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Howl picks Calcifer up, carefully, carefully, and takes two precise steps to the chalked circle on the floor; Sophie watches, her heart in her throat, and silently prays for this to work. Howl stands with terrified Calcifer at the center of the five-pointed star, and then he turns –
And then Sophie finds herself old again, hauling her aching legs up onto the doorstop, exhausted down to her bones and beyond, down into the heart of her she never did learn to trust.
At first she thinks she's dreaming. Or perhaps it's a nightmare. Perhaps the Witch cursed her with more than looking on the outside the way she has always felt on the inside; perhaps she is cursed with might-have-beens, with if-onlys, with the loneliness of remembering a future that will now never come to pass. Perhaps that life will always be just a dream she had when she was young.
(Sophie is and always has been the constant around which everything and everyone moves through their lives. Bedrock knows better than to dream, Sophie thinks with a dull, calm acceptance. Foundations do not allow themselves to wish for love on a falling star. Choices are things that happen to other people.)
She knows who Howl is now, she knows what he's made of, and because of that – despite that – she cannot bring herself to tell him anything. With five repeats under her belt, she realizes that he suspects something about her, and therefore there is something about her that is suspicious; after seven, the tangle the Witch has made of her emotions and her power and the curse of age, all knotted up together like a game of cat's cradle that's been thrown down on the ground out of disgust, seeps into her very bones like a miasma.
She should have known that Calcifer would notice.
"I exist outside of time," he says one quiet night, while Howl is away and Michael is sleeping. "Of course I noticed. You're giving me a headache, and I didn't think that was possible."
"I'm sorry," Sophie says, rocking gently; she's attending to her knitting. She finds that it soothes more than her fingers to have something soft and repetitive in her hands. "Is there anything I can do?"
"You can pay attention when I tell you that this is killing you," Calcifer says harshly.
"I'm not sure that's possible," she says. "I think it would just reset, don't you? I don't think the curse will let me die."
Calcifer stares at her, his eyes the bright, blinding heart of fire, until she can't bear to hold the connection anymore and drops her gaze to look at the hearth instead. "I wasn't talking about your body."
She is withdrawing, Sophie realizes after another ten repeats, after Howl and Michael grow ever colder, until she's the only one who remembers the family they'd become. She's stopped giving anything of herself to them because it all seems so pointless when she's the only one who remembers. Too much effort.
(It hurts too much.)
It's not pointless. Sophie makes them better; Sophie makes them work. Sophie is the one who makes them a family. She hadn't seen that before.
It takes her three more repeats before Sophie can truly bring herself to believe it, but when she finally does, she slows down, she pays attention – she takes the time to remember how to open up her heart and give pieces of herself that she's not sure she'll ever get back. And the more Sophie gives, the more that she cares, the more Howl looks at her like he knows her, like she's something more than a cleaning lady, more than a hatter, more than a poor, twisted, cursed creature that crawled out of the swamp and stole the very warmth of his hearth –
On the twentieth repeat Sophie kisses him, long and sweet, and then longer and not sweet at all, but hungry for things no good girl would ever dream of admitting that they wanted. It doesn't matter. He won't remember it.
He kisses her back, though, kisses her with more focused passion than she thought him capable of feeling.
(It does matter. She remembers it.)
It doesn't head off the slime, of course, but as Sophie rolls up her sleeves and scrubs her bitter way through the entire house again, she counts it as her punishment. She knows better than this. She doesn't wish for herself. She's the eldest; she's the one who gives.
In the next repeat she tries to remember how it went the first time, the time when everything was real and fresh, when she gave and gave and asked only for what she truly needed, and she makes a true effort to repeat that – but when she does, Howl isn't looking at her anymore. He's off, doing spells, chasing his girls – chasing Lettie, the cad – and sparing her only a puzzled glance or two.
It shouldn't hurt. She doesn't want him to look at her like that. She doesn't want him to treat her like one of those girls – she doesn't want to be one of those girls. She doesn't even know why she puts up with him at all.
(And if she ever figures it out, she'll excise that piece of her with a rusty knife. Honestly, Howl is unbelievable.)
Howl asks her to play his poor, old, aged mother and – and of course she says yes, of course she does. She always says yes eventually. But for the first time, it occurs to her to wonder – who's really causing all of the problems in her life? Is it the Witch, or Howl? Or is the one person who always says yes – is she the problem?
Is Sophie causing this?
She doesn't dare change anything, not yet, but when Howl steps up to scoop Calcifer out of the hearth and cast the spell that has always marked the beginning and the end of her own personal purgatory, something makes Sophie really open her eyes and pay attention – not just to the spell and the spectacle that Howl always trails in his wake like stardust, but to the way their magic moves through the room, to Michael's face, half frightened and half fascinated, to the spidery traces of her own affection that lie strewn through the house like tiny confetti, reaching out for the nearest person with tiny hands like ivy suckers.
The more she thinks about it – the more she avoids thinking about it – the more she is convinced that this is her fault. There's something that she does that sends her spinning back to the first time she'd set foot in this castle. Something that she does every time, without thinking about her actions; something instinctual.
What's the one thing that Sophie always does?
This isn't a riddle. She knows the answer. It's only that –
As always, Sophie is scared. She doesn't want to live like this forever, living two months at a time, unable to move forward with her life. But at the same time, she's struggling to take the step that will set her free. Here, she knows all the steps. Here she knows the rules. Out there –
Anything could happen.
The thing she is lacking is the courage to believe that she can take control of the situation and make the right choice.
(Sophie has always stepped into the trap of her own free will – Sophie has always laid her own trap – Sophie has always, always caged herself.)
Howl picks Calcifer up, carefully, carefully, and takes two precise steps to the chalked circle on the floor; Sophie watches, her heart in her throat; she carefully does not pray for luck. Sophie keeps her feelings and her power inside of her, where they belong. She trusts Howl to be enough. Howl stands with terrified Calcifer at the center of the five-pointed star, and then he turns –
And there's magic in the air, this little piece of the universe swinging loose and free from the rest of it, controlled only by Howl's intent and Calcifer's power.
Sophie feels like she's stepped into an uncertain future, something she doesn't understand, and she never thought she'd be glad of that; she never thought that all she would feel is curiosity about what happens next.
Later, Calcifer stares a hole in the side of her head. "All of that time you wasted," Calcifer complains. "And you didn't find out anything about the curse!"
"I think I might have one idea," Sophie says, her eyes on Howl, and smiles.