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1.
Closing your eyes, you let sleep come over you.
Supposedly you would wake up once the gnosia infection had been eliminated, but you knew better. You would sleep and see all these same people; you would wake up and see them all again. It felt like one long dream you were always falling into, rotating through the same familiar faces inside the same scenes. Sometimes the ending would change, and you never knew if it would end up a nightmare or another forgettable repeat, but in the end it was the same story beats, the same carouselling cast of characters.
Maybe a mobile was a more apt comparison, these faces spinning above you and lulling you into another dream. You could see one of them now, shuffling around the door of your pod; Setsu peered in through the window, their face your final lullaby before the glass frosted over.
1.
Dreams are, in essence, the brain taking collections of information and organizing them into a cohesive narrative. Your mind takes people, places, and details, and mashes them together.
For example: the crew of the D.Q.O. The hull, cafeteria, private quarters. Crew, bug, doctor, gnosia.
Faces, settings, details, shuffled at random while your unconscious makes sense of them. Sometimes you wondered if these loops were just your brain trying to understand what was happening—a mixing of the puzzle pieces, over and over, until you finally understood where the puzzle came from in the first place.
"Puzzles are meant to be solved, right?" Setsu kept their eyes pointed out the window, as if they were counting to be sure the number of stars in this reality were the same as last time. "Then that's what we'll do."
You nodded, facing out toward space and pretending you weren't just watching Setsu's reflection in the glass. You'd long since gotten bored of these sprawling galaxies, but despite how long you two had been doing this you never grew tired of looking at Setsu.
1.
You had gone through so many iterations of the same week. They all felt dreamlike to you, but Setsu's face betrayed any allusion to rest; they looked so tired.
They didn't always see this world the way you did, as reoccurring dreams made of nothing more than memory. Setsu saw their friends, warm and real and alive, and saw them kill and be killed. Setsu took everything so seriously, always thinking about the consequences.
You suggested there were no consequences.
This is how you found yourself in the ship's theater, watching an old Earth movie neither of you could quite understand. The low lighting and comforting wash of sound had coaxed Setsu into a well-deserved slumber; you whispered "sweet dreams" into their ear and Setsu's eyes scrunched for a moment, your breath tickling their skin. Shigemichi shushed you for talking and Setsu twitched again, before their face finally relaxed into something peaceful.
But eventually the lights blinked back on, Setsu blinked back into consciousness, and it was off to the cold sleep pods.
1.
Yuriko once told you that the universe was insane.
Her words had been looping more times than you have, repeating endlessly in your head. After all, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result; and even if it wasn't quite by choice, isn't that what you and Setsu were doing?
Well, it didn't feel like a choice for you. You'd throw away as many loops as you cared to if you could, fooling around and pushing the limits of these dreams just to see what would happen, or just to entertain yourself. But Setsu started every session determined to make it the last—they chose, again and again, like it wasn't equivalent bashing their head against a wall.
These cycles gave only the illusion of progression, like running in a hamster wheel. You certainly felt like a caged animal, at times.
1.
You are the guardian angel, and this time you've decided to be selfish.
Ignoring logic and strategy, you choose to save Setsu every single time. You do this not knowing if they are gnosia or crew, and you don't care. For once you weren't keeping someone alive because they were the most likely target or because you needed them in order to achieve some goal; you were doing this just because you could and you wanted to.
If Setsu knew what you were doing they'd definitely be upset, but what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them. And during this loop, at the very least, you decided nothing would hurt them—you covered for them when necessary, threw attention away when it was appropriate, anything to keep Setsu out of cold sleep. You'd long since lost track of the facts, all the faces and memories blurring with the past loops.
But you played the game, well, if only so that you could survive and keep Setsu alive. And it didn't matter if you used innocent people as distractions and acted confident about statements you pulled out of your ass, because hadn't you done this so many times before to protect others and win their secrets from them? Why was this any different?
You and Setsu had hypothesized going after specific results and trying new things could change something: maybe, this time, something would change. (Maybe this time, Setsu would love you.)
1.
You would waste an eternity's worth of sessions if it gave you more time with Setsu.
You never told them that. You could imagine the look of disappointment they would give you, eyes heavy with exhaustion. You feared that look following you into every loop that came after.
You knew they would say what they always said, that they just wanted this to be over. That was the only dream they every seemed to talk about.
2.
Setsu never sank into stagnation like a comfort. They always needed a sense of progression, the feeling that steps were being taken and there was a goal to achieve. Urgency burned through them, always yearning to see things through while you couldn't conceptualize an ending at all. They pushed forward until one appeared, in the form of a door.
Afterwards you stood in the middle of the festivities painfully lucid. You felt hollow; you felt like someone had poured cold water over your head and woken you up.
You said Setsu's name and it was echoed back as a question. The person at the center of everything had disappeared, leaving behind an awkward, gaping hole. You felt it like something tangible, like a wound.
The emptiness ached inside you. You felt so painfully, painfully awake.