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It gets harder to keep track of the details, you notice, sometime after the 100th loop.
How did you die, this time? You’ve only just woken up to a fresh loop, and you’ve already forgotten what had happened moments ago (to you, at least). Were you frozen by a tear? Did a sadness rip you to pieces? Were you crushed to a fine paste by that blinding trap in the first corridor you keep forgetting about?
So many ways to die! You thank the stars that out of everything that stays the same, at least you get to choose something new when you're tired of shoving your arm into the nearest tear. Maybe you can even discover a brand new death you haven’t come across yet! How exciting!
You carefully avoid thinking about what your family would think of this. There is a reason you make sure never to look at them, to always turn away, to close your eye when you can't take their attention off you, because the horror etched in their faces each time your body falls to the floor is equally etched into your mind.
Of the few things your sieve of a brain remembers, you really wish this wasn't one of them.
You shake the thought away. Snap out of it, Siffrin. You’ve got a country to save.
Your walk to Dormont is the same. Your chat with Mirabelle is the same (have you thought of doing a sleepover? I'll let everyone know. have you heard of the CARROT method? great, see you later!). You walk around and run the same errands. It's all the same the same the same the same—
Even Loop is the same, greeting you with the same words and smiling that same infuriating smile that narrows their mismatched eyes to mere slits. Narrowed, never closed, because you know they're always, always watching.
Watching what, exactly, you can't quite tell, but watching nonetheless. It unnerves you.
There's not much to say this loop, not for you nor for them. You've exhausted every conversation topic that either of you are willing to talk about by now, your encounters amounting to little more than an acknowledgement that you both still exist. But you still come to the Favor Tree all the same, to the only other variable in this country of constants.
As much as they stay the same, you can see the miniscule changes in the way they sit, the angle of their eyes, the stars floating around them, because they are real and alive and in front of you. It irritates and comforts you in equal measure that, sometimes, you think that they are more real than your own family.
But they’re not, you decide. Your family is just as real, only trapped in the loops, and once you break out, they’ll finally be free.
(But are you even real, anymore?)
“...What about you, Siffrin?”
You look up with tired eyes at your companions when Mirabelle gives your cue to speak. You weren't quite listening, but you already know what she's asking—why wouldn't you, when you've heard it all already again and again? That blinding question about what to do with your dead body doesn’t even matter, because it has never applied to you, doesn’t apply to you, and possibly never will apply to you.
What about you, Siffrin? Throw my ashes to the sky! What about you, Siffrin? Bury me on the highest peak! What about you, Siffrin? It won't happen, so it doesn't matter!
What about you, Siffrin?
Throw my ashes on the highest peak, so it doesn't matter!
…
But it does matter, doesn't it?
If it doesn’t, why have you watched your family members cry over your dying body so many times? Why did they mourn, if it didn’t matter? If they cared, then you should too, right?
None of the scripted lines in your throat seem to fit right this time, and for the first time in many, many loops, you think about the question they asked.
What do you want them to do with you after you die?
…
A pointless line of thought, since you won't even be dead for long enough for your corpse to grow cold. This body will never leave Dormont or its House.
But you think anyway.
The Universe doesn't need your bones, doesn't even want them from the way it coughs and spits and hacks you up time after time after time. So, you think—you think that maybe you don't want the Universe to have you either, even in the imaginary world where you're dead and gone for good. You don't want to be buried in the earth or thrown to the sky or cast into the waves, where the Universe can claim you in its greedy little fingers after turning a blind eye to you for so long.
No, what you want is…
“Carry my ashes with you.”
You only realize you've said the words out loud when you catch three pairs of eyes watching you when you glance up. Oh stars, you’ve broken the script and now everything is—
“Ha, like, cut your ashes in equal parts like a pizza?” Isabeau suggests before you get a chance to try to correct your blunder. You blink at him once, twice before you finally process what he’s saying.
It's ridiculous. It's impossible; you can't just cut ashes like you would a pizza, or a sadness, or yourself.
But it's oh-so-very Isabeau that your lips quirk up into a smile you didn't know you still had.
“We'd each get a part of you…” Mirabelle bravely adds, and your smile widens a smidgen more. She seems a little uneasy at the idea, but it makes you wonder.
It would be fun, wouldn't it? Even after everything ends and everyone goes their separate ways, you could stay with them! You could visit more places with Mirabelle, stay by Isabeau’s side as he designs clothes, go to Ka Bue together with Odile, be there when Bonnie reunites with their sister…
You'd like that, you think.
So when Odile says she’ll leave you behind (even if only for 2 hours a day), and Bonnie brings out the snacks (madeleines, pineapple, and fish head, you mentally recite), and the Universe goes on after that as if nothing has changed, the weight that you hadn’t noticed had left returns to the pit of your stomach.
It's unfortunate that it will never happen, the Universe says. By the time you die for real, everyone will be long gone, back to their homes, and there will be nobody left to carry your ashes except the Universe you used to love, the Universe that never loved you back, the stars whisper. You will always be alone, your shadow mourns.
Your smile falters for a moment, and no one notices.
That's fine. You don't really care what the Universe has to say to you anyway.
You fight the King. You win. You walk down the hallway with your family in tow and you face the Head Housemaiden. Again. You look away. You don't want to see her face.
But you have to look, when you finally get to her, because there's nothing else to look at. The way her expression crumples is as familiar to you as the dialogue she has rehearsed oh-so-perfectly, never missing a single beat no matter how you try. All twelve lines of it, inevitable and never-changing. She begins to cry on the fifth.
It makes you sick.
As the world twists around you (broken, failing, rotting), you barely hear the words coming from her mouth anymore, but you know her cues just as well as she does. Three lines left. Two lines. One line, before the end.
(Will you learn to forgive them?)
You feel a tug on your stomach.
When you come back to the Favor Tree and sit on the roots across from Loop, you can tell from their pointed look that they already have an inkling of what you want to ask after watching your previous loop, and they don't like it.
You smile. That makes things easier.
“...What about you, Loop?”
If the world doesn't deserve your bones, and your friends can't cut you into parts like a pizza and bring you with them, then who will take you? Who would be willing to taint their hands to carry your filthy remains?
What about you, Siffrin?
You are carrying the ashes of the Siffrins before and the Siffrins to come and as the world turns to sugar at the end of time, you add your own ashes upon the pile to hand off to the next in line. Nobody will carry you and so you carry yourself, forever and onward until forever ends.
[what you don't know is that there is someone else carrying these ashes as well, someone who is not-quite-siffrin but also not-quite-not-siffrin, cradling this stardust so closely they could crush it, so closely to not lose a single speck of what remains of them.]
[but this is not their story, nor are these their ashes.]