Archive of Our Own

Coming to life again in Dormont is terror. Coming to “life” again in Dormont, nestled neatly between the roots of a tree, curled like a dry, dead leaf—coming to awareness without lungs and not, again, in that forever meadow—is terror, too. A different kind. Behind your eyes opens a booklet of instruction, truth, ability, purpose, a guidance absolute and yet without answer, and you have not even a single wretched moment for doubt.

You know exactly why you are here.

Just a few lengths away, your own footsteps retreat, a folded wish left in their wake. Everything in you begs to reach and tear that wish from the breeze it rides on—but of course it would lead to nothing. You know it utterly: time is already coiling around, open maw approaching tail.

The Universe—that so-vast and blanketing all, that friend, that future—answered you. So much vile time ago, before resurrection, before recursion, you asked of It: I want to stay with them! And as It has all your life, It answered.

It led. You, helpless, trusting, followed.

In response to your plea, the Universe gave to you eternity—but you found you did not want it! And when you gave in, when you crumbled and asked again: help me, It—It looked at you, It listened, and It—!

It led.

In following, you have come to half-life again in Dormont, knowing already the role in which you’ve been cast. You have been severed. Peeled away from your body and life. The Universe has plucked you from your reality and set you back down in another; it has made you a star, in service. Some other Siffrin takes the stage.

You, selfish, failed, wanting—you take your seat in the wings and let your eye glaze over. You watch through a gaze that should be yours as its owner takes all your same steps.

The Universe listened to you. It led. You followed, and followed, and followed, and followed, and—

Well! You gave up, didn’t you? Stepped off the path the Universe lovingly lit? Begged It to reconsider, give you something better?

Better? When the Universe always knows best? It leads. You can only follow.

So. No wonder It turned Its gaze from you.

Some other Siffrin wins.

Some other Siffrin breaks, but not like you did—your stardust does not give up so much as they implode; it is not the Universe they cry out to, for they do not cry at all. Between the two of you, it was you who stooped so low as to ask for help, and they who received it.

From the Favor Tree’s top, your connection to the party and to your stardust long fizzled, you watch the sky curl and the play end.

Night is shot through blinding when the King attacks. The sky curdles, visceral, when Siffrin’s starry shadow towers over the House. And then he wins, and everything breaking eases—the sky returns to day; the world to proper shades; his wish to energy, dissipating. A distance away from you, at the peak of Dormont’s House, a single claw of the Universe has for so long reached down and pinned time in place. Now it lifts. Chronology gasps for breath and shoots forward. The Universe, sated, pulls away.

Unlike you, Siffrin did not disappoint.

This is what you came to star-throbbing existence again knowing:

Your role backstage. Your utter severance from Siffrinhood. All that you’d learned about the loops on your own. How to induce dissociation, how to anchor time and loop back or forward, how to craft-communicate, how to kill yourself.

The Universe gave you these tools so you could nudge Siffrin forward. Guide them, as your role bid. The Universe did not inform you of what the loops’ conditions actually were; the Universe did not warn you that breaking a wish could crack the sky apart; the Universe did not remind you how to read your mother tongue, or speak it. Not even when It let Siffrin remember. Because It had shuffled you out of that role already, a bad actor for the part, and your mother tongue was as such no longer yours.

Now you are a star. No—a meteorite struck earth, cracked apart, crumbled. If any language was yours, it has burned away now. The Universe has even refused you a mouth.

Some other Siffrin wins.

You gave in to your recast and did your best. You sat in the wings and helped Siffrin review the script, helped them memorize their blocking, the choreography of their fight scenes. After so many rehearsals, the final performance went on! And with so many hitches! So many missed cues and fumbling improvisations and a badly butchered last scene, and that was the show the Universe decided was your last. It’s called for curtains. All the actors got to bow, and you stood shadowed backstage, unapplauded.

Now, the actors must return to life. Pick up reality again. Turn in their costumes and props. But not you~! Their reality was yours, once, and it can be no longer—that is, there is no life for you to return to—that is, you have been severed from Siffrinhood and offered no alternative but service—that is, now that time has spit out its own recursing body, you are utterly useless to it—that is, you have served your purpose.

Siffrin won.

In service of him, you came to star-throbbing existence again knowing: the Universe cannot abide a wish left unfulfilled. When yours proved impossible, It led you to make another, one with which It could adjust the circumstances of the first.

You came to star-throbbing existence again understanding: the Universe pays no attention to which actor fills the role; only that the role is filled.

You come to the end, the real end, finally, and realize: the Universe leaves the detritus of a wish wherever it falls. It matters only that the wish is complete.

Some other Siffrin wins, and you—a star, a shell-of-Siffrin, a guide handmade by the Universe to address this very specific, ridiculous situation—do not disappear. You do not dissipate. You do not die.

You are detritus.

Before your stardust returns to you—before he can return wide-eyed, smiling, breathless with joy that he got what you wanted—beneath the Favor Tree, you find the sharpest branch available, and impale yourself upon it.

And you loop back.

You are detritus. You are still here. Beneath the Favor Tree, your body is pristine, and a branch flung off into the woods drips with the strange silver fluid that came gushing from your chest.

Beneath the Favor Tree, your stardust returns to you wide-eyed, and smiling, and joyous, so filled with the beautiful light of possession. He has everything you wanted.

Beneath the Favor Tree, you goad him into killing you.

And you loop back.

And back.

And back.

And back.

And back.

And because the Universe is so obviously leading you to, you give up.

You’re still here.

They take you with them.

You’re still here.

They drag you with them.

You are still here.

Siffrin, the better, the loved, won’t let go of you.

You are here. And here. And here. And here. And here.

The Universe remade you in service of the wish you made. It gave you new gifts and allowed you to keep the one It had already given you, looping, and then nudged you forward in service of completion: see that Siffrin’s wish is fulfilled! See that Siffrin makes it to the end, and kills the King, and stays with them! And you saw it fulfilled. You saw them to the end; you served; you completed.

Siffrin’s wish was fulfilled. He gets to stay with them!

His wish was your wish. Your wish was Siffrin’s wish. Siffrin made a wish, and you are no longer Siffrin; the Universe has dictated it.

But you can still feel it.

A begging, haunting whorl lingering in your gut, a sick scent clogging your throat, a barely-there wanting that wishes and wishes and wishes and wishes—

You are still here. You still loop back.

The Universe has made you Loop, but there is still enough Siffrin in you to want.

You want your family back. You want to be touched. You want to go home, or to even remember it. You can never have any of these things and you will always want them, and you are still here, because you cannot even kill yourself, because Siffrin keeps hauling you along beside them. You can do nothing but drift behind. You persist. You are deathless, without closure; you are perpetuity; you are a stew. You watch from behind as your stardust basks in it: everything you wanted. The reward they got.

You cannot have it.

And you cannot die.

The Universe, vindictive vast-and-all that It is, will not lead you to.

A year passes.

Deathless, perpetuous, you watched from behind during that year as time finally moved forward. As, ahead of you, five silhouettes slotted together as they should. As Siffrin cradled close to his chest that beautiful warmth: everything he wanted.

From Dormont, the obvious first stop was Bambouche. You didn’t expect it, but when you arrived, the party and yourself spent two full months on that beach. The Kid needed it: the stability of home, the reassurance of their sister, flesh-and-blood-and-unfrozen. The adults needed it too: a moment of stillness, a moment to let the last five (linear) months catch up with them and settle. You weren’t particularly part of it, but you know the settling happened: in late nights on the Kid’s back porch, in beachside bonfires, in drink and in morning-after sobriety, the journey was picked apart and laid bare. Mouths were opened. Hurts and hopes both years old and new were unspooled, and fears were addressed, and insecurities shared and reassured. Not all was fixed—not all was possible to be fixed, or even looked at, in two short months—but the party was family, now. They’d had that conversation again. They’d cemented it; they’d paved the way toward all sorts of fixings.

When you set out again from Bambouche with the Kid in tow those two months later, it was a compromise. Pétronille didn’t want her sibling to go, but she’d eavesdropped on the same conversations you did; she knew the depth of attachment the party had to each other, could see the terror in Siffrin’s bitten lip. She knew the broad strokes of the agony that magnetized them. She knew why Siffrin lost their eye.

So she agreed: they could have one year. After that, Bonnie had to come home and go to school.

The party took the compromise. And you were dragged along again: for another ten months the party traveled, a victory lap of Vaugarde with a plus-one, a familiar routine somehow so starkly different. This journey, the second journey, was… slow. Unlike both the first journey and the countless empty, dead years you and Siffrin had traveled before that, this time was unharried by apocalypse, unburdened by no-home-no-memory. This travel was not out of necessity or terror.

No—those months’ only purpose was closeness. Curiosity. Exploration. The party toured Vaugarde slow: spent time in towns not on any schedule, but by whim; stayed weeks in some and barely a day in others, whatever everyone pleased. When they came upon markers that indicated landmarks, or ruins, or sights to see, everyone was game to detour and find them. It was leisurely. Simple. As much in motion as the group was, it seemed all the more like rest—in those ten months, words were always being spoken, and comfortable silences were always being had, and hobbies were indulged, and bucket lists written. None of the party wanted for anything.

When the Kid ended up getting homesick before the full year was through, no one else was quite ready—but, too, no one could have denied them. So you turned and went back north.

By the time you arrived again in the Kid’s hometown, it was not twelve months from your leaving, but ten—making it not a year since Bambouche, but a year since Dormont. Since the loops.

This time, the journey was over. The Kid needed stability, and education. The Researcher had long started complaining about what the road did to her back. The Fighter was game for stillness, and your stardust would follow the others anywhere, and the Housemaiden wanted for a desk she could write on. Siffrin never did have that original spoilers conversation with her, but she figured it out anyway—somewhere along the journey, between sights seen and mouths opened, she’d unraveled her thoughts on love and Change and determined to put pen to paper. The road was no good for that.

This time, the journey was over—but when you arrived again in Bambouche, no one eagerly walked away.

Instead, unspoken, easily, they all just… lingered.

The Fighter was never particularly close with his family, and he’d left his job behind for good when he set out with the Housemaiden. The Housemaiden knew she would always be welcome in Dormont, and equally welcome to leave it. The Researcher didn’t say much, but it was easy to read between the lines: yes, she had a life in Ka Bue she could return to. But, for now, she wouldn’t.

It was all so easy. One beautiful year ended, yes—but then led into some beautiful continuation, a potential eternity. A house on the beach just a few down from the Kid’s, with five bedrooms and a big kitchen and a back porch facing the sea. For the Saviors of Vaugarde, it wasn’t free, but far cheaper than anyone had any right to buy it for.

In Bambouche, a year after the loops’ end, Siffrin kept everything he wanted.

Including you.

The fifth bedroom is yours.

It should be the Kid’s, by rights. They are the fifth party member, after all—but they also have their own room in their own house a two minutes’ walk away and aren’t particularly eager to leave it. You wouldn’t be, either, if you had a sister who’d been frozen—but even when the Kid comes for sleepovers, as they do multiple times a week, they don’t kick you out. Instead they prefer to bunk with the Housemaiden, as they had along the journey. So, the fifth bedroom is yours.

The fifth seat at the kitchen table is yours. One of the porch chairs is yours. In the mornings you have an informal time slot in the upstairs bathroom, between the Housemaiden’s early rising and your stardust’s sleepy routine. There is a toothbrush for you on the edge of the sink, lined up next to three others (the Researcher’s being in her own bathroom on the ground floor), yours the brightest shade. There is a shelf in the cabinets in the kitchen that is yours. And a neighbor who prefers to talk to you over any of the party. And a hollow in the cliffside of a half-hidden cove, just a few minutes’ walk down the beach, that no one else comes to sit in.

You spend a lot of time in that hollow, staring out at the water, listening to waves lap sand. If you close your eyes and try, you can pretend that sand is lightless. If you close your eyes, you can pretend you remember lightless sand, and not just the King and Siffrin mentioning it.

In the hollow you do not have a room or a seat or a toothbrush. In the hollow, with your eyes closed, you do not see how the cliffside fails to light up with your no-longer glow.

It was during the beautiful year. You, dragged along behind Siffrin and his family, through town and city and along dusty road, got tired of the stares.

For all that bodies can be molded to one’s liking, body craft cannot do what the Universe did to you. People do not glow, hearts are not star-shaped, blood does not exchange itself for helium fused. You looked more like a sadness than a person, and—wasn’t that right? Wasn’t that what you were? Defeated, sad?

Night after night after night you whispered wishes to the sky. Anchored, asked for, repeated and repeated and repeated, you wished—but were never answered. Not any one of the blinding times you tried.

The Universe had shut its ears and gaze to you.

And Siffrin caught you one night, babbling, begging, and he—in all his infinite generosity, his idiotic feeling of debt to you, his kindness—he took over, and wished for you.

And you will never know what it really was—whether it was that, from those memories he’d dredged up, he knew more about wish craft than you ever learned, or simply because to you the Universe refused to listen—and it doesn’t matter that you won’t! Because either answer amounts to the same! If it’s because Siffrin remembers wish craft better than you, they only do because the Universe allowed them to remember. And if it’s because the Universe had refused your calls in particular, then… then the Universe favored Siffrin enough to grant them what had been your wish, their voice speaking it on your behalf.

It doesn’t matter. It amounts to the same, to what you already knew the second your god set you down beneath that tree, the moment you understood the role in which you’d been cast. The Universe likes Siffrin more~!

And you are no longer Siffrin.

It amounts to this: on the long road between Corbeaux and the next major city, your stardust glanced your way and noticed you scrabbling at your star-riddled body, noticed you wish wrong, noticed you wish right and the Universe fail to answer. And they trotted over and knelt next to you and halted your efforts and did it for you.

Knelt there in the dirt, burnt sugar-smell rose. And your skin turned inside out, and your organs ballooned back into being, and your light fell limply into hair and your star contorted into heart and your helium shook itself off and became blood. Because Siffrin wished it.

Naked, you sat there, for the first time in months feeling nauseous. You had a stomach from which to expel. A nervous system to clench your gut and teeth and to make you shake. You remembered immediately and with violence the physical accompaniments to torment.

You wanted this. Didn’t you? To shed the half-hearted skin the Universe shoved you into? For the stares to slide away? For a mouth with which to eat, and speak, again?

Your stardust returned—you hadn’t noticed them leaving—and knelt next to you in the dark—everyone else had long been asleep—and pulled his own clothes over your head and up your legs.

They… fit.

You halted, at that.

When you had been Siffrin, your clothes did not fit. They were universally too long or too loose; you were a skinny thing, always moving more than what you ate could keep up with, always preferring to drown yourself in articles than be plainly visible. As Loop, the Universe had let you keep none of your clothes and gifted you no new ones. Your body was already so starkly, horrifically different that a change in size would have at first barely registered.

But you had loops and loops and loops with which to stare down at your unskin and catalogue what you had become, so you knew it had not happened then.

No—instead of a return to form, you learned there on the ground while Siffrin dressed you, this was some new metamorphosis. You had been so slightly altered. You’d grown a tad taller, filled out just slightly, enough for your clothes—your old clothes—your stardust’s clothes—to fit.

In the very next city, you ditched the party and raided a clothing boutique. You looked for anything new: things flashier than Siffrin would ever wear, things frumpier than the Fighter would ever allow polite company to be seen in, things too-tight or too-loose, nothing fitting. You took Siffrin’s clothes off the second you could. At the register, the bemused woman behind the counter tallied your total by pulling the clothes away from your skin, dipping her hands down the back of your neck and at the base of your spine just enough to tug out the tags. You shivered when she, professionally, brushed your skin. And you resigned yourself again to being the bizarre curiosity of the day—but this time, at least, not because you were a star.

It was a relief, to no longer be so, to have lungs again. And yet you itched.

Siffrin’s clothes fit. But they were not yours.

The fifth bedroom doesn’t feel like yours.

The toothbrush doesn’t. Your time in the bathroom doesn’t. The porch chair doesn’t, nor the one at the kitchen table, nor the shelf allotted for your snacks. A vast majority of the time, you do not leave the fifth bedroom, let alone the house; you do not allow that neighbor the opportunity to say hello.

None of this is yours. Not the place Siffrin has forcibly made for you, not the last beautiful year, not the new, potential eternity the Universe has rewarded him with.

But you are still here.

You still want, and cannot have.

You still cannot die.

So you rearrange the furniture in the fifth bedroom, to cover up new dark stains you cannot scrub from the floorboards. And you persist.

You are here, and here, and here, and here, and here. In this beautiful future that belongs to some other you.

Firelight reaches up to the fifth bedroom window.

Outside, on the sand, the party builds its first beachside bonfire since returning to Bambouche. You watch from above as the Fighter hefts a large log straight over his head, showing off for the others. The Kid gasps and grins and pushes at him, trying to topple him over; the others laugh. It’s the tail end of summer—the party, and you, have lived in this house for just over a month.

The Fighter tends the flame, building it up high, as every summer bonfire should be built. Pétronille hands out snacks and cold drinks. The Researcher lays comfortably on the sand, basking in the warm evening and the flames’ flicker-lick, leant against one of the sitting logs. The Housemaiden and your stardust chase each other up the beach. The Fighter manages to safely add his bounty, the Kid unsuccessful in their quest to knock him down.

You watch. The window is unlatched and open, your elbows resting on its sill, one hand propping your chin up. A breeze swoops in, wafting smoke and sea-smells toward you, beckoning; further away, the water, as ever, laps. Pulls and pushes. Reaches in and recedes. In and out, like breaths.

You listen as they open their mouths again.

“Are you sure, Mira?”

“Definitely not! But it’s a good option, I think, and I don’t really know what else I’d do? So… I think I’m going to say yes. Maybe.”

“You should! You’ll be a great teacher.”

“Plus it’ll be easier than Dormont, since the kids are all Bonbon’s age. Way less intimidating, right, Mira?”

The Kid makes an incandescent noise of rage. “I AM FIVE WHOLE YEARS OLDER THAN EIGHT!!! They are not my age!!!”

“Same difference.”

“FRIN!”

“That aside, I’m glad you’ll have something to do with your time besides work on your thesis, Mirabelle. You’ve been tearing your hair out over it; the time away will do you some good.”

“What m’dame said. Doing tailor work at that place in town has been nice; I feel useful. I bet it’ll be the same for you.”

“Yes, you’re probably right… I’ll let you all know once I’ve really decided.”

The Researcher turns to a new victim. “Siffrin, have you thought about taking up work yet?”

“Me? Sort of. I’ve done some work for hire. I used to do that on the road, I think; I like it. Last week I helped our neighbors sand their porch and re-stain it, and there were some sadnesses that wandered close by that I took out.” They pause. The fire crackles. Pétronille roasts something on a stick. “I also thought… the woodcarver in town. I sometimes think about seeing if she’ll take on an apprentice.”

“Oh, Siffrin! That sounds like a lovely idea.”

“It really does! Why haven’t you asked yet?”

“… I don’t know. No reason.”

Everyone perks up. Time to pry them open~!

“Siffrin.”

“Sif. Sifarooni.”

“Siffrin?”

“Frin don’t be a crab and answer us right now.”

“Stars, alright! I—I just. I’m worried that she’ll say no. And I’m also worried that… that she’ll say yes, and then I’ll have to leave.”

“Leave? I hope not, Siffrin; I’m too old to be getting back on the road any time soon.”

“That’s. Not what I meant.”

The fire licks and jumps and lights them, fleetingly, gently.

“Then… what did you mean, Siffrin?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Sif. This isn’t temporary. You know that, right?”

The Fighter looks back at the house. The fire so close to him, and with nothing lighting the windows, he won’t be able to see you. He gestures in your direction. But not at you.

“This isn’t an inn. It’s a home. We’re job hunting, setting down roots.”

“Isabeau’s right, Siffrin. I’m sorry if we haven’t made this clear yet. I may want to return to Ka Bue eventually—I do have people there I want to see—but not for a while yet. And even then, I see that as more a visit than a permanent return. For now… no, for the last year and a half, my life has been here in Vaugarde with all of you.”

“Me too! I can be a Housemaiden anywhere, Siffrin. What’s most important to me now is that I’m with you all.”

“You guys aren’t allowed to leave anyway. I brought you home and Nille said I get to keep you.”

“That I did!”

The Kid’s comment makes Siffrin laugh, surprised, relieved, so happy. It kickstarts the rest of them; the uncertain tension breaks and they shuffle closer together, closer to the fire, basking in all sorts of light.

A home, is it?

The Fighter has his new apprenticeship, and Siffrin seems to be gunning for one of his own. The Housemaiden will probably accept that position at the local primary school. The Researcher hasn’t settled on anything yet, and for how coy she was about her “research” during the journey, no one’s quite sure what sort of work she actually enjoys; she’s still keeping it secret until she decides, just for fun.

They’re settling. They’re staying. In Dormont, at the top of the House, your stardust’s family agreed to stay with him a bit longer—but “a bit” has somehow stretched out into this: a year. A home. Job-hunting. Roots, growing in.

A fifth bedroom to hold a ghost in.

In the mirror in the bathroom, you look at what the Universe, at Siffrin’s asking, made you into.

In the mirror in the bathroom, you look at what Siffrin, via the Universe, made you into.

You look like him.

You don’t look like him. You look like who you once were. You are unrecognizable from then. You are familiar, like the face of a person you can’t quite name. You—you don’t like this body. But you didn’t like being a star, either, and if Siffrin had given you a face entirely different from theirs, from what yours used to be, you don’t think you could have taken it.

You can take this: their face, a little more filled out. Their hair, a little limper, a little longer, all darkless. Their body, less worked, better fed. Something like two inches taller. All-over freckled, little star remnants of what the Universe first folded you into. Two eyes in your head, one scarred, one sighted.

You can take this. You don’t like it, but you can take it.

Every day when Siffrin bullies you into brushing your teeth at night, you can take it: their slightly-smaller frame next to you. Your shoulders brushing. Your faces like twins: all the foundations the same, just slightly diverged.

Cataloguing your similarities and differences is the only time you think of the two of you in the framework of siblings. That isn’t what you are to each other. Neither are you friends, and you certainly aren’t part of their family. At this point, out of the context of the loops, you’re not their guide, or their confidant, or anything so vital. No, you two are… something else. Person and shadow. Traveler and weighty souvenir. Body and reflection. Winner and reward. Walker and dog, resisting the leash.

The wish in you, unfulfilled, neglected by the Universe, scrabbles at is cage. It howls. It wants, and its name is Siffrin, and Siffrin is standing right next to you.

In the mirror in the upstairs bathroom, you look at what you have unwillingly become, and you have no name for it other than Loop.

You brush your teeth a little harder.

Siffrin is your jailor. Your purpose. Your caretaker. Your better self, your now-unreachable future, your child all grown up. You—you are past the point of wanting to take their place. All you want now is a belonging of your own or another cessation, a complete one, because this? This fifth bedroom, this toothbrush, this windowsill overlooking their life? This you cannot take. And as much as every day you miss the people who are right there in front of you, you know they are not yours.

It is easier to beg when you know for a fact nothing will listen.

The hollow in the cove on the beach, small as it is, does not echo. Instead, with the way the wind scoops inside, it muffles: all words you speak and murmur and plead are scattered away, unheard by anyone, human or star. Rock crags hide you from the beach and the five-bedroom house. Rock crags, too, hide the sight of civilization from you. Sitting here, all you can see is sand and sea and horizon. And the far-off shimmer of a place not quite there, which the Universe impersonally leads your gaze from.

You are alone here.

So you beg.

In the cove, on the short strip of sand not crawled up on by the tide, you draw spiraling patterns and walk them. You press your palms to your chest, beneath which you can feel the old wish tugging, and repeat your want three times. And when that doesn’t feel right, you repeat it five times. And then thirteen, and then twenty-five, and then you lose count. You pluck stones from the sand and skip them, matching your wish to the leaps; you lift unoccupied seashells from tide pools and cast them to the ocean, your wish their anchor. You ask again and again and again. You wish again and again and again. You beg: release me. Release me. Release me.

And when nothing answers, you beg again—not to the Universe, but to air, just for the sake of begging. Just to get it out where no one will hear your pathetic pleas.

“I’m sorry I gave up. I’m sorry I asked for more. I’m sorry I failed, I’m sorry that I could not be Siffrin enough. I am never going to be Siffrin again; I can’t, I know I can’t, so why do I still loop back?” You shout out over the water, emptying your lungs, clutching at your chest. “Why is the wish that Siffrin made still holding me? That wish was fulfilled, it’s finished! He got what he wanted and I’m not him anymore, so let go of me!”

Since having a nose again, you have smelled nothing but sugar. Since Dormont, you have tried to kill yourself both as a star and as flesh-and-blood. For a year and change, you have persisted; you have been here-and-here-and-here; you have not died.

Since Dormont, Siffrin’s hand has been in yours. They have held the leash looped around your neck. The noose-that-will-not-tighten. The noose that will, but which cannot suffocate.

“I am useless now! I am not needed, I don’t belong here, so let go of me!” Your voice cracks with the strain of screaming. “I don’t want to be here! I can’t take this! I cannot exist in this life, I can’t keep watching it go on without me, so let me leave it!”

But nothing answers you.

And you weren’t expecting It would.

Six months pass in Bambouche.

Things settle. Isabeau has quickly made a name for himself in town, both as himself and as a professional. Mirabelle did end up taking that teaching job, and since then she’s grown a backbone that only dealing with little kids can give you. Siffrin worked up the guts to go knock on the woodcarver’s door and has since earned his apprenticeship, and a new friend. Odile started up some mysterious business correspondence over long-distance mail. Mirabelle is exchanging letters with her connections in Dormont, and Isabeau has been having back-and-forth rows by mail with one of his siblings, which he’s tried to hide from the others, poorly. Boniface is deep into daily complaining about school. They like it; everyone can tell.

You… persist.

You, mold, grow into the walls and floorboards of the fifth bedroom. You become one with its bed. Every household job gets done and enough money gets made and there is always someone to cook every meal, and so you are not needed, and so you do not emerge. You have no purpose. Your only one was lost over a year and a half ago, and so for that long you have been here-and-here-and-here. Persisting, where your stardust put you.

Tonight, they crawl into your bed.

The door creaking tentatively open is just a familiar enough noise to make you sigh, but you don’t turn to greet him. You stay where you are, fetal-curled, facing the wall. Undeterred, Siffrin pokes you to see if you’re awake—and when you grunt, he doesn’t hesitate to clamber over and squish himself into the tiny space between you and the wall. You wheeze when he knees your ribcage.

“Sorry,” he whispers, reaching up to tug the sheet away from your face. Automatically, you look away. Even in the darkness, you can’t meet their gaze for too long. “Hi, Loop.”

In your periphery, a slant of moonlight crosses Siffrin’s face: the Universe leading you to look.

“Just can’t stay away from me, can you, stardust?” you respond, Loop-coy, cut by the way you murmur. “I just saw you a couple hours ago.” You trace your gaze over their cheek, the long lock of hair fallen over it. A concession.

“That doesn’t count. We brush our teeth together every night.”

“Like a babysitter and their charge. I’m soooo grateful.”

“Shut up,” they say, without bite. They’d stopped taking your taunts to heart something like a year ago.

Both of you are quiet for a moment. In that silence, you keep your gaze locked on the soft, unscarred flesh of Siffrin’s cheek. You keep away from their eye, their mouth: both such talkative pieces of the body.

“What do you want?” you ask. “I can’t imagine you’re here for any of the normal reasons one might crawl into someone’s bed.” To emphasize the point, you reach out one tired arm and drum them as if on piano keys down the length of Siffrin’s side, ribs to hip, teasing. They shiver. But not like that.

“Ha, ha,” they say flatly, but don’t pull away when you let your hand settle, a hesitant weight on their hip. This is the first you’ve moved in hours. “Can’t I just enjoy your company?”

“At crab-o-clock in the morning?”

“Why not? You’re awake.”

“You had no idea if I was going to be.”

“And so I would’ve just woken you up if you weren’t,” they say, sticking their tongue out, brat that they are. They wouldn’t have, though. They’re too nice for that.

“So you say,” you reply breezily. “But if you really wanted to enjoy my company without ulterior motives, you would have just bothered me in the morning. What do you want, stardust? Tell me, tell me, tell me!”

This is a bad thing to press, probably. Most likely, you don’t actually want to know why they’re here, what plagues their mind, because these days—judging by the look that’s been lingering in their eyes, which you have so hated having to meet—what plagues them is mostly you. But you cannot help what you are, what role you’ve been cast in. You only have so many possible lines in this scene.

So used to having their mouth pried open by now, Siffrin doesn’t resist. He speaks.

“I’m worried about you,” your stardust says, and you stop listening.

A week ago, Siffrin dragged you from the house down to the water’s edge.

Winter had brought a chill to Bambouche: made its beaches and streets foggy, the air a slow slosh of damp-and-cold, the whole town with a touch of that seaside horror Mirabelle so loves.

You hadn’t bothered to put on any footwear since Siffrin hadn’t wrestled you into any, and so when he tugged you into the surf proper, you both went in barefoot. Then, the shock of that icy water went straight through to bone, and it was—familiar. He’d dragged you out there to feel it: that saltwater ice bath, ever-moving, singing. Like a curse in your teeth. Long ago, somewhere else, you’d known the feeling. Long ago, when you were someone else—you’d known the feeling.

He held onto you then, and for good reason, because you’d threatened to tip right over into it. Cold water. You remember so little, so much less than what your stardust does—you’ve had so much longer than him to forget it, and none of the Universe’s favor to recall—and yet! This was still familiar. You could grasp no solid memory, could call up nothing specific, no instance great or small, but in that moment, a week ago, ankle-deep, it was familiar. A muscle memory, a skin memory, called up from some hollow in your mind that could not be stolen from.

You went completely limp. Siffrin scrambled to hold you up, your fronts pressed together, his arms under yours, your head flopped down over his shoulder. Your ankles awkwardly tangled, gone mostly numb in the tide. He struggled under your dead weight.

“Stars, Loop, come on—”

All this time—those first eight weeks in Bambouche, the past six months—you had avoided this. You had walked the beach but not set a toe in the water; you had sat in your hollow and scooched away from the tide coming in; you’d denied every optimistic invitation from the party out to swim. You patiently listened, obeyed, as the Universe led you to look away: from that no-longer on the horizon, from your obliterated past, from Siffrin’s face when he recalls. You have forgotten everything. You have forgotten so much more than they have, and been gifted none of what they’re permitted to remember. And so you had been afraid: of the water. Of what you no longer knew of it.

But it was still familiar.

You did know water, sea; you knew the swell of it, the caress around ankles, the fickle tide—you knew that chill! Her unforgiving shock! You could not remember why you knew it, could not remember who introduced it to you or on what solitary occasion you met it alone, but even in absence of solidity, of moment, of remembrance, your body had not forgotten cold water. What surrounded your once-home, what you were borne into this unforgotten world on: the sea.

Before Siffrin could buckle and send you both crumpling down into the frigid water, you put weight on your own feet again. They breathed relief, but didn’t step back—for fear you’d go limp again, or simply because they wanted to be close, you didn’t bother guessing. You let them press into you. You pressed back, and breathed.

“Remember?” they murmured into your ear.

No. Yes. Less than what they must, but—

“Pieces,” you responded, all breath, desperate, happy even for this small nothing.

“Yeah,” they said back, overestimating you. “Yeah, me too.”

If you could—if you knew time would not turn back, if you thought over-and-over drownings wouldn’t be worse madness than the meadow, if you thought you could endure the seafloor, that pressure—you would have cast yourself to the waves then. Easily. Remorselessly.

But you knew cold water, and her utter unmercy.

“The sky, the sea, the sun, the stars,” Siffrin called, a low drum-hum into your throat, “take measure, sail home free.”

“Never together and never apart,” you responded, “the horizon’s where all meets.”

His words, his call, hooked and dragged the response out of you as though on a fishing line, and you still could not—could not remember it, could not identify where you learned the words, who taught them to you; you could not have initiated the call on your own, could only have been the response. Of course it was to Siffrin that this memory was granted. Of course them—of course not, never you. Siffrin takes it all: sky and sea and sun and stars, all above and all below the horizon.

Numbness crept up from your feet to your calves. Water soaked the hems of your pajama pants.

“A ritual?” You muttered the question into their shirt, unsure if it was even audible.

They heard you. “No, I think—” They paused for a moment, searching. “I think it was more mundane than that. I don’t remember. A playground rhyme, or a sailing song, or… something.”

It was a relief. Both that he couldn’t recall the details any better than what he’d dredged up in you, and that it was not some call upward that tugged itself from your mouth. Not another plea the Universe might ignore—not one that it might actually listen to, since Siffrin was there, since Siffrin began it.

“Or something,” you echoed, shivering with cold. You felt him smile into the side of your neck.

A moment passed.

“You should come with us when we hang out,” Siffrin murmured, voice just louder than the wind. “Maybe if you did, we would have remembered this sooner.”

Standing there, cold, wet, wrapped awkwardly in his arms, you stilled.

“Maybe.”

The word was devoid of everything. Your body was a lead weight, and Siffrin’s grip on you a leash.

A month ago, on a rainy evening, Odile beckoned you into the kitchen to help with dinner.

Winter early dark was at its earliest, and the kitchen was barely brighter than the night outside. In low light, Odile prepared a cut of lamb with a familiar pinch to her brow. A migraine night. Who were you, then, to deny her when she stopped your awkward shuffle past and put you to work chopping veggies?

You needed no direction. This wasn’t the first, nor the last, time you’d shared a space; it’s more often than not that Odile wants quiet, and she was the one who understood it first: that your grating voice only pipes up when prompted. Your silence otherwise—it’s useful to her. In the winter early dark, kitchen knife in hand, cabbage on the cutting board waiting for you, you acquiesced to her use.

Two months before that, Mirabelle, first back home from errands or work or whatever else the rest were doing that day, plopped down on the couch beside you, too-close. She’d bought the first of a newly-published book series at the shop in town: a rush cash-grab “novelization” of the saviors’ journey, part one. Mirabelle snuggled into the cushions next to you and propped the book up so you both could see, and read aloud.

There was no elegant way to excuse yourself once she’d started, so you stayed. Trapped on the couch, you listened to her read, eyebrows shooting up at the first few audacious paragraphs and only climbing higher as she continued. Next to none of it was truth. Mirabelle had to break a couple times to laugh, and a couple more to fume, and you just… sat there. And endured the butchered rendition of your lives.

Before that, sometime in the middle of the fall, Isabeau coaxed you from the fifth bedroom into his, to be a model for some pieces he was working on. You were good at it: at standing still as he pinned and adjusted and note-took, at running your mouth, offering scathing criticism and effusive praise as he needed it, matching his casual chatter. You had become used to being a doll, played with.

And back when everyone first moved into the house, Boniface had decided their new calling was as a tour guide. The first time the party reached Bambouche, they’d been in no shape for it—they were busy resting, and crying into their sister’s chest, and holding onto the hem of Odile’s shirt, and cooking. This time around, they could introduce everyone to their hometown in earnest, and they did; Boniface tugged everyone everywhere, chatted a mile a minute, introduced you to neighbors and shopkeeps and maidens of the local House. They brought you and Siffrin in particular to the tallest hill near town, on the clearest night they could bear to wait for, and pointed up, an obvious lead. You did not want to, but you could only follow. You laid on your back next to Siffrin, Boniface on his other side, and listened to him work his way around what stars he could piece together. To endure it, you pretended you remembered just the same as he did.

Moments and moments and moments. The Universe will hardly look at you, will not answer any of your calls, but it has not ceased in its other prodding: follow Siffrin’s lead. It will forever respond only to your first wish, his wish: I want to stay with them!

So you are sentenced. So you are here-and-here-and-here. So you persist: deathless, devoid of any alternative but the leash, but this five-bedroom house.

“—seem like you’re hardly here, and I just—Loop?”

You tune back in to the fifth bedroom, to Siffrin in your bed at an atrocious time of night, when they cut themself off, finally having noticed that you weren’t paying attention.

“Loop?” he repeats. “Are you okay?”

“You droning on was putting me to sleep,” you complain in your Loop voice, syrupy and mean. You lift your hand from his side and pull it back to yourself. “Did you have to stop?”

His face twists. You’ve managed to really irritate him.

“I’m trying to talk to you,” he says, low, in that tone of voice people use when they’re trying to get something through a thick skull.

“You’re interrupting my beauty sleep.”

“Loop.”

“What am I supposed to say, stardust? You’re worried about me. Great! That sounds like a you problem.”

“I—I want to know how to help.” Siffrin reaches out and grabs your upper arm, squeezing you just slightly. “I can tell you aren’t happy. But I don’t know what you need, and you really aren’t making it easy for us.”

Easy for them?

You—you—

You stop listening.

You start leaving the house more often.

It seems to reassure Siffrin and his party when you’re up and about, so you take note and make yourself scarce: put on whatever clean clothes you first grab, run fingers through scraggly hair to “brush” it, escape out the back door toward the water. You almost prefer it. It’s easy to exist in that bedroom, and just as vile; at least out here, you cannot hear them all puttering about the house, their distant voices making conversation, laughing. Out here, the coast drowns out all else. Icy wind and water, gulls calling, are all that reach you.

Most time you spend in the cove. Its hollow, a shallow scoop in the rock with a perfect flat shelf at its bottom to sit on, has been your favorite place to rest since you first found it, way back when the party moved in. The hollow is just above where high tide reaches, you’ve found. The most ambitious waves don’t quite reach the cliff face, but if you sit down on the sand just beneath and stretch your legs out, you can let the surf lick up your ankles. The cove is even shadowed enough, its cliff walls curled around enough, that you can wade out up to your waist and still not be seen.

It's nice. It’s preferable. If nothing else about Bambouche, you welcome its water and the skin memory you have of it: not one dangled in front of you by the Universe and handed off to Siffrin, but something you’ve always had, something It never took from you. Maybe the details, the specifics, It stole—but the instinct to hold your breath when you go under can’t be taken. Swaying with the currents can’t be taken. Muscle memory can’t be overwritten: swimming, treading water, traveling parallel to riptides to be free of them. The Universe can take the sky from you and give it to Siffrin, but it cannot take the sea.

So you spend time with it. In the dead of winter, shivering, purposeless, you keep your eyes below the horizon. You stay outside for hours. You let your feet go numb in the tide, and begin a collection: shells, coiled and opalescent. Sea stars and sand dollars, dead. Hagstones, eroded smooth, with holes large enough to put your finger through. You arrange them in the rock shelf of your hollow and keep every single one you find, ugly or beautiful, with pleasant textures or terrible ones. You memorize them all. You forget and look up and forget again their names: the sorts of creatures which occupied the shells, the sorts of rocks which washed ashore. You don’t let yourself forget for long. These small things are yours: finders’ keepers, and you found. You do your best to keep them.

In things like this, you’re not much one for favorites, but you think that of your collection you like one of the hagstones best. It’s a smooth, dark stone, with one perfect hole in its center, just wide enough for your index finger. Holding it up to your eye, you can gaze through it like a telescope: capture boats in it, encircle the moon, even the sun—just for moments—just long enough to cover your vision in spots before you have to look away.

Salt crusts on your skin and clumps in your hair by the time you go back to the house every night. On your return, inevitably, one of the party will tut at you; to assuage them, you take too-long showers, dead cold. These days, you’re always half-numb.

It lasts until just before spring.

It is edging closer and closer to two years since Siffrin won, and you try not to look too closely at that number: at its length, at how long you have watched this future play out; at how laughably miniscule it is, compared to your own lonely loops. All that time scrabbling forward. For this.

The days you spend out of the house, in the cove you’ve begun to think of as your own, amount to something like two months before the Universe steps in and reminds you: you do not own anything.

It is an unassuming midmorning just before spring that you pick your way around the cliffside to reach the cove, as you do every day, if perhaps a few hours later than you normally might. And when you arrive, you find that there is a person in it.

You find that there is Siffrin in it. Standing bundled and cozy in a coat Isabeau had tailored for him, admiring the hollow’s perfect rock shelf, holding up to the light your favorite hagstone, which—of course—when he tries, fits perfectly on his finger. He doesn’t notice your arrival at first, just hums, examining your collection, turning the stone over and over in his delicate, deft little hands. And you watch it turn. Over and over.

You must shift slightly, make some soft noise on the sand, because eventually Siffrin starts. He turns, and sees you, and smiles. He waves you over, always the lead, and you—as you are bid, as you have done and cannot deny—follow.

“Hey, Loop,” your stardust greets. Their grin turns lopsided, bemused, when they look down at the shorts you have on. “Aren’t you cold?”

You’re wearing shorts and beach sandals and, only begrudgingly, a wool coat forced on you by Odile. Yes, you’re cold. But you don’t care. This has been your daily outfit for weeks, and for weeks you have been spending full days outside, making nice with the season. You would do anything do get out of that house. If it were not still the tail end of winter, if freezing to death weren’t so unattractive a consequence, you’d spend even nights out on this sand.

“Aren’t you?” You dodge the question. “You’re not much one for adventuring when it’s chilly out.”

That makes him smile. “Nah. Isabeau just finished this for me. It’s cozy.” He holds his arms up and out to show off the garment: well-tailored, warm-looking, long. It fits. He asks: “Want to try it on?”

You breathe. In and out.

“No thanks, stardust!” you respond.

Siffrin waits for an elaboration—one is always in your script—but this time you do not give.

A beat passes.

His smile falters. “Okay, suit yourself.” Turning away, he reaches into the hollow with his free hand and runs fingers over your collection, skin catching on dried sea stars and broken shells. “Isn’t this place cool? I’m surprised it took so long for one of us to find, with how often Bonnie takes us out to explore. Wonder how long it’s been since whoever collected all this put it here.”

Less than a day.

“It’s pretty, though.” Siffrin turns out toward the sea, lifting your hagstone up between two fingers, and you—

You let your eye glaze over. You look through his, and watch him take all your same steps.

Siffrin’s hands, ungloved, tremble slightly with the season as he holds your sea-borne treasure to the light. He brings the stone to his eye and gazes through its scope: with it, he sweeps the horizon. Follows distant seabird swoops. Captures a far-off fishing vessel, a down-the-road neighbor the party knows well, and smiles. He does not look into the sun.

Your gaze is your own again by the time Siffrin’s arm falls, and he looks back at you. He tosses the hagstone into the air once, and catches it again in his waiting palm. Easily. Like it’s his.

“I’m going to keep this one,” he says, admiring it. Another souvenir. “I like it.”

Of course. The Universe reminds you: you do not own anything.

Not your name. Not your family, or your body, or your life. Certainly not this cove, or the hollow within it; certainly not the collection you’ve amassed. This place was never private. This place was never any escape in truth; no land was deeded in your name; you do not own it. It is not yours.

Siffrin holds his palm out to you, the stone resting on it placidly, happy to be his. He offers: “Want to see?”

The Universe reminds you: you may only have what Siffrin deigns to share.

You breathe. In and out.

And think—that, too, is something he shared with you! The ability to breathe! This body with lungs that fill and deflate is a gift he gave back to you!

Snappish, less Loop than you mean it to be, you say: “No. No, Siffrin, I think I am just fine without.”

Their expression cinches, concern creeping in. They close their fingers over the stone and tuck it into one pocket; like it was always theirs, it disappears. Another thing taken from you. Another reward they are given.

The two of you meet eyes for a moment. It’s you who turns away first, but before you do, you see it—the searching in Siffrin’s gaze, the thing-that-plagues-them, what they recognize in you. Something is wrong. Something has been wrong, and the two of you both know it; the whole party does, you’re sure, because you are not well-versed in subtlety—that is, Loop runs as far away from it as they can in separation from Siffrin. There is something wrong, and Siffrin sees it. There is something wrong, and Siffrin is worried about you. There is something wrong, and it is not what they think it is, and you know it isn’t, because for the better of the last two years, you have watched your stardust walk further and further ahead of you, unaware of just how far you have trailed behind.

Practiced, now, in reaching out and asking, Siffrin says: “Loop, are you okay?”

And you smile. And there is nothing in it.

Not having returned their gaze yet, you stare out over the water. You notice how the sunlight plays on the waves: a dance of glittering, a familiar choreography, a daily routine. The sun is still low enough in the sky that the rising path it made on the water is discernable—a path that would have been visible from the beach behind the five-bedroom house, drawing the eye, leading some avid follower in its direction, off to places less tread. Here.

The Universe reminds you: It likes Siffrin more.

“I am just peachy, stardust,” you say. “Just wasn’t expecting to see you out on my walk.”

You haven’t ventured out the other side of the cove much. Mostly, you spend time in it; no need to go further when you’re hidden enough staying still. Now, though, as Siffrin watches you, you walk that way. You skirt as far around them as you can on the small stretch of sand below the hollow—which isn’t far at all—and try not to look like anything. “I’ll see you later,” you say. Your voice is not quite as blasé as you intend it.

Of course they stop you. Of course they reach out to grasp your upper arm in hand, physically stopping you.

“Can I tag along?” they ask.

The Universe reminds you: this is what you asked for. You wanted to stay with them, remember?

“Too bored exploring on your own?” You finally turn to them, smiling, snippy. “Where’s that traveler’s spirit in you, hmm?”

Siffrin glares at you without heat. “Come on. You’re never around, recently. Everybody’s been missing you.” They bite their lip, embarrassed but being oh-so-brave. “I miss you. I just want to hang out with you.”

And you—you just—! You cannot have anything, can you?

Resigned, so angry, you cannot help but sigh. “Oh, well, if you’re missing me, how could I possibly refuse?” You step back, giving in to the leash, gesturing Siffrin forward. “Lead the way, then. Take us on a walk.” You can only follow.

But he does not go forward.

Instead he looks at you. What plagues him.

“Really,” Siffrin says. “What’s wrong, Loop?”

At your silence, he goes on: “I know you probably don’t want to talk about it. But—you said it, remember? ‘You’re going to have to talk to them?’ That goes for you, too.” He squeezes your arm, a pressure probably meant to be reassuring. “And—of anyone—I bet I’ll understand. Right?”

You—

You.

You laugh at him.

Siffrin’s hand jerks and lifts from you, his face twisting with hurt. “Loop?”

He’ll understand? He’ll understand?

In this life, in this beautiful potential eternity that Siffrin has been rewarded with, there are many things about the two of you that are similar, that you can understand of him that no one else will and that he can understand of you that no one else could—but this is not one of them. Of everything that you share—of your bodies, your identities, your memories, your lives—this has only ever been your burden. Of all that he has ever met with, he has not endured this.

There is a wish in you. A ghost of one, ever-burning, a sentencing that has glued you to the shell of a life you vacated unwillingly. A wish he made, and received the reward of. A wish you made, and are beholden to: stay.

You wanted this, once. You wanted this future, this beautiful potential eternity; you wanted your family, and a home, and roots growing in. You wanted someone that would understand you utterly, without you having to speak. But you were Siffrin when you wanted it—but, in wanting it, you took for granted that you would always be Siffrin. That the future you’d enter would be yours.

You cannot take this.

You cannot take this, but you must, for you are beholden to it: stay. The leash can be resisted but cannot be broken. You can kill yourself, but you will always loop back to living.

The Universe reminds you: you will have what Siffrin deigns to share.

And he has chosen to share his life with you.

“You’re hilarious, stardust,” you say, voice dead. You walk backward, away from him, not caring that you step right into the shore. You are long used to numb ankles; cold water is something you know. “You’ll understand? Don’t make me laugh.”

His nostrils flare, lips twisting up in an incredulous grimace, splaying out his hands like it’s obvious. “Who else but me, Loop?”

“Don’t steal my lines,” you spit. “I understand you because I am you, Siffrin, but don’t think it goes the other way around. You are not me. You could not possibly understand this.”

“Then tell me what’s wrong!” he shouts, stepping forward to follow you but stopping shy of the water. “I can at least try!”

And you—you, you, you want to, want to scream at Siffrin until he is faced with every wretched detail of the half-life you are decaying into, want to lay out for him the agony that is persistence, that is here-and-here-and-here, but you! You cannot! You did not get the reward he did; you did not have a family to pry open your reticent mouth—nor, in fact, did you have a mouth at all! The Universe recreated you without one! The Universe has dictated that you will stay, and the Universe has dictated that you will not speak. It has promised you: you cannot. It has promised you: you have no choice.

You are silent. Beneath you, the sea sloshes forth energetically. Wind whips. You saw clouds on the horizon when you left the house earlier—a storm is on its way.

You are silent, and so Siffrin speaks again.

They say: “All the time we’ve been here, you’ve been like a ghost, Loop! You barely eat with us, you spend all day shut up in your room or gone without a trace, I don’t think you’ve ever accepted when we’ve invited you to hang out with the group, and I just—why? Did we do something wrong? Is there something different we can do to help?”

Across the short gap of sea-and-sand between you, you stare at Siffrin, at their desperation, and you don’t know what’s on your face. Your mouth trembles with how hard you press your lips together. You cannot take it. The Universe has dictated that you must have what Siffrin deigns to share, and they are trying so hard to share it with you: their life, their family, their beautiful future—and this is the only option they offer. The only thing that can change is them. Did they do something wrong? Can they do something different? So long as you stay? So long as you participate? In this life that is not yours? You, Loop, accessory to Siffrin and toy to be passed around and reward to admire? You, detritus?

You cannot take this. This utter, fundamental misunderstanding Siffrin wields, unaware they are holding a weapon, unaware they are holding a leash. The Universe has washed Its hands of the wish stuck within you and handed the reins to Siffrin. And Siffrin has dictated: your only option is to stay.

It is leave, or die, or stay, and the wish in you, the Universe, Siffrin, have barred all but one.

You would do anything to have a choice.

But you, deathless, nameless, nothing—you, mouthless—you cannot even ask for it!

But—

But the Universe has dictated that you will have what Siffrin deigns to share. And they have already given it to you, haven’t they? They have turned you from star to flesh-and-blood. They have gifted you lungs which fill and deflate.

You have a mouth.

Siffrin has dictated it.

Standing there, waiting through the tense silence, your stardust’s face walks away from concern and straight into frustration. “Would you just say something? Anything? What is your problem, Loop?”

You laugh at them.

“My problem is you, Siffrin.” You fist your hands in the soft material of your shorts, barely feeling it. It’s freezing. Your whole body is numb, trembling. “My problem is that you are selfish.”

Their head jerks back, offense clearly written—but more than that, they’re surprised. Good. You want to surprise them. You want this to hurt.

“My problem is that you are stupid. I mean, have you ever, even once, tried to put yourself in my shoes? Have you ever thought about it? What it must be like to live like this, to not get to be Siffrin, to be forced to be Loop?” Your voice is a snarl, barely articulate, weighted with all the words held back. “Every blinding day I have to sit here and watch as you live a life that should have been mine, with a family that should have been mine, in a future that should have been mine. And you wonder why I’m not happy? You can’t tell what my problem is?”

Siffrin opens their mouth, surely to say something, to argue, but you don’t let them.

“You think I haven’t stopped feeling bitter? Did you think our little fight back in Dormont fixed it, that I got all my anger out then and have been fine ever since?” You laugh. “Siffrin, if I had any choice at all in this world, I would not be here.”

There’s a ringing quiet after that.

It’s not a silence—the wind is picking up, and the sky is darkening; the world murmurs its audible warnings—but it holds just as heavy a tension, those lingering few seconds in which you wait to see if Siffrin will be brave enough to speak.

He is.

“Why haven’t you left, then?” he says. “If you’re so miserable with us.”

“You think I haven’t tried?”

One thing that you know and the others do not—one thing that Siffrin has hidden from them, but has not bothered to hide from you—is that he brings his dagger with him everywhere he goes.

His family wouldn’t like it, but he does. He sleeps with it under his pillow at night and tucks it beneath whatever clothing will hide it best in the day, and when he has nightmares, he comes to you. He squeezes into your bed between your body and the wall and clutches his dagger, its handle and sheathed blade, trembling. You know what it is to have nightmares. You know what it is to be Siffrin. You know how he feels, how he needs to have it with him, have the option of reaching out, or in, to cut. Of anyone, you will understand. So he comes to you. And you valiantly comfort him with nothing yourself to hold onto.

One thing you know that the others do not is that Siffrin has his dagger, and he’s keeping it in a little holster just beneath the flap of that tailored coat.

One thing you know is how easily you could steal it.

“Wh—Loop—!”

You dart back from him, slower than you’d like in the cold but faster still than he is, he who wasn’t expecting it, he who has, since the beginning, for some blinding reason, implicitly trusted you. You spend an indulgent second relishing in the dagger’s familiar grip beneath your palm before you bring the blade to your throat.

Siffrin’s eyes bug, horrified.

He thinks you haven’t tried to leave? Please.

You press the blade to skin. And just as you and he both have practiced, as so many fed up loops taught you, you make a clean, suicidal slice.

Blood spurts. The life that Siffrin wished for you unspools.

You aren’t insane enough to say this out loud, but it’s almost nice, those few stretching seconds in which you’re dying. They always hurt exactly the same, and yet every time you can delude yourself: maybe this time will be different! Maybe this time, you’ll have hit the right note, have tricked the Universe into letting you slip through Its restrictive fingers. Maybe this time you will not have to get back up and put half-life on again: go downstairs to breakfast, sit and watch the domesticity of your family and your jailor, pretend you can endure the different way they speak to you. They include you. They care about you. But in their eyes you are not Siffrin, and you are not stupid enough to think that in a five-bedroom house, there is room enough for a sixth.

Siffrin doesn’t move. He just watches, wide-eyed.

For the last meager second, you hope—

But no. Just like every time before, the remnant wish within you pulses and cups its resilient hands over the wound in your neck. The life that Siffrin wished for you halts before it ends.

One of the gifts the Universe gave you, when It put you beneath that tree, was control. It taught you how to anchor time, how to loop forwards and back. You took that gift and taught it just the same to Siffrin—taught him how to grab onto the meadow and go there, the first floor of the House, the second, the third. You still retain that gift now. You know how to anchor, how to manipulate the loop. But it hardly matters! Because the wish in you is barely a spark; it isn’t grand enough any longer to hold all of time in place. You can go forward or backward, but only you can. Time goes on without you. Your body is all that loops.

One of the punishments the Universe left you with is this: you can be whole, or you can be bleeding. But you cannot be dead.

You wrap your life backward. You let I-want-to-stay-with-them!’s wretched hands stitch your neck back up. It’s imperfect—your blood doesn’t all go back in; some splatter remains on the knife, dribbles mixing with the icy sea—but you’ve tested that plenty. It’s never imperfect enough to fail you. You loop back. You live.

Siffrin stares at you.

Coughing slightly, clearing your throat of blood, you say: “I have tried to leave, stardust. I have tried to walk away, but you have kept me here. I have tried to kill myself, but I always loop back.” You grip his dagger tight, and your death-weak, winter-numb hands shake. “You got your wish, but I wished it too, remember? And I can never have it. It can never be fulfilled, so I still loop back. I am stuck here. I have to stay with you.”

Their mouth opens and closes, at a loss. They look up finally from your throat, and flounder, and say: “Even—even if—you—” They cut off. They close their mouth, and breathe in, and out. And try again. “You don’t have to stay. I thought—I thought you wanted to.”

You did too, at first.

You tried, after your initial anger, your horror, your unanswered pleas, to believe that this would be enough. That you should be grateful to Siffrin that instead of thanking you and leaving, they had offered to let you in—that, even if you could not be Siffrin anymore, at least you could still be with your family. You had hoped it would be enough. You had wanted to try.

But your family did not know who you were, and they did not mesh with who you had made Loop to be, and you could not step out of the role you’d been cast in. You did not know how to reveal yourself; you had not been pulled from reticence and had, then, still no mouth you might pry open yourself! And when they did find out who you were—when Siffrin remade you, when Siffrin explained it to them—

They still did not look at you as they once did. You were no longer a stranger, but you were still Loop.

Accessory to Siffrin. Unfortunate alternate reality. Curiosity to ask questions of, pretty doll to dress up, source of information when Siffrin wouldn’t speak.

It was then that it became clear that you could not take it.

Then, when Siffrin had taken you in hand and wished up a new body for you, one that looked like him. It was not your body. The Universe had not given you back the one you vacated; no, Siffrin had created for you one entirely new, one a little bigger, a little taller, one that he liked better. Siffrin made you a body that fits in his clothes. Siffrin made you a body, and saved you from stares and whispers, and ensured that even if you managed to leave, you would always, always be associated with him. Look at them, the new whispers state! Twin of one of the Saviors of Vaugarde!

The Universe reminds you and reminds you and reminds you. Siffrin reminds you and reminds you and reminds you.

You cannot own anything.

Not your name. Not your body. Not your life.

You don’t—you don’t really want to die, but you do desperately want the choice. Your life is not yours to decide what to do with! You cannot choose where to go, or who to be near, or what to do! You cannot even choose to leave it!

To Siffrin’s statement, you shake your head.

“I don’t want to share a life with you, Siffrin,” you say, voice rough, flat. “I wanted to have it. But you and I both know that ship has long sailed.”

The tide sloshes in and out, roughly crashing around your ankles, reaching toward Siffrin’s. You’re shivering harder than you have in weeks. All your bundled anger has leaked, and now you feel weak without it—feel cold, feel final.

The rain finally starts. Ice-cold driving droplets patter down onto the water and your skin.

You clutch at the front of your coat, beneath which you can feel the tugging. That blinding wish.

“I don’t want to be here,” you say, and you—you are begging, again. Humiliatingly, unalone, you are begging. “I don’t want to live like this. I don’t want to have to wake up every day and watch you live the life I wanted. I don’t want to listen to you talk about the memories you get back, that I don’t get to remember.” You are trying very hard not to cry. “I don’t want to! I don’t wish it! I don’t want to stay with them, not like this!”

I-want-to-stay-with-them! tugs, wiggles, in your chest. It hears you. But it does not break.

You lose the battle. In addition to the rain slicking your hair and numbing your every extremity, hot, messy tears roll down one side of your face. Your other messed-up tear duct aches.

“But I have to!” you cry. “Because the wish won’t end! Because it was Siffrin that made it, and I am not Siffrin, and the Universe only listens to you!”

You sob, and give; you collapse onto your knees in the tide, the water soaking you up to your waist. It is so cold. It doesn’t matter that spring is almost here; today, it is only barely above freezing. The water in which you sit feels like ice.

Release me, release me, release me, you beg, a forever-litany. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me. Release me.

Siffrin stumbles forward. They join you in the water, kneeling in front of you, soaking themself the same as you are and seeming not to care. They reach out and uncurl your numb fingers and pull their dagger away, and you cannot deny them. It’s theirs. They get to have everything they want.

“Wish craft is just energy,” Siffrin says then, and it’s so far from anything you expected them to say that your sobs catch, and you look up to meet their eyes. “Maybe it could have lasted forever in the loops, if looping back reset how much energy we had—but you’re not looping in time. You’re just fixing yourself. So maybe you can run it out.”

What?

“What?”

They press their lips together, determined. “You’re right, Loop, I did get my wish—but I also used up all of the wish craft left in me at the end. Remember?”

Siffrin’s starry shadow towering over the House. You remember.

You nod.

“So maybe you can use it up, too.”

Can you?

When you loop, your wish acquiesces to the control the Universe taught you: you can loop back pristine and uninjured, or halfway through your cut throat, if you wanted. Would it listen to your control in some other direction? Could you do what he did?

At death or at the Head Housemaiden’s hand, Siffrin’s terror at losing his family would alert his wish and tug him backward. At the top of the House, in that last loop, with proof in hand that even at his worst his family would not leave him, the Head Housemaiden implied the journey was over anyway. That his wish was impossible. And Siffrin’s terror did not tug him backward—then, instead, it panicked and used itself all up at once. It transformed him.

When you try to defy your wish and leave them, it tuts and tugs you backward, knits your skin back together. When you try to defy your wish and leave them, the Universe leads someone to catch your retreating arm.

Can you make staying seem impossible? Can you trick yourself into it? Can you run far enough away, fast enough, that your wish panics and uses itself up, trying to tug you back?

Hah.

Resignation wells in you.

You know you can’t. You have been resigned to it for too long by now: there is nothing you can do but stay. There is nowhere else you can go and no one else you can be; the Universe has dictated it.

You sigh.

“How could I? Dormont happened because the world was working against you. You only blew up like that because you thought you couldn’t get your wish,” you say bitterly. “This wish is very possible. From that last day in Dormont, you made it possible: you brought me with you, tried so hard to include me. I just can’t play the role well enough. Siffrin made the wish, and I—I am not Siffrin.”

As you say it, you shudder, a full-body convulsion, a reaction to the cold. Odile’s wool coat is doing its best to keep you warm even soaked, but it cannot stop the seawater that fills the pockets beneath it, that chills your legs to bone; it cannot protect you from the pelting rain that makes even your scalp go numb. Wind batters you, insult to injury.

Your stardust tilts their head.

“I mean… aren’t you?”

“What?”

“If it was Siffrin that made that wish, and the wish is paying attention to you and not me, then… you’re Siffrin.” He shudders, clearly colder than you, staying kneeling in the surf like this only because you are. You can’t bring yourself to stand. “Maybe I don’t get what you’re going through, but I get you. You do want to stay. Because you’re Siffrin.”

“Stop it,” you deny.

“But no one else sees that you are, and there’s another Siffrin anyway. So you’re stuck. So you can’t have what you wished for, even though it’s right there.” He reaches out and holds onto your shoulders, a grounding grip; he seeks your gaze even as you look all over, trying to avoid. “But it must still be possible, if the wish is still active, right? So what is it?”

You—you—!

Of course you’re Siffrin.

Of course you’re still Siffrin, when you never made any choice to Change, when being ripped out of your continuity and shoved into another was so violent and unwilling. The Universe didn’t make you a new person when It remade you. The Universe couldn’t have, because what It needed was you, Siffrin, someone who had endured the loops and could take a few more while guiding a fresh candidate toward success. You had to be Siffrin, for your stardust to win. If you weren’t, the two of you never would have figured anything out. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have been able to make that judgement call in the last loop: you wouldn’t have seen yourself from the outside long enough to get it, wouldn’t have known how badly your stardust needed them to save him. His family, clued in on what his problem actually was. If you hadn’t been Siffrin, you wouldn’t have been able to tell them.

But you can’t be Siffrin, because your stardust is! You can’t be Siffrin, because when you first woke up under that tree and found yourself in a star-suit, you failed to introduce yourself right, invented a part to play just to endure it! You can’t be Siffrin, because you are Loop—but who is Loop? A character? A guide? A role in a play long over? Loop isn’t you. Loop is a creation, a coping mechanism, an endurance test. You’re Siffrin! Stifled and unallowed! You’re Siffrin, and so is he, and the Universe prefers him!

And you—you—!

You don’t want to be Siffrin anymore.

A wave sloshes up higher than any has just yet, catching you full in the back, making you gasp reflexively and your stardust flinch—but you barely consciously notice it. You’re too busy focusing on the sensation beating, warming, churning within your chest.

Your wish flutters up and pulses, frantic.

You are Siffrin, but you will never be the Siffrin that won. You will never get your wish, you will never have what you wanted; your family might like and include you, but they will never be yours. And the wish still clinging to you—the thing which saw your Siffrinhood and tried its best to keep you close to the object of your desire, the thing which has bid its time and held you in place, waiting for some opportunity, some moment in which you might swoop in and make it all yours—pulses.

Very suddenly, you are not cold anymore.

You feel your body roil.

The wish you made was created for and to the end of one thing: I want to stay with them. I, Siffrin, want to stay with them, my family. You don’t want to stay with the party like this, but you do want to stay with them; irrationally, desperately, unendingly, you want to be the Siffrin that gets to stay. You are still Siffrin, but have spent the better part of two years trying to pretend you’re not, trying to justify the difference in how they look at you and your stardust, trying to endure that they will never look at you the right way again. Of course your wish has persisted; of course it has forced you to persist. You are exactly the same as you were all that vile time ago, beneath the Favor Tree. You, Siffrin, wish you could hold your family with you forever. You wish you could be theirs again.

But you have spent the better part of two years pretending you are not Siffrin.

And even if you did not really believe in it—even if you were not given a choice, even if your façade has been flimsy and invented—that time has still changed you. Pretending is, after all, the first step toward being.

You… are not quite Siffrin.

The tugging on your stomach intensifies, but it cannot bring you anywhere; there is no physical escape from epiphany, and yours is not a wish which steals memory. So instead it tugs—so instead, it tries to find the next best solution. If you are failing to be Siffrin, it will make you be.

Your wish starts to use itself up.

You destabilize; your body churns; Siffrin’s hands on your shoulders suddenly press closer than they should and then fall through. Wish craft ripples through you and you are saltwater; you are seafoam; you are melting apart and reshaping; the not-quite-right body Siffrin had made for you clearly wasn’t Siffrin enough. This time, your wish is determined to get it right. It swirls you into a current, lets parts of you melt into the true waves, takes in more from the rain; it tries to reshape you correctly, tries to bring back whatever made you Siffrin. You get swept up in it. You don’t hear your stardust calling you, frightened, don’t feel them reaching their hands out and only splashing them into your water-shadow of a body. Wish craft roils, frantic, and you—you almost start to want it. You almost give in to the fantasy: that there is something out there that could ever fix what’s done, that the Universe would ever reach down and put things to rights, make you Siffrin again, cast you once more in your first role. You know It won’t. You know, even if It did—change has already happened.

You already had all the pieces, didn’t you? You learned way back then: the Universe can’t abide a wish left unfulfilled.

This had to happen. Loop had to come about for Siffrin to win, and you had to make your wish in the first place for Loop to come about. This remnant wish, you, they’re just aftershocks. Just the Universe trying to tie up loose ends.

This wish was fulfilled, Universe. The evidence of it is kneeling right in front of you. This wish was already fulfilled, and anyway, you are—really, this time—no longer the one who made it.

Seawater churns, and sloshes, and rises and recedes; it’s you, ice-cold, ever-moving. It’s terrified and trying to be something you are no longer, and it’s burning up a wish you made years ago. Your body, unstable, is looking for an anchor. And that anchor is not Siffrin. And it is not Loop.

Even if their family hadn’t reached out and pried them open, you’re sure big, starry Siffrin wouldn’t have lasted long. Wish craft wasn’t meant to be used up like this, all-at-once and terrified and scrabbling. Already, your seafoam is trying to return to rights. From flesh to star to flesh to sea to flesh again—but what flesh? Who, now, will you be?

Your lungs reform. You breathe.

Your ears reform. You hear—rain, still pattering. Waves, sloshing up. Your stardust, calling: “Siffrin? Loop?”

Your eyes reform. Two open, and one sees.

Across from you, Siffrin is still there, still kneeling in the water, shivering violently, looking at you with such terror. And now, too, with hesitant relief. And he’s looking at you—

You… have no idea what you look like.

He’s looking at you like a stranger. No—no, not like that.

Like you’ve Changed. Like you’re someone new.