One Day
Rating: PG
Spoilers: For the second season.
Notes: This is about five months too early . . . Homura does that brooding thing. *shrug* Infer what you will.
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He liked to go out into the fields to brood because there was no one else there. It really wasn't conducive to brooding, those fields of wild flowers. But it helped to pass the time all these years . . .
It was said that one day in Heaven was equivalent to a year on the Earth. It *could* be true.
Time moved differently here.
Here in Heaven. With its celestial court and the trappings of paradise.
It was a marvellous thing, was it not? Endless fields of pastel-coloured flowers, eternally in bloom. Never night. Never a storm or a drought to mar the endless summer. And so the celestials could look down at the mortals on Earth and think about how lucky they were that they lived in a safe, comfortable Heaven without change.
Bah.
At least the mortals had their own pitiful degree of freedom, constrained and limited as they were.
Homura had heard that that mortals set aside a certain day for lovers. It was based on a quaint legend about a human cowherd and a celestial weaving maiden who had fallen in love. Naturally, that sort of relationship was forbidden and the lovers were separated.
Other less romantic versions implied that that relationship was a shotgun marriage between a heavenly maiden and a cowherd who had seen her naked while bathing.
And there was the one about the pair of celestial functionaries who got introduced and fell so much in love that they neglected their duties.
One thing the stories were very clear about was the eventual separation of the lovers and the bridge of sympathetic magpies.
Why *magpies*? he had wondered, but that was not the point of the story.
Magpies, moved by the sad tale, gathered to form a bridge with their wings so that the lovers could meet once a year.
Of course it was a silly story. There were no exceptions and no one-day-only concessions in Heaven. And anyone expecting the Powers That Be to be moved by love would be in for a severe disappointment.
There was no bridge of overly romantic birds for heavenly civil servants who were killers and none for those who had been cast into the mortal world, fated to live and die repeated as the Wheel of Life ground on.
But then . . . Hypothetically speaking, if the legendary bridge did exist, one day in a year would be grossly unfair to the mortal half of the pair. Or would it?
And one day was such a short time. How could anyone put up with that? *He* certainly wouldn't.
But hadn't it been a day in *Heaven* in the stories? Wasn't that a technical loophole in the heavenly decree?
So perhaps to those lovers, one moment on an imaginary bridge might seem longer than a day . . .
Homura shook off that train of thought. Frivolous. Impossible.
There was no such thing as one day like that in Heaven or on Earth. Not for him or anyone else.