#the au will eventually have sloop (among other relationships) but y'know that's not for years from their pov

[aeb-art]

Memory of Face

Loop & Siffrin

Rating: T Summary: Loop has a bit more of a visceral reaction while watching Siffrin and the King attempt to say the name of the forgotten country and they fail to reign in their emotions before Siffrin returns to the Favor Tree. CW: past injury, self-harm, mutilation, self-mutilation, body horror

(ao3 link)

Act 3 - Loops 56 and 57

You were watching when it happened. Of course you were watching!

Stardust was just getting so fixated with talking to the King… Sure, you were learning new information, but in your opinion, none of it sounded useful in actually breaking the loops themselves. You couldn’t talk them out of trying so you just had to watch instead.

You just daydreamed and watched the birds and clouds for the majority of the loop. There was nothing new to see and you couldn’t feel as though stardust was very distressed, so you waited for the end, for when it mattered.

Admittedly, you weren’t actually listening as hard as you should have after you started watching in the King’s chamber. If you had to listen to everything that vile waste of oxygen had to say every single time, you’d go more insane than you already felt.

But then…

There was blood.

You jolted upright, almost falling out of the tree as you snapped to attention.

Blood splattered from stardust’s throat. They hacked it up violently with tears forming in the corner of their eye. His dagger clattered to the floor as his one hand gripped tight on his shirt over his heart and the other came up to his throat. Stardust’s family were surrounding them the next second, crying out for them to stop and trying to protect them, thinking it was the King himself doing this, as if the King wasn’t coughing up that same shade.

Wait- the shade- how did you not realize it… Was that a… color? The others had read a book or two in the House about it, you think. It hurt to look at. It made you physically recoil after you focused on it for a moment too long.

Stardust’s fingers gripped their throat tighter. They couldn’t dig into it with their gloves still on. They couldn’t claw the name out.

But you... You felt… pain.

Your body mimicked stardust’s own body without you realizing it. The tips of your fingers sharpened like claws and, as you gripped your neck tighter and tighter, you sank in. As he coughed and struggled to speak, you felt like you were burning. Just as stardust could not get the name of your country out, you could not…

GET IT OUT GET IT OUT GET IT OUT

Your claws dug and dug and dug into your neck and down. They would not find what they were looking for of course. You couldn’t stop what already happened, what was already done to you, what your selfish mistake had done to you.

The lightless grains of sugary craft making up your body flew and flew as you tried in vain to tear yourself apart.

You just made a wish for an escape, for an end, for help, for anyone’s help, but then… You only wanted their help and THEY… THEY-!

IT burned! The star meant to grant your wish boiled your insides! You wanted to take it back, to throw IT up, to pull IT back out! But it burned!

IT BURNED IT BURNED IT BURNED

THEY mutilated you! THEY took your mouth, the only escape for that stupid cursed star! Then IT blinding exploded! IT destroyed you, everything about you. IT made you unrecognizable and THEY just had to put you back together in THEIR image!

You were going to be sick.

Stardust tried to speak again and his throat tore open. It painted their cloak in that awful awful shade…

Your hand tore into your chest, grabbed that star you were forced to use now as a heart, and ripped!

And you’d screamed. You’d both screamed and screamed and screamed.

Although the loop reset, the phantom sensations from your “Change” [Ew.] never left. The feeling of your body being broken and forced back together was unbearable, even as a memory. Your chest expanded, your limbs stretched out, your bones were flung out of their sockets, and then it was all just sucked back together. THEY vacuum-sealed your “skin” tight around your mangled shattered skeleton just as your insides were completely consumed by sickening sweetness.

You grabbed your head tight as your entire body vibrated violently.

Calm down! You had to calm down! You couldn’t be seen like this! You couldn’t break character, right? C’mon, Siffrin, what if your friends saw you? You needed to get back to… to…

No, no, you’re not him anymore. You gave that up! You were literally reexperiencing the excruciating pain associated with leaving your own narrative, with damning yourself as you so expertfully had, right at this very moment!

You were Loop! helpful Loop! and that’s all you would be, ever again! That was all you were allowed to be right now!

So you needed to calm down, be normal, or at least good enough that… that he wouldn’t see… you… like this…

…

Stardust was looking at you. Right. Now. He was already at the tree.

You lost track of time. It normally took him an hour to get to you. Had he run here…? Or did you really lie here with your claws embedded in your neck [for the second time now] for all that time?

“L-Loop…?” Stardust sounded… scared? What? Why would he be…?

!!!

Your light was out! You normally lit yourself up when stardust got close, but you hid in the dark otherwise so nobody [especially a certain party member that was usually nearby] would see you.

You didn’t know what you looked like. Stardust drew you a couple loops back and it… Well, you didn’t want to think about it! You specifically forced away all thoughts about your altered appearance. You didn’t need to know! It didn’t matter! Why would it?

But why was stardust staring at you like that? What did your head look like? What awful visage did your glow normally keep hidden away?

Did your face look anything like it used to?

You wiped the stinging tears from your eyes and sat back upright on your usual tree root. As you started to glow at your usual brightness level, you forced cheer into your voice. “Oh! Why, welcome back, stardust!~” You tried smiling too, even if he couldn’t see that. You didn’t really have a jaw or lips anymore, or at least you didn’t feel them. “How can I help you on this wonderful new loop?”

They blinked at you. They did not sit on the ground in their usual spot. “Loop, you’re… You’re bleeding…” His voice wavered. One of his hands reached up just a little, but they did not come any closer to you. Hypocrite.

You brought a hand back up to your neck. It came back wet. The lightless fluid sparkled and you had to restrain yourself from glaring at the little stars in it. It mocked you. “Huh… So I am!”

“Can I…? I could heal you?” He cringed and took a step forward finally. His leg trembled. You realized his throat sounded raw and you wondered if he’d woken up still screaming. “I’m not on Mira’s level with healing craft, but-”

“No.” You said a bit too fast and with too much bite. He flinched and you tried not to feel bad about it. “I can do it myself, thank you.”

You still weren’t calm after you healed yourself, but you did feel a little better. The cool wave of healing craft filled you with an energy that almost made you nostalgic. You hadn’t been injured nor healed in a long time now.

You moved your still bloody hand away and waved at him with it. “See? All better! Tee-hee!”

“I’d offer you something to wipe that off with, but…” They trailed off, their face scrunching up as they cringed a bit, and finally went to sit down across from you. Their hands gripped the grass tight and they leaned back against a big tree root. They didn’t look at you.

Or they couldn’t look at you, not after that. What did he see? Was he really that scared of you? of a monster like you who gave up their humanity because they were so blinding selfish!?

“But all you have are your clothes and you can’t let your family members see them with weird blood on them, yes, yes.” You closed your eyes and crossed your legs, your sticky [Ew.] hands clasped in your lap. “It’s the thought that counts, I suppose…”

You could not breathe so you could not soothe yourself as you did in another life. You rubbed your buzzing arms and hoped that was enough… It wasn’t.

“But thank you anyway.” You waited for them to look at you. “Let’s talk about something else.”

They gave a sympathetic nod. Your shoulders relaxed, just a little.

Even if talking about the King or stardust’s family made you feel like you were being stabbed, it wasn’t about you! Can’t have stardust seeing behind the curtains too much after all. You actually managed to not flub too much for the rest of the interaction and had genuine cheer in your voice by the time stardust finally got up to leave.

…

[Stardust.]

He stopped walking and looked back at you over his shoulder. You closed your eyes.

[You got Memory of Face. When equipped, +5 Luck for every loop you’ve visited your dearest companion- which is me, Loop, obviously- buuut -25 Defense.]

[It did catch you off guard- you certainly looked startled- so naturally there’d be a negative side effect.]

You opened your eyes to look at him. He had fully turned back toward you.

[Maybe learn to knock next time? Tee-hee!~] You winked.

Stardust shook his head with a soft laugh before waving goodbye and finally leaving. You almost forgot to wave back.

Once you were alone, you felt… cold.

The wind hit you through the tree branches and a shiver ran through you. It felt like your skin was sticking together like glue… You cringed. It was a disgusting, vile, and overwhelming sensation.

You stood up and put your light out to be safe once again before you headed into the dark woods. You needed to clean this blood off of you before you started panicking for different reasons from before. The sensation of the grains being wet and drying together all crusty was going to make you vibrate until your body tore itself apart.

Still, this wasn’t going to go well, was it?

Your only ideas for your appearance were from stardust’s little drawing and what you could see when you looked down. You had no idea what your face looked like, but you already knew you weren’t going to like it.

You were walking toward the river, but downstream as it ran through the thicker parts of the forest. You’d never wandered this far from town before, so you just had to hold on hope that there wouldn’t be any people foraging or hunting back here. This area wasn’t frozen by the curse yet, there was still food to be found, and the people of Dormont, from their perspective, would be getting desperate for food sooner rather than later.

For old time’s sake, you piou piou���d back at the birds you passed.

The ground was dry and hard beneath your feet, you could see the earth cracking in a spot without grass. Because the curse messed with the weather, you couldn’t recall it having rained much in Dormont for a couple weeks before your party arrived. The ecological damage the King was going to cause Vaugarde by the time these loops ended and he was finally truly dead was going to be devastating. It would likely take years to recover.

There were no fish in the water when you got to the river. The person fishing in town mentioned all the fish were frozen far up and down stream, you think. The water level was very low and the flow was unnaturally slow. You couldn’t understand how it flowed at all; where was the water coming from if the source was frozen in time? You shook those thoughts away as you kneeled at the river’s edge. Hm. It was more like a stream now, wasn’t it? or a creek? Ah, but that wasn’t very important.

Okay, moment of truth. This was the first time seeing your reflection in… Stars, probably since the morning before the loops began. You hadn’t looked at yourself in five years. That was… a lot.

You steeled yourself, best as you could, and closed your eyes. You leaned forward over the water and gave yourself a mental countdown. Normally you’d do three, you picked threes for everything, but the pit in your gut said to make it longer, so seven felt right this time. Slowly, you opened your eyes and…

Ah.

You understood stardust’s reaction now. If you had a mouth it would be gaping.

You thought your head looked vaguely like a skull, but it was the same sparkling lightless sugar as the rest of your body. You were missing a jaw and lips like you’d first thought. What would be the top of your mouth, where teeth would be, was just smoothed out, which was probably a blessing, it would look weirder with them there and not the rest, you thought… How could you speak?

The softness of your old face was mostly gone now. You ran your fingers along your sharper cheekbones with a grimace. There was hardly any give at all. Your ears were different too. It looked like the cartilage had burned so hot they melted and were flattened against the sides of your head, leaving only bumps that vaguely hinted at what used to be there. There were still holes though, so you didn’t have to question how you could still hear. You pressed your palms against the bumps to block the sound and yep! The muffling of the babbling brook in front of you confirmed that you still heard through them! That was some consolation, you supposed, some thread of normalcy.

You still had your nose surprisingly. That made no sense considering you could no longer breathe. It looked out of place without the rest of your face. The bridge looked like it’d been broken at some point, curving a little toward your left side. You booped it and it seemed to be the only part of you that was still just as squishy as you vaguely remembered it used to be… Not that you were regularly booping your own nose or anything, but you thought your whole head was squishy back then, your baby fat had never fallen off. That was always a little weird to you considering the fact that you were struggling to find food for about a decade, right up until you met your friends, especially after Bonnie joined and started making you all gourmet meals. The rest of your body was pretty gangly and you were always happy your cloak hid it… It was embarrassing.

Your gaze came to your eyes now. They were different shades, just like stardust said. Your left eye’s shade lightened, as if your blindness was some prolonged natural cause and not from sacrifice. The grains shifted around your eyes like skin might so you could still make expressions, but it certainly looked wrong, and the uncanniness only worsened the longer you stared at yourself.

Okay, you’d seen yourself now. That was enough for at least another five years. You’d gotten a teeny tiny bit of closure on exactly one thing. That had to count for something, right?

You washed the blood from your hands, face, neck, and chest after that without much fanfare. You didn’t have access to soap or a sponge, but it was good enough. It would just reset anyway.

The grains of craft still clumped together, but somehow you knew it would all dry without having that awful feeling you had before. You’d just have to lie in the sun before it set… Then you looked up through the canopy to see it had actually already set and you groaned. It seemed you lost track of time yet again, not that it mattered very much now. You didn’t have anything else to do until the next day and that was really only if stardust called you.

Hm?

Stardust was calling you right now actually. Huh? Shouldn’t they be at dinner? Or on their little stargazing date? Hah… The thought of them calling you instead of silently looking at Isa with heart eyes alone together in that field… The “skin” over your stomach frizzled uncomfortably.

[I’m surprised to hear from you again so soon, stardust!~ Are you really that lonely without me? You’ll make me blush!]

(Where are you? You aren’t at the tree.)

Huh???

[Shouldn’t you be at the clocktower?] You shook the excess water off of you and stood up. You might as well head back to see what he needed of you. [Don’t tell me you’re willingly ditching them to hang out with little old me again? and so soon after the last time!]

(No, that’s…) You heard them gulp, even though this wasn’t really a verbal conversation.

(Dinner’s over already. I told them I wanted to go on a walk.)

[Too antsy to be stuck in bed just yet?]

(... Something like that.)

[Well, I’m almost back. I just had to freshen up a bit.]

The call ended just like that and only a few minutes later, you were back at the tree. You lit yourself up once more, but kept yourself a bit dim. It was dark out now, you didn’t want to have bugs completely swarming you.

Stardust was standing up, leaning their back against the Favor Tree and looking up into the pitch canopy. You purposefully walked with louder steps so they’d hear you approach.

“So, what do you need from me, stardust?” You asked when he’d looked over at you. As you got closer, you were forced to realize that… he was shorter than you. You knew your body was strange now, wrong, but the height difference was wholly unexpected. You kind of liked that change actually. You were a full head taller… Were you still shorter than Odile? You pushed that thought aside for now.

They smiled warmly and pushed themself off the tree. Then from under their cloak, they pulled out… “Flower for you.”

You blinked at it. What? Seriously?

“Seriously, stardust? You came back out here just for that?” You huffed and crossed your arms over your chest. “How many times do I have to say no?”

You’re supposed to give flowers to people that are important. You didn’t fit that description.

“Not even as an apology?” Their face fell into the most pitiful, disappointed pout you’d ever seen. If it was an act, you must admit that it was a very good one.

“No.” You grimaced down at them. “And…” You groaned and looked away. You tried not to glow any brighter, but from how your light hit the leaves around you, you knew you were failing. “You don’t have to apologize for… That. There was no way you could’ve known about that.”

Their hand holding the flower fell back to their side after a beat of silence, at least you assumed from seeing vague movement in your periphery. “Is there anything I could do…?”

“Just don’t…” Your hands gripped onto your upper arms, perhaps too tight. “Don’t bring it up again.”

“Okay…” You could hear the defeat in their voice. Good.

“You could probably still give the flower to one of your family members I’m sure,” You sighed and looked at them once again. “Or you could, I don’t know, maybe pin it to your cloak or something?”

Their eyes widened just a fraction before they fumbled with one of the pins on the collar and the flower. Then they held them up to you, eye sparkling. “Can you do it?”

Well… He wasn’t making you take the stupid flower for yourself, so you considered this a win. You took the items and ignored how giddy he looked as you reached up to pin it. It wasn’t a difficult process by any means, though you worried about the pin stabbing them. You didn’t exactly have the gentlest touch. You took a step back afterwards and… Oh, huh. That looked cute actually. Why hadn’t you ever done that before?

“Awww, stardust, that looks sooo cuuuuuute!~” You cooed and pinched their cheek, tugging on it until they were slapping your hand away. You giggled and backed off.

He was blushing darkly as he rubbed his cheek. “Thanks…” They dipped their head into the collar of their cloak before you could see any more and tilted their head down so their hat’s brim would hide the rest.

That certainly wasn’t a reaction you got out of them very often, so you decided to push it. “Aw, can my dearest stardust not take being told how adorable he is?”

“You know I can’t!” They whined and pulled the brim of their hat down further with their hands.

“But you admit you are cute?~” You bent forward, trying to move so you could see his face again. This was too much fun, you couldn’t help yourself.

“Ugh, good night, Loop!” They hurriedly backed away.

“Good night, cutie!~” You just kept laughing as you watched them skitter off into the night.

Oh.

You actually felt better now.

Ehehe… Hahahahaha!

You were… You were glad you had stardust around for company. You didn’t really get to appreciate that in earnest yet. Finally you had someone to talk to, someone who, to an extent, understood what you went through [even though they didn’t know you went through it].

Not only that, but… You got to genuinely joke around again. You’d been stuck repeating the same lines so long that every joke was hollow and meaningless. You used to annoy your friends with bad puns at every opportunity, playing the comedian was basically the core personality trait you adopted, but you lost that. For so long, you’d lost that part of yourself. You didn’t know if you’d be able to make puns anytime soon, if ever again, but at least with stardust you could have a little fun. You could tease him like it was second nature to you. It made the weight on you a little more bearable.

And if that also made his own load lighter? Well, that was simply an added bonus.

If you had someone to talk to from the start, you- you…

Hm. Well, you immediately soured your good mood with that one. Great job, Loop.

You shook away your thoughts and looked for a comfy patch of grass in the dark brush. You might as well try and sleep. You didn’t have much else to do anyway. You supposed you were back to your regular schedule now. There was supposed to be a script to follow and a play to watch. You were nothing if not a stickler for following the order of things, even when you no longer wanted to.

It was a big day tomorrow, you could feel it. Despite living that day thousands of times, you felt… an inexplicable dread.

You didn’t sleep that night.