Chapter Text
She was crying before she was awake.
That was the worst part — the way it came back before she did. The body remembering what the mind hadn't caught up to yet. Petra surfaced out of sleep with her face already wet and her throat already tight, and for one long, stupid moment she lay in the dark of her room and didn't know what year it was.
Then she did.
The grief arrived in the particular way grief arrives when you've had it a long time — not like a wave, but like a room you've walked back into. Familiar. Shaped to fit you. A year and a half of her life in that room: the smell of woodsmoke and beeswax in the manor's main hall; Ram's precise, dismissive voice reading inventory lists aloud while Petra took notes; Frederica showing her, once, how to press flowers without bruising the petals; the sound Rem made when she laughed at something unexpected, which was rare and completely worth waiting for.
Subaru teaching her to arm-wrestle. Subaru losing on purpose when she got frustrated. Subaru not losing on purpose when she accused him of it, and losing anyway, and blaming his arm.
She pressed both hands flat against her face and breathed in and out until her ribs stopped aching.
Outside, the sky was just beginning to go grey. An hour before her mother would wake. She could hear the village settling into morning around her — a cart on the road, the distant complaint of the miller's rooster, the sound of her own heartbeat too loud in the quiet house. All of it ordinary. All of it unchanged.
The world had reset.
She understood that now, though it had taken her the whole of yesterday — she'd had to sit with it, turn it over, press it from different angles. It was the only explanation for why she was twelve years old again in a bed in Arlam, why the ache in her left knee from where she'd twisted it last winter was simply gone, why she could hear her father's slow snoring through the wall in the way she hadn't been able to hear anything for months because her father had been two weeks dead.
The world had reset, and she remembered all of it, and apparently she was the only one.
She lay still and stared at the ceiling until the grey outside became pale blue. She listened to her father snore. She did this very carefully, the way you do something you know you will need the memory of later. The rise and fall of it. The small familiar rhythm.
Then she got up, washed her face in the basin, and went to help her mother with breakfast.
Her mother was already in the kitchen when she came down. This was the first thing she'd forgotten — that her mother was always first, had always been first, that getting up early had been something Petra learned from watching her. You lose the small things first, when people are gone. You remember the shape of them but not the texture.
"You're up early," her mother said, without turning around. She was cutting bread in the particular efficient way she had, the loaf braced against her forearm.
"Couldn't sleep." Petra took the knife when her mother finished and started slicing the hard cheese at the end of the board. Her hands remembered how thick to cut it. Her hands remembered a lot of things.
"Bad dream?"
"Something like that."
Her mother glanced at her then — that quick, sideways look that meant she was deciding whether to push — and apparently decided against it, which was very much like her, and which Petra found so piercingly familiar that she had to keep her eyes on the cheese.
They worked in silence for a while. The fire popped. The light came in under the shutters in the long thin way it did in early morning, striped across the kitchen floor. Petra had forgotten this too — the specific quality of morning light in this house, how different it was from the manor's high windows.
She'd spent so much time away that the small things had gone fuzzy. Now here they all were, sharp as cut glass, every detail returned to her intact and unchanged, as if the house had been waiting.
The world had reset.
Her father was alive.
Rem was asleep somewhere — not the coma, the real sleep, the person she'd been before Gluttony — and Emilia was in the capital and Subaru was —
Subaru was somewhere in Lugnica right now, confused and hungry, probably about to be robbed.
Petra put down the knife. She looked at her hands. She picked the knife back up.
"Petra?"
"I'm fine."
After breakfast, when her mother went to the well and her father went to the smithy and the village settled into its ordinary morning business, Petra walked to the edge of the north road and stood there for a while.
The road to Lugnica was visible for about half a mile before it curved behind the treeline. Nothing on it. Just the ruts left by yesterday's carts and a line of crows on the fence rail doing absolutely nothing of consequence.
She knew what was happening in the capital right now, or roughly so. She'd heard the story enough times in different ways — Subaru's version, which was scattered and performed and true; Reinhard's version, which was brief and modest and also true; the various half-heard accounts from people who'd been there or knew someone who had. She knew about the badge. She knew about the slums. She knew about Felt, small and sharp and bristling, and about the moment Emilia looked at Subaru and decided he was worth something.
She knew that none of it needed her.
That was the thing she'd been sitting with since she woke up, turning it over like a stone she couldn't put down. What she knew. What she was supposed to do with knowing it. Whether there was anything she could do, or whether doing anything at all would snap something she couldn't see.
She'd thought about this in the abstract, sometimes, in the long nights of the previous timeline when Beatrice was tutoring her and she had too much quiet time and not enough to fill it with. What would it mean to change something? What's the smallest possible change that wouldn't cascade? An interesting game when the stakes were hypothetical. Considerably less interesting now.
A crow turned on the fence rail and looked at her.
"I know," Petra said aloud.
The crow did not answer, which was appropriate.
She went home.
That afternoon she found the loose board in her bedroom floor — she'd noticed it years ago, the original years, before everything — and pried it up to check the space beneath it. Just packed earth. A little dust. Nothing special.
She sat back on her heels and thought about what she needed.
Something to write in, and something to write with. She had both; she'd been given a small supply of writing materials last year for her lessons, and most of it was still in the chest under her bed, the quill going dry at the nib but salvageable. She retrieved it, trimmed the quill, mixed a small amount of the ink from the dry cake she'd learned to reconstitute from Beatrice — who'd been deeply unimpressed when she'd asked and deeply satisfied when Petra had gotten the ratio right on the second try.
She sat at her desk and opened to the first page of the unused journal, which had been a gift from the village schoolmaster and which she'd always been too precious about to actually write in. It smelled like cedar and ink. She looked at it for a moment.
Then she wrote a date at the top of the first page. Not today's date. The date of the original summoning. The day, as best she could calculate it, that Natsuki Subaru had fallen out of a convenience store and into the world.
Underneath she wrote: He is alive. He does not know me yet. The story is starting again.
She looked at this for a long time.
Then she wrote: I don't know why I remember. I don't know if it matters that I do.
She paused. Added: It has to matter. It has to count for something. I won't believe that it doesn't.
She closed the journal and put it under the loose board and replaced the board and sat on it for a moment, which was not a dignified thing to do but felt necessary. Then she smoothed her skirt, went downstairs, and started the washing, because the washing still needed to be done.
The world had ended and reset and given her back her father and her home and her mother's early-morning bread and two more years of her childhood, and somewhere in the capital Natsuki Subaru was about to become the worst-informed person in the history of Lugunica, and she was wringing out linens in a village two days' ride away because what else was there to do.
She would figure out the rest later. For now, she wrung out the linens. She hung them to dry. She watched them move in the wind.
Later, when her father came home from the smithy smelling of iron and sweat and ruffled her hair with one big hand, she let herself lean into it for a second longer than was probably normal for a twelve-year-old with her dignity to consider.
He didn't notice anything wrong. He just laughed at something and went to wash up.
Petra stood in the kitchen doorway and breathed.
Outside, the light was going golden and long. Somewhere, it was the first day of the story. For her, it was the first day of what came after.
She didn't know what to call that yet.