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Something is shaking your shoulder.
“Loop,” A familiar voice whispers urgently. “Loop. Lu, wake up, it’s raining.”
You groggily shove at your Stardust. “Mmmrhg…”
“It’s raining!”
It takes a second for the words to set in. Your body is heavy, mind slow with grogginess. You blink away the sleep clinging to you, and see your Stardust hovering over you, unbrushed hair falling in front of his eye. He’s not wearing the eyepatch, but he is still wearing that ridiculous sleepcap.
“It’s… raining?” You say, testing the words out in your mouth. Tastes strange, fake, like a bad scene change.
They nod rapidly.
Sighing, you sit up. The room you’re staying in is drenched in darkness, only alight with the moon and stars shimmering through the window. It casts a dreamlike pallor over everything that makes your heart momentarily seize in your chest - a Siffrin, lightless walls, time hanging liquid in the air. But it fades, seeing the longer hair of your Stardust and hearing something… strange?
It’s like a… knocking, of some kind, though that’s not the right word. Pattering pops into your mind. Is that it? Soft, almost soothing, with just enough strength behind it, like an Isa hug.
The window letting in the moonlight is dappled, covered in droplets racing each other. You realize, with a bitter calm for something that feels so devastating, that you had forgotten what rain sounded like. You… don’t know what to feel.
Stardust stares at you with bated breath, seemingly waiting for something.
“Well,” You say awkwardly, voice almost breathy. “It appears it is.”
The two of you fall silent, staring at each other. You take a moment to admire your Stardust - hair tangling around his neck, the glitter in his wide eye, the sound of their breathing.
“It’s- I almost forgot what rain sounded like.”
You break eye contact. It burns, all of a sudden.
“Strange, isn’t it?” You mutter. “Almost uncanny.”
“Yeah.”
Silence settles over you both once more. You think maybe it’ll stay like that - like a little moment of forever, a dream in a tear, frozen - but then your Stardust blurts out, “Let’s go out in it.”
You look at him like he’s crazy, because he is. “Excuse me?”
There’s a faint tremble in Stardust’s hands, a spark in his eyes that you don’t like. “Let’s- let’s go out in it, Loop. I wanna go out in it.”
You blink dumbly. You wrack your brain as hard as you can for any knowledge of if normal people went to go in the rain for no reason. Nothing shows up, except a faint, surreal nostalgia. “Is that… a thing people do?”
“Um- maybe?”
Moonlight glimmers in the droplets on the glass, like a snapshot of a watery night sky. It’s easier to look at that for a moment, but soon enough, your chest just grows tighter. You have the strangest urge to shatter the glass and eat it while it still looks like the stars. Have it shred open your throat on the way down. How nostalgic.
You look back to Stardust, their tussled hair, rumpled sleep clothes, the bags under their eye and scar. You know in your bones they’re not going back to sleep tonight.
You suppose you aren’t, either.
-
So that’s how the two of you wind up outside in the middle of the night, shivering and stupid with no hat to shield either of you from the rain.
Siffrin’s got your - well, their - cloak thrown on over them, while you remain in just your sleep clothes. There’s not two cloaks, after all. There’s no duplicates of anything, for the two of you. Except the obvious, of course. Whatever.
You remember what Isa said about that cloak - you’d forgotten, for a while. Only knew that you shouldn’t check the closet for some reason or other. Shouldn’t bring up being a designer to him. But for some reason, (you suspect the Universe’s sponsorship), you never forgot anything about Stardust’s loops. Oftentimes, once they’d do something, it’d unlock another memory within you - you forgot how the first time you fell into a tear was from Bonnie’s push, you forgot that there was a poem in that one dead end, and you forgot that Isa could tell how loved you used to be from just your cloak.
You used to be so loved.
Stardust looks at you again, the way they’ve been doing this whole time. Like you’re gonna disappear if they don’t double check, or like you have any answers. You don’t know what they want from you, but each time you make eye contact, something in their shoulders seems to relax.
You can’t stop noticing the rain, a kind of jittery feeling filling your bones at each reminder. Rain plasters their hair to their face, a stray droplet running down their star-shaped scar, making them shiver.
“Loop…” They whisper under the torrent. “Why am I scared?”
For a moment, you are so blindingly proud of them it hurts.
Over a month ago, they never would’ve brought it up themself. You’d have to be the one to say something. Now, though they tremble, though they have to pull words from their mouth like teeth, they still do it. They’re very capable of change, after all. You’re not sure you're nearly as good at it.
They still make you want to try.
It takes you a bit to find the words, then more to find the courage to speak them.
“Many reasons, Stardust. Because it means it’s really over. Because it might not be as good as you daydreamed about. Because it reminds you of something but you can’t remember what. And it reminds you again of everything you’ve forgotten. And you don’t know what comes next.”
They close their eye. You wonder if they’re pretending that it’s still just rain running down their cheek, now. It’s harder to tell what they’re thinking, though, these days. A taste of your own medicine, maybe, before they realized who, or what, you were.
“It’s over,” Their voice breaks. “Stars, it's really over.”
“It’s over, Stardust.”
You’re not really sure what you’re feeling - relieved? Hollow? The bittersweet drum of rain on your shoulders? Neither of you are all that cold, at least. Something about the stars all around you, on you, within you, keep you just as warm as the cloak does for Siffrin. But whatever it is, it wraps around your glowing heart like a hug, and you feel strangely weightless. Whatever it is, you think the good outweighs the bad.
Your skin crawls and your body aches, suddenly, for more than this. But that’s greedy, and disgusting, and Siffrin may deserve it, but you don’t, and, and-
And you breathe in, and out.
Slowly, anxiously, you awkwardly hold open your arms for a hug. You’re sure you look like an idiot who has never done this before. Which is fairly fitting, because you have zero memory of it, and that’s pretty much the same, except not really.
When he looks at you again, it is with such blatant confusion that you want to dissolve into the aether again except this time never come back ever. You stand there, frozen and burning, and think, stars, what am I doing, this was a terrible idea-
But slowly, like a feral cat being lured out with food, they process your silent offer and inch closer. And closer. And closer, while your heart beats like it’s being chased down by a sadness, until they finally - just as awkwardly - hug you.
You flounder for a moment as you frantically try to remember how hugs work. Luckily, (miraculously, weirdly, wonderfully), it’s not your first hug since you’ve been back, so you don’t freeze up as much as you did the first time. His arms wrap snugly around you, and you snake yours around him, hoping it feels as good to him as it does to you. Are you a bad hugger? You don’t know, and you especially don’t know how to ask, but you decide it doesn’t matter. Because they’re here, with you, and they could’ve gone to anyone else tonight, but they chose you.
They tuck their face into your neck, making your heart do something gooey and strange, so you hold on a little tighter.
“But I’m happy, too,” He says into your neck, which does something to you that you don’t want to think about too hard. “Scared and happy at the same time.”
A familiar thought blooms in your mind. It’s not an uncommon thought, not with them, and you’d thought it during the loops a million times. You never said it, though. Didn’t seem like there was a point, didn’t seem worth it, didn’t seem doable. It was disgustingly, terrifyingly vulnerable. Strange, that it doesn’t feel so daunting now. It doesn’t feel like breaking character or the fourth wall anymore. It feels scary, but worth it, so weirdly worth it.
“We can be scared and happy together.” You say.
Their smile feels like rain and fresh flowers against you. “Yeah,” he agrees softly. “We can.”
Perhaps the rain is the tears from something higher, like clouds in relief or stars in mourning. The cold wind whistles past you both, whips the rain into your faces and drenches your clothes. The leaves rustle with it, the ground soaks it up, and every little piece of the Universe simply exists in tandem. The tears of the stars and the tears of the people on the ground mix together until they’re indistinguishable. Though the world shakes, you are warm, and your Stardust is too. And he is so, so loved, and… and you are, too.
The dark clouds cover up the constellations, but you don’t feel alone without them. You don’t feel alone at all.
They are holding you just as tight, you realize.
It doesn’t matter how much time you and your Stardust spend in the rain in the middle of the night. Every moment is worth it.