chapter 1: it pulls you under, it will take you whole

Frankly, you should be used to the heat this time of year—it's only June, after all—but the concrete jungle still has you sweating like a pig. And it's not like Houston is going to stop being a hellhole anytime soon.

Not that you've chosen the best way to beat the heat, either. Sparring may have its benefits—letting off steam, preventing you from rotting a slow and boring death in your apartment, getting the kid some exercise—but you've ended up with the kid sluggish and near-passed out from heat stroke enough times to know when to quit. You usually ramp up slowly, just to make sure he can keep up a little. It's how you've been playing it out today as well, letting the tempo rise as he gets warmed up. He's getting tired, though—you can see it in the way he lets the blade scrape against the concrete roof.

You had a weird dream this morning. It ended badly.

Best to get it over with.

He balks at the sudden change of pace, only barely matching your blows and not even bothering parrying the ones he knows aren't going to slice. You don't stop those before they land. He should know better by now than to think that blunt force can't fuck you up just as bad as cuts. A swipe at his feet almost throws him off-balance, but he recovers just in time to block the strike at his stomach. Good. You get caught up in the rhythm of it, falling into step in the sharp choreography you've long grown used to.

At one point he goes on the offensive—a desperate measure if ever you saw one—and you dodge most of the swings with ease, parrying a single strike just for the hell of it. He's done with it after a few moments. Tiring yourself out like that is never a good play, not when you don't have a straight line to victory. When he centers his stance, you charge in again.

Apparently the heat isn't just getting to him, though, because when you blink he's a good foot away from where you were aiming, his sword going straight at you. You step forward rather than away. The size of his weapon will make it hard for him to change course. It's only when you're halfway through the motion that you realize you've gotten it wrong—he aims the sword at the gap between your arm and your torso, his grip on it lighter than you'd thought. It's good; he's letting gravity carry the swing through when he can't do it himself. It's another moment before you remember the exact same move leading to your inner elbow getting cut to the bone.

The shock of the phantom pain means you only narrowly avoid the blow coming for you. The sword still manages to graze your arm in the same way as it did in your—dream?—this morning, even as you manage to avoid the worst of it. Following through on your own swing, turning your foot before it lands and stepping hard enough to let the momentum twist the rest of your body back around, you grip your sword and—

Why isn't he parrying?

You know he's quick enough to raise the sword in time. He's done it a thousand times before. You've made him do it a thousand times before.

His eyebrows are raised in—shock? terror?—and he isn't looking at you, he's looking at his own blade, stupid, he's in an active combat situation and he still isn't focused on the threat—

He looks up. When his gaze meets yours through twin layers of darkness, he scrambles, hands fumbling around the hilt.

It's not fast enough.

You are, though, and you manage to stop the swing going at his neck before it hits. It's a matter of milliseconds.

You look down at the sword in his hands. There's blood on it. He looks at your face as the heavy gasps wracking through his body turn more even. His breathing picks up again when he follows your gaze down to the blade, high and reedy. It's like listening to a preschooler's recorder recital. Grating on your ears. Cowering.

The familiar ice of disappointment spreads through your veins. How was this kid ever going to be anything like your brother? What little kindness you've handed him has clearly turned him far softer than he needs to be.

Your continued silence seems to break some sort of dam, because suddenly he's babbling, nonsense that strings together into begging, nervous pitch scraping against something behind your eyes worse than when he was hyperventilating.

“Shit—dude, are you alright—fuck, obviously not, shit—it wasn't—”

The whole thing comes to a screeching halt when you turn to look at him rather than the weapon still dripping with your blood. You feel the hilt of your own sword loose in your hand, blade gone slack and fallen on the shoulder of his shirt like a kind hand guiding him.

You tighten your grip again. The blade turns, hand turning into claws a twitch away from digging into him. His eyebrows fly up over the brim of his sunglasses.

The start of a snarl works it way across your face, and—

You blink. You've just awoken to the dulcet tones of Fred Durst yelling about the way that it's just one of those days when you don't want to wake up. Raising your very uninjured arm and pressing your hand against your eyes so hard you start seeing stars, you just might have to agree with his assessment. Because it is one of those days where everything is fucked. Everybody does, in fact, suck.

Your name is DIRK STRIDER, and this is the third time you've woken up on this exact morning.

You just might have to start breaking stuff.

⁙

The rest of the morning goes about the same as it has the past two times. You're glad, in a vague sense, that you don't have a day job anymore; no need to call in if you only work nights and the day resets sometime around 5 o'clock. Grabbing the t-shirt on the floor by the futon and pulling it over your head, you wonder vaguely where Cal's at, and immediately regret it as the familiar weight of him lands on your shoulders. You secure your cap on your head before you even deign to acknowledge he's there. His head turns towards you over your shoulder, closer and closer until you would have felt his breath on your cheekbones if he had working lungs.

You flick his polished-wood face. There's a hollow tock.

AND A HOWDYDOO TO YOU TOO, ASSHOLE, he screeches in bright neon and reels back in clacking puppet laughter, blasting the taste of orange soda right into your mind. You groan. You used to like puppets, years back. A lot of artistry goes into them, both in terms of operating and making the things—it's part of why you bought Lil' Cal when you did, 12 years stupid, seeing an ad for a ventriloquism class and ready to latch onto just about anything that would get you out of the house. But almost two decades of having the thing yelling in your mind with your own whiny prepubescent voice, unchanging even through yours dropping and getting rougher through years of smokes, has put you off even trying to getting another one. If you're not careful, it might turn out like the malign marionette himself. You're also pretty sure he'd be jealous, which... the thought makes you vaguely disgusted.

YOU JUST DON'T WANT TO ADMIT I'M YOUR ONE AND ONLY, he interrupts, and even though you can't see his face you get the very vivid image of him winking overlaid on the rest of your vision. It's a nauseating experience.

Worst thing is, you think, you can't even get rid of him. Call it sentimental bullshit or whatever, you just don't like the thought of selling him off—you aren't sure the transfer of ownership through trade even applies to him, metaphysically speaking. And destroying him is out of the question—you've tried that already. It didn't end well.

CAN'T LIVE WITH ME, CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT ME, Cal cackles. You sniff. You don't like it, but he's right.

ALWAYS AM, SUGARTITS takes a bit to dissipate from your vision, but when it does you propel yourself up and off the futon. You don't really care that Cal falls off you. He deserves it, you think pettily. Shouldn't've been an ass.

You set some water to boil. Nothing like shitty instant noodles for breakfast. As you eat, you think. The loop seems to be a total reset of all conditions to this morning—considering the first go had your arm cut to the bone and you barely even feel a twinge when you try to remember the sensation, you guess nothing carries over. Other than your consciousness, obviously. From what you can tell, Dave doesn't seem to remember anything, either, which is just as well; you don't want to have to deal with him running around and trying to figure out what's going on.

You let the day pass as the other two loops before rather than try to change anything drastic just yet. It's a good idea to commit the whole thing to memory first—that way you'll be able to tell if anything out of the new ordinary happens. You change the song on your alarm to Always by Erasure. It's probably pointless, but you don't dismiss the idea that the loop isn't actually happening. You know your own mind well enough not to. You also don't trust Dave to mention it to you if you're acting erractically, which is fine, and to some extent by design, but it does mean you have to take some precautions on your own. Dealing with Cal is already a handful—frankly, you sometimes wish he were a hallucination. Rather that than having to pretend you're puppeteering him when Dave's around. Your breaks with reality are thankfully uncommon these days, even if they still happen from time to time—and they usually aren't as bad as they used to be, back when Dave was still a kid. There's a lot of stuff you don't remember from back then. You don't know if you want to remember.

Dave steals out of his room to get lunch at some point, but you're too caught up in going through the footage from your cameras to really notice if he says anything or not. He can handle himself.

At about a quarter to 5p.m., you lean back over your chair and feel just about every single vertebra in your spine click. There's absolutely fucking nothing happening in any of the footage from the last 24 hours. You wave lazily at one of the cameras, hidden away just behind the corner of a home-printed Birdemic poster. In one corner of the live feed, a collection of you-shaped pixels waves back.

You guess it's time to get back on track. A note is left on Dave's door, sword grabbed from off the wall, and the second you hear the door up to the roof open you turn towards it.

He's going down, you signal, and he grips the sword tighter. It's heavy in his hands, you note—his arms are shaking just a touch—but he isn't any use to you if he doesn't get used to the real thing.

The rest of the fight is about the same as before. You ramp up slower this time, letting him catch his breath when he's getting unsure in his movements, but it doesn't change much. He still forgets to dodge some blows, or lessen the impact of others that are unavoidable, and he still takes that desperate measure when he starts to falter.

And again, there is the moment where you seem to lose track of your surroundings.

You flashstep out of the way this time—it's frankly embarrassing how you managed to get caught on that no less than twice—but then again, it's a pretty good move. You really don't know how he does it—you're sure it isn't your own heat exhaustion by now, because this time you've made sure to keep an eye on yourself. Somehow he manages to flashstep past you. Or do something like that. You're not sure it's physically possible for the human body to move that fast. It's promising, at the very least—it might not be what you're looking for, but you suspect it is. And if so, it means you haven't been wasting the past 14 years.

The thought invigorates you—maybe, you think, if you just push him that tiny bit further, he'll get there sooner—and you barely manage to keep the buzzing energy trapped under your skin. Dave isn't prepared for it, you remind yourself. Still, you can't help it—the beat goes faster, pounding through your body, blow by blow until it happens again, and this time he catches you on your left wrist, right under your glove.

He stops dead in his tracks. The blade is still embedded in you, and fuck but it burns, like sparks inside your hand when he pulls it out hyperventilating and wringing out swears like no tomorrow. You find your own breath, even and deep. He's dropped the sword—clangs against the concrete—and when he looks up at your face his eyes widen and there is—

Fred Durst, once again. You half-heartedly throw your phone at a spot next to the television, looking up at the ceiling as the song plays from wherever it's landed on the floor.

There's a few things you want to try out, you think, after a good while trying to map out what you know for certain and what's still up in the air. There's a consistent theme of major injury. But is it necessarily tied to that? Or is that just a consequence of your spar with Dave? Will it still happen if you avoid it entirely? And what constitutes a major injury? You haven't died yet, for one—is death permanent, or will it just reset you back to the start?

Although. Testing that one out might be a pointless endeavour.

In any case, you've got a general idea of the baseline of the process—relatively normal day, major injury inflicted by Dave. Time to find out what happens if you fuck around. It probably isn't going to work, but hey, it's a time loop—might as well do some dumb shit that isn't going to have lasting consequences.

If it's just major injury that triggers the loop state, you have plenty of options to try out. You are never in want of a weapon, not while you're on home turf. You still decide to go with your usual sword rather than any of the novelty items—you trust that thing more than you do anything else in the world. Arm held over the sink, you briefly ponder the absurd familiarity of the situation—a childish attempt at escape mirrored in a clinical and methodical test of the world.

Who are you kidding. This is as clinical and methodical as a grade schooler's science fair project.

As you feel the bite of steel on the inside of your arm, you wonder what constitutes a major injury. The second loop's was decently serious, even if it had only felt like a graze in the moment—the swing had been on course to cutting to the bone; even when it had only reached half as deep it had worked well into muscle.

You suppose that might be the minimum, then, because the shallow cut you have so far isn't exactly resetting the fabric of reality.

After a bit, you wrap almost a whole kitchen roll around your arm and move the whole operation to the bathroom. It's starting to make too much of a mess. You'd rather not let Dave walk into a scene straight from Saw and have him try to stop you. Really, you'd have preferred to figure the threshold out before 5 p.m., but you keep having to take breaks to make sure you're not making any noise; you've reached bone, and you really don't know how much more you can take without passing out. Faintly, you wonder at how much the human body can endure.

You hole up in the shower. You let yourself breathe. You start again.

At some point you've clenched your teeth so hard you're sure they're about to break. You've been chipping away at bone for what feels like hours, and you've already thrown up everything that's left in your empty stomach three times over. It's about 5 o'clock, you think, but you can't get up to check because you don't know if you can stand up. And anyway, you can hear the kid messing around in the kitchen. You are not letting him see you with your sword stuck in you and your arm open to the marrow.

You must be the world's unluckiest son of a bitch, though, because it isn't long before he's knocking on the bathroom door.

“The fuck are you doing in there, Bro,” he yells, rattling the doorknob in vain.

“None'a,” you slur, hitting some nerve that makes your hand spasm, “none'a yer fuckin' business, lil' man.”

“Fuck off, I know you're not jacking off in there or whatever, there's blood all over the kitchen, shit looks like a fucking crime scene, what the fuck did you do—” He stops, letting you breathe in blessed silence for all of two seconds before he starts banging on the door like mad. “Bro, if you don't open this door right this fucking second I'm gonna—fuck—talk, you piece of shit, just fucking say something, this isn't funny you asshole—”

“Shut,” you breathe in, “you shut the fuck up, Dave Strider, or I'm gonna come out there and—”

You hiss, trying to hold back the scream building in the back of your throat. It doesn't work, the sword chipping another piece of bone away, and you yell loudly as the pain shoots up your arm and into your head.

You shoot upwards before Break Stuff even starts. The phone clatters onto the floor.

Guess it's supposed to happen after 5 p.m.

Your morning is spent slowly working your way through the apartment, trying to find anything out of place. You even dig through all the shit you have stashed away in the crawlspace. It doesn't seem like there's anything new or particularly time-warp looking trash anywhere, though—at least, not anywhere you're aware of. You don't know about Dave's room, but you're not about to go look through his stuff. Privacy is privacy, even if the living room is fair game for surveillance cameras. You stop rummaging through the back of one of the cabinets at the thought—maybe those have caught something since last time. You didn't go through the footage the first two loops.

Scrubbing through it again takes a good few hours out of your day, and it lands you with a hot steaming pile of absolutely zilch. Vaguely disappointing, you think—it might've been funny to riff on your amateur amputation snuff film if any of it had survived.

This time, you think, you'll get out and get some fresh air. Who knows. Maybe the whole thing is localized entirely within the confines of the apartment building; failing that, the city of Houston. Dave can probably handle himself for a day or two. Grabbing your car keys, you make your way out into the afternoon swelter of the city. You try to keep the pickup close to the apartment, but sometimes, like now, you end up having to walk for a good while before you actually reach the lot it's in. It's frustrating, but what can you do? It's Houston.

The pickup—a black Nissan Navara '98 with about as many shitty horse decals you could ever want plastered on the sides—is sitting pretty right where you left it. You hiss when you open the door—it's been out here all day, and even though black might be the coolest color for a car to have it's also black metal left outside in the Texas heat. One of these days you're going to try frying eggs on it.

Traffic is hellish; the drive out of Houston takes almost two hours. It's another good while before you're going towards Dallas, but the sun's still barely halfway down its course. You've got another few hours before the day resets—maybe you'll figure out a way to get out faster next time. For now, you travel the interstate, with nothing on your mind but the end of the road.

You're glad, in some distant way, that the need to get away as fast as possible soon becomes almost mindless—weaving through 18-wheelers and spotting gaps in the stream left by smaller cars, squeezing your way in and keeping the pace until another opportunity to push in presents itself. You're still only pushing 80, though. It'll probably pick up once you're a bit further out. You turn on the radio, leaving any conscious thought behind—it's you and the car ahead of you, and the only puzzle you need to solve is how to get in front of the asshole driving it. The dashboard flickers up at you.

At some point you look down to see it's 5:07, and you brace yourself for the change—grip the wheel a bit harder, hear the sound of your gloves rubbing against it, feeling yourself tense up—

But nothing happens. Even as the minutes pass, as you keep waiting breathlessly for the sun to go backwards in the sky, for something to tell you you're stuck, there is nothing but the car in front of you and the one behind you. A small breathless laugh escapes you. It's just Houston. Houston's what's fucked. You hum along to Bruno Mars over the speakers, drumming along with your hands on the wheel.  

⁙

It's 8 p.m., and the sun's making its way down past the edge of the world, bathing you in golden light as you drive. The interstate's the same as ever, asphalt going to the horizon and Dallas stuck somewhere past the line—the setting sun is doing something to the whole scene that makes it mesmerizing, glints of metal bouncing off the cars in front of you and drowning the road in sparks of light. You've been listening to a lot of radio on the way—you didn't realize how much you missed driving until you finally spent a good few hours zoning out to anything that was playing over the airwaves.

Radio was fine and all until you stopped for gas and remembered your CD case, abandoned in your haste—it dropped to the floor by the passenger seat at some point recently, probably when you were last out with Dave. You fish it out with the back of your heel as you're getting back on the road, almost slamming in whatever you get your hands on first—the familiar intro of Smack My Bitch Up starts rattling through the car. Seems like you've hit the jackpot on your first try.

You've put on a couple albums since then, keeping half an eye on the road as you flip through the case and picking stuff you're in the mood for. It's past the time any of the other loops ended, so you reckon you might as well enjoy the rest of the drive—no reason to keep listening to the same old shit that's been playing all summer when you have the best of just about any decade. Doesn't hurt that it's stuff that you actually like. You've even managed to find the CD for Significant Other, and though you clench your teeth when Break Stuff starts, it's a pretty solid album all in all.

The sky is turning lavender as the last vestiges of golden light fade.

You wake up. You really don't want to. Your phone goes down to the floor, where it keeps playing The Song.

At least you know the day doesn't end at 5 p.m. now, you think, staring up at the ceiling.

The car is gone when you get down to the parking lot again. You wreck one of the other cars cooking in the midday sun, only pausing and heaving for air once the wail of the alarm has thoroughly bored its way into your mind. The walk back to the apartment is step-by-step—you barely even notice it when you arrive back at the front door. It's only the key ring jingling in your hand that kicks you back into gear, and there's a disorienting moment where you have to remember how keys work in the first place.

You get there eventually, though.

The walk up to the apartment is similarly hazy, but you manage to stop yourself before you enter.

If the car actually is gone, then what...

You do figure out a way to get out faster this time—it just isn't out of Houston.

The roof seems like the best place to jump from. You wouldn't be able to fit through the window in the apartment if you tried—you've already figured that out years ago. Stepping off the ledge is harder than you thought it would be, but when you've got one leg off gravity's already doing all the work for you.

DO A FLIP, you see-hear Cal say from where he's perched himself on the edge of the roof.

Guitars through tinny speakers.

You can hear the alarm of the car before you even get back to the parking lot. So changes do actually keep outside of a certain radius. Doesn't help if you yourself can't get out of it, though, since you've managed to utterly isolate yourself. You don't have anyone in Houston that would believe you. And anyone you might contact outside of Houston is... 

no way josé.

You don't have anyone you can leave any coded messages or weird breadcrumbs, is the point. You've got fucking nothing. Nothing except time, your own mind, and an apartment full of ways to off yourself.

If some changes do take—why not try to overload the loop with one very specific end state?

You spend a good while trying to figure out how best to behead yourself. There's already scar tissue to work through, but you don't think that's going to be an issue as long as the sword's sharp enough. It seems like too much work to do it through the neck on your own, though, so you opt for just stabbing into your brain through the underside of your jaw instead. The whole sword through skull imagery would make for a pretty metal album cover, you think, right before you drop yourself onto the edge of the blade.

An E-flat power chord blasts directly into your ear. You consider waterboarding yourself.

It's harder than it looks, though, even after you've set up the whole thing with a towel and all—you just end up sputtering water all over the kitchen counter. This leads to Dave poking his head out of his room and looking askance at you hunched over the sink. You give him a thumbs up, face stone even as he can clearly see how your entire shit is dripping wet. He raises an eyebrow at you and retreats back into his room.

You drown the phone instead of yourself. After a bit you decide that, fuck it, you've never been a quitter; might as well follow Fred and the gang into their watery grave. It's pretty difficult, trying to hold yourself down on the chair you've dragged over so you can keep your head under the sink, and you almost give up once or twice. The whole thing's a bit of a blur after you get too tired to move.

You guess it works out eventually, because there is Durst at the end of the tunnel. This time you take out a razor after you've shaved, do it the classic way.

You wonder, as you've got your back against the shower wall and blood running down into the drain, why people think this is better than just jumping or stepping in front of a car or something. You don't really get it. Making it look like a freak accident has always been the highest priority to you in your fantasies. Maybe it's the violence of it that scares them, but considering the way the shower looks straight out of a slasher, you doubt it—it's not like this is any less violent. You guess it's about the people who have to see your body—is traumatizing a stranger somehow worse than having someone who might actually care find you cold and curled up afterwards?

On the other hand, it might be about spiting those people who should have cared about you. Make them have to clean out your body and all that. That's more your style than the stupid emo bullshit about not wanting to be a bother or whatever—you've been a bother all your life, and you sure as hell ain't sorry about it. Might as well go out as one too.

It takes a god damn while and a half, too, compared to the other methods. A bother if you ever fucking saw one. The whole thing just has you waiting as your thoughts start to get foggy, trying to time your mental start of the riff so that it'll line up with your alarm.

You get it just a bit too early for when the song starts. The phone goes through the garbage disposal.

You don't have much of anything to overdose on. Not even however much codeine it took to off DJ Screw. Whatever you do have enough of would probably suck worse than bleeding out, anyway; you're not so desperate as to try alcohol poisoning just yet. You shoot yourself in the head with the gun you have stashed away instead. Tried and true.

You spend one day just trying to bash your head in using the cinder block table. You're woozy by the third strike of your forehead against the concrete. Interestingly enough, you end up hearing Fred before you even get halfway to unconscious—maybe the loop's gotten sick of your little tantrum and is sending you into time-out. I know I would.

Do what, you think, feeling yourself stand up with the phone still in your hand and dropping it through the window.

Send you into time-out. You're being unbearably petulant about this. By the way, the water's boiling. The shitty ramen you haven't eaten for a few goes round is still just as bad as you remember it. It's still better than nothing. You haven't eaten in more than three days, if we're counting the total amount of hours spent conscious. Apparently it's a sign of severe sickness or distress when an animal refuses to eat. I don't know about you, but I don't particularly enjoy having worse survival instincts than your average goose.

Piss off, you think, drinking the last of the broth.

What delicious salt we're having for breakfast today. The instant ramen could use some work, though.

So could your attitude, you think. Not exactly like there's a lot of options for healthy eating here.

And whose fault is that, I wonder. Surely not the man who finds the idea of going outside and risk having to deal with people so repelling he's committing consequence-free test runs of his own death before even thinking of, I don't know, trying something that isn't that? Like having a normal day out? Or in? Or talking to someone about it? Maybe getting into contact with someone who might know how to fix it? Maybe, god forbid, maybe even someone who isn't a part of your own utterly fractured inner monologue?

Fuck you, know-it-all prick, you think tiredly, you're an uppity piece of junk that got handed a thesaurus and shoved it so far up your own ass that your spit smells of ink. You put the bowl by the sink instead of putting it in the washer.

Sick own, bro, you get that from Anti-Intellectuals Weekly?

Yeah, from when I was looking through your mom's magazines last night, you think, folding your arms and leaning back against the counter.

My god, he's venturing into Oedipal territory without even making a quip about it. Someone, please, get a doctor—it's a psychomedical emergency.

Get me a lobotomy too while you're at it, you think.

Yessir, I'll get right on the case. Shouldn't take any longer than it's taking you to talk to someone who actually exists in the real world.

If you're so great at getting things done, you think acidly, why don't you take over, then? Show lil' ol' me how to do things right, since I'm clearly too stupid to do them myself.

The inside of your mind is about as quiet as the kitchen is. Or as quiet as the kitchen would be, had the washer not started about a few moments ago.

“That's what I thought, asshole,” you mutter, presumably to no one but yourself.

Later, when your vision is going spotty and you're wondering if extreme autoerotic asphyxiation really is all it's cracked up to be, you realize you don't remember starting the washer in the first place. You're also pretty sure you didn't put the bowl in, either. In a desperate attempt to turn yourself around that makes you look like a dying fish, you try to get a look at the counter. Is the sink empty or not?

You don't get the answer to that before you're choking on thin air instead of your own tongue and the unbearable God damn fucking shitty ass riff you'd give a leg not to hear ever again washes over you. The phone gets stabbed.

For the first time in... two and a half weeks, you hazard, counting the days you've woken up and not total time spent conscious, you take a shower. It's a good half hour long, and Dave bangs on the door at some point, yelling about how you're hogging the bathroom. You make a point to stay in a little longer than actually necessary just for that.

When you get out and dry off, you glance at the mirror, and pause for a second. You look terrible. You don't think you've seen worse bags under your eyes for years. Maybe your unbearable excuse for a self-preservation instinct has a point—this isn't getting you anywhere. You're running around in circles and you really, truly don't know why you should have expected otherwise. It would be wishful thinking to hope any of your attempts would have ended up with blissful oblivion. Rubbing absentmindedly around your neck, scar tissue pale against your tan and still raising the skin even though the wound's healed years ago, you already know that that isn't going to happen anytime soon.

“Come on, man,” Dave yells through the door, “you've been in there for like an hour. I've gotta piss, dude.”

You flick his forehead on your way out, and he flips you the bird as he scuttles past you.

It's been a while since you've last sparred. You throw the shuriken lazily at Dave's door, and barely blink when you're on the roof, taking a step towards him, and wake up on the futon instead. Freddie gets to see what the inside of the blender is like.

You spend the day going through every single game in your library, trying to get at the more obscure glitches and exploits. Going out of bounds in Extreeem Roadster Skating isn't terribly hard, but getting back in while locking the hitbox in place outside of the map so that none of the obstacles will actually register as such proves to be far more difficult. It also causes the character model to disappear, effectively making the game first person until you change the camera angle, at which point the whole game starts trying to lock the camera to the model again. This makes the whole thing flip its lid furiously.

You've only managed it once before, years ago. It had been a long week, stuck inside; you'd become convinced the asshole next door had somehow gotten into your apartment's surveillance system and was either going to use whatever he'd gotten his hands on as blackmail material or to call the cops on you. You were sure he'd be right there outside your door, just waiting for you to walk right into his trap. When you did go out, fueled by sheer necessity—stupid of you, to get used to the comfort of living in the city—, it had been without the frankly ridiculous amount of knives you'd've liked to have on you.

Nothing had happened. You had a regular grocery run, stocking up on every canned food you had burned your way through in the paranoia-induced gaming session.

It had been stupid. Even if the guy had gotten into your systems, this was before Dave—nothing he could have got you on, you think, not even child endangerment. At most some questions about erratic behavior, what with Cal and all, and you could've gotten back at him with pointed questions about where he'd gotten the footage. You moved shortly after that, when you realized that even your skills at making something out of absolutely fucking nothing didn't extend to raising a baby in a studio apartment. Plus, you never could shake the feeling he was going to do something at some point. Didn't help that he looked like the asshole that raised you.

These days you can manage to make a grocery trip last for a bit more than two weeks, which is a feat with a teenager. And even more so considering you barely buy more than you used to. Not that it matters much right now—the cabinets are filled back up every time you stumble over to the kitchen from your futon, no matter how many times you make increasingly extravagant instant noodles just to spite yourself.

You hum in thought as the speakers play the bitcrushed soundbite of Sick flip! that plays whenever you do a backflip. The model's still outside the map, so it's the only thing that gives you any indication of what you're doing.You mindlessly try to lock the camera back, and the game freaks out, the sudden bright flashes shocking you into gripping the controller so hard it hurts. The character model eats shit across every dimension that they could fit in the game. You think you can feel the plastic creak. If you pressed hard enough, would it break? Or just give way, soft and malleable under your touch? Never giving you the reprieve of sharp edges against your skin or the catharsis of seeing something utterly destroyed.

You breathe. In, out, getting into some off-kilter rhythm that distracts you enough that you manage to slowly start releasing the controller one finger at a time.

Your heart's still beating in double time when you let go of the thing and hear it clatter onto the floor. You look down at it. It's slightly worn from years of use—you brought it with you from the other apartment, and the left thumbstick has a slight drift that you've grown used to working with—but it's still usable.

You step on it, hard. It breaks easily. The screen flashes still, and you breathe hard and heavy through your mouth. Next is the television—you've always wondered, vaguely, how hard it would be to break it. It's survived a lot.

It doesn't survive you grabbing it, heaving it up and off the wall with both arms, and throwing it onto the floor. There's a dull thunk as the screen cracks on the floor. The sound the console makes when the cable rips out is fascinating, but it doesn't stop you from thrashing that with the game still in as well.

The television goes out the open window.

After a moment of consideration, so does the console. And your computer.

You breathe, lungs working like pistons, and finally think to close the window so you can actually break the glass instead of just hearing whatever you throw out of it hit the ground far below. You flip the board you've put on top of one of the cinder block piles and grab one of them. You heave it up to the window and let it fly, clear shards shattering out into the Houston air like midday stars as a dozen pounds of concrete go through the glass.

You don't even get to enjoy the acid satisfaction of standing in the ruins of a place well-trashed for longer than a second or two before whoever in Limp Bizkit plays the opening riff to Break Stuff starts his thing.

⁙

Going through the motions of what a morning is supposed to look like comes easy to you. You barely taste the noodles.

HEY THERE, BIG GUY, Cal announces as he flops on top of your head and lets his face fall down right in front of yours, YOU WANNA TRY THAT AGAIN? COULDN'T HURT TO LET OFF SOME MORE STEAM. MAYBE GET A BIT MORE CREATIVE WITH IT THIS TIME.

The sound of a car alarm runs through your mind.

YOU STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO OTHER PEOPLE IF THEY GET HURT INSIDE THE LOOP.

You ignore him. Cal never has any good ideas—yet another thing you've learned the hard way. Best not to dignify this with a response. You do shove him off the top of your head, though, because it's a pain in the ass to have him hanging off you like that.

But. On the other hand. There is one other thing you haven't tried yet. You don't really want to, you realize, mostly because you don't know if it'll work out the way you want it to. Even if it does—no, you can't dwell on it. That's a train of thought you have to shut down before the tracks are even laid. You can't think about it.

Worst case scenario is probably just that you'll have to listen to more Limp Bizkit than should be legally or ethically allowed for one man.

At a little to 5 p.m., you lodge the shuriken well into the already-chipped door to Dave's room and head up to the roof. You stub out the cigarette you've been indulging yourself in when you hear the door open, turning halfway to see Dave with his sword in hand.

The fight is the same. You can pinpoint the exact steps that you've taken a dozen times over now, the way Dave parries only the potentially lethal swings, the echo of the blows singing through the swords and up your arm. It's the same song, same dance—only one step off from usual.

This time, you don't dodge.

Instead, you twist yourself just so before the swing, the blade no longer aimed at your arm but rather at your chest. The momentum is just enough to cut through flesh, but not enough to get it through bone—gravity has to do the rest of the work, you reckon, so you dig your feet into the concrete until Dave is almost directly under you, the sword at a 90 degree angle to the ground. He looks, uncomprehending, up at where the sword's stuck in your chest. His grip on the hilt is white-knuckled.

“Twist out,” you garble.

“What?” he says, eyes flying up to meet yours past two layers of shades.

“Right before I drop. Won't—won't have to get out from under me.” You wheeze, wincing when the action scrapes the blade against your ribs.

“Dude, what the fuck—” he yells, right in your fucking face, and you're sick and tired and you just want him to get the fuck out from under you so you at least don't have to deal with some asshole finding the kid up here with broken ribs and—

You go slack, smacking your arm against Dave weakly as you drop. He still doesn't get out of the way quick enough, never was as fast as you were at his age. The sword goes about halfway through your body, and you hear the shunk of it exiting your back before the pain hits. It's like someone's dropped on top of you, your lungs emptying out as the sword goes what feels like another fucking foot into you—ironic, you think hysterically, laughing even though it just pushes the blade further in, because the only asshole that's dropped on anyone is you—you can feel Dave's legs kicking up against your stomach, fucking hell he's loud, your head pounds in time with his heaving breaths and the sword, fuck, feels like it's a fucking pipe gone through you, why are you still fucking breathing, every part of it hurts, feels like the worst god damn itch of your life on the inside of your sternum, and the kid still isn't fucking shutting up—

And you heave, suddenly filled with the deep-seated longing to take Wes Borland and beat his face in so bad he'll need plastic surgery afterwards. You throw up over the edge of the futon, right onto the floor.

You really don't know why you thought that would work.

This next morning is weird. You barely manage to feel out your phone to enact your now-customary revenge on Durst's auditory personage before you hear a clatter from Dave's room, a muffled yell, and he tumbles out of his room like he's fleeing for his life before stopping immediately, eyes wide and looking right at where you're still only halfway up from the futon. He opens his mouth like he's about to say something, stock-still for a solid few seconds, but nothing comes out. Instead he just turns and goes straight for the bathroom. You guess he isn't doing much better than you are, considering the sounds.

You stop. He isn't doing much better than you are, which means.

Before you manage to finish the thought, you start upwards to the sound of the fourth song off Limp Bizkit's second and seminal album Significant Other, a keystone in the nu-metal trend that swept the nation in the late 90s to early 00s, Break Stuff, whose heavy soundscape and violent lyrical universe is almost perfectly archetypical of the genre.

Fuck.

You stay still, reaching over and shutting off your good friend Fred's musings about the state of mankind and the aggravating nature of human interaction as quietly as you have in weeks. Or, at least, what feels like weeks. Then you stick your fist in your mouth and try not to yell at the top of your lungs. Eventually the urge resides. Not before you've woken up Dave, though.

Listening intently for any noise from his room, you hear a dull thump, followed by him repeating something over and over like a mantra—probably swearing up a storm—and pacing. He's quiet, but you have good hearing. His steps carry through even past the vague sounds of traffic from way down below.

Eventually, though, he turns the handle. He does it slowly, like he's some chick in a horror movie trying not to make any noise that's gonna alert the monster/murderer/malign spirit/strike whichever is not applicable. which is none of them, by the way. you are all of the above. they are you. It gives you enough time to sit up on the edge of the futon and put on your t-shirt. You spot him peeking out from behind the door in the corner of your eye when you glance over your back, but then he flashsteps out and closes the door behind him.

When you turn towards him properly, you see his eyes widen for just a moment before he schools his expression again. His poker face might be decent, but it isn't nearly as good as yours. There's a tightness around the corner of his mouth, like he's biting the inside of it.

“You cool? Thought I heard something, wondering if you ate shit again last night, but if it's nothing I can get with that, you know? It's cool. I know when not to get in another guy's business. King of not getting into other people's business. Won't even enter a grocery store if it's not mine, that's how fucking serious I take this not getting into businesses. I've been building a portfolio, getting stocks and shit just to make sure a business is mine before I go into it. Woulda starved years ago without it.”

He keeps going, but the constant stream of words falters when you don't respond. You look at him. Your glasses are still on the cinder block table at the other end of the futon. He squirms, hands firmly stuck in the pockets of his jeans.

“Bro, come on, you can't leave me hanging like this—”

You interrupt him before he can have another bout of verbal diarrhea.

“It's you.”

A carefully calculated look of confusion settles over his features, eyebrows furrowing down past his sunglasses. He's still sweating bullets.

“What are you talking about, man? I don't—”

“The loop.”

It's nearly comical, the way he swallows nervously and tries to laugh.

“What d'ya mean, loop, you flipping out again or something? I mean, I get it, days bleedin' together and all, ain't exactly like we've got the most varied routine, we should go to the zoo or some shit—”

“Dave.”

He shuts his mouth right quick.

“Today has happened—” you feel your jaw tighten—you don't actually remember how many times it's been, “—has been happening for a good fuckin' while. We both know this morning has happened before. You just haven't remembered it until now."

You can tell he isn't looking at you, eyes trained a bit to the left of your face. The sunglasses aren't as opaque as he'd like them to be.

“What did you do.”

It isn't a question.

“What—you're asking me? You're asking me what I fucking did? You're the one that went batshit and—fuckin'—what the hell? Is it too much to ask that you warn a guy before you—” his breath hitches, voice pitched out high and fast, “—before you fucking impale yourself on his sword?”

His voice cracks, as much due to his age as it is due to panic. He's shaking.

Has he been turning back time because you keep scaring him? What have you even been doing that would—

Ah.

If he's the one activating the loop, then...

You guess seeing someone's dead body is still a bit much for as sheltered a 14-year-old as he is.

This, you remember, running your hand through your hair and letting out a frustrated hiss, this is why you didn't want to try this until his late teens. A bit more time and you would have had it. A bit more time to get him used to the thought. A bit more time to let the resentment build up, let him come to the conclusion on his own. Time, which is exactly what he isn't giving either of you now.

Your name is DIRK STRIDER, and you've been waiting to die for the past 17 years. It hasn't stuck yet.