Difference between revisions of "Kyouko Sakura"

Note: The second and third portions, "Kyouko, the Girl" and "Kyouko, the Magical Girl" occur simultaneously on the timeline. They’ve been split to reflect both halves of the dual life she was leading as her mundane identity and as a Puella Magi, respectively.

Kyouko, the Original: Kyouko grew up as a preacher’s daughter in the town of Kazamino. Her family’s fate was tied to her father’s fortunes, and the comfort she knew as a small child was whisked away as her father began to stray from the dogma of his faith, preaching new sermons based on new doctrines. When his maverick proselytizing saw him cast out of the church of his creed, he took his message to the streets, desperately searching for congregants amongst the apathetic strangers of the city, even as his wife and two daughters suffered terribly in shared misfortune. Kyouko believed in her father’s sermons because she believed in her father; she always had. But hers was a child’s faith, rooted in an unquestioning acceptance of the wisdom of her parents. Her heart broke as everybody they encountered treated their father like a nuisance or a heretic. Between Kyouko’s emotional turmoil and her unrealized potential, Kyuubey sought her out in this state to offer the power of a Puella Magi, finding her an excellent candidate for his intentions. Kyouko wished that people would listen to her father. It’s true that she thought that she could help make the world a better place in doing so, but in her heart of hearts, she wished as she did in a desperation to spare her father of the brutal downward spiral that he had endured for his beliefs.

Kyouko, the Girl: The very next morning, Kyouko’s father was sought out for his sermons, not by a handful but by groups of six to twelve at least and coming in swarms. The preacher was stunned, and knew that God Almighty had miraculously intervened to vindicate his faith. It was the perfect confirmation that his path was the true and righteous route. The tithes and support of the shepherd’s new flock were as revolutionary a shift as his earlier excommunication. Acquiring a vacant temple on the market, the family enjoyed a degree of comfort surpassing any they’d ever known, and the happy serenity newly perched in their household was as joyous as things had been hungry and desperate such little time ago. Nevertheless, buried deeply beneath all of that a splinter had stabbed its way into Kyouko. For the first time, she had a truth to conceal from the rest of her family, a lie known only to her that shouldered the weight of all of their newfound happiness. She was so relieved by her father’s renewed vitality that she came close to missing the splinter’s presence entirely, but a hole had been irrevocably punched through her faith, seeing her father for the first time as less of a prophet and more of a man channeling his ignorance into delusion. If he was so confidently wrong about the nature of his turn of fortune, he could have been as confidently wrong about God knows what else. But such thoughts were buried deep, and even as they slowly grew they occupied so minuscule a presence that ignoring them was fairly simple. It grew more and more difficult for Kyouko to lead a double life as an active Puella Magi, and as the girl, daughter, and student that she had been. Her father eventually became aware of her nature, and like the exponential decay of a dam after springing a first leak, his worldview rapidly eroded. To Kyouko’s father’s perception, none of his flock were there of their own free will. Either his religion was a lie or he had been deceived into serving its devil. Descending into a despairing madness, one night, while Kyouko was out hunting a familiar that was attempting to settle into a drug rehabilitation center, Father Sakura murdered their family. When she returned home, weary from battle, her home was a pulsating inferno. Kyouko’s magic allowed her to survive the flames, desperate to find her family. When she did, she could see amidst the flames that they were past saving, laying in pools of boiling blood. She could make out the butcher’s knife where it fell an inch or two away from her father’s hand. Kyouko would never know exactly what had taken place, or what rationale her father had taken to justify so horrendous a crime, but she understood that she had set it all into motion all the same.

Kyouko, the Magical Girl: Kyouko’s spirits were high when she made her wish. Her father’s lifted mood and her family’s newly blessed circumstances could have managed as much on their own, but she took to her new role as a Puella Magi with enthusiasm and delight. The stories that always captured her heart enshrined love and courage, and the chance to meaningfully help people gripped by despair while facing her fears and growing strong seemed like living a fantasy. Possessing powers of illusion and manipulation, Kyouko could have been as a ninja, but found in herself a boldness that she’d never really tapped in to. She was a mostly amateurish fighter, but beneath layers of novice clumsiness peeked glimmers of a relentless, cunning, and aggressive fighter. Around the time that she grew strong enough to begin to feel the most tentative measures of confidence, she made the acquaintance of Mami Tomoe, resident Puella Magi of the neighboring town of Mitakihara. Their altruistic attitudes meshed nicely, and they quickly struck up a relationship of senpai and kohai. Kyouko learned so much from Mami, and they had ample opportunity to save each other’s skin, hunting together wherever people were threatened by witches and their ilk. Kyouko grew more and more distant from Mami as her father discovered her nature and began to deteriorate. Mami had lost her family, and had made her wish purely for survival. Kyouko felt more and more that her father may have been better off if she hadn’t interfered. As this sentiment was confirmed by his fall, Kyouko felt increasingly sure that she bore full responsibility for all that was happening within her family. She could not talk to the friend that had had her family snatched away about the way that Kyouko was destroying her own. The last hunt Mami and Kyouko shared, the last moment that they were truly senpai and kohai, took them to a familiar attempting to nest at a rehabilitation center for drug addicts. It was the same night that Kyouko lost her family to her father’s madness, to her idiotic, naive, dangerous wish.

Kyouko, the Orphan: For three days and three nights Kyouko Sakura aimlessly wandered, reeling from the visions of her slaughtered family and drowning in the thoughts and conclusions bursting like bombs across her consciousness. Like a zombie she walked, and walked, everywhere and nowhere, barely functional enough to avoid walking through traffic, and even that was more of an ingrained habit than a bellwether of her composure. Everything beneath her had slipped away, and her mind was in a state of free-fall. Every ideal, every fantasy, every pleasure, every irritation..every THING, was swept into a vortex of an enraged, agonized guilt. She did not look at her soul stone, did not think of her soul stone, but if she had, she would have found its crimson color nearly overwhelmed by an inky black. In this distracted state, Kyouko wandered into a particular alley and bumped into three thugs. Their intentions were as ill as ever dwelled in the hearts of men, that much was quite clear, but even so, she was possessed by her own collapsing headspace. It’s hard for her to know whether it was the knife blade against her neck, the dribble of blood it cut free, the sound of her shirt ripping, or the hard pressure of the knuckles ripping it off that snapped her out of the fog. They all happened so closely together that it all seemed to happen at once. In that moment, impulse, instinct, and action were one, and in a fury of magic and violence all three brutes were dead. One had been made swiss cheese with her spear. One lacked anything resembling a face after her fists and boots came to rest. One was in five big pieces and probably a dozen or so little ones.

Kyouko, the Apex Predator: When the violence passed, Kyouko found that the strangling haze she’d been wandering in had lifted, and in an instant knew the secret to the universe. Her soul gem should have darkened from the magic she expended, but was instead cleansed as her delirious grief receded. She’d survived just then because she was strong. She survived her family, because she was strong. Her father died because he wasn’t strong enough for the world he found himself in, the world he put his faith into. Her mother, her sister, died because they weren’t strong enough against her father, the man they put their faith into. Kyouko’s enlightenment was that the dynamic between the stronger and the weaker lay at the most fundamental, foundational level of existence, and that all truths emanate from the fact that the weak perish and that the strong survive and thrive. All of Mami’s successes lived in the fact that she had wished for herself, that she had lived by herself, that she had fought by herself. Kyouko had lived for others in a way that she now understood to be so contrary to nature that she could have spat in God’s eye and still committed less a transgression. Her sister’s lifeblood seeped out of her while Kyouko was off….what? Sparing miserable, repulsive drug fiends too weak to sidestep killing themselves? Killing a runt that drained her energies, offering no reward greater than the satisfaction of knowing that the lives of addicts were safe until the pathetic weaklings overdosed? She could have saved her mother, she could have saved Momo. Instead she defied nature and chose to save scum over her own blood. She would never again. With nobody left worth caring for, Kyouko would live the rest of her days for herself, seeing the world with unclouded eyes, undistracted by romanticism or ‘morality,’ or the endless concerns of the past or the future. In a world of predators and prey, she would sit the top of the pole. She would bite the throats out of any other animal too stupid to run from her, and when she wasn’t hunting, she would live life as she pleased, eating what she’d been denied when she relied on others for her food, abandoning the empty rituals of school and church and the broader trappings of living in a society. But beneath all this transformation remained the traumatized core of a girl that loved stories of courage and love, of a girl that wished for salvation upon salvation. That anguished spirit was buried alive and left for dead, but no matter how firmly Kyouko suppresses her pain, it cannot be denied: the magics of illusion that defined so much of her ability were completely gone. She had no more powers of deception than did a piece of lint. This did not stop her. Like the badger, Kyouko understood that savagery trumped size. The loss of her school of magic did not make her less dangerous, but it did make her more vicious.