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Months have passed and she still can’t shake the tradition. Every Sunday without fail, Kyoko wakes up before the dawn, the routine engraved too deeply into her body to be smoothed out with time. The warmth her two layers of thick, itchy comforters affords her is at least new.
It doesn’t matter how late she sleeps the night before, how many fights prior have made her muscles ache and her bones grow weary. She wakes up at 4:30 on the dot every time, the internal clock branded into her just like every other part of her body.
She can itch and scratch and bite at it but it remains all the same.
There is one of those ratty, King James Versions of the Bible tucked into the top drawer of the hotel she’s chosen to post up at. The gold emblazoned on the cover is tacky and the print is filled with more facetious words and turns of phrases than anyone could ever hope to unravel but she lets her fingers ghost across the cover, resting on the edge of a corner.
The prayer leaves her thoughts out of habit more than anything else and she only manages to stop it on the third line. Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be–
She slams the drawer shut, blatantly ignoring the violent screech it lets loose as it closes. Kyoko reaches for the crumpled paper bag on her nightstand instead, unrolling the top until she can jam her hand inside.
She withdraws one bruised apple and frowns down at it, at the way her affection shines through the affliction.
The apple and Eve. Yet another story she can never escape.
Kyoko wipes a patch of the rosy-red skin with her sleeve and sinks her teeth into the flesh until the pain shoots through her gums and the juice spills out of her mouth.
She walks the city at dawn. The streets are different while they sleep, littered with forgotten stalls and loosely nailed-down crates.
Occasionally, there will be a fight to draw her attention away from her perusing. Occasionally, there will be a blip of violence to interrupt her routine and she will revel in the difference. She will swing her spear, feel the weight of every prattled word, every sermon in the line of her shoulders.
(And praying to ward off demons, swinging blades to fight off witches–is there really any difference in the daylight?)
She collects the grief seed and wayward groceries all in one motion.
Kyoko has spent enough of her life giving. She has spent enough of her life corralled into a narrative of servitude to bother anymore with asking.
If she is fast and quick about it, no one is the wiser. And who is there really to hold her accountable for her sins?
Sakura Kyoko knows no other way to love than with her whole body and soul. To love in a way that chews her up from the inside out, burns a little hole in the center of her heart and consumes and consumes until she has nothing left to give.
Kyoko will come to love three times in her life. The first one will mold her, the second one will harden her and the third will break her.
She wonders if an all-consuming love is a byproduct or mere coincidence of living your whole life in servitude.
Pink on pink on pink.
She sees Momo reaching out for her, eyes crusted over with sleep. Her fingers, stump and short, ball into a fist by her ear.
“I don’t want to go,” she huffs, cheeks turning rosy red. Kyoko pinches one for the fun of it and Momo lets her, her frown chasing after her fingers. “It’s long and boring.”
Kyoko does not know what she is talking about. She has always loved the sound of her father’s voice, echoing even in an empty sanctuary. She has always loved the light in his eyes, the way his syllables, brimming with passion and good and joy, seem on the brink of spilling over.
(And it must run in the family. To love and love and love with all your body and soul that when you lose it, it consumes you in turn, engulfs you wholly in its emptiness in the same way the love fills you from the bottom up.)
“Fine,” she says, tugging her sister forwards. “It can get a little bit long. But if you come, I promise I’ll buy you something sweet–as long as you don’t tell Otou-san and Okaa-san. ”
(And the aching sweet tooth, that must be another thing that runs in the family.)
Momo nods vigorously at the offer, curling her fingers into the meat of Kyoko’s palm.
They file into their car that runs more on luck than anything else. It takes two tries to slam the trunk shut, still filled with addendums to the Bible that her father had printed out months ago. The binding is crooked from where her mother had stitched the pages together herself.
The AC in the car doesn’t work in summer and the radio only plays one staticky station. The belt has to be jury-rigged over the peeling car seat and Kyoko gives Momo one cursory pat before sliding over into the space next to her, her giggle roaring in her ears.
“You promise?” Momo asks her, wiggling one fat pinky at her. Kyoko loops it through her own, grinning.
“I promise,” she replies and Momo’s flush against the dawn is beautiful.
Pink on pink on pink.
The strawberry pocky is on sale today–two for five–and she stalks straight past it.
Tomoe Mami is everything good and kind left in the world and she meets her at the peak of her life.
She is patient where Kyoko is restless, forgiving where Kyoko is stubborn, all rounded corners and soft lines compared to Kyoko’s bold colors and rough edges.
She doesn’t mind the way Kyoko fills the silence with endless prattle–stories about a new family that’s joined their church, a recap of her father’s latest sermon, a shyly-offered wooden cross on a chain and the lecture that accompanies it.
Momo loves Mami too and she wonders if it’s something in the pattern of their names or something just about Mami, the way she manages to draw everyone into her warmth like a soft ray of sunshine.
Kyoko only talks to her once after The Incident–to tell her to kindly fuck off and die –and then never again.
She hears of her death from Kyubey with a practiced smile plastered onto her lips, head tossed carelessly back into the wind.
Despite everything, Sakura Kyoko is still her father’s daughter. She offers up a prayer for her soul before she manages to catch it by the tail end and squeeze the life out of it with her own disbelief.
The third and final time Kyoko loves is when her heart has shriveled down to the size of a raisin. She has seen all the world has to offer and then some, staring as the girl she knew and loved twists and contorts into a demon before her eyes.
The building collapses around her as she feels the love dig its claws into the flesh of her neck and takes what little she has left to give.
She doesn’t burn a house down or drag the few people around her–bound by loose morals and oppressive affection–with her to her grave. Madoka blinks back at her blankly and she waves her spear in the air to snap her back to reality.
“Go!” she spits in the face of Sodom and Gomorrah to Lot and her pitiful crew.
(And she always hated that story, laughed, even, at the ridiculousness of it all.
“Why did she turn around?” she asked on her father’s lap, fingers small enough to trace the words, the colors on the book washed out from overuse. “Why did she look back?”
Her father’s expression shifted, his cheeks smoothed. Something stern rippled through his face and left behind scars.
“Because her heart was full of sin and greed,” he said finally. “Because she loved something else more than God.”)
And she may be her father’s daughter, may be built of false prophecies and half-baked confessions but Kyoko, at least, has the decency to bear the burden of her love alone. She rips her gaze from Madoka and Homura’s retreating back, fingers interlaced together, and swings her spear for the final and last time.
Ah, she thinks, staring the blazing fury of her own love, her own foolishness in the face.
I am no better than Lot’s wife.
And a piano isn’t an organ but when Sayaka stoops down to cup her in her hand, a cacophony of off-key notes swallowing the silence, it reminds her of when the church bells ring.