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Sometimes they wake with the sun shining on their faces, a village sprawling out beneath the grassy hill they lay on. Sometimes they hold hands and watch the sunset in a field of flowers. Sometimes they exist to live for but a moment, together for every last second. sometimes they fight. Sometimes they hurt each other. Sometimes it's them against the world. Sometimes they've known each other their whole lives. Sometimes they don't get enough time to scratch even the surface. Sometimes they're an explorer, a pirate, an alien, a demon. It all ends the same.
They meet, they love, they die.
Neither of them remembers the first universe, if there even was one. Maybe this is the first universe. Maybe they've been stuck in this loop for longer than time itself has existed. None of that matters to them when they wake up in each world. To them, each life is their first life. The memories don't stay with them. The scars, though, the scars in their heads and their hearts do. They don't realize that the grief and despair and longing they feel is from universes past. How could they? They have no way of knowing that the emotions that plague them are all that have carried over from the countless worlds they've lived and died in.
There's always a pattern. First, they meet. For a while, it becomes easier once they find each other. At what point does it stop counting as love at first sight, when they've loved for lifetimes upon lifetimes? They love deeply nonetheless. Sometimes their love is cut off before it can even fully start. Sometimes it gets time to develop and blossom, before cutting out suddenly with a rapid decrescendo. They never get to grow old together, to find peace as two halves of a whole.
They die, sometimes together, sometimes apart, never gently. The cycle starts again. but just as the love stays with them when they move on, so does the pain. Sometimes it's betrayal. Sometimes it's guilt and regret. Grief is a constant in whatever form it chooses to take. Eventually, it becomes too much. Eventually, they meet in a universe where the hurt is too strong. They love, but it isn't enough. In these universes, they die alone, separate. They love each other but not together. It happens again in the next world, and the one after that, and the one after that, until eventually, the pain has faded enough for them to love again. And so they do, for a while. But the hurt starts building again and the shifting balance between love and pain becomes its own cycle. And through it all, they are trapped living life after life until they achieve a happy ending eternally out of reach.
They meet, they love, they die, again and again forevermore.