Chapter 16: Hug me
He couldn’t pin down when it changed. There was no single loop he could point to.
She was beside him, reading the place where he’d cut the notch again. He looked at her profile against the white and felt the thing he’d spent several loops pretending wasn’t there.
"What," she said, catching him.
"Nothing."
"You are doing it again."
"Doing what."
"The face."
"I told you. I do not have a face."
She held his eyes a beat longer than the joke required, then looked back down at the notch.
"You look at me differently than you used to," she said.
"Yes."
"Since when."
"I do not know. I think it was always there and I was not paying attention."
She didn’t answer right away.
"That is either honest or convenient," she said.
"It is honest," he said. "I do not have the energy left for convenient."
The loop reset. She was standing her usual distance from the tree. He was on the ground where he always started.
He stood up, crossed the distance, and stopped in front of her, slightly too close.
"Still true," he said.
"You are going to make this complicated."
"It is already complicated. I am just naming it."
"Naming things does not usually go well for gods," she said. "Ask me how I got this job."
"Name it then," she said.
"I like you," he said. "Considerably more than the situation warrants. I have for a while."
"That is a terrible time to bring it up."
"I am aware. I am bringing it up anyway."
"I have not been liked before," she said. "Not like that."
"I know."
"You cannot know."
"I know what you told me about the windows. The mother. The hands on the crowded street. You watched it happen to strangers for four thousand loops and called it envy. I think some of it was. I think some of it was something else."
"What else," she said.
"Longing," he said. "Which is what you were supposed to be the goddess of."
She didn’t say anything to that for a moment. Then, quietly: "That is an annoyingly accurate point."
"I have my moments."
She sat down against the tree. He sat beside her. Neither of them widened the gap.
He told her about the knight system from the third-era empire histories.
"We did not have knights," she said.
"You had gods sitting around a table deciding what mortals were owed. I think that’s worse."
"Fair."
"A knight swears to a specific person. Not a crown, not a cause. A person."
"That is an interesting system," she said.
"I am offering to be yours."
"You are offering to be my knight," she said, turning to look at him.
"Yes."
"You have no sword."
"Technicality."
"You are trapped in a looping white dimension with me."
"Also a technicality."
"Itsuki." She used his name carefully.
He looked at her.
"Yes," he said. "I am offering to be yours. Whatever that means in here. It means something to me regardless."
She looked out at the white for a long moment.
"I do not know how to accept something like that," she said. "I have not been given things. I have only wanted things through windows."
"You do not have to do anything. The offer just needed to be made."
"That is a very inefficient way to propose a job."
"I’m new at this."
She didn’t say anything else for the rest of that loop.
At the start of the next one, she crossed the distance herself first time and sat down beside him before he’d gotten all the way upright.
"Yes," she said — too quickly, like she had already said it before and wasn’t sure if it counted.
[WARNING: LOOP INTEGRITY COMPROMISED.]
[UNAUTHORIZED VARIABLE DETECTED.]
He looked at her, startled.
"Yes," she said again, and her voice cracked slightly in the middle of it.
He didn’t say anything back. He just put his hand near hers. She looked at it, suspicious, then put her hand over his.
[WARNING: SUBJECT CONTACT THRESHOLD EXCEEDED.]
Then the panel went dark.
"This does not mean I am being nice to you," she said.
"Wouldn’t dream of expecting it."
Time passed.
He started noticing things carrying over. Not memories those had always carried. Smaller than that. The particular pressure of her hand against his, arriving in the next loop before he’d fully sat up. The tree feeling slightly warmer than it should have near the base, on mornings when the loop before had ended in that argument.
"It is the same," he said, dragging a hand across the bark.
"It is not."
"It is. I have touched every inch of this tree. It is the same texture everywhere."
"It is rougher near the base."
"It is not rougher near the base."
They spent three loops on it. The results were inconclusive. He started humming tuneless without realizing it, and she’d smile every time, and he never noticed the smile either.
She started cutting the notch herself now, before he could, same spot every time.
"You’re stealing my bit," he said.
"It is not a bit. It is a ritual."
"It’s my ritual."
"It is ours now. You do not get to keep all the good ones."
He told her about Yui again, a different angle this time.
"You have told me this part before."
"Not like this."
She listened to every version anyway.
"She would like you," he said once.
"You cannot know that."
"She would like anyone who made me cut notches in things and argue about texture variance."
She looked at the notch, quiet for a second.
"She sounds like someone worth going back to," she said.
"Yes," he said. "She is."
Neither of them said anything else for a while. He picked at a loose thread on his sleeve. She watched him do it.
She started disappearing for a few seconds at a time.
Not the loop resetting. One moment she was there. The next she wasn’t. Then she was again before the thing rising in his chest had time to become anything he could name.
"What was that," he said.
"Nothing."
"That was not nothing."
"It was..." She stopped. Started again. "It was nothing important." the pause was wrong in a way he couldn’t point to. Like she’d reached for a word and found a different one waiting there instead.
He let it go.
He noticed things after, in the loops where she came back from the disappearing. The way she held her hands differently fingers slightly open, like she’d just let something go.
The way she looked toward wherever the boundary was, if the white had a boundary. He noticed and didn’t ask.
What he didn’t know was what she’d been working on alone, in the seconds when his attention was somewhere else, in the loops where she pretended to be asleep was a way out that included both of them.
There wasn’t one.
She’d searched anyway. Stubbornness had never been one of her virtues. It had simply refused to leave.
Four thousand loops ago, they had told her never to touch the boundary.
Four thousand loops later, she finally did.
It was real. It answered.
The white cracked.
A door appeared that should not have been allowed to exist for even a second.
He noticed it as a change in the air and then her hand found his, the pressure of it arriving before he’d fully remembered where he was. Something had already broken that neither of them had named yet.
"Do you feel that," he said.
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