Archive of Our Own ^beta

You have heard this before.

Multiple times, actually. 

“We did it, we won, ect.” Odile is musing, eyes flitting about the sky, the pillars, vaugarde just below. You’ve seen this part enough times to predict the way the adrenaline leaves her accomplished but depleted. 

You’ve begun to loathe this part more than the actual fight, really. 

Odile groans, and if you really wanted to, you’d be able to mimic the sound with what you’d assume to be scary accuracy. You don’t. 

You feel like you’ve been here a thousand times. You probably have. You’ve been up and down this whole castle again, and again, and again. At times, you swear you can feel your legs aching or your hands cramping from shuffling through items and searching things. You dismiss it as a phantom pain of sorts. The loops don’t let you keep much, if anything at all. Loop had already laid out those rules for you.

“Urgh. Whatever. This was.. Quite a workout, my whole body is screaming.” Yours is too, in a way that’s faded to a mindless, sickening buzz, but that isn’t your line. “Savior of Vaugarde, huh? That's something to add to my list of accomplishments.”

You’re sure she could, if any of you would ever end up anywhere outside of here, off the stage, where it’d matter. 

“But now I can finally go back to traveling,” she says, and if it were more than a few loops prior, you might even feel guilty about the bitter annoyance that laces through you. You’d like to see her take even a step out of here, or maybe that’d only make the feeling worse.

You can’t help the way you float through this conversation. You try to remain for parts of it. At first, it’d been out of respect to everyone. It felt wrong, to mindlessly rush through the things they shared with you. Their stories, their plans, the honest versions you didn’t have for yourself to give in return.

But as you listened to them again, and again, and again— it became hard to even distinguish the words from one another. To recognize the sincerity with which you’d once been warmed with. Now, you have your cues. The rest has started to slip away from you, like your brain can’t hold onto much else.


You tune back in soon enough to not miss your line, forcing a smile onto your lips. “To do your research?”

That amuses Odile, your persistence. You noticed that the rewarding feeling that usually came along with that had faded quickly through the loops.

It’d been a nice thing to hold onto. Odile had been intimidating, at first. In some ways, she still is, but she’s also curious, careful to ensure everyone's well being. Once, when you’d been able to make plans for when these loops ended without sickening yourself, you’d wanted to go back with her to see her country. Maybe that version of you would’ve taken a conversation like this like approval.  

“Are you hoping I’ll tell you now that our journey is over?” 

Your eyes fall to the book she holds. You know what comes after this, step by step. She huffs out a laugh, eyes darting down to her book. Keep dreaming, she says. You think, I want to be. I want to be. 

Instead, there is an odd pause. Not awkward, just.. Empty. She’s missing her cue. 

Your brows furrow, flitting back up to her, but everything's hazy, now. “Odile?”

You get no response. You swear you can’t make out her expression, like being unable to recall someone's face. “Odile, are you–”

The first thing you notice is that you are no longer at the peaceful top of the house, no longer under the blanket of false contentment that falls over everyone after having beaten the king. 

You know this, because you can hear the shouting and exclamations of the party around you. It is a few moments afterwards when you realize the sound is directed at a sadness standing before you, instinctively tensing up. 

It is a few moments after that in which you realize you’ve been standing there uselessly, that Isabeau had given you an opening, wasted because you missed it. You swing your head around, a part of you still having your lines from before plastered in your head. Smile back. Answer questions. 

Except that Odile isn’t there, she’s beside you, giving you a look as if to ask if you’d lost your mind or what you’re doing, and, all too slowly, you have to scramble for your dagger, only to realize the weight is already steady in your palm, something you don’t remember having or holding. You don’t remember any of this, this isn’t where you’d been, not somewhere you’d looped to–

Mercilessly, you miss your cue. Again. You’re actually not sure what part of the script you’re meant to be following. 

“Oh,” you mumble intelligently, before the sadness swipes at you.

There’s an overwhelming burst of sound, piercing shouts from both sides of you that intertwine with the sadnesses wailing– panicked sounds from Mirabelle, scattered questions and callings from Odile and Isabeau that you can’t decipher while your head spins, and maybe that’s what makes the pain feel like it stings more than it should.

These fights don’t hurt like they had when you’d first started looping. You can’t remember the exact loop that it had started to grow duller, left the forefront of your mind and became as blissfully, excruciatingly mindless as everything else.

Still, this time, it feels worse.

You can’t be sure if it’s the way you stumble, your typical readied stance thrown off, the lack of expectation for all the words that are suddenly being directed at you.

Or maybe it’s seeing Bonnie staring at you as you take the hit, sickeningly familiar in the way their eyes widen, how they go completely still, small hands clutching a bottle.

“Sif?” Isa calls. He’s concerned. It isn’t a new sound, but improperly placed, for where you’d left off from. If you’d done your lines correctly, that is. “Sif, are you okay?”

This isn’t a time where you’ve memorized the exact way to answer that question without some sort of follow up. You try to form a lie, but all your previous options come up in half formed fractures, and you can’t force your mouth open. You feel faint.

“Focus, Isabeau.” Odile reminds him. You’d almost think the intervention was merciful if you hadn’t felt Odile's calculating gaze on you before she’d seemingly decided to shift focus. It’s almost offputting, at times, how quickly Odile is able to notice and catalogue things before you can think to tuck them back where they should be. 

She gives you one last glance. You can tell when she’s assessing something, more or less. She isn’t supposed to have to be this engaged in a fight, not yet, not until one of the sadnesses when going up a floor, or the king. You don’t even know what floor you’re on.

“We have to handle this first.” She says, seemingly deciding that you’re well enough to be left in your stupor while they handle the sadness. It’d make you feel useless if you weren’t so otherwise distracted. 

You’d beat him. You’re sure you did. Not that it mattered, you’d be sent back to the beginning just as surely as every time before that, but you hadn’t even spoken to the housemaiden. Hadn’t finished speaking to Odile. You wonder if she knows. A part of you desperately hopes she both does and doesn’t, and you don’t let yourself ruminate enough to figure out which is louder. 

You don’t quite have time to see what Odile suggests specifically to take down the sadness, her conclusion on the state of you, or any further  scoldings or worried inquiries, as there’s suddenly a cool sensation in the palm of your hands. Had you already tucked away your dagger?

Everything seems to snap into focus, just enough for guilt to settle somewhere in your stomach when you realize who’s giving it to you. You still feel sick. A constant, churning push and pull that is in no way comforting in its increasing familiarity. The effect of the loops, hunger, and the nauseating effect of having to face them– your friends, your actors– it all starts to fade into each other.

Bonnie seems spectacularly real right now, though. Scared. Not meant to be there. It all feels the same nonetheless.

You’d made a promise about something like this, hadn’t you?

“Frin?”

Made and failed to keep it, at least. Or, if you were obeying the specific wording, you suppose this doesn’t count as a second violation. It had been about not letting anything happen, and nothing had. You can distantly hear Isabeau and Odile handling it. You’ve been downed before, and if you’d taken the time to walk through the house, pulled your punches, they were strong enough to finish off the fights on your own.

Except you can’t remember if you’d done that. You don’t recall any of how you’d gotten here, nothing beyond Odile and then suddenly–

“Frin!” 

Maybe it is good to set an expectation of failure now, though, even if you do all make it through this loop. You wonder if it’s crueler to have let Bonnie ever believe you’d been honest in the first place. Maybe it’s better to let them know now than later, something will always happen. Every time, every loop, and you can’t do anything about it. Or, you can, but only the wrong thing. The wrong time, the wrong book, the wrong room, the wrong line, the wrong strike–

“FRIN!!!”

You startle.

Bonnie is in front of you. Bonnie is handing you a sour tonic. You have, foolishly, not accepted the offered healing. You think the consequences would be far more playful— perhaps dealt out by Odile if Bonnie desired the help— if their hands weren’t shaking and eyes weren’t glassy. 

You’ve upset Bonnie. Again. For, maybe, the millionth time. You want, desperately, to go back to Odile’s droning on about mundane, useless, impossible plans. You don’t know what you’ve already said to Bonnie, if you’ve made the promise, if you’d done the training or if you’d rushed to the house.

You don’t know your line, you don’t know your line, you don’t know your line—

You can’t form the words. You take the drink, and it nearly slips out of your hands. You, thankfully, don’t need to answer for it when you hear the sound of the final blow being dealt to the sadness, the sound of footsteps approaching. It all feels distant, like you’re overhearing it from a hall or two away.

You hear Mirabelle and Isabeau first. They’re checking on you, which you probably could’ve guessed at any other time without even needing to hear the overlapping of ‘are you okay’s and eyes flitting over your form as if your cloak wouldn’t conceal the worst of anything.

Odile praises Bonnie for getting to you so quickly. A piece of you wills Odile to be distracted by this, for her to comfort Bonnie long enough for the loop to do.. whatever it did, and let you go back. For it to fix itself.

You shut your eye. You wait for the tug. For the universe's nauseating call to the stage.

It doesn’t work. Nothing works, none of it works. 

Your eye opens, because you need to reorient yourself, find a tear or where you are or find a way to tell Loop, and nearly jump out of your skin when you find yourself eye to eye with Odile. Mirabelle hovers beside her, nervously fiddling with her hands.

“Siffrin,” Odile says, slowly, and you think you may want to crawl out of your skin, “tell us what’s happening. You froze, and you’d been out of it even before that.”

When you stare at her, uncomprehending, she stresses, “if you’re lost in thought, we have to help you so this doesn’t happen again, especially not during a fight.”

There’s a blur of motion to Odile's right. Mirabelle is nodding vigorously. “If you need a break, we can stop sometime soon for a little, Bonnie still has extra snacks from our last snack time.”

You want to laugh. You almost do. It comes out strangled and soft, and Odile's eyes narrow at you.

A break. Yes, you’d like a break. Wouldn’t it all be so easy if any of the reassurances or meals Bonnie made could help soothe any of this into something manageable? If it held even a fraction of whatever it did before.

You want to tell them it doesn’t. It doesn’t. It doesn’t matter, this is all pointless, a filler part of the script you could be skipping if it hadn’t crumpled in on itself and you still don’t know why—

“I have to go,” you hear yourself say. Your voice sounds wrong. You don’t have any lines in that tone.

Isabeau, who’d stepped off to the side to distract Bonnie, but had still been eyeing the conversation, blinks at him. “Go.. where, Sif?”

It doesn’t matter, is your first thought. It grates at you that they don’t seem to grasp this. The point of them, of this dead end hallway they’re in, whichever one it is, isn’t to ask questions with some illusioned sense of urgency or concern. You have time. All you will ever have is time, and you’re the only one who will ever know.

Except— except Loop.

You have to tell Loop. It’s just another thing you need to find, a paper or book to read, an errand to run. You’d just.. broken a few of the scenes along the way.

“I have to go,” you stress again, muttering, “something’s wrong. I have to restart, this one’s.. wrong, I didn’t- I didn’t get to the end! I didn’t die, I didn’t touch anything—“

“Siffrin,” that’s Mirabelle's voice, frantic in a way you should’ve been taking measures to prevent. “What are you talking about? Restart what?”

You wonder if this is the role the Universe, the Change God, enjoys assigning Mira, or if it’s just her, the way she’s the one to snap you out of things. Waking you up every loop, for one, and you think that’s where you should be right now.

You wouldn’t mind skipping the head housemaidens speech, really. The desperate grip, the consuming scent of burnt sugar, the constant reminder that this isn’t over– but even then, you’d be back at the beginning. This, here, whatever floor you’re on, is wrong. You don’t think you can handle any more variation of these loops. 

“If this is about the fight, then everyone’s fine, Siffrin. Other than you, everyone else is fine, and Bonnie still has food and healing.” Odile says slowly, but she’s looking at you like she’s expecting you to tell her it’s more than that. You don’t want to look at her anymore.

You shake your head. You take another step back. You have to find a tear. If you go back, you can talk to Loop, come up with a theory, find whatever’s wrong that had messed up the loop.

You don’t really realize stumbling back until Odile's hand steadies you, Mirabelle hovering, and your mind blanks to the point that you’re not sure what reaction you have, and can’t bring yourself to check what they seem to see, either. They don’t do that, not here, not now. You don’t know where you are, which floor, which hall, but this isn’t in the script, and these aren’t their lines, not yours, and it’s all wrong.

You feel a wall at your back, and then you feel, suddenly, nothing at all. 

Dirt.

There’s dirt. Under your fingernails, in front of your face. Smeared on your cloak. Your vision swims and you think you’re swaying— maybe falling, but shortly after realize you aren’t moving at all. 

“Stardust, as lovely as my company is, there isn’t a line to see me.”

You're on the ground, you realize belatedly. 

Dizzily, you look up. The favor tree.

Another swift motion makes you want to double over to wretch, but it subsides, and you blearily watch as Loop clasps their hands together. They coo at you. Or maybe laugh. All of the sound warbles into one string of assaulting sound, muffled by cotton. 

“Look at you! So close!” Loop praises. It takes you a moment to realize they probably mean the progress from you managing to get your eye to focus. Another few to realize it isn’t sincere.

Slowly, you pick yourself up. A little too quickly, as you come to settle in the fact that there’s no more wailing of a sadness, hands oddly light, free of Mirabelle’s desperate grip. Loop’s eyes are focused on you. Waiting for something, maybe. Or seeing something that they won’t bother telling you. At least not in a way that makes sense. 

“Something’s wrong,” you gasp out, finally, to the person you’d meant to. Something’s broken, something’s failing, rotting. “Something’s wrong with the loops.”

Loop considers this, or they seem to. The silence makes them seem almost thoughtful, for a few moments, tilting their head at you. “With the loops,” they echo.

You can’t tell what’s in their tone. You’re too tired, too sick, too stuck in whatever new problem you’ve managed to find, to care to decipher it. “Everything’s out of order, and I’m not ending the loops anymore, it’s like I’m just— floating through them. Or getting put in different places. Something’s wrong, I didn’t do anything different—“

“You never do,” Loop chirps, an edge to their voice.

You can’t think much else of it. You nod frantically. “Right. Which is why I don’t understand-“

“Maybe it’s something you’re not doing, stardust.” Loop suggests, waggling a cheery finger in the air, “something you’ve not considered yet, that’s been consistently ignored enough to cause this.”

You stare. You wait for Loop to give you the answer. Any answer at all. Another pointless chase through the house, a snarky remark on something you didn’t check thoroughly enough. 

“I’ve not changed anything. Nothing should change, should it?” You say, because you remember, vaguely, what Loop had said when you’d asked if you should do the same things all over again. It’ll just make you crazy to expect something to change when nothing will.

You think the change feels worse, actually. Infinitely and unreasonably worse.

Loop sighs for a dramatically long time. You have the urge to snap and ask if you’re bothering them so greatly with your time loop breaking. You can barely stomach the exertion it’d take to even engage in this, though, and you imagine it’d only worsen your headache.

“It’s broken. Like the housemaiden said, but it’s different now.” You continue.

“Right. Your time loop is different, broken, failing, rotting,” Loop makes a gesture as if to say ‘blah, blah, blah’ “What, you think the loops are devolving?”

You feel almost chastised. You sink into your cloak a little. It’s a constant. Maybe the only one.

“It makes sense, doesn’t it?” You mumble. “There’s no other explanation. There’s no.. correlation, like last time. Nothing big or different happened, I was talking to Odile after we beat the king, then I was back in the castle—“

“Your researcher!” Loop exclaims, clapping their hands together. “She’s perceptive. I’d be careful of letting those little slip ups happen in front of her.” Loop giggles. “Or do! Maybe you can use some of her research methods to figure out what you broke.”

You think of Odile's sharp eyes on you, questioning as if she’d already seen straight through you. You tip your head down. “I don’t think—

Loop waves their hand. “I know, I know. Your script! Your lines! The show! Can’t let anyone know. So many of those committed, interesting little habits you have.” They tilt their head. “She’d probably tell you they’re in need of reevaluation.” 

You feel your face scrunch up. Interesting. You feel a little like a bug under a microscope. Loop seems to think this is all overwhelmingly funny. 

“What’s that supposed to—“

Your world sways, and falls away.

Stars.

All you see are stars. 

For a few beautiful, terrifying moments, you think you’re floating. You can’t tangibly feel your body, nothing but a thousand different dull aches that seemed to sharpen with every loop, every moment. It’s familiar enough. It’s odd when paired with the relief of a lack of a concept of time passing. No freezing or rewinding or moving through or past you. 

If you let it settle into you, you think you could allow it. This exchange of the hollow pit in your stomach, and the dull throbbing in your limbs, the exhaustion, for this pause in everything.

If you let it settle into you, you might want to talk to the stars. To scream at them, more accurately. The universe. To demand answers, to ask how they can still exist and still be left behind, why you have to be as well. For watching, for not intervening, for being here every single time. 

If you let it settle into you, you’d likely reach an eventual, dreadful feeling. You can think yourself into one easily enough. You don’t know where your family is. You don’t know what’d happen to them or the king if you were to stay in this. If you give any of this enough thought, you’d thrash, or pull back, or think, logically, that you should be more concerned.

“Sif,” you hear Isabeau say. Careful, and pleasantly far from the concerned, panicked tone you’d last heard from him.

You think, oh, Isabeau. That solves a lot of this, then, doesn’t it?

Isabeau wouldn’t be here if the rest of your party wasn’t okay. You’re sure of this and not much else. If he’s here, as calm as he sounds, he probably knows where the others are, and it’s probably nowhere bad. You don’t think he can do anything about the rest of it. You don’t think anyone can. 

You don’t get the chance to reply before he’s in your line of sight. You blink as his face comes into view, framed by the inky void and stares you’d been staring at moments before.

You blink again, frowning. “Isa?”

He smiles at you, sheepish when he sees the way you seem almost perturbed by the interruption. “Hey,” he greets gently, “uh, you’ve just been sitting here a while. Looking out. You okay?”

You run the words through your head a few times before you realize. 

You come back to your body slowly, feeling unpleasantly tethered, but you force it to work for you as it always does, hands moving to feel what you’d first believed to be void.

The floor. Cool, solid under your hands. You look up above Isabeau, then above the stars, and see it fully for what it is. The window. The observatory. 

Of course.

You’re in the house. You’re on the third floor. You’re still in the timeloop, because you can’t fix it, and it’s splitting even further, leaving you here. You can’t recall hoe you ended up here, much less disoriented enough to have gotten so distracted, so lost.

You must look upset before you can even realize you’re making a face, because Isabeau is quick to reassure you.

“It’s okay!! I mean!! To take a break!!” He exclaims. They all keep telling you that, when you break the script. You’re too tired to tell what you make of that. “I just wanted to check. See if you’re, uh, good. Do you.. see something, when you’re looking out there?”

You pause. You’re not sure if he’s referring to now, or any time you’ve looked up there. 

“Stars,” you say. Maybe it’s because you should be getting as close to the typical script as you can, or maybe it’s just the empty feeling in your chest.

Isabeau nods, very seriously. It is ridiculously sincere, and very Isabeau. 

The last time you’d tried to explain stars, they hadn’t cared. You’d played it off as a joke. You’d earned a laugh from Isabeau.  You’re starting to wonder if that’s all anything you’re familiar with will ever be. 

You want to have something like Mirabelle or Isabeau or Odile. To point something out in a room, something you have a memory of, buried or not, and have everyone look at it with recognition, too. Their own stories, their own versions of what they’d learned of it. You don’t want to be the only one able to try to put any words or ideas together to explain it. 

Well. Not the only one. Maybe you and the king are both perfectly suited for never being able to convey what must’ve been so lively and complex into anything but twisting hurt. 

“And there’s other things too, right?” Isabeau prompts when you don’t say anything. “I mean, you’ve mentioned planets, the sun, you seem to know a lot about those.”

Not enough, you think. You don’t ever think you’ll remember enough about it. You imagine it all must’ve been so much bigger than what you’re able to comprehend, lessened even more by what you’re able to say. 

Isabeau had taken you to see the stars, in some earlier loops. You can’t remember the exact last time, even without the hazy recollection from your disordered looping. You couldn’t stomach doing it as consistently as the other tasks. It hadn’t been a task at all. Maybe that was the problem.

He’d mentioned searching books for the things you’d mentioned and coming up with nothing. He’d still taken you. Asked someone about it. I thought you’d like it, he’d said. 

The stars were wondrous, and they also made you so sick you wanted to crush them. 

Your eye falls back on Isabeau. 

Other things out there, other things out there, other things out there. 

Your country is out there. Or maybe it isn’t. You cannot see it. You can’t be sure if it’s destroyed, if it’s still truly itself. You wouldn’t know. You wouldn’t be able to tell if your home was still your home at all.

Beneath your flimsy gloves, your hands shake, and curl into your cloak.

“Isa,” you say quietly. 

He looks to you. He is listening. The stars are not.

You don’t know what you’re going to say, what you want to say. Everything's become muddled, blurring into each other until you can’t tell one feeling from the other. You want to say something, though. Something your own, like your lines had once been.

You should backtrack. If you focused enough, you could probably find a way to set this back onto the path it’s meant to be on. You’re not sure which version of them this is, what version of you you’re supposed to be. You don’t even know how different these things are anymore.

This is the one thing you can say, though, isn’t it?

Even if you can’t say the name, can’t read the scrolls, can’t remember the people, the specifics–

You can say what little you do know, now, can’t you?

You force the words out.

“Isa,” you repeat, a little more urgently, still focused on the window, on the stars outside. “Out there. I think–”

“That’s an egg,” you’re saying. You can feel yourself smiling, and you don’t realize until you’re grounded enough to feel the way your cheeks ache, and then the way you want to claw at it.

The egg key rests in your hands. Your mouth snaps shut. That wasn’t what you’d been trying to say, you weren’t—

“An egg?” Bonnie echoes. Bonnie is making grabby hands at you.

You don’t respond in time, and they nab it from you. Their hands leave a sticky residue.

Isabeau peers over at it. “Ah, so the next key should be a broken egg, right?”

You want to scream. No, you want to say, no, why are you back here, can’t you remember? Go back, go back, go back—

“Are eggs important to the Change belief somehow?” Odile asks.

Mirabelle launches into the same spiel she always does, eyes sparkling. About change. Changing yourself, leaving a piece yourself or others behind, about breaking and fracturing and moving on and it goes on and on and on.

You take the opportunity to look around. There are no more stars, no more observatory, just the house's kitchen. Just the frozen spices, the tall stack of plates, just the same stupid words stuck in your throat that you can’t get out.

Of course!!! Of course it didn’t work. 

You really thought– what did you think would happen?

What were you expecting? Going off script, trying to reach for something you can’t have, that isn’t there anymore. Trying to repeat the same mistakes you’d made with the king, trying to get a false sense of.. of what? 

Is that what the universe wants from you? For you to fracture and crack and split down the middle as a means of change? 

Is that why the loops are breaking, now? You don’t think you’d come particularly close to any answers. Had your failures not been entertaining enough? Maybe your means of ending this, the loops, the king, needs to be theatric. Take after take until finally, you might be sufficiently changed, or broken, or left behind, to let it be over, and take your final bow.

You wish–

“Siffrin?” Mirabelle asks.

You’re tired, you think, of people skipping their lines to call your name like that. As if you can fix any of this. As if you have an answer. You look at her in response, and probably don’t look as perfectly neutral as this scene requires from you. 

“Sorry, am I boring you? We can move on.” She gives you a sheepish smile. 

This is where you reassure her she hasn’t, you know, even if you’ve not gone through this talk in other loops. This is where you breathe, and smile, and insist she goes on. You manage the second part, and you find your cheeks hurt.

In this bubble, where everything stays the exact same, 

“It’s just– lazy, isn’t it?” You ask. You sound like you’re going to laugh, but you’re not certain you can breathe, first. “To expect everyone to change, or break off pieces of themselves, while the Change God watches.”

How will you bring about change?

You, despite the horrible, uncomfortable gnawing in you, the way you feel far heavier than you should, you are not far gone enough to not notice the discomfort in the silence. How stiff the party grows around you.

You’re not certain that it’s to do with the comment at all, really. Mirabelle had indulged questions before. Comments. They see something in you, or the way you say it. You don’t care to know what they find.

“I just mean— what’s the point of having a God for it if they don’t do anything,” you try. 

You think that maybe even the change god knows it is worse to have a God, a world, that does not speak to you at all.

“Your hands are shaking, Siffrin,” Odile says, voice level. You can’t tell if it infuriates you or makes you want to cry. You wish the universe were kind enough to swallow you whole. “Maybe we should take a moment.”

You know it isn’t a cruel suggestion, because Odile isn’t. Still, it makes something in your flare, and, “we don’t have time. I’m fine, we need to find the other key—“

“We have time,” Odile says, not unkindly. You think this is probably the first time she’s been right about that, but it still feels like a waste. It won’t fix anything, you know. There isn’t a point.

Mirabelle gives you a small smile. It’s a little strained, and you feel like something tangled up in your chest. 

“We’ll find it,” she assures you. You think she knows this isn’t about that, but that it’s the closest thing she can reassure you about, so this is where you land.

You can’t do anything but nod.

You’re not sure how long Odile plans the break to be, but it doesn’t matter much. You lean against a nearby barrel, fiddling with your dagger, and by the time you hear footsteps, your eyes have slipped shut, and you’re gone.

“Is that so?”

Everything is buzzing. Too bright, too much. You barely register the words.

Odile is back in front of you. You can barely remember why you’d been waiting for that to happen in the first place. When the loops first broke, you’d been here, hadn’t you?

If you’d gone back—

“So timecraft has nothing to do with you?”

You still completely. Your heart thuds, and you think you feel any warmth you held leave with it. 

“What?” You barely manage the word. You’re not sure if Odile hears it as anything more than a half formed, choked breath. You feel your world spin.

“I’m not stupid, Siffrin. If I find something strange, I can do nothing except give it my full attention.” Odile gestures at you. 

You scream at your mind to think, to generate anything remotely helpful, but you can’t remember. Everything’s been half formed, fading into each other, ending as abruptly as it started.

“You’ve been spacing off all the time, including when you’re fighting, or looking for traps. Somehow, you still manage to get us out of it unscathed, and the only time you’re remotely concerned about it is when you’re muttering about which floor we’re on, restarting as if that’s even an option.”

No. No, no, no, no, no.

You want to hit your own head, to sink into the cloak, to suffer another abrupt transition and end up anywhere else in the forsaken loops.  Loops previous warning lingers in your head, their giggle about Odiles perceptiveness.

“That’s not what I—“

“So it’s not?” Odile demands, raising an eyebrow at you. “It has nothing to do with timecraft, and you deny ever having used it?”

You uselessly open your mouth, and hesitate. Say something, say something, saying something!!!

Odile continues, “something happened to us, is that it? Did we die against The king? Is that why you’re repeating the same things again, Siffrin, you’re trying to find the way to fix it?”

“I CAN’T!” You scream. 

You can feel your party’s eyes on you, startling the relief that had fallen over them. Your eyes burn.


"Sif, Odile..?" Isabeau asks, taking a cautious step forward, frowning. You should feel guilty for the way you want to yell at him to stay in his place. This isn't how this goes, this isn't how this goes. 

“I can’t!! I can’t find the right way!! And even if I could, you all keep breaking the script, you keep sending me back!” You don’t know that for certain. You don’t, but you don’t care, you can’t, because the loops are breaking and none of these conversations matter when it’ll just break apart and dissolve soon enough anyway. The Change God had said something about this, you remember. A pocket of time where everything stays the same. You wonder if this is less entertaining, now that you're not the only one changing. 

"Siffrin," Odile tries, but you shake your head visciously, nails digging crescents into your palm.
 

“If you want to help me so bad, go back to it! Go back, go back, go back!!! Stop noticing, stop looking, just follow the script—“

You wake up in the grass. You are warmed by the sun. You don't let yourself fall back asleep, even if Mirabelle will come to wake you soon. You haven't in a while, you don't think.

You feel like you forgot something.

You feel like  you forgot a lot of somethings.

What have you been doing, for the past few loops?

...

You suppose it doesn't matter.

It's not like anything new would've happened, anyway.