Work Text:
You keep count.
Loop keeps count.
Wake, walk, unlock. Cut, lie, loop. All and everything becomes choreography, all the world a stage. Your life narrows to a stretch under forty-eight hours. Your hands lift up on their own, puppet-strung. They reach for a key and a knife, a lock and a throat. There’s your cue again: wake.
Beneath the Favor Tree, Loop stares at you. All eyes, it is what they’re good at—but even without a mouth, they’re more practiced at speaking than you are.
“Been a while, hasn’t it?”
It isn’t their usual line, and there’s the proof: that you know them. That you, slippery, sieve, have been crushed between the pages of this script so thoroughly they’ll need to scrape you off; that you know not only your own lines, but theirs. Everyone’s. Been a while. Yes. Irrationally, you think: this is all your life has ever been. You are the Universe’s beloved lead actor.
“A year,” Loop goes on. “And you’re still here.”
What else are you supposed to do? Leave them?
You fracture away from Loop. You fracture the performance: fumble lines, miss cues, confuse stage directions. You have spent a full looping year doing just that: cutting everything to ribbons. The Universe, all that time, has patiently waited for you to take a deep enough breath and get it right.
Irrationally, you believe: this is all your life is capable of being. Beyond the Head Housemaiden, there is nothing for you. There is no right. There is only what you are capable of preserving, as long as you play your role well enough. If you freeze here forever, if you turn this year into two and three and eons, you’ll never have to watch anyone leave.
So you keep count of the loops. Of the time you get to keep them.
A year. Yes, it’s been a while.
And you will stay forever.