Title: one day more
Fandom: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika/Les Mis
Rating: G
Length: 455
Content notes: AU with slightly off-from-canon timing
Summary: Kyubey hunts down another contract.




It was quite by chance that they met as they did, on an empty, smoke-filled street. To be sure, Paris in its entire was an excellent prospect for his business - full of oppression, hatred, and broken girls grown up in bleak deprivation - but he had not expected one so perfect for his purposes to show herself so immediately, just when he had need of her. An excellent coincidence.

She walked quickly, her head down against the slight drizzle that was beginning to fall. The rain did much to cover the wet outlines of her footprints and hide the dark stain growing on her too-large greatcoat, but he noted them anyway and, satisfied, felt that he could already add her tally to his quota.

Skipping ahead of her a bit, almost to the cross-street where the barricade had been raised, he stepped out to wait. There was a soldier's corpse lying near the edge of the road, raised out of the muck of the gutter, and he lighted on it gracefully, tucking up his tail to keep it clean as he sat. She would not be long.

And indeed she was not. The corpse gave her no pause, as he had thought - but he did. She hesitated slightly in her errand, footsteps drawing to a slow halt, and turned to look at him fully.

Hello, he said.

She looked about her briefly, as the girls almost always did, but her eyes fixed on him again faster than most. Perhaps, despite the despair she held clutched to her like a second coat, she might last longer than he had initially thought. All the better.

"So I am imagining cats talking to me," she said to herself, with a noise halfway between laugh and cough, then bit her lip, pressed her free hand more tightly to her chest and, wincing, turned to continue on in her path. "There is no time."

There will be time, he said, if you make a contract with me.

She had not quite taken a step; beneath her feet, the stones of the street were growing wet with more than water. "And now they sound like lawyers. Am I already dead?"

It would do. He leapt from the body over the worst of the muck and crossed closer to her until she glanced back at him. Her dark eyes widened as she got a better look at him and finally, quite obviously, realized he was no cat. If you swear to fight for me, I can give you anything.

She stood unmoving a second longer, then slowly, carefully knelt down to peer at him more closely, almost as if she thought she knew him. "...M'sieur Marius?"

If that's what you wish for, Éponine!