s over, that this wasn’t the plan, that she’s doing this out of her desire, her want for me.

But this moment is so perfect, so intricately beautiful, that I can’t believe the Madoka who laughed water over rocks, wind between leaves, and silence among the stars hasn’t had a hand in crafting it.

Motes of silver slowly rain around us just for a moment, just for a second that I’m too late to stretch into eternity, and I feel the ghost of the other, twin, gentle fingers gently caressing my cheek.

I close my eyes.

Breathe in.

What fills my lungs isn’t moonlight bouncing off dewdrops in a forest that isn’t dreaming at night because it bloomed before dawn existed.

No. What fills my world is the scent that has a hint of lavender over sun-kissed earth, only with a piquant note, with something heavier and sharper being carried off sweat drops over glistening skin.

Because the divine Madoka will always be there, I finally understand. She touched me like she touched no other, and I carry her mark, her blessing.

But the one who stayed behind, the one beneath me, sighing in pleasure and yearning, is the other Madoka.

The one who loved me with a human heart.

My left hand drifts down her body, past her enticing waist that I won’t hesitate to encircle with my fingers anymore, past the slight dip where her belly sinks into her hipline. Past soft, warm, humid hair that feels more like featherdown than anything a regular girl should have.

And then I find her entrance.

Madoka grabs my hair and tilts my head back. Not enough to stop my kiss on her breast, but enough that trembling pink looks straight to and into me.

“Do it, Homura. Take me. Please.”

My middle finger traces over a small, wet, hard bump, and Madoka shivers.

Then I go past and below it, to the wet entrance below, and push inside.

Madoka bites her lip, a low whine emerging from her and vibrating through the chest I still hold in my hand and between my lips, and the heat engulfs my finger.

She’s beautiful.

Her eyes looking at me through barely open slits, the mouth twisted in almost suffering at the intense sensation of having me inside her for the first time, the flush spreading across her nose and over her breasts…

Beautiful.

My lips open, and her breast quivers as it drops down into my hand’s firm grasp, then I crawl over Madoka’s body until my eyes are over hers, until her breath washes over my lips, until scattered pink over lush grass perfectly frames the face of the girl I fell for before I understood what clumsy, lonely, naïve Homura Akemi really felt for gentle, caring, naïve Madoka Kaname.

“I…” I want to tell her something. Something meaningful, something deep that encompasses all that I feel in this moment, all the small Homuras vying for attention as they want to make themselves known to the girl they devoted themselves to.

She cups my cheek, her warm, slender fingers tracing the same pattern ones made of silver moonlight danced across my skin a moment ago.

“No need to rush. We have a lifetime,” she says, that tender smile once more in her face right before she twitches, and I feel her clenching around my finger in a spasm that contorts her face.

And she’s still beautiful. Still breathtakingly so.

“I… don’t know if I’ve thanked you. If I’ve told you how grateful I am—”

“Don’t. That is not what—Homura, don’t move, please!”

I blink in confusion, and she clenches once more around my finger.

Then everything catches up with me.

Madoka, naked below me save for the white, frilly knee socks she wears in this form, her back arched as she pushes her breast against my hold, her sex clamping around my finger even as soft thighs encompass my hand.

Madoka, face consumed by the same lustful yearning I was always ashamed to feel, but somehow still innocent, still pure Madoka.

Madoka, on the verge of coming at my hand.

I dip down, once more biting down on her neck, and my hand gets—not rougher, because even if she asks me for it, I still will hesitate to cross that line, but more forceful. The heel of my palm presses down on her clit with circular motions as my middle finger speeds in and out of her.

Madoka whimpers.

“Homura… This is… I don’t know what to do…”

She sounds lost, adrift.

Without even meaning to, I rub my thighs together, the irregular patches of exposed skin through torn pantyhose wet with my arousal at the girl I love, worship, being on the edge of falling down because of my touch.

The thrill of the blasphemy mixes with the warmth of my devotion, and I bite down harder than I have up till now.

“Homura! Ah! Please!”

She could be asking me to stop. To slow down. To go back to gentler caresses.

She isn’t.

The legs I tried not to admire when she acrobatically jumped through the battlefield clamp down around my hand, and nails too short to hurt dig into my scalp, pulling me to her neck.

Then other fingers grab beneath torn pantyhose, my cheek molding to her touch, deep furrows being carved into me, resonating inside me, making me gasp as my mouth lets go of her for just a moment.

Then, awkwardly, in a bad position to do so, Madoka’s hand reaches over my ass and plunges a finger inside me.

I shiver, my teeth clenched almost painfully as I hear her labored breathing, and I force my own hand not to stop.

My body yields easily to her, barely offering any resistance to a touch I craved again and again, and I feel myself beating around the only intrusion I will ever welcome in my body: that of Madoka’s.

Then she pulls back, and I clench around it, my sex as desperate as I am not to let her go.

And she comes back in.

Her chest is rising and falling beneath my hand, and I can feel the bird getting even more frantic, the fluttering wings as quick as those of the one trapped in my chest.

I pull my finger out of her almost all the way, just the very tip remaining inside wet warmth.

She does the same.

I open my eyes and go from her neck to above her face, to look at Madoka looking up at me, her mouth open in a small ‘o’ that perfectly mirrors my own.

None of us say anything.

Two fingers plunge into two bodies, and two girls in love arch their backs.

We do it again, and again, and again, both of us desperately clinging to one another, both of us overwhelmed by the other’s touch, both of us on the brink of something we never shared, nor will share, with another person.

Madoka’s eyes flutter, I swallow as my breathing gets ever more ragged, and our hands speed up one more time.

Then I drop down on her, my lips taking hers and being taken, our tongues tangling in hunger and yearning, and our fingers buried as far as they will go with the awkward angle as our bodies tremble, as we finally climax at the other’s hand.

My moans mingle with Madoka’s, both of us swallowing them greedily, and the whole world fades as lavender over sun-kissed land carries me away.

***

When I open my eyes, I am lying on a comfortable bed in an old inn’s room I share with my lover and two would-be friends.

Madoka’s hand still holds mine, and I turn to her just as she turns toward me.

Warm, gentle pink twinkles in the almost darkness.

And, without a word, Madoka lifts the covers of her bed and crawls into mine, the two of us shifting on our sides to make room before she takes my lips in a tender kiss that leaves me breathless and light-headed.

I hold her to me, my embrace burying her face on top of my chest, my fingers buried between her tresses.

“I love you,” she whispers.

“Thank you,” I answer.

It’s not what she wants to hear, but it’s what I want to say, and, just this time, I will affront her.

Because I love her too much not to.